Shabbat
Reading List

David Klion (contributing editor): The recent, zoomer-driven revival of interest in Lena Dunham’s Girls has me feeling a little smug. As an elder millennial two years older than Dunham, I loved Girls when it debuted in 2012, I loved every season through the 2017 finale, and I loved it on full rewatch in the early pandemic. The various objections critics raised at the time (that a show about a particular type of white millennial in Brooklyn was too white; that the four lead actresses were all the children of prominent creatives; that the characters were too unlikable; that Dunham’s public persona was also unlikable) struck me as tedious and superficial at the time, while the show’s sharp humor, emotional sincerity, and unsparing critique of the exact demographic it captured seemed to go over a lot of heads. I’m glad that with a decade’s hindsight, everyone can finally admit that Girls was always good.

It was not, however, very good for Dunham. Sure, it made her a lot of money, but it also turned a precociously talented 26-year-old into an overnight celebrity, and thus subject to a culture that systematically devours young artists, especially women. In the years after the finale, Dunham’s life fell apart—a combination of severe chronic health issues, painkiller addiction, semi-cancellation, the fickle cruelty of 2010s bloggers, the failure of various creative projects, and the end of both her romantic partnership with superstar pop producer Jack Antonoff and her “friendship” (in reality, a business partnership) with Girls co-showrunner Jenni Konner. Gradually, Dunham pulled herself back together, and now she has a bestselling and buzzy memoir, Famesick, that tries to make sense of what happened.

Taking the briefest of respites from research for my own book project, I ploughed through Famesick’s 400 pages in three sittings. I read a lot of memoirs these days, mostly of New York Jewish intellectuals with scores to settle, so trust me when I say that Dunham is a real writer and her book is genuinely good. It’s also harrowing, packed with gruesome body horror and intimate emotional violence. While there is plenty of fodder for celebrity gossip sites, and you’ve probably encountered some of the juicier details whether you wanted to or not, what makes Famesick worthwhile is the sense that Dunham, who turns 40 this month, has actually learned something.

Though Girls was in some ways preternaturally wise, part of why it initially unsettled viewers was that it was never clear how much Dunham identified with her narcissistic and oblivious protagonists. Was she celebrating them or skewering them, and which did she expect the show’s demographically similar target audience to do? The answer likely lay somewhere in between, but suffice it to say that the Dunham of 2026 has emerged from her many trials with an authentically adult perspective, including on her own poor decisions. She does not present herself as a pure victim (she made choices, including the choice to work harder for success and validation than her body could physically withstand) or as glibly triumphant (her many physical and emotional scars endure). Her portraits of the other people in her life—above all Antonoff, Konner, and Dunham’s formidable but frustrating mother, Laurie Simmons—all balance generosity with cold candor. She understands what is lovable and hateable about each of them, and about herself, and she allows us to draw our own judgments. She is, at the end of the day, an artist.

Hannah Gold (assistant editor): My partner, as a final (and admittedly random) elective credit for his psychoanalytic training, is taking a class on the Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar. So far, I have caught five of the ten required films, dutifully projected onto the walls of our apartment, or on our upstairs neighbor’s TV.

We’ve been moving chronologically across Almodóvar’s more than 40 years of filmmaking, starting with Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón (there isn’t a standard translation of the title, but one is Pepi, Luci, Bom, and other women on the heap), a film from 1980 centered on the misadventures of poorly treated, poorly behaved women who are out for revenge and a good time. Pepi and the other early films are raunchy and disorganized, flippantly violent, juvenile and charming. They capture Madrid just a few years post-Franco, following young punks, mostly queer people and women—even the nuns are snorting cocaine and injecting heroin. Gender and sexuality are unstable, AIDS is killing, the clubs are full. Watched in rapid succession, the movies blur together in their absurdity, as recurring actors engage in convoluted plotlines. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, from 1988, is now a cult classic, and was nominated for an Oscar for best foreign language film. Eleven years later, All About My Mother finally won Almodóvar the prize. Both films are worth watching. But my favorite by far has been Volver.

Released more than two decades into his career, Volver is more polished, more normative—but only by Almodóvar’s standards. The film centers a family: Raimunda, played by Penélope Cruz, and her mother, sister, daughter, aunt, and longtime neighbor. The aunt and neighbor still live in the village where Raimunda and her sister were raised, which is plagued by wind. Their mother and father were killed in a wildfire, stoked by those nefarious winds, but their mother has recently been sighted around the village; it’s believed that she returned as a ghost, to nurse her sister in her final weeks. The aunt’s death is one of two that open the film—the second occurs when Raimunda’s teenage daughter stabs her father (Raimunda’s husband) after he comes onto her. Most of the movie occurs in the aftermath of these losses. Raimunda comically and fairly nonchalantly deals with the body of her pedophile, deadbeat husband, while opening an ad hoc restaurant in an empty building next door. After the aunt’s funeral, the mother (who may or may not be a ghost), comes to live with Raimunda’s sister in Madrid, posing as a Russian emigre as she assists in her daughter’s apartment-based hair salon. For those recently awash in Almodóvar’s oeuvre, it’s a pleasure to see Carmen Maura, who starred in the earlier films in her twenties, return as a charming, maybe-dead grandmother.

In keeping with Almodóvar’s style, the men are cartoonishly villainous, or otherwise minor. The women are idiosyncratic in both their sloppiness and their devotion to each other, but are more tempered than the stars of his earlier projects (there’s only one sex worker in this film, and the protagonist is much too comfortable treating her badly). There is still a campy playfulness, and a willingness to bend the limits of the realistic. Unlike the earlier films, Volver makes good on each thread of the intricate plotline, and is tremendously satisfying. I won’t ruin the twists, but one elicited audible gasps from myself, my partner, and our benevolent host of an upstairs neighbor.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Love as a destructive force is at the heart of Arnaud Desplechin’s new film Two Pianos. It doesn’t lead to death in this case, as it does in other films that view love in this way, like Truffaut’s The Woman Next Door, but it wreaks havoc on a marriage and a musical career.

Mathias Vogler, played by the strikingly handsome François Civil, has returned to his native Lyon from Japan, where he has taught piano for several years. He’s come back—in a dreadful state—to participate in a concert with his revered former teacher, Elena Audin (a steely Charlotte Rampling), frail and elderly. Audin tells her former student that her mind is going and that rather than resort to playing from a score rather than from memory, she will be ending her career. She wants Mathias at her side when she makes the announcement. But the revival of a failed love from his past puts paid to this plan.

When Mathias arrives at Elena’s apartment directly from the airport, he faints dead away at the sight of a woman exiting the elevator. We’ve already seen her at home with her happy, enthusiastic husband, who recounts Jewish jokes and Hasidic tales. Claude and her husband are old friends of Mathias, though Claude was far more. It was the end of her affair with Voglet that drove him from France. The time away has done him no good: he loves her every bit as much as he did before leaving.

Claude has had a child in the interim, and Mathias, who has crossed paths with him by chance, realizes that the child is his. When Claude’s adoring husband dies suddenly, his hopes of picking up where they had left off are revived. She’s not averse to this, or is she? Two Pianos is an account of their coming close to repairing their loss, in the same way Matthias is attempting to repair his shattered career. However talented Matthias might be, it’s not the healing power of music and his rare talent that drive him, but the uncontrollable train that is thwarted love.

If Mathias is all desire, Claude is far more complicated. Desire there is, and she teases her ex with its rekindling, advancing and then retreating from her beloved. Seeing the return of a love thought lost then thwarted anew, Mathias’ self-destructiveness adds force to love’s destructive capabilities. Matthias must decide whether to stay and fight for Claude or to accept that the game isn’t worth the candle. Paradoxically, his decision will destroy him on one front and save him on another. I’ve not yet decided whether the end of the film is a happy one, or even if it’s the end of the story, and that is its genius.

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Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): There are a great many heavy, serious things I’ve been reading and watching, but because we all need it, I thought I would share something that brought me about an hour of pure, unmitigated joy and escapism. Who among us elder millennials and Gen X cusps does not have the softest of spots for Richard Linklater’s 1993 movie Dazed and Confused, about the last day of school in Austin, Texas, in 1976? Among the many things I love about it is the way it’s very much of a specific time (the mid-’70s) and also out of it: The early ’90s was almost a sister period, the fashion sense and hedonistic sensibilities of two decades prior having cycled back around. But more importantly, the time is youth. There’s a loving and intoxicating portrait of American adolescence that both takes it seriously and grants it its frivolity. Of course, so much of that is tied up with sex—it’s the climate of the film, it’s in the air. Attractions circulate and shift directions with the wind.

That’s why it was so much fun to stumble upon a 2020 oral history of the real-life flirtations and hookups on the set of Dazed and Confused among the young, horny cast. Parker Posey seeking solace from her fraying relationship in Anthony Rapp! Joey Lauren Adams and Rory Cochrane listening to music together until 4 am! (And Ben Affleck getting none, ha!) Milla Jovovich was only 16 but ended up eloping with her onscreen boyfriend Shawn Andrews (her mother forced an annulment soon after). Jason London fell in “love-at-first sight” at auditions with Chrisse Harnos. In other words, it was all real. They were having an unforgettable summer together, sneaking in and out of each other’s hotel rooms, falling in love, being reckless and hormonal. If you’re a fan of the movie, I promise you’ll get a kick out of this little history.

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s Rheology begins as a science lecture. Bulbul Chakraborty, a real-life physics professor at Brandeis, stands before a blackboard, chalking formulas and amiably explaining the mysteries of sand (rheology is the study of how matter changes form under pressure). Sand is a “fragile matter,” she demonstrates, that can flow like water and also behave like something fixed and firm. Which is it, she amiably asks, liquid or solid?

Something similar might be asked of theater—it’s a flowing evanescent figment made of fleshly humans—and writer-director Chowdhury soon tacitly draws the analogy. Some 20 minutes into her lecture, Chakraborty sips some water and, alarmingly, begins to choke. Only when Chowdhury rises from a seat in the audience, to give her acting notes and to urge her to try again, do we know that she was faking. But she wasn’t at all faking in the sense one expects in the theater. She is no actor playing a fictional character; she is not only a real physicist, but also Chowdhury’s real-life mother, and in this false-but-true theatrical moment in which she struggles to breathe, Rheology changes its own form—and then does so again and again.

It morphs from science lesson into fourth wall-busting self-reflection, and then into operatic histrionics (a live cellist heightening the ginned-up emotion), surrealist fantasy, Tagore-inspired melodrama, and sentimental mother-son duet, all as Chowdhury imagines the unimaginable: his mother’s inevitable death. As it prances across these forms, the piece is by turns playful, tender, uncanny, and in one scene, when Chowdhury curls up next his mother and sucks his thumb, creepily Oedipal.

Performance theorists have long figured theater as a rehearsal for death. Herb Blau famously noted that it’s the only art form in which its medium—the human body—is moving toward its demise as we watch; Peggy Phelan argued that performance “becomes itself through disappearance.”

But Rheology also dramatizes a mother and son understanding each other in the fullness of their distinct lives—Chowdhury literally giving stage to Chakraborty’s arcane field of physics (as well as showing something of her existence before parenthood and her experience of losing her own mother) and Chakraborty literally entering the theatrical realm where her son professionally dwells. This profound mutual recognition makes it easy to believe Chakraborty when she reassures Chowdhury—who insists he will die without her—“You will hold your shape.”

When I saw Rheology last spring at the Bushwick Starr—it is now revived at Playwrights Horizons—it was just months after my own mother had died (at age 97—Chakraborty is only in her early 70s) and I had been feeling far more liquid than solid. Chakraborty described my state: I was like grains of sand that “hold together even as they come apart from themselves.”

Yet she reassured me, too, and so did the show, even as it shattered me.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): In the ’70s, it seemed that every week there was a new film released by Lina Wertmüller. She was an over-the-top director whose films I didn’t much like, preferring Bresson, Rohmer, Wenders, and Truffaut. In truth, I found her films unpleasant—her exaggerated characters struck me as buffoons of no interest, her attitude toward them as contemptuous and facile. But the restoration and rerelease of the first film of her major period, 1972’s The Seduction of Mimi, has shown me that I wasn’t nearly as intelligent and sophisticated a cinephile as I thought I was when I was 20.

It is not in any way a subtle film; its characters are not granted depth, and their lives and circumstances are not painted in subtle shadings. Everything in it is larger than life, pushed to the extreme. I didn’t see then what I see clearly now: The Seduction of Mimi is an opera without songs. In his brilliant Love and Death in the American Novel, Leslie Fiedler talks about how operas were the novels of illiterate Italy. The Seduction of Mimi applies the spirit of opera to the European art film, making its points broadly and brutally, but even so, with great truth.

The original title of the film translates to The Metallurgist Mimi Wounded in Honor, which pretty much tells the tale. The titular Mimi is a poor Sicilian laborer, unhappily married, who moves, as so many from southern Italy did, to Turin. Though he lost a job for voting Communist, through Mafia connections he manages to get a new job in an auto factory, and he immediately falls in with the Communists there. He becomes enamored of a beautiful supporter of the far left; playing on every possible stereotype of the over-sexed southerner, Wertmüller has him sweep her off her feet. They have a child, and he leaves politics behind. After another run in with the Mafia, he is transferred to his native region, where he falls into a caricatural—an operatic—version of a tale of jealousy and infidelity.

Mimi—played by Wertmüller’s favorite actor, Giancarlo Giannini—is a cartoon version of a Sicilian, with slicked back hair, out-of-date attire, and revoltingly reactionary attitudes toward women despite his professed Communism. Every gesture he makes is grand, every emotion spills off the screen in its excess. He is honest to the max, unfaithful to the max, an imposing lover to the max, a cuckold to the max, and an avenger to the max. Everyone around him is cut on the same cloth, from his Turinese lover, played by Wertmüller regular Mariangela Melato, to his Sicilian wife, his wife’s lover, and his wife’s lover’s wife, whom he impregnates out of spite.

No one is realistic, and the score by Piero Piccioni accentuates the operatic nature of the film. Mimi is, of course, one of the most famous of all names in Italian opera, but in the opera it is that of a woman, the female lead in La bohème. That it’s borne here by a man (his real name is Carmelo) is just another way for Wertmüller to mock the hyper-masculinity of the character.

Wertmüller’s satire is broad and all-encompassing. Crooked capitalists, southern Italians, masculinity, reactionary womanhood, and hippie leftism all take it on the chin. Wertmüller’s touch is not flawless, and there are moments of grotesque cruelty that are simply mean-spirited. But The Seduction of Mimi is a magnificent relic of a time when there was a left in Italy, when the working class and its organizations were feared and hated. More than a relic, it’s a film that marked an epoch in Italian cinema.

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): Science fiction doesn’t always age well, but Philip K. Dick’s work is an exception. The Penultimate Truth is a good example. Written in 1964 and set in 2025, the novel has its moments of satisfying prescience: Who but Dick would have predicted that our world would contain, for instance, a text-generation machine that tells insipid jokes about genocide?

But Dick is less interested in prophecy than in historical revision. The conceit of The Penultimate Truth is that the masses of humanity live in claustrophobic underground tanks, manufacturing what they think are robotic soldiers to fight an ongoing nuclear war with the Soviets. In fact, the war lasted only two years and has been over for a decade. These “leadies” are actually mechanical serfs in the expansive demesnes of a tiny culture-industry aristocracy dwelling luxuriously on the earth’s surface, which busies itself writing and producing propaganda films of apocalyptic destruction. Their Bible, which they lovingly study and imitate, is a pair of faked, contradictory documentaries about World War II, intended to convince Soviet audiences that Hitler was spying for the United States, and to convince American audiences of the opposite, thus igniting World War III.

As is often the case with Dick’s fiction, serious political ideas are exaggerated into monstrous, paranoid paradoxes: Here, he is literalizing the idea that national conflicts are illusory, ideological superstructures that conceal the real, class war. The joke about “genocide” proves central to the plot, in which a time-traveling Native American man orchestrates the unraveling of this order. Dick often highlights the parallels between the Holocaust and earlier American exterminations, and here he shows his feudal elite rushing to stake settler claims on war-torn land as its radioactivity approaches livable levels, in a kind of suicidal homesteading.

Dave Lontano, the regime’s nemesis, paradoxically has been liberated from the 15th century by mysterious alien artifacts retrojected (by time machine) in a bungled attempt to frame an enemy of the state for violating archeological remains. Lontano is endowed with strange powers and subjected to a fluctuating temporality, so that he oscillates between youth and old age, becoming an uncanny (if a bit cringe) icon of the subaltern’s syncopated vengeance, and of the curious entanglement of modes of production across centuries.

Not all of this ultimately coheres, but it’s fascinating and strange—and not a bit dated. How could one date, after all, a fictional world where feudalism and monopoly capitalism, settler-colonialism and the culture industry are jumbled together in a coeval heap? The novel escapes becoming a Cold War period piece by substituting for the historical period a historical question mark.

Noa Azulai (program coordinator): I’ll be honest: When I joined Jewish Currents last October, I didn’t foresee my first recommendation for the Shabbat Reading List being Justin Bieber’s headline set at Coachella. I figured I’d come up with something more… intellectual. But a couple nights ago, when I found myself up at 1 am rewatching the moment when the pop star’s voice pivots up a few octaves, I felt moved to write about it. (I should note I was not actually at Coachella, the influencer-laden music festival set annually in the California desert, nor have I ever been.)

The performance itself has been, unsurprisingly, divisive. Some critics are calling it “lazy” or “unprofessional,” or raising the perhaps-valid point that if a woman gave nothing the way some think Justin did, their careers wouldn’t survive it. That may be right. But I want to direct you to the last 20 minutes of his set, at which point Justin positions himself in front of his laptop and begins pulling up YouTube videos of his earliest songs, singing along to them. The crowd goes nuts. I am, somehow, in tears, as Justin cycles through hits like “Baby,” “Beauty and a Beat,” “Favorite Girl,” and “Confident.” Songs that soundtracked my middle school dances, my first kisses, my teenage summers drinking smuggled vodka out of plastic water bottles by the beach. I wasn’t a Belieber by any metric, but in the 2010s you didn’t have to be. He was everywhere.

Then, he faced what so many who undergo the meat grinder of childhood fame do: mental health crises, PR crises, other personal crises that we are not, and should not, be privy to. His Coachella performance was his first in over four years, after cancelling the remainder of his Justice World Tour in 2022/2023 due to health issues. It was, in many ways, his great return to the place he’d first arrived when he was just 13 years old: the world stage. In that moment, when his adultish monotone voice reaches back up for the octave of his younger self, he smiles.

We should never underestimate the power of nostalgia to draw up unforeseen connections within, and perhaps also outside, of ourselves. As technology, led by those with the most destructive tendencies, outpaces my own tolerance for change, I find myself tenderized by the most seemingly meaningless things sometimes—in this case, the international pop sensation Justin Bieber, singing songs of a shared youth to his own past self as much as to ours.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): As the US increasingly becomes the repressive, imperial state the left always warned we’d become, Punishment Park, the great leftist film from the Nixon era, goes surprisingly unmentioned. I was pleased and surprised to find that Peter Watkins’ chilling warning from 1971 is available on what has become my go-to streaming service, Tubi, a subsidiary of Netflix, which is free and stuffed with an astounding variety of films. If many of the films are totally forgettable direct-to-video junk, Tubi also makes available silent classics (Battleship Potemkin, Greed, Sunrise), American indies (Language Lessons, Slacker) and foreign treasures (Mississippi Mermaid, Godard’s Film Socialisme). It was while scrolling through Tubi that I found Punishment Park, by the director of such left-wing standards as La Commune (Paris, 1871) and the greatest of all artist biopics, Edvard Munch.

In Watkins’ film, the Vietnam War is still raging, and opponents of all stripes—anticapitalist revolutionaries, pacifists, hippies, whatever—are being rounded up and receiving summary trials carried out by right-wing draft boards. Sentences are passed and the guilty—i.e., all of the defendants—are presented with the options of either serving a lengthy prison term or three days and two nights in Punishment Park. Almost all choose the latter. The park is something of a misnomer, for it is a long stretch of the Southern California desert which must be traversed by those who choose that as their sentence. The goal is to reach an American flag planted in the middle of nowhere, 53 miles from the starting point. The obstacles are not just the distance and the baking heat. Also set loose in the desert, shortly after the prisoners begin their trek, are uniformed members of various forces of repression—army, local police, state police, National Guard—all armed, all allowed to shoot to kill.

Here we have the dream scenario of our native aspirant dictator: Leftists penned in and subject to the death penalty, amid the illusion of the ability to regain their freedom. As in all of Watkins’ films, the performers are non-actors, chosen for their resemblance in life to the characters in the film. From the right and the left, they discuss the situation in the park and the nation and react to provocations and threats, not—or not just—as their characters, but as themselves. Punishment Park is thus full of the lucubration of the long-haired radicals many of us were back then: the jargon, the ultra-radicalism, but also the valiant spirit of resistance. Against them are conservatives who are housewives, businessmen, and union leaders, while pursuing them across the desert, armed and ready to wipe them out, are soldiers and cops whose faces and voices haven’t changed in the intervening 55 years.

Watkins at times allowed his films to go on way too long, and they were sometimes buried under self-congratulatory revolutionary boasting and posturing. Punishment Park shows a far more likely scenario: Radicals fenced in in the open with no one or nothing to protect them, and with the press on hand to film the cold-blooded slaughter. Punishment Park is a warning from the past we can still learn from.

Cynthia Friedman (managing director): Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! has been on my reading list since it debuted two years ago. I will follow in the footsteps of our former publisher Jacob Plitman’s famously brief reading recommendations to say: If this has been on your list, now is the time to read it. Covering addiction and recovery, global empire, art, and friendship, Martyr! moves between past and present, spanning the perspectives of its compelling, imperfect characters. Cyrus Sham’s story and Akbar’s lyrical prose are unlike anything else I’ve read, and have stayed with me. 18/10.

Sean Pergola (operations coordinator): A few weeks ago in this newsletter, Raphael Magarik recommended Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, soon before it was predictably and tragically snubbed at the Oscars. Allow me to re-recommend this film for your viewing and save it from the oblivion of a mere nominee.

The Secret Agent takes place at the tail end of the internationally lauded “Brazilian Miracle,” a time of, well, miraculous economic expansion and urbanization. What enabled this growth was, in part, a military dictatorship that took power in a coup and subsequently used state terror to brutally crush popular dissent. The global celebrations of Brazil’s entry as a player on the world economic stage belied a domestic atmosphere of violence and fear, and it is this disconnect––disturbing to the point of comedy––that Filho deploys as the film’s central theme.

Depicting a dark underbelly out of view of the general public is typical enough of film noir, and The Secret Agent’s plot fits that familiar template: Marcelo, our protagonist, is on the run from a ruthless killer-for-hire while most of Brazil is busy partying during Carnaval. What sets The Secret Agent apart is how self-conscious, almost Brechtian, it is. Films themselves play a major role in it, displacing the public’s paranoia around very real political violence onto entertaining fantasies––yet this divide between film and reality unravels when a police coverup of a murder manifests into The Secret Agent’s own depiction of a disembodied leg attacking nighttime park-cruisers, with the lighting, soundtrack, and cinematography you’d expect from a classic horror movie.

This gesture against realism becomes all the more compelling in tandem with the film’s framing device: An archival researcher is discovering Marcelo’s story in parallel to the main plotline. I must respectfully disagree with Magarik’s comment that, in “celebrating the archival work of those who cling to, reconstruct, and honor the past of a battered and fragmented resistance,” The Secret Agent is “somehow a hopeful movie.” I would argue, rather, that we’re left wondering how much of what we see is “real,” and how much of it is the archivist’s interpretation of scattered recordings. If anything, this is the film at its most disorienting––the archivist’s work does less to uncover a past than to retroactively distort it into the shape of a thriller.

To call the film’s ending anticlimactic is to massively understate the point. It is anticlimactic in the way revolutionary struggle––the bare struggle to survive in an unjust world without betraying one’s own principles––is almost always anticlimactic. Most stories of resistance are stories of loss, in every sense; power is brutal, and history is forgetful. If there is no satisfying ending here, let alone a happy one, it is because, beyond the magic of film and of Carnaval, this is how life in this broken world is.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Fiume o morte! by the Croatian director Igor Bezinovic—which will be screened this week at Metrograph on the Lower East Side and then will be showing around the country—presents a unique model for making historical films. Though for much of the film, the characters dress in period costumes, they do so not to lend verisimilitude but as an integral part of the mockery of an event in Italian and Croatian history that was at one and the same time opera buffa and tragedy: the 1919 “conquest” of the city of Fiume (now Rijeka, Croatia) by the proto-fascist army of the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio. It is a warning and a reminder that even the most absurd events can have aftershocks of great terror. In this case, D’Annunzio attempted to undo the Treaty of Rapallo and to see to it that Fiume, which had been granted city-state status, would be annexed to Italy. A year after the occupation ended in bloodshed, the actual fascists took over not just a small city, but all of Italy.

In order to tell the story, Bezinovic makes use of the period, documented in some 10,000 photos and kilometers of film. The “actors” in the film are all locals from Rijeka, many of whom were convinced to participate when casually approached by the director to recount what they knew of D’Annunzio and his invasion. The factitious quality of the events is made clear by the actors’ being posed, in stills and in moving picture footage, exactly like the participants in the actual event. This mock verisimilitude allows us to see that in many cases even the original players were playing the part of a conquering army. The conquest of Fiume was, we see, proof positive of the dangers of putting a poet or poseur in power, granting him some special right to do whatever he wishes. D’Annunzio, famous for his amorous adventures, his cocaine use, and also as Italy’s most famous writer of the period, was in fact a tiny man, bald and (literally) toothless. The notion of him as a conqueror should have been seen by all concerned as a joke. But he showed, as so many have since, that a clown and a buffoon can, by force of character and will and through his persuasive powers, inflict great harm.

For a second recommendation this week—what François Ozon gets especially right in his film of Camus’ The Stranger is the physicality of this supposedly philosophical novel. Along with the protagonist, Meursault, his lover Marie, his neighbor Salamano, and his friend Sintès, whose personal troubles lead to a fateful encounter on the beach, the sun and the heat of summertime Algiers are central characters. Sweat, glare, and the desire to escape the stifling air are constant, as the characters attempt to live their lives. It is not only Sintès and his dispute with the brother of his Algerian mistress that impel Meursault to the murder by the springs, but, as he says at his trial, the sun. Ozon’s film, shot in crisp black and white, makes the heated air palpable.

Meursault, played by Benjamin Voisin, is virtually expressionless and emotionless throughout the tale, as he is in the novel. Camus’ neutral prose is translated skillfully by Ozon, though a flat affect is far easier and more acceptable in a reader’s imagination than on the screen. Meursault shows no emotion when killing, an essential element in Camus’ tale; he is equally emotionless at his trial, when he refuses to say anything exculpatory. He is honesty incarnate, quietly so. It is only when the prison chaplain comes to see him and calls him to accept God in his final moments that he explodes. It is a stunning reminder of the heart of the existentialism of Camus: There is no God, and we are all guilty of something and can expect no forgiveness.

Simone Zimmerman (advisory board member): Don’t read Lily Meyer’s The End of Romance if you don’t like reading about someone who could be you, or one of your friends. Don’t read it if a book about a millennial feminist who crafts elaborate theories to cope with her most intimate problems will feel too uncanny valley—as one friend remarked when I pitched it to one of my best lady groupchats—to be engrossed by it. However, to my fiction girlies looking for a smart, fun romance, and who can handle the relatability, please do read it and text me about it.

The book follows the journey of Sylvie Broder, a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors who runs away from an abusive husband and reinvents herself as a philosophy PhD candidate at the University of Virginia, where she spends her days trying to conceptualize how to “end romance”—to completely divorce sex and love in order to liberate straight women from the patriarchy. I found myself deeply invested in this maddening protagonist whose attempts to theorize her way out of heartbreak inevitably lead her into a devastatingly messy love triangle entirely of her own making—with two very familiar-sounding men offering radically different types of love and visions of a life together. Oh, and she still can’t bear to officially ask her loser high school sweetheart for a divorce—which frankly makes no sense for a woman who is so fiercely independent and so committed to her own pleasure and self-actualization (and also has no trouble picking up any man at a bar on any night of the week).

Sylvie over-intellectualizes her problems, and then creates new ones, to avoid doing what she obviously wants and needs to do. I desperately wanted to yell at her, “You must cross the street by yourself Sylvie!”—inspired by Vivian Gornick’s therapist’s advice in Lux (which Sylvie would obviously love). But I also really felt for her. The hardest part of life is often not knowing what you need to do, but actually doing it. That first step into an uncertain future can be excruciating. Meyer crafts Sylvie’s inner monologue (often via conversations with an imaginary turtle friend) so well that it was easy to empathize. Fortunately, along with the turtle, she has a delightful best friend, Nadia, and an equally delightful older mentor, Elaine, who are not only her best supports on her journey, but profound models of love and friendship.

Upon finishing The End of Romance, I learned that it was in part inspired by Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Enemies, A Love Story, so readers, if you want to book club that too, I’m here for it.

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): I find baseball dull, but I like amiably contrarian, gracefully written essays about cultural history, and so I enjoyed David Henkin’s Out of the Ballpark: How to Think About Baseball. Much baseball writing is mired in religious mystique about the game’s unique, intrinsic qualities, and is consequently as appealing to an unbeliever as a subway evangelist’s sermon. Henkin, a fan but also an academic historian, is gently skeptical of these pieties, whether it’s the supposedly high, morally improving rate of failure (as he points out, it depends how you count), or the weird fetish for the field’s geometry, which converts the sport into an odd, latter-day Pythagorean cult.

Instead, the book focuses on the culture around baseball, and there it turns out there’s plenty to say. In an essay worthy of Raymond Williams, Henkin shows how a sport constantly celebrated for its pastoral qualities is actually a product of cities: 19th century urbanization created the crowds for spectator events, the print public sphere in which to chronicle and interpret ongoing athletic competitions, and, paradoxically, the very longing for green space and fantasies of rural simplicity that now leads us to associate baseball with the country, rather than the city. Other essays in the book take up the sport’s historical dynamics of gender (female fans were necessary to distinguish baseball players’ balanced masculinity from the cruder, blood-sport virility of, say, boxing; yet women who were too into baseball were often belittled or subject to suspicion for insincerity), its connections with empires (intriguingly, not just the United States’), and its odd tradition of ordinary people logging statistical information about the games they watch.

Out of the Ballpark would be a good book for a baseball fan to buy for a loved one who does not understand, say, why they can rattle off players’ batting-averages from the Carter administration, or why they make a yearly pilgrimage to see the St. Louis Cardinals play, as if compelled by some avian migratory pattern of their own. And though Henkin avoids bombastic claims, I feel he offers a peaceably revisionist account of the American Pastime—that is, of a core component of the national culture. In place of essentialist, chauvinistic mythology, his work quietly suggests, we might discover a genially self-critical, intellectually worldly fandom. A prospect perhaps as remote as the White Sox winning the pennant this year—but, of course, one can hope.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): It takes no great courage to make a film attacking the crimes of the Stalin years. Those years tainted the name of socialism and even more, of communism for all eternity. We’ve been inundated over the years with communists depicted in literature and film as hypocrites, cowards, liars, and sycophants. But if it were true that communist governments and parties were composed of people bereft of all morals and decency, would the system have lasted as long as it did, and would millions around the world have looked to it as their hope?

It would be far bolder for an artist to posit that even under during Stalin’s purges in the 1930s, there were communists, even prosecutors, who believed honestly and firmly in Stalin and communism—men and women who thought that if crimes were being committed, they were aberrations, and that if the crimes were made known then all would be well. Sergei Loznitsa’s latest film, Two Prosecutors, is precisely that film. Kornyev, a newly minted prosecutor played with firmness and rigor by Aleksandr Kuznetsov, is a believing communist and Stalinist who is presented with a prisoner who has been a victim of false charges and torture. Without hesitating (the film takes place over the course of two days), he decides that it is his duty as a communist to stand up against the false charges, and abuse of power. These acts were committed, he is sure, in an effort to sabotage the Soviet state, by enemies within the state disguised as loyal communists.

Kornyev is a character against the standard type. He brandishes his Communist Party membership booklet with pride, almost as a weapon. Doors should and must open for him because that booklet is proof of his loyalty and, even more, his probity. And so, when he is passed a note, written in blood, by a prisoner of the NKVD saying he’s been tortured, he expects the prison warden to open all the necessary doors so he can interview the prisoner, an Old Bolshevik. He is shocked when the reality is different, but he is undaunted, for with his booklet he is the incarnation of right and he believes that right cannot but triumph in the world’s first socialist state. His meeting with the prisoner shakes him, but not his belief in communism: Rather. it confirms him in his belief that the enemy has insinuated himself into the heart of the system. The system is pure, but has been perverted by corrupt elements in the secret police.

He bravely and foolishly decides to go to Moscow to inform the state prosecutor, Andrei Vishinsky—historically one of the great monsters and hypocrites of the Stalinist years—and is certain that by telling him what is happening all will be well. But Kornyev‘s vision is simply an inversion of the system of the purges. If for the Stalinist leadership anything that is going wrong is the work of Trotskyists in the pay of Nazis and fascists, for Kornyev the extermination of real Bolsheviks is also a conspiracy, but through infiltration of the NKVD. Both sides are conspiratorial, and both are possessed of an unbreakable and unfalsifiable logic. Kornyev is every bit as wrong as Vishinsky. The difference is, the latter has the might of the state behind him. Kornyev’s party booklet won’t be able to save him.