Close-Knit (2017)

Ogigami Naoko's Close-Knit (彼らが本気で編むときは、) is a very sweet family drama about a young girl named Tomo who is abandoned by her mother and who goes to live with her uncle and becomes close to his trans girlfriend. There are many different kinds of mothers in this film, so Close-Knit also gives us a range of possible ways of mothering a child. There is also a secondary storyline about a boy who wants to be Tomo's friend and whom everyone calls gay. This little boy waits for Tomo and asks her to hang out every day, and we slowly learn more about him. Close-Knit is a movie designed, in many ways, to normalize trans folks, to show that trans folks are members of families like anyone else, that they want to love and be loved, and that the desire to be a mother can be shared, rejected, difficult, complicated, or whatever, but being a mother has nothing to do with some kind of internal impulse that women who are assigned female at birth somehow possess and trans women do not.

This whole thing is just charming and sweet. The English title, Close-Knit, refers to familial ties but also to the practice of knitting that becomes a larger theme in the film – just another of its charms, honestly. I have no idea why this wasn't released in theatres in the U.S. back in 2017. It feels like it's something that should have taken off with American audiences, particularly at that time. I don't know what happened, but this is very good.

Pasolini's Canterbury Tales

Pasolini's I Racconti di Canterbury (1972) is a kind of continuation of his Decameron (1971) and prefigures his Arabian Knights (1974). I loved both of those movies, and I think part of my problem with Canterbury is that it doesn't really do anything new with the formula. Mind you, I saw Arabian Nights before I saw Canterbury Tales, and I might have felt differently about that movie if I had seen that third, but I don't think so. There's something... I don't know... disconnected about this one in comparison with the other two. We never spend enough time with any one story to really connect with the characters.

Or maybe it's the dubbing. I know this is very typical of Italian films from this period, but it's truly egregious here. Hugh Griffith and many other actors are obviously speaking English, but their voices come out speaking a decidedly disconnected Italian. Sometimes the mood of the words doesn't even match what the actors are doing on the screen. I don't know. It really bugged me.

Ninetto Davoli's appearance is a high point of the film, of course, and there are plenty of really delightful sequences, so I am not really complaining, and I liked it well enough. I just loved The Decameron and Arabian Nights so much, and this one is not as good.

The movie's final sequence, though, in which a greedy monk is led into Hell and meets the devil, who shits out other friars, is hilarious, absurd, and delightful. It's a wonderfully sacrilegious way to end the movie and a stark contrast to the beautifully sacred ending to The Decameron.