The Hottest August
This clip show from filmmaker Brett Story (The Prison in Twelve Landscapes) is more of a shapeless idea than a coherent documentary. The idea was to interview random people on the streets (and waterways) of New York City’s five boroughs during August 2017, with recurring references to climate change and the future. Both topics, it turns out, are just two of the film’s many dead ends.
Story asks now and again about Hurricane Sandy, which devastated oceanside property in the city in 2012, and visits one neighborhood that had been under water. But most of her interviews are just people talking about themselves or what they’re doing — swing dancing in a park in 1920s costumes, sweating on a crowded beach — and most people are barely introduced before they’re abandoned and never seen again. And just to further confuse or tease the viewer, there’s also an occasional voiceover, by Clare Coulter, sharing incomprehensible excerpts from poetry. At least, I think it’s poetry. Who knows? As with everything else here, there’s no guiding intelligence apparent.
The Hottest August is like looking through an uncurated pile of snapshots — some of them may be intriguing, but they’re too disconnected to provide a narrative or theme. It’s mostly working class people — but not entirely, since the academic-sounding guy in a gallery seems privileged. It’s sort of about the weather (see title), but some interviews have no connection to climate. It’s sort of about anxiety about the future — many subjects are asked to address it — but mostly it’s about the present and recent past. It’s sort of about the age of Trump — the Charlottesville, Virginia, racist rally was that month — but politics are studiously avoided. Variety called the film a “brilliant puzzle-mosaic,” but if it’s a puzzle, most of the pieces are missing, and if a mosaic, its fragments are unglued.
The images, on the other hand, are often beautifully composed, and some may remind you of paintings by Edward Hopper. Story has a brilliant visual sense, but even there she’s inconsistent — for example, cropping in on one image of an escaped umbrella in the wind so tightly that the poor image resolution ruins the shot, or reframing too late when a subject drifts off camera.
I’m not sure who the target audience is for The Hottest August. My best guess for an ideal viewer would be an upper-class liberal who enjoys feeling like their political savvy and artistic tastes are more sophisticated than those of the hoi polloi. Among those who probably won’t enjoy the film are practically everyone in it, since the subjects tend to be deeply grounded in the realities of their lives, topics that the film snips and snaps at without any abiding interest. But hey, ain’t it pretty?
Grade: D. Not rated, but PG equivalent. Available for streaming via both the Fine Arts Theatre and Grail Moviehouse websites. A portion of the streaming fee supports the theaters during their shutdown.
(Photo: Grasshopper Films)
