Vintage Sand Episode 39: Director's Cut: Chloe Zhao

Vintage Sand

Episode 39 finds your intrepid Team Vintage Sand doing a deep dive into the work of one of our most promising young filmmakers, 2020 Best Director Oscar-winner Chloe Zhao. Although she has only done four feature films to this point, she has already established a distinctive painterly and brilliant visual style, and, as no less an authority than Frances McDormand put it, has shown herself able to successfully walk the line between sentiment and sentimentality. We take an auteurist approach to Zhao’s work by dividing her young career into two distinct parts. She began with two very low-budget films, Songs My Brother Taught Me and The Rider, using non-actors essentially playing themselves. Notably, both were set in the unique and wonderful landscape of the Pine Ridge Reservation in the Black Hills of South Dakota, a location that is becoming to Zhao what Monument Valley was to John Ford. Her Oscar winner, Nomadland, was a transitional work, featuring old pros McDormand and David Strathairn mixed in with non-actors. This unexpected success then led to her chance to be part of the MCU with Eternals, a huge-budget film that many connoisseurs of the genre consider to be the worst of the Marvel films. So our fundamental question is simple: how do the visual and thematic elements that made her first two films so uniquely personal and intimate carry over into the second pair of films, done on a much different scale? As frequently happens, there is some dissent within Team Vintage Sand. Michael, and to a lesser extent John argue, as do many, that Zhao’s films suffer from her insistence on non-actors, and that Songs and The Rider would have been better had Zhao populated her film with professional actors. I’m not bothered as much by it, but I see where they’re coming from, especially since they are both trained actors. That being said, there is no doubt that Zhao has a phenomenal eye and that she is an artist to be closely watched; for us, she is one of the few young directors who has earned a lifetime ticket, which simply means that if she’s directing a film, we’ll be there opening weekend. So sit back, enjoy, and we’ll see you all down the road.