This Must Be the Place (2011)

Paolo Sorrentino's This Must Be the Place concerns Cheyenne, a wealthy retired rock star who has spent two decades in a Dublin mansion wearing eyeliner and speaking in a whisper, and who decides to cross America in pursuit of the SS officer who tormented his father at Auschwitz. Sean Penn plays him as a sleepwalker. Frances McDormand plays his wife with the patience of a woman waiting out a long winter. The film is strange, melancholy, and unhurried, and it competed at Cannes, which tells us something about the appetites of festival juries.

The Holocaust sits at the center of the story, and the film treats it with conventional moral seriousness. A Nazi hunter is consulted. A blind old man in the New Mexico desert is made to walk naked into the salt flats. Memory is honored, evil is named, and the camera regards it all with a somber Italian eye. None of this registers as contemporary social consciousness. The persecution of the Jewish people, rendered here as a family wound and a historical debt, is not the same as modern anti-racist commentary, and the film makes no effort to convert it into one. Cheyenne's androgynous presentation is a style borrowed from Robert Smith of The Cure, not a statement about identity. The women in the film are wives and granddaughters, present and largely unexamined.

Sorrentino has said he wanted the least likely avenger imaginable, a self-absorbed celebrity drifting through diners and motels. The result is a road movie about grief and belatedness. It has no interest in lecturing us about capital, climate, or the body politic. It simply wants to watch a man in lipstick buy a gun and then put the gun away. The classification is straightforward. The ledger is clean.