Archive for the ‘Drama’ Category

The Shooting (1966)

Dir: Monte Hellman | Cast: Jack Nicolson, Warren Oates, Millie Perkins, Will Hitchens | US Drama 82’

A historically important film since it marked the beginning of the collaboration between Monte Hellman and Warren Oates that eventually came to full fruition with ‘Two-Lane Blacktop’.

For Jack Nicholson, who co.produced with Hellman and plays yet another in a long line of leering malcontents it represented yet another frustration before he finally arrived with ‘Easy Rider’.

Assisted by the minimal score by Richard Markowitz the predominantly horizontal visuals created by cinematographer Gregor Sandor dispenses with the usual visual attraction associated with the genre concentrating instead upon character interaction; while as the shady lady – like Nicholson wearing a striking wide-brimmed hat – the freckles on Milly Perkins’ face shows she had spent far more time exposed to the sun than poor Anne Frank had. @RichardChatten

NOW ON YOUTUBE

Abschied (1930) Powell + Pressburger Season at the Bfi

Dir: Robert Siodmak | Cast: Brigitte Horney, Aribert Mog, Emilie Unda | Drama

Made in Neubabelsberg Studios in Berlin in just ten days on a budget of DM80,000, Abschied (Farewell) gained Emeric Pressburger his first screen credit during his brief sojourn in Weimar Germany before settling in Britain in 1936.

The action never leaves the shabby boarding house presided over by Emilia Unda, who some viewers might recall as the headmistress in Madchen in Uniform. Unlike Robert Siodmak’s previous outing of outdoor Neue Sachlicheit (Menschen am Sontag (1929) this anticipates the later garrulous romantic realism of Pressburger’s own Miracle in Soho minus the baroque touches one came to associate with those of his longtime collaborator Michael Powell. @RichardChatten

POWELL + PRESSBURGER SEASON AT THE BFI AUTUMN 2023

Dawn of a New Day (1964) Youssef Chahine Season

Dir: Youssef Chahine | Drama, Egypt

Dawn of a New Day has been described as Sirkian. In reality this glossy sixties colour moral tale bears a stronger resemblance to Antonioni; while the cast of overdressed, big-haired women foreshadow Almodovar, the backdrop here is Cairo rather than Buenos Aires.

Stage star Sanaa Gamil is a formidable protagonist, unhappily married to an indolent mercenary husband – played by director Chahine himself – who, it is suggested, forced the 40 year-old into an abortion that plainly leaves a huge hole in her heart, filled by an affair with a 22 year-old lad.

This moral tale makes no bones about her selfishness and venality, Chahine’s much-vaunted social conscience is implied by the offhand way she treats her servants in a parable that leaves us with a hopeful message: each day brings a new dawn, so never lose faith in the future. @Richard Chatten

Drama & Desire: The Films of Youssef Chahine – BFI Southbank season

The Swimmer (1968)

Dir: Frank Perry | Cast: Burt Lancaster, Janet Langard, Janice Rule, Tony Bickley, Marge Champion | US Drama 95′

A man spends a summer’s day swimming as many pools as he can in a quiet suburban town in this cult classic that Burt Lancaster called the favourite of his career

A nightmare drenched in beautiful Connecticut locations in glorious sunlight, this review is for those reeling from the devastating ending and wondering what THAT was all about!

My mother’s typically astute interpretation which seems to hit the nail on the head was that Lancaster suffered some catastrophe that cost him his job and his marriage, had a nervous breakdown and one day wandered out of the sanatorium where he’d spent the last couple of years unaware that time had passed; hence the ambivalent response of everyone he meets to see him. @RicharfChatten

NOW AT BFI SOUTHBANK

Driving Mum (2022)

Wri|Dir: Hilmar Oddsson

Hilmar Oddsson offers up another tale of Icelandic family strife and dysfunction, a black comedy very much along the lines of his fellow countryman Grímur Hákonarson’s dour and determined tale of sibling rivalry set in a farming community, Rams.

Although here the drift is towards melancholic fantasy, it’s a brave and bracingly impressive feature proving Icelandic cinema to be one of the most offbeat and ingenious in the magnetic north.

Þröstur Leó Gunnarsson cuts a dismal figure as A son whose existence is diminished by the maternal force that gave him life – and we feel for him. His indomitable mother (Kristbjörg Kjeld) is the classic monster matriarch – feared and yet revered in equal measure and he finds himself trapped by her influence.

This son, his dog and his deceased mother – the ultimate back seat driver – take to the road in a final surreal cross-country journey. Sardonic is the watchword as long-discussed funeral plans are finally put in motion in a grim valedictory voyage. Although dead, mother still dominates from beyond the grave as a gaunt and ghoulish physical presence to ensure her wishes are followed to a tee.

Óttar Guðnason creates a saturnine sense of place with his stark black and white cinematography providing a bleak and baleful backcloth to Jon’s rumination on an unfulfilled existence and his lonely life. Revenants from his past include a solitary female figure, a group of karaoke revellers and a recurring carnival motif.

Reality occasionally rears its head in the understandable queries he receives from people he meets along the way, and this contrast between the mundane and the ephemeral provides the piece with its vein of tragi-comedy.

Although his dead mother remains tight lipped and stoical, her wishes become real-time in-car conversations that really need no voice; they are seared into Jon’s unconscious like some macabre maternal spell that bizarrely echoes from the other side. MT

IN CINEMAS FROM FRIDAY 1 MARCH | GRAND PRIX winner at Tallinn International Film Festival 2022

Inland (2022)

Dir.: Fridtjof Ryder; Cast: Rory Alexander, Mark Rylance, Katherine Hunter, Eleanor Holiday, Shaun Dingwall, Neil Williams; UK 2022, 82 min.

Fridtjof Ryder makes a striking but saturnine first feature, borrowing heavily from Nicolas Roeg and David Lynch, as implied by the film’s title. Ryder wrote the script before he was twenty, but filming was delayed for several years due to the pandemic.

Essentially a two hander, the film follows a young man (Alexander) whose disturbed mental state lies at the heart of the narrative and will dictate the course of his life even after longterm psychiatric treatment. One relationship in particular looms large; with garage owner Dunleavy (a saturnine Mark Rylance) who offers him board and employment in the West Country city of Gloucester (the director’s hometown). The two will circle each other like fish in an aquarium: the implications are not promising, but their interaction is never really explored. This young man has obvious lived through abandonment issues and has difficulty integrating, a flyer shows the photo of his mother, who has gone missing.

Donleavy remains the only fully fleshed out character here but his relationship with his employee is never developed beyond the surface. Alexander’s young man remains enigmatic, ephemeral even, never emerging as someone substantial. There are nods to his mother’s Romani background – but Inland asks more questions than it answers.

DoP Ravi Doubleday lets the camera roam in the dark woods and poorly-lit streets of Gloucester in a pervasive atmosphere of gloom. Dunleavy’s little house looks lost in the dark forest. Rylance tries hard to fill out his character, but struggles with the avoidance of anything factual. Alexander walks in a landscape he is supposed to know, but childhood and present always mingle, giving him no foothold in reality. AS

IN CINEMAS FROM 16 JUNE 2023

 

 

Last Dance (2022)

Dir/Wri: Delphine Lehericey | Cast: Francois Berleand, Kacey Mottet Klein, Deborah Lukumuena, Dominique Reymond, Astrid Whettnall, Sabine Timoteo, Jean-Benoit Uguez | Comedy, 90′

A delightfully bittersweet Swiss Belgian comedy drama starring Francois Berleand as a po-faced widower coping with the loss of his wife and the unwanted intrusion of his well-meaning loved ones.

Last Dance mulls over familiar territory when it comes to bereavement: and for 75-year-old Germain the grief is sudden and heartfelt. But he hardly has time to recover when the constant intrusive ‘phone calls to check on his well-being begin. And these are mostly to relieve the callers’ anxiety rather than for any sense of neighbourly care. Then there’s the stream of well-intentioned but unsolicited cakes, pies and casseroles (which Germain duly feeds to the cat.) Family visits never seem to stop – or end – and he wonders why his kids are unable to stick to their individual weekly visiting rota that he could really do without (Carole is Tuesday, Matthieu, Friday – or was it the other way round).

Lise (Reymond), his much loved wife of 50 years, was heavily into volunteering and experimental dance in a troupe led by the domineering choreographer ‘La Ribot’ (Lukumuena) and Samar (Mottet Klein).  In a bid to show willing, Germain feels obliged to take Lise’s place enacting a series of avant-garde movements that feel entirely awkward, causing him to break his bedside lamp rehearsing in the privacy of his bedroom. But he puts his foot down to the idea of taking on a mentorship for a young student, until his daughter insists it will be good for his ‘mental health’. So student and mentor eventually come to a ‘win win’ situation that suits both of them – but will anyone actually benefit from their arrangement?.

Delphine Lehericey directs her witty insightful script with great confidence and dexterity and the performances all round are really spot on. There are some laughs to be had too in this deadpan tongue-in-cheek story about a man who resolutely refuses to mourn, in the conventional sense, after a lifetime of happiness with his lost love. MT

ON RELEASE IN FRANCE AND BELGIUM |  BEST FILM | LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2022

Paris, Texas (1984)

Dir.: Wim Wenders; Cast: Harry Dean Stanton, Nasstassja Kinski, Dean Stockwell, Aurore Clement, Hunter Carson, Bernhard Wicki; West Germany/France 1984, 147 min.

German director Wim Wenders follows his earlier road movies with a real cult classic. Paris, Texas is perhaps most memorable for Harry Dean Stanton, Ry Cooder’s moody score and the burning images of the Wenders regular, Austrian DoP Robby Müller. Written by the Sam Shephard, and adapted for the screen by L.M. Kit Carson, this enigmatic character drama won the “Palme d’Or” in Cannes 1984.

Wim Wenders in Cannes | Debussy Cinema @Meredith Taylor copyright

 

Stanton is Travis Henderson, an aimless drifter who stumbles into a bar in the Texan desert, and promptly passes out. A German doctor (Wicki) revives him and finds a piece of paper with a phone number, in the man’s pocket. It belongs to Travis’ brother Walt (the charismatic Dean Stockwell), who collect him and endures his brother’s stony silence on the long drive back to LA where Walt lives with his gentle wife Anne (Clement) and Travis’ 7 year old son Hunter (H Carson, son of Karen Black and Kit Carson) who they have raised for the past four years.

Hunter and Travis hit it off – against all odds – and Anne tells Travis that Hunter’s birth mother is paying a monthly deposit money into an account for her son. Travis and Hunter track Jane (Kinski) down to San Antonio, Texas where it transpires she is working as a sex worker in a Peep-Show. Pretending to be a client, Travis, who can not be seen by Jane because of one-way glass window, talks to her via an intercom, sharing their love story until she cottons on. Confused by his emotions but wanting the best for Hunter, Travis finally hatches a very unlikely plan.

Guilt is the watchword in Wenders’ movies. Overtaken by the emotion from an early age, he considered taking the priesthood to fulfil his strong feelings about Catholicism. Nearly all his anti-heroes live their lives in the past, and fear the future. Travis’ unfounded jealousy and alcoholism led to the break-up of the torrid relationship with the much younger Jane (a luminous Kinski). He had even bought a plot of land to prepare for their future together. Only a crumpled photo of a ramshackle hut in the desert remains. But Travis clings to it like a totem. Along with the titular hero in The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty (1972), who kills out of boredom, Travis is always running away, not to find anything, just to lose himself.

The German photographer in Alice in the Cities (1974) escapes to another continent to ‘forget’ a relationship, only to be trumped by a mother who leaves her daughter in his care, expecting him to trace the girl’s relatives in Germany. Kings of the Road (1976) sees two lorry drivers dreaming of a future which will never be realised because they can only talk about women, and how much they miss them. Finally, in The American Friend (1977) Zimmermann, a painter and frame-maker, is unable to communicate his physical and emotional turmoil to his wife; instead he goes on murdering spree, for money.

Paris, Texas raises the timely theme of belonging: As nurturing fill-in parents to Hunter for most of his life, Walt and Anne are the losers of the piece. But Wenders hardly touches on their emotional arc – or their pain – in the aftermath to Hunter’s departure. His focus is the birth mother and son who must be united at all costs. And their final scene together brings to mind the emblematic coupling of Christ with the Virgin Mary.

Leading men are generally loners in Wenders’ features, their isolating fear of women gradually diminishes their persona as the narrative unfolds. Violence is never far away, and Travis suppresses his anger into a brooding silence. Harry Dean Stanton channels a palpable intensity of feelings into a performance that is subtle and exquisitely felt, but barely shown. His brother Walt is likeable and articulate along with his delicate wife Anne, a touching turn from Aurore Clement. There’s an almost whimsical quality to the early domestic scenes with the four of them together. Where there could have been emotional trauma and harsh words, Wenders instead brings a tender, almost comedic lightness of touch.

Wenders’ love for America and its culture is explainable: violence is simmering under the surface, ready to explode at any time. Paris, Texas is never violent, but the emotional pain is only too visible. A cult classic that needs to be explored again and again.

ON RE-RELEASE AT Picturehouses | Curzon Cinemas | from 29th July 2022

A Tale of Filipino Violence (2022)

Dir.: Lav Diaz; Cast: John Lloyd Cruz, Hazel Morenci, Shaina Magddayao, Agot Isidro , Charo Santos-Concio, Josef Nanding, Bart Goingona, Alsajir Puno, Earl Ignazio, Gio Gahom; Philippines, 2021, 409 min.

Filipino director, co-writer, co-DoP, designer and editor Lav Diaz once again delves into his country’s rich history from Spanish colonisation to present-day feudalism in an epic drama with touchstones to the present, based on Ricardo Lee’s short story and screen play “Servando Magdamag”.

As the title suggests – this is a blood-soaked ballad of brutal confrontations tracing the life and times of an infamous Filipino dynasty, the violence mostly happening off-screen in the director’s signature slow-burn style that envelopes us into the action. After seven hours we are very much part of his world, and the family feud at its core.

A Tale – shot once again in velvety black & white – takes place in the early days of the dictatorship of Fernando Marcos (1917-1989). Elected President in 1965 he declared Martial Law in 1972 so as to avoid calling an election shortly before the end of his second term, the regime gradually becoming more entrenched. Ironically, his son Marcos jun (Bong Bong) has just been elected president of his country in a landslide victory paving the way for his mother Imelda to return to the presidential palace. She would flee the country with her family in February 1986.

Servando Monzon VI (an impressive John Lloyd Cruz) proves to be a somewhat unreliable narrator, reading from the journal of his ancestor Servando Monzon I who was born in Spain but deported to the Philippines in 1979 after killing his lover, stabbing her 52 times. The founder of the family fortune used slavery to establish the huge and profitable ‘Hacienda’. In one of the early scenes the violent heir Tres Monzon III (Goingoa) is delivered back to his Villa in the Hacienda by ambulance. Suffering from pancreatic cancer, he only has a month to live, but he has been fortunate: family money has saved him from a long prison sentence for his crimes of rape and murder. But his comes uppence has finally arrived, fate delivering the final blow.

Servando is married to Belinda (Orenzio, who is also the film’s co-producer and assistant director). The university educated Belinda sympathises with her brother Delio (Gahom) who is an active part of the NPA forces operating in the vicinity of the Hacienda. Belinda is also taking care of Tya Dencia (Isodro) who has witnessed the 1945 murder of many of the Monzon clan and their women by Japanese forces. One of them, Dolores, gave birth to three children after being repeatedly raped. Dencia suffers from schizophrenia and has fled into her childhood, playing with dolls and singing sad songs. Delio is captured and interrogated by Captain Andres (Ignazio), who later promises a fellow guerrilla that he will be freed if he kills Delio. In the end we hear three shots, suggesting Andres did not keep his word. What follows is a catalogue of killing and corruption – leaving many maimed, murdered and damaged for life – meted out by the Monzons not only to their adversaries but also their own close family in a story that sees Diaz eventually turning the tables to show who Servando really is.

Diaz has made a serial version of the film in colour, and a cinema version in black & white. Crucially, he has chosen to classify A Tale as a cine-novela because, like many of other historical epics, the feature is structured rather like a long novel. The reader – rather like the film’s audience – gets slowly embedded into the narrative. There are no rush cuts, long static shots allow the audience to become at one with place and protagonist. The Hacienda villa, like a theatre set, is filled with sinister foreboding and gloomy shadows, not least because Tres is on his death bed. Diaz avoids any shock effects in a story that always retains an element of surprise. Rather like the doom-laden family mansion of the House of Usher, Servando’s house is tainted by the past. Marcos speaks on the radio while real history is unfolding, and it feels like a real and integrated part of the feature.

Strangely the atmosphere of the pandemic still pervades the film. The immediacy of the moment helps to explain the effect it will have on the audience: a sort of ‘dance on a volcano’ sensation with the same long shot techniques employed by the Lumiere Brothers to surprise their audiences. The poetry and songs (composed by Diaz) bring to mind Melancholia in their ritual function.

And one last point: Diaz’s features should be approached in the same slow, episodic, patient way as a Henry James’ novel, not read in one go. Diaz plans to create a three-part cinema version – the complexities are often hidden in James’ half-page sentences, while Diaz’ films hide their power behind the non-dramatic developments; as with the prolonged death of Tres, who becomes a main protagonist by simply dying, igniting the demise of the Monzon clan and, at the same time, immersing us in this house of death where we simply languish like all the other protagonists.

Patience is the key to entering Diaz’ world, where every little detail is painstakingly viewed from different angles, showing the characters caught in a magnificent spider’s web.AS

FID MARSEILLE | 5-12 JULY 2022

The Quiet Woman (1951) TPTVEncore

Dir/Wri: John Gilling | Cast: Derek Bond, Jane Hylton, Dora Bryan, Michael Balfour | UK Drama 71′

Older viewers probably remember Jane Hylton (who died aged just 51) as Frank Spencer’s highly strung mother-in-law in ‘Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em’ rather than for her films; but here she plays the title role and models a variety of eye-catching outfits ranging from a swimsuit to a man’s suit (watch the film if you want to find out how that came about) in this breezy piece of escapism enhanced by excellent photography by co-producer Monty Berman including attractive location work shot on Romney Marshes in the summer of 1950.

As Britain continued to suffer rationing and austerity, smuggling rapidly came to seem rather romantic and featured in quite a few films at that time; now so long ago that Derek Bond, John Horsely, Harry Towb and even Michael Balfour all then looked relatively young and dashing. @RichardChatten

NOW ON TPTVENCORE.CO.UK

The Good Boss (2021)

Dir.: Fernando Leon Aranoa; Cast: Javier Bardem, Oscar de la Fuente, Manob Solo, Almadena Amor, Tarik Rmili, Sonia Atmarcha, Fernando Albiza, Celso Bugallo; Spain 2021, 119 min.

Javier Bardem plays another arch villain in this darkly satirical Spanish arthouse flic which is entertaining up to a point, but doesn’t quite do justice to the serious nature of the material with bland jokes and one-dimensional characters often reducing the narrative to a farce, the many plots and subplots are still left dangling despite the generous running time.

Blanco (Bardem) has inherited a factory from his father, and somehow thinks he owns his employees into the bargain, lording it over them and interfering in their lives at will. The regional council is giving out a prize for the most progressive company and Blanco is keen on the prestige the award confers, and the prize money. His first target is José (de la Fuente), who takes his revenge on being sacked by building a minicamp outside the main gates of the factory where he is joined by his children in chaotic protests. Next in line is production manager Miralles (Solo). The two grew up together and Blanco believes he can sort out Miralles’ marriage rift when his wife decides to play the field. But all he gets for his troubles is a slap in face from the wife, in public. When new intern Liliana (Amor) joins the company Blanco’s luck seems to change. But after a night of passion with Liliana he find out from his long suffering wife Adela (Almarcha) that he looked after Liliana as the baby daughter of some close friends. Blanco ends the relationship unceremoniously, but Liliana teams up with Khaled (Rmli), who has taken over from Miralles’ role as productions manager, leveraging a pay rise and a job as marketing boss in return for not spilling the beans to her parents. So Blanco’s dream of winning the coveted award seems a long way off at this point in the game.

Best known for his breakout hit Loving Pablo, one can see what Spanish director Fernando Leon Aranoa had in mind: a modern version of a Frank Capra movie. But he lacks the finesse of the legendary American director, and even though Bardem makes for a charismatic lead there is no Jimmy Stewart to counter him. DoP Paul Esteve Birba and his handheld camera keep up the tempo in the production scenes, but the domestic stuff with Blanco in different bedrooms is rather old hat. Overall Boss falls between two stools, lacking the ballast to be a populist satire or enough humour and nuance for a modern screwball comedy – but it’s certainly worth a watch. AS

OUT ON 15 JULY at CURZON CINEMAS and CURZON HOME VIDEO 2022

Tinnitus (2022) Karlovy Vary Film Festival 2022

Dir: Gregorio Graziosi | Cast: Alli Willow, Joana de Verona, Antonio Pitanga, Indira Nascimento,

An addition to the female sports genre is this visually dynamic drama from Brazilian director Gregorio Graziosi who explores disability through the competitive world of women’s synchronised diving.

And where better to set the story than the nation’s capital with its all round summer climate and impressive architectural landscape with iconic 1920s skyscrapers jostling with Oscar Niemayer’s contemporary creations and colonial style churches dating back to the 16th century.

Marina lives here in a stylish apartment with her doctor boyfriend and has reached peak condition in pursuit of her dream of competing in synchronised diving events in Sao Paulo’s state of the art olympic sized swimming centre. But a sudden attack of tinnitus – an excruciating ringing in the ears – that hampers her progress with her diving colleague. And Marina is forced to abandon the season and take up another rather more dubious water-based job as a ‘mermaid’ in the public aquarium, entertaining tourists with her colourful costumes. Naturally this is a career comedown for Marina and impacts on her emotional wellbeing as well as her relationship with her boyfriend. Her swimming partner is now left in the lurch and is forced to start looking for another to take her place

The premise is a good and one Graziosi’s cinematic vision realised by DoP Rui Pocas (Tabu, Zama and Good Manners) is certainly exceptional. But the script involving three writers often feels over ambitious in trying to fathom out Marina’s reaction to her illness and the complexities of women’s relationships when the three main female characters fall out – and the ensuing (ubiquitous) lesbian twist feels contrived rather than natural along with the trip to Japan. Meshing these various narrative strands together weakens an otherwise original idea, so why not tell it more simply and trust in the strength of the original idea. Less is always more. MT

KARLOVY VARY FILM FESTIVAL | 2022 PROXIMA COMPETITION

 

 

 

The Integrity of Joseph Chambers (2022) Tribeca 2022

Wri/Dir: David Manchoian | Cast: Clayne Crawford, Jordana Brewster, Michael Raymond James, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Carl Kennedy | US Drama 96’

Contrary to the promise of the title Joseph Chambers is largely a twit with earnest intentions of proving his manhood with a flimsy excuse of providing for his family by bringing home the bacon in the shape of a deer,

This flimsy but faintly amusing morality tale is David Manchoian’s follow up to his incendiary drama The Killing of Two Lovers which had less of a plot but far more complexity and soul, both features exploring the deepest reaches of the male psyche in down at heel contemporary rural America.

Once again Clayne Crawford plays the man in question (and also serves as producer), but this time he is a much valued lover to Tess (Jordana Brewster), an inexperienced hunter who fancies his chances of shooting a deer to keep the proverbial wolf away from the door. But we have much less sympathy for him than for his previous character David in The Killing. 

The Integrity is slow-burning to point of pulling teeth. But to his credit, Machoian’s rigour is once again to be admired along with Peter Albrechtsen’s seething soundscape which creates the film’s compelling atmosphere in the bosky foothills of the Appalchians where Joseph ventures with a rifle borrowed from his friend Doug (Karl Kennedy) who seems to share our scepticism of Joseph’s abilities beyond the bed chamber.

Unravelling during the course of one day, Joseph’s misguided hunting trip will prove his ego and prowess as ‘king of the mountains” to be far greater than his actual skill as a hunter. When faced with an emergency exposing his inadequacies, he simply breaks down in tears and then eventually runs home as if nothing has happened. Part of the problem with Joseph is our lack of empathy with him largely due to his lack of integrity from the outset to the final scenes. MT

TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Breaking the Ice (2022) TriBeCa 2022

Dir.: Clara Stern; Cast: Alina Schaller, Judith Altenberger, Tobias Resch, Wolfgang Böck, Pia Herzegger; Austria 2022, 102 min.

This tour-de-force of family dysfunction and first love on the ice rink is the latest in a recent crop of films about ‘women in sport’ but lacks the slick delivery and emotional punch of Charlene Favier’s skiing thriller Slalom or even The Novice which looked at the loneliness of competitive rowing.

Austrian writer director Clara Stern certainly makes a promising start but a lack of structure makes it difficult to keep up with the main character’s changing moods, the high octane world of Women’s Ice Hockey giving the whole undertaking a sensationalist quality and contributing to the overall unevenness.

Playing ice hockey as captain of the Dragon’s team is how Mira (Schaller) handles the stress of running the family vineyard with her mother (Herzegger), after the tragedy of her grandmother’s death with her brother Paul (Resch) at the wheel. Meanwhile her grandfather (Böck) is sliding into dementia and Paul has left home in disgrace.

Paul’s sudden reappearance during a critical match involving the “Dragon’s sends Mira into overdrive. He starts playing the fool forcing her to leave the rink at a critical moment and she ends up being stripped on her captaincy after a severe reprimand from the team’s coach. Mira is told to pull herself together, to forget her family troubles and give all for the team in the forthcoming national final between the ‘Dragons’ and the ‘Lakers’.

A challenge from another player Theresa (Altenberger), is the spark that ignites an unexpected attraction from her team player Theresa who is driven by the desire to succeed professionally and wants to be selected for a try-out with the National Women’s Hockey League of the USA. Tensions rise between the women before the start of a game, Mira and Theresa creating mayhem in the dressing room.

BREAKING THE ICE is not as progressive as it thinks it is, despite a lesbian twist. Aesthetically very conventional – the sporting sequences following the same pattern as male features of the sub-genre – and are overloaded with conflict. Stereotyping the main female protagonists does not help either, and the simplistic solutions offered are too close to the usual mainstream features to be convincing. We are not particularly drawn to any of the characters and Schaller fails to bring out the humanity in Mira despite the conflict she faces.  Stern is simply is not up to the task of marshalling the strings of the narrative together to a satisfying conclusion.AS

TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL 2022

January (2022) Tribeca Film Festival 2022

Dir.: Viesturs Kairiss; Cast: Kärlis Arnolds, Avots, Alise Dzene, Baliba Broka, Aleksas Kazanavicius, Juhars Ulfsack; Latvia/Lithuvania/Poland 2022, 95 min.

Latvian director/co-writer Viesturs Kairiss recreates the turbulent days of January 1991 when Latvia – and other Baltic countries – were fighting for independence from the collapsing Soviet Union. Centred around a young student at the film school in Riga, January is shot in eight and sixteen mm, giving the feature a very intimate atmosphere. Dedicated to all the documentary filmmakers who died during the period, this is a chronicle of a lost youth set against a nation in crisis.

Jazis (Avots) is facing a crisis of a different kind: that of his own identity: he fancies himself as the new Tarkovsky, and manages to impress co-student Anna (Dzene) who is fascinated by his rather pretentious lectures, but when they end up in bed incapable of satisfying his new girlfriend, and he retreats into a depression. But the main problem in Jazis’ life are his parents: His mother Biruta (Broka) has fallen out with Communism and now activates for independence. Father Andrejs (Kazanavicius) is still a believer, even though he can see the crumbling Empire.

Then Podnieks (Ulfsack), a famous filmmaker, turns up to make matters worse for Jazis, especially when he hires Anna as his assistant. But their attraction for each other soon dies and Anna turns her affections back to Jazis who has almost lost interest in her. Everything comes to a head during the mid January demonstrations when barricades are erected in the streets of Riga and soon Jazis finds himself conscripted into the Russian army because his doctor refuses to attest to his “depression”. But when violence erupts on the streets, and demonstrators storm the Interior Ministry, Jazis problems are forced onto the back burner: “I will never find out who I am really’, he laments.

DoP Wojciech Staron frenetic handheld images capture the mayhem not only in Jazis’ mind but also in the disruption brewing around him.  January is very much a testament to the liberation movement, but the lovers are still the main protagonists: caught up in radical new ideas, but very much the victims of contradictions beyond their influence. A paean to revolutionary passion with a touch of early Truffaut.

TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL 2022 | WORLD PREMIERE JUNE 12

The Green Perfume (2022) Cannes Film Festival

Dir.: Nicolas Pariser; Cast: Sandrine Kimberlain, Vincent Lacoste, Rüdiger Vogler, Léonie Simaga, Arie Worthalter, Jenna Thiam, Pascal Rénéric, Thomas Chabrol; France 2022, 104 min.

A really seductive title that fails to live up to expectations, Le Parfum Vert tries hard, perhaps too hard, to revive Hitchcock mysteries in the style of Jacques Rivette. And while the French New Wave master would be delighted with the central pairing – two Jewish oddballs – along with the theatre setting; Nicolas Pariser is less successful when it comes to the modern version of Hitchcock: the plot is, to say the least, weak, setting aside the simplistic political plotline.

Martin (Lacoste), an actor, is witness to the onstage murder of his friend Vlad (Rénéric) during Anton Chekhov’s play ‘Ivanov’. In his last breath Vlad implicates the Green Perfume group. Martin, always the hypochondriac, freaks out when it turns out he is the main suspect. Fellow actor Caroline (Thiam) tries to calm him down but Martin is then abducted by a right-wing group with links to Russia, led by the sinister Hartz (Vogler), a cartoonish Austrian. Martin is then released the following morning, and running away from the police, led by detective inspector Louise (Simaga), meets Claire (Kimberlain), a cartoonist and owner of a bookshop, who is hounded by her sister and mother, phoning her in the middle of the night with a link to a Jewish dating agency.

Claire has spent a long time in Israel, she dislikes the snobby French but has to admit Israel is not European any more. Martin, who also spent time in Jewish summer camps, is more obsessed with his health and lack of love in his relationships: he is in the middle of a divorce and as self-obsessed as his new partner. Somehow, Louise catches up with the pair on Martin’s next engagement in Budapest where Corneille’s ”L’Illusion Comique” is on the programme. The Hartz Group will try to get hold of a super disinformation system. The clue to its whereabouts will be triggered by one of the actors who will use the wrong cue – the play is in French, the audience has a Hungarian translation. To find the traitor Claire follows Martin in the hunt, in spite of a bullet wound in her leg, before she too is abducted by Harzt and his men in the Budapest theatre.

Forget the farcical plot, The Green Parfum succeeds largely due to the compelling chemistry of the leads – both lonely and out of luck in love. A Jewish identity gets you only so far, and both have not really grown up and still hankers after ideas which are now on the scrap heap. Like Hansel and Gretel, they have lost their way home, only existing only in their imagination. Unaware of the danger of the real conspiracy, they save themselves by falling in love.

DoP Sebastien Buchmann pictures Paris and Budapest in a nostalgic glow. The chase scenes in the theatre are lively, but Buchmann is (like Pariser) most convincing, when it comes to small details, like the observations on the train when the two chases their pursuers – or find a corpse. Every day life is much more exciting than the wildest political plots – particularly when poorly executed. AS

THE GREEN PERFUME | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL

Under the Fig Trees (2022)

Dir.: Erige Sehri; Cast: Ameni Fdhili Fide Fdhili, Fetan Fdhili, Samar SIFI, Abdelba Mrabti, Firas Amri, Leila Ouhebi, Ghaith Mendassi; Tunisia, Switzerland, Qatar, France 2021, 92 min.

A first foray into drama for French Tunisian filmmaker Erige Sehri, whose journalistic experience served her well in her documentary debut Railway Men.

With its cast of mainly non-pros Under the Fig Trees is a pleasant discursive comedy of manners that plays out in the countryside location of a fig orchard where fruit pickers of all ages expound their personal animosities and gender conflicts in the languorous heat of a summer afternoon, the fig serving as a sexual metaphor for turbulent times ahead as an entire family struggles to interpret the past, present and future of Tunisia.

The director’s background in documentary filmmaking is always prevalent. During filming her focus is on personal dynamics and body language and she spends time with the female protagonists who are trying to find a way out of the past, symbolised by their parents (and the older co-workers), into a future that will offer them the chance to opt for a profession instead of just marriage. Their attitude towards love, as seen in their instagram pictures, is still very romantic, but they know they will have to work hard for a freedom their mothers, and the Leilas of this world, never had.

Ghaith is paying Leila (Leila Ouhebi) extra money for acting as his ‘eyes and ears’. It is no accident that Leila is one of the few older women who encourage the teenagers to behave and pray – something which falls on deaf ears. Ghaith, who is always asking his staff to follow his orders, is very lax in performing his own duties; but in the end, he is the man who pays at the end of the week, and this power gives him a free hand in doling out favours or pay cuts. Melek and her sister Fide are constantly at loggerheads, Melek is in love with Abdoul (Mrabti), who has been living in Monastir for the last years, where he and Melik were an item. But Abdoul has a much more serious matter to deal with: his uncle, who owns the orchard where they work. He has sent the bailiff to his family home, to collect money. And the main focus is their confrontation. More intriguing is the relationship between Sana (A. Fdhili) and her love for co-worker Firas (Ameni) who plays the field, metaphorically, with Sana trying in vain to come to terms with his emotional neglect.

DoP Frida Marzouk’s handheld camerawork is fluid and appealing with poetic images of the fruit-picking and surrounding countryside. Playing out as a series of contemplative episodes without any real dramatic arc Under the Fig Trees is interesting but ultimately less meaningful than it could have been in raising awareness of Tunisian society and its place in the world. AS

NOW AT VIENNALE 2022 | DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT 2022

 

Luzzu (2021)

Dir/Wri: Alex Camilleri | Cast: Jesmark Scicluna, Marlene Schranz, David Scicluna, Marta Vella | Drama 94′

Fisherman all over the world are under pressure in what is surely one of the most honourable professions since the time of Jesus: bringing home the catch.

Maltese American filmmaker Alex Camilleri backed by award-winning screenwriter Ramin Bahrani casts a real working fisherman (Jesmark Scicluna) in his intelligent debut feature that plays out like an agonising arthouse thriller set in a fishing Mediterranean community struggling to survive. Jesmark is one of a long line of locals making (or not making) their living from the sea. Each days he sets sails in his colourful painted luzzu – a traditional man-made wooden boat – hoping to support his newborn son who needs medical treatment. The alternative is to decommission his vessel for an EU payout and possibly getting tied up in EU red tape, or go on the black market with the island’s criminal underclass. Seemingly a no-win situation. Interestingly Malta joined the European Union in 2004 and their exotic language sounds like a cross between Sicilian and North African Arabic.

So the odds are really stacked against Jesmark who manages to look resentful, hurt and bewildered in a convincing performance that won him Best Acting award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Meanwhile, his wife Denise (Michela Farrugia) manages to make everything look like his fault, along with his mother in law. And to makes matters worse he now has to rely on a friend (David Scicluna) to help him.

Their daily catch yields a mixture of sea bream, mullet and bass, but they are forced to throw a lucrative swordfish back in the sea, although the fish is already dead,  because it contravenes EU regulations, and this is a tense moment for Jesmark who clearly feels back-footed and diminished. Clearly this is not working. So he joins forces with the unscrupulous Uday (Uday Maclean) in a soulless (!) foray that goes his integrity. This black market option requires him to go back on his tracks after dark and collect the leftover fish which can then be sold on to restaurants.

With disappointment and anger etched on his weatherbeaten face Jesmark is the embodiment of male failure. Luzzu serves a vibrant snapshot of this ancient Southern European archipelago with its age-old traditions and tightknit community dogged by global economic turndown and EU restrictions. MT

SUNDANCE SPECIAL JURY AWARD – ACTING | OUT ON 27 MAY 2022

Casablanca Beats (2021)

Dir/Wri.: Nabil Ayouch, Cast: Anas Basbousi, Ismail Adouab, Amina Kannan, Meriem Nekkach, Nouhaila Arif, Zineb Boujemaa, Samah Barigou, Abdelilah Basbousi, Maha Menan, Mehdi Razzouk, Marwa Kniniche, Soufiane Belali, Zineb Boujemaa; Morocco/France 2021, 101 min.

French-Moroccan director Nabil Ayouch is no stranger to controversy: His feature Much Loved about prostitution in his home country was banned, and Horses of God is a sober fictionalisation of the the suicide bombing that killed 33 people in Sidi Moumen, a deprived neighbourhood in Casablanca.

Ayoch has returned to Sidi Moumen with CASABLANCA BEATS, the first Moroccan feature in competition at Cannes since 1962. An uplifting story of local teenagers, uses rap and hip hop to hit back at the male-dominated set-up, and the religious bigotry that condones it. All actors are playing out their own lives with Anas Basbousi being the central character. Basbousi is a rapper, who founded the ‘Positive School’ in a cultural centre in Sidi Moumen where he clashes with the leader who feels his progressive style of music will alienate the centre from the rest of the community. In real life, Ayouch was instrumental in setting up the cultural Centre ‘Les Etoiles’ in Sidi Moumen back in 2014, together with author Mahi Binebine, on whose novel ‘Les Etoiles de Sidi Moumen’ Horses of God was based.

“Hip hop is an art form”, exclaims Anas, but not everyone shares his enthusiasm. It certainly proves to be a divisive art form, particularly for the parents of teenager Maha Menan who protest “Not for us”, as they drag their daughter out of the centre. Meriem Nekkach’s brother even tries to prevent her visits. But her counter attack makes things clear: “For you, women are slaves/It makes me sick/For you, being a man, means dominating us/look at our mother in chains/never had a voice, and never complained. While all this is happening the male religious enforcers (known at The “Beards”) patrol the streets extolling the teachings of the Quran: “Everything that lures us from God’s path is a sin”.

But the dance craze is refusing to back down. More centres along the lines of the Sidi Moumen “Positive School”, have now been stablished in Morocco, and Casablanca Beats’ main dancers, Ismail and Mehdi have now turned semi-professional. The film comes to a head with the long anticipated ‘big concert’, which should have won over hearts and minds – but ends in a violent confrontation with the “Beards” and their supporters, leaving Anas’ future in the balance.

This effervescent feature fizzes with fun thanks to the lively camerawork of Amine Messadi and Virginie Surdej. Casablanca Beats is not simply a North African version of the Bronx or Paris sub-culture, but an indigenous approach to rap/hip hop artists, defined by the fighting spirit of a youth rising up against a repressive and often violent parental and authoritarian regime. In true Middle Eastern style Casablanca Beats is a feisty but fervent hymn to music, life and love. AS

IN CINEMAS AND ON CURZON HOME  FROM FRIDAY 29 APRIL 2022

Cries and Whispers

Dir.: Ingmar Bergman; Cast: Harriet Andersson, Liv Ullmann, Kari Sylwan, Ingrid Thulin, Anders Ek, Erland Josephson, Henning Moritzen, Georg Arlin; Sweden 1972, 92 min.

CRIES AND WHISPERS stands out in the Bergman canon and not only from The Touch (1971) and Face to Face (1976), which came before and after this 1972 outing. Like so many of Bergman’s films, they were straightforward relationship dramas. Cries takes us back to Bergman’s early features dominated by death and the human relationship with God, men and women living separate lives even after marriage. Yet Cries is also a horror feature, not least because the dissolves (replacing conventional cuts) are crimson red. Another point worth mentioning, is that

In rural Sweden Agnes (Andersson) is dying of cancer. Her two sisters arrive more out of duty than real concern. More caught up with their own lives, they don’t see eye to eye. Maria (Ullmann) is unhappily married to Joakim (Moritzen) and desperate to rekindle her affair with the family doctor, David (Josephson). Karin (Thulin) is aloof and lives with the cold-hearted tyrant Fredrik (Arlin). So the caring role falls to the maid Kari (Sylwan), who has already lost her daughter.

After Agnes’ agonising death, the vicar prays with Kari and the sisters, reassuring them  that Agnes’ faith was even stronger than his. Suddenly, Agnes comes back to life for a moment, asking her sisters to stay with her. Both decline, making spurious excuses to get back to their own families, and for a moment they make peace with each other. Kari offers Agnes her support. There is a positive denouement, even though the narrator, Agnes, can not be totally trusted.

The crux of the story is that Maria was the family favourite. Agnes can only remember getting her mother’s full and undivided attention on one occasion. But, crucially, she has left her diaries to Kari, who is touched by the gesture. Perhaps these will provide a clue?

DoP Sven Nykvist shot more than a dozen of Bergman’s features in black & white, and Cries was all about getting used to colour film, somehow also achieves a fairytale atmosphere. Ullman not only plays a sister, but also the role of mother to Agnes and Karin when they were children. Cries is probably not the most momentous of Bergman’s features, but it is certainly one of the most daring. AS

Opening on 1 April 2022 at BFI Southbank, HOME Manchester, Watershed Bristol, Tyneside Cinema, Cine Lumiere, IFI Dublin, Glasgow Film Theatre, Broadway Nottingham and selected cinemas UK-wide

The Divide | La Fracture (2021) Bfi Flare 2022

Dir: Catherine Corsini | Cast: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Marina Foïs, Pio Marmaï, Aissatou Diallo Sagna, Jean-Louis Coulloc’h | France, Drama 98′

Corsini’s Parisian dramady unfolds over 24 hours reflecting the political conflicts dividing France through a disintegrating romantic relationship between two women. Raf (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) and Julie (Marina Foïs) have been together for ten years but the arguments are getting worse. After a night of angry texting distraught Raf begs Julie to stay chasing after her into the street and ending up in hospital with a broken elbow. The two are briefly united in a ward fraught with hysterical patients, Raf knocking back the tramadol to quell her physical and emotional pain. Valeria Bruni Tedeschi gives another of her signature melodramatic performances full of vulnerability and mischievous tongue in cheek humour.

Meanwhile outside the famous ‘gilets-jaunes’ are staging yet another rally against president Macron. One of the protestors is truck driver Yann (Pio Marmaï) who takes a bullet from the police and ends up in the same ward as Raf. ‘Casualty’ fills up with a constant stream of sick and injured while the staff do their best – led by real-life caregiver Aïssatou Diallo Sagna – in a microcosm of French society ‘du jour’ raging with anger, fear and disenchantment at the government and the world at large. Joined by her co-writers Agnes Feuvre and Laurette Polmanss Corsini directs a whip smart script laced with satire and acute observations. MT

SCREENING AT BFI FLARE | CANNES 2021 PREMIERE

 

 

 

Wet Sand (2021) Bfi Flare

Dir: Elene Naveriani | Cast: Gia Agumava, Eka Chavleishvili, Zaal Goguadze, Kakha Kobaladze, Megi Kobaladze, Bebe Sesitashvili | Georgia, Drama, 115′

Elene Naveriani’s subtle and classically told auteur feature centres on a rather sinister turn of events in the closely knit seaside community on Georgia’s Black Sea coast. Neighbours who thought they knew each other are suddenly back-footed when a regular at the local beach cafe is found to have committed suicide to everyone’s surprise. The dark humour is in the realisation that savage mistrust and divided loyalties are just as at home here and they are in the big city, and perhaps even more so. Agnes Pakozdi’s camerawork creates a painterly sense of place in the faded grandeur of the settings. Naveriani directs with style and attention to detail in an unhurried but memorable gem that won Gia Agumava’s performance Best Actress at Locarno 2021. MT

NOW SCREENING AT BFI FLARE 2022

 

Vilnius International Film Festival – 24 March – 3 April (2022)

Vilnius IFF will be the first international festival to actively boycott Russian film with the focus of this year’s 27th edition firmly on the recent petition from the Ukrainian Film Academy. Day Zero – on March 23rd – will be dedicated to the latest crop of features and documentaries from the besieged European country. With Lithuania now welcoming hundreds of thousands Ukrainian refugees – and adding children’s films to the line-up – there will free screenings to entertain all ages.

Five films in particular will highlight Ukraine cinema and will open this year’s celebration on 23 March 2022:

BAD ROADS  Dir: Natalya Vorozhbit (image above)

Lithuania knows a thing or two about staying silent. That silence ended on 23 August 1989 when two million people across Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia formed a human chain: the Baltic Way. Seven months later, on March 11 1990, Lithuania was the first Soviet republic to declare independence.

MARIUPOLIS  Dir: Mantas Kvedaravicius

Daily news reports have shown the devastation of this Ukrainian sea port. In his sophomore feature Lithuanian filmmaker Mantas Kvedaravicius centres on ordinary life and happenstance in a community unaware that 2022 would bear witness to a tragic loss of life and destruction.

THE DISTANT BARKING OF DOGS  Dir: Simon Lereng Wilmont (main image)

Set in Eastern Ukraine town of Hnutove, on the frontline of the war, the film follows a year in the life of 10-year-old Oleg who lives with his grandmother. As his friends gradually leave the village we witness the gradual erosion of his innocence amid the constant pressure of the unfolding conflict.

 

ATLANTIS  Dir: Valentyn Vasyanovych

Ukraine’s Valentyn Vasyanovych would go on to win a slew of awards for his first feature that highlights the camaraderie and resilience that has been the life force of this year’s Russian invasion. It sees a soldier suffering from PTSD befriending a young volunteer and hoping to restore peaceful energy to a war-torn society.

MY THOUGHTS ARE SILENT Dir: Antonio Lukich (image above)

Vadim, a sound engineer, has decided to emigrate from Ukraine to Canada at the age of 22. But before he leaves he must undertake an unusual assignment: to record the song of a very rare bird native of the Transcarpathian mountains of Ukraine.

As part of the European Capital of Culture celebration in the city of Kaunas, the festival will build a one-off theatre for a special screening of Laurynas Bareiša’s PILGRIMS (Venice, Best Film Orizzonti 2021) in the village of Karmelava where the film was shot. Vilnius IFF’s industry program Meeting Point Vilnius (MPV) also disinvited Russian projects in line with the festival’s boycott. Instead It will dedicate a special Ukrainian day to its program on April 1 with panels on political, institutional and film industry levels. The Vilnius Film Festival is supported by the Lithuanian Film Centre, co-funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture, Creative Europe MEDIA Programme of the European Union, Vilnius City

DAY ZERO | VILNIUS INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2022 | LITHUANIA 

 

Ingeborg Holm (1913)

Dir: Victor Sjostrom | Cast: Hilda Borgestrom, Aron Lindgren, Erik Lindholm, Georg Gronroos, Richard Lund | Sweden, Silent Drama 96′

To anyone with a nodding acquaintance with silent cinema the idyllic opening scene depicting the happy Holm family will seem ominous rather than heartwarming; and when Ingeborg Holm’s husband starts placing his hand on his chest in discomfort, you know that trouble and strife lies ahead.

Based on a 1906 play by Nils Krok, it’s realistic and unmelodramatic depiction of hardship generated much discussion and led to changes in the poorhouse laws. A hundred years ago it would have seemed to the socially concerned that the current pace of technological process would ensure that poverty exacerbated by the harsh unyielding poorhouse regime endured by Ingeborg Holm would have become just a distant memory by the end of the 20th Century. More than 50 years later, however, Cathy Come Home (1966) showed that little had changed; and another 50 years has now passed since then. Ingeborg probably ends up costing the state infinitely more than the debts that forced her into the workhouse in the first place, where the irascible officials who have a budget to balance won’t pay for her to visit her sick daughter; but then end up having to foot the bill for the police investigation that tracks her down (just as the taxpayer presumably ended up paying for her later years in a mental institution).

The smattering of Danish films from this period that I’ve seen show that technically Ingeborg Holm is not really the trail-blazer it tends to be claimed. The naturalistic acting is less unusual for the period than those unfamiliar with silent cinema are usually pleasantly surprised to discover, the sets are convincing and lighting is skilfully employed by cameraman Henrik Jaenzon for dramatic impact; but Victor Sjostrom actually frames the action for the most part rather stiffly in the middle distance. It is the content rather than the form that really impresses.

There are no moustache-twirling villains. Even seemingly unsympathetic characters will show unexpected little flashes of humanity (such as the bullying old harridan at the poorhouse who then offers Ingeborg a sip from her hip flask; and the two coppers sent to recapture her). The nearest thing to a villain the film supplies is the jerk manning the counter discouraging customers and ripping off the Holms while Ingeborg’s husband is too sick to keep an eye on him. Having Ingeborg go mad is probably a surrender to the need for some sort of dramatic conclusion to the story. The rest of the film having been such a relentless downer, having her eventually reunited with her long-lost son (played by the same actor who had played her late husband) represents some sort of a happy ending. In reality she would look much, much worse after 15 years in the psychiatric ward than she does here; but the scene is played touchingly and without histrionics. (Although it raises again the question posed by other films with epilogues set several years later: was the main action set in 1898 or the epilogue in 1928?).

The atmospheric photography and period costumes and settings makes ‘Ingeborg Holm’ seem a lot quainter to a modern audience than it would have done at the time. In modern London she would probably end her days less picturesquely sleeping rough in a shop doorway somewhere.@RichardChatten

Autumn Girl (2021) Netflix

Dir.: Katarzyna Klimkiewicz; Cast: Maria Debska, Leszek Lichota, Krzysztof Zalewski, Bartlomiej Kotschedoff, Katarzyna Obidzinska; Poland 2021, 105 min.

Katarzina Klimkiewicz’s Autumn Girl is both a tribute a Kalina Jedrusik (1930-1991), Poland’s answer to Marilyn Monroe, and a snapshot of her homeland in the 1960s.

Krzysztof Kieslowski pictures life in sixties Poland as a time of austerity, to say the least. Not so according to Klimkiewicz and Maria Debska who turn this biopic into a first class Hollywood musical, overcoming sexism and dodgy politics, with a triumphant Debska getting away with everything, just like the original Kalina Jedrusik who died of an asthma attack after starring in Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Veronique.

It all starts in a fashion boutique where Kalina refuses, and not for the first time, to toe the Party line: “The Woman of the 1960s should be fashionable, but modest. Dashing but modest. Chic but modest. Focused of Hearth and Home”. But Jedrusik is anything but modest, she lives the life of Laurie as the star of a Polish TV show, and men literally queuing round the block. After hours, she lives with husband and writer Stanislaw Dygat (Lichota), but their flat is also home to hunky, in-house lover Lucek (Zalewski).

When party bureaucrat Ryszard Molski (Kotschedoff) takes over the TV Ents department – he too wants a piece of the action with Kalina (literally), more or less calling her a whore. And when she rejects his advances she is blacklisted and even banned from her favourite show the “Elderly Gentlemen’s Cabaret”. Her mood swings from aggression to self pity but she paints the town red with her best friend Xymena (Obidzinks), the two ending up in the bus depot after midnight, one of the buzziest numbers of this revue.

Warsaw dazzles in Weronika Bilska and PD Wojciech Zogada’s stunning camerawork with Debska the star turn in an all-singing-all-dancing extravaganza set to Radoslaw Luka’s original score. The aesthetic choices are adventurous in a parallel universe where candy-colours quell dour black-and-white reality: Ken Russell minus the hyperbole springs to mind, with Klimkiewicz playing fast and loose with the facts. Autumn Girl’s success lies in not taking itself not too seriously, or resorting to camp. It maybe a man’s world, but this woman reigns supreme with her sparkling zest for life. AS

NOW ON NETFLIX

Murina (2021) Glasgow Film Festival 2022

Wri/Dir: Antoneta Alamos Kusinajanovic | Cast: Gracija Filipovic, Danica Curcic, Leon Lucev, Cliff Curtis | Drama, 82′

Croatian director Antoneta Alamos Kusinajanovic has fleshed out her Berlinale award-winning short Into the Blue delivering a tightly wound sensually charged story of sexual awakening that picked up the Camera D’Or at Cannes 2021.

In many ways Murina echoes Heitor Dhalia’s sun-drenched romantic drama Adrift (2009) but here the action travels from Brazil to the crystal waters of the Adriatic, off the coast of Croatia, where feisty teenager Julija (Filipovic) is on a pre-uni holiday with her mother and controlling father Ante (Lucev) who is keen to keep them both under his thumb. Once again there’s an unmistakable friction between father and wilful daughter and plenty of crotch shots of the latter as she swims and frolics in the turquoise waters of this rocky island paradise despite to break free of her parental constraints.

The arrival of Ante’s friend and ex boss Javier (Curtis) is cause for celebration and a certain amount of nostalgia as they reminisce about the past, and when Julija is asked to recite some poetry Javi is instantly drawn to her sultry charm and feral beauty in scenes that set fire to a strong sexual vibe that smoulders as they swim together the following day. But Julija is not the only one Javi has eyes for: he still holds a candle for her ex beauty-queen mother Nela (Curcic) who views his keenness on her daughter with lowkey resentment, but has no intention of getting involved with the peripatetic playboy who clearly is not one for settling down. This air of danger excites the nascent sexual desire in Julija and, oblivious to her father’s well-founded warnings, she embarks on a bid for freedom that sizzles with erotic tension and uncovering uncomfortable truths from the past. MT

SCREENING DURING GLASGOW FILM FESTIVAL 2-13 MARCH | Curzon Sunday 13 March 2022

Robe of Gems (2022) Berlinale Film Festival | Silver Bear Jury Prize

Dir/scr: Natalia López Gallardo. Mexico/Argentina/US. 2022. 118 mins

A visually striking, thought-provoking and disquieting feature debut from Natalia López Gallardo who joins a talented array of female filmmakers such as Tatiana Huezo (Prayers for the Stolen)and Fernanda Valadez (Identifying Features) in bringing more intriguing stories from Latin America.

Isabel (Nailea Norvind) and her family live with her mother (Monica Poggio) in a rambling estancia where the threat of gang violence seems a million miles away from their languorous existence, although for their housekeeper, Maria (Antonia Olivares), it is very real and possibly the reason for the recent disappearance of her sister. Isabel is going through some kind of emotional trauma of her own after a potential marital disagreement. At a loose end and in empathy with Maria, she decides to make some discrete but ultimately ill-advised inquiries of her own.

In a bid to be enigmatic Robe of Gems loses its impact drifting around nebulously between a police thriller and a stylistic arthouse drama until finally gaining some shape in the second hour. The connections between the characters are never fully explained, their lives gradually fading into view in the woozy heat of a Mexican summer, the focus on mid-shots and close-ups only adding to the air of mystery in a drama where a great deal happens off-camera, in a series of episodes. Beyond the artistic flourishes though, few clues are given to enable understanding or feeling for the rather buttoned-up characters. That all said, López Gallardo must be applauded for telling a sinister story with such a lightness of touch and without resorting to violence; the final scene is quietly devastating. MT

SILVER BEAR JURY PRIZE WINNER | BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL 2022

 

Northern Skies Over Empty Space (2022) Berlinale Panorama

Dir.: Alejandra Marquez Abella; Cast: Gerardo Trejoluna, Paloma Petra, Dolores Heredia, Mayra Hermosillo, Francesco Barreiro, Juan Daniel Garcia Trevino, Raul Briones; Mexico 202, 115 min.

After her first feature, The Good Girls, a superficial comedy of manners, Mexican director/co-writer Alejandra Marquez Abella, comes up trumps with a hard hitting neo noir Western, a stylish, epic tale of violence and spurned love. Brilliantly shot by DoP Claudia Becerril Bulos, this is a mixture of Italo-Western and soap-opera, with an ending like Rene Clement’s late feature La course du lièvre à travers les champs.

Don Reynaldo (Trejoluna) is a ranch owner near the city of Monterrey. Ranch and owner are decaying, and family life is more than complicated. Suffering from prostate cancer and failing eyesight, Reynaldo (‘Rey’) can’t even hunt any more – his greatest hobby, as documented by the many trophies in the mansion, which has seen also better times. He is married to long suffering Sofia (Heredia), whose life is dominated by the menopause. Rey’s best (and only friend) is Rosa (Petra), the dominant manager of the state, who even shoots a deer for her master, after he has muffed the shots. Apart from her, everyone in the family wants to inherit the ranch, even though nobody takes any responsibilities, leaving Rey to mis-manage the property, whilst still pretending to be a great hunter. He has an ambivalent relationship with his son Elias (Barreiro), who is going through a divorce, and might lose custody of his children. Elias wants nothing more than be loved by his father, and Sofia reminds her husband to show some affection. Daughter Lily (Hermosillo), once dad’s favourite, is now distancing herself from the once proud patriarch. Then, one the day, Rey is celebrating the founding of the ranch by his father, a stranger, calling himself Guzman (Briones), appears and asks for ‘Protection’ money. Rey sends him away, but we all know, that the man, or even worse characters, will appear again. Rey, obviously having a death wish, sends everyone of his his family away. Only Rose, pregnant after having been gang-raped, will fight Rey to the bitter end – but not before she makes the most astonishing confessions.

There’s enough going on here in to sustain our attention for the two hours running time. Petra carries the film and the conflicting interests of Rey and his family, as well as the few employees left. The atmosphere is maudlin from the beginning, and amid the escalating violence and betrayals, Rey gradually loses control while the family run for cover. Rosa and Rey seem to be the only couple with mutual feelings – until the former’s disclosure seems to pull the rug from underneath what Rey and the audience assumed to be the truth in this impressive spectacle of class conflict, opportunism, greed, shattered illusions and death. AS

BERLINALE | PANORAMA 2022

Return to Dust (2022)

Dir: Li Ruijin | Cast: Renlin Wu, Hai-Qing | China, Drama 131′

“Love is not about staring at each other, but looking in the same direction”

The sun shines and each frame glows with painterly charm in this modest but momentous story of love and adversity for two people rejected by their family after an arranged marriage, and forced into a humble existence on their isolated homestead in rural northwestern China, 

Return to Dust is the latest from Chinese independent director Li Ruijin who scores subtle political points behind his perfectly pitched storyline that speaks volumes about the China’s rapid urban shift. The focus is farming couple Ma (Renlin Wu) and Gui (Hai-Qing) as they face the odds together in the rugged landscape with only their livestock for company. Tenderness contrasts with dark humour as Ruijin depicts the crass materialism of modern China with the poetic honesty of the past: one scene features their donkey alongside a flash new BMW signalling that time, inevitably, must move on. 

Each day a new challenge presents itself and Ma and Cao seem to cope without drama fronting up placidly seemingly unsurmountable hardship in the haunting beauty of the remote setting. Li Ruijun – best known for his 2015 feature River Road – focuses on the growing strength of their relationship as it transforms from initial diffidence to enduring love. MT

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM FRIDAY | BERLINALE 2022 | GOLDEN BEAR COMPETITION 

 

Concerned Citizen (2022) Berlinale | Panorama 2022

Dir.: Idan Haguel; Cast: Shlomi Bertonov, Ariel Wolf, Ilan Hazan; Israel 2022, 81 min.

Israeli writer/director Idan Haguel tries hard debunk a few urban myths with an uninvolving drama that ends up as a farce.

Gay couple Ben (Bertenov) and Raz (Wolf) have moved to a downmarket part of Tel Aviv where they’ve have more space for themselves and their new baby. The hope is the kid will knock their relationship into shape and bring them closer together; they’ve paid a woman in a catalogue thousands to bear their bundle of joy, but somehow this detached approach to life seeps through the rest of the film.

For Ben and Raz the focus is on fitness, and they prance around their swanky new place wizzing up healthy drinks and exercising. “In five years, this will be a different area” is their positive take on the multi-cultural set up, which is still in its rather wild infancy.

As a gesture of neighbourly goodwill, Ben has planted a tree in the street below their apartment and takes a dismal approach to the two immigrants from Africa using it as a leaning post. Ben asks them politely to respect nature, but to no avail. The police respond to his complaint – and beat up one of the young men, who subsequently dies. Ben – the concerned citizen – then makes a call to the security forces. It turns out the victim lived below and Ben, rather at odds with himself, joins his grieving family at mourning along with his therapist (Hazan).

All the prejudices and latent racial tensions soon emerge at a therapy group session.

We are also watching some animation of happy people in the midst of new apartment blocks, mixing joyfully. But we do not need this reminder to learn about the ideological conflicts in existing in Israeli society, caused by the ‘polite’ racism of a so-called progressive middle class, pretending to be in Sweden or Norway. DoP Guy Sahaf succeeds very much in showing the emptiness of modernity, trying to hide the real conflict. But the structured, overly didactic approach never lets the feature flow, and leaves the audience emotionally disconnected. AS

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL 2022

Without Warning (1952)

Dir: Arnold Laven | US Thriller

I became aware of this film years ago from a passing reference to it in Carlos Clarens’ ‘Horror Movies’, which had led me to assume that it was better known than it actually is.

The maiden production of the company Levy-Gardner-Laven (later to become very active in TV), and the directorial debut of Arnold Laven, Without Warning! isn’t particularly original – following as it does in the well-worn footsteps of flavourful location-shot police procedurals like The Naked City; and the ending wraps things up a little too abruptly. But as photographed by the veteran Joseph Biroc it treats us to a magnificent tour of some of the seamier parts of Los Angeles as they looked in 1951 (no crime film set in Los Angeles at this time, for example, became complete without a visit to its storm drains, which duly put in an appearance). One of many memorable images the film provides is the all-blonde police decoy squad who resemble something out of The Man from UNCLE; and despite the ultra-noirish title sequence and the occasional night scene, much of the action actually takes place bathed in glorious Californian sunlight for a change.

There are hints that the grip of the Breen Office was beginning to weaken (the wedding ring visibly worn by the blonde that Martin picks up in a bar, for example, would have been vetoed a few years earlier for depicting adultery), and the killer in this film is obviously motivated by sex; although the fact that we later learn that he’s bearing a grudge at the blonde wife who left him makes him more of a sore loser than the all-out sadistic sex fiend the film initially promises (and doesn’t really square with the glee he takes in reading about the case in the papers).

Edward Binns, who plays the police lieutenant, will be most familiar to viewers as Juror 6 in 12 Angry Men, and both he and killer Adam Williams were in North by Northwest; the former again playing a detective and the latter again playing a gardener. @RichardChatten

The Souvenir: Part II

Dir/Wri: Joanna Hogg | Cast; Honor Swinton Byrne, Tilda Swinton, James Spencer Ashworth, Richard Ayoade | UK Drama

Joanna Hogg continues the impressionistic reflection on her twenties in The Souvenir Part II that sees her coming to terms with the abusive relationship that ended in tragedy for her boyfriend, Anthony (an archly sardonic Tom Burke) the first part.

There’s a strong feeling that Julie (Swinton Byrne) invested far more in the relationship than did Anthony. Somehow his caddish manner, pinstriped suit and ‘foreign office’ job made her believe he was worthy of consideration, love even; yet behind it all he was a fantasist and a drug addict who undermined her (“you’re lost and you’ll always be lost”) and stole from her to fund his habit. Hogg brilliantly epitomises this kind of fucked up weirdness of the 1980s that many repressed middle class girls still tolerated in the name of love, and the decent straightforwardness of her comforting parents (Tilda Swinton and James Spencer Ashworth) who provide a welcome sense of equilibrium that kept her going off the rails. But Julie resolves to go back to her London flat where the ‘love story’ forms the more authentic ‘autobiographical’ narrative for her graduation film, after the bogus script about poverty stricken Sunderland is vehemently rejected by her tutors.

Anthony remains the glowering elephant in the room, her colleagues, friends and family tiptoeing around the issue, not wanting to offend Julie who continues to elevate his memory with a solemn respect when secretly he was despised by everyone else accept his long-suffering parents, who gradually fade into the background. At one point Julie tentatively asks her flighty filmmaker friend Patrick (a standout Ayoade): “do you think Anthony worked for the Foreign Office?” He firmly bursts her bubble with: “he was a junkie – move forward”.

Still processing her feelings of grief Julie understandably lacks the conviction to take charge and direct her cast and crew with the confidence they desperately need, and Hogg deftly handles the ‘film in a film’ structure with its scenes of naturalistic on-set mayhem between all of them. Ably supported by her real life mother (Swinton), Honor Swinton Byrne glides through her performance with decorum avoiding histrionics yet imbuing Julie with all the pent up anxiety and hurt her upbringing has forced her to internalise. MT

THE SOUVENIR II IS IN CINEMAS NATIONWIDE FROM 4 FEBRUARY 2022

 

 

Lingui, The Sacred Bonds (2021)

Dir/Wri: Mahamat-Saleh Haroun | Achouackh Abakar Souleymane, Rihane KHALIL ALIO BRAHIM Youssouf DJAORO FANTA Briya GOMDIGUE | Chad, Drama, 87′

Visual storytelling at its most resplendent Lingui is a simple tale gracefully crafted by a director at the top of his game and brought to life by his talented cast.

In a landlocked Muslim country Lingui (The Sacred Ties) follows Amina an observant single mother living on the margins of a male-dominated society with her teenage daughter Maria. The men not only hold sway, they hold themselves above the law, laying it down harshly for their womenfolk. So the women are forced to play them at their game as we discover when Maria falls pregnant and cannot, by law, have an abortion.

With his vibrant compositions and exquisite framing the director keeps dialogue to a minimum in this filmic ‘whodunnit’ relying on strong cinematic language and a propulsive occasional score by Wasis Diop to show how pleasure occasionally breaks into the harsh realities of life in Chad’s main city of N’Djamena, where a tribal society has given way to strictly enforced Islam with mosque attendance ‘de rigueur’. Woman are expected to be subservient and cover themselves up in public, ritual circumcision is routinely practiced and performed by the women themselves when the girls are still very young. To be an unmarried mother is considered sinful whatever the circumstances and so for Maria the future looks especially bleak. And rumours spread fast.

Amina makes metal household equipment which she sells for a pittance by the roadside, but not enough to pay for illegal medical intervention. Maria is a typical young teenager: proudly defiant and living by her own modern standards, but her pregnancy will take her back to the dark ages of backstreet abortions. Worse still, she won’t reveal the truth until circumstances suddenly point to a solution. MT

Born in Chad, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun first won critical acclaim for his short films before directing his first feature, Bye-bye Africa (Best First Film, Venice Film Festival 1999). In 2010, the Venice Mostra gave him the Robert Bresson Award for his complete works and in 2013, the Fellini Medal awarded by UNESCO.

ON MUBI FROM 4 FEBRUARY 2022

The Hustler (1961) Prime

Dir: Robert Rossen | Cast: Paul Newman, Jackie Gleason, Piper Laurie, George C Scott | US Drama 134’

Like Rita Moreno, who was in the original West Side Story, Piper Laurie is now ninety. Since the recent remake of the former underperformed at the box office it’s unlikely to elbow aside the competition the way the original did sixty years ago.

But even then The Hustler collected Academy Awards for the photography of Eugen Schuften and design by Harry Horner, which demonstrated that Americans could use black & white and widescreen with the same intimacy and grace as the Japanese; the pool table lending itself well to CinemaScope, prompting Andrew Tudor to declare that it “remains an object lesson in framing and lighting the wide CinemaScope image”.

The film is also employs a cool score by Kenyon Hopkins and sleek editing by Dede Allen, concentrating for the most part on the actors’ faces rather than the balls; but which includes the participants actually wielding their cues enough times for you to feel you’re watching real games being played. @RichardChatten

NOW ON AMAZON PRIME

Flag Day (2021)

Dir: Sean Penn | Cast: Sean Penn, Dylan Penn, Mitchell McCormick | US Drama

Sean Penn plays the main role and gets his family involved in this torpidly sanctimonious true life drama about a father who turns to crime to finance his daughter (Dylan Penn).

Filming with kids and animals is a well known caveat, but family members should be included too. And the excuse that breaking the law is somehow ok if you need the money can never be justified. So there’s two reasons why Penn sets off on a dodgy wicket with his latest directing project – which rather than entertaining the audience brings nothing new to a mundane story of a feckless felon – the third is his own lacklustre performance as the charmless grifter at the centre of it all.

Growing up with an unreliable father big on grandstanding statements but mired in debt is never a good start for a girl, and even worse when her mother (Winnick) is also irresponsible. But Jennifer Vogel (Dylan Penn) and her brother somehow cope. Over the years John Vogel swings in and out of her life always vowing to do better, and Jennifer (played by various actors as a kid and pre-teen) generally buys into his lies for reasons that remain a total mystery as the two have absolutely no emotional rapport or redeeming qualities whatsoever – but there’s plenty of slanging matches amid rather idyllic shots of nature and swooping wildlife.

Unsurprisingly Dylan eventually goes her own way in Jez Butterworth’s joyless narrative (based on Jennifer’s own book) that does nothing to endear us to its characters, or even feel for them despite their flaws. We remain disenchanted outsiders desperately willing it all to end. The only flag here is a red one. MT

FLAG DAY IS ON RELEASE FROM 28 JANUARY 2022

 

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967)

Dir: Stanley Kramer | Cast: Spencer Tracy, Sidney Poitier, Katherine Hepburn | US Drama, 108’

A curious mass of anomalies. The daring subject matter is cocooned in a very old-fashioned production in which well-heeled professionals do little but talk in a glossily photographed, lavishly appointed set looking out on a diorama of San Francisco in which the trees never move.

The late Sidney Poitier has charisma to spare and it has old-fashioned star power in the final screen teaming of Tracy & Hepburn. The latter deservedly won an Oscar; and the former (whose final speech – which took longer to edit than shoot – in which he swears onscreen for the first and last time when he says “screw all those people”) should at least have been posthumously nominated. @RichardChatten

Now on prime video

The King’s Man (2021)

Wri/Dir: Matthew Vaughn | UK, Action Comedy, 130’

Ralph Fiennes and Rhys Ifans lead a magnificent cast in this entertaining if occasionally ridiculous romp, a historical re-write riffing on an eponymous secret spy organisation active in preventing global conflict during the First World War .

Don’t worry if you haven’t followed the other episodes this stand alone comedy sees Fiennes’s back again as the dapper aristo Orlando Oxford, a patriotic pacifist war veteran who rapidly converts to killer mode when his family is slowly decimated by the war effort.

After his wife is killed by a stray bullet in the opening scenes Oxford actively discourages his only son Conrad (Harris Dickinson) from enlisting in the army – but boys will be boys. Aided and abetted by his game comrades Djimon Hounsou (who plays the token black guy) and Gemma Arterton (the token female with an unfeasible Yorkshire accent), Fiennes plays a chivalrous James Bond-style gentleman hero, impeccably suave in Savile Row suiting, and dashingly daring til the end.

Tonally off-kilter for most of its running time – patriotically reverent melodrama making an awkward bedfellow to ‘boys own’ rambunctiousness and silly humour, there are some rip-roaring set pieces, notably the hair-raising hike up a stratospheric mountain-side to find the home of a storied cashmere-bearing goat.

Rhys Ifans is terrific as the anti-hero Rasputin – although the accent is definitely more Gary Oldman’s 1992 Dracula than the sinister Russian mystic. There are various subplots that feel totally redundant to the main thrust of the narrative – a resentful Scotsman whose identity is only revealed at the end (who even cares?). A bit of a mess then, but a really enjoyable one. MT

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE

Zenobia (1939)

Dir: Gordon Douglas | US Drama 99’

This unusual title – aka Elephants Never Forget – is familiar to most cinephiles as Oliver Hardy’s one starring vehicle of the sound era without Stan Laurel; and aided by an excellent supporting cast he carries the film extremely well. Playing the beloved local doctor of the fictitious town of Carterville, Mississippi in 1870, the Southern setting well suits him, and provides him with a context in which to exhibit the same Southern courtliness without being the pompous buffoon he usually was when teamed with Stan Laurel. He gives a performance of grace and charm, even dancing a few steps with spouse Billie Burke, and shows a concern for the underdog that extends to the little black kid played by Philip Hurlic that is reasonably lacking in condescension for 1939, let alone 1870. While it doesn’t even attempt to be as funny as Hardy’s work with Laurel, the film is however characterised by the charm and lack of sentimentality which remain one the principal reasons that Laurel & Hardy’s work has worn so well to this day compared to that of Chaplin.

When you see Step’in Fetchit billed with his name ‘humorously’ spelled thus in the credits you fear the worst, although in the film that follows his mistress Billie Burke is actually dafter than he is. Hardy’s comments about Southern segregation are later underlined without labouring the point by a fleeting shot of Hurlic, Fetchit & Hattie McDaniel watching the trial through the courthouse window rather than from the public gallery. This film is often spoken of as an ersatz Laurel & Hardy film with Harry Langdon filling in for Laurel, but Langdon’s is really only a supporting role, although he acquits himself well, the old gestures from his silent films are still there, and it’s interesting to both see and hear Langdon for once. Both he and Hardy look remarkably comfortable around Miss Zenobia, who plays the title role. @RichardChatten

Cicada (2021)

Dir.: Matt Fifer, Kieran Mulcare; Cast: Matt Fifer, Sheldon D. Brown, Sandra Bauleo, Michael Potts, Jazmin Grimaldi, Scott Adsit, Cobie Smulders; USA 2020, 96 min.

Auto-fiction can be very satisfying in feature films as well as novels, but the logo “based on a true Story” does not always guarantee the promising results anticipated. First time directors Kieran Mulcare and Matt Fifer – also the co-star, co-writer, producer and editor – have scripted reality into something which is often to pat, and looks more constructed than the authors might have wished.

New York drifter and sex addict Ben (Fifer) meets data-tech expert Sam (Brown, who also has a writing credit), gay and the only black employee in his company. Whilst Ben is only too happy to let everyone know how much in love he is, Sam is understandably more reserved about showing his emotions in public.

We are introduced to Ben’s family: his mother (Bauleo), sister Grimaldi) and church-going father (Potts) and also meet Sam’s father. These short encounters are mainly used to explain the past of the couple: Ben has been sexually assaulted as a child, and Sam nearly died, when he was shot in broad daylight. Misfiring cars bring his PTDS to the surface, whilst Ben has developed a catalogue of psycho-somatic illnesses, for which the stern doctor (Adsit) has no diagnosis. A visit to an off-beat psychiatrist (Smulders), whose dog shares the sessions, does not help Ben either. We are witness to the couple’s self-help, which is also limited, in spite of their best and long drawn-out discussions. The outside world, in from of a news commentary about the Jerry Sandusky trail (2012) does not often enough intrude into this often clumsy and over-wrought ‘Kammerspiel’.

The NY images of DoP Erich Schlicher save the feature from being a verbal slug feast: the scenes set in Washington Park Square are a poetic master-stroke. But even with a running time of only just over 90 minutes CICADA overstays its welcome: repetitions and a near pathological need to show the main protagonists in the best light, leave the audience for great parts unengaged – there are simply no barbs in this rather simplistic tale of love and coming to terms with the past. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 21 JANUARY 2022 theatrical and digital in UK and EIRE

 

Jules et Jim (1961) Truffaut Season at the BFI

Dir.: Francois Truffaut; Cast: Jeanne Moreau, Oscar Werner, Henri Serre, Marie Dubois, Vanna Urbino, Sabine Haudepin, Boris Bassiak; France 1961, 105 min.

Truffaut mentioned Henri-Pierre Roché’s 1953 novel ‘Jules et Jim’ first in his ‘Cahiers du Cinema’ review for Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1955 western feature The Naked Dawn. Roché (1879-1959) had been a famous Dadaist; he wrote Jules et Jim at the age of 74. Three years later, he would publish ‘Les deux Anglaises et le Continent’, and Truffaut’s screen version followed in 1971.  Both novels are highly autobiographically, featuring a passionate menage-a-trois: Jules et Jim tells the story of a strong woman loved  by two very different men, Les Deux Anglaises is about a weak man in love with two wilful women.

Covering the time between 1912 and 1935, the script adapted by Truffaut and Jean Gruault follows German writer Jules (Werner) and his French counterpart Jim (Serre), who meet in Paris. Jim is a hedonistic womaniser (very much like the novelist Roché) whereas Jules is serious, self-pitying and naive, clinging to abstracts and words rather than actions. They both fall in love with Catherine (Moreau), who is the polar opposite of Jules who she ends up marrying, against Jim’s advice.

The marriage is a disaster, but the war intervenes, the two men fighting on different sides and afraid to kill each other. After the war, Jim goes to see Jules, Catherine and their daughter Sabine (Haudepin) in a small village in southern Germany. Catherine is unhappy, and Jules asks Jim “not to see me as an obstacle” in making love to Catherine. The ménage-a trois is a happy one, but Jim can’t tear himself away from Paris and patient girl friend Gilberte (Urbino), with Catherine’s passionate jealousy ending it all. The trio meet accidentally in Paris in 1934, watching a newsreel about the Nazis burning books. Catherine’s revenge is as brutal as its imaginative and leaves Jules bereft alone in a world which he never understood.

The casting of Moreau made Jules et Jim from a “film d’auteur” into a “film de comédienne”, as Claude Mauriac put it. Arguably, the great DoP Raoul Coutard also owns more of the feature than the director. Coutard’s roving camera, old-fashioned fade-outs and languid tracking shots creates an unreal atmosphere, keeping the audience at the whim of the changing camera angles, just like Jules is permanently wrong-footed by life and his love for Catherine.

Jules et Jim was certainly the high point in Truffaut’s career. His next feature, La Peau Douce (1963/64) would be his last in black-and-white for a very long time; but the change to colour was not only an aesthetic choice. Despite the radical ending, La Peau Douce (like most features which followed) were very much a return the French cinema of quality and psychological drama Truffaut had attacked so vehemently as a critic. AS

 

FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT SEASON ON BFI PLAYER & AT BFI SOUTHBANK
The BFI’s celebration of film critic-turned-director, François Truffaut takes place across the UK during January – February 2022 to include a two-month season at BFI Southbank and BFI Distribution re-releases of THE 400 BLOWS and JULES ET JIM.

LES MISTONS (THE MISCHIEF MAKERS) (1957)
A group of boys have a crush on a girl called Bernadette. As they are jealous of Gérard, her lover, they try to disrupt their relationship. When Gérard catches one of the kids spying on them, he thrashes him severely. In retaliation, the boys attempt inspiring Bernadette to doubt Gérard’s love.

SHOOT THE PIANIST (1960)
Charlie is approached by his crook brother Chico, who is chased by two gangsters. Charlie helps him to escape, but he upsets the criminals, so when his brother Fido is kidnapped, Charlie has to take an attitude with tragic consequences.

ANTOINE ET COLETTE (1962)
Now aged 17, Antoine Doinel (introduced in THE 400 BLOWS) works in a factory which makes records. At a music concert, he meets a girl his own age, Colette, and falls in love with her. Later, Antoine goes to extraordinary lengths to please his new girlfriend and her parents, but Colette still only regards him as a casual friend.

STOLEN KISSES (BAISERS VOLÉS) (1968)
It’s 1968 and the forever lustful protagonist of the Antoine Doinel series, has been discharged from military service. He stumbles into a position assisting a private eye where many misadventures, romantic and otherwise ensue.

BED AND BOARD (DOMICILE CONJUGAL) (1970)
Antoine has married his sweetheart Christine, and the couple have set up a cosy life of selling flowers and giving violin lessons while Antoine works on his long-gestating novel. As Christine is pregnant with the couple’s first child, Antoine finds himself enraptured with a young Japanese beauty.

ANNE AND MURIEL (AKA TWO ENGLISH GIRLS) (1971)
At the beginning of the 20th century, Claude Roc, a young middle-class Frenchman, befriends Anne, an Englishwoman. While spending time in England with Anne’s family, Claude falls in love with her sister Muriel, but both families lay down a year-long separation without contact before they may marry.

UNE BELLE FILLE COMME MOI (SUCH A GORGEOUS KID LIKE ME) 1972)
Stanislas Previne is a young sociologist, preparing a thesis on criminal women. He meets Camille Bliss in prison to interview her. Camille is accused of murdering her lover Arthur and her husband Clovis. She tells Stanislas about her life and her love affairs…

LOVE ON THE RUN (L’AMOUR EN FUITE) (1978)
Antoine is now thirty, working as a proofreader and getting divorced from his wife. It being the first “no-fault” divorce in France, a media circus erupts, dredging up Antoine’s past. Indecisive about his new love with a store clerk, he impulsively takes off with an old flame.

THE WOMAN NEXT DOOR (LA FEMME D’A COTE) (1981)
Two ex-lovers wind up living next door to each other with their respective spouses. Forbidden passions ensue.

FINALLY, SUNDAY! (VIVEMENT DIMANCHE!) (1983)
Based on ‘The Long Saturday Night’ by Charles Williams, the story is set over the course of a few nights in a small town in the South of France. Julien Vercel, director of an estate agency, finds himself suspected of a double murder: that of his wife, Marie-Christine, and her lover, Claude Massoulier. As circumstantial evidence is against him and a third murder is attributed to him, Vercel takes off to escape the police. His secretary, Barbara, conducts her own inquiry in a bid to find out the truth and gets herself into some worrying, unexpected situations.

Forces Occultes (1943)

Dir: Jean Mamy (as Paul Riche) | cast: Maurice Remy, Marcel Vibert, August Boverio, Gisele Parry | France, Thrille 53′

Freemasonry continues to be viewed with deep suspicion in many quarters to this day, and like the Jehovah’s Witnesses they attracted the hostility of the Nazis. Hence this diatribe against them made by a group of Vichy enthusiasts during the Occupation.

Forces Occultes is bookended by two pieces of crude symbolism that most obviously nail the film’s colours to its mast as a sock puppet on behalf of the Propaganda Abteilung which had commissioned it. The first is a childishly constructed model spider with a Masonic square and compasses on its back coming to rest on a map of France; and at the end a dastardly Jew gloating over a blazing globe of the world before the caption ‘Fin’ comes up framed within a Star of David. A map is also employed at the outset to demonstrate that only those countries that were under fascism during the thirties were free of “Jewish-Masonic influence”.

We are then introduced to Pierre Avenel, an idealistic young member of parliament seen railing against both the capitalists and communists during the early thirties (in a scene actually shot in the currently disused Chamber of Deputies at the Palais-Bourbon; the French parliament having been transferred to Vichy). He catches the eye of the Masons in parliament and requires remarkably little persuasion to join them, despite the reservations of his wife. A quarter of the film’s 53 minute running time is then given over to a detailed enactment of the ceremony which marks Avenel’s initiation (and Yes, he does wear his right trouser leg rolled up). The ceremony over, he is shown how the famous handshake works and is immediately inundated with requests for strings to be pulled on their behalf by the cartel of spivs – some of them obviously Jewish – that to his distaste he now finds himself beholden to.

The Stavisky scandal is name-checked and the ensuing anti-government riots dramatised; and we now learn that the “mediocre social climbers” Avenel is being forced to associate with are merely pawns in a much larger game that extends all the way up to George V and President Roosevelt and whose ultimate objective (announced by a very Jewish looking speaker at a lodge meeting) is war between France and Germany. The film ends in September 1939: Mission Accomplished.

With the Liberation of France the year after it’s release, many of this film’s makers had to make themselves scarce (Maurice Rémy, who played Avenel, fled to Argentina for five years); while director Paul Riche in 1949 became the only French filmmaker to be executed after the war, although for his collaborationist journalism rather than this film. Technically the film is a thoroughly professional job, with a jaunty score by Jean Martinon and photography of the calibre one would expect of Marcel Lucien, Jean Renoir’s cameraman on ‘Boudu Sauvé des Eaux’.
3 out of 5 found. @Richard Chatten

NOW ON YOUTUBE

The Great Freedom (2021) MUBI

Fir: Sebastian Meise | Drama 104’

Franz Rogowski is the dynamite that burns through this outré arthouse portrait of illicit homosexuality in post war Berlin from Austrian filmmaker Sebastian Meise.

Arrested for cottaging in the grubby confines of a public lavatory in the claustrophobic early cine-camera scenes he is Hans Hoffmann, a man who will spend the remainder of the film in prison surrounded by murderers and thieves, before homosexuality was decriminalised in 1969.

Meise makes no attempt to make his characters likeable in this sordid slice of social realism but Rogowski always brings an appealing sense of vulnerability that softens the hard edges of this overlong sober prison drama with its flecks of brilliance. The final scene is a memorable masterstroke.

The narrative unfolds across three interlinking timelines seeing Hans in a series of sexual encounters in the same sordid prison where he often finds himself in solitary confinement for doing so. The touchstones are 1945, 1957 and 1968 where he forms a close relationship with homophobe Viktor (Georg Freidrich) who is serving time for murder but whose sexual yearnings are for women, not men.

But Meise plays on the theme of sexual fluidity here in a story that very much explores sex as a physical release as much as an emotional need in a pivotal part of the storyline that leads to the men’s relationship soon developing into a close bond of friendship and reliance that touches on love but never speaks its name.

Hans dabbles in other affairs in the story’s most poignant scenes and here he gives full throttle to his signatory romantic sensuality in a gutsy performance that carries the film through its rather low-key narrative where tighter writing in the middle act could have made this more intense.

Nevertheless this is a nakedly unflinching look at a time when men weren’t allowed to show their love for each other and a worthwhile warts of all expose of the German prison system of the era. MT

ON MUBI FROM 11 MARCH 2022

Best Austrian Film, VIENNALE 2021:
GROSSE FREIHEIT (GREAT FREEDOM), Sebastian Meise, Austria/Germany 2021

Pleasure (2021)

Dir.: Ninja There; Cast: Sofia Kappel, Revika Anne Reustle, Evelyn Claire, Chris Cock, Eva Melander; Sweden/Netherlands/France 2021, 109 min.

Girls in the world of porn is the subversive subject of this first feature from Swedish director Ninja There. Expanding her 2013 Cannes award-winning short offers a timely opportunity to explore the lucrative male-dominated sector of the economy where women are literally asked to betray their own gender. Whilst the cool, analytical form may not be everyone’s taste, Pleasure is a stunning portrait of an industry just invented to titillate men.

A young Swedish woman lands in LAX and is asked a common question: Business or Pleasure? She opts for the latter, but it turns out to be an illusion. With a new name, Bella Cherry (Kappel) she will join the many hopefuls who try to make a name and fortune in the porn industry. Apart from Kappel, all protagonists are in the business – so to speak – including top talent agent Mark Spiegler. Set in the grim industrial San Fernando valley and the interiors of some garish mansions, Bella joins collegues in a house where she makes friends with Joy (Reustle) who teaches the uninitiated the tricks of the trade.

When Bear (Cock), a senior crew member, asks her about her life story, Bella claims she has been raped by her father, laughing it off in the same breath and Bear warns her about the competition. Bella’s first shoot is fairly lowkey – one of the crew members is a woman. But then she enters the harsh end of the profession: rough sex, or, as it turns out, rape. Three men coerce her into hours of submission, threatening not to pay her all if she refuses to comply to their wishes.

Bella is a bit of a loner back in Sweden, as we learn this from a phone conversation with her Mum (Melander), but is determined to do her best She wants to succeed, at all costs. But friendships soon fall by the wayside. Joy, nicknamed “trailer trash” by one of the so-called stars, pushes him into the pool. Shortly afterwards Bella sides with the producers, when Joy is clearly hurt by a male actor – but Bella keeps schtum. She is in awe of the glittering Ava (Claire), the latest ‘Spiegler Girl’ who acts in girl-on-girl features. Their love/hate relationship is the pivotal point of the feature and its abrupt ending.

There are some parallels here with a recent Swedish feature, Holiday (2018) by Isabella Eklöf. But Thyberg goes into detail, including full erections. DoP Sophie Winquist keeps a firm grasp on her film with a woman’s gaze, always subverting expectations – in total contrast to a straight-up porn film. But the key element is Thyberg’s unflinching attack on the patriarchal power at play. Bold and with a brilliant eye for detail, Pleasure never lets the audience forget who is in charge and why. AS

https://youtu.be/1hl4D0sE5TA

IN CINEMAS & MUBI 17 JUNE 2022 | ZURICH FILM FESTIVAL 2021

 

Copilot (2021)

Dir.: Anna Zohar Berrached; Cast: Canan Kir, Roger Azar, Ozay Fecht, Julia Roth, Ceci Chuh; Germany/France 2021, 118 min.

German director Anna Zohra Berrached is the daughter of an Algerian immigrant who grew up in the GDR. Her sophomore feature, a complex character study, follows a Muslim couple in late 1999s Germany before the world was changed forever by the turbulent events of 9/11. Based loosely on one of the pilots (Ziad Jarrah) who actually took part in the atrocity (Ziad Jarrah), the film asks the question: how much do we really know about people close to us?

Asli (Kir) is a brilliant medical student, shy and insecure. She falls for a Lebanese student Saeed (Azar), whose dream is to be a pilot, but his wealthy traditional family refuse to support him, Asli’s Turkish just wanting her to marry the ‘right’ husband. Saeed is certainly not on this list partly because of his Arabic background. so the lovers will later marry in secret, but not before Saeed becomes more radical in his views, giving up alcohol and avoiding sex with Asli, telling her: “I don’t want to be like the Germans, who sleep around”.

But there are warning signs from the beginning. Saaed’s anti-Israel remarks soon make the two of them social outcasts amongst their group of friends as Saaed starts proselytising Islam to them and eventually Saeed disappears off to Yemen for a while. And when he comes back his behaviour has changed radically. Suddenly, he decides to take up his pilot licence in Florida, the cheapest and quickest way possible. Asli joins him and they fly together as she gradually becoming his titular co-pilot. Returning to Germany for an operation, Asli comes round from the anaesthetic to see breaking news about the 9/11 disaster on her beside TV. But Saeed’s mobile is switched off.

With its multi-lingual cast and differing cultural touchstones Copilot had quite a laborious scripting and filming process, and as the story unfolds hope gradually fades as Asil loses her focus on reality, preoccupied with work. As for Saeed, he lived in a dream world, sustained by a nightmare: his final letter to his wife is proof of his ghastly fantasy: “The world will be a different one, and happier for all”.

RELEASED IN UK & IRELAND IN CINEMAS 10 SEPTEMBER 2021

Bergman Island (2021)

Wri/Dir: Mia Hansen-Løve | MCast: Vicky Krieps, Tim Roth, Mia Wasikowska, Anders Danielsen Lie | Drama 112′

In the Swedish island of Faro two filmmakers explore their work and their love for each other in Mia Hansen-Løve’s dreamy sun-kissed drama that combines a documentary stye to explore the island’s cinema legacy.

The ghost of Ingmar Bergman fills this sensuous summer story through the emotional encounters of a group of friends there to celebrate a wedding and a writers’ workshop. Filmmakers Chris (Krieps) and Tony (Roth) will stay at the famous house where Bergman shot Scenes from a Marriage. Krieps is the same diffident, restless woman she was in Phantom Thread, finding the peace and tranquility of the island oppressive and missing her daughter June. Tony is laid-back, supportive and secure in his skin as the two discuss their various projects, Chris keen to probe his ideas on her outline film script which forms the core of this film within a film that sees Mia Wasikowska as Amy, the slated central character and also a guest at the wedding where she is reunited with her ex-lover Joseph (Anders Danielsen Lie) their affair rekindled, although both are now spoken for back home. Chris also makes friends with a Swedish film student (Hampus Nordenson), whose role is to instruct us on the Bergman background.

Mia Hansen-Løve directs with confidence and a lightness of touch deftly integrating the various strands of her story with seamless ease in a drama that explores the ups and down of love and the complexities of modern relationships exposing both the pleasure and the pain in a breezy beachside reverie. Faro is very much a character here DP Denis Lenoir’s luminous landscapes providing the backcloth for this enjoyable and affecting drama. MT

NOW ON RELEASE FROM 3 JUNE 2022

 

Souad (2021)

Dir.: Ayten Amin; Cast: Bassant Ahmed, Basmala Elghaiesh, Hager Mahmoud, Hussain Ghanem, Carol Ackad, Sarah Shedid, Islam Shalaby, Mona Elnamoury; Egypt/Germany/ Tunisia, 96 min.

Egyptian director/co-writer Ayten Anin (Villa 69) offers a snapshot of the younger female generation symbolising all the contradictions of Muslim countries like Egypt, where their modern world is on collusion course with the more traditional background of their families. Amin has her narrative structured in chapters, the headings go with the main protagonists.

Chapter one, named after the titular heroine, nineteen-year old Souad (Bassant), begins in a commuter bus where Souad tells a woman seated next to her all about her fiancé Ahmed who is serving in the army, a fact that frightens her – but she can’t wait to get married and loves his family.  Next, she is in another bus with another woman, and this time Souad’s fiancé is still Ahmed, but this time he’s a surgeon in Cairo, and Souad herself is studying medicine, coming from a family of doctors.

The reality is very different, when we watch Souad in the small flat she shares with her younger sister Rabab (Elgaiesh) and her traditional parents (Shalaby/Elnamoury). They live in Zagazig, a fraught industrial town. Souad and her girfriends Yara (Ackad), Amira (Shedid) and Rabab are addicted to their mobiles – to the exclusion of nearly everything else.

Souad likes to flirt, particularly with the rather wild Wessam (Mahmoud), but her true love is Ahmed (Ghanem) although he lives 300 miles away in an upmarket part of Alexandria. Ahmed is a budding influencer on the insta, and the two share photos and poems, even engaging in phone sex. They will never meet, because Souad, anxious about her exam results, throws herself from the balcony of the flat.

For her parents it’s enough that she died a virgin, the rest is “God’s will”. Basically, the feature starts again when Rabab, who has inherited Souad’s mobile, travels to Alexandria to meet Ahmed, to “give him a present from Souad”. Rabab falls for Ahmed’s charm, just like her sister, but at only sixteen she is more realistic, far too young to have a fiancé. Ahmed is now betrothed to an upper-class girl from a leading family but he’s decent enough to admit to Rabab that he did love Souad although she well aware of the situation. Ironically, she passed all her exams.

Souad’s confabulations are not uncommon for a young woman of her age, but is also clear, that she – and her friends – are used to living in a parallel universe, where shopping with her mother for a new hijab, collides with her activities on the mobile. What is also pivotal is the lack of understand about her depression. The friends’ rivalry is certainly part of it – they argued about the use of cosmetics to make them look whiter, among other issues. But rather than explore her psyche Amin is more interested in the impact her death made on her family and friends. What is crucial here the affects of societal repression on a whole generation of young Muslim women in countries dominated by a male-orientated religion.

The ensemble acting is brilliant; Ahmed and Elghaiesh won joint “Best Actress” at Tribeca this year. DoP Maged Nader excels both in close-ups and a roaming camera in the cities of Zagazig and Alexandria, underscoring the social divide that impacted on Souad’s wellbeing. Ayten Amin directs with great sensibility in this moving expose of Arab society. AS

ON RELEASE IN AUGUST 2021

False Positive (2021) TriBeCa 2021

Dir/Wri: John Lee | Cast: Ilana Glazer, Justin Theroux, Pierce Brosnan, Gretchen Mol, Sophia Bush, Zainab Jah, Josh Hamilton, Sabina Gadecki, Jaygee Macapugay, Danielle Slavick, Lucy Walters, Kelly AuCoin, Nils Lawton, Sullivan Jones | US Fantasy thriller 92′

Ilana Glazer co-wrote the script for False Positive in which she also stars as Lucy, a desperate New Yorker trying to get pregnant with her husband Adrian (Theroux). But this is no ordinary fertility drama – there are quirky bits like the scene where Adrian jacks off to an extreme bondage video to provide the sperm for the procedure – and so we’re not surprised when events turn more sinister as the psychological thriller unfolds with its feint echoes of Rosemary’s Baby, naturally minus Polanski’s iconic allure.

A pompous Pierce Brosnan (channelling Vincent Price) is the archetypal maverick fertility expert (and cosmetic surgeon) Dr Hindle who treats Lucy in his new age clinic where he has masterminded an enigmatic ground-breaking technique. After jumping the queue thanks to Adrian’s medical connections with the good doctor, all goes according to plan and soon Lucy is pregnant with – not one – but three potential babies: twin boys and a singleton girl. But something’s not right. And there’s not room for the three foetuses to develop, so amidst growing paranoia and a need for ‘selective reduction’ Lucy and Adrian must a harrowing decision to abort either the two boys or the girl. And they decide to keep the girl naming her ‘Wendy’ in line with the film’s burgeoning ‘Peter Pan’ motif.

Midsommer and Hereditory DoP Pawel Pogorzelski creates some sinuous visuals which add to a sinister soundscape pulsing away in the background (including a dulcet performance from Marcia Henderson of “Who Am I” from the 1950 Broadway musical Peter Pan). False Positive makes for a chilling addition to the small but perfectly formed fertility horror genre which relies on women’s natural fears and anxieties surrounding safe pregnancy and birth to drive the story forward sending it soaring into stratospheric realms of terror.

To add grist to the fearful misogynist maelstrom, derogatory phrases such as “mummy brain” are frequently bandied about in a patriarchal culture that still seems to persist in today’s medical establishment. Lee interweaves photos from the archives showing the gruesome possibilities when childbirth goes wrong, but this feels tonally out of kilter with the otherwise slick drama unfolding that even hints at artificial selection.

Meanwhile, Lucy is desperately trying to keep her job as a marketing consultant on track. Late in the day she decides to change her ‘birthplan’ after bizarre developments with Dr Hindle cause her to seek out a new midwife, the mysterious Grace Singleton (Zainab Jha).

Convincing performances from the central trio are what makes this compelling, based on an original story by John Lee and Alissa Nutting. This is a stealthy psychological thriller that keeps us glued to the screen despite some awkward elements showing that when the chips are down women can trust no one – least of all other women. That all said, the conclusion is definitely positive. MT

Tribeca Film Festival 2021

 

 

 

The Christine Jorgensen Story (1970)

Dir: Irving Rapper |  US Drama 98′

Described by David Thomson as “possibly the most bizarre departure by any director once in steady work”. The Christine Jorgensen Story that explores identity confusion, is virtually a remake by Irving Rapper, the veteran gay director of Hollywood ‘women’s pictures’- then in his seventies – of his 1942 classic Now, Voyager.  Yet Bette Davis looked far more butch in her Warner Bros. prime than John Hansen ever does here.

Rapper was doubtless equipped to empathise with what was troubling his confused young ‘heroine’, and it shows in the film; although the Danish ‘heroine’s transformation is here brought about by surgery, rather than psychoanalysis and a makeover by Perc Westmore and Orry-Kelly.

Based on Jorgensen’s autobiography the film feels like a TV movie of the period, complete with a 50’s-style piano & violin score by the veteran team of Paul Sawtell & Bert Shefter, but with the addition of words like ‘clitoris’ and ‘testicles’ to the script, and a glimpse of a penis in a shower-room sequence (was this a Hollywood first?). With women today clamouring to be taken seriously as footballers and for basic training for the armed forces, young George’s dislike for these activities and preference for wearing dresses would not necessarily today be seen as evidence that he’s ‘really’ a woman. The discovery by Professor Estabrook (Will Kuluva) that George’s glands are secreting more oestrogen than testosterone curiously leads him to recommend cutting them off altogether rather than simply injecting him with testosterone. So off to Denmark it is, where the operation he is about to undergo is described in quite some detail by Dr.Dahlman (Oscar Beregi).

We finally meet Christine about two-thirds into the film, when Hansen is transformed into a better-looking version of John Lithgow in The World According to Garp rather than the elegant and articulate woman Jorgensen actually became. That his father is discovered to be waiting for ‘her’ at the airport upon her arrival back in America provides a genuinely touching conclusion. Jorgensen declared herself satisfied with the result; as well as relieved that it didn’t end up as another ‘Myra Breckinridge’ @Richard Chatten

 

No Man of God (2021) TriBeCa 2021

Dir: Amber Sealey | Wri: Kit Lesser | 112′

Ted Bundy, one of America’s most notorious serial killers, is the subject of this evocative drama with a persuasive performance from Elijah Wood as the FBI analyst who formed a close bond with the killer before his execution in a Florida State Prison, following 10 years of exhaustive Death Row appeals.

Wood is Bill Hagmaier a rookie cop and religious family man whose thoughtful and measured approach made great inroads into understanding the felon – a compulsively watchable Luke Kirby – in the early days of the Bureau’s profiling unit. His methodology would go on to make him Chief of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, with ‘interviewees’ specifically asking to speak to Hagmaier because of his well-known association with Bundy.

Appealing to Bundy’s ego and ‘befriending’ him was one of Hagmaier’ masterstrokes to unlocking the killer’s mind. And this soft-peddling ‘servant and mentor’ approach seems to work wonders, the two sharing their innermost thoughts as they gradually grew closer in the interrogation suite, Bundy claiming to feel ‘like a human being’. But it’s not all plain-sailing as Hagmaier discovers despite his thorough preparation for the confrontation, and his patent awareness of Bundy’s hatred of the FEDs. At the time of the series of in-depth interviews the convicted killer had not yet acknowledged the criminal methodology he describes as his own.

Celebrating its World Premiere at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, Amber Healey’s cool and confident two-hander is imaginatively enlivened by lushing dramatised interludes and upbeat home movie clips set to a racy electronic occasional score ,adding context and cut and thrust to the intensive tete a tetes between the two men as they inveigle each other into a outwardly complicit buddy relationship. And the strength here is that we never really know who’s leading who into the terrible quagmire of a psychopath’s mind.

Other characters skating round the main narrative are Carolyn Lieberman (Aleksa Palladino), a fictionalised version of the anti-capital punishment lawyer who represented Bundy in his final appeals, and Hagmaier’s boss Roger Depue (Robert Patrick) who grants him access to the felon, the mild-mannered Hagmaier requesting that the crime-scene photos be withheld. Script-wise C. Robert Cargill writes under the pseudonym Kit Lesser, inspired by Hagmaier’s recollections, recordings and interview transcripts in this muscular and compellingly gripping psychological drama. MT

TRIBECO FILM FESTIVAL | JUNE 2021

 

Scarecrow | Pugalo (2021) IFFR 2021

Dir: Dmitri Davydov | Cast; Valentina Romanova-Chyskyyray, Anatoly Struchkov, Artur Zakharov, Sargylana Lukovtseva | USSR Drama 72′

Sakha director Dmitry Davydov, a rising star internationally, has built an intriguing drama with horror genre elements on the basis of this frosty story about a social outcast ostracised by uncompromising locals whose obdurate demeanour reflects their dour surroundings and harsh outlook on life.

A modern day fable of witchery is wrapped round an astonishing central performance from Valentina Romanova-Chyskyyray who plays a healer who lives in the vast, snowy expanse of the Sakha Republic in Russia. Ostracised by the local population despite her proven supernatural powers, she is clearly a neutralising conduit of disease and toxic negativity, suffering grotesquely- or even entering a trance-like state each time she treats a patient, making this feel authentic as well as intriguing and visually arresting with its evocative occasional score that features the ‘krymppa’, a rustic violin-like instrument.

Enigmatic, spare on dialogue and immaculately photographed in picturesque widescreen long takes and in intimate close-up by Ivan Semyonov in a monochrome palette of taupe and snowy greys, Scarecrow is one of the strongest, recent examples of the flourishing Sakha cinema, where local makers stray beyond the confines of Russian cinema, creating their own cinematic identity.

Like many other Sakha makers, Davydov is a self-taught director who combines serious drama with genre elements, Sakha folklore and landscapes. The disturbing scene, shot in one long take, in which the troubled lead takes great gulps from a vodka bottle whilst crying, is haunting, mesmerising and memorable. MT

ROTTERDAM FILM FESTIVAL | SUMMER SEASON | 3 -6 JUNE 2021

Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool (2017) Prime

Dir: Paul McGuigan | Cast: Annette Bening, Jamie Bell, Kenneth Cranham, Julie Walters | UK Drama 105′

Years later I discovered that during the late sixties, Veronica Lake and I had both been living in Ipswich at the same time; and at the Sheffield Crucible in 1979 I actually saw Gloria Grahame in the same production of ‘The Glass Menagerie’ we see her preparing for in the opening scene (I also later watched my own mother succumb to cancer.) Gloria had looked just as she had in her Hollywood prime, and I was astonished when only a couple of years later she joined the ages.

Annette Bening is too distinctive-looking in her own right, doesn’t have Ms Grahame’s slinky eyes, pouting lips, or even attempt her distinctive gurgling voice; but brings her own authentic movie star quality to the part – along with the appropriate vulnerability; it also seamlessly synchronises archive footage of the real Grahame into the narrative, based on the book by Peter Turner.

It’s strange to see a time I was actually living through now part of history, a fact underlined when a publican informs the young hero that his pint is 90p. @Richard Chatten

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

Mandabi (1968)

Directed by Ousmane Sembène. Starring Makhouredia Gueye, Ynousse N’Diaye, Isseu Niang, Mustapha Ture, Farba Sarr.

Directed, written and produced by the legendary, ‘father of African film’ Ousmane Sembène, Mandabi was originally made in 1968 and won the Special Jury Prize at Venice Film Festival. 

There’s an elegant simplicity to Sembène‘s cinema that makes it a joy to watch. This second feature was the first ever made in the Wolof language—and glows with its involving narrative, convincing overblown characters and spectacular sense of place.

Adapting his own novella – Sembène crafts a scathing satire of society in his native Senegal, scarred by corruption, greed, and poverty in a post-colonial disarray with its own hierarchical system led by head honcho, Ibahima Dieng, an obnoxious self-entitled bully (Gueye) who is pictured enjoying the attentions of a local street barber in the opening scenes.

Presiding over his large family and two wives who pander to his every need, Ibrahima is a penniless proligate who lives on a mountain of debt. And when a nephew in Paris sends a generous money order back home to Dakar, for a time is looks like Ibrahima’s lucky break, but it isn’t. And French colonialism is to blame for what happens next – as a Kafkaesque nightmare unfolds.

While we hate him for his pompousness, Ibrahima also has our sympathy. The trials and tribulations he experiences are only too familiar red-tape wise. Absurdist humour takes the edge off the harsh realities of life in this beautiful but impoverished corner of Africa, Paul Soulignac’camerawork adding to the allure of this neorealist gem. MT

MANDABI is in cinemas June 11, available on Blu-ray, DVD and Digital from June 28 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3LJ5RJ8wOg

The Killing of Two Lovers (2020)

Dir/Wri: Robert Machoian | Cast: Clayne Crawford, Sepideh Moafi, Chris Coy, Avery Pizzuto, Arri Graham, Ezra Graham, Jonah Graham, Bruce Graham, Barbara Whinnery | US Drama 84′

A searingly honest portrait of relationship breakdown plays out like a social realist thriller in the bleak big sky country of snowy Utah.

Wrapped around a simmering central performance from Clayne Crawford who co-wrote the script and plays David, a mixed-up musician who is barely tolerating a break from his marriage to Niki while they ‘work things out”. Niki meanwhile has taken a lover – Derek – into the family home she shares with their four kids, two boys and a teenage girl, who are all apposed to this new set-up.

David is out on limb in many ways – rather like Adam Driver’s character in Marriage Story – he’s in a no-win situation, an articulate wife holding all the cards. An unemployed musician and part-time carer for his ageing father – Bruce Graham in amusing vignette – David also acts as house husband to Niki and the kids. But his self esteem has hit rock bottom, and we see him toying with a gun in the opening scene as he agonises over killing the titular sleeping couple now occupying his own marital home.

The background to this sorry story is left to our imagination – but we can scope out the scene: Niki is sick of running the show financially, David possibly not pulling his weight, so they go for a trial separation, David unable to get Niki or his beloved kids out of his head. We also see the couple declaring love for one another – it’s a familiar situation, and we feel for them both.

The tautly spare narrative gives nothing away and wastes no time in words. It’s an astonishing first feature for writer-director Robert Machoian who joins Clayne Crawford in the writing of an intimate, intense and incendiary realist drama that bursts into flames in the breathtaking final scene that will leave you gasping with its brutal impact.

An angsty occasional percussive score drives the action forward, sometimes echoing gunfire: it’s a bewildering sound technique. Worth mentioning also is the grainy look of the film shot by Oscar Ignacio Jiménez in the boxy claustrophobic 4:3 aspect ratio used in the silent era, making the emotional impact more keenly felt. MT

ON BFI PLAYER FROM 9 DECEMBER 2021

 

 

 

The Babadook (2014) Bluray release

Dir: Jennifer Kent | Cast: Essie Davies, Noah Wiseman, Douglas Henshall Aus Horror, 94′

When it comes to home invasion thrillers it doesn’t get much scarier than this Australian shocker from Jennifer Kent that started life as a short film called The Monster in 2005. Over the next decade Kent tooled away at the narrative and in 2014 THE BABADOOK was born. It went on to win over fifty international awards from critics and viewers alike. Kent successfully employs every horror trope in the book along with a discombobulating soundscape to create a cumulatively distressing psychological thriller that feels real and yet completely outlandish at the same time with its violent visual and emotional onslaught .

Amazingly THE BABADOOK was also Kent’s first full length feature, and worth watching for its sensational central performance from Essie Davis as Amelia, a bereaved single mother still going through the trauma of her husband’s death in a car crash minutes before she gave birth to her only child, Samuel (Wiseman). The two hunker down in their dour Victorian house on the outskirts of Adelaide, where the boy becomes obsessed with a children’s book entitled Mr Babadook, a dark demonic raven-like creature who gradually becomes the vehement vector for their mutual misery and paranoia.     

At times unbearable to watch it’s the way little Samuel bears the brunt of his mother’s violent anguish that makes this so horrifying and heartfelt. There’s a visceral longing and a sexual yearning in Amelia that tips the feature into full blown Gothic territory. And as usual the family dog has to die. MT

The Babadook: Limited Edition 4K/ Blu-ray is now 28th June 2021 from Second Sight Films.

Spring Blossom (2020) Curzon

Dir/Wri | Cast: Suzanne Lindon, Arnaud Valois, Frédéric Pierrot, Florence Viala | France, Drama 78′

A delicate sensuous coming of age story from Suzanne Lindon who stars as the film’s subversive heroine who is also rather a dark horse.

In her directing and acting debut Lindon has clearly inherited her parents’ talents – she’s the 20-year-old daughter of Vincent Lindon and Sandrine Kiberlain, but wrote the film when she was only 15. They clearly said: “write about what you know” and this is exactly what’s she’s done, Spring Blossom has a freshness of touch that perfectly compliments its subtle narrative.

Spring Blossom is slim but evocatively recherché – avoiding gauche thrills or flirty silliness it feels its way intuitively forward. There’s a palpable sensuality to the heady taste of first love that slowly simmers and smoulders between the stylish but vulnerable high-school girl and her older crush Raphaël (Arnaud Valois), an actor performing in the local theatre and experiencing the ennui of performance fatigue. In a sun-dappled Southern France the amorous feelings gradually well up in her teenage heart but Suzanne remains dignified and secretive around her parents, sharing the odd complicit tete a tete with her younger sister.

There’s a sense that Suzanne will grow up to be subversively sensual like Jacqueline Bisset or Charlotte Rampling, still retaining that edgy sexiness that sets women like her apart from the crowd. And in a way Lindon’s slight narrative plays to the film’s advantage, hinting at the mysteries of female sexuality as Suzanne’s febrile imagination considers the art of seduction.

There’s something provocative but eminently natural about this suggestive love affair that seems grown-up and plausible, each character possessing calm dignity and an alluring sense of self. Seen from the young woman’s perspective, there’s nothing smutty about the concept of a teenager with an ‘older’ man, although you’d hardly notice the age different, Raphaël not coming across as a lothario,  but a ‘bon chic bon genre’ type of guy. The pairing has very much the clean-cut top drawer allure of Joanna Hogg’s recent The Souvenir, but the brittle cruelty of Tom Burke’s Anglo Saxon public school boy turned roguish love rat contrasts with the rather lowkey laidback loucheness of Valois’Raphaël. This is very much a French love story with a hint of Louis Garel’s early films about it all. MT

ON CURZON ONLINE FROM 23 APRIL 2021

 

The Artist’s Wife (2020)

Dir: Tom Dolby | Cast: Lena Olin, Bruce Dern, Juliet Rylance, Avan Jogia, Stephanie Powers, Catherine Curtin, Tonya Pinkins, Caryn West, Ravi Cabot-Conyers | US Drama

Dementia is not a happy affliction so Tom Dolby’s film is bound to make for painful viewing despite thoughtful turns from Bruce Dern who plays an ageing artist stumbling on the foothills of mental decline, and his wife Lena Olin who somehow gains strength from the experience.

Claire Smythson (Olin) is a sympathetic character who has sidelined her own painting career to support her husband, a renowned abstract artist Richard Smythson. And it all starts breezily with the two being interviewed as she snuggles up affectionately to her husband: “I create the art, and Claire creates the rest of our life.”

The drama plays along similar lines to The Wife which is a shame because you can’t help feeling a sense of deja vu despite Olin and Dern who are always enjoyable to watch and bring head-nodding subtext to their respective roles.

Dern is particularly good as the vulnerable ego-driven sweetheart who realises his life – and control – is ebbing away making him hit out and occasionally become obnoxious. He’s not as funny as he was in Nebraska, but this is inspired by Dolby’s own experience so his script is all the more personal (yet sketchy – despite involving two other writers).

Olin gets the surprisingly insightful role that sees her increasingly empowered to develop her own craft, and then there’s her prickly daughter in law Angela (Juliet Rylance) a lesbian who’s – predictably – ‘so busy’ and also has a child with her partner – but  it’s a hapless “you were never there for me role” vis a vis her estranged father. There’s a bit of a romantic frisson between Angela’s nanny Danny (Jogia) and Claire but nothing happens.

The focus is Richard’s recent diagnosis which comes in the wake of some erratic behaviour. The timing couldn’t be worse as he’s preparing for a major show which also make things feel rather schematic.

Beautifully filmed in the Hamptons and occasionally moving despite its irritating score, this goes down easily – and predictably, there are no surprises. MT

ON DIGITAL PLATFORMS + UK & IRISH CINEMAS FROM 30 APRIL

Aviva (2021) Curzon

Dir.: Boaz Yakin; Cast: Zina Zinchenko, Tyler Philips, Bobbi Jene Smith, Or Schraiber; USA/France 2020, 116 min.

This fluid, romantic drama from American-Israeli writer director Boaz Yakin explores a fluid relationship between Parisian Aviva and her New York lover Eden. Dance and sex scenes dominate but the standout here in that the couple are in reality a quartet: Aviva has a male double, Eden a female one. They interact on all levels and in all combinations.

It all starts with a film-in-film scene where Aviva (Zinchenko), declares her love for the camera that follows them in their most banal and intimate moments. Her love object is Eden (Philips), the two are very intimate online – but after Aviva has moved to New York, their love-making is awkward, to say the least, Aviva complaining that Eden doesn’t look at her. Closeness, it seems, it much more easily achievable online. The couple’s gender alternatives are surprising: Eden’s female identity is acted out by Bobbi Jene Smith, Aviva’s male soul partner is Or Schraiber; with Smith and Schraiber, who are connected to the Israeli dance company Batsheva, responsible for the feature’s choreography.

An early rather enigmatic chapter, titled “Anatomy of a Kiss” deals with Aviva’s childhood: a montage of babies and fathers, parents having sex and lots of giggling teenagers. Eden’s backlog memories are a little more to the point with the little boy discovering that his boy friend is actually a little girl. “Paradise is lost” for Eden.

But there is a hint to adult Eden’s inability to come to terms with Aviva and his own female self. Dancing (and lovemaking) dominate: Eden’s history is told in flash-backs where lively kids dance and play in Coney Island. Eden has the most problematic rapport with his female self: his sullen behaviour while flat-hunting with Aviva is typically male (as well as the boy he was). When not the centre of attention, he shouts at his inner woman. This all constitutes a form of misogyny, which has so far not been shown on screen.

The wedding scene is therefore, logically, acted out by the two female selves. Unfortunately, the love story is rather gloomy with banal dialogue, Eden coming across as more and more insecure. Aviva is much more able to come to terms with her dual existence. A rather morbid injury to the titular heroine and a late announced pregnancy propel the action forward – until the audience has to guess the identity of the ‘couples’ walking off in the park.

Yakin has difficulty developing the threadbare storyline into a two-hour feature, edging dangerously near to pretentiousness. DoP Arseni Khachaturian saves the day with a dreamlike atmosphere that somehow softens the sex scenes, creating something wild and other-worldly heightened by Asaf Avidan’s, enthusiastic score. Zina Zinchenko leads an inspired cast, transforming the rather tepid script into something extraordinary. AS

CURZON HOME CINEMA | 30 April 2021

The Amazing Mrs Holliday (1943)

Dir: Bruce Manning | Cast: Deanna Durbin, Edmond O’Brien, Barry Fitzgerald, Arthur Treacher, Frieda Inescort | Drama 96′

‘Amazing’ hardly begins to describe this searing, no-holds-barred depiction of the hell of war that brought together the studio that produced All Quiet on the Western Front with the director of ‘La Grand Illusion’, and addresses the sadly all-too topical issue of what is to be done for displaced children from the war zones of Asia.

Miss Durbin we are told is a missionary’s daughter who has grown up speaking Chinese but who speaks English like a native and sings with the technical skill and vocal range of a legitimate lyric soprano. In the sombre opening sequence we are introduced to her nine young charges who unlike the hulking young men presently making their way across Europe from Syria are cute little kids with American accents orphaned by the Japs in China. They find sanctuary in a vast Nob Hill mansion presided over by a sneering Arthur Treacher and resplendently designed by Jack Otterson and photographed by Woody Bredell, with a wardrobe full of knock ’em dead gowns by Vera West and a hairdresser on the premises who we never see but whose hand is evident throughout in Miss Durbin’s various immaculate coifs.

The acting master of the house following the loss at sea of his own father is a young and slim Edmond O’Brien, who heads an excellent supporting cast; although Barry Fitzgerald’s Oirish comic relief seems jarringly out of place throughout most of the film. The film does in fact prove a bizarre mixture of stark drama and very broad comedy; the latter including a hilarious scene at Grand Central Station with a hapless Gus Schilling, and a reenactment with Deanna of Mrs. Culpepper pursuing the cherry around her plate in the silent Laurel & Hardy short From Soup to Nuts.

The most amazing thing about this already bizarre film is the fact that the original director was of all people the great Jean Renoir, who worked on the film for 47 days before being replaced by producer Bruce Manning, whose only directing credit this is. @Richard Chatten

 

Eternal Love (1929) Prime Video

Dir: Ernst Lubitsch | Cast: John Barrymore, Camilla Horn | German, 61′

Eternal Love was the final silent film made by Ernst Lubitsch and John Barrymore. Based on a 1900 novel by J.C.Heer called ‘Der Koenig der Bernina’, the feature is fairly typical of the cross-pollination then common between Europe and Hollywood, with a German director and scriptwriter and female leading actress, sets and costumes by Caligari veteran Walter Reimann and Banff National Park in Canada standing in for the Swiss Alps in 1806.

Despite the high-powered talent brought to bear on it, Eternal Love for the most part lacks Lubitsch’s customary saucy wit promised in the earlier scenes featuring the saucy Mona Rico, and seems rather perfunctory compared to G.W.Pabst’s similar but far superior Weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü released later the same year. Oliver Marsh’s photography would plainly be far more impressive in its pristine nitrate form than the rather blurry version available today, while the drab Vitaphone score by Hugo Riesenfeld also rather holds it back.

The luminescent final shot of the moon emerging as the clouds part strikingly anticipates Crack in the World (1965), directed 35 years later by Eternal Love’s editor Andrew Marton, which ends with a shot almost identical to that of Eternal Love, except that at the end of Marton’s later film there are two moons…@Richard Chatten

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) Prime Video

Dir: Anthony Mann | Cast: Christopher Plummer, Sophia Loren, James Mason, Alex Guinness | US Action drama

Samuel Bronston’s answer to Heaven’s Gate is usually dismissed as inferior to El Cid, but The Fall of the Roman Empire still has recent Desert Island Disks castaway Sophia Loren in it (according to George MacDonald Fraser the historical Livia was “a murderous adultress who tried to assassinate her brother”, so maybe Lollobrigida should have played her after all); plus the inevitable Finlay Currie clinching this film’s credentials as a bona fide vintage historical epic. There is also the bonus of Alec Guinness and James Mason.

The late Christopher Plummer meanwhile hit his stride as a screen actor as the seriously mad Emperor Commodus. (He and director Anthony Mann had a such a blast working together they were keen to do another picture together; but Mann sadly died only four years and one and a half films later before that could happen.)

The fact that it was a colossal financial (and critical) flop simply enhances its grandeur and the money is certainly all there up on the screen, with impressively wintry location work shot outside Madrid; while the recreation of the Forum in Rome made it into the ‘Guinness Book of Records’ as the largest set ever built for a movie. (There is none of that fake-looking CGI or wobbly steadicam that ruins 21st Century epics. And what colours!)

Robert Krasker and composer Dimitri Tiomkin both surpassed their work on the previous film, and although like most epics it’s at least an hour too long, Plummer comes into his own in that final lap; his emergence from a giant hand worth of Brigitte Helm flaunting herself in Metropolis and Dietrich shedding a gorilla skin in Blonde Venus. @Richard Chatten

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

 

Black Oxen (1923)

Dir: Frank Lloyd | Cast: Corinne Griffith, Conway Tearle, Tom Ricketts, Clara Bow, Tom Guise | US Drama 81′

This film version of 65 year-old feminist writer Gertrude Atherton’s controversial 1923 novel, based upon her own treatment with an early form of hormone therapy, was on cinema screens by the end of the year and generated a lot of discussion at the height of the flapper era; and it remains increasingly topical today.

Aged 45 (but like many matinée idols of the era looking much older), Conway Tearle as eligible bachelor Lee Clavering has the dilemma that dizzy flappers like Janet Ogelthorpe (played by Clara Bow) bore him, yet has “a vague idea that Autumnal love is – is rather indecent”. He indeed looks pretty long in the tooth for 28 year-old Corinne Griffith as the mysterious Mary Ogden, referred to in the opening credits simply as “The Woman”; about whom an awful lot of footage is squandered upon speculation as to her true identity until she finally fesses up and confirms that she is really sixty year-old Madame Zatianny. In a flashback in which she is supposed to be in her late fifties, but is made up and shuffles about like an infirm eighty year-old, she is rejuvenated in Austria by a medical procedure that is alluded to only very vaguely.

At this point it gets interesting, as her old friends digest the implications of this revelation; notably Claire McDowell as Agnes Trevor, who bitterly regrets her own lost opportunities to find love when young and thus sorely envies Madame Zatianny the second chance her treatment has gifted her. (McDowell was actually less than six months older than Tearle and would probably have benefited enormously just from a more contemporary makeup and wardrobe like Griffith’s.) Unfortunately, with twenty minutes still to go this is the point at which the only currently available version of Black Oxen abruptly ends. Or maybe it’s not so unfortunate. We know from original reviews that her old Austrian beau Prince Rohenhauer (played by Alan Hale) shows up, persuades her to act her age and return with him to Austria, leaving Lee to find true happiness with the flapper who had so bored him earlier, provoking ‘Variety’s original reviewer to ironically state that the film’s “only fault seems to be the disappointing ending”.

An epilogue to Black Oxen that proves yet again how much stranger real life can be even than a silent movie came in 1966 (the year that Claire McDowell died at the age of 88) when 72 year-old Griffith divorced her 45 year-old fourth husband of a few days and testified in court (contradicting testimony from Betty Blythe and Claire Windsor, who had both known her during the 1920s) that she was not Corinne Griffith, but her younger sister who had taken her place upon her elder sibling’s death. @Richard Chatten

 

Peril for the Guy (1956)

Dir: James Hill | Cast: Frazer Hines, Mandy Harper, Christopher Warbey, Ali Allen | UK Drama, 55′

A delightful CFF lark that starts well with a jaunty title sequence, after which it’s elegantly directed by James Hill against the atmospheric backdrop of a freezing fifties London fog.

Blandishments that would satisfy the most politically correct modern audience include a little black kid called ‘Ali’, with an oil company the guys in black hats rather than the usual gormless spivs (although Ian Whittaker is gormless enough for an entire gang), Paul Daneman suitably dashing as the young inventor whose invention they’re after, Katherine Kath a glacial, buttoned-down dragon lady and today’s cameo appearance provided by an unbilled Arthur Mullard.

The makers actually managed to commandeer a helicopter for the finale, while as befits a film set around Guy Fawkes night the climax involves fireworks rather than water. Without being too preachy about it the audience is discretely reminded to be careful around fireworks and the final display is conducted under the stewardship of (reasonably) responsible adults. ©Richard Chatten

NOW ON BFI PLAYER

True Mothers | Asa Ga Kuru (2020)

Dir.: Naomi Kawase; Cast: Hiromi Nagasaku, Arata Iura, Aju Makita, Reo Sato, Hiroko Nakajima, Telsu Hirahara, Myoko Asada, Ren Komai, Taketo Takata); Japan 2020, 139 min.

Naomi Kawase’s films are an acquired taste but have a firm following. Here she adapts Mizuki Tsujimura’s mystery novel about motherhood from two different perspectives and frequently departing from the narrative to delve into arthouse-style reverie exploring maternal feelings and emotions, rather like her Cannes Grand Prix winner Mourning Forest. And although True Mothers is more accessible than many of Kawase’s films, the flashbacks and epic length require commitment.

The first hour focuses on the dawning realisation and gradual resignation to the sadness that haunts every childless couple. Satoko (Nagasaku) and Kiyokazu (Iura) can’t have their own family so after much soul-searching they turn to Mrs Asami’s adoption agency (Baby Baton) for a child, and are overjoyed when the big day finally arrives. Baby Asato is handed over to his new parents by his mother, 14-year old schoolgirl Hikaru Katakura. who apologises, her parents cowering in shame.

Five years later, the couple get a strange phonecall from someone claiming to be their son’s real birth mother, demanding her baby back – or a great deal of money. When the woman arrives, looking rough and disheveled, she doesn’t resemble the meek and submissive Hikari who handed over their child, and the Kuriharas make it clear they are in doubt of their son’s real background, but can’t help wondering if they’ve been scammed.

We now learn more about Hikari’s fate. Her family never forgave her for “bringing shame” on the family. In one disturbing scene her uncle tells her “I know about it, horrible business, really” during a family meeting that descends into a brawl. Leaving her family, and finding no support from the child’s father Takumi (Takata), who simply ignores her, Hikari starts work as a paper seller, and meets Tomoko, one of girls who was at Baby Baton. Tomoko is a sex worker, and forges Hikari’s signature as a guarantor on a loan agreement. The money lenders are vicious, making desperate Hikari phone the Kuriharas. When all seems lost for Hikari, True Mothers takes a very surprising turn.

The multiple flashbacks are the strength and the weakness of the feature: the intercutting results in a languid rhythm where nature is often involved as a healing source, while, at the same time, the audience is somehow frustrated by just another plot twist. The half hour spent on the Kuriharas’ pondering their childless status before finding a solution is certainly worth a re-edit. Although this clearly underlines the gravity for some viewers, for natural parents it might seem tedious. And Kawase could have concentrated more on the titular protagonists, particularly since Aju Makita (whom we saw in some minor roles in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s recent features) is brilliant in being the centre of a melodrama, whilst Nagasaku is really convincing in her proprietary approach, as the mother, who has ‘waited’ too long for a child. DoP Yuta Tsukinage uses a sunny, limid colours, dwelling long on detail, with wonderful expressive close-ups. With a little less self-indulgence by Kawase, this could have been a real masterpiece. AS

TRUE MOTHERS | CURZON home cinema | 16 April 2021

 

 

 

 

 

Theodora Goes Wild (1936)

Dir: Richard Boleslawski | Wri: Sidney Buchman/Mary McCarthy | Cast: Irene Dunne, Melvyn Douglas, Thomas Mitchell | US Comedy

Seen today, accustomed as we are to seeing the adorable Irene Dunne in her later comedies slinkily casting those lovely eyes sideways and laughing that distinctive gurgling laugh it’s hard to believe that after several years as a celebrated drama queen Theodora Goes Wild represented for her a leap in the dark into the hitherto unaccustomed territory of farce; at which she immediately proved adept.

Thomas Mitchell as the town’s abrasive newspaper editor figures prominently in the opening and closing scenes, promising a more satirical subject than we actually get. Theodora’s ‘scandalous’ novel ‘The Sinner’ was by now inevitably required by the proprieties of the Production Code to be wholly a work of her imagination and is largely forgotten as the film progresses; post-Code, the Hays Office would never permit the notion that there could possibly have actually been any men in the life of the demure, unmarried Ms Dunne before she put pen to paper. Five years earlier it would have been a very different story indeed and the escapist fantasy of Theodora Goes Wild – even down to its innocently racy title – recalls a silent film of ten years earlier rather than the earthier fare of the early sound era.

Ms Dunne was approaching forty when she made this film, and although the title holds out the promise of her eventually letting her hair down, she never reveals half as much in the film as she does baring her arms and shoulders in the figure-hugging dress she wears on the poster; revealing her inner hussy by instead piling on feathers and sashaying about in expensive bad taste while the plot ties itself into knots attempting to subvert the requirements of The Code while simultaneously observing its constraints and parodying the very rural bluestockings it was introduced to appease.

This was the last film completed by the always interesting Richard Boleslawski before his sudden death the following year at the age of 47. Aided by luminous photography by Frank Capra’s regular cameraman Joseph Walker and superb performances by a first-rate supporting cast, the end result is a handsome piece of fluff wholly devoid of the bite and contemporary relevance it would have had if made five years earlier. Melvyn Douglas does his best to bestow some charm on the obnoxious Michael Grant, but the two lead characters have absolutely nothing in common, and Theodora deserves much better than this mischief-making jerk who doesn’t even let her know that he’s married. ©Richard Chatten

Wilderness (2021)

Dir.: Justin John Doherty; Cast: Katharine Davenport, James Barnes, Sebastian Badarau, Bean Downes; UK 2017, 84 min.

The first feature for Justin John Doherty, scripted by Neil Fox, is a melancholic tract on the impossibility of true love. Set during the 1960s Wilderness is two films in one: a passionate and playful love affair influenced by Godard’s wordy confrontation of the genders in Contempt all coupled with a brilliant jazz score reminiscent of Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’echefaud .

John (Barnes), a black jazz musician, who shuttles between Europe and the US, meets Alice (Davenport), the two of them stealing moments between concerts and travel. Their relationship is fired by a palpable physical attraction that powers their idealistic affair. This loved-up dynamic changes when they spend a long weekend beachside in Cornwall meeting strangers and friends only to discover (like the audience) they hardly know each other beyond a sexual bond.

At a drunken party with John’s friend Charlie (Baderau) and his partner Francis (Downes), the tenuous nature of their relationship becomes obvious. Alice starts dancing rather too intimately with Charlie, and then joins Francis in criticising ‘men’ for keeping old affairs to themselves.

While Alice is interested in finding out about John – particularly his past – John is often unable to voice his feelings. Alice is shown as a rather moody character, her randomness often leaving John bewildered. “Are we over?” he asks at one point. But that would be too easy for Alice who involves John, not for the first time, in a game of strip poker. Side by side on the floor, they mourn the loss of their idealised passion. Gender and race politics raise their heads but are integrated into the narrative.

Shot with four professional actors and the same number of filmmakers, Wilderness feels very much a work in progress, and this has pro and cons: the poetic, non-linear element of the first part confidently reflects the more daring student element, but the rather wobbly second part, particularly the clunky dialogue and the lack of visual strength, might have been avoided by a more self-critical crew. Overall, Wilderness feels like a promising feature in its draft process, the completed version still waiting to be unveiled. AS

WILDERNESS IS ON 5 APRIL 2021 ON SKY STORE, iTUNES, AMAZON, GOOGLE, and BT

The Terror (2021)

When it comes to TV drama this surreal and sinister epic is a real corker with its gripping plot lines and creeping sense of dread all handsomely shot in Northern Canada.

Of course Ridley Scott put his money behind it, and it shows with a sterling British cast – shame that Ciaran Hands drops out in the early episodes, leaving Jared Harris and Tobias Menzies at the helm of The Terror with its crew inspired by a real life Royal Naval expedition.

Tobias Menzies as James Fitzjames – The Terror _ Season 1, Episode 3 – Photo AMC

 

Nive Nielsen as Lady Silence – The Terror _ Season 1, Episode 3 – Photo Credit: Aidan Monaghan/AMC

 

Based on Canadian writer Dan Simmons’ best-selling novel it follows the fated mission led by three captains, Sir John Franklin (Hinds) Francis Crozier (Harris) and James Fitzjames (Menzies), who venture out into to explore the Arctic’s fabled treacherous Northwest Passage in 1847, but instead discover a monstrous polar bear-like predator, a cunning and vicious Gothic horror that stalks the ships in a desperate game of survival. The men reach out in desperation to a mysterious Inuit woman Lady Silence (played by Greenlander Nive Nielsen) who may or may not be the key to the horrifying and macabre death toll.

As morale amongst the men deteriorates and rations putrify, a terror of a different kind rears its head in the shape of Cornelius Hickey a self-seeking villainous member of the crew who causes a seething mutiny amongst the men as, one by one, they are picked off in a terrifying ordeal that invariably ends in death as they battle the elements, the supernatural and eventually – their own crew-members,

Stunning to look at and compelling throughout, the standout performances comes from the three captains and their medic Paul Ready as a doc with a really human touch who falls for Lady Silence’s luminous charms. Even without the monster this is a compelling and memorable drama series.

Following its run on BBC Two, The Terror is on Blu-ray, DVD and digital debut on 3 May 2021.

Strange Journey | El Extrano Viaje (1964)

Dir: Fernando Fernan Gomez | Cast: Carlos Larranaga, Tota Alba, Lina Canalejas, Rafaela Aparicio | Spain, Drama 92’

It’s a wonder this very black comedy got past Franco’s censors in the first place. After the premiere it received only a very limited release, but has since enjoyed considerable acclaim. Based on the notorious unsolved death of two brothers found dead on a beach in Mazarrón in 1956, in the film they have become brother and sister; a pair of moon-faced simpletons completely under the thumb of their terrifying big sister Ignacia. The setting is a small coastal town in which old women in black shawls cluck with disapproval at swinging young sixties chicks in leopardskin slacks; while Ignacia presides over a Gothic old house deliberately reminiscent of the Bates mansion in Psycho.

Described by Pedro Almodóvar as an “accursed masterpiece”, the film’s director Fernando Fernán Gómez (1921-2007) was best known in Spain as an actor, and fleetingly appeared as Penelope Cruz’s senile father in Almodóvar’s All About My Mother (1999).

After Tota Alba’s Ignacia discovers passion she undergoes a startling visual transformation from the housekeeper in The Cat and the Canary into a dead ringer for one of Almodóvar’s short-skirted, big-haired cougars of the eighties and nineties. And as if the film wasn’t already weird enough, her downtrodden brother Venancio is played by international sleazemeister Jesús Franco, who although he often played small parts in his own films, here makes an extremely rare appearance in a substantial acting role in a ‘respectable’ film. ©Richard Chatten

 

Night World (1932)

Dir: Hobart Henley | Cast: Lew Ayres, Mae Clarke, Boris Karloff, Dorothy Revier | US Drama 58′

The opening montage of this delirious slice of pre-Code life amounts virtually to a declaration of intent, as various New Yorkers hit the town in pursuit of sex, booze and violence. You can practically hear the scratch of pencils from the bluestockings in the audience whose increasingly persistent calls to put a stop to the depiction of just this sort of depravity would soon, alas, be calling the shots in Hollywood.

In just 58 minutes, Night World depicts illegal booze (“they can make it faster than you can drink it”), homosexuality (in the flouncing form of “MISTER Baby”, played by a very young Byron Foulger before he grew his moustache) and adultery as facts of life; and comes dangerously close to condoning the latter in the scene in which Hedda Hopper appears as Lew Ayres’ ghastly mother who shot his father for an improbably innocent dalliance with another woman. (It also takes a rather callously casual view of violent death when the bullets start seriously flying in the film’s finale).

A couple of previous reviewers have compared Night World to a low rent Grand Hotel; with Merritt Gerstad’s extraordinarily mobile camera weaving it’s way throughout the joint picking up one set of characters and then another rather as Robert Altman would later do. Presiding over ‘Happy’s Place’ is a tall, lisping, English-accented proprietor called “Happy” MacDonald, played by – of all people – a third-billed and fascinatingly miscast Boris Karloff. The women all look magnificent – all that bobbed hair and bare shoulders! – and a sweet blonde Mae Clarke is permitted a sunnier characterisation than we are accustomed to seeing her get a chance to play. It’s a blast to see her actually dancing in the lineup on the floor show (with appropriately lascivious choreography courtesy of Busby Berkeley himself)!

The name of the prolific Hobart Henley often crops up in filmographies from the early thirties, but after Night World he only directed one more film. On the strength of this I’d sure like to see some of his others. ©Richard Chatten

 

Zana (2019) digital release

Dir: Antoneta Kastrati | Cast: Adriana Matoshi, Astrit Kabashi, Fatmire Sahiti, Mensur Safqui | Serbia Drama 93′

The legacy of a war on a Kosovar woman’s life are insightfully portrayed in this hauntingly lyrical debut feature from Kosovo-born, LA-based writer/director Antoneta Kastrati.

Lume (Matoshi) lives with her loving husband Ilir (Kabashi) in a farming village of Kosovar Muslims, dominated by rituals and superstitions and caught between the past and the present in the lush Albanian countryside. Psychological scars run deep years after the war is over and Lume is suffering the double blow of losing a child and being unable to conceive another. Her bereavement is made all the more insufferable as she is defined by her childlessness in a community where family is the entire focus of a woman’s life.

Lume experiences the emotional fallout in all kinds of ways: nightmares and hallucinations – involving dead or wounded animals and a mysterious bloody corpse – and these are cleverly woven into the narrative providing a constant reminder of the atrocities of the 1990s – while daily village life sees grotesque interference from her mother in law, Lume emerging a detached and morose figure lost in a world of hopeless misery and indignity.

So backward is the set-up here that the family believe Lume to be possessed by an evil spirit rather than needing medical advice. But she soon resorts to village healers in the hope of a much desired pregnancy, and these intimate scenes are evocatively captured and contrast with the bucolic images of farming in the Balkan countryside that could be set in the 18th century.

Ilir is the most likeable character supporting his wife with genuine love and concern even when Lume’s father threatens to burn the couple’s house down when his daughter asks to come home after a visiting her mother. And this is where Kastrati makes us aware of the superstitious attitudes that are still very much alive, with constant talk of spells, curses and Black Magic freely banded around by a community still locked in the past, mobile phones their only acknowledgement of contemporary life.

Lume keeps her calm distance throughout until Ilir takes her to a witch doctor to rid her of ‘inner demons’. And she objects to his violent methods. But life improves dramatically when Lume finally conceives and once again we experience the full force of traditional rituals, her mother in law dominating family life and undermining her in every way. And gradually as winter sets in, the trauma of the past catches up with the present in a grim reveal which finally clarifies Lume’s rich dream life in a deeply felt tribute to Kastrati’s own family. MT

ON CURZON HOME CINEMA, BFI PLAYER AND BARBICAN CINEMA ON DEMAND from 2nd APRIL 2021

 

 

Senso (1954) DVD/blu-ray

Dir: Luchino Visconti | Cast: Farley Grainger, Marcella Mariani, Alida Valli, Massimo Girotti, Heinz Moog, Rina Morelli | Italy, Drama 123′

Visconti’s first film in colour and his first with a patrician 19th Century backdrop, Senso is a squalid tale of base animal passion with an epic grandeur that raises it to the pantheon of Great Screen Romances by courtesy of Visconti having robed his sixth feature in the trappings of the momentous historical backdrop of the Risorgimento of 1866, Venetian locations, plush interiors, immaculate costumes and Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony (which wasn’t actually composed until fifteen years later).

The plot actually has marked similarities to Joseph Losey’s The Sleeping Tiger, made concurrently in drab monochrome in postwar austerity Britain; in which refined Alexis Smith (married to decent but dull Alexander Knox) completely loses her head over delinquent Dirk Bogarde. Ten years earlier, Visconti himself made a much more unadorned treatment of greed and destructive passion with Ossessione (1942) an adaptation of James M. Cain’s sweaty tale of blue-collar adultery and murder, The Postman Always Rings Twice.

Maria Callas had been Visconti’s first choice for the part of Countess Livia Serpieri – a society wife who becomes infatuated with good-looking creep Lieutenant Franz Mahler (played in a gleaming white uniform by an obviously dubbed Farley Granger), but she had too many theatre commitments to take time out for the shoot which eventually took nine months to complete, and Ingrid Bergman was too wrapped up working with her husband Roberto Rossellini, so the role eventually went to Alida Valli. Still stunning, but already perceptibly older than during her late forties Hollywood sojourn, in the arms of Lt. Mahler Valli discovers an erotic fulfilment entirely new to her; but to Franz she’s just another notch on his bedpost, and someone to sponge off.

Marcella Mariani (who died in a plane crash aged 19, just six weeks after Senso‘s premiere) is rather sweet and vulnerable as the young prostitute Clara who is spitefully exploited by Franz to further rub Livia’s nose in his rejection of her. Rina Morelli has an eye-catching cameo flitting about Livia’s villa in Aldeno as her maid, who seems to be actively enjoying the thrill of her mistress’s affair. But the most blackly comic element in the film is the way that as momentous historical events escalate around them, she and her idealistic cousin Roberto Ussoni (played by Massimo Girotti) are shown to be completely oblivious to what is making the other tick.

Under the impression that Franz is waiting for her at an address to which she has been followed by her stuffy husband (Heinz Moog) she melodramatically declares, with her back to the door, that YES SHE HAS A LOVER!!!, only to discover the place occupied by Roberto and his revolutionaries eagerly making plans; as oblivious of the turmoil raging inside Livia as she is by now indifferent to their cause. She commits treason by sheltering Franz from the Italians, and then gets even deeper into corruption by helping him to avoid combat by giving money meant for The Cause to him. One of a number of loose ends in the plot is that we never find out what happens when it’s discovered that 200,000 florins have gone missing from the fund intended to finance The Revolution, has been filched by yours truly.

As her grip on sanity loosens, Livia’s wardrobe (the work of Marcel Escoffier & Piero Tosi) becomes more and more buttoned down and severe, the black dress she wears in her final scenes making her resemble some ferocious bird of prey. The distinguished Italian cameraman G.R. Aldo was killed in a car crash during filming (this was also his first colour production); and the opening scene in Venice’s Fenice Theatre is the work of his successor Robert Krasker, who himself walked out on the production after falling out with Visconti, leaving the film to be completed by Giuseppe Rotunno. Whoever shot the amazing close-ups of Valli – her eyes wildly darting from side to side as she becomes more and more unhinged – merits particular kudos. During the final confrontation in the hotel you’re expecting her to produce a gun and shoot Franz; but she achieves the same end by more deliciously vindictive means, and he ends up in front of a firing squad assembled at remarkably short notice while she careens into the night to a very uncertain fate.

Having ended with a bang, the final credits still have one more surprise to serve up when the first two names we see after Visconti’s turn out to be those of the future directors (on this occasion humble assistants), Francesco Rosi and Franco Zeffirelli.

Senso was shot in English, and there are a couple of excerpts on YouTube from the truncated 94 minute English-language version, ‘The Wanton Countess’ which enable you to hear Granger in his own voice speaking dialogue written by no less than Tennessee Williams and Paul Bowles (thus confirming suspicions that we are witnessing a Venetian variation on A Streetcar Named Desire).

By the 1970s Visconti could finally make a film truer to his own inclinations in Death in Venice (1971), with Dirk Bogarde – once the object of infatuation himself in The Sleeping Tiger, but now the one smitten – in a production again dressed up to the nines, handsomely set in period, again using beautiful Venetian locations and this time almost entirely dispensing with dialogue in favour of Mahler, his favourite composer; whose name he had co-opted for the young officer in Senso (who had been called Remigio Ruz in Camillo Boito’s original novella). Richard Chatten.

NOW AVAILABLE ON DVD on AMAZON + CRITERION COLLECTION

The Little Things (2020) Digital release

Dir: John Lee Hancock | Cast: Denzel Washington, Rami Malek, Jared Leto, Chris Bauer | US Crime thriller 128′

John Lee Hancock proves that casting three Oscar winners isn’t always guaranteed to set the night on fire in his pensive police potboiler that ignites in the final hour.

The Little Things is a workmanlike Neo-Noir thriller that sees Denzel Washington’s Deputy Sheriff Deke Deacon join forces with Rami Malek’s Sargent Jim Baxter to track down a serial killer in a moody retro Los Angeles (the 1990s). And the sultry cinematic scenes are what makes this moody cat and mouse procedural watchable thanks to John Schwartman’s stylish visuals that keep us amused while the action gets going. Chemistry-wise Sargent and Sheriff are a mismatched pair who seem to be in different films that suddenly fuse once catalyst Jared Leto (Albert Sparma) appears as the scary suspect of their investigation.

Jim Baxter is basically an awkward bugger with a long-suffering wife, and troubled by past memories stoked up by the serial killer haunting the streets of downtown LA. And he lets it get to him. Deke has seen it all before and is far too laconic to allow ‘the little things’ to bother him, plodding along placidly before he pounces like a jaguar on his pray. Of the two you’ll be rooting for Deke.

These well-crafted characters feel real and believable but they just don’t gel – or at least that’s the impression given by Hancock’s rather loose script and treatment. Support comes in the shape of Chris Bauer’s genial Detective Sal Rizoli, and a cute little cop played by Natalie Morales.

As the net closes in around Sparma, Baxter’s mental instability gets in the way of the investigation, and Deke puts his foot down, tired of the suspect taking the law for a ride in the confines of the interrogation suite. Photos of the victims are bandied about but there’s no suspense to speak of – this is more a film about the cats than the mice, although Leto creates an unsettling crim with his haunting eyes, Robert Peston style vocal delivery, and a strangely incongruous pot belly.

The Little Things leaves us with too many unanswered questions as it trundles into a rather subdued character study of midlife crisis: Baxter’s coiled anger and petulant navel-gazing and Deke’s avuncular musings. The likeable Deke has no backstory as such but he’s living in a trailer in his run up to retirement, and making tentative advances towards Judith Scott’s calm and confident pathologist (far the most interesting and powerful female character of the piece) who doesn’t encourage him, so no love interest to speak of. What starts as a promise of Noirish excitement eventually finds its way into the crowed annuls of ‘also-rans’ as an everyday story of world-weary perfunctoriness that provides decent entertainment but certainly nothing to challenge your heart rate. I quite liked it. MT

THE LITTLE THINGS IS AVAILABLE TO RENT AT HOME ON PREMIUM VIDEO ON DEMAND

The Good Fairy (1935)

Dir: William Wyler | Wri: Preston Sturges | Cast: Margaret Sullavan, Herbert Marshall, Frank Morgan, Cesar Romero, June Clayworth | US Drama 98′

In her short life, the ethereally radiant Margaret Sullavan (1909-1960) did not last the night, but the lovely light she briefly gave is preserved for posterity in charming mementoes such as this. Deeply touching in drama, Sullavan’s best remembered comedy role was in Ernst Lubitsch’s evergreen The Shop Around the Corner (1940), which was the second romantic comedy she made set in Budapest. ‘The Good Fairy’ was the first.

Scripted by Preston Sturges from a play by Ferenc Molnár produced on Broadway in 1931, The Good Fairy would have been a very different film indeed but for the introduction of the strict new Production Code of June 1934 just three months before shooting commenced. Sturges had to keep one step ahead of the film throughout production as he extensively rewrote the script, which has the Hays Office’s fingerprints all over it; as well as a generally disjointed feeling – such as the early disappearance of Alan Hale from the narrative, never to return; and the late appearance of Herbert Marshall, never to leave – and a LOT of talk. The droll film-within-the-film which reduces Ms Sullavan to tears which was added to the script by Sturges is among a number of hints earlier on in the film that we were going to something sharper and more sophisticated than the bowdlerised romcom that we actually get. (The same plot played as drama might have made better use of Ms Sullavan’s talents and made a more interesting film).

Sullavan plays Luisa Ginglebusher, a charming, accident-prone orphan who is vastly more innocent and unworldly than the sweetly manipulative little vixen played on Broadway by Helen Hayes. Rather bizarrely plucked from the orphanage to become a cinema usherette – for which Luisa is kitted out in a magnificent uniform that looks more like one of Marlene Dietrich’s cast-offs from ‘The Scarlet Empress’ – as Miss Ginglebusher ventures out into the big wicked city, one initially fears for the safety of this seeming cross between Prince Myshkin and a more garrulous version of Chauncey Gardner.

But salvation is at hand in the form of Detlaff, a brusquely kind-hearted waiter played by Reginald Owen; who looks younger than I’m used to seeing him and gives the most engaging performance I’ve ever seen him give (he befriends her while cautiously removing her knife when she reveals to him during dinner that she was released from an asylum that morning, but quietly returns it when it turns out that the asylum was for orphans); and takes it upon himself to protect her from the wolves that prowl the city (an extremely wolfish-looking Cesar Romero puts in a brief appearance as one such).

The film, unfortunately, soon tires of giving us a heroine who’s just a simple working girl (we never actually see where she lives, for example), and is irrevocably derailed by the introduction of Frank Morgan as Konrad – one of those vague, benevolent millionaires encountered so often in Hollywood movies – who agrees to become Sullavan’s sugar daddy without ever suggesting he might eventually be expecting some sugar in return. Ironically, considering he is today principally remembered for later playing the title role in The Wizard of Oz, Morgan actually describes himself at one point as “a wizard” and offers to demonstrate his magic powers to Luisa by pulling out his cheque book to enhance the life of the non-existent husband she has just made up to ward of his advances.

I agree with ‘kyrat’, who said in an earlier IMDb review nearly fifteen years ago that it would have been more fitting to have bestowed Konrad’s windfall upon her own good fairy Detlaff rather than just randomly take a name from the ‘phone book; and the romance that develops between Luisa and the thus gifted Dr. Sporum (Herbert Marshall in a goatee and wing collar) – whose greatest excitement at his sudden good fortune is that he can now afford a proper office pencil-sharpener – seems dictated by Hollywood convention rather than any actual chemistry between them. (Surprise! Surprise! the film ends in a wedding; and I would have liked to have had a better look at the very striking wet-look art deco bridal gown we fleetingly see Ms Sullavan walk down the aisle in just before the end credits.)

As the film progresses Luisa frankly comes across as a bit of a simpleton rather than just a pure simple soul; and the 25 year-old Sullavan is playing a girl nearly ten years younger than her real age surrounded by middle-aged men whose motives all remain impeccably but rather improbably chaste (there’s some supposedly innocent but I found decidedly creepy horseplay in Konrad’s hotel room with him pretending that he’s a mountain lion and Luisa’s a lamb).

But this is all A-grade Hollywood hokum done to a turn by rising young director William Wyler (who ran off with Sullavan to get married in the middle of production), and all very pleasant if you don’t take it too seriously; which I’m sure nobody involved in the production did. Richard Chatten

NOW ON AMAZON

The Ace of Hearts (1921)

Dir: Wallace Worsley | Wri: Gouverneur Morris, Ruth Wightman | Cast: Lon Chaney, Leatrice Joy, John Bowers, Raymond Hatton, Hardee Kirkland | US Silent, Drama 65′

At noon on 16 September 1920 the United States suffered the most destructive act of terrorism yet committed on American soil when a bomb believed to have been planted by Italian anarchists exploded on Wall Street, killing 30 people outright and injuring hundreds of others.

Already in cinemas, Wallace Worsley’s The Penalty (1920), had recently starred Lon Chaney as the head of a gang of anarchists plotting a spectacular robbery; and a year later the director and star released a similarly themed follow-up based upon another novel by Gouverneur Morris.

Obviously a pot-boiler compared to The Penalty (but like its predecessor handsomely shot by Donovan Short), Chaney has top billing but a very secondary role as a member of a secret society who resemble the anarchists in Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), the conspirators in Thorold Dickinson’s Secret People (1952) and the vigilante judges in Peter Hyams’ The Star Chamber (1983). They decide to rid society of a vile plutocrat (Raymond Hatton, called “The Menace” in the cast list but referred to throughout the film as “The Man Who Has Lived Too Long”) by cutting cards to choose the assassin. This scheme is complicated by an extremely uninteresting love triangle comprising Farallone (Chaney), Forrest (John Bowers) and the intriguingly named Lilith (Leatrice Joy); the last being the brotherhood’s only sister, a prig whose infatuation with “the Cause” means she has zero interest in romantic matters.

Although selected on the basis of cutting cards (an obvious nod to Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Suicide Club’), Forrest should have been the obvious candidate to carry out the assassination in the first place; since for the past three months he’s been working as a waiter in the restaurant where The Menace has breakfast every morning at 9.00, and thus perfectly placed to shoot him in the head at point blank range.

Instead their chosen method of execution takes the form of an entirely indiscriminate act of terror employing a bomb capable of destroying an entire building; which it should already have been obvious to Forrest and his associates would mean that The Menace would not be the only casualty (like the little Kenyan girl in Eye in the Sky). Sure enough, when it finally dawns upon Forrest that there will be collateral damage the entire operation is compromised.

The bomb itself looks like a cigarette case and neatly fits into a jacket pocket: yet another example of movie technology far in advance of anything available in real life. The Wall Street bomb itself had had to be brought to the site where it exploded on a horse-drawn wagon.Richard Chatten

NOW ON YOUTUBE

 

Film Memories from Korea: Five of the Best

Sweet Dream (Lullaby of Death) (1936) Yang Ju-Nam

One of the few lost films from the Japanese colonial era (1910-45) that has been rediscovered in recent years tells the story of Ae-sun, the vain wife of a middle-class man who has no interest in looking after her family and is chased out by her husband, only to find out her lover is not the prosperous entrepreneur she thought he was but a poor student and criminal.

Madame Freedom (1956) Han Hyeong-Mo

Films of the 1950s confronted some of the key issues facing Korean society as it rebuilt itself again. Madame Freedom, an adaptation of the decade’s most scandalous serial novel, centred on a woman whose troubled marriage symbolises the tension between collapsing traditional values and the influence of Western capitalism, as she goes from one torrid encounter to the next. The box-office success of this film encouraged a renewed flow of investment into a film industry hit hard by the war.

Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter…and Spring (2003) Kim Ki-duk

A sublime, poetic, transcendental trip that explores the essence of the human condition with wit and poignancy. Sadly Kim Ki-duk died in December 2020 but his often provocative award-winning work defined Korean arthouse cinema at the turn of the 21st century, with often striking visual allure.

Thirst (2009) Park Chan-Wook

An intelligent take on Zola’s Therese Raquin this opulent and topical vampire melodrama seethes with irony in its Grand Guignol lyricism. A priest offers himself up to be infected with a virus that eventually takes over forcing him to abandon his ascetic existance. 

In Another Country (2012) Sang-soo Hong

This low budget comedy drama starring Isabelle is one of funniest Korean films I’ve ever seen and competed for the Palme d’Or in 2012. Huppert plays three different versions of a French woman who visits a small fishing village, the humour lying in the ‘lost in translation’ situational comedy in her interactions with various locals.

NOW ON YOUTUBE | ON DEMAND | DVD/BLU

A New Kind of Love (1963)

Dir: Melville Shavelson | Cast: Paul Newman, Joanne Woodwood, Thelma Ritter, Eva Gabor | US Romantic Comedy 100′

One of the funniest things The Marx Brothers ever did was attempt to pass themselves off as Maurice Chevalier singing the title song of this ghastly misfire to bluff their way through customs in Monkey Business (1931). Over thirty years later Chevalier here puts in an appearance to briefly warble it himself; which simply demonstrates that they did this sort of thing better in the thirties and that Paul Newman couldn’t play comedy.

Rehashing the old chestnut that short hair and a suit equals frumpy, and that tarting herself up and plonking on a blonde wig and several pounds of slap automatically makes an already delightful woman irresistible. The plot resembles a leering cross between Ninotchka and Two-Faced Woman on which glossy Technicolor photography by Daniel Fapp and fanciful colour effects by George Hoyningen-Heune have been squandered. And it all thinks it’s a lot cleverer and sophisticated than it actually is. Years later they used one of the photos to headline the Cannes Film Festival, bringing the film back into the collective conscience, so that served a purpose of sorts. Richard Chatten

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

The Investigation (2021) BBCiPlayer | DVD

 

Dir: Tobias Linholm | Cast: Soren Malling, Pilou Asbaek, Pernilla August, Rolf Lassgard, Laura Christensen, Dulfi Al-Jabouri, Hans Henrik Clemensen | Denmark, True crime drama, 2021

True crime doesn’t get any more gruesome than the murder of journalist Kim Wall. So the Danes have thrown their best talent behind this HBO miniseries (now also on BBC 2) written and directed by Tobias Lindholm (whose Another Round is Denmark’s Oscar hopeful) and starring Pernilla August, Borgen‘s Soren Malling, Pilou Asbaek (A Hijacking) and Rolf Lassgard.

This was a murder that shocked the world: a Danish inventor Peter Madsen invited Wall to visit his homemade submarine somewhere off the coast of Denmark. She then disappeared without trace and Madsen was rescued after his vessel sunk near to Copenhagen’s Koge bay. Interviewed by police Madsen later claimed Wall had slipped and hit her head, drowning in a watery grave. But then it gets weird. As Wall’s body parts were gradually washed up, the head some time later delaying identification, Madsen was arrested and charged with her murder, changing his story several times in the aftermath.

Sombre and sumptuously photographed by Magnus Nordenhof Jonck this plays out as a slow burning and evocative thriller that manages to be utterly compelling while respecting the delicate subject matter and Wall’s loved ones, as it carefully chronicles the unfolding investigation – day by day – under the guidance of Malling’s thoughtful Jens Moller. The detective really took it upon himself to ensure that no stone was left unturned in exploring the unpalatable facts, consulting oceanographers and tide experts to fathom out what happened during that fateful night of August 10th 2017.

Wall was an accomplished professional investigative journalist with everything to live for, yet her career was cut short by Madsen who not only ended her life, but in such a macabre way – presumably he hoped the evidence would be destroyed by marine life.

Moller works painstakingly in the suitably grim conditions of a rainy Danish autumn – the whole process took four months – to try and piece together enough evidence to nail Madsen. Dogs detectives join specialist divers and pathologists, and the scenes involving Walls’ parents are particularly moving. The six part structure enables Lindholm to fully flesh out the characters’ backstories in this deeply affecting criminal procedural that widens out into a slice of social history.

Although one tries to avoid the expression ‘Nordic Noir’ in this particular case, it’s just what it is. No disrespect to Wall, she just happened to be the victim. All things considered I think she would consider this a fitting tribute to her life. MT

ON BBC2 from 29 January 2021 | DVD on 1March 2021

 

 

The White Tiger (2020) Netflix

Dir: Ramin Bahrani | Wri: Aravind Adiga, Ramin Bahrani | Cast: Priyanka Chopra, Rajkummar Rao, Adarsh Gourav | Drama 125′

This stylish snapshot of modern india glints with cynism and snarky humour its sharp social contrasts bared like the titular tiger’s teeth.

Netflix has the pleasure of hosting this little brute from 99 Homes’ Ramin Bahrani, adapting Aravind Adiga’s 2008 Booker Prize-winning novel that sees a poor guy from rural India rise from servitude to success as a global entrepreneur in Bangalore. The wider world opens up through his experiences along the way as a driver for the spoilt and privileged son of a corrupt local industrialist.

The first person voiceover brings to mind Slumdog Millionnaire but that’s where the similarities end – this is a much edgier beast powered forward by the appealing character of young Delhi tea-maker Balram (Adarsh Gourav), who one day lands a job far beyond village life, ferrying round US educated Ashok (Rajkummar Rao) and his liberated wife Pinky (Chopra). This lowly gig leads Balram to a rocky but glittering future by keeping his nose to the grindstone and his eyes to the stars.

Bahrani’s focus is very much on bumpy road ahead as his hero Balram navigates potholes in this journey of self-awareness and nouse-gathering. And this angel-faced servant soon has to toughen up if he’s to survive and thrive. Rather like Balzac’s rags to riches hero Eugene de Rastignac, Balram is a socially challenged but highly intelligent young ingenue equipped with guile, charisma and a low cunning as he wades through a morass of corruption, deceit and betrayal of India’s myriad social divide. Adarsh Gourav is entertaining to watch as he masters Balham’s dextrous human complexities, ducking and diving and wising up through the exotic ever-challenging landscape that lies before him.

Bahrani shows a real understanding of the delicate social structures at play, conjuring up the dark continent convincingly with its intoxicating chemistry of sights, sounds and contemporary social scenery which is magically conveyed by Paolo Carnera’s dazzling camerawork and set to an original soundscape from Oscar-tipped Danny Bensi and Saunder Juriaans. MT

Available on Netflix worldwide Jan 22.

 

Slalom (2020) Curzon VOD

Dir: Charlène Favier | Writers: Charlène Favier, Marie Talon | Cast: Noée Abita, Jérémie Renier, Marie Denarnaud, Muriel Combeau, Maïra Schmitt, Axel Auriant | France, Drama

Noée Abita made a name for herself in Lea Mysius’ poignant drama Ava (2017) about a girl gradually losing her sight. In Slalom she stars alongside Jérémie Renier in a love story set in the snowy French Alps.

This coming of age sports drama is an impressive debut for writer-director Charlène Favier who made the Cannes 2020 official selection. Abita plays 15-year-old ski professional-in- training Lyz who falls for her sexually voracious power-tripping coach Max (Renier), already in a relationship with another team member (Marie Denarnaud), in a drama that echoes real life cases in the world of tennis and swimming in France and the US.

Favier and her co-writer Talon show how kids of that age are emotionally vulnerable and subject to hero-worshipping in a world where their collaborative and professional relationship is particularly vital, especially when they have little support from their parents. In this case her mother (Muriel Combeau) makes a new boyfriend a priority, rather than the stability and wellbeing of her daughter who she abandons to rush off on a romantic break over Christmas. Lyz is understanding heartbroken. But not for long.

Deftly interweaving the heart-pumping slalom competitions that will shape her into an Olympic hopeful, and the intense love story at its core, this snowbound affair is as hot as they come – especially when its focus is first love – set in the spectacular mountain scenery of the French Alps where Yann Maritaud creates a real sense of drama on the sparking icebound slopes and frosty moonlit nights-capes not to mention those intimate close-ups.

Lyz experiences a whirlwind of emotions from anxiety surrounding her sporting prowess, to confusion in lust-ridden days of wondering whether Max will be there for her in bed – and on the slopes. Of course, we can all see Max’s own adrenalin- fuelled turmoil as he barks orders, and commands his star pupil’s respect, while being confused by his own feelings.

Abita is terrific as she gradually develops stamina, independence and self-belief – physically, as well as mentally – straining every core of her body to reach peak performance, Her gamine insecurity gathers storm as she develops a fierce sense of pride and integrity. If there was ever a drama perfect for teenage girls – (or adult girls who’ve already been there) this is it!.MT

ON CURZON VOD from 12 February 2021

 

 

 

 

The Last Warning (1928) *** Bluray

Dir.: Paul Leni; Cast: Laura La Plante, Montague Love, Roy D’Arcy, Burr McIntosh, Margaret Livingston, Carrie Daumery, John Boles)Bert Roach, D’Arcy Corrigan; USA 1928, 89 min.

Universal intended The Last Warning as a companion piece to Leni’s more famous (and superior) The Cat and the Canary (1927), and it was also German born director Paul Leni’s final: he died at the age of forty four eight months after the film’s premiere, contracting sepsis from an untreated tooth infection.

Based on the novel by Wordsworth Camp, the Broadway play by Thomas F. Fallon and then adapted for the screen by Alfred A. Cohn, The Last Warning is a mystery-thriller ‘who-done-it’, with a clunky and complicated narrative dominated by Leni’s direction and Hal Mohr’s jerky camerawork. Charles D. Hall’s art direction is inspired by German expressionism, with Leni’s Das Wachsfigurenkabinett/ Waxworks (1924) perhaps his greatest achievement.

Leni made use of the Phantom of the Opera (1925) set for his last outing which begins with one of the actors (Woodford’s D’Arcy Corrigan) being electrocuted on stage. There is rumour Woodford was part of a menage-a-trois, but more confusion occurs when the body disappears without trace. The theatre is closed but five years later producer Mike Brody (Roach) re-opens the place to catch the murderer by staging a re-run of the play with the original cast members.

During the rehearsals falling scenery, a fire and frightening noises occur, and the purse of leading lady Doris (La Plante) is stolen. Stage manager Josia Bunce (McIntosh) receives a telegram,  signed by John Woodford, telling him to abandon the play and this sets the stage, quite literally, for a series of disasters, involving a 400 volt cable electrocution and worse was to come.

After the shooting, some spoken dialogue and audio effects were added, but this version has been lost. We are left with great moments of camera work, such as in a scene where veteran actress Barbara Morgan leaps from the stage and plummets to the ground, with the camera taking on her POV. Whilst Phantom of the Opera would play a great role in future Universal canon of horror features, The Last Warning, with its masked killer, is a prelude to the Italian ‘Gialli’ features of directors Dario Argento and Mario Bava. AS

ON EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA 15 FEBRUARY 2021

Bebia: a Mon Seul Desir (2021) IFFR 2021

Dir.: Juja Dobrachkous; Cast: Anastasia Davidson, Anushka Andronikashvili, Anastasia Chanturaia, Guliko Gurgenidze; UK/Georgia 2020, 113 min.

This first feature film from Russian born Juja Dobrachkous is a visually stylish and evocative drama tracing three generations of Georgian women with a timelessness reminiscent of classical Russian cinema.

Ariadna (Davidson) works as a model in Tbilisi and is still suffering from her traumatic experiences at boarding school and the female influences in her life. The sudden death of her grandmother Bebia (Gurgenidze) forces her to confront the past returning to the village where she grew up, at odds with her both the women, particularly her mother (Chanturia).

When she finally gets to the village Ariadna realises nothing has changed as far as her mother concerned – she is in the throes of a second divorce, having driven Ariadna’s father away. Tradition dictates that as the youngest member of her grandmother’s family, Ariadna must now unite Bebia’s soul (she died in the hospital) with her home 25 kilometres away, by means of a connecting thread. Dato, the village elder, explains to Ariadna how to go about her task, asking Temo (Gurgenidze) to accompany her on the trip. But for some reason the two don’t get on, Ariadna accusing him of pushing his luck, despite his rather calming presence during their eventful journey to fix the thread.

Turbulent storms enliven their exhausting journey and presents challenges, mirroring their emotional conflict, particularly when a violent storm sees Ariadna fighting to save the barn where she and Temo take shelter. It soon emerges that Temo has had his own share of family difficulties, having run away from home after finding out out his mother was raped by a local bandit; his father, the country’s attorney general, failing to bring charges fearing for his own position: “In the end, I hated them both equally” claims Temo.

Rather than presenting village life as a calming retreat from the big city, the rural setting merely brings back bad memories for Ariadna, Georgia’s rugged countryside serving as a metaphor for her troubled past, as she reflects on her life in Tbilisi wondering why on earth she is going back to place that only brought trouble: “This is the 21st century, why am I doing this?”

Ariadna is annoyed to find out she has inherited her grandmother’s house “I do not want the house, as I did not want her dresses as a child, or her fine stockings, I became a model to prove that I was beautiful, and that she was wrong.” After the wake, she tells Temo that it was all a delusion: “The train cut the thread. We did it all for nothing, Bebia’s soul is lost”. But worse is to come when she discovers her mother has fallen ill.

DoP Veronica Solovyeva’s magic black-and-white images, full of poetry, yearning and loss, save the often nebulous feature from being an “atmospheric” pretence, making great use of light and shadow with subtle chiaroscuro camerawork.

Dobrachkous’ narrative is strong on detail, but leaves us too often in the dark as to its thematic concerns. The sequences from the boarding school, wonderfull as they are, do not really explain why Ariadne suffered, or how she got a nasty injury on her arm. The nonlinear narrative muddies the story, making us feel an even more urgent need for structure. The ensemble acting is wonderful,  Davidson always finding the right tone of disquiet with her family and herself in this graceful study of matriarchal discontent. AS

ROTTERDAM FILM FESTIVAL 2021 | 6 February 2021

In Cold Blood (1967) DVD

Dir: Richard Brooks | Cast: Robert Blake, Scott Wilson, John Forsythe, Tex Smith, Paul Stewart, Jeff Corey, Gerald S O’Loughlin | US Crime Thriller, 130′

Truman Capote’s celebrated reporting of a Kansas murder case, In Cold Blood, is the basis for Richard Brooks’s disturbing docudrama. The film opens as a Greyhound bus roars into the darkness of a desolate prairie night, bound for Kansas City. Black silhouetted figures stand out, one is a man with a guitar. A girl passenger sees a boot with the famous catspaw soles (‘catspaws won’t slip’), and this is the clue that will eventually lead to the murderer – and the Capote’s nemesis.

Formally ambitious yet elegantly restrained the film crisply evokes the small-town Sixties Kansas in Conrad Hall’s stylish black and white visuals with a classy score by Quincy Jones. New Yorker Capote had spent over six months getting to know the Kansas locals for his ‘non-fiction novel’, and one local in particular would be his unravelling. He trusted Brooks to transfer his own ideas to the screen, and they were both sold on black and white, Hall creating a gritty true crime feel, and some stunning Wild West style panoramas, Brooks carrying the authenticity through by filming in the town and the exact house where the murders actually happened, but Capote became mesmerised by one of the perpetrators, Perry Smith.

The events of the case grippingly unfold in a chronological narrative recounting how four members of the ‘God-fearing’ Clutter family were slaughtered in cold blood one night in 1959 by two two ex-convicts looking for cash during a random burglary in the remote  rural property. They stole a radio and a few dollars and left few clues as to their identity, but Brooks shows how Kansas Police (lead by a superb John Forsythe) embark on a lengthy and painstaking investigation eventually catching and convicting the killers and bringing them to justice in 1965.

Robert Blake (Perry Smith) and Scott Wilson (Dick Hickock) are utterly convincing as the ruthless killers. And although we already know that they committed the murders from the early scenes Brooks generates a palpable tension while he fleshes out the investigation and we get a chance to fathom the broken minds of the perpetrators.

At the end of the day, who can really understand why two people only intending to rob the Clutters, and who had not committed murder before, suddenly decided to sadistically murder four innocent people on a quiet night in 1959? And what did the modest Clutters do provoke such vicious violence?

Richard Brooks’s fractured narrative flips nervously back and forth brilliantly evoking both the frenzied minds of the killers and the fervent need of detectives to nail and endite their suspects. Conrad Hall’s noirish visuals re-visit the rain-soaked scene of the crime, the remote locations and the fugitives’ brief escape to Mexico and their chance arrest in Las Vegas, while allowing brief glimpses of the genesis of their disfunctional family stories.

Brooks skilfully avoids showing bloodshed, violence or macabre crime scenes, allowing the terror to haunt our minds rather than the cinema screen. The mercilessness of the intruders and the abject fear and vulnerability of Clutters in their final moments is more evocative than any blood-soaked bedroom scene. By the time we reach the trial and imprisonment, we are glad to be done with these sordid criminals, although Brooks a scintilla of sympathy for Perry Smith who seems to have been led on. Robert Blake and Scott Wilson give chilling and resonant portrayals in the leading roles. MT

ON DVD | REMASTERED COURTESY OF PARK CIRCUS FILMS.

 

The Man Without a Past (2002) Now on Prime Video

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Dir\Writer: Aki Kaurismaki: Cast: Markku Peltola, Kati Outinen, Sakar Kuosmanen; Finland/France/Germany 2002; 97 min.

Like many auteurs of his generation, Aki Kaurismaki is entirely self-taught. After a working life spent as a postman and film critic amongst other things, he turned his hand to film-making in the eighties and has been incredibly successful in his endeavour, producing his own films and distributing them through his own company Alphaville, and even showing them at his own arthouse cinemas in Finland. Often working with his elder brother Mika, they have shaped the face of Finnish cinema, crafting one-fifth of the Finnish film industry’s total output since 1981.

In love with the past and Finland’s lugubrious hard-drinking working classes, often down on their luck – anything post 1980 does not interest Kaurismaki visually and he made this retro look his trademark. The Man Without a Past sees him create another antihero, this time the director doesn’t even give him a name, in the credits he is just ‘M’.

M (his beloved Markku Peltola) arrives one Spring evening in Helsinki, with a small suitcase. Resting on a park bench he nods off and is attacked by three young men, who leave him for dead. Coming round in a rain-soaked stupor, he makes his way to A&E where retrograde amnesia is diagnosed. Discharged from hospital and homeless, he makes his way to a container site where he rents a place to rest his head from a conman called Antilla (Kuosmanen). The geezer exploits those down on their luck. His ‘fierce’ dog Hannibal turns out to be submissive, snuggling up with M on his bed. All this plays out with Kaurismaki’s classic blend of eccentric situational humour which is light on dialogue and heavy on innuendo.

M can’t remember a thing about his life but when he catches sight of a couple of metal workers down near the port he feels a strange affinity to their daily grind, leading him to believe he was a welder in a former life. Turning to the Samaritans for help, he falls in love with Irma (Outinen) and a new lease of life. Soon he’ part of a swing band with the local Samaritans, and manages to secure some welding work. But his luck turns sour when he gets caught up in a bank robbery and this brush with the police leads to his identification. It soon emerges he was married, but his wife divorced him on account of his gambling. When M travels back to his home town by train he finds her living in their former marital dwelling with a boyfriend. M is only too relieved he doesn’t have to fight it out with his rival, returning back to Irma in Helsinki and eventual revenge.

Kaurismaki’s classic absurdist humour is an acquired taste and The Man Without a Past is one of the best examples. When M cooks dinner for Irma in his container, she asks politely “Are you sure, I can’t help”. His deadpan response is: “I think it’s ruined already”. Later when an electrician has helped him connect his container to a power source, M asks how he could return the favour. The man answers matter of factly: “If you see me lying in the gutter face down, turn me on my back”.

Kaurismaki is best compared with Preston Sturges and his comedies of the 30s; his heroes are like the actors Buster Keaton used to preferred, “they can’t raise their voice, their only reaction are furrowed brows”. DOP Timo Salminen, who shot nearly all of Kaurismaki’s films, shows Finland as a morose country where suicide, poverty, hunger and alcoholism is rife. All this is borne, (according to the director) “out of the change in society from a mainly agricultural country, to an industrialised one – many feel rootless and alienated from the country, in a place where high rise blocks and unemployment kill the soul. ” This, and his beloved band music, are the touchstones of his film career that started in 1991.

The Man Without a Past won the Grand Prix at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, Kati Outinen best actress. AS

 

Personal Shopper (2016) MUBI

Dir: Olivier Assayas | Cast: Kristen Stewart, Nora vonWaltstätten, Anders Danielsen Lie | 101mins | Fantasy drama | France

Paris has always had a sinister side inspiring Balzac to write his famous ‘Pere Goriot’, a stark story of social realism set near the Pierre Lachaise Cemetery, and Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘Murders in The Rue Morgue. French literature is redolent with macabre tales conjured up by the dark side of the capital. So it feels fitting that Olivier Assayas should add other chilling chapter to this spectrally-charged city with his ghost-themed story Personal Shopper.

Similar in tone to Joanna Hogg’s recent outing The Lost Daughter, this surreal outing is creepy, charismatic and quirky. Assayas’ films are always diverse and this is his first ever ghost story. Kristen Stewart shimmers in a sombre turn bringing a gamine insouciant sensuality to her role that feels both menacing and intriguing in its sexual ambivalence. She is Maureen Cartwright, a 27 year old American girl working as a stylist to a bitchy German media figure Kyra (Nora vonWaltstätten) while mourning the death of her twin brother Lewis.

Paris is the centre of the fashion world and Assayas works this elegantly into the plot as Maureen glides through a series of glitzy ateliers selecting hand-made garments and jewelled accoutrements from Chanel and Cartier to meet the needs of her demanding boss. This is a job that fills Maureen with ennui as she considers herself worthy of better things. So she spends her free time sketching and researching her yen for the supernatural, exploring the Victor Hugo’s psychic experiments and the avant garde Swedish artist Hilma af Klint. On the sly, she guiltily slips into Kyra’s couturier gowns and fetishistic footwear.

Maureen is also developing her psychic skills in trying to contact her brother Lewis who died of a congenital heart condition in a dreary nearby fin de siecle mansion where they both grew up. Spending several spooky nights there Maureen is aware of a ghostly presence who whispers inaudibly in scenes that are genuinely scary and plausible given the undercurrent of glowering spitefulness that sets the tone for this  increasingly dark narrative. Maureen believes she may be instrumental in conjuring up the devil’s work or there is there something more sinister at play. Olivier Assayas’s wickedly inventive vision is one of his most exciting so far. MT

PERSONAL SHOPPER IS NOW ON MUBI | Best Director for Olivier Assayas Cannes 2016

LIBERTÉ (2019) Bfi Player

Dir: Albert Serra | Cast: Cast: Helmut Berger, Marc Susini, Iliana Zabeth, Laura Poulvet, Baptiste Pinteaux, Théodora Marcadé, Alexander García Düttmann | Drama | Spain 132′

Catalan auteur Albert Serra was born in 1975 in Girona and is known for his delicately drawn and exquisitely mounted historical dramas such as La Mort de Louis XIV (2016); Honour of the Knights (Quixotic) 2006; and Story of My Death (2013). And there’s a great deal of mounting in his latest feature which stars veteran arthouse star Helmut Berger and competes in last year’s Un Certain Regard sidebar at Cannes Film Festival.

The theme in Liberté  is essentially voyeurism. If you should find yourself in Hampstead Heath on a balmy afternoon you will notice male figures darting surrepticiousy in the shady vegetation. You may even chance upon a secret tryst (if you are unlucky enough while walking your dog). Take this image and sashay back to the 18th century, somewhere between Potsdam and Berlin, and you bring to mind the scenario in Liberté – only here both male and female characters are taking part.

The year is 1774, shortly before the French Revolution. Madame de Dumeval, the Duc de Tesis and the Duc de Wand, all libertines expelled from the puritanical French court of Louis XVI, and seeking the support of the legendary Duc de Walchen, a German seducer and freethinker in a country where hypocrisy and false virtue reign. Their mission is to export libertinage, a philosophy of enlightenment founded on the rejection of moral boundaries and authorities. Most of all they are looking for a safe place to pursue their quest for pleasure.

This louche cruising amongst elegantly attired courtiers and aristocrats sounds fascinating, and it is for a while  Slightly more portly but nevertheless soigné individuals duck and dive in the undergrowth, in various stages of undress, their white linens contrasting with tanned breasts and buttocks, larded legs and bloated beerguts. Very much like Sade, Serra explores the darker side of human desire but always with graceful discretion. The louche antic gradually become more and more explicit to the point where they actually gets a little close for comfort, eventually verging on the pornographic. Suggestive but never lewd Liberte is a clever game of subterfuge that plays on our curiosity and makes use of a richly textured soundscape to create a atmosphere of sultry expectancy. There is no narrative as such just a series of enigmatic vignettes that take place during the hours of darkness one balmy summer night.

Arriving in painted palanquin borne by his henchmen the Duc de Wand (Baptiste Pinteaux) is recalling the execution of an unfortunate individual whose limbs were pulled one by one from his body. Obsessed by bestiality and golden showers, he loves to salivate over his lascivious encounters, that often involve dogs or farm animals. Fortunately were are spared the most lurid encounters due to the bosky nocturnal shadows as Artur Tort’s roving camera spies voyeuristically on the other outré encounters taking place in the semi-darkness of the eucalyptus trees (eucalyptus trees in the 18th century? – check continuity).

Decadence is the watchword here as none of the trysts is particularly joy-filled unless you are into sado masochism or subjugation. The tone is subdued rather that lascivious, poe-faced even. The film’s enigmatic title suggests that these aristos have too much time on their hands and nothing left to lose as they skip the light fantastic in the lush setting of a midnight night’s dream: Serra’s film may not appeal to everyone but it is certainly a brave and visually alluring meditation on permissiveness. MT

NOW on Subscription at BFI Player  | UN CERTAIN REGARD 2019 | SPECIAL JURY PRIZE

 

Falling (2020) ***

Dir/Wri: Viggo Mortensen | Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Lance Henriksen, Laura Linney, Sverrir Gudnason, | US Drama, 112′

In his first foray into filmmaking Viggo Mortensen writes and also stars in this insightful, semi-autobiographical story of family dysfunction. It sees an irascible old farmer (a feisty Lance Henrikson) gradually losing his grip to dementia as his bewildered gay son grapples for largely unwanted control of the family.

The subject of dementia is so increasingly widespread nowadays it almost needs a genre of its own. And as such this could have been more humorous in the style of Bruce Dern’s Nebraska, or even poetic and whimsical like Miroslav Mandic’s recent arthouse gem Sanremo, but that’s not the point. Falling is a well-made if sombre family drama exploring the fallout of this dread disease, and a decent debut for this seasoned actor. MT

NOW ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE

Evolution (2015) **** MUBI

Dir.: Lucile Hadzihalilovic | Cast: Max Brebant, Roxanne Duran, Julie-Marie Parmentier France/Belgium 2015, 81 min.

Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s memorable debut feature Innocence dealt with a teenage girl in a boarding school. EVOLUTION centres this time on a group of boys on the crest of adolescence. Living a frigid existence by an eerie seashore with their mothers, there are no adult males to be seen. Hadzihalilovic presents a joyless antiseptic world where even the meals of strained seaweed broth appear medicinal rather than satisfying. Cinematographer Manuel Dacosses’s spare and pristine interior visuals give the impression of a wide-scale marine laboratory where a sci-fi experiment is underway and the boys are the victims.

Young Nicolas (Brebant) and his mother (Parmentier) live in this dreary community: their spartan lifestyle is marked by robotic rituals: dinner is always followed by the intake of an inky medicine, which appears to be therapeutic. Somehow Nicolas suspects that something is going on beyond the surface of enforced rigour: he follows his mother to the beach at night, where he observes her writhe in ecstacy with other women. Before he can unravel the mysterious plan, he is sent to a dilapidated early 20th century hospital where some of his friends are also patients. Weird experiments are carried out and one boy disappears completely. Nicolas is befriended by one of the nurses, Stella (Duran), who supplies him with material for his drawings. When the dreadful secret emerges, Stella tries to help Nicolas to escape.

The boys in EVOLUTION have no rights over their bodies, but what emerges is that they are the unwitting victims of some kind of freaky, gender-reversal surgery. The dreamlike atmosphere evokes a past we can not see, but the boys’ dreams  suggest they have been taken away from their real families to take part in a medical experiment destined to help mankind’s survival. But dreams and reality are indistinguishable, the underwater scenes suggest more sinister plans are underway: perhaps mankind has to become amphibious to survive. The ghastly hospitals are horror institutions located underground and under the control of the sullen – all female – doctors and nurses. Syringes and scalpels take on a sadistic undertone creating a frightening parallel with medical experiments in Nazi concentration camps.

EVOLUTION haunts and beguiles for just over an hour. Hadzihalilovic and her co-scripter Alante Kavaite (Summer of Sangaile) cleverly keep the tension taught requiring the audience to invest a great deal in the narrative before any salient clues emerge – but even then much remains unexplained and enigmatic; not that EVOLUTION wants to be understood. Part of its allure is this inaccessibility, unsettlingly evoking a world far beyond any genre, it is esoteric and anguished in its unique otherworldliness. Too many films feature repetitive images and schematic self-indulgent narratives: how refreshing to find a true original revealing a totally new world in just 81 minutes. MT

NOW ON MUBI

Far From the Madding Crowd (2015) *** BBCiplayer

Dir: Thomas Vinterberg  Wri: David Nicholls | Cast: Matthias Schoenaerts, Carey Mulligan, Michael Sheen, Tom Sturridge, | 119min   GB/US  Drama

John Schlesinger’s 1967 film of Hardy’s novel, Far from the Madding Crowd, was always going to be a hard act to follow. Nearly 50 years later Thomas Vinterberg’s version of the tale of Bathsheba Everdene a “headstrong country girl” and her three suitors, has a distinctly European flavour. A Danish director and DoP; an English screenwriter (David Nicholls); a Belgian Gabriel Oak (Matthias Schoenaerts) and the occasional Welsh twang of Michael Sheen’s Mr Boldwood make up this neatly potted version, running at 40 minutes shorter than the original 1960s version.

Vinterberg’s focus here is on the intimacy between the central characters: particularly for Carey Mulligan who exudes a serene dignity as Bathsheba. Her relationship with Gabriel – that starts as a proposal in the middle of a field – simmers away in the background as the two play a subtle and convincing game of interdependency that adds a sexual frisson to their working friendship  – Oak is the only man who makes Bethesda smile broadly, and shed a tear.

After the reversal of fortune brought about by the loss of his sheep, Oak may have less to offer financially when she inherits her Uncle’s farm, but throughout he is his own man, and a good man at that, and not afraid to walk away – and that is Hardy’s clincher at the end of the day. Schoenaerts evokes a powerful masculinity that is both physical and emotional, but he also a brings reliability, for as long as Bathsheba needs him, making it clear that he will one day walk away. Oaks not only becomes a confidante to Bathsheba but also to Boldwood, a middle-aged landowner whose senses are inflamed on receiving her casual Valentine with its throw-away message. But what Michael Sheen lacks the regal detachment of Peter Finch’s Boldwood, he makes up for in with the desperate, gnawing vulnerability he brings to the role; the only one of the trio who has as much to lose as to gain, as the eldest, if he fails to win Bathsheba’s hand. Sheen’s poignantly-tortured agony as he questions his chances, is one of the triumphs of the film.

But Vinterberg’s version has much less of the duplicitous chancer, Sergeant Troy (Tom Sturridge). In an underwritten role, that fails to conjure up his importance as the most manipulative and controlling of Bathsheba’s consorts, Sturridge is no match for the dashing blue-eyed charm or erotism of Terence Stamp –  for one, he looks positively wet behind the ears (despite being exactly the same age as Stamp in the role – 29); for another, he emerges as even more the cad and less as the skilful seducer than Stamp did back in the sixties.

At the heart of Winterberg’s film is the subtle, slow-burn relationship between Mulligan’s Bathsheba and Schoenaerts’ Oak and one which develops through the ups and downs of their farming challenges. The smouldering Schoenaerts has a difficult role as he is forced into underplaying his character, relying on a potent chemistry to attract Bathsheba. Carey Mulligan is elegantly attractive, her ladylike daintiness tempered by a shrewd sense-of-self and a maturity beyond her years; as against Julie Christie’s more ethereal light-hearted girliness.

What Vinterberg’s film lacks is Hardy’s (and Schlesinger’s) potent essence of 19th Dorset life – the vagaries of farming and animal husbandry, and the way they drive the narrative forward shaping the lives of this ‘madding crowd’ of rural countryfolk. It’s a brave attempt though, and an enjoyable re-make. MT

NOW ON BBCiplayer

Rotterdam Film Festival 2021 – a hybrid two-parter

 

The 50th celebration of Rotterdam Film Festival (IFFR) will take place in two parts, kicking off in the first week of February followed a physical event from June 2-6, 2021,

A light-hearted comedy opener seems fitting for this special edition: Anders Thomas Jensen’s Riders of Justice  stars Mads Mikkelsen and Nicolaj Lie Kaas. The first week of the festival is dedicated to The Tiger Competition this year feature 16 titles (a larger competition line-up for the future) , Big Screen Competition and its Ammodo Tiger Shorts and Limelight sections which will see 60 titles taking part. Other talent in competition includes Benoît Jacquot, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Mosese, Dea Kulumbegashvili and Nicolás Jaar.

The Tiger Competition winner will be announced on 7 February by a (virtual) jury headed this year by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese joining IDFA’s artistic director Orwa Nyrabia, visual artist and filmmaker Hala Elkoussy, critic Helena van der Meulen and film producer Ilse Hughan.

Taking over from IFFR’s artistic director Beyro Beyer, Vanja Kaludjercic has faced a challenging year where filmmakers “have gone above and beyond to complete works in challenging circumstances, and there has been no shortage of great films looking for a home at IFFR”.

Once again the selection aims to ‘encapsulate IFFR’s spirit as a platform for the discovery of visions that pique our curiosity and capture our imagination. The sheer determination of these striking new voices is exhilarating, and I’m proud that we can bring an outstanding selection to our film-loving audiences in new ways that captivate the collective spirit.”

This is reflected in the one-off festival re-design in response to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, which is expected to keep much of Europe under full or partial lockdown in the early months of 2021. In a very welcome move, IFFR has awarded US director First Cow director Kelly Reichardt the festival’s honorary Robby Müller Award named after the late Dutch cinematographer and granted to a filmmaker who has ”created authentic, credible and emotionally striking visual language throughout their work”. The festival has been a platform for her features Old Joy, Meek’s Cutoff and Wendy And Lucy. 

TIGER COMPETITION |  1-7 FEBRUARY 2021

Agate Mousse (Lebanon) world premiere
Dir. Selim Mourad

Bebia, à mon seul désir (Georgia, UK) world premiere
Dir. Juja Dobrachkous

Bipolar (China) world premiere
Dir. Queena Li

Black Medusa (Tunisia) world premire
Dir. ismaël, Youssef Chebbi

A Corsican Summer (France) world premiere
Dir. Pascal Tagnat

The Edge of Daybreak (Thailand/Switzerland) world premiere
Dir. Taiki Sakpisit

Feast (Netherlands) world premiere
Dir. Tim Leyendekker

Friends and Strangers (Australia) world premiere
Dir. James Vaughan

Gritt (Norway) international premiere
Dir, Itonje Søimer Guttormsen

Landscapes of Resistance (Serbia/Germany/France) world premiere
Dir. Marta Popivoda

Liborio (Dominican Republic/Puerto Rico/Qatar) world premiere
Dir. Nino Martínez Sosa

Looking for Venera ( Kosovo/Macedonia) world premiere
Dir. Norika Sefa, 2021

Madalena
Dir. Madiano Marcheti

Mayday (US) international premiere
Dir, Karen Cinorre

Mighty Flash (Spain) world premiere
Dir. Ainhoa Rodríguez

BIG SCREEN Competition

Archipel (Canada) world premiere
Dir. Félix Dufour-Laperrière

Aristocrats (Japan) international premiere
Dir. Sode Yukiko

As We Like It (Taiwan) world premiere
Dir. Chen Hung-i & Muni Wei.

Aurora (Costa Rica, Mexico) world premiere
Dir. Paz Fábrega

Carro Rei (Brazil) world premiere
Dir. Renata Pinheiro

The Cemil Show (Turkey) world premiere
Dir. Bariş Sarhan

Drifting (Hong Kong) world premiere
Dir. Li Jun

The Harbour (India), world premiere
Dir. Rajeev Ravi

The Last Farmer (India) world premiere
Dir. M. Manikandan

Lone Wolf (Australia) world premiere
Dir. Jonathan Ogilvie

The North Wind (Russia) world premiere
Dir. Renata Litvinova

El perro que no calla (Argentina) European premiere
Dir. Ana Katz

Sexual Drive (Japan) world premiere
Dir. Yoshida Kota

Les Sorcières de l’Orient (France) world premiere
Dir. Julien Faraut

The Year Before the War (Latvia) world premiere
Dir. Dāvis Sīmanis

Limelight (World Premieres)

Dead & Beautiful (Netherlands, Taiwan) world premiere
Dir. David Verbeek

Mitra (Netherlands) world premiere
Dir. Kaweh Modiri

IFFR | 1-7 FEBRUARY | 2-6 JUNE 2021

 

Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) ***

Dir: Patty Jenkins | Gal Gadot, Kirsten Wiig, Pedro Pascal, Chris Pine | US Action Drama, 151′

Women are the superheroes of this Amazonian flight of fantasy that soon crashes down to earth in an over-bloated final hour. As blockbusters go Wonder Woman 84 is tremendous fun, swinging us back to the Eighties in a blousy, big haired way, and with a heroine who is clever, kind, gorgeous, and vulnerable – but not a fool for love, as we soon discover.

That’s Gal Gadot in the title role of Diana Prince. Since her last appearance in the 2017 original there are new tricks up her sleeve: the ability to make mincemeat out of cheesy dialogue, and add emotional ballast to the splashy set pieces that see her young self defying gravity as the pint size heroine (Lilly Aspell) in the film’s opening sequence. Learning life’s lessons early, she cheats and gets a ticking off from her mother Hippolyta (Nielsen) “No hero is born from lies”. All well and good, so far.

This sequel to brilliant original epic is set in greedy mid-1980s America. This time around, there’s a plot device involving a mysterious crystal that will grant a single wish to its possessor, but that works both ways too – life’s never easy, even for wonder women.

Diana now finds herself gainly employed at the Washington’s Smithsonian where her most cherished wish is the return of the – now dead – love of her life  – Steve (Pine), although the chemistry has certainly fizzled out of that affair. She also meets the geeky be-spectacled Barbara (a fab Kirsten Wiig), who is a dashing blond beneath her bookish exterior. And must contend with a power-crazy profligate Maxwell (Pascal) an overblown twat looking to dominate the world wearing a wig and false teeth (not to mention ‘too much info’ trousers). Naturally good triumphs over evil in a happy ending, but one which ends up confused, strung out, and far too excited to keep us entertained for two and a half hours. . MT

Wonder Woman 1984 is now on release

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970) ****

Dir.: Vittorio De Sica; Cast: Dominque Sanda, Lino Capollicchio, Fabrio Testi, Romolo Valli, Helmut Berger, Camillo Cesarei; Italy/West Germany 1970, 74 min.

The Garden of the Finzi-Contini won director Vittorio De Sica (1901-1974) his third Oscar (after Ladri di Biciclette and Ieri Oggi Domani), as well as ‘Golden Bear’ at the Berlin Film Festival. Based on the novel by Giorgio Bassani (who later tried to distance himself from the feature) and written by Ugo Pirro and Vittorio Bonicelli  – as well as the uncredited De Sica regulars Cesare Zavattini and Valerio Zurlini – is one of the the very few Italian films shedding light on the murder of Italian Jews by the Fascists. The general consensus was/is that Germany was uniquely responsible for the genocide of the Holocaust.

Set in Ferrara between 1938 and 1943 (with flash-backs to 1920s) the narrative centres around the relationship between Micol Finzi-Contini (Sanda) and Giorgio (Capollicchio) who are in their early twenties. The couple are chalk and cheese, their only common bond is their Jewishness. Micol comes from one of Emilia Romagna’s most distinguished families and lives like a princess, ferried around in a carriage to and from her lush country villa, surrounded by its huge titular garden. Her old school crush Giorgio, meanwhile, is unhappily stuck with his middle-class family.

At the time, Jews are banned from places of public entertainment and the Finzi-Contini’s are no exception – so the capo di famiglia, Professor Ermano, has provided his family with a tennis court, where le tout Ferrara comes to play. Micol flirts with hunky Gianpiero Malnate (Testi), even though he is a gentile and, ‘even worse’, a socialist. Poor Giorgio suffers in silence, watching the lovers until his worst suspicions come true, Micol leaving nothing to the imagination.

Giorgio is so upset he confides in his father (Valli), although blaming him guilty for bribing the authorities with donations. No such compromises in the Finzi-Contini household where Micol proudly points to an old tree, remarking to Giorgio that it might have been planted by Lucrezia Borgia. The Finzi Continis see themselves as part of a ruling class going back centuries – their Jewishness is just a side issue. Giorgio’s father tells his son “they are not really Jewish”. But most of them will meet on their way to the death camps, with Giorgio’s father telling Micol “we are hopefully staying together, we Jews from Ferrara”.

There is much to be admired in the soft-lens images of DoP Ennio Guarnieri (Ginger&Fred, Medea). The family enjoy a charmed, unhurried existence, the camera passing languidly over the estate in deference to their status as upper intellectuals and scholars. Sanda is the epitome of all this refined breeding, but she still prefers the guy from the wrong side of the track. Poor Giorgio has to take comfort in his brotherly relationship with her, not unlike her real brother Alberto: “We all live in our memories”. Real life, like the political noose which is put around their necks, is just a passing feature.

Even after fifty years, The Garden has lost little of its poignancy: the victims sleep walking into annihilation, feeling safe behind the walls surrounding their lives – whilst the silent shadow of the pogrom grows darker and darker. AS

 

The Girl on a Motorcycle (1968) ****

Dir: Jack Cardiff | Wri: Ronald Duncan, Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues (Novel), Gillian Freeman| Cast: Marianne Faithfull, Alan Delon, Marius Goring, Catherine Jourdan, Jean Leduc, Jacques Marin, Andre Maranne | Drama, 91′

“Take Me to Him, My Black Pimp!”

A public safety film about the correct way to ride pillion masquerading as groovy sixties psychedelia. Based on Andre Pieyre De Mandiargues’ 1963 novel; at least the film version of Fifty Shades of Gray spared us the heroine’s inane interior monologues. The premise was simple: a married woman leaves her husband and zooms off on her motorcycle to see her lover.

It has been said that bad directors become mere photographers, and even Britain’s pre-eminent Technicolor cameraman Jack Cardiff never remotely approached, as a director, the heights he regularly achieved with his lighting. And you’d have thought he’d have have known better than all those pans and zooms (not to mention that lousy process work).

Anyone who liked the title probably wasn’t disappointed with the film; although, like Vertigo, the film that ultimately emerged was very different from that originally envisaged, because the intended female lead was rendered incapable of starring by the time the project eventually went into production. Susan Denberg, the actress originally cast (after an impressive but dubbed performance in Frankenstein Created Woman), succumbed to drug addiction. Her replacement, Marianne Faithfull, was of course chosen for her beauty as well as her celebrity rather than her ability to act (or to ride a motorbike; wearing a silly helmet that never looked as if it offered much protection), with sadly predictable results. Richard Chatten.

ON PRIME VIDEO

Son of Sofia (2019) **** Artekino Festival

Dir: Elina Psikou | Victor Khomut, Valery Tcheplanowa, Thanasis Papageorgiou | Greece, Drama 113′

A Russian boy escapes into a world of fantasy when forced to relocate thousands of miles away from his familiar culture and homeland.

Writer-Director Elina Psikou’s sophomore feature Son of Sofia brings to mind another film about childhood trauma Valley of Shadows (2017). Both explore the coming-of-age of two young boys who have lost their father figures and are going through the trauma of early adolescence in unfamiliar territory. In this case Misha arrives in Greece after several years away from his mother. He is barely 11. The Olympic Games are in full swing but another, much more momentous event clouds his sense of gleeful anticipation – a strange man on the scene, and suddenly the threat of rejection once again beckons, along with the scorching heat of Summer, as the odd trio try make the best of their new lives together in this doleful menage a trois.

In his debut role, Khomout perfectly captures the vulnerability of a young boy’s bitter disappointment, and it never seems to leave his tear-stained face. For her part, Sofia (Valery Tcheplanowais) is keen to make a fresh start with her ‘new’ family, greeting her son with one of the cuddly toys she makes for a living.  But however much she cares for her new partner, she cannot force Misha to feel the same way. Misha (Viktor Khomut) feels his initial relief at finding his mother again melt away as he retreats into a fantasy world in a powerfully atmospheric environment where the winds of change leave him out on a limb. Desperately clinging to his mother he is unable to move forward with any certainty and feels trapped in his own private hell in coming to terms with this new life, and potentially more heartache. The elderly man, purportedly his mother’s boss, Mr. Nikos (Thanasis Papageorgiou), soon turns out to be a rival for her affections, and a violent one into the bargain. An unusual but thoughtfully crafted story that generates a powerful sense of place and reconnects to the frightened child in all of us. MT

WINNER AT SARAJEVO CICAE | JURY AWARD TRIBECA 2017 | also now available free to watch at ARTE

 

 

 

The Letter (1940) **** Prime Video

Dir: William Wyler | Wri: Howard Koch | Cast: Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall, James Stephenson, Frieda Inescor, Gale Sondergaard, Bruce Lester | US Drama, 95’

Geoffrey Hammond learns the hard way in this mesmerising classic Hollywood melodrama that you end a relationship with Bette Davis at your peril. Although Bette Davis and Herbert Marshall get top billing, the film is really held together by the late James Stephenson in an Oscar-nominated performance, while Gale Sondergaard is unforgettable as the vengeful “Mrs.Hammond” (who with her arched eyebrows and in her skin-tight qipao bears an eerie resemblance to the Martian Girl in Mars Attacks!).

Davis is the wife of a rubber plantation administrator who shoots a man to death claiming it was self-defence. But a letter in her own hand may prove her undoing.

William Wyler not surprisingly had wanted Gregg Toland, but veteran cameraman Tony Gaudio provides a more gothic look (aided by the immaculate production design of Jules Carl Weyl), and creates some vivid moonlit scenes, while Wyler occasionally achieves an interesting effect, akin to Toland’s depth of field, emphasising the intensity of the images by occasionally putting Stephensen in some of his scenes with Davis exaggeratedly out of focus either in the foreground or background.

It all goes a bit over the top towards the end in order to appease the Hays Office, and Max Steiner’s score is a bit – well – Steinerish at times, but his eerie main theme is yet another aspect of the film that will stay with you long afterwards. Richard Chatten

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

Cat in the Wall (2019) Locarno

Dir: Mina Mileva and Vesela Kazakova | Drama | 

Award-winning Bulgarian duo Mina Mileva and Vesela Kazakova are no strangers to controversy. Their popular award-winning documentary Uncle Tony, Three Fools and the Secret Service was widely condemned by the authorities for exposing the corrupt totalitarian regime in their homeland.

Undeterred, they have pushed on with another potential firecracker in the shape of Cat in the Wall, this time based on real events in a Peckham council estate as experienced by a professional Bulgarian single mother trying to make it in London. This English-language sink-estate drama playfully deals with inflammatory themes such a Brexit, gentrification and the pitfalls of home-owning through the endearing tale of a wayward cat who also reserves his right to roam into pastures new.

Atanasova plays the main character Irina, an architect who has bought and renovated a council flat in a Peckham Estate where she lives with her young son Jojo (Orlin Asenov) and her brother Vlado (Angel Genov), a well-qualified historian who has turned his hand to installing Satellite dishes. Hoping to leave the corrupt post-communist set-up in Bulgaria to start a new life in Britain she soon discovers the grim reality of ‘playing the game’ in Britain.

Naturalistic performances from a cast of non-pros and experienced thesps and a refreshing script are the strengths of this light-hearted bit of social realism, piqued by dark humour. Utterly refusing to cow-tow to the usual Loachian style of Tory-bashing, this film still exposes some uncomfortable truths in a storyline that builds quite a head of steam and some set-tos that make it tense but also thoroughly grounded in reality. Unsurprisingly it never got a release in Britain.

Irina, Vlado and Jojo inject a much-needed breath of fresh air into a hackneyed scenario, where they uncover the usual set-backs to living in social housing – the urine-drenched lift is a classic example. But soon they find themselves face to face with a ginger tabby cat, and after adopting it for Jojo they are soon accused of animal theft by a neighbouring family.

As an educated immigrant who is well-placed to comment on Bulgaria and Brexit-Britain, Irina comes across as sympathetic and thoroughly likeable, eking out an existence that sees her pitching for architectural schemes while supplementing her meagre salary with bar work. Meanwhile she notices how most of her neighbours are living on generous state benefits that make finding paid work nonsensical.

“I didn’t come here to be a leech,” says the politically-savvy Irina who may well prove unpopular with diehard socialists in the audience. The recent words of Trump also echo: ‘if she doesn’t like it she can go back home”. And then there is her little son Jojo who is trying to make the best of his rather isolated existence as an immigrant child with no local friends, but who thinks he has found one in Goldie.

The directors maintain their distance, serving up all this ‘near the bone controversy’ with such a lightness of touch that it is difficult to take offence in a social satire that mostly feels even-handed. The character of Irina’s neighbour Camilla is a case in point. Played by veteran actress Camilla Godard she brings a gentleness to her part as a drug-smoking depressive who, it later emerges, bought the cat as a present for her special needs granddaughter, another example of the more hapless denizens of the estate. And while we feel for Camilla she also conveys an ambivalence that somehow cuts both ways. We can sympathise but also condemn her. Cat in the Wall is a clever and highly enjoyable drama that really shines a light on some shadowy issues in the home we now call post-Brexit ‘broken Britain’. At least we have our ‘Sovereignty’ despite losing our freedom of movement. Full marks to Irina and those pioneers like her, she will be sorely missed. MT

NOW FREE TO WATCH ON ARTEKINO | LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL premiere

Harmonium (2016) | Fuchi Ni Tatsu **** Mubi

Dir.: Koji Fukada | Cast: Mariko Tsutsui, Kanji Furutacki, Momone Shinokawa, Taiga, Tadnubo Asano | Japan | 120 min.

The habitual genteel family set-up is turned upside down in Koji Fukada’s noir thriller Harmonium where a Japanese home becomes an unsettling place fraught with underlying guilt from  which resurfaces when a strange figure from the past disrupts the domestic harmony of one small family.

The Japanese title Fuchi Ni Tatsu alludes to the edgy atmosphere that envelopes the lives of Toshio (Furutacki) a regular church-goer who runs a small engineering workshop from home where he lives with his wife Akie (Tsutsui) and young daughter Hotaru (Shinokawa).

Life is fairly uneventful, Hotaru is learning to play the harmonium, her musical talent eclipsed by her pretentious and argumentative nature. But when Toshio takes pity on a old friend Yasaka (Asano) who has just been released from jail for committing murder, not only employing him, but also giving him a room in his house, the story takes a sinister turn for the worst.

The reason for Toshio’s generosity appears to stem from their collaboration in the murder, but Yasaka initially seems to have turned over a new leaf, making himself an affable guest, even offering to help Hotaru with her music studies. Can a leopard ever change his spots? This is the premise on which the narrative unfolds. And without giving too much away, it seems –  as ever – that this is unlikely.

What makes Harmonium so remarkable is that all the adult protagonists are terrible ordinary, banal even: there is no whiff of any sculduggery, just smalltime folk going through the daily grind – we see Toshio toiling in his workshop and Akie sewing – they only speak to each other at mealtimes; Toshio seems totally detached from the other members of his family, and has more in common with Yasaka, his guilt for having avoided prison appears to be his only emotion.

DoP Ken’ichi Negishi’s camera closes in on the characters, underlining their isolation from each other. This is a tense and cleverly misleading thriller with some impressive performances, particularly from Tsutsui who feels betrayed by the men, and yet helpless in her attempts at making her daughter’s life meaningful. A clinical study of the banality of evil. AS

NOW ON MUBI

Persian Lessons (2020) ****

Dir: Vadim Perelman. Russia/Germany/Belarus. 2020. 128mins

A war of attrition plays out between Belgian Jew and Nazi in this clever and darkly amusing ride to hell and back from Ukrainian born director Vadim Perelman (House of Fog).

Set in occupied France in 1942 and based on a short story by Wolfgang Kohlhaase, a young Belgian prisoner of war is forced to change his nationality and invent an entire language – pretending to being Persian – in order to escape the clutches of an ego-driven commandant who saves him from the firing squad – simply because he has a penchant for learning the lingo (Farsi).

The physical tortures of war are one thing, but the psychological effects can be equally painful, and this film makes a nonsense of the popular saying: “sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me”. The young Belgian is played with considerably aplomb by (man of the moment) Nahuel Perez Biscayart. As Reza he not only has to lie but also remember the lies. The payback of these mental gymnastics comes in the film’s stunning reveal that is almost as moving as the final scene in Polanski’s The Pianist.

These were the tortuous hoops that people had to jump through during the Second World War. And Persian Lessons is another astonishing angle on conflict, and another tribute to our collective memory of the Holocaust. Meanwhile the gruelling tension of the folie-a-deux between Commandant and POW is lightened by a deliciously salacious undercurrent of flirtatiousness that burbles away between the Nazi staff running the camp. And although there is a slight longueur towards the final stretch in a story that requires a leap of faith, the strength of the performances and of Ilya Zofin’s brilliant writing combined with the impressive mise en scene blow these minor flaws away.

Reza is an extremely smart young guy and while he quivers in his boots, he also works out how to massage Commandant Koch’s fragile ego. And Lars Eidinger – in one of the best performances of his career – is deeply sinister as the vain and deeply insecure Commandant, who has no access to the internet or even a smart phone to check the Farsi words and phrases, so the plot pivots between his desire to trust Reza and his deep fear of leaving himself exposed to ridicule by his peers and his young teacher, who is living his life on a knife edge.

Elegantly framed and lit by DoP Vladislav Opelyants, the only flaw is the irritating score that incessantly needles away when silence would occasionally be preferable. But even that can’t detract from this really gripping and intelligent wartime thriller. MT

On DIGITAL 22 JANUARY and DVD on 8 FEBRUARY

 

 

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Blue Sky (1994) **** Blu-ray BFI


Dir: Tony Richardson | Wri: Rama Laurie Stagner | Cast: Jessice Lange, Tommy Lee Jones, Powers Boothe, Carrie Snodgress, May Locane, Anna Klemp | US Drama 101′

A few years before he died in 1991 Tony Richardson created a powerful portrait of obsession between a diva and the man who loves her. A more mainstream hit than his arthouse affair, thirty years earlier, but with the same mesmerising punch as Mademoiselle (1966).

Jessica Lange and Tommy Lee Jones score high on the sparky chemistry front as Carly and Hank whose dynamite devotion dominates everything else in their lives, including their children and an army career that suffer as a consequence. And so did  Richardson’s swan song, hitting the buffers when Orion went bust, its release was put back until three years later. Blue Sky is still a memorable tribute to his career.

If histrionic performances appeal – and Jessica Lange scooped Best Actress for this one – then Blue Sky is right up your street. The Oscars are littered with plate-throwing turns from Bette Davis in Jezebel to Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf?, yet emotional nuance is a more difficult skill to master, and therefore possibly more laudable. Food for thought. Lange is particularly fiery here and oozes chutzpah and charm, and her dance sequences are really spectacular. 

Hank is besotted with his wife, despite her manic moods, largely attributable to her unsuitability as an army wife confined to prefab housing in military backwaters, as here in Selma, Alabama. Carly is a deeply narcissistic fantasist who sees herself as a Southern Belle of the ball, lauding it over everyone in her sphere: in short, not one of the army girls, or a team-player. Her marriage with Hank is a miracle but it works (to the detriment of everyone else), such is the mystery of love and sexual attraction, and the script – a three-handed effort by Stagner with Arlene Sarner and Jerry Leichtling – conveys this with considerable skill and insight, leaving the strand about army radiation tests in the ‘atomic’ 1960s firmly in the background.

Talking of which, Hank is an army scientist engaged in nuclear testing in the Alabama desert and tasked with investigating a dangerous leak. But Carly proves to be far more dangerous: a ‘stay at home’ housewife is, in her case, a misnomer if ever there was one: she spends her time cavorting topless on the beach and dancing suggestively with Hank’s boss, a smouldering Powers Boothe, and neglecting her daughters who are gleefully left to their own romantic devices.

Highly entertaining and occasionally funny, this is a complex, fraught and often embarrassing inter-dependent relationship, Lange and Lee Jones shimmer at the top of their game in Richardson’s last hurrah. MT

OUT ON BLURAY 25 JANUARY 2021 | BFI

The Exception (2020) ****

Dir.: Jesper W. Nielsen; Cast: Danica Curcic, Amanda Collin, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Lene Maria Christensen, Olaf Johannsen, Magnus Krepper, Borut Veselko, Simon Sears; Denmark/Norway/Sweden 2019, 116 min.

Best known for his thrillers Through a Glass, Darkly and The Day Will Come Jesper W. Nielsen is becoming a master of Nordic Noir. His latest thriller is based on Christian Jungersen’s 2004 novel, and adapted by Christian Torpe into a gripping hybrid of crime, horror and a discourse on violence. And although genre purists may disagree, Nielsen directs with skill and confidence. Reality and nightmare twist and turn in a relentless maelstrom of aesthetic brilliance.

The story centres on four women in a Copenhagen NGO (though the film was actually shot in Budapest). Their lives are far from easy: Iben (Curcic) has escaped kidnapping by clever negotiation with one of her Kenyan captors, Malene (Collin) suffers from debilitating rheumatoid arthritis and is struggling with a marriage breakdown. Both vy for Gunnar’s attention, and he “is certainly not the marrying kind”. Lene-Maria (Christensen) seems the most sorted of the four, but her affair with Serbian solder Mirko Zigic (Veselko), was probably a mistake – accused of genocide he’s soon the target of Iben and Malene’s latest research project. Librarian Anne-Lise (Knudsen) is the odd one out. Paul (Johannsen) heads up the team, a bit of a cold fish. Meanwhile, Malene and Iben are on the receiving end of suspicious emails and just when their computer specialist is on the case he suffers a fatal fall, and they go missing.

Seen through the eyes of four unreliable narrators the shifts in perspective are simply staggering, forcing us to re-examine the facts as reality spins out of control. And why are these charitable women fighting for a better world, when they are so immersed in guilt, real or imagined?. The Exception avoids easy answers, the perpetrators going back to their everyday lives – without any repercussions.

DoP Erik Zappon’s noirish aesthetic is all cold steel and white: Sidse Babett Knudsen is phenomenal as the haunted outsider, keen to do everything to be a part of the collective. Nielsen never sticks to a formula confronting us with our own self-doubts. The Exception is challenging, often seeming contradictory, but that is exactly what makes it so unique. AS

The Exception will released across all major UK Digital Platforms on 22nd January including iTunesAppleTV, Sky Store, Google Play, Amazon, Virgin, Curzon Home Cinema & Chili (& BT on rental only from 1st Feb)

Tales of Hoffmann (1951) **** Mubi

Dir. Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger

Cast: Moira Shearer, Ludmilla Tcherina, Ann Ayars, Robert Rounseville, Leonide Massine

UK 1951, 138 min.

Jacques Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann was his final, unfinished work, his only serious opera. After the success of THE RED SHOES, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger looked for another ballet related project; in particular Pressburger, whose first love was music, wanted to realise the idea of “a composed film”. Although Moira Shearer, the star of The Red Shoes. had made clear she was never going to act in another film, Pressburger eventually talked her into appearing in The Tales, which was introduced as an ‘Archers’ production in October 1949; Alexander Korda’s ‘British Lion Film’ would distribute.

The poet Hoffmann (Rounseville) falls in love with Stella (Shearer), a ballerina. Watching her on stage, his leaves and wanders into a tavern where a group of students ask him to tell them stories. His three stories are all connected by disappointed love: Olympia (Shearer) turns out to be a mechanical doll, Giuletta (Tcherina) wants to steal Hoffmann’s soul, and finally, Antonia (Ayars), a consumptive opera singer, dies while singing an aria. Hoffmann himself collapses at the end of his last story, just when Stella enters the tavern. She is lead away by Hoffmann’s eternal rival. But the muse of Poetry appears, and beckons Hoffmann to chose a life in the service of literature.

The film’s music is conducted by Sir Thomas Beeacham; of the cast, only Ayars and Rounseville sang. This was not a problem, since the film was shot entirely as a silent film (later to be dubbed in a studio), on the old silent stage at Shepperton studios, the largest in Europe, which had been constructed for Things to Come in 1936. Shooting took place from July to the end of September 1950. When Korda was first approached by Powell and Pressburger about the project, he asked (innocently) if any of the film makers had actually seen a stage version. Powell admitted he hadn’t, while Pressburger could claim to have played the second violin in the orchestra during performances in Prague, but “from where I sat, I could not see much”(!). Korda duly bought them tickets for a performance of the opera in Vienna, but their plane was delayed, they landed in the Russian zone, and had to wait for visas into the British side, where the performance was being held – they entered the theatre finally as Antonia was giving up her ghost.

The film was premiered on 1st April 1951 in New York, and seventeen days later in London, Queen Mary, Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart being in the audience. Critical acclaim was great, but the film just recouped its production costs, being only shown in selected cinemas. On April 20th, it graced the Cannes Film Festival line-up where it won two awards.

According to Powell, he had a fight with Korda and Pressburger, who both wanted to cut the third act to enhance its chances of winning the Palme d’Or. Since there were only two days between the London and Cannes performance, there wa hardly time for a recut – and Kevin Macdonald, who wrote Pressburger’s biography, claims “Powell wanted to see things as he saw them, not as they happened”. But The Tales of Hoffmann was the beginning of the end for the working relationship of the Powell/Pressburger duo, they seemed to have been a lack of trust, and they went their own separate their professional ways. AS

NOW ON MUBI

 

Under the Tree | Undir Trenu (2018) **** Mubi

Dir.: Hafstein Gunnar Sigurdsson; Cast.: Steinthor Steinporsson, Edda Bjorgvinsdottir, Sigurdur Sigurjonsson, Lara Johanna Jonsdottir, Pornsteinn Bachmann, Selma Bjornsdottir; Iceland//Denmark/Poland/Germany 2017, 89 min.

In this urban satire, Hafstein Gunnar Sigurdsson (Rams) pulls off a comedy feat, making us laugh at our own small mindedness. A great ensemble showcases this tour-de-force of middle-class nimby-ism with much the same dark humour as Rams.

It all starts with male embarrassment: husband Atli (Steinporsson) is surprised by his wife Agnes (Jonsdottir) in the early morning, masturbating to pornographic images of himself on his laptop  – or so he claims. Agnes throws him out, not realising that his next place of residence back home with his parents – will soon be a war zone. Meanwhile Atli’s brother is heading for suicide, and his mother Inga (Bjorgvinsdottir) – suffering from depression – has chosen the next-door neighbours Konrad (Bachman) and Eybjorg (Bjornsdottir) as the butt of her deflected self-hatred. Konrad and Eyborg, not unreasonably, want the huge tree on his parents’ property trimmed, at it blocks the sun from their front porch. While Inga’s husband Baldvin (Sigurjonsson) is ready to compromise, Inga herself does not want to sacrifice a leaf – she goes on the warpath blowing a gasket of pent up emotion. So Atli moves into a tent in the garden, his parent’s Persian cat disappears without a trace and Inga is convinced the neighbours have abducted the puss.

Since said neighbours own a proud German shepherd, Inga takes matters in her own hands: impersonating Eybjorg opts for extreme measures with the animal. And when husband Baldvin criticises her for being over the top, she tells him “at least they know where he is, unlike me” – referring to the missing body of her son. Then Konrad, in the middle of the night, takes his saw to the tree in question, setting in motion a bloody Shakespearean tragedy.

Violence simmers under the suface: Atli cannot stand the thought of Agnes getting custody of their four-year old daughter Asa: who he abducts from Kindergarten. later smashing his wife’s mobile and threatening violence. Unlike his mother, Atli is too phlegmatic to escalate the conflict, listening to his father’s solution for compromise  – the apple never falls far from this tree either.

The film never takes itself too seriously: at a tenants’ meeting in Agnes’ flat, she complains about him being there, blurting out at the meeting “Atli masturbates to his girlfriend’s pictures. That’s not right, is it?”, to which the male half of a couple, whose nightly lovemaking keeps the neighbourhood awake, responds with a curt “why not, it’s okay”.

Under the Tree is chock-full of witty one-liners as hilarious as they are absurd: but underneath there lurks a nimbyism and an intolerance of anyone not sharing their own values (while also claiming to be ‘liberal’). By the end, Sigurdsson, fed up with  humans, leaves the last word to the cat. AS

NOW ON MUBI

Dishonored Lady (1947) ****

Dir: Robert Stevenson | Cast: Hedy Lamarr, Dennis O’Keefe, John Loder, William Lundigan, Morris Carnovsky | US Noir thriller, 85′

The second of two independent productions made by Hedy Lamarr’s own company continuing Hollywood’s forties fascination with psychiatry; with Morris Carnovsky’s benign, pipe-smoking psychiatrist following in the footsteps of Now Voyager’s Dr.Jaquith in curing fur-coated glamour puss Lamarr (“as pretty as a picture and as stubborn as a mule”) of a malaise languidly expressed in chain-smoking and dependence on sleeping pills.

Directed by Robert Stevenson, who later made Mary Poppins, this too concerns the exploits of a career woman in a suit without a woman’s usual fear of mice. She’s not short of suitors (plainly cast with actors intended not to outshine the star; one of them Lamarr’s then-husband John Loder, who courts her to ‘Tristan and Isolde’).

About two-thirds of the way through the plot abruptly changes from Lady in the Dark to Mildred Pierce, with Lamarr a glamorous defendant in the dock in the final third after one of the suitors gets murdered. But I won’t spoil the ending for you..Richard Chatten.

NOW ON YOUTUBE | Prime Video

Cocoon (2020) *** VOD, Bluray

Dir.: Leonie Krippendorff; Cast: Lena Urzendowsky, Lena Klenke, Jella Haase, Elina Vildanova, Anja Schneider, Bill Becker; Germany 2020, 99 min.

Over a decade ago Celine Sciamma burst onto the scene with her refreshing look at lesbian romance in Water Lilies. Native Berliner Leonie Krippendorff’s seductive spin on teenage love is a contempo coming-of-age story that just manages to avoid symbolic overdrive and sentimentality.

Set in the sweltering summer heat of Kreuzberg, the capital’s answer to Hackney, the story revolves around Nora (played by an impressive Lena Urzendowsky, with already has over twenty screen credits to her name). Hanging out with her older sister  Jule (Klenke) and friend Aylin (Vildanova) and her boozy mother Vivienne (Schneider) who appears to be somewhat of an intellectual who come to life when she gets a birthday present of Judith Butler’s novel ‘Bodies that matter’, dedicated to her by a certain Twiggy, a friend from a happier chapter in her life.

Nora’s curiosity is woken when she meets the older Romy (Haase), who comes to her aid during an embarrassing poolside incident, and the girls become instant best friends bonding over boyfriends, but Romy’s not just interested in boys, or so it seems. A good deal of hazy camerawork seems appropriate for the lust-fuelled summer reverie, not unlike Pawel Pawlikovski created in My Summer of Love.

Cocoon is not that revealing, or particularly noteworthy in its love story, what stand out is the social background, showing how the girls prefer Muslim boyfriends because of their apparent faithfulness, nearly all of them repeating “I swear on the Koran”!. Perhaps this successful integration is overdone, but nevertheless, some progress has been made.

DoP Martin Neumeyer is clearly influenced by Spring Breakers, although sadly Berlin’s public swimming pools are a far cry from Florida’s beaches. Still, he captures the uniqueness of the borough of Kreuzberg which retains a certain bohemian charm in an otherwise gentrified capital city. AS

DVD, BLURAY and VOD release from 25 JANUARY 2021

County Lines (2019)

Dir: Henry Blake | Cast: Conrad Khan, Ashley Madekwe,

First time filmmaker Henry Blake directs this unflinching slice of social realism about a teenage boy who finds himself drawn into a ring of drug traffickers known as County Lines.

County Lines is a modern tragedy born out of the breakdown of the family unit and the educational crisis that sees many white working class boys left on the sidelines with poor skillsets and little hope of a decent career. They start as victims of bullying and soon fall prey to lethal traffickers who lure them into becoming mules with the promise of lucrative but ultimately punitive gains. The teen in question here is Tyler – an impressive Conrad Khan – who finds himself inveigled into working for the ruthless and opportunistic dealer Simon (Harris Dickinson) after his mother Toni (Madekwe) loses her cleaning job after a one-night stand.

All sorts of contemporary issues are deftly interwoven in this well-padded drama with its harrowing violence and affecting performances: family dysfunction and male identity are the most resonant but Blake also touches on the importance of strong role models particularly at school, but also at home. Blake has previously worked on short films, and this big screen debut is extended from a short, but there’s plenty of material to flesh it out and keep us engaged with Tyler and his transformation from naive older brother to full-fledged felon after a chance meeting in a chip shop leads to his descent into criminality. The innocuous stranger  turns out to be Simon a crook in disguise who quickly grooms him into the venal and lucrative drug trade, Tyler’s self-focused mother turning a blind eye to the influx of ready cash.

County Lines is a difficult and depressing to watch but Blake’s cinematic eye and intelligent script along and superb performances especially from Khan make it worthwhile and memorable. Thousands of British children are currently working as drug mules. This is their story. MT

COUNTY LINES | RELEASED IN UK & IRISH CINEMAS AND DIGITAL PLATFORMS ON 4TH DECEMBER

INCLUDING BFI PLAYER, CURZON HOME CINEMA & IFI @ HOME

 

 

The Father | Bashtata (2019) Oscars 2021 | Glasgow Film Festival 2021

Dir: Kristina Grozeva, Petar Vlachanov | Bulgaria Drama 87′

The Father is the third collaboration for Bulgarian auteurs Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov. This superbly scripted psychological drama follows in the wake of The Lesson (2014) and Glory (2016/7) and explores a son’s attempts to rescue his father from the hands of an unscrupulous psychic healer.

Fraught with darkly piquant humour this comedy will resonate with anyone experiencing similar issues with their own ageing parents, the judicious mixture of farce and satire intertwining to deliver an enjoyable watch while skewering the situation down to a tee.

The Father in question is a dreadful dominating demon. Vasil (Ivan Savov) has no respect for his respectable married middle-aged son Pavel (an appealing Ivan Barnev) who is almost diminished to a blithering idiot in his presence, despite being a successful businessman.

During his wife Valentina’s funeral, Vasil behaves in a disgraceful manner by asking Pavel to take some final photographs of his mother’s corpse in its coffin. When Pavel refuses, Vassil berates him in front of the assembled mourners and insists on doing it himself, belittling Pavel in the process, who later deletes the macabre snaps.

But it doesn’t end there. Vasil becomes obsessed with the idea that his wife is trying to contact him from beyond the grave (by mobile) and decides to consult with a local medium, Dr Ruvi, involving Pavel in the process. Pavel feels responsible for his father, while not liking him terribly much: thoughts of getting back to his wife and business are subsumed by those of guilt; somehow he feels drawn into Vasil’s web of madness, unable to extricate himself from the parental ties that bind. Very much in the same vein as Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, Vasil exerts the same vulnerable power as Bruce Dern’s paternal figure. Clearly Vasil needs protecting from the strange requests made by Ruvi, but in helping him, Pavel takes on an irritating and undignified mission.

Pavel is also consumed by latent anger and constantly back-footed by his father’s unreasonable demands. Meanwhile Vasil become more and more absurd and desperate – the interplay between the two men providing a rich vein of humour. This entertaining two-hander (we never actually meet Ruvi or Pavel’s wife) cleverly sees Pavel emerging as the ultimate hero of the piece, Grozeva and Valchanov adding plenty of textural grist to the duo’s convincingly volatile relationship. MT

NOW SCREENING AT GLASGOW FILM FESTIVAL ONLINE | THE FATHER IS BULGARIA’S OFFICIAL ENTRY TO THE OSCARS 2021

CRYSTAL GLOBE WINNER | KARLOVY VARY FILM FESTIVAL 2019

Camouflage (1976) Barwy Ochronne | Kinoteka 2020

Dir/wri: Krzysztof Zanusssi | Cast: Piotr Garlicki, Zbigniew Zapasiewicz, Christine Paul-Podlasky, Mariusz Dmochowski, Wojciech Alaborski | 106min  Comedy Drama  Polish with subtitles

Krzysztof Zanusssi’s Camouflage is a satire worthy of Lubitsch, set in a summer camp in the mid Seventies, where progressive professor Jaroslaw Kruszynaki (Garlicki) is battling it out with old hand and party faithful, Jacub Szelestowski (Zapasiewicz).

The pawn between the two kings is student Jarek, whose paper in the linguistic completion is original but does not tow the party line. When the deputy dean arrives for the prize-giving ceremony, all hell breaks loose: the Dean is bitten, chaos reigns and the police are called in.

Zanussi’s attack on the meritocracy based on party affiliation and nothing else, plays like out like an absurdist comedy, revealing corruption, disillusionment and confusion. Reality is always close by: Poland’s filmmakers of that era were competing with each other for major prizes at home and abroad: and while the more diffident amongst them gained support from political bureaucrats, the more adventurous found adulation and prizes in Venice and Cannes – doubt where Zanussi belonged. Since the censors could hardly fault his clever narrative construction – open to interpretation – they accused him of “mocking the system” in quoting Lenin, when Jacub argues “most important is the selection of staff”. Zanussi eventually gave in, changing ‘staff’ to ‘people’.

As a director whose style was more humorously subversive than Wajda with his dramatic frontal attacks; he employs down-to-earth characters who are very much aware of being totally compromised by the socio-political situation they find themselves in. They do not revolt openly but try just to survive with as much self-respect as possible. Zanussi never denounces his characters, but shows their reaction to the intellectual oppression of the state in relation to what they have to lose: in this way he is a humanist who accepts that the older one gets, the more there is to lose. Above all, Camouflage is witty and extremely subtle and a highlight of this canon. A great choice for a weird year! AS

KINOTEKA FILM FESTIVAL 2020 

Luxor (2020) ****

Dir/Wri: Zeina Durra | Cast: Andrea Riseborough, Janie Aziz, Michael Landers | Drama, 85′

A war zone doctor’s inner turmoil gradually surfaces in this serene second feature from British director Zeina Durra (The Imperialists are Still Alive!).

Never before has heartache appeared so muted and contemplative than in Andrea Riseborough’s portrait of post-traumatic stress disorder. She plays Hanna, a thirty-something aid worker who has just completed a stressful tour of duty in a wartorn corner of the Middle East. In Luxor, she finds herself physically and emotionally depleted, quietly contemplating her next move in the gentle faded splendour of the legendary Winter Palace Hotel on the banks of the Nile.

The genteel location is the stuff of dreams providing solace and a sanctuary for exhausted minds, damaged souls or simply those seeking a seasonal break in Eygpt’s pleasant climate. Luxor also lends a luminous spiritual dimension of this portrait of midlife crisis. A professional woman who has seen things “no human should have to witness” finds herself slipping down a path of increasing melancholy bordering on misery with the gradual realisation that normality and nurturing is now the order of the day, rather than more frontline trauma. Recuperating on quiet days of solitude amongst the ancient sites, she comes across a lover from a more light-hearted era. The passage of time – some twenty years it soon emerges –  has not dimmed the candle she once held for Sultan (Karim Saleh), an archaeologist from America. Quite to the contrary, it now burns even brighter leaving the void inside her soul crying out to be healed rather than temporarily satisfied.

Surrounded by the pharaonic tombs and towering temples, Luxor is very much the star turn. The peaceful city exudes a majestic energy empowering the film with an ethereal feeling of calm beneficence. Hana’s hotel companions, predominantly female, are genial and considerate, the only awkwardness comes after a one night stand she meets in the bar (played gamely Michael Landes) and provides a twist of humour rather than annoyance. Durra keeps dialogue to a minimum focusing on mood and feeling to sublime effect. Days spent reconnecting with her ex-lover soon expose a desperate longing that sees Hana quietly dissolving into tears, a raw nerve he unwittingly triggers in moments that are palpable in their intensity. 

Riseborough is gloriously lowkey at first, her perfect manners and placidity belying the simmering turmoil that gradually makes her more inhibited. She gives an understated physical performance, all blue-eyes, loose limbs and creamy complexion. Luxor has echoes of Columbus its scenic settings and philosophical discussions providing the peaceful backdrop for Hana’s story to unravel. And although the final scenes feel trite in contrast to the film’s thematic concerns the redemptive journey has been a beautiful and illuminating one. MT

NOW AVAILABLE online from next week | LUXOR PREMIERED AT SUNDANCE and KVIFF 2020 | KVIFF Competition returns in 2021

Queen of Hearts (2019) ****

Dir.: May el-Toukhy; Cast: Trine Dyrholm, Magnus Kepper, Gustav Lindt, Liv Esmar Dannemann, Silja Esmar Dannemann; Sweden/Denmark 2018, 127 min.

May el-Toukhy (Long Story Short, Cairo) has made a name for herself on Danish radio and TV with the series Borgen. Her third feature is a chilling portrait of the Nordic bourgeoisie. Set in an almost perfect environment, Trine Dyrholm shimmers as an elegant working wife and mother acting out a tragedy which is as heartless as avoidable. The complex narrative is structured like a thriller: guilt, lust and power dominate the proceedings.

Anne (Dyrholm), a counsellor for abused minors, and her doctor husband Magnus (Kepper) live with their blond/blue-eyed twins Frida and Fanny (Liv and Silja Esmar Dannemann) in a fabulous modernist house surrounded by woods. But the couple are living a lie: Anne is a control freak, and Magnus too keen on his work. The twins are clearly an afterthought and make up the perfect façade, but they are emotionally neglected. Then Gustav (Lindt), Magnus’s son from his first, failed marriage, joins the household. He has been excluded from school and thrown of the house by his mother – he is a godsend for Magnus, to assuage his guilt. All goes well at the beginning, the twins are thrilled with their new brother, who gives them lots of attention and reads them bed stories. But Anne is overcome by lust for the young man, and kicks off a passionate sexual relationship with Gustav, right in the family home. But her passion does not last long; eventually her intellect takes over and she ends the relationship abruptly. On an outing with his father, Gustav tells all, and Magnus confronts Anne – who plays the innocent victim. All very convincing. Magnus actually believes his son instinctively, but fears the consequences.  And it’s easier for him to send his son away. Gustav confronts Anne at her work place, but she shuts him down with the words: ”Who will be believed, you or me?” Gustav make a last ditch attempt during the Christmas holidays. But the drawbridge is up and it all ends with a family outing, everyone dressed in black.

Gustav is by no means idealised: he is a nasty piece of work who really wants to ruin the family. But that does not alter the fact that he is a minor, and Anne has taken advantage of him. Yes, he consented, but a minor who consents is still – in the eyes of the law -a victim. Nobody knows that better than Anne. But the truth would ruin her reputation.

This is a slick and enjoyable arthouse drama complimented by its stylish visual aesthetic. Jon Ekstrand’s eerie score – a mixture of late Janacek and early Schnittke – fits perfectly in a saga of icy, calculating relationships.

Queen of Hearts is available to stream and on Prime Video

Looted (2019) ****

Dir: Rene van Pannevis | Charley Palmer Rothwell, Morgane Polanski, Tom Fisher, Tom Turgoose | UK Drama 90′

Looted is a refreshing departure from those run-of-the-mill British  indies made under the UK Tax haven purely to serve a purpose. Based on the director’s own experience as a troubled teen growing up in Hartlepool on the North East coast, it feels real and is often genuinely amusing despite the sombre storyline.

Set against a background of industrial decline – Hartlepool was a major centre for fishing – there’s a poetic poignance to the troubled wasteland where young sensibilities are beautifully brought to life in Aadel Nodeh-Farahani’s limpid camerawork.

Teenager Rob (Charley Palmer Rothwell) lives with his father Oswald, a retired sailer dying of asbestos poisoning. During the day Rob cares for Oswald (a gently humorous Tom Fisher) or hangs out on the docks with his mouthy friend Leo (Thomas Turgoose). Morgane Polanski is terrific as Rob’s knowing Polish girlfriend Kasha, adding cachet and integrity to the piece despite her limited role. When night falls Rob and Leo hit the streets of the seaside town for a spot of car-jacking, until their luck turns sour. With a solid script and convincing performances Looted takes a thoughtful look at the complexity behind criminal life without condoning it or seeking to pass judgement. MT

FIPRESCI PRIZE WINNER | TALLINN BLACK NIGHTS 2019 | NOW on all major VOD platforms including Curzon Home Cinema. 

 

 

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Corn Island (2014) Simindis kundzuli | Georgian Retro | DocLisboa 2020

Director: George Ovashvili   Writers: Roelof Jan Minneboo, Nugzar Shataidze, George Ovashvili

Cast: Ilyas Salman, Tamer Levent, Mariam Buturishvili, Ylias Salman |  Drama, Georgia 100′

Corn Island could take place anywhere. The brooding fable is set in remote islands that surface annually from the bed of the river Enguri in Eastern Georgia, enriching them with nutrients and making them ideal farmland for seasonal crop-rearing by nomads. In the silence of a serene summer an old man and a young girl  settle in this mist-clothed island paradise where they fish and cultivate the earth as isolated gunfire mingles with birdsong in the distance. Few words are exchanged but a sinister undertone persists and a watchful vigilance that seems to presage doom.

Georgian auteur Ovashvili’s multi-award winning second feature was nominated for an Oscar in the Academy Award Foreign Language section the following year, echoes the recent conflicts that have taken place in the Caucasian States. His debut drama, Gagma napiri (2009), was also inspired by these events. Corn Island is a quiet, sensory affair that succeeds in building a considerable dramatic punch through subtle performances, clever camerawork that makes good use of the changing natural light and rich tones of yellow, blue and gold and well-paced storytelling with an atmospheric occasional score. This simple but profound tale is elevated by the events taking place at its margins and yet never does its narrative succumb to the outside world making the human story all the more powerful and profound.

This season Georgian farmer (Ylias Salman) and his granddaughter (Mariam Buturishvili), are here to spend the summer, the age-old topic of school work their only desultory conversation. Army officers pass by on the distant riverbank. The girl swims in the crystalline water in a dreamlike midnight sequence auguring her sexual awakening and, as if by chance, the next day a wounded soldier is washed ashore sparking friction between the threesome and a passing boat of Russian guards patrolling the river for signs of trouble. In these heavenly surroundings a palpable tension gently smoulders between the girl, the farmer and the soldiers sparked by fear, sexual frisson and danger. When the girl flirtatiously throws water on the soldier the pair chase into the fully grown corn. This small kingdom and wains when finally tragedy strikes from an unexpected source leaving us with to ponder our existence and our insignificance in the grand scheme of things. MT

CORN ISLAND | DOCLISBOA 2020 | GEORGIAN RETROSPECTIVE

Dede (2017) **** Georgian Retrospective DOCLISBOA 2020

Dir.: Mariam Khatchvani; Cast: George Babluani, Nukri Khatchvani, Natia Vibliani, Girshel Chelidze; Georgia/Croatia/UK/Ireland/Netherlands/Qatar 2017, 97 min.

This first feature from Georgian documentarian Mariam Khatchvani is based on true events that took place at the outset of the Georgian Civil War in the remote mountainous community of Svaneti, far removed from the modern world. It pictures a patriarchal society where forced marriages, pride and tradition dictate the code of daily life. Dina is a young woman promised by her draconian grandfather to David, one of the soldiers returning from the war. Once a marriage arrangement is brokered by two families, failure to follow through on the commitment is unthinkable.

Khatchvani uses an evocative visual approach with minimal dialogue to tell the story of this woman essentially trapped by men. Gegi (Babluani) has just saved his best friend’s David’s life. Ironically this leaves David (N. Khtachvani) free to marry Dina (Vibliani). But in reality Gegi is in love with her – the two fell for each other, though their original meeting was so brief they never even exchanged names. When Dina reveals her true feelings to David, he simply replies: “you will marry me, even if you are unhappy for the rest of your life”. David then suggests Gegi join him for a hunting trip which ends in tragedy leaving this intelligent woman thwarted by the controlling men in her life.

DoP Mindia Esadze impresses with towering panoramas of the mountains, and the more domestic-based clashes between progress and tradition. Babluani is really convincing in her passionate fight for happiness, even though she hardly raises her voice. 

Khatchvani shows the backward life for Georgian women in a country where traditional Spiritualism and the Muslim faith both conspire against them, and men end arguments by simply stating: “a woman has no say in this matter”. The director is living proof that women can succeed – with this atmospheric arthouse indie made on a restricted budge. The feature leaves only one question: since both fatal accidents were shown off-camera, we are left wondering whether Girshel might have been the perpetrator in both cases. AS

SCREENING AT DOCLISBOA, GEORGIAN RETROSPECTIVE 2020 | AVAILABLE ON AMAZON VIDEO & PRIME, DVD (AMAZON) VIMEO ON DEMAND AND INDIEFLIX

 

Striding into the Wind (2020) *** Cannes Selection 2020

Dir.: Wei Shujun; Cast: Zheng Yingchen, Zhou You, Lin Kai, Wang Xiaomu; China 2020, 134 min.

Wei Shujun won a Special Award for his short film On the Border at Cannes 2018 and was back in the competition selection again this year with this eye-catching but flawed drama which overstays its welcome at over two hours.

Based on Wei Shujun’s own experiences, Striding Into the Wind is a footloose road movie that offers a snapshot of modern China through the life of two film school layabouts. Essentially a series of episodes that take place in and around  Beijing where restless sound technician Zuo Kun (Zhou) is taking time out from his final year studies behind the wheel of a beaten-up Jeep. Kun can’t seem to commit to anything – let alone a driving test – and we see him flouncing off in a fit of rage when things go wrong. The Jeep eventually becomes a liability: he is stopped for driving under the influence and ends up in prison, where his warden Dad is able to get him an early release.

Kun’s portly comrade in arms, Tong (Kai) is a junk food addict who rolls out of bed just in time for the college start at noon. The women is Kun’s life are more practical: his long suffering girl A Zhi (Yingchen) lends him cash, and his mother, a university lecturer, supplies exam papers which sell for good money on campus. A film shoot provides the opportunity for the pair to break loose and  decamp to Inner Mongolia where they attempt to lock down their film project and Kun makes a play for the Mongolian star actress.

What saves this from being an empty rant in celebration of juvenile delinquency is the imaginative visuals bringing to mind early 1980s features by Hsiao-Hsien Hou. Shujun’s sycophantic treatment of his two main characters adds to the overindulgent feel of a film where so much talent has been wasted on immature postering. AS

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2020 | COMPETITION LINEUP | BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2020

    

Carmilla (2019) **

Dir/scr. Emily Harris. UK. 2019. 95 mins.

This exquisite-looking atmospheric drama based on Sheridan Le Fanu’s female vampire tale is a blood-drained version of the original spine chiller.

‘Carmilla’ pre-dates Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ by nearly three decades yet remains a more obscure affair lurking behind the more famous ‘Uncle Silas’. And this film version is a pale rider compared to the 1871 novel that chronicles the dwindling life of teenage Lara (Hannah Rae) whose impromptu house guest (an exotic Devrim Lingnau) arrives in a mysterious carriage. Carmilla eventually outstays her welcome – not not by drinking Lara’s cellar dry – but draining her hostess’s blood and reducing her to a bedridden cypher.

Women of that era were destined to be seen and not heard, and this is the fate of Lara whose increasingly demure behaviour fails to alarm her family. In her first film, Emily Harris stays faithful to the supernatural powers of the book but fails to convey the sinuous terror instilled by Sheridan Le Fanu’s novel. Carmilla is a fable fraught with sullen and brooding characters, but most of the support cast here just seem lacklustre. Never mind a splash of blood, Harris could have added a jolt of life by reanimating the novel’s spectacular opening carriage scene, adding some vital backstory and dramatic heft as a counterpoint to the languorous aftermath in the claustrophobic interiors of the remote country pile where the Gothic tale unfolds.  

DoP Michael Wood conjures up summery English scenery and lowkey candlelit interiors that set the perfect scene for a sapphic ‘love story’ to be delicately evoked by the bewitched duo. Shame then that Harris fails to breathe life into this rather wan thriller that feels as lethargic as the lovers themselves . MT

NOW IN CINEMAS | 16 OCTOBER 2020

 

A Perfectly Normal Family (2020) ****

Dir.: Malou Reymann; Cast: Kaya Toft Loholt, Mikkel Boe Folsgaard, Rigmor Ranthe, Neel Ronlolt | Denmark 2020, 93 min.

Dutch filmmaker Malou Reymann directs and co-writes this thoughtful family drama about a sex change: the football mad father decides to live in a woman’s body, having fought his owns demons to reach a decision. His wife and two young daughters are left to cope with the shock of their new reality in small-town middle-class Denmark.

It all starts with the birth of the youngest daughter Emma who has hardly left the womb before she is watching a rowdy football match sitting on her father’s lap. Fast forward to her preteen years (played by Loholt) as a striker for the local girl’s team, father Thomas (Folsgaard) in rapt attendance. The whole family is flabbergasted when he admits to being on hormone replacement therapy in preparation for the sex-change operation in Thailand. Although his wife Helle (Ronlolt) feels alienated; teenage daughter Caro (Ranthe) takes it all in her stride, criticising Emma for not accepting Thomas as ‘Agnete’. A therapist doesn’t help matters, and Emma finds it difficult when Agnete refers to ‘her femininity’, insisting the family use her new name in public.

Caro’s big family confirmation celebration passes without incident, Helle even dancing with Agnete. But Emma is awkward around her ‘new mother’, who wants to be referred to as such in front of Dutch strangers on a family holiday on Mallorca. Emma hits the bottle after hearing her friends slagging Agnete off (“he had his dick cut off”). This is all too much for Thomas/Agnete who makes some radical changes.

Reymann interweaves the beautifully crafted narrative with home videos of the daughters at a young age, showing how things change. Loholt is undoubtedly the star of the show in a performance that perfectly conveys feelings of bewilderment when her football-loving dad suddenly pretends to “know nothing about football”, in a bid to cosy up to women in his new gender status.

If Reymann is critical at all it is when Thomas overdoes the female angle, showing a distinct lack of sensitivity towards Emma and her efforts to take it all onboard. Occasionally erring on the didactic, A Perfectly Normal Family packs in the small details in a texturally rich drama, seen from Emma’s perspective, adjusting to the new status quo without the emotional filters of adulthood. Never melodramatic or sentimental, Reymann’s debut is a mature and measured experience of modern sexuality. AS

NOW IN CINEMAS | ROTTERDAM FILM FESTIVAL | Big Screen Competition (Voices) WINNER 2020

 

Eternal Beauty (2019) **

Dir.: Craig Roberts; Cast: Sally Hawkins, Billie Piper, David Thewlis, Alice Lowe, Penelope Wilton, Morphed Clark, Robert Pugh, Paul Hilton, Tony Leader, Rita Bernhard-Shaw; UK 2019, 93 min.

Films about mental health are always challenging for viewers, crew and cast. Craig Roberts has jumped into the deep end for his debut as a director but struggles to remain true to his cause.

Eternal Beauty is about a paranoid schizophrenic young woman, Jane (Hawkins), whose life is turned upside down when her lover Johnny leaves on her wedding day. Craig tries to show Jane not as an out-and-out victim, but as a person in her own right. But he undermines any realistic approach with his tricky camerawork: out-of-focus images and tilted angles just don’t work here. Over-the-top acting by the unlikeable support cast further undermines any claim to realism Craig may have.

Jane imagines she is still in contact with Johnny by phone – not only on her house phone, but any public phone she passes. She harks back to her younger self (Clark) through spy holes all over the place, including the psychiatric ward where she was submitted to electro-shock therapy. Her parents Vivianne (Wilton) and Dennis (Pugh) are helpless but very much set in their lower middle class identities. Sisters Nicola (Piper) and Alice (Lowe) could not be more different: former beauty queen Nicola craves male attention and protection, finally finding a man to marry her in the much older Lesley (Leader); Alice takes care of Jane, while her husband Tony (Hilton) cheats on her. And then there is pushy young Lucy (Bernhard-Shaw) who feels like a replacement daughter for the three who’ve flown the nest. Enter Mike (Thewlis), an old friend of Jane who turns up in her  acquaintance of Jane, who turns up in her psychiatrist’s waiting room. Mike is a musician and talks Jane into singing with him. But their budding romance goes off the rails when Nicola’s Lesley disappears,

To call Eternal Beauty tumultuous is an understatement. The characters are so overworked they feel like parodies of themselves with Jane’s illness is shown as a spectacle. Mental health sufferers are not ordinary people – they are pre-dominantly victims – but not so far removed from any normative person who can easily fall victim to any of the many afflictions of the mind. Craig and DoP Kit Fraser feast self-indulgently on special effects, shot on 35 mm film stock (Kodak Vision3), surrounding Jane with cyphers instead of real characters. Schizophrenia is many things – but not this version of a would-be horror movie. AS

IN CINEMAS FROM 2 OCTOBER 2020 | In Cinemas and On Demand

The Ground Beneath my Feet (2019) Pride Month

Dir.: Marie Kreutzer; Cast: Valerie Pachner, Pia Hierzegger, Mavie Hörbiger, Michelle Barthel, Marc Benjamin; Austria 2019, 108 min.

This gripping arthouse psychodrama sees two different characters drawn together by circumstance in modern Vienna. Austrian auteuse Marie Kreutzer avoids genre clichés in steering the idiosyncratic characters through a turbulent sometimes mysterious course. 

Sisters Lola (Pachner) and Conny (Hierzegger) are polar opposites, on the surface of it Lola is a hard-working business consultant always on the move from her Vienna base. Much older Conny is forty, and suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. Not for the first time she has tries to take her life, swallowing a handful of tranquillisers. Lola finds out about this latest attempt on a business trip to the east German city of Rostock (a rather original setting), where she is hoping to land a contract from a company on the verge of bankruptcy. Lola is also having an affair with her boss Elise (Hörbiger) who promises her promotion and a glamorous job in Sydney for both of them.

Conny was once Lola’s legal guardian after the untimely death of their parents. She wants to check out of the psychiatric ward immediately, and move in with her sister. But Lola has other plans, and is juggling work commitments not least fighting off competition from colleague Sebastian (Benjamin), and Birgit (Barthel) in the office. Then the strange ‘phone calls begin. They seem to be coming from Conny even though she has no access to a ‘phone. Even more bizarrely, Conny appears to be in Rostock, attempting to gas-light her younger sister – are Elise and Sebastian behind this odd conspiracy? Lola’s professional facade slips when Sebastian gets the plum job in Sydney. And soon the two sisters start to rely on each other when Conny is forced to move in.

Kreuzer imbues her drama with keen social commentary, contrasting well-heeled Vienna and its nouveau riche atmosphere with Rostock, a once poor harbour city down on its knees behind the iron curtain. Lola is a modern business woman who takes pride in her professional attitude and is always well-turned out in a smart suit and stilettos. Conny is a wreck who clings to Lola for support. Both Pachner and Hierzegger are convincing, but Hörbiger tops the bill as an ice maiden instilling a frosty froideur to her nuanced performance; sensitive between the sheets, but hyper-efficient in the board room. “Why do you have difficulties accepting me as your boss, Lola?” There are shades of Christian Petzold and Kreutzer’s compatriot Jessica Hausner here, but overall the Austrian auteuse is blazing her own trail.

The Ground Beneath My Feet | Now on BFI Player to celebrate PRIDE Month 2023

Petite Fille (Little Girl) 2020 ****

Dir.: Sebastien Lifshitz; Documentary with Sasha; France 2020, 90 min.

French filmmaker Sebastien Lifshitz is particularly interested in gender issues (Les Invisibles) and his latest documentary explores Gender Disphoria (GD), through the eyes of a girl who was born a boy living in provincial France.

Sasha is now seven year. Her mother explains the ramifications of her GD to a psychologist. It all started when she was just a toddler: “if I grow up, I want to be a girl”. She was mortified when told this was not going to be the case. Her school head is unwilling to work with the family so a referral to a specialist in Paris seems the only way forward. Problem is, Sasha wants to stay with her friends. The only time Sasha can dress up is in her ballet lessons but at school she still has to keep up the pretence of being a boy.

A great deal of soul-searching goes on for her mother. Naturally she feels responsible in some way, because she actually wanted a girl. But the Paris specialist Dr Bargiacci allays her fears. Surprisingly Sasha’s father and brother supports Sasha desire to be male and so a series of hormone treatments is on the cards in preparation for puberty. Once this happens there is no going back. Sasha goes on her summer holidays, armed with a bikini and new dresses. Then comes the breakthrough the family were waiting for: the school will allow Sasha back, as a girl, beginning her After the holidays, finally the break-throw the family was waiting for: The director, after having talked to the specialist from Paris over the phone, will allow Sasha back to school. She is now eight. But there is bad news too: the Russian ballet teacher literally shoves her out the class, telling her mother: “such things do not happen in her homeland”. The child is naturally dismayed by all this and her mother fears a lifetime of abuse for her child, but at the same time supports her. “We all have a mission in life, and mine is to look after my daughter”.

Moving and passionate, Little Girl is simple but not at all simplistic. DoP Paul Guilhaume’s camera is not intrusive option for a fly-on-the-wall approach. What emerges more than anything is the Sasha’s innocence and nativity in contrast to the prejudice shown her by adults. Do they know better? Will she change her mind? These are the salient issues the film raises. But the overriding feeling is that of Sasha’s confidence in her achievement, staying true to herself and telling the director proudly, after showing him photos of her when she was much younger: “You can see, how much I have changed”. A fascinating snapshot of modern times. AS

IN CINEMAS NOW and INCLUSIVELY on CURZON HOME CINEMA from 25 SEPTEMBER 2020 | UK PREMIER AT CURZON X CAMDEN MARKET ON 17 SEPTEMBER 2020

 

The Painted Bird (2019)

Dir.: Vaclav Marhoul, Cast: Petr Kotlar, Stellan Skarsgard, Harvei Keitel, Udo Kier, Julia Vidrnakova, Nina Sunevic, Jitka Cvancarova, Julian Sands, Czechia/Ukraine/Slovakia 2019, 159 min.

The Painted Bird is inspired by Jerzy Kosinski’s 1965 novel based on on real interviews with holocaust survivors in Poland makes for grim viewing with some of the most horrific scenes ever committed to celluloid. Don’t be seduced by the colourful title – the film is shot in black and white, more appropriate in conveying the stark nature of its contents. 

Some might accuse the Czech director of anti-Polish sentiments – but Poland has actually faced enormous difficulties coming to terms antisemitism during WWII. And that’s not only based on the violence and racism shown in this drama. The Polish government recently legislated to make it a crime to talk about Polish collaboration in the Holocaust. The law had to be withdrawn, but the unease remains.

It sees a young Jewish boy Joshka (Kotlar) whose parents have left him with a relative (Martha/Sunevic) in the belief he will be safer in the countryside. But after Martha dies the boy starts an epic journey of deprivation. Eventually captured by the Germans, he manages to escape his elderly ambivalent guard (Skarsgard) whose mournful eyes shows he has seen enough of death. He then witnesses German soldiers killing a group of Jews trying to escape from a cattle train, heading for  an extermination camp. A sick old priest (Keitel) saves his life but Garbos (Sands), the man charged with looking after him, brutally rapes him, and suffers a particularly gruesome death: the boy has learnt his lesson and is able to be as savage as the others.

The horrific violence continues when Joshka is befriended by a miller’s wife who saves him from drowning. But worse is to come at the hands of her husband (Kier). When he eventually finds sanctuary with Labina (Vidrnakova), it seems his luck has turned. But the young woman needs a lover, not a boy. Soon it becomes clear he has switched allegiances in this descent into hell.

Vladimir Smutny creates a devastating landscape where the characters cling to life stripped of any capacity to care or love in an apocalyptic orgy of destruction and self-destruction echoing scenes from Hieronymus Bosch. AS

NOW ON BFI PLAYER

Koko-di Koko-da (2019) ****

Dir.: Johannes Nyholm; Cast: Leif Edlun, Yiva Gallon, Katarina Jacobsen, Peter Belli, Morad Baloo Khatchadorian, Brandy Litmanen; Denmark/Sweden 2019 Horror, 86 min.

Koko-di Koko-da blends live scenes and 1950s puppetry to create an enigmatic study of grief that plays out like infinite swirling blend of Groundhog Day and The Babodook. It also stars a white cat leading us through the forest where the leading couple’s nightmare is accompanied by a haunting refrain from an old-fashioned music box.

Writer/director and animator Johannes Nyholm gained critical acclaim with his first film The Giant which shares this latest outing’s sense of unsetting poignancy. Tobias (Edlund), his wife Elin (Gallon) and their daughter Maja (Jacobsen), all made-up with rabbit faces, are enjoying a shellfish supper which leads to the young girl being hospitalised, dying the following morning on her eighth birthday, their present of an old fashioned music box carefully wrapped, but suddenly superfluous.

Grief divides Elin and Tobias. Soon they cannot stand each other’s company. On a camping trip in the woods they both endure a concurrent nightmare that sees them attacked by three of phantasy horror figures – weirdly those depicted on the music box. They are led by Mog (Belli), a dandy with a bowler, who is one of the most talkative killers in film history. His vicious dog is equally frightful, whilst Sampo the Strongman (Baloo Khatchadorian) is a man of few words. Cherry (Litmanen) looks like a hairy monster, and is mute. The nightmare always stars with Elin wanting to leave the tent for a wee. She is slaughtered, and Tobias, who does not try to defend her, meets the same gruesome fate. Unlike Groundhog Day, the two learn nothing from the attacks. The grim denouement offers a solution to their trauma affront.  

Cuddly bunnies become beasts of horror here. The terrifying dramatic scenes are intercut with 1950s-style monochromatic animations involving three of the furry beasts. The role of the white cat, who leads Elin to a cinema like room, where she can watch the animation, is not quite clear, but more of the feline would have been welcome.

DoPs Johann Lundborg and Tobias Höiem conjure up extraordinary images, reflecting the unfolding horror in the woods, with the claustrophobic scenes in the tent and the car the most convincing. Nyholm never lets a moment go by where Elin and Tobias are not threatened, the noise of the smallest twig breaking sets off alarm bells. What at first sight seemed merely eclectic, enigmatic and opaque gradually becomes texturally more rich and intriguing. No wonder it won awards at the Fantasia Film Festival and the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival. AS

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE from 7th September 2020

 

She Dies Tomorrow (2019) Bfi Player

Dir/Scr: Amy Seimetz. US. 2019. 84mins | Main cast: Kate Lyn Sheil, Jane Adams, Kentucker Audley, Katie Aselton, Chris Messina, Tunde Adebimpe, Jennifer Kim, Josh Lucas, Adam Wingard, Michelle Rodriguez, Olivia Taylor Dudley

An insightful drama perfectly echoing the corrosive coronavirus paranoia through a study of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. In her second feature Amy Seimetz continues to intrigue us with an unsettling piece of cinema that is prescient yet refreshingly novel in exploring depression and disillusionment.

So inured is the central character (Amy/Sheil) to her impending demise she surfs the internet looking at human caskets, before switching to leather jackets in a sudden spurt of hope.

She Dies Tomorrow could be accused of humouring its heroine: have we reached such a state of self-pitying and narcissism that we are unable to front up to the current, admittedly mortifying state of affairs, that is no worse than our forebears suffered on a far more serious level with famine, plague and war?

But the malingering mood is fractured by the arrival of Amy’s friend Jane who encourages her to ‘buck up” her ideas: “Come on – I’m going to call you tomorrow” – Amy replies with the melodramatic “there is no tomorrow for me” to the tones of Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor ‘Lacrimosa’.

She Dies Tomorrow morphs into a much more upbeat and often frivolous mode the following day at Jane’s birthday celebration, but the central premise of mortality still remains, and provides an ongoing rumination for the rest of the piece: we are all going to die eventually, it’s just a question of when.

This often dreamlike absurdist drama works an an amusing meditation on death, dressed up with an eclectic soundscape and plenty of visual fireworks Seimetz managing the tonal shifts with surprising grace and confidence. Jane sashays through the film in a pair of flowery pyjamas, her thoughts in perpetual ‘worried well” mode, consulting (and then seducing) her bemused doctor (Josh Lucas – who quickly returns home to roost while she imagines the sword of Damocles coming down on her at any given moment. Kate Lyn Sheil is a more tentative soul who soon joins her boyfriend in the desert for a becalmed romantic break that never gets off the ground after a bizarre pizza delivery. And yes, the audience is left as baffled – as it was during Upstream Color where Seimetz made her ground-breaking debut as Kris. Other characters are played by Katie Aselton and Chris Messina, who play Jane’s brother, and his wife who find themselves forced to entertain her in a vignette that will feel uncomfortably familiar.

This is very much a mood piece where traditional narrative pretensions fall by the way to reveal something altogether more experimental enlivened by Jay Keitel’s dazzling images. But like abstract art, the strong craft has to be there in the outset for the abstract to develop and Seimetz doesn’t convince us that it is, despite committed performances and visual creativity.

There are Lynchian moment – the scene where a weird tanner describes the method for making a jacket from a recently killed animal hide. But for the most part, She Dies is more a collection of episodes – that explore modern angst through addiction, loneliness and depression –  than a cohesive drama offering a satisfying allover experience. She Dies Tomorrow’ is enjoyable while it lasts, but like Sushi – is soon forgotten. Let’s hope the collective trauma of Covid eventually suffers the same fate. MT

NOW ON BFI PLAYER

Hope Gap (2019) **

Dir/Wri: William Nicholson | Cast: Annette Bening, Bill Nighy, Josh O’Connor | UK Drama 100′

William Nicholson’S second feature sees a hopelessly miscast Annette Bening struggle as a literary-minded English wife whose marriage is on the rocks. Bill Nighy plays her reserved husband, in his usual diffident style, more concerned for his work than his crumbling relationship.

Clearly Bening is there to sell the film to the US, but she never feels real in this maudlinly stagey affair with its flawed structure and awkward characters. Nicholson is such a brilliant writer, Oscar-nominated for Shadowlands and Gladiator but he needed a more complex and punchy counterpart to play against Nighy, who can suck the air out of any situation, and one who could have breathed life into some deft dialogue, rather than simply just reciting the lines. Nicholson reduced us to tears in Shadowlands but here we don’t care about any of his characters. Hope Bay mostly feels trite and generic, lacking in emotional depth.

Set in East Sussex, it sees Nighy’s Edward leaving his wife (Grace) of nearly thirty years. Their grown-up son Jamie (Josh O’Connor) is caught in the crossfire. Predictably, Edward is leaving because he can’t be the husband he thinks Grace wants – lame excuse – and is tired of trying, and of her complaining. All Grace wants is a little more reassurance that they’re “on a path together”. But clearly they’re not. Edward has been invited to walk away with someone else, someone more pliant and undemanding. Somehow Nicholson fails to mine the rich dramatic potential here in a drama that entirely lacks any dramatic sparkle. The only dynamism is in the widescreen wonder of soaring cliffs and magnificent views across the Seaford bay.

Edward announces he’s leaving Grace before we’ve even invested in their lives together, or got to know and feel for them as a couple divided by their respective points of view. Most of the film sees Grace moping about on the cliffs, or nagging Jamie about his own love life – or lack of it – and joining some bogus telephone helpline. No self-respecting counselling service would take on a person going through emotional trauma so the storyline isn’t even authentic. And rather than empathising with Grace’s perspective on her marriage failure, and appreciating Edward’s cowardice and his own viewpoint, we are simply left with a nagging woman, and a man who has been tempted by a new love. “It’s all contactless nowadays, Dad” says Jamie when Edward tries to buy him an ice cream. “You got it there” Edward retorts – and that telling phrase sums the film up. MT

NOW ON RELEASE FROM 28 AUGUST 2020

 

Ava (2019) ****

Dir.: Sadaf Foroughi; Cast: Mahour Jabhari, Shayesteh Sajadi, Bahaar Noohiaw, Sarah Alimoradi, Vahid Aghapoor, Leili Rashidi, Houman Hoursan, Mona Ghiasi; Iran/Qatar/Canada 2017, 103 min.

Born in Teheran in 1976, writer/director Sadaf Foroughi later went on to study in France and now lives in Canada. Her first feature Ava, is a coming of age story that won the FIPRESCI Discovery Prize at the 42nd Toronto International Film Festival for its depiction of teenage life in today’s Tehran.

Brilliant newcomer Jabhari plays the main character Ava, a girl from a comfortable background who rebels against her professional parents and her all girls school, where she is encouraged towards Science rather than the Arts, ironic as her father (Aghapoor) is an architect. She is keen on music and is competing for a place at the capital’s Conservatoire.

School days are never easy for teenagers and particularly in Iran’s restrictive society where young women are scrutinised at every turn. This provides plenty of dramatic potential for Foroughi to make the most innocent behaviour seemingly outlandish. Ava and her friends Melody (Sajadi) and Shirin (Alimoradi)  are no different from Western teenagers, and her parents’ marriage is clearly coming under strain like any modern marriage with today’s pressures.  The school’s supervisor Ms. Dehkhoda (Rashidi) is a bit of a martinet, who makes Ava’s life particularly difficult.  Her father is the more liberal of the parents, but he too claims not to understand his daughter and there is no physical contact between them, not even as basic as holding hands.

Ava has much in common with the features of Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira (1908-2015): Sina Kermanizadeh keeps his camera static, the protagonists moving slowly around the frame, sometimes even leaving. Ava, is stubborn and wilful, very much like Ema in de Oliveira’s Vale Abraäo, based on the Portuguese version of Flaubert’s Emma. Foroughi is clearly influenced by de Oliveira, her heroine subject to the paternalistic constraints of Iranian society where women will always be under the control of their parents. In one scene, her parents discuss Ava’s failings – and their own marital conflicts, Ava meanwhile is packing her rucksack for school – only a thin wall separating them, but the teenager may as well not exist. Many of the authoritative admonishments are made in the third person: teacher and parents making announcement indirectly. A case in point is Dekhoda’s insinuation to the whole class, that “over-eating” is taking place in her school: “girls getting up at night, while everyone is sleeping and sneaking over to the fridge”.  

Passionate but aesthetically restrained, Ava is a mature debut from a talented and assured newcomer. AS

OUT ON 21 AUGUST 2020 | BFI PLAYER

Babyteeth (2019) *** 2019

Dir,: Shannon Murphy, Cast: Eliza Scanien, Ben Mendelsohn, Essie Davis, Toby Wallace, Emily Barklay, Australia 2019, 120 min. 

Australian filmmaker Shannon Murphy directs her debut with sentiment and a sort of obnoxious humour, the clash of styles is something only Australian filmmakers can muster.

Adapted for the screen by Rita Kainejais, based on her own play, it sees sixteen year old Milla (Scanien) dying of cancer. Her psychiatrist father Henry (Ben Mendelsohn) and psychotherapist mother Anna (Davis) are finding it hard to cope despite their professional training but they also have their own demons to deal with. Henry neglects his clients, seeking  diversion by helping pregnant neighbour Toby (Emily Barklay) with the household tasks. Enter Moses, a small-time crook in his mid-twenties, who nearly pushes Milla under a train. She falls for him all the same, and her bewildered parents put up with the relationship to make her final months bearable. Moses finally moves in and Henry supplies morphine to his daughter and her boyfriend. Anna is the most interesting character and Davis plays her with subtlety: a talented middle-aged musician whose sexual urges are not always satisfied by her husband, despite their fondness for one another and the impending crisis.  

Babyteeth is a beautifully performed four-hander – but Murphy never really finds the right blend of calmness and flippancy to make the drama work as a convincing piece of cinema. But these faults are the faults of inexperience and Andrew Commis’ images are a striking firework of colours, underlining the chaotic storyline. Scanien is a tour de force, bringing both vulnerability and power to her role. Comparisons with Jane Champion’s early films are wide of the mark – but there is always hope for this promising new filmmaker. AS

IN CINEMAS from 21 August 2020 | premiered at VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2019

Perfumes (2019) ***

Dir: Gregory Magne | Emmanuelle Devos, Gregory Montel, Gustav Kervern, Sergi Lopez | Drama France,

We can always rely on the French to make good-looking and believable middle age love stories, grounded in reality with appealing characters, and style to boot. Their poverty stricken single dads have sex appeal, and the camera loves their selfish divas, especially when have the soigné nonchalance of Emmanuelle Devos who stars here as a once-famous ‘nose’ in the perfume industry.

She plays Anne Walberg in Gregory Magne’s second outing into light-hearted romcom territory. The story kicks off in one of those warm French Octobers where the sun adds a glow of expectancy to this roundabout autumn romance. Anne is kitted out in her chic winter coat and ready to promote the fragrances she creates. Collecting her in a black Mercedes Limo is chauffeur Guillaume Favre, a single dad down on his luck whose dark good looks inject a subtle frisson to their taxi journey.

Still waters run deep, and neither are aware just how much they are going to need each other on this earthy odyssey that goes to unexpected places. Not hot to trot, but certainly persuasive and enjoyable, Perfume’s wayward narrative has a convincing end game. It’s flirty and original just like Anne’s perfumes. MT

NOW ON CURZON WORLD | on Curzon Cinemas | Friday 21st August

Venice Film Festival 2020

The first physical film festival since Coronavirus VENICE returns to its origins with a bracingly auteurist competition line-up that shines the spotlight on Arthouse masters and brazen new talent From Europe, Asia and South America.

Championing female filmmakers and fraught with exciting news films from veterans Lav Diaz, Fred Wiseman, Andrey Konchalovsky, Orson Welles and Amos Gitai the 77th Venice Film will take place on the Lido from September 2-12.

Among the regular auteurs selected are Chloe Zhao (Nomadland),  Nicole Garcia (Lovers),  Michel Franco (Nuevo Orden), Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Wife Of A Spy), Malgorzata Szumowska (Never Gonna Snow Again, co-dircted by Michal Englert) and Gianfranco Rosi with his latest documentary Notturno

Buzz-worthy British films include Roger Michell’s The Duke, with Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren; and Luke Holland documentary Final Account, both playing out of competition. The Critics’ Week selection also includes The Book of Vision starring Britain’s Charles Dance and Uberto Pasolini’s Nowhere Special starring James Norton and produced by a UK/Romania/Italian team.

The festival opens with Daniele Luchetti’s Lacci, the first Italian film to open the celebrations fr quite some time. Festival director Alberto Barbera describes it as: “an anatomy of a married couple’s problematic coexistence, as they struggle with infidelity, emotional blackmail, suffering and guilt, with an added mystery that is not revealed until the end. Supported by an outstanding cast, the film is also a sign of the promising phase in Italian cinema today, continuing the positive trend seen in recent years, which the quality of the films invited to Venice this year will surely confirm.”

Competition

Nomadland (US) (above) | Dir. Chloe Zhao

Frances McDormand (Three Billboards) embarks on a road journey across America in the latest from The Rider director Chloe Zhao

Quo Vadis, Aida? | Dir. Jasmila Zbanic

And Tomorrow The Entire World (Ger-Fr) | Dir. Julia Von Heinz

The Disciple (India) | Dir. Chaitanya Tamhane

Never Gonna Snow Again (Pol-Ger) | Dir. Malgorzata Szumowska, Michal Englert

Notturno (It-Fr-Ger) | Dir. Gianfranco Rosi

Gianfranco Rosi poignant love letter to Lampedusa (Fire at Sea) won him an armful of awards including the Golden Bear at Berlinale 2016. He is back in Venice, where he won the Golden Lion in 2013, this time turning his documentary camera on Syria.

Padrenostro (It) | Dir. Claudio Noce

Miss Marx (It-Bel) | Dir. Susanna Nicchiarelli

Italy’s Susanna Nicchiarelli won the Orizzonti Award in 2017 for her dazzling drama Nico 1988

Now in the main competition with an all star British cast she explore the life of Eleanor Marx daughter of the infamous Carl.

Pieces Of A Woman (Can-Hun) | Dir. Kornel Mandruczo

In his first English language film the Hungarian director who made his name with White Dog explores the emotional journey of a woman who has lost her child.

Sun Children (Iran) | Dir. Majid Majidi

The Tehran based director has already won plaudits for best script, production design and film for his latest drama that tackles the subject of child labour.

Wife Of A Spy (Jap) | Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa

A Japanese wife is saddled with the sins of her husband in this painterly portrait set in 1940s Japan from Kiyoshi Kurasawa (Creepy).

Dear Comrades (Rus) | Dir. Andrey Konchalovsky

The Russian director known for Postman’s White Nights (2014) and Paradise (2016) returns to Venice with his latest, a political drama based on real events in Novocherkassk 1962 when Soviet troops seeking to cover up mass labour strikes opened fire on workers and one in particular Lyudmila (Yuliya Vysotskaya).

Laila In Haifa (Isr-Fr) | Dir. Amos Gitai

Lovers (Fr) | Dir. Nicole Garcia

Pierre Niney, Stacy Martin and Benoit Magimel star in this Noirish Parisian drama that sees a woman fall for her ex while on holiday with her husband.

Nuevo Orden (Mex-Fr) | Dir. Michel Franco

Franco loves exploring the psychology behind human relationships as he does here again in this latest that sees a high-society wedding gatecrashed by unwelcome guests.

The World To Come (US) | Dir. Mona Fastvold

Physical and emotional privation gives rise to a surprising love story in Norwegian filmmaker Mona Fastvold’s drama set in an US East Coast frontier town during the 1850s.

Le Sorelle Macaluso (It) | Dir. Emma Dante

In Between Dying (Az-US) | Dir. Hilal Baydarov

Out Of Competition – Drama

Lacci (It) – Opening Film | Dir. Daniele Luchetti

Mosquito State (Pol) | Dir. Filip Jan Rymsza

Night In Paradise (S Kor) | Dir. Park Hoon-Jung

The Duke (UK) | Dir. Roger Michell

Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren lead a cast of Fionn Whitehead, Matthew Goode, Anna Maxwell Martin for this British drama based on the theft of Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in London in 1961.

Assandira (It) | Dir. Salvatore Mereu

Love After Love (China) | Dir. Ann Hui

Mandibules (Fr-Bel) | Dir. Quentin Dupieux

Lasciami Andare (It) – Closing Film | Dir. Stafano Mordini

The Human Voice (approximately 30’) is a loose adaptation of the original stage play by Jean Cocteau, directed by Pedro Almodóvar and featuring Tilda Swinton as ‘the voice’. It tells the story of a jilted woman (Swinton), hoping her lover will get in touch. This is Pedro Almodóvar’s first time shooting in English. Alberto Iglesias composed the score.

One Night in Miami by Regina King

Set on the night of February 25, 1964, the story follows a young Cassius Clay (before he became Muhammad Ali) on the night her defeated Sonny Liston to win the title of World Heavyweight Boxing Champion. Clay – unable to stay on at the venue because of Jim Crow-era segregation laws – instead spends the night at the Hampton House Motel in one of Miami’s historically black neighbourhoods, celebrating with three of his closest friends: activist Malcolm X, singer Sam Cooke and football star Jim Brown. The next morning, the four men emerge determined to define a new world for themselves and their people. In One Night in Miami, Kemp Powers explores what happened during these pivotal hours through the dynamic relationship between the four men and the way their friendship, paired with their shared struggles, fueled their path to becoming the civil rights icons they are today.

Out Of Competition – Documentaries

Sportin’ Life (It) | Dir. Abel Ferrara

Crazy, Not Insane (US) | Dir. Alex Gibney

Greta (Swe) | Dir. Nathan Grossman

Salvatore – Shoemaker of Dreams (It) | Dir. Luca Guadagnino

Final Account (UK) | Dir. Luke Holland

Looking at the other side of the coin, Holland cobbles together interviews from those Nazis who perpetrated the Holocaust.

La Verita Su La Dolce Vita (It) | Dir. Giuseppe Pedersoli

Molecole (It) | Dir. Andrea Segre

Paolo Conte, Via Con Me (It) | Dir. Giorgio Verdelli

Narciso Em Ferias (Bra) | Dirs. Renato Terra, Ricardo Calil

Hopper/Welles (USA) | Dir. Orson Welles

Yes, another documentary about Orson Welles – can there ever be too many? This unscripted one captures a conversation between the maverick multi-talented Welles and the ingenu filmmaker Hopper that took place in 1971 over dinner, shooting the breeze over politics, personal issues and, or course, filmmaking. Made available courtesy of The Other Side of the Wind (Venice 2018) producer Filip Jan Rymsza.

City Hall (USA) | Dir. Frederick Wiseman

Out Of Competition – Special Screenings

Princesse Europe (Fra) | Dir. Camille Lotteau

30 Monedas – episode 1 (Spa) – series | Dir. Alex De La Iglesia

Orizzonti

Apples (Greece-Pol-Slovenia) – Opening Film | Dir. Christos Nikou

La Troisième Guerre (Fra) | Dir. Giovanni Aloi

Milestone (India) | Dir. Ivan Ayr

The Wasteland (Iran) | Dir. Ahmad Bahrami

The Man Who Sold His Skin | Dir. Kaouther Ben Hania

I Predatori (It) | Dir. Pietro Castellitto

Mainstream (USA) | Dir. Gia Coppola

Genus Pan (Phil) | Dir. Lav Diaz

Zanka Contact (Fr-Mor-Bel) | Dir. Ismael El Iraki

Guerra E Pace (It-Switz) | Dirs. Martina Parenti, Massimo D’Anolfi

La Buit Des Rois (Ivory Coast-Fr-Can) | Dir. Philippe Lacote

The Furnace (Aus) | Dir. Roderick Mackay

Careless Crime (Iran) | Dir. Shahram Mokri

Gaza Mon Amour | Dirs. Tarzan Nasser, Arab Nasser

Selva Tragica (Mex-Fr-Ger) | Dir. Yulene Olaizola

Nowhere Special (It-Rom-UK) | Dir. Uberto Pasolini

Listen (UK-Port) | Dir. Ana Rocha De Sousa

The Best Is Yet To Come (China) | Dir. Wang Jing

Yellow Cat (Kazakhstan-Fr) | Dir. Adilkhan Yerzhanov

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2-12 SEPTEMBER

Pinocchio (2019) ****

Dir: Matteo Garrone | Fantasy Drama, Italy 122′

Matteo Garrone’s enchanting version of Carlo Callodi’s 1883 classic has appeal for adults and pre-teens with its endearing characters and sharp social commentary.

Best described as a bedtime cautionary tale in the dark style of the Grimm or Hoffman, Garrone’s latest has shades of his 2015 Tale of Tales in the extravagant costumes. But here animals pose as humans and vice versa, although clearly it’s not salacious, veering more into terrifying territory in warning of the disastrous consequences of childhood misbehaviour in an exaggerated way.

This Pinocchio stays faithful to the page, Roberto Benigni is the woodcutter Geppetto, who begs a trunk of wood from his friend and crafts a puppet to replace the son he never had. But Garrone keeps Benigni under control – his weird 2002 adaptation in which he also starred clearly came to mind – and he’s gone after the first couple of scenes, 8 year-old Federico Ielapi’s Pinocchio running away to seek his fortune armed with 5 gold coins, as a naive but disobedient wooden puppet child. But not before burning his feet by the fireside, in one of the film’s more sinister sequences.

The ancient fishing villages near Bari and the baked landscapes of Sienna provide the vivid backdrop to a story that is certainly compelling, and the Berlinale press audience looked on with a childish fascination and very few walk-outs.

Pinocchio and some of the other puppets have authentic looking wood-grained faces and eyes that are living behind them. A tiny talking cricket (Davide Marotta) is particularly cute and so is the money-like judge (Teco Celio) who sends Pinocchio down “because the innocent always go to jail, and the guilty go free”. This is the tenor of its social satire. In one delightful scene, Pinocchio’s nose grows out when he lies, serving as a branch for starlings to peck at.

Garrone and Massimo Ceccherini collaborate on the script that is essentially as series of adventures showcasing how Pinocchio refuses to do his homework, and keeps making mistakes, as all boys do, eventually turning into a donkey sold into a life of slavery. He is also almost eaten alive and falls prey to a pair of feline fraudsters (played by Ceccherini and Rocco Papaleo), desperate to get their paws on his money. Enter the famous “magic money tree.” well known to Jeremy Corbyn, although that particular fantasist doesn’t have a part in this fairy story. The Blue Fairy does, however, and she grows into a beautiful woman (Marine Vacth) who looks after Pinocchio, assisted by her snail-like housekeeper. And eventually the boy comes good, and his reward arrives in a moving and magical finale that drags its heels but finally delivers the classic happy ending. MT

OUT ON 14 August 2020 | premiered at BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL | 20 February – 1 March 2020

American Pickle (2020) ***

Dir: Brandon Trost | Cast: Seth Rogen, Sarah Snook, Molly Evensen, Eliot Glazer, Kalen Allen, Sean Whalen, Jorma Taccone, Kevin O’Rourke, Marsha Stephanie Blake | US Comedy 90′

Seth Rogen gives not one but two clever performances – as a Brooklyn techie and his Eastern European immigrant great-grandfather – in this upbeat and intelligent cultural satire bringing to mind Fiddler on the Roof.

An American Pickle underlines just how far we’ve come in the political correctness stakes. Notions of family rivalry and what it takes to succeed in in life are served as a refreshing cocktail of black humour, the weight behind the storyline offering home truths and caustic observations and making this comedy worthy of serious consideration, although Simon Rich’s script based on his novella Sell Out slightly loses its sting in the final stages.

In the Hollywood style opening scenes Seth Rogen plays a fiery but likeable downtrodden Polish peasant Herschel Greenbaum who accidentally falls into a vat of pickling brine in the Jewish community of Schlupsk during the Cossack invasion of 1919. Re-surfacing perfectly preserved in present-day New York (please suspend your disbelief) he meets his tech-designer ancestor Ben, a subdued singleton who has spent his last five years develop0ing an app, and is now looking for investors.

Director Brandon Trost has worked with Rogen before in comedies such as This is the End, The Night Before, The Interview. This latest is fraught with Jewish jokes and immigrant references but the strong theme of hard work and perseverance against the odds rings true more than ever before and resonates with the tough times we’re all going through.

Herschel Greenbaum fetches up in Brooklyn ‘penniless’ and moves in with great grand-son Ben, determined to pay his way by inventing home-cured pickles using rainwater, recycled jars and gherkins thrown out by neighbouring restaurants. This ‘natural’ product this goes down a treat with the ‘woke’ locals (Eliot Glazer and Kalen Allen), and soon he’s making a few dollars.

Determination and self-belief keep him going and spur him on to buy the local Jewish cemetery where his wife Sarah (Snook) is buried, and where construction workers put up a billboard for Russian vodka. The thought of ‘Cossacks’ invading once again is the motivating force for his beef. When the workers refuse to remove the sign, a punch-up ensues and he and Ben find themselves in prison custody, scuppering Ben’s chances of securing finance from ethically conscientious investors. Furious, Ben hits back at Herschel and secretly shops him to the ‘health and safety’ authorities, Herschel losing his pickle livelihood on the grounds of consumer safety.

There is much to enjoy in the tussle between Herschel’s old-fashioned hard-grafting verve and his more passive aggressive modern relative Ben and the family rift drives this feel good comedy forward showing that in the end blood is always thicker than brine. MT

IN CINEMAS FROM 7 AUGUST 2020

 

 

 

 

 

Unhinged (2020) *

Dir: Derrick Borte | Cast: Russell Crowe, Rachel Pretorius, Jimmi Simpson, Gabriel Bateman | Thriller, 90′

In the shocking opening scenes of Unhinged a man is seen axing down  his wife and her lover in the privacy of their home. Essentially a road movie driven by anger, the focus then broadens to shards of news footage featuring road rage incidents on America’s highways. The intention is clear – to establish the climate of downright fury endemic in society today. But you can’t base an entire feature on road rage without a plausible, gut-punching storyline, and this is where Derrick Borte and his writer Carl Ellsworth run out of fuel.

‘The man’ in question is Russell Crowe in psychopath mode and his tantrum feeds into a generalised fury demonstrating how simmering resentment spills into everyday life, especially on our roads. There is no real reason for the man’s vendetta against random motorist Rachel (Pistorius) and her young son Kyle (Bateman), who merely serve as the butt of his rage for the entire duration of the thriller.

After a torpid breakfast scene in the family kitchen, Rachel sets off  in heavy traffic to meet her friend and divorce lawyer Andy (Simpson) – but they never get there. At the traffic lights they become the inadvertent victims of Crowe’s psychopathic cuckhold who pursues Kyle and Rachel  whose only mistake was to hoot him when the traffic lights turned green.

Making mincemeat of the rest of the cast – particularly Simpson who gets it in the neck, quite literally –  Crowe walks his way robotically through this psychological thriller full of plot-holes but lacking in dramatic mileage. The car chases are spectacular but that’s not enough to fuel an entire feature even given the modest running time. MT
OPENS ONLY IN UK AND IRISH CINEMAS 31 JULY 2020
https://youtu.be/40M7RxLRsiY

 

 

 

Casting (2017) *** Digital release

Dir.: Nicolas Wackerbarth; Cast: Judith Engel, Gerwin Haas, Corinna Kirchhoff, Ursina Lardi, Stephen Grossmann, Milena Dreissig; Germany 2017, 91 min.

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant was a study in female sado-masochism and one of the best films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s short-lived but sparkling career. Casting is a pale rider in comparison. The play within a film sees Nicolas Wackerbarth attempting to update the original. It requires the audience’s familiarity with the 1972 feature, and the fate of the Fassbinder crew and cast, who were a close-knit family. Here Petra becomes a man – in line with the assumption that Fassbinder himself was the model for Petra (Margit Carstensen) – who sexually objectifies  younger lover Karin Thimm (Hanna Schygulla).

Newbie director Vera (Engel) is five days away from the first day of filming, but she still hasn’t found her lead. Well – she thought she had, in the shape of Almut (Lardi), but rumour has it that Vera and producer Manfred (Grossmann) are now looking for a younger actress, possibly Mila Ury-Teche (Sellem). The action gradually closes in on Karl (Haas), who is just a ‘prop’ reading the parts of the actors who can’t be on set. But he somehow fits the part of Petra, and hassled by the commissioning TV editor and the producer, Vera gets more and more keen on the idea of the part being male, and gradually Karl seems to fit the bill in resembling the original Petra. But will it all work?

Casting settles down to an odd mixture of comedy and drama: the majority of films in Germany are TV co-productions and rely on the goodwill of commissioning TV editors. Although the lampooning works successfully here, the narrative is too episodic to keep us interested and the haphazard handheld camerawork makes this worse, the protagonists dodging in and out of the frame in a  ‘running gag’ that becomes irritating, undermining its original intention. 

Wackerbarth’s description of his female characters stays true to that of Fassbinder who once commented “women use their repression as terror weapons. I am not a misogynist, I am just honest”. The message here is the same. Michael Ballhaus’s images are light years away from Jurgen Carle’s would-be-avant-garde approach. On the whole, progress still seems an uphill struggle for German Cinema. AS

CASTING IS SET FOR A DIGITAL RELEASE ON 31 JULY 2020

 

Proxima (2019) **** Rotterdam Film Festival 2020

Dir: Alice Winocour | Wri: Alice Winocour, Jean-Stephane Bron | Cast: Eva Green, Lars Eidinger, Matt Dillon, Sandra Huller | Sci-fi Drama 107′

Proxima is Alice Winocour’s most ambitious film to date and certainly her most unique and cinematic. It depicts the struggle of an ordinary mother (Green) who is an outstanding engineer and cosmonaut. Melding docudrama with a moving love story, Proxima is full of haunting images heightened by Ryuichi Sakamoto’s ethereal score, all enveloped in a gripping storyline: Will a woman deeply attached to her young daughter make it into Space and back.

Green’s female engineer Sarah is at the heart of Proxima. She is a luminous presence – fragile tough and strangely otherworldly. Given the opportunity to join the European Space Agency’s Mars probe mission along with other seasoned spacemen – including Matt Dillon’s macho but golden-hearted leader – she takes the plunge. What starts out as matter of fact preparation for the long term mission soon becomes a fraught and increasingly affecting exploration of what is means to love, to be a parent, to meet professional goals, and to thrive and appreciate our own planet. Proxima is a ground-breaking and beautiful film as much about our life here on Earth as is about this perilous journey into the unknown.

The Parisian-born part Russian director, who has Russian blood, avoids melodrama until the final remarkable scenes. And she doesn’t stint on detail when describing the gruelling physical and emotional preparations for space travel. The final titles include a roll-call of famous cosmonaut mothers – because the crucial twist here is that Sarah must leave her daughter Stella (a determined Zelie Boulant) for six months to join the mission. Convincingly shot on location in the ESA facilities in Cologne and in Star City near Moscow, Winocour spent two years researching and writing the script (with regular Jean-Stephane Bron). It shows how motherhood can thwart ambition particular when along comes a small, needy child. And it cuts both ways – Sarah often being driven to tears of doubt and remorse rather than her toddler Stella – kids are tough! And this element gives the drama its rich emotional underbelly.

Green is convincing both as the highly driven scientist and the tender-hearted parent who may lose her life. Lars Eidinger is a lowkey but supportive presence as the astrophysicist dad. There is a subtle suspense at play throughout this remarkable journey and the moving love story at its core. MT

NOW AT UK PICTUREHOUSES| ROTTERDAM FILM FESTIVAL 2020 |

Venice Film Festival 2020 | Main jury complete

Preparations for the real time  77th Venice Film festival are gaining momentum with the announcement of an impressive jury headed by this year’s president Cate Blanchett – currently appearing in the BBC’s breakout series Mrs America.

Australia’s Blanchett is an internationally acclaimed and award-winning actress, producer, humanitarian, and dedicated member of the arts community. In 2018, she was one of the most engaging and affective Jury Presidents at Cannes Film Festival. A winter of three well deserved BAFTAs, two Academy Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, as well as numerous award nominations. Blanchett is equally accomplished on the stage, having led the Sydney Theatre Company as co-Artistic Director and CEO for six years with her partner, Andrew Upton.

Veronika Franz (Austria), arthouse auteuse and screenwriter, Franz started her career in journalism for the Viennese daily Tageszeitung Kurier. Since 1997 and has more recently worked with director Ulrich Seidle as an artistic collaborator, and co-screenwriter on Dog Days (Hundstage, 2001), Import Export (2007) and the PARADISE trilogy (2012/13). The documentary Kern (2102) was both her debut film as a director, and the first film she made with director Severin Fiala. It was followed by her first fiction feature film, Goodnight Mommy (Ich seh Ich seh, 2014), which she co-directed with Fiala and presented in Venice in the Orizzonti section. The film won numerous awards and was selected to represent Austria at the Academy Awards. The two directors then made their first film in English, The Lodge, starring Riley Keough and Jaeden Martell, presented at the Sundance Film Festival 2019.

Courtesy of Wikipedia

Joanna Hogg (Great Britain), is a director and screenwriter, unique for her depictions of middle and upper class life in London’s creative milieu. Her first feature-length film, Unrelated (2008), starring Tom Hiddleston, won the Fipresci Prize at The London Film Festival. Her second film, Archipelago (2010) won a Special Commendation at The London Film Festival and had a successful theatrical release. In 2013 she made Exhibition, starring the Slits guitarist Viv Albertine, and British artist Liam Gillick. Her most recent semi-autobiographical film The Souvenir, executive produced by Martin Scorsese, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival 2019 where it won the World Cinema Dramatic Grand Jury Award.

Nicola Lagioia (Italy), a writer, is the director of the Salone Internazionale del Libro in Turin since 2016 and also a radio broadcaster  on Rai Radio3. He writes for publications such as «Repubblica», «Il Venerdi», «Internazionale», «La Stampa». His books have been translated in 15 countries.

Christian Petzold (Germany), leading protagonists of the German ‘New Wave’ and one of the most significant film directors working in Germany today he won the German Film Critics’ award for Best Film three times for Die innere Sicherheit (The State I Am In, 2000), presented in Venice, Gespenster (Ghosts, 2005) and Yella (2007), presented in Berlin. In 2008, he was in Venice in Competition with Jerichow, for which he won the Deutscher Filmpreis in 2009 as Best Director. He won the Silver Bear in 2012 for Barbara (above) in Berlin, where in 2018 he won great critical acclaim for Transit. In 2020, again in Berlin, he won the FIPRESCI award for Undine.

Cristi Puiu (Romania), director and screenwriter, made his debut as a director in 2001 with the low-cost road movie Stuff and Dough (Marfa şi bani), presented in the Quinzaines section at Cannes and considered to be the film that ushered in New Romanian Cinema. In 2005 his second feature film, the black comedy titled The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, won critical acclaim and the Un Certain Regard prize at the Cannes Film Festival. He had equal success with Sieranevada, presented in Competition at Cannes. In 2020 Manor House (Malmkrog) won the award for Best Director in the Encounters section of the Berlin Film Festival.

Ludivine Sagnier (France), is an actress whose screen debut was in Alain Resnais’ 1989 drama in I Want to Go Home! In 1990 she appeared in the epic film Cyrano de Bergerac. In 2003 she played Tinkerbelle in P. J. Hogan’s film Peter Pan. One French director François Ozon regulars she also starred in: Water Drops on Burning Rocks, 8 Women and Swimming Pool, alongside Charlotte Rampling and has become one of the most renowned and esteemed French actresses. Her most recent films include The Truth (La Vérité) by Hirokazu Koreeda, the opening film of the Venice International Film Festival 2019, and the second series The New Pope by Paolo Sorrentino.

MATT DILLON has now replaced Cristi Puiu

The Jury of Venice 77 will award the following official prizes to the feature films in Competition: Golden Lion for Best Film, Silver Lion – Grand Jury Prize, Silver Lion for Best Director, Coppa Volpi for Best Actor, Coppa Volpi for Best Actress, Award for Best Screenplay, Special Jury Prize “Marcello Mastroianni” Award for Best New Young Actor or Actress.

Giornate degli Autori | Venice Days 2020

Venice Days is back from 2 – 12 September this year. Live on the Lido at the famous Villa Degli Autori 
DAYS OF COURAGE is the sentiment expressing this year’s celebration. Ten new films from all over the world will compete for the main prize of the 17th edition running from 2 -12 until September. The closing film will be Saint-Narcisse presented by Canadian maverick Bruce LaBruce. The focus of this year’s Cinema of Inclusivity is Italy’s own Liliana Cavani who was nominated for the Golden Lion back in 1968 with her film Galileo. Here is a selection of this year’s competing films.
MAMA – set in rural China during the final decade of 20th century this first feature from Li Dongmei is a mature and sober drama.
200 METRES – the wall between Palestine and Israel is the focus of Ameen Nayfeh’s drama that stars leading Arab star. Ali Suliman.
 
KITOBOY – So many remarkable stories are coming out of Ukraine and this debut from Philipp Yuryev is the latest, set in a whaling community.
SPACCAPIETRE – in the Southern Italian region of Puglia a family tragedy with human repercussions gradually plays out in the De Serio brothers’ drama.
 
HONEY CIGAR  Algeria is the setting for this sensuous debut drama from Kamir Aïnouz, the sister of the well-known Brazilian filmmaker Karim Aïnouz).
RESIDUE Merawi Geriman’s moving first film echoes the recent racial tensions Stateside.
 
MY TENDER MATADOR – following his extraordinary performance in Theo Court’s White on White (Venice 2019) Alfredo Castro lends his talents to Rodrigo Sepúlveda’s queer love story set during the time of Pinochet in Santiago de Chile.
VENICE DAYS | GIORNATE DEGLI AUTORI 2-12 SEPTEMBER 2020

The Rifleman | Dveselu Putensis (2019) *** Digital and DVD

Dir.: Dzintars Dreibergs; Cast: Otto Brantevics, Taimonds Celms, Martin Vilsons, Greta Trusina; Latvia 2019, 104 min.

The Rifleman pays stark witness to the horrors and brutality of the First World War, as seen through the eyes of an innocent 17-year-old farm-boy turned soldier and the tragic fate of his family.

Written by Boris Frumin and based on the 1933/34 novel by Aleksanders Grins, which was forbidden in the USSR, its author shot down in 1941. This lushly mounted historical drama was, not surprisingly, a huge success at the box-office in Latvia, and an impressive first feature for Latvia’s Dzintars Dreibergs, who made his name as sports documentarian.

The Rifleman is an unashamedly male and patriotic affair, filmed as an eyewitness report from the POV of 17-tear-old Arthurs Vanags (Brantevics), it opens in 1914 giving full emotional throttle to the murder of the young man’s mother by German soldiers, who, for good measure also kill the family’s dog. Arthur’s father (Vilsons) has served in the Russian Imperial Army, and burns down the farmhouse and shoots the cattle, before enlisting with Arthurs and his brother Edgars (Celms) in Latvia’s first National Battalion, part of the Russian forces overrun by the Germans.

Wounded in a skirmish, Arthurs soon falls for Marta (Trusina), a nurse in the field hospital. But more tragedy follows when Arthurs is asked by Red Army commanders to shoot Latvian soldiers who have disobeyed their Russian officers. Returning home, Arthurs catches up with Marta who is now working as a farmhand in Latvia, before setting out to liberate his homeland from “Tsars, Red Army and the Germans who all want to repress Latvian independence.”

DoP Valdis Celmins does a great job with his grizzly images of foggy snowbound battles, the frozen bodies reduced to ghostly spectres. Lolita Ritmanis’ evocative score is in line with this heroic approach to war, providing the emotional underpinnings to this rousing feature (1917 it is not) depicting a grim episode in Latvian history. AS

In the Showcase Cinema circuit nationwide | Sunday 26th July  
On Digital from 10th August | On DVD from 24th August 
 

The Good Die Young (1954) *** Blu-ray

Dir: Lewis Gilbert | Cast: Stanley Baker, Gloria Grahame, Joan Collins, Laurence Harvey, John Ireland, Richard Basehart | UK Drama

This watchable if rather moralistic British thriller sees three law-abiding men brought together Producer Clayton and director Gilbert (the most hard-working of all British post-war film-makers) assembled a top Anglo-American cast for this rather moralisitic and decent thriller, based on a book by Richard Macauley).

Boasting a stellar cast that also includes Gloria Grahame (The Bad and the Beautiful), Joan Collins (Cosh Boy) and Robert Morley (The Battle of the Sexes), this compelling crime picture is presented in both its original theatrical version and in an extended export cut (Blu-ray only), originally intended for international audiences.

Psychotic playboy Harvey finds himself short of the readies so he persuades ex-GI Basehart, AWOL Air Force sergeant Ireland and no-hope boxer Baker to join him in holding up a mail van. This being a British picture from the ’50s, you don’t expect them to get away with it – but neither do you quite anticipate Joan Collins and Gloria Grahamepopping up in such low-key supporting roles as they do here.

Amoral aristocrat Miles Ravenscourt (Laurence Harvey, Room at the Top) plots a daring robbery to settle his gambling debts in this taut, tough thriller played out on the shadowy streets of post-war London. Enlisting the aid of washed-up former boxer Mike (Stanley Baker, Zulu), ex-GI Joe (Richard Basehart, Moby Dick) and US airman Eddie (John Ireland, Red River), Ravenscourt sets out to plan the perfect heist. But is there any such thing as a sure thing?

Blu-ray/DVD release on 20 July 2020, and on iTunes and Amazon Prime on 3 August 2020

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Las Ninas Bien | The Good Girls (2018) Mubi

Dir.: Alejandra Marquez Abella; Cast: Ilse Salas, Flavio Medina, Paulina Gaitan; Mexico 2018, 93 min.

Alejandra Marquez Abella’s flawed sophomore feature is a social anthropologist’s dream: based on characters by Guadelupe Loaeza, a group of bitchy competitive Mexican wives whose the crowning glory is having Julio Iglesias for dinner. Sofia, leads the cast of mere cyphers in an episodic narrative that drains out patience even with the modest running time.

Sofia (Salas) is desperate to deny her Latin American heritage. Sending her three children off to summer camp, she warns them “don’t hang out with Mexicans”. A European background is what she and her female rivals long for. In the social whirl, Sofia’s parties are epic productions,  funded by her husband Fernando (Medina) whose   family is of Spanish heritage. Everything is a competition for Sofia, the smallest bum note could lead to a loss of face among her female friends. But we are in the early 1980s, and the Mexican Peso suddenly bottoms out. As Sofia and her circle rely on imported goods, this is a major catastrophe all round. So when credit cards get politely refused and the servants don’t get paid, doom is imminent. To make matters worse, Sofia’s arch rival, the noveau-riche Ana Paula (Gaitan), is still quids in. Her default-position is resigned acceptance, but with the Peso tumbling further, even this seems beyond the pail.

Salas is always brilliant, cool and contained, she carries the film as much as possible. DoP Daniela Ludlow succeeds in conjuring up this lush environment of petty mini-me’s in meltdown, keeping everything close and personal, despite the widescreen format. As a chick-flick study of vanity and self-deceit this is promising but lacks emotional depth and an absorbing dramatic arc. AS

NOW ON MUBI

The Portuguese Woman | A Portuguesa (2019) **** Mubi

Dir.: Rita Azevedo Gomes; Cast: Clara Riedenstein, Marcello Urgeghe, Ingrid Caven, Joao Vicente, Alexandre Alves Costa; Portugal 2018, 136 min.

A languid and painterly reflection on art, feminism and beauty and the latest drama from award-winning filmmaker Rita Azevedo Gomes whose debut A Coleccaio Invisivel was based on a 1924 novella by Robert Musil, a contemporary of Stephen Zweig.

Although the timeframe is ambiguous, the setting is Europe – possibly Sintra – somewhere between the 17th/18th century. The film opens with “Unter den Linden”, sung by Ingrid Caven, who accompanies the narrative like a Brechtian chorus as we meet the recently married Lord Von Hutten (Urgeghe) and his wife, the titular Portuguese woman (Riedenstein) whose year-long honeymoon has been brought to an abrupt end when Von Hutten is called to battle by the rather combative Bishop of Trento (Costa): “War is made of debt, and peace is the conduit of corruption and vice”.

When Von Hutten finally returns to his wife and child, who are living in his decrepit castle, she has been enjoying a lengthy visit from her cousin Dom Pero Loboto (Vicente), whose stay has given rise to local gossip, and murderous jealousy on the part of the conquering soldier.

Lavishly mounted and sumptuously captured by DoP Acacio de Almeida whose intense images bring to mind the paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Gomes cleverly transforms Musil’s mysticism, his metaphors for humankind’s failure to retain traditional values, above all love, into landscapes shrouded in mist where the derelict castle represents a refuge from the outside world of strife. Manoel de Oliveira regular Agustina Bessa-Luis comes up with some brilliant dialogue pieces performed with languorous resonance by a superb ensemble cast. In the style of Oliveira, Gomes draws from literature and the world of art to create intentionally static scenes enriched by transcendental poetic realism in this enchanting and magical drama. MT

NOW ON MUBI | VIENNALE 2019 | 24 October – 26 November 2019

 

       

Cannes Classics | Festival de Cannes 2020

In the Mood for love by Wong Kar-wai twenty years after, À Bout de souffle and L’Avventuraturn 60, great filmmakers (Wim Wenders, Federico Fellini, Bertrand Blier, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Glauber Rocha, Lino Brocka), Tilda Swinton’s first major role in a science fiction film, Muhammad Ali meets William Klein, rediscoveries from the Festival de Cannes ‘60, ‘68, ‘73 and ’81, the first color fiction of Chinese cinema, an unknown masterpiece from Sri Lanka, a Serbian comedy, the new wave of Russian cinema, from yesterday’s cinema to today’s world with the first film by Melvin Van Peebles and a stricking documentary on women from Brittany, a landmark film about Charlie Chaplin, an exceptional portrait of actor John Belushi, Bruce Lee revisited and a celebration to great Italian actress Alida Valli, here is Cannes Classics 2020.

In the Mood for Love (2000, 1h38, Hong Kong) by Wong Kar-wai

The 4k restoration of the film made from the original negative was lead by Criterion and L’Immagine Ritrovata under the supervision of Wong Kar-wai. In the Mood for Love, by Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai, made its lead actor Tony Leung win the Male Interpretation Prize.

French theatrical distribution: The Jokers Films, date of release: December 2, 2020.

Actress Tilda Switon in her first big screen role to pay tribute to film director and film theorist Peter Wollen. It will be the rediscovery of a rare work.

Friendship’s Death (1987, 1h12, United Kingdom) by Peter Wollen

Presented by the British Film Institute (BFI). The 4K remastering by the BFI National Archive was from the original Standard 16mm colour negative. The soundtrack was digitised directly from the original 35mm final mix magnetic master track. The remastering was undertaken in collaboration with the film’s producer, Rebecca O’Brien and cinematographer, Witold Stok.

The Story of a Three-Day Pass (La Permission) (1967, 1h27, France) by Melvin Van Peebles

Presented by IndieCollect and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. The restoration of The Story of a Three-Day Pass (La Permission) was funded by a grant from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. The original film elements were found by the IndieCollect team during its inventory of Melvin Van Peebles’ New York apartment and storage facility. To create the restoration, the IndieCollect team used a 5K Kinetta Archival Scanner to digitally capture the 35mm Interpositive of the American version and combined it with elements scanned from the French version. Color grading and restoration were completed in-house by Oskar Miarka, and the titles were recreated by Cameron Haffner. Sandra Schulberg translated the French dialogue and new English subtitles were created.

Lyulskiy dozhd (July Rain / Pluie de juillet) (1966, 1h48, Russia) by Marlen Khutsiev

Presented by Mosfilm Cinema Concern. Source material: negative. 4K digital restoration. Restored by: Mosfilm Cinema Concern. Producer of restoration: Karen Shakhnazarov. Year of restoration: 2020.

Quand les femmes ont pris la colère (1977, 1h15, France) by Soizick Chappedelaine and René Vautier

Presented by Ciaofilm. The film was scanned in 4K and restored in 2K from the original 16mm negative. Image works carried out by ECLAIR Classics and by L.E.DIAPASON for the sound under the supervision of Moïra Chappedelaine-Vautier with the support of the CNC, the Cinémathèque de Bretagne and the Région Bretagne.

French theatrical distribution in 2021. DVD / Blu-ray release by Les Mutins de Pangée and in VOD on Cinémutins in 2021.

Préparez vos mouchoirs (Get Out Your Handkerchiefs) (1977, 1h50, France) by Bertrand Blier

Presented by TF1 Studio and Orange Studio / CAPAC. 4K Restoration from the picture negative and the French magnetic soud track, supervised by Bertrand Blier. Digital works carried out by Eclair laboratory in 2019.

Hester Street (1973, 1h30, USA) by Joan Micklin Silver

Presented by Cohen Film Collection. The primary source element for the restoration of Hester Street was the original 35mm camera negative. Brief sections of duplicate negative, in particular the opening title sequence with burned in titles, were cut into the original negative in order to produce the original release prints. 4K scanning and restoration work was carried out by DuArt Media Services in New York.

Ko to tamo peva ? (Who’s Singing Over There? / Qui chante là-bas ?) (1980, 1h26, Serbia) by Slobodan Šijan

Presented by Malavida Films. Restoration from the picture and sound negative. Scanning: Arriscan. Supervision: Slobodan Šijan with Milorad Glusica. Sound restored by Aleksandar Stojsin.

French theatrical distribution: Malavida Films, date of release :  October 21, 2020.

Prae dum (Black Silk) (1961, 1h58, Thailand) by R.D. Pestonji

Presented by Film Archive Thailand (Public Organization). 4K Scan and 4K Restoration from the original 35mm negative (preserved by Film Archive Thailand). Restoration made and financed by Film Archive Thailand and Thai Ministry of Culture. Mastered in 4K for Digital Projection.

Zhu Fu (New Year Sacrifice) (1956, 1h40, China) by Hu Sang

Presented by Shanghai International Film Festival and China Film Archive. 4K Scan and 4K Digital Restoration from the original 35mm image negative and sound negative (preserved by China Film Archive). Restoration made by China Film Archive. Co-financed by Shanghai International Film Festival and Jaeger-LeCoultre. Mastered in 4K for Digital Projection.

Feldobott kő (Upthrown Stone / La Pierre lancée) (1968, 1h25, Hungary) by Sándor Sára

Presented by National Film Institute – Film Archive – Hongrie.

The 4K digital restoration was carried out as part of ‘The long-term restoration program of Hungarian film heritage” of the National Film Institute – Film Archive. The restoration was made using the original image and sound negatives by the National Film Institute – Filmlab. The Digital grading was supervised by Sándor Sára. Collaborating partner: Hungarian Society of Cinematographers.

Neige (1981, 1h30, France) by Juliet Berto and Jean-Henri Roger

Presented by JHR Films. First 4k digital restoration submitted by JHR Films with the support of the CNC et de l’image animée. The restoration was carried out at L’Image Retrouvée laboratory in Bologna and in Paris.

French theatrical distribution: JHR Films, date of release: spring 2021.

Bambaru Avith (The Wasps Are Here) (1978, 2h, Sri Lanka) by Dharmasena Pathiraja

Presented by Asian Film Archive. 4K film and sound restoration was carried out by L’Immagine Ritrovata using the sole-surviving 35mm film positive. The raw and restored 4K scans, a new 35mm picture and sound negatives, and a new positive print of the restored version of the film have been produced and are preserved by the Asian Film Archive.

Bayanko: Kapit sa patalim (Bayan Ko) (1984, 1h48, Philippines / France) by Lino Brocka

Presented by Le Chat qui fume. First 4k digital restoration submitted by Le Chat qui fume. Scanning made at VDM laboratory and restoration carried out by Le Chat qui fume in Paris.

French theatrical distribution and Blu-ray / UHD release: Le Chat qui fume, date of release: February 2021.

La Poupée (1962, 1h34, France) by Jacques Baratier

Presented by the CNC. Sound and image digital work of restoration executed by the CNC and carried out by Hiventy. Follow-up by the CNC and supervised by Diane Baratier. Digital restoration made from 4K scans of the original negative. A 35mm print from the digital restoration was released. French distribution: Tamasa Distribution.

Sanatorium pod klepsydra (The Hourglass Sanatory / La Clepsydre) (1973, 2h04, Poland) by Wojciech J. Has 

Presented by Polish Film Classics. 4k Scan and 2K restoration carried out by DI Factory and the reKino team by keeping the guidelines of DOP Witold Sobociński (this restoration is dedicated to him) who could eventually achieve the image he wished to obtain in 1973. Artistic supervision: cinematographer Piotr Sobociński Jr. Right-owners: WFDiF.

French Blu-ray release: Malavida Films, date of release: May 2021.

L’Amérique insolite (America as Seen by a Frenchman) (1959, 1h30, France) by François Reichenbach

Presented by Les Films du jeudi. Restoration carried out at Hiventy: 4K scan – 2K restoration from the original negatives.

Deveti krug (The Ninth Circle / Neuvième cercle) (1960, 1h37, Croatia) by France Štiglic

Digital restoration in 2K presented by Croatian Cinematheque – Croatian State Archives with the support of Croatian Audiovisual Centre. Restoration performed by Ater and Klik Film studios in Zagreb, Croatia.

Muhammad Ali the Greatest (1974, 2h03, France) by William Klein

Presented by Films Paris New York and ARTE. First digital 2K restoration from the original 16mm negative scanned in 4K carried out with the support of the CNC. Image works were carried out by ECLAIR Classics and by L.E.DIAPASON for the sound.

SCREENING AT CANNES and at the FESTIVAL LUMIERE LYON

Maborosi (1995) **** Blu-ray release

Dir.: Hirokazu Kore-eda; Cast: Makiko Esumi, Takashi Naito, Gohki Kashima, Tadanobo Asanao; Japan 1995, 110 min.

Born in 1962, Hirokazu Kore-eda studied literature at university with plans to become a novelist, later establishing himself as a documentarian in the late 1980s, working in television, were he directed several prize-winning programmes. Maborosi brought him and his DoP Masao Nakabori international acclaim, winning awards at Venice film festival. He would later win the Palme d’Or at Cannes with Shoplifters (2018).

Maborosi is a mature, poetic discourse on the meaning of loss and longing. Scripted by Yoshihisa Ogita and based on a novel by Teru Miyanoto. Maborosi takes its title from the Japanese word for mirage, and resonates with Feu Follet, Louis Malle’s feature about a suicide. Kore-eda was 34 when he shot Maborosi; contrasting modern and traditional life, rather like Japanese master Ozu.

In Osaka, Yumiko (Esumi) is content with her easy-going husband Ikuo (Asano) and their baby-boy Yuichi. One morning she finds the police on her doorstep: Ikuo has been killed on the nearby railroad tracks. Yumiko is shattered, the tragedy bringing back memories of the disappearance and death of her grandmother Kyo, when Yumiko was twelve years old. For a long time Yumiko lives in limbo, not able to accept the death of her husband. An arranged marriage brings her to the remote windswept coast of Uniumachi on the Noto peninsula. Her new husband Tamio (Naito) and his daughter live with an extended family and Yuichi (Kashima) bonds easily with the two. But Yumiko takes time to adjust to her new life, unable to forget her the deep affectionate love she shared with Ikuo. And when she returns to Osaka for a visit, all the old wounds open – particularly when she re-connects with Ikuo’s friends about the circumstances of his death. She goes back to Uniumachi but the past stays with her.

The hustle and bustle of city life in Osako contrast with the tranquil setting of the fishing village. Although in both places Kore-eda shows the warmth and humanity of close neighbours and the daily routine. Yumiko’s anxiousness and the barriers she puts between herself and a new life are palpable: for most of the film we see her as an observer, looking in from outside. The languid tempo also brings to mind Ozu, as do the frequent near static shots, featuring the rough landscape around the village. The feeling that fate could once again We observe this grieving process with a shared feeling of ambivalence: Yumiko has lost confidence in happiness, doom is constantly waiting round the corner. She is not yet ready to say goodbye to her former life and the limbo between the past and an unknown future, where “she brings death to the ones she is close to” – like her first husband and her grandmother.

Moborosi is a story that also paints an emotional portrait; music, light and weather express the heroine’s sate of mind while her serene persona is also deeply troubled. The spoken word is often replaced often by an inner monologue. In the end she has to make up her mind whether she, like Ikuo, wants to ‘listen’ to the siren songs in the light of death, or whether she is ready to progress with her life and new family. Like his compatriot Hsiao Hsien Ho, Kore-eda takes care of every frame: nothing is superfluous, everything is stripped down to the minimum. Kore-eda’s whole oeuvre is about using the screen to paint poetry, his protagonists seek to overcome their banal reality with something more meaningful which, as in this case, can also be destructive. AS

NOW ON BLU-RAY

 

Alice (2019) *** Digital release

Dir/Wri: Josephine Mackerras | Cast: Emilie Piponnier, Martin Swabey, Chloe Boreham | Drama, France 103′

Could you have sex with a man you had no feelings for, and possibly didn’t even fancy? When disaster strikes sex work is the only way forward for a respectable Parisian mother in this watchable first film from Australian writer director Josephine Mackerras.

Emilie Piponnier gives it her all as Alice the impressive woman in question, forced to the brink when her affectionate, poetry quoting husband François (Martin Swabey) suddenly disappears, taking all their money. Left with nothing but debt and her adorable toddler she has to act quickly. And learn not just to be a paid lover, but one who also calls the shots. A situation which ends up being empowering, and potentially lucrative.

All easier said than done. And Mackerras certainly has a rosy view of  prostitution. At times this veers into Celine and Julie go Boating territory but it does help that the men who enter Alice’s ‘professional’ love life are mostly easy on the eye. Some are even intelligent and attractive. So no beer-gutted, baldies to deal with – although one man breaks down in tears. But mastering the art of seduction is only half the battle for this sexually rather naive young mother. And she learns the psychological tricks of the trade from a frisky female she meets in a bar, who turns out to be Lisa (Chloe Boreham) an escort at an agency. The tricky bit comes in keeping the debtors as bay in tense scenes that will frighten the life out of anyone who has experienced the issues involved. Then Francois comes up with a sob story about how his father took him to a prostitute at the age of thirteen, begging for forgiveness, so Alice uses him as a babysitter. Then the worm turns, and Francois threatens to takes Jules away in scenes that culminate in an over-the-top happy ending.

This is a sunny insightful story that goes to fraught and unexpected places in showing how women are often tougher than they imagine, and how earning money from pleasing men can be infinitely more satisfying that not being paid to massage their egos within a dysfunctional marriage. MT

Alice will be released on selected digital platforms (Curzon Home Cinema, The BFI Player, Amazon Prime Video) from 24 July 2020. 

Clemency (2019) Prime Video

Dir.: Chinonye Chukwu; Cast: Alfre Woodard, Aldis Hodge, Richard Schiff, Danielle Brooks, Michael O’Neill, Wendell Pierce, Richard Gunn, Vernee Watson; USA 2019, 113 min.

Director/writer Chinonye Chukwu certainly knows her subject. The founder of a filmmaking collective dedicated to teaching incarcerated women, she has also worked as a volunteer on many clemency appeal cases. But despite a towering performance by Alfre Woodard in the lead role, Clemency is surprisingly under-whelming.

Bernadine Williams (Chukwu) is the chief warden of a High Security prison, facing the twelfth execution of her tenure. The previous one was a botched job, the anaesthetic injection and lethal substance just didn’t work. So Williams was forced to close the curtains between the execution chamber and the witness booth to the chagrin of family members.

Case number twelve is a certain Anthony Woods (Hodge), on death row for more than a decade after  killing a police officer – even though he maintains his innocence. The proceedings will test Bernadine to the last: Defence attorney Marty Lumetta (Schiff), also a fighter, and like Bernadine, on his final job before retirement. He’s hoping for a reprieve for his client. Meanwhile her deputy (Gunn) is going for another job in a prison without an execution facility. The Prison Chaplain (O’Neill), is equally disenchanted and opting for a transfer.

Bernadine is somehow left high and dry, her co-workers making her look cold and over-efficient. Her school teacher husband (Pierce) is sententious but not unsympathetic. Reading Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man’ to his students, he clearly considers himself special and somehow shames his wife into re-examining their marriage, driving her to the bottle with his prim attitude. Bernadine also has to deal with histrionics from the dead policeman’s mother (Watson), and by now we have come to understand Bernadine is fighting a one-woman battle, the writer/director letting her down badly, somehow making her look incapable. Meanwhile Woods’ discovers he is now a father, and the demonstrators outside the prison are getting louder as the day of execution approaches.

Clemency is a heavy film to watch not because of its subject matter but because it is seriously down on its heroine despite her diligent and likeable personality. Eric Branco provides stylish, if somewhat over-symbolic, widescreen images and Kathryn Bostic’s score is subtle. Despite all this it feels as if Chukwu has abandoned the quietly thoughtful heroine Bernadine in favour of those who question the system. AS

GRAND JURY PRIZE | Sundance Film Festival | FRIDAY 17 JULY 2020 | CURZON HOME CINEMA  

The Truman Show (1998) **** Netflix

Dir.: Peter Weir; Cast: Jim Carrey, Laura Linney, Ed Harris, Noah Emmerich, Natalie McElhone, Brian Delate; US 1998, 103 min.

A pioneer of arthouse cinema in his native Australia Peter Weir (*1944) has made fourteen features in a career spanning 44 years. The Cars that Ate Paris (1974) was followed by string of cult classics: Gallipoli (1981), Picnic Rock on Hanging (1975) Dead Poet’s Society (1981) and Witness (1985) to name a few. The Truman Show is an underrated gem, a stinging satire of meticulous execution. Written by Andrew Niccol (who directed Gattica), who clearly had in mind the ‘Twilight Zone”, Weir in the end insisted on a more upbeat approach for this amusing state of the nation allegory which is increasingly relevant today.

Thirty-year-old insurance salesman Truman Burbank (Carrey) lives a toy town existence in smalltime Florida with his preternaturally chipper wife Meryl (Linney). Everything appears to be perfect but Truman somehow feels incomplete in this saccharine existence and we soon discover why. He is actually taking part in a global reality TV show which has been running world-wide for with more than 10, 000 eps, kicking off with Truman’s live birth on TV.

Life becomes even more disjointed when when his drowned father, appears to resurface. Or is it his father? A radio car message, not meant for him but for ‘actors’ in his vicinity, makes Truman even more suspicious and then completely bewildered when the beam from a Klieg light narrowly misses him from somewhere up in the sky. College girl friend Sylvia (McElhone) has to be written out of the show when she tries to spill the beans, finding her way to Seahaven, to warn Truman before being dragged away by her ‘father’, claiming his daughter is schizophrenic and will be taken to the Fiji Islands.

One feeling persists for Truman in this anodyne nightmare. The love he felt for an enigmatic woman, and his efforts to reach her provide the film’s dramatic thrust and the underlying truth behind life’s charade. Meanwhile Cristof (Harris) the director and creator of the TV show, would rather drown him than release his money-making hero into the real world. Credits must go to PD Dennis Gassner for creating a Stepford Wives-like environment, and DoP Peter Biziou for executing the different forms of reality in all its fine detail.

In an interview in 1999 Weir told me he and his fellow Australian filmmakers, amongst them Bruce Beresford and Gillian Armstrong, really benefitted from the imported culture from the USA and Europe. “Culturally, we had a diet similar to Americans of our generation. Australians had no culture. We were simple people until recent times. We were Europeans in the bottom end of the world. As with a new colony, the Arts are the last thing to be developed. I think, my generation was the first to not withdraw, but go to London, as did the generation before us. But we stayed there. We were determined to make our mark, like the kid who has been the shortest at school and been bullied.”

Understatement is very much the watchword of Weir’s features, even those as placative as The Truman Show. Later on in his career with Witness and The year of Living Dangerously, he brought a delicate voyeurism to sex scenes, unlike many 1970 features, which showed too much naked skin. His response to why he chose this approach was revealing: “When the Hays Code operated between 1930 and 1966, directors were far more inventive in the way they showed love and lust. With the Hays Code gone, I tried to use the lessons I learnt; that less is more. You allow the viewers to join in making the film and apply their imagination. They are joining in and completing the movie with me”. AS

NOW ON NETFLIX

https://youtu.be/c3gI9ms8Fdc

 

 

Parasite (2019) **** In Black and White

Dir: Bong Joon Ho | Cast: Song Kang-ho, Choi Woo-shik, Chang Hyae-jin, Park So-dam, Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong, Jung Ziso, Lee Jung-em, Jung Hyeon-jun | Drama | Korea 131′

The black and white cut of this wickedly thrilling upstairs downstairs social satire Korean-style seems even more resonant, relevant and appealing in its monochrome format.

This scabrous story is the latest in a line of hits from the South Korean master along with The Host, Snowpiercer and Okja. But this time the gloves are off as Boon Joon offers up shameless social reality and makes no bones it, dishing the dirt on the rigid class system in his homeland.

Thematically rather too similar to last year’s Plane d’Or winner Shopkeepers to offer any big surprises about South Korean life, this is nonetheless startling in its candour. The characters are ordinary people making their way as best they can. But this is a flashier film that wears its satire on its slick sleeve for all to access, and there’s nothing subtle about its social message. The ‘parasites’ are sharp individuals who cunningly see their way to the main chance. Bong Joon calls the film “a comedy without clowns, a tragedy without villains.” Yet in the natural world, parasites live off their hosts, depending on them for survival, but often causing disease or harm. This certainly was the case in The Servant, but does it happen here?

Head of the family Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho) lives with his wife Chung-sook (Chang Hyae-jin), son Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) and daughter Ki-jung (Park So-dam) in a squalid slum, grafting a living by preparing cardboard pizza boxes. Through his backstreet contacts, young Ki-woo inveigles himself into a wealthy household of a captain of industry Mr. Park (Lee Sun-kyun) where he is tasked with tutoring his teenage daughter Da-hye (Jung Ziso). Her mother Yeon-kyo (Cho Yeo-jeong) is a typically vacuous trophy wife who prances around their pristine modernist mansion all day, doing a spot of shopping when she occasionally ventures out with . Without giving any clues away, the Ki-woo’s entire family are drafted into the vast mansion, taking various guises, and booting out the old guard. As the narrative spools out with a series of plot twists, the tension gradually mounts and the gulf between rich and poor is ramped up to the maximum. No one comes out a winner after a lavish garden party where they all take part in some form or another, as blood mingles with the champagne.

Winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2019 and four Academy Awards in 2020, including the Oscar for Best International Feature, this is a confident and entertaining drama that beats as it sweeps, its production values as smooth as silk and laced with a dread-laden score. The kids give as good as the adults performance-wise and leave us pondering which is best: North Korea with its oppressively restrictive communist regime or the South with its dog eat dog capitalism based on the law of the jungle? MT

PARASITE WON THE PALME D’OR 2019 | ACADEMY AWARDS FOR BEST DIRECTOR, BEST MOTION PICTURE, BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY, BEST INTERNATIONAL FEATURE.

NOW in Black and White COURTESY OF CURZON ARTIFICIAL EYE | IN CINEMAS from 24 July 2020

 

 

 

Krabi 2562 (2019) *** Bfi Player

Dir: Ben Rivers, Anocha Suwichakornpong | Experimental, Drama | UK 97 minutes

Krabi is not just an exotic beach location in Thailand where you can ‘get a massage”, as a one banal Western couple found out. In this offbeat cinema vérité experiment Ben Rivers joins fellow director Anocha Suwichakornpong to explore the landscape and stories within the wider community of this well-known beauty spot rich in Mangrove forests, limestone cliffs and offshore islands. 

The meditative often mysterious drama works chronologically, ethnologically and socially, the atmospheric use of sound – whether ambient or man-made – captures and distils the often eerie enigmatic essence of the place in a specific moment in time where the pre-historic, the recent past and the contemporary world collide. Tonally, Rivers conjures up that same resonant serenity and offbeat humour often associated with the Far East in a story that feels very much like that of Hong Sang-soo’s humorous In Another Country (2012). 

A Thai filmmaker arrives in the area to research locations. She is escorted by a guide offering insight into local folklore and a chance to discover the area’s more undiscovered corners: remote caves where they come across a wild-haired shaman in a loin-cloth, stoking his glowing campfire. Bizarrely, a film shoot is also taking place nearby jolting us back into reality as the scantily clad actor clocks the shaman, Rivers contrasts this with her trip to the highly commercialised shopping area where every type of cuisine is on offer. Deep in the lush rainforest we meet an octogenarian who has lived his entire life in a wooden house. The farmstead is also home to a humpback pig and cockerels. The news that Krabi has a Biennale of its own plays out against the background of gently flowing water as a group of rowers glides by gigantic cliffs. Another black and white scene features enormous shells and skeletons in a depths of a coastal cave giving the piece at atavistic twist.

It soon turns out that the location scouting filmmaker is researching the town’s cinema that has been shut since 1981; a banner announcing the latest releases “Comming soon!” – is a dusty testament to a cinematic past where screenings ran for 24 hours a day, and were packed full. But her presence seems to be a concern only to the local police, as bats and flocks of birds flit past the ghostlike temples of spiritualism and commerce, and dusk falls in this dreamy backwater. Langourously the strands come together to exert an unsettling pull over us as we muse over this fascinating but rather enigmatic trail of events. Intriguing nonetheless. MT

BFI PLAYER from 20 JULY 2020 | LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2019 |  7 -17 AUGUST 2019

The Disappearance at Clifton Hill (2019) ****

Dir: Albert Shin | Cast: Tuppence Middleton, David Cronenberg | Fantasy Drama, Canada 100′

Tuppence Middleton is the intriguing focus of this Canadian-set mystery drama that sees her investigating a haunting childhood event in the Clifton Hill area of Niagara Falls. David Cronenberg plays a mesmerising podcaster who joins in to unlock the past in a thriller that is interesting to watch rather than gripping as a psychological whodunnit.

In his third feature Canadian filmmaker Albert Shin has developed a distinctive cinematic style with lurid echoes of David Lynch, Hitchcock and even Cronenberg himself. There’s a chilling vibe to the richly textured, atmospheric drama with its characters who feel like real people you might even know, and you certainly feel for Middleton’s Abby who still keeps her edgy allure. The story develops in an offbeat but often contrived way and what slowly comes to light is predictable until the riveting reveal.

Shin knows the territory well. He grew up in Niagara Falls where we first meet Abby working as a hotel receptionist in this seedy off season tourist centre. Nothing is what it seems, and Abby gradually becomes an enigmatic woman dogged by a history of mental illness clouding the truth behind that  lakeside outing with her parents when she saw a boy with a patch over his eye, being kidnapped.

Back in the present and Abby and her sister (Laure/Gross) have recently lost their mother and are back in town with the family lawyer (Dan Lett). The girls now own a motel and a sale needs to be concluded on the rather distressed property. The sibling rivalry feels genuine here and naturally they fall out over their legacy. Initially we are on board with Abby, rather taking her side of events, until she starts to give off unreliable vibes after a chance meeting in a bar with a guy (McQueen) who turns out to be a detective. A one night stand goes pear-shaped but he takes up the case of the missing boy and further investigations soon reveal sleazy secrets from the past, and some characters who you wouldn’t trust to post a letter. These include the infamous Magnificent Moulins (Marie-Josée Croze and Paulino Nunes) who turn out to be the parents of the missing one-eyed boy whose disappearance underpins the narrative. Also key are a couple of raddled old-timers (Elizabeth Saunders and Maxwell McCabe-Lokos) who seems to play a part in the boy’s murky fate.

An evocative jazzy soundtrack gives the film part of its unsettling allure, Catherine Luke creating neon-tinged visuals that reflect a tackier side of the lakeside resort, this is a captivating film that casts a certain spell. MT

ON DIGITAL DOWNLOAD 20 JULY | DVD 3 AUGUST 2020

Dark Waters (2019) *** Home Entertainment

Director: Todd Haynes | Cast: Mark Ruffalo, Anne Hathaway, Tim Robbins, Bill Pullman, Bill Camp, Victor Garber, Mare Winningham, William Jackson Harper, Louisa Krause, Kevin Crowley, Bruce Cromer, Denise Dal Vera, Richard Hagerman

Mark Ruffalo plays a whistleblowing lawyer in Todd Haynes’ fact-based drama, co-starring Anne Hathaway and Tim Robbins.

After some rather elegant arthouse dramas such as Carol Haynes returns to more conventional territory with this sober legal inquiry that echoes Safe (1997) in gradually unearthing the facts behind the DuPont water poisoning travesty that came to light as a result of a 1990s New York Times magazine article “The Lawyer who became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare”. It reveals how the conglomerate had been contaminating water in the area around West Virginia with the carcinogenic substance PFOA. Cattle in a local farm were dying and the chemical – used in Teflon – had entered the bloodstreams of people living nearby with disastrous affects.

Ruffalo plays the scandal’s original hero Robert Bilott who slowly but surely builds a case against DuPont, much to the initial consternation of his boss (Tim Robbins) and colleagues at a Cincinnati law firm who realise they could be losing more than they stand to gain against the corporate giant.
In all starts in 1998 when a local farmer Wilbur Tennant (a sad-faced Bill Camp) approaches Bilott impressing him with his conviction that DuPont are dumping chemical waste near his farm in Bilott’s home town in West Virginia. Cows are literally dropping dead and some of the locals have blackened gums, flagging up water as the likely contaminant. Bilott remembers a photograph of girl with this problem, and is the kicker for him to proceed. It takes legal tenacity and perseverance to pursue the case and Bilott has this in spades, along with a quietly spoken, lowkey charm that makes him a likeable character guided by moral integrity and supported in his endeavour by his clever professional wife (Hathaway, in equally subdued mode).
Fraught with unsettling undertones and creeping paranoia, Ohio looks sombre in Ed Lachmann’s blue-tinged visual makeover, and West Virginia even more so. But Dark Waters is not all bleak: Robbins get some caustic dialogue in a case that is complex and a film that is plodding but satisfyingly persuasive. MT
RELEASE ON 6 JULY ON HOME ENTERTAINMENT

 

Au Bout des Doigts | In Her Hands (2019) *** Curzon Home Cinema

Dir: Ludovic Bernard | Cast Karidja Touré, Lambert Wilson | Kristin Scott Thomas | Jules Benchetrit | Drama French, 106 minutes
Music is the redeeming force in this Parisian prodigy drama from Luc Besson’s former assistant director Ludovic Bernard (Lucy).
Social realism clashes with the soigné world of the National Music Conservatory in an elliptical story that sees a disadvantaged young man develop his hidden talent thanks to a well-meaning protegé inspired by a tragedy of his own. Lambert Wilson is Pierre Geithner the director of the music college where Kristin Scott Thomas is draconian piano teacher, La Comtesse. Both will help Mathieu Malinski (Benchetrit) to become a concert pianist in this French riff on ‘My Fair Lady’.
As French dramas go this is solid rather than inspiring. Both Geitner and Malinski have the most scope as characters with their troubled backstories which are well-sketched out – although Benchetrit doesn’t always make the most of his complex role. The reverse is true for Scott Thomas, who tries hard to add nuance to her rather one dimensional Countess. Fortunately she has enough experience and talent to flesh out this severe woman, not so Malinski’s mother, a rather weak performance from Else Lepoivre. Karidja Toure is a breath of fresh air as Mathieu’s girlfriend Anna, a talented musician who possesses enough carefree elan to give Mathieu the confidence to believe in himself, in this casebook study of young male empowerment.
Jean Nouvel’s slick contemporary culture complex provides a slick counterpoint to the scenes in the down-at-heel banlieu where Malinski hangs out with his gang. In flashback we see him being inspired by a kindly old relative before the chic Countess swings in with her no nonsense approach, that often clashes with Malinski’s laid back style. And although she almost gives up in the end, Geitner’s continued passion for his discovery offers the most surprising reveal. MT
UK Release Date | 10th July 2020 | On Curzon Home Cinema

Family Romance LLC (2019) *** Streaming

Dir.: Werner Herzog; Cast: Yuchi Ishii, Mahiro Tamimoto, Miki Fujimaki; USA 2019, 89 min.

Werner Herzog is experimenting again and this latest feature gamely blends drama with a hybridised fiction and documentary. Based on Japanese company that hires out its founder to act as a stand-in to suit client circumstances is not particularly original, although a tongue in cheek humour shines through in some of the cameos. Yorgos Lanthimos did this much better in Alps (2011). Here Herzog somehow falls victim to his narrative’s ambiguity: We’re never sure whether this is social critique, or a hidden camera gag.

Yuchi Ishii is boss and main employee of his Family Romance LLF (Limited Liability Company). His first assignment is at Cherry Blossom time in Tokyo’s Yoyogi Park where he is meeting twelve-year old Mahiro Tamimoto: hired by the girl’s mother, his remit is to impersonate her father. The Dad in question pushed off when Mahiro was very young, and her mother Miki Fujimaki needs Yuchi to replace him, on important occasions. But this is just one of Yuchi many gigs: a young celebrity-hungry actor then hires him with a posse of fake photographers to get her face into the newspapers; an elderly woman, who has won 180 000 Yen in the lottery, has wants him to create that same feeling of elation when she found out about her win. Yuchi is also hired by a railway employee to take a bollocking from his boss over the late running of a train – the humour here lies in the perceived loss of face for the worker. But when Mahiro arrives one day with an Afro-American toddler “who no one wants to hang out with” because of her “fire-burned face”, things becomes distinctly weird. And when Mahiro falls for ‘father’ Yuchi, her mother tries to have the him move in.

Herzog tries to be philosophical throughout this often awkward, often amusing oddity, but the episodes are simply too thin to invite deep reflection. When Yuchi visits a hotel run by AI service personnel (robots), we are reminded of Philip K. Dick, but the director immediately jumps to another of his numerous exploits. Herzog’s basic camerawork contributes to making this feel like a very minor work, along with Ernst Reijseger’s saccharine score. AS

VOD RELEASE FROM FRIDAY 3 JULY 2020

   

  

The Girl with the Bracelet (2019) **** Curzon World

Dir/Wri:Cast: Stéphane Demoustier | Cast: Melissa Guers, Roschdy Zem, Anaïs Demoustier, Chiara Mastroianni, Annie Mercier, Pascal-Pierre Garbarini

Wilful nonchalance comes across as evil in this sophisticated social thriller from Stephane Demoustier based on the script of Acusada by G. Tobal and U. Porra Guardiola and set in the Britanny town of Nantes. 

Thee chilling story of modern teenagehood plays out in the stylish family home of Lise Bataille (Guers) – accused of murdering her best friend Flora Dufour – and in courtroom scenes where an intense battle plays out during the murder trial. This is probing stuff and you really have to concentrate hard on the subtitles if you don’t speak fluent French.

16 year old Lisa lives with her parents (Chiara Mastroianni and Roschdy Zem) and has been forced to wear an electronic ankle monitor after the fateful night she spent at Flora’s house. Flora was found savagely stabbed to death around midday the following morning. Lise is the main suspect and the only genetic print on Flora’s body has been traced back her. It also emerges through Lise’s frank confession, that the two purportedly slept together naked in Flora’s single bed, Lise giving her friend oral sex before they fell asleep intoxicated from an evening of drinking during which Lisa had also sucked off a boy called Nathan, an incident filmed on a mobile ‘phone, and produced in court.

This is a psychological thriller that focuses on how the witness comes across, rather than the forensic evidence of the murder. The reaction of Lise’s family, friends and those in the courtroom comes under the spotlight but her parent’s seemingly fraught relationship fails to be fleshed out, leaving us in doubt about their exact feelings for one another, or indeed if they are still together and there is no backstory to inform the aftermath of these crucial details. Meanwhile, Lise appears poker-faced and indifferent throughout, sometimes even given a unsettling stare. It’s a mesmerising performance from newcomer Guers. Both her parents express their surprise at the change in her behaviour, both stating that prior to the tragedy she was an open, pleasant and easygoing daughter. Now they start to questions her motives, as well as her innocence.

The Girl With a Bracelet puts the audience in the role of judge and jury as the rest of the courtroom tends to fade into the background. Anais Demoustier (the director’s sister) is powerful as the prosecuting barrister, and Annie Mercier is also convincing as the experienced defence counsel. But Lise’s supreme confidence and aplomb generates considerable tension for all concerned as we start to question if she’s playing us all along as a killer with no remorse, or really is a complete innocent. When this whodunnit from the court room drama genre, the crucial difference here is attitude rather than evidence. And here we are left pondering how we would anticipate a close family member to react when accused of murder, and whether we’d judge them for their behaviour in court, or give them the justice they deserved. The final scenes reveals all. MT

NOW ON CURZON WORLD | LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2020

 

 

Locarno Film Festival 2020 | Films After Tomorrow

Artistic Director Lilli Hinstin and the Locarno Festival selection film committee today released a shortlist of twenty full length features that will receive support for their teams who were forced to stop working due to Covid. The lucky winners will receive finance going forward.

The eclectic line-up mixes leading artists on the festival circuit, as well as emerging talents, and includes award-winning directors such as Lucrecia Martel/Zama, Lav Dias/The Woman Who Left, Miguel Gomes/Arabian Nights and Lisandro Alonso/Jauja . And their films will be judged on 15 August by a panel of filmmakers to be announced in early July 2020. As usual the edgy, pioneering spirit which has always been the hallmarks of Locarno is alive and kicking in all of these projects.

Chocobar by Lucrecia Martel – Argentina/USA/The Netherlands

Cidade;Campo by Juliana Rojas – Brazil –

De Humani Corporis Fabrica (The Fabric of the Human Body) Verena Paravel/Lucien Castaing-Taylor – France/USA

Eureka by Lisandro Alonso – France/Germany/Portugal/Mexico/Argentina – Produced by: Luxbox: Fiorella Moretti and Hédi Zardi, Komplizen, Rosa Filmes, Mr. Woo, 4L

Human Flowers of Flesh by Helena Wittmann – Germany/France

I Come From Ikotun by WANG Bing – France/China

Kapag Wala Nang Mga Alon (When The Waves Are Gone) by Lav Diaz

Nowhere Near by Miko Revereza – Philippines/Mexico/USA

Petite Solange (Little Solange) by Axelle Ropert – France

Selvajaria (Savagery) by Miguel Gomes – Portugal/France/Brazil/China/Greece

These are the 10 projects from Switzerland:

Azor by Andreas Fontana – Switzerland/Argentina/France

Ein Stück Himmel (A Piece of Sky) by Michael Koch

Far West by Pierre-François Sauter

A Flower in the Mouth by Eric Baudelaire

L’Afrique des femmes by Mohammed Soudani

Les Histoires d’amour de Liv S. by Anna Luif – Switzerland

LUX by Raphaël Dubach and Mateo Ybarra – Switzerland

Olga by Elie Grappe – Switzerland/France

Unrueh (Unrest) by Cyril Schäublin – Switzerland

Zahorí by Marí Alessandrini

FILMS AFTER TOMORROW | LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2020

True History of the Kelly Gang (2019) ****

Dir: Justin Kurzel | Cast: George MacKay, Essie Davis, Nicholas Hoult, Thomasin McKenzie | Biopic 124′

Australian thrillers are usually brutal and anarchic, emblematic of the scorched earth savagery of their remote and often desiccated homeland. Justin (Snowtown) Kurzel’s latest foray into fiendishness is adapted by Shaun Grant from Peter Carey’s novel, and inspired by the infamous Ned Kelly, who raged through the bush in a melodramatic meltdown during 19th-century English colonial occupation. 

This incarnation of Kelly is a tightly muscled racier beast that Carey’s animal, bred out dysfunction to become a macho psychopath of the worst order, and obsessed by an abusive mother Ellen (Essie Davis) who sold him as an apprentice to local bandit Harry Power (a scabrous Russell Crowe ) who taught him the tricks of the trade. Kurzel excels in creating vicious villains. Here he shows us the how Ned Kelly (an outlandish George MacKay) became such a hell-raiser, through a serious of episodic accounts that link the past with his criminal activities as leader of the gang. These encompass a weirdly mixed-up sexual ambivalence and a predilection for homoeroticism and cross-dressing. 

Kelly emerges a weak-willed brothel-creeper from the outset, unable to avenge his mother’s sexual abuse at the hands of an English sergeant (Charlie Hunnam), and drawn to the company of other low-life members of the English regiment. One is Nicholas Hoult’s Constable Fitzpatrick who frequents a local brothel, where Kelly falls into the clutches of Mary (Thomasin McKenzie) and morphs into full-blown insurgency against the British (The Nightingale here we go again). And it’s at this stage that film starts to visually resonate with Kurzel’s 2015 outing  Macbeth and there are also echoes of Snowtown (2012) but it’s also here that is starts to unravel into something unhinged but also hypnotic, breaking free from its period drama into a psychedelic thriller.

Mesmerising for the most part, True History is an ultimately an uneven experience unable to maintain the sheer pace of its early scenes. But its vehemence, passion and visual allure burn bright, and the final part of the film descends into extraordinary surreal psychodrama. Kelly is a chameleon character who always knows where his bread is buttered, and is able to ingratiate himself with the right people at the right time – and George Mackay once again shows his amazing talents in this transformative role. A psychedelic and shatteringly violent experience but one that is compelling despite its flaws. MT

LIVE YOUTUBE Q&A WITH DIRECTOR & CAST 28 JUNE 2020

 

WITH DIRECTOR JUSTIN KURZEL

AND ACTORS GEORGE MACKAY, ESSIE DAVIS, AND EARL CAVE

 

A White, White Day | Hvítur (2019)

Dir: Hlynur Palmason | Iceland, Drama 90′

Hlynur Palmason follows his debut feature Winter Brothers with this stark portrait of rugged masculinity in the face of bereavement. Grimly buttoned up against the wild landscapes of his remote Icelandic homeland, Ingimundur (Sigurdsson) resolutely refuses to give in, mentally or physically, to the grinding grief that engulfs him after the death of his beloved wife.

The seasons pass in a series of long takes picturing the house Ingimundur is rebuilding with support of his young granddaughter Salka (Ida Mekkin Hlynsdottir in her stunning debut). His wife, a local teacher, has lost her life in a car accident and the vehicle swerves over the foggy mountainside road in the opening scene.

Ex-policeman Ingimundur is used to dealing with similar incidents and their effect on broken families, but when it involves his own he carries on in disbelief as gradually the enigmatic scenario surrounding her death falls into place; whether a crime has been committed or her whether her death was accidental remains in the air as this dour and gruelling feature plays out.

Sigurdsson gives a gritty performance tempered by the tenderness he feels for his granddaughter: it’s almost as if he’s channelling all the love he had for his wife into the little girl, and she soaks it up with wide-eyed innocence and an insight beyond her years.

Palmason suffuses his story with allusions to Icelandic culture and mythology and these are shared through storytelling: the craggy-faced grandfather passing on cherished folklore through bedtime stories complete with all the actions. And meanwhile the house takes shape around them, satisfyingly providing a new beginning with stunning views over the scenic countryside and sea where Ingimundur fishes for wild salmon. The grieving man also plays football, and this is where he catches sight of a man he doesn’t recognise but who has appeared in a cache of his wife’s photos.

Ingimundir shares his fears about a possible affair with one of his drinking pals. And the subject of female infidelity is broached with a shrugging nonchalance on the part of his friend. But Ingimundur’s fears take shape in an irrationally violent chain of events, sparked by jealousy, revenge and desperation in a tense and surprising finale which once again showcases Palmason’s inventive imagination for telling a yarn. MT

NOW ON BFI PLAYER

Summertime | La Belle Saison (2015) *** MUBI

Dir: Catherine Corsini | Cast: Cecile de France, Izia Higelin, Noemie Lvovsky, Benjamin Bellecour | 104min  | Drama | France

Catherine Corsini brings a sizzling energy to her lesbian love story set in Paris and the glorious landscapes of Le Limousin. Summertime will appeal to arthouse lovers and the LGBT crowd alike with its fresh and feisty turns from Cécile de France and Izia Higelin as unlikely bedfellows who come together during the French feminist uprisings in 1971.

Izia Higelin plays Delphine, a simple country girl arriving in Paris from her parents’ farm to seek her fortune in the capital. Feeling gauche and naive she soon gets caught up in the vortex of female political activism attracted by the strong and earthy women who appeal to her nascent lesbian leanings. Working at that well known grocery store Félix Potin, she falls in love with 35-year-old Carole (Cécile de France) who is dating the dishy writer Manuel (Benjamin Bellecour). After an awkward first act focusing on the feminist fervour of the time – which sadly feels embarrassing and rather contrived – the two begin a torrid affair that takes them back to the countryside where Delphine’s father becomes seriously ill and her mother Monique (Noemie Lvovsky) is left to run the business. They all get on like a house on fire in this sunny second act that serves as a genuinely delightful introduction to  daily life on a small working farm. Here we meet Antoine, a family friend and Delphine’s intended – according to her mother – and he immediately takes on the role of a sexual voyeur, tuning into couple’s romantic vibes, while giving Carole a wide berth. Delphine’s heart is in the ‘terroir’ but her love for Carole grows. Cécile de France gives a gutsy go at being Carole, torn between her life in Paris with Manuel and her budding feelings for Delphine.

Corsini conveys the strong physical urges of her lovers with scenes of earthy nudity and splashy sex. And although the two are a potent match, it’s clear Carole is experimenting while Delphine is  committed. Higelin brings a natural vulnerability to her part, not dissimilar from that of Adèle Exarchopoulos in Blue is the Warmest Colour. The younger of the two, she exudes a natural affection for Carole as well as a healthy lust, but Carole is a more complex girl whose ego demands to be worshipped.

Corsini is no stranger to big-screen lesbian love affairs, best known in this context for her 2001 Cannes competition hopeful Replay, featuring a gutsy yet tragic relationship between Emmanuelle Beart, a successful actress, and her less accomplished partner. Here the focus is more on innocence versus experience.  In a welcome twist, Delphine pursues Carole initially in a cat and mouse chase that spices up the storyline. But tradition starts to take over as the family responsibilities take over, throwing her back into Antoine’s orbit.

Although the film struggles for a feminist political agenda this often feels forced and less convincing than the scenes in the traditional farmstead. Lvovsky is a natural as Delphine’s mother whose straightforwardness and feral protection of her daughter and farm provides lush contrast to the more liberated Parisian style of Carole. Azais’ character masks an emotionally buttoned-up man, hesitant to pursue his personal agenda, a quality her shares with his object of affection Delphine.

Jeanne Lapoirie’s widescreen cinematography is resplendent but doesn’t idolise the Rubenesque voluptuousness of the naked women making love in the meadows, and Gregoire Hetzel’s occasional score adds a zeitgeisty ’70s twang to the soundtrack. MT

On MUBI THIS WEEKEND | 19 JUNE 2020

The Bigamist (1953) *** MUBI

Director: Ida Lupino. Screenplay: Collier Young. Cast: Edmond O’Brien, Joan Fontaine, Ida Lupino, Edmund Gwenn, Kenneth Tobey, Jane Darwell. Drama / United States / 80′.

Ida Lupino directs and stars in  this final feature for her production company The Filmakers before moving into television.

The blunt title serves as a massive spoiler from the word Go. There’s no doubt as to where the plot is going, but strange as it may seem today, bigamy was surprisingly common at the time, as this film is at pains to point out.

A British film called The Bigamist had been made as early as 1916; but during the 195os the subject was usually treated light-heartedly as a subject of comedy (as in the same year’s The Captain’s Paradise, with Alec Guinness, Celia Johnson and Yvonne de Carlo). But when children are involved – as is the case here – it really becomes significant; and bigamy is just one of a whole raft of issues – including unplanned pregnancy and adoption (where do most adopted children come from in the first place?) – the film explores in just eighty minutes.

With so many people raising kids these days without bothering to get married, the mores of this era seem rather quaint and as remote as the silent era. The earnest tone of the film rather recalls the silent ‘social problem’ films of pioneer women directors Lois Weber and Mrs Wallace Reid in whose footsteps Lupino was following.

The Bigamist is rather like a silent film in the way Lupino’s pregnancy is implied to be the result of the sole occasion she had slept with her lover (O’Brien) as a “birthday treat” for him. And she becomes pregnant the very first time she had slept with a man since she got a ‘Dear Phyllis’ letter from a previous boyfriend several years earlier. O’Brien never squares with her that he’s married; but the thought must have crossed her mind.

It was brave of Edmond O’Brien to take on such an unheroic role, and interesting that Lupino chose to cast herself as the Other Woman rather than the wife. Under any other circumstances it would have been refreshing to see Joan Fontaine as the wife so confidently holding forth on technical matters at the dinner table were she not shown immediately afterwards to be neglecting O’Brien’s need for physical intimacy by immediately turning her back on him in bed (they sleep in separate beds and have been unable to have children).

Could there have been some way of engineering a happy resolution by having O’Brien present Lupino’s child to Fontaine to raise as their own? Perhaps. But Lupino probably wasn’t seeking a tidy resolution, and instead it all ends messily in court with O’Brien getting his knuckles sternly but regretfully rapped by a judge. Richard Chatten.

THE BIGAMIST IS now SCREENING ON MUBI

Resistance (2020) *** Streaming

Dir.: Jonathan Jacubowicz; Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Clemence Poesy, Matthias Schweighöfer, Felix Moati, Karl Markovics, Geza Röhrig, Vica Kerekes, Bella Ramsey, Ed Harris; USA 2020, 121 min.

Hollywood and Holocaust are often poor bedfellows: One hugging the duvet the other suffering in silence, as in this biopic on Jewish hero and mime legend Marcel Marceau, that gives centre stage to the infamous Klaus Barbie who already hogged the limelight in Max Ophuls’ definitive documentary Hotel Terminus. Barbie may provide the stuff of melodramas but here the focus should have been Marceau.

Venezuelan born filmmaker Jonathan Jacubowicz (Hands of Stone) bills this son of a Jewish butcher, who started life in Strasbourg as Marcel Mangel, as a ‘Piped Piper of Hamlyn’ figure who played a significant role in smuggling Jewish kids to safety. The director has clearly done his homework in a script informed by Marceau’s cousin Georges Loinger (Geza Röhrig). The result is Life is Beautiful meets Inglorious Basterds: once again the Hollywood playbook wins the day.

The film joins young Mangel just before War breaks out, he’s running the shop with his father (Markovics) and keen to marry French resistance worker Emma (Poesy) impressed by her knowledge of Freud and attempts to smuggle Jewish orphans into Switzerland. Joined by his  brother Alain (Moati), cousin Georges and his girl-friend Mila (Kerekes) Mangel soon discovers his gift for mime, communicating silently with the children, one is Elsbeth (Ramsey) traumatised by the brutal murder of her parents in the “Kristall Nacht” pogrom of November 1938, pictured in the opening sequence. Once the Germans occupy France, the group moves on to Limoges, then Lyon where Mangel takes up forgery changing his ID documents to Marceau, and comes up against the Gestapo, led by the infamous Klaus Barbie, the “butcher of Lyon” who soon imprisons Emma and Mila in the city’s Hotel Terminus that has become his private torture chamber After Marcel’s father is deported Auschwitz, the film culminates in a “great escape” of sorts.

DoP Miguel I. Littin-Menz sets this on a grandiose scale with breathtaking panorama shots and intimate close-ups of Klaus Barbie and his young family, upstaging Marcel and his troupe who feel like pale riders in comparison. A terrible quote from Anna Karenina forms the backdrop to one eerie scene round the hotel’s empty swimming pool. Despite his idiosyncratic talent for facial subtlety, mime is clearly not Eisenberg’s metier but he makes for a compelling He relies on his spoken language, but makes for a thoughtful Marceau. With a running time not warranted by the narrative, Resistance is certainly revealing, but fails on the finer points: the Shoah was not a colourful spectacle – we shouldn’t honour the dead by giving so much time and attention to the murderers. 

ON MAJOR STREAMING PLATFORMS | 19 JUNE 2020

https://youtu.be/hkE7daIvkeM

Fanny Lye Deliver’d (2019) ***

Dir: Thomas Clay | Cast: Maxine Peake, Charles Dance, Freddie Fox | UK Drama 112′

British indie filmmaker Thomas Clay is a fresh and inventive talent who returns after more than a decade with this sinister 17th century home invasion drama cum feminist awakening saga set in a remote Shropshire homestead in 1657, during the final year of Oliver Cromwell’s time as protector.

The morality tale revolves around Fanny (Peake) and her domineering ex-solider husband John (Dance) strict Puritans who live in a remotely situated wattle and daub house with their infant son Arthur. In the opening titles Clay establishes the lawlessness of the English Revolution showing how the countryside was a dangerous place to be, the Cavaliers and Roundheads were still engaged in open warfare using any weapons they could lay their hands on – at one point the local sheriff is seen dangling – his eyes gouged out – in an iron cage at a crossroads. But Clay also imbues his drama with a contemporary urban feel using expressions such as: “I’d lose that attitude if I were you” when a couple of mouthy wayfarers take refuge in their barn while the family are attending church.

The two are Thomas Ashbury (Fox) and his companion Rebecca Henshaw (Reynolds) who claim to have been the victims brigands in a nearby hostelry. Clay telegraphs doom from the opening scene, narrated by Fanny: “I never thought this would be the last time we attended church as a family”. So from then on we are just waiting for something awful to happen.

Against their better judgement, Fanny and John agree to let the couple stay, but soon regret their decision when news comes of a warrant for the arrest of a couple wanted for holding orgies and preaching on the equality of women, or what was termed “leveller” preaching. At this point you have to cast your mind back to the 17th century, a time when ordinary women were owned by their husbands, and actually believed they were second-class citizens. And Fanny is so modest she even looks up to Thomas, even though he is considerably younger.

All this has a a similar feel to Ben Wheatley’s English Revolution piece A Field in England (2013). But Clay plays it more down the line, drifting into salacious territory as Thomas and Rebecca play a subtle game of subversion, gradually asserting their authority through teasing Fanny, as John gradually loses his power, and dignity. Fanny appears to fall for Thomas’s sexual goading, up to a point – and this is a particularly uncomfortable scene to watch. But when Arthur gets involved, Fanny comes to her senses.

The Puritan era was a time of spiritual authoritarianism – but the contrasting rakish lifestyle is clearly what Clay is alluding to in Thomas and Rebecca. Only three years later Charles II would be on the throne again and the theatre, science and sexual promiscuity would flourish again, embodied by John Wilmot, the famous Earl of Rochester, aka The Libertine.

Fanny Lye is a fascinating if rather predictable film with a gripping start and ending, although it loses momentum in the second act. Peake keeps it all together with her intelligent performance as a morally unambiguous woman prepared to fight her corner. The impressive 17th century sets look convincing and Clay’s needling original score keeps us in suspense until the grim finale. MT

DIGITAL STREAMING | DVD FROM 24 AUGUST 2020

Phantom Thread (2017) **** Blu-ray release

Dir: Paul Anderson | Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Vicky Krieps, Lesley Manville, 130′ | US | Drama

The latest film from Paul Thomas Anderson is quite unlike anything he has done before. PHANTOM THREAD is a deliciously thrilling love story with a slow-burning tight-lipped tension bred partly out of the discrete haute couture world of its gracefully dapper central character Reynolds Woodcock. Played peerlessly by Daniel Day-Lewis in his ‘swan song’, Reynolds is a Hardy Amies-style fashion designer who lives and works in London’s Fitzroy Square where he presides over a celebrated 1950s fashion house specialising in dressing high society and the Royals.

This stylishly buttoned-up affair is all about control, power and prestige in maintaining a veneer of respectability through discipline, dedication and duty that drives Reynolds forward, preventing him from acknowledging the hole in his soul, left by the death of his dear mother, and the absence of true love in his life.  Anderson constructs a world of superlative elegance where the daily round involves the pristine almost priestly preparation of his dress, coiffure, floral arrangements and particularly his breakfast: “I can’t begin my day with a confrontation.” Says Reynolds primly as he goes through the motions of his morning tea ceremony (lapsong, please) and silently buttered toast. “Nothing stodgy”. And no “loud sounds”. His sister Cyril (Lesley Manville at the top of her game), trundles in all red-puckered lips and seamed stockings. She rules the roost with utmost decorum, helping Reynolds as his business advisor and mentor. Reynolds is a disillusioned romantic, a bachelor in his fifties secretly yearning for love, but unable to let it into his tightly-corseted schedule. So his lust for carnal pleasure is channelled into luscious food – runny egg yolks and jugs of cream – until the real thing comes along to unleash his passion in the shape of a scrubbed up waitress named Alma (Luxumbourgeoise actor Vicky Krieps).

In his weekend retreat, he delicately delivers a breakfast order to her: poached eggs, butter, bacon, and jam – but not strawberry, raspberry…and some sausages –  is the verbal equivalent of an orgasm. And beneath Reynolds’ fussy exterior there really does lie a highly sensual man capable – we feel – of giving sexual pleasure to a woman, as well as tailored perfection, and this is the fine line that prevents Day-Lewis’ performance from being too prissy, although it sometimes veers in the direction. Alma is slightly gauche but also sensuous – like a ripe peach that won’t yet yield its stone. And so love gently blossoms in the autumn of Reynolds’ life while storm clouds linger on the horizon.

PHANTOM THREAD feels like a perfect metaphor for the well-known adage: AISLE ALTER HYMN (I’ll alter him, for the uninitiated) and this is just what the innocent-looking Alma has in mind when the two start working together in the West End atelier. This is a drama that sums up the utter dread many men feel about losing control of themselves to a woman. Reynolds will not cede to Alma’s charms and refuses to sacrifice his precious craft by allowing her control of his inner sanctum – the House of Woodcock – which represents his heart and life blood. She remains tough but loving – the perfect replica of his beloved mother, tempting him yet repulsing him by equal measure. Day-Lewis is adamant as the tortured artist, every subtle nuance flickers across his face in a display of mesmerising petulance. It’s impossible not to admire his gentle delivery and his chiselled, tousled allure. As an actor his economy of movement is unparalleled; he possesses the feline grace of Roger Federer and the innate style of breeding of George Sanders. During a delirious night of Alma-induced food-poisoning, Reynolds reveals his deep love attachment to his mother (whose ghost appears to him in her wedding dress)  and somehow her power is magically transferred to Alma, who from then on gets to wear the tailored trousers.

PHANTOM THREAD is Anderson’s eighth feature, and refreshingly is not based on anything but his own inventiveness. It perfectly suits its 1950s setting, an era where England was still on its knees after the war and rationing, and duty and pride in one’s work was paramount – people were so glad to have a job – and this is conveyed by a team of first rate unflappable seamstresses (with names like Biddy and Nana) who understand implicitly when a deadline looms, and a wedding dress must be tweaked or repaired for the following morning at 9am.

There is an erotic charge to PHANTOM that cannot be underestimated despite its immaculate and primped aesthetic. And the acerbically brittle Reynolds is no high-performing borderline psycho. He can transform at the doff of a cap into an amorous and extremely tender lover.  As in “The Master (2012) this is a film about the power and control dynamic between man and woman, and who eventually wins. It moves like the well-oiled engine of Reynolds’ blood red Bristol he drives down country lanes to his retreat. “I think you’re only acting strong,” says Alma, to which he replies, “I am strong.” And the two continue their power play in a way that never resorts to extreme physical or extreme verbal displays, although there is an extremely sinister side to Alma’s methods that make her the perfect antiheroine of the piece, Reynolds, like some overtly powerful  men, emerging the weaker of the two.

Jonny Greenwood’s music is the crowning glory, setting a tuneful rhythm of piano and strings for the soigné scenario that often feels quite claustrophobic, particularly in the final scenes, where we find ourselves shouting: “Don’t!” (you’ll soon see what I mean). At one point Reynolds says: Are you sent here to ruin my evening? And possibly my entire life?” These are the long-held suspicions of the committed bachelor who desperately longs for love, but constantly suspects the worst from his loving mate. Regretfully PHANTOM THREAD is our last chance to see Day-Lewis on the screen. He will be much missed from the films that he has graced. And this is possibly his best. MT

PHANTOM THREAD IS ON Blu-ray

Emma (2020) *** DVD/Blu-ray release

Dir.: Autumn de Wilde; Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Mia Goth, Johnny Flynn, Callum Turner, Gemma Whelan, Bill Nighy, Amanda Hart, Amber Anderson, Josh O’Connor, Rupert Graves, Tanya Reynolds; UK/US 2020, 124 min.

Emma has enjoyed several screen and TV versions but this visually ravishing addition to the party refreshes Austen’s novel with a delightful contemporary cast, adding to its allure. American photographer Autumn de Wilde films Eleanor Catton’s script casting Anya Taylor-Joy as Austen’s titular heroine. Far better than previous big screen outings, it trumps the limp 1996 version by Douglas McGrath, starring a self-congratulatory Gwyneth Paltrow.

We first meet twenty-one year-old Emma (Taylor-Joy) picking flowers for her ex-governess Miss Taylor (Whelan) on her wedding day to Mr. Weston(Graves). Emma and her hypochondriac father (Nighy) are sad to lose her. Emma – intelligent, beautiful, rich and wilful – turns her attentions to new best friend Harriet Smith (Goth) who is in awe of our accomplished heroine. Emma tells her to reject a proposal from Robert Martin, a prosperous farmer, implying Harriet can do much better. But close confidante George Knightley (Flynn) is not always taken in by Emma’s scheming, despite being in thrall to her charms. Vicar Elton (O’Connor) asks for her hand in marriage and gets a swift kick in the teeth, metaphorically speaking. Frank Churchill (Turner) is a bit of a mystery but comes good in the end, marrying the timid Jane Fairfax (Anderson) who piano and singing skills far outweigh Emma’s.

Cannon’s narrative thrusts the spotlight on Emma, keeping the running time manageable, but rather undercooking the other characters; a device that won’t flummox Austen habitués but may leave newcomers with too many questions unanswered. Anya Taylor-Joy inhabits Miss Woodhouse better than the filmmakers give her credit for, making her far too saccharine: Austen’s acerbic anti-heroine describes her as “only likeable for myself”.

DoP Christopher Blauvelt (Certain Women) conjures up England’s green pleasant land where nature and the characters melt into languid dances of love-sickness, bolstered by a never ending supply of servants. Taylor-Joy sparkles with mischievousness as if the world is her own private kingdom – and male acolytes react accordingly. Flynn’s George is in every way a match for her, but Callum Turner’s Frank pales into insignificance like most of the support cast. Miranda Hart is a perfect Miss Bates in a performance that will linger for a long time. Overall this Emma is good but not great compared to the BBC version. Still a worthwhile celebration of one of our best loved English novels. AS

DVD/BLU-RAY release 22 June 2020

On a Magical Night, Room 212 (2019) ** Curzon World

Dir Christophe Honoré  | France, Drama 93′

What happens when a marriage goes plutonic? Christophe Honoré covers familiar ground in this Parisian drama that turns an old chestnut into a half-baked potboiler despite its arthouse pretensions and an award-winning turn from his regular muse Chiara Mastroianni as the leading star.

She is self-possessed and feisty as Maria married to Richard (her one-time partner Benjamin Biolay). Their relationship is as stale as an old baguette and nothing can warm things up between the sheets on frigid nights in their apartment in Montparnasse. Refreshingly, it is Maria who has strayed from the marital bed rather than Richard. And not just once: Maria has played the field with half a dozen handsome young studs during the course of her 25 year relationship with uber faithful Richard. After he discovers incriminating texts on her ‘phone, they have a low-key bust up that sees him crying into his cups, while she moves into the hotel opposite (hence the titular Room 212) to text pouty paramours who are then paraded before our eyes in an upbeat playful way as Maria revisits the past in this rather twee chamber piece.

On a Magical Night is Honoré’s follow-up to his sombre Sorry Angel, a gay melodrama that screened at Cannes 2018 in the competition section. Although Magical Night attempts to explore the theme of marital stagnation it doesn’t do so in a meaningful or entertaining way, actually looking more like a cheeky drama from the late 1970s. Mastroianni tries to liven things up but Briolay is rather tepid as her husband – this no melodrama – he simply mopes about tearfully as she secretly watches him from the 2 star hotel opposite.

Vincent Lacoste plays a younger puppyish version of Briolay, and his piano teacher ex, Irene, is Camille Cottin, who also breaks into charmless impromptu song. Decent at first this soon becomes tedious, leaving us checking our watches after an hour of frivolous nonsense, Mastroianni parading in various states of undress and in different positions as she attempts to straddle Lacoste in faux love-making. An interesting idea, but forgettably frothy in execution. MT

CURZON WORLD | CANNES UN CERTAIN REGARD WINNER – BEST ACTRESS

 

 

The Ornithologist (2016) **** BFiplayer

Dir: Joao Pedro Rodrigues Cast: Paul Hamy, Xelo Cagiao, Joao Pedro Rodrigues, Han Wen, Chan Suan, Juliane Elting | Fantasy Drama | Portugal | 118min |

Portuguese auteur Joao Pedro Rodrigues won the main prize at Locarno for his avantgarde fifth feature. Good and evil collide during a Hearts of Darkness style odyssey through the verdant landscapes and lush forests of Northern Portugal.

The journeyman is gay birdwatcher Fernando (Paul Hamy) who is undertaking research, although his attitude to wildlife appears somewhat ambivalent. Paddling his kayak through the limpid waters of the River Douro, he is surprised by sudden rapids and disappears under water until he is later found and rescued by two Chinese girls (Han Wen, Chan Suan) purporting to be devout Christians on a pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago (in Spain). But there is a price to pay for  saving his life. Clearly they pari have lost their way literally and metaphorically. But they are not the only untrustworthy people Fernando is to come across during his trip. A deaf mute shepherd called Jesus; a group of exuberant Careto revellers and a trio of Latin-speaking Amazonian girls on horseback, all appear to be have dubious intentions. Although Rodrigues’ film is a modern gay-themed version of the parable of Saint Anthony of Lisbon (and of Padua) patron saint of lost things and devotion to the poor and sick, this stylish arthouse offering could also serve as a metaphor for our journey through the 21st century’s pitfalls.

A visionary freethinker and consummate storyteller, Rodrigues brings a resonant stillness and contemplativeness to his film along with bursts of joie de vivre – as in the scene where Jesus drinks milk straight from a goat’s teet. Animals play a significant part here from exotic birds to dogs and local fauna. Cinematographer, Rui Pocas, cleverly evokes the interaction between man and beast. Fernando becomes irritated when a white dove he has tried to cure – possibly representing the Holy Spirit – then seems to be following him. Rodrigues leads us into all sorts of blind alleys with an immersive narrative full of textural richness that also echoes the journey seen in the recent Embrace of the Serpent. Those flumuxed by Miguel Gomes Arabian Nights will be encouraged to hear that The Ornithologist is also a great deal more accessible than the Inebriated Chorus of Chaffinches segment in the trilogy.

There does seem to be some poetic licence over geography in the piece: the Chinese girls are heading for Santiago de Compostela but somehow have wandered into Portugal and the film ends up in Padua, Italy presumably in reference to St Anthony dying there, although this is initially bewildering unless you know the religious background. The gay elements of the film feel entirely in the natural in the milieu and Fernando’s transformation into Saint Anthony dovetailing elegantly into the final scenes show we are never far from salvation. MT

FREE ON BFiPLAYER |

https://player.bfi.org.uk/rentals/film/watch-the-ornithologist-2016-online

 

Prince Avalanche (2012) **** MUBI

Dir/Wri:: David Gordon Green | Original: Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurdsson | Cast: Paul Rudd, Emile Hirsch, Lance Le Gault, Joyce Payne | 94min  Comedy  US

David Gordon Green plunders the Icelandic comedy original Either Way (2011) for this deliciously quirky re-make of male bonding and reflective melancholy. It all kicks off when an unlikely couple of friends spend the summer of 1988 Texas repainting traffic lines on a Texan country highway ravaged by wildfire.

Prince_Avalanche_1_PUBS copy

Ostensibly a recipe for disaster: Lance (Hirsch) is an insecure extrovert looking for casual weekend hook-ups and conversation, Alvin (Rudd) is shy and self-contained but, crucially, dating Lance’s elder sister and is corresponding with her by letter, it being the eighties. A rich vein of comedy lies in their gradual falling out and re-grouping as they discover weird and wonderful things about themselves and about each other that creates a strange and appealing chemistry. Occasionally wandering into whimsey with the arrival of a local elderly woman who lost her home in the fire, and an old man who offers them a slug of the local hooch, the film maintains an offbeat feel true to Gordon Green’s indie roots.

Tim Orr’s cinematography focuses on the stunning natural environment picking out the local wildlife to stunning effect. An evocative original score from David Wingo and Explosion in the Sky (The Kite Runner) really captures the hazy, mood. MT

ON MUBI FROM 13 JUNE 2020 | Best Director Silver Bear Berlinale 2013

Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence (1983) Mubi

Dir.: Nagisa Ôshima; Cast: David Bowie, Tom Conti, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Takeshi Kitano, Jack Thompson, Johnny Okura; Japan/UK/New Zealand 1983, 123 min.

David Bowie is the star of this emotional rollercoaster from Japanese New Wave director Nagisa Ôshima (1932-2013) also known for Empire of Passion.

Mr. Lawrence has aged very well and has lost nothing of its impact as an analysis of male short-comings. Adapted from Laurens van Der Post’s The Seed and the Sower, the film takes place in a Japanese POW camp during the Second World War and is centred on four men: British POWs Major Jack ‘Strafer’ Celliers (Bowie) and Lt. Col. John Lawrence (Conti), and two Japanese soldiers, camp commander Capt. Yonoi (Sakamoto, who also composed the score) and sergeant Gengo Hara, a brute with a softer side.

Group Captain Hicksley (Thompson), the camp’s highest ranking officer and the spokesmen for the prisoners plays a minor, but catalysing role. Celliers’ stubbornness sees him locked in a battle of wills with the camp’s new commandant, a man obsessed with discipline and the glory of Imperial Japan. Lieutenant Colonel Lawrence (Tom Conti) is the only inmate with a degree of sympathy for Japanese culture and an understanding of the language, and attempts to bridge the divide through his friendship with Yonoi’s second-in-command, Sergeant Hara (Takeshi Kitano), a man possessing a surprising degree of compassion beneath his cruel façade. Celliers is also living with a guilty secret: he has betrayed his younger brother at boarding school. Captain Yonoi is also secretly ashamed of himself for being part of a military uprising in 1936, but unlike his comrades-in-arms, he escaped execution. Yonei develops a homo-erotic crush on Celliers, provoking him into a duel with the salve: “if you kill me, you will be free”. Celliers declines.

When a secret radio is discovered at the base, Yonoi makes Celliers and Lawrence take responsibility, sentencing them to death. But on Christmas Day, Hara frees the two prisoners, wishing Lawrence a titular “Merry Christmas”. Hara gets a light ticking off for showing mercy. But when Group Captain Hicksley learns about Yonoi’s plan to replace him, a fracas develops with the Japanese camp commander ordering Hicksley to have all men stand up on the parade ground, including the sick. When Hicksley refuses, Yonoi wants to kill him, but Celliers kisses him on the cheek. With his honour in tatters, Yonoi retreats and is replaced as camp commandant who doesn’t give Celliers such a wide birth, “unlike my predecessor, I am not a romantic” and buries Celliers up to his neck in sand as a punishment.

At an epilogue set in 1946, Lawrence makes a trip to visit Hara who has been sentenced to death. Yonoi has already been executed, and Hara tells Lawrence that Yonoi gave him the lock from Celliers hair to place in a shrine in Yonoi’s home village.

David Bowie commented later that during the shooting he had been surprised Ôshima only showed the perimeters of the prison camp – yet when he saw the film afterwards he was able to appreciate how much more terrifying the threat of the compound was in contrast to the detail of the camp itself. DoP Toichiro Naushima (Double Suicide) shows how the mens’ emotions reflect the harshness of their surroundings (filming took place on the Polynesian island of Rarotonga) by continuously changing the angles of close-ups and the long tracking shots. Merry Christmas avoids the moral judgements made by David Lean on Bridge on the River Kwai.  In his valedictory chat to Hara, Lawrence makes a shrewd observation: “there are times when victory is very hard to take“. Ôshima always keeps the balance, avoiding sentimentality, without shrinking from this very emotional conflict. AS  

NOW ON MUBI 

                                        

   

 

 

Magic Mountains (2020) **** Cannes Market 2020

Dir: Urzula Antoniak | Thriller, Holland/Poland 82′

Poland’s Urzula Antoniak follows her enigmatic displacement drama Beyond Words with another spare and haunting psychological thriller that relies on magnificent mountain settings, evocative lighting and intense atmosphere to explore the complex aftermath of love and longing for a couple whose relationship lies in tatters.

Dutch actors Thomas Ryckewaert and Hannah Hoekstra play Lex and Hannah, still on speaking terms despite their recent break-up, instigated by Hannah for reasons unknown. In order to lay his own emotional demons to rest, Lex makes the unusual request of asking Hannah to join him in a final climbing holiday, led by Voytek (the Polish actor Marcin Dorocinski (Anthropoid, 2016) whose unsettling presence lends a sinister vibe to this doomed emotional exploration fraught with vertiginous moments of its own.

Quite why Hannah decides to continue on this challenging odyssey is anyone’s guess. But mesmerised by Voytek’s mysterious allure and Lex’s ambivalent motivations, she presses on increasingly disturbed by her strange companions and the dizzying surroundings. Magic Mountains is a simple but effective metaphor for our troubling times. Antoniak’s enigmatic storyline and Lennert Hillege’s atmospheric visuals provide the needling tension fuelling this complex mood piece that takes us to the unknown reaches of the human mind with a  devastating finale. MT

Throw Down (2004) *** Blu-ray release

Dir.: Johnnie To; Cast: Louis Koo, Aaron Kwok, Cherrie Ying, Hoi Pang Lo, Tony Leung, Calvin Choi, Eddie Cheung; China/Hong Kong 2004, 95 min.

Throw Down has a very special place in Johnnie To’s body of work. It stands apart from narrative driven films like Election or Office: Throw Down is Kurosawa on speed, the plot being more or less accidental. The son of Judo Master Cheng introduces himself to his opponents in the violent arcade games “I will be Sanshiro Sugate, you will be Higaki”, referring to Sanshiro Sugate I and II, Kurosawa’s first and third features featuring judo fighters.

Sze-to Bo (Koo) is a bar owner who steals big time from gangster boss Savage (Cheung), only to lose the money on the gambling table. Bo had been a judo champion a long time ago, but has retired for unknown reasons. Lee Ah-kong, the current champion, has a grudge against Bo because the he failed to turn up for a fight Lee was sure he would won. Master Cheng (Pang Lo) is Bo’s former teacher; his son Ching stricken by dementia, prone to introducing himself as Sugagte. Into this murky milieu comes Tony (Kwook), a keen judo fighter, and Mona (Ying), a would-be singer, who is running away from her pimping manager. Bo joins this desperate, spunky trio, with To staging some bizarre sequences. At one point, Bo steals money from Savage and his men, only to lose it on their flight, with Mona returning to pick up some bank notes, Savage’s henchman doing the same at the other end of the street. Mona then runs to Bo, who has lost a shoe – Mona running back to pick it up front of the gangsters, still collecting the bank notes, which have flown everywhere like confetti. When Bo gives up fighting because of threatened blindness due to his detached retina, a frantic finale starts to unfurl, Bo trying to wipe out his adversaries before losing his sight. But the atmosphere remains the dominant factor right to the end.

DoP Sie-Keung Cheng’s stylish images of noirish sleaziness overlay this angst ridden riot. Artificial light dominates in the studio and the eerie empty streets of Hong Kong. Yeun Bun, in charge of the fight scenes, choreographs like a ballet master. Ying is by far the liveliest protagonist, running riot over the fighting males. Overall, Throw Down is an idiosyncratic mixture of fight movie and melodrama, with large dollop of surrealism thrown in. AS

NOW ON BLU-RAY COURTESY OF EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA   

A Scandal in Paris (1946)

Dir.: Douglas Sirk; Cast: George Sanders, Signe Hasso, Carole Landis, Akim Tamiroff, Alma Kruger, Gene Lockart; USA 1946, 100 min.

Douglas Sirk (1897-1987) started life as Detlef Sierck in Berlin (UFA), before emigrating via France to Los Angeles just before the Second World War. Best known for his florid Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s, Magnificent Obsession and All I DesireSummer Storm (1944) and A Scandal in Paris (1946) are beasts of another feather and throwbacks to his German career. Scandal is based on the autobiography of Francois Eugene Vidocq, erstwhile criminal who became the Police Chief of Paris. Adapted by Ellis St. Joseph, Vidocq tries his best to camouflage his real past: His father was a wealthy man, and probably the first victim of his criminal son.  

In 1775, we meet Vidocq (Sanders) and his sidekick Emile (Tamiroff) on the verge of fleeing prison with the help of a file hidden in a cake. Thanks to a forger, part of Emile’s large criminal family, Vidocq is made a lieutenant in the French army, a perfect foil for stealing jewellery from wealthy women who fall under his spell.

Next on the list is the chanteuse Loretta de Richet (Landis), who is married to Chief of Police Richet (Lockhart). After successfully completing his assignment, Vidocq sets his eyes on the jewels of the de Pierremont family, represented by the Marquise de Pierremont (Kruger) and her daughter Therese (Hasso). But having trousered the gems, Vidocq changes tack after Richet being sacked by the Marquis de Pierremont, his superior. The master thief not only ‘solves’ the case, but also ‘recovers’ the jewels, becoming Richet’s successor, a move that will give him access to the vault of the Paris Bank.

Loretta blackmails Vidoqc, asking him to give up Therese and rekindle their relationship. But this leads to a chain of events culminating in a deadly struggle at a merry-go-round in the woodlands, the exact same place where Therese revealed she knew everything about Vidocq’s shady past.

DoP Eugen Schuftan (1983-1977), a legend who shot Menschen am Sonntag and early Hitchcock features, goes uncredited, with Guy Rose getting the only camerawork mention. Schuftan gives the feature a decisively European look reminiscent of Max Ophuls’ pre-war fare. Hans Eisler’s score echoes this arrestingly stylish look and Hungarian born producer Emeric Pressburger makes up the team whose roots were cultured in the old continent before the rise of fascism.

George Sanders is brilliant as the ambivalent anti-hero, the same goes for Carole Landis who, in one of her scenes as a chanteuse, very much impersonates Marlene Dietrich in Der Blaue Engel. But, alas both actors had a string of unhappy relationships and would go on to commit suicide: Landis in 1948 at the age of twenty-nine and Sanders in 1972, plagued by dementia and depression. Signe Hasso on the other hand never lived up to her billing as Greta Garbo’s successor, living a long and happy life, mainly starring in TV commercials. 

Fellow émigré director Edgar Ulmer mentioned Scandal‘s sublime quality unique to Sirk’s oeuvre, that lends an ethereal touch to this romantic drama with is exquisite costumes by Norma (Koch). AS

NOW ON CURZON ONLINE AS PART OF THE COHEN VINTAGE COLLECTION

Mary is Happy, Mary is Happy (2013) | We Are One Festival

Dir/Wri: Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit | Cast: Chonnikan Netjui, Patcha Poonpiriya | 127’ Thailand   Drama

The second film from Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit, Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy follows in the footsteps of the Thai director’s debut, 36, by continuing his examination into life in the digital age. Much like 36, Mary… concerns itself with our relationship to technology, this time looking specifically at the effect social media has upon narrative forms – not only conventional storytelling, but also the way that we as individuals attempt to construct narratives out of our lives.

Adapted from 410 consecutive Tweets from a real life Twitter user, @marylony, Mary… is by nature a bitty, picaresque affair (the source Tweets are presented as on screen text, the noise of typing ringing beneath them on the soundtrack). Ostensibly, the Tweets have been worked into a narrative concerning Mary’s attempts to finish her school yearbook in time for her graduation, but by following the free-flowing stream of @marylony’s twitter feed, Thamrongrattanarit’s film has no choice but to adapt to a similarly free-form approach, both in style (handheld and jump-cut) and narrative.

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Indeed, in just one of many reflexive moments within the film, even Mary says that she seems to do things randomly and for no reason. Thamrongrattanarit has said that, in part, the film is meant as a play on the scriptwriter’s control over narrative, but when Mary asks if there is ‘some force controlling my life’ the question can be understood just as easily as a theological concern as it can a reflexive statement. However, by posing questions about narrative authorship within film, Mary… also examines the way people author their own lives on social media. Like conventional storytellers, users of social media sites open windows through which their audiences can come to engage with their created protagonists, be they real or imagined (or a mixture of the two). Whether they realise it or not, Twitter users are unfolding a narrative and revealing something of themselves with every single Tweet they publish. In a world crammed with information, there may never have been a bigger need to turn our lives into stories, and Mary… raises important questions concerning randomness and predestination.

So it’s a shame, then, that the film never quite comes to life. It’s filled with humour and captivating moments, but at 127 minutes its looseness begins to feel baggy and tedious. But if Mary… fails to recreate the magic of Thamrongrattanarit’s pitch-perfect debut, it is nevertheless an interesting experiment, and certainly marks him out as a director to watch.  Alex Barrett

MARY IS HAPPY, MARY IS HAPPY | WE ARE ONE FESTIVAL 2020 4 June 2020

 

 

The Dead and the Others (2018)| New Brazilian Cinema | Mubi

Docudrama | 114’ | Brazil/Portugal

Brazilian cinema is entering a new era in the wake of the country’s unprecedented political turmoil. Several new films are now available online along with this look at the Directed by Palme d’Or winner João Salaviza and Renée Nader Messora, The Dead and the Others is a haunting docudrama based on their experiences of living for nearly a year in Pedra Branca, a village inhabited by the indigenous community of the Kraho people in Northern Brazil. The Kraho very much want to continue their way of life and traditions in their rural community, striving to be self-sufficient. Their plight connects with a global narrative of survival for small communities all over the world.

Fifteen year old Ihjãc has been suffering from nightmares since he lost his father and in the opening scene he walks through the rain forest in the light of the moon. A distant sound of chanting comes through the palm trees. His father’s voice calls him to the waterfall. It is now time to organise the funeral feast so his father’s spirit can depart to the village of the Dead and mourning for him can come to an end. Although his baby son Tepto was born in the local hospital, Ihjãc still spends most of his life with his family in the remote forest and although the village elders are urging him to fulfil his duty to undergo the crucial process of becoming a shaman, Ihjãc escapes back to the local town to avoid the transition. There, far from his people and culture, he faces the reality of being an indigenous native in contemporary Brazil.

With its themes of loss, displacement and cultural identity this eerie and woozily impressionistic piece that has a poignant urgency in its message, glowingly conveyed in vibrant, high contrast cinematography. MT

NEW BRAZILIAN CINEMA | UN CERTAIN REGARD JURY PRIZE 2018 | LET IT BURN

Suspicion (1941) *** BBCiplayer

Dir.: Alfred Hitchcock; Cast: Cary Grant, Joan Fontaine; USA 1941, 100 min

Suspicion rarely emerges as a Hitchcock favourite. Critics don’t like writing about his 1941 feature, everyone opting for: Psycho, North by North West and Vertigo. Yet there’s Cary Grant, Hitchcock’s hero for all seasons, and the timidly appealing Joan Fontaine, who had starred in Hitch’ first American feature Rebecca (1939). ‘Brain trust’ writers Samson Raphaelson, Joan Harrison and Alma Reville (Mrs. Hitchcock) adapted the script from Before the Fact by Francis Iles aka Anthony Berkeley Cox. And Harry Stradling (A Streetcar named Desire, Angel Face) served up memorable black-and-white images. So what could go wrong?

Well, the Hitchcock thriller is really about the destructive power of love, rather than its redemptive qualities.  Suspicion showcases how women are often drawn to charismatic cads rather than more sincere, stable types. And Lina McLaidlaw (Joan Fontaine) is certainly one of them. A quietly bookish be-spectacled heiress she first sets eyes on Johnny (Grant) during a train journey where he cockily sits in First Class with a cheaper ticket, launching a charm offensive on the guard in a bid to stay there. She is smitten, and marries him fully aware that he doesn’t really love her in the slightest, and is a liar, and a profligate. Doubt and desperation gnaw away at her self-esteem as she suspects him of wanting to murder her. She wants to believe he’s a hero, and this powerful urge becomes a destructive force that feeds her toxic addiction. The studio atmosphere is not a great setting for this emotive tale, heavy back-projections spoiling the atmosphere. We are left with a few memorable vignettes where Hitchcock returns to his silent roots, with no need for dialogue.

Lina’s short-sightedness is a metaphor for her emotional blindness, although intellectually she is sharp cookie. And as her suspicion festers, the more the spiderwebs trap her, a prisoner of her own fear. Hitch makes us well aware from the get go that Johnny is fickle and emotionally shallow: first we see Lina enjoying few flowers in a vase on the table, these are replaced by a bouquet of roses, but then the flowers are gone, and Lina is fretting over the ‘phone. The coup of coups, and the only reason Suspicion is mentioned in the Hitchcock canon at all, is the famous light bulb, hidden in the glass of milk that Johnny carries upstairs to his wife – the spider webs in the background showing his evil intent. Fontaine is simply brilliant as the decent, love-sick woman who wants to believe her husband and live happily ever after – and we feel for her. But Grant’s bad-boy allure if more irritating than appealing – we just want to knock his block off!

But, alas the ending, Hitchcock returning to the botched plot in a very polite English way when talking to Francois Truffaut: “Well I am not too pleased with the way Suspicion ends. I had something else in mind. The scene I wanted – but it was never shot – was for Cary Grant to bring her a glass of milk that’s been poisoned, Joan Fontaine having just finished a letter to her mother. ‘Dear mother, I am desperately in love with him, but I don’t want to live because he is a killer. Though I’d rather die, I think society should be protected from him”. Then Grant comes in with the fatal glass, and she says ‘Will you mail this letter to my mother, dear?’ She drinks the milk and dies. Fade out, and fade in on one short shot: Cary Grant, whistling cheerfully, walks over to the mail box and pops the letter in”. If this sounds a little like Shadow of a Doubt (1943), you’re right. That wasn’t too difficult, was it?  

https://youtu.be/1j_pqa74WbU

Robert Siodmak | Master of Shadows | Blu-ray release

Dresden 1918, Robert Siodmak left his upper-middle class, orthodox Jewish home in this epicentre of European modern art, to join a theatre touring company. He was 18, and this was the first of many radical changes that would see him becoming a pioneer of film noir, and directing 56 feature films fraught with (anti)heroes who are morose, malevolent, violent and generally downbeat (spoilers).

Robert Siodmak began his film career in 1925, translating inter-titles. Later he learnt the editing business with Harry Piel. In 1927/28 he worked under Kurt (Curtis) Bernhardt (Das letzte Fort) and Alfred Lind. But MENSCHEN AM SONNTAG (1929/30) (left) would transform his professional life forever. Together with Edgar G. Ulmer, he would direct a semi-documentary, social realist portrait that pictured ordinary Berliners, far away from the expensive “Illusionsfilme” (escapist films) of the UFA. The idea was the brainchild of Robert’s younger brother Curt (born in Kracow), who would become a screen-writer and director of Horror/SF films, and follow his brother and Ulmer to Hollywood – along with the rest of the team: Billy Wilder, Eugen Schüfftan, Fred Zinnemann and Rochus Gliese (later art director for Murnau’s Sunrise). Robert Siodmak, Ulmer and Giese would also be part of the “Remigrants”, film makers, who would return to Germany after 1945.

People_on_Sunday_2 copyMENSCHEN AM SONNTAG was filmed on a succession of Sundays in 1929. Subtitled “a film without actors” – which is misleading, since the actors – non-professionals – co-wrote and co-produced the film, had already returned to their day jobs when the film was premiered in 1930. The five main protagonists spend a weekend near a lake in a Berlin suburb: Wolfgang (a wine seller) and Christl (a mannequin) meet for the first time at the Bahnhof Zoo by accident on Saturday morning, Christl had been stood up. On the same evening, Erwin (a taxi driver) and his girl friend Annie have a violent quarrel, tearing up each other’s photos. As a result, Erwin and his friend Wolfgang travel with Christl on the following Sunday to the Nicolas Lake. And here on the ‘beach’ Wolfgang meets Brigitte (a vinyl record sales assistant), the four spend the day together; intercut with images of the forlorn “stay-at-home” Annie. The final scene returns the quartet to the heart of the metropolis: four million waiting for another Sunday. MENSCHEN AM SONNTAG is a chronicle; a document shot against the narrative UFA style of the day. There is no story, just interaction. Even in the complex narratives of his films Noir, Siodmak would always be the bystander, the person who observes much more than directs.

Inquest_2 copyINQUEST (VORUNTERSUCHUNG), Robert Siodmak’s third feature film as a director, produced in 1931, is his first ‘Kriminalfilm” (thriller). The student Fritz Bernt (Gustaf Fröhlich), has a three year-long affair with the prostitute Erna – he also receives money from her. After falling in love with his friend Walter’s sister, Fritz wants to leave Erna. Out of cowardice, he sends Walter to her flat to break the news. But Walter sleeps with Erna’s flatmate and goes for a drink afterwards. When Erna’s body is found the next morning, Fritz is the main suspect. In charge of the inquest is Dr. Bienert (Albert Bassermann), who happens to be Walter’s father. The denouement is a surprise. In many ways, INQUEST is a “Strassenfilm”, Kracauer’s definition of films where the middle-class protagonist is in love with a sexy prostitute, but goes home to roost, marrying a bourgeois girl of his own class. Some of the main scenes of the film are shot in the staircase of the house where Erna lives, the shadowy lighting clearly foreshadowing Siodmak’s Noir period. Sexuality is the enemy of bourgeois society here, and Bassermann’s Dr. Bienert is a blustering patriarch, who would sacrifice anyone to save his son.

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THE BURNING SECRET (BRENNENDES GEHEIMNIS) is based on a novel by Stefan Zweig. Shot in 1932, it was to be Siodmak’s last German film for 23 years. In a Swiss Sanatorium, the twelve-year old Edgar (H.J. Schaufuss) is bored, and pleased to befriend Baron Von Haller (Willi Forst), a racing driver. But he does not know that Von Haller is using him to get close to his mother (Hilde Wagner). Soon Edgar gets suspicious, the two adults always want to be alone. He surprises them in flagrante and runs home to his father, although he does not give his secret away. When his mother arrives, he looks at her knowingly, but stays ‘mum’. Siodmak has sharpened the edges of this coming-of-age story, the novel concentrating more on romantic and psychological aspects. There is real violence between Edgar and Von Haller, and the lovemaking of the adulterous couple, which Edgar interrupts, is more vicious than affectionate. When the film was premiered in March 1933, Siodmak was already living in Paris, and Goebbels denounced the film as un-German, not surprisingly, since both the author of the novel and the director of the film were Jews living abroad in exile.

Hatred_1 copyWhen Siodmak shot MOLLENARD (1937) in France, it would be the penultimate of his French-set features. (In 1938, he would finish “Ultimatum” for the fatally ill Robert Wiene; and in the same year he is credited with “artistic supervision” for Vendetta, directed by Georges Kelber). MOLLENARD (HATRED) is the nearest to a film Noir so far: it is a fight to the death between Captain Mollenard (Harry Baur) and his wife Mathide (Gabrielle Dorziat). Captain Mollenard is a gun runner in Shanghai, he is shown as a hero, a good friend to his crew. When he returns to Dunkirk and his wife and two children, illness renders him powerless to his vitriolic wife, who tries to turn the children against him. Mollenard attempts to use his strength to re-conquer his wife, but fails, unlike during his days in Shanghai. The son takes the side of his mother, the daughter tries to drown herself, but Mollenard saves her. In the end, his crew carries the dying man out of the house, he would end his life where he was most happy – at sea. MOLLENARD is a contrast between utopia and dystopia for the main protagonist: the sea, where he is free (to commit crimes), and the bourgeois home, where he is a prisoner of conventions. He is unable to survive in this which cold, emotionless prison. MOLLENARD is seen as his greatest film in France, a dramatic version of Noir.

Snares copyPIÈGES (1939) was Siodmak’s last French film before emigrating to the USA – and his greatest box-office success of this period. Whilst most of Siodmak’s French films featured fellow emigrés in front and behind the camera, PIÈGES only has the co-author, Ernst Neubach, as a fellow emigré– the DOP, Ted Pahle, was American, and the star, Maurice Chevalier, already an legend was very much a Frenchman: Siodmak had established himself. (A fact, which would count for nothing at the start of his US career.)  PIÈGES is the story of a serial killer who murders eleven women in the music-hall world of Paris. The police, whose main suspect is the night-club-owner and womaniser Fleury (Chevalier), chooses Arienne (the debutant Marie Dea), to lure the murderer into the open. But Arienne falls in love with Fleury’s associate Brémontière, only to find out that he is the murderer. In the end the gutsy Arienne (Dea is a subtle antithesis to the French heroines of this period) has to risk her lift to save her husband Fleury’s. There are more than a few clues to the later “Phantom Lady” in PIÈGES.  Eric von Stroheim is brilliant as a mad fashion czar who has lost his fortune and adoring women.

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SON OF DRACULA (1943) was already Robert Siodmak’s seventh film in Hollywood, his first for Universal. Scripted by his brother Curt, SON OF DRACULA was a great risk for Robert, it was his first outing in the classical Horror genre, not to mention the great ‘Dracula tradition’ started by Ted Browning in 1931. The film is set in the bayous of Louisianna, where Katherine Caldwell has inherited the plantation “Dark Oaks” from her father, who died suddenly under mysterious circumstances. She gives a party, and entertains Count Alucard (Lon Chaney jr.) an acquaintance  from her travels in central Europe. She discards her fiancée Frank and marries Alucard. Frank shoots the count, but the bullet passes through him, killing Katherine. In prison, Katherine visits him as a bat, turning into her human form (a first in film history), and asking Frank to kill Alucard, so they can live together forever as vampires. Frank grants her wish, but also burns her in her coffin. SON OF DRACULA is pure gothic horror, but suffered from Lon Chaney jr. being miscast in a role created by Bela Lugosi as his Alter Ego. Strongest are the scenes in the bayous, where the evil still lurks after the death of Katherine and Alucard: everything seems toxic, the spell of the vampire lives on.

Cobra_Woman_1.jpg_rgb copyCOBRA WOMAN (1943) was Robert Siodmak’s first film in colour, shot in widescreen Technicolor. Its star, Maria Montez, an aristocrat from the Dominican Republic, whose real name was Maria Africa Garcia Vidal de Santo Silas, would later gain cult status after her early death at the age of 39 from a heart attack in her bathtub in Paris. Maria plays Tollea, who is whisked away just before her wedding to Ramu, to her birth island where her evil twin sister Naja (also played by Montez) holds sway. Ramu and his helper Kado follow her, but Tollea has decided to sacrifice her love for Ramu to become the new ruler of the island, so as to prevent an eruption of the volcano provoked by Naja’s sins. COBRA WOMAN is pure camp, Siodmak said “it was nonsense, but fun”.

Phantom_Lady_1 copyIn 1943 Siodmak was on a roll: he would make four film that year, and PHANTOM LADY (1943) was also the most important of his American period to date: the first of a quartet, which would form with The Spiral Staircase, The Killers and Criss Cross, the classic Noir films of their creator.

PHANTOM LADY is based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich (William Irish), a prolific writer, whose novels and short stories were the basis for twenty films Noir of the classic period. They also provided the basis for Nouvelle Vague fare. Pivotal in Woolrich’s novels is the race against time. Scott Henderson, an engineer, is accused of murdering his wife. He proclaims his innocence, but is sentenced to death. His secretary Carol “Kansas” Richman (Ella Raines) is convinced he is not a murderer, and together with inspector Burges, she sets out to find the real culprit. Henderson’s alibi is a woman with a flamboyant hat, he meets in a bar, and spends the evening with, while  his wife was murdered – but they promised not to reveal their identities. The mystery woman  is illusive and when Carol tries to unravel her identity, the barman, who to denies having seen her at all, is run over by a car shortly after interviewed by Richman. Another witness, a drummer (Elisha Cook. Jr.), is also murdered, before Richman corners Franchot Tone, an artist, and Richman’s best friend as the murderer: he had an affair with Richman’s wife. German expressionism and Siodmak’s customary near documentary style dominate: New York is a bed of intrigue, where shadows lurk and footsteps signal danger. The majority of scenes could be watched without dialogue, particularly Cook’s drummer solo, which fits in well with the impressionist décor. With PHANTOM LADY, Robert Siodmak had found his (sub)genre.

Christmas_Holiday_10CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY (1944), based on a novel by Somerset Maugham, has a most misleading title and is perhaps Siodmak’s most exotic film Noir. Lt. Mason, on Christmas leave, is delayed in New Orleans, where he meets the singer Jackie Lamont (Deanna Durham) who tells him her real name is Abigail Manette, and that her husband Robert (Gene Kelly) is in jail for murdering his bookie. In a long flashback, we see Robert’s mother trying to cover up her son’s crime. After Jackie leaves Mason, she is confronted in a roadhouse by Robert who has escaped from jail. Before he can shoot her, a policeman’s bullet kills him. Like “Phantom Lady”, CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY is photographed again by Woody Bredell, New Orleans is a tropical, outlandish setting and the film has much more the feel of a French film-noir than an American. Siodmak uses Wagner’s “Liebestod” to frame the love story of the doomed couple.

THE SUSPECT (1944) is one of Siodmak’s less convincing Noirs. Philip Marshall (Charles Laughton), a sedentary middle-aged man, is driven out by his heartless wife Cora, and falls in love with the much younger Mary (Ella Raines). Philip becomes a different person, and thrives with his new love. But Cora finds out about the couple and threatens Philip with disclosure, which would have ruined him professionally. He kills first Cora, then his neighbour Gilbert Simmons, who blackmails him. Inspector Huxley has no proof against him, and Philip could start a new life with his young wife in Canada, but he decides to stay and give himself up, just as Huxley had predicted. Shot entirely in a studio, THE SUSPECT lacks suspense, and is only remarkable for Laughton’s brilliant performance.

The_Strange_Affair_of_Uncle_Harry_3 copyTHE STRANGE AFFAIR OF UNCLE HARRY (1945) features a semi-incestuous relationship between brother and sister: John “Harry” Quincy (George Sanders) lives a quiet life in New Hampshire with his sisters Lettie (Geraldine Fitzgerald) and Hester. When he meets the fashion designer Deborah Brown (Ella Raines), he falls in love with her. Lettie is jeaulous, and feigns a heart attack. Harry wants to murder her, but Hester drinks the poison intended for Lettie, who is convicted for Hester’s murder, but does not give away the real culprit, since she knows that her death will prevent Harry from marrying Deborah. To mollify The “MPAA code agency”, Siodmak found a new ending: Harry wakes up at, having only dreamt the events; producer Joan Harrison resigned from the project in protest. Lettie is a psychopath in the vein of the murderer in Phantom Lady and Olivia de Havilland’s murderous twin in The Dark Mirror. But there is more ambiguity to the narrative than is obvious at first sight: there is a vey clear resemblance between Lettie and Deborah – they might have been exchangeable for Harry. THE STRANGE AFFAIR OF UNCLE HARRY is one of the darkest Noirs, because all is played out on the background of a very respectable family, in small town America.

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THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE (1945) is Siodmak’s most famous Noir, a classic because of its old-dark-house setting and the woman-in-peril theme. In a small town in New England, handicapped women are being murdered. Helen (Dorothy McGuire) is watching a silent movie in town, where a lame woman is strangled. Helen then hurries home, to look after the family matriarch Mrs. Warren (Ethel Barrymore), who is bedridden. Since Helen is mute, she is in mortal danger: the killer lives in the house. When Helen finds the body of Blanche, who was engaged to Albert Warren (George Brent), after having left his half-brother Steve, Helen suspects Stephen and locks him in the cellar; then she tries to phone Dr. Parry, but she cannot communicate. Too late she finds out that Albert is the killer, who chases her up the spiral staircase, but his mother gets up and shoots him, causing Helen, who lost her voice after witnessing the traumatic death of her parents, to cry out loud. Very little of the background to the narrative has been mentioned: the theme being eugenics, a concept the late President Theodore Roosevelt was very keen on. Albert Warren has taken this concept a step further; he kills “weak and imperfect” humans because he believes his father would be proud of him. Like T. Roosevelt, Albert’s father was a big-game hunter. In his mother’s bedroom is a poster with a Teddy Roosevelt lookalike and the initials “TR” above an elephant’s tusk. Considering the Nazi Euthanasia programmes, this aspect of THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE has often been neglected by critics.

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THE DARK MIRROR (1946) reflects Hollywood’s interest in Freud. Two identical sisters, Terry and Ruth Collins, both played by Olivia de Havilland, are suspected of murder, when one of the women’s suitors is found dead. Inspector Stevenson is fascinated by the two woman, but would not have solved the crime without the help of Dr. Elliot, a psychoanalyst. He finds out that whilst Ruth is a very adjusted and loving person, Terry is just her opposite: a ruthless psychopath, who fabricates clues, to make Ruth look like the murderess, whilst at the same time is planning to kill her sister, before Dr. Elliot is able to expose her. Siodmak deals with the “Doppelgänger” theme, which was explored as early as in the silent film era of expressionism, by using Freudian theory to explain the perversity of the “evil” sister: rejection, confusion and lastly alienation let her spin out of control, allowing only “herself” to survive. Unlike in The Spiral Staircase, the interior is totally unthreatening, which makes Terry’s murderous lust even more terrifying.

TIme_Out_of_Mind_2 copyTIME OUT OF MIND (1946/7) is more melodrama than Noir. Chris Fortune (Robert Hutton), the son of a heartless and ambitious shipping tycoon, falls in love with the servant girl Kate (Phyllis Calvert). But in 19th century New England, this was not the social norm. Kate encourages Chris to marry a lady of his class, who turns out to be a beast and drives Chris more into alcohol dependency. Chris fancies himself as a composer, but only Kate believes in his talent. The Noir aspect is the family constellation: Chris is obviously weak, and his overbearing father (Leo G. Carroll) rules over his life. More to the point, Chris’s sister Rissa (Ella Raines) seemingly protects her younger brother, but is in reality totally obsessed by him. She represents the semi-incestuous theme running, not only through Siodmak’s, noir films.

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CRISS CROSS (1949) is perhaps Siodmak’s most personal Noir. Reworking elements of The Killers – and casting Burt Lancaster again in the role of the obsessed lover -, CRISS CROSS is the story of an “amour fou”, its emotional intensity on par with Tourneur’s classic Out of the Past. Steve Thompson (Lancaster) is still in love with his ex wife Anna (Yvonne De Carlo), who now lives with the gangster Slim Dundee (Dan Duryea). But when the two of them meet in a bar, the whole things starts up again. Dundee surprises them, Thompson comes up with an excuse: he needs Dundee’s help for an armed car robbery. But Dundee is suspicious: he and his gang kill Thompson’s partner and wound him after the robbery. When Anna goes missing with the money, Dundee suspects the couple have double-crossed him. Dundee has Thompson abducted, but Thompson bribes his captors and finds Anna. She is terrified by the thought that Dundee will find them and wants to abandon the wounded Steve, but Dundee arrives and shoots them both, before running towards the police. The final scene, when Anna’s and Steve’s bodies fall literally into each other, bullets flying as the police siren’s grow louder, is the apotheosis of everything that’s gone on since the scene in the bar. From then on, in true Noir fashion, all is told in flashbacks and voice-over narration. Anna is the quintessential Noir heroine, telling Steve: “All those things which have happened we’ll forget it. You see, I make you forget it. After it’s done, after it’s all over and we are safe, it will be just you and me. The way it should’ve been all along from the start”. CRISS CROSS is my personal favourite: dark, expressionistic, melancholic and wonderfully doomed.

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THE GREAT SINNER (1948/9) is an awkward mixture of high literature and low-brow melodrama. Based partly on Dostoyevsky’s novel “The Gambler” and some autobiographical details of this author, Siodmak struggles to bring this expensive “A-picture” to life. The stars Gregory Peck (Fedya) and Ava Gardener (Pauline Ostrovsky) – in the first of three collaborations – do their best, but Christopher Isherwood’s script is a hotchpotch of the sensational and sentimental, tragic events unfold fast and furiously, logic and characterisation falling by the wayside. Told in a long flash-back, Pauline receives a manuscript from the dying writer Fedya, in which he tells the story of their first meeting in 1860 in Wiesbaden. Then, Fedya met Pauline on a train journey from Paris to Moscow, but follows her to the casino in Wiesbaden, to study the effects of gambling on the whole Ostrovsky clan. When Pitard, a gambler and friend of Pauline, steals Fedya’s money, the latter tries to save Pitard from his fate, and gives him the money so he can leave the city. But Pitard loses in the casino and shoots himself. Strangely enough, Fedya, who has fallen in love with Pauline, also becomes addicted to gambling – but telling himself, that he wants to win the money, so that Pauline’s father can pay back his debts to the casino owner Armand, and thus free Pauline from the engagement to the ruthless tycoon. But after some early success, Fedya looses heavily, tries to in vain to pawn a religious medal, which belongs to Pauline; finally, he wants to commit suicide, before he looses consciousness. Recovered, he finishes his novel and Pauline forgives him. In spite of a strong supporting cast including Ethel Barrymore, Melvin Douglas, Agnes Moorehead and Walter Huston, THE GREAT SINNER flopped at the box-office, having cost 20 m Dollar in today’s money, it lost 8 m Dollar. Siodmak, according to Gregory Peck, did not enjoy the responsibility of the big budget production, “he looked like a nervous wreck”.

The_File_on_Thelma_2 copyWith THE FILE ON THELMA JORDON (1949) Siodmak returned to the safe ground of Noir films. Thelma (Barbara Stanwyck) is unhappily married to Tony Laredo (Richard Rober), but is attracted to his animalistic sex-appeal. When she discusses burglaries at her wealthy aunt’s house, where she also lives, with assistant district attorney Cleve Marshall (Wendell Correy), the two fall in love. When the aunt is killed, and a necklace stolen, Thelma is the main suspect, because Tony has been away to Chicago. Thelma is put on trial, and Cleve pays her lawyer and plans the trial strategy with him, even though he has learned about Thelma’s past, and is convinced that she is the murderer. The aunt’s butler has seen a stranger at the crime scene, but did not recognise him. Thelma, who knows that the person is Cleve, does not give his name away. She is aquitted and wants to leave town with Tony, when Cleve confronts them. Tony beats Cleve up and the couple flee, but Thelma causes an accident on purpose, in which both are killed – but not before she has confessed to the murder. In spite of this, Cleve’s career and marriage is ruined. THE FILE ON THELMA JORDON is a neat reversal on Double Indemnity, which also starred Stanwyck as the Queen of all femme fatales. But here, Thelma and Cleve really love each other, and Thelma pays for her crime with her life, and Cleve will be ostracised by society for a long time. Whilst Wilder’s couple was evil from the beginning, Siodmak gives his lovers a much more human touch. THE FILE ON THELMA JORDON was Robert Siodmak’s last American Film Noir. He would later direct two more films, which are in certain ways close to the subgenre; but he would never again achieve the greatness of his American Film Noir cycle, even his directing output would run to another 18 films.

The_Crimson_Pirate_3In the THE CRIMSON PIRATE (1951/2) Siodmak was reunited with Burt Lancaster, who also produced the film. Set in the late 18th century in the Caribbean, Captain Vallo (Lancaster), is a pirate, who tries to make money from selling weapons to the rebels on the island of Cobra, lead by El Libre (Frederick Leicester). On the island, Vallo falls in love with El Libre’s daughter Conseuela (Eva Bartok). Later he has to rescue her father, and support the revolution – even against the wishes of his fellow pirates, who do not see the reason for such a good deed – since it is totally unprofitable! In a stormy finale with tanks, TNT, machine guns and an outstanding colourful airship, our hero, now in drag, wins the revolution and Consulea’s heart. What is most surprising is the humour and lightheartedness of the production. Everything is told tongue-in-cheek, the action scenes are overwhelming and Lancaster (the ex-circus acrobat) dominates the film with his stunts. It seems hardly credible Robert Siodmak, creator of gloom and doom, dark shadows and even darker hearts, would be responsible for such an uplifting and hilarious spectacle, 15 years before Louis Malle’s equally enchanting “Viva Maria!”. Ken Adam, the future “Bond” production designer, earned one of his first credits for this film.

It will never be absolutely clear why Robert Siodmak decided to leave Hollywood after he finished THE CRIMSON PIRATE, to work again in Germany (with a one-film stop in France, so as to repeat his journey of the thirties backwards). In the USA, he was offered a lucrative six-film deal and had shown with his last film, that he could now also handle big productions successfully. There are rumours of pending HUAC hearings, because of his friendship with Charles Spencer Chaplin, but Siodmak himself never mentioned these as a reason for the return to his homeland. Rather like Fritz Lang and Edgar Ulmer, it can only be assumed that “Heimweh” was the reason for Siodmak’s return. True, he lived in Ascona, Switzerland, but he worked nearly exclusively in Germany. What he, and other “Remigrants” did not reckon with, was the political and cultural climate in the Federal Republic of Germany. When these directors had left Germany, the Nazis had just started the transformation of the country. But in the early fifties, the democracy of the country was not chosen, but forced on the population by the Allies. Old Nazis were still in many powerful positions, and the majority of the population still grieved, full of self-pity, about their defeat. The Third Reich, and particularly the Holocaust, were more or less Taboo, both in daily life and in all cultural referenced. The film industry also suffered from the lack of a new beginning; even Veit Harlan, director of Jud Süss, was allowed to restart his career. It is no co-incidence that neither Lang or Ulmer produced anything notable after their return.

The_Devil_Strikes_at_Night_4 copyThe same can be said for Robert Siodmak, with one exception: THE DEVIL STRIKES AT NIGHT (NACHTS WENN DER TEUFEL KAM), which he directed in 1957 was, deservedly, nominated for the “Oscar” as “Best foreign film”. Set during WWII in Hamburg, the film tells the story of the serial killer Bruno Lüdke (Mario Adorf). When caught by inspector Kersten (Claus Holm), the latter’s superior, the Gestapo Officer Rossdorf (Hannes Messmer) points out that another man had already been ‘convicted’: Willi Keun (Wolfgang Peters), a small-time party member, had “been shot whilst escaping” – without informing the population about the murders, since just a monstrous criminal did not fit in with ruling ideology of the Aryan supremacy. Both, police man and Gestapo officer, now have the difficult task to start to convince the authorities that a German serial killer was on the loose for over a decade. Both will be sent to the Eastern front, to cover up the case. The film is based on real events, Bruno Lüdke (1908-1944) was mentally retarded, but may have confessed to more murders than he actually committed – to clear up unsolved murder cases. Siodmak re-creates the atmosphere of his best Noir films: the city is darkened, the image dissolves from an omniscient perspective to a particular one – particularly in the scene where Lüdke is caught in the headlights of a car. Fear and excitement permeate like a black stain throughout. Kesten’s obsession with the case create a fragmented world, where the images seem to splinter. Chaos rules, and nobody seems to be safe: the hunt for Lüdke, which frames the film, is shown like a haunting parable on the destructive nature of the 3rd Reich. Unfortunately, Siodmak fell short of this standard in the other 12 films directed in West Germany between 1955 and 1969.

The_Rough_and_the_Smooth_1In 1959 Siodmak worked in the Elstree-Borehamwood studios, to direct THE ROUGH AND THE SMOOTH, based on the novel by Robin Maugham. Robert Cecil Romer, 2nd Viscount Maugham, nephew of Somerset Maugham, was the enfant terrible of his family. Socialist and self-confessed homosexual, he was a very underrated novelist: The Servant, filmed in 1963 by Joseph Loosey, with Dirk Bogarde in the title role, is one of the classics of British post-WWII cinema. THE ROUGH AND THE SMOOTH shows similarities: Mike Thompson (Tony Britton), an archeologist, is engaged to Margaret (Natasha Parry), the daughter of his boss, who finances his work. Mike feels trapped in a loveless relationship, and falls for Ila Hansen (Nadja Tiller), a young and attractive woman. But she has a secret: not only is she in cahoots with the tough gangster Reg Barker (William Bendix), but there is a third man in her life, who has a hold over her. After Barker commits suicide, driven by Hansen’s demands, the latter tries also to blackmail Mike and Margaret. The ending is quiet original. There are very dark undertones, particularly for the late 50s, when Ila comments: “I don’t cry much, I have been hurt a lot”. THE ROUGH AND THE SMOOTH is a subversive film considering the context of its period. The camera pans over stultified Britain of the last 50s, where there seems to be no middle-ground between boring respectability and outright perversion. When the two worlds collide, the conflict is fought on both sides with grim, violent determination. With THE ROUGH AND THE SMOOTH, Siodmak, would, for the last time, come close to his American Noir films, for which he was called “Prince of the Shadows”: referring not only to the quality of the images, but also to a society, where, to quote Brecht, “we are only aware of the ones in the light, the ones in the shadows, we don’t see”. Robert Siodmak made sure that the ones in the shadows played the major roles in his Films Noir career. Andre Simonoviescz ©

MASTER OF SHADOWS | A RETROSPECTIVE OF ROBERT SIODMAK

Masters of Cinema home video release of CRISS CROSS; Robert Siodmak’s influential film noir masterpiece; to be released on 22 June 2020.

 

 

 

Human Rights Watch Festival 2020 | Now Online


The Human Rights Watch Film Festival is about documentaries and dramas that celebrate courageous people and those affected by Human Rights issues in their countries – which this year include: Armenia, Australia, Bangladesh, Bolivia, China, Guatemala, Germany, Iran, Macedonia, Mexico, Peru, Romania, the United States, and Vietnam. Ten of the 14 films selected for this 24th edition are directed by women.

In this latest online London Edition nine (out of 14) films will be streamed to UK audiences from 22 May until 5 June and each film has a live Q&A webinar discussion scheduled. For anyone wanting to get that festival feeling of watching a film followed immediately by a discussion, the festival has recommended timings to start streaming each film title, details here:

https://ff.hrw.org/london-digital-edition. Otherwise there is also a handy list of the free live Q&A’s here:

https://ff.hrw.org/venueinfo/london-digital-edition

Here are some of this year’s highlights:

Shot entirely on three mobile phones, MIDNIGHT TRAVELER follows the traumatic journey of Afghan filmmaker Hassan Fazili as he and his family escape across Europe from their homeland. It is not their choice to flee, and they are not doing so on economic grounds. Hassan’s life is in danger from the Taliban due to a fatwah.
Indigenous rights come under the spotlight in Claudia Sparrow’s doc MAXIMA which has been a favourite for audiences all over the festival circuit. It tells the story of Máxima Acuña (winner of the 2016 environmental Goldman Prize) a free-spirited and courageous woman who owns a small, remote plot in the Peruvian Highlands near another owned by one the world’s largest gold-mining corporations. The charismatic and indomitable Maxima is determined to preserve the rights of the locals in this stunning natural environment. (not in online selection)
China’s now-defunct ‘one only’ child policy has left millions of single women under immense social pressures to marry quickly, or be rejected by society. This crisis is explored in depth through the lives of three women in Hilla Medalia and Shosh Shlam’s LEFTOVER WOMEN (2019) that won the Best Director and Editing prizes at the Tel Aviv documentary festival DocAviv last year.

When she was 12 years old, the actress and filmmaker Maryam Zaree found out that she was one of many babies born inside Evin, Iran’s notorious political prison; Maryam’s parents were imprisoned shortly after Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in 1979. BORN IN EVIN cuts to the chase with an appealing and lyrical approach that sees Zaree confronting decades of silence in her family to understand the impact of trauma on the bodies and souls of survivors and their children.

As witnesses of the genocide of over 200,000 indigenous people, the Mayan women of Guatemala act as a bridge between the past and present in César Diaz’ Caméra d’Or-winning debut drama, OUR MOTHERS which follows Ernesto, a young forensic anthropologist who is tasked with identifying missing victims of Guatemala’s 36-year civil war. While documenting the account of an elder Mayan woman searching for the remains of her husband, Ernesto believes he might have found a lead that will guide him to his own father, a guerrillero who disappeared during the war. (Not in selection)

Rubaiyat Hossain’s impressive debut drama, MADE IN BANGLADESH, is the final film on Friday, 20 March. Best known for her 2011 film Meherjaan (2011) the director draws on her own life experience as a women’s rights activist, shining a light on the oppressive conditions in the clothing industry through the story of Shimu and her efforts to create a trade union against all odds. The screening will be followed by an in-depth discussion with Rubaiyat Hossain and special guests.

The films are streaming through CURZON HOME CINEMA and the cost is £7.99 for the majority. The Q&As are free.

 

Woman at War (2018) **** Mubi

Dir.: Benedict Erlingsson; Cast: Haldora Geirhardsdottir, Johann Sigurdason, Juan Camillo Roman Estrada; France/Iceland/Ukraine 101 min.

Benedict Erlingsson’s follow-up to Of Horses and Men is an energetic eco-warrior drama that sees a feisty woman taking on the state of Iceland with surprising results. Lead actress Haldora Geirhardsdottir has an athletic schedule, running all over the rugged  countryside, with helicopters and drones circling overhead.

Halla Haldora (Geirhardsdottir) lives a double life: one minute she is a mild-mannered physical therapist and choir leader, the next she’s roaming the countryside, bringing down electricity pylons with a bow and arrow and wire cutters. The only person aware of her war against the multi-nationals’ new technology is Sweinbjorn (Sigurdason), who works for the government and sings in her choir. She gets support from a local farmer, who could be a distant relative, and has a sheep dog called ‘woman’.

But her adventures have more severe repercussions for Juan Camillo (Estrada), who is under suspicion himself for bringing down the pylons. Another running gag in this amusing drama involves three women wearing the Icelandic national costume, who stand at the wayside during Halla’s adventures; a trio of musicians playing drums, the tuba and accordion. Halla’s twin sister Asa, also played by Geirhardsdottir, is a yoga teacher and is about to set off for an ashram in south-east Asia, when Halla gets the news that her adoption application has been granted. As a result four-year old Nika, whose whole family has been wiped out in the Ukraine conflict, is now waiting for Halla to pick her up. But misfortune intervenes.

With a magnificent twist at the end, Woman at War is a stormy but often amusing affair. There are echoes of Aki Kaurismaki, with the dead pan humour taking away some of the tension of the countryside hunt for Halla. And Erlingsson makes a refreshing break from tradition in the super hero genre, by casting a super-fit middle-aged woman in the central role.

Making good use of the stunning country side, DoP Bergsteinn Björgulfsson’s widescreen images and towering panorama shots are truly magnificent, along with the road movie sequences that showcase Iceland’s wild scenery. Perhaps a little too generous on the running time, this feature combines hilarious scenes with a well-structured narrative and a convincing female heroine. AS

FROM FRIDAY, 3 MAY 2019 | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL SACD WINNER 2018

Suddenly, Last Summer (1960) Blu-ray

Director: Joseph Mankiewicz | Script: Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal | Cast: Elizabeth Taylor, Katherine Hepburn, Montgomery Clift, Albert Dekker, Mercedes McCambridge, Gary Raymond, Mavis Villiers | US | 110′

Sam Spiegel was already firing on all cylinders by the time he backed an adaptation of the standout stage play by the great Tennessee Williams, having already made The African Queen, On The Waterfront and Bridge On The River Kwai. It’s therefore no surprise that he was able to command a headliner cast anyone else might give their right arm for, Taylor, Hepburn and Clift.

All was not quite as it seemed though. In 1957, Clift had been involved in a near fatal car crash and had only been saved by Elizabeth Taylor pulling two teeth out of his mouth, preventing him from choking to death. He required extensive facial reconstruction and was also a serious addict to pain killers by the time filming started, however Taylor would only accept the role if her great friend Clift was cast opposite her.

Spiegel understood the draw of Taylor; there was nobody hotter, she having recently completed Giant opposite James Dean, her Oscar nominated Raintree County and Cat On A Hot Tin Roof with Paul Newman, so he passed over his more favoured choice of Brando to keep her onboard.

Liz first met Monty when the studio asked her to accompany him to the 1949 premier of The Heiress in an attempt to assuage growing rumours of his homosexuality, prior to their working together in A Place In The Sun. They hit it off immediately and remained close friends until his untimely death in 1966.

The subject matter for Suddenly, Last Summer was a delicate one and perhaps a difficult sell, if it wasn’t for the star wattage involved in the cast. Mental health might not be the first choice topic for a blockbuster, but the film was a huge success and Taylor was again Oscar nominated alongside Katherine Hepburn. They both lost out to Simone Signoret (for Room At The Top), but Taylor did win a Golden Globe for her performance as a traumatised young woman who cannot remember something truly horrific that she witnessed.

Hepburn plays Violet Venable, her rich, powerful but deeply manipulative aunt, threatening to have her lobotomised to keep her silent about what she witnessed the day Violet’s ‘canonised’ son died. Under extreme duress, it’s down to Monty’s Surgical Doctor Cukrowicz to cure her.

Obviously, Tennessee Williams is no slouch and the story is a good one, tension coming from the personal politics and financial need and greed as much as Catherine’s desperate illness, all topped off with sexual desire. It’s a heady mix and one we are quickly drawn into; Hepburn is sublime as the all-powerful grieving multi-millionaire.

Clift is good too but the role demands less of him and having seen several movies in the Monty canon in short order recently, the transformation to his visage is marked and appears even to have left him partially frozen. Upsetting to see his star power here prematurely on the wane.

But it’s Liz Taylor who tears up the screen. If you haven’t seen a Liz Taylor film for a while, then this is an example of why she was regarded as one of the last true screen legends, nominated for Oscars for four consecutive movie performances. There’s a vulnerability, a truth to her performance and a luminescence to her beauty that comes across in spades, even here in black and white.

Structurally, this is a storyline that may feel overfamiliar to many; even hackneyed, but it is also worth considering that this film was made in 1959 and has had many imitators in the intervening years. At the time, it was busy blazing a trail for what was permissible for the big screen as much as for a new way of performing. One to see perhaps for Kate and Liz then, rather than Monty, but one to see nevertheless. MT

SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER | Blu-ray 

 

Only the Animals (2019) Netflix

Dir.: Dominik Moll; Cast: Damien Bonnard, Bastien Boillon, Laura Calamy, Denis Menochet, Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, Roger ‘Bibesse’ N’drin, France/Germany 2019, 116′.

German born director Dominik Moll has been sadly neglected of late. Best known for his psychological thrillers Harry He’s Here to Help and Lemming and the hilarious News from Planet Mars (which never got a UK release) he came to Venice last year with one of the best features in the Venice Days line-up . Adapted from Colin Niel’s 2014 novel of the same name, this is an intense non-linear study of human behaviour, showing greed and possessiveness as the motivator that drives us all forward in the belief we are in love.

Most of the action takes part in a remote snowbound part of the French Massif Central, but the drama opens in the port city of Abidjan in Ivory Coast. There Armand (N’drin) sets in motion a sort of Ariadne trail, with one woman paying with her life for the sins of others. Armand is a small time grafter who finds photos of Marion (Tereszkiewicz) on the net, setting her up as bait for the French farmer Denis (Menochet), who is married to insurance saleswoman Alice (Calamy).

She has fallen for one of her clients, Joseph, an unstable farmhand in Denis’ employer who has been disturbed by hallucinations since the death of his mother: “I only talk to the animals”, he tells Alice. Meanwhile back in Abidjan, Armand has succeeded in making Denis fall for Marion, extracting the first tranche of the money transfers from the farmer. Armand, who nicknames Marion ‘Armandine’ – even though he has never met her – then invents a precarious story making Denis fall into the trap of wanting to rescue Armandine – whatever the cost. But the real Marion in in a relationship with Evelyne (Tedeschi), who shares a holiday home with her husband Guillaume just down the road from Alice and Denis.

This is a complex plot, intricately put together by Moll and his co-writer Gilles Marchand (who worked with him on Harry). Suffice to say it keeps up absolutely glued to the screen, enthralled by a seductively simmering plot line, Patrick Ghiringhell’s camerawork providing plenty of visual thrills including panoramic images of the magnificent mountain region and the lively African port city. A spine-tingling score of strings primps the moments of tension.

The saying “money makes the world go round”  has never been so true, and in this particular drama it is spot on: internet and money transfers connect every part of the globe. And every character wants a part of the action. Apart from Joseph, who leaves no clues to his disappearance from the scene in this enigmatic mystery thriller. AS

NOW ON NETFLIX
https://youtu.be/5HYJ6CjOzi8

Take Me Somewhere Nice (2019) *** MUBI

Dir: Ewa Sendijarevic | Drama | 91′

In her impressive debut feature, Ewa Sendijarevic takes a fresh and playfully cinematic approach to this semi-autobiographical expression of ‘positive experience of loneliness’ for the average multi-cultural person. To put it more simply, her central character Alma has grown up in Holland from Bosnian parentage and returns there to visit her father for the first time, with the gaze of an alien. Although this theme has been done before, most recently in a radical way by Jonathan Glazer in his mystery thriller Under The Skin, Take Me Somewhere Nice is a much more down to earth affair, enriched by its stunning visual approach and minimal dialogue. Alma is an Alice in Wonderland like character who goes on a Kafkaesque journey to visit her origins. She is accompanied by her cousin and his best friend, both from Bosnia, both unemployed and just as “care free” as Alma herself.

This triangle of characters represents a West-East European power balance between the privileged, and those left behind; the bitter and the opportunistic, the ones who would like to join the West and the ones who actively turn their back to it. This tension between the three bright young things occasionally becomes recklessly sexual, at other times gently attempts to forge a meaningful connection. Each frame completes the brightly coloured jigsaw of Alma’s eventful story, and even when it ventures into darker themes – a road kill incident and beach attack – still feels hopeful and energetic, in contrast to the clichéd portrayals of migrant misery and put-upon womanhood in the beleaguered Balkans.

Sometimes Sendijarevic inverts expectations, making us uncomfortable in a Brechtian way, and more acutely aware of traditional approaches the buzzy subject matter. TAKE ME SOMEWHERE NICE is also a film about using our contact with nature and the animal kingdom to celebrate being alive and being present in our world, wherever we lay our hats. Spirited performances and a lively colour palette make this journey fun and highly watchable. Sendijarevic believes in the Romantic – and laudable – idea that in “the moments we spend alone, preferably in nature, we can connect to our true selves in a spectacular way”. a sentiment that holds true now more that ever. A delightedly inventive and lively first feature. MT

NOW ON MUBI from 21 MAY 2020 | THE SPECIAL JURY AWARD WINNER | ROTTERDAM FILM FESTIVAL 2019 |

 

Heat & Dust (1983) **** Curzon World

Dir.: James Ivory; Cast: Julie Christie, Greta Scacchi, Shashi Kapoor, Christopher Cazenove, Zakir Hussain, Charles McCaughan, Patrick Geoffrey; UK 1983, 132 min. 

Heat and Dust was the twelfth (of twenty-seven) collaborations between director James Ivory, producer Ismail Merchant and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Based on the Booker Prize winning novel, the screen adaptation is a break with the social realism of the trio’s earlier features such as Shakespeare Wallah (1965). Its visual opulence made it by far their most successful feature at the box office to date.

Heat and Dust is a lush evocation of the sensuous beauty of India, sashaying between the 1920s and the 1980s in an epic of self-discovery, starring Julie Christie, Shashi Kapoor, and Greta Scacchi in her breakthrough role, with a strong supporting cast

When BBC researcher Anne (Christie) inherits the writings of her great aunt Olivia in 1982, she travels to India to find out more about the ‘scandal’ Olivia caused in 1923. The narrative tells the parallel story of both women. Olivia was married to the naïve and conventional Colonial Civil Servant Douglas Rivers (Cazenove), who had no clue about Olivia’s emotions. Bored by the stifling narrow-mindedness of the ex-patriate community, Olivia soon meets the sophisticated maverick Nawab (Kapoor) who, in his role as Viceroy, runs his private army, often indulging in violence on a grand scale. Olivia falls in love with him, but when she gets pregnant, decides on an abortion for fear of the obvious repercussions. Running away from the British hospital and the reactionary Chief Medical officer (Geoffrey) after the botched surgery, she flees to Kapoor, spending the last years of her life in a villa in the mountains where Kapoor, now deposed by the British, rarely visits her.

Anne traces Olivia’s steps, meeting on her way a young boisterous American would-be-monk (McCaughan), who is only interested in sleeping with her. But his body cannot cope with the foreign lifestyle and diet: Anne puts him into a train back to the USA. In her rooming house, she falls in love with Indor Lai (Hussain), her landlord. She too becomes pregnant, wanting to abort the baby at first, but changing her mind and planning to give birth in a hospital, near the villa, where Olivia lives out her lonely days.

Very much influenced by the writing of E.M. Forster – whose novels would be filmed later by Merchant/Ivory/Jhabvala – Heat and Dust is a not so nostalgic look back to the days of the Raj, carried by the spirited Scacchi, who injects a feeling of joie de vivre to the role, growing increasingly melancholy. The 1980s segments are comparably less remarkable. But the feature belongs to DoP Walter Lassally, who not only shot the New English Cinema (A Taste of Honey, Tom Jones) but also won an Oscar for Zorba the Greek. The languid but vivid images of British rule in India would go on to inspire a generation of cinematographers, taking their cue from Walter Lassally. Heat and Dust, whilst not as stunning as the more mature Howards End, is nevertheless a trend setter: The legendary David Lean finished his career with the Forster adaption Passage to India in 1984. AS

NOW ON CURZON WORLD AS PART OF THE James Ivory series. 

      

Curtiz (2019) *** NETFLIX

Dir.: Tamas Yvan Topolanzky; Cast: Ferenc Lengyel, Evelin Dobos, Andrew Hefler, Scott Alexander Young, Declan Hannigan, Nicolett Barabas, Caroline Boulton, Christopher Krieg; Hungary 2018, 98 min.

The shooting of Casablanca, one of the most iconic Hollywood features, is the centrepiece of this ambitious debut drama from Swiss-Hungarian writer/director Tamas Yvan Topolanzky. The result is not a disaster, but underwhelming: Curtiz will be best remembered for making us want to see the 1942 classic again, and with new eyes. The film also explores the troubled relationship between Curtiz and his daughter, which was never resolved (according to the final credits).

Born in Budapest in 1886 as Mano Kaminer, Michael Curtiz arrived in Hollywood in 1926 and would direct a string of masterpieces: The Adventures of Robin Hood and Mildred Pierce being the most outstanding in a career that would showcase his talents across the genres, with 177 feature films. Casablanca, for which he won his only Oscar, was bedevilled from the very beginning. Studio boss Jack L. Warner (Hefler) and producer Hal B. Wallis (Young) had a fight on their hands to keep Curtiz and Johnson (Hannigan), the censorship head, from tearing each other’s heads off. Curtiz was a mixture of fellow Austro-Hungarian directors Erich von Stroheim and Otto Preminger. But Warner was a bottom line man (“I don’t want it great. I want it Tuesday”), and the spiralling production budget made him concerned that Bogart and Bergman would walk away – they were critical of the  script. Curtiz (“Don’t talk to me when I am interrupting) was a well known womaniser and but his grasp of English led to some hilarious misunderstandings during the making of Casablanca: there is an amusing interlude when the prop master misinterprets Curtiz’ request for ‘puddles’ during the rainy scene at the Gare de Lyon, bringing five poodles on the set, amid much consternation. But the joke was on Curtiz who also had a long running argument with actor Conrad Veidt (Krieg), a German emigrant who often cast as a Nazi; but vehemently insisting that not all Germans were Nazis, a fair point.

The director flagrantly cheated on his third wife Bess Meredyth (Barabas), an accomplished actor and writer, seducing young women, by using his director star power. The arrival of his daughter Kitty (Dobos), from an earlier marriage in Hungary, made things even more complicated. In a very ugly scene, we see see Wallis trying to rape Kitty, unaware she is Curtiz’ daughter. The director (“Magic happens on the casting couch”) was also disinclined to help his sister leave a Hungarian ghetto. She and her family were eventually deported to Auschwitz, she was the only survivor. Finally, we come to the end of shooting, when the small cardboard plane, which will carry Elsa and Laszlo to the USA, is half hidden in fog and surrounded by Lilliputian soldiers, to make it look bigger.

Curtiz is stylishly shot by DoP Zoltan Devenyi, his roving camera often mimicking the style of Christian Matras in La Ronde: the re-imagining of the original black-and-white photography is stunning, although the crane and circular rotation shots are overdone. This is a film where the aesthetics beat out a script clinging to the sensational, and parlously uncritical of any sexism. AS

NOW ON NETFLIX

 

   

The Lunchbox (2013) – BBC iplayer – Tribute to Irrfan Khan

Director: Ritesh Batra Irrfan Khan, Nimrat Kaur, Nawazuddin Siddiqui 104min  India   Drama

Ritesh Batra’s debut feature is a feelgood riff on the classic bored housewife theme and runs along the lines of an exotic version of The Go-Between.  In Mumbai, the well known ‘dabba’ or lunchbox courier system is legendary for its reliability. But a punka walla’s mistake results in a sweet-hearted romance that springs up when a lonely wife (Nimrat Kaur) midday meal for her husband ends up on another man’s desk. Exploring a range of nuanced emotions, Batra’s elegantly-paced and often humorous narrative unfolds at  leisure; suffused with charm and well-observed detail of its contemporary Indian setting.  The Lunchbox showcases some of India’s finest contemporary acting talent in delightful performances from Irrfan Khan (Life of Pi) and Nawazuddin Siddiqui (Gangs of Wasseypur) – not to mention a luminous newcomer Nimrat Kaur.

NOW ON BBC IPLAYER | IN TRIBUTE TO IFFAN KHAN (1967-2020)

1917 (2019) ***** Mubi

Dir: Sam Mendes | George Schofield, Dean-Charles Chapman, Andrew Scott, Mark Strong, Benedict Cumberbatch | UK War epic, 118′

This exhilarating epic allows us to experience the terrors and triumphs of the First World War at first hand as we follow two young soldiers tasked with taking vital dispatch across enemy lines in France in April, 1917.

The green pastures of spring scattered with snowy cherry blossoms never looked so welcoming as they did during those final months of conflict. Scenes of hellish devastation are in brutal contrast to this rural idyll and make 1917 an exquisitely poignant memoir to the pity of war. Sam Mendes’ single-shot action thriller is audacious and deeply affecting adding another poignant chapter to the combat cannon. Working with young screenwriter Kyrsty Wilson-Cairns, the film’s structural flaws are eventually overcome by the sheer magnificence of this worthwhile tribute to the many who lost their lives defending liberty.

Dedicated to Mendes’ great-grandfather, 1917 also serves as a emotional touchstone for those of us who lost family in the conflict. Boyish young men who blithely volunteered to serve their country, but who never returned from the carnage, losing their lives, their innocence and hope in the hostilities. 1917 also gives the crew a chance to show off some technical brilliance – Roger Deakins’ agile camerawork is one of the most gratifying aspects of this saga, ambitious in scale but intimate in its simple premise: a race against time and in hostile terrain to deliver a life-saving letter.

In a glittering cast, the two leads in question, George Mackay plays lance corporal Schofield and Chapman a lance corporal Blake, don’t initially inspire our confidence. But as the narrative gets underway, Schofield triumphs as a naive and rather aimless soldier whose courageous qualities eventually come to the surface when the going gets tough. The two are given an almost fatal mission by Colin Firth’s heavyweight General Erinore. To cross the trenches via No Man’s Land into purportedly vacated enemy territory, and personally serve a hand-written letter that will stop 1600 soldiers charging to their untimely deaths. The kicker is that Blake’s brother is in the regiment concerned, and so he has a vested interest in his perilous mission.

George MacKay really looks the part: he could be your own great grandfather or uncle. It’s a demanding role: mentally and physically, but he rises to the occasion that tests his acting skills to the limit. And by the end we’re behind him and invested in his journey and the extraordinary and unexpected challenges that are thrown his way. The pacing is breathless, occasionally relieved by more upbeat scenes: at one point Schofield meets an almost happy go lucky regiment who play a vital part in the grand finale. This gives Mendes a chance to enrich his drama with textural and cultural references and convincing characters, even adding flinty humour.

Expertly edited by Lee Smith, this surreal reverie glides along seamlessly the occasional bout of brutal violence tempered by tender moments that introduce a civilian dimension of the conflict – we see Schofield comforting a young French woman and her tiny baby giving them milk from recently slaughtered cows. And although the war is full of horror and hostility, 1917 highlights the intensity of the feel good factor: the kindness of strangers and the goodness of mankind. MT

ON MUBI

 

 

A Paris Education | Mes Provinciales (2018) **** DVD

Dir.: Jean-Paul Civeyrac; Cast: Andranic Manet, Diane Rouxel, Jenna Thiam, Gonzague van Bervesseles, Corentin Fila, Valentine Catzeflis, Sophie Verbeck, Christine Brucher, Gregori Manoukov; France 2018, 137 min.

Jean-Paul Civeyrac’s passionate cocktail of Sex, cinema and politics is a seductive distillation of what it means to be French. Based on the novel Lettres Provinciales by Blaise Pascal, it follows the adventures of Etienne who arrived from Lyons to study filmmaking in Paris, Saint-Denis, leaving his family and friend Lucie (Rouxel) behind. Shot in ravishing black-and-white by Pierre-Hubert Martin, A Paris Education feels very much like La Maman et la Putain by Eustache, transported into contemporary times.

Etienne (Manet) is a shy, immature young man – and extremely naïve – he’s looking for a mother/father figure. Shacking up with a new flat mate Valentina (Thiam), he soon falls under the spell of the enigmatic Mathias (Fila), a fellow student and troubled provocateur who would rather criticise than actually put himself out there and make a film. Then there is Jean-Noel (Bervesseles), who is just the opposite: caring and balanced – Etienne’s two new friends could not be more different. Yet he seems to be more passionate about Mathias than anybody else – even though he hardly knows him. Meanwhile Valentina moves to Berlin and is replaced by fierce eco-warrior Annabelle (Verbeck). Etienne tries to get close to this vulnerable woman but she falls for Mathias, until his violent outbursts jeopardise their love, Mathias turning his aggression on himself; Etienne has lost both his friends – and he is literally picked up by Barbara (Catzeflis), who was only briefly introduced to him by Annabelle in the flat.

Etienne appears vulnerable but he is primarily a non-committal, both in love and work. He sails through the film like a ship without a flag: his only constant concern is to make films, people come second in every way – with the exception of Mathias. Even his relationship with his parents (Brucher/Manoukov) is far from straightforward. When they visit him in Paris he seems embarrassed and aloof. The endless discussions with his friends and co-students seem to be a way to avoid growing up, and also full-time work. In a sad epilogue, we see him gradually withdraw from Barbara: how can he commit when he only loves himself.

Music plays a central part in this affecting drama; editor Louise Narboni has worked in opera, and Bach and Mahler dominate (particularly his 5th symphony that scored Death in Venice), and underline how marginalised Etienne has become since leaving provincial life made him a big fish in small bowl.  In Paris his lack of real identity and commitment turn him into Musil’s titular hero in A Man without Attributes. A Paris Education is a tour-de-force of art and psychology, and for once, the running time of over two hours is appropriate. AS

NOW ON DVD FROM 11 MAY 2020  

Eve (Eva) (1962) **** Prime

Dir.: Joseph Losey; Cast: Jeanne Moreau, Stanley Baker, Virna Lisi, Giorgio Albertazzi; France/Italy 1962, 116′.

Jean-Luc Godard was originally slated to film this classic paperback hit from James Hadley Chase, whose novels provided rich dramatic pickings for the big screen (around 50 were filmed). The Franco-Swiss director wanted Richard Burton as his leading man, but it was another Welsh actor, Stanley Baker, who finally stepped up to the plate and his choice of helmer was Joseph Losey. And it was a memorable one.

Stanley Baker had already triumphed as a saturnine but alluring tough guy in Losey’s Blind Date (1959) and The Criminal (1960) the two developing a well-oiled working relationship, so Baker had no problem selling him to the producers, Raymond and Robert Hakim. Jeanne Moreau manages to tease out Baker’s raw romantic credentials in the stylish thriller, but Chase’s pulp fiction style sat uneasily with Losey and his two scriptwriters Hugo Butler and Evan Jones – Losey eventually falling out with his long term friend Jones, who had also been a victim of the HUAC witch hunt. The result was a critical and financial disaster – but has stood the test of time, Eva now being one of the cornerstones of Losey’s oeuvre – and also his personal favourite.

Eva begins with a prologue: Jeanne Moreau sailing by on a water taxi in a wintry Venice. A mournful trumpet prepares us for the gloomy outcome. The credits roll and we see Eva approaching Harry’s bar, where Tyvian Jones (Baker) holds court, telling the story of his brother, a Welsh miner (like himself). He is accosted by Branco (Albertazzi), the producer of the film adaptation of Tyvian’s novel: it is the second anniversary of the suicide of Tyvian’s Italian wife Francesca (Lisi), whom Branco loved.

Cut to Venice Film Festival two years previously, when Tyvian is seen water-skiing, as Eva looks on. Francesca is madly in love with her Welshman fiance, who is too busy to celebrate the success of the film version of his novel. A rainstorm brings Eva into Tyvian’s life: she and her client force entry into into the writer’s rented hideaway on the island of Torcello. Eva makes herself at home in the bedroom – to Billy Hollidays’ Willow, Weep for Me – and later takes a bath. When Tyvian enters she shrugs her shoulders nonchalantly, ignoring him. The writer throws out the client, thus entering a relationship which will destroy him – even though Eva tells him she is only in it for the money. But after Tyvian remarks: “let’s see, what you can do”, she knocks him out with a huge glass ashtray.

Tyvian is already engaged to the charming Francesca (a delicate Virna Lisi) but he becomes mesmerised by Moreau’s Eva who slowly ensnares him – it’s a magical performance from Moreau but Baker is equally enthralling. The Hakim Brothers cut the 155-minute version, and withdrew the feature from Venice Film Festival. A later cut shredded even more of the storyline, leaving just a 100-minute feature at the premiere in 1963.

How much Losey himself was involved is still a question. But there is much to admire: Michel Legrand’s jazzy score, andparticularly DoP Gianni Di Vinanzo’s sparkling black-and-white images of Venice and Rome. There are also intricate interior shots, using the mirrors in Eva’s apartment to show the compelling interplay between the lovers. In The Servant, Losey’s next feature, it was James Fox’s turn to be caught in the mirrors of his supercilious superiority. The only difference between the two films is that Robin Maugham’s book and Harold Pinter’s script for The Servant were far superior to the Chase/Butler-Jones version of Eve. When all is said and done, Losey’s original film far outstrips Benoit Jacquot’s 2018 remake, and not even Isabelle Huppert can save that pale rider. MT

ON PRIME VIDEO

 

 

 

 

 

Sátántangó (1991/3) Bfi Player

Dir.: Bela Tarr; Cast: Mihaly Vig, Istvan Horvath, Erika Bök, Peter Berling, Miklos B. Szekely, Laszlo Fe Lugossy, Eva Almassi Albert, Alfred Jaray, Erzsebet Gaal, Janos Derzsi, Iren Szajki; Hungary/Germany/Switzerland 1991/93, 450′.

Based on the novel 1985 by co-writer Laszlo Krasnahorkai, Bela Tarr’s collaborator in his final five feature films, Sátántangó is a human tragedy that deals with time, memory and melancholy, delving into the final years of Communism in a Hungarian village, where everyone plays a part in their collective fate.

Filmed in long tracking shots, the opening sequence – an eight minute take of cows ruminating in the grounds of a decaying estate – is symbolic for what is to follow. Told in two parts with six episodes each, Santantango uses tango steps for the retrogressive dance sequences as the story unfolds. The work of Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard clearly springs to mind, but Tarr/Krasmahorkai add an extra dimension of absolute stasis that contrasts with the characters’ overriding desire to escape their fate from the outset.

The story begins in 1990s Hungary where life has come to a standstill for a group of farmers waiting for their collective farm to be shut down. Their plan is to move to a new location. But socially things are looking bleak: Futaki (Szekely) is having an affair with Mrs. Schmidt (Albert); Mr. Schmidt (Lugossy) is trying to steal the money the villagers have put aside for their escape plan. Futaki demands to be part of the scheme. All this goes on under the beady eye of a drunk Doctor (Berling) who  chronicles the unfolding narrative.

However, the master plan is abandoned when the villagers discover that Irimias (Vig) and his manipulative co-conspirator Petrina (Horvath) have returned. The two have struck a deal with the police captain to spy on the villagers. The doctor has run out of brandy, and after replenishing his supplies, he meets the young Estike (Bök), who asks him desperately for help. But the doctor passes out in the wood. The morning before, Estika had been tricked into planting a ‘money tree’ by her brother in the nearby wasteland. Estike tortures and poisons her cat to show she has some form of control over her life, but she soon loses the plot, like many others who are seen dancing in the pub.

But Estike has a shred of humanity, and is overcome by grief after her cruelty to the cat. She asks the doctor to save her pet, but this episode ends in tragedy. Meanwhile Irimias then turns his efforts to convincing the villagers to hand over the escape money. But he also has another dastardly plan up his sleeve. And the story ends with the doctor returning to the abandoned farm, unaware he is alone. On hearing the church bells ringing and a madman shouting: “the Turks are coming”, the doctor nails his windows shut and starts the narration from its beginning.

Gabor Medvigy’s intimate camera encircles the characters with long panning shots and cold-blooded close-ups, leaving nothing to the imagination. Tarr shows us that there are three cinematic worlds to escape into: the one of beauty, the ugly one and the empty one. Beauty belongs to the works of Tarkovsky; Ozu’s films meditate the void, and the early works of Antonioni portray ugliness.

Dedicating a whole day to watch Satantango is to immerse yourself in a world of visual wonder. It’s not that there is so much to tell, but because there is so much to understand. Neo-Realism revolutionised the world of cinema by allowing the audience to participate, and take part in the composition. Neo-Realism is only effective if the audience can watch the film from the inside. If today’s films want to be meaningful they need to focus on the strength of the script, rather than degenerating into attention-grabbing digital trickery.

Satantango offers a chance to immerse ourselves completely in a point in time, and be a part of the story. Watch and submerge yourself in the reality of this remarkable story-telling – and join the world of sense and sensibility. AS

NOW AVAILABLE ON BFI Player | Also on Bluray     

                         

A Russian Youth (2019) *** on Mubi

Wri/Dir: Alexander Zolotukhin, Russian, 72 min | with: Vladimir Korolev, Mikhail Buturlov, Artem Leshik, Danil Tyabin, Sergey Goncharenko, Filipp Dyachkov

A poetic and lyrical First World War trench memoir set to a live orchestra playing Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 Op. 30 (1909) and Symphonic Dances Op. 45 (1940).

A Russian Youth sees its freckled hero blithely setting out for the ‘Great War’. But the pastural romance of the early scenes soon gives way to the terrors of trench warfare. Our vulnerable hero loses his accordion, and then his sight. But his keenness to continue the battle keeps him at the front and deployed to listen out for enemy planes at the giant metal pipes that form a kind of early-warning system. Talk about using the difficulty!

Capturing the evocative poignance of Wilfrid Owen’s poetry, especially his keen ear for sound and his instinct for the modulating of rhythm, this small gem certainly conveys the “pity of war”. Its faded images transport us back to the greatest tragedy of the early 20th century: life would never be the same again. But there’s also a stylised, abstract quality to the grainy sepia-tinted footage. The camera follows the febrile action with an atmospheric, jerky quality, so reminiscent of the age. Cutting away frequently from the action slightly spoils the narrative flow of this delicate fragment of yesteryear, re-ignited by contemporary relevance. MT

NOW ON MUBI

Ema (2019) ** Curzon World

Cast: Mariana Di Girolamo, Gael Garcia Bernal, Paola Giannini, Santiago Cabrera, Cristian Suarez, Catalina Saavedra

Director: Pablo Larrain | Drama Chile 102’

Music is the only star of Pablo Larrain’s story of parental irresponsibility that unfolds amidst the cool vibes of seaside Valparaiso. This South American idyll is also home to the pumping sounds of the reggaetón dance world that is only authentic element of this glib story. 

Back in the present after his lush 1960s drama Jackie, Larrain casts newcomer Mariana Di Girolamo and a reliable Gael Garcia Bernal as a couple who clash due to their immaturity and lack of life experience when juggling their artistic collaboration with a desire to have a child.

Taking on such an emotive theme exposes Larrain’s ineptitude in handling the delicate subject matter, and questions whether he has personally been affected by the issues involved – clearly not, otherwise he would have have given it more thoughtful treatment.  And although he brings his edgy cinematic talents to the party, the experiment fails. Ema is a drama that is neither engaging nor convincingly performed, even Gael Garcia Bernal cannot inject any depth to his character, apart from his incendiary outburst at Ema and her dancing troupe.

After a dynamic opening sequence featuring a massive fire at a traffic lights junctions, the film scatterguns into a series of stilted episodes as Larrain attempts to establish the storyline using the rhythm of his pulsating score as the driving factor. It’s a clever idea that fails in a drama that never gains a satisfying momentum.

Ema (Di Girolamo) is a bleached blond dancer in her early twenties who has recently adopted a 7 year old orphan from Columbia, named Polo (Cristian Suarez), because her choreographer husband Gaston (Bernal) has been declared infertile. Coming from a troubled start in life Polo soon becomes too much of a handful for his naive parents and sets their home on fire, leaving Ema’s sister with facial injuries.

So back Polo goes into the system, Ema and Gaston bemoaning their loss as if the boy was a psychopathic pet rabbit, with Ema blithely declaring she’ll ‘pick another one’, laying the blame squarely at Gaston’s feet. Gaston is the less irritating of the two but even his star-power fails to makes this rewarding or meaningful, remaining cold and distant throughout. And the visually arresting dance sequences and pumping vibes just feel incongruous, somehow reducing this to a trivial soap opera, rather than offering tonal relief from the couple’s fraught situation. A simpering social worker (Catalina Saavedra) who had pulled strings to get the couple a child, just adds to the woeful mistreatment. Is this an inditement on Chilean youth, a lowkey expose on the perils of adoption, or a novel way of raising awareness of reggaeton, either way, it does feel mildly offensive. Larrain’s co-writer Guillermo Calderon did some brilliant work on The Club and Neruda so hopefully this is just a bum note for this duo. MT

NOW ON DIGITAL RELEASE | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL Review 2019 

Scandinavian Silence (2019) ****

Dir: Martti Helde | Cast: Rea Lest, Reimo Sagor

The life of three siblings is told by each of them in this stylish Scandinavian thriller from Estonian director Martti Helde 

Martti Helde was feted for In the Crosswind his experimental wartime feature debut back in 2014. This stylishly frosty foray into family territory is more intimate in focus despite its striking widescreen visuals and tells the story of siblings struck dumb by violent circumstances.

Essentially a two-hander that plays out in three parts, Scandinavian Silence muses over themes of false memory and subjective interpretation in an enigmatic film that is ultimately more visually arresting than entirely satisfying in its storytelling, leaving us with more questions than answers. But it certainly captivates and conjures up a Tarkovskian sense of resonance through expert camerawork from Sten-Johan Lill and Erik Pllumaa creating an arresting sense of place.

In a freezing forest landscape Tom (Reimo Sagor) joins his sister Jenna (Rea Lest) in a drive that is a one-sided monologue, Tom expressing his feelings of regret, confusion and self-doubt about a troubling family set-to that left him in prison and his sister Jenna exposed to their father’s abuse. Then back at the same starting point, Jenna gives her sides of the story while Tom keeps his powder dry at a table in a roadside cafe. And what emerges is a different take on the situation, Jenna partially exonerating Tom for his acute feelings of guilt. This diatribe is punctuated by a strange encounter with an older couple adding an unsettling vibe to the proceedings that resonates with their dysfunctional homelife.

The third section of the trilogy is like a silent film of what has gone before, neither Tom nor Jenna speaking, it relies entirely on body language, suggestive expressions and eye contact culminating in a surprising finale that somehow leaves us wanting given the weight of expectancy with what has gone before.

Style over substance this may be but Helde certainly creates an arresting piece of cinema that offers much food for thought in the frozen wastelands of the mind, where less can often mean more. MT

https://vimeo.com/314322683

The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse | Die tausend Augen des Dr. Mabuse (1960) ***

Dir.: Fritz Lang; Cast: Peter van Eyck, Dawn Addams, Gert Fröbe, Werner Peters, Wolfgang Preiss, Lupo Prezzo, Reinhard Kolldehoff; Germany/Italy/France 1960, 103 min.

Fritz Lang (1890-1976) goes back to the beginning with his final output: The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse: there is the re-emigrant Lang, making his last of three films in West Germany, finishing his career with completing the Mabuse trilogy that started with Mabuse the Gambler (1922) and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1932). Joining fellow Hollywood re-emigrant Peter Van Eyck, Lang concentrated on the Nazi spirit of evil, still virulent in West Germany, and his favourite topic: machines versus humans. Based on the novel by Polish author Jan Fethke and using the Mabuse character created by Norbert Jacques, The Thousand Eyes is a melancholic good-bye from one of 20th century’s greatest directors, who had forged his career in the early days of silent film.

Having promised his radio station an impressive scoop, a reporter is murdered in his car. Meanwhile in the Hotel Luxor, where the Nazis used spy on the clientele with hidden microphones, wealthy American Henry Travers (Van Eyck) saves the live of fellow guest Marion Menil (Addams) not once but twice: he saves her from committing suicide, then kills her club-footed husband Roberto (Kolldehoff) with a single shot. A voyeur is in control of the hotel, watching every room via TV: the new Mabuse is after Travers’ nuclear plans to dominate the world. But detective Kras (Fröbe) is puzzled by the identity of the evil genius: is it the ubiquitous salesman Hironymos B. Mistelzweig (Peters); the blind clairvoyant Cornelius (Prezzo), or the enigmatic Professor Jordan (Preiss)?

The Thousand Eyes is a feature of double mirrors: every scene is connected to the previous one. Each take is followed by something “directed” by the evil genius. As in Metropolis, the story is one of triumph and destruction of a machine come alive. This Mabuse is the very much in the spirit of the 1932 feature: Hitler using technology first to conquer Germany, then the world. But this Mabuse is more creative than ever: he makes friends, divulging his secrets to them, only to destroy them when they are no longer of use. He is subversive, hoping to change the power structure from within.

Sadly DoP Karl Löb’s black-and-white images lack elegance and fluidity, short-changing the feature along with the German cast who are anything but enigmatic or unfathomable: they were the same actors who played clichéd characters in the UFA re-makes of the era – at a time when the Nouvelle Vague in neighbouring France was re-inventing cinema. So we often get second-hand emotions, and bemusement instead of real angst. That Lang’s last feature is still by far the most interesting of the era in West Germany’s post WWII film history speaks for itself – the era was  dominated by caricature thrillers based on the work of British author Edgar Wallace, who met deadlines by dictated his books from London phone boxes. No fewer than six Mabuse ‘thrillers’ were produced in the next decade in Germany, Lang was eventually forced to retire after his eye-sight worsened. AS    

ON BLU-RAY FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THE UK ON 11 MAY 2020

               

Tchaikovsky and the Music Lovers (1970) **** Blu-ray

Dir.: Ken Russell; Cast: Richard Chamberlain, Glenda Jackson, Max Adrian, Christopher Gable, Kenneth Colley, Izabella Telezynska, Sabina Maydelle; UK 1970, 122 min.

Blending the crass with the ethereal as was his wont Ken Russell billed his portrait of Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) as “a romance about a homosexual married to a nymphomaniac”. Riding high on his success with Women in Love, United Artists allowed a lavish budget for The Music Lovers, and it was completed in the same year as Russell’s Richard Strauss biopic Dance of the seven Veils for the BBC.

As a director of sober BBC biopics and large screen escapism, Russell was having a field day. Dance of the Seven Veils was only aired once until recently, after the Strauss family forbade any music by Richard Strauss to be played in the feature because they misinterpreted the composer being shown as a staunch Nazi, which the archive material shows quite clearly. The Music Lovers, on the other hand, is aesthetically much closer Russell’s Mahler portrait of 1974. Based on the letters between Tchaikovsky (Chamberlain) and his benefactor Madame Nadezhda von Meck (Telezynska), edited by Catherine Drinker Bowen and Barbara von Meck, Melvyn Bragg’s script has operatic proportions but uses dialogue very sparsely, leaving the music to stand for itself.

In a romantic setting, we meet the composer first with his lover Count Chiluvsky (Gable). But homosexuality was illegal in Czarist Russia, and at the conservatoire, fellow composers including Rubinstein (Adrian) had started gossiping. Tchaikovsky takes an aggressive, and as it turned out, not too wise approach to the dilemma: he marries the over-sexed and rather fragile Antonina Miliukova (Jackson). The marriage ends in disaster with Antonina becoming more and more unhinged, finally ending up in a psychiatric ward. Tchaikovsky dearly loves his family, brother Modest (Colley) and favourite sister Sasha (Maydelle), he also has a horrible memory of his beloved mother’s death, which will, in the end, mirror his own. He transfers all his attentions to Madame von Meck, who lives in Switzerland. On her estate, the composer rests for long periods of time, whilst von Meck travels in Europe. In reality the two never met, but in the feature von Meck watches the sleeping composer. The episodic character of the narrative, combining Tchaikovsky’s music and psychological estate, as it does in the 1812 Overture, is less jarring than in later features such as Lisztomania.

With much help from the great Douglas Slocombe (Rollerball, Hedda) and his sweepingly romantic images, The Music Lovers just stays on the right side of the line between opulent drama and over-the-top showmanship. Chamberlain and Jackson are outstanding in their turbulent train crash of a the newly married couple paired with Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, and this is the highlight of Russell’s stylistic achievement. AS

NOW ON BLU-RAY

 

Bartok (1964) ***** Russell and the Music Makers

Dir.: Ken Russell; Cast: Boris Ranevsky, Pauline Boty, Sandor Eles, Peter Brett, Rosalind Watkins, Huw Wheldon (narrator); UK  1964, 50 min. (For BBC ‘Monitor’)

Ken Russell’s first feature film French Dressing (a re-make of a Roger Vadim And God Created Woman) in 1964 was a critical and financial disaster. So back he went to the BBC’s Monitor/Omnibus, a long-running Arts magazine series, that would spawn a host of black and white musical biopics including a triumphant study of Elgar (1962) and an innovative look at the Hungarian composer. Bela Bartok (1881-1945). When Russell returned to feature films in 1967 with the Len Deighton adaption of A Billion Dollar Brain, the result was, sadly, similar to his 1964 outing. But you could never accuse him of being banal.

There are many parallels between Bartok and Elgar, mainly their love of the countryside, which is reflected in their music. But Bartok (like his music) was a much less straightforward character than the rather robust Victorian Elgar: he was downbeat, full of angst and loss, suffering an eventual exile, which robbed him of his beloved Hungarian countryside.

We start with a reflexion on The Miraculous Mandarin, influenced by Stravinsky and Schoenberg. But there are also undertones of Debussy, who was one of his great admirers. Russell’s narrative is darkly erotic – the ballet features a girl who is led by men to seduce clients making love to them until death. Then there is a young sex worker (Boty) whose engagement with a client (Eles), is interrupted by her pimps. They rob him, let him escape, but again catch up with him, beating him up again. The rather violent sex (and misogyny) united Bartok and the Russell of his later films. The same goes for the one act Opera Bluebird’s Castle, where we follow Bluebird (Brett) and his latest wife Judith (Watkins). She does not want any secrets between them and pays with her life, when the last chamber is opened she gets a good glimpse of the bodies of his previous wives.

Huw Wheldon was much more than just the narrator of Bartok – he had been made Controller of BBC One. As such he wielded enormous power, and (again) refused any re-construction (docu-drama) of real events. Bartok begins with the composer (Ranevsky) as an old man, according to Wheldon’s commentary, in poor health and fighting his demons. But overall “Bartok struggled all his life to maintain his privacy, he was an alien in an alien world”. This condition found its way into his music, a theme Russell graphically conveys into images: Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta is underlined by Bartok’s near paranoid loneliness. Showing his isolation, claustrophobia, later repeated on a crowded escalator: a permanent descent into the nadir.

Bartok’s fragility is understandable, given the state of Hungary: after growing nationalism the First World War brought Hungary independence from the hated House of Habsburg; but what followed was the chaos of the Räte Republic and immediately afterwards the semi-fascist rule by Admiral Horthy. The latter lasted until the end of WWII, and Bartok forbade his work to be performed in Germany and Italy, even though he needed the royalties. He did well to escape to the USA with his second wife in 1940. Wheldon describes his music for Divertimento for String Orchestra from 1939 as a “statement of grief.” Later Bartok wrote in one his letters: “What an elemental disease home sickness is, how overwhelming. What a strict law lies here, not likely to be disturbed. Hungary had never meant more to anybody.”

Bartok had always fought the Germanic influence in Hungary’s cultural life. He, like Elgar, fled the big city and ventured out into the countryside. “Whenever possible, he got away into the plains and villages of Hungary, living with the peasants and sharing their life. He conducted a systematic investigation of the whole peasant music tradition of Hungary.”                              

Another emigrant, Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov put it like this: “I discovered in nature the non-egalitarian delights that I thought in art. Both were forms of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.” But there was a lot of darkness in Bartok and his music, and this nocturnal quality is reflected in the vivid images. Quoting Wheldon again we learn “that nocturnal themes, famous now as Bartok’s Night Music, turn up quite explicitly, again and again, over the the whole of his output.” This goes particularly for Bartok’s final composition Concerto for Orchestra. A mourning song text, that he had collected in 1913 seems perfectly related to the music: “Oh you black and woeful earth!/Who ever gets inside you/Nevermore comes back gain/Many people have you swallowed/Yet you haven’t had your fill.” Written by a man, who found life in New York (in spite of a teaching post at Columbia) a brutal experience.

Russell and DoP Charles Parnall navigate their way though loss, grief and anguish, bringing out the fate of Bartok in poetic sequences, using his music to underline the complexity of his compositions. The overall tone is always reflects the thematic darkness: the destruction of total war. Like the last words in Bluebird’s Castle: “Henceforth, there shall be darkness, darkness, darkness.”  AS

BARTOK ON THE BBC MONITOR SERIES 1964 | MONITOR

   

 

Becky Sharp (1935) Blu-ray release

Dir Rouben Mamoulian | Cast: Miriam Hopkins, Frances Dee, Cedric Hardwicke, Billie Burke | US Drama 84’

The first feature film shot entirely in the newly perfected Technicolor process, Becky Sharp – which had cost an estimated $950,000 – was dismissed at the time by Otis Ferguson as “As pleasing to the eye as a fresh fruit sundae, but not much more”. Unlike The Jazz Singer – which had blazed an equivalent technological trail eight years earlier – Becky Sharp was not a box office hit, and colour was to take another thirty years to become the cinema’s default setting the way sound did; more associated with historical rather than contemporary subjects.

Becky Sharp was in fact the third film version to be made of Thackeray’s sprawling 1847-48 novel (which had originally appeared in serial form) set against the backdrop of the Napoleonic wars. This version was based upon the hit 1899 Broadway dramatisation by Langdon Mitchell, and as meticulously designed by acclaimed theatre designer Robert Edmond Jones. The rigours of early Technicolor filmmaking resulted in an extremely stagy and studio-bound experience which whizzes in just 84 minutes through an originally very long and convoluted narrative under the punishingly hot lights that made early Technicolor films such a trial to act in. (Mira Nair’s 2004 remake with Reece Witherspoon, by comparison, clocks in at 141 minutes!)

The men at whom Miss Sharp sets her cap are all inclined to be pompous middle-aged caricatures (with the honourable exception of Alan Mowbray as Rawdon Crawley), since she is after financial security rather than romance. Opinion continues to remain divided over Miriam Hopkins in the title role, whose stature as an actress has dimmed considerably since she received an Oscar nomination for this film; but she does bring sparkling blue eyes to the part, seldom apparent in her other movies. Although the most eye-catching moments involve red British army uniforms, much of the rest of the film actually employs blue (a hue hitherto absent from the Technicolor palette) to attractive effect. The credits, for example, are in blue, and the first shot of the film itself is of a blue stage curtain being pushed aside.

For over forty years the film languished in the public domain in a cheap 67 minute 16mm Cinecolor travesty until finally restored in 1984. It subsequently received only one British TV screening ten years later; but now be enjoyed on BluRay as the “triumph for colour” Graham Greene declared it on its first appearance. Richard Chatten

BECKY SHARP (1935) NOW AVAILABLE ON BLU-RAY

Kwaidan (1964) **** Blu-ray release

Dir.: Massaki Kobayashi; Cast: Michiyo Aratama, Misako Watanabe, Renaro Mikuni, Tatsuya Nakadai, Keiko Kishi, Katsuo Nakamura, Tetsuo Tanba, Takashi Shimura, Hanuko Sugimura, Osamu Takizawa, Ganjiro Nakamura, Noburo Nakaya; Japan 1964, 183 min.

Japanese director Massaki Kobayashi (1916-1996), best known for his Human Condition trilogy, adapted writer Yoko Mizuki’s script based on four short stories by Lafkadio Hearn, into a sumptuous, eerie and beguiling horror feature, with the images of DoP Yoshio Miyajima of carrying the sometimes rather slim narrative. To use the term horror is perhaps a little misleading since the storyline often focuses on supernatural forces invading the human sphere and re-creating a balance, which was disturbed by the protagonists. The quartet are more or less fairy-stories, all told with a didactic undertone. 

In The Black Hair (Kurokami), a poor Samurai (Mikuni) leaves his loving wife (Aratama) because he can not stand the poverty any more. He marries the daughter of a wealthy family (Watanabe), but soon tires of her, telling the lday-in-waiting he had only married for her inheritance, sending her back to the family in shame. After years of wandering around, the Samurai returns to his first wife’s house, finding it in disrepair. She surprisingly takes him back and, before falling asleep, the re-united couple make plans for a happy future. When the warrior wakes up next morning he discovers, he has slept next to her rotting corpse and tries to run away in horror, but the titular hair of his wife keeps him back.

The Snow Maiden  (Yukionna) is the tale of two woodcutters who seek refuge from the cold in a fisherman’s hut. One of them, Mosaku is killed by a Yuki-Onna (Keiko Kishi), a ghost-like creature. When it is Minokishi’s (Tatsuya Nakadai) turn, the spirit spares him because he is so handsome. But she tells him never to share her secret. Minokoshi returns home, and obeys her. One day she meets a beautiful woman, called Yuki, another incarnation of the Yuki-Onna. When she stitches a kimono at night, he sees the resemblance and tells her. Yuki forgives him for breaking his word because of their two children, but leaves him behind, heartbroken.

In Hoichi the Earless (Miminashi Hoichi no Hanashi), a blind musician/monk, Hoichi (Nakamura) is an accomplished biwa player. He is singing about the battle between two clans at the height of the Genpei War. One night a Samurai (Taba) visits him in the garden, asking him to play for his master, the Warlord. The High Priest of the monastery (Shimura) finds out about Hoichi’s nightly adventures, and tells him he is in great danger. The monks paint the text of the war ballad all over Hoichi’s body, but forget the ears. This has dire consequences for Hoichi, but there is still a happy-end waiting for him.

The last episode, In a Cup of Tea  (Chawan no naka) is rather tame in comparison with the previous trio. A writer (Takizawa), who is also the narrator, hears the story about the attendant Sekinai, who sees the face of un unknown man in a cup of water. Even though he refills the cup many times, the face will not go away. Later on, the person’s face comes alive, calling himself Shikibu (Nakaya). He brings two friends with him, the trio trying to kill Sekinai. The writer leaves the end of the story open, leaving the solution to the imagination of the readers.

Kwaidan went on to win the Special Jury Price at the Cannes Festival in 1964. Today it is mainly considered a masterpiece due to Miyajima’s masterly photography. The whole set was located in a huge aircraft hangar, with the hand-painted sets reflecting the changing seasons and settings. Kwaidan needs to be watched, not seen or interpreted. It has all the qualities of a Grimm fairy-tales, coupled with a specific Japanese form of angst and fatalism. AS

NOW ON BLURAY COURTESY OF MASTERS OF CINEMA | 27 APRIL 2020

Transit (2018) **** Curzon Home Cinema

Dir/Writer: Christian Petzold | Franz Rogowski, Paula Beer, Godehard Giese | Drama | Ger |

Christian Petzold’s tale of love during wartime captivates with a romantic allure that feels timeless yet very much rooted in the 1940s. Unlike his 2014 drama Phoenix, this is a more ephemeral film – a noirish mystery thriller with modern credentials that imagines a believable yet imaginary scenario: there are no guns or soldiers on parade and the costumes are ‘classic’: don’t expect a clear cut finale because TRANSIT captures the essence of transience: we’re never quite sure of what will happen next.

Franz Rogowski – Europe’s answer to Joaquin Phoenix – gives a charistmatic tour de force as German refugee Georg who is escaping the Nazis in Marseille with another escapee, a writer called Weidel who dies on route. Taking his papers, which include a manuscript and a letter from an Embassy assuring him a visa, Georg has secured an identity and an escape route – but his plans are soon to change when a mysterious woman crosses his path and the two become linked by a extraordinary twist of fate.

Petzold fleshes out his sinuous storyline with some convincing characters: there’s a conductor on his way to Caracas, a Jewish woman who is stuck with her employers’ two dogs and the enigmatic Marie (Petzold’s latest Paula Beer), who is searching for her husband. Georg becomes obsessed by Marie but cannot reveal the truth of is own identity which must remain a mystery to her. This intoxicating love affair thrives on this sense of enigma and shadowplay.

The starving wartime Europeans escaping their homelands for a new beginning feel very much like today’s refugees, looking for a stable existence in this saraband for lost souls, who may even just be fleeing from themselves in a time of uncertainty. Franz Rogowski (the interloper in Happy End) shares a potent onscreen chemistry with Paula Beer’s beguiling Marie. This is a moving, memorable and thematically rich addition to Christian Petzold’s war-themes tales: Phoenix; Barbara and Jerichow  . MT

NOW ON CURZON HOME CINEMA | BERLINALE 2018

Krzysztof Kieslowski – Early works on Blu-ray

Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski (1941-1996) brings a raw emotional simplicity to his films that disarm even the hardest heart. Nothing is overstated or irrelevant in his sober depictions of human life during the last thirty years of Polish communism.  Starting his career as a documentarian, by the mid 1970s a novel by Romuald Karas was to inspire his first feature The Scar (1976).

THE SCAR (BLIZNA, 1976)

Dir.: Krzysztof Kieslowski; Cast: Frantisek Pieczka, Marius Dmochowski, Jerzy Stuhr, Halina Winiarski; Poland 1976, 106 min.

In the small Polish city of Olechov, the local party committee decides to build a huge chemical complex. The project is forced through despite the local fear of environmental fallout. Stephan Bednarz (Pieczaka) heads up the project. A very straightforward and honest Party man, he and his wife (Winiarski) used to live in the area and had some unpleasant experiences there, although the exact nature of these is not alluded too. Bednarz is responsible to the Party boss (Dmochowski), who has his hands full with infighting in his many sub-committees. Stephan’s wife (Winiarski) has been very sceptical from the beginning, along with his assistant (Stuhr). Everyone wants a piece of the action, and Stephan is buried under an avalanche of complaints. Kieslowski and DoP Slawomir Idziak handle the crowd scenes very well, as the focus narrows on Stuhr’s assistant. Fans will appreciate this dour slice of social realism made starker by Kieslowski’s documentary style which lacks humour or even irony. A bleak start for the director’s dramatic career.

CAMERA BUFF (AMATOR, 1979/80)

Dir.: Krzysztof Kieslowski; Cast: Jerzy Stuhr, Malgorzata Zablonska, Ewa Pacas; Poland 1979/80, 112 min.

Camera Buff is a much more human affair. Kieslowski, co-writes in a drama that concentrates on the individuals, the society issues melting into the background. Remarkably, Kieslowski had five DoPs sharing camera duties. The story revolves around Filip Mosz (Stuhr) who has bought himself a an eight millimetre camera to film the birth of his daughter. He takes his new hobby seriously: When his daughter falls off her chair, he continues to shoot oblivious. “Would you have gone on filming, had she fallen off the balcony?” asks his wife Irka (Zablosnka). As his talent develops, his boss asks Filip to be the official chronicler of Party activities. With responsibility comes privilege, and the “man with the camera” turns into more than just an observer: When he shoots the workers mending the pavement, he does so from his balcony – symbolising his new empowerment. Family life takes a back seat and he belittles his wife when she walks out on him: “I saw you walking away. You looked so small. I will always see you like this”. Filip is proud to be a chronicler, but, as one of his friends puts it “filmmakers are service providers”. His new sense of entitlement blinds him to his obligations to society. Total autonomy and independence are illusions, as Julie will find out in Three Colours Blue.

NO END (BEZ KONCA, 1985 

Dir.: Krzysztof Kieslowski; Cast: Grazyna Szapolska, Maria Pakulniss, Alexander Bardini, Danny Webb; Poland, 107 min.

Even though playful at times, No End is a serious story, the narrative’s absurdist elements never overshadow the sober nature of the human struggle at the film’s core. The main character Ursula Zyro (Szpolska) has lost her lawyer husband Antek (Radziwilowicz) to a heart attack. And Antek faces the camera in the opening scene describing the moments surrounding his death on the way to take their son Jack to school. He was set to defend a man accused of organising activities for the repressed Solidarity movement during a time of draconian martial law in Poland. Ulla, an English translator, currently working on ‘the’ Orwell project, feels guilty, because their marriage had been going through a bad patch. Ulla reaches out to an American tourist (Webb) and they sleep together even though he doesn’t even speak Polish, but Ulla shares her grief all  the same. Meanwhile, the activist’s case is taken up by an old lawyer called Labrador (Bardini), who had been Antek’s teacher, but is now rather cynical, convincing his new client to agree a plea bargaining sentence. Meanwhile, Antek comes back to haunt proceedings as a ghost, still talking directly to the camera and watching over Ulla and Jacek. At one point he is seen stroking a dark Labrador (sic). It’s amazing that No End got through the Communist censors and made it to cinema screens. Ironically, the only criticism came from the opposition parties and the Catholic Church. No End was Kieslowski’s first time collaboration with scriptwriter Krzyszof Piesewicz, a partnership that was to last until the end of Kieslowski’s career – and further. The two worked together on three scripts before the director’s death. These were filmed by Tom Tykwer, Stanislaw Mucha and Danis Tanovic, in the first years after the new millennium. AS

BLIND CHANCE, 1987

ON LIMITED EDITION BLURAY | CINEMA OF CONFLICT: FOUR FILMS BY KRZYSZTOF KIESLOWSKI | 20 APRIL 2020

The Sense of an Ending (2017) ****

Dir.: Ritesh Batra | Script: Nick Payne | Cast: Jim Broadbent, Charlotte Rampling, Harriet Walker, Michelle Dockery, Freya Mavor, Billy Howle, Emily Mortimer, Joe Alvyn, Matthew Goode UK | Drama | 108 min.

The past is how we choose to remember it. Sometimes significant events are forgotten or edited out. This is the premise of Julian Barnes’ 2011 Booker Prize winning novella that explores the psyche of a quintessential Englishman and his selective memories of youth.

Thoughtfully adapted for the screen by Nick Payne, THE SENSE OF AN ENDING is a dispassionate film in many ways, not least because the characters are so repellent, thornily portrayed by the subtle support trio of Rampling, Walter and Dockery with a nuanced Jim Broadbent as Tony Webster, the main focus in this amusing drama from Indian director Ritesh Batra who is so clever at making this feel so classically and insightfully British. The story is certainly gripping and keeps us invested in Barnes’ intricate storytelling but the flashbacks, so vital to informing the plot, are actually key to understanding the main character’s motivations and there is a strand of sardonic humour that makes this another brilliant observation of emotional suppression that often follows a false start in youth. The 1960s scenes are teasingly repressive and so representative of how damaging an unsatisfactory first relationship can be, particularly for sensitive souls such as young Tony.

The story revolves around Tony Webster, divorced and busily keeping life at bay as the proprietor of a small speciality camera shop in leafy North London. This unfruitful foray into passionate love during his college years has sent him scurrying for cover, and after coasting through his marriage to QC Margaret (a brilliant Walter), which produced a (now pregnant) lesbian daughter Susie (Dockery), he has managed to avoid emotional entanglements of any kind. And although he enjoys Margaret’s caustic company over dinner he still doesn’t get why their marriage is over.

But the past returns to bite Tony when he is left a strange bequest in a will, encouraging him to track down his enigmatic first love Veronica Ford who is still as evasive as ever in responding to his requests. Their eventual meeting drudges up an unfortunate episode that Tony had chosen to forget and reveals how the Young Tony (Howle) fell for the ambivalent Veronica (Mavor) during an awkward weekend at her family home in rural England, where he is entranced by Veronica’s mother Sarah (played by a winsomely suggestive Emily Mortimer).

Tony discovers subsequently that Veronica has taken up with his maverick friend Adrian (Alvyn), who fancies himself as a cool Camus-quoiting intellectual (later committing suicide). Disillusioned by love and bewildered by his feelings for Veronica, Tony is forced to confront a past that offers the key to his future.

According to Margaret and Susie, Tony has become an emotional avoidant dinosaur, a ‘curmudgeon’ who regards the modern world with disappointment and disdain. Having successfully cleansed his memory of any wrongdoing regarding Veronica – and subsequently Margaret – his self-glorification shows him up to be exactly the same person he was as a young man: an arrogant but misunderstood bystander, proud to have chosen a life in his shell.

Suicide, sexual repression and unrequited love are themes of incendiary dramatic potential, and this film, with its thoughtful musical choices, trades passion for emotional restraint and typical English poignance. Clearly, Tony has lost contact with his feelings and shut the door on romance without even realising the effect this has had on his wife and family. But his emotional day of reckoning will strangely be the making of him. MT

ON BBC IPLAYER

 

Battleship Potemkin (1925) Bfi Blu-ray release

EISENSTEIN ON THE STEPS: Alan Price shares some thoughts on Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 epic that sees the crew of a Russian battleship mutiny against the brutal, tyrannical regime of the vessel’s officers, resulting in a street massacre with police when the ship finally docked in Odessa in 1905.                          

There are three problematic shots of lion statues in Battleship Potemkin (1925) that disturb some critics when they discuss the use of montage in film. And they profoundly offended V.F.Perkins in his landmark book Film as Film. He didn’t proceed to attack Potemkin’s most famous montage moment, the Odessa Steps sequence. No, it was the lions, as symbols of authority, inserted arbitrarily into the general narrative of Potemkin, which he thought to be wilfully self-imposed. Though if you consider Potemkin as a great example of revolutionary propaganda then can you denounce Czarism’s lions the right to be assertively present and thus exposed as another enemy of the people?

Victor Perkins considers the lions to be a “momentary flaw” that “adventurous filmmakers are bound to explore.” Does that mean directors will become over-iconoclastic and throw in any image to make a dubious point? Yet his argument is more with critics “I would wish the limits of my attack on montage to be clear. I claim only that there is no special merit attached to the use of editing devices as such, and nothing more cinematic or creative about these usages than about achievements in the significant use of lighting, dialogue, décor, gesture or any other of the film-maker’s resources.”

The expressiveness of a fully functioning mise en scene requires what’s listed. And the outcome of such cinematic density can be synthesised into the long take – the logical antithesis to rapid cutting. As Andre Bazin said of the films of Stroheim, “One can well imagine in theory, a Stroheim film composed of a single shot which would be as long and as close-up as one liked” I can easily conjure up shots from Stroheim’s often raw and pitiless Greed (1924) that create the illusion of holding your attention longer than their actual screen time. But they are never un-cinematic or boring. 

The mise en scene of Eisenstein’s Potemkin is often a fidgety motion holding back or anticipating the rapid editing of the film’s climaxes. Thousands of words have been written on the construction of the Odessa steps sequence but they cannot really paraphrase its dynamic (though director Roger Corman made a fine attempt now viewable on YouTube.) Film students can theorise about the meaning of the editing but as an ordinary viewer you really have to bodily feel that you and its victims are helplessly falling down and down. Even today we are forced to emphasise with the fate of that baby in the pram, just prior to it bumping down the many steps. It makes you want to reach out a hand and save the innocent. The firing soldiers move, like a stark Italian Futurist machine, over the running and falling bodies forcing you to imagine peoples screams and the cracking of heads and ribs. Those seven and a half minutes of violent repression still exert an artistic and visceral power that shames other cinematic crushes (or more precisely bloodbaths) like the formulaic violence often found in Tarantino and De Palma’s self-conscious Odessa imitation, The Untouchables: but at least managing to constructively inspire the massacres in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch or the violent mayhem of The Godfather 2.

Potemkin is a film in five parts. (1) Men and Maggots – The sailors protest at having to eat rancid meat. The doctor, peering through his pince-nez, examines a carcass and tells the sailors that it’s not worms but only maggots that can be easily washed off with brine (In the BFI Blu Ray restoration they have never looked so sharp and repugnant.) (2) Drama at the Harbour – the sailors’ mutiny and their leader Vakulynchuk is killed along with some officers and a priest (played by Eisenstein, suddenly laughing and yielding his cross after feigning death.) As the mutiny is enacted Eisenstein’s masterly eye for group composition is apparent– though I do have sympathy with those of his Russian contemporaries who accused Eisenstein of being a mere formalist- for this grouping and re-grouping of men can’t escape from sometimes being manipulative and self-conscious – not exactly a slow game of chess more rapid checkers. (3) A Dead Man calls for Justice, the body of Vakulynchuk is mourned over by the inhabitants of Odessa (The composition of the shots we view from inside the covering, over Vakulynchuk, as mourners approach him, has a superb lyric strength.)  (4) The Odessa Staircase – the Tsarist soldiers kill and trample everyone with the cold logic of a programmed Terminator. Heightened realism it might be but a realism that shifts its killing machine into fantasy, even SF. (5) The Rendezvous with a Squadron. We assume the navy is about to attack Potemkin, but end up joining forces with the rebellious sailors (wonderful images of sailing boats and warships here but less wonderful is the relentless pounding rhythm of Eisenstein’s editing accompanied by Edmund Meisel’s apt, if bombastic score, that rapidly becomes hectoring.) 

Parts 1 – 4 climaxing on Odessa are mostly thrilling. But after the magnificent steps magic Potemkin has nowhere to go. Of course anything afterwards was bound to be an anti-climax. But the film can’t end here – there must be an epilogue. Yet Part 5 begins to bludgeon you with its revolutionary fervour. If only it had been shorter and not built up over-inexorably to its triumphant conclusion. Sergei, the state required a communist message, but it should (could have?) have been trimmed and then I might have forgiven you that shot of a hoisted up, red-tinted flag.

The violence of Odessa lives on as great cinema amidst Potemkin’s other episodes where ‘masterly’ filmmaking can appear strained. Odessa will always command our compassion and horror even though that sequence is heavily aestheticized An aesthetic call to revolution can work powerfully in political cinema (see The Battle of Algiers) yet at Potemkin’s climax it naively feels like a command to rejoice in victory, or else comrade! 

Stark Eisenstein violence preceded Potemkin in his savage first feature, the consistently brilliant Strike. Eisenstein moved on, with his mathematical film concepts, and realised, for me, his greatest compositional achievement (and most satisfyingly film) in Ivan the Terrible Part 1.  Whilst an even more richly sensual and liberated imagery is to be found in the stunning fragments that remain of his uncompleted Que Viva Mexico (with the gay shots of Potemkin sailors in hammocks anticipating the Mexican peasantry in their hammocks too). Mexico and the tyrant Ivan appeared long after the explosion of Potemkin – produced when Eisenstein was twenty seven: youthful genius indeed that we’ll continue to celebrate along with the other films I’ve admired, his theoretical writings, a vast amount of drawings (sometimes erotic) and generally marvellous artwork. ALAN PRICE

BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN is now on blu-ray at the BFI 

  

I Am Love (2009) **** BFi Player

Dir: Luca Guadagnino | Italian, Drama, 120′

Tilda Swinton is the graceful and luminous presence who lights up this sexually ambitious  drama about a woman whose sterile existence comes to life when she falls in love.

She plays an ice cool aristocratic-looking Russian who assumes a dignified role as the doyenne in the wealthy moneyed household of her Italian husband Tancredi Recchi. Their austere 1930s mansion is surrounded by formal gardens and staffed by a legion of white-aproned maids and black-coated butlers. But she is about as satisfied as Silvana Magnani in Pasolini’s Theorem, or Lucia Bose in Antonioni’s Cronaca di Un Amore, although a good deal more wealthy.

The rich and powerful Recchi dynasty is well-established, like a tight-lipped Northern Italian version of the Corleone’s without the Mafia connection – or at least there is no allusion to that here. And Emma is tasked with organising a birthday dinner for her father in law (Gabriele Ferzetti) who informs them all during the afternoon that follows the expansive banquet that he has decided to hand over the reigns of the family business to Emma’s husband and her younger son Edo (Flavio Parenti).

There is plenty to enjoy here even if the ensuing love story or business wranglings fail to ignite your imagination. And fortunately Emma’s lover (Antonio Biscaglia) is a more sensible choice than Mangani’s dalliance with The Visitor in the shape of Terence Stamp in Theorem. There have been many Spring/Autumn affairs in the history of film and this one is delicately handled by Swinton who appears to share her sentimental feelings with her son Edo, although the Lesbian liaison of her art student daughter (a perfectly cast Alba Rohrwacher) seems a bit contrived and less convincing. When love blossoms for Emma the dour Milanese winter scenes are abandoned for a sun-filled sojourn on Liguria’s coastline, at least for a while and everything glows in Yorick La Saux’s sumptuous visuals which won him awards for Best Cinematography two years later. Antonella Cannorozzi does her stuff exquisitely in the costume department, although the Oscar went to Colleen Atwood for Alice in Wonderland (2010). The only bum note is the inappropriate score.

But dark clouds gather on this brief-lived idll and ugliness is soon exposed behind the facade of elegance and respectability. Just goes to show what glisters isn’t always gold. MT

Fire Will Come | O Que Arde (2019)

Dir: Oliver Laxe | Wri: Oliver Laxe, Santiago Fillol, Oliver Laxe | DoP Mauro Herce | 90′

One of the strongest films in the Un Certain Regard at Cannes 2019 was this stunning docudrama from Mimosas director Oliver Laxe.

Set in the remote Ancares region in the heart of the Galician mountains Oliver Laxe’s stirring third feature transports us back to a rural way of life where the occupants live in gentle and humble acceptance of nature, eeking out their existence from the land and the animals who live amongst them.

This wild and savagely beautiful part of North East Spain is covered in rain-drenched forests and rolling mountains where the gusty winds can kindle even a small fire and send it raging incandescently through the region decimating flora and fauna. Laxe’s gaze is detached but brooding with sensitivity, inviting us into to this strangely unsettling world.

Amador grew up here with his parents and his respect for the local way of life is palpable. His regular cinematographer Mauro Herce (Dead Slow Ahead) shooting on Super 16, films a row of fir trees cascading to the ground and eventually revealing a massive bulldozer causing widespread mayhem as it moves ominously through the wooded hillside like a behemoth .

Amador (Amador Arias) comes home after serving time for causing a fire that almost wiped out the villagers, not to mention the vegetation and livestock. Set to the sonorous tones of a Vivaldi psalm we can sense this is a bitter homecoming for a middle-aged man with no one but his 83 year old mother Benedicta (Sanchez) to welcome him. She does this with a simple acknowledgement. “Are you hungry?” Both characters are played by non-pros who inhabit their roles with the naturalism professionals

Mother and son continue their day to day life as they left off. Amador is rather harsh on his sweet and obliging mother who runs their smallholding single-handedly, tending their three cows and trudging backwards and forwards with their ageing Alsatian. The other locals in this mournful corner include Inazio (Inazio Abra), who is working on a large-scale refurbishment of his parents’ stone farmhouse. Amador is emotionally buttoned down and taciturn, refusing to rise to the bait when one of the villagers shouts, “Hey Amador, have you got a light?”

There is a solace to this spartan existence drawn by Laxe with moving simplicity. The animals complete their household. Elena (Fernandez) the vet is the only intruder and she arrives to help pull one of their cows out of a ditch. The journey back to her practice is one of poignant beauty and wry humour as Amador once again remains tacitly unfriendly while the cow’s gentle eyes look on trustingly.

This is a minimalist film of rare eloquence. Nothing is forced or spare, the unsettling narrative gradually unfolding with a growing sense of doom as, predictably, the fires come back to the mountains forcing the animals to flee amid devastation, firefighters struggling with the raw power of the mammoth flames. One image that remains seared to the memory is of a horse stumbling bewildered from the wreckage, having been singed by thefla,es. The tiny figure of Benedicta is seen wandering disconsolately across the charred landscape. And we are once again left to ponder Amador’s involvement. Fire Will Come is pure cinema. Set to the atmospheric ambient sounds of nature and full of naturalistic detail and subtle undercurrents, it is joy to behold. MT

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

White God (2014) | Bfi Player

Dir/Wri: Kornél Mundruczó | Cast: Zsofia Psotta, Sandor Zsoter, Lili Horvath, Szabolcs Thuroczy, Lili Momori, Gergely Banki, Karoly Ascher | 119min  Drama/Thriller  Hungary

Hungarian director, Kornél Mundruczó’s art house thriller is also a revenge flick with a touch of the “Pied Piper of Hamlin’ about it. Serving as an elusive parable on human supremacy, it scratches the edges of fantasy with some bizarre and brutal elements.

Dogs, or more correctly, mutts are the stars of the story which opens with a little girl cycling through the mysteriously empty streets of Budapest, followed by a pack of barking beasts. With is canine cast of Alsations to Labradors, Rottweilers and even little terriers, WHITE GOD also brings to mind The Incredible Journey with a darkly sinister twist. Is she escaping a virus, or a human enemy?

These dogs are clearly well-trained and credit goes to the Mundruczo for his ambitious undertaking, but then Magyars have a reputation for their horsemanship and this clearly extends to the canine species. It transpires that Lilli (Zsofia Psotta) the girl on the bike, has adopted a large street dog called Hagen. Lilli’s mum is off on a business trip with her new boyfriend, leaving her in the care of her emotionally distant but rather sensitive father who ironically works as an abattoir inspector.

Their relationship is not a close one and Lilli becomes even more distant from him when he insists on her getting rid of her loveable pet. Budapest is a city full of street dogs and the Hungarians appear to be a great deal less keen on animal welfare than most European countries. Hagen is soon picked up by a new owner, an unscrupulous dog fighter, who sets about turning him into a savage warrior-dog, before he escapes and ends up in the Police dog pound, where he stages a mass canine uprising. The transformation is both sad and frightening but there are also poignant moments as Hagen as his ‘mate,’ a sweet Jack Russell, desperately try to evade re-capture by their enemies – human beings. And it is this balance of power that underpins Mundruczó’s unique drama transforming it from an animal adventure to a satire with universal appeal. WHITE DOG is quite literally, a tale of the ‘underdog’ rising up and claiming his rightful place in society: on a more sinister level it could represent the masses over-taking society. A captivating and provocative piece of filmmaking. MT

NOW ON BFI PLAYER | Dedicated to the late Miklós Jancsó, WHITE GOD won PRIX UN CERTAIN REGARD in Cannes 2014.

The Corporal and the Others | A Tizedes meg a Tobbiek (1965) ****

Dir: Marton Keleti | Wri: Imre Dobozi | Cast: Tamas Major, Imre Sinkovits, Laszlo Kozak, Ivan Darvas | Drama, Hungarian 108′

The Corporal and the Others is an anti-communist comedy and a satirical take on outside forces occupying Hungary during the Second World War. It was of course made during Soviet occupation so uses metaphor to escape the censors.

Although Hungary was technically on the same side at Germany, having relied on on the nation to pull it out of the Great Depression, The Corporal portrays the relationship as deeply farcical despite the soberness of its subject matter. And this deadpan humour is what makes it all so amusing, emphasised by the film’s upbeat score.

Imre Dobozi’s script was obviously going to make the film a crowd pleaser for Hungarian audiences, but Keleti’s direction is also laudable with some extraordinary set pieces featuring snow-swept battle scenes, and a sneering central performance from Imre Sinkovits ( Ferenc Smolnar) as the corporal himself. At the Hungarian Film Week, the most important film festival in its homeland, the film bagged him best actor and garnered critical acclaim sweeping the board in 1966. A great comedy then, but not a masterpiece. A metaphor for Hungary always being under occupation, each of the characters represents a cliche of sorts: Major is the distinguished Englishman, Sinkovits, the upstart an so on.

Marton Keleti is not well known outside his homeland unlike Bela Tarr; Istvan Szabo; Sandor Kovacs; Zoltan Fabri or Milos Jancso. On account of being Jewish, Keleti was actually banned from making films during the war years but he certainly addressed the balance with a decent output of fifty films, starting in 1937 with Viki, and taking up in the immediate aftermath to the war with A Tanitono (1945). Possibly his most notable achievement outside Hungary was his Palme d’Or hopeful Ket Vallomas (Two Wishes, 1957) which came home empty handed despite a wonderful central performance from Hungarian star of the time Mari Torocsik.

The Corporal and the Others sees the German Fascists plan their exit from Hungary at the end of the war (1944-45) only to be replaced by the Russians Soviet troops. In the ensuing mayhem, deserting Hungarian soldiers and are just trying to avoid being killed, including those from the special Fascist wing under Ferenc Szalasi.

Molnar is stuck in a deserted country house (which is still being run by the butler Albert (Tamas Major/Colonel Redl) having stolen the money to pay his fellow comrades in arms. But unbeknown to Molnar, other deserters are also in residence: Imre Gaspar (Laszlo Kozak) and Gyorgy Fekete (Gyula Szabo) to name but a few.

There is nothing heroic about any of these characters, in fact most are actually cowards, making things all the more hilarious, as heroism is the last thing on their minds, and they duck and dive like chameleons in company of their enemies, constantly changing uniforms to mask their real identity. And this was the crux of the comedy: Hungarians often joking about having to change uniforms to reflect its history of being occupied, first by the Turks, then by the Austrians, Germans and finally the Russian Communists who radar Keleti was keen to escape. MT

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Colonel Redl | Oberst Redl (1985) **** Streaming

Dir.: Istvan Szabo; Cast: Karl-Maria Brandauer, Hans-Christian Blech, Armin Müller-Stahl, Gudrun Landgrebe, Jan Niklas, Dorottya Udvaros, Laszlo Galffy; Hungary/West Germany/Yugoslavia/ Austria 1985, 144 min.

Colonel Redl is the second part of a trilogy of true life fables dealing with the political and psychological milieu in Hungary in the early half of the 20th Century. Flanked by Mephisto (1981) and Hanussen (1988) which unfurl in Germany, Colonel Redl is set in the final years before the outbreak of the First World War in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Adapted from A Patriot For Me by John Osborne, it centres on the rise and fall of an opportunistic real life character, a bisexual Austrian officer who trades in his integrity for personal gain, betraying Austro-Hungarian secrets to the Russians on the cusp of war.

Karl-Maria Brandauer is the driving force of these three films with his sheer physicality and the mesmerising power of his performance impersonating three well known Europeans who find themselves dicing with intricate moral dilemmas. Although Mephisto is by far the most dazzling here Colonel Redl certainly has its moments under masterly direction of Istvan Szabo who cinematographer Lajos Koltai also photographed the other two features.

Alfred Redl (Brandauer) grew up in modest circumstances, but was educated at a prestigious military school. There he met fellow student Krystof Kubinyi (Niklas), who invited him to holiday on the estate of his aristocratic family. There Redl meets his sister Katalin (Landgrebe), who has a crush on him. But Alfred is drawn to Krystof, even though he would go on to enjoys the sexual favours of Katalin. Redl is a social climber and over-ambitious at work, where he rules his men with a draconian command. General Von Roden (Blech) is impressed with him, and promotes him to chief of Military Intelligence. Even though Redl is aware of his sexual ambivalence, he marries a Viennese wife from the upper classes (Udvaros), still lusting over Krystof, even though they have a falling out. Introduced to Archduke Franz-Ferdinand (Müller-Stahl), he tries to find a scapegoat, preferably from the Ukraine, whose trial would go on to send shock-waves through the officer corps. Redl is unaware of being the chosen sacrificial lamb, and after passing on secrets to his lover Velocchio (Galffy), he commits suicide on 19th March 1913 saving himself and the army a trial for treason.

Szabo plays fast and loose with historical facts, and the focus is very much Redl’s dual personality, which manifests itself in his sexual orientation and spying activities. Like many in his position, he feels alienated and pays a heavy price for professional and social success. Brandauer also brings out the sadist in him, taking pleasure in degrading others in public. His love for Krystof is equal to his envy for his position in life, and he would do anything to swop places with him. Redl excels professionally but is always aware of his lowly upbringing, he get rid of his sister by palming her off with money, but forbidding her to visit him again. 

If there is one criticism here it is the over-bloated narrative. There was no need for an epic, the scenes of Redl’s youth at home add unnecessary detail. Brandauer is brillaint most of the time, but sometimes overdoes the ‘tortured soul ‘moments. The rest of the ensemble is excellent, with Landgrebe’s Katalin moving as the woman who tries desperately to change the sexual orientation of a gay man. DoP Laszlo Koltai (Malena) succeeds in re-creating the glamour and decadence of the Vienna court, everything glitters and glows, and the imperial architecture is playing a major part. Colonel Redl might not be Szabo’s most outstanding work, but it is still a stunning story and and won a BAFTA in 1986 and the Jury Prize at Cannes 1985. AS

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Woman in Chains (1968) | Classic Clouzot on Mubi

French director Henri-Georges Clouzot (1907-1977) is best remembered for his dark thrillers and some of the greatest films of the 1950s.  The Wages of Fear won him the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the Berlinale Golden Bear in 1953, and rounded off the hat trick with a BAFTA two years later.

Even Alfred Hitchcock docked his hat to his French contemporary whose documentary Mystere de Picasso records the legendary artist painting various canvasses for the camera, allowing us to understand his creative purpose at work.  Le Corbeau is now available to watch at home, together with Elizabeth Wiener’s distinctive performance in Woman in Chains  (aka La Prisonniere, Clouzot’s last film and his only one in colour). Quai des Orfevres, completes the trio, of stylish films from the French Master of Suspense now emerging from the shadows to watch online at MUBI. With striking visuals and an unforgettably tense style, Clouzot’s films make classic noir viewing.

Le Corbeau (1942)

A stylish masterpiece of French cinema, Le Corbeau is a dark and subversive study of human nature starring Pierre Fresnay and Ginette Leclerc. In a nod to the Vichy regime of the era (not to mention Nazism), a wave of hysteria sweeps the small provincial town of St. Robin when a series of poison-pen letters signed ‘Le Corbeau’ (The Raven) begin to appear, denouncing several prominent members of society. The slow trickle of unsettling letters soon becomes a flood, and no one is safe from their mysterious accusations. Upon its release in 1943, Le Corbeau was condemned by the political left and right and the church, and Clouzot was banned from filmmaking for two years.

Woman in Chains (1968)

Josée (Elizabeth Wiener) is the wife of an artist whose work is exhibited in Stan Hassler’s modern art gallery. Stan (Laurent Terzieff), impotent and depraved, satisfies himself by photographing women in humiliating poses. Josée is fascinated by the man and soon falls completely in love with him.

Quai des Orfèvres (1947)

A marriage that has fallen on hard times is further tested by the couple’s implication in a murder. Jenny Lamour (Suzy Delair) is a music hall chanteuse married to her pianist husband Maurice (Bernard Blier). Keen to get ahead, Jenny leaps at the chance when an ageing wealthy businessman (Charles Dullin) offers her the chance of some gigs. However, when she agrees to a meeting at his home and he is found dead later in the evening – Maurice’s untamed jealousy is in the frame. A Maigret-esque detective, Antoine, played by Louis Jouvet, leaves no stone unturned in his exceedingly private investigations of the down-at-heel showbiz couple’s sad, tempestuous life.

Henri-Georges Clouzot Focus now on MUBI.com

 

 

 

 

Narcissus and Psyché | Nárcisz és Psyché (1980) *****

Dir: Gábor Bódy | Fantasy drama, Hungarian, 261′

Hungarian director Bódy Gábor, (1946-1985, Budapest), was a provocateur and pioneer of the Hungarian ‘New Sensibility’ film movement whose controversial arthouse features garnered critical success at home and abroad where he won an award at Locarno for this dreamlike Avantgarde masterpiece completed in 1980, a few years before his death by suicide in 1985.

Adapted for the screen with writers Vilmos Csaplar and Vera Varga, Narcissus and Psyche is based on Hungarian poet Sándor Weöres’s Psyché (1972), an anthology of letters and poems by a fictional 19th-century female poet Erzsebet Lonyai (aka Psyche played by Patricia Adriani ). The arthouse drama is full of surrealistic elements, philosophical symbolism and visual experimentation with the use of slow-mo; time lapse sequences; hypnotic sex scenes; motion trails; and colour filters, it spans a century (between the Napoleonic wars and the Second World War,) yet is miraculously condensed into a lifetime experience exploring Psyche’s enduring love for Narcissus (a blond haired Udo Kier). Their affair is often ambivalent but never consummated and withstands a lifetime of influences from other relationships, sexual disease and tragedy. 

This mesmerising tour de force is extraordinary to look at and was shot by renowned cinematographer Istvan Hildebrand with a score by My Twentieth Century composer Laszlo Vidovskzky that feels both modern and classical. With a running time of nearly four hours, the epic is told in three parts. There are striking slo-mo love scenes set to harpsichord music that draw us into the action yet remain intimate and erotically poetic. Other love-making sequences feel more remote and salacious, such as the one set by a blazing fire while stoats and wild animals roam around the vast stone-floored bedroom of an enchanted castle, where later a ballroom scene sees dancers swirling around in a 3D style masterstroke. 

One elicit scene features the Pope pulling up his trousers after enjoying a blowjob from a young male courtier. He then gives an audience which is filmed from underneath the glass floor to reveal the sparkling soles of his diamanté slippers. Psyche herself emerges a sultry and tousled haired beauty, always ready for a new liaison she is libidinous and licentious and runs the gauntlet of male attraction much to the chagrin of Narcissus who suffers from syphilis contracted from gypsies earlier on in his life. Psyche is seduced, used and lusted after – in an inspired and lyrical depiction of life for most attractive women, even today. Narcissus remains her soulmate, teacher and friend but she is forced to marry an indifferent nobleman and this plot line is the thread that runs through this jewel-like richly textured tapestry. MT

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80 Hussars | 80 Huszár (1978) **** Online

Dir.: Sára Sándor; Cast: Lászlo Dózsa, Josezsef Madaras, György Csenhalmi, Jacint Juhász, Geza Tordy; Hungary 1978, 124 min.

Prolific Hungarian director Sára Sándor (1933-2019) is best known for this patriotic historical drama, based on the true story of Captain Janos Lenkey (here known as Paal Farkas), set during the 1848 revolution. Europe is seething with rebellions against the tyrannical Austrian Empire, and the emperor even abdicates the throne. A regiment of Hungarian hussars are stationed in Galician Poland, serving out their enlistment time in the Imperial Austrian Army. The hussars just want to return to Hungary, but their superiors in Vienna have no intention of allowing that, knowing full well that they’d fight on the side of the revolution and not maintain their loyalty to the Austrians. When they receive orders to fire on rebelling Poles in Krakow, they refuse and head back to their homes.

András Korsos (Madaras) absconds from the army aiming to kick start a revolution in Hungary, overthrowing the hated Viennese. But he is soon captured and dragged to a small town where he is made to run the gauntlet, and is nearly whipped to death. Stories of his ill-treatment soon spread throughout the community leading to widespread protests, and a student is shot dead for hanging an effigy of an Austrian soldier during a Polish seminar. His rebellion is also derided by  an Austrian general, shown as pompous and arrogant, who lectures the leader of the seminar about the fruitless hope for a revolution: “Just a revolt, nothing more” His words are also meant for the Hungarian soldiers, who are furious about the treatment meted out to Korsos.

With its widescreen set pieces demonstrating the skill and rigorous training of the hussars in the mountainous terrain of the Carpathian Mountains this is a rousing drama, and there are moments of brutal violence as they trudge through the inhospitable landscape on their way back to their homeland under the leadership of Captain Farkas (Dózsa). Their downhill struggle is difficult to watch, many of the horses dying along with their masters who are bedraggled by the poor weather conditions, petty disagreements undermining their integrity. Finally, having made a prisoner from the Austrian army, who has followed them relentlessly, they tie him to a tree, setting off joyfully, after having heard Hungarian voices. But they run straight into a trap. After being captured, Farkas is courageous to the last, saluting his co-leaders Lieutenant Bodogh Szilvevezter (Tordy), and corporals Peter Acs (Jacint Juhász) and Istvan Csorgas (Csenhalmi) with his sword that has been broken in half by the commanding Austrian officer.

Petöfi, Hungary’s most famous poet raised the profile of Lenkey inspired by his bravery and sense of moral restitude. Co-scripter, Sàndor Csoóri, a poet himself instills the march through the fog and mist of the swamps with a lyrical brilliance that adds a heroic poignance to the endless misery. Korsos is so enraged by the loss of his men that he attacks his horse in a fit of madness, whilst another hussar threatens his starving fellow soldiers with a gun, in case they dare make a meal of his dead horse. There are many cross references to the failed revolution of 1956, asking questions about this recurrent theme in Hungary’s history. A powerful and often violent feature, 80 Hussars leaves the audience spellbound, but also traumatised. AS

AVAILABLE ONLINE WITH KIND PERMISSION FROM THE HUNGARIAN CULTURAL CENTRE IN LONDON UK         

https://vimeo.com/288005139

La Soledad (2016) **** Free online

UnknownDir: Jorge Thielen Armand | Writer: Rodrigo Michelangeli | Docu-Drama | 89′ | Venezuela | Canada

A crumbling old villa in contemporary Caracas is haunted by seething resentment from occupying former retainers providing a fitting metaphor for Venezuela’s current economic crisis. Jorge Thielen Armand’s poetic paean to his grandparents home is a mournful one full of exotic birdsong, plants peeping through cracks in the walls and old photo albums covered in the dust. Cine footage shows the filmmaker playing in the gardens of La Soledad back in the 1960s, now only memories remain as ghosts of the past. A plan to restore the villa has been abandoned leaving handyman Jose and his 72-year-old mother Rosina (a former housekeeper), wife and daughter homeless as the economic situation worsens each day. Jose combs the streets for his mother’s medication and even food is hard to come as the empty shop shelves testify.

Amand avoids bombastic statements about his country’s woes preferring this softly softly approach. The cinema verite drama remains tethered to the local neighbourhood making no attempt to broaden its view of Venezuela’s political woes beyond the concerns of the poorest people here in Caracas. And although Amand is respectful and sympathetic towards the current occupants, it soon emerges that only Rosina has a right to live in the property. Her family – as she points out herself- should really only be there on a temporary basis. But Jose’s only hope of work is re-building the villa whose history dates back to a time when valuable coins were purportedly buried in parts of the building. He taps the peeling walls and hires a metal detector in the hope of making a quick buck. Some of his friends are considering kidnapping as a way to raise funds; others are leaving to look for work in Colombia and Ecuador, including his wife. But like a Venezuelan Mr Micawber, Jose has no desire to move on preferring to stay put in the hope that his boss and co-worker Jorge will offer him a future. But even bosses have to move on when crisis is the order of the day. MT

FREE ONLINE | THIS WEEKEND ONLY

 

 

Calm with Horses (2019) ****

Dir: Nick Rowland | Wri: Joe Murtagh | Cast: Cosmo Jarvis, Barry Keoghan, Niamh Algar, Ned Dennehy, David Wilmot, Kiljan Moroney 

This ultra violent Irish crime thriller is a tale of love lost and vehement revenge that starts well but shoots itself in the foot slightly with a smaltzy ending. The wafer thin plot is a lowkey version of Mean Streets bulked out by shed-loads of atmosphere and a seething central performance by Cosmo Jarvis as an addled ex-boxer stuck between raising his son and serving as a mob enforcer for the dreaded Devers family. The drug-dealing Devers are a fearful bunch of thugs and interpersonal skills are parlous.

Calm with Horses is Nick Rowland’s feature debut adapted by Joe Murtagh from a selection of stories by Irish author Colin Barrett. The terrific Irish cast are what makes this so compelling: all seasoned pros you wouldn’t want to meet on a dark night, or even a sunny day, for that matter. Douglas Armstrong (Jarvis) is a dim-witted explosive henchman for drug-runner Dymphna (a nose-picking Keoghan) and his family, headed by the monstrous Paudi (veteran Ned Dennehy), for whom loyalty is the watchword. ‘Arm’ also has an autistic son from his ex Ursula (Niamh Algar) who wants him to help finance the boy’s education. They’re a heavy-drinking, snooker-playing mob who speed around this remote rural backwater of Ireland. It’s the sort of  downtrodden place where an abandoned settee is left rotting in the High Street.

The title refers to a nearby horse-training farm where Ursula’s boyfriend Rob (Welsh) is teaching the boy to ride, but Calm With Horses works best in the scenes involving the Devers family and their sculduggery. Efforts to make this into a love story revolving around Arm and Ursula fall flat, that’s for another film, and thus the final misjudged scene takes the sting out the thriller’s tail. Rowland sets up a superb showcase showdown in a country house deep in the wilds, but then spoils it all by turning it into a sob story. But for those who like a happy ending of sorts this is an impressive start to a promising career. MT

UK & Irish Digital release available on a broad range of VOD platforms including iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, Sky Store, Virgin Movies, Talk Talk, BT TV, Curzon Home Cinema, BFI Player, Rakuten TV and Volta  from 27th April 2020.

2020

 

Le Mans 66 (2019) ***** Home Ent

Dir: James Mangold | Cast: Christian Bale, Matt Damon, Caitriona Balfe, Jon Bernthal, Josh Lucas, Noah Jupe, Tracy Letts. | US Drama 152′

A dynamite duo of Christian Bale and Matt Damon powers this petrolhead portrait of the feud between Ford Motor Company and Ferrari at Le Mans in 1966. They play racing legends Ken Miles and Carroll Shelby in James Mangold’s finely crafted high octane vehicle. 

Back in the 1960s motor racing was still a raw and dangerous game. But James Mangold makes it into a meaningful drama for all the family, exploring the real lives and loves behind the dynamic days of Formula One.

In those days Ferrari dominated the circuit, combining speed with stylish design. But as the film opens Ferrari is experiencing financial problems and Henry Ford II and his lieutenant Lee Iacocca – famous for the Mustang – see a gap in the market to make a racing car that could compete with the Italians – and win.

Straighforwardly told by Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth and Jason Keller, this is a well-paced and suspenceful piece of kit that revs up from the start with some magnificent widescreen camerawork, a cast of likeable and dastardly characters adding sparky dynamics to the action drama’s historic underpinnings. From the riveting race scenes to the poignant personal stories this is enjoyable and intensely moving.

James Mangold adds steely humour in constrasting the rival’s corporate culture. Boring old Ford’s budget for lavatory paper alone exceeds stylish Ferrari’s spend on show cars. And it’s the attention to detail and personal touch that wins through for the charismatic Enzo Ferrari who presides over his empire like a feudal Medici. And these scenes are a breath of fresh air when compared to the posturing ego of Tracy Letts’ flaccid Ford and his simpering sidekick Leo Beebe (a suitably mincing Josh Lucas).

Ford is bored with his beige output and desperate to make his name with something more interesting that can compete on the racetrack. He puts his money on the table and sets his minions to finding a winning solution. But at the heart of the film is a more thoughtful story: the strong working friendship between former Le Mans winner turned designer Shelby and maverick mechanic Ken Miles. The winning focus for Shelby is to create a hot car for Ford, and get Miles – who has already rubbed up against Beebe – behind the wheel.

Bale brings a breath of fresh air in the shape of lone wolf mechanic Miles who is an awkward and unpredictable perfectionist tempered by his appealing wife Mollie (Caitriona Balfe) and intelligent son Peter (Noah Jupe). The share a mutual respect for one another but aren’t afraid to air their differences, ending up at one point in a punch-up. and this all adds grist to the film’s feisty dramatics.

The nerve-shedding third act takes us through the gruelling 1966 24-hour French marathon that sees the drivers pit their wits against the harsh conditions in a competition that never fails to impress with its viciousness and verve. But Shelby and Miles are past masters in an endeavour that doesn’t always end well. The crucial element here is the Ford car’s breaks which have been subject to failure. Bale and Damon’s energetic chemistry provides for a thrilling watch with a fair share of tear-pricking tenderness and angry set-to’s. The male centric cast showcases an era when men were men and women watched on, encouragingly. What shines through here is their courage to achieve or to fade into the background. MT

ON DIGITAL DOWNLOAD 9 MARCH | ON 4 K ULTRA HD, BLU-RAY, DVD and VOD 23 MARCH 2020

Rio Grande (1950) ** Bluray

Dir.: John Ford; Cast: John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara, Claude Jarman jr., Ben Johnson; USA 1950, 105 min.

John Ford’s Rio Grande is the final part of the “cavalry” trilogy that started with Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and continues in the same vein: the Indians are dastardly, real men – when on the right side – are above the law, and women get to see what’s good for them, even if it takes them a long time.

Colonel Kirby Yorke (Wayne) is fighting the Indians at the titular river, but the cowards always decamp into Mexico when things get rough. And the high command allows him not to go in hot pursuit, since Mexico is a foreign country. Enter Jefferson Yorke, a son Kirby hasn’t seen for fifteen years. Jeff’ has just flunked West Point, but still wants to be a good soldier under Dad’s command. Hot on his heels comes mother Kathleen (O’Hara) – who has also has not seen Kirby since the latter burned down her family mansion during the Civil War. Kathleen wants to buy her son out of the army, but Jeff is hellbent on following Dad, and earning his spurs. Up comes trooper Tyree (Johnson), who is on the run for manslaughter, but is given a helping hand by the Colonel and his mates. Eventually, the Colonel finds a way to track the Indians down – even if it means breaking the law. But hell, if a certain Lt. General Sheridan is your best friend, you can take a chance or two.

Rio Grande now seems so dated, not only in look but also in theme. And there are many little ‘Trumps’ at work: misogynists for whom the law means nothing. The Indians are shown as a wild bunch who need to be killed lest they further endanger white women and children. The script by James Kevin McGuiness is as vapid as a plume of pipe-smoke, the downtime between fighting scenes filled with songs by the Sons of the Pioneers. DoP Bert Glennon (Stagecoach) does his best, but General Sheridan didn’t need to worry  (“I wonder what history will say about this”): all is now being revealed in the White House today. AS

NOW ON BLURAY COURTESY OF EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA | APRIL 6TH   

  

 

Vivarium (2019) **** Digital release

Dir: Lorcan Finnegan | Wri: Garret Shanley  | Cast: Imogen Poots, Jesse Eisenberg, Senan Jennings, Eanna Harwicke, Jonathan Aris | Drama 

Ever wondered what it’s like to live in a bland new-build housing estate? Well Lorcan Finnegan’s weirdly dystopian domestic sci-fi thriller gives you an idea. Vivarium feels like a cross between Black Mirror, Funny Games and The Truman Show with the hyper-realist look of Jessica Hausner’s Little Joe.
Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg are the best thing about this strange drama. They play an ordinary down to earth couple looking to buy a house. But what starts as cheerful and upbeat soon descends into claustrophobic fog-bound horror when the creepy estate agen (Jonathan Aris),abandons them during a viewing and they get lost and then isolated in a maze of similar streets and are somehow lured into moving into one of the pristine show-houses, where everything is provided (although gemutlichkeit is not the operative word), and raise its existing inhabitant, a cuckoo-like android from Hell or even Omen II (Irish actor Senan Jennings), that bears a striking resemblance to the estate agent who disappeared, and also speaks with an adult voice.

This classic genre piece clearly nods at authors like John Wyndam and H P Lovecraft and although Eisenberg’s character soon becomes affected by the spookiness of it all, digging a hole in the synthetic soil as a displacement activitiy, Poots, a junior school teacher, gets the bit between her teeth and refuses be brought down by this malign and impossible alien child. Occasional aerial shots show the uncanny village with its identical houses that go on apparently for miles. The couple’s sane and well-adjusted relationship starts to implode when the child becomes an adult and a war of attrition plays out as he questions them inanely in barbed and sarcastic way.

Vivarium is certainly compelling and intelligent, although Eisenberg’s sensitive talents are slightly out of kilter with his rugged, outdoorsy character. Poots has a more complex character arc and she provides the much needed integrity and ballast to counter the weirdness that is going on all around her. The film looks startlingly good, but the Garret Stanley’s script doesn’t quite max out the potential of the film’s universal themes: what’s it like to cope with the financial and emotional pressures of child raising and house buying. At its core though is the closeness of this couple in love and once that starts to implode then all hell breaks loose. In a quiet but terrifying way. MT

VIVARIUM will be released digitally on March 27th 2020 courtesy of  Vertigo Releasing | iTunes/Apple TV, Amazon, Sky Store, Virgin, Google Play, Rakuten, BT, Playstation, Microsoft, Curzon Home Cinema, BFI Player

 

The Truth (2019) *** Curzon Home Cinema

Dir: Hirokazu Kore-eda | Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche, Ethan Hawke, Clementine Grenier, Manon Clavil, Alain Libolt, Ludivine Sagnier | Drama, France

Well known for his family-orientated dramas, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest sees Catherine Deneuve in a role familiar to her own heart. She plays a French movie star whose newly published biography deeply affects her daughter, played by Juliette Binoche.

From the outset you wonder if her screen persona bears any similarity to her 70 something self. Deneuve still looks stunning as the narcissistic matriarch at the centre of this story of dysfunctionality. Clearly the director loves Deneuve in his first film made outside his homeland of Japan. Binoche is equally caustic as the daughter and script writer who remembers her childhood with mixed feelings. There were good times and bad, but once again, human memory can be complex and unreliable and this is a theme that Kore-eda has mused over before in Without Memory in particular. The Truth is more enigmatic and this does not always work in the film’s favour.

With his usual lightness of touch Kore-eda opens with a scene that will be familiar to the press:. Deneuve’s Fabienne is being interviewed by a sycophantic journalist and she is not making it easy. And once again, we wonder how close Deneuve really is to this woman she is playing. Meanwhile she holds her own family in lip-curling disdain where referring to her son-in-law Hank’s (Ethan Hawke) profession as “Actor is saying a lot”.

Hank and her daughter Lumir (Binoche) have arrived with their daughter Charlotte (Clementine Grenier) to stay at her elegant mansion surrounded by leafy gardens where a turtle called Pierre also roams. An uninvited guest also turns up in the shape of veteran actor Roger Van Hool (The Woman Next Door) who places Fabienne’s ex husband Pierre. 

Meanwhile Lumir is expressing her anger at not being sent a copy of the book prior to publishing and feels the relationship between her and her mother poorly reflected. Naturally Fabienne disagrees but it seems the book is merely a PR exercise. The book also mentions Sarah, an actress friend of the family who became close to Lumir, posing a threat to Fabienne, who is starring in a sci-fi film entitled Memories of My Mother with a character called Manon (Manon Clavil), who is purportedly very similar to Sarah. The sci-fi has an interesting relevance here as it is based on a book by Ken Liu, about a dying woman who buys herself more time by escaping to space, remaining unchanged while her daughter continues gets older, Dorian Grey style.

Another person whose nose has been put out of joint by the memoirs is Fabienne’s faithful personal assistant Luc (Alain Libolt). So much so that he resigns just as the Sci-fi film within the film is about to start shooting. He feels aggrieved that Fabienne has never mentioned his devoted service or the fact that he has six grandchildren. Neither does she appear the slightest bit interested in her own grand-children such is her own self focus.

The character who brings out the best in Fabienne is predictably her boyfriend Jacques (Christian Crahay), and more unexpectedly, by Manon. Cleverly Deneuve keeps up the various shades of enigma in a graceful and subtle turn in this complex study of maternal influences and also creative personalities. There are similarities here with Frankie that focused on another powerful matriarch in the shape of Isabelle Huppert, and also The Midwife where Deneuve plays an equally self-serving but bewitchingly charismatic woman at peak of her influence. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 20 MARCH 2020

 

 

Wake in Fright (1971) ****

image004 copyDir: Ted Kotcheff | Writer: Evan Jones, based on the novel by Kenneth Cook

Cast: Donald Pleasence, Gary Bond, Chips Rafferty, Sylvia Kay, Jack Thompson | DoP: Brian West | 108min   Drama

The maverick and multi-talented filmmaker Ted Kotcheff grew up in a Macedonian community in Toronto, eventually becoming the youngest drama director in the country at only 24. Working extensively for theatre and TV, his well-known series ‘Play for Today’ and ‘Afternoon Theatre’ became household names.  His features have become cult classics from Life at the Top with Jean Simmons and Honour Blackman; Golden Bear winner: The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974) that launched the career of Richard Dreyfus to Uncommon Valor, considered one of the greatest dramas about the Vietnam war. First Blood defined the Rambo series and his North Dallas Forty is considered to be one of the best sports films ever made. Turning his hand to successful comedies: Fun With Dick and Jane and Weekend at Bernie’s, Kotcheff has also been behind the popular ‘Law & Order: Special Victims Unit’ for the past 12 years.

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His second feature, Wake In Fright, screened to massive critical acclaim at Cannes in 1971, whereafter it did very poor box office internationally: a not unusual occurrence – Rome, Open City (also re-launching this week), was also unsuccessful on its first release. But Wake In Fright is considered by many to be one of the best Australian films ever made, revitalising the flagging film scene and ushering in the Australian New Wave movement and Ozploitation movies (low budget horror, comedy or action), along with others that wandered into the same cinematic territory: the Barrie McKenzie series, Mad Max 1 & 2, and Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout.

Based on a book by Kenneth Cook, Kotcheff opens with a 360-degree pan of the isolated sun-baked wilderness of the outback establishing the de-humanising environment into which our protagonist John Grant wanders when he fetches up in the Australian mining town of Yabba on his way to Sydney for the Christmas holidays.  Played by the impossibly good-looking Gary Bond, he’s a dapper and fresh-faced young intellectual. But when he comes across the local bobby Jock Crawford (Chips Rafferty) in a bar, he ends up on a drunker bender, gambling away his earnings in the hope of winning enough to leave the job he hates in a dead-end location.  Up on the money, he retires to bed, then making the classic mistake of returning to the gambling game. And so begins his descent into a nightmarish hell, isolated from civilisation, in the back of beyond with a collection of raucous locals.

Grant emerges a malleable, weak-willed man who dislikes the people he comes across but is unable to extricate himself from their company or show any restraint in dealing with them. Serving as a parable for the Innocent’s descent into Hell, Wake in Fright perpetuates the theory that men will turn into monsters given sufficient alcohol, testosterone and bad company. And the Yabba is a place where you can murder, rape and kill but it’s a criminal offence not to hang with the boys; and once you spend time here the law of the jungle prevails.

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Forcing themselves onto Grant’s urbane gentility, the locals ply him with drink and inane banter which he parries with good grace and without restraint until he becomes a lightweight creature of scorn. These are men who slaughter animals for fun and undermine women. After his skinful on the first night, Grant then encounters Tim Hynes, a local ‘businessman’ who invites him to stay in his ranch.  His daughter Janette (Sylvia Kay in a gracefully alluring turn), has also been forced to her knees emotionally after years of disdain from the local menfolk. Donald Pleasence plays a flippant, roguish doctor, struck-off in Sydney and now in the Yabba to ply his trade to the initiated and uncaring.  Of all the characters, Dr Tydon and Janette are probably the most well-matched, occasionally ‘friends with benefits’; Dr Tydon is a sexually ambiguous character. He’s also the most psychopathic and least red-necked local, but there’s a hard-edged sinister quality hiding behind his glib charm and well-manicured hands. Kotcheff remains completely neutral to his characters, observing their antics dispassionately and giving us space to be disgusted or pitiful at Grant’s fate and introducing an element of realism into the drama. But it’s difficult not to be sickened by the unrelenting depravity which peaks during an horrific night-time foray where they indulge in kangaroos shoot-out from their jeep, in a set piece which remains seared into the memory.

Although Wake in Fright is not classified as a horror film as such, the narrative contains elements of horror in its sinister build-up. There are no moments of explicit terror; just an unrelenting stream of offence that gradually has a corrosive effect on the psyche and soon the long-cherished idea of Aussie manhood and camaraderie is shot down and exposed for what is ultimately is: a  lame excuse for wanton brutality and mayhem. By the end of the film, nobody emerges unscathed by the events or worthy of our sympathy and so this becomes a drama entirely fraught with antagonists, leaving us desperate to find some kind of redemption where none exists, putting this on a par with John Boorman’s Deliverance or Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch: quite an achievement given its low budget, lack of stylistic effects or any real bankable stars apart from Donald Pleasance, who shines out with his richly-crafted portrait of Dr Tydon.  Wake in Fright is a chilling but universal portrait of a civilised man who falls victim to a community he holds in contempt. MT

NOW AVAILABLE ON BFI PLAYER

KOTCHEFF ON THE KANGEROO FOOTAGE: “I loved the kangaroos. I spent a lot of time with them, intimately close: they would lie around my director’s chair, waiting, like extras to be asked to do something. They are the most anthropomorphic creatures I have ever encountered. Nothing on earth would persuade me to hurt them or any other animal for any reason whatsoever.”

Sea Without Shore (2015) ****

Dir.: André Semenza, Fernanda Lippi | Cast: Livia Rangel, Fernanda Lippi | Sweden/UK/Brazil 2015, 89 min.

Set in the 19th century on a remote rural island in Sweden, Sea Without A Shore is a choreographed love poem featuring two nameless women whose intense relationship is abruptly terminated.

First premiered at Glasgow Film Festival five years ago the film finally finds its way onto general release. Directors André Semenza and Fernanda Lippi (who worked together on Ashes of God (2003), the latter setting up the Anglo/Brazilian ballet company ‘Zikzira Physical Theatre’, have brought to life this unique combination of ballet, images and words. Defying categorisation, it is absolutely stunning in its gloomy intensity.

The two women, one in a lace dress (Rangel), the other one with long, black hair (Lippi) move gracefully through a spooky fin-de-siècle setting, until forced apart by mythical forces. We see them in a house, resting on a sofa, then writhing around on the floor. They cycle in the woods, float in the water, holding hands – their bodies are on the back of two horses who carry them through the fields and woods, led by the women of the forest. Their dialogue, voiced by Marcela Rosas and Fernanda Lippi quoting from works by Charles Algernon Swinburne, Renée Vivien, and 17th century Lesbian poet Katherine Philips, is a stream-of-consciousness about love and loss. With the narrative slidin backwards and forwards in time, the couple seems caught in a vicious circle from which there is no escape. Their approach to love is all-or-nothing, oscillating between ecstasy and abject loneliness; haunted by their future, even when they are ‘in love’. The landscape, brilliantly photographed in cinema-scope by Marcus Waterloo, is the third character in this two-hander: the two women seem to be always in contact with the ground or the water, echoing their emotional bond. Carrying the weights of the women solemnly, the horses seem integrated in this procession of doomed love. The sound is supervised by multi-award-winning Glenn Freemantle (Gravity).

This is a unique piece yet there are echoes of Gabor Body’s NÁRCISZ ÉS PSYCHÉ. Sea Without A Shore stands alone as a commingle of poetry and ballet, painted with images to create desire and loss in a most absolute form. AS

NOW ON RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS

 

Last Holiday (1950) **** Bluray release

Last Holiday is based on a simple premise: a man believing himself to be terminally ill splurges his life savings on a luxury stay in an exclusive seaside hotel. Alec Guinness plays the man in question, JB Priestley produced the film and wrote the script which was directed by a young Hampstead filmmaker Henry Cass who was known for The Glass Mountain (1949) and would go on to make The Reluctant Bride (1955) and comedy, Castle in the Air (1952).
Aware of his impending fate, Alec Guinness’s George actually has a new lease of life and loses his inhibitions to indulge in some traditional English pastimes such as croquet and horse-racing, all kitted out in some seriously elegant outfits. Priestley makes some witty and ironic observations on the nature of life, love and loss this is a poignant and enjoyable B movie which ends happily – but you’ll have to watch it to find out why. MT
LAST HOLIAY | DVD, Blu-Ray and Digital | 9 MARCH 2020  COURTESY OF STUDIOCANAL VINTAGE CLASSICS
https://youtu.be/m2dO-ufQpvo

Orlando (1992) **** re-release

Orlando - Tilda SwintonDirector/Writer: Sally Potter | Cast: Tilda Swinton, Bill Zane, Quentin Crisp, Jimmy Somerville, Toby Jones, Simon Russell Beale | 94min   Fantasy Drama  UK

Sally Potter’s inventive, vibrant and visually sumptuous adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel is the ideal vehicle for Tilda Swinton’s versatility as the metrosexual maverick poet and nobleman Orlando, who is commanded by Elizabeth I to stay eternally young. If you could only have one auteu film in your timecapsule or desert island retreat, make it this one.

The story is endlessly fascinating and enduring, engaging modern audiences with its androgynous allure and sexual enigma. The characters are exotic and compelling. The costumes and set pieces are magnificent.  In short it is a love-letter to England’s rich language and literature. MT

NOW ON RERELEASE at THE BFI WITH AN INTRO BY POTTER AND SWINTON ON 8 MARCH 2020 and BFI PLAYER

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Servants | Sluzobnici (2020)

Dir.: Ivan Ostrochovsky; Cast: Samuel Skyva, Samuel Olakovic, Vladimir Miculcik, Vladimir Obsil, Vlad Ivanov, Martin Sulik, Vladimir Strnisco; Slovakia/Romania/Czech Republic/Ireland 2020, 78 min.

Slovakian director/co-writer Ivan Ostrochovsky creates a Bresson-like study of resistance set in a religious seminary in 1980 Bratislava (which back then was the capital of the Slovak Socialist Republic in  Czechoslovakia).

Shot in luminous black-and-white by DoP Juraj Chipikin in the old-fashioned 4:3 ratio, The Servants is a tightly-scripted Noirish portrait of temptation and belief.

The 1980s was a tough time for the Catholic Church whose religious freedom came under threat from the draconian cosh of the continuing communist regime. The clergy was divided into the regime-critical “catacomb church” which maintains contact with the Vatican and Western media, and the “ecclesiastical hierarchy” which cooperated with those in power and was represented by the state-sponsored priests’ association Pacem in Terris. (1971-1989).

Two young seminarians, Juraj (Skyva) and Michal (Polakovic) enter the Catholic institution in Bratislava to take the priesthood. Each must decide whether to collaborate with the regime or whether to remain faithful to their idealist views, and submitting to the surveillance of the secret police.

Most of the priests in the seminary are members of the Pacem in Terris group. Unfortunately for the two newcomers, their confessor is even worse: not only has he killed a man in a hit-and-ran accident, he is also an informer for the local Secret Service, led by Frantisek (Sulik), a medic who is in league with the Dean, Tibor (Strnisco).

Coufar (Obsil) meanwhile has been disciplined by the authorities but still organises secret meetings with scholars in his house and reports incidents to Radio Free Europe. Frantisek kills him, making it look like a road accident. But nobody is fooled and Michal joins the resistance group. Juraj is then threatened with being drafted into the army by Frantisek, but withstands the temptation. Michal, who does not know that Juraj has been interrogated, posts a leaflet on the noticeboard asking the seminarians to join a hunger strike in support of Coufar’s murder.

Ostrochovsky and his co-writers are particularly scathing about the collaborators in Pacem in Terris. The Dean and Frantsisek have a relationship founded on mutual collaboration – as Frantisek puts it: “if we fail to find the ringleader of the revolt in the seminary, both our heads will roll”. Coufar is the more cynical of the two: he produces Michal’s Secret Police File and tells him “You need to understand that we are not here to be happy”.

This is an austere but laudable drama enhanced by its stunning visual allure: there are astonishing shots of the inner courtyard of the seminary, showcasing an arena which serves both as a football pitch and a place for collective punishment. The Noirish atmosphere prevails, underlined by the protagonists’ long shadows, the night scenes artfully shot with one single light source. Servants is true to the spirit of Bresson whose hero Francois Leterrier from Un Condamne a Mort s’est Echappe is recreated in the resisters. AS

On Curzon Home Cinema on May 14th. As a virtual cinema screenings at HOME Manchester and ArtHouse, Crouch End as well as IFI@Home in Ireland | BERLINALE premiere in 2020

                                    

       

Persian Lessons (2020) **** Berlinale Special

Dir: Vadim Perelman. Russia/Germany/Belarus. 2020. 128mins

A war of attrition plays out between Belgian Jew and Nazi in this clever and darkly amusing ride to hell and back from Ukrainian born director Vadim Perelman (House of Fog).

Set in occupied France in 1942 and based on a short story by Wolfgang Kohlhaase, a young Belgian prisoner of war is forced to change his nationality and invent an entire language on the pretence of being Persian, in order to escape the clutches of an ego-driven commandant who saves him from the firing squad – simply because he has a penchant for learning the lingo (Farsi).

The physical tortures of war are one thing, but the psychological effects can be equally painful, and this film makes a nonsense of the popular saying: “sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me”. The young Belgian is played with considerably aplomb by (man of the moment) Nahuel Perez Biscayart. As Reza he not only has to lie but also remember the lies. The payback of these mental gymnastics comes in the film’s stunning reveal that is almost as moving as the final scene in Polanski’s The Pianist.

These were the tortuous hoops that people had to jump through during Nazism. And Persian Lessons is another astonishing angle on the war, and another tribute to our collective memory of the Holocaust. The gruelling tension of the folly-a-deux between Commandant and POW is lightened by a deliciously salacious undercurrent of flirtatiousness that burbles away between the Nazi staff running the camp. And although there is a slight longueur towards the final stretch in a story that requires a leap of faith, the strength of the performances and of Ilya Zofin’s brilliant writing combined with the impressive mise en scene blow these minor flaws away.

Reza is an extremely smart young man and while he quivers in his boots, he also works out how to massage Commandant Koch’s fragile ego. And Lars Eidinger – in one of the best performances of his career – is deeply sinister as the vain and deeply insecure Commandant, who has no access to the internet or even a smart phone to check the Farsi words and phrases, so the plot pivots between his desire to trust Reza and his deep fear of leaving himself exposed to ridicule by his peers and his young teacher, who is living his life on a knife edge.

Elegantly framed and lit by DoP Vladislav Opelyants, the only flaw is the irritating score that incessantly needles away when silence would occasionally be preferable. But even that can’t detract from this really gripping and intelligent wartime thriller. MT

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL 2020 | 20 February 2020 – 1 MARCH 2020

 

 

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My New York Year (2020)

Dir: Philippe Falardeau | Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Margaret Qualley | Canadian Drama, 101′

Most people have heard of Catcher in the Rye and its intriguing author, J D Salinger. Canadian filmmaker Philippe Falardeau choses to focus on the 2014 memoirs of Joanna Rakoff who served served as an intern to Salinger’s literary agent, and Sigourney Weaver does her utmost to breath life into her character in this rather flaccid adaptation of even though she gives its a certain a damn good try.

My Salinger Year – now renamed  My New York Year – presumably to give it a push into more mainstream audiences – run along similar lines the The Devil Wears Prada without the chutzpah: country girl goes to the city and is given a jolly good hiding by an urbane sophisticate, triumph and then to move on. Joanna has to deal with the writer’s fan mail, with a concise and polite generic response.

Margaret Qualley plays Joanna, the college graduate in question, as socially gauche but spunky enough to snare this rather plumb job that puts her in phone contact with the urbane novelist, but gives her a rough ride from the mercurial Margaret who enjoys upstaging Joanna and toys with her like a cat with a mouse. We are treated to dramatised excerpts from the rather idolatrous fan letters, and a subplot involving Joanna’s love interest Don (Douglas Booth) and her trials and tribulations of being a newcomer in the New York metropolis.

The problem here is really Falardeau’s lacklustre script that doesn’t stoke the kind of incendiary sparkle Anne Hathaway shared with Meryl Streep in Devil. In fact, quite the reverse happens here and the writing – faithful to the introspective nature of Rakoff’s page memoirs – represses the women into a dignified torpor rather than feisty fun and repartee. And we experience nothing of Salinger himself – after all the most intriguing character – not only for literary fans but anyone who has vaguely heard of the book. MT

IN CINEMAS 20 May 2021 | BERLINALE FILM premiere 2020.

 

 

 

 

 

The Old Dark House (1932)

Dir: James Whale | Wri: Benn Levy/J B Priestley | Cast: Boris Karloff| Charles Laughton | Eva Moore | Gloria Stuart | Melvyn Douglas| Raymond Massey | Horror / Comedy |US  75′

James Whale’s greatest film was arguably The Bride of Frankenstein but The Old Dark House comes a near second with its spine-tingling blend of thrilling suspense piqued with deliciously dark humour, cleverly sending up the horror genre in a subtle and brilliant way, thanks to Benn W. Levy’s script based on J B Priestley novel, Benighted. The storyline is secondary to spirited performances from a superb cast led by Raymond Massey, Mervyn Douglas and Gloria Stuart as a trio forced to take refuge in a macabre household presided over by sinister siblings (Ernest Thesiger and Elspeth Dudgeon). Things go bump in the night and Boris Karloff plays the monstrous hirsute butler off his rocker – hinting at an early version of Frankenstein himself. But it’s the quirky characterisations that make this supremely entertaining, along with an eerily evoked Gothic atmosphere. Another threesome soon emerges – a ménage à trois between Charles Laughton’s bumptious  Yorkshire mill-owner and his gal (Lilian Bond) who is chivalrously courted by Douglas whispering sweet nothings in the gloaming. Good fun all round. MT

New 4K restoration of THE CHILLING LOST CLASSIC from the director of FRANKENSTEIN, THE INVISIBLE MAN & THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN | and on dual format from 21 May 2018 COURTESY OF EUREKA MASTERS of CINEMA | ALSO SHOWING AT THE CINEMA MUSEUM, LONDON on FEBRUARY 23  

 

 

Ghost (1990) ***

Dir: Jerry Zucker | Cast: Demi Moore, Patrick Swayze, Whoopi Goldberg | US Fantasy Drama 127′

Jerry Zucker made a clutch of light-hearted films in the 1980s and 90s. This mystical romantic thriller was his most heartfelt with its theme of enduring love, and popular stars of the day Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze. After a brief but passionate affair, death divides the young lovers on their way home from the theatre in Manhattan. But it doesn’t end in tears. A purple coiffed Whoopi Goldberg brings a touch of wacky weirdness to the story as a psychic who reunites them in the ether, thanks to her hammy supernatural powers.

Bruce Joel Rubin’s writing skills make this plausible and enjoyable, although it’s a tad long at over two hours. Still, it went on to be a massive box office success and the highest grossing film of 1990. The other interesting takeaway is Sam Raimi’s roving camerawork which elevates the film from an ordinary drama to the realms of fantasy with stylish dissolves between scenes where Patrick Swayze’s character morphs into a ghostly presence with the ability to walk between walls. And Maurice Jarre’s score reworks the 1955 song Unchained Melody originally composed by Alex North. It went for the Academy Award that year but lost out to John Barrie’s for Dances with Wolves. MT

RE-RELEASED by PARK CIRCUS | 30th ANNIVERSARY | Nationwide for Valentine’s Day 2020

The Truth (2019) ***

Dir: Hirokazu Kore-eda | Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche, Ethan Hawke, Clementine Grenier, Manon Clavil, Alain Libolt, Ludivine Sagnier | Drama, France

Well known for his family-orientated dramas, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest sees Catherine Deneuve in a role close to her heart as a French movie star whose newly published biography offends her onscreen daughter, Juliette Binoche.

From the outset you wonder if Deneuve’s screen persona bears any similarity to her 70 something self. She looks stunning as the narcissistic matriarch at the centre of this story of family dysfunction. Kore-eda clearly loves Deneuve in this first film made outside his homeland of Japan. Binoche is tight-lipped and caustic as a daughter whose childhood memories are far from rosy. There were good times and bad, but once again, human memory can be complex and unreliable, and Kore-eda returns to a theme he has mused over before, Without Memory a case in point. The Truth is more enigmatic and this does not always work in the film’s favour. The opening scene shows his hallmark lightness of touch: Deneuve’s Fabienne is being interviewed by a sycophantic journalist, and the diva’s curt answers give this vignette an amusing twist. Meanwhile she holds her own family in lip-curling disdain, particularly her son in law Hank (Ethan Hawke) whose loose American style jars with the prim French comme-il-faut set-up.

Lumir (Binoche) has brought her own daughter Charlotte (Clementine Grenier) to stay at the elegant family mansion surrounded by leafy gardens where a turtle called Pierre also roams. An uninvited guest turns up in the shape of veteran actor Roger Van Hool (The Woman Next Door) who plays Fabienne’s ex-husband Pierre. 

Meanwhile Lumir feels hard done by at not being sent a copy of her mother’s book prior to publishing. She also feels their relationship is poorly reflected. Naturally Fabienne disagrees but it seems the book is merely a PR exercise. It features Sarah, an actress friend of the family who became close to Lumir, and posed a threat to Fabienne. Deneuve is in the throes of filming a sci-fi outing entitled Memories of My Mother which has a character called Manon (Manon Clavil), who is purportedly very similar to Sarah. The sci-fi has an interesting relevance here as it is based on a book by Ken Liu about a dying woman who buys herself more time by escaping into space, where she remains youthful while her daughter continues to age, Dorian Grey style.

Another person whose nose has been put out of joint by the memoirs is Fabienne’s faithful personal assistant Luc (Alain Libolt). So much so that he resigns just as the Sci-fi film within the film is about to start shooting. He feels aggrieved that Fabienne has never mentioned his devoted service. This is Deneuve’s show and she is not the slightest bit interested in her grand-children, or anyone else for that matter.

The character who brings out the best in Fabienne is predictably her boyfriend Jacques (Christian Crahay). Deneuve maintains the nuances of enigma in a graceful and subtle turn in this complex study of maternal influences, and also creative personalities. There are similarities here with Frankie that focused on another powerful matriarch in the shape of Isabelle Huppert, and also The Midwife where Deneuve plays an equally self-serving but bewitchingly charismatic woman at peak of her influence. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 20 MARCH 2020

 

 

Glasgow Film Festival 2020 | 26 February – 8 March 2020

Glasgow is Scotland’s creative capital. Famed for its Art Nouveau architecture and home to the Scottish Ballet, Scottish Opera and National Theatre of Scotland, the Clyde-side metropolis throbs with artistic vibes and plays host to one of the UK’s leading annual film festivals. Across 12 days GIFF2020 will screen 9 World premieres, 10 European premieres, and 102 UK premieres.

There will be a chance to see World premieres of Sulphur & White, and Flint, Anthony Baxter’s water-themed follow-up to You’ve Been Trumped Too. And fresh from the international film festival circuit is Justin Kurzel’s latest thriller The True History of the Kelly Gang, award-winning Spanish Western Luz, The Flower of Evil, and Igor Tuveri’s stylish 5 is the Perfect Number adapted from his graphic novel and featuring Italian megastar Toni Servillo (The Great Beauty).  

Documentary wise: Ebs Burnough’s The Capote Tapes takes us back through the archives to revisit the iconic American novelist, while Nanni Moretti’s Santiago, Italia (left) explores the Italian role in rescuing exiles out of Chile after Pinochet’s Coup d’Etat.  Michael Paszt tells a story definitely stranger than fiction in his feature documentary Nail in the Coffin: The Fall and Rise of Vampiro, which follows a professional wrestler juggling dual roles of running Lucha Libre AAA in Mexico and parenting his teenage daughter. Meanwhile Billie aims to be the definitive documentary on Lady Day herself, featuring never-before-seen interviews with those who knew one of the world’s greatest jazz singers

Classic films to look out for are Tarkovsky’s sinister masterpiece Stalker (1979) and Richard Fleischer’s cult Sci-fi thriller Soylent Green (1973) starring Charlton Heston and Edward G Robinson. There is also a chance to revisit two classics directed by women: Dorothy Arzner’s 1932 comedy Merrily We Go to Hell and Nietzchka Keene’s Bjork-starring fantasy fable The Juniper Tree (1990). Both shot in luminous black and white.

Women filmmakers will be also championed in Mark Cousins’ 2018 epic homage to the history of female talent: Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema. This groundbreaking 14-hour documentary is narrated by Tilda Swinton and Jane Fonda and takes place in five instalments (main pic). And celebrated photographer Susan Wood will talk about her life behind the camera in Susan Wood: A life in Pictures (left).

The festival will open and close with UK premieres of films directed by women – Alice Winocour’s Proxima starring Eva Green as an astronaut preparing for a mission to the International Space Station and Beanie Feldstein’s star turn in the big screen adaptation of Caitlin Moran’s blockbusting memoir How to Build a Girl, directed by Coky Giedroyc.

Glasgow Film Festival closes on International Women’s Day with a celebratory showcase of female talent – with every film screened either directed or written by a woman or starring a female lead.

Glasgow Film Festival | 28 FEBRUARY – 8 MARCH 2020

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

Mr Jones (2021) Ukrainian Relief

Dir: Agnieszka Holland | Cast: James Norton, Vanessa Kirby, Peter Sarsgaard, Joseph Mawle, Fenella Woolgar, Kenneth Cranham, Celyn Jones, Krzysztof Pieczyński, Michalina Olszańska, Patricia Volny | Poland, United Kingdom, Ukraine 2019 | Cinematography: Tomasz Naumiuk, Editing: Michał Czarnecki | Music: Antoni Komasa-Łazarkiewicz | 141′

This riveting romp through Russian history follows a young Welsh journalist who ventured into the Soviet Union in 1933 to discover the sinister background to Stalin’s Communist regime. Stalin was feeding Moscow while millions of Ukrainians were dying of famine due to forced state control of their farms and food. Andrea Chalupa has been developing the script for 14 years, conflating the story with that of Animal Farm, based on her own book: Orwell and the Refugees: The Untold Story of Animal Farm.

The man in question is Gareth Jones (Norton), a respected attache of Lloyd George (Cranham) who sets off for Moscow where he comes up against pro-Stalin press supremo and Pulitzer prize-winner Walter Duranty (a cold-eyed Sarsgaard) tasked with keeping the famine under wraps from the World.

During his stay, Duranty invites Jones to luxuriate in the excesses of the State budget, but the Welsh gentleman gracefully declines, preferring the intellectual stimulation of one Ada Brooks, a journalist for the New York Times, and in thrall to Duranty. Against advice from all sides, Jones then makes a perilous journey south and nearly dies himself of hunger- and Holland makes this second act a gruelling one to impress upon us the suffering endured by the rural population, women and children. Jones then exposes the story to the World, via Randolph Heart, putting Sarsgaard’s nose out of joint. But tragedy is to follow – as it often does when Russian secrets are shared.

Holland’s ambitious attempt to pull the various strands together leaves a subplot showing Orwell writing Animal Farm slightly adrift, and the use of montage to invigorate the various train journeys is rather hammy. But the entertainment factor rides over the structural imperfections and superb performances make this a really entertaining romp. Norton is simply brilliant as Jones, a decent and persevering professional gifted with integrity and a pioneering spirit. Kirby also shines as the conflicted woman at the centre of the furore. In thrall to Duranty, she shuts down Jones’ romantic advances, unable to develop them, despite their chemistry. There is great support from Fenella Woolgard; Kenneth Cranham does Lloyd George with a charming Welsh accent; and Sarsgaard seethes with shifty antagonism tempered by a veneer of supercilious charm.

Shot in Poland, Scotland (not Wales) and in original locations in the snowbound Ukraine, the homecoming scenes in Barry with Jones and his father are particularly poignant. Chulapa’s script and dialogue shows an acute English sensibility. It’s a mammoth achievement. Agnieszka Holland works with her Polish craftsman to make this a thoroughly engrossing experience which flashes by despite a running time of over two hours. MT

LONDON SOUTH BANK UNIVERSITY HOSTS SPECIAL FILM SCREENING FOR MR JONES  | TO HELP RAISE FUNDS FOR UKRAINIAN RELIEF  |TUESDAY 10TH MAY | 5:45 FOR 6:05PM START | LSBU KEYWORTH CENTRE  KEYWORTH STREET LONDON SE1 6LN

Yalda (2019) **** Sundance 2020

Dir/scr: Massoud Bakhshi. Iran, France, Germany, Switzerland, Luxembourg. 2019. 89 mins

Women are much maligned in Iran’s sternly patriarchal society. Writer and director Massoud Bakhshi uses one woman’s story to shed light on this deeply misogynist culture that has taken the nation further and further back in time from the more enlightened days of the Shah back in the 1970s.  Cutting his teeth in 2014 with A Respectable Family, this second feature is a tensely slick affair that uses melodrama to heighten the film’s stark thematic concerns of life and death.

In Tehran festivities for the winter celebration of Yalda are in full swing lighting up a capital that looks, to all intents and purposes, like any other modern metropolis. The focus narrows into the confined space of a TV studio where Maryam (Sadaf Asgari) arrives in handcuffs to appear in a popular reality show called ’Joy Of Forgiveness’ that also includes literary readings and music.

Maryam has been sentenced to death for the murder of her much older husband Nasser. But the good news is that the family have it in their power to forgive her and make way for a reprieve. Nasser’s daughter Mona (Behnaz Jafari) used to be her best friend. But tonight Mona will decide Maryam’s fate on live television. The film plays out almost like a TV trial, Maryam pleading her case and hoping to persuade Mona to let her go free. Bakhshi mines the rich dramatic potential of the subject to great affect, leaving us shaken and stirred as the story moves towards its febrile finale.

Performances are strong from a really impressive female cast. Asgari makes for a convincingly uneasy Maryam contrasting with the steely calm of Behnaz Jafari’s Mona. We are reminded that men clearly have the upper hand in Iran, but that women can also be each other’s enemies all over the world. MT

Sundance Film Festival 2020 | 23 JANUARY – 1 FEBRUARY 2020

 

The Lighthouse (2019) *****

Dir: Robert Eggers | Thriller, US 109′

Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe are hard-nosed sea salts caught in a battle of wills in this terrifying two-hander set in 1890s Maine.

The Lighthouse is Robert Eggers much anticipated follow-up to The Witch and it certainly doesn’t disappoint. Fuelled by a pent up rage that seethes right through to the biting end of this often claustrophobic thriller, the lauded American auteur adds another cult classic to the New England Gothic genre.

Arriving from Canada Ephraim Winslow (Pattinson) joins the craggy and flatulent old retainer Thomas Wake (Dafoe) to offer support as the winter sets in and the weather worsens. The stormy dynamic of their emotional voyage is fraught with hallucinatory twists and turns in a gripping yet enigmatic chiller that relies on atmosphere and a mounting dread to tell a stir-crazy tale infused with mystery, myth and legend. The haunting atmospheric soundscape is particularly redolent of solitude and isolation setting a plangent tone for what is to come.

Echoes of Moby Dick are clearly felt but this artful drama is more akin to Robert O’Flaherty’s 1934 document Man of Aran with its dense grainy black and white images and rugged sense of place. The Movie-tone aspect ratio focuses the attention on the keepers’ constantly fleeting expressions, like storm clouds scudding by. Louise Ford’s editing borrows from Soviet Montage outings such as The Diplomatic Pouch (1927) and Old and New (1929). Eggers scripts with his brother Max, and his regular cinematographer Jarin Blaschke captures the mournful misery of it all in chiaroscuro brilliance.

Dafoe is brilliantly cast as Wake, William Blake his literary touchstone, a grizzled beard and rugged features bearing witness to an eternity of storms and baking sun. Hobbling about on a gammy leg, his countenance is that of stiff-necked superiority and he pulls rank at every opportunity over his junior Winslow, who bitterly resents every command, turning his gaze on the slowly revolving beam, mesmerised by its chiaroscuro shadow play. Wake insists on being “the keeper of the light,” but we are soon made aware of a curious sexual vide that also inhabits these close quarters. Both have a troubled past and a need for solitude so their enforced nearness is a constant thorn in the side of the other.

Seabirds are very much a motif here along with a recurring sequence where Winslow is sexually tormented by a mermaid. A contretemps with an angry seagull marks a change in the weather, bringing a freezing storm from the North East and ruining their food stocks, sending them straight to the bottle for sustenance, with alarming and ambiguous consequences. Clearly it will all end in tears, albeit very salty ones laced with rum. MT

NOW ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE

Berlinale 2020 | Competition titles Announced

Carlo Chatrian announced his first Berlinale competition line-up describing it “quite dark’ with a glittering array of “earth-shattering, and intimate stories” to screen from 20 until 1 March 2020.

The 70th edition opens with French Canadian director Philippe Falardeau’s My Salinger YearThe  film depicts the small New York City literary world of the 1990s with humour and verve. Sigourney Weaver, the three times Oscar nominee plays the author’s literary agent, based on a memoir by Joanna Rakoff portrayed by Emmy-winning Margaret Qualley (daughter of Andie MacDowell).

This year’s slate of Golden Bear hopefuls features heavyweight regulars and prodigious female directing talent in the shape of Orlando’s Sally Potter, who brings a story of existential angst starring Javier Bardem and his onscreen daughter Elle Fanning; Berlinale regular Kelly Reichardt with her latest, a period drama First Cow that has Toby Jones wondering around the countryside (as he did in By Ourselves). Then there is Swiss duo Stéphanie Chuat, Véronique Reymond who direct Nina Hoss in My Little Sister; Argentina’s Natalia Meta with The Intruder and finally from the US Eliza Hittman with Never, Rarely Sometimes, Always. The prolific Hong Sang-soo is back with The Woman Who Ran featuring his current muse Kim Minhee. Berlinale heavyweights Benoit Delepine, Philippe Garel, Malaysia’s Tsai Ming-Liang, and Cambodia’s Rithy Pan will also be in town.

Elsewhere in the programme there is documentary graces the line-up programme includes 18 films from 18 countries with 16 world premieres as well as one documentary form.
The line-up of the Berlinale Specials features Vanessa Lapa’s documentary about the Nazi architect’s time in the US; Speer goes to Hollywood. . Four more titles have been confirmed. You can find these films following the list of the Competition.

Competition

Berlin Alexanderplatz
Germany / Netherlands
by Burhan Qurbani
with Welket Bungué, Jella Haase, Albrecht Schuch, Joachim Król, Annabelle Mandeng, Nils Verkooijen, Richard Fouofié Djimeli
World premiere

DAU. Natasha
Germany / Ukraine / United Kingdom / Russian Federation
by Ilya Khrzhanovskiy, Jekaterina Oertel
with Natalia Berezhnaya, Olga Shkabarnya, Vladimir Azhippo, Alexei Blinov, Luc Bigé
World premiere

Domangchin yeoja (The Woman Who Ran)
Republic of Korea
by Hong Sangsoo
with Kim Minhee, Seo Younghwa, Song Seonmi, Kim Saebyuk, Lee Eunmi, Kwon Haehyo, Shin Seokho, Ha Seongguk
World premiere

Effacer l’historique (Delete History)
France / Belgium
by Benoît Delépine, Gustave Kervern
with Blanche Gardin, Denis Podalydès, Corinne Masiero
World premiere

El prófugo (The Intruder)
Argentina / Mexico
by Natalia Meta
with Érica Rivas, Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, Daniel Hendler, Cecilia Roth, Guillermo Arengo, Agustín Rittano, Mirta Busnelli
World premiere

Favolacce (Bad Tales)
Italy / Switzerland
by Damiano & Fabio D’’Innocenzo
with Elio Germano, Barbara Chichiarelli, Lino Musella, Gabriel Montesi, Max Malatesta
World premiere

First Cow
USA
by Kelly Reichardt
with John Magaro, Orion Lee, Toby Jones, Scott Shepherd, Gary Farmer, Lily Gladstone
International premiere

Irradiés (Irradiated)
France / Cambodia
by Rithy Panh
World premiere / Documentary form

Le sel des larmes (The Salt of Tears)
France / Switzerland
by Philippe Garrel
with Logann Antuofermo, Oulaya Amamra, André Wilms, Louise Chevillotte, Souheila Yacoub
World premiere

Never Rarely Sometimes Always
USA
by Eliza Hittman
with Sidney Flanigan, Talia Ryder, Théodore Pellerin, Ryan Eggold, Sharon Van Etten
International premiere

Rizi (Days)
Taiwan
by Tsai Ming-Liang
with Lee Kang-Sheng, Anong Houngheuangsy
World premiere

The Roads Not Taken
United Kingdom
by Sally Potter
with Javier Bardem, Elle Fanning, Salma Hayek, Laura Linney
World premiere

Schwesterlein (My Little Sister)
Switzerland
by Stéphanie Chuat, Véronique Reymond
with Nina Hoss, Lars Eidinger, Marthe Keller, Jens Albinus, Thomas Ostermeier, Linne-Lu Lungershausen, Noah Tscharland, Isabelle Caillat, Moritz Gottwald, Urs Jucker
World premiere

Sheytan vojud nadarad (There Is No Evil)
Germany / Czech Republic / Iran
by Mohammad Rasoulof
World premiere

Siberia
Italy / Germany / Mexico
by Abel Ferrara
with Willem Dafoe, Dounia Sichov, Simon McBurney, Cristina Chiriac
World premiere

Todos os mortos (All the Dead Ones)
Brazil / France
by Caetano Gotardo, Marco Dutra
with Mawusi Tulani, Clarissa Kiste, Carolina Bianchi, Thaia Perez, Alaíde Costa, Leonor Silveira, Agyei Augusto, Rogério Brito, Thomás Aquino, Andrea Marquee
World premiere

Undine
Germany / France
by Christian Petzold
with Paula Beer, Franz Rogowski, Maryam Zaree, Jacob Matschenz
World premiere

Volevo nascondermi (Hidden Away)
Italy
by Giorgio Diritti
with Elio Germano
World premiere

Berlinale Special

“This section provides a platform for films that captivate a wide audience. We call them ‘moving images’ because they move audiences with their expressiveness and their brilliant and courageous performers. The gala premieres fulfil the desire for the stars, glitz and glamour that is part of every big festival. Berlinale Series offers an insight into new forms of storytelling while Berlinale Special presents itself as a forum for debate and discussion and builds bridges between the audience and cinema,” comments Carlo Chatrian, Artistic Director of the Berlinale.
The following four films complete the programme of this year’s Berlinale Special. In total, 20 films from 19 countries, among them 15 world premieres, will be shown in the section.

Berlinale Special Gala at Berlinale Palast

Onward
USA
by Dan Scanlon
with the voices of Tom Holland, Chris Pratt, Julia-Louis Dreyfus, Octavia Spencer, Mel Rodriguez, Kyle Bornheimer, Lena Waithe, Ali Wong
International premiere / Animation

Berlinale Special Gala at Friedrichstadt-Palast

Curveball
Germany
by Johannes Naber
with Sebastian Blomberg, Dar Salim, Virginia Kull, Michael Wittenborn, Thorsten Merten, Franziska Brandmeier
World premiere

Berlinale Special at Haus der Berliner Festspiele

DAU. Degeneratsia (DAU. Degeneration)
Germany / Ukraine / United Kingdom / Russian Federation
by Ilya Khrzhanovskiy, Ilya Permyakov
World premiere / Documentary form

Speer Goes to Hollywood
Israel
by Vanessa Lapa
World premiere / Documentary form

BERLINALE 2020 | 20-29 FEBRUARY 2020

 

The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019) ****

Dir: Armando Iannucci | Cast: Dev Patel, Hugh Laurie, Ben Wishaw, Peter Capaldi | UK. 2019. 116mins

Armando Iannucci brings a wonderful exuberance to this nimble adaptation of the novel Dickens considered his favourite. The autobiographical account of an author’s formative years unfolds in a dazzling swirl of engaging vignettes and enduring characters. Often riotously funny, the drama never lose sight of the novel’s underlying central themes of poverty, class, and importance of friends. It also conveys Dickens’ sense of humour, whether dark or upbeat, that permeates nearly all his novels. Personal History Of David Copperfield should also appeal to new and younger audiences put off by the weighty and worthy tomes lining their parents books shelves. Dev Patel is wonderful in the central role, his dark looks and vivaciousness lighting up every scene.

Many directors have mined the rich dramatic potential that David Copperfield offers to the big screen and TV. Most notable is the 1935 version that perfectly showcased W.C.Fields talents and portliness in the role of Mr. Micawber. Iannucci brings an effervescent energy to his film, which feels thoroughly modern while retaining its old worldy aesthetic. New is the idea of sentences literally written across the screen, and it works due to the manic pacing and visual busyness, colours and characters vibrate with enthusiasm.

David Copperfield relied on the kindness of strangers after a childhood of abuse at the hands of his wicked stepfather. And he runs the gamut of gruelling jobs and uncomfortable dwellings remaining chipper and optimistic throughout. He is a role model for children nowadays channelling that well known phrase: through hard work, to the stars. His philanthropic nature is also to be applauded. Copperfield grows up clever, self-aware and a skilled judge of character; traits that will go on to serve him well in this great writings.

Sumptuously mounted the film looks like a jewel box and is equally uplifting with its elegant costumes and beautiful frocks. An all star cast includes Tilda Swinton as a febrile Betsey Trotwood and Ben Whishaw’s ‘everso humble’ hand-wringing Uriah Heep. Hugh Laurie’s is also back from the US with a droll and debonair Mr. Dick. A delightful  film and the perfect tonic for January. MT

NOW OUT ON RELEASE FROM 31 JANUARY 2020

 

Piedra Sola | Lonely Rock (2020) **** Rotterdam Film Festival 2020

Dir: Alejandro Telemaco Tarraf | Writers: Lucas Distefano, Telemaco Tarraf | Drama | Argentina, 82′ | Spanish/Quechua

High up in the Andes mountains a herder sees his lamas threatened by a puma in this impressive feature debut that melds fiction, documentary and ethnographical elements to tell a mystical story full of breathtaking landscapes. Co-writing with Distefano, Tarraf makes minimal use of dialogue, which is mainly in the native Quechua. A unsettling soundscape accompanies this haunting piece of filmmaking.

Set on the widescreen and in intimate close-up the film follows herder Ricardo and his family. And although they seem cut off from humanity in this remote part of the world the hypnotic human interest story very much connects to a global narrative of survival for small communities everywhere. Pitting his wits against animals and the elements rather than sales figures and corporate competitors, Ricardo is constantly aware that self-sufficiency is paramount: one of his lama pelts barely fetches £5, and no one seems very interested in the animal’s meat when he eventually makes it to the nearest market, a long trip away on foot and bus.

So tracking down the puma is vital. According to local custom, he must also make an offering to the beast. At one point an anonymous funeral cortege passes by serving as a token of awareness of the fragility of man’s existence here, rather than marking an actual death. The herder joins in chanting: “do not forget you are mortal”. The burning byre is an eerie counterpoint to the darkness enveloping the ‘mourners’ as they commune in silence.

Ricardo’s quest for the puma is gradually transformed into an exploration of something deeper and more spiritual. The Andes are a mysterious range of mountains that seem to possess a transformative power. The white horse in the opening scene becomes the wooden statue representing death. Meanwhile the titular lone monolith metamorphoses into an Andean version of Ayres Rock with its strange potency that suggests an otherworldly force is at play beyond the humans and their animals. MT

ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2020

The End Will Be Spectacular (2020) **** Rotterdam Film Festival

Dir.: Ersin Celik; Cast: Arjin Baysal, Delil Piran, Cîan Seve, Sevda Kina, Sahire Ozhari; Syria 2019, 135 min.

Ersin Celek’s feature debut celebrates the Kurdish fight for independence. Shot in the autonomous region of Northern Syria, The End Will be Spectacular tells the story of the siege of Diyarbakir and the ancient city of Sur, attacked by the Turkish army for over hundred days, from December 2nd 2015, after the declaration of independence by the Sur’s Kurdish assembly.

Zilan (Baysal) enters Diyarbakir to meet up with friends of her brother Andok, killed here fighting for the Kurdish PKK. She encounters a number of women fighters amongst them the commander Nucan (Ozhan), and Dilan (Kina) who also wants to avenge her brother. The overall leader is Ciyzger (Seve), whose titular speech ends with “When hope and resistance come together, no matter what happens: the end will be spectacular”. The slow and bespectacled Zilan is not the model of a resistance fighter. But she soon speeds, and gets quite nifty with her semi-automatic gun. Dilan (Kina) decides to burn her diaries, she feels personal memories are no longer relevant in times of hardship. Then Zilan and Nucan watch in horror as Dilan gives herself up to the Turkish forces. But to their surpise, the diary she is gives the Turkish commander is not a plan of the defence lines but an explosive device, killing a load of Turks, Zilan and Nucan saving her in  the aftermath. The Turkish army with their tanks makes progress, and there is an impressive burial scene amidst the first snows. Later, a traitor is caught having sold the location of the anti-tank mines to the Turks. He meets a sticky end. The siege grinds to a conclusion, Ciyager sending out a small group, including Zilan, who will tell the Kurdish villages and towns in the area about the heroic fight in the hope of garnering support and swelling their ranks.

Shot imaginatively by DoP Cemil Kizildag, The End resonates with Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers narrative-wise, but aesthetically it is closer to Malle’s Viva Maria!. Celik is very much an idealist at heart, and his portraits of women fighters is the highlight of his feature. A little overindulgence by Celek manifests itself in the running time of 135 minutes, but the emotional suspense created by the brilliant ensemble (including seven, who act out their roles in the real uprising) makes up for it. AS

ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2020

 

Richard Jewell (2019) ***

Dir: Clint Eastwood | Wri: Marie Brenner | Cast: Sam Rockwell, Paul Walter Hauser, Olivia Wilde, Jon Hamm, Kathy Bates | US Drama 131′

Richard Jewell was an Atlanta security guard falsely accused of planting a bomb in Centennial Olympic Park during the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. Clint Eastwood directs his latest ‘underdog’ story with sleek and workmanlike economy. Visually Richard Jewell is bland, but narratively straightforward, although some critics (who tend on the whole to be left-wing) may argue that Eastwood overlays the feature with his famous right-wing gaze.

Paul Walter Hauser plays Jewell, a pleasantly portly figure who we first meet working as a janitor in a law firm, plying his lawyer boss (Sam Rockwell) with Snicker bars. Keen to get back into law enforcement with the police he is clearly doing his best to make a good impression and soon lands a job in security at the Centennial Olympic Park. A jovial and modest character he takes his job seriously and immediately calls a bomb expert when spotting a backpack under a park bench – although his colleagues accusing him of ‘crying wolf’. The bomb goes off as Jewell, the police and the FBI are clearing the area where Kenny Rogers has been entertaining a large crowd of merrymakers. Several people lose their lives and Jewell is named the hero of the day. But the tables are turned when the FBI decide to finger him as the lone-wolf bomber, taking him in for questioning. A nightmarish saga develops as Jewell and his homely mother – Kathy Bates plays a convincing Mrs Jewell who spends her time popping cakes in the oven to feed his paunch.

Eastwood does make us question Jewell’s innocence at first, but by the end of the investigation, Jewell seethes with a quietly affecting conviction as the former roly poly policeman whose life is put on hold and traumatised by the gross intrusion. The losers are the FBI, and of course the media. Kathy Scruggs, the brash journalist at the centre of the furore is also slated – but Wilde makes her glib and unlikeable, so no love lost there. But it’s due to her diligence – or over-zealousness – that Jewell suddenly becomes the villain of the piece, his status as a prime suspect is leaked to the press, Scruggs nabbing the story. After coming under intense scrutiny by the FBI, he is then defended by his former boss Watson Bryant (Sam Rockwell), who was impressed by his Snicker habit, probity and upbeat disposition when they worked together. Jewell eventually gets off scot free due to a total lack of evidence.

Eastwood makes some salient points in this enjoyable moral tale that shows how democracy can work to the advantage of ordinary citizens, protecting them from the Police – as long as they can afford a good lawyer. Eastward also enforces his usual points about common decency and neighbourliness. Once an accuser becomes the accused – and this applies to false claims of all kinds: rape, robbery, stalking – society has clearly lost its way. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 31 JANUARY 2020

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Young Hunter | El Cazador (2020) *** Rotterdam Film Festival 2020

Dir: Marco Berger | Drama, Argentina 90’

Marco Berger’s latest film is a sympathetic exploration of gaydom in modern day Buenos Aires.

Berger won the Teddy award for Absent in Berlin eight years ago. This latest is an enigmatic feature that pictures its young protagonist on the hunt for a partner. Fifteen-year-old Ezequiel (Juan Pablo Cestaro) is seen discussing a porn magazine with his heterosexual friend in the open scene. He is not sure how to approach his sexuality, but with his parents away travelling now seems as good a time as any to take things forward.

In the skater park he meets the tattooed Mono (Lautaro Rodríguez), who seems ready to be his friend – but is so cool and laid back it may be that he is not gay. And soon Ezekiel finds out that he was right to be diffident about Mono.

This LGBTQ+ feature manages to keep us intrigued with its undercurrent of tension and Cestaro’s acting talent that conveys palpable chemistry and playfulness retaining a certain vulnerability about his character. Rodriquez’ Mono reciprocates with sultry glances and a certain insouciance which adds to his allure.

But there are some plot issues and the heavy-handed score telegraphs moments of caution almost cueing them to happen rather than allowing the story to unfurl naturally. Berger introduces another character to the story in the shape of a younger boy Juan Ignazio (Patricio Rodriquez) and this adds adds another dimension to the piece informing act three.

There is nothing particularly innovative about the film’s straightforward camerawork and aesthetic but the performances are impressive across the board and particularly thoughtful is the subtle interplay between Ezekiel and his father (Luciano Suardi) who is there for his boy although he does not necessarily understand his motivations.  MT

ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2020

Los Fantasmas (2020) **** Rotterdam International Film Festival 2020

Dir: Sebastián Lojo | Guatemala / Argentina, 2020, 75′ | world premiere

Lojo brings a distinct retro look to his impressively filmic feature debut that follows Koki, a charismatic young man making a living as a petty criminal in the hilly backwaters of Guatemala City.

Under the glowering skies of this impoverished capital, Koki and his mates are forced into a nether world of  deceit and violence; the banal, repetitive realities of working class life adding a facade of normality to their grim existence. Grifting is a fact of life not just a lifestyle choice for these troubled individuals, it is a necessity. In crafting his antiheroes, Lojo is clearly influenced by Arturo Ripstein’s Bleak Street but this is a much darker less stylised affair that seethes with subdued discontent, the soulful female characters remaining firmly in the background, weak and undeveloped, merely there to serve their men.

Koki’s sultry afternoons give way to intense nighttime forays as he plies his trade, ducking and diving in bars and shady nightclubs. He befriends gringos (tourists) who are suddenly and suspiciously mugged. After dark, he seduces male strangers, leading them to an hotel room where they are robbed by his older associate Carlos (real life wrestler Carlos, El Punisher), a middle aged, senior member of staff at the hotel. Lojo often pictures Koki glaring straight into the camera, giving this cool urban thriller a complicit fourth wall. And like the figures in Edward Hopper paintings, there are others just like Koki; anonymous men who sit alone and morose in penumbral shadows, their intense gaze searing out of the semi-darkness, challenging our preconceptions about their motives with steely resignation. Away from the daily grind of his claustrophobic workplace, the white-shirted Carlos has another string to his bow, moonlighting as a wrestler, disguised under a thick mask of make-up. But retribution eventually catches up with Koki. And when the tables are turned, and when it does her finds himself pushed even further down the food chain, forced to witness the violent effects of his own actions from an almost disembodied perspective.

Lojo works makes great use of a minimal budget in a country without much infrastructure or film expertise creating a palpable snapshot of modern Guatamala with authentic settings and convincing local characters. This is a slim but captivating mood piece that keeps its distance throughout its modest running time. The ambiguous characters and minimal dialogue keeps the tension taut but strangely leave us alienated and unmoved. Los Fantasmas always remains a mystery, never really catching fire, sizzling in its night-bound neon aesthetic before fizzling out, its cypher-like antihero reaching a nebulous nadir.  MT

ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 22 JANUARY  – 3 FEBRUARY 2020

Bitter Chestnut (2020) *** Rotterdam Film Festival 2020

Dir: Gurvinder Singh | Wri: Gayatri Chatterjee | Drama, 100′

Bitter Chestnut is an intimate, authentic coming-of-age story that sees a teenager torn between a steady traditional life in his village in the Himalayan hills of Himachal Pradesh and the bright lights of modern Delhi. Another local man tried his luck down in the city but soon returned bankrupt.

Kishan is pleasant and hard-working in Gurvinder Singh’s film that successfully incorporates a lowkey drama with documentary style footage of locals going about their everyday life which is very much a communal affair: the women discuss childbirth and weaving methods, while the men are busy building houses and working in the fields – although these activities are not gender exclusive. Kishan seems to come from a more educated family, his grandmother owns the local  Cloudoor Cafe which Kishan runs while also preparing her food. She teaches him English, a language she speaks daily with her close friend in Delhi.

Meanwhile Kishan remembers when the village was burnt down by a fire when he was only six. He is still haunted by the memory, but those who lost their houses in the blaze have never got back to normal. It takes 12 trees to build a wooden house but due to the danger of fire, village houses are now built of concrete, which is not so comfortable or warm. The proud owner of a designer-style beanie and the latest mobile phone, Kishan is also versed in local folklore and knows why the chestnut got its bitter taste. The fruit of the Kaunach tree, these chestnuts were cursed when one fell on the head of a woman who was cleaning her scalp. No washing can get rid the fruit of its bitterness. Likewise the locals believe that no one can change their fate. Later Kishan is seen asking advice from the local soothsayer who tells him to go away.

Singh works with local, non-professional actors, and is maintains his distance from the debate about migration to the cities being an existential threat to traditional village communities. Kishan is placid despite his curiosity about life in the developed world. He is still deeply rooted in his village, and knows that moving to Delhi is not without its risks from the stories of prison and abuse he hears from returning friends. Kishan’s family try to talk him out of his plans to go there. His fate is clearly still in the balance. MT

ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2020

 

Bergamo Film Meeting 2020

BERGAMO FILM MEETING is back for its 38th edition running from 7th March until Sunday 15th in the alpine region of Lombardy. 

This year the focus is on Europe with Europe, Now!João Nicolau (Portugal), Rúnar Rúnarsson (Iceland) and Danis Tanović (Bosnia and Herzegovina) will attend the jamboree showcasing a retrospective of their entire oeuvres. The three filmmakers are known for their ability to picture the turmoil of those who find themselves at the coalface of generational issues, or torn by the complexities of socio-political conflicts – and often with dark humour.

Boys & Girls. The best of Cilect Prize, showcases a selection of graduation films from the European film schools participating in the CILECT program, and by Europe, Now! Film Industry Meetings, a brand new and all-European industry section – scheduled on 13th and 14th March – intended as a Networking Platform for European festivals, markets, training programmes and those seeking funding in a more professional and international perspective.

Also up for grabs are 7 Italian premieres that will screen in the Competition-Exhibition section; 15 documentaries in the Close-Up section; a retrospective dedicated to Polish director, screenwriter and actor Jerzy Skolimowski, one of the world’s most prominent and original figures in contemporary cinema; a tribute, accompanied by the exhibition Gwen, le livre de sable, to master animator Jean-François Laguionie; the passing of the torch between BFM and Bergamo Jazz; the Kino Club section, for young viewers; along with a diverse array of previews and events made possible thanks to the support of local cultural institutions and commercial entities. MT

BERGAMO FILM MEETING | 7 -15 MARCH 2020

Rotterdam Film Festival 2020

In his final year as creative director Bero Beyer recently announced the 2020 line-up for the 49th International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) including the 10 films selected for the Tiger Competition. Known for its edgy arthouse bias, this year’s film include Kim Yong-hoon’s South Korean crime drama Beasts Clawing at Straws; Arun Karthick’s Nasir, a portrait of theHindu-nationalist province of Tamil Nadu; and Jorge Thielen Armand’s drama La fortaleza, set in the jungles of Venezuela.

The festival also features the Big Screen Competition and the revamped Bright Future Competition, the fifth theme programme Ordinary Heroes and a special screening of David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996) with a live musical score by the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra. The festival opens on the 22 January 2020 with Joao Nuno Pinto’s period drama Mosquito, exploring a Portuguese soldier’s adventures in Mozambique during the First World War, and close on 2 February with Marielle Heller’s Oscar contender A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood that revisits the popular children’s television personality Fred Rogers (Tom Hanks) through his meeting with skeptical journalist Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys).

The Tiger competition will be judged by a panel composed of Dutch-Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad (Paradise Now), Visions du Réel artistic director Emilie Bujès, South Korea-born American filmmaker Kogonada (Columbus), Dutch filmmaker Sacha Polak (Dirty God) and Indonesian artist Hafiz Rancajale.

The Big Screen Competition features nine films including Danish filmmaker Malou Reymann’s A Perfectly Normal Family; Eden from Hungarian filmmaker Ágnes Kocsis (who made Pál Adrienn) and Argentinian auteur Marco Berger’s El cazador (Young Hunter) which stars End of Century’s Juan Barberini

The Bright Future Competition, comprising a selection of 15 feature-length debuts, includes Liang Ming’s Pingyao film festival award-winning Wisdom Tooth, and feature debuts from Russian filmmaker Artem Aisagaliev’s (Babai) and Bolivian Diego Mondaca’s Chaco.

The 49th International Film Festival Rotterdam | 22 January – 2 February 2020

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Images from the Tiger Competition selection

Tiger Competition

Beyer said: all the films in Tiger Competition radiate a strong sense of personal urgency and cinematic relevance, fuelled by boundary-pushing directorial visions.”

All films selected for Tiger Competition 2020:

El año del descubrimiento, Luis López Carrasco, 2020, Spain/Switzerland, world premiere

Beasts Clawing at Straws, Kim Yonghoon, 2020, South Korea, world premiere

The Cloud in Her Room, Zheng Lu Xinyuan, 2020, France/China, world premiere

Desterro, Maria Clara Escobar, 2020, Brazil/Portugal/Argentina, world premiere

Drama Girl, Vincent Boy Kars, 2020, Netherlands, world premiere

La fortaleza, Jorge Thielen Armand, 2020, Venezuela/France/Netherlands/Colombia, world premiere

Kala azar, Janis Rafa, 2020, Netherlands/Greece, world premiere

Nasir, Arun Karthick, 2020, India/Netherlands, world premiere

Piedra sola, Alejandro Telemaco Tarraf, 2020, Argentina/Mexico/Qatar/UK, world premiere

Si yo fuera el invierno mismo, Jazmín López, 2020, Argentina, world premiere

The Tiger jury consists of Dutch-Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad, artistic director of Visions du Réel Emilie Bujès, South Korean-born American filmmaker Kogonada, Dutch filmmaker Sacha Polak and Indonesian artist, curator and filmmaker Hafiz Rancajale.

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Images from the Big Screen Competition selection

Big Screen Competition

The Big Screen Competition, part of IFFR’s Voices section, features nine films which, according to IFFR programmers, deserve to hit the big screen after the festival. A jury consisting of five audience members picks the winner of the VPRO Big Screen Award. This film gets a guaranteed theatrical release in the Netherlands and will be broadcast on Dutch TV by VPRO and NPO.

All films selected for Big Screen Competition 2020:

El cazador, Marco Berger, 2020, Argentina, world premiere

Eden, Ágnes Kocsis, 2020, Hungary/Romania, world premiere

Énorme, Sophie Letourneur, 2019, France, international premiere

The Evening Hour, Braden King, 2020, USA, international premiere

Fanny Lye Deliver’d, Thomas Clay, 2019, UK/Germany, international premiere

Mosquito, João Nuno Pinto, 2020, Portugal/France/Brazil, world premiere

A Perfectly Normal Family, Malou Reymann, 2020, Denmark,world premiere

Synapses, Chang Tso-chi, 2019, Taiwan, international premiere

A Yellow Animal, Felipe Bragança, 2020, Brazil/Portugal/Mozambique, world premiere

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Images from the Bright Future Competition selection

Bright Future Competition

The Bright Future Competition comprises a selection of 15 feature-length film debuts, screening in world or international premiere. IFFR’s competition for first-time filmmakers presents a variety of innovative, cutting-edge and promising discoveries from all over the world. The Bright Future Award is chosen by a jury of three film professionals.

All films selected for Bright Future Competition 2020:

Babai, Artem Aisagaliev, 2020, Russia/USA, world premiere

Chaco, Diego Mondaca, 2020, Bolivia/Argentina, world premiere

Los fantasmas, Sebastián Lojo, 2020, Guatemala/Argentina, world premiere

Fellwechselzeit, Sabrina Mertens, 2020, Germany, international premiere

For the Time Being, Salka Tiziana, 2020, Germany/Spain/Switzerland, international premiere

I Blame Society, Gillian Wallace Horvat, 2020, USA, world premiere

Moving On, Yoon Dan-bi, 2019, South Korea, international premiere

My Mexican Bretzel, Nuria Giménez Lorang, 2019, Spain, international premiere

Ofrenda, Juan María Mónaco Cagni, 2020, Argentina, world premiere

Panquiaco, Ana Elena Tejera, 2020, Panama, world premiere

A Rifle and a Bag, Isabella Rinaldi/Cristina Hanes/Arya Rothe, 2020, India, world premiere

Sebastian springt über Geländer, Ceylan-Alejandro Ataman-Checa, 2020, Germany, world premiere

The Trouble with Nature, Illum Jacobi, 2020, Denmark/France, world premiere

Truth or Consequences, Hannah Jayanti, 2020, USA, world premiere

Wisdom Tooth, Liang Ming, 2019, China, international premiere

ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2020 | 22 JANUARY – 2 FEBRUARY 

Waves (2019) ***

Dir.: Trey Edward Shults; Cast: Taylor Russell, Kevin Harrison jr., Sterling K.  Brown, Renee Elise Goldsberry, Alexa Demie, Lucas Hedges; USA 2019, 135 min.

Trey Edward Shults shot to fame with his debut It comes at Night. His third feature is an overblown melodrama. Aiming for East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause it is a film that rests on a  maximalist aesthetic to cover up for its emptiness, relying on the well worn love/forgiveness thematic. In other words, it is vacuous and dishonest, and the director’s self-importance is evident in the running time of over two hours.

Waves opens with High School teenager Tyler (Harrison jr.) being dealt a double blow: he is diagnosed with a muscle tear in his shoulder, ending his promising future in wrestling, and casting doubts on his university career. Then lover Alexis (Demie) decides not to terminate her pregnancy. Father Ronald (Brown), a sergeant major type, who tells his son ‘black people cannot afford to be average’ might be well-meaning but drives Tyler away. The South Florida mansion, once a status symbol for the family, becomes meaningless after Tyler kills Alexis during a school dance and is sentenced to life in prison. Stepmother Catherine (Goldsberry) blames her husband and gives his the cold shoulder. Timid daughter Emily (Russell) is ostracised at school, then falls for equally awkward Luke, a friend of Tyler’s from the wrestling team. Emily confesses her hatred for Tyler, and makes Luke visit his dying father in Missouri, despite his admission that his father deserves to die for abusing Luke and his mother. Via this second-hand act of forgiveness, Emily frees herself, making father and stepmother follow her into the newly found guilt-free paradise of love.

It looks like that Shults watched Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers over and over again in preparation for making Waves. The teen diving scenes are filmed with 360 degree rotating cameras, somehow implying direct danger. At High School, the camera pans constantly in a bid to convey the fraught nature of the setting. Moonlight and Terence Malick’s later films are also reference points for Shults. The diminishing aspect ratio has in mind Tyler’s isolation – slowly widening after Emily’s ‘rebirth’. Alexis’s killing is a particularly gruesome scene, Shults bathing her in fluorescent red. All this, with the words of the preacher telling his Sunday congregation: “We need love to bring us back”, makes for a conceptual second-hand feature. Sadly this is just retail therapy – Shults wants us to label his film as ‘ambitious’, hoping the critics will excuse his failure as a noble attempt. The director courts importance, but hasn’t yet earned it. In using Thom Yorke’s poetry at the end, he lays himself open to the emptiness of his own approach. And all this without the underlying question, who should make what type of films?. It would have made not one iota of difference if the family of colour had been replaced by Caucasians like Trey Edward Shults. If Meghan Markle made a film, this would be it. AS

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE

The Winslow Boy (1948) *****

Dir: Anthony Asquith | Cast: Cedric Hardwicke, Robert Donat, Margaret Leighton

Anthony Asquith and playwright Terence Rattigan worked together on three literary adaptations, but this legal-themed drama about defending justice is possibly the best. It was also a great stage success for Rattigan, reflecting the traditional values of middle-class society in a glorious portrait of Edwardian England. David Mamet’s 1999 version isn’t a patch on this black and white masterpiece with its drole comedy undertones. Based on the true-life Archer-Shee case of 1910, it sees a strong-willed father (Cedric Hardwicke) determined to risk his reputation and fortune in defending his son’s honour when the young navy cadet (an earnest Neil North) is accused by the establishment of stealing a £5 postal order (a bill of payment, rather like a cheque). Meanwhile the Winslow family relationships come under strain as the legal case plods on endlessly – nothing has changed there.

Cedric Hardwicke and Robert Donat are superb as Ronnie Winslow’s father Arthur Winslow and his defending barrister Sir Robert Morton respectively (Morton is based on a renowned Irish lawyer Sir Edward Carson). Margaret Leighton is also superb as Winslow’s suffragette sister, Catherine, looking graceful in William Chapell’s elegant designs (she was a willowy, 5.10’). Mona Washburne plays against type as an amusingly plucky female journalist who comes to cover the case for the Evening News (Morton later has a dig at the press: “What you say, will have little bearing on what they write”). There are rousing musical interludes capturing the zeitgeist of the era, and one echoes the public’s support, courtesy of Herbert Clifford’s musical compositions. Mother Grace (Marie Lohr) berates her husband for devoting his life to his son’s innocence at the expense of the rest of the family: Catherine’s upcoming nuptials are put in jeopardy by her future father in law. This is all captured in Freddie Young’s lustrous monochrome camerawork. The Winslow Boy competed for the Grand International Award at Venice Film Festival that year but came home empty-handed. The winner was Lawrence Olivier’s Hamlet, with Jean Simmons winning Best Actress, so at least the British didn’t lose out that year. MT

FULLY RESTORED AND RELEASED FOR THE FIRST TIME ON BLURAY | DVD | DIGITAL | 3 FEBRUARY 2020

Lullaby (Chanson Douce) ****

Lucie Borleteau; Cast: Karin Viard, Leïla Bekhti, Antoine Reinartz, Assya Da Silva, Rehad Mehal; France 2019, 120 min.

Lucie Borleteau follows her accomplished 2014 drama Fidelio:Alice’s Odyssey with another journey into troubled waters, this time adapting Leïla Slimani’s Goncourt winning novel Chanson Douce in an arthouse style nanny thriller.

Borleteau sets herself a tall order. Chanson Douce was one of the best novels of the last decade – but her film certainly passes muster, staying faithful to the page and keeping the keys ideas intact. Slimani uses Brecht’s trick of revealing the story’s tragic outcome in a few lines at the beginning of her novel allowing us to reflect on the detail leading up to tragic ending. Borleteau opts for a more conventional linear structure but there no is chance of this having a happy ending as doubt soon begins to cloud over the upbeat sunny beginning.

In Paris lawyer Myriam (Bekhti) and her husband Paul are delighted when they find the perfect nanny for their two kids. Much older Louise (Viard) has an old-fashioned, subservient attitude to her employers. She is more than happy to play the role of cleaner and cook, as well as taking care of the children: five-year old Mila (Da Silva) and toddler Adam. But it never dawns on Myriam and Paul why Louise is so dedicated, working all hours so the couple can re-kindle their social and even sex life – even taking the kids out in the evenings. The reason for the inter-dependency is perfectly clear as far as Louise is concerned: she is a lonely widow living in social housing, and has a troubled history of drug abuse. She sees this as a job for life. But things start to fall apart after a holiday on Formentera, where Paul and Myriam are forced to look after their kids on the beach because Louise is unable to swim. Back in Paris, Paul and Myriam get a letter from the authorities about the nanny’s delayed tax payments, and it soon becomes clear that Louise’s life fell apart after the death of her husband. Paul then returns home one day to find his daughter covered in make-up and threatens to dismiss the nanny, who is also wearing face paint

The resonance with previous nanny-themed psychodramas such as The Hand that Rocks the Cradle and Saawan Kumar’s Khal-Naaikaa are clear. A woman invests emotionally in a family, hoping to reap the rewards of becoming part of the fold. And Louise cannot imagine a life without them – at least not without the children. There is something deeply strange about her behaviour (and there are some awkward scenes here). Her borderline personality disorder sees her stepping into Myriam’s life and even her bed at one point. Suddenly her life becomes unconscionable without Mila and Adam.

DoP Alexis Kavyrchine’s muted images are suggestive of the psychological meltdown that slowly unfolds, night merging into day. Karin Viard’s Louise is convincing as the quirky but homely nanny, her casting was Slimani’s idea. Lullaby is a nightmarish journey through a labyrinth of emotions – weird and worrying and without an Ariadne thread. AS
NOW ON RELEASE AT ARTHOUSE CINEMAS NATIONWIDE 

 

A Hidden Life (2019) ***

Dir|Wri: Terrence Malick | Cast: August Diehl, Valerie Pachner, Michael Nyqvist, Matthias Schoenaerts, Bruno Ganz, Karl Markovics, Franz Rogowski | US Drama 173′

Terrence Malick brings his tenth feature to Cannes with a reputation in the balance. Although appreciated by a small cadre of Malickians, his post-Tree of Life output even his defenders seem to agree needs defending.

So is A Hidden Life a return to form, or is it another stage in a sad decline. Well, the truth is: a bit of both. It tells the true story of conscientious objector Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl) and his wife Fani, played by Valerie Pachner, who lived in St. Radegund, an Austrian farming community. Beautiful mountains form a backdrop, an idyll just as the tropical islands did prior to the hostilities of The Thin Red Line. But war is approaching fast with Hitler, a native of the same region, glowering from newsreel footage and ripping through first France and then into Austria. At this point, Franz decides that he cannot swear an oath of allegiance to a man he views as the antiChrist. How he comes to this conclusion is unclear as Malick’s typically syllopsistic style means we never see him read a newspaper or watch any of the newsreels we see.

Everyone in the village tries to persuade Franz against his decision from the ultra-nationalistic mayor to the well-meaning priest. Again the gaps in the narrative made by the relentless moving fluttering from one beautiful image to another means that we weirdly never hear Jews mentioned, despite the fact that anti-Semitism was rife.  Hitler wasn’t some exceptional monster. His hatred and xenophobia and anti-Semitism were a product of his Austrian upbringing. This was by no means exclusive to Austria or Germany, but there was a particular virulence which made the message of National Socialism resonate. But according to Malick everyone just wanted to cut grass and drink beer.

Franz’s rebellion is religious and almost anti-political. And again Malick’s style favours this approach. There are no dialogues in Terrence Malick’s cinema and it is almost impossible to talk about politics without allowing people to actually talk. We have a series of monologues directed at characters which typically take place in the context of some photogenic meandering. The letters which form the bulk of the voiceover (yes, there’s voiceover) simply reiterate much of what we’re seeing on screen. But again I never felt that above a lot of PDAs there isn’t much of a relationship between Franz and Fani. They say they love each other a lot, but again they don’t argue and frankly I don’t trust a couple that doesn’t argue from time to time. They also have three extremely pretty daughters, Franz’s mother, who frequently looks pitiable against a white washed wall and Fani’s spinster sister living with them.

A film with no scenes is way too long at three hours. Joerg Widmer’s camera peers into faces with a distracting lack of respect for personal space before zooming off to look for something else to be interested in. Again, the absence of the conventional blocking of scenes means that often actors are left to wander like non-player characters in a mid-90s video game. And the decision to make the film bilingual with the Nazis speaking German and the protagonists English is a ludicrous one. How can you aim to be daring as filmmaker on one hand and then submit to such a lazy Hollywood convention? And one with such damaging effect on your political position.

But again, what political position? I respect the true story behind this but Malick seems to want the whole of the second world war and the moral universe to hang in the balance here. Franz is held up as an exemplar – something like Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Joan of Arc – but I couldn’t help but think of him as something of a von Trapp. His refusal to say the oath – he is offered the chance to work in a non-combat capacity – feels petty in the face of the unnamed Holocaust which is going on at exactly the same time.

Ultimately, Malick has made another technically beautiful film, with a gorgeous soundtrack and wonderful photography, that is at the same time unable or unwilling to engage with its subject. In always trying to go for the glory, he seems to miss what it is that makes us essentially human. We talk to each other. John Bleasdale

ON RELEASE FROM 17 JANUARY 2020

La Dolce Vita (1960) *****

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Dir.: Federico Fellini; Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Anouk Aimée, Yvonne Furneaux, Walter Santesso, Alain Cuny, Annibale Ninchi, Laura Betti, Lex Barker; Italy 1960, 174 min.

Fellini’s early films were largely autobiographical, and this is particularly true of – I Vitelloni and Il Bidone  But in the 1960s his focus took a radical shift: La Dolce Vita is a sumptuous story about the pampered aristocracy and their superficial followers, seen from the perspective of  Fellini’s alter-ego, the journalist Marcelo Rubini. Fellini would stick with this lavish aesthetic for rest of his career. 

The opening sequence is symbolic: Rubini (Mastroianni) sits in a helicopter with his photographer sidekick (Santesso) next to him. A helicopter is transporting a vast statue of Christ over Rome, but the men are only interested in getting the phone numbers of some young women sunbathing on a roof terrace. Rubini is not really a journalist, he writes gossip columns about celebrities and their orgies; well-healed Romans and religious maniacs. Children run along the streets, trying to catch hold of the statue – in vain, it is just another mirage. Rubini is running too: away from his suicidal fiancé Emma (Furneaux). First he takes a joyride with the love-crazed heiress Maddalena (Aimée). The couple pick up a sex worker and drive the woman to her flooded basement flat. Then while she’s busy making coffee, they indulge in a lust-fuelled quickie, perversely turned-on by the decadent surroundings. Paying her generously only demonstrates their utter contempt of her sordid lifestyle. Next on Rubini’s agenda is Sylvia (Ekberg), a Swedish starlet whose arrival at the airport we have already witnessed. Again, Rubini invites the woman into his car – this time for a tour of Rome – ending at the famous scene of Fountain of Neptune. But there is no happy-ending here either: Sylvia’s husband (Barker) first slaps his wife, then gives Marcello a good going over. Meanwhile Marcello has had to fetch Emma from the hospital, where she has been treated for an overdose; now clinging to him even more. 

They fetch up in a circus-like site near Rome, where two children have witnessed the appearance of The Madonna – but Rubini is not the only one doubting this miracle. Via a sexually charged jamboree with the aristocracy (where we meet Maddalena again) Marcello ends up at yet another celebration, this time near the sea where a fantasy creature with one eye is the main attraction.

Marcello’s moral bankruptcy is portrayed by two crucial encounters: the first sees his lonely father (Ninchi) literally running away from him, appalled by his glib emptiness. The second involves the writer Steiner (Cuny), who undertakes to find Marcello a serious writing job “so you can stop working for semi-fascist papers”. But Steiner’s own life ends in tragedy in a devastating scene, his wife and Marcello looking on in utter horror.

The wide-screen images of Fellini’s regular collaborator Otello Martelli (La Strada, Il Vitelloni) underline the filmmaker’s raison d’être was to portray “expressive and often ridiculous visions of life” – “where nobody gets out alive”.  Nowhere is this better illustrated than during a dazzling sequence where a woman is standing on a table above a horse.  The photographer asks Rubini for advice on the next shot. He answers caustically: “Reverse their position”. AS

Opening at BFI Southbank, HOME Manchester, Watershed Bristol, Broadway Nottingham, Edinburgh Filmhouse, Glasgow Film Theatre, Eye Galway, Triskel Arts Centre and cinemas UK-wide on 3 January 2020 in celebration of its 60th anniversary and Federico Fellini’s centenary

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Seberg (2019) **

Dir. Benedict Andrews | Cast: Kristen Stewart, Jack O’Connell, Margaret Qualley, Zazie Beetz, Yvan Attal, Colm Meaney, Anthony Mackie, Vince Vaughn | US Drama 2019. 102 mins.

Even Kristen Stewart at her most ravishing can’t save this awkward biopic. She plays the ground-breakingly liberal American actress Jean Seberg who met her professional fate at the hands of Edgar Hoover’s FBI, eventually dying of an overdose in Paris in 1979.

Seberg had made her name starring alongside Jean Paul Belmondo in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 Nouvelle Vague film Breathless (A bout de Souffle), but none of this information is provided in Joe Shrapnel and Anna Woodhouse’s script. Stewart captures her well-meaning naivety with delicate allure. She juggled the radical politics of the era and had a tricky time of it as an Avant-garde figure in an era of change, and she suffered as a result.

The film opens with a brief scene showing Jean being burned at the stake in Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan. We then meet Seberg in Paris at the age of 30 and on the verge of leaving her husband Romain (Attal) and baby son to join the 1968 musical Paint Your Wagon. On the plane to the US she clashes with radical black political activist Hakim Abdullah Jamal (Anthony Mackie). This leads into a pivotal meeting with FBI agents Jack O’Connell and Vince Vaughan who gradually dismantle her emotionally.

Despite all the negativity, Stewart is mesmerising as she wafts around her Coldwater Canyon hideout in a series of flimsy kaftans, her wide-eyed beauty and fragility encapsulated in Jahmin Assa’s dreamy set design. By no means a shrinking violet, she comes alive with a steely resolve when the going gets tough. And Stewart’s fans with certainly find much to admire in her performance which provides the focus here in this rather sprawling and unconvincing drama. Above and beyond her talent as an actress, Seberg supported many worthy causes: from the NAACP to the Panthers and Native Americans: certainly not just a pretty face, and Stewart conveys all this in her subtle and winning performance. MT

NOW ON NETFLIX

 

 

A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) ****

Dir.: Elia Kazan; Cast: Vivien Leigh, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden; USA 1951, 127 min.

Elia Kazan (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn) transposes his Broadway production of Tennessee Williams’ play to the big screen, complete with the original cast of Marlon Brando (Kowalski), Kim Hunter (Stella DuBois) and Karl Malden (Mitch). But Jessica Tandy’s Blanche is played by Vivien Leigh, who had perfected her role in the London production directed by her then-husband Laurence Olivier.

The stagey confines are still palpable but the brilliance of the acting makes this soar to new heights thanks to  smouldering chemistry from the trio. Stella’s lustful glances at her husband Stanley and hints of Blanche’s promiscuity (originally cut by the Hays-Code censorship) are now restored to sizzling effect .

Streetcar sees Southern Belle Blanche Dubois washed up on the streets after her wealthy Mississippi family falls on hard times. She hopes to find solace in New Orleans with her younger sister Stella and her husband Stanley Kowalski but the lovebirds are in no mood for a prima donna in their nest, and Blanche’s fragile emotional state sets the cat amongst the pigeons. Kazan and his co-writer Oscar Saul give full throttle to the family fallout, mining the melodrama to its full potential. In the sweltering heat of the Southern summer tempers flare and fists fly. It soon emerges that Blanche has an ugly secret: she has been sacked from her teaching post for seducing a minor. But it soon emerges that her first – much younger husband – committed suicide,  and was most certainly homosexual. Blanche is not used to the squalid living conditions her sister now lives in, despite being in lust with Kowalski. Blanch finds him alluring but is appalled by his brutal, animalistic behaviour. But she soon meets Mitch and another chance for happiness is clearly on the cards. Mitch is a friend of Kowalski – but very much his opposite – he falls for her, but their marriage dreams soon evaporate after her brother in law spills the beans on her shady past. Blanche does her best to improve the shabby living conditions, but Kowalski becomes more and more antagonistic towards her and a physical assault leads to Blanche’s committal to psychiatric hospital, in really troubling scenes. In this version, Saul and Kazan formulate a new ending, showing Stella leaving her husband, with her new born baby.

Even by today‘s standards the unruly violence of Brando’s performance is startling. He stalks Blanche like a stone-age predator, pulling no punches in his cruel verbal and physical onslaught. Of all Williams’ Southern plays and film adaptions – The Glass Menagerie and Baby Doll – this is by far the most Gothic. The setting looks more like a prison than a flat, and Harry Stradling’s black-and-white photography conjures up images that conjure up Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. Whilst Stella and Stanley are down to earth characters living in their loved up social realism, Blanche is has the febrile delicacy of a young Miss Faversham, lost in her fairytale and caught between dream and reality. Some contemporary critics claim that Williams, who was gay, really intended to show Blanche as a drag queen, and Kowalski as a closet gay, continually over-playing the macho angle out of fear that his true sexual orientation would be discovered. But maybe this is just wishful thinking on their part. Good-looking Macho men still exist, but they are an endangered species. AS

OPENING AT BFI Southbank and CINEMAS UK-WIDE on 7 February 2020.      

Long Day’s Journey into Night (2018) ****

Dir/scr: Bi Gan | Cast: Huang Jue, Tang Wei, Sylvia Chang, Lee Hong-Chi, Chen Yongzhong, Luo Feiyang | Music: Lim Giong, Point Hsu | China/France. 2018. 130 mins.

A lush and painterly visual poem that loses much of its allure to enigma. Chinese director Bi Gan’s Noirish second feature is nonetheless a captivating fantasy reverie in the style of Wong Ka Wai.

It concerns a man’s spiritual and physical odyssey to recapture his lost love. It all takes place in Gan’s rain-soaked sub-tropical hometown of Kaili in Southern China. The resonance with his 2o15 debut Kaili Blues is clear, but this is an even more languorous drama that sizzles with regret and longing scored by a dulcet electronic soundscape and crowned by a final 3D sequence, shot in one take by DoP David Chizallet (Mustang).

Long Day’s Journey into Night shares the same title as Eugene O’Neill’s  play but there the similarities end. This drama explores the soul-searching of the main character (Huang Jue) who yearns for his former lover Wan Qiwen (Tang Wei). We first meet him in a restaurant where his father was purportedly murdered a decade previously. Luo is guided to a women’s prison where he learns that Wan stole a green book of fairy tales that somehow provides further clues to the mystery through a series of charms and spells.

Gan spins his story into a shadowy cyclical affair full of smoke and mirrors, infused with memories, incantations and seductive sequences in a surreal backwater that was again referred to in Kaili Blues – Dangmai. Here the natives speak Kaili rather than Mandarin.

In this dizzy and dazzling dance through time, water and clocks also feature heavily as Luo’s obsession eventually leads him through a post-apocalyptic industrial setting in search of his dream. This is not a film to understand but an experience to wallow in. MT

NOW ON RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS

Un Certain Regard section of the 2018 Cannes festival

 

 

Top Films of the Decade | 2010 – 2020

The past decade has seen independent film grow from strength to strength: Arthouse theatres are now more sophisticated than ever, offering lush surroundings and state of the art facilities. Streaming services Netflix and Amazon have also broadened the reach of mid-budget films to a wider audience who are now able to access films without paying expensive ticket prices: Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story and Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman in the comfort and your own home.

Here is another selection of art house gems from across the decade from 2010 to the end of 2019.
AMOUR (2012)  Michael Haneke, Austria
Surviving well into old age – or not dying – has become a timely topic in the past decade as our parents’ and grandparents’ generation live well into their nineties and beyond thanks to medical science and a lean wartime diet. Michael Haneke conveys all this with grace and subtlety in his Cannes Palme d’Or Winner which saw Jean-Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva united once again (since their 1959 Last Year in Marienbab) in this spare and understated portrait of enduring love, commitment and companionship.
PARADISE TRILOGY (2012-13) Ulrich Seidl, Austria 
Ulrich Seidl’s lays bare the human race and all its foibles in this darkly amusing and often tragic trilogy of studies, Paradise: Love (2012); Paradise: Faith (2012); Paradise: Hope (2013). With wicked humour and a sinister twist, Seidl and his long-time collaborator, Veronika Franz, have tapped into a raw nerve of the female psyche with three interlocking stories based on Odon von Horvath’s 1932 play ‘Faith, Hope and Charity’. The “Paradise” trilogy eloquently and provocatively probes the trans-generational experiences and differing concerns of a contemporary Austrian family of three women: a young girl, Melanie; her mother, Teresa and aunt Anna Maria. These focus on teenage issues, sex and religion. The first in the trilogy, Paradise: Love, follows Teresa (Margarethe Tiesel), a voluptuous but matronly blonde in her forties who has disappeared below the search radar of most men on the local dating scene. When she heads off to Kenya for a much needed blast of sun, her prospects seem to improve.

20 FEET FROM STARDOM | Morgan Neville, US (2013)

Winning an Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2015, it’s clear to see why Morgan Neville’s 20 Feet From Stardom (2014) was triumphant as a compelling, heartwarming and unaffected exploration into the fascinating world of backing singers. From the contentiously salacious vocals on Ray Charles ‘What’d I Say’, to the graceful arrangement of ‘Lean on Me’ by Bill Withers, backing vocals are integral to our enjoyment of music across the decades. Having spent years in the shadows of some of the finest, most prominent recording artists of all time, now the likes of Merry Clayton, Lisa Fischer and Darlene Love are given the platform to shine, and showcase their unique, and somewhat breathtaking abilities.

THE GREAT BEAUTY |  Paolo Sorrentino, Italy (2013)  

The heart and soul of Italy leaps off the screen in all its beauty and decadence in this cornucopia of delights. Paolo Sorrentino’s sensual Italian overload transports us to Rome for a paean to pleasure and pain, gaiety and melancholy seen through the eyes of writer and roué, Jep Gambardella, played exultantly by Sorrentino regular, Toni Servillo (The Consequences of Love). This is possibly Sorrentino’s best film, a satire capturing the essence of his homeland’s beauty and culture with an appealing and bittersweet languor that was first experienced in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita,  and now in the context of the 21st century.

WINTER SLEEP (2014) Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey

Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Palme D’Or Winner is, in spite of its considerable length, a densely discursive and often confrontational portrait of human fallibility. Even though it takes place inside a claustrophobic hotel, the outdoor scenes are riveting, set against the background of the majestic mountains. Men are usually out of touch in all of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s films, and in WINTER SLEEP, his new anti-hero Aydin (Bilginer) is no exception. An ex-actor, Aydin sees himself as an enlightened feudal lord; spending his days in the hotel where he writes a daily column for the local newspaper. Ceylan pays homage to Bergman and Bresson in the long, vicious arguments between Aydin and his wife and sister, the camera catches the protagonists in shot/contra-shot movement, the close-ups showing the hurt on the faces of the women, who are treated with contempt and often impudence.

UNDER THE SKIN (2014) |  Jonathan Glazer, UK

Glazer developed Under the Skin for over a decade; he and co-screenwriter Walter Campbell pared it back from an elaborate, special effects-heavy concept to a sparse story focusing on an alien perspective of the human world. Most characters were played by non-actors, and many scenes were filmed with hidden cameras. With a total worldwide gross of £5.2 million, Under the Skin was failed at the box office. With its timely themes of migration, sexual politics and safety, it received critical acclaim, particularly for Johansson’s performance, Glazer’s direction, and Mica Levi‘s score. It garnered multiple awards for its groundbreaking visual allure and was named one of 2014’s best films by several publications. It ranks 61st on the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st century.

Indiewire ranked it the 2nd best film of the 2010s.

POSTMAN’S WHITE NIGHTS (2014) | Andrey Konchalovsky, USSR

The best work happens in the quieter, contemplative moments of this reflective fable from  Russian master Andrey Konchalovsky. A moving scene captures a village elder’s funeral, where the community talk of the “socialistic romanticism” of her era, a time unlike, apparently, a present Russia in which their humble roles in society seem almost obsolete. Why should Russians pay humble fishermen in rural villages for their fish, rather than modern, faceless dragnet fishing, as one sequence depicts? And as the young Timur is wont to say to Aleksey, “do we need postmen when we can email?” Konchalovksy’s art reveals a beauty to a rustic life that is being lost – as if this is the last chance to witness this kind of small-town life. If it is, Konchalovsky has crafted a beautiful record of this world.

THE ASSASSIN (2015) | Hsiao-hsien Hou, Taiwan

Taiwanese director Hsiao-hsien Hou’s spectacular drama is a graceful and sumptuously composed masterpiece – in the true sense of the word. Hou brings a sense of uncompromising formal brilliance to the wuxia material. THE ASSASSIN is a work of spiritual resonance and historical importance, but it is also exquisite. Set during the Tang dynasty, the story opens as a young girl (played by Shu Qi) undergoes training to be an assassin. But her female sympathies stand in the way of her killing instinct, and after failing an important mission she is sent back to her hometown. Some time later, she is again tasked with killing an important governor (played by Chang Chen) who questions the Emperor’s authority. The task involves a moral twist: not only is the governor her cousin, but also her first love.

EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT (2015) | Ciro Guerra, Colombia

Colombian writer|director Ciro Guerra’s third feature is a visually stunning exploration to a heart of darkness that brings to mind Miguel Gomes’ Tabu or Werner Herzog’s Cobra Verde or even Nicolas Roeg’s Belize-set drama Heart of Darkness (1993).

Serving as a backlash on organised Religion and Colonialism, the film’s slow-burn intensity has a morose and unsettling undercurrent that threatens to submerge you in the sweaty waters of the Amazon River whence its token German explorer, Theodor Koch-Grunberg (Jan Bijvoet) meanders fitfully in search of a rare and exotic flower with restorative powers.

FIRE AT SEA (2016) Gianfranco Rosi, Italy 

Gianfranco Rosi’s spare yet absorbing documentary offers an important and non-judgemental portrait of the immigration crisis facing Southern Italy, where both immigrants and islanders are given ample weight in story of their struggle to survive. Pictures can tell a thousand words and that’s the way Rosi leaves it: we must draw our own impressions and conclusions from this poignant human story.

PHANTOM THREAD (2017) Paul Thomas Anderson, US

This is arthouse drama at its best. Exploring the negative impulses of love, it is a delicately drawn tale about man’s fear of  losing control to a woman. The man in question, a fashion designer played by Daniel Day-Lewis, is captivated by a young woman’s grace and charm but refuses to let her into his business life, which is really his heart and soul. She remains tough but loving – the perfect replica of his beloved mother, tempting him but paradoxically also repulsing him. Day-Lewis remains adamant as the tortured artist, every subtle nuance of his adamance flickers across his face in a subtle display of petulance. Day-Lewis gives another remarkable performance this time as the classic gentleman artist delivered with finesse and his idiosyncratic  allure. His economy of movement is admirable capturing the feline grace of Federer and the innate style and sardonic humour of Cary Grant. When his resistance is lowered by a bout of illness, Reynolds’ reveals a deep weakness for his mother (whose ghost appears to him in her wedding dress) and her power is magically transferred to his assistant Alma, who then gets to wear the trousers – immaculately tailored – of course. MT

BEST INDIE FILMS of the Decade | 2010 – 2020

Catherine the Great (2019) **** Home Ent

Catherine the Great is a sweeping, romantic epic masterpiece series following the power, politics, and passions of the legendary monarch. In the sumptuous bonkbuster Helen Mirren is magnificent and still seriously sexy at 74, with Jason Clarke as a raunchy Grigory Potemkin riding roughshod over Nigel Williams’ frigid script. In reality, Catherine was decades younger when she came to the throne, yet Mirren carries it all off with graceful allure as the monarch in her final years. She became  Empress in 1762 after her husband Peter III was murdered by her lover, Count Orlov (Richard Roxburgh) – who she refuses to marry – and his brother, Alexei (Kevin McNally).

Surrounded by untrustworthy men: her son, Paul (Joseph Quinn), a weak and conniving dipstick; her adviser, Minister Panin (Rory Kinnear) and even Count Orlov, Catherine feels vulnerable yet she is also wise and steely. Then along comes Potemkin whose role was pivotal in the coup that brought her to the throne. She has possibly one ally in the shape of Countess Bruce (Gina McKee). But McKee cleverly paints herself into the background as an amusing and helpful ally. 

The tete a tetes with Potemkin sound louche rather than witty and urbane in the awkward script:. Mirren is a Russian version of le Roi de Soleil surrounded by disappointing acolytes, although Clarke and McKee do their best to add piquancy to the lacklustre dialogue, along with Rory Kinnear.

The small screen doesn’t do justice to the sumptuous recreation of the era and the grandiosity of it all. But Catherine the Great still manages to be an amusing snapshot of Russian history thanks to its performances rather than its mise en scene

Catherine the Great out now on Blu-ray, DVD & Digital

Amazon: https://amzn.to/2ltnpih 

Best of the Decade | 2010-2020

ALPS (2011)  Jorgos Lanthimos, Greece

After Dogtooth, Jorgos Lanthimos comes up with an even more bizarre take on human frailties. Alps is the name of a hospital group who offer suffering relatives a unique service: they will impersonate the deceased for a while, enabling the families to come to term with their loss. Needless to say, that this causes a whole host of complications. There is an anarchic wildness at play here, which makes Alps much original than Lobster. which was to follow. Lanthimos crafts an absurdist play, very much in the tradition of Aragon and the early Bunuel.

AN ELEPHANT SITTING STILL (2019)

Hu Bo’s one and only film is a true masterpiece. The Chinese director committed suicide before the end of the shoot after falling out with the production company over feature’s running time. Equally sad and poignant it plays out like Balzac’s ‘comedie humaine’, Hu Bo keeping the elliptical narrative going, always coming up with new plot-twists for his four characters to meet under new circumstances in their urban backdrop. Chao Fan’s camera pans relentlessly through the jungle of hideousness, the environment echoing Bela Tarr’s vision of dystopia.

THE WOMAN WHO LEFT (2016)

Filipino filmmaker Lab Diaz follows his four hour Silver Bear winner A Lullaby to a sorrowful Mystery, with this opaque revenge drama that clocks in at 226 minutes and bagged the main prize at the Venice Film Festival of the same year. Diaz once again focuses on his wartorn and impoverished homeland with echoes of Metropolis, early Eisenstein works or Mark Donskoy’s first part of his Gorky trilogy My Childhood. The main character Horacia walks the nightly streets like Murnau’s phantom. The glacial pacing contributes to a nightmarish atmosphere, the blackest of noir. Horacia uses different names for herself, indicating that her personality is splitting. We see the shadow world she moves in, out of her POV: the focus becomes more and more blurred, particularly during a scene at the beach. Once again, the past takes over the present, destroying Horacia’s identity. For those who have never experienced Diaz’ work, his magnetism is difficult to convey: we are literally drawn into the narrative for the entire running time.

LEVIATHAN (2014) USSR

Director Andrey Zvyagintsev and cinematographer Mikhail Krichman strikingly composed  political drama affirms a sense of existential hopelessness. The characters’ vulnerabilities, and the sense that their homes offer inadequate sanctuary are a recurring theme in Zvyagintsev’s work.  Leviathan references the Book of Job and indicate government corruption through figures such as Boris Yeltsin. Everywhere is a profound sense of moral loss. A real Russian Noir where the victims are without hope or redemption.

SON OF SAUL (2015) Laszlo Nemez

The young Hungarian director’s debut is a tour-de-force of suffering. Set in a nameless concentration camp, it features Saul Auslander (Geza Rohrig) as a Sonderkommando in the Auschwitz death camp in October 1944. Sonderkommandos were units of Jewish prisoners forced to perform grisly tasks on their own dead, knowing very well they too would be executed in due course.  Shot totally from the perspective of his main character Saul, Laszlo Nemez accomplishes a frightening directness. Everything is happening right in front of our faces in this journey into the darkest hell.

THE LAST OF THE UNJUST – Claude Lanzmann, France

The documentary takes its title from the main protagonist: Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein (1905-1989), who was the third and only surviving “Jewish Elder” “of the Nazi concentration camp Terezin (Theresienstadt). Nothing can compare with the role of a “Jewish Elder”, a position invented by the Nazis in camps and ghettos to divide the Jews by making the Elders do much of their dirty work. The Elders were permanently in conflict with the German authority and their own people. They were mistrusted by their own and despised by the Germans. And most of them went to the gas chambers themselves. After including Murmelstein’ story in Shoah, Lanzmann decided, that his story should be told at length in a separate film. Murmelstein was sent to Terezin in 1942, just after the city had been cleared of their Czech inhabitants. Terezin was meant as a Ghetto for the elderly, many German Jews “bought” their places in this “retirement” town from the Nazi authorities, paying with their savings. It turned out to be a death camp like all the others: over 33 000 Jews, mostly elderly, died there, apart from the 88, 000 deported to the Gas chambers. Lanzmann works with the same rigour as always: the devil is in the detail.

ZAMA- (2017) Lucrecia Martel, Argentina

Written and directed by Argentine Lucrecia Martel (The Headless Woman), Zama is an adaptation of a Latin American classic by Argentinian novelist Antonio di Benedetto, who was imprisoned and tortured during his country’s Dirty War in the 1970s. Influenced by Dostoevsky the film’s hero Don Diego de Zama (Daniel Gimenez Cacho), had a lot in common with his Russian literary counterpart.  The action takes place in the sun-baked South American pampas during the last decade of the 18th century. Zama is an officer of the Spanish Crown, stranded in this backwater for what eventually becomes the rest of his life. Llamas and other livestock wander blithely across the streets, the bumbling corruption unfolds to a backcloth of Guarani folk who watch on dispassionately. The governor wears a shrivelled trophy – a pair of ears – which we are told –  belonged to a master bandit, who has recently be executed. But later, Zama will learn at his cost, that the bandit is alive and well. Zama is part horror, part magic realism, a wonderful mixture of images and symbols.

ALL OUR DESIRES (2011) Philippe Loiret, France

Directed by Philippe Lioret (I Am Alright) and based on a non-fiction book by Emanuel Carriere (Other Lives but Mine), this is an emotionally taxing feature that sees a young judge (Marie Gillain) facing up to an incurable disease and mounting a widescale case against a financial body that exploits the poor. Despite potential melodrama Loiret offers a spare and restrained treatment with brilliant performances, Lyndon playing, as always, the calm stalwart of the underprivileged. One of the most admirable yet gruelling films of the decade.

FROM CALIGARI TO HITLER (2014) – Rüdiger Suchsland, Germany

Suchsland, inspired by Siegfried Kracauer, explains – in a sleek 2 hours – how the Geman cinema of the Weimarer Republic prepared the country for Hitler and the Nazis. Suchsland follows the thesis of Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966), a German film critic and journalist, friend of Benjamin and Adorno, who in his psychological history of the German film with the same title as the film (published 1947 in emigration in New York) – which is still the most well known German film-history book. In his documentary debut Suchsland traces the correlation between screen action and the psychology of the defeated German masses. According to Kracauer, “M” was Lang’s first serious film for over a decade. Together with von Sternberg’s Blauer Engel (1930) and Berlin Alexanderplatz” (1931) by Piel Jutzi: these three films marked the end of any serious critique of the right in the Weimarer Republic in films, whilst Pabst Westfront 1918 (1930) at least tried a pacifistic view of WWI, and Kuhle Wampe by Dudow (after a script by Brecht) showed a communist alternative to fighting unemployment. But the “National Epic” was soon back: The Last Company (1930) by Kurt Bernhardt; Der Schwarze Husar (Gerhard Lamprecht 1932), Prussia (Carl Froehlich 1931), Gustav Ucicky’s York (1931) and the never-ending five “Frederikus Rex” films with Otto Gebühr in the title role. And it was no accident that the list of films premiered in 1933 included many titles, which were produced before January 30th 1933, like the U-boot film Morgenrot by Ucicky. Kracauer/Suchsland prove, that all of Germany at the time was at least subconsciously aware that the most dangerous psychopath would soon take the position of the director of the asylum called Germany.

FOXTROT – Samuel Maoz, Israel

Samuel Moaz follows up on his brilliant Lebanon with an even more impressive feature: Foxtrot is a story of bereavement and denial of guilt, played against the background of a middle-class Jewish family in Tel-Aviv.
 Michael Feldman (Ashkenazi) and his wife Dafne (Adler) live in a spacious, expensively decorated apartment, which feels like a five-star hotel suite. When they learn about the death of their soldier son Jonathan (Shiray), Dafne faints, whilst her husband is cold and aggressive, even kicking the family dog, who wants to console him. But the Feldman family is only a cypher for many Israeli families in a country, which is at war for nearly 70 years. “This is war, and shit happens in war” says the Israeli general to the soldiers after another needless killing. Maoz captures the absurdity of this permanent war in hilarious scenes at the roadblock, mixing phantasy with reality, and contrasting the hell of war with the cool and sober apartment of the Feldman family: the two levels, at home at once in one country, have seemingly nothing in common. But it is the denial of those at home, which makes Israeli soldiers kill and being killed for over forty years. Sombre and without illusion. AS

BEST OF THE DECADE 2010-2020

 

Anna Karina (1940-2019) Obituary

Danish born actor Anna Karina (Hanne Karin Bayer), face of the Nouvelle Vague, has died in Paris. Her eventful life reads like a film script: She was seventeen, when she came arrived in Paris to find herself living on the streets and speaking very little French. She became a supermodel a few years later helped, among others, by Coco Chanel, who invented her screen name. Karina’s face was plastered on advertising boards on both sides of the Champs Elysee. She met Jean-Luc Godard when he was casting for his first film in 1960, A bout de Souffle. He offered her a small part, but Karina rejected it, because of the nudity involved. Godard accused her of double standards, claiming she was naked in a Palmolive advert. Karina called him naïve: she actually wore a Bikini hidden by the bubbles for the shoot. But the following year they were married.

Karina went on to star in seven of his films, the first was Le Petit Soldat that same year. She won Best Actress at the Berlin Film Festival in 1961 for Une Femme est une Femme. While marriage to Godard was stormy to say the least – he neglected her emotionally – “he was the sort of man who would go for a packet of cigarettes and return three weeks later” – their artistic relationship blossomed with a string of New Wave hits: Vivre sa Vie (1962); Bande a Part (1964); Pierrot Le Fou (1965); Alphaville (1965) and Made in USA (1966). When Godard cast her in his episode ‘Anticipation’ for The Oldest Profession (1966), they were already divorced and not on speaking terms. But Karina stayed loyal to Godard and a few years ago at the BFI she talked about him in glowing terms.

Karina would go on working for other directors from the Nouvelle Vague: Jacques Rivette (La Religeuse, Haut, Bas, Fragile) and also starring in Lucino Visconti’s L’Etranger, 1967, George Cukor’s Justine, Tony Richardson’s Nabokov adaption Laughter in the Dark (1969); and Fassbinder’s Chinese Roulette (1967).  She also directed Vivre Ensemble (1973) and Victoria (2008).

Anna Karina will especially be remembered for the dance number in Bande a Part, her heart- breaking Nana in Vivre sa Vie, when Godard made her ugly on purpose by cutting off her long hair. And as Natascha von Braun in Alphaville, a woman desperate to reconnect with her feelings.

The French Minister of Culture Franck Riester said today: “French Film has become an orphan” with Karina’s death – but we have all been orphaned worldwide. AS

Alva – White (2019) ***

Dir.: Ico Costa; Cast: Henrique Bonacho; Portugal 2018, 98 min.

Renowned Portuguese short-film director Ico Costa creates an impressive first feature which he also wrote. It tells the story of Henrique Bonacho who has been abandoned by family and driven delirious, punishing the ones he held responsible. 

We first meet Henrique (a very intense Henrique Bonacho) as a shepherd, living in a dilapidated  hovel in the mountains. Uncommunicative, he also looks unkempt and lost. We later learn that his wife Vitoria and his two daughters have left him. Driving into the local village he kills a woman psychologist and puts her male college into a coma, punishing the people he holds responsible for the break-up of his family. He then threatens Vitoria’s mother, demanding to see his daughters. When she calls the police, he flees into the mountains where he cannot live with with the unbearable isolation for long and, so he soon returns to his home. This time he decides to put on his best clothes: a beautiful white suit. But Henrique’s problems are not over.

Alva plays out in an elliptical way, the title stands for Henrique’s re-birth: the white suit representing the old, unspoiled self. In between he looks more like a hunted animal than a human. DoP Hugo Azevedo makes imaginative use of the wild woods and mountains crafting glorious images as a hideout for the fugitive. The colours in town are more subdued, the streets become a labyrinth for Henrique. Only at the end, when he has found his place again, do we get some sunlight. But there is a powerful impression that this happy-end will not last forever. Alva is a study in loss, and eventual redemption. A small gem told in a minimalist cinematic language, with a towering performance by Bonacho. AS

NOW AT AT THE ICA LONDON

Sons of Denmark | Denmarks Sonner (2018)***

Dir.: Ulaa Salim; Cast: Mohammed Ismail Mohammed, Zaki Youssef, Imad Abul-Foul), Rasmus Bjerg; Denmark 2019, 120 min.

Judging by his debut feature Ulaa Salim is clearly a better director than a screenwriter. Although didactic and melodramatic at times Sons of Denmark is certainly a rollicking ride through radicalised Copenhagen with a game-changing twist that takes us all by surprise.

Set in the near future after a bomb attack in Copenhagen has claimed twenty-three lives, we witness 19 year old Zakaria (Mohammed) and his mates drifting into radicalisation when the populist right-wing politician Martin Nordahl (Bjerg) enters the  forthcoming general election – with a manifesto that pledges a purge on immigration.

Zakaria’s mother and little brother, once the centre of his life, now means less and less to him. Neighbourhood elder Hassan (Abul-Foul) knows how to channel Zakaria’s unrest, and this involves the experienced Ali (Yousef) who is going to train Zakaria to join the jihad. Their target is none other than Nordahl whose poll figures are climbing. But when Zakaria enters Nordahl’s flat, the police are there waiting. And the young man soon learns the truth about Ali in a striking volte face.

Salim handles the domestic scenes and the action sequences with impressive aplomb,  supported by first time DoP Eddie Klint, whose widescreen images are a startling reflection of the desperate state of things in Denmark. Bjerg’s Nordahl is just the right mixture of bully and seducer: his simplistic “send-them-home-message” is very seductive, he has graduated from a street-fighter to TV personality. Back in the day TV main news wouldn’t have given him credence, but now he is fawned over by most of the media. 

Sons of Denmark would have worked even better as a TV mini-series: there is so much to say about the main characters, particularly Ali. And Salim is also a revelation with plenty of tricks up his sleeve, with his score incorporating the ‘Lacrimosa’ from Mozart’s Requiem, underlining the emotional upheaval of a suffering society. By no means perfect, but still an impressive debut. AS

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM 6 DECEMBER 2019  

WatchAUT | Austrian Film weekend 13 – 15 December 2019

London’s Picturehouse Central will play host to a weekend of Austrian cinema from 13-15 December 2019. WatchAUT provides a glimpse of the world as perceived by the current generation of Austrian filmmakers. 
 
The festival opens with a special gala preview of LITTLE JOE, director Jessica Hausner’s foreboding tale of genetically modified flowers starring Emily Beecham (a role that won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival), Ben Whitshaw and Kerry Fox. Emily Beecham and Kerry Fox are both due to attend and take part in a post screening Q&A.
 
Festival titles focus on today’s hottest issues including the environment, women, and migrationOther acclaimed Austrian features to watch out for include multi-award winning STYX followed by a Q&A with director Wolfgang Fischer, plus other female-focused films THE GROUND BENEATH MY FEET and MADEMOISELLE PARADIS. The documentary programme comprises CHAOS, a compelling story of three Syrian women exposed to war, while EARTHWELCOME TO SODOM and THE GREEN LIE explore the many environmental issues that afflict our planet.
watchAUT | 13 -15 DECEMBER 2019

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg | Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964) *****

Dir.: Jacques Demy; Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Anne Vernon, Ellen Farmer, Nino Castelnuovo, Marc Michel, Mireille Perrey; France/West Germany 1964, 91 min.

Jacques Demy (1931-1990) was a unique and multi-talented filmmaker who rose to fame in the wake of the New Wave. The Umbrellas was the second of a trilogy, bookended by Lola (1961) and Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967). American style musicals are dominated by song and dance numbers, whereas in The Umbrellas is entirely sung. Demy wanted to create a European counterpart to the American tradition: The film is much closer in style to opera than musical.

It all focuses on Sixteen-year old Genevieve Emery (Deneuve) who is madly in love with car mechanic Guy (Castelnuovo). Her mother (Vernon) is not keen on the marriage, she is holding out for a more substantial match for her daughter. Guy is not really poor, he still lives with his godmother Elise (Perrey), who spends most of her time in bed, being looked after by Madeleine (Farner). But Madame Emery has another reason to wish for a financially more rewarding partnership for her daughter: her umbrella shop is on the verge of bankruptcy. Enter Roland (Michel), a diamond dealer, who falls for Genevieve.

When Guy gets drafted into the army, with the possibility of seeing action in the Algeria War, the lovers consummate their relationship. Madame Emery’s best laid plans seem to come to nothing when her daughter gets pregnant. But Roland (who was part of Lola, and quotes from it), forgives all and suggests they bring up the child together. But the marriage ceremony is anything but joyful, and the little epilogue is even grimmer: Guy has married Madeleine after the death of Elise, and has bought a petrol station with the money he inherited from her. On a cold winter evening Genevieve stops at the petrol station and asks Guy if he wants to speak to his daughter, who is in the car. Guy is not keen at all, looking forward to meeting his wife and little son.

Comparing The Umbrellas with Godard’s Un Homme et une Femme (1961), it turns out that Demy is very much more a realist than the self-proclaimed revolutionary Godard. Whist Anna Karina (in bohemian Paris) just wants to marry Jean-Paul Belmondo to have a baby – even if the baby’s father might be Jean-Claude Brialy, Genevieve and her mother (in provincial Cherbourg) see the child as a fly in the works. Instead of a fairy tale ending, where the pigherd marries the beautiful princess and they live happily ever after, Demy offers an exchange relationship: Genevieve’s young beauty is traded for Roland’s wealth. The ending is more bitter than sweet.

Michel Legrand’s score and Jean Rabier’s colourful images have made The Umbrellas into an emotionally resonant classic. Shot on Eastmancolour, notorious for fading, Demy’s widow Agnes Varda created a restored copy in 1992. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 6 DECEMBER 2019 at BFI SOUTHBANK and NATIONWIDE as part of the BFI MUSICALS! THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH

Valley of Souls (2019) MUBI

Dir|Wri: Nicolás Rincón Gille | Doc 136′ | Columbia, Belgium

Valley of Souls revisits a devastating chapter in Colombian history when locals were killed or forced out of their own country by right-wing militia. Belgian director Nicolás Rincón Gille makes the social realist drama even more haunting by casting Colombians who were directly affected by the tragedy back in 2002.

This Neo-Western sees its hero Jose on a quest for the truth, his striking features and epic intensity burning fearlessly against the rain forest and riverbanks of this subtropical paradise.

Jose has returned from a day’s fishing to discover the forces have killed his two sons Rafaele and Dionisio, and thrown their bodies into the river. These thugs are known locally as the United Self-Defenders of Colombia (AUC) – but worse – they have sprayed the slogan “Death and Purification” onto Jose’s fishing hut.

Honourable in the face of anger and sadness, Jose must find their bodies and give them a decent Christian burial. So he sets off fearlessly into the unknown on a journey that some may find rather too slow-burning, but echoes of Ciro Guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent and even Argentinian drama Rojo are clearly felt. Survival with be difficult in this hostile territory and, even if he finds his children, removing their bodies from the water is an act punishable by death. The river he once loved and relied upon for his livelihood is now transformed into a place of horror and mourning and the macabre backdrop to his sons’ final moments.

He finds Rafael very soon after setting off and the young man’s body becomes a weirdly comforting companion in his canoe as he continues his odyssey into the heart of darkness. One encounter sees him bravely confronting two violent paramilitaries who goad him into stripping the hapless body of a dead friend of his, just to give them the watch and necklace. Another finds him face to face with the head honcho who force feeds him a thin soup until he manages to slip away as the soldiers are celebrating a win for their sporting hero on TV.

D0P Juan Sarmiento G. shoots on an Arri mini Alexa his magnificent widescreen images doing justice to the enormity of the situation and offering up a visual masterpiece even when the story starts to slow down midway.

But Jose is certainly a tragic hero who perseveres indomitably even when this involves digging up an entire graveyard of fresh corpses to see if his son is amongst them. Naturally, this is done with gravity and respect; he even uses his own green and yellow Brazilian football T-shirt as a shroud in an act that carries with it an almost poetic sense of dignity.

Colombian cinema has really taken off recently and Valley of Souls is just another in the vast wealth of films coming out of South America today. MT

ON MUBI 15 APRIL 2021 | MARRAKECH FILM FESTIVAL 2019 | Winner ETOILE D’OR 2019

Mickey and the Bear (2019) *** Marrakech Film Festival 2019

Dir/Wri: Annabelle Attanasio Cast: Camila Morrone, James Badge Dale, Calvin Demba, Ben Rosenfield, Rebecca Henderson, Donna Davis, Ralph Villa | US Drama

Camila Morrone is impressive as a conflicted girl forced kicking and screaming into womanhood in this tender and richly textured first feature from actor turned director Annabelle Attanasio

Father and daughter relationships can be challenging especially when the dad has a checkered past of drug abuse and drinking. Mickey is an 18 year old in a fraught relationship with her father Hank an Iraqi war veteran who is still on the bottle, Mickey keeping him on the straight and narrow and dealing with his occasional lapses. The two live in a trailer big country Montana where Mickey works part-time in a taxidermists and widowed Hank is now retired and mooches around in a semi-permanent fog, sometimes confusing Mickey with his late wife.

Attanasio’s nuanced characters have unpredictable edges and make this drama the success that it is. Father and daughter have a joint bereavement that binds them together and somehow they rub along although sparks occasionally fly. And Hank has a habit of hiding from reality.

Mickey’s boyfriend, Aron (Ben Rosenfield), is the weak link character-wise. A controlling whinger hooked on his ability to win Mickey back whenever she tries to leave him, while. she’s applied to college in San Diego in a bid to make something of the future, Aron only sees them settling down with kids. But then she meets aspiring musician Wyatt and suddenly Mickey’s head is filled with new ideas in a story that doesn’t go where you think it might. And Mickey soon finds herself struggling with two unstable males and a disastrous bear-hunting episode, not to mention an anaconda. DP Conor Murphy captures the lyrical journey with some imaginative camerawork and Brian McOmber and Angel Deradoorian’s soundscape echoing the highs and lows of the characters’ emotional journey along with a well-chosen musical selection, and some quiet moments too. MT

MARRAKECH FILM FESTIVAL 2019

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Greta Scacchi | Tribute to Australian Cinema | Marrakech Film Festival 2019

Born in Milan, Italian Australian actor Greta Scacchi studied at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School before beginning a sustained and successful career on stage and screen. The early 1980s was a particularly prolific time when she made four films in fifteen months. Her most iconic roll is possibly as Olivia in Merchant Ivory’s Heat and Dust in 1983, and she went on to star in Michael Radford’s White Mischief three years later. International film work beckoned with The Coca Cola Kid (1985)), Three Sisters (1988) and Alan J Pakula’s Presumed Innocent (1990) when she starred alongside Harrison Ford. Gillian Armstrong’s Fires Within (1991) allowed her to play alongside her then partner Vincent D’Onofrio. Robert Altman’s The Player followed and English classic The Browning Version based on Terence Rattigan’s play. Most recently Scacchi appears in Rachel Ward’s Palm Beach (2019) and Colombian director Ciro Guerra’s Colonial drama Waiting for the Barbarians (2019) which unites Greta Scacchi with actor Mark Rylance. She also appears in Mikhael Hers’ French family drama Amanda. MT

Marrakech Film Festival | TRIBUTE TO AUSTRALIAN FILM 2019

Motherless Brooklyn (2019) ****

Dir.: Edward Norton; Cast: Edward Norton, Bruce Willis, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Alex Baldwin, Willem Dafoe, Leslie Mann Bobby Cannavale, Robert Wisdom, Ethan Suplee, Dallas Roberts Josh Pais; USA 2019, 144′.

US audiences and critics have been rather harsh with Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn. Many expected more, and now feel short-changed because Motherless is not Chinatown. Sure, Norton has not created a classic – but something special. As for the length, like Scorsese’s Irishman, Motherless has the feel of a TV mini-series.

Norton acquired the rights to Jonathan Letham’s novel of the same name in 1999, when it was published. It took him nearly twenty years to be its writer, director and star. He changed the timeframe – contemporary in the case of the novel – to the 1950s, but kept the main theme, gentrification and the hero, PI Lionel Essrog, who suffers from Tourette syndrome, when nobody had a name for it.

Frank Minna (Willis) runs a detective agency in NY with four younger men he has rescued from the orphanage: Lionel (Norton); Tony (Vermonte); Danny (Roberts) and Gilbert (Suplee). Frank never calls Lionel by his name, he is the titular Motherless Brooklyn. Frank is on a dangerous mission, and Gilbert and Danny listen to the phone, because Frank is taping the conversation. Tony and Lionel are in hot pursuit of Frank, but can only witness when he is shot and  dies later in hospital. For Lionel revenge is a matter of honour, and he finds the first clues when he meets the black anti-gentrification lawyer Laura Rose (Mbatha-Raw). She introduces him to his father Billy (Wisdom), who runs a Jazz-club. Billy mistakes Lionel, who poses as a newspaper journalist, for one of the henchman of developer Moses Randolph (Baldwin), and has him beaten up. When he finds out the truth he agrees to meet Lionel to tell more. But he is murdered, his death staged as a suicide. Lionel saves Laura’s life and meets Randolph’s brother Paul (Dafoe), an architect. Laura tells Lionel that Paul is her real father – but when Lionel discovers Frank had tried to blackmail City Commissioner William Lieberman (Pais), because the latter wanted more money for his services from Moses Randolph, all assumptions he had made prove to be false.

Lionel is not the only motherless person: Laura grieves about the loss of her own parent, and like in all noir films, the oedipal motive is also centre stage: in this case Tony sleeping with Frank’s wife Julia (Mann). Lionel is a throw-back to Elliot Gould’s Marlowe in The Long Goodbye, also sharing an apartment with his cat. Baldwin’s Moses Randolp is very much modelled on the real life NY developer Robert Moses (1888-1981), who tore down many neighbourhoods and eschewed public transport in favour of motorways. He also was the force behind the move of the Brooklyn Dodgers to California, robbing the borough of much of its identity. But since he was also the creator of around 245 parks in the city, many people admired him. Perhaps not the population of Harlem, because of the 245 parks, just one was built in their borough. But Baldwin is also Trump: his racist attitudes, phrases like “winning is all what is about” and “America’s greatness”, together with his posture, the childishly folded arms and a pouty posture. 

British DoP Dick Pope (Mr. Turner) and PD Beth Mickie (Drive) take the lion’s share of the success: the brownstone buildings have never looked more real, and the car chase images are not the only highlights: Pope includes all the yesterdays, even a Gothic=looking Penn Station. Norton is part of a brilliant ensemble and he can be proud of his attempt to fuse past and present together with personal stories. No Chinatown – but a bloody relevant and entertaining feature. AS

ON RELEASE from 6 December 2019

Scattered Night (2019) **** Marrakech Film Festival 2019

Dir: Sol Kim and Jihyoung Lee | S. Korea dram 90′

Sol Kim and Jihyoung Lee’s first film captures the trauma of family break-up seen through the eyes of two small children in this austere cinema verite drama that gradually builds into a convincing conclusion.

Little Seung-ah Moon (Sumin) is at the centre of it all. Barely ten, she intuitively taps into the imploding relationship of her increasingly alienated parents, searching in vain for guidance, assurance or a hint of stability as she struggles to understand how her parents still care for each other but now want the family to live apart. The questions she asks are basic and natural, but she never gets a proper replay, let alone any love or attention – apart from the occasional platitude and a throwaway comment: “you’ll understand one day”.

Scattered Night is an intense experience, the camera never leaving the child’s face through its entire running time in a compelling natural performance for one so young and vulnerable as Seung-ah Moon. But the filmmakers are not interested in Sumin’s ordinary parents, who carry their own emotional baggage from the past, influenced by society’s expectations of them, fleshed out in a sequence where grandma comes to stay. The focus here is the Sumin (Moon Seung- a) and her brother Jinho (Choi Junwoo) who are barely coping with the emotional confusion of the separation. Using sustained takes and languid pacing the filmmakers carefully observe the children’s reactions to their parent’s non-committal body language, avoiding sentimentality or melodrama in crafting a subtle and resonant snapshot that shares its tragic story full of complexity, uncertainty and pain. MT

SCATTERED NIGHT | Marrakech Film Festival 2019 

 

So Long My Son | Di jiu tian chang (2019) ****

Dir Wang Xiaoshuai | Cast: Wang Jingchun, Yong Mei, Qi Xi, Wang Yuan, Du Jiang, Ai Liya, Xu Cheng, Li Jingjing, Zhao Yanguozhang | China, Drama 185′

This delicate and deeply affecting melodrama explores one tragic couple’s life during thirty years of China’s one-child policy (1979-2013).

Wang Xiaoshuai’s So Long, My Son (Di jiu tian chang) is intimate in style but ambitious in its storyline that straddles three decades of Chinese social history during an absorbing three hours. It all begins with two young boys eager to join their friends messing about in a reservoir a northern town in 1986. Xingxing can’t swim and is nervous; Haohao tries to persuade him but eventually runs off alone. The next scene sees a family enjoying their supper. Xingxing, his father Yaoyun (Wang Jinchung) and mother Liyun (Yong Mei). But back at the reservoir again, all hell breaks loose as one of the kids appears to be lying in the mud. A frantic chase to the hospital ends in distress – clearly a child has lost his life, and it appears to be Xingxing. The story then jumps forward to the 1990s where the couple are arguing with a teenage boy called Xingxing. Did he miraculously survive the drowning or is this another boy altogether?. Reality will be revealed in a deftly devised subplot.

But from the moment they lose their first child, Yaoyun and Liyun will never be the same, the tragedy bonds them as they live a quiet existence marked by sadness – and we feel for them. One of the grace moments is a silent scene on a bus where Liyun stares ruefully into the distance while another woman chats away to her, oblivious of her pain.

Yaoyun and Liyun are close to Haohao’s parents, mother Haiyan (Ai Liya), the factory line manager, and father Yingming (Xu Cheng), but tragedy strikes again when Liyun becomes pregnant with a second child, the state policy cruelly forcing her to have an abortion. Meanwhile Yaoyun grew close to Yingming’s sister Moli (Qi Xi), who holds the key to this heart-rending social saga.

Performances are tender and utterly convincing from the lead couple, winning them prizes at the Berlin where the film premiered in 2019. This is a sumptuous slow-moving feast for the eyes that also feeds the soul with its resonant storyline. The revolutionary changes provide a subtle backdrop to this social drama with its brooding texture and grace notes that will resonate with anyone affected by their plight. MT
NOW IN CINEMAS from 6 DECEMBER 2019

Honey Boy (2019) ***

Director: Alma Har’el | Cast: Shia LaBeouf, Lucas Hedges, Noah Jupe, FKA Twigs, Martin Starr, Laura San Giacomo | US Drama 

Shia LaBeouf has always been one of the most complex stars in the Hollywood firmament. His stunts and tantrums are well known in film circles and in this sincere and deeply tender drama, playing his own father, he tries to illuminate a troubled childhood and the ensuing fallout. His young self Otis is played gamely by an angelic-like Noah Jupe.

Honey Boy is LaBeouf’s second film this year, following on from The Peanut Butter Falcon.  The title refers to his nickname as a child growing up in a motel-style bungalow where he shared the only room with his father, a circus entertainer who actually lived off his son’s work as a stunt artist. The feature debut of Israeli-American documentarian Alma Har’el, the film flips backwards and forwards telling its story in atmospheric visuals and impressionistic vignettes fleshing out a dysfunctional childhood where as a 12-year old child he was on the receiving end of constant verbal and often physical abuse from his ex-alcoholic father (LaBeouf sports a paunch and comb-over), a disillusioned ex-circus clown who continually badmouths and harangues him: “How do you think it feels to have my son paying me?” he says, and Otis (sagely replies’ “You wouldn’t be here if I didn’t”.

Har’el establishes the environment of ‘toxic masculinity’ but never really delves deeply into this subject matter of his trauma, only lightly touching on Otis’ therapy sessions with Laura San Giacomo’s psychiatrist Dr Moreno, once he becomes a young actor played with a stinging intensity by Lucas Hedges.

What the film lacks in depth it certainly makes up for in soul and LaBeouf’s well-constructed script makes for an impressive and heartfelt tale of emotional woe and comparative deprivation, Har’el’s direction is assured but occasionally needed to slow down a bit and allow us time to contemplate this fraught emotional scenario.

The film’s opening sequence follows the grown-up Otis during his counselling sessions for a PTSD diagnosis, and then delves back to the past where the pre-teen often demonstrates a maturity beyond his years, in the rather squalid home where he gets up at 4am to be shuttled to the film set for a full day’s work, before returning to his joyless home life.

LaBeouf creates an authentically loathsome character of his father James, wallowing in self-pity and regret, and we feel for Jupe’s vulnerability and quiet desperation that never resorts to peevishness. It’s good to know that LaBeouf’s talents have finally superseded his public image with this visually nuanced and affecting portrait of childhood trauma. MT

https://youtu.be/5RR8WTQzwSk

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM 6 DECEMBER 2019

Sole (2019) ***

Dir: Carlo Sironi | Italy, Drama 90′

For some a baby is a prized goal in life while others can use their fertility to make some cash on the side. This is the premise in this spare but topical drama from new Italian director Carlo Sironi. It centres on a heavily pregnant Polish girl (Lena/Sandra Drzymalska) who agrees to sell her offspring to a desperate childless Italian couple, splitting the proceeds of the fee with their nephew Ermanno (Claudio Segaluscio) who poses as the biological father of the baby. Surrogacy is still illegal in Italy.

The director steers well clear of melodrama or sentimentality in this rather austere feature that keeps a tight control of its plot-line, playing its cards close to its chest: Ermanno and Lena make for a morose couple who barely rub along in their relationship of convenience, although things improve slightly with the impending birth giving Ermanno a new aim in life, a welcome break from his state of hopelessness.

Ermanno is certainly a contemporary character, a buttoned down anger simmers behind his poker faced demeanour. It’s a thoughtful performance from non-pro Segaluscio, whereas Drzymalska is more accepting of her situation, inured to the pain she has clearly suffered in the past and quietly pleased to be prized rather than put down in her new role. But when the chips are down and Lena realises her baby is just a porn in her struggle to survive, the emotional meltdown is palpable. MT

Marrakech Film Festival 2019 | IN COMPETITION

 

Noura’s Dream (2019) *** Marrakech Film Festival 2019

Dir/scr. Hinde Boujemaa | Cast: Hend Sabri, Lotfi Abdelli, Hakim Boumsaoudi, Imen Cherif, Saif Dhrif, Jamel Sassi Tunisia, Belgium, France, Qatar. |  92 mins.

Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution was a time of change for the nation’s working class. Filmmaker Hinde Boujemaa eyed the era with caution in her 2012 documentary It Was Better Tomorrow.

In her richly textured drama debut, Boujemaa brings the epoch to life in a flawed but fascinating story set in the crumbling backstreets of Tunis and led by a towering performance from Tunisian actress Hend Sabri.

Obviously corruption reigns and petty criminals abound in this impoverishing milieu enchanted by its once glamorous colonial buildings and now fraught with world-weary resilience amongst ordinary people just trying to make their way in life.

Hospital laundry worker Noura (Sabri) is in love with Lassad (Boumsaoudi) and the two share amorous embraces and fond glances indicative of the secrecy of their romance as Noura is seeking a divorce from Jamel (Abdelli), her jailed husband. She is a mother to three children, and her female lawyer reminds her that adultery, in Tunisia, carries a five-year prison sentence. Women beware women.

Jamel is intellectually challenged, to say the least. And when he is suddenly released from prison he starts to threaten Noura again. But Lassad offers little in emotional support. Noura is caught between a rock and a hard place: but most women will be familiar with this territory.

Sabri is brilliant as the central character. Her careworn face is a testament to suffering, yet she carries on in desperation, hoping against hope that love will find a way. Her son is just another misogynist in the making and her daughter looks on almost contemptuously as she vows not to make the same mistakes. An affecting debut that says: Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. Mt

IN COMPETITION | Marrakech Film Festival 2019 

 

 

Mosaic Portrait (2019) *** Marrakech Film Festival 2019

Dir: Zhai Yixiang | Drama, China, 91’

Zhai Yixiang’s sophomore feature is an enigmatic experience to say the least and aptly named, its fractured pieces never quite slotting together. In provincial China miopic teenager Xu Ying (Zhang Tongxi in her screen debut) discovers she is pregnant and accuses one of the teachers in her school.

Blurry, unfocused camerawork point to the nebulousness behind her claims, suggesting she might not really know the true identity of the father, or even care. Her largely absent migrant worker father Guangjun (Wang Yanhui decides to embark on a fruitless attempt to scope out the culprits but gets short shift from the headmaster. But the situation then comes to attention of a reporter from the nearest big city Jia (Wang Chaunjun) who starts to show an rather uncalled interest in the case by putting pressure on the school and the local police

Clearly an attention seeker Ying then steps back from the affair and having proverbially thrown the toys out of the pram seems totally ambivalent about what happens next. But her intentions are clear. She is making a protest about mainland China’s male dominated society that enforces a State controlled One-Child Policy.

But this is not a mystery whodunnit and once the identity of her baby is revealed Zing heads for the big city where she takes solace in the female centric surroundings of a home for women down on their luck. This visually appealing segment delicately captures the lives of the local Chinese girls and Zhai excels in his female gaze on proceedings that avoids sentimentality but marks this out as more of a meandering mood piece than an involving piece of storytelling, once its social comment has been made. MT

MARRAKECH FILM FESTIVAL 2019

Babel Film Festival 2019 | Cagliari, Sardinia

 

The Sardinians have come up with a novel idea for a film festival. Babel focuses on ethnic minorities, and in particular linguistic ones.

Film is all about cultural exchange. Babel hopes to enrich and enliven the global debate with some marginal cinematic experiences, connecting the mainstream world with communities struggling to survive, not only physically, but culturally.

The programme offers a diverse array of documentaries, fiction features and shorts, and contributions from the world of theatre and music mining a wealth of minority languages since the dawn of time.

Now celebrating its sixth biennale edition the Babel Film Festival hopes to roll out festivities in an annual event making the Sardinian capital city of Cagliari a place for enlightened discussion and cultural exchange. Cineastes and industry professional can visit and get to know this exotic source of creativity featuring a diversity of minority languages, including dialects, slang and more. Lesser known languages are not just about communication on a basic everyday level, they are complex methods of expression in their own right, allowing speakers the freedom to wax lyrical with a nuanced and poetic vision of the world they live in.

BABEL FILM FESTIVAL | 2 -7 DECEMBER 2019

Marrakech International Film Festival 2019 | Tributes Australian Film

MARRAKECH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL is set to pay tribute to screen legend and Sundance pioneer Robert Redford in its 18th edition which also showcases an extensive retrospective of Australian Cinema. November 29th to December 7th 2019.

Marrakech Film Festival is one of the most glamorous events in the film festival circuit attracting professionals and film lovers from all over the World and honouring global film in all its forms. This year’s International Competition Jury is headed by Tilda Swinton, who has starred in over 70 feature films, most recently in The Personal History of David Copperfield, and Wes Anderson latest comedy drama The French Dispatch which will premiere early next year.

This year’s 18th edition taking place from November 29th until December 7th also plays host to an impressive tribute to Australian cinema, considered to be one of the oldest in the world. This year’s tribute is also the biggest get-together of Australian actors and directors ever to take place at a film festival. Australia has a tradition of a gutsy hard-nosed crime thrillers but also lyrical arthouse dramas and comedies that embody the infinite variety of the vast nation. From the hostile outback of Ayer’s Rock to the sophisticated urban centres Australia’s spectacular landscape provides a remarkable background for its visual arts. And although the average cinema-goer may only be able to remember Crocodile Dundee, the country has an impressive array of movies to draw on and one of the world’s most active film industries boasting memorable commercial and indie titles and directors as diverse as Baz Lurhmann, Gillian Armstong, Mel Gibson, Ivan Sen and film pioneer and screenwriter Lottie Lyell  (1890-1925) considered to be Australia’s first film star. During her short life she made an important contribution to the industry in the silent era with The Blue Mountains Mystery (1921) which she co-directed with Raymond Longford. Here is a selection of some outstanding Australian cult classics to put us in mind of what we might look forward during the Marrakech official selection in November 2019.

WALKABOUT (1971)

In Nicolas Roeg’s moving mystical coming of age drama an Aboriginal boy comes to the rescue to two teenagers abandoned by their father in the remote corner of the Outback. Walkabout is a bleak but beguiling feature that riffs on the theme of human kindness and cultural differences. Although Roeg and most of the cast are British, the film has been taken to Australias’s heart because it launched the remarkable career of Indigenous Australian actor David Gulpilil.

WAKE IN FRIGHT (1971)

Directed by Toronto born maverick Ted Kotcheff and also known as Outback, Wake in Fright kicked off the Australian New Wave and is now considered one of the most extraordinary Australian features ever made. Blending horror with an immersive character drama, it was ‘lost’ for many years, until veteran producer Anthony Buckley finally tracked it down in 20o4 in a Pittsburgh warehouse. Remastered and given a theatrical release and the Bluray treatment in 2014 (courtesy of Eureka) this is one film you simply must see with its standout performances from Donald Pleasence, Chips Rafferty and Sylvia Kay.

PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK (1975)

A mesmerising and unsolved mystery about a group of school girls who disappear during a school picnic on Hanging Rock. Peter Weir’s haunting drama stays in the memory with its luminous cast and glowering background of Ayer’s Rock. Based on the novel by Joan Lindsey it was adapted for the big screen – and I mean big – by Cliff Green.

GALLIPOLI (1981)

Another haunting tragedy that tells a poignant tale of war and guarantees a tearful audience. Set in Australia just before the First World War, it follows a group of Western Australian soldiers who will eventually meet their fate during the Gallipoli campaign on Turkish soil. Mel Gibson leads a cast of men whose lost innocence and dedication to duty continue to resonate nearly forty years later.

DEAD CALM (1989) not showing

Where would Australian cinema be without British-born Sam Neill and his leading lady Nicole Kidman. Alone on a yacht off the Great Barrier Reef they face up to a psychotic monster Billy Zane in this tensely gripping thriller.

ROMPER STOMPER (1992) not showing

Russell Crowe embodies stomping but he is an actor who can also do subtlety and infinite gentleness. Here in Geoffrey Wright’s urban thriller he does the former with gusto. Set in a working class Melbourne suburb, Romper Stomper sees a motley crew of neo-Nazi skinheads rise up against their changing neighbourhood with devastating consequences.

LANTANA (2001)

Kerry Armstrong, Anthony LaPaglia and Geoffrey Rush star in this taut and emotional thriller elegantly enveloped in a characterful study of human relationships in suburban Sydney. A dead body, a detective caught in flagrante, a psychiatrist whose own marriage is floundering: these are the elements that gentle stew for two engrossing hours in Ray Lawrence’s memorable mystery movie.

JAPANESE STORY (2003) not showing

In the Australian desert, a guide and a Japanese businessman who can’t stand each other are suddenly drawn together in an awkward situation that ends in tragedy. Toni Collette gives an outstanding performance as the guide in this memorable multi-award-winning psychological drama. Sue Brooks directs Alison Tilson’s brilliant script with aplomb.

THE PROPOSITION (2005) not showing

John Hillcoat directs a superb cast of Ray Winstone, Guy Pearce and Emily Watson in this bleak and feral outback Western scripted and scored by Nick Cave. What can go wrong? The answer is absolutely nothing. The Proposition won awards across the board for its thorny depiction of a criminal  family that sees an outlaw ordered to kill his older brother in order to save the life of his younger one.

ANIMAL KINGDOM (2010)

David Michod’s tense and brutal urban epic sees a mafia-style family locked in bitter conflict in 1980s Melbourne. Based on a real life Pettingill family it stars Oscar-nominated Jacki Weaver as a machiavellian matriarch playing each relative off against the other as she protects her 17 year old son (James Frecheville) without a shred of sentimentality.

SNOWTOWN (2011) not showing

With its unforgettable clanging score, Snowtown sent critics into a cold sweat. This Adelaide-based real crime thriller explores the descent into hell of a young man (Lucas Pittaway) at the hands of his charismatic mentor turned vicious serial killer, the infamous John Bunting – who went on to kill 11 people (chillingly played by Douglas Henshall). Snowtown was the feature debut of Justin Kurzel who  has gone on to deliver The Turning (2013), Macbeth (2015) and historical fact-based drama The True History of the Kelly Gang (2019).  

THE BABBADOOK (2014) not showing 

One of the best horror films in memory is Jennifer Kent’s truly terrifying and formally splendid psychological chiller. Melding a suspenseful narrative with finely crafted horror tropes, the film swept the board at the global film genre awards and is still popular with horror enthusiasts everywhere.

MAD MAX (1979)

Cinema goers didn’t know what had hit them when George Miller’s sadistic motor cycle thriller revved onto the big screen fuelled by murder and mayhem. It was a mesmerising experience and still is, with its odd combination of eccentric characters, stunning scenery and throat-grabbing barbarism that would spawn several sequels, but this was the weirdest yet.

PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK (1975)

The 1970s was a standout decade for Australian film not least because of the Peter Weir’s languorous mystery drama suffused with an eerie delicacy and based on Joan Lindsay’s novel that sees a group of school girls go missing on Valentine’s Day 1900 in the sizzling heat of summer. Starring Rachel Roberts, Helen Morse and Jacki Weaver, the drama went on to win a BAFTA for cinematography.

MY BRILLIANT CAREER (1979)

Judy Davis won a BAFTA for her performance as a writer and contemporary female role model Sybylla Melvyn in this 19th century set debut feature for Gillian Armstrong. It garnered awards across the board but went home empty handed from Cannes in the year of release.

THE YEAR MY VOICE BROKE (1987)

A young man (Noah Taylor) suffers teenage angst as his crush and best friend (Leone Carmen) falls in love with an older guy in John Duigan’s poignantly funny 1960s set coming of age drama. A budding Ben Mendelsohn triumphs as the thuggish rugby playing criminal whose violence sets off an irreversible chain of events.

A CRY IN THE DARK (1988)

Based on John Bryson’s novel Evil Angels, Meryl Streep inspires terrifying evil as she fights to prove her innocence in Fred Schepisi’s biopic drama about the woman whose child was supposedly killed by a dingo in the Australian Outback.

During this year’s festival a distinguished delegation of Australian actors and directors will make the trip to Marrakech to enjoy this exceptional tribute and take part in a range of stage appearances and lives events in the Moroccan capital and its lush locations.

MARRAKECH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2019 | 29 NOVEMBER – 7 DECEMBER 2019

 

The Nightingale (2018) ****

Dir. Jennifer Kent. Australia. 2018. 136′

Australian writer-director Jennifer Kent is best known for her chiller The Babadook. Here she turns her camera to focus on Australia’s colonial history with the premise: “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”.

Nightingale is a sprawling and furious foray into the wilds Tasmania fuelled by a passion of a woman driven to defend her honour to the utmost. Aisling Franciosi brings vehemence and a surreal luminance as the central character Clare. And while Nightingale is certainly impassioned, lushly mounted and ambitious, it often gets waylaid by plotwists on the narrative front: from the outset the outcome is more or less predictable, although its odyssey into the heart of Australia’s colonial darkness certainly has us gasping for breath.

Anyone would be enraged if not extremely distraught to be subjected to gang rape and the killing of their baby and partner. And this is exactly what happens to Clare, forcing her to embark on a perilous and highly-charged quest for revenge taking as her guide a single-minded young aboriginal man. Their journey into the dark heart of Tasmania will be a perilous and eventful experience – and an extremely gruelling one for the audience. But what is undoubtedly a great premise for an epic saga, gets far too excited and over-heated plot-wise for its own good under Kent’s direction. And that’s a shame. Ultimately though, The Nightingale is a respectable auteurist enterprise.

Back in 1825, Tasmania was known as Van Diemen’s Land and that is where the young Irish woman fetches up after a career of what is now euphemistically known as stealing ‘to survive’. As a servant to the British occupying forces she is married to another ex-convict Aidan (Michael Sheasby), and has a tiny baby. But the man who has saved her – commanding officer Lieutenant Hawkins (Sam Claflin) – also fancies his chances with her and after she perform the titular Irish folk song to entertain the troops one night, he calls her to his quarters where he brutally rapes her. But it doesn’t end there, and by the end of the evening her entire family is dead, and Clare is determined to get her own back on the feckless man and his vicious collaborators Sergeant Ruse (Damon Herriman) and Ensign Jago (Harry Greenwood), following them to a their new posting in the town of Launceston, where Hawkins hopes to get a promotion.

Aboriginal Billy (Baykali Ganambarr) is not keen on the idea of accompanying a young white woman, but the oddly-matched couple eventually set off through the dense forest, their spirited exchanges fuelling what is otherwise a predicable journey. Their accompanying animals will invariably come off worst, along with their English overlords, who are invariably depicted as the same one-dimentional arch villains we will soon meet in Black 47 (2018). 

Nightingale triumphs as a robust cocktail of female oppression interwoven with anti-colonial overtones and laced with a folkloric twist (not to mention the Gaelic and the Palawi kani banter). Clare’s rendition of the ballad ‘Nightingale’ and other melodies is tunefully mellow in stark contrast to the ultra-brutal violence that eventually becomes as tedious as the repetitive plot reversals, and have the same affect as commercial breaks in subtracting dramatic heft from what could have been a succinct and infinitely more immersive historical drama, despite the rather trite denouement.

Along with terrific performances from the lead duo, Radek Ladczuk’s camerawork does Nightingale proud – all those vigorously verdant forests and burgeoning bushes giving way to the vibrant lushness of the Tasmanian widescreen landscapes. The Nightingale is a worthwhile exploration of a lesser known, but horrific episode in Antipodean colonial history. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 29 NOVEMBER 2019

Atlantics (2019) **

Dir: Mati Diop | Wri: Olivier Demangel | Cast: Traore, Mame Sane, Aminata Kane | Drama 104′

Mati Diop, now 36, was one of the four women, and the only black female director in this year’s Cannes competition line-up with this fabulous but flawed surreal love story. With a French mother and Senegalese father, she grew up in Paris and rose to fame with Simon Killer going on to film, direct and write several short films. Her Dakar-set debut feature Atlantics sees a young girl trapped by her love for an unpaid construction worker and her arranged marriage to a glib entrepreneur.

Similar in many ways to Diop’s short film Atlantiques (2009) it also echoes Alain Gomis’ Aujourd’hui (2012) in its glorious setting by Dakar’s Atlantic coast, atmospherically shot by Claire Mathon. Mame Sane makes for an impressive lead as the feisty but vulnerable central character Ada, but there are tonal inconsistencies and Diop’s attempt to fuse the social realism of the early scenes with the magic realist elements of the final half feel unconvincing and may leave many viewers bewildered.

A confident beginning sees construction workers on the rampage. They have been building the tall skyscraper that gives the city the skyline of a smaller version of Dubai, but are owed  three months’ pay. Assurances from the foreman that the boss, Mr. N’Diaye (Diankou Sembene) will pay up, fall on deaf ears. One of the worker, Souleiman (Traore), meets up with with 17-year-old Ada and the two share passionate embraces on the beach. But this doomed romance is bound to fail: Ada has been betrothed to Omar, a rich man who shuttles between Dakar and Italy, and the wedding is in a few days Meanwhile Souleiman has decided to take off in a pirogue with his mates hoping to find better luck in Spain.

Ada finds out about all this when she meets him later in a bar on the beach run by her friend Dior (Nicole Sougou). Her other friends Fanta (Amina Kane) and Mariama (Mariama Gassama) will be bereft now that the men are leaving town. They have all used their feminine wiles to get ahead financially and this is described by Diop as “Afro capitalist neo-feminism.” And when they see Ada’s new home they are deeply envious, she is utterly unimpressed and actively rebels against the wedding .

Luckily for Ada, someone deeply objects to the horrendous white polyester Louis XV bedroom and set fire to the whole property, although no-one is harmed. The police officer assigned to investigate, Issa (Amadou Mbow), proves unworthy of his job and seems to be suffering unexplained blackouts as proceedings take on a surreal twist with some of the characters developing white, zombie like eyes.

The supernatural soon invades reality as the film morphs into horror mode and the pacing slurs to Al Qadiri’s eerie score that mixes electronics with African instruments. This tonal shift feels odd and take us by surprise with the action moving predominantly into the night and Diop making great use of the raging Atlantic sea as a surging malevolent undercurrent . Her inventive visual ideas mingle well with the film’s undertones of Islamist misogynism, post-imperialism and witch doctors; although these remain rather unwritten, along with the enigmatic love story, despite an ample running time of nearly two hours. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE | JURY Grand Prix WINNER CANNES 2019

 

The Last Faust (2019) **

Dir.: Philipp Humm, Dominik Wieschermann; Cast: Stephen Berkoff, Martin Hancock, Glyn Dilley, Yvonne Mai, Edwin de la Renta, Scarlet Mellish Wilson; UK 2019, 107 min.

Philipp Humm came to filmmaking from a background at Amazon, Deutsche Telecom and T-Mobile USA. He got together with DoP Dominik Wieschermann and the result is this stylish and stagey but flawed imagining of Goethe’s Faust One and Two.

It took Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 60 years to finish his tragic magnum opus -the original stage play can run for anything between 14 and 21 hours. Here the  filmmakers have distilled it into a 107 minute film transposing the 500-year old allegorical tale of Faust’s pact with the Devil to Silicon Valley in the year 2059. Humanity is on the brink of extinction as Artificial Intelligence (AI) heralds a new dawn of technological superiority.

Faust One is straightforward, God betting Mephistopheles (Glyn Dilley) that he cannot tempt Dr. Faust (Martin Hancock) to do evil. But after seducing young Gretchen (Yvonne Mai), the good Doctor is drunk on power. So for the second part, Humm introduces Dr. Goodfellow (Berkoff), a Tech wizard who is Dr. Faust’s successor, and probably the last one. 

It all begins with a Star Wars- like exposition (minus scrolling text) which explains that an artificial neural network is taking over and will overpower humankind sooner than later. Dr. Goodfellow is in the only safe place not connected to his vast network: his mother’s home, where he tells the Superhuman machine robot AI Paris the original Faust story.

Goethe introduced diverse cultural styles for the second part, comprising opera; ballet; Greek tragedy and medieval mystery plays. Here Berkoff opts for contemporary dance, overwhelming music (Yello), comedy costumes and a great deal of partially digested philosophy centred around Friedrich Nietzsche’s Ubermensch (Supermann) theories from his opus: Also sprach Zarathustra.

Somehow the story gets lost under all this ballast, and even the Weinstein parallel can’t save it. You can see what Humm has in mind with his reductionist action and poetic interludes, but it comes adrift with Dr. Goodfellow’s narration of the storyline. The play-in-play structure is another inspired departure – with Humm using Faust dressed as Steve Job – but overall these individual strokes of brilliance diminish the strength of the endeavour as a whole, and we are left high and dry by the Sorcerer’s apprentices Humm and Wieschermann. AS

AVAILABLE 2 DECEMBER ON ALL MAJOR DIGITAL PLATFORMS (AMAZON, iTUNES, and SKY STORE

 

La Belle Epoque (2019) ****

Dir.: Nicolas Bedos; Cast: Daniel Auteuil, Guillaume Canet, Doria Tillier, Fanny Ardant, Pierre Arditi; France 2019, 115 min.

Nicolas Bedos has set his stall out writing light-hearted and clever dramas. He follows his popular debut Mr. & Mrs. Adelman with this well-crafted and rather old-fashioned screwball comedy that sees a disgruntled 60-something man revisit his past to discover why he fell in love with his wife in the first place.

Parisians Victor (Auteuil) and Marianne (Ardant) have been married for forty years. But their marriage has hit the skids due to Victor’s disillusionment with life after losing his job as a newspaper cartoonist. Psychologist Marianne has also lost her mojo. She treats her patients like objects on a conveyer belt, and only looks forward to riding in her self-driving Tesla car. Their two sons are very much in step with their millennial generation. But even they are shocked when Marianne tells them that she has a new lover (who predictably is only interested in a place live). Victor gets the bums rush.

As this point Bedos adopts a similar premise to Herzog in his Family Romance, LLC. Victor calls on family friend Antoine (Canet), who runs a stage company organising time travel for a range of wealthy clients. You can explore the era of Marie Antoinette or even reinvent yourself as Hitler. So Victor opts to be beamed back to the Lyon of 1974, when he first fell for his wife, played by young Margot (Tillier), who is also in an on-off relationship with the unfaithful Antoine. While ‘directing’ behind the scenes, Antoine is well aware that Victor is falling for his own lover. The script dictates they go to bed on day four, but Antoine makes sure this date is never reached.

Always inventive, DoP Nicolas Bedos creates delightful scenes in front and behind the camera, very much in the style of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off. The prompting alone is hair-raising, and Antoine gets into such a bad mood that he immediately replaces actors who fall foul of his directions. And since it is France, the actors performing the orgy scene, are only too happy to do some unpaid overtime. It is a chaos of situations and emotions, and although Bedos brings nothing new to the party Belle Epoche is a lively and enjoyable comedy. AS

NOW ON RELEASE FROM 22 NOVEMBER 2019

    

Judy & Punch (2019) *** LFF 2019

Dir.: Mirrah Foulkes; Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Damon Herriman, Benedict Hardie, Tom Budge, Brenda Palmer, Terry Norris; Australia 2019, 105 min.

Australian actor turned filmmaker Mirrah Foulkes creates a full-on fairytale with a feminist twist that doesn’t pull its punches. A brilliant cast is led by Mia Wasikowska in this tonally off kilter comedy-drama that champions the resilience of women in a man’s world.

For a first feature this is wacky but wonderful stuff that makes use of magic tricks and  slapstick in a 16th-century village called Seaside – the joke is on the not very bright denizens, as the place totally landlocked. Said locals are not only slightly retarded, they are downright vicious, particularly when it comes to their treatment of women. There is a regular ‘Stoning Day’, and if anyone is unlucky enough to have her chickens die on that day, stare at the Moon too long or develop a rash – they are stoned to death.

Puppeteers Punch (Herriman) and Judy (Wasikowska) run a regular show that recently suffered from Punch’s boozing and violent temper. Judy is the most gifted of two and she soon emerges as the stronger. While preparing for the latest show Punch’s cruel nature once again rears its ugly head undermining her efforts to win back the audience. A tragic incident does not lead to  contrition on his part, and he makes matters worse by nearly beating his wife to death, before dumping her in the forest. He then blames their endearing servants Maud (Palmer) and her dementia-ridden husband Scaramouche (Norris), the mild protestations of police officer Derrick (Hardie) brushed aside. Meanwhile, Judy has been found in the woods and recovers to reek her brilliant revenge.

Foulkes certainly has a penchant for camp in the hotchpotch of just about everything. Herriman’s Punch channels Captain Sparrow, his charm masking a violent personality. Joined by a motley crew of villagers who dance around in Renaissance rig-outs rehearsing their tai chi moves in the ancient forest. Whether to laugh or cry or even recoil in horror, is entirely up to you. That said, DoP Stefan Duscio’s wide-screen images are impressive, his imagination running riot. Wasikowska rises to the occasion as an enterprising young woman, taking on her husband and the entire in the feisty finale. But the contradictions somehow spoil the enjoyment: swinging between utter farce and black comedy the audience loses its bearings too often. And in spite of some strong ideas and a wonderful  Wasikowska, Judy & Punch never really catches fire. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 27 NOVEMBER 2019     

Harriet (2019) **

Dir/Wri: Kasi Lemmons | Cast: Cynthia Erivo, Jennifer Nettles, Mike Marunde, Joe Alwyn | Historical Drama | US 125′

Cynthia Erivo plays gutsy slavery heroine Harriet Tubman is this uninspiring biopic drama that feels lofty and pedantic rather than rousing and radically original. 

Harriet is the latest drama from Eve’s Bayou director Kasi Lemmons who squanders her big budget on flashy settings rather on script development and a cast to match Erivo’s nuanced appeal. Growing in stature from a lowly slave girl in the Deep South of 1849 to a commanding presence who leads 70 other workers to freedom – inspired by the past – (seen in vivid flashback), Erivo makes for a quietly convincing visionary, eventually gaining the nickname “Moses” from the plantation owners who are brought to their knees by her extraordinary will to free her fellow men and women.

Playing out as a heavy-handed historical potboiler against the glowering skies of the Deep South, Harriet occasionally hints at Porgy and Bess (1959) but never really achieves Preminger’s spirituality and dramatic heft, or that of 12 Years a Slave that conveyed the desperation of the down trodden and traumatised sub-class. Lemmons ticks off the boxes, cueing us all the time as to how we should feel; making her white men objectionable and ultra violent and her ‘people of colour’ benign and put-upon victims  – with only one exception.

Starting off in the household of the draconian plantation owners (Jennifer Nettles and Mike Marunde): this is a drama that gradually grows in proportions and ambitions finally rolling out its heroine’s achievements in the rather cramped third act that resorts to didacticism in pathing the way to Civil War, and further danger for the enslaved protagonists.

Lemmons, writing with Gregory Allan Howard, makes Erivo the uncontested standout in a morass of middling support performances, namely Joe Alwyn’s slave owner Gideon who is both her boss but also has unrequited passions fostered since their childhood growing up together on the plantation. Her husband (C J McBath) is an insignificant cypher who ends up marrying someone else, thinking she has run away, and disappeared forever. There is a muddled attempt to finesse the lines between black slaves and those who have never lived in bondage but are still not free, despite owning property. There are also black slave catchers, and the American equivalent of South African’s Cape Coloureds – those who have mixed parentage. All said and done, Harriet feels like it should be shown in classrooms rather than in movie theatres. Get the point? MT

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM 22 NOVEMBER 2019

 

 

Marriage Story (2019) ****

Dir.: Noah Baumbach, Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver, Azly Robertson, Laura Dern, Ray Liotta;ion, the running time USA 2019, 135 min.
Writer/director Noah Baumbach (Frances Ha) has produced his version of Scenes from a Marriage, mostly funny, but in the end veering of into something altogether more sinister. The stellar cast keeps us engaged for over two hours in what seems like an overindulgence on Baumbach’s part, especially as the film will end up on Netflix – making it even less likely to sustain an audience.
Nicole (Johansson) and Charlie (Driver) have been married for a decade and have a son, Henry (Robertson), who is at pre-school age. Charlie is the director of an avantgarde, off-Broadway theater group, Nicole his star. For a long time she wanted to direct herself, but is always thwarted by the narcissistic and overbearing Charlie, who likes to control her life like the classic patriarch men often are. The son is spoilt and even gets presents for going to the bathroom.
When Nicole finds out Charlie has slept with a colleague, the dam bursts and she goes for a divorce, taking Henry to her family home in LA. Before Nicole met Charlie, she had success as a mainstream actor, and she takes up her professional life in the same circles. At first, Charlie does not take his wife seriously, hoping that “she will come to her senses”. It soon dawns on him he will lose her, and also his son. Soon they are both getting legal advice. Nicole engages the fiery Nora Fanshaw (Dern), who makes Charlie go back to his first choice lawyer (Liotta), who is equally as expensive and as dirty as his female counterpart.
Despite the heavy subject matter, Baumbach brings a lightness of touch in the form of witty one-liners and slapstick. One scene takes place in Charlie’s LA flat, where he tries to prove to the state evaluator that he and Henry are happy. But there are darker moments, and the tone grows more hysterical – and soon sparks fly.
DoP Robbie Ryan turns out the usual cliched images of New York and LA. Hollywood’s town is a colourful circus, unlike sober, intellectual NY. Baumbach is skilled in this kind of territory – it’s clearly a subject he knows well, and lays bear the subtle nuances that lead to the end of love. Although he brings nothing particularly new to the party. This has a richer texture than his previous films, as he reworks and embellishes an already rich tapestry of replays in this sub-genre with its universal appeal. The Randy Newman score is unobtrusive, but effective. Performance wise this is a winner. Marriage Story is a tale we all know too well. AS
NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL  REVIEW 2019

UK French Film Festival (2019)

The French Film Festival UK is the only festival dedicated to French and Francophone cinema, embracing French and Francophone cinema in all its diversity, featuring a bumper programme bursting with variety and vitality. The 27th edition runs from 1 November to 15 December 2019, showing over 50 films in 35 towns and cities across the UK. 

Nana | Nana (N/C 12A+)

Dir Jean Renoir | Scr Pierre Lestringuez | based on the Emile Zola novel | Music Baudime Jam | 1926 | France | 170 mins |

This special screening of Jean Renoir’s full-length silent film includes two magnificent set pieces – a horse race and an open-air ball – accompanied live by Prima Vista Quintet 

A Paris Education | Mes Provinciales (N/C 15+)

Dir Jean-Paul Civeyrac | 2018 | France | 136 mins |

Pure love of cinema inhabits every frame of Jean-Paul Civeyrac’s sensitive and sophisticated portrait of Etienne, a provincial boy who moves to Paris to attend film school. 

By the Grace of God | Grâce à Dieu (15)

Dir François Ozon | 2019 | 137 mins |

When Alexandre learns that the priest who assaulted him decades earlier at a scouts’ camp still works with young people, he tells his family what happened and seeks out other victims so that the Church will take action.

Happy Birthday | Fête de Famille (N/C 15+)

Dir Cédric Kahn | 2019 | France | 101 mins |

Family relations unravel to wonderfully excruciating comic and dramatic effect in this all-star ensemble piece from versatile French writer-director and here, co-star, Cédric Kahn. 

Oh les filles ! | Haut les filles (N/C 12A+)

Dir François Armanet | 2019 | France | 79 mins |

Telling the untold story of French female rock stars from sixties pop to today’s gender-indifferent anthems.

The Salamander | La Salamandre (N/C 18+)

Dir Alain Tanner | 1971 | Switzerland, France | 123 mins |

Two self-proclaimed writers attempt to retell how a young woman shot her uncle. 

Yves St Laurent: The Last Collections (N/C 15+)

Dir Olivier Meyrou | 2007 (release: 2018) | France | 73 mins |

Olivier Meyrou’s controversial yet exquisitely drawn portrait of France’s last great fashion designer, Yves Saint Laurent, has finally seen the light of day.

For full listings: https://www.regentstreetcinema.com/

 

 

The African Queen (1951) **** Bluray

Dir: John Huston | Katherine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Morley | US Drama 105’

The African Queen, is one of the best romantic adventures to come out of the First World War. Adapted from a novel by C.S. Forester, this rollicking rollercoaster sees Bogart and Hepburn as an unlikely couple forced to travel together down a hazardous East African river.

Katharine Hepburn plays Rose Sayer, the unmarried sister of a prim British missionary (Robert Morley). When occupying German forces pitch up in her village, killing her brother, Bogart comes to the rescue in the shape of raddled old captain Charlie Allnut (a role that won him his only Oscar), whisking her away in his rambling tramp steamer called the African Queen. But the voyage is more eventful than either could possibly imagine. And from their intense hatred of one another develops a sparky romance that carries them through against the odds. And they sail towards calmer waters united by their battle against the Germans.

The African Queen is one of the most popular films in the history of cinema, and may well be the perfect adventure film and certainly is one of the best literary adaptations ever to hit the big screen.

THE AFRICAN QUEEN is available from 18 November 2019 EUREKA

Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (2019) PÖFF

Tallinn Black Nights runs from the 15 November until 1 December 2019 offering an extended celebration of international films. For the second year running the festival will also showcase the latest in Baltic cinema with a special sidebar dedicated to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The idea is to offer industry professionals and film critics a wider experience and offer the festival audience a taste of local talent.

Tom Sullivan’s Arracht (Monster) is told in Gaelic and set in Ireland in 1845 where a small community fisherman is persuaded to offer board to a sinister stranger. Another world premiere is German filmmaker Hüseyin Tabak’s Hamburg set Gypsy Queen, Konstantin Lopushansky’s Through Black Glass and Narges Abyar’s When The Moon Was Full.

ESTONIA

After her success with Come Back Free, documentary filmmaker Ksenia Okhapkina won this year’s Grand Prix at Karlovy Vary with Immortal exploring a Russian social mechanism that feels a lot like the political systems of the last century.

Manfred Vainokivi presents his latest documentary biography In Bed With A Writer, a portrait of the controversial and newly divorced Estonian writer Peeter Sauter. We follow Sauter in Estonia’s art and underground scene as he shares his thoughts on women, sex and ageing.

In a small Estonian town largely inhabited by ethnic minorities, Vladimir Loginov’s second documentary Prazdnik explores the age old phenomenon of the beauty pageant and whether they still have a place in modern society.   .

Having travelled the globe with his debut In the Crosswind, Martti Helde returns with Scandinavian Silence, a thriller that makes use of an unusual narrative device: the tale of a man reunited with his sister having spent years in jail.

One of the biggest box office hits in the country’s history, Tanel Toom’s literary based feature debut Truth and Justice follows the decade-spanning feud of two neighbours during the second half of the 19th century. Toom previously won the Student Academy Award with his short film The Confession.

Hot from a successful run at the Estonian box office, the comedic depiction of the global and local startup culture, Chasing Unicorns, is start-up entrepreneur Rain Rannu’s sophomore feature.

LATVIA

A culmination of one artist’s creative journey that lasted 3,5 years, Away is a fantasy animation directed, animated and composed by Gints Zilbalodis.

Chronicling the tumultuous times in Post-Soviet Latvia, Jānis Ābele’s feature film Jelgava 94 shines a light on the period where teenagers were obsessed with heavy metal.

Juris Kursietis’ second feature Oleg premiered at Quinzaine des Realiseteurs during this year’s Cannes. It’s a gritty tale of Latvian migrant workers searching for a better life in Belgium, not always on the right side of the law.

The life cycle of the Spoon in the globalised economy is Laila Pakalnina’s documentary follow up to her award-winning drama Ausma (2015) that won Jury Prize Best Cinematographer for DoP Anrijs Krenbergs.

LITHUANIA

Taxidermy, deer-farming and museum curatorship are the focus of this fascinating documentary from Aistė Žegulytė. Animus Animalis, guides us around a bizarre world where reality and artificiality blur.

Meanwhile, Ignas Jonynas’ second film Invisible presents the story of a former dancer Jonas pretending to be blind to enter a TV dance competition, as an intimate and emotional relationship builds between him and his dancing partner. He soon reconnects with the past and a dark secret.

Tomas Vengris’ debut Motherland revisits the year 1992 in a Lithuania, right after the collapse of the Soviet Union, as a single mother and her 12-year-old return to Lithuania, after a long stay in the US, to claim the property that was taken from the woman’s parents when they were sent to labour camps decades ago.

The late 1930s is the setting for Karolis Kaupinis’ historic drama Nova Lithuania where in 1938 the young Lithuanian state celebrated twenty years of independence. Meanwhile situation in Europe is becoming increasingly tense so geographer Feliksas Gruodis sets about raising finance for his novel solution to creating a “backup Lithuania” overseas, where the country’s inhabitants could move in case the whole scenario goes pear-shaped.

Legendary director Algimantas Puipa presents The Other Side of Silence, a tale inspired by the book Bumblebee Honey by Swedish writer Torgny Lindgren. It sees   two brothers living in the same village, on the same lake, by the same forest, but sharing a mutual hatred sparked by their love of the same woman.

The 23rd Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival runs from the 15th of November until the 1st of December.

 

Solomon and Gaenor (1999) *** UK Jewish Film Festival 2019

Dir/Wri: Paul Morrison | Cast: Ioan Gruffudd, Nia Roberts, Sue Jones-Davies, William Thomas | UK Drama 105′

This Welsh/Jewish version of Romeo & Juliet fails to generate any heat despite fresh performances from its dynamic central duo. It went on to be the British hopeful for Best Foreign Language Oscar in 2000, but came home empty-handed.

In turn of the century Wales during an upswell of anti-semitism, largely caused by social discontent in a small community dependent on coal-mining, Welsh Christian Gaenor (Roberts) and Orthodox Jewish Solomon (Gruffudd) meet face to face when he rings her bell as a door to door salesman. His family also own the local pawnshop making Solomon’s religious affiliations seem evident. But we are led to believe Gaenor has not cottoned on to his religious persuasion and they subsequently fall for one another in coup de foudre culminating in a barn. Clearly Solomon is far less experienced than Gaenor, who is not just a church-goer, as she comments: “you’re different from other men, and different down there”. She doesn’t twig why he is different, or even think to ask. But their onscreen chemistry is convincing and heartfelt.

But Solomon – or Sam – is still keeping his light under a bushel in this dangerous game of love. The lengths he goes to conceal his Jewishness and his refusal to accept the ultimate impact of his lie on his love for Gaenor is the crux of this rather grimly-mounted drama. Sam remains a tortured soul throughout particularly when he discovers her pregnancy. But although Morrison is even-handed in his portrayal of Jewish and Welsh hostility to one another, this element is underwritten and takes a backseat to the couple’s love story that relies on romantic cliches and narrative contrivances, leading to a ludicrously melodramatic finale.

Not what Shakespeare would have hoped for, and certainly not what Zeffirelli achieved in his far superlative 1968 original with Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting. First time filmmaker Paul Morrison went on to make the more successful Wondrous Oblivion four years later, but lacked the experience to set the night on fire with this predictably maudlin Shakespeare re-imagining. MT

HEADLINING THE UK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL 2019 | UNTIL 27 NOVEMBER 2019

Russian Film Week 2019

The fourth annual Russian Film Week is back at various major venues in London from November 24 to December 1, 2019 

The eight-day festival brings the latest Russian films to London with the aim of providing a varied picture of Russian culture across this enormous nation. This year’s programme showcases a glittering array of thirty seven features and 18 shorts including several documentaries. The celebration culminates in the Golden Unicorn Awards.

The newly refurbished Odeon Luxe Leicester Square will host the world premiere of Klim Shipenko’s comedy The Peasant. It sees a modern young Moscovite being sent to a ‘boot camp’ of sorts, where he is forced to live according to the peasant traditions of the 19th century.  

Woman’s Day is one of several female-directed features in this year’s line-up. Dolya Gavanski’s feature debut shares experiences from women in the USSR who reveal their lives from the 1917 revolution to the present day. Intimate, surprising, funny, eccentric, painful and contradictory – this is the unknown history of Russian feminism. Based on the filmmaker’s own extensive research, the film focuses on rare archive footage of women experiencing at first hand the siege of Leningrad in subzero temperatures, living in communal flats, smuggling forbidden literature, flying into Space, performing the perfect Soviet ballet pirouette or even giving a new name to a husband, not to mention the political and cultural complexities. These women were brought up in a culture that had officially proclaimed women equal to men. They were told they could achieve it all. So what was their reality?

Russian filmmaker Eva Bass makes her feature debut with an impressive drama Kettle that contemplates freewill in the face of desperate circumstances. In Moscow, twenty five year old Savva is a misfit and intellectual, bored with his life running a computer club called ‘The Kettle’.  Savva’s existential crisis deepens after his old friend Roman commits suicide. Bass directs with confidence in this inquiring drama written by Nikita Kasimtsev.

Irina Zhuravleva and Vladislav Grishin have developed a meditative approach to studying the lives of bears in the South Kamchatka Federal Sanctuary. In Kamchatka Bears: Life Begins, music, ambient sounds and the absence of a human voices makes this a chance to experience nature at its purest form.

Meanwhile, war is experienced at first hand in Andrey Volgin’s gripping action drama The Balkan Line. Set in Yugoslavia, 1999, a young commander is tasked to take control of the Slatina airport in Kosovo and hold it until the arrival of the reinforcements discovers his girlfriend is among the hostages at the airport.

Critically acclaimed Uzbek filmmaker Yusup Razykov won the FIPRESCI award at Karlovy Vary several years ago for Shame his claustrophobic drama about an isolated community of women. This year the Russian Critics’ Circle awarded his a gong for his drama Kerosin. His second film this year is Sabre Dance a wartime drama set in the city of Molotov in 1942 where the Leningrad Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet (after Kirov) has been evacuated during the stressful preparations for the premiere of the Gayane ballet. The world of a theatre in evacuation is mysterious and rather cold. The privations of war give rise to half-starved ballerinas, corps de ballet members, who turn into “Pink Ladies” on stage along with performances in hospitals, defence factories and endless rehearsals. Final efforts to create Gayane coincide with the creation of the first tact of the 2nd symphony, often overlapping. Meanwhile, in 8 hours, Khachaturian dashes off his most performed creation.

Great Poetry is a portrait of loneliness, friendship and betrayal that sees two  men clinging together for survival as cash collectors in the outskirts of Moscow where their time is spent moving money for other people and gaming on cockfights at a dorm of migrant workers. Dreaming of a better future, they enrol on a poetry class but sadly find it easier to make a living as petty criminals in this wistful reflection on 19th ideals. Aleksandr Kutznetsov was awarded Best Actor or his performance in the film that also won Lungin Best Director at this year’s Sochi Russian Open Film Festival 

Although Yury Bykov’s The Factory is firmly set in the world of Russian capitalism, it harks back to the glory of the revolution. Many of the workers in a remote industrial factory have been employed there before the change from state regulation to capitalist privatisation. So when owner Kalugin, a well-connected local oligarch, announces the redundancy, a group of workers who haven’t been paid for months kidnap him for a ransom. Led by the mysterious Alexei whose motives are far from clear, the heist doesn’t end well. Kalugin’s private security guards and a police SWAT team quickly have the building surrounded and the comrades are forced to experience the coal face of their so-called camaraderie.

Alexander Zolotukhin’s elegiac portrait of a young Russian soldier pieces together the early days of the The First World War when tragedy strikes even before glory is allowed to show its face. Three decades later, at the beginning of the Second World War, Rachmaninoff will create “Symphonic dances” op.45, an even more grand and vigorous work which was also his swansong. A tender tragedy suffused with courage and melancholy.

Russian Film Week and The Golden Unicorn Awards was founded in 2016 by Filip Perkon (Perkon Productions Ltd.). The festival is supported by the Russian Ministry of Culture.

https://youtu.be/D-Rt3ENvVLo

 

Marrakech Film Festival 2019 | Competition and Special Screenings

British actress Tilda Swinton will preside over this year’s jury at Marrakech Film Festival. At the 18th Moroccan celebration she will be joined by French director Rebecca Zlotowski, British director Andrea Arnold, Franco-Italian actress Chiara Mastroianni and five male jurors: Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho, Swedish actor Mikael Persbrandt, Afghan writer and director Atiq Rahimi, Australian director David Michôd, and Moroccan director Ali Essafi. 

Films in competition for the Étoile d’Or de Marrakech are as follows:

BABYTEETH / Australia | Shannon Murphy
Starring Eliza Scanlen, Toby Wallace, Emily Barclay, Eugene Gilfedder, Essie Davis, Ben Mendelsohn 

BOMBAY ROSE / India/Fr/Qatar | Gitanjali Rao
Starring Cyli Khare, Amit Deondi, Gargi Shitole, Makrand Deshpande 

THE FEVER | Brazil | Maya Da-Rin
Starring Regis Myrupu, Rosa Peixoto 

LAST VISIT  `| Abdulmohsen Aldhabaan(Akher Ziyara) /Saudi Arabia
 Starring Osama Alqess, Abdullah Alfahad, Fahad Alghariri, Mousaed Khaled, Ghazi Hamad 

LYNN + LUCY/UK | Fyzal Boulifa
Starring Roxanne Scrimshaw, Nichola Burley 

MAMONGA /Serbia | Stefan Malešević
Starring Marta Bjelica, Dražen Pavlović,  Nabi Tang, Vuk Janošević 

MICKEY AND THE BEAR /USA | Annabelle Attanasio
Starring Camila Morrone, James Badge Dale, Calvin Demba, Ben Rosenfield, Rebecca Henderson 

MOSAIC PORTRAIT | (Ma Sai Ke Shao Nu) / China
By Zhai Yixiang
Starring Wang Yanhui, Wang Chuanjun, Zhang Tongxi, Chen Di, Xie Lixun, Liu Yiying, Ke Limu 

NAFI’S FATHER (Baamum Nafi) / Senegal | Mamadou Dia
Starring Alassane Sy, Saïkou Lô, Aïcha Talla, Penda Sy, Mamadou Bayo Sarr, Alassane Ndoye 

SCATTERED NIGHT  | (Heut-eo-jin Bam) / South Korea
By Lee Jih-young, Kim Sol
Starring Moon Seun-ga, Choi Jun-woo, Kim Hye- young, Lim Ho 

SOLE / Italia, Poland | Carlo Sironi
Starring Sandra Drzymalska, Claudio Segaluscio, Bario, Barbara Ronchi, Bruno Buzzi 

TLAMESS / Tunisia, France | Ala Eddine Slim
Starring Abdullah Miniawy, Souhir Ben Amara, Khaled Ben Aïssa 

THE UNKNOWN SAINT (Sid El-Majhoul) / Morocco, France
By Alaa Eddine Aljem
Starring Younes Bouab, Salah Bensalah, Bouchaib Essamak, Mohamed Naimane, Anas El Baz, Hassan Ben Bdida, Abdelghani Kitab, Ahmed Yaab, Ahmed Yarziz 

VALLEY OF SOULS  | (Tantas Almas) / Colombia, Belgium, Brazil, France
By Nicolás Rincón Gille
Starring Arley de Jesús Carvallido Lobo  

ADAM / Morocco, France, Belgium | Maryam Touzani
Starring Lubna Azabal, Nisrin Erradi, Douae Belkhaouda, Aziz Hattab, Hasna Tamtaoui 

THE IRISHMAN / USA | Martin Scorsese
Starring Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Harvey Keitel, Ray Romano, Bobby Cannavale, Anna Paquin 

IT MUST BE HEAVEN / Elia Suleiman
Starring Elia Suleiman, Tarik Kopti, Kareem Ghneim, George Khleifi, Raiïa Haiïdar, Gael García Bernal 

KNIVES OUT / USA | Rian Johnson
Starring Daniel Craig, Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, Don Johnson, Toni Collette, Christopher Plummer 

MARRIAGE STORY / USA | Noah Baumbach
Starring Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver, Laura Dern, Alan Alda, Ray Liotta, Julie Hagerty, Merritt Wever, Azhy Robertson 

RAS EL SANA / Egypt | By Sakr
Starring Eyad Nassar, Ahmed Malek, Sherine Reda, Engy El Mokaddem, Ali Kassem 

NOURA’S DREAM | (Noura Tahlam) / Tunisia, France |  Hinde Boujemaa
Starring Hend Sabri, Lotfi Abdelli, Hakim Boumsaoudi, Imen Cherif, Saif Dhrif, Jamel Sassi 

There will also be a special selection of GALA Screenings 

ALL THIS VICTORY | Ahmad Ghossein – This Lebanese war drama won the Audience Award at this year’s Venice Critics’ Week

A SON | (Bik N’Ish) / Tunisia, France, Lebanon, Qatar | Mehdi M. Barsaoui
Starring Sami Bouajila, Najla Ben Abdallah, Youssef Khemiri, Noomen Hamda, Qasim Rawane, Slah Msaddak, Mohamed Ali Ben Jemaa 

SOUTH TERMINAL  | (Terminal Sud) / France | Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche
Starring Ramzy Bedia, Amel Brahim-Djelloul, Slimane Dazi, Salim Ameur-Zaïmeche, Nabil Djedouani 

STATE FUNERAL  | (Gosurdarstvennye Pohony) /  Ned/Lith  | Sergei Loznitsa | Doc

TALKING ABOUT TREES  | (Al-Hadith ’An Al-Ashjar) / France, Sudan, Germany, Chad, Qatar | Suhaib Gasmelbari | Doc 

WORKFORCE  | (Mano De Obra) / Mexico
By David Zonana
Starring Luis Alberti, Hugo Mendoza, Jonathan Sanchez, Horacio Celestino, Francisco Díaz 

(Jidar Al-Sawt) /LEBANON | By Ahmad Ghossein
Starring Karam Ghossein, Adel Chahine, Boutros Rouhana, Issam Bou, Khaled, Sahar Minkara, Flavia Juska Bechara 

IF ONLY  | (Magari) / Italy, France
By Ginevra Elkann
Starring Riccardo Scamarcio, Alba Rohrwacher, Ettore Giustiniani, Oro de Commarque, Millo Roussel, Celine Sallette, Brett Gelman 

MOFFIE / South Africa | Oliver Hermanus
Starring Kai Luke Brummer, Ryan de Villiers, Matthew Vey, Stefan Vermaak, Hilton Pelser 

NO. 7 CHERRY LANE | (Ji Yuan Tai Qi Hao) / Hong Kong, China | Yonfan
Starring Sylvia Chang, Zhao Wei, Alex Lam, Kelly Yao, Teresa Chung, Jiang Wen-li, Nathalie Duplessis 

OUR LADY OF THE NILE  | (Notre-Dame du Nil) / France, Belgium, Rwanda | Atiq Rahimi
Starring Santa Amanda Mugabekazi, Albina Sydney Kirenga, Angel Uwamahoro, Clariella Bizimana, Belinda Rubango Simbi, Pascal Greggory 

MARRAKECH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2019 | 

Femmes Fatales of Fashion | London Fashion Week 2021

The sinister crime-laden dramas that came out of post war Hollywood were the visual expressions of anxiety. Film Noir featured venal antiheroes, mysterious femme fatales, and rain-soaked urban settings where shadows and intrigue played upon the inner consciousness. The tightly scripted stories were also richly thematic, compellingly seductive and wonderful to look at. And that iconic look was often created by women designers. 

Based on hard-edged detective stories from the likes of Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain and Cornell Woolrich, ‘Crime Noir’ was spiced up by the wartime influx of sophisticated European craftsman such as Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Jacques Tourneur and Robert Siodmak whose edgy expressionism and Avantgarde lighting techniques added zest to the predominantly black & white post war genre. 

By the mid 1940s Film Noir reigned supreme. Nightly screenings – and each night was different – saw the stars of the day strutting their stuff but also looking amazing into the bargain: Barbara Stanwyck, Humphrey Bogarde, Gene Tierney and June Vincent all had their particular allure. And some Noir actors also directed the genre such as The Big Combo‘s Cornel Wilde with Storm Fear (1955). But while the narratives were unsavoury the costumes were quite the opposite: the elegant couture, hairstyles and even jewellery made style icons of these scheming antiheroes, adding charisma to their public profiles in stark contrast to the characters they played. By association, film noir became arguably the most strikingly seductive genre in the film firmament.   

But while the filmmakers arrived from Europe, the costume designers were often American woman with noirish backstories of their own to the bring to the party. Universal’s head of costume design for twenty years VERA WEST (1898-1947), met a tragic death drowning in her own swimming pool, dressed in one of her signature silk dressing gowns (ironically her designs for Virginia Grey had the been the star turn in Charles Barton’s film-noir Smooth as Silk the previous year ). Although the evidence pointed towards suicide as a result of a troubled past, there have since been rumours that her husband was to blame.

West had trained in Philadelphia and worked as apprentice to the pioneering British catwalk designer Lady Duff Gordon (Lucile) before being hired by Stanley Kubrick to create Ava Gardner’s look in The Killers (1946). She also designed for June Vincent in Roy William Neill’s Black Angel (1946); for Teresa Wright in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and the outfits for Lewis D Collins’ Danger Woman (1946). Despite these high-profile commissions, she never received an award until finally winning the Costume Designers Guild Hall of Fame in 2005. 

Another female Hollywood designer shrouded in intrigue was IRENE LENZ GIBBONS – known simply as Irene (1900-1962), whose private life was as colourful as her gowns. A shrewd business woman she ran a series of boutiques and was also appointed head of costume design at MGM, replacing the well-known legend Adrian. Her Noir credentials included couture for Katherine Hepburn, Robert Taylor and Robert Mitchum in Vincente Minnelli’s Undercurrent (1946) based on a story by Thelma Shrabel.

She also was credited for the couture creations in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) where a married Lana Turner and her lover plan to kill her husband (Cecil Kellaway). Other Noir and thriller projects included Roy Rowland’s Scene of the Crime (1949) and Gaslight (1944). Reports of her long-standing love affair with Gary Cooper were never confirmed but she committed suicide after slashing her wrists and jumping out of Los Angeles’ Knickerbocker Hotel a year after his death. 

One of the most successful female designers of film noir was undoubtedly BONNIE CASHIN (1915-2000). Cashin was already making dresses from the age of 8. By 16 her talent was making her a living as designer for the chorus line based in Los Angeles which led her into theatre work in New York. Returning West in the early 1940s she signed with 20th Century Fox where she made a name for herself with the gowns in Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944) and Fallen Angel (1945); Robert Siodmak’s Cry of the City (1948) – Shelley Winter’s leopard skin coat would have the activists up in arms, but back then it certainly made her stand out in the sleazy night scenes.

Cashin’s style worked wonders for Signe Hasso in Hathaway’s Oscar-winning The House on 92nd Street (1944) and for Gene Tierney in Laura. Nightmare Alley (1947) gave her the opportunity to work with a leading cast of Tyrone Power (as antihero Stan Carlyle), Joan Blondell, Coleen Gray and Helen Walker. Power’s untimely death of a heart attack aged 44, saw the film gain wider circulation over the years due to his popularity, and Cashin’s costumes lived on into the late 1950s and beyond. MT

London Fashion Week 2021

LAURA is now on Bluray courtesy of EUREKA (MASTERS OF CINEMA) 

The Golem: How he came into the World (1920) ****

Dir.: Paul Wegener, Carl Boese; Cast: Paul Wegener, Albert Steinrück, Lydia Salmonova, Ernst Deutsch, Lothar Müthel; Deutschland 1920, 91 min.

The Golem was one of the highlights of German  Expressionism. Directors Paul Wegener (The Student of Prague) and Carl Boese (Grock) created a world of chaos and destruction in the Jewish ghetto of Prague, where love and political commitment are shown as equally destructive. 

Set in the Middle-Ages, the Emperor gives the order for all the Jews to leave the country. Rabbi Löw (Steinrück) is able to to convince the Emperor to take the decree back. And he is helped in his endeavour by the Golem (Wegener), a giant who is  (sometimes) under the command of the evil genius Astaroth. The Rabbi is not aware of it, but when the Cosmic forces allow the Golem becomes destructive. He is helped by the Rabbi’s assistant (Deutsch), who is in love with the Rabbi’s daughter Miriam (Slamonova). When his assistant finds Miriam in bed with the Knight Florian (Müthel), he brings the Golem back to life: the Rabbi had merely ‘disarmed’ him. The Rabbi’s assistant tells the Golem to open the heavily locked door to Miriam’s bedroom, but the Golem kidnaps Miriam and runs riot, destroying nearly all of the ghetto. The Rabbi is able to destroy the connection between the Golem and Astaroth, making the giant docile again. Finally, a little girl innocently plucks away his amulet, which gives him life force.

Brilliantly shot by Karl Freund (The Last Laugh) and Guido Seeber (Sylvester), this, the forth Golem film version (The 1915 version was lost), was a great success at the box office, and is also, according to Kracauer “the only progressive feature made during the post-war period. If this attempt of reason would have been successful, reason would have denounced the character of torture and given way to the true alternative to tyranny and chaos”. AS

THE 4K RESTORATION IS AVAILABLE 19 November 2019 COURTESY OF EUREKA

 

The Irishman (2019) *****

Dir: Martin Scorsese | Wri: Steven Zaillian | Cast: Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Harvey Keitel, Anna Paquin, Stephen Graham, Bobby Cannavale, Jesse Plemons | US Crime Drama, 2019, 208mins

Much of the hype surrounding The Irishman has focused on the fact that it reunites Martin Scorsese with Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci for the first time since 1995’s Casino. It also throws Al Pacino into the mix, and marks a return to the mob-infused crime dramas with which Scorsese made his name. The excitement is understandable – Scorsese made a string of iconic hits while working with De Niro, and it was through these that he established himself as one of the great American filmmakers. 

And yet… Scorsese’s body of work has a depth and breadth to it which is often obscured by a focus on certain titles (notably GoodFellas, 1990), and there was, perhaps, a fear that Scorsese’s return to this world might present if not a step backwards, at least a retread of ground already covered. 

Fortunately, such worries prove to be unfounded: the world of The Irishman may be familiar – it even touches on the mob’s involvement in Las Vegas, which formed the backbone of Casino – but the tone is something new: though not without Scorsese’s trademark humour, the film trades the baroque exuberance of his earlier work for a more reflective pace, closer to the ruminations of Silence (2016) than the crashing excess of Casino. 

Spanning multiple timelines set over several decades, The Irishman spends as much time examining the wiles of old age as the wilds of youth. In parts, the film almost plays like a eulogy: throughout, Scorsese uses titles to tell us how characters will die, and the film’s focus on death and aging seems like a lament for the end of an era – of a certain type of lifestyle, and a certain type of cinema. In the past, Scorsese has faced accusations that he glamorises mobsters, but here everyone seems to end up worn out, tired or dead, as if those are the only possible outcomes. The religious angst which has fuelled Scorsese’s work since Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1967) has here transmuted into a nihilistic acceptance of life as it is.

The story itself is drawn from the nonfiction book I Heard You Paint Houses, by former investigator Charles Brandt, and follows Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran’s career as a hitman for the mob, painting houses with other people’s blood. After being introduced by head mobster Russell Bufalino (Pesci), Sheeran becomes right-hand man to Jimmy Hoffa (Pacino), President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and a loan-shark to the mob, supplying them with funds from the Union’s pension fund. As the decades pass, the mob’s machinations extend from the union to the White House, installing and removing presidents to suit their needs – an offhand remark about one of the Teamsters’ love of golf makes for some interesting contemporary commentary. 

Throughout the years, Sheeran’s conscience is troubled by disapproving glances from his daughter (for Sheeran has a personal family as well as his mobster family), but it is Sheeran’s friendships with Bufalino and Hoffa that really form the heart of the epic narrative, and which drive it towards its tragically moving conclusion. Given that the film serves, in so many ways, as a family reunion, it’s a fitting thematic thread and one which, thankfully, weaves a powerful tribute to the legacy of what’s come before it. Alex Barrett

NOW ON NETFLIX

 

Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) ****

Dir.: Mervin Le Roy; Cast: Dick Powell, Ginger Rogers, Warren William, Ruby Keeler, Joan Blondell, Alice McMahon, Ned Sparks; USA 1933, 97 min.

Shot during the Great Depression, this 1930s musical extravaganza rails against the privations of the era with its verve and pizazz. Mervin Le Roy (Quo Vadis, The Wizard of Oz) may have been the director but Busby Berkeley, who choreographed the lavish dance numbers, is very much the ‘father’ – and he nearly paid for it with his life: During the shooting of the “Shadow Waltz” number, the famous Long Beach Earthquake rocked the set, causing a black-out and leaving Berkeley hanging with one hand from the camera boom, whilst the dance troop was perilously trapped on a near ten-meter. 

The jamboree opens modestly in a rather glum apartment. Three of the four Gold Diggers, Polly (Keeler), Carol (Blondell) and Trixie (MacMahon) are showgirls desperate to make it in the grim days of economic hardship. Then along comes producer Barney Hopkins (Sparks) to discuss their planned musical. Hopkins has just seen his creditors, and hope is fading on the money front. Then salvation arrives in the shape of girl’s Polly’s boyfriend next door Brad Roberts (Powell).  He miraculously comes up with the cash – although the cast and producer treat him more like the villain of the piece, believing the finance comes from ill-gotten gain. 

In reality Roberts is a millionaire who keeps his theatre connections secret from his family in the film’s simple plot that lets the musical numbers take centre stage. Apart from Fay (Rogers) all the showgirls have lived up to their Gold-digging nick names. The most famous song, “We’re in the Money” is sung by Ginger Rogers; “Pettin’ in the Park” in the Park” by Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell, who also delivers the aforementioned “Shadow Waltz”. Finally there is ”Remember my Forgotten Man”, performed with allure by Joan Blondell.

The musical set pieces are absolutely spectacular and captured with gusto by the great Sol Polito (Sergeant York, Robin Hood). Warner Brothers had to go to great lengths to avoid censorship over the scantily clad dancing girls: They produced different copies of the feature, some for more liberal regions like New York, some for more prudish districts in the deep South. Overall, Gold Diggers never forgets the gloom of the era, and when Hopkins explains to the girls that the musical is about the Depression, they answer spontaneously, “we won’t need to rehearse that”!

MUSICALS: THE GREATEST SHOW ON SCREEN | Nov-Jan 2019/20

 

Uzak | Distant (2002) ****

Dir/DoP:  Nuri Bilge Ceylan | Cast: Muzaffer Ozdemir, Mehmet Emin Toprak, Zuhal Gencer Erkaya, Mazan Kirilmis, Feridun Koc, Fatma Ceylan, Ebru Ceylan | Drama Turkey

In his third feature Uzak you can sees Ceylan gradually transitioning from the social realist cinema verite style of his early two works to something more like an urban arthouse drama. Spare on dialogue and score, Mozart’s Symphony Concertante (K364) accentuates the feeling of displacement and alienation in this thoughtfully sober two-hander.

At this stage Ceylan is still writing, photographing, editing and producing his own features and this melancholy depiction of loneliness and isolation is set in a dour and wintry Istanbul where Yusuf (Mehmet Emin Topak) fetches up from the country in order to find work on the banks of the Bosphorus. He moves in with Mahmut (Muzaffer Ozdemir) a distant relative and successful photographer whose flat over looks the harbour. Keen on arthouse cinema, particularly Tarkovsky, he enjoys the company of various women friends or hanging out in a jazz-filled local cafe. The contrast between the rough-edged young blade and the louche yet faintly sophisticated older man makes Distant compellingly watchable as the two ruffle each others feathers in a low-key but extremely masculine way. Ceylan’s static camera observes their daily life from a detached point of view: eavesdropping on casual conversations, laconic encounters and familiar comings and goings in the block of flats where they live out an uneventful existence.  .

Mahmut is often pictured in front of the TV, his feet up on a poof, enjoying a film while in the background distant conversations emanate from the concierge downstairs. His wife Nazan has left him and he has grown accustomed to his state of isolation almost relishing it as a badge of honour and with a comforting pride. But he still mourns hiss loss. Meanwhile his mother is forever leaving urgent messages on the ‘phone which he ignores as a matter of course.

Yusuf, on the other hand, is uneasy and restless, out of sync with his newfound urban freedom. He spends his days idly wandering around the locale, trying to meet women in the hope that something will give without much effort on his part, in the style of Dickens’ Mr McCawber. A poignant moment sees him worrying about the suffering of little mouse which Mahmut has tried to poison. The country boy still has a feeling for nature, lost to the man inured to harshness of city life.

Stunningly visual, leisurely and slow-burning but not to the extent of his later films Winter Sleep and The Wild Pear Tree, this is very much a tale from the city that relies on an atmosphere and takes the viewpoint of a detached observer allowing plenty of scope for our imagination to wander and even enjoy the subtle situational humour created by the growing friction between these uneasy flatmates who are clearly both lonely but also loathe to come to any satisfactory modus vivendi. The only moment of real drama is when Mahmut berates Yusuf about not flushing the lavatory. And this leads to a contretemps with the older many suddenly tiring of this young feckless loser who expects to be handed things on a plate, a conversation which highlights Ceylan’s ongoing preoccupation: the contrast between town and country; the old and the new. MT

NOW ON DVD/BLURAY COURTESY OF NEW WAVE FILMS | 11 NOVEMBER 2019

 

 

UK Jewish Film Festival 2019

UK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL 2019 TAKES PLACE 6 NOVEMBER – 21 NOVEMBER 2019 ACROSS CENTRAL LONDON VENUES AND 20 TOWNS AND CITIES ACROSS ENGLAND

UK Jewish Film is delighted to announce the 23rd UK Jewish Film Festival, which will run from 6th – 21st November at 15 cinemas across London. A UK tour of festival highlights to 20 towns and cities across England, Scotland and Wales will run until 12th December.

This year’s programme, comprising 96 films, plus Q&As and discussions with directors, actors, politicians, journalists and others, is the largest Jewish film festival programme in the world. The film programme includes 8 world premieres, 1 European premiere, 40 UK premieres, and films from 24 countries, including 23 films from the UK.

The diverse range of films in this year’s programme includes Oscar tipped satire from Fox Searchlight Pictures Jojo Rabbit which will be the Closing Night Gala along with the Centrepiece Gala being The Operative which stars Martin Freeman and Diane Kruger which will receive its UK premiere at the festival.

Further highlights include Synonyms which was awarded the Golden Bear at this years Berlin International Film Festival, documentary The Human Factor which is directed by Oscar nominated documentarian Dror Moreh and Israeli filmmaker Itay Tal’s intense portrait of motherly obsession God of the Piano. Meanwhile Norwegian teenager Esther finds herself caught up in the Nazi occupation in Ross Clarke’s award-winning drama The Birdcatcher

A documentary strand includes Amos Gitai’s  A Tramway in Jerusalem and Advocate a look at the life and work of Jewish-Israeli lawyer Lea Tsemel who has represented political prisoners for nearly 50 years.

There will also be a chance to revisit a some cult classics such as the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man, When Harry Met Sally and even Fiddler on the Roof!

Festival tickets can be purchased via the UK Jewish Film website here:
https://ukjewishfilm.org/festival/uk-jewish-film-festival-2019/

 

After the Wedding (2019) ****

Dir: Bart Freundlich | Wir: Susanne Bier/Anders Thomas Jensen | Cast: Julianne Moore, Michelle Williams, Billy Crudup, Abby Quinn | US Drama 110′

One of two films out this season starring Julianne Moore. Both are remakes, but this orphanage-themed story is the one to go for.

Danish director Susanne Bier made the original ‘dogma styled’ version and was nominated for an Oscar back in 2006. The US version has two powerful female leads, and Julianne Moore and Michelle Williams make for a terrific duo as a successful business woman and a free-thinking philanthropist, respectively.

Earth mother Isobel (Williams) runs an orphanage in Kolkata, but the magnificent opening sequence has the drones sweeping in over the exotic landscape quickly establishing this as a glossy drama all about fraught relationships, love, and forgiveness rather than a grim slice of social realism. True there are some cheesy elements at the start of the film: we don’t particularly warm to Moore at first, as she sashays round her ample New York residence, nodding to domestic staff while she talks on her ‘phone. But her character soon proves to have a hidden agenda behind its rather glacial facade. She’s a wife, a mother of three and an accomplished entrepreneur married to Billy Crudup’s rather puppyish sculptor, Oscar.

Freundlich has clearly crafted Theresa with Moore in mind. She is businesslike, a loving mother to her kids and affectionate with her husband – a woman who seems to have it all – but we will later discover that she doesn’t. Her daughter (Abby Quinn) is about to get married, but she seems rather unsure of intended. But Theresa gives her plenty of cheesy assurances and she is busy organising her ridiculously lavish wedding and shooting orders at everyone in sight. At first we dislike this rather glib family.

And Isobel (Williams) isn’t much better. Although she clearly loves the beautifully polite kids in her orphanage, and particularly eight-year-old Jai (Vir Pachisia), there’s a steely dissatisfaction behind her doting gestures. And we soon discover why when she turns up in New York to take delivery of the “suitcase full of money” offered to her orphanage by a benefactor who demands a face to face meeting.

This donor turns out to be none other that Theresa. There’s a motif running through the drama that points to her sympathy for felled trees and wounded birds. But she’s also a draconian boss, and there’s a wonderful kick-ass scene involving her assistant, that you’d never get away with in Britain.

The New York scenes are typically over the top with lavish hotel suites, brands everywhere and riches beyond the dreams of avarice in Theresa’s waterfront estate. The first reveal in this strangely absorbing drama occurs when Oscar clocks Isobel at the wedding (she’s been press-ganged into attending by Theresa).

Bizarre the next reveal may be, but it certainly packs a punch. And the characters are sent reeling in disbelief and horror. At this point, Theresa decides to widen the remit of her donation, naturally with poisoned chalice conditions. Isabel may practice yoga and have a habit of kicking her shoes off without a by your leave, but she’s certainly no fool and remains skeptical of her Theresa’s motives. And with good reason. Another dramatic twist leads to the rationale behind Theresa’s erratic behaviour.

These two woman are tough as nails behind their faux sympathy. They display the spiky machiavellian capabilities of the deadlier sex. And it’s a joy to watch them in full flow in this engrossing melodrama that almost puts the BBC’s Dr Foster in the shade. Bier’s original had two male protagonists but these women are much more convincing and never fail to surprise us with their sneakiness. Although a beginner, Quinn is the only one who really displays  heartfelt feelings, but the other characters offer plenty to chew on in this meaty melodrama. MT

NOW ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM 1 NOVEMBER 2019

Helena Třeštíková – Czech Velvet | 17-19 November 2019

November marks the 30th anniversary of the 1989 Velvet Revolution that saw a non-violent transition of power in what was then Czechoslovakia. Taking place from 17 November to 29 December 1989 it resulted in the end of 41 years of one-party rule and the subsequent transformation of the country to a parliamentary republic.

In celebration of these years London Czech centre is to pay hommage to the first lady of time-lapse documentaries, Czech filmmaker Helena Třeštíková, whose impressive film career spans over 40 years and features more than 50 documentaries including the 2008 European Film Academy the Prix Arte winner, René.

Following people’s stories over the course of several years, even decades, Trestikova builds up with openness and intimacy full character studies of her protagonists whether these are married couples (A Marriage Story), young delinquents (René) or women (Malloy). Finding the universal in her subjects and their life dramas, an unsensational excitement in their everyday adventures, Trestikova bears witness to the human condition as lives evolve before our eyes recalling of Richard Linklater´s film Boyhood.

An hommage will feature the UK premiere of her latest film Forman vs Forman, a fascinating portrayal of the Academy Award-winning director of Amadeus, Milos Forman, which premiered at Cannes Classics 2019, and MalloryTřeštíková’s long-term observation project from her series Trapped In, Trapped Out, and A Marriage Story, representing her signature series.

AT VARIOUS VENUES IN LONDON | 17-19 November 2019

Five Films by Samuel Fuller | Bluray release

A towering figure of American cinema, Samuel Fuller was a master of the B-movie, a pulp maestro whose iconoclastic vision elevated the American genre film to new heights. After the major success of The Steel Helmet, Fuller was put under contract by Twentieth Century Fox after being impressed by Darryl F. Zanuck’s direct sales pitch (other studios offered Fuller money and tax shelters; Zanuck simply told him, “We make better movies.”).

Over a six-year period, Fuller would produce some of the best work of his career, (and therefore, some of the best films in American cinema), an uncompromising series of masterpieces spanning multiple genres (the Western, the War film, film noir, the Crime-Thriller) that would establish the director as a true auteur, whose influence continues to be felt today.

Five of the films from this fruitful period, are now presented on blu-ray from stunning restorations. The impossibly tense Korean-War drama Fixed Bayonets! (1951); the outrageous and confrontational spy-thriller Pickup on South Street (1953); the Cold War submarine-actioner Hell and High Water (1954); the lushly photographed, cold-as-ice film noir House of Bamboo (1955/main picture); and the audacious Western with a feminist twist, Forty Guns (1957). Also included is Samantha Fuller’s 2013 documentary, A Fuller Life, featuring friends and admirers of the great director reading extracts from his memoirs.

ON BLURAY | 28 OCTOBER 2019 | EUREKA 

 

The Dove on the Roof | Die Taube auf dem Dach (1973/2010)

Dir/Wri: Iris Gusner | Cast: Heidemarie Wenzel, Gunter Naumann, Katrin Martin, Heimat Guass | Director of Photography: Roland Gräf | GDR 1973/2010, b/w, DCP, digitally restored version 2010, (35mm), 85 mins. Drama 90’

Iris Gusner’s light and episodic story of a young contruction site manager who has to juggle shortages of building material and her relationships with two very different men was made in a moment of artistic freedom only to be condemned to decades of oblivion when the political climate changed again.

Linda Hinrichs is the manager of a building site in Thuringia in the south of the GDR. New “Plattenbau” (prefabricated) flats are to be erected, and Linda has to move things forward in spite of building material shortages and other problems. As if this was not enough of a challenge, Linda also has to juggle her relationships with two male colleagues she feels attracted to. Daniel is an idealistic and a little crazy student who is seeking some work experience during his summer holidays, while the much older brigade leader Böwe is a restless, sometimes alcohol infused soul who has moved from construction site to site for years. Gusner surrounds this trio with an ensemble of original characters and spins a loose and episodic, sometimes amusing, sometimes melancholic narrative around them. Lightness and a touch of anarchy, the change of location between the construction site and the narrow streets of the medieval town of Arnstadt, references to Palestinian refugees and Angela Davis, as well as a daring opening “cosmic” montage, make this film stand out within the DEFA film production of the time.

Making such a film seemed possible in 1972, when Gusner’s script for this film, her directorial debut, passed the DEFA studio’s assessment.  But by the time the final film was judged by the studio officials in 1973, the mood had changed. Not only was the film criticised as an ‘artistic error’, it was also denounced for its supposedly disrespectful representation of the GDR worker. Though defended by renowned directors such as Konrad Wolf and Kurt Maetzig, the film was never licensed for distribution. It only resurfaced after the film’s camera man Roland Gräf (who also shot Born in ’45 by Jürgen Böttcher) while searching for banned DEFA films. As the print was no longer screenable, a black and white dup-negative was made from which a black and white screening print was struck.The film we are screening is a digital version of a reconstruction made by the DEFA foundation in 2009 on the basis of the mentioned dub-negative. That is why colour film stills of the film circulate, but the film can only be screened in black and white. Review courtesy of Goethe Institute

The Dove on The Roof –  Review courtesy of the Goethe Institute | 30 October 2019

The Goethe Institute will also be screening a Böttcher season this October 2019

 

Enchained | Quragnaye (2019) ****

Dir.: Moges Tafessa; Cast: Zerihun Mulatu, Yimisirach Girma, Tesfaye Yiman, Frehiwot Kelkilew; Ethiopia 2019, 97 min.

This magical morality play is the impressive feature debut of Moges Tafessa who makes the best of a shoestring budget to create a fabulous fable of love, justice and poetry set in 1916.

Enchained tells the story of a gifted young Ethiopian literary student Gobeze (Mulatu) who has dedicated his life to studying the “Sem Ina Werq” riddles (a branch of Ethiopian culture) and to finding his childhood bride Aleme (Girma) who was abducted from his family home seven years previously. It emerges that she has been  kidnapped and married off to a judge and landowner Gonite (Yiman). When Gobeze finally does track her down the furious judge finds the two lovers in bed. 

This is magic realism at its best. Combining breath-taking landscapes with superb performances piqued by humour and irony, Tasser takes the audience by storm in a tense and moving ethnological drama suffused with passion, jealousy and bitter anger of the traditional Ethiopian establishment.

The enchaining of the title refers to the way Ethiopian social justice is meted out by the local community who insist on Gobeze being tried by Queen Zewditu at her personal court. But Gobeze falls ill and so Gonite is forced to drag him to court on a sheepskin: according to the law the accuser has to bring the accused alive to seek justice, otherwise he stands to forfeit his own life. In a tense court-room showdown, the villagers behave like a Greek chorus, taking sides during the trial. When Gobeze tries to avoid cross-examination by Gonite, he is punished and must receive ten lashes.

But the queen has a great deal of sympathy for Gobeze, is some ways they are very similar, even from different sides of the social spectrum. Her underlings try to rule her, and make her a stand-in queen, to be disposed of at their will. Her passion is not for another person, but for her role as a woman in a men’s world. Tafessa weaves the two narrative strands together, creating a very rich feature drama that melds traditional and modern, fairy tale and social realism in a wonderful, unique experience. AS

SCREENING AT RICHMIX ON 19 and 23 OCTOBER 2019

 

 

 

 

That’ll be the Day (1973) **** Home Ent release

Dir: Claude Watham, Wri: Ray Connelly | Cast: David Essex, Ringo Star, Keith Moon, Robert Lindsay, Rosemary Leach | UK Drama 91′

Bad boy David Essex was a teenage heartthrob back in the 1970s. With his twisted grin, blue-eyes and cheeky swagger he was a little bit louche in contrast to David Cassidy’s fresh-faced boy next door. But the camera loves him as Jim MacLaine, the perfect teen hero in Claude Whatham’s seamy coming of age drama about wannabe rock ‘n’ roll stardom in a post-war suburbia where England is still rather down on its knees, gloomily captured by legendary DoP Peter Suschitzky. Leaving school just before the end of term exams Jim soon finds himself in the Isle of Wight working in a holiday camp, and then joins the travelling fair where he meets his mentor in the shape of a game Ringo Star with his mellow Merseyside burr. Rosemary Leach doesn’t get much of a role as Jim’s mother, but she certainly makes her mark as the face of maternal disillusionment in this poignantly atmospheric trip down memory lane. MT

NOW COMING TO DVD, Bluray and DIGITAL together with cult classic STARDUST (1974) | 21 OCTOBER 2019

Non-Fiction | Doubles Vies (2018) Bfi player

Dir.: Olivier Assayas; Cast: Guillaume Canet, Juliette Binoche, Vincent Macaigne, Norah Hamzawi, Christa Theret, Pascal Gregory, France 2018, 107 min.

One of France’s most inventive and diverse directors returns to the theme of alienation  with a classically styled drama set in contemporary Paris. Non-Fiction analyses the detached charm of the intellectual bourgeoisie, seem through the lives of two middle-age couples who are losing their place in the sun thanks to the digital age. Knowledge and experience is replaced more and more by market strategies; and personal relationships turn out to be as fraught as the digitalisation of culture.

Alain (Canet), editor-in-chief of a successful publishing house is meeting one of his writers, Leonard (Macaigne) over a rejection lunch. Alain will not be publishing his new book. The reasons are purely commercial, but the situation is made more difficult by their family friendship. In the end, Alain has to spell it out, and Leonard, looking very much like his younger, unkempt student self, in contrast to the well-groomed Alain, takes it badly. At home he complains to his over-worked wife Valerie (Hamzawi), PA to a leading politician engaged in an election battle. When the couples meet later on, nothing is said about the rejection, instead everyone is ganging up against against Valerie – who is in fact the only likeable protagonist – for her engagement in politics. They all believe in the future of e-books and the power of algorithms. But their world will soon crumble: Alain is summoned to Marc-Antoine (Gregory) the owner of the publishing company, who nonchalantly admits to selling up, putting Alain out of a job. Alain’s young lover and colleague, the even more ambitious Laure (Theret) is leaving him to take up a post in London. Luckily Alain is unaware that his wife Selena (Binoche), a TV actress, has long been involved with Leonard – who has a penchant for writing for including his private life in his book – and not always well-disguised, at that.

On the surface, this is a verbal war, rich in dialogue where Adorno and Lampedusa are often quoted, but beneath the intellectual surface lies growing insecurity. Alain over-estimates his power, he is totally unaware that he is a play-ball of forces he cannot control. Selena, trying to put some gloss on her mediocre career, will soon live under the threat of Leonard’s next book, whilst Leonard himself is still playing around like a teenager, not wanting to adjust to reality – even though he confesses his affair eventually, he really does not deserve his faithful but self-focused wife. 

Non-Fiction can sometimes feel overly verbose, Assayas keeps up our interest by involving the audience in his protagonists’ subterfuge. Apart from Valerie, everybody is an out and out opportunist, trying to hide behind ideas which have completely lost their meaning for them: they have become slaves of ratings and sales figures. The only humour is self-inflicted and involuntarily. The betrayals are in the end self-betrayals, but these people are too far gone to distinguish between feelings and façade: they only believe in perception. The polished aesthetics are workmanlike with a grainy indie feel that seems to suit this bookish study of greed and lust. AS

NOW ON BFI PLAYER

 

The Peanut Butter Falcon (2019) ****

Dirs: Tyler Nilson, Michael Schwartz | Dakota Johnson, Bruce Dern, Shia LaBeouf, Zak Gottsagen | US Comedy 93′

A buddy movie with some good laughs and a really warm heart that doesn’t seek the easy way out in depicting its Down’s Syndrome hero who makes a break for freedom confounding the odds.

Zack Gottsagen plays Zak, a young Down’s syndrome man with no family confined to living in a care home and sharing a bedroom with an old timer – a game Bruce Dern – in North Carolina. Zak may have his limits but he wants to live those to the full. A local wrestling school has captured his imagination although it appalls his carer Eleanor (Johnson), so with the help of his roommate he makes a bid for freedom, wearing only a pair of Y-fronts, hooking up with LaBeouf’s struggling fisherman Tyler – after spending the night under canvas on his boat.

Even hard-to-please cynics will enjoy this charming comedy. All the characters are convincing and appealingly fleshed out. Zak and his new friend Tyler make an oddly endearing couple – Zak is surprisingly tough under his vulnerable facade and so is the macho Tyler who is still mourning his brother – flashback scenes shows the two of them  in affectionate mellow-tinted musings.

The adventure they embark on is a picaresque-styled sortie with shades of Mark Twain. They eventually catch up with Zak’s wrestling heros (cameos from real-life fighter Mick Foley and Jake Roberts, in mufti.). And although Zak often comes a cropper in his white wellies, y-fronts and combat trousers he is a character who we laugh with, and never a figure of fun: A perfect role model for those with life-limiting conditions.

The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao (2019)

Dir: Karim Ainouz | Writers: Murilo Hauser, Ines Bortagaray | Cast: Carol Duarte, Julia Stockler, Gregorio Duvivier, Fernanda Montenegro, Barbara Santos, Flavia Gusmao, Maria Manoella, Antonio Fonseca, Cristina Pereira, Gillray Coutinho | Brazil, 139′

Two sisters are forced into separate lives in this striking melodrama set in male-dominated Rio de Janeiro of the 1950s.

The Brazilian director’s two previous films have been enjoyable but lightweight compared to this ambitious but highly intimate drama, based on a novel by Martha Batalha, The Invisible Life soaks up the vibrant sensuality of tropical Brazil and distills into an intense and passionate portrait of feminine desire and longing in a country where a woman’s only domaine was the home. But their self-determination burns brightly throughout this moving story of female emancipation. There’s nothing coy or dainty about Ainouz’s complex and fully fleshed out characters played spiritedly by newcomers Carol Duarte (Euridice) and Julia Stockler (Guida) who make this often languorous film an extremely moving experience that follows the women’s lives from early adulthood to old age, the reveal comes in the form of an ingenious coda.

It’s 1941 and Guida and her younger sister Euridice are discussing sex – or the febrile expectancy of it – as they wander through the verdant coastline surrounding their cramped family home in Rio. Daughters of a draconian father and his meek wife – described as a shadow by Euridice later on in the film – the girls are bound together by an unusual closeness forcing them to share all their hopes and dreams which will be stifled by a patriarchal set-up as the film plays out. The story is framed by a plot device that causes the girls to be separated and so their only way of communicating is through stifled correspondence and unanswered questions. What emerges is a fascinating social history of Brazil during the 1940s and ’50s seen from a female perspective, but one which is gutsy and deeply affecting.

While Guida is conducting a secret affair with darkly handsome Greek sailor Yorgos (Nikolas Antunes), Euridice is developing her keyboard skills on the family’s piano, with a view to studying at the conservatory in Vienna. We then find out – through a letter to their father – that Guida has eloped with her man on a ship bound for Athens, whence she returns alone and pregnant. Clearly Yorgos had a girl in every port, but worse, her father throws her out callously disinheriting her, and telling her that Euridice is studying in Austria. In actual fact Euridice has married Antenor (Duvivier) a crude bore who spends most of his time in his underwear, and given birth to a daughter he didn’t really want. Meanwhile, Guida finds solace in the home of a prostitute Filomena (Barbara Santos) where she brings up her son.

Ainouz has an extraordinary eye for detail and the film’s well-paced dramatic arc unfolds through tone and atmosphere closely following the literary structure, drawing us into the women’s world where we share in their intimate feelings, joys, heartache and sadness. It’s a emotional rollercoaster but one told with such intense warmth and beauty that by the end we feel a deep connection to these characters and their experiences. Something that is rare nowadays, with so many atmospheric yet empty films.

Spectacular vibrant camerawork is provided by French DoP Helene Louvart (Happy as Lazzaro) both on the widescreen and in really intimate close-up – and although some of the images are quite graphic, adding considerable gravity and truth to the alarming scenes of birth and love-making. The male characters invariably have feet of clay but in subtle ways that show them as convincing people not just hastily drawn cyphers. Each frame is exquisitely captured adding texture to an immersive family saga that bears testament to the enormous forbearance and indomitable resilience of its female characters. It seems appropriate that piano studies from Liszt, Grieg and Chopin should be the accompanying score. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 15 OCTOVER  2021 | WINNER UN CERTAIN REGARD | Cannes Film Festival 2019

 

The Voice | Glas 2019 **** Busan Film Festival 2019

Dir.: Ognjen Svilicic; Cast: Franco Jakovcevic, Belma Salkunic Mia Petricevic, Klara, Mucci; Croatia/Macedonia/ Serbia 2019, 80 min.

Five years after his award-winning feature debut These Are the Rules, Croatian filmmaker Ognjen Svilicic is back at Busan competing in one of Asia’s top festivals with this restrained portrait of rebellion and religious dogma in today’s Eastern Europe.

The rebel in question is teenager Goran (Jakovcevic) who has been sent to a religious boarding school by his single mother who hopes her only child will been given a Catholic eduction and a new group of friends outside the confines of his sheltered upbringing.

Svilicic handles his theme with great sensitivity showing how Goran’s background has not prepared him for the real world, let alone sharing a room with his rowdy mates. And although the staff seem tolerant at first, Goran is immediately marked as a ‘non-believer’ after he volunteers to play Joseph in a play about the conception and birth of Jesus, refusing to fall in with the traditional concept of the virgin birth, or to apologise for the disruption caused by his failure to accept this most basic credo of Catholicism. It appears Goran doesn’t even believe in God, which immediately sets him at odds with the staff and pupils despite their own inability to explain or fathom out the virgin birth.

The next point of confrontation comes when Goran supports a march in favour of the legalisation of abortion. He is pilloried by the enraged head mistress. But Goran defends the women, and, as a punishment, none of the students is allowed to eat dinner until Goran has retracted his viewpoint. Naturally, he is ostracised by the kids, one of whom boys beats him up. Goran runs off, throwing a rock at the statue of the Virgin Mary in front of the school, and decapitating it. Again, he fails to not apologise, and faints during in an interrogation.

After the headmistress reads an apostolic letter, talking about “the invasion of of Europe from the east”, Goran discusses his opposition with Mirela, a fellow student, who seems to have sympathy for him. At an outing, Goran swims far out into the sea, and has to be rescued by a boat. But Goran holds his ground, repeating his original protest, and leaving the school play after his replacement in the role of Joseph, utters the lines which the intransigent teen objected to in the first place.

Although Svilicic adopts a didactic approach to the narrative, he never simplifies the situation. Crucially, the majority of the students do not seen to believe much more than Goran in the preached dogma: they are more interested in video games and porn than religious education. They pick on Goran, because he makes them feels guilty for their own lack of engagement. DoP Marinko Marinkic’s limpid camerawork shows Goran’s growing isolation at a school where even the chapel has disco lighting. AS

World Premiere | BUSAN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | 5 October 2019

https://vimeo.com/360637567

 

 

 

Joker (2019) **** Golden Lion Winner Venice 2019

Dir: Todd Phillips | Cast: Joaquin Pheonix, Robert De Niro
Joaquin Phoenix coruscates with desperate anger as a tortured mentally ill loner in Todd Phillips’ tale of the age old arch-nemesis. Imagine Taxi Driver ten years on without the heart and soul of Scorsese or Bernard Herrmann’s iconic 70s score; add some hyper violence and a dose of livid desperation and you have Joker, another rich character study not for the feint-hearted.

Robert De Niro also stars as a glib gameshow host Murray Franklin but this is Phoenix’s film and he is a firecracker as the disgruntled and delusional Arthur Fleck tending his ailing mother whilst trying to juggle various jobs, gradually losing his sanity. He is also cursed with a corrosive condition forcing him to cackle with laughter – uncontrollably and mostly inappropriately – whenever he is stressed or put upon. One such incident occurs in the opening scene where he is chased down and beaten up by kids who steal his sale placard.

Shocking in its sheer intensity, Joker is a film for everyone who has ever been scorned or short-changed, so that’s just about everyone. Joaquin Phoenix looks as if he nearly died preparing for the role, his emaciated body and strung out demeanour testament to the sheer dedication of an actor at the top of his game – thoughts of quitting should now be way behind him.

Phillips and Scott Silver’s script is not based on any of the DC Comics oeuvre, but its resonance will delight an eager fan base. In Gotham City, inspired by New York of the same era, Fleck is also fond of his role as a clown, and he is good at it. Strutting his stuff in the local children’s hospital but also imagining himself performing as a stand-up comedian – one of his jokes is “let’s hope my death makes more cents than my life”.

After the street punch up Fleck is lent a gun by a workmate, but foolishly incorporates it in his act at the hospital, a mistake that leads to his sacking and final down-spiralling. One night in the tube he becomes trigger happy when taunted by some City workers and is soon running for his life, the sheer payback exhilaration infecting the audience with complicit delight as he becomes everyone’s misguided ‘have a go hero’.

Without revealing the rest of the plot, let’s just say Arthur makes one bad choice after another. And when certain facts come to light about his family and background, he morphs into a fully fledged psychopath not caring what happens next – to him, or anybody else’s for that matter.

Phoenix brings a scathing humanity to a tragic soul in crisis. Even a romance with a neighbour Sophie (Zazie Beetz) seems to be a figment of his shattered psyche as he descends into a hellish underworld of his own making. Although technically brilliant you have to question the sheer level of the gratuitous violence. That said, this cuastic moral tale will leave everyone with a vague sense of satisfaction and sadness as Joaquin struts his stuff to Gary Glitter’s 1972 hit Rock and Roll, part 2. MT

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM FRIDAY 4 OCTOBER 2019

The Prince | El Principe (2019) ***

Dir: Sebastián Muñoz | Cast: Juan Carlos Maldonado, Alfredo Castro, Gaston Pauls, Sebastian Ayala, Lucas Balmaceda, Cesare Serra, José Antonio Raffo |Drama,  96′, 2019)

Based on a novel by Mario Cruz, this Chilean prison drama won the Queer Lion at Venice in competition with the far superior Moffie by Oliver Hermanus.

The Prince is Chilean set designer Sebastián Muñoz’s feature debut, and as you would expect it all looks rather stylish, if that’s possible for a jail-based film. It’s 1970, just before President Allende brought his particular brand of Marxism to a liberal democracy backed by the CIA. At the time this must have seemed quite a controversial story with its scantily-clad gay men cavorting behind bars, but now it all feels rather quaint.

The story revolves around a 20 year-old called (Jaime Juan Carlos Maldonado) serving time for stabbing his best friend (Cesare Serra), possibly in flagrante delicto, in the opening scene. In flashback, we see Jaime unable to express his sexual feelings in the Chilean town of San Bernardo, but these episodes don’t successfully inform what he has now become and play out rather like stand-alone vignettes. Sharing a cell with four other guys he soon becomes close to Stallion (Castro) a sort of prison gang leader who will open him up sexually and teach him the ways of world, jail-wise. The prison is a violent place but there’s also lots of full on sex, and Jaime soon starts to enjoy himself in this permissive set-up that would be undreamed of in the outside world, back in the day, but one that provides endless playmates for Jaime’s amusement, until it all ends in tears. Quite why Munoz has decided on this rather dated minor work- given today’s permissiveness – will be beyond most people. But it will go down well with the LGBTQ crowd despite its rather threadbare narrative.

The best thing about The Prince is Alfredo Castro (Blanco en Blanco) who puts a world weary complexity into his role as the oldest male prisoner in Jaime’s four bunk cell. He has a younger lover (Sebastian Ayala) but throws him over in preference to Jaime, hence his nickname “the prince”.

Munoz wrote the screenplay with Luis Barrales but it fails to convey Mario Cruz’ tribute to his central character as a victim of his times. Jaime is certainly an antihero but not a victim here as he seems to drift along in this sweaty paradise more or less ambivalent to his position in the pecking order. Weirdly, it appears that all the other prisoners in this clink are gay, which feels rather utopian, if you’re looking at it from Jaime’s perspective. MT

SAN SEBASTIAN FILM FESTIVAL 2019 | 18-28 SEPTEMBER 2019 | HORIZONTES LATINOS Strand

 

 

 

 

 

The Prey (2018) **

Dir.: Jimmy. Henderson; Cast: Gu Shangwei, Vithaya Pansringarm, Dy Sonita, Nophand Boonyai, Byron Bishop, Sahajak Boonthanakit; Cambodia 2018, 93 min.

Italian born director, co-writer and producer Jimmy Henderson (Jailbreak) may well lay claim to have delivered the first Cambodian action movie, but The Prey is a second rate blend of Irving Pichel’s The Most Dangerous Game, Predator and Hard Target. Henderson never avoids a cliché, if he can help it – making this debut at times rather tedious.

Chinese undercover cop Xin (Shangwei), is investigating a ‘phone scam involving Mainland Chinese customers in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh. Captured by local police in a raid he is sent to a faraway prison with the Warden (Pansringarm) is less interested in rehabilitation, and more in hiring out his prisoners to be hunted down and killed Hunger Games style.

Released into the jungle Xin and the other victims are hunted down by Payak (Boonthanakit), Mat (Bishop) and Ti (Boonyai). Fortunately, and to keep the plot rolling, Xin is able to send off a signal to his superiors, who send in a rescue team which includes Li (Chinese supermodel Dy Sonata). There is a sub-plot with a rebel village controlled by the The Warden, but this narrative strain is quickly forgotten. Instead, booby traps; gruesome injuries; snapping twigs as well as unbelievable braveness and sadistic brutality takes over, to deliver a predictable outcome. 

The production values, including DoP Lucas Gath’s lively images and original angles, make this old-style slaughter feature slightly more bearable than the more recent, CGI controlled models. But that’s not saying not too much. AS

AVAILABLE ON DIGITAL DOWNLOAD FROM 7 OCTOBER 2019  

 

The Waiter (2019) ***** Raindance Film Festival 2019

Dir: Wri/Dir: Steve Krikris | Cast: Aris Servetalis, Yannis Stankoglou, Chiara Gensini, Alexandros Mavropoulos, Antonis Myriagos | Drama, Greece, 93′

This deliciously dark and sardonic Neo-noir sees a lonely waiter fall prey to a ménage à trois that throws a spanner into his ordered life in modern day Athens.

Steve Krikis has already won a string of awards for his stylish Greek new wave debut, a crisply captured, elegantly framed affair that unfurls in an upmarket quartier of Greece’s capital. Beautifully balanced like a tray of martini cocktails and tinted with the same olive hue, it follows the day to day existence of plant lover and bar employee Reno (Aris Servetalis) whose routine is meticulously laid out in the opening scenes: the comfortable black leather shoes are polished; the white shirt pressed and pristine, the glossy black hair slicked black and ready for business. Every day follows the same pattern for his work in one of the oldest establishments in the city.

Then one evening while emptying the rubbish Renos finds a dismembered body the dumpster. And recognises it as his neighbour, Milan (Antonis Myriagos). The following night in the corridor of his modernist block he bumps into the neighbour opposite, a be-spectacled man with a leonine shock of red hair, known as “The Blond” (Yannis Stankoglou) who invites him in for dinner, a dinner which starts suspiciously with enormous pieces of osso buco (braised calf bone) followed by beef bourguignon. Renos is naturally alarmed. And from then on he becomes a sort of undercover detective enthralled by this macabre man and his surreptitious comings and goings. And so do we.

Deadly, dialogue light and mostly silent, apart from a bewitching soundtrack, The Waiter is an enthralling and seductive story that says as much about Renos as a character as it does about the enigmatic Blond, and his discretely unwilling female companion Tzina (Chiara Gensini). Clearly their perplexingly teasing relationship presses buttons for Renos in the sexual department, or lack of it. Renos also starts to question his own rather vacuous existence while wondering whether the couple are accomplices to a murder, and if he is the next victim. One particularly beguiling scene is set in an Athens dawn in a beautiful outdoor temple where Renos comes across Tzina suffering a bout of hiccups. He tries to explain to Tzina the medical reason for hiccups and she asks him if he’s always so calm. “Don’t you ever get scared” she says. Renos replies: “Fear disrupts the will”. Clearly he is a self-contained man with hidden depths, practising the art of being “in the now”. For the moment.

But ‘the now’ soon unravels for Renos as his placid routine gradually becomes destabilised by his sinister new friends. And the compelling denouement offers a surprise in a sultry wooded area at dusk, captured sumptuously on the widescreen by DoP Giorgos Karvelas whose immaculate camerawork has made this something of a visual treat. And we are left to contemplate the humdrum nature of everyday life. Often a desperate wish for change, can also ruin the status quo forever . MT

RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL | 18 – 28 SEPTEMBER 2019

 

 

Matthias and Maxime (2019) ***

Dir: Xavier Dolan |

French-Canadian director Xavier Dolan directed his first film in 2009 at the age of just 20. He was back at Cannes this year with a coming of drama, set again in Montreal where a young man at the cusp of his working life is stuck at home looking after his abusive addict of a mother. He also has a facial blemish that saps his confidence. At a friend’s garrulous get-together Matthew finds himself play-acting a gay role with a young lawyer Matthias (Gabriel D’Almeida Freitas), who is in a committed relationship and a settled career, albeit a boring one. Sparks fly. Although the two have met before in their childhood, clearly things have moved on and the chemistry between them is now palpable. But the path to love never runs smoothly.

The camerawork is all close up and personal. And in common with Dolan’s dialogue-heavy previous films (It’s only the End of the World) there is that shouty, rowdy restless vibe that some might find objectionable while to others  this tender playfulness will be intoxicating. The performances are strong and convincing across the board and genuinely heartfelt, and once again Dolan is in the thick of it all – as Maxime. MT

LONDON FILM FESTIVAL |  2-13 OCTOBER 2019

 

 

Tremors | Temblores (2019)

Dir: Jayro Bustamente | Cast: Juan Pablo Olyslager, Diane Bathen, Mauricio Armas Zebadua, María Telon, Sabrina de La Hoz | Drama, Guatemala. 102′

The wrath of God comes down on a Guatemalan financier who tries to leave his wife in Jayro Bustamente’s gloweringly oppressive sophomore feature. There is a definite touch of Garcia Lorca to this fraught affair that sees Juan Pablo Olyslager as the good-looking husband to Isa (Diane Bathen) and father of two in a prominent Evangelical family where the matriarch still rules the roost with fire and brimstone. Not quite as enjoyable at the Guatemalan director’s first feature Ixcanul (2015) this will certainly be popular with the LGBT+ crowd and arthouse audiences who have tuned in to the creative wealth coming out of South and Latin America at the moment.

Guatemala City looks strange and exotic in the brooding widescreen images of cinematographer Luis Armando Arteaga, who also lensed Ixcanul. And to complete the atmosphere Julien Cloquet has devised a haunting soundscape that compliments the tremors of the film’s title. It appears to be the rainy season adding to the gloom of this sombre story with its emphasis on machismo and the importance of holding onto your man – if you’re a woman, that is. But also if you’re a gay man. The LGBT+ community are really having a tough time of it in the bars and spas where Pablo (Olyslager) runs into tousled haired loose-limbed Francisco (Mauricio Armas Zebadua), who inhabits these haunts with an air of world-weary nonchalance knowing full well the competitiveness of his game.

Meanwhile behind the tight security of Pablo’s upmarket family citadel a battle rages to get him to see sense and realise the shame he is bringing on the family, particularly his parents, with a scandalous revelation that comes to light in the opening scenes. So serious is the situation that Pablo is also forced to resign his post amid accusations of paedophilia, leaving him a rather sorry figure as he hangs around the spa where Francisco offers neck massage.

His wife is being supported by the family housekeeper (Maria Telon) as she goes about her day trying to gain comfort from her girlfriends who urge her to focus on getting Pablo back, at any cost. This is further emphasised by the overt community prayers at the family’s Evangelical Christian church where the pastor (Rui Frati) and his brisk sidekick  (Sabrina de la Hoz) exhort the congregation into loud praying. There are some flaws in a script that focuses on the atmosphere of dread and wrong-doing rather than the exact nature of Pablo’s wrongdoing and why he agrees to submit to the church’s “conversion therapy programme” – a highly contemporary sounding measure in the traditional and devoutly Catholic country. As a result it all becomes rather telenovela-ish and histrionic. What does emerge from this striking feature though is the vehemence of the community against sexual deviation of any kind. MT

NOW ON MUBI

A Certain Kind of Silence (2019) **** Raindance Film Festival 2019

Dir.: Michal Hogenauer; Cast: Eliska Krenkova, Jacob Jutte, Monic Hendrickx, Roeland Fernhout, Jiri Rendl, Matthis Ijgosse; Czecj Republic/The Netherlands/Latvia 2019, 95 min.

This stylish Czech thriller centres on a secretive religious sect known as the Twelve Tribes. It is the impressive feature debut of Czech filmmaker Michal Hogenauer who offers up a cleverly crafted piece of evil in the guise of a domestic drama filmed in the forested stillness of suburban Riga, beside the Daugava river.

Eliska Krenkova plays Mia a young au pair who has emigrated from Prague to work in the pristine household of a formal professional couple (Hendrickx and Fernhout) who have one precocious little son, Sebastian (Jutte). Their house is immaculate, sterile even and Mia is not encouraged to become familiar with the parents or the boy. And although she stands her ground and refuses to be intimidated by their frigid demeanour, she soon becomes more and more worn down. Hogenauer employs a clever plot device that adds suspense and intrigue as the story plays out, by intercutting the action with scenes of Mia being interrogated by a faceless authority, presumably the police. It’s as if a crime has already been committed.

Sebastian is being trained to become a professional tennis player, and his parents take his progress very seriously. Their controlling behaviour also extends to Mia – who is actually called Mishka until they force her to accept a new nickname, just to add to her discombobulation. Mia’s presence is also required at unsettling social get-togethers (which turn out to be cult meetings) where she meets and becomes involved with a new boyfriend (Ijgosse). Soon the plucky and confident Mia finds herself drawn into a strange and sinister set-up where the gaslighting couple coerce her into doing things against her will, as they manipulate her mind. They force her into beating Sebastian, who eventually stabs Mia in retaliation. The flesh-wound is not life-threatening, but Sebastian is suddenly replaced by Daniel (Rendl), who wears a five-digit number on his back – we have already witnessed that Sebastian’s school is Number 23, and the school bus, which takes the children ‘off piste’ to school in a mystery destination. DoP Gregg Telussa captures the clinical atmosphere in the house with slickness doing justice to Laura Dislere’s immaculate set design, a paradise for those with OCD. All this is amplified by Filip Misek’s minimalist sound design which echoes something Philip Glass might compose. Hogenauer directs with great sensibility, never going over the top, by showing this ghastly utopian reality with restraint and admirable rigour. AS

The Twelve Tribes is a new religious movement founded by Gene Spriggs and was originally founded in Tennessee with the aim of raising 144,000 pure boys, so that Jesus can return to Earth. The children are corporally punished when showing emotion, playing or committing a disobedience. A raid in September liberated over 40 children from the organisation, who also run youth hostels, farms and restaurants. 

RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL | LONDON | 18 – 29 September 2019 

 

The Goldfinch (2019) ***

Dir: Jason Crowley | Cast: Oakes Fegley, Ansel Elgort, Nicole Kidman, Jeffrey Wright, Luke Wilson, Sarah Paulson, Willa Fitzgerald, Aneurin Barnard, Finn Wolfhard, Ashleigh Cummings | US Drama 149′

A young boy takes a 17th century painting of a goldfinch from the scene of an explosion at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art where his mother is killed. The famous work of art serves as a constant reminder of her love and a metaphor for his own fight for survival. The boy is Theodore Decker and The Goldfinch is by Dutch master Carel Fabritius.

Based on Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer winning best-seller, this sprawling but deeply affecting drama has been adapted for the screen by British writer Peter Straughan (Wolf Hall) who has decided to slowly reveal the beginning of the story at the end of the film. It’s as if elements of the tragedy have remained buried in Theodore’s subconscious and with time gradually come flooding back during the course of the narrative. Although the book’s essential plot elements are retained, this structural change has divided audiences faithful to the original.

New York is slick and sumptuously cinematic in Roger Deakins’ lush camerawork that breathes life into the stiff upper lip of its Upper East side locations where Theodore lives out his bereaved childhood. Even the explosion scenes take on a dreamlike Tarkovskyian feel as the boy pieces together the tragic event in tortured recollections: “We’re so used to disguising ourselves to others, that in the end we disguise ourselves to ourselves”. Played convincingly as a boy by Oakes Fegley, and bravely as Ansel Elgort as a young man, we feel for his buried and buttoned-up pain although he does his best to hide it growing up as an well-behaved orphan in the prim Barbour household: Nicole Kidman is suitably nipped, tucked and botoxed as the winsome lady of the house, where he finds a soulmate in her sensitive young son Andy (Foust). But his abusive estranged father (Luke Wilson) has an eye to the boy’s inheritance and soon scoops him up and away to a repossessed housing estate in Las Vegas with his railer-trash girlfriend (Paulson), and it is there that he does most of his growing up in a gambling-fuelled, drug-addled lifestyle. And this is where Theo also forms a lifelong friendship with Ukrainian Boris – played by a spiky Finn Wolfhard as a kid. Theodore will meet him again years later in New York and Aneurin Barnard playing adult Boris as a nervy restless fervour, not unlike a male take on Fleabag’s Villanelle. Boris’ new life and their close friendship holds the key to the importance of the painting for Theodore, who grows into just the kind of emotionally detached adult you would expect given his past. Constantly absorbing new traumas, he puts his best food forward with a slick persona, and Ansel Elgort is superb at projecting this rather glib exterior as Head of Sales in the antique business headed up by the urbanely earthy antique dealer Hobie (Jeffrey Wright), but Theo remains wedded to security net of the Barbour family. His discrete passion for fellow survivor Pippa (Ashleigh Cumming) shines through his well-manicured exterior. Clearly he’s crying inside when they meet up again as adults, bonded by pain. And it’s one of the more emotional scenes of this engrossing saga that slowly gathers momentum in the final moving reveal. The book is not the film. The film is a slow-burning but intriguing portrait of childhood grief and survival. MT

OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM FRIDAY 27 SEPTEMBER 2019

 

The Birdcatcher (2018) ***

Dir.: Ross Clarke; Cast: Sofie Boussnina, Arthur Hakalahti, Jacob Cedergen, Laura Birn; Norway/UK 2019, 100′.

Ross Clarke has adapted Trond Morten Venaasen’s script in this gripping thriller that uncovers a relatively unknown slice of Norwegian Second World War history. It follows an enterprising Jewish teenager who takes refuge in a farm belonging to a Nazi sympathiser in a bid to escape persecution and deportation. From collaboration to resistance, the local population’s reaction to their Nazi conquerors was not always clear-cut. And while some of the action pieces here feel unconvincing, strong performances make this an absorbing drama.

In 1942 Trondheim, Esther (Boussnina) dreams of becoming a Hollywood actress despite her humble beginnings. Her father has planned their escape to the USA, but Nazi raids on the Jewish population condemn Esther to a lonely struggle in the remote countryside, after escaping a deportation convoy.

She ends up at a farm house, dressed as a boy and calling herself Ula. Although the owner Johann (Cedergen) supports the Nazi occupation, he does little to help his son Aksel (Hakalahti), despite his disabilities. The only person who rumbles Esther is Johann’s wife Anna, who is having a affair with a Nazi officer, and keeps quiet about the girl in defiance of her husband. During a bloody shoot-out between Johann and his wife’s lover, Esther and Aksel try to escape on a sleigh over the frozen sea to Sweden. An epilogue set in Trondheim after the war delivers the final surprise.

Clarke uncovers some original takes on Nazi politics during the occupation. Johann goes with Esther to the local cinema where German propaganda films are casually screened alongside dance-features and bogus propaganda newsreels showing unanimous Norwegian support for their German occupiers. Boussnina is outstanding as Esther, and the rest of the ensemble offers convincing support. DoP John Christian Rosenlund creates an impressive sense of place, with glorious widescreen images and realistic shots of Nazi Party meetings. AS

ON RELEASE in Cinemas, Digital HD & DVD from 4th October 2019

 

 

 

Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom | Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1975) *** 

Dir.: Pier Paolo Pasolini; Cast: Tatiana Mogilansky, Susanna Radaelli, Giuliana Orlandi, Liana Acquaviva, Paolo Boacelli, Giorgio Cataldi, Umbert Paolo Quintavalle, Aldo Valletti, Caterina Boratto, Elsa De Giorgi, Helene Surgere, Sonia Saviange; Italy 1975, 117min.

Banned, censored and reviled the world over since its release, Salò was Pasolini’s final and most controversial masterpiece. The content and imagery is extreme, retaining the power to shock, repel and distress. But it remains a cinematic milestone: culturally significant, politically vital and visually stunning.

Originally intended as the first part of a trilogy about death, it was actually Pier Paolo Pasolini’s swansong: it was premiered at the Paris Film Festival on 23rd November 1975, three weeks after his murder. Based on the novel The 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade, it takes place in Northern Italian Fascist Republic of Salò (1943-1945), controlled by Mussolini with the support of Nazi Germany. It tells the story of the Libertines, who kidnap 18 teenagers and subject them to four months of violence, murder, sadism and sexual and psychological torture. Told in four segments ((Ante Inferno, Circle of Manias, Circle of Shit, Circle of Blood), all based on Dante’s The Divine Comedy. There are also quotes of Friedrich Nietzsche (On the Generality of Morality), the poem The Cantos by Ezra Pound and A la Recherche de Temps Perdu by Proust. Shot brilliantly by DoP Tonino Delli Colli and with a score by Ennio Morricone, the drama has moments of brilliance.

The public officials The Duke (Bonacelli), The Bishop (Cataldi), The Magistrate (Quintavalle) and the President (Valletti) decide to marry each other’s daughters: all four are raped and killed in the end. The victims are told “we will govern your life”. Heterosexual intercourse will be punished by mutilation and “the slightest religious act committed by anyone will be punished by death.” Most of the action takes place in a villa, including the coprophagic wedding banquet. Like a Greek chorus, four middle-aged prostitutes are commenting on the on-going bloodshed. The four men dictate everything, their slogans are actual fascist quotes or ones by de Sade. Death is the central topic, Pasolini claims that real and imagined death is connected, and that political and pornographic dehumanisation are the same kind of phantasy. Filmed with radical artificiality, on purpose Saló is very uncomfortable to watch. The Cubist art on the walls, the camp outfits, the sheer absurdity of certain scenes – especially the drag wedding – all make it impossible to reason with anything. The fascists laugh, but it is certainly not funny when they declare: “You cannot reason your way to an understanding of us or a prediction of what we will do next”.

The overriding impression of is of dread. The violent scenes are brief, but the torture that unfolding in the imagination is even more unbearable. The essence of torture is not violence or physical pain, but in the de-humanisation that takes place beforehand. Comparisons with Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter and Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing are clear.

Roland Barthes felt that Pasolini failed on both accounts with Salò: describing fascism and combining it with de Sade. “A flop of figuration (both of Sade and of the fascist system). That is why I wonder, if, at the end of a long concatenation of errors, Pasolini’s Salò is not, all things considered, a proper Sadean object: absolutely irredeemable: no one, indeed, so it seems, can redeem it.” 

Surprisingly, most of crew and cast claimed to have enjoyed the shoot, despite the bruises and cuts they suffered. During the filming at the Villa Gonzaga-Zani in Villempunta, the Salò team where not far away from Bertolucci’s 1900 shoot, which provided the ideal opportunity for these directors to bury the hatchet on their long-standing disagreement that had started when Pasolini criticised Last Tango in Paris. AS

On 30 September 2019 the BFI will release Salò on Blu-ray utilising a High Definition master new to the UK. Special features for this release include a new commentary by Kat Ellinger.

 

           

London Spanish Film Festival 2019 | 25 – 29 September 2019

London Spanish Film Festival is back again for the 15th time around bringing the latest Spanish releases to central London over five days in September. There will be the usual chance to meet the directors and talent in Q&As, offering exclusive insight and background on their craft.

BUÑUEL EN EL LABERINTO DE LAS TORTUGAS  | Buñuel in the Labyrinth of Turtles

dir. Salvador Simó, with Jorge Usón, Fernando Ramos, Luis Enrique de Tomás | Animation | Spain | 2019 | 80 min | cert. PG| in Spanish with English subtitles

Paris, 1930. Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí are the figureheads of the Surrealist movement. Their masterpieces An Andalusian Dog (1929) and The Golden Age (1930) have caused intense scandal for their shocking, violent imagery. Penniless, Buñuel must postpone his next project, a documentary focused on one of the poorest regions in Spain: Las Hurdes. Yet in a stroke of bizarre, miraculous luck, his best friend Ramón Acín wins the lottery, and together they set off to film this unreported hardship. Tempers flare, however, for whilst Acín prefers an unvarnished, pared-back, no-frills approach, Buñuel manipulates reality to achieve his intended political, often manufactured effects. Based on a true story, this animated “making of” of Buñuel’s Land Without Bread (1993) asks, with a healthy dose of humour, whether the camera is always, to some extent, a partisan, prejudiced device, exploring the curious complexities of ‘fact’ and ‘accuracy’ within taped, captured footage.

Wed 25 Sep | 6.30pm | Ciné Lumière | £13, conc. £11

OLA DE CRÍMENES | Crime Wave

dir. Gracia Quejereta, with Maribel Verdú, Juana Acosta, Paula Echevarría | Black Comedy | Spain | 2018 | 98 min | cert. 12A | in Spanish with English subtitles

Leyre (Maribel Verdú) is a well-heeled divorcee enjoying a comfortable life at her villa in Bilbao. However, her world is turned upside down when her son Asier, threatened with a shotgun and nasty insults, kills her ex-husband stone-dead. In an instant, Leyre will transform from aspiring cupcake entrepreneur to protective mother, going to absurd lengths to save her son and hide the crimes from the police. As the mayhem piles up and up in this fresh, hectic, and hysterical comedy, Leyre is forced to navigate the amorous attentions of Asier’s friend Julen, the tax-fraud schemes of her ex-husband’s widow, and the volley of frank, hilarious opinions from her ageing, no-nonsense mother.

Thu 26 Sep | 8.30pm | Ciné Lumière | £13, conc. £11

TRINTA LUMES  | Thirty Souls 

dir. Diana Toucedo, with Alba Arias, Samuel Vilariño | Documentary | Spain | 2018 | 80 min | cert. 15 | in Galician and Spanish with English subtitles

Set in the sparsely-populated village of O Courel, Galicia, Thirty Souls is a mysterious, magical, and haunting meditation on the life-cycle of birth and death in rural Spain. Deeply embedded in local folkloric tradition and the fragile balance between innocence and experience, two children, Alba and Samuel, explore abandoned homes in search of missing names and vanished livelihoods. They expose the sheer power of the Galician landscape with its echoing, menacing mountains and sublime sense of imminent threat. This oneiric love-letter to a remote, enchanting region of Spain – which took a full six years to shoot – is painted through daily rhythms and cadences, exposing life at its most tender and brutal, inviting and savage.

Followed by a Q&A with the director | Sat 28 Sep | 4.00pm | Regent Street Cinema | £12, conc. £11

ABUELOS | Grandfathers

dir. Santiago Requejo, with Carlos Iglesias, Roberto Álvarez, Ramón Barea | Comedy | Spain | 2019 | 108 min | cert. PG | in Spanish with English subtitles

Isidro (Carlos Iglesias) has suffered heavily from the Spanish financial crash. He is unemployed at the age of 56, but nobody wants to hire a senior — even one with 30 years of relevant experience. His friends Desiderio (Ramón Barea), a writer of romantic fiction, and Arturo (Roberto Álvarez), a retiree desperate to be a grandfather, feel similarly out of place and behind the times in a globalised world in which image, youth, and technology reign supreme. Even so, the trio refuse to give up, joining forces to prove that they still have something to offer. Side by side they launch a modern, forward-thinking (or so they think) business from scratch: a nursery for toddlers. What could go wrong!? The first full-length feature from director Santiago Requejo, Abuelos is jam-packed with warm-hearted, feel-good humour — and a sharp critique of cultural assumptions about the elderly.

Followed by a Q&A (tbc) | Sat 28 Sep | 6.15pm | Ciné Lumière | £13, conc. £11

LITUS 

dir. Dani de la Orden, with Jorge Cabrera, Belén Cuesta, Miquel Fernández | Comedy-Drama | Spain | 2019 | 85 min | cert. PG| in Spanish with English subtitles

Three months ago, young Spaniard Litus was killed in a car accident. Now, for the first time since his death, his brother Toni gathers his friends together to reminisce about old times and find closure from the tragedy. However, Toni brings unexpected news: Litus left a series of mysterious letters of farewell, one for each companion. As hidden secrets and furtive riddles come tumbling out beyond the grave, director Dani de la Orden provides a complex, layered study of the crushing heartbreak, and tender humour, of a group in mourning.

Sun 29 Sep | 8.30pm | Regent Street Cinema | £12, conc. £11

CATALAN WINDOW

LA FILLA D’ALGÚ / LA HIJA DE ALGUIEN | Somebody’s Daughter

dir. ensemble of 4th-year students at ESCAC (Cinema and Audiovisual School of Catalonia), with Aina Clotet, Pep Ambròs, Marta Aguilar | Drama | Spain | 2019 | 72 min | cert. 18 | in Catalan with English subtitles

At the age of 30, successful Catalan lawyer Eli (Aina Clotet) has it all: the career, the boyfriend, the family (she is heavily pregnant with her first child). However, on the day of a major, high-profile court case, her father suddenly disappears, throwing the entire business into jeopardy. After several frantic calls to her nearest and dearest, Eli postpones the meeting as long as she dare, racing around Barcelona to unravel myriad, mysterious secrets that have, until now, been kept under wraps. The camera never leaves her side in this intense psychological thriller played out breathlessly in real-time, as Eli’s comfortable, bourgeois stability gradually crumbles before her very eyes… Winner of the Movistar+ award for best full-length film in the Málaga Festival’s ZonaZine, this beautifully balanced work is shot by a wide array of graduates from the Barcelona film school (ESCAC), displaying a wisdom and maturity far beyond their tender years.

Wed 25 Sep | 8.30pm | Ciné Lumière | £13, conc. £11

YO SOY LA RUMBA  | Peret: My Name Is Rumba

dir. Paloma Zapata, with Pepita Becas, Miliu Calabuch, La Chana | Documentary | Spain | 2018 | 92 min | cert. U | in Catalan and Spanish with English subtitles

The title makes it clear. Pere Pubill Calaf – Peret – is rumba. This documentary traces the life and work of an enigmatic singer and guitarist who, raised in the humble, gypsy neighbourhood of Sant Antoni, Barcelona, would be universally hailed as the ‘King of Rumba’ for his fusion of flamenco song with Latin American beats and rhythms. In a career spanning six decades, from the mid-1950s to his death in 2014, Peret rubbed shoulders with Pérez Prado, sang with Elvis Presley, and released global smash-hits such as ‘Borriquito’. From his enforced performance at Eurovision, to his long break from stardom to become an Evangelical pastor in the USA, to his triumphant return at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, Peret provides a warm, intimate portrait – through heartfelt testimonies from grandchildren and friends (Petitet, Justo Molinero) – of a musician full of contradiction and paradox but also, and most importantly, a deep kindness and an irrepressible love of song. A must-see for music lovers, Peret won Best International Film at the MUVI Music Film Festival 2019.

Thu 26 Sep | 6.30pm | Ciné Lumière | £13, conc. £11

LA DONA DEL SEGLE | The Woman of the Century

dir. Sílvia Quer, with Elena Martín, Nora Navas, Àlex Monner | Drama | Spain | 2019 | 90 min | cert. PG | in Catalan and Spanish with English subtitles

Barcelona, 1919. A city awash with workers’ strikes, criminal gangs, and social divisions. Consuelo, a young woman raised in an orphanage, is mistaken for a seamstress at department store El Siglo – the exemplary bourgeois establishment of the era. Yet, rather than point out the error, she simply completes the job to an excellent standard, and is soon offered a full-time contract. However, her lowly background and lack of proper documentation, at a time of entrenched class-based prejudice, threaten to shatter her feminist dreams of empowerment and emancipation. When all seems lost, a possible lifeline emerges: might she be the daughter of famous painter Isidre Nonell and his gypsy muse? A film dedicated to all those women who bravely stirred the winds of revolutionary change at the start of the twentieth century.

Fri 27 Sep | 8.30pm | Regent Street Cinema | £12, conc. £11

PETRA (main picture)

dir. Jaime Rosales, with Bábara Lennie, Alex Brendemühl, Joan Botey | Drama | Spain | 2018 | 107 min | cert. 18 | in Spanish with English subtitles

Artist Petra arrives at the home of celebrated sculptor Jaume Navarro, ready to begin a creative residency. However, nothing is as it seems in this Catalan countryside. After the death of her mother, she is desperate for answers regarding identity and place, suspecting the boorish Jaume of being the father she never knew. Petra is soon embroiled in a series of intricate, spiralling secrecies, as the lives of Jaume’s wife Marisa, their photographer son Lucas, his housekeeper Teresa, Teresa’s husband Juanjo, and their son Pau forcefully collide in a malicious, absorbing battle of lies, myths, and broken memories. A Greek tragedy Spanish-style, complete with eerie, non-chronological shifts of time, Petra is the sixth feature from art-film director Jaime Rosales, a regular at Cannes for many years.

Followed by a Q&A with Bárbara Lennie with Prof. Maria Delgado (Royal School of Speech and Drama) | Sun 29 Sep | 4.00pm | Regent Street Cinema | £12, conc. £11

ENTRE DOS AGUAS | Between Two Waters

dir. Isaki Lacuesta, with Israel Gómez Romero, Fransisco José Gómez Romero, Óscar Rodríguez | Drama | Spain | 2019 | 136 min | cert. 12 | in Spanish with English subtitles

When filmmaker Isaki Lacuesta released The Legend of Time in 2006, part-fiction and part-documentary about gypsy brothers Isra and Cheíto, Spain’s daily El País labelled it a ‘miracle’. Fast-forward 12 years, and Between Two Waters finds the impish boys now matured into adult men with pressures, duties, and responsibilities. Having gone their separate ways since childhood, the pair are reunited once more in their hometown, the island of San Fernando. Isra is recently released from jail, desperate to win back his wife and three daughters, and Cheíto, having just finished a long mission with the marines, hungers to settle down with his family. As the brothers’ reunion sparks memories of their father’s violent death, a series of candid, piercing conversations reveals a profound sense of reconciliation, redemption, and fellow-feeling.

Sun 29 Sep | 4.00pm | Regent Street Cinema | £12, conc. £11

BASQUE WINDOW

EL INCREÍBLE FINDE MENGUANTE | The Incredible Shrinking Wknd

dir. Jon Mikel Caballero, with Iria del Río, Adam Quintero, & Nadia de Santiago | Drama, Time-Travel | Spain | 2019 | 93 min | cert. 18 | In Spanish with English subtitles

To celebrate her 30th birthday, Alba and her friends rent a woodland cottage for the weekend, eager to clink glasses, let loose, and live it up to the maximum. However, the festivities turn sour when Pablo, Alba’s boyfriend, unexpectedly breaks up with her, claiming that he needs time. In a neat sci-fi trick, Alba is suddenly frozen in her own time-loop, transported back to the car journey and condemned to relive the separation over and over – but with one hour less each time. Can she avoid the inevitable and persuade Pablo of her love, before it’s too late? It’s a countdown – and time is running out.

Written and directed by Jon Mikel Caballero, The Incredible Shrinking Wknd is a dark, poignant reimagination of Groundhog Day – but for break-ups.

MUDAR LA PIEL | The Spy Within 

dir. Ana Schulz, Cristóbal Fernández, with Juan Gutiérrez, Mingo Ràfols, Frauke Schulz | Spy Documentary | Spain | 2018 | 89 min | cert. PG | in Spanish with English subtitles

Juan Gutiérrez is a negotiator who strove to generate peace between ETA and the Spanish government during the most violent years of Spanish political conflict (1980s-90s). Roberto Flórez is his best friend and confidant – but also a double-crossing spy, who kept him under secret surveillance at all times. This is the first of countless betrayals, discrepancies, and misgivings at play in this captivating, slippery work – a documentary, but with a healthy dose of fiction – featuring intense, candid interviews with both men in turn. Winner of the 2017 MECAS Award at Las Palmas International Film Festival, first-time directors Cristóbal Fernández and Ana Schulz (Juan’s own daughter) create a deeply personal, moving film, exploring the powerful bonds of affection between parent and child, double-agent and mediator, traitor and comrade… and the best of friends.

Sat 28 Sep | 2.00pm | Regent Street Cinema | £12, conc. £11

70 BINLADENS | 70 Big Ones

dir. Koldo Serra, with Emma Suárez, Nathalie Poza, Hugo Silvia | Thriller | Spain | 2018 | 104 min | cert. 18| in Spanish with English subtitles

When little Alba is kidnapped, her mother Raquel has 24 hours to find €35,000 – or 70 €500 bills, known in Spain as binladens because everyone talks about them but never sees them. After a long, gruelling search, she finally locates a bank willing to loan the money, but halfway through the transaction two robbers suddenly burst in, taking everyone hostage and throwing her plans into disarray. Raquel must think fast, outfox her rivals, and save her daughter’s life – no matter the price. This third full-length feature from director Koldo Serra is a pulsating watch, with thrilling performances from female leads Emma Suárez and Nathalie Poza.

Sat 28 Sep | 8.45pm | Ciné Lumière | £13, conc. £11

LONDON SPANISH FILM FESTIVAL | CENTRAL LONDON | 25 -29 SEPTEMBER 2019

Shock of the Future **

Dir: Marc Collin | Music Drama, Biopic | France 84′

A girl reacts with nonchalance, petulance and finally flirty self-assurance when hired to compose a jingle for an advert in late 1970s Paris. Not much of a role model for aspiring female music-makers – especially when the sleazy old geezers that rally round to help her are clearly after one thing – which is why Marc Collin’s film is such a missed opportunity.

The Shock of the Future works best as a riff on the genesis of electronic funk and synthesised music from Pink Floyd to Michel Jarre and French disco drummer Cerrone (nice to revisit his one hit wonder ‘Supernature’) during the late 1970s early 1980s. Collin is a French musician and producer so has a keen feel for the vibe and the pioneering women who made it happen: Delia Derbyshire, Laurie Spiegel and Wendy Carlos. But he is clearly over-awed by Alma Jodorowsky – granddaughter of Alejandro – who plays sultry Ana, a chain-smoking budding composer whose sexy attributes ensure oodles of assistance from the men who swing by her humble bedsit where she idly twiddles knobs – sadly not theirs – on an impressive early synthesiser. The threadbare narrative and shallow characterisations don’t do the film a favour – especially for Jodorowsky’s subtle talents, but it’s short and sweet at only 84 minutes running time and provides a pleasurable heads up for that heady era. MT

OUT THIS FRIDAY, 13 September 2019

 

 

Antigone (2019) *** TIFF 2019

Wri/Dir: Sophie Deraspe | Drama Canada 109′
Sophie Deraspe’s provocative social realist re-imagining of the Sophocles’ Greek tragedy of the same name explores universal themes of sacrifice and responsibility through the story an immigrant woman and her desperate bid for justice in contemporary Montreal.

Nahema Ricci plays Antigone, the highly intelligent woman in question, with a powerful sense of her own identity but also a vulnerability that is touching and deeply affecting in this compassionate family drama that offers another snapshot of the refugee crisis, this time in Canada. Following the murder of their parents, Antigone, her sister Ismène (Nour Belkiria), and her brothers Étéocle and Polynice, find themselves taking refuge in a cramped apartment in the working class area,  joined by their grandmother Ménécée.

But another tragedy soon follows when Étéocle gets involved in the arrest of a petty criminal and drug dealer and takes a police bullet and ends up in prison. This sense of family responsibility is also one that lies at the heart of Martin Scorsese’s New York thrillers. Made on a considerably tighter budget this less ambitious film is also set on a smaller scale, although the ideas are just as relevant: the responsible family member feeling duty bound to rescue a relative in order to secure the future for everyone else. As a woman, Antigone is also forced to deal with a male-dominated judicial and penal system which she must appose with her own set of values.

Acting as her own cinematographer and ably assisted by a female led crew, Deraspe conjures up a palpable sense of Montreal and its immigrant community in this moving piece of indie cinema. MT

TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL | 5-15 SEPTEMBER 2019 

Phoenix (2019) ***

Dir: Camilla Strøm Henriksen | Cast: Ylva Bjørkaas Thedin, Maria Bonnevie, Sverrir Gudnason, Casper Falck-Løvås | Norway Drama 97′

This portrait of parental neglect sees a teenager taking responsibility for her younger brother as her selfish parents pursue their own dreams. At home in Stockholm Jill is looking forward to her 14th birthday. But the cake that arrives on the doorstep is for her narcissistic mother who is celebrating a job interview – another opportunity to showcase her second-rate art – and sidestepping Jill completely.

Henriksen handles Jill’s complex emotional arc in a convincing performance from Ylva Bjørkaas Thedin, and Marie Bonnevie is superb as the depressed mother. What doesn’t work here is the horror element of the story which fails to ring true with the rest of this enigmatic domestic dystopia.

Phoenix is Norwegian actor Camilla Strøm Henriksen’s feature directorial debut and is based on her own life experience. Jill is forced to grow up too quickly and becomes  increasingly manipulative as she juggles the family dynamic – her youth is a disaster waiting to happen in adulthood. More disappointment arrives in the shape of her musician father who showers her with presents only to prove he too has feet of clay. Henriksen leaves us to imagine the ending in this rather lightweight drama that nevertheless provides food for thought. MT

NOW ON RELEASE FROM FRIDAY, 13 SEPTEMBER 2019

Midnight Cowboy (1969) ***** Re-release

Dir.: John Schlesinger; Cast: Dustin Hoffman, John Voigt, Sylvia Miles, Brenda Vaccaro, Jennifer Salt; USA 1969, 113 min.

Based on James Leo Herlihy’s 1965 novel, scripted by Black List victim Waldo Salt, John Schlesinger’s 1969 film adaption of Midnight Cowboy is still a landmark in film history. Not only were gay men shown for the first time in mainstream history, the hero’s broken sexual identity (in the novel Joe Buck is raped by two men) is an equal first. Schlesinger excels like in his two other epics, Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) and Day of the Locust (1975), because he takes his time to develop his characters in all their ambiguity.

Joe Buck (Voigt) sees himself as stud, who leaves his small town Texas home for the glittering prizes waiting for him in New York. But Joe is anything but like John Wayne, his hero. Left by his mother with his granny, who looked after him affectionately, he was in love with Annie (Salt), a ‘nymphomaniac’, who is put into psychiatric care by her father. But Joe feels safe in his Cowboy outfit, bringing a brand new, all conquering identity to the Big Apple. And soon he picks up veteran sex worker Cass (Miles), having a great time – before he asks for money. Needless to say, that he is the one who pays – his bravado personality punctured immediately. Meeting small-time conman Ratso Rizzo (Hoffman), costs him more money and a further deflation of his Ego. He spends the winter in Rizzo’s unbelievable derelict squat, trying his luck as a rent boy, but mainly looking after the deteriorating Rizzo, whose tuberculosis is getting worse. After he meets Shirley (Vaccaro) at a sort of Warhol party, his luck seems to have changed. But soon the duo is back at the condemned flat. And again, Joe conjures up a magic cure for salvation: to finance a trip for two to Miami, he attacks and (perhaps kills) a customer. Alas, only one of them will arrive.

Midnight Cowboy is told like a latter-day Hardy novel, with Jude the Obscure a likely comparison. Like in most Hardy novels, poverty and (self) delusion lead to violence. Joe is the only one, falling for his macho image, and he pays for affection of the only love-object he has (Rizzo) by loosing him too. DoP Adam Holender’s images are dark and grey, (Rizzo’s flat) and a garish colour of glittering New York, for which nobody falls. The gay men Joe meets live in depraved circumstances, only a little better off than Joe. This is a feature of decline and deprivation, Joe is caught in his own spider web of dishonesty and deceit, the turmoil from Texas is following him. Unable to adjust to any reality, he is driven to self-distraction: he is Rizzo one step removed. In its total bleakness, Midnight Cowboy goes very much again the grain of a society, in which clean sex and clear sexual identities were the pillars of a positivistic consumer society, which does allow no deviation. This way, Schlesinger is ahead of the changes which were on its way. With Annie, Joe and Rizzo are a trio of victims of a society, whose celebrated superficial optimism was to collapse in the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement – closely followed by Stonewall. AS

OPENING AT BFI SOUTHBANK AND CINEMAS NATIONWIDE | 13 SEPTEMBER 2019

 

  

Nobadi (2019) *** Toronto Film Festival 2019

Dir: Kark Markovics | Drama, Austria 83’

This darkly amusing social satire premiering at this year’s TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL is the third outing for actor turned director Karl Markovics who is also turning out to quite a talent behind the camera winning awards at Cannes, Sarajevo and Zurich for his features Breathing (2011) and Superwelt (2015).

Stunningly captured on the wide screen and in crisply shot close-up his latest NOBADI has quite a few surprises up its sleeve in a story that seems at first like a less ambitious version of The Interpreter – two characters come up against each other from across the divide – but this moral fable soon takes a much darker direction plumbing the depths of the immigrant crisis for one young man from Afghanistan.

A pithy and sardonic script and a steely central performance from veteran Austrian actor Heinz Trixner make this a winner. He plays a curmudgeonly old buffer Robert Senft who grudgingly employs a desperate manual labourer down on his luck to help him dig a hole in his back yard to bury his dead dog. After beating him down on his hourly rate, he agrees to pay a measley three euros to the well-mannered Adib (gamely played by newcomer Borhanulddin Hassan Zadeh). But as works starts the old man’s character is revealed in all its complexity. Meanwhile Adib comes across as decent and biddable. But what happens next is both unexpected and tragic allowing Markovics to make some subtle but light-hearted digs at the sad state of affairs in his native Austria. MT

TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | 5-15 September 2019 WORLD PREMIERING ON SEPTEMBER 8th

 

 

White on White (2019)

Dir/Wri. Théo Court.   Spain/Chile/France/Germany. Drama. 1oo’.

South America’s Tierra del Fuego is the setting for this weirdly compelling drama telling an equally unsettling story against the background of colonialist brutality in late 19th century Chile.

Anchored by a magnetic performance from one of Chile’s leading acting talents Alfredo Castro (Rojo) this is an enigmatic film with suitably ambiguous characters. Castro plays Pedro, a photographer hired by a wealthy landowner to record his impending nuptials. But what starts as a seemingly straightforward gig soon develops into something sinister and otherworld as he finds himself drawn into a nightmarish scenario from which escape seems increasingly unlikely.

In his follow-up to Ocaso Théo Court takes us to the brink with a slow-burning mystery that chases its tale to the point of bewilderment, José Alayón’s striking widescreen cinematography capture the bleak snow-swept landscapes forming a chilling backdrop to this disquieting story  in the remotest corner of the Earth.

After painstakingly setting up his camera to photograph the timid pre-teen bride Sara (Ether Vega) in a series of alluring poses that hint at salaciousness. Pedro is then forced to languish in an isolated cabin awaiting further instructions from Mr Porter, an increasingly evasive employe, who never actually appears. The contrast between this vast wilderness and the claustrophobic interiors and oppressive characters is the crux of this fascinating film which keeps us in suspense until a shocking finale.

Co-scripting with Samuel M. Delgado, Court vaguely hints at arthouse paedophilia in his characterisation of Pedro, a man who has possibly overstepped the mark in his growing obsession for an innocent bride. You could also say he was just an artist keen to do his best in fulfilling his creative brief, but there’s something unsavoury about it all.

White on White makes an uncomfortable watch during these slightly scabrous portrait scenes. Things become even more questionable when Pedro persuades Sara’s governess Aurora (Lola Rubio) to bring the girl for another photo session at dawn. And what follows is worse. From being a respectable outsider, Pedro gradually becomes trapped in this dystopian community of ranchers who have been tasked by the absentee landowner to build an encampment and enslave the Indigenous Selkham people. Pedro eventually finds himself engaged in a more sinister commission, that of immortalising their massacres for posterity at this ‘important time in history’, as Porter describes it.

Although the Selkham people are naturally horrified, Mr Porter believes his civilising influence is somehow an act of heroism. And the final scene contrasts the absurdity of Pedro’s obsession with the compositing his shot with the vile nature of his subject matter. White on White shares a common vein with Lucrecia Martel’s Zama, and there are also echoes of Juaja here in the surreal and scary backwater that refuses to yield its exotic power to the misguided marauders in its midst. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 30 JUNE 2021 | ORIZZONTI PRIZE Winner BEST DIRECTOR | FIPRESCI PRIZE 2019

 

Ecstasy | Estasi (1932) Made in Prague Film Festival 2021

Dir.: Gustav Machaty; Cast: Hedy Kiesler-Lamarr, Aribert Moog, Zvonimir Rogoz, Leopold Kramer; Czechoslovakia 1932, 90 min.

Czech director/co-writer Gustav Machaty (1901-1963) paints a portrait of passionate love and jealousy, set in and around Prague in the early 1930s and based on the novel by Robert Horky.

A mixture of sound and silent film, Ecstasy would be remembered for its nude scenes rather than its cinematographic value or its bold feminist stance. Hedy Kiesler was the star turn – she would soar to the Hollywood firmament as Hedy Lamarr.

The drama opens as newly-wed couple Ewa (Kiesler) and the much older Emile (Rogoz) arrive home.  Emile fumbles with his keys, desperate for a night-cup. Pricking his finger while trying to help Ewa take off her necklace, his mood worsens and he reaches for the newspaper, ignoring his beautiful bride. Ewa leaves him and returns to the estate of her father (Kramer) where she skinny-dips in the lake, her horse running off with her clothes. Meanwhile Adam (Moog), a young engineer, working on the railway-line, catches the horse and returns her clothes in an encounter that leads to a torrid night of sex and the first female orgasm on screen: Ewa’s eyes are closed, her lips parted, whilst another shot shows her limp wrist, symbolically dropping the necklace with its pearls rattling to the floor. 

Emile realises the error of his ways and tries to make amends – but Ewa rejects him  – he then comes across Adam and gives him a lift in his car unaware to the tryst. But when he sees the necklace in Adam’s hands, Emile is distraught and commits suicide the same evening in a hotel where the couple are dancing. Ewa is shocked and abandons Adam. The finale pictures her happily cuddling a new-born baby.

Ewa’s search for passion is seen as a rightful pursuit, a stance against her selfish  husband. But Adam is neither her saviour nor her downfall. Ewa’s reputation survives intact, Adam comes across as a naïve country boy, fulfilled by his work on the land more than his affair with a woman, and merely the catalyst for Ewa’s emancipation. Ewa is not punished like Madame Bovary. She is a self-determining woman who has chosen pleasure above pain.

Produced for the German market, Ecstasy is certainly still very central European in tone, Vienna, Austria, and the old Habsburg Empire are still alive. The lack of dialogue is surprising: Ewa’s scenes with Emile and Adam are silent. At a time when men had the last word, Ewa proves that actions speak louder than words. But when she does speak – in the scene with her father – Ewa is in charge, telling him to lie to her ex-husband when the he phones. Her father asks: “Why do I have to lie?”, Ewa answering “So I have my peace”. 

The film premiered in Prague in January 1933, with Kiesler storming out of the theatre, feeling betrayed by the director and producer, who had promised that the nude scenes would be shot from far away, so that nobody would recognise her. In Germany, the feature was cut from the original length of 95 minutes to a mere 82. In the USA, Ecstasy was forbidden until 1940, when it was show in an even more edited version than in Germany. France was the only place where the original version is still shown even today.

Later, Kiesler’s husband, the arms dealer Fritz Mandle, would try to buy up all the copies of the film but without the negative, his efforts would be in vain – as were his attempts to hold on to his wife.

Shot by DoP Jan Stallich in intimate close-ups, the wider screen scenes at the railway, are edited by Antonin Zelenka in the way of the Russian montage features. Ecstasy would be Machaty’s last film in his homeland. He went to work in Germany and Italy, before returning to Hollywood, where he had learned his trade from Griffith and Von Sternberg in the 1920s. His film noir Jealousy (1945) is one of the gems of the genre. Machaty moved to Germany in 1951, teaching at the Munich Film School and directing his last feature Suchkind 312 in 1955. AS

Ecstasy with live overture by Anna Vöröšová / Sun 7 Nov, 3 pm

     

   

The Domaine (2019) *** Venice Film Festival 2019

Dir: Tiago Guedes. Portugal. 2019. 166mins

A slow-moving simmering saga that sees a discontented family’s fortunes ebb and flow in a vast estancia on banks of the Tagus where its macho patriarch holds sway challenged by forces from within and without.

Portuguese director Tiago Guedes maintains a masterful control of his three hour narrative. Full of unappealing characters who drink and chain-smoke their way through 45 years of Portuguese history. After opening scene set in 1946 the film gets underway in the wake of the death of statesman and prime minster Salazar who presided over the Estado Novo regime and famously fell off his deck chair in the summer of 1970 after suffering a stroke. This all ushers in Portugal’s ‘Carnation Revolution’ in April 1974, which led to an era of democracy, the film ending in September 1991.

The Domaine lacks the intensity or heft of a Nuri Bilge Ceylan drama so fails to hold our attention for nearly three hours but it is an accomplished work and benefits from the glowering magnetism  of its central character played by Albano Jeronimo who as Joao Fernandes presides over his ‘kingdom’ with a reptilian contempt for everyone around him, except his elegant black stallions and his little son Miquel.

Sandra Faleiro is equally snide as his wife Leonor, whose father is a high-ranking general, and knows she must compete with the other females in her household for her husband’s attentions which generate a hostile climate of competitive breeding amongst the women. Rosa (Ana Vilela da Costa) is one of them and is married to  Joao’s right hand man Joaquim (Miguel Borges) who runs the state.

Another key employee is the Communist tractor driver Leonel. The final act sees Joao greying as power slips between his fingers 1990s section, as 20-something Miguel, played by Joao Pedro Mamede, has become a drug-taking loser in a dismal world that festers in the restless shadows of its former pride. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2019

Atlantis (2019) **** Venice Film Festival 2019

Dir.: Valentyn Vasyanovych; Cast: Andriy Rymaruk, Liudmyla Bileka. Sergiy Katya; USA/Ukraine 2019, 104 min.

This third feature by Ukranian director/writer DoP Valentyn Vasyanovych (Kredens) is a bleak dystopian fable set in contemporary Eastern Ukraine, where anti-hero Sergiy battles not only his PTSD, but also a poisoned environment – literally and figuratively.

Atlantis is a difficult film to watch, and remains seared to the memory as it plays out mostly without dialogue, the roaming camera telling us all we need to know. Vasyanovych avoids sentimentality, his courageous protagonists having to face up to a hellish existence which is not of their own making.

This apocalyptic thriller opens with five male holograms dancing around menacingly. Cut to a reality, and a war-ravaged landscape where the rivers have been poisoned by the Russians. Sergiy (Rymaruk) and his friend Ivan (Katya) work in a smelting furnace which is soon to close. Ivan is so depressed with the futility of his existence he jumps into the burning steel lava. Sergiy, feeling guilty about his friend’s death later burns himself with a hot iron in his decrepit studio room. Atlantis shows how the deep bonds of love and homeland can help us to endure the most appalling situations, no matter how difficult the circumstances.

After the factory is shut, Sergiy takes as job as a driver for a mobile water tank, providing fresh supplies for soldiers and state employees. He is warned it will take several decades to clear the unexploded mines but things look up when he meets para-medic Katya (Bileka) who is helping to identify the many corpses still littering the countryside. Her car has broken down, and Sergiy tows her vehicle to the nearest town where we witness an exhumation performed by two pathologists. The whole scene is one of the most difficult of the entire feature, the medics going painstakingly about their business painstakingly detailing the decaying bodies. Surprisingly (or not), Sergiy is not particularly hungry afterwards, buy while Katya tucks into her food, he offers to help her on his weeks off. This work is not for the faint-hearted and she has to help him to get over the shock of the gruesome finds. Another stroke of luck comes when he saves the life of a woman who tuns out to be an ecologist for a worldwide organisation, and offers him a job abroad, “to start a new life”. But however gruelling, he prefers working with Katya, and when their vehicle breaks down, the camera zooms in from the outside through the torrents of rain, showing two deeply affected people who slowly fall for each other, their feelings an antidote to the horror of war. Vasyanovich leaves us to draw our own conclusions about this deeply affecting but enigmatic feature: “This is like a reservation for people like us, it would be hard to live anywhere else.” AS

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2019 | 28 – 7 August 2019

     

The King (2019) **** Venice Film Festival 2019

Dir. David Michôd. US/Australia. 2019. 133mins

David Michôd’s The King re-imagines history to give a rather intriguing version of the story of Henry IV’s least favourite son Prince Hal, a Prince Harry style character who mends his ways to become serious about the business of running the kingdom and bringing glory to England at the Battle of Agincourt.

Although there is no mention of Shakespeare here, all the traditions are respected, the costumes are magnificent and the battle scenes spectacular. Even though we know what happened on that fateful day, Michôd and his co-writer Joel Edgerton – who also stars as Sir John Falstaff – embellish the story to deliver a solemnly gripping firecracker of a film that will make you “Cry God! For Harry, England and St George” and Brexit too, if you’re so inclined.

Timothée Chalamet is sombre and rather thoughtful with a cut glass English accent in the style of a David Lean wartime hero. All peaky and pale as Hal, his transformation into a King, on the death of his father (Ben Mendelsohn), sees him exuding newfound charisma and integrity in a gentle way – Chalamet gives a performance of vulnerable allure lighting up every scene. The screen time shared with his trusted friend and ally Falstaff makes this one of the most engaging versions, Edgerton bringing a warm and witty confidence to his Sir John.

The trump card is played by Robert Pattinson as a sneering and flirty Dauphin with a tousled mop of hair and a perky French accent that would make Macron proud.

The elegant script allows plenty of time for philosophising as each powerful lord gives his liege the benefit of well-formed opinion as to the merits of spoiling for battle with France after the King is given a cricket ball as a coronation present by the Dauphin. Evidence of an assassination plot come to light courtesy of a courtier William (Sean Harris) – a decision he will live to regret: this sylph-like newly-crowned Monarch has a fist of iron and a steely resolve behind his boyish exterior, and this comes through in impetuous bursts as the story unfolds.

The battle scenes unleash their bloody mayhem with a hail of longbow arrows and a clash of steel armour and military might as blood soaks the muddy Autumn fields of Pas de Calais in 1415. The strategy is a good one explained calmly by Falstaff in his moment of glory.  This should be experienced on the large screen but sadly The King is bound for Netflix.

The female roles go to Lily-Rose Depp as the bony-faced French princess who makes her caustic intentions clear as Henry’s bride. Tara Fitzgerald has a cameo as the cantankerous  barmaid and thorn in the bibulous Falstaff’s side.

On the eve of battle he proclaims in a timely speech that still holds true today : “I die here or I die of the bottle in Eastcheap — I think this makes for a better story.” And given the parlous state of England’s care homes dying with glory seems a more sensible idea. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | 29 August – 7 September 2019

The Laundromat (2019) ** Venice Film Festival 2019

Dir: Stephen Soderbergh | Meryl Street, Gary Oldman, Sharon Stone, Antonio Banderas | US Drama 96’

Steven Soderbergh has decided on a comic-didactic treatment to tell the story of the ‘Panama Papers’ insurance scandal of 2016. But Laundromat feels more like a tedious economics lecture than an piece of enjoyable cinema. It all opens with an introduction from the dinner-jacketed partners of the firm Mossack Fonseca played by Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas with odd accents. Meryl Streep plays the archetypical middle-aged American tourist whose husband is drowned after a cruise boat accident. It soon emerges their holiday insurance is null and void due a multiple re-selling scam to avoid tax. Naturally Meryl is not going to let the insurers get away without laying down the law so embarks on a plucky quest for justice which leads her nowhere fast. Episodic and patchy, The Laundromat relies on breaking news intercuts and inter-titles with Streep pontificating about how the public has been let down by democracy and the powers that be. We all leave feeling harangued rather than entertained. MT 

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | 29 August – 7 September 2019

London Film Festival 2019

The 63rd edition of the London Film Festival takes place in various venues across the city. The celebration opens on the 3rd of October with THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF DAVID COPPERFIELD and closes on the 13th with Martin Scorsese’s long-awaited drama THE IRISHMAN which will go to Netflix after a brief run on the big screen.

In a year where 60 percent of the films are directed or co-directed by women, the Official Competition line-up includes the following titles

THE LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 3-13 OCTOBER 2019

The Truth (2019) *** Venice Film Festival 2019

Dir.: Kore-eda Hirokazu; Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche, Ethan Hawk, Clementine Grenier, Manon Clavel; France 2019, 106 min.

Japanese director/writer/editor Kore-eda Hirokazu follows his Cannes winner Shoplifters with a feature which could hardly be more French despite his Japanese background: The Truth is not only set in a circle of actors (demi-gods in France), it is also all about the profession itself, with a little bit of gossip and lies as spice. And it features a cast to die for.

Deneuve assumes her usual role as Matriarch. She has just written her auto-biography, and scriptwriter daughter Lumir (Binoche) and family: husband Hank (Hawk) and daughter Charlotte (Grenier) have arrived from New York to celebrate. Actually they have really come to rehash the past: family secrets, grudges and other repressed emotions. Fabienne has always put her career first, leaving Lumir with fellow actress Sarah before she drowned under the influence of alcohol. “She wanted to steal my daughter” is Fabienne’s comment. Lumir’s biological father is always short of cash Fabienne’s current husband has taken on the role of martyr, so has the butler, who goes off in a sulk because he has not been mentioned in Fabienne’s opus. Lumir and Hank have an uneasy relationship, with him having been in rehab more than once. “Lets say he is a better lover than actor” tells Lumir, which may not mean much, since Hank himself believes that he is an second rate TV thespian. And there is the young starlet Manon (Clavel) who acts with Fabienne in her current feature, who reminds all of the famous Sarah.Needless to say, that Fabienne wins out – all he little white lies are swept under the carpet.

THE TRUTH is fun to watch, not surprising considering the cast. Kore-eda has developed a good feel for the rather superficial milieu, but he lets everyone get away with a slap on the wrist. Eric Gautier’s images are lush, particularly Fabienne’s villa is real property porn  – in spite of the prison build directly behind it. The film-in-film  sequences remind us of Truffaut’s Day for Night – which could be said for the whole endeavour. Hardly groundbreaking, but done with tender love for the cinema and its protagonists. AS

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 28 August – 7 September 2019

Scarborough (2018) ***

Writ/Dir: Barnaby Southcombe |Cast: Jodhi May, Jordan Bolger, Jessica Barden, Edward Hogg | UK Drama | 84′

Freed from the confines of the stage, for which it was written by Fiona Evans, Barnaby Southcombe’s seaside love story soars and never loses its footloose fun reflected in Ian Leggett’s energetic hand-held camera and limpid widescreen seascapes. It’s a more lightweight film that his standout noir I, Anna that starred his mother Charlotte Rampling as an enigmatic femme fatale. But his work is always charismatic and entertaining.

Intimate in scope but universal in its subject matter, SCARBOROUGH is a sensory exploration of love through a series of flirty and at times moving vignettes rather than a gripping narrative, and some of the dialogue feels cliched-ridden, but its lightly touching and thoughtful in its modest running time. And when people are coupling up or falling out, glib cliches often pour out volubly through guilt or even lack of imagination.

It sees two couples pursue impossible love stories. Both are generations apart and its clear from the offset that neither will be enduring. In love, longevity often trumps passion, and both the older lovers are in committed relationships that have stood the test of time, despite their downfalls, that seem connected to infertility on both sides.

The narrative sashays between the two couples. Jodhi May is lithe and luminous as a 45 year-old teacher in love with her muscular pupil Daz (Jordan Bolger), whose puppy-like naive enthusiasm could clearly wane. They’ve only actually spent 22 hours together during their snatched lunches and afternoon escapes. But she’s tried for years to get pregnant, and when the result comes through her demeanour changes. May brings considerable complexity to her role, despite its confines. His enthusiasm seems to dampen her ardour, and her maturity as a woman is shown through her skill as an actor.

The other two, Jessica Barden (Mindhorn) and Edward Hogg (Jupiter Ascending), are celebrating her birthday. He’s much older than the giggly twenty-something. Barden has a more difficult role and still feels slightly unconvincing. One always gets the impression she’s a kid and her duplicity makes things worse, especially with lines like “get her off the ‘phone, she’s proper ruining my day”, when he tries sensitively to split up with her girlfriend Chris over the ‘phone. This also seems to be the catalyst for some passionate love-making, yet great sex doesn’t always lead to commitment. Daniel York is particularly amusing in as the hotel manager in this extremely watchable drama. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE. | PREMIERED DURING WARSAW FILM FESTIVAL | 12-21 October 2018

 

 

The Souvenir (2018) *****

Dir/Wri: Joanna Hogg | Tilda Swinton, Tom Burke, Honour Swinton Byrne | Drama UK | 100′

Joanna Hogg is the only living female filmmaker who portrays a particular English contemporary milieu. Usually creative, invariably white and well-educated, these characters are liberal in outlook and mostly live in London. With such unique sensibilities and vision she is able to understand and convey as certain type of middle class angst (borne out of having to do the right thing, irrespective of personal choice). She did it gracefully in Unrelated (2007), Archipelago (2010) and Exhibition (2013), And she does it peerlessly again here with The Souvenir, a nuanced and delicately drawn story of addiction and strained relationships that very much echoes its time and place: the late 1980s – although it was inspired and takes its name from  Fragonard’s painting, a motif that runs through the film.

This all revolves around Julie, a dark horse and an English rose (earnestly played by Tilda Swinton’s daughter Honour Swinton Byrne) who is tentatively making a career for herself in film school while awkwardly becoming involved with her first proper boyfriend. Clearly she is talented but lacks real confidence – both in love and in life – largely due to a repressed English background. Although her mother is loving and wonderful there are clear hints that certain things were simply not discussed at home, but still waters nevertheless run deep on the feelings front. Hogg relies on an improvisational approach, stripping away clichés to distill the emotional content of each scene, often with minimal dialogue and relying on body language and atmosphere. 

Women of that era will remember the silent voids during a date where the silence spoke volumes, often marking the beginning or the end of another tortuous romance with a man who could not express himself, and chose merely to back away and then reappear with pleadings and desperate often incoherent bids to meet again. Often covering this with bluster and demeaning put-downs, Tom Burke gives a priceless performance as Anthony, a man whose emotional range does Attila the Hun a disservice when it comes to affairs of the heart. “You’re a freak. You’ll always be last,” he tells Julie. And Hogg is clearly mining these fraught memories too with this doomed romantic pairing.

Julie presses on undeterred, internalising her feelings, and clearly drawn to public school Anthony through some atavistic genetic link. Because he purports to be ‘from the right background’ – he is clearly approved of by her parents – the very mild-mannered Tilda and her on screen husband.William. One of of the best scenes sees Richard Ayoade playing a ‘cutting edge’ filmmaker and deftly spilling the beans that Anthony is a heroin addict. “I find doing heroin to be mainstream behaviour,” he jokes to a rather bewildered Julie. And we discover she’s funding his habit with donations gleaned from her mother, who does seem alarmed at Julie’s rising expenditure for film-school supplies. In a caddish moment Anthony even roughs up Julie’s Notting Hill flat, faking a burglary to raise funds for his addiction. Drugs make psychopaths and monsters of addicts. And Julie is a victim too, of love. But she keeps a stiff upper lip. Endearing scenes with her parents are a triumph in their candid intimacy, and make us reflect on the placid generosity of the British. 

Julie and Anthony share a deceptively satisfying sex life behind closed doors, shown in 16mm-styled footage that follows them on an impromptu romantic break to Venice, funded unflinchingly by Julie. She epitomises the female lack of confidence of that era, back-footed by her desire to appear cool and inclusive when pitching for a film school project, and desperate to fit in with the others. She emerges lonely and rather misunderstood, though keen to do the right thing. And the comforting presence of her concerned on screen mother resonates throughout, you stifle a snigger when she utters the words: “Anthony was taken ill in the Wallace Collection”. 

Joanna Hogg will soon embark on the second part of this semi-biopic affair with Robert Pattinson joining the cast. The story of a young filmmaker finally making her way is something to look forward to. MT

OUT ON 30 AUGUST 2019 AT CURZON CINEMAS

Psykosia (2019) Undiscovered festival gems

Dir.: Marie Grahto Sorensen | Cast: Lisa Carlehed, Victoria Carmen Sonne, Trine Dyrholm, Bebiane Ivalo Kreutzmann; Denmark/Finland 2019, 87 min.

Danish director/co-writer Marie Grahto had great success with her medium-length films, particularly Teenland. Her first feature film Psykosia, is an enigmatic story set in a psychiatric ward, where the limits of patient/doctor relationships are tested to the full.

When middle-aged Viktoria (Carlehed) enters a psychiatric institution ran by Dr. Anna Klein (Dyrholm) to help with a particular case, we can’t help finding the environment and the relationship between the two odd. The whole place has a distinct mid-twentieth century twist making it feel like a place lost in time.

Viktoria is a researcher specialising in suicide, but she has no clinical experience so it’s surprising that Dr. Klein employs her at all. The only patient Viktoria will look after is a teenage girl, Jenny Lilith (Viktoria Carmen Sonne of Holiday fame), who has a history of suicide attempts, and so far has allowed none of the therapists to come close to her.

Jenny is close to another patient, Zarah (Kreutzmann), the two of them have been hospitalised together on numerous occasions, and they even end up sharing a bath, the water turning red after Jenny slashed her arm. Jenny tells Viktoria “death is purity, in death you are free”. Their therapeutic sessions have also helped the women to bond, but one gets the impression this is due to transference, Viktoria trying to get to Jenny via self-disclosure, mentioning her own strict upbringing.

In a chapel, next to an enormous abandoned church, Viktoria tells Jenny “that psychoanalysis is a form of art, like this chapel. After Viktoria tries to hang herself on several occasions, claiming her thoughts of suicide “can be a comfort, keeping you alive”.

When Zarah commits suicide, Dr. Klein asks Viktoria to tell Jenny the truth, but the former is unwilling, not wanting to risk the therapeutic progress she has made with her patient. Dr. Klein, looking out of the window like a threatening Super-Ego, seems to will Viktoria to make the announcement, just before the denouncement of the mysterious conundrum.

There are many coded clues to what is going on here: Jenny’s full name is Lilith, a wanton woman in Jewish mythology; Anna Klein is an amalgamation of Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, founder and rivals of theories in child development. And certainly the closeness and identification between Viktoria and Jenny is a play on transference, used by analysts to get close to patients – but leaving them often helpless when patients use counter-transference to draw the analyst in.

Subtle and nuanced performances from a strong female cast, DoP Catherine Pattinama Coleman (part of an all-women crew) using her long takes in the institutional corridors to mesmerising effect, recalling the atmosphere in Kubrick’s The Shining. Music by Schubert (Der Leiermann) and the Francoise Hardy song Il est trop loin’ help to create an atmosphere of utter bewilderment, where the borders between reality and spirituality, patients and analysts are not the only things breaking down. Sheer genius. Shame the film is still waiting for a UK release. AS

PREMIERED Venice Film Festival 2019

Cat in the Wall (2019) **** Locarno Film Festival 2019

Dir: Mina Mileva and Vesela Kazakova | Drama | 

Award-winning Bulgarian duo Mina Mileva and Vesela Kazakova are no strangers to controversy. Their popular award-winning documentary Uncle Tony, Three Fools and the Secret Service was widely condemned by the authorities for exposing the corrupt totalitarian regime in their homeland.

Undeterred, they have pushed on with another potential firecracker in the shape of Cat in the Wall, based on real events in a Peckham council estate as experienced by a professional Bulgarian single mother trying to make it in London. This English-language sink-estate drama playfully deals with inflammatory themes such a Brexit, gentrification and the pitfalls of home-owning through the endearing tale of a wayward cat who also reserves his right to roam into pastures new.

Irina Atanasova plays the main character Irina, an architect who has bought and renovated a council flat in a Peckham Estate where she lives with her young son Jojo (Orlin Asenov) and her brother Vlado (Angel Genov) a well-qualified historian who has turned his hand to installing Satellite dishes. Hoping to leave  the corrupt post communist set-up in Bulgaria to start a new life in Britain she soon discovers the grim reality of Britain.

Naturalistic performances from a cast of non-pros and experienced thespians and a refreshing script are the strengths of this light-hearted bit of social realism, piqued by dark humour. Utterly refusing to cow-tow to the usual Loachian style of Tory-bashing this film still exposes some uncomfortable truths in a storyline that builds quite a head of steam and some set-tos that make it tense but also thoroughly grounded in reality.

Irina, Vlado and Jojo inject a much-needed breath of fresh air into a hackneyed scenario, where they uncover the usual set-backs to living social housing – the urine-drenched lift is a classic example. But soon they find themselves face to face with a ginger tabby cat, but altering adopting for Jojo they are soon accused of animal theft by a neighbouring family.

As an educated immigrant who is well placed to comment on the Bulgaria and Brexit-Britain, Irina comes across as a sympathetic and thoroughly likeable, eking out an existence that sees her pitching for architectural schemes while supplementing her meagre salary with bar work. Meanwhile she notices how most of her neighbours are living on generous state benefits that make finding paid work nonsensical.

“I didn’t come here to be a leech,” says the politically-savvy Irina who may well prove unpopular with diehard socialists in the audience. The recent words of Trump also echo: ‘if she doesn’t like it she can go back home”. And then there is her little son Jojo who is trying to make the best of his rather isolated existence as an immigrant child with no local friends, who thinks he has found one in Goldie.

The directors maintain their distance, serving up all this near the bone controversy with such a lightness of touch that it is difficult to take offence in a social satire that mostly feels even-handed. The character of Irina’s neighbour Camilla is a case in point. Played by veteran actress Camilla Godard she brings a gentleness to her part as a drug-smoking depressive who, it later emerges, bought the cat as a present for her special needs granddaughter, another example of the more hapless denizens of the estate. And while we feel for Camilla she also conveys an ambivalence that somehow cuts both ways. We can sympathise but also condemn her. Cat in the Wall is a clever and highly enjoyable drama that really shines a light on some shadowy issues in the home we call ‘broken Britain’ . MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL | 7-17 AUGUST 2019

Kaleidoscope (2016) **** Home Ent release

Dir.: Rupert Jones; Cast: Toby Jones, Anne Reid, Sinead Matthews, Cecilia Noble; UK 2016, 100 min.

British director Rupert Jones keeps it in the family with this surreal and nightmarish psychological thriller, enhanced by yet another standout performance from his brother Toby as the tortured anti-hero.

Set in a large London Housing Estate, where Carl (Jones) lives in a pokey flat – a throwback to the 70s. We learn that he has moved in a year ago after being released from prison where he’s done  time for a serious crime. One morning Carl wakes up to find the body of a young woman in his bathroom. His memory serves up a meeting with her, she was called Abby (Matthews), they danced and he might have locked her in the bathroom. When he walks up the stairs, the staircase becomes a kaleidoscope, it seems to strangle him in continuous twists and turns. The police show up, and so does a helpful neighbour, Monique (Noble). Toby is convinced of some wrong-doing – but can’t think what, exactly. When his mother Aileen (Reid) invites herself over- very much against his will, the images of Abbey and Aileen mingle, Toby certainly suffers from displacement activity – a repressed guilt complex, exposed in the final reveal.

This is 10 Rillington Place meets Kafka’s The Trial: spookily Jones even looks like Richard Attenborough as the murderous landlord. The grimy atmosphere in the flat is another parallel – but while Attenborough’s John Christie was sheer evil, Carl is suffering from past trauma. He hectically tries to cover up the traces of whatever he might have done; objects, he wants to destroy or find, becoming his enemies. Carl is paralysed: whenever he meets authority, be it the police, or his boss at the garden centre, he goes into meltdown. His anxiety grows the longer Aileen stays in his flat. And when she reveals she has bone cancer and wants to spend a lottery win on a last family visit to Canada with her son, Carl is close to breaking point.

Kaleidoscope is crucially “a psychological thriller, a tragedy, but not a horror feature”. The score, using a harp concerto by the German/American composer Albert Zabel, underlines Carl’s feeling of tension. The whole film resonates with Hitchcock,  particularly in the way the staircase is shot. It also brings to mind Bernhard Hermann’s score for Hitchcock’s Vertigo: But whilst Scottie was suffering from Vertigo (and love sickness), Carl is haunted by a past he has yet to understand fully. DoP Philipp Blaubach (Hush) creates elliptical camera movements, showing Carl permanently fleeing from himself, the long tracking shots mark him like a hunted animal. Overall, Jones has made the most of his limited budget, avoiding any gore, and staying consistently on a psychological level. AS

 On UK digital platforms on 12 August 2019, followed by its DVD release on 23 September 2019. The cast includes Sinead Matthews (Jellyfish), Cecilia Noble (Danny and the Human Zoo) and a stand out turn from national treasure Anna Reid, MBE (Last Tango in Halifax).

 

 

 

Jeremiah Terminator LeRoy (2018) ***

Dir/Wri: Justin Kelly | Cast: Kristen Stewart, Laura Dern, Diane Kruger, Jim Sturgess | US Biopic Dram | 108′

The story behind the literary persona JT LeRoy, created by American author Laura Albert, has certainly had some cinematic mileage. Albert took part in the documentary Author: The JT Leroy Story (2016) that screened a few years ago at the BFI Flare’s Film Festival, Here she is played by Laura Dern in Justin Kelly’s slick and lively re-imagining of one of the most brazen literary hoaxes known to mankind. Albert published three books in the early years of the 21st century, under her nom de plume JT LeRoy. They explored the life of a sexually confused teenage boy, abused in childhood. A gamine Kristen Stewart plays her sister-in-law, Savannah Knoop, who comes to stay and ends up being persuaded by Albert to pose as JT for a promotional photo session. And it doesn’t end there. Dern and Stewart give luminous performances in this seamlessly pleasurable and darkly amusing drama that explores themes of gender fluidity, moral ambiguity and fraud. MT
NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE | premiered at BFI FLARE FILM FESTIVAL | 21 -31 MARCH 2019

The Science of Fictions (2019) Locarno Film Festival 2019

Indonesia, Malaysia, France  ·  2019  ·  DCP  ·  Colour and Black and White  ·  106′  ·  o.v. Indonesian

Yosep Anggi Noen (Solitude) marks the 50th anniversary of the moon landings, with a curious re-imagined fable that translocates the landmark event to Indonesia.

But this strange tale has a broader context in the scheme of things, reflecting on social injustice and corruption not just in his homeland but everywhere else where truth is clouded in ‘fake news’ and people disappearing from the face of the earth during sinister political regimes.

Noen’s  adventurous premise plays out through the story of a man called Siman who  inadvertently witnesses a foreign film crew shooting a fake moon landing in a sandy farming backwater. The authorities quickly step in and Simon’s tongue is removed to prevent him spilling the beans. What’s worse, his neighbours pour scorn on his desperate attempt to broadcast his experience – by walking in slow-motion wearing a handmade space suit – and consign him to the loony-bin, turning him into a modern day village idiot.

But the poor man’s brush with reality haunts him. And although fake news is very a much a buzz word at the moment, it is by no means a new phenomenon – the massaging of fact has been going on for decades, not only but especially in Indonesia where the bloody coup of 1965 was completely buried from the media. Conversely, there are still conspiracy theories floating around claiming that the Moon landings were actually faked by NASA with the help of Stanley Kubrick (his 2001, a Space Odyssey proved he had the lenses and technological knowhow to bring it all off), amongst other collaborators, and even more outlandishly, that the Holocaust never actually happened.

In a similar vein but more ambitious and dramatically successful is Agnieszka Holland’s recent Berlinale thriller Mr Jones that chronicles a British investigative journalist’s efforts to expose 1930s Holodomor. It does seem to prove the saying that “Let he who shouts the loudest by heard first”. And although Yosep Anggi Noen’s film doesn’t quite match up to Ms Holland’s spectacular mise on scene  it offers nevertheless a worthwhile contribution to the ‘fake news’  canon, despite its flawed finale. But you only have to go to social platforms such as twitter and facebook to realise that misinformation is more dangerous than ignorance. Just because only one person experienced reality, is doesn’t make any less real, even if that person is a simple farmer in the middle of Indonesia. MT

SPECIAL MENTION AWARD | LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL | 7-17 AUGUST 2019

 

The World Ends | O fim do Mundo (2019) **** Locarno Film Festival 2019

Dir: Basil da Cunha | Crime drama | Portugal 107′

Basil da Cunha is back with a woozily haunting realist revenge drama of Lisbon low-lifes in the badass backwaters of Reboleira. What starts as a roaming review of this close-knit community made up of a cast of locals and non-actors, gradually gets under the skin of its despicable central character Spira. Recently released from a remand home with a string of crimes ‘as long as your arm’, he has gone back to the house he shares with his father’s girlfriend. The area is being bulldozed, and the locals are slowly losing their ramshackle homes in the hope of being re-housed by money from the EU. But they still desperately hold on to their old possessions (even lavatories and toasters). And once darkness falls they continue to rant and rage with each other while partying and drinking the night away.

Although da Cunha has upper his game since 2013, once again, we are back in After the Night territory, musing over the rights and wrongs of this Creole slum – the women desperately trying to keep the families together while the men have the upper hand and often resort to petty crime to make a living. And da Cunha lays the blame on government cut-backs – and they are clearly not pulling their weight as far as public services are concerned – but that does not mean people should break the law according to Spira’s flirty step-mother who is keen to keep him on the straight and narrow with her ‘crime doesn’t pay’ diatribe – but she’s gradually losing the battle. Spira sees himself as head of the household despite being only 18 and incapable of even fetching her two young children from school. To make matters worse he has no time to make an honest living, he’s too busy hanging with his friends Chandi and drug-dealing Giovani.

Gradually a sketchy plot emerges from the party-fuelled storyline: Spira’s arch rival and gang-leader Kikas is far from pleased to see him back in the ‘hood, particularly since Spira has torched his car, for no apparent reason other than boredom. So Kikas wacks him over the head with some piping demanding he pay for his misdemeanour, but Spira has other ideas. Meanwhile, he’s falling in love with another lost soul in the shape of teenage mother Lara (Lara Cristina Cardoso).

Da Cunha and his Dop Rui Xavier create alluring images amid the pitiful slums of this squalid part of Portugal’s capital city where the glittering nightscapes seem magical in contrast with the poverty. A sombre organ score often elevates this drama despite its sordid subject-matter. Even the affair between Spira and Lara resonates with a palpable chemistry. Their love is a thing of beauty, like a diamond in the dust. But despite this often mesmerising makeover, you just can’t like these people. MT

LOCARNO FIOLM FESTIVAL | 7-17 AUGUST 2019

 

 

Technoboss (2019) Locarno Film Festival 2019

Dir: Joao Nicolau | Miguel Lobo Antunes | Portugal/France | Drama 112mins

Joao Nicolau’s musical bittersweet tragedy could be described as the sentimental swan song of a technophobe – quite literally. It witnesses the slow death of a salesman, but this Willy Loman is defiantly not going to give up without a struggle. Luis Rovisco (Lobo Antunes) is an endearing old buffer who is nearing retirement after dedicating his life to one company. His marriage is over so a paperback book keeps him company on lonely nights on the road, when he’s not bursting into impromptu bouts of song at every opportunity.

Naturally, he suffers the usual aches and pains of late middle age. And rather like Victor Meldrew he finds technology challenging to say the least: bank codes and car-parking barriers often get the better of him. But he’s no fool when it comes to dealing with old-fashioned paperwork and his verbal dexterity and negotiating skills serve him well and could run rings around many a digital native when it comes to servicing his clients.

Newcomer Miguel Lobo Antunes throws himself into the role with gusto and is totally unselfconscious in this inventive musical hybrid – which takes a bit of getting used to, and may not appeal to everyone with its slightly 1970s look. Although the film is overlong, Nicolau’s characterisation keeps us engaged because Luis feels like a real person – he may even be someone you know. His natural joie de vivre and charisma is infectious as the story wears on, Luis embodying the ideal salesman with his positive manner. And when he meets up again with a previous flame in the shape of a rather reluctant Lucinda (Luisa Cruz), who works in one of his regular haunts romance may even be on the cards again: If he can close any sale, let’s hope it’s this one. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL | COMPETITION | 7 -17 AUGUST 2019

 

Maternal | Hogar (2019) Locarno Film Festival 2019 | Special Mention

Dir: Maura Delpero | With Lidya Liberman, Agustina Malale, Isabella Cilia, Alan Rivas, Livia Fernan, Marta Lubos, Renata Palminiello | Italy, Argentina | 91′

There are so many worthwhile features coming out of South America at the moment, particularly by women filmmakers, and Maternal is just one of them making its debut here at Locarno. With a cast of newcomers and a predominantely female crew, Delpero delicately explores the importance of secure start in life, and shows how this need not necessarily come from the birth mother.

Elegantly framed and quietly moving, Maura Delpero’s female centric story revolves around a group of frustrated teenage mums Lu and Fati who live in the calm confines of a religious shelter in Buenos Aires where novice Sister Paola has recently arrived from Rome to take her final vows.

Delpero quickly establishes the contrast between the lives of the nuns and their unruly counterparts who live upstairs. While the ‘morally loose’ girls have clearly fallen on hard times, and are unable to support their kids on their own, the nuns avoid judging them but are by now means easygoing, spending their time quietly in prayer, providing a stable environment where the kids can be looked after and given a Christian start in life. Pregnant Fati tries to keep herself to herself in the room she shares with the promiscuous tattooed Lu who has clearly gone off the rails and shows little interest in her adorable little daughter Nina. The other girls are vulgar, rowdy and competitive and although they are allowed to let off steam at ‘party nights’, they often come to blows which each other, to the exasperation of the nuns.

A bond soon develops between Nina and Paola who steps into to fill the maternal vacuum left by Lu’s absence – she is more interested in sexual exploits outside the Convent and leaves one night. Nina is very much in need of love and attention and a unsettling atmosphere gradually develops as she grows more attached to Sister Paola – now ordained – who has a moral obligation to stay neutral, particularly as Lu resents the growing closeness between the nun and her daughter when she returns.

As the story reaches its stunning denouement Delpero relies less and less on dialogue eliciting convincing naturalistic performances from her largely inexperienced cast. And the final scenes play out with extraordinary serenity given the brooding tension, as once again Sister Paola is put to the test. MT

LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2019 | 7 -17 AUGUST 2019  | SPECIAL MENTION AWARD

Adolescentes | Adolescence (2019)

Dir.: Sebastien Lifshitz; Documentary; France 2019, 135 min.

Five years in the making Sebastien Lifshitz’ longterm observation of two unrelated teenagers from the small town of Brive-la-Gaillarde (Corrèze) is an illuminating study of human development, and through their personal stories, a snapshot of life in France between 2013 and 2018.

Emma and Anaïs come from very different backgrounds: middle-class Emma lives with working parents who are always stressed-out by the demands of their jobs, particularly her mother who hothouses her at school, pushing for top marks in a conflict that runs through the whole film. Plump Anaïs has an obese mother who tries, unsuccessfully, to make her daughter diet. With two younger siblings to look after Anaïs rarely sees her father due to his shift work. Schoolwork dominates their lives: Both teens spend most of their time worrying about exam results. The French education system has many cut-off points, like the old 11plus in the UK, forcing the kids to pass endless tests to qualify for the next stage. Emma has her eye on being in dance or theatre; Anaïs hopes to become a Kindergarten teacher.

In the summer holidays, Emma is packed off to her family’s holiday home to skate-board and enjoy the time off. But for Anaïs there is no time for play – domestic work taking the place of her studies – she has to help her mother whose health gradually deteriorates due to cancer. In January 2015, France is rocked by the killing of Charlie Hebdo journalists. Anaïs reacts in a mature way to the killings, defending ordinary Muslims, and citing the Muslim supermarket clerk who saved Jews by hiding them from the Islamist attackers. She is adamant that organised religion is to be blamed for many wars.

Meanwhile, both teenagers do well at school, passing their exams. Although she was worried about failing, Anaïs gets better marks than Emma. Both chose vocational careers, and Anaïs is interested in teaching infants, there is a warning not to get too close to the kids. She will later change course and chose geriatric care: ”having grown up a lot”. Affairs of the heart are similarly traumatic for both girls with both suffering in their first attempts at dating.

The Balaclan concert massacre in November 2015  brings shock waves through their school life once again. Emma is slacking a bit– and her mother is not pleased – Anaïs’ grandmother dies, and she is caught in the crossfire with her brother Tiimeo. Meanwhile Emma and her mother continue their slanging matches, although her acting is going well. She gravitates towards becoming a Director of Photography, or film director – driving her to despair. The reaction to Macron’s election victory in 2017 is very different in both households: Emma’s father talks about Mitterand’s victory in 1981, and the great political involvement of his generation;  Emma is less enthusiastic “As long as it is not Le Pen, it’s OK”. But there is despair in Anaïs’ household: father and daughter slumping onto the sofa claiming “It’s all for the Rich”.

With the final examinations round the corner, Anaïs mother makes a last attempt to prevent her daughter from leaving – but in vain. The results again show Anaïs getting better results than Emma, finishing with Merit. Emma only has one offer – from a university in Paris – to study film, her mother showing her disappointment in the strongest possible way. The girls meet up for a goodbye chat near the lake. Both complaining that the “Fourteen-year-olds of today seem to have slept with half the South/West coast”. They both even contemplate moving back to Brive to bring up their kids.

This personal history lesson is luminously photographed by Antoine Parouty and Paul Guilhaume, with director Lifshitz always looking over the shoulder of the main protagonists, picking up every detail and nuance in a naturalistic tour de force. Despite its lengthy running time of over nearly three hours, Adolescence is an engrossing and valuable endeavour, documenting adolescence from a female perspective, informing and entertaining in equal parts. AS

GRAND JURY PRIZE WINNER | MY FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL 2021 | LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL PREMIERE | SEMAINE DE LA CRITIQUE AUGUST 2019     

 

 

 

Instinct (2019) Locarno Film Festival 2019

Dir: Halina Reijn | Cast: Carice van Houten, Marwan Kenzari, Betty Schuurman, Marie-Mae van Zuilen, Pieter Embrechts, Ariane Schluter, Maria Kraakman, Tamar van den Dop, Robert de Hoog, Juda Goslinga | Holland, Psychodrama 103′

In this vicious prison drama a hospital psychiatrist and a violent rapist score points off each other – but who is chasing whom? Not an original idea but a brilliant riff on sexual in a film holds you in its uncomfortable grasp and positively radiates their palpable chemistry right through to the fizzing finale. But crucially there is nothing titillating about what happens between them and many will find what happens between them difficult to watch.

In her debut the Dutch theatre actor turned director takes on a tricky theme – and it doesn’t always work out. Although we are led to believe that Nicoline has fallen for Idris (Kenzari), clearly the feelings are mutual, and the criminal has had a lifetime to hone his abusive skills, but animal attraction shoots from the hip, rather than the intellect.

It all kicks off when Nicoline (van Houten), a rather blasé prison therapist at the top of her game, arrives at the squeaky clean seaside internment centre to deal with the transitional parole of a convicted sex offender. Although she’s keen to get on with the assignment, you get the impression there is a void in her personal life: during the induction interview her gaze drifts off in the direction of a travel poster. Clearly she’s looking for something beyond her work – but what?

Sexual sparks fly when she meets her patient Idris. Maintaining a professional approach is clearly going to be difficult in the face of this potent attraction. It doesn’t help that her only bedfellow is her mother (Schurmann), who insists on sleeping with her when she stays over in the luxury flat Nicoline occupies alone. She’s a bit too touchy feely for comfort.

Idris (Kenzari) is a mercurial character, his cheeky grin belying a nasty temper. And Nicoline tunes into this and disagrees with the other staff about the merit of his impending release back into the community. In the stark and clinical rooms where the patient and doctor meet, Reijn relies on body language and atmosphere rather than dialogue to drive the intriguing narrative forward. But what little dialogue there is – crafted by writer Esther Gerritsen – works well. And Idris’ lines expertly written lines also convey the psychological buttons he is used to pushing to get the right reactions from Nicoline. Clearly he wants her, but he wants to punish her too, and his machievellian style is learned behaviour from childhood. We find out nothing of his past, or the exact nature of his crimes, Reijn focusing on the here and now in this intimately-drawn games of wits and wiles.

Kenzari has an easier role than van Houten and he plays it convincingly. For her, it’s more of a complex role, and one that requires a great deal of subtlety, yet the subtext of her emotional arc is easy to understand. She needs to internalise her feelings, yet keep them brewing under the surface, and van Houten does this with instinct. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2019 | VARIETY PIAZZA GRANDE AWARD

 

The Fever | A Fevre (2019) Bfi player

Dir: Maya Da-Rin | Cast: Regis Myrupu, Rosa Peixoto, Johnatan Sodré, Kaisaro Jussara Brito, Edmildo Vaz Pimentel, Anunciata Teles Soares, Lourinelson Wladimir |Brazil/ France/Germany 98′ Tukano/Portuguese

Maya Da-Rin’s stunning feature debut is a beguiling exploration of cultural identity seen through the eyes of a modest indigenous Brazilian Indian torn between Manaus, the port city where he works as a security guard, and the call of the wild in the Amazon village of his birth.

We first meet 45 year old Justino – newcomer Regis Myrupu – going through the daily grind: a bus takes him in the early morning to start his first day in the new job where he is almost dwarfed by the enormous containers he will guard in the dockyard. Back home at night he joins his family in a welcoming ramshackle dwelling where they eat dinner together. Although he is now a widow, his adult daughter still lives at home and is preparing to study medicine in Brasilia.

This alluring family drama positively pulsates with the heady rhythms and ambient sounds in the vast state of Amazonas; the whirring of cicadas and exotic birdsong  – you can almost feel the sweltering heat and tropical downpours that occasionally bring relief. Da-Rin absorbs us into a gentle hypnotic way of life. A member of the indigenous Desana people, who are Christians, Justino is tough, resilient and well-versed in the ways of the forest but he must now adapt to city life, which is out of sync with nature and his upbringing. He he doesn’t complain and refuses to accept benefits offering by the company as part of his “indigenous condition”.

The sounds of the city are also different and less seductive, the clanking and jarring of metal and shrill ringing of alarms. DoP Barbara Alvarez – from the 2004 classic Whisky – again enchants us with elegant framing and a vibrant colour palette reflecting the geometric shapes of the shipyard and lush forest scenery both on the widescreen in more intimate close-up as the increasingly unsettling narrative plays out with its cultural references to Desana folklore, comparing and contrasting life in the country and town.

The tone grows more urgent when Justino develops an unexplained sweating fever but he is reluctant to investigate further, preferring to soldier on stoically. Eventually the doctor runs tests, but Justino has no faith in 21st century medicine, and the results are inconclusive anyway. Eventually Justino is drawn back to the place where he grew up, to seek the answer from the depth of the forest in this captivating, atmospheric but rather too enigmatic feature. MT

NOW ON BFI PLAYER / LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2019 | COMPETITION

 

 

 

Magari | If Only (2019) Locarno Film Festival 2019

Dir: Ginevra Eklann with Alba Rohrwacher, Riccardo Scamarcio, Brett Gelman | Italy, France  ·  2019  ·  100′                                

Kids are the victims of Ginevra Eklann’s sentimental saga of divorce and disarray. Opening this year’s LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL, this breezy upbeat drama sees three siblings  desperately hoping their parents will get back together again – ‘if only’.

The family’s tensions finally come to a head during Christmas when their disorganised dad Carlo (Scamarcio) whisks them off for holidays that will end in sadness and sexual awakening. But before they go Alma (Oro De Commarque), Jean (Giustiniani) and Sebastiano (Roussel) arrive in Rome with their Russian Orthodox mother Charlotte and her new boyfriend. Carlo is one of those dads who is great fun but not one for detail. He is more interested in his latest script and in his co-writer Benedetta (Alba Rohrwacher) than taking care of his children. And while they’re on holiday – at the seaside rather than the usual family trip to the mountains – his only preoccupation is work.

The story is seen from the kids’ point of view. How they cope with being part of a broken marriage. And they soon catch on to the holiday romance under their noses. Seba is keenly aware of the sexual vibe going on between Carlo and Benedetta, but he’s also burdened with being the eldest, while the other two feel homesick for their mother but find their father fun and exciting – it’s a well known dynamic.

Carlo and Benedetta seem well-matched. She is flirty and fun, but a bad influence on the kids with her pot-smoking and stealing from the local market. Seba clearly fancies her but also disapproves – a heady mix that will see them having a bit of a sub-fling on a cheeky Sunday trip to church – while Carlo is busy writing. It’s a shame Eklann relies on the cliched dramatic trick of having Carlo’s dog disappear in a gimmick that we know will end in tragedy. Why do so many indie filmmakers do this?

Scamarcio and Rohrwacher are effortlessly the stars of this well-crafted family affair which is both light-hearted, sentimental and firmly tethered to reality. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL | 7-17 AUGUST 2019

Photograph (2019)


Dir:Wri: Ritesh Batra | India, 110′

See Mumbai and slowly fall in love. Seems like a dream but it’s a dream come true in Ritesh Batra’s latest drama that sees two worlds collide and then gradually come together. The Mumbai-born director is back with a slowburn snapshot of this ancient city making its way into the modern world and beyond.

Here a photograph taken one summer afternoon in the Gateway to India forms a tenuous link that will unite two people across the barrier of religion, class, and culture as poignant impossibilities gradually becoming certainties due to education and entrepreneurial spark. 

Street photographer Rafi (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) gets by snapping tourists. He has a simple sales pitch: but one that’s captured the imagination of his punters and will one day serve him well. Or at least that’s what’s we’re led to believe in this leisurely look at contemporary India, and the power of possibility that had motivated the nation into the fast lane. But the detailed world around Rafi is what makes this languid romantic comedy so richly enjoyable.

Miloni (Sanya Malhotra) is a timid intelligent student training to be a chartered accountant. One day she comes across Rafi and has her photo taking in a chance meeting that provides the starting point to fragrant possibilities. Rafi is silently struck not her gentle presence, but is pressurised by his social status and his grandmother to marry. Miloni agrees to pose as his potential bride when his grandmother arrives and gradually this delicate date becomes a lasting connection that sees them meeting every day while the old woman stays in Rafi’s modern accommodation he shares with a motley crew of unmarried men.   

The films glows on the widescreen where DoP Ben Kutchins captures the chaotic cacophony and sun-dappled boulevards of Mumbai and its delightful street carts selling all kinds of cuisine and produce. Ambient sounds transport is into the centre of this action making this a tangible and highly visual, sensual travelogue

Batra gives us time – and many may say too much time – to get to know his characters; to glory in the sensuousness of it all. And this sensitivity is part of the drama’s lushness. Rafi and Miloni are quietly beautiful to look. Even her housemaid’s  jewellery russles as she pads barefoot to serve dinner and assure Miloni of her discretion when she sees the two of them waking in the square. This attention to detail makes the film pleasurable along with its languorous dramatic arc.

There are long affectionate glances but few words as the couple’s relationship takes shape. And Batra luxuriates in the rich textural influences of the characters around them: Miloni’s teacher and her parents. But most of all Rafi’s grandma whose wise words and chiding bring the film its comic moments. Batra judiciously doesn’t allow these two the power of touch until the the final scenes, and even then we’re left expectant but convinced there can be a future. But that is left to our own imagination with the tangible facts in place. And this slowly looms into perspective in the final act when we become more attuned to the directors modus operandi. 

The class distinctions are subtly alluded to through comments on skin colour. Rafi is refered as a “black raisin,” according to his grandmother, due to his street job. Other class tags are noted in the way the higher castes interweave English into their conversations. When Miloni goes to meet a potential marriage partner who immediately talks about international locations for setting up home. Miloni – not keen on him at all – hints at her desire to ‘live in a village and farm before taking a nap in the afternoon’.

The desire for a concrete culimination to their union has left some unsatisfied with the film. But that is the very nature of the piece and why Batra doesn’t need to spell it out for us. The ending is fully formed by what has gone before in subtle gestures and intimations. It is what it is. A mature and ravishingly rewarding experience MT

NOW ON BFI Player |

 

Le Sang d’un Poète | Le Testament d’Orphee – re-mastered on Bluray

Jean Cocteau – poet, playwright, novelist, designer, visual artist and one of the avant-garde movement’s most inventive and influential filmmakers was born in 1889, and grew up in Paris, immersed in the theatre and art world. He published his first volume of poems at just 15 and began mixing in bohemian circles becoming known as the Frivolous Prince.

He associated with Marcel Proust, Maurice Barres, Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani and numerous other writers and artists with whom he later collaborated. At a time when society condemned it, he was openly homosexual and homoerotic undertones, imagery and symbolism pervade all aspects of his writings, art and films. Despite financial constraints he continued to work even through the war years when he was forced to ad-lib often making do with bric-a-brak and bed sheets as part of the scenery in Le Belle et la Bête (1946). It still looked ravishing.

Made thirty years apart, these two recent 4k restorations effectively frame his filmic career and are both considered masterpieces of the avant-garde movement. 

LE SANG D’UN POÊTE – is an exploration of the tortuous relationship between the artist and his creations. LE SANG D’UN POÊTE, seeks to explore the feelings within a poet’s heart and soul, beginning in an artist’s studio where an unfinished statue comes to life. The lips of its androgynous face move, pressing a kiss to the artist’s hand. At the statues demand, he plunges it into a mirror.

LE TESTAMENT D’ORPHÉE brings full circle the journey made in 1932, the first part of the ‘Orphic’ trilogy LE TESTAMENT D’ORPHÉE (1960)

This last film is a truly abstract piece of work. Portraying an 18th century poet who travels through time on a quest for divine wisdom, it is another finely crafted, surreal and magical piece set in a mysterious, post-apocalyptic desert where Cocteau meets a series of enigmatic characters, joining them to muse about about the nature of art. Often gently poignant and whimsical in tone, this ethereal drama resonates with his Spanish roots – he settled in Andalucia for a while, in common with Picasso. Cocteau assembles an eclectic cast that includes vignettes with  Pablo Picasso himself, Jean Marais, Brigitte Bardot, Charles Aznavour, Roger Vadim and Yul Brenner in a piece that veers between gentle irony and low-key pessimism. Cocteau admirers will probably find it very moving.

LE SANG D’UN POÊTE (The Blood of a Poet) and LE TESTAMENT D’ORPHÉE (The Testament of Orpheus) will be released on ON BLU-RAY, DVD AND DIGITAL DOWNLOAD – 5TH AUGUST 2019

Pre-order now: http://po.st/TestamentOrphee; http://po.st/SangPoete.

https://youtu.be/qW84uNnNv0Y

Animals (2019) ****

Dir.: Sophie Hyde; Cast: Holiday Grainger, Alia Shawkat, Fra Fee, Dermont Murphy, Amy Molloy, Dermont Murphy; UK/Australia/ROI 2019, 109 min.

In her sophomore feature Australian filmmaker Sophie Hyde (52 Tuesdays) directs Emma-Jane Unsworth’ script of her own novel. It centres on two close friends Laura (Grainger) and Tyler (Shawcat) in Dublin who spend most of their time in being drunk and high on drugs. Well at least that’s the way it’s seemed for the past ten years. But now in their thirties, things are about to change.

Their story unfolds from the perspective of Laura, a struggling writer whose novel progresses a line a week – meanwhile she works as a barista in a coffee shop, to make ends meet. Her sister Jean (Molloy), once a wild child herself, announces that she has now chosen adult life and motherhood. Laura reacts with panic: suddenly casual boyfriend Jim (Fee), a very serious pianist, becomes a plausible alternative to her living the life of Riley with Tyler. But then along comes uber-pretentious author Marthy (Murphy) and Laura soon sees the error of her ways. And somehow the never fully explained cloud over Tyler’s life (some trauma in the past) becomes more important – or is it just the realisation, that their friendship is much more of a love story then they want to admit. Most features are built on the rock of a happy-ending with friendship being replaced by the great love conquering all – but Hyde raises doubts: is it really inevitable that all women should spend their life with the opposite gender just because mother nature and a concept called adulthood dictate it – or can Goethe’s Elective Affinities overcome the norm – at least sometimes?

Grainger and Shawkat carry the feature – their relationship is anything but ideal – but at least it is honest, and we are never allowed to forget it. Hyde directs with great sensibility, athough there are more than enough emotional episodes to go round. DoP Bryan Mason has a fine feel for the Dublin scene, even though the film actually takes place in Manchester. Animals is full of surprises and never resorts to the banal. It is a brave attempt at trying to align the impossible, but it manages to remain sincere: when Jim calls Laura Tyler’s wife, he is not too far off. AS

ON RELEASE FROM FRIDAY 2 AUGUST

       

Hard Paint | Tinta Bruta (2018) ***

Dir/Writers| Filipe Matzembacher, Marcio Reolon | Cast: Shico Menegat, Bruno Fernandes, Guega Peixoto, Sandra Dani, Frederico Vasques, Denis Gosh, Camila Falcao, Aurea Baptista, Larissa Sanguine, Ze Adao Barbosa

Contrary to its flamboyant sounding title, Hard Paint sees a soulful young loner seeking seclusion in the virtual world of gay chatrooms until his colourful cover is blown with mixed consequences.

This visually alluring and sensually suggestive character study unravels in Brazil’s Porto Alegre were the troubled protagonist has reinvented himself as an online performer when his actual life disappoints him sexually and socially. But despite his vulnerable appearance Pedro (Shico Menegat) has developed a an emotional toughness that serves him well in his harsh contemporary surroundings where his androgynous appearance and pretty boy tousled locks are often viewed with contempt, desire and even open hostility.

Told in three chapters, the film is shot in intimate close up but also gets out and about in the locale capturing the skyline of this southernmost Brazilian city. The first chapter is dedicated to Pedro’s sister Luiza (Guega Peixoto), who has supported him through thick and thin and is now leaving to work in another part of Brazil, and his parents are no longer on the scene. The subdued daytime scenes provide a rhythmic counterpoint to his graphic love-making with rival Leo (Bruno Fernandes), and the dreamlike chatroom sequences where his body glows with florescent paint as he gyrates to electronic vibes.

But Leo is also competing with him online as Boy25, and he forms the subject of Chapter 2. Leo wants to move from the downmarket Porto Alegre to the bright lights of BA where he hopes to take up a dance scholarship, and soon the two are performing as a double act online, and making money. Pedro must now clear up some legal business relating to a serious road accident. Leo seems supportive as the couple’s online and offline lives start to be mutually beneficial and they share a palpable onscreen chemistry in graffic sex scenes which incredibly authentic.

Neon Boy is the appropriately titled enigmatic Third Chapter where Pedro faces the music, and the music starts to become a more noticeable part of the film. The gloves are now off and the real Pedro is revealed in some scenes of heightened drama. The weak may look vulnerable but they are often the strongest people around. MT

ON RELEASE FROM FRIDAY 2 AUGUST 2019

 

A Short Film About Killing (1988) | KROTKI FILM O ZABIJANIU

Dir.: Krzysztof Kieslowski; Cast: Miroslaw Baka, Krzyztof Globisz | Poland 1988, 84 min.

So powerful was the effect of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s graphic description of violence in eighties Warsaw that the Polish authorities declared a five-year moratorium on capital punishment. Forty minutes go by before the first murder: a nearly botched attempt, mercilessly shown in all the gory detail. The second killing is just the opposite: a professional job, executed by the hangman in cold blood, but much more gruesome than the first one. A rope is used in both cases, but there all similarities end.

Jacek (Baka) is a young man lost in the high-rise concrete that is Warsaw in 1988. The camera encircles him like an animal in a laboratory. He is alienated, has lost nearly all contact to friends and family, life has been sucked out of him. When he kills the taxi driver without an obvious motive it may seem senseless to the audience, but for Jacek it is only just one more unexplainable act in a chain of events he cannot comprehend any more. Jacek’s lawyer in the forthcoming murder trial, Piotr Balicki, (Globisz) is just his opposite. Not much older than the murderer he is defending, Piotr has just finished law school and is a ferocious opponent of the death penalty. He is full of idealism with his life stretching out in front of him in a clear path: he wants to do good. But he too will be scarred by the case; he stands no chance in the courtroom and for the rest of his life he will suffer from this defeat.

Kieslowski shows a grim world; children play with dead cats in dark backyards – the light seems a predominantly nauseous green, as in a  morgue. Jacek is a product of this society – we should not be surprised that he acts out his inner hollowness in this way. Many reviewers saw this film as a condemnation of the death penalty (which was only abolished in Poland in 1997), but it is more realistic to assume that Kieslowski wanted to show that Stalinism had hit rock bottom – a year before the system finally collapsed.

Both leads give dynamite performances. The camera shows this Dantesque Inferno with panoramic shots and close-ups. Jacek is cold-eyed and ashen-faced throughout. The portrait of a dying world in which murder, in whichever form it takes, is as normal as clocking-in for work. AS

A SHORT FILM ABOUT KILLING IS NOW OUT ON BLURAY

The Many Seasons of Mexican Popular Cinema (1940s – 1960s) Retrospective | Locarno Film Festival 2023

Mexican cinema has more than proved its worth in the last few years with a new generation of talent in the shape of Alfonso Cuarón, Carlos Reygadas, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Amat Escalante and Michel Franco. These directors have brought us a glittering array of daringly inventive and cinematically bold fare, Roma being the first Mexican film to win an Oscar in 2019.

This year’s LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL centrepiece retrospective Spectacle Every Day – The Many Seasons of Popular Mexican Cinema explores Mexican film production from the 1940s to the 1960s, three decades of creativity that have inspired subsequent generations of cineastes. It showcases works by Roberto Gavaldon, Alejandro Galindo, Chano Urueta, Matilde Landeta, Emilio Fernandez, Fernando Mendez and many more with 36 feature films from Juan Bustillo Oro’s 1940 drama En Tiempos de Don Porfirio to Alberto Isaac’s 1969 outing Olimpiada En Mexico. 

 

 

Han matado a Tongolele courtesy of Filmoteca UNAM

 

So Mexico has always had a distinctive style of its own and a rich culture to draw on. It was one of the first countries to embrace new film technology, and did so back in the late 1890s when the country’s first filmmaker and distributor Salvador Toscano Barragan (1872-1947) introduced the first moving images using a cinematograph camera which had been been invented in France in 1895. Toscano also opened Mexico’s first cinema in Mexico City in 1897. As a documentarian he specialised in the Mexican Revolution, drawing on a rich vein of dramatic potential. 

But the Golden Age (1933-1964) was to come decades later during the 1930s when Mexican cinema all but dominated the Latin American film industry, and even rivalled Hollywood in its quality and prodigiousness. And it was largely Europe and the US’ preoccupation and involvement with the Second World War that allowed Mexico to step into the breach with their own feisty brand of rousing romantic and revolutionary melodramas and musicals, which provided a much needed antidote to the war-themed fare being produced elsewhere – although their own films where far from light-hearted and happy, often ending in tears, vehemence and bitter recrimination. 

La Noche Avanza (1952) Roberto Galvadon

 

Gabriel Figueroa (1907-1997) was a leading figure of Mexican Cinema in its most glorious period, photographing 212 feature films, starting his career in 1932, when he shared camera credits with the great Eduard Tisse for Sergej M. Eisenstein’s ¡Que Viva Mexico! (1932). The epic visuals are certainly influenced by Eisenstein’s work. The Mexican landscape is celebrated in long, carefully composed shots. Figueroa’s penultimate feature was Under the Volcano (1984), directed by John Huston – the two had already made Night of the Iguana (1964). 

Fernandez and Figueroa would work together on 25 features. Both El Indio and Figueroa established the character of a ‘Mestizaje’, a mixed race identity which Fernandez, whose mother was Native American, carried around proudly all his life.

Maria Candelaria (1944) saw the quartet reunited, Salon Mexico (1949) was another iconic work by director and cameraman. By the Mid-1950 they went different ways; La rebellion de los Colgados  was their last great success; even though their last collaboration was Una Cita de Amor in 1958. Figueroa would go shooting several Bunuel features like Los Olividados, Nazarin, La Joven and El Angel Exterminador.

The Black Pit of Dr M (1959) Fernando Mendez

 

One of them Pedro Infante (1917-1957) would go on to become a screen idol in that he represented all the qualities most highly cherished and sought after in a true Mexican hero: that of being a dutiful son, a firm friend and a romantic lover. In Nosotros los pobres (1947) he fulfils all these attributes, securing himself an everlasting place in the heart and soul of the Mexican public, and crowning it all by dying when he was only 39, in a plane crash.

Another popular star was Arturo de Cordova (1908-1973) who often played tormented men driven to distraction, his suave elegance and drop-dead good looks making him highly popular with female audiences and winning him 4 Ariel awards during the 1950s. He often played alongside his wife Margi Lopez (who was actually born in Argentina). Lopez’s best film was Salon Mexico (1950) and she won an Ariel for Best Actress as ravishing dancer Mercedes Gomez who reeks revenge on her pimp (Alfredo Acosta) when he tries to double-cross her. 

Another Idol who died young was Jorge Negrete 1910-53) although he made the best of his acting and musical talents during a career that lasted from 1930 through to his death. After enrolling in the military, Negrete made his way into singing opera, his recording of ‘Mexico Lindo e Querido’ is now considered the country’s unofficial anthem. Despite his short life, he married twice – Maria Felix and Elisa Christy – and also lived with the co-star of ten of his 44 films: Gloria Marin.

For her own part Maria Felix (1914-2002) (left) was a real stunner with a strong and vibrant personality, perfectly suiting her for femme fatale roles – most famously creating that of remarkable Dona Barbara (1943) in which she captured the public’s imagination, ensuring her place in the Golden Age firmament for posterity.

Directors such as Alberto Gout, Alejandro Galindo, Julio Bracho, and Juan Bustillo Oro were also popular and successful during this Golden Age. Their talents stretched across the board from screwball comedy to country and urban dramas offering audiences a well-rounded view of the Mexican people, their intriguing history and culture. It  was only when television came along to challenge their dominion and their hold over the nation’s viewers, that the Golden Age started to wane.

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | RETROSPECTIVE 2023

 

 

One Deadly Summer – l’Eté meurtrier (1983)**** Blu-ray release

Dir: Jean Becker | Wri Sébastien Japrisot | Cast: Isabelle Adjani, Alain Souchon, Suzanne Flon, Jenny Clève, Michel Galabru, François Cluzet, Edith Scob | France 133’

Isabelle Adjani plays a sensual pert-bottomed coquette in Jean Becker’s flirty revenge thriller based on Sébastien Japrisot’s script from his novel of the same name. In true petulant form, Adjani originally rejected the part but after reconsidering she came back to play Elle, kicking Becker’s second choice Valerie Kaprisky into the long grass.

It doesn’t take much to get French men going, so when Elle prances into a small French village in the Vaucluse the locals are predictably hot to trot. But the tone soon shifts when it turns out the lusty long-legged temptress is more interested in getting her own back rather than conquering hearts in this increasingly unsettling and complex drama.

The action unfurls through the eyes of the various characters as elements of trickery, lies and exploitation all come into play in this vivid yet surprisingly subtle film “du look”. Japrisot’s bold characterisations reveal multi-layered personalities in a sinuously gripping storyline where nothing is black and white amusingly played by a cast led by the seductive Adjani in luminous form. MT

CultFilms presents One Deadly Summer on dual format Blu-ray and DVD 29 July

https://youtu.be/IOd_NBTqjnA

The Chambermaid (2018) ****

Dir: Lila Alviles | Cartol | Drama | Mexico | 90′

The Chambermaid plays the same thematic tune as two other festival winners this Summer: Golden Lion winner Roma and In A Distant Land which won the Golden Leopard at Locarno. They highlight the isolated and lonely lives of ordinary working people, often migrants – in this case, a Mexican national whose job in the capital detaches her from her loved ones. There is a distinct chilly humour to this acutely observed feature debut from Mexican actress, filmmaker and opera director Lila Alviles. It follows the daily grind of a hotel worker in one of the Mexico City’s 5 star hotels. Cartol (La Tirisia) plays Eve with infinite grace and good humour – in one astonishing scene she stands for seemingly ages outside a lift during one of those awkward silences – catching a hotel guest’s eye several times with an expression that speaks volumes.

Pristinely executed in the zen-like interiors of this palace of interior design, the film pictures an upmarket public as they often are behind the closed door of their luxury suites: ill-mannered, demanding and crude. Bereft of their clothes they also take leave of their humanity – never mind their courtesy. This is social politics laid bare. The Chambermaid also examines the crafty interactions between the low-level workers themselves: the cunning soft sales techniques of her colleague in the laundry who is trying to supplement her low-paid job by selling hand cream and Tupperware. Or just trying to con her into sharing the latest fad – in this case, a gadget that delivers a shock to stimulate a feel-good rush of endorphin. Like a some ghastly face to face equivalent of FarmVille.

The Chambermaid is set in Mexico City’s Presidente Intercontinental. Eve is hard-working and diligent, but if she tries harder she’ll be allocated the stratospheric, newly refurbished 42nd floor with views to die for and even infinity pools. Pinning her hopes on the promotion, she improves her efficiency but to no avail. The only bonus here is in the lost property cupboard. In one of her rooms Eve has found a red dress and hopes to take it home, if the owner doesn’t claim it. But her gruelling schedule leaves no time to be with her child, let alone meet a partner. Outwardly timid, Eve shows her true colours in one scene involving a window cleaner who has taken a shine to her – along with his windows. Eve acknowledges him at a distance. Her reaction is plausible – a little light relief in a sea of sameness. But Alviles restrains herself and keeps this convincing.

Stunningly captured by Carlos Rossini’s creative camerawork, this sealed and sanitised world has a strange beauty. Loosely based on the book Hotel, by Sophie Calle, The Chambermaid is a contemplative but well-paced cinema verité piece that resonates with a powerful message from both sides of the equation. Eve’s humdrum existence is piqued by moments of insight that show her in a different light as she endure the indignities of her role with calm forbearance and subdued silence. The magnificent skyscapes are hers to see but never to enjoy in her closeted existence, locked in an eternal bubble with no respite, until the final scene where the ambient sounds of exotic birdsong replace the refrigerated buzz of musak and air-conditioning.  MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE

Gwen (2018) ***

Dir.: William McGregor; Cast: Maxine Peake, Eleanor Worthington-Cox, Jody Innes, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith; UK 2018, 88 min.

This Gothic coming of age folk tale is the big screen debut of TV director William McGregor, who is well known for his character based dramas such as Poldark. Gwen is a long version of his 2009 short film, which was shot in Slovenia. Falling between ultra-realism and English Gothic horror in the style of Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England, Gwen never quite lives up to its early promise, in spite of an evocative setting and haunting images by DoP Adam Etherington.

Set in 19th century Snowdonia during the industrial revolution, the story centres on 17-year old Gwen, her younger sister Mari (Innes) and mother Elen (Peake), an authoritative woman suffering from a epilepsy. Elen and Gwen look after the family’s small-holding, in the absence of the patriarch, who is fighting a far-away war. But doom and gloom overwhelms them from the start, with a series of tragic events: their sheep are slaughtered and have to be destroyed; the pack horse bolts at the stormy weather and has to be put down, and the local quarry owner puts in a bid to buy their farm, supported by the village elders. But Elen stubbornly resists, wanting to preserve the land for her husband’s home-coming (although she has been informed of his death).

Gwen’s life becomes increasingly difficult with her only male support being Dr Wren (Holdbrook-Smith). And just before gothic horror takes over completely in a bloody finale, we learn that even the good doctor is on the side of the evil-doers rather than our tragic heroine.

But McGregor then shifts from realism to full blown gothic horror with the introduction of jump scares and other well-worn horror tropes. Bloodletting and ghostly images of the missing father feel really superfluous – as are symbolic gestures, such as the rotten potato in the ground. Eleanor Worthington-Cox saves the day with a terrific performance as Gwen. She starred in the title role of the stage musical Matilda and is now in her late teens. Together with Maxine Peake she carries this hybrid feature to a devastating conclusion, bailing out the director and his simplistic over-the-top approach. AS

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASES FROM 20 JULY 2019

 

My Friend the Polish Girl (2018) ***

Dir.: Ewa Banasziewicz, Mateusz Dymek; Cast: Aneta Piotrowska, Emma Feldman-Cohen, Daniel Barry, Max Davies; UK 2018, 87 min.

Ewa Banasziewicz and Mateusz Dymek have directed written and produced this sometimes uneven cinema verite style mockumentary that explores whether the documentary form can ever be objective: or does the filmmaker always influence the outcome with their own subjectivity? Shot mostly in black-and-white by Dymek, with enchanting animation by Mathieu Rok, My Friend is aesthetically much more convincing than its sometimes questionable narrative.

New York filmmaker Katie (Friedman-Cohen) lives in London where she picks the Polish actor, thirty-something Alicja (Piotrowska), as the central focus for her Brexit-themed documentary. But nothing goes to plan: first of all Alicja, (who is living with her boyfriend (Barry) in the Edgware Road), tells Katie that he is suffering from terminal cancer. Michael then denies the gravity of his illness and moves out, not wanting to be filmed by a very intrusive Katie. The two women have not always got on together so Katie decides “to change” Alicja’s life, by introducing her to a group of filmmakers at the Groucho Club. Alicja is going to play a Russian prostitute (her seventh casting in this role), and shooting is due to commence, but when it does, Michael’s condition worsens with Alicja trying in vain to stop the cancer by buying expensive alternative medicines from a Harley Street doctor. To no avail, he dies and at the rather embarrassing wake for Michael, she meets his friend Max (Davies), who stays the night. By now, Katie has moved in with her girlfriend, both declaring they are misfits. But when Alicja is suddenly fired from the film set, she also runs away from Katie who is forced to use a false ending (Alicja’s suicide) to finish her film. 

Despite their best intentions the portrayal of the complicated relationship between documentary filmmakers and their subjects sometimes falls victim to rather bad taste, such as in the faux-sex scene between the two women in Alicja’s bedroom. But the female leads are so convincing in portraying their obsessive relationship they somehow manage to overcome this setback. Overall, My Friend is a brave attempt to discuss the essence of documentary filmmaking, and, in spite of everything, it is a very worthwhile watch. AS

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE NATIONWIDE

Coming Home (1978) *** Blu-ray release

Dir: Hal Ashby | Cast: Jane Fonda, Jon Voight, Bruce Dern | Drama US

One of director Hal Ashby’s biggest hits (second only to Shampoo) is a compelling and uncompromising tale of love and loss, exploring the shattering aftermath of the Vietnam War and starring a trio of Hollywood’s best: Jane Fonda, Jon Voight and Bruce Dern.

When Marine Captain Bob Hyde (Bruce Dern) leaves for Vietnam, his wife Sally (Fonda) volunteers at a local hospital. There she meets and falls for Luke Martin (Voight), a former sergeant whose war injury has left him a paraplegic. Embittered with rage and filled with frustration, Luke finds new hope and confidence through his growing intimacy with Sally. The relationship transforms Sally’s feelings about life, love and the horrors of war. And when, wounded and disillusioned, Sally’s husband returns home, all three must grapple with the full impact of a brutal, distant war that has changed their lives forever.

Coming Home is sometimes over-sentimental in its portrayal of a nation’s guilt but the performances win through and the movie won three Oscars, for Best Actress (Jane Fonda), Actor (Jon Voight), and Original Screenplay.

Available on The Masters of Cinema Series for the first time on Blu-ray in the UK on 15 July 2019.

Our Time (Nuestro Tiempo) ****

Dir.: Carlos Reygadas, Cast: Carlos Reygadas, Natalia Lopez, Phil Burgers; Mexico/ France/ Germany/ Denmark/Sweden 2018, 173 min.

Carlos Reygadas is one of the few auteurs who have kept their independence and their unique style, Our Time is the story of a ménage-à-trois set high up in the Mexican mountains, where a Bunūel-like, surreal narrative develops in this fresh and original feature. which Reygadas also stars.

Reygadas stars as Juan living with his wife Ester (Lopez) and their three children on a huge farm, where they breed bulls to fight in the arena. Ester seems very much in charge of the enterprise, whilst Juan is more interested in writing poetry and libretti for operas. Enter horse breeder Phil (Burgers), who falls for Ester and upsets the equilibrium of family and work life. Juan is upset when he finds out about Ester’s liaison: he is not at all the man he pretends to be and Juan reacts with jealousy and temper tantrums, before a visit to a dying friend changes him: he starts to communicate with both Ester and Phil, but also wants to be near them when they make love. He begins to see the affair as a stage play where he takes part but also directs; and while he’s in control the situation is bearable, mitigating the emotional effect of the fallout . The parallels to the actual shooting of the feature eventually become obvious.

Reygadas contrasts the various strands of the narrative: Juan and Esther go to Mexico City to participate in cultural events, where he is feted. The rather long preamble shows the couple’s two younger children hanging out with friends near a lake on their farm. Meanwhile the oldest son gets a taste of first love, not wanting to return to boarding school at the end of the summer. All this is obviously dwarfed by the marriage crisis. Reygadas’ lets his zany sense of sense of humour lose in the way he allows the five-year old daughter to read out a running commentary on the state of her parent’s marriage. 

DoP Diego Garcia’s rain-soaked foggy landscape contrast poetically with the urban chaos and glittering nightime panoramas. Reygadas’ inventive narrative snakes its way to a surprising denouement, leaving the interpretation open and showing that he is still in very much in love with filmmaking in a playful way. AS

IN CINEMAS FROM 12 JULY 3019

Come Back to the Five and Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982) ****

Dir.: Robert Altman; Cast: Sandra Dennis, Cher, Karen Black, Sudie Bond; USA 1982, 102 min.

The terrible box-office receipts for Popeye forced director Robert Altman to sell Lion’s Gate and his Malibu home in 1981. He took his family to New York to begin his “minimalist’ decade. The French, always helpful when it came to Hollywood misfits of all sorts, gave out the official Altman line that he “was trying the small format as a means of circumventing the traditional film distribution circuits” – but in reality the retreat was nothing but a final effort to mend his now nearly defunct relationship with the major studios. On a personal level, he felt isolated and paranoia had got the better of him. His supporters believers had to listen to rants about old and new enemies – one of them, director Alan Rudolph was singled out for crossing the line to the enemy, by asking MGM to produce his next feature – never mind that only a few years later, Altman would do exactly the same.

At this point, the theatre was the logical stepping stone. He directed two one-acters for the Los Angeles Actor’s Theatre. One of them, Two by South was re-staged in Manhattan in the autumn of 1981 and taped for TV, after good reviews. When Altman staged Come back to the five and dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean in New York, the reviews were quiet unfavourable. Never the less, a new recruit to the Altman ‘family’, the former sports reporter and documentary filmmaker Peter Newman, set up a deal for cable TV. The budget was USD 850 000, when backers pulled out, Altman had to put USD 200 000 of his own money into the production. 

Written by Ed Graczyk and based on his stage play, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy is just another soul searching expedition in the Tennessee Williams mode. It is set in a rundown Woolworth store in a small Texan town called McCarthy (sic!). James Dean disciples are commemorating the 20th anniversary of their idols death in 1975. The flashbacks show his arrival in a near-by town, where Giants would be shot. Sandra Dennis is Mona, asthmatic and hyper sensible. Cher, at a low point in her singing career, is Sissy, a waitress with artificial breasts whose wisecracks hide a secret. Finally, there is Karen Black’s Joanna, who comes late and gets of the attention in Juanita’s (Bond) restaurant. At the end all is revealed: Joanna (who had a sex change operation) is the father of Mona’s son, who steals a Porsche – putting an end to speculation that he might be Dean’s son.

Apart from the brilliant female cast, PD David Cropman and DoP Pierre Mignot (who would shoot the rest of the Altman pictures in the 80s) take most of the credits. Cropman built a set of two identical dime store stage sets, separated by a two-way mirror. This way, the audience was looking at a self-reflecting front store. Mignot’s 16mm camera captures the anguish in very intimate shots, creating an atmosphere not unlike Streetcar Named Desire.

Altman took the film (literally) with him to any festival who would pay his flights and hotel. His credit cards were often rejected, and whilst Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean made a small profit, Altman was back where he started before: drinking on long flight and waxing nostalgically, oblivious to the fact that he had launched Cher’s film career, self obsessed as always. A Hollywood rebel without a cause. AS

ON DUAL FORMAT DVD AND BLURAY FROM 22 JULY 2019

Patrick | De Patrick (2019) Bfi Player

Dir: Tim Mielants; Cast: Kevin Janssens, Josse de Pauw, Hannah Hoekstra, Jemaine Clement Katelinje Damen, Ariane van der Velt, Pierre Bokma; Belgium 2019, 97 min.

Peaky Blinders’ Tim Mielants won the directing prize at Karlovy Vary for this subversive tragicomedy that takes place in a Belgian nudist camp fraught with scheming machiavellians.

In his late thirties the naive main character Patrick (Janssens) is still living with his father Rudy (de Pauw) and blind mother Nelly (Damen). They run a summer camp fraught with  scantily dressed, middle-aged holiday-makers. Rudy is on his last legs but his son has no aptitude for business, and so he relies on Herman (Bokma), whose wife Liliane (Van Welt) projects her lust on the undersexed Patrick.

Into this bizarre environment comes Natalie (Hoekstra) whose unfaithful musician boyfriend Dustin (Clement) immediately strikes up a relationship with another adoring female. So Natalie decides to turn her attentions to Patrick whose sideline as a joiner now becomes central to the narrative, and the tool of his trade, a hammer, one of the main protagonists. When Rudy dies, Herman and Liliane plan to take over the place, declaring Patrick ‘not fit for purpose’, in running the camp’s affairs – not least because his hammer was the weapon of choice in a catastrophe that cost the commune their entire funds. It soon emerges that the hammer was also the weapon used in a murder in Brussels.

Even though the naturalists proclaim to be progressive, they are really straight out of the 1950s. Mielants’ humour does not always come off, and De Patrick often feels repetitive – the running time could be tightened up a tab. But there are enough contradictions to keep the show on the road, and Janssens makes for a brilliant anti-hero. AS

NOW ON IPLAYER | BEST DIRECTOR WINNER | KARLOVY VARY FILM FESTIVAL 2019

Half Sister (2019) Polsestra **** Karlovy Vary Film Festival 2019

Dir.: Damjan Kozole; Cast: Ursa Menart, Liza Marijina, Jurij Drevensek, Peter Musevski; Republic of Macedonia/Serbia/Slovenia; 105 min.

Another tightly controlled and intriguing drama from veteran documentarian Damjan Kozole, who won best director at Karlovy Vary with Nightlife in 2016 . 

Irena and Nezha, the titular half-sisters hate each others guts – but when push comes to shove, blood proves thicker than life-long animosities. Irina (Menart) works in the local hairdressers: she is protected from the outside world by a half-open jalousie. And it soon emerges why. 

Separated from her violent husband Branco (Drevensek), she is looking for a place to stay and visits her mother. Clearly moving in with her mother is no option, the two have a fractured relationship and the same goes for her father handball coach Silvio (Musevski) who ran off with an Albanian woman when Irena was a little girl. But one of her half-sisters Anisa (Marijina) is moving to Ljubljana to study for an MA in communications, so she asks her father if she could live shares the flat with her rival Nezha, a tomboyish aggressor, who has a knife handy wherever she goes. Nezha immediately blames Silvo (who pays the rent) and Irena for setting her up. But blaming everybody – apart from her dog Jimmy – is Nezha’s default position in life. A vegan (for environmental reasons) she attacks Irena full on: “If Dad wasn’t such a pussy, he’d put you in a nuthouse”. Irena answers with well trained passive-aggressiveness. But when Branco assaults Irena, breaking her nose, the dynamic changes, Nezha going on the attack to defend Irena to the last.

Half-Sister is a brilliant character study, the near-perfect script an exception in today’s landscape of ‘atmospheric non-narratives”. DoP Miladin Colakovic’s intimate camera conveys the emotional range of the rollercoaster, and despite of the antagonistic characters involved, one cannot help but smile. Finally, Menart and Marijina gives remarkable performances, playing off each other like the real thing. AS

Karlovy Vary FILM FESTIVAL 2019 | Until 7 July 2019

 

 

Don’t Look Now (1973) *****

Dir: Nicholas Roeg | Writers: Alan Scott, Chris Bryant | Cast: Julie Christie, Donald Sutherland, Hilary Mason, Clelia Matania | Fantasy Horror, UK 110’

Nicolas Roeg based his achingly tragic supernatural drama on a short story by Daphne du Maurier. It sees a grieving couple burying their sorrows in Italy after their small daughter drowns at home in Suffolk, wearing a shiny new mackintosh. John, an architect, has been commissioned to restore a church and Venice is eerie and beguiling in the out of season mists. But soon a doom-laden warning from a two English women, one of them a blind psychic, takes them off guard shrouding their bereavement in fear and but bringing Laura (Christie) a strange sense of hope in the shape of premonitions. But soon further torment seems unavoidable as the past and the future collide.

 As a wave of killings haunts the city, Laura returns to England to visit their son after an accident at his school. But the premonitions don’t stop: John suffers a near-fatal accident high on the church scaffolding, and then he glimpses his wife, supposedly hundreds of miles away, on a private launch flanked by the two mysterious sisters. The local police are intrigued by and even sympathetic to his story, but cannot help. As Venice and his fate closes in on John, illusion, reality and sudden terror spiral the story to its grotesque climax, as the design in director Nicolas Roeg’s mosaic becomes unforgettably clear.

Don’t look now is a richly romantic and deeply sorrowful story of love, longing and quiet desperation Imbued with ominous motifs and Roeg’s evocative visual style. Fate seems inescapable in this  dreamlike place where time stands still and unsettling silence is occasionally broken by a bird in flight or a banging door. A whiff of atavistic evil lurks at every lonely corner undermining the power of love and casting a dark pall over the couple’s attempts to discover the truth as they are gradually drawn into a web of mystery and horror. It’s a dignified, discreet and well bred terror, but it’s terrifying all the same.

Christie and Sutherland exude a captivating chemistry drowning in this kindgom of the senses the mood gradually escalating in into a mood of horror and disbelief surrounding their dead daughter. MT

4K ULTRA HD RESTORATION BACK IN CINEMAS JULY 5 COURTESY OF STUDIOCANAL | AVAILABLE ON BLURAY, DVD, COLLECTOR’s EDITION and EST JULY 29

https://youtu.be/xXP8OaJGxrM

Venezia (2019) Edinburgh Film Festival 2019

Dir: Rodrigo Guerrero | Cast: Paula Lussi, Margherita  Mannino | Drama Argentina, France, Italy 75’

At the start of Rodrigo Guerrero’s atmospheric drama VENEZIA, Sofia (Paula Lussi) lies on a bed in a hotel room, sobbing gently and utterly alone. Her mobile buzzes, but she doesn’t answer. Later, as we see her pace through the winding, narrows streets of the eponymous city, the cause of her tears and solitude is slowly revealed, her loneliness signalling an absence in her life – and an absence felt in the film itself, for the story begins in media res, with a slow-burning sense of uneasy mystery.

As such, the opening raises a string of active questions whichwould not feel out of place in a thriller, but Guerrero instead uses these intrigues as hooks by which to propel an engrossing character study – a portrait of a lost woman attempting to find solace and understanding for what life has thrown her way.

Thankfully, and in contrast to so many other recent films, the opaqueness gradually lightens, allowing us a rich understanding of the problems faced by Sofia, as wonderfully conveyed through Lussi’s hypnotic performance. Indeed, the film’s only slight misstep is the inclusion of a scene which takes the focus momentarily away from Sofia, to give us an unnecessary insight into the life of Francesca (Margherita Mannino), one of several characters who Sofia encounters as she drifts through the city – for this is Sofia’s story, and it’s in following the minutiae of her journey (physical and emotional) that the film excels.

Filmed in striking 1.33:1 images, Venezia‘s evocative, observational style follows in the arthouse tradition which is too often described as ‘detached’ – it would be better, and more accurate, to say that Guerrero’s engrossing, tender film is unsentimental and devoid of emotional manipulation, and that it’s all the more impactful as a result. Understated and light on dialogue, Venezia reminds us that, so often, less is more – and, with a slender runtime of just 75 minutes, it also offers a further rejoinder to the bloated nature of much contemporary cinema. A real, subtle gem.

Elsewhere in the programme, Sasha Collington’s LOVE TYPE D offered a very different, and much more light-hearted, portrait of a lonely woman: Frankie (Maeve Dermody), who has just been dumped for the 11th time in a row. Discovering a scientific theory that suggests her run of bad luck may be the result of genetics and, more specifically, a ‘loser in love‘ gene, Frankie sets about trying to cure herself. Slightly more high-concept than your average rom-com, Love Type D offers plenty of laughs and entertainment, frivolous though it may all be. ALEX BARRETT

EDINBURGH FILM FESTIVAL 19-30 JUNE 2019

Support the Girls (2018) ****


Dir.: Andrew Bujalski; Cast: Regina Hall, Haley Lu Richardson, Shyna McHayle, James Le Gros, Brooklyn Decker, Lea DeLaria; USA 2018, 89 min.

Andrew Bujalski  pays homage to working class feminism in his raucous comedy caper.

Set in a joint called Double Whammies, run by a largely absentee owner, it features a cast of skimpily clad women waitresses although the real work is done by Lisa, who keeps staff and customers at bay. We meet Lisa Conroy (Hall) already distraught before her day begins. She has too much on her plate: a rotten marriage, an interfering boss and a rapid staff turnover. Her deputy Dannyelle (McHayle) and the boisterous Maci (Richardson) have to keep staff and customers happy, they range from flirtatious to downright rude, and get two minutes attention per table, and you may touch a customer, but not squeeze him – one of the rules Lisa tries to get over to the ingénues of the day.

One of the waitresses has problems at home, another was mixed up in an attempted robbery of the place. And today, they discover a would-be robber in the ventilation pipes. He is wedged in, and Lisa has to call the cops to have him freed – and arrested. Then the sound system breaks down. But that it is not the end of Lisa’s woes: the TV system is down too, and there will be no wrestling matches on ESPN for the mainly male clientele. But Lisa puts the angst of the future behind her – at least for the time being – because the present has too many problems. All the male characters are a misogynous bunch, let alone a butch lesbian (DeLaria) who supports the crew.  

DoP Matthias Grunsky’s camera is very intimate, but also conveys Lisa’s isolation. The feature is dedicated to ‘Mothers’ – and while Lisa may be childless, the rest of her crew definitely qualifies, all shouting their frustration from the roof of the ManCave building: they remain indomitable and Regina Hall is outstanding in this breezy and understated comedy of survival. AS

NOW ON RELEASE FROM 28 JUNE 2019

 

Never Look Away (2018) **

Dir.: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck; Cast: Tom Schilling, Sebastian Koch, Paula Beer, Saskia Rosendahl, Oliver Masucci; Italy/Germany 2018, 188 min.

After The Life of Others Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck makes another ambitious but deeply unfilmic foray that tackles three decades of his country’s history from Nazi Germany of the late 1930s right through to the GDR, and finally the FRG. The focus is an anti-hero and his sympathetic counterpart. 

In Dresden 1937 the young Elisabeth May takes her young nephew Kurt Barnert to see an exibition of ‘Entartete Kunst’, showing paintings by Picasso, Kandinsky and others forbidden in the Third Reich. The guide tells Kurt that he could do better than said works of art. But Elisabeth, a free spirit, tells the boy “never to look away” from beauty. Soon she is playing the piano naked. Her desperate family send her to Prof. Seeband (Koch), who is in charge of the local Euthanasia programme, thence to a special hospital where she is gassed with other citizens who are not “worth being kept alive”. 

Seeband is later captured by the Russians but helps to deliver the baby of a high-ranking officer who offers him a career in the GDR. The story then flips forward to see Kurt (Schilling), now in his twenties, falling in love with Ellie Barnert (who very much resembles Elisabeth), the two men begin an uneasy relationship. And when Ellie gets pregnant, her father carries out an abortion, making sure his daughter can no longer produce and have the Barnert family poison his own bloodline: Kurt’s father had committed suicide. 

Ellie and Kurt, both fed up with social realism at university, flee to West Berlin, and later settle in Dusseldorf where Kurt studies with a Beus-look-alike, professor von Verten (Masucci). Here Kurt finds his artistic calling, and also the true identity of his father-in-law, who had also settled very sucessfully in the FRG.

Von Donnersmarck is spot on in picturing life in Nazi Germany and the GDR, but his vision of the FRG, where the majority of ex-Nazis made a career, as far too easygoing. After all, cultural institutions such as the Art Academy in Dusseldorf, were unique places of artistic refuge. Where the film really falls down though is in the bland description of life. Considering Kurt is a painter, the cinematography is unimpressive and stale, calling to mind the “Alfred Weidemann” films of the late 50s and set in the FRG, where UFA veterans where still shooting in the style of the 1930s. Furthermore the acting is patchy, Beer the standout in a sea of rather hammy male performances. Despite a narrative spanning nearly thirty years nothing seems to change, the action is caught in a permanent time-warp where even Kurt’s final liberation feels unconvincing and artificial. Never Look Away is an uninventive saga that drags laboriously feeling even longer than its 3+ hours, AS

ON RELEASE AT ARTHOUSE CINEMAS | PREMIERED AT VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2018

In Fabric (2018) ****

Writer/Director: Peter Strickland | Cast: Sidse Babett Knudsen, Gwendoline Christie, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Julian Barratt, Leo Bill, Fatma Mohamed, Richard Bremmer | Horror | UK | 118′

Peter Strickland follow-up to his lesbian frolic The Duke of Burgundy is a sinister 1970s sartorial satire which gets sillier the more it wears on. This fourth bizarre entry is another of those richly entertaining and quirkily fascinating films we’ve come to expect from the British director, now at the top of his game.

A dress is the antiheroine of IN FABRIC. Vampishly voluptuous in scarlet silk and satin, it is a garment to die for, and that is both a blessing and a curse for those who slip it on. For the dress in question possesses strange qualities that no-one can vanquish, because no-one is clever enough to interpret its power. This dense but simply plotted Giallo-inspired erotic thriller conjures up dread, horror and even disgust through its inventive visual aesthetic, and a signature atmospheric soundtrack that recalls Berberian Sound Studio and channels the bizarre human obsessions of sales shopping and stag nights.

It all starts in Dentley & Soper’s fashion emporium back in the day where the January sales were a post Christmas bonanza. In a choppy collage of archive photos of garish retro ad campaigns, Strickland quickly establishes the furore of price slashes and the adrenaline rush of queue barging – the public baying for bargains in anticipation of the fray, long before couch-based internet shopping saw daily discounts.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays 50 year old Sheila who’s back on the dating scene, through the small ads – fraught with weirdos, even back then. Sheila is sick and tired of her teenage son’s in-house love-ins with Gwendoline Christie’s woman twice his age, so under the spiky guidance of a crinoline sporting sales woman (Fatma Mohamed speaking in Romanian-accented riddles) she is tempted and then urged to buy ‘the dress’.

Although her date is a disaster, strange things start to happen to Sheila once she gets the red dress which takes on a slinky life of its own, hovering over her bed at night and causing her washing machine to self-combust. The garment’s next owner (Leo Bill) gets to wear it at his stag party, and the next morning his irritating wife (Hayley Squires) takes a fancy to it too and rapidly develops a skin rash. Meanwhile, in the backroom after hours, Fatma Mohamed turns weird and witchy, wearing a wig and wickedly caressing her shop mannequins to the erotic delight of the Dracula-like manager Mr Lundy (Richard Bremmer). The humour lies in the contrast between the banal and the bizarrely erotic – or just plain weird. Images of sumptuously stewing peppers in Sheila’s kitchen give way to those of sexy underwear in her son’s bedroom; Julian Barratt’s hilarious turn as Sheila’s boss is as cliched as Fatma Mohamed’s grotesque Victorian vendeuse is uncanny.

The sad hope that a mere garment will satisfy in our human need to be loved and unique (and if not, recycled to the next person) is echoed in the film’s themes of obsession, superficiality and consumerism. Sidse Babett Knudsen, the submissive lover in The Duke of Burgundy, is revealed as the dress’s original owner, who modelling the garment in the shop’s catalogue, under the lofty spiel: “ambassadorial function dress, canapé conversation” – a promise that aspires more to James Bond rather than the Thames Valley. But by the time the victims begin to realise that the dress is damned, it’s already too late. And as much as we aspire to creating a good impression, we’re also guilty of judging a book by its cover. Meanwhile Peter Strickland will be saying at the Q&A: “the film means nothing, I was just having a bit of fun”. MT

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM 28 JUNE 2019

Vita & Virginia (2018)

Dir-Scr Chanya Button | Evangelo Kioussis. With Gemma Arterton, Elizabeth Debicki, Isabella Rossellini. UK-Ireland 2018. 110min.

How can a film about two of the 20th century’s most colourful female characters be so underwhelming? Drawing from Eileen Atkins’ 1993 play, Chanya Button’s biopic explores the lesbian relationship between Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf without ever mining its incendiary dramatic potential. It is a drama without  drama, lacklustre and trivial despite its lush, unconventional pretensions.

Elizabeth Debicki is suburb as the rather awkward blue-stocking Wolfe. And she towers above Arterton’s impishly pedestrian portrait of glamorous socialite and gardening expert Sackville-West (doyenne of Sissinghurst Castle, whose Grade I listed gardens is one of the most famous in England). Sadly, the only reference to horticulture is a rather odd attempt at magic realism that sees CGI ivy sprouting out of the floors.

Vita & Virginia looks absolutely sumptuous in its rich 1920s Arts & Crafts settings (including medieval Knole House) but the film plays out like an insipid soap opera, its lacklustre characters simply going through the motions. There’s a great deal of pouting and misty close-ups of lips; but in the end nothing vaguely illuminating happens, and we left in the dark about these avant-garde women. Director Chanya Button has had a promising career so far with several awards for her filmmaking. Yet this most fascinating of themes: LGBTQ, horticulture and literature fails to ignite on any level.

Part of the problem is the script – written by Button and Atkins – which simply traces the steps that lead to Woolf’s sexual awakening in rather tepid bed scenes, rather than probing the depths of their intellectual attraction. In fact, Vita emerges a rather bored, housewife with a faux posh accent, rather than a highly creative aristocrat and free-thinking intellectual. The two exchange excerpts from twee love letters bringing nothing constructive to the party. And to cast Isabella Rossellini as Arterton’s on-screen mother, Baroness Sackville, is a grave mistake – the two couldn’t be more different. Rossellini exudes charisma in her role, threatening to cut off her daughter’s allowance if she doesn’t behave.

Vita is married to a suave bisexual diplomat Sir Harold Nicholson (Rupert Penry-Jones in fine fettle) and Woolf is supported by her loving husband Leonard (Peter Ferdinando) who recognised her need for stability. Vita worships her from afar and the women finally meet at a bohemian Bloomsbury party. From then on a friendship develops – although the two share no chemistry to speak of. Vita is 30, Virginia 10 years her senior. Debecki adds subtle layers of depth to her character, including an impressive accent, redolent of the era. Her sister is the painter Vanessa Bell (Emerald Fennell) who lives with a gay artist Duncan Grant (Adam Gillen).

Although this is essentially Vita’s story, the emotionally delicate Virginia steals the show as a highly enigmatic character who is in the process of penning the radical 1928 novel Orlando, an experience that appears initially to thrill her far more than her lesbian dalliance with the “Sapphic” Sackville-West, and encapsulates the male/female duality of her character. Virginia gradually becomes more involved in the relationship which eventually destabilises her (she in fact went on to commit suicide) and this is shown through convincing CGI rooks sweeping down in the gardens of the Knole.

Button certainly exposes the lesbian relationship between her characters but that’s really all the film does. Vita & Virginia is a missed opportunity to offer something more invigorating about the women themselves, and what attracted them to each other in the first place. MT

ON BFI SUBSCRIPTION FROM 24 May 2022

https://youtu.be/mPHxrdIneP4

Robert the Bruce (2019) ** Edinburgh Film Festival 2019

Dir: Richard Gray | Cast: Angus MacFadyen, Gabriel Bateman, Macaulay Callard, Jared Harris, Zach McGowan | US Drama

Headlining Edinburgh Film Festival’s latest edition this very Scottish saga is unconvincing and lacklustre, and far too ambitious for its limited resources. Directed by the Australian Richard Gray and made in the US it comes hot on the heels of another disappointing exploration of the Hibernian legend of machismo – Outlaw King from last October’s London Film Festival.

Setting itself up as a sequel to the superlative original interpretation of the story, Braveheart starring Mel Gibson, Robert the Bruce is much anticipated, particularly by the Scots. And with Angus MacFadyen in the leading role as the swashbuckling Scottish king – what could go wrong?. The answer is a great deal.  Co-scripter Eric Belgau sets the epic during the interregnum between the death of hero William Wallace and the First War of Scottish Independence. Heavy-handed and decidedly dour this is a film with an overinflated sense of its own importance despite its lack of authenticity and dodgy Scottish accents (due to a largely US cast). A restricted budget and pallid performances across the board further ensure that Robert the Bruce will fall on the sword of its predecessor.

In 1306 the war-weary Robert has been violently attacked by his former henchmen keen to get their hands on the bounty of 50 gold sovereigns offered as a reward for his death by the English King, Edward I. A family of crofters take the injured nobleman turned outlaw under their wing and he sallies forth again keen to avoid further ado with the bounty seekers. But brutal scuffles continue to break out as he goes on his lonely way plagued by doubt and desperate to survive the inclement winter of discontent. Rather than make the best of its indie low budget credentials with a pared down, gritty character study about a beaten down hero, the film tries to channel Braveheart‘s epic quality with a smattering of wide screen set pieces, while the Robert ruminates introspectively with squirrelly speeches about honour and duty.  And that lack of cohesion is ultimately the film’s downfall. MT

EIFF 2019 | 19 -30 JUNE 2019 

Alice (2019) ** Edinburgh Film Festival 2019

Dir.: Josephine Mackerras; Cast: Emelie Piponnier, Cloe Boreham, Martin Swabey, Jules Ferrand, UK/Australia/France 2019, 103 min.

ALICE sees two sex workers frolicking around in Paris and looking very much like Celine and Julie go Boating from Jacques Rivette’s New Wave classic. One says to the other “We are in control, you will see how easy it is”.

So what did Josephine Mackerras have in mind with her story of modern day Parisian sex workers? Alice (Piponnier) and Francois (Swabey) seem to be happy as a couple: we first meet them at a party where Francois quotes large chunks of Racine and kisses his wife passionately. But soon we learn that he has been seeing high class prostitutes and frittered away the money in their joint bank account, and, worst of all, has not paid the mortgage for twelve months: Alice learns that their flat will be re-possessed if she cannot pay the the arrears and worries about her little son’s Jules (Ferrand) future. Then, finding the contact number of an escort agency on Francois’ mobile, she attends an interview session, and gets the job. She meets Lisa, who shows her the ropes, and they become best friends. Clients are as worst odd, but usually very understanding. Then Francois comes up with a sob story about how his father took him to a prostitute age thirteen. He begs for forgiveness, so Alice uses him only as a babysitter. Then the worm turns, and Francois threatens to take Jules away from her mother. Mackerras ends her dubious tale with a kitsch, over-the-top happy end.

DoP Mickhael Delahaie’s idyllic Paris images would look better with a tourist advert – Alice and Lisa wandering around ‘romantic’ Montmartre is one example of the escalating cringe factor. Francois is the only convincing character, the women leads have to deal with simplistic dialogue; and Alice seems pretty clueless as a woman too dumb to check her bank accounts for a whole year. But the main problem with ALICE  is the director’s attempt to romanticise a profession which destroys both body and soul. AS

EDINBURGH FILM FESTIVAL | 19-30 JUNE 2019

 

 

Vagabond (1985) Bfi Player

Dir Agnès Varda | Cast: Sandrine Bonnaire, Macha Méril, Yolande Moreau | 106′ | France | Drama

Venice Goldenn Lion winner Vagabond is haunting story about loss, loneliness and defiance expressed through its remarkable central character played by one of French cinema’s most intriguing talents, Sandrine Bonnaire, who had made her first appearance in Maurice Pialat’s À nos amours. Here she gives a captivating performance as the freewheeling rebel Mona who spends her days wondering aimlessly through the South of France, her death in the opening scenes of this melancholy human story allowing Varda to explore and us to reflect on society’s preconceptions about women and the disenchfranchised. Despite its 1980s setting, Vagabond feels every as relevant in today’s shifting sociopolitical climate. A simple narrative but one with everlasting appeal and universal resonance.

NOW ON BFI PLAYER

Ruben Brandt, Collector (2018) **** Edinburgh Film Festival 2019

Dir.: Milorad Krstic; Animation with the voices of Ivan Kamaras, Gabriella Hamori, Zalan Makranczi; Hungary 2018, 96 min.

Milorad Krstic (66), director, designer and script-writer of his debut animation feature, won the Golden Bear for Best Short Film at the Berlinale in 1995. Premiering here at Locarno Film Festival Ruben Brandt is mostly hand-drawn with some CG elements and very much resembles in style and narrative of the recent Folimage animation feature A Cat in Paris , even though the tone is much darker.

Psychotherapist Ruben Brandt (Kamaras) suffers from dreams and hallucinations: He is attacked by figures from famous paintings like Velazquez’ “Infanta Margarita” and Botticelli’s “Venus”. Nevertheless, Brandt goes on treating his four patients, through role-plays of stories such as Little Riding Hood. They are all highly skilled burglars; so is Mimi (Hamori), who puts Ruben’s plan into action; he wants to possess thirteen famous paintings, so Mimi heads first to the Paris Louvre, hotly pursued by detective Kowalski (Makranczi), who has been hired by various insurance companies, who put a 100million dollar bounty on Ruben’s head. But Brandt becomes increasingly desperate, his dreams growing ever more violent. We see little Ruben, his neurologist father making him watch cartoons, a favourite is Rusalocka in “The Little Mermaid”. The thieves embark on a world cruise to steal Van Gogh’s “Postman Roulin”, Titan’s “Venus of Urbino” and Picasso’s “Woman with Book”, visiting the Uffizzi, the Hermitage, Tate and MoMA. There are flying cats, and the pictures start to interact with Ruben. In the Pantheon, Ruben is asked to participate in a Western duel, before being whisked off in a plane to Arles in Provence. Matters become even more complicated it emerges that Kowalski is Ruben’s half-brother. Their father Gerhardt was a Stasi spy who defected to the USA and worked for the CIA on neurological research. He has just died, and Kowalski’s mother tells his son, “ I had to leave your father, so you could have your own dreams”. Ruben meanwhile is meeting the painter Renoir, and is trying to unravel his father’s life. After a wild hunt, when the six are hunted down by two oil-tankers and a helicopter, the chase ends in Tokyo, during the attempted theft of the last painting, Warhol’s “Double Elvis”.

On one level Ruben Brandt is a haunt caper, one the other a trip through European film history from ‘Caligari’, Eisenstein, Hitchcock to Wenders. Krstic is clear about his intentions: “To be haunted by ghosts or zombies in nightmares is a cliché, it’s more exciting to be haunted by Velázquez’s ‘Infanta Margarita’ or Botticelli’s ‘Venus.” And paraphrasing Godard he explains his aesthetic concept: “For me drawing is imagination, and animated film is imagination twenty-four times a second.” His attempt at an ‘audio-visual symphony’ might be strange at times, but is always fascinating, and even in its most absurd moments Ruben Brandt is utterly compelling. A unique, magical, trippy experience, a throwback to the Sixties with its echoes of Pink Panther.

EIFF 19 JUNE – 30 JUNE | ANIMATION STRAND | PREMIERED AT LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2018

Summer 1993 (2017) Bfi player

Dir/Writer: Carla Simón | Drama | Spain, 2017 | 96′

Tears will well up within the first few minutes of this tender tale about a little orphaned Catalan girl coping with grief and uncertainty after her parents’ death. Cast your mind back to the panic and fear of losing sight of your own mother in the supermarket when you were six. And that coupled with the realisation that she’s never coming back is the feeling Simón inspires in debut that won Best First Feature award at Berlinale 2017.

Shooting at waist level the director manages to convey life from Frida’s perspective, and Laia Artigas gives a determined performance, mature for one so young. She views her new family set-up with a certain feral mistrust tempered with the anger of abandonment brought on by insecurity and steely pragmatism. Frida is not sure how to respond to her changed circumstances as she goes about her daily routine in the limpid naturalistic light of the family’s home in rural Girona. It’s only in quiet moments that she allows herself to dissolve in tears.

Life couldn’t be better with her uncle Esteve (David Verdaguer, 10,000km), aunt Marga (Bruna Cusi), and toddler cousin Anna (Paula Robles), and Simón’s quietly observant treatment takes a ‘less is more’ approach as she tells her story, for the most part without dialogue, allowing us to contemplate and revisit our own childhood through Frida’s innocent eyes.

Marga is clearly on her best behaviour, often chiding Anna as she strains to protect Frida with kid gloves. Clearly, Frida’s bereavement is not going to be as simple as we thought. Simón brings her own experiences to bear in a story that has an certain unsettling feel throughout its well-paced running time making SUMMER 1993 – although not entirely surprising – engaging and quietly memorable. MT

NOW ON BFI PLAYER SCREENING AS PART OF THE FOCUS ON SPAIN STRAND | EIFF 19-29 JUNE 2109

 

Blancanieves (2012) **** Edinburgh Film Festival

Dir: Pablo Berger | Cast: Maribel Verdu, Emilio Gavira, Daniel Gimenez Cacho | Spain Drama 110’

A bittersweet homage to the Golden Age of Spanish silent cinema, Pablo Berger’s intoxicating Gothic fantasy relocates the tale of Snow White to a sweepingly romantic vision of 1920s Seville, where a little girl overcomes cruel adversity to find fame as a bullfighter.

Tinged with melancholy and the macabre, along the lines of a Grimm’s Fairy Tale, Blancanieves is delicately rendered in elegant black and white and set to Alfonso de Vilallonga’s lush score.

Carmen (played by Sofia Oria as a child and Macarena Garcia in later life) is the daughter of a proud and famous bullfighter who is paralysed in the ring.  After her mother’s death in childbirth, her father remarries unwisely to Marbel Verdu’s spiteful and self-centred virago Encarna. She neglects both Carmen and her father who later dies leaving the little girl at her mercy.  In this version six miniature bullfighters take the role of the seven dwarfs who come to Carmen’s rescue after finding her abandoned one day by Encarna. She is re-named ‘Blancanieves’.

As the story progresses, the production is slightly hampered by tonal differences as heightened melodrama struggles with Gothic and surreal fantasy to create slightly off-key episodes of banal humour which detract from the graceful delicacy of Kiko de la Rica’s cinematography.  A passionate and inspired creation, nevertheless, with the fresh appeal of The Artist tweaked with touches of Buñuel: it has certainly won the hearts of the Festival Circuit Juries winning no less than 33 awards in one year for script, score, cinematography, cast and costumes. Snow White has never looked so good!. MT

BLANCANIEVES screening on 22 June 2019 at EIFF | Part of the Once Upon a Time in Spain Strand

 

The Captor (2018) **

Dir: Robert Burdeau | Cast: Ethan Hawke, Noomi Rapace, Mark Strong | Drama 90′

Ethan Hawke dominates this strangely placid bank robbery drama spiked by absurdist humour and based on a real event in 1970s Stockholm that gave birth to the medical condition (Stockholm syndrome). It was back in 1973 that criminal Jan-Erik Olsson (Hawke) donned a jaunty cowboy hat and strolled cockily into the main branch of Kreditbanken. Clearly on drugs, he has a field day as the Easy Rider robber and even finds love with the unlikely bland bank clerk Bianca (Repace is a real discovery in the role).

The capable cast desperately try to enliven this curious caper eking out their thin characterisations – but to no avail. Boring and monotonous for the most part the humour almost succeeds but eventually even that starts to run out of steam. Burdeau seems happy to let Strong and Hawke run wild as the shouty criminals but there’s no real dramatic heft in this hammy heist. MT

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 21 JUNE 2019

The Flood (2019)***

Dir: Anthony Woodley | Cast: Lena Headey, Iain Glenn, Ivanno Jeremiah | Drama 98′

Inspired by the growing issue surrounding immigration Anthony Woodley has put together a moving drama that examines both sides of this tragic human crisis.

Crowned by three tremendous central performances The Flood centres on the plight of a doe-eyed Eritrean man Haile (a stunning Jeremiah) who has had a traumatic time getting to England in the back of a lorry. The action flips back and forth between the official interrogation in stifling government offices and Haile’s eventful journey, his doe-eyed gentleness making it clear that he is certainly no criminal despite the unfortunate circumstances of his discovery by police.

Lena Headey makes for a convincing world weary immigration official wading diligently through the tears and excuses while drowning in a personal crisis of her own. “Everyone has their story” she posits sarcastically, while swigging water from a plastic bottle (that we later discover is vodka). Iain Glen plays her exhausted boss bowing under pressure to meet government targets.

Refreshingly The Flood is a cinematic, understated and sleek-looking film full of decent well-intentioned souls trying to survive rather than the hard-nosed characters we’ve come to expect in the growing ‘immigration’ genre. Helen Kingston’s script is based on Woodley’s own accounts during his time volunteering in the Calais Jungle. But one can’t help wondering too about the UK housing crisis, as one of the successful imigrées opens the front door of her new council home. MT

THE FLOOD is in UK cinemas and on demand from 21st June

Amin (2018) ***

Dir: Philippe Faucon | France | Drama | 97’

Without resorting to outrage or dour social realism to convey his indignation, respected filmmaker Philippe Faucon draws on his lifetime experiences in Africa for this visually limpid ans gently humanist story of a Senegalese immigrant grafting to provide for his family back home, where the sun shines all year but life is as tough. The difference is that in France he can earn much more money, despite the increasing problems of unemployment, but his marriage starts to suffer.

AMIN is a watchable if rather predictable drama that joins other similar eye-opening interracial romances such as Laurent Cantet’s Vers Le Sud and Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise: Love in illustrating the plight of those with restrained financial or emotional circumstances and how this weakens their moral resolve and as they reach out to those who share their emotional pain from the other of the social or geographical divide.

Amin does his best to succeed with dignity and respect for his fellows in the noisy hostel they share on the outskirts of the big city. He is a proud and decent father of three but is growing increasingly distant from his wife who pressures him to bring the family to France. Faucon spends over half of the film slowly building a poignant picture of emotional and social strife for immigrant newcomers to France. Almost all of them have been short-changed by the system despite working hard to build up the country. Amin soon meets Emanuelle Devos’ single mother while working with some other builders to renovate her house. She has fallen out with her husband and has a little girl to support (Fantine Harduin from last year’s Happy End). The denouement is fairly formulaic but AMIN is a beautifully crafted drama that captures the zeitgeist in a charming and human way.

NOW ON GENERAL 21 JUNE 2019 | DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT  CANNES 2018

 

 

Romeo and Juliet (1968) **** Tribute to Franco Zeffirelli

Director: Franco Zeffirelli  Screenplay: Franco Brusati, Masolino D’Amico | Cast: Olivia Hussey, Leonard Whiting, John McEnery, Milo O’Shea, Pat Heywood, Robert Stephens, Michael York, Bruce Robinson

138min  | Romantic Drama | Italy

Franco Zeffirelli’s ROMEO AND JULIET captures the innocent rapture of teenage love when hormones spill over to create an intoxicating cocktail of lust and longing. Full of life and perfectly cast, newcomers Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey were absolutely exquisite as the star-struck pair, evoking a sweetly innocent sexuality that has never been seen again in cinema history. Their beautifully spoken prose and mesmerising chemistry completes this idealistic yet achingly romantic depiction of tragic love between Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet, who came from different warring families.

And although D’Amico and Brusati’s screenplay dumbs things down in the classic speeches, each character is superbly cast: Milo O’Shea as the kindly indulgent yet dignified Friar Laurence; John McEnergy’s fiesty Mercutio, and Pat Heywood’s jovial Nurse all make their memorable mark and are still fresh and familiar nearly 50 years later, in this sparkling restoration. Zeffirelli makes good use of the original settings of the play in the medieval ‘struscio’ of Perugia, Viterbo, Siena and the Palazzo Borghese in Rome, and where Pasqualino De Santis’ stunning set pieces luxuriate in an around the rolling countryside of Gubbio (Umbria) and rural Siena (Tuscany), winning him an Oscar for cinematography. Danilo Donati won another for his richly beautiful costumes, and also a Bafta.

Nino Rota’s romantic score “What is Youth” will also flood back to the memories of those who first saw it in the late ’60s or ’70s. He made his name in The Leopard and would go on to write music for The Godfather, Part I and II. The script plays up the relationship between friends Mercutio and Romeo. And Robert Stephens is suave and wise as the Prince of Verona. Romeo and Juliet’s bedroom scenes are quite raunchy in a sensual way – Hussey was almost 16 and Whiting 17 – but they show their tenderness when they break down in tears in the touching final scenes and win Golden Globes for Most Promising Newcomers. MT

A BRAND NEW 4K RESTORATION is now available |  PART OF THE SHAKESPEARE LIVES SEASON: CELEBRATING THE WORKS OF THE BARD over 400 YEARS AFTER HIS DEATH.

 

 

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945) **** Home Ent

Dir: Elia Kazan | Drama | US

Elia Kazan‘s first film, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn shows that the filmmaker’s great empathy for his characters was already quite evident at this early juncture, and this endures as one of the most moving Hollywood dramas of the 1940s. Based on Betty Smith‘s novel – a bestseller in the U.S. but also one of the most popular books among American soldiers overseas in WWII – Kazan’s debut is a sensitive, masterful adaptation.

Set among Brooklyn tenements circa 1912, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a portrait of the Nolans, an Irish-American family living in financially challenging circumstances, often made worse by father Johnny’s drinking and employment problems. But matriarch Katie keeps the family together, caring for son Neeley and daughter Francie, as well as Katie’s outspoken, oft-married sister Sissy. But just as Francie’s gift for writing opens up new avenues, more tragic developments test the family’s resolve.

Winning Academy Awards for actors James Dunn (as Johnny) and Peggy Ann Garner (as Francie), and featuring splendid work by Dorothy McGuire and Joan BlondellA Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a heartfelt testament to the strength of family, and offers an early indication of Kazan’s unrivalled proficiency with actors. COURTESY OF EUREKA

ON RELEASE from 22 July 2019  https://amzn.to/2VM4GdJ Eureka Store  https://eurekavideo.co.uk/movie/a-tree-grows-in-brooklyn/

 

Sometimes Always Never (2018) ****

Dir: Carl Hunter | Writer: Frank Cottrell Boyce | Cast: Bill Nighy, Jenny Agutter, Sam Riley, Tim McInnerny, Alice Lowe | UK Comedy Drama | 97′

Bill Nighy, Sam Riley and Jenny Agutter star in this stylishly amusing comedy-drama that explores love, loss and communication – or the lack of it – for one English family. The title refers to the tailors’ code to buttoning a suit jacket.

Nighy is terrific as Alan, a retired but sharply suited Merseyside tailor who still enjoys a game of scrabble and his nighttime strolls, always hoping to bump into his son who disappeared years ago. Grief has seen Alan retreat into the comfort of lexicography, and this obsession for scrabble enables him to showcase his broad knowledge of words in a killer ability to play a world-class game. Yet beneath Alan’s dapper exterior and  nonchalance lies a deep sadness and disillusionment, and a longing for the son he will never forget, and who left in a huff after a scrabble contretemps erupted over the word “Zo”.

A gentle rain falls as we first meet Alan on the beach in Crosby where he joins his other son Peter (Sam Riley) for one of their regular visits to identify an unclaimed body. Deciding to make a night of it, they head to a nearby hotel where they come across another scrabble-loving couple in the shape of Agutter and McInnerny in a scene that’s a real pleasure to watch, performed with consummate ease, and yet riven with subtle psychological insight and deadpan humour.

Sam Riley gives a stunning turn as the dejected ‘also ran’ Peter, who lives contentedly with his pleasant wife Sue (a superb Alice Lowe) and their secretive son Jack (Louis Healy). But it’s Alan’s dedication to scrabble that forms the nub of the narrative and the dramatic touchstone that drives the plot forward. Staying at Peter’s house after the morgue visit Alan gets the chance to share some local family history: “your aunt was a part-time, freelance coal miner”, he also comes across an online Scrabble opponent who appears to fit the profile of his missing son, sending Alan into a fierce all-nighter trying to track down the mystery internet player.

Scrabble is the cement that holds this family together in this poignant but enjoyably petillant paean to communication. Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s intelligent script is fraught with witty and wise dialogue and is stylishly directed by cinematographer Carl Hunter who brings artistic flair to the idiosyncratic domestic interiors and the widescreen images that reflect the loveliness of the luminous Lancashire landscapes. MT

NOW ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE.

The Hummingbird Project (2018) Mubi

Dir: Kim Nguyen | Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Alexander Skarsgard, Salma Hayek, Michael Mando, Sarah Goldberg | Tech thriller | US 111′

In Kim Nguyen’s ambitious financial thriller Jesse Eisenberg and Alexander Skarsgard are New York tech wizards working for Salma Hayek’s Stock Exchange trading magnate.

Meanwhile the two cousins have a secret money-making plan of their own. It involves the construction of a high speed fiber-optic cable that allows information to travel in a nanosecond (the beat of a hummingbird’s wing) so stockbrokers can beat their competitors hands down.

Although it sounds rather highfaluting, this is a slick and intelligent film that explores the humanity in a high octane premise, even finding humour in those dark nights of the soul. Salma Hayek is Eva Torres, a wacky but believable City whizz babe with roots as dark as Kunta Kinti. Her ironic approach to her uptight character is one of the highlights here along with. Jesse Eisenberg whose suave sales patter barely hides an existential angst of his own and in his element as a man under pressure, fronting up a dicey operation with considerable aplomb while everything around him  is in doubt. Meanwhile Anton (Alexander Skarsgard) is the hypochondriac nerd helping him to pull off the scheme with conviction — and even though we know the project is outlandish – it very much buys into the zeitgeist. There’s a angsty atmospheric score by Yves Gourmeur that primps the tension and then mollifies it in all the right places.

Half way into the story, Vincent decides they should both resign from Torres’ employ and focus on their own project, finding investors for their new-fangled cable, and trousering the profits. But this is easier said than done, and Vincent’s tip-top negotiating skills are soon compromised by his deteriorating health.

The seemingly unfeasible project involves drilling a line horizontally under private land, a logistical nightmare that involves endless red tape and deep pockets on the financial front. Vincent schmoozes the home-owners, contractors and drillers, while Anton disappears into the world of computer coding, hilariously oblivious of his wife’s increasingly histrionic  demands. Clearly on the spectrum, Anton is mesmerised by his work,  Skarsgard fashions a fascinating portrait of emotional detachment that almost borders on autism.

Clearly Hummingbird has issues quite apart from its outlandish premise and tonal flaws, but this is an engrossing study of ambition, perseverance and the human desire to make one’s mark, however challenging, or unfeasible. Nguyen manages to humanise the much maligned world of finance and technology by deconstructing those struggling with their demons both physical and mental. He does so with a quirky vein of humour making The Hummingbird Project an enjoyable and original watch. MT

 

Revenge | Mest (1989) **** Midnight Sun Film Festival 2019

Dir: JERMEK ŠINARBAYEV | Russia | Drama 99′

When the Soviet Union broke up, the Kazakh New Wave was born. Two of its brightest protagonists were Jermek Shinarbayev and his scriptwriter Anatoli Kimi. Of their three films, the most remarkable and poetic is this exquisite tale of violence and obsession that had its international premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 1991.

Unfolding in the eight parts, the opening episode takes place in 17th century Korea where a child is raised specifically to avenge the death of his father’s first born: the Emperor’s son is trained as a soldier, but his best friend becomes a poet of violence. In 1915, the teacher kills his pupil, a little girl. The girl’s father swears revenge and follows the teacher to China, but is unable to carry out her intentions.

Elegant yet complex the film’s ingenious narrative elements are enhanced by Sergei Kosmanjov’s stunningly evocative images. Revenge has been restored as part of Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project.

Restored in 2010 by the Cinemaeca di Bologna / L’Immagine Ritrovata Laboratory in Kazakhstan Studio of the Republic of Kazakhstan and Ermek Shinarbaev.

Midnight Sun Film Festival 2019 | 12-16 June 2019

Celebrating its 34th year the Midnight Sun Film Festival presents a niche selection of this year’s features and documentaries, along with musical evenings and master classes in its luminous setting of Sodankylä, Finnish Lapland. 

At the top of the list of new films is Berlinare’s Golden Bear award, Nadar Lapid’s Synonyms, a weird and wacky drama about a young Israeli in Paris. French Canadian Denis Cotê will also be in the Arctic Circle this June with his enigmatic portrayal of a village, Ghost Town Anthology. along with Claire Denis and her latest High Life, a sci-fi drama starring Robert Pattinson and Juliette Binoche. And one of the gems of San Sebastian 2018  will be also join the party, Rojo, a film from Argentinian director Benjamin Naishtat, captures the existential angst of the military dictatorship of the 1970s.

Portuguese director Rodrigo Areias will present the Finnish premiere of his documentary film about a fishing village in the Azores, Blue Breath. One of festival’s top documentaries was a favourite at this year’s Sundance. Honeyland from directors Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov, explores the life of ”the last female wild beekeeper”.

From last year’s Karlovy Vary Festival there will also I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians, Romanian’s top director Radu Jude’s distinctive analysis of the country’s history and the present. Belarus is sadly not well known for its cinema, let alone its strong female characters, so Darya Zhuk’s Crystal Swan  offers a chance to sample the creative efforts of both its lead and director. Meanwhile, There will also be a chance to see Kazakh cult film director, Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s colourful melodrama The Gentle Indifference of The World.

Masterclasses and specialties

One of the festival’s guest film maker, Kent Jones, will be presenting in his masterclasses films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller The Lady Vanishes, as an expert of Kazakhstan’s New Wave of the 90s, Jermek Šinarbajev’s true rarity, Revenge (above).

What do we know about the films of the Baltic States? The artistic director of the heartfelt Riga International Film Festival, Sonora Broka, will be leading the audience to the joyful cult film specialties from musical films to erotic horror: included in the ”Baltic 101” theme will be Estonian director Rainer Sarnet’s November, Lithuanian Arünas Zebriünas’s The Devil’s Bride and Latvian Vasili Massi’s The Spider as well as Ronald Kalnis’s Four White Skirts.

Finland’s internationally best known festival curator, Mika Taanila will return to Sodankylä once again presenting not only the newest short film treasures of experimental films from all around the world, but also in a special show, the legendary short film sensation Christmas on Earth, by the shooting star of the 60s underground, Barbara Rubin, complemented with Chuck Smith’s documentary Barbara Rubin and the Exploiding NY Underground.

Music films and auteur portraits

Traditionally, music films and documentaries about filmmakers with production samples are a part of the programme at MSFF. The great actor Ethan Hawke has once again been behind the camera and directed a successful biography Blaze about Texas singer legend Blaze Foley. Airbek Daiyerbekov’s The Song of The Tree is a unique Kyrgyz musical. This time jazz is represented in two elegant documentaries: Leslie Woodhead’ssinger portrait Ella Fitzgerald: Just One of Those Things and Eric Friendler’s It Must Schwing: The Blue Note Story.

MIDNIGHT SUN FILM FESTIVAL | 12-16 JUNE 2019

 

Edinburgh Film Festival 2019 – New Films

Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) is taking place between 19th and 30th June. This year the Festival will screen around 121 new features, including 18 feature film World Premieres from across the globe.

This year the focus is Spain and there will be a particular emphasis on genre films from women directors from around the world, ranging from gothic romance and Western chills through to science fiction and old-fashioned horror. All this set alongside a tribute to French filmmaker Agnès Varda, a woman who has inspired generations of directors.

There will be guests including one of Britain’s most successful directors, Danny Boyle, award-winning actor and producer Jack Lowden, British documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield and Scottish writer, director and actor Pollyanna McIntosh who also brings her latest film, Darlin’ to this year’s EIFF, and director, actor, writer and producer Icíar Bollaín. 

The festival will screen the world premiere of Adrian Noble’s Mrs Lowry & Son, starring Timothy Spall as the iconic painter L S Lowry, and Vanessa Redgrave. The Black Forest described as a ‘love letter to Europe’ from writer-director Ruth Platt; and coming-of-age supernatural love story Carmilla from director Emily Harris.

The EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVES strand features: Elfar Adalsteins’ End of Sentence where a bickering father and son from America take a road trip in Ireland; The Emperor of Paris starring Vincent Cassel will receive its UK Premiere at the Festival alongside Rudolph Herzog’s amusing How to Fake a War starring Katherine Parkinson and Aniara, an epic science-fiction drama about a passenger spaceship lost in the void, as well as titles including Barbara Vekarić’s Aleksi from Croatia; Susanne Heinrich’s Aren’t You Happy? from Germany and Swiss psychological drama Cronofobia. Audiences can also look forward to the return of France’s favourite Gaul in Asterix: The Secret of the Magic Potion.

This year’s WORLD PERSPECTIVES strand offers audiences an exciting and challenging array of new works by talented filmmakers from around the world. Highlights include: the World Premieres of Astronaut, starring Richard Dreyfuss as a lonely widower who dreams of a trip to space and Rodrigo Guerrero’s Venezia. Australian cinema features prominently this year with the acclaimed Acute Misfortune, a striking, brilliant and unconventional portrait of one of Australia’s most acclaimed and idiosyncratic painters, Adam Cullen; Other highlights include two South Korean action-adventure masterclasses in the form of Unstoppable and box office smash Extreme Job.

This year’s DOCUMENTARIES programme reflects the ability of documentary film to amaze, inspire, challenge, provoke and fascinate audiences, offering them the unique chance to travel the world and see strange and unusual sights. Strand highlights include:Memory: The Origins of Alien, a fascinating documentary about the making of Alien from the very beginning; This Changes Everything which examines the problems faced by women filmmakers and features interviews with Hollywood greats including Geena Davis, Meryl Streep, Natalie Portman, Taraji P. Henson, Reese Witherspoon and Cate Blanchett; Loopers: The Caddie’s Long Walk narrated by former caddie Bill Murray and Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love, from Nick Broomfield, giving audiences an insight into Leonard Cohen’s love affair with Marianne Ihlen. 

This year’s retrospective strand entitled ONCE UPON A TIME IN SPAIN, will explore Spain’s rich cinematic history through three strands: A Retrospective Celebration of Modern Spanish Cinema; A Retrospective Selection of Cult Spanish Cinema and an in-depth celebration of the work of legendary Spanish writer, actor and filmmaker, Icíar Bollaín. Designed to begin where the retrospective ends, FOCUS ON SPAIN features a selection of brand new Spanish cinema by some of the country’s most promising directors. Highlights include: Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles from Salvador Simó, an accomplished and fitting homage to the great master of surrealist cinema; the directorial debut from Nicolás Pacheco Cages and gripping sci-fi thriller h0us3 from Manolo Munguía, inspired by the mysterious ‘insurance files’ famously employed by Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. 

The Festival will screen a number of films by the late great Agnès Varda across a retrospective strand entitled THE FEATURES OF AGNÈS and Varda by Agnès, her final film which will be introduced by Honorary Patron Mark Cousins.

Audiences can look forward to a whistle-stop tour of the latest ideas and techniques being explored in the world of animated film in the International Animation selection, as part of the Festival’s annual dedicated ANIMATION strand, as well as a screening of an anthology of anime shorts from the Japanese Studio Ponoc – the anticipated successor to Studio Ghibli – in association with Scotland Loves Anime.

If the weather holds there will be a free open-air cinema event, Film Fest in the City with Edinburgh Live, at St Andrew Square Garden, running from Friday 14th to Sunday 16th June 2019.

EDINBURGH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | 19-30 JUNE 2019 

 

Gloria Bell (2018)

Dir.: Sebastian Lelio; Cast: Julianne Moore, John Turturro, Michael Cera, Alanna Ubach, Brad Garrett, Jeanne Triplehorn; USA 2018, 102 min.

Sebastian Lelio takes his Chilean production of Gloria to Los Angeles, and even though Julianne Moore is magnificent in the title role (as was Paulina Garcia, who won Best Actress at Berlin), this version is not a winner, largely down to the tempo – the original Gloria was a tightly-paced fast-moving romantic drama, evocative of the intense cosmopolitan atmosphere of the capital Santiago. This LA version suffers a meandering script and too much sentimentality. Lelio may have won the Oscar for best Foreign feature with A Fantastic Woman, but his strongest film to date is still his Berlinale hit Gloria.

We meet Moore in a dance club looking for someone special, although her independent life is full of friends and family. Her choice of Arnold (Turturro) is an odd one: he is an ex-Marine, weapons aficionado (running a military theme park, where participants shoot each other with paint guns) and global-warming denier to boot. The sex is good, but their different outlooks clash at a family re-union. Gloria invites Arnold to a party with her ex-husband Dustin (Garrett), his new wife Fiona (Triplehorn), and their adult children Peter (Cera) and Veronica (Urbach). Whilst Gloria gets on very well with her ex and Fiona, Arnold is left out in the cold.

The four of them enjoy a nostalgic journey into the childhood of Pete and Veronica, ignoring Arnold. He leaves, and it takes a while for the rest to recognise his disappearance. Gloria is unforgiving and drops him. His two grown-up children resist him have a new life. After getting back together the couple head to Vegas where Arnold’s daughters again get the attention, after one of them walks through a glass door. After after a sweet revenge act on Arnold Gloria is back to the drawing board, unbroken in her optimism to find a viable man to love.

Lelio plays to the gallery, desperate for Gloria (and the feature) to be loved at all costs. The cheesy moments don’t help: when Arnold reads a South-American love poem to Gloria, the cringe level rises. There are some nice touches, like the Sphinx cat who has adopted Gloria; and her phone calls to the children, ending, passive-aggressively with “it’s your mother”. Arnold puts up with his two clinging daughters, but Gloria can’t let go off her daughter Veronica, who is off to Sweden to marry a surfer. All said and done, this is a pale rider, Lelio does not make the most of the situation and neither does DoP Natasha Braier, whose Las Vegas images are particularly cliché ridden. Moore saves the day, but – as is almost always the case – you can’t beat the original. AS

OUT ON 7 June 2019

We The Animals (2018) ****

Dir.: Jeremiah Zagar; Cast: Evan Rosado, Isaiah Kristian, Josiah Gabriel, Sheila Vand, Paul Cashillo; USA 2018, 93 min.

Jeremiah Zagar’s debut feature is a dreamlike portrait of the artist as a (very) young man, and a total repudiation of macho behaviour. Shot brilliantly on 16mm by DoP Zak Mulligan, We The Animals is a unique undertaking.

Based on a novel by Justin Torres, this is a wild ride of sexual awakening told from the perspective of nine-year old Jonah (Rosado) the youngest of three brothers who live with their parents in a dilapidated house in rural New York. Their Mum (Vand) a white woman from Brooklyn, who works at a bottling plant and her husband (Cashillo), a Puerto Rican security guard, are either fighting or fucking passionately, so the three boys are left to themselves; the two older ones, Manny (Kristian) and Joel (Gabriel) looking out for their little brother. A lakeside incident sets the tone: Dad, all macho bravado, throws Jonah into the water – and he is lucky to survive. His furious mother is soon the victim of more violence from her husband. After that, the father disappears only to re-appear suddenly, wanting to be part of the family, like nothing has happened. Mum asks Jonah “to stay my little boy” – no wonder, because her older sons copy their dad’s obstreperous  behaviour. As a form of escapism, Jonah starts sketching, under the bed at night. After his drawings are discovered, he has to make a choice.

The human side of the outside world takes a back seat to the adventures in the forest, but the neighbour’s emotionally immature son makes a dramatic impact on the three siblings with his amateur porn videos, one of which features a homosexual act – and something in Jonah stirs.

Whilst the adult’s relationship is too often clichéd, the children’s games are full of magic and poetry. Jonah’s self-discovery comes in leaps and bounds, and the languid images are a perfect foil for it. The crude drawings and illustrations by Mark Samsonovich are somehow fitting as a “Contra-Point” to the overall dreamlike mood. Cruelty and imagination live cheek by jowl, and Jonah’s inner life is as volatile as his parent’s relationship. We the Animals is freewheeling and genre-less, an innovation in itself, like Jonah’s coming of age in a world of permanent contradictions, using art for self-determination. AS

SCREENING DURING BFI FLARE 2019 | ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE COURTESY OF EUREKA from 14 JUNE 2019    

   

I Was Monty’s Double (1958) **** Blu-ray release

Dir: John Guillermin | Script: Bryan Forbes | Cast: M E Clifton Jones, John Mills, Maureen Connell, Cecil Parker, Patrick Allen, Leslie Philips, Barbara Hicks, Sidney James, John Le Mesurier, Marius Goring, Michael Hordern | War Drama | UK 101′

During the war years doubles often served as decoys to divert the enemy away from the main action. One such doppelgänger was ME Clifton-James whose striking resemblance to General Montgomery made him the ideal candidate to impersonate him during a special assignment in North Africa with D-Day fast approaching at the end of the Second World War. And he really is terrific in the role, successfully drawing German troops away from Normandy and becoming both a hero and a major military target.

The riveting real story has been amusingly adapted for the screen by Bryn Forbes providing the drama for John Guillermin’s entertaining caper which stars his wife Peggy and a top-tier array of British talent from the era including a chipper John Mills, Leslie Philips (looking rather pleased with himself), John Le Mesurier (playing it rather severely against type), Michael Hordern and even Marius Goring. I WAS MONTY’S DOUBLE is smart, astute and pacy as it powers along convincingly in Basil Emmott’s slick black and white camerawork. As Clifton James prepares for his role of a lifetime there’s never a dull moment both in the tensely conspiratorial interior scenes and on the widescreen – with some terrific set pieces such as the landing in Gibraltar and North Africa. Guillermin’s eclectic career path would see him directing Orson Welles in the 1966 mystery thriller House of Cards and Paul Newman and Steve McQueen in The Towering Inferno (1974). MT

AVAILABLE from JUNE 11 | COURTESY OF STUDIOCANAL to COMMEMORATE the 75th ANNIVERSARY OF THE D-DAY LANDINGS

Odette (1950) **** Home Ent release

Dir.: Herbert Wilcox; Cast: Anna Neagle, Trevor Howard, Marius Goring, Peter Ustinov, Alfred Schieske; UK 1950, 124 min.

Directed by Herbert Wilcox (1890-1977) and scripted by Warren Chetham-Strode after the book Odette, The Story of a British Agent by Jerrad Tickell, Odette was produced by Wilcox and his leading lady and wife Anna Neagle (1904-1986). 

A popular star of the British cinema from the 1930s onwards, she played Neil Gwynn, Queen Victorian (twice) and Edith Cavell, Neagle was nevertheless reluctant to be cast as Odette Hallowes- Samson-Churchill, a French born British Special Operations agent, who survived Ravensbrück Concentration Camp after being captured working for the resistance in France. Wilcox (The Lady with a Lamp) offered the part to Michèle Morgan and Ingrid Bergman, who both turned him down. The real Odette Samson finally convinced Neagle to take on the role.

Odette works with the resistance as British operative in France. She meets and works for commander Peter Churchill (Howard), whom she would marry after the war. Odette and the Russian agent Arnaud (Ustinov) are lured into a trap by ‘Henri’ (Goring), who is really the German Abwehr spy Hugo Bleicher, pretending that he is on the side of anti-Hitler forces. The three of them are captured, and Odette is tortured in the notorious Fresnes prison near Paris. Whilst Arnaud (real name Rabinovitch) is sent to the extermination camp Rawicz, near Lodz in Poland, Odette is transferred to Ravensbrück, where she is to be executed. But the camp commandant Fritz Suhren (Schieske) believes her lie, that she is Winston Churchill’s niece. He hopes to bargain for a pardon after letting her go free to meet the advancing American troops. Odette is reunited with Peter in the UK, and a witness in the trial against Suhren – who was, ironically hanged the same year, the feature Odette hit the British cinemas, being the forth most successful film that year at the box-office.

This was a picture with some real howlers (like Bleicher apologising to Odette, and making it possible for her to see Peter Churchill in prison ‘for a last time’), Neagle is superb in her understatement. But the star is veteran DoP Max Green aka Mutz Greenbaum (1896-1968), a German émigré who founded the ‘Deutsche Bioscope’ and was after his emigration responsible for classics like The Stars look Down, Night and the City and So evil, my Love. The black-and-white images, particularly the one in Fresnes and Ravensbrück, belie the studio background. Only slightly dated, Odette is still a harrowing reminder of the price women had to pay in the liberation from fascism. AS

DVD, BLU-RAY, DOWNLOAD | JUNE 11th | STUDIOCANAL VINTAGE CLASSICS | COMMEMORATING THE 75th ANNIVERSARY OF D DAY 

Last Summer (2018) ***

Dir: Jon Jones | Richard Harrington, Nia Roberts, Robert Wilfort and Steffan Rhodri | UK 97′                                          

Four boys are looking forward to their summer holidays in the Welsh valleys when the adult world intervenes to spoil their fun. Instead of playing and discovering the joys of barn owls and and a sheep dog Rex, they are faced with the police and the social services as reality strikes. Catapulted into the adult world, they decide to take matters into their own hands – and who wouldn’t with a mother like Davy’s, freaking the boy out with the threat of some impending fate. Getting the melodramatic bits over early, means this well-paced drama can then unfold gradually, from the perspective of the boys.

Set during the 1970s in the stunning countryside of South Wales, and chockfull of authentic ’70s detail (right down to the anaglypta wallpaper), Last Summer is certainly  powerful emotional coming of age drama exploring the nature of growing up in a small rural community. There’s an appealing purity and an innocence to it making a refreshing change from the hardbitten sweary slices of social realism we’ve grown to expect from British filmmakers nowadays. It also introduces an outstanding cast of young Welsh actors including Gruffydd Weston, Rowan Jones and Christopher Benning with an astonishing performance from Noa Thomas as Davy. Best known for his TV fare such as Cold Feet and Northanger Abbey, this is Jones’ feature debut and he really pulls it off. The cast includes Richard Harrington (Hinterland), Steffan Rhodri (Gavin and Stacey) Robert Wilfort (Peterloo, Wolf Hall) and Nia Roberts (Keeping Faith, Rillington Place, Hidden).

ON RELEASE FROM 7 JUNE 2019

Mountain films during the Weimar years: Beyond your Wildest Dreams

In spite of a new revisionist film history, which tries to exonerate the BERGFILM sub-genre from its close connection with Fascist ideology, the filmmakers of the Weimar years and their chosen subjects were close allies of German Fascism – and Leni Riefenstahl was arguably its leading film propagandist. Attempting to link the Bergfilm with what Kracauer called “Streetfilms”, is aesthetically and content wise a dishonest bid to rewrite (film)history. Streetfilms were set in big cities where the male protagonist falls for a sexually alluring woman from a lower social class, only to be roped back to roost in his middle-class milieu by figures of authority. The Bergfilm might feature alluring women (Riefenstahl certainly qualified), but the narrative comes to very different solutions, and this is amply demonstrated in Luis Trenker’s The Prodigal Son (Der verlorene Sohn, 1932), which sees the hero falling for an alluring ‘foreign’ woman, who embroils his in the traumas of big city life before he escapes triumphantly back to his home in the mountains to become an upright citizen and family man. You don’t have to take my word for it – Dr. Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary during a visit to the mountains: “That was my yearning; for all the divine solitude and calm of the mountains, for white, virginal (sic!) snow, I was weary of the big city. I am at home again in the mountains. I spent many hours in their white unspoiltness and find myself again”.

There is a strong link between Anti-Urbanism, unspoilt elements of nature, destiny (in German ‘Vorsehung’, Hitler’s favourite phrase) and a surrender to irrational values: exactly the cinema which Kracauer describes in his ground breaking text. Yes, there was modern technology: telescopes and microscopes – and airplanes. But one look at Riefenstahl’s films of the Nazi Party get togethers in Nuremberg (Sieg des Glaubens, Triumph des Willens) shows the underlying irrationality: after we have seen the city full of “believers”, Hitler comes down from the sky in a plane. A demi-God, winged like in Greek mythology, he flies into the world to make it sane (heil) again. In German the phrase of ‘heile Welt’ is still used to define a system without any contradiction, perfect by definition. In comparing the Nazi regime with eternal nature, all clean and sane, its opponents are immediately categorised as unclean. In the case of Jews, they were vermin, to be eradicated. 

Director Arnold Fanck (1889-1974) can be called the father of the Bergfilm. His features with Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003), a former ballerina, are the bedrock of the sub-genre: Der Heilige Berg (main picture) in 1926), Der grosse Sprung (1927), Die weisse Hölle vom Piz Palü (and its sound remake in 1938); Stürme über dem Montblanc  (1930) and Der grosse Rausch (1931). In 1932 Riefenstahl became star, producer, director with Das Blaue Licht, written by Bela Balasz. Balasz, often called a progressive, was anything but. He might have been, perhaps, politically on the opposite end of the spectrum from Riefenstahl, but his aesthetics were very much influenced by Stalin’s realism which censored and destroyed the directors of the early post-revolutionary era. And it’s no coincidence that in Fall of Berlin (Mikheil Chiaureli, 1950), Stalin (all in white) would also come down from the sky in a plane to greet his followers like a Messiah.

As far as the Die weisse Hölle vom Piz Palü is concerned, it was described by a contemporary critic from ‘The Frankfurter Zeitung’ as having a “seductive force, the mysterious power of the mountains, forcing people into inescapable dependency. The mountain rages, and demands sacrifices”. What it does fails to mention is that Riefenstahl’s Hella comes between two men, ending their friendship and forcing the aforementioned sacrifice. Here the mountain is shown as a noble monster, very much like the dragon in Siegfried. 

Das Blaue Licht won an award in Venice and convinced Hitler that Riefenstahl should direct the Nuremberg rally documentaries. A post war critic in the ‘Cine-Club de Toulouse’ wrote in 1949, picking up on the Siegfried theme: “It is the always eternal topic of Siegfried, as the young hero. Because always the young men are ready to sacrifice their lives, and only have contempt for everything, which does not omply with their ideas. This is a feature seen entirely from the viewpoint of Nazi ideology. We find the same sort of youth enthusiasm seen in Riefenstahl’s Nuremberg documentaries. Young people joined in with the hope that the regime would reward them because of their racial purity”.

A German critic in 1932 had a very different impression: “A slow journey of images like in the fables of old, like paintings, composed in magical light. Leni Riefenstahl looks magical and almost surreal, a creature not from this planet, but a Mountain Fairy. She alone is enough to give this this feature an otherworldly, touching charm.”

And then the Mountain Fairy came down from her world, and staged the Party Congress. AS

BEYOND YOUR WILDEST DREAMS | MOUNTAIN FILMS FROM THE WEIMAR ERA 

      

             

   

Beyond your Wildest Dreams: Entertainment cinema during the Weimar years

BFI Southbank and various venues nationwide will mark the centenary of the Weimar Republic with a major two-month season running from Wednesday 1 MaySunday 30 June; BEYOND YOUR WILDEST DREAMS: WEIMAR CINEMA 1919-1933 celebrates a ground-breaking era of German cinema showcasing the extraordinary diversity of styles and genres in Weimar cinema, which conjured surreal visions in the sparkling musicals Heaven on Earth (Reinhold Schünzel, Alfred Schirokauer, 1927) and A Blonde Dream (below, Paul Martin, 1932) and gender-bending farces such as I Don’t Want to Be a Man (Ernst Lubitsch, 1918).

“Ein blonder Traum”
D 1932
Lilian Harvey

In this first foray into the Weimar era we will try to analyse the mainly escapist features of the period, leaving out the prestige projects of Lang and G.W. Pabst, covered in Rudi Suskind’s comprehensive documentary From Caligari to Hitler, and have a look at the B-features which were part and parcel of the growing film industry in Germany, leading to a rapid rise of new cinemas, particularly in the urban centres. Director/producer Joe May, who gave Fritz Lang his big break (before also emigrating to Hollywood) was not only was responsible for mega-productions like Das Indische Grabmal, but, among the 88 features he directed, were small comedies like Veritas Vincit (1918), in which transmigration of the spirit is used, to tell a love story. E.A. Dupont’s Varieté (1925) was a celebration of the music-hall, but was not modern at all: it sounded more like an epilogue than a resume. Karl-Heinz Martin’s From Morning to Midnight (1920) was in contrast a very expressionistic film. Set in Japan, it tells the story of a bank teller, who uses the money he steals on sex-workers, before committing suicide. The Love Letters of the Countess S. (Henrik Galeen, 1924) was typical for a series of films, which dealt with love affairs at aristocratic courts. Comedy of the Heart by Rochus Gliese (1924), also falls in the category ‘scandalous love affairs of the monarchs’. Blitzzug der Liebe (1925) directed by Johannes Gunter might not be well known, but its narrative is very typical for the genre: Fred loves Lizzy, but does not want to marry her. Lizzy makes him jealous, by asking the gigolo Charley to court her. But Charley is in love with the dancer Kitty, who is fancied by Fred. A double wedding solves all problems. Max Reichmann’s Manege (1927) is a sort of minor variation of Varieté , set in the world of the circus. Dupont again is responsible for Moulin Rouge (1928), one of many Varieté  remakes. Ein Walzertraum (1925) by Ludwig Berger and War of the Waltz 1933) by the same director, are, like Two Hearts in Walzertune (1932) by Geza von Bolvary part of many features shot in Vienna, featuring the music of the Strauss family. Karl Grune’s Arabella (1925) is a rather more intriguing endeavour showing the life of the titular horse from its own POV. The Erich Pommer production of Melody of the Heart (Hanns Schwarz, 1929) was one of the first sound features; DoP Karl Hoffmann lamented: “Poor camera! No more of your graceful movements. Chained again”. Even the grim reality of unemployment featured in comedies such as The Three from the Unemployment Office (1932) directed by Eugen Thiele, a plagiarism of his more famous The Three from the Petrol Station (1930). Director Karl Hartl, who would later be a standard bearer of the Nazi regime, showed potential in The countess of Monte Christo (1932), in which a poor film extra (Brigitte Helm) is mistaken for the star, having a great time at a luxury hotel. The final mention should go to Hans Albers, the action man of the German cinema, his career lasting from the Weimar era, via Goebbels and the III. Reich to the post WWII cinema in the Federal Republic: he starred in four Erich Pommer films: FPI Doesn’t Answer, a U-Boot Sci-fi adventure directed by Karl Hartl and scripted by Curt Siodmak and based on his novel of the title; Monte Carlo Madness (Hanns Scharz, 1931), Quick ( 1932, directed by Robert Siodmak, who would soon emigrate) stars Albert as a womanising clown and The Victor (Hans Hinrich/Paul Martin, 1932), where Albers rather ordinary telegraphist develops into a fearless hero. AS

BEYOND YOUR WILDEST DREAMS: WEIMAR CINEMA 1919-1933

 

The Last Tree (2019) *** Sundance London 2019

Dir.: Shola Amoo; Cast: Sam Adewunmi, Gbemisola Ikumelo, Denise Black, Tai Golding, Nicholas Pinnock, DemmyLadipo; UK 2019, 100 min.

Writer/director Shola Amoo explores a conflicted teenager at odds with his environment in modern Britain, with his roots in Nigeria.

We meet Femi (Tai Golding) as a happy eleven-year old in rural Lincolnshire where he runs wild with his white school friends during the day, before returning to loving foster Mum Mary (Black) in a middle class area. But Femi is suddenly uprooted when his birth mother Yinka (Ikumelo) demands his return to her tiny flat in one of many high-rise blocks in South-London. Femi is stranded: on the phone he calls Mary ‘Nan’, but refuses to admit how much he is alienated by the black ghetto, and his authoritarian Mum. She punishes him physically, telling him “I did not raise you, to be rude”. To which Femi answers “You did not raise me”.

Sixteen-year old Femi (Adewunmi) has nothing but his memories, but he makes up for it by presenting himself as a proud African. Meanwhile, many of his mates are much more assimilated, and bully him. For a short while, he fells under the spell of the local mini-gangster Mace (Ladipo), but an upright teacher helps him to free himself from the clutches of petty crime. A romantic interlude just goes to enforce his alienation. But this all changes in the third act when his mother introduces him to his birth father in Nigeria.  A wealthy Christian, he rejected Yinka and his son because she believed in the old mysticism of the country and “was not ready to submit like a Christian woman.”

The structure of the feature underlines Femi’s conflict. There is only one scene when past and present interact positively and this involves his foster mother Mary. DoP Stil Williams uses a peachy pastel palette for the Lincolnshire scenes, than switches to hyper-realism for the South London interlude, before prime colours show his re-awakening in Nigeria.

THE LAST TREE (the title remains opaque) has not the narrative strength of Sally El Hosaini’s My Brother, the Devil, but relies on emotional power. Femi is black, African and disenfranchised British, but at the same time rejected on all three levels. He is not able to connect his childhood memories with anything in his adult life, and the question remains if he will find acceptance in Nigeria, or if the fragmentation will continue. Amoo’s feature has certainly structural fault lines, but he makes up partly for it with a radical passionate approach, showing a picture of unreconciled loneliness. AS

SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL LONDON | 30 MAY – 2 JUNE 2019

Homeward (2019)

Dir: Nariman Aliev. Ukraine 97 mins

Nariman Aliev’s feature debut is a powerful cri de coeur for his homeland Crimea exploring the fractured relationship between Ukraine and Russia. The young director is only in his mid twenties but already manages his material with confidence and maturity to create a gripping and thoughtful story about family responsibility and the ties that bind.

Mustafa (Akhtem Seitablayev) has driven to Kiev to collect the body of his son who has been killed in the war with Russia. His mission is simple, to bury Nazim in the family’s home in Crimea. But the journey will be eventful and fraught with difficulty. It will also bring him closer to his teenage son Alim (Remzi Bilyalov), who joins him on the journey.

And the two are not on great terms. Mustafa is an aggressive disciplinarian father who doesn’t pull any punches, least of all with his youngest boy. His simmering rage is partly due to the needlessness of Nazim’s death – in his eyes – marrying a non Muslim woman Olesya (Dariya Barihashvilli) he set up home in Ukraine, and clearly Mustafa was never going to approve of the match.Mustafa’s intention was to leave the family farm in Crimea to his boys so clearly his nose has been put out of joint with this marriage. To make matters worse, the two have a violent confrontation when he refuses to include Olesya in the funeral arrangements, leaving her locked in her own bathroom, oblivious to her feelings, or even her survival. This mere act displays an extraordinary disregard for his late son’s wishes, and makes a broad reference to his misogynist tendencies which will again rear their head later on. The British phrase “a bit of a Tartar” certainly comes to mind with this implacable man.

Alim has also made plans that don’t involve returning to the family farm. On the drive through Kiev he points out the university where he is studying journalism and his father remains stony-faced refusing show any interest. The journey continues with the usual checkpoints and border controls and Mustafa is truculent and surly with local officials. He then gives Alim a crash course in how to defend himself with a knife and this comes in handy later on when they are robbed, and Alim is able to gain his father’s grudging respect.

Akhtem Seitablayev manages shows us a chink of humanity in Mustafa – clearly he loves his son, and death often brings out the worst in family dynamics. Alim evidently respects his father, and is totally under his thumbl: when the boy gets a chance to swim in the river with some locals, including an attractive blond girl, Mustafa later slams down his wallet on the dinner table and suggests Alim goes his own way. This is a man who has lived by his wits and his courage and we feel a strange respect for him, and his desperation to keep the family together.

Homeward is a film that looks stunning and has that extraordinary resonance of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s work. Anton Fursa captures the burning sunset and the bucolic pastures of the vast flat landscape with its wide dusty roads and fast flowing rivers that really evoke that sense of belonging for Mustafa and his family have fought for. MT

New Wave Films digital release from 23 April 2021 | PREMIERED CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | UN CERTAIN REGARD 2019

 

Frankie (2019)

Dir: Ira Sachs | Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Jérémie Renier, Marisa Tomei, Brendan Gleeson, Greg Kinear | US, Drama 104′

Ira Sachs makes his Cannes Competition debut with this sedate drama set amongst the balmy hillsides and fairytale castles of Sintra which is very much the star of the show. Pleasant and well-paced it has Isabelle Huppert in the title role as a terminally ill actress who gathers her family around her for a final – occasionally fraught – summer break.

This languorous drama explores the intimate interlocking stories between the nine friends and family style. Frankie (Huppert) is a luminous presence throughout the film with her dry sense of humour and effortless allure  remaining serene and very much in control despite the anxiety of her loved ones.

Writing and his regular scripter Mauricio Zacharias Sachs doesn’t look for easy connections between these rather sedate showbiz types, the pencil-slim narrative ticking all the right boxes and gradually finding its way to an unspectacular conclusion.

From the outset, Frankie hums a Schubert tune which pretty much sums up the slumbering tone of the narrative. After a winning scene that sees her diving into an aquamarine swimming pool surrounded by lush gardens, her step granddaughter Maya (Nenua) reminds her there are guests in the hotel who might take photographs: “It’s alright, I’m very photogenic.” she cooly responds. And this sardonic wit flows throughout.

Frankie is stoical about her illness as she puts her affairs in order with the family: husband Jimmy (Gleeson in lowkey affectionate mode) his daughter from an earlier marriage, Sylvia (Robinson), and Ian (Bakare), the husband she is on the verge of leaving. There’s also Frankie’s son Paul  (Renier) and his father Michel (Greggory), who married a man after Frankie left him. Frankie’s best friend New Yorker Ilene (Tomei) joins the party with docile cameraman boyfriend Gary who is eager to propose to her – a nice touch in these non-committal days – she nevertheless damns him with faint praise. Sachs adds another strand involving Tiago (Cotta), a local Portuguese guide hired to show them the sights.

Cinematographer Rui Pocas, who photographed the fabulous arthouse films Zama and The Ornithologist, captures the splendour of the setting At usual, Huppert reigns supreme throughout, even in the fading days of her life she eclipses everyone. MT

NOW IN CINEMAS NATIONWIDE

 

 

Thunder Road (2018) ****

Dir.: Jim Cummings; Cast: Jim Cummings, Jocelyn De Boer, Kendal Farr, Nican Robinson, Chelsea Edmundson | Comedy Drama | USA 2018 | 92′.

Director/writer/star Jim Cumming’s debut feature is a symbolic portrait of the white American middle-aged, middle-class male about to lose it all. Its anti-hero, Officer Jim Arnaud, is coming apart in every sense – and he doesn’t even know it.

The first take – unbroken, ten minutes long – sets the tone: police officer Jim Arnaud (Cummings) gives a eulogy to his newly-deceased mother at the funeral. Well, it is supposed to be a eulogy, but Arnaud loses his thread pretty rapidly: the speech is more and more about himself, his failures, his fears – of which there are many. He becomes a parody of himself when he tries in vain to play his mother’s favourite song, Bruce Springsteen’s Thunder Road on the pink toy-boom box of his daughter Crystal, making things worse by dancing to the non-existent music. Finally, he grabs Crystal (Farr) from her mother Rosalind (De Boer), and cuddles her helplessly crying in a back row.

Jim is in trouble: his wife is suing him for a divorce, he is partly suspended from work – all because he finds communicate difficult. He tries out phrases from a self-help book, such as “this means a lot to me” – but he gets in the way of his best intentions, always ranting on about his bad luck, great plans and guilt, loosing who ever he is talking to – with the exception of fellow officer Nate Lewis (Robinson) who has the patience of a saint. But it is not just only the dyslexia and dyspraxia which undermines Jim: his anger about his diminishing status turns into violence, and finally he throws a tantrum at work, drawing his gun on his fellow officers, and is lucky to escape with a dismissal. There is not much family life either: his sister Morgan (Edmundson) is also deeply depressed, and daughter Crystal is showing signs of male-adjustment disorder at school where Jim, talking to her teacher, is again unable to relate to the topic, reacting with another violent scene. The final tragedy will leave him with too much responsibility to carry and the audience rightly fears for his future.

Jim Arnaud is unaware of himself and his destructive narcissism, which might even be in the lower range of the Autism spectrum. But he shares his anxieties with too many around him: this is just not Jim coming apart, but a whole spectrum of white America, fearful of losing their middle-class status, getting poorer, suspecting (rightfully) that their children will have a worse life than themselves. It’s the end of a dream: the American Dream. His ranting is like that of a wounded animal, who does not understand what is happening to him.

Cummings is brilliant in all his triple roles, and the ensembles acting is very convincing. Lovell A. Meyer’s camera moves around furiously: his images portray the emotional roller-caster Jim finds himself on. Carefully avoiding a sentimental approach, but always with poignant humour, Cummings’ excels himself. AS.

NOW ON RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS

Oleg (2019) Mubi

Dir.: Juris Kursietis; Cast: Valentin Novopolski, Dawid Ogrodnik, Anna Prochniak, Guna Zarina; Latvia/Lithuania/Belgium/France 2019, 108 min.

Director/co-writer Juris Kursietis (Modris) has created a spare but thrilling feature about a Latvian emigrant in Belgium, who falls under the spell of an evil smalltime gangster from Poland. Long takes and agile handheld camerawork along with some poetic under-water scenes make for an affecting verité drama. A twist of subversive humour lifts Oleg out of the   ‘grim and depressing’ category often associated with realism.

Oleg (Novopolksi) recalls how he was deeply affected as a child by his grandmother’s tale of the sacrificial lamb. Broke and in debt he feels just like that lamb in real life. A vision of him trying to breaking through the ice as he struggles under water occurs frequently throughout the film. Eventually he lands a job in a meat processing plant in Ghent where his training as a butcher comes in handy. Unfortunately, one of his illegal co-workers is maimed in one of the machines, blaming Oleg for the accident. His mates force him to take the rap in order to avoid an investigation. Back home – and jobless Oleg again – he meets the gregarious and charismatic Andrzej (Ogrodnik), who organises a motley crew of East-Europeans, hiring them out to do various jobs.

But Andzejs turns out to be a conman, who hardly ever pays his men. Oleg runs away, even though he fancies Andrzej’ girl friend Margosa (Prochniak), who is in thrall to her sadistic boyfriend. Alone in the streets at Christmas time, Oleg walks into a Latvian restaurant and is mistaken for an actor by rather posh Zita (Zarina), who runs the place. After a night of lovemaking, Oleg confesses he’s not really an actor, and is thrown out. Briefly returning to work for Andrzej things don’t improve and so he goes to the police, and informs on the gangster, having asked his grandmother to do the same in Latvia. Now at a lose end and with his freedom back, Oleg buys a plane ticket to Riga, but the night before his flight, he meets Margosa.

Despite of the underlying harshness of the narrative this is a bracing account of life as an immigrant. Andzejs gives Oleg a ‘forged’ Polish passport, calling him a “Novopolski” and the scenes in the meat factory are extremely brutal – and if you’re still not a vegetarian, you might now change your mind. The bleached-out aesthetic seems to mirror the hollowed out lives of these illegal workers, and the underwater sequences reflect Oleg’s feelings of desperation and powerlessness: struggling to survive in every way.  Kursietis seems to have re-invented social realism, or at least put a new appealing face on the genre. AS

NOW ON MUBI | PREMIERED AT CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | Quinzaine des Réalisateurs 2019

 

The Best Years of a Life (2019) **** Cannes Film Festival 2019

Dir: Claude Lelouch | France Drama, 90′

Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant are back together again 53 years later in Claude Lelouch’s sequel to Un Homme et Une Femme. 

Claude Lelouch’s cult classic with its breezy romantic score by Francis Lai is one of the most popular French films ever made. Even the title harks back to that “ou la la! moment when your French lover sweeps you off your feet in a cosy bistro savouring a post prandial Cointreau.

Well that was back in 1966 but this sequel feels surprisingly slick and contemporary. Now in his 80s, ex racing driver Jean-Louis Duroc (Trintignant at 89, for the un-initiated) is in a swish Normandy care home – infinitely more appealing than the ones BUPA charges £100k a year for, even the staff are sexier.

The Best Years of a Life (Les Plus Belles Années d’une Vie)sees Jean-Louis considerably more dishevelled but the cheeky twinkle in his eye is still there as he flirts with his carer and wanders around the foothills of dementia – or is he just having us on?. Meanwhile his long-lost love, a well-preserved Anne Gauthier (Aimée, an amazing 87) is running a small shop and enjoying her daughter and granddaughter. His son Antoine (Antoine Sire, now grown up since his childhood role) persuades Anne to visit his father. Jean-Louis pretends not to recognise her at first – she is still the diffident one, and he is still a bit of a rascal. Lelouch, now 81, clearly understand Jean-Louis, and his script is insightful and extremely convincing for anyone who has a father of this age. And as the two go back down memory lane, Lelouch cleverly splices extracts from the original film: the lovers cavorting on the beach and laughing with their kids. Lelouch has even added footage of an exhilarating drive through Paris in the early hours of the morning, and layered it over images from his other films. In a way this is the director’s chance to bring his 1966 film back to life and offer a plausible and authentic conclusion to the story, attracting nostalgic older audiences – and even inquisitive new ones. And although the previous sequel, A Man and a Women: 20 Years Later (1986), was not a success, this seems to have considerably more depth and understanding.

A great deal of the film is pure nostalgia, but there’s humour too and it flows along pleasantly without any awkward moments – the flirty bits do happen as men of this generation get older. You have to remember – they grew up in a completely different century.

The Best Years of a Life was made in just under two weeks, showing how the veteran director and his ageing stars are still capable of being impressive. And with its timely themes and the impressive car sequence it competes favourably with anything in the competition line-up. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | 14-25 May 2019

LIBERTÉ (2019) **** Un Certain Regard 2019

Dir: Albert Serra | Cast: Cast: Helmut Berger, Marc Susini, Iliana Zabeth, Laura Poulvet, Baptiste Pinteaux, Théodora Marcadé, Alexander García Düttmann | Drama | Spain 132′

Catalan auteur Albert Serra was born in 1975 in Girona and is known for his delicately drawn and exquisitely mounted historical dramas such as La Mort de Louis XIV (2016); Honour of the Knights (Quixotic) 2006; and Story of My Death (2013). And there’s a great deal of exquisite mounting in his latest feature which stars veteran arthouse star Helmut Berger and competes in the Un Certain Regard sidebar.

The theme in Liberté  is essentially voyeurism. If you find yourself in Hampstead Heath on a balmy afternoon you will notice vague male figures wandering around in the shady vegetation. You may even come across a secret tryst (if you are unlucky enough while walking your dog). Take this image and sashay back to the 18th century, somewhere between Potsdam and Berlin, and this is the scenario in Liberté – only here both male and female characters are taking part.

The year is 1774, shortly before the French Revolution. Madame de Dumeval, the Duc de Tesis and the Duc de Wand, libertines expelled from the puritanical court of Louis XVI, seek the support of the legendary Duc de Walchen, German seducer and freethinker, lonely in a country where hypocrisy and false virtue reign. Their mission is to export libertinage, a philosophy of enlightenment founded on the rejection of moral boundaries and authorities, but moreover to find a safe place to pursue their errant games, where the quest for pleasure no longer obeys laws other than those dictated by unfulfilled desires.

This louche cruising amongst bewigged courtiers and aristocrats sounds fascinating, and it is for a while. Soigné and slightly porkier individuals duck and dive in the undergrowth, in various stages of undress, their elegant white linens contrasting with tanned breasts and buttocks, larded legs and bloated beerguts. Very much like Sade, Serra explores the darker side of human desire which gradually becomes more and more explicit to the point where it actually gets a little close for comfort, verging on and eventually becoming explicitly pornographic. There is no narrative as such just a series of vignettes that take place during the hours of darkness one summer night.

Arriving in painted palanquin borne by his henchmen the Duc de Wand (Baptiste Pinteaux) is recounting the execution of an unfortunate individual whose limbs were pulled one by one from his body. Obsessed by bestiality and golden showers, he loves to salivate about his lascivious encounters, often involving dogs or farm animals. Fortunately were are spared the most lurid encounters due to the bosky nocturnal shadows as Artur Tort’s roving camera spies voyeuristically on to various other outré encounters in the semi-darkness of the eucalyptus trees (eucalyptus trees in the 18th century? – check continuity).

Decadence is the watchword here as none of the trysts is particularly joy-filled unless you are into sado masochism or subjugation. The tone is also rather mournful as body fluids are shed and shared. The film’s enigmatic title suggests that these aristos have too much time on their hands and nothing left to lose: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Serra’s film is brave and extraordinary well made. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | UN CERTAIN REGARD 2019 | SPECIAL JURY PRIZE

 

The Wild Goose Lake (2019) *** Cannes Film Festival 2019

Dir: Diao Yinan | Cast: Hu Ge, Gwei Lun Mei, Laio Fan, Wan Quian, Qi Dao, Huang Jue, Zheng Meihuizi, Zhang Yicong, Chen Yongzhong | China 113′

Chinese writer-director Diao Yinan’s long-awaited follow up to Berlinale winner Black Coal, Thin Ice is a beautiful and beguiling crime caper that somehow fails to deliver the thrills it promises, rather like the bathing beauties who seduce and tease on the murky shores of the Wild Goose Lake of its setting.

This enjoyable and elegantly styled noir thriller is certainly awash with wonderful set-pieces and exquisite visual moments which skilfully echo China’s gilded past and leave us in no doubt of its contempo criminality and territory wars. The enigmatic plot involves a sinuous gangster Zhou Zenong (Hu Ge) on the run from his own mob and the local police, one of whom he shot by accident in a frenzy-fuelled bike escapade along the lake, near the central Chinese city of Wuhan.

Sashaying between various timeframes The Wild Goose Lake follows Zenong as he meets up with  with Liu Aiai (Gwei Lun Mei/Black Coal, Thin Ice) one of the bathing beauties (sex workers) who works for his boss, and may have been sent to help him. But the police have also set a ransom on his head so Liu Aiai may be tempted to turn him in.

The two chase through narrow streets and backwaters, Zenong on the run from everybody, including his shop worker wife Yang Shujun (Wan Qian), and Liu Aiai pursuing him in a chase that turns out also to be fuelled by lust. Eventually she catches up with him in a languorous lakeside scene where Zenong is lounging in a becalmed boat, bleeding profusely from his wounds. She seduces him and spits his semen out into the water, from then on the two are close allies. Swinging through the backstreets and side alleys, Dong Jinsong’s fast-moving camerawork skilfully captures the neon drenched ambiance. One scene features dancers rocking to the 70s disco hit “Rasputin” their LED-lit trainers adding a jewel-like dimension to the night setting.

But these are Noirish nights and there’s no happy ending in sight for the lovers as they rush from scene to scene. The Wild Goose Lake is at heart a wild and beautiful goose chase between the cops, the crooks, a gangster on the run and his femme fatale. But when did Noir thrillers ever have a happy ending? MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | IN COMPETITION 14-25 MAY 2019

 

The Orphanage (2019) **** Cannes Film Festival 2019

Dir.: Sharbanoo Sadat; Cast: Quodrattolah Quadri,  Ahmed Fayaz Osmani, Hasibukkah Rasooli, Eshanullah Kharoti, Anwar Hashimi, Asadullah Kabiri; Den/Ger/France/ Lux/Afghanistan 2019, 90 min. 

Writer/director Sharbanoo Sadat (29) won the Quinzaine Main Prize in 2016 for her debut feature Wolf and Sheep, as well as CICAE-Festival Award for “most daring feature”. Born in Tehran, she grew up in a remote village in Afghanistan, that forms the setting of her feature debut, after studying documentary filmmaking in Kabul; The Orphanage is part of a planned quintology based on the diaries of her friend Anwar Hashimi.

Kabul 1989 is under Soviet rule, but teen-cousins Qudrat (Quadri) and Fayaz (Osmani are not really that worried about politics. Qudrat, a Bollywood fan, dreams about becoming a famous actor and the boys make some money selling scalped cinema tickets. Finally, their luck runs out and they land up in a Russian orphanage. There they immediately turn their attentions to the girls in their class, and even the female teachers. Instead of listening to the teacher, Qudrat dreams himself into the role of a heroic lover impressing his beautiful girlfriend – no other than the girl sitting in front of him in class. In his dorm, Fayaz is “christened” ‘Redhead’ by Eshan (Kharoti), the main bully on the block. Meanwhile Eshan’s best friend Asad (Kabiri) steals a new T-shirt and shoes from a much younger boy. The two are then confronted by the supervisor (Hashimi), who stands up for the younger boys. Love-sick Qudrat meanwhile somehow gets into the Deputy Headmistress’s bedroom, while she is asleep. The whole orphanage then heads off to Moscow, to spend time with a ‘Pioneer’ Group. The main focus of the trip is to interest the boys in Soviet ideology by visiting Lenin’s Tomb. But the kids are much more interested in the Pioneer girls. After their return to Kabul, Hasib (Rasoli) and some of his friends find an overturned Soviet tank. They steal bullets, Hasib has a tragic accident when of them explodes. Fayaz comes down with a mystery illness, and is transferred to a psychiatric ward, where he eventually recovers. Eshan challenges one of the younger boys to a chess game, but turns violent when he loses, and the antics eventually come to a head and Eshan is expelled. When the Mujahidin advance on Kabul, Hashimi asks the boys to burn all written material in the courtyard. An impressive finale sees Qudrat again in “cinema mode”, this time in a musical, singing “Death is our Lover”, whilst defending Hashimi from the violent Islamic State soldiers.

Shooting in Tajikistan, DoP Virginie Surdej is able to turn Sadat’s overflowing imagination into stunning images. Qudrat’s wonderfully anarchic “cinema stunts” are brilliant, and the interactions of the boys with their Russian teachers is equally impressive in their subtlety. The ensemble cast is convincing, and Sadat’s untamed approach is a refreshing change from the calculated story-telling in so many films nowadays. AS

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2019 | Quinzaine des Réalisateurs 2019

                           

Le Daim (Deerskin) 2019

Dir: Quentin Dupieux | Cast: Jean Dujardin, Adêle Haenel, Albert Delpy, Pierre Commé | Comedy Drama, France 77′

The apparel doth oft proclaim the man, says Polonius and the apparel in Quentin Dupieux’s new film Deerskin doth certainly proclaim Jean Dujardin’s Georges pretty oft.  We first meet Georges in that typical midnight-of-the-soul location: a motorway service station. He is feeling a sudden contempt for his corduroy jacket, trying to stuff it down the toilet. Apparently in the immediate aftermath of a marital breakdown, Georges splurges a huge sum on a second hand 100% deerskin jacket with tassels. Not since Daniel Day-Lewis in Phantom Thread has a man been so taken with a sartorial item. Georges’ new jacket is tight for him and weird, and yet he’s so excited about being the height of what he calls “killer style”.

Holing up in a remote mountain hotel, Georges starts to film his jacket with a camcorder (thrown in as part of the jacket deal) and hold conversations with the garment with Dujardin doing both voices. On one level, Georges seems like a pitiable middle-aged man in the midst of a crisis: his bank account is frozen; his wife tells him he no longer exists and he even resorts to eating out of a bin. And yet Georges is armoured by his own delusions which quickly turn psychotic. Befriending a local bartender Denise (the ubiquitous Adêle Haenel), he convinces her he is making a film, which gels with her own ambition to be an editor. But the filmmaking pose is only a way toward securing his more ambitious goal – a dream he vocally shares with his jacket – of eliminating all other jackets; and therefore all other jacket wearers.

It is testament to Dupieux’s skill and the utter commitment of his two leads that Georges madness somehow feels grounded in an ordinary world. And yet it’s a world of ordinary madness. There are no police around and no consequences to the violence, even though Georges doesn’t seem to be hiding the bodies. In fact, he’s filming the killings and Denise is onboard, enthused enough by the footage to start financing the movie herself. Albeit occasionally dense – he doesn’t seem to understand computers – Georges has a fiendish talent for improvisation and the same could be said of the film. Its twists and turns, its toying with expectation, keep the shuttlecock of lunacy airborne long enough for Georges to get himself kitted out with more deerskin products and the movie to turn in some hilarious moments of violence.

Although more recently seen as a straight dramatic actor Haenel has proven comedy chops and she makes Denise both a credible foil and accomplice to Georges. But the power of the movie comes with Dujardin’s performance, which is detailed and astute, comic and unnerving. Dujardin shows Georges to be a vain preening man – he asks women in a bar if they were talking about his jacket – who demands attention and insecurely needs to be the boss. It’s like he’s playing American Psycho via David Brent.

The film is a portrait of toxic masculinity weirdly stripped of its most common denominator: misogyny. Georges doesn’t care for anyone except himself and his jacket. Deerskin is a reductio ad absurdum of male obsession and vanity and it is all done in “Killer Style”.  John Bleasdale

NOW IN CINEMAS | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2019 | Quinzaine des Réalisateurs

Sorry We Missed you (2019) *** Cannes Film Festival 2019

Dir: Ken Loach | UK Drama 100′

After his Palme d’Or win in 2015 with I, Daniel Black, Cannes old timer Ken Loach is back with his regular writer Paul Laverty and another slice of social realism with a title that will resonate bitterly if you’re still waiting for that parcel. SORRY WE MISSED YOU takes Loach back to the North East and the streets of Gateshead and Newcastle where hard-up grafter Ricky and his family have been facing an uphill struggle against debt since the 2008 financial crash and the rise of the gig economy and zero contract hours. An opportunity to get back into the black again comes in the shape of a shiny new van and a chance to run his own business as a self-employed delivery driver, but things don’t quite work out as expected despite his best efforts, and we feel for him. Laverty’s script flows along as smoothly as the Tyne in scenes that showcase Loach’s talent for bringing out the best in newcomers in an able cast that includes Kris Hitchen and Debbie Honeywood with Rhys Stone and Katie Proctor as their son and daughter. This time humour and honesty keep sentimentality low key. The locale is very much a character too, Shields Road and Byker which we get to know like the back of our hand in this enjoyable tale of woe, and we have his regular photographer Robbie Ryan to thank for that. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | 14-25 MAY 2019

Pain and Glory (2019) **** Cannes Film Festival 2019

Dir: Pedro Almodovar | Penelope Cruz, Antonio Banderas | Drama, Spain 117’

Pedro Almodóvar has never won the coveted Palme d’Or but here he gets another chance to prove his impressive talents at portraying with probing insight and humanity a variety of tortured characters both male and female. Pain and Glory is a uniquely piquant and personal portrait that takes us into his own heart through the story of another struggling filmmaker. Once again, as we enjoyed in Julieta, this is a confident and passionate affair resonating with the work of many great auteurs before him, Fellini springs to mind, and the film is seductively set to a score by Alberto Iglesias. But this is one of his most subtle almost sensitive works to date that feels convincingly honest and spontaneous, while quailing away from theatricality it is elegant and self-assured. Maybe the Spanish director has finally let down his guard and bared his soul in this rather delicate drama. It follows one Salvador Mallo (his longtime collaborator Antonio Banderas who plays his alter ego with feeling) a filmmaker who has lost his way and now reflects mournfully on his past in lonely solitude as the present quietly collapses around him. And we feel for his quiet pain in every scene as the narrative unfolds in the context of other minor stories. Finally the fourth wall is broken and we discover the truth, in rather an abrupt finale. Mallo opines “a great actor is not the one who cries, but the one who knows how to contain his tears”. Pedro Almodovar has finally come home, but ironically Banderas wins the award. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | 14-25 MAY 2019 |Winner Best Actor for Antonio Banderas

 

 

 

The Unknown Saint (2019) **** Semaine de la Critique 2019

Dir.: Alaa Eddine Aljem; Cast: Younes Bouab, Salah Bensalah, Bouchaits Essamak, Mohmed Naimane, Anas El Vaz, Hassan Ben Bdida, Abdelhaini Kitab, Ahmed Yarziz; Morocco/France/Qatar/Germany, Lebanon; 100 min.

Alaa Eddine Aljem’s debut feature is a little gem: filmed with great confidence, it is the story of a thief in a small Moroccan desert village trying to recover his loot, while the villagers pray for rain. In tune with its sun-baked environment the tautly inventive narrative unfolds in a languid style in scenes showcasing the fleshed out characters and talented cast.

On the run from the police, a young thief Amine (Bouab)has just time enough to bury his booty on a desert hill, camouflaging the scene as a modest grave. Ten years later, Amine and his accomplice, simply called “The Brain” (Bensalah) for his lack of the grey matter, return to discover a Mausoleum for an unknown Saint has been built over the grave. No rain has fallen for over a decade and the villagers are desperate; one of them, Hassan (Essamak) wants to go elsewhere, but his father Brahim (Naimane), the religious leader of the village holds him back. Then there is Aziz (Kitab), the self-appointed mausoleum guard who treats his son with contempt, his life revolving around his Alsatian dog. For some unknown reason, the new doctor (El Baz) is only getting women patients at his surgery. His long suffering nurse (Ben Bdida), who survives on alcohol and weed, explains that the women use the surgery as a “hangout”, while collecting their prescriptions. Meanwhile, Amine and his helper wonder how to tackle Aziz so they can recover the loot. This is a sinuous and slow-burning drama with just enough irony not to reduce it to a farce. The characters are larger than life, appealing despite their foibles and full of humanity and charm. Even the two criminals come across as incompetent bunglers rather than hard-edged thieves. DoP Amine Berrada uses the desert as a majestic background, his panoramas are impressive, particularly the night shots. Judging by this impressive debut, Aljem is a filmmaker with a bright future ahead of him.  

SEMAINE DE LA CRITIQUE | Wednesday 15 May 2019 |11.30am

 

     

   

Too Late to Die Young (2018) ****

Dir/Writer: Demian Hernandez, Antar Machado, Magdalena Totoro, Antonia Zegers, Martias Oviedo | Chile | Drama | 110′

Chilean auteur Dominga Sotomayor follows her debut Thursday ’til Sunday with a freewheeling, semi-autobiographical cinema vérité story that soft-peddles through the winds of change expressed during a family New Year holiday on the cusp of Chile’s transition to democracy in 1990.

Themes of love, loss, belonging and owning are teased out through a lithe and loose-limbed interlude that takes place in the hills above Santiago where the outbreak of forest fires on the tinder dry landscape signal the death of the old and the ushering in of new forces for freedom that marked the nation’s break with Pinochet’s dictatorship.

But nothing could be less political than this woozy woodland reverie for teenagers Sofia and Lucas (16) and little Clara who now face fears of a more organic kind when their dog Frida suddenly disappears and their parents decide to part in the wake of the environmental tragedy.

Pictured in Inti Briones’ bleached out images the desiccated Summer landscape seem ready for some kind of regeneration and this gently embodied in Sotomayor clever writing and a select choice of musical hits that hark back to the era. Demian Hernandes makes her thoughtful debut as the musically-gifted and lovelorn Sofia leading a cast of mostly non-professional actors of all ages selected by the filmmaker and her casting director mother. Antonia Zegers (Elena) is the only well-known actress outside Chile.

If you’re looking for punchy plot lines, this female centric drama can at times feel a tad too enigmatic, and most of the characters, particulars the males, are suggested rather than fully developed. This sketchiness can be part of the film’s charm, providing you’re in the mood to surrender to the dreamy, bemusing complexities of young love and complicated relationships. The disappearance of the dog Frida/Cindy gives the film some direction and drama and also some of its wry humour as the outcome of this strand actually ends up being rather amusing. Delicately drawn, thoughtful and always perceptive, Sotomayor

Dominga Sotomayor made history by winning the Leopard for Best Director at the 71st Locarno Festival, making her the first female director to receive this award. She has that rare gift of lightness of touch, letting her drama take shape naturally marking her out as a real talent to watch out for. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 24 MAY 2019 

Memoir of War (2018) ****

Dir: Emmanuel Finkiel | Cast: Melanie Thierry, Benoit Magimel, Benjamin Biolay | France, 127′

Memoir of War (La Douleur) was France’s entry to the Oscars this year. It didn’t win but is eminently worth watching for Melanie Thierry’s hypnotic performance as Marguerite Duras in an elegant adaptation of the writer’s semi-autobiographical novel “The War: A Memoir”, set in Paris during German occupation.

Emmanuel Finkiel (Voyages) takes a conventional approach to this stunningly filmed cool classic that dramatises the writer’s life in Paris under German occupation in the final years of the war. After her husband Robert Anselme, a major figure in the Resistance, is arrested and deported, she is forced to live by her wits in order to get him back. And this involves a cat and mouse game with a French Nazi agent collaborator called Rabier (a stout Benoit Magimel with a dark wig).

Duras, who wrote the Oscar-nominated script for Alain Resnais’ drama Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), was an intellectual of the highest order, and this is reflected in Thierry’s contemplative, nuanced gaze, as she chain-smokes her way through one of the best performances of the Oscar nominations. Finkiel completely eschews melodrama in taking us into Duras’ intimate thoughts and recollections, often blurring the focus to suggest enigmatic events, and using her own stream of consciousness to drive the narrative forward as she struggles to survive the intrigue going on around her. Tortured by self-doubt and anxiety, she yearns for Robert but emerges obdurate and determined to find him.

Meanwhile, Robert (Emmanuel Bourdieu) barely makes an appearance despite the anguish surrounding him. The first hour deals with Duras’ efforts to keep Rabier onside, although clearly finding him rather repellent in many ways — and she may even be wasting her time. He is rather taken with her bluestocking beauty and literary credentials, and two enjoy a series of clandestine tête à têtes in discreet venues. But Finkiel’s film flows impressively as the focus shifts away from the couple and increasingly on to Duras’ fraught and internalised musings about Robert, as she gets closer to his colleague Dionys (Biolay).

The final denouement is as unexpected and it is slightly unsatisfactory. Robert is liberated and brought back to Paris by the skilful negotiations of Francois Mitterand and the film is suddenly brought to a conclusion that some may find brusque given the slow-burning nature of the early scenes. That said, Thierry is mesmerising to watch in a graceful tour de force of controlled anguish. This is Finkiel’s second feature with Thierry, and he clearly knows how to make the most of her. MT

ON RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS | 15 May 2019

 

Float like a Butterfly (2018) ***

Dir: Carmel Winters | Drama | Ireland | 104′

Carmel Winters second feature is a poetic and gorgeously redolent coming of age drama set in the Emerald Isle of the 1960s where a young Irish Traveller has to contend with the death of her mother and an abusive father as she follows her dream of becoming a boxer like her idol Muhammad Ali.

Hazel Doupe gives a stunning performance as tomboy Hazel whose daily life in a wooden caravan with her younger brother and wayfarer father Michael (Dara Devaney) is fraught with altercations not only with the local Garda but also members of this feisty family and their old-fashioned attitudes towards gender roles that hamper her own natural pugilist talents.

With its universal themes Float Like A Butterfly has the rare quality of being utterly relevant today and yet quaintly traditional, its placid pacing capturing the slow-burning essence of a bygone era. Auteuse Carmel Winters’ writing and directing has a distinct lightness of touch which brings both gentleness and integrity to her storytelling. This is a drama that glows with the lush beauty of its verdant Irish setting untrammelled by time and enlivened by stirring folk music, suddenly catching fire in its final denouement. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE from 10 May 2019 | FIPRESCI PRIZE Winner | TIFF 2019

Madeline’s Madeline **** (2018)

Dir: Josephine Decker | US | 90′ | Drama | Cast: Miranda July, Molly Parker, Helena Howard

Josephine Decker’s inventive, impressionistic dramas – Butter on the Latch (2013) /Though Wast Mild and Lovely (2014) are an acquired taste but one that marks her out as a distinctive female voice on the American indie circuit. And here she is at Berlinale again with a multi-layered mother and daughter tale that is probably her best feature so far. With a stunning central performance from newcomer Helena Howard and a dash of cinematic chutzpah that sends this soaring, Madeline’s Madeline is a thing of beauty, intoxicating to watch, compellingly chaotic and with a potently emotional storyline. It’s probably best described as a experimental drama set in an experimental theatre run by Evangeline (Molly Parker), who, at one point says to protege Madeline: “In all chaos there is a cosmos. In all disorder a secret order.” In other words, “there’s a method in the madness; a predictability to every unpredictability”. And this seemingly obtuse truism really sums up this most original of features.

Howard’s Madeline is an often precocious but highly gifted performer teenager and who is clearly on the spectrum but we are never quite sure of what mental condition or how much it affects her. Hospital visits are mentioned and medication is involved, and mother Regina (Miranda July) and daughter clearly have issues with each other. Evangeline has spotted the 16 year old’s talent to entertain, and is also nurturing and exploiting it, and the trio’s relationship becomes increasingly complex and unpredictable. Ashley Connor’s roving camera is all over the place creating a fluid feeling that is enjoyable, but also disorientating as Madeline becomes more and more powerful in this ingenious female ménage à trois. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 10 May 2019

 

Sundance London 2019 | 30 May – 2 June 2019

Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival brings a selection of films to London, screening at at PICTUREHOUSE CENTRAL from 30 MAY – 2 JUNE 2019. Here is a selection of the features and documentaries scheduled:

THE LAST TREE/ United Kingdom (Director/Screenwriter: Shola Amoo) – Femi is a British boy of Nigerian heritage who, after a happy childhood in rural Lincolnshire, moves to inner London to live with his mum. Struggling with the unfamiliar culture and values of his new environment, teenage Femi has to figure out which path to adulthood he wants to take CAST: Sam Adewunmi, Gbemisola Ikumelo, Denise Black, Tai Golding, Nicholas Pinnock 

LATE NIGHT U.S.A. (Director: Nisha Ganatra, Screenwriter: Mindy Kaling) – Legendary late-night talk show host’s world is turned upside down when she hires her only female staff writer. Originally intended to smooth over diversity concerns, her decision has unexpectedly hilarious consequences as the two women separated by culture and generation are united by their love of a biting punchline. Cast: Emma Thompson, Mindy Kaling, John Lithgow, Paul Walter Hauser, Reid Scott, Amy Ryan

THE NIGHTINGALE Australia (Director/Screenwriter: Jennifer Kent) – 1825. Clare, a young Irish convictwoman, chases a British officer through the Tasmanian wilderness, bent on revenge for a terrible act of violence he committed against her family. On the way she enlists the services of Aboriginal tracker Billy, who is marked by trauma from his own violence-filled past. Cast: Aisling Franciosi, Sam Claflin, Baykali Ganambarr, Damon Herriman, Harry Greenwood, Ewen Leslie

HAIL SATAN? U.S.A. (Director: Penny Lane) – A look at the intersection of religion and activism, tracing the rise of The Satanic Temple: only six years old and already one of the most controversial religious movements in American history. The Temple is calling for a Satanic revolution to save the nation’s soul. But are they for real? 

THE FAREWELL U.S.A., China (Director/Screenwriter: Lulu Wang) – A headstrong Chinese-American woman returns to China when her beloved grandmother is given a terminal diagnosis. Billi struggles with her family’s decision to keep grandma in the dark about her own illness as they all stage an impromptu wedding to see grandma one last time.  CAST: Awkwafina, Tzi Ma, Diana Lin, Zhao Shuzhen, Lu Hong, Jiang Yongbo

THE DEATH OF DICK LONG U.S.A. (Director: Daniel Scheinert, Screenwriter: Billy Chew) – Dick died last night, and Zeke and Earl don’t want anybody finding out how. That’s too bad though, cause news travels fast in small-town Alabama. CAST: Michael Abbott Jr., Virginia Newcomb, Andre Hyland, Sarah Baker, Jess Weixler 

CORPORATE ANIMALS U.S.A. (Director: Patrick Brice, Screenwriter: Sam Bain) – Disaster strikes when the egotistical CEO of an edible cutlery company leads her long-suffering staff on a corporate team- building trip in New Mexico. Trapped underground, this mismatched and disgruntled group must pull together to survive. CAST: Demi Moore, Ed Helms, Jessica Williams, Karan Soni

ASK DR RUTH  U.S.A. (Director: Ryan White) – A documentary portrait chronicling the incredible life of Dr. Ruth Westheimer, a Holocaust survivor who became America’s most famous sex therapist. As her 90th birthday approaches, Dr. Ruth revisits her painful past and her career at the forefront of the sexual revolution. 

THE BRINK U.S.A. (Director: Alison Klayman) – Now unconstrained by an official White House post, Steve Bannon is free to peddle influence as a perceived kingmaker with a direct line to the President. As self-appointed leader of the “populist movement,” he travels around the U.S. and the world spreading his hard-line anti-immigration message

Tickets on sale Tuesday 23 April; priority booking from Friday 19 April

Find out more at picturehouses.com/sundance

 

Arctic (2018) **

Writer-Dir: Joe Penna | Cast: Mads Mikkelsen, Maria Thelma Smaradottir | Drama | 93’

A macho Mads Mikkelsen is marooned in Arctic nothingness in Joe Penna’s dialogue free survival saga. You could almost call ARCTIC a road movie, but there isn’t a road to speak of. And this is not really a two hander either because the woman Mads tries to save – when her own aircraft crashes trying rescue him – is just a concussed and grunting victim he feels duty bound to take with him on his mission to reach safety in the snowy wilderness of craggy peaks and perilous caverns.

Moving mountains to get her to hospital is an experience as gruelling for Mads as it since for us viewers, if you haven’t already drifted off in the opening stages. If you do remain awake, there is no backstory or attempt at characterisation to make you care whether either of the travellers makes it home. Barren of landscape and of narrative, ARCTIC follows Mads as he moves in a slow circle, due to his poor map-reading skills, after etching an enormous SOS in the snow. The only brief moment of drama is derived from seeing a Polar bear deprived of his dinner when our hero hides in a cave.  Meanwhile Mads develops clever ways of catching and eating raw fish, a sight almost as unpalatable as Joseph Trapanese’s screeching score. 

Even Stakhanov would be proud of the work Mads puts in, and his perseverance in getting the injured woman out of danger as he drags her up hill and down dale without a by your leave, and certainly no encouragement from his human bundle. Yet he never gives up hope until the final showdown where he sets off a flare which is totally ignored, leaving him to trudge on tirelessly through the elements. Mikkelsen’s grunting performance has a strange humour to it, matched only by the moment when he catches sight of an artic flower and then rapidly disappears through a pothole. Marvellous stuff. MT

NOW ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE from 10 MAY 2019

Cannes 2019 – Final additions…

COMPETITION SCREENINGS 

Thierry Fremaux hinted that there may be final additions to the official line-up and here they are – with his comments.

Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood – Quentin Tarantino (2 hrs 45)

“We were afraid the film would not be ready, as it wouldn’t be ready until late July, but Quentin Tarantino, who has not left the editing room in four months, is a real, loyal and punctual child of Cannes! He’ll definitely be at Cannes this year, as he was  Inglourious Basterds,  – 25 years after the Palme d’or for Pulp Fiction – with a finished film screened in 35mm and his cast in tow (Leonardo DiCaprio, Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt). His film is a love letter to the Hollywood of his childhood, a rock music tour of 1969, and an ode to cinema as a whole.

He added: “In addition to thanking Quentin and his crew for spending days and nights in the editing room, the Festival wants to give special thanks to the teams at Sony Pictures, who made all of this possible.”

Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo by Abdellatif Kechiche (4 hrs)

French-Tunisian director Abdellatif Kechiche returns to Cannes with the Intermezzo of Mektoub, my Love six years after his Palme d’or with La Vie d’Adèle (Blue Is the Warmest Color). The groundwork for this saga storytelling and extraordinary portrait of French youth in the 90s was laid in his Canto Uno, and it will be a pleasure to see its cast again.”

MIDNIGHT SCREENING

Lux Æterna by Gaspar Noé (50 min)

“Two actresses, Béatrice Dalle and Charlotte Gainsbourg, are on a film set telling stories about witches – but that’s not all. Lux Æterna is also an essay on cinema, the love of film, and on-set hysterics. It’s a brilliant fast-paced medium-length film for Gaspar Noé’s return – an unexpected one until recently – to the Official Selection, for a film that the Selection Committee watched at the last minute and which will be shown in a Midnight Screening as hyped as it is mysterious.”

UN CERTAIN REGARD

La famosa invasione degli orsi in Sicilia by Lorenzo Mattotti (1 hr 22)

“Adapted from Dino Buzzati’s children’s book, this animated film by illustrator and comic book author Lorenzo Mattotti is a visual extravaganza, whose graphic ingenuity and colour work will delight much wider audiences than the fans of the Italian master. With Italian voices by Toni Servillo, Antonio Albanese, and Andrea Camilleri, and French voices by Leïla Bekthi, Arthur Dupont, and Jean-Claude Carrière. Like the other Un Certain Regard film in animation Les Hirondelles de Kaboul (The Swallows of Kabul) by Zabou Breitman and Eléa Gobbé-Mevellec, La famosa invasione degli orsi in Sicilia will also be competing next June at the acclaimed Annecy International Animated Film Festival.”

Odnazhdy v Trubchevske by Larissa Sadilova (1h30)

“Russian filmmaker Larissa Sadilova, who already directed six features, hadn’t shot a film in several years. She is back with this “chronicle from the village of Troubtchevsk”, evoking the feelings of love in the contemporary Russian countryside, shooting characters played by her formidable actors with refined direction and a gentle eye. Women aspirations, their patience, the courage that has to be displayed towards an always illusory emancipation, desire, frustration, and a certain sense of immemorial fatalism are all examined, acutely and without weight. It will be the first time the Festival de Cannes welcomes Larissa Sadilova.”

SPECIAL SCREENINGS

Chicuarotes by Gael García Bernal (1 hr 35)

“A full-fledged member of Mexico’s exceptionally talented generation, a first-rate actor in films by Iñárritu and Cuarón, Gael García Bernal, along with Diego Luna, is a devotee of Cannes, where he was on the Jury in 2014. Chicuarotes is the actor’s second feature film where he takes a deep dive into Mexican society with a story about teenagers that is an affectionate portrayal, continuing in Mexican cinema’s tradition to pay homage to its eternal country, film after film.”

La Cordillera de los sueños by Patricio Guzmán (1 hr 24)

“Patricio Guzmán left Chile more than 40 years ago when the military dictatorship took over the democratically-elected government, but he never stopped thinking about a country, a culture, and a place on the map that he never forgot. After covering the North in Nostalgia for the Light and the South in The Pearl Button, his shots get up-close with what he calls “the vast revealing backbone of Chile’s past and recent history.” La Cordillera de los sueños is a visual poem, an historical inquiry, a cinematographic essay, and magnificent personal exercise in soul-searching.”

Ice on Fire by Leila Conners (1 hr 38)

“In 2007, Leila Conners screened The 11th Hour at Cannes, a hard-hitting documentary about climate change produced by Leonardo DiCaprio. The Festival screens conflict documentaries as part of a strong and proud tradition, like it also did with An Inconvenient Truth by Davis Guggenheim, which won an Oscar and earned Al Gore a Nobel Peace Prize. Twelve years later as the alarm bells are still multiplying all around the world (and more!), Leila Conners and Leonardo DiCaprio teamed up again on the same topic to make a film with an eloquent title: Ice on Fire. ”

5B by Dan Krauss (1 hr 33)

“In the 1980s, only a number and letter were used to designate a ward at San Francisco General Hospital, the first in the country to treat patients with AIDS. While a portion of society saw these patients as pariahs, the male and female caregivers in 5B chose a different route. This film is their story.

Directed by Dan Krauss, 5B is a film about a past that questions our present. It will be distributed in the United States, all around the world, and in France, which in October will be hosting the world conference for all fund-raisers donating money over the next three years to fight HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria. U2 singer Bono has been a fervent champion of the cause – and of this film, which he will be coming to Cannes to support.”

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | 14 – 25 MAY 2019 

Lolita (1961) ***

Dir.: Stanley Kubrick; Cast: Sue Lyon, James Mason, Shelley Winters, Peter Sellers; UK/US 1961, 152 min.

Vladimir Nabokov wrote a screenplay of 400 pages for Stanley Kubrick’s film adaption of his 1955 novel – it would have amounted to a running time of over seven hours. Kubrick also had to take into account the Hays censorship code, which made it impossible to show detailed sexual aspects of the love between Humbert Humbert, a middle aged college lecturer and a twelve-year-old girl named Lolita, whose name became synonymous with any young temptress – even though she was the victim of adult male predators.

Lolita opens with a murder: a drunk elderly man is shot dead while playing Chopin on the piano. Then the linear events leading to this crime unfold: A lecturer in French literature Humbert Humbert (Mason), arrives in Ramsdale, New Hampshire, in search for lodgings. On the verge of turning down the rooms on offer from Charlotte Haze (Winters), he is just about to reject them, when he sees her daughter Dolores ‘Lolita’ (Lyon) and falls in love. But Charlotte has a shine for Humbert too, and drives her daughter to a girl’s camp, leaving a letter for Humbert, telling him to move out – or marry her. Humbert, still obsessed with Lolita, then marries Charlotte who later reads his diary where he confesses to his love for the school girl. Charlotte runs out of the house to post a letter to the authorities, but is killed in a car crash. Humbert fetches Lolita from the camp, pretending that her mother is in hospital, but seduces the girl in a motel. They set off on a romantic adventure, and are followed by an obnoxious stranger. In the autumn, Humbert enrols Lolita in a nearby High School where she is to participate in a school play. A discussion with Dr, Zempf (Sellers) upsets Humbert and he takes Lolita out of the school, touring the country again. Finally, Lolita disappears; leaving Humbert desolate. Much later, he learns that she is pregnant, living in a tranquil suburb. He gives her money, from the sale of her mother’s house, but she wants to stay with her husband Dick. She also tells Humbert that she ran away with Clare Quilty (Sellers), a famous playwright, who impersonated Dr. Zempf and followed them on their journeys. Humbert dies before the murder trial.

Kubrick set his sights on Mason to play Humbert from the beginning, but he was unavailable due to other commitments. Laurence Olivier and David Niven also turned down the part, but finally Mason took it on board. Kubrick and Nabokov were happy with the casting of Sue Lyon – who was fourteen, playing a twelve-year-old – Nabokov later admitted he would have preferred the French actress Catherine Demongeot, who played Zazie in Louis Malle’s Zazie dans le Metro. Over 800 actresses had test screenings for the young Lolita. 

Meanwhile, a 1977 remake by Adrian Lyne –  much more faithful to the novel – made a colossal loss at the box office.

And while Kubrick tried to make Humbert into an “Unreliable Narrator” telling the story from his own selfish viewpoint, he fails to do the Lolita character any justice. Lolita certainly has its merits as a drama, but it’s un-conceivable that such a film could ever be made today. AS

Stanley Kubrick RETROSPECTIVE | APRIL AND MAY AT THE BFI 2019  

    

 

Stanley Kubrick Retrospective: Art and Film 2019

Stanley Kubrick, one of the greatest film makers of the 20th century, spent most of his later life working in England where he raised a family in the Hertfordshire town of Childwickbury, between St Albans and Harpenden, 35 minutes drive North of London. It was in the Norfolk Broads and Beckton, in the East End that he created the Vietnam scenes for Full Metal Jacket (1987), an orbiting space station for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and Dr Strangelove’s war room (1964). 

BFI KUBRICK RETRO  

Throughout April and May 2019 the BFI will present, in partnership with The Design Museum, Kensington, a definitive Stanley Kubrick season at BFI Southbank. The season will offer audiences the opportunity to experience masterpieces such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Barry Lyndon (1975) and The Shining (1980) on the big screen as Kubrick intended, with screenings being presented on 35mm wherever possible. The season will also delve deep into the director’s oeuvre with a playful and diverse programme of events, revealing why Kubrick is considered one of the most influential filmmakers of all time, and his style has given rise to the new entry in the Oxford Dictionary: “Kubrickian” meaning painstakingly perfectionist.

Stanley Kubrick was most inventive in his introduction of revolutionary devices to his filmmaking, such as the camera lens designed for NASA to shoot by candlelight. His fascination with all aspects of design and architecture influenced every stage of all his films. He worked with many key designers of his generation, from Hardy Amies to Saul Bass, Eliot Noyes and Ken Adam.

KENSINGTON EXHIBITION 

The exhibition, which has already travelled round Europe, is supported by Kubrick’s brother-in-law and executive producer on many of his films, Jan Harlan. The two first collaborated on Kubrick’s unrealised film project Napoleon in 1969, which has become known as the greatest movie never made, and will shortly form the subject of a made for TV documentary inspired by Steven Spielberg and directed Cary Fukunaga (Bond 2025).

Kubrick was as demanding on his actors as he was on himself. After playing Barry Lyndon’s hapless stepson in the 1975 epic drama English actor Leon Vitali went to work as his assistant for some 30 years and his story is told in Tony Zierra’s informative 2017 documentary Filmworker

The exhibition at Kensington’s Design Museum features scripts, costumes, films and props and provides a fascinating counterpoint to the BFI’s film retrospective, which takes place from April to May what it has called the “definitive Stanley Kubrick season” showing his films in 35mm, using projectors. There will also be a new print of A Clockwork Orange. MT

Kubrick’s feature films:

Fear and Desire (1953)

Killer’s Kiss (1955);

The Killing (1956)

Paths of Glory (1957)

Spartacus (1960)

Lolita (1962)

Dr. Strangelove or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

A Clockwork Orange (1971)

Barry Lyndon (1975)

The Shining (1980)

Full Metal Jacket (1987)

Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Stanley Kubrick: the Exhibition | Kensington Design Museum 26 April-17 September 2019.

Cannes Classics 2019

The 25 years of La Cité de la peur, a Midnight Screening of The Shining presented by Alfonso Cuarón, the 50 years of the mythical Easy Rider in the company of Peter Fonda, Luis Buñuel in the spotlight with three films, the attendance of Lina Wertmüller, the Grand Prix of 1951 Vittorio De Sica’s Miracle in Milan, a final salute to Milos Forman, the first Japanese animated film in color, the World Cinema Project and the Film Foundation of Martin Scorsese, documentaries about cinema and History, masterpieces known and rare films in restored version from countries rarely honored, this is the new edition of Cannes Classics—the first section dedicated to heritage cinema ever created in a major festival.  

 The majority of the films will be screened at Buñuel Theater, Salle du 60e or at the Cinéma de la Plage, all presented by major players in the film heritage: directors, artists or restoration managers.

The 50 years of the mythical Easy Rider

Presented half a century ago on the Croisette, in Competition at the Festival de Cannes, the film won the Prize for a first work. Co-writer, co-producer and lead actor, Peter Fonda will be in Cannes at the invitation of the Festival to celebrate this anniversary.
Easy Rider (1969, 1h35, USA) by Dennis Hopper

Restored in 4K by Sony Pictures Entertainment in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna. Restored from the 35mm Original Picture Negative and 35mm Black and White Separation Masters. 4K scanning and digital image restoration by Immagine Ritrovata. Audio restoration from the 35mm Original 3-track Magnetic Master by Chace Audio and Deluxe Audio. Color grading, picture conform, additional image restoration and DCP by Roundabout Entertainment. Colorist: Sheri Eisenberg. Restoration supervised by Grover Crisp.

Midnight Screening of The Shining 

The ultimate horror film for an event screening presented by Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón.
The Shining by Stanley Kubrick (1980, 2h26, UK / USA)

A Presentation of Warner Bros. The 4K remastering was done using a new 4K scan of the original 35mm camera negative. The mastering was done at Warner Bros. Motion Picture Imaging, and the color grading was done by Janet Wilson, with supervision from Stanley Kubrick’s former personal assistant Leon Vitali.

The 50 years ofLa Cité de la peur

The cult comedy of comic group Les Nuls will be screened at Cannes Classics au Cinéma de la Plage upon the occasion of the 4K restoration of the film for its 25th anniversary with Alain Chabat, Chantal Lauby and Dominique Farrugia in attendance.
La Cité de la peur, une comédie familiale (1994, 1h39, France) by Alain Berbérian

Presented by Studiocanal. A restoration by Studiocanal and TF1 Studio . 4K scanning 16bits from the original negative 35mm on Lasergraphics director. The pre-calibration was done in a projection room equipped by a 4k projector 4k Christie Laser by Pascal Bousquet and additional work of filtering, dusting was done to compensate the imperfection due to the age of the film. Optical illusion composited on DI on Flame to remain close to the quality of the original negative. Calibration validated by Laurent Dailland, director of photography. Original digital sound was used without modification. Work of remastering done by VDM Laboratory.

Luis Buñuel in the spotlight with three films

Three films by Mexican director and screenwriter, with Spanish origin, will be shown this year.
Los Olvidados (The Young and the Damned) (1950, 1h20, Mexico) by Luis Buñuel

Presented by the World Cinema Project. Restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project at L’Immagine Ritrovata in collaboration with Fundación Televisa, Cineteca Nacional Mexico, and Filmoteca de la UNAM. Restoration funding provided by The Material World Foundation.

Nazarín (1958, 1h34, Mexico) by Luis Buñuel

Presented by Cineteca Nacional Mexico. 3K Scan and 3K Digital Restoration from the original 35mm image negative (preserved by Televisa) and prints positive materials from Cineteca Nacional. Restoration made and financed by Cineteca Nacional Mexico. Mastered in 2K for Digital Projection.

L’Âge d’or (The Golden Age) (1930, 1h, France) by Luis Buñuel

Presented by La Cinemathèque française. A 4K restoration of The Golden Age was done by la Cinemathèque française and le Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Experimental cinema’s department, at Hiventy Laboratory for the image and at L.E. Diapason’s studio for the sound, using the original nitrate negative, original sound and safety elements.

Tribute to Lina Wertmüller

The first woman director ever nominated as a director at the Academy Awards in 1977 for Pasqualino Settebellezze, Lina Wertmüller will introduce the film with lead actor Giancarlo Giannini in attendance.
Pasqualino Settebellezze (Seven Beauties) (1975, 1h56, Italy) by Lina Wertmüller

Presented by Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia – Cineteca Nazionale. Restored by Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia – Cineteca Nazionale with the support of Genoma Films and Deisa Ebano from the original 35mm picture and optical soundtrack negative made available by RTI S.p.A. Digital scanning and restoration work carried out by Cinema Communications in Rome.

The 1951 “Palme d’or”

The Palme d’or was created in 1955 but the Grand Prix awarded to Miracle in Milan by Vittorio De Sica was the equivalent.
Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan) (1951, 1h40, Italy) by Vittorio De Sica

Presented by Cineteca di Bologna. Restored by Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna and Compass Film, in collaboration with Mediaset, Infinity TV, Artur Cohn, Films sans frontières and Variety Communications at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory. 4K Scan and Digital Restoration from the original 35mm camera negative and a vintage dupe positive. Colour grading supervised by DoP Luca Bigazzi.

Milos Forman

A devotee of the Festival de Cannes, a former President of the Jury, a director with several lives, Milos Forman passed away one year ago. The restoration of his second film and a documentary will give us the opportunity to pay our tribute and remember him.
Lásky jedné plavovlásky (Loves of a Blonde) (1965, 1h21, Czech Republic) by Milos Forman

A presentation of the Národní filmový archiv, Prague. 4K digital restoration based on the original camera done by the Universal Production Partners and Soundsquare in Prague, 2019. The donors of this project were Mrs. Milada Kučerová and Mr. Eduard Kučera. Restored in partnership with the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival and the Czech Film Fund. French distribution: Carlotta Films.

Forman vs. Forman (Czech Republic / France, 1h17) by Helena Trestikova and Jakub Hejna

Presented by  Negativ Film Productions, Alegria Productions, Czech Television, ARTE. A powerful documentary that recounts with emotion the career of director Milos Forman, from the Czech New Wave to Hollywood. Oscars, politics and political upheavals for a life in the service of cinema.

All the restored films of Cannes Classics 2019

Toniby Jean Renoir (1934, 1h22, France)

Presented by Gaumont. First digital restoration in 4K presented by Gaumont with the support of the CNC. Restoration done by L’image retrouvée in Bologna and Paris.

Le Ciel est à vous (1943, 1h45, France) by Jean Grémillon

Presented by TF1 Studio. Restaured version in 4K using two intermediate and a duplicate done by TF1 studio, with the support of the CNC and Coin de Mire cinéma. Digital and photochimical work done by L21 laboratory.

Moulin Rouge (1952, 1h59, UK) by John Huston 

Presented and restored by The Film Foundation in collaboration with Park Circus, Romulus Films and MGM with additional funding provided by the Franco-American Cultural Fund, a unique partnership between the Directors Guild of America (DGA), the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the Société des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Editeurs de Musique (SACEM), and the Writers Guild of America, West (WGAW).   Restored from the 35mm Original Nitrate 3-Strip Technicolor Negative. 4K scanning, color grading, digital image restoration and film recording by Cineric, Inc., New York. Colorist: Daniel DeVincent. Audio restoration by Chace Audio. Restoration Consultant: Grover Crisp.

Kanal (They Loved Life) (1957, 1h34, Poland) by Andrzej Wajda

Presented by Malavida, in association with Kdr. Scanned, calibrated and restored in 4K under the artistic supervision of Andrzej Wajda and Jerzy Wójcik, second DOP, and regular collaborator of Wajda (Ashes and Diamonds) and one of the greatest Polish DOP. Technical supervision: Waldermar Makula. 4k Scan from the original negative, image and sound. Producted by Studio Filmowe Kadr with the participation of  Filmoteka Narodowa. French distribution: Malavida. International Sales: Studio Filmowe Kadr.

Hu shi ri ji (Diary of a Nurse) (1957, 1h37, China) by Tao Jin

Presented by IQIYI et New Ipicture Media co., ltd (NIPM). 4K Scan and 3K Digital Restoration from the original 35mm print positive materials mastered in 2K. Restoration financed by IQIYI & NIPM, and made by L’Immagine Ritrovata (Italy) and Laser Digital Film SRL (Italy).

Hakujaden (The White Snake Enchantress) (1958, 1h18, Japan) by Taiji Yabushita

Presented by  Toei Animation Company, ltd., Toei company, ltd. et and National Archive of Japan. The project celebrates the 100th year anniversary for the birth of Japan animation and 60th anniversary for the original theatrical release in 1958.
4K scan and restoration from the original negative, 35mm print, tape materials, and animation cels by Toei lab tech co., ltd. et Toei digital center are carried out. The restored data is stored in 2K.

125 Rue Montmartre (1959, 1h25, France) by Gilles Grangier

Presented by Pathé. 4K Scan and 2k restoration, using the original safety negative (negative image, intermediate and negative optique sound) Work done by Eclair laboratory for the image and L.E Diapason (Léon Rousseau) for the sound part. Restored with the support of the Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée (CNC).

A tanú (The Witness) (1969, 1h52, Hongrie) by Péter Bacsó

The original uncensored  version presented by the Hungarian National Film Fund – Film Archive. The film was restored in 4K using the original camera negative and outtakes, the only existing uncensored positive print and the original magnetic sound. The restoration was carried out at the Hungarian Filmlab. The digital colour grading was supervised by Tamás Andor (HSC, Hungarian Society of Cinematographers).

Tetri karavani (The White Caravan) (1964, 1h37, Georgia) by Eldar Shengelaia and Tamaz Meliava

Presented by Georgian National Film Center. 4K Scan from 35mm, digital restoration (color, grading, stabilization). Restoration financed by the Georgian National Film Center, the restoration made by National Archives of Georgia.

Director Eldar Shengelaia in attendance.

Plogoff, des pierres contre des fusilsby Nicole Le Garrec (1980, 1h48, France)

Presented by Ciaofilm. Restored in 2k from the original negative 16mm image. Sound restoration from the 16mm magnetic. Work done by Hiventy laboratory  under the supervision of Ciaofilm and Pascale Le Garrec, with the help of the CNC, Région Bretagne and the Cinemathèque de Bretagne. Distributed by Next Film Distribution.

Director Nicole Le Garrec in attendance.

Caméra d’Afrique  (20 Years of African Cinema) by Férid Boughedir (1983, 1h38, Tunisia / France)

Presented by the CNC. Restoration: Laboratory of the CNC. 2K scan from the original 16mm image negative. Sound restoration : Hiventy. This movie fits into the restoration scheme initiated by L’Institut français and the CNC, supervised by the commitee for the African cinematographic heritage. Right-holders: Marsa film. French Distribution: Les Films du Losange.

Director Férid Boughedir in attendance. 

Dao ma zei (The Horse Thief ) (1986, 1h28, China) by Tian Zhuangzhuang and Peicheng Pan

Presented by Xi’An Film Studio. 4K Scan and 4K 48 fps digital restoration from the 35mm original camera negative. Restoration financed and made by China Film Archive.

Director Tian Zhuangzhuang  and Cinematographer Hou Yong in attendance. 

The Doors (1991, 2h20, USA) by Oliver Stone

Presented by Studiocanal, in partnership with Paramount, Lionsgate and Imagine Ritrovatta. Restored in 4k, initiated and supervised by Oliver Stone from the original negative, scanned in 4k 16 bits on ARRISCAN at Fotokem US. Restoration managed by Imagine Ritrovatta in Italy. Calibrated work supervised by Oliver Stone. Immersive soundtrack thanks to the Atmos mix created by Formosa Group, Hollywood, under the supervision of Dolby and original mixers of the film Wylie Stateman and Lon Bender. The movie can be seen in 7.1 and 5.1. Remastered 4K now available in 4K Cinema, UHD Dolby Vision and Atmos.

Documentaries

Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound (USA, 1h34) by Midge Costin

Presented by Dogwoof and Cinetic Media.

The biggest directors and artists make us immerse in the history and impact of sound in cinema: Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Barbra Streisand, John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Patty Jenkins, Robert Redford, Ryan Coogler, David Lynch, Sofia Coppola, Christopher Nolan, Ang Lee, Walter Murch. A rich, fascinating and essential documentary.

Les Silences de Johnny (55mn, France) by Pierre-William Glenn

Presented by les films du Phœnix  in coproduction with Ciné+.

A personal and moving portrait of actor Johnny Hallyday by great cinematographer, director and friend of Johnny’s Pierre-William Glenn.

La Passione di Anna Magnani(1h, Italy / France) by Enrico Cerasuolo

Presented by les Films du Poisson and Zenit Arti Audiovisive.

The destiny of legendary actress Anna Magnani through archive footage, often unpublished. To dive into the history of Italian cinema.

Cinecittà – I mestieri del cinema Bernardo Bertolucci (Italy, 55mn) by Mario Sesti

Presented by Erma Pictures in collaboration with Cinecittà Luce.

A presentation of Erma Pictures in collaboration with Cinecittà Luce.

The last interview of the Master Bertolucci who recalls his work with precision, delicacy and philosophy. A movie lesson.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2019 | 15-25 May 2019

 

Pond Life (2017) ***

Dir.: Bill Buckhurst; Cast: Tom Varley, Esme Creed-Miles, Angus Imrie, Daisy Edgar-Jones, Abraham Levis, Ethan Wilkie, Gianluca Galucci, Sian Brooke; UK 2017, 100 min.

Bill Buckhurst sets his feature debut in a mining village near Doncaster, South Yorkshire in 1994. Based on scriptwriter’s Richard Cameron play of the same name, it On the surface it’s a gentle comedy, but beware there are unknown depths, and not just in the pond.

Trev (Varley) is spending his last summer in the village where his best friend Pogo (Creed-Miles) is acting strangely, even for a teenager. Cassie (Edgar-Jones) on the other hand, is a fully fledged adolescent, all strops and tantrums if she does not get her way, and in she’s fallen for Maurice (Levis), a rather dubious figure. To make matters worse, her Ex, Malcolm (Imrie) has not come to terms with things, and is stalking her. Two pre-pubescence boys, Dave (Wilkie) and Shane (Galucci) are also suffering from hormonal changes, and spend their time watching Cassie and Maurice in the high grass, or nicking Cassie’s stockings and suspenders. Adults play a secondary role in Pond Life, like Pogo’s Mum (Brooke), who is suffering from a depression. 

Meanwhile Tom is an expert fisherman, and come nightfall, takes them all out fishing to catch the mystical beast, they call Nessie. When Pogo’s line pulls, she decides – against the odds – to put the fish back into the water. And the  following morning, finds out that Trevor had already left, and all is not well with Maurice.

There’s nothing really happening in the village, except for some slot machines and and a ropey old cafe. The adults tend to meet up in the Miners Club, where they reminisce about a weird guy called Tony Blair, who has just become leader of the Labour Party, and wants to live in Number Ten. “Fat chance”, is the overwhelming comment of the crowd.

Although watchable enough Pond Life still feels rather stagey and this somehow limits its filmic scope on the big screen. DoP Nick Cooke, struggles to find innovative angles in this rather down beaten environment whose dilapidated settings hark back to the mining crisis which has cast a  deep melancholy on everything that moves, (and doesn’t). And whilst this atmosphere of total abandonment is captured rather well, the threadbare narrative strains to keep our attention for the full running time. Pond Life wants very much to be liked, but in the end, tries too hard. AS

ON RELEASE ON 12 APRIL 2019

 

Canada Now Week 2019

CANADA NOW festival brings a selection of new Canadian films to the United KingdomLaunching on the 24th April 2019, nine films will play across five days at the Curzon Soho and Phoenix East Finchley cinemas, followed by a nationwide tour

As always, the 2019 CANADA NOW celebrates the independent spirit that has always been a hallmark of Canadian cinema along with its cultural diversity and twist of French heritage.

The festival opens with the London premiere of Keith Behrman’s LBGTQ+ drama GIANT LITTLE ONES, a refreshingly original and emotionally powerful coming-of-age drama. And the festival closes with Barry Avrich’s PROSECUTING EVIL, a feature biopic of Benjamin Ferencz, the last surviving Nuremberg prosecutor and life-long human rights activist. CANADA NOW expects many of the filmmakers and cast to be in attendance.

Alongside eight U.K. premieres, CANADA NOW also includes a performance from Canadian filmmaker Daniel Cockburn of his surreal, autobiographical show HOW NOT TO WATCH A MOVIE.

The full programme is listed below, and tickets are now on sale:

http://canadanow.co.uk/

Donbass (2018) ****

Writer/Dir: Sergey Loznitsa | Cast: Valeriu Andriuta, Boris Kamorzin, Sergey Kolesov | Drama | Ukraine/Ger/France/Neth/Romania/Russia | 110

Donbass today is a conflation of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine, and an important mining region since the late 19th century, when it became heavily industrialised. Sergey Loznitsa’s drama set in the region opened this year’s Un Certain Regard strand at Cannes.

In March 2014, following the 2014 Ukrainian revolution and Russian military intervention, large swaths of the Donbass seethed with unrest that eventually erupted in a war between pro-Russian separatists affiliated with the self-proclaimed unrecognized Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, and the post-revolutionary Ukrainian government. Until the ongoing war, Donbass – which borders Russia – was the most densely populated of all the regions of Ukraine, apart from the capital city of Kiev. Before the war, the city of Donetsk (then the fifth largest city in Ukraine) had been considered the unofficial capital of the Donbass.

And it is during this troubled period of history that the Ukrainian born filmmaker sets his follow-up to last year’s Cannes title A Gentle Creature (he has made a film every year since his 2012 In The Fog: The Letter; Maidan; The Event and Austerlitz. Elliptical and visually striking, DONBASS does lack a certain warmth, focusing on its formal rigour and an evocative sense of emptiness, it is a piece that will certainly appeal to the diehard arthouse crowd.

The narrative follows but does not focus on any particular character, as a series of interconnecting vignettes gradually unfold that will be more engaging for audiences intimately familiar with the situation, rather than to outsiders looking in. There is a haunting scene where a prisoner (Valery Antoniuk) gets lynched by a crowd of locals who believe him to be a member of a Ukrainian execution squad. But nobody seems safe in this combattive, hostile and unpredicatble environment fraught with sudden explosions as gunfire rumbles continually in the background. The director conveys a palpable sense of generalised chaos and desperation.

Loznitsa collaborates again with DoP Oleg Mutu (who also lensed A Gentle Creature). This is a muscular and intelligent piece of filmmaking, but one that will have the most appeal to keen historians and ardant fans of this accomplished and fascinating director.MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | UN CERTAIN REGARD 2018

 

 

Cannes Film Festival –

Thierry Frémaux (now general delegate) has unveiled the 2019 official selection. And this year’s Cannes looks to be a glittering number with plenty of real stars gracing the Croisette (Elton John, Isabelle Huppert, Tilda Swinton and Claude Lelouch), four female filmmakers in the main Competition line-up which strikes a good balance of well known auteurs and new filmmakers – and some promising British Films: Dexter Fletcher’s biopic Rocketman; Asif Kapadia new documentary about his hero Diego Maradona, and another dose of dour social realism from Ken Loach. Cannes and Netflix are still at loggerheads – in the best possible way – but where would Cannes be without a little controversy to hit to headlines…

The four Palme d’Or hopefuls directed by women are— Mati Diop’s Atlantique (she was memorable in Simon Killer);Jessica Hausner’s Sci-fi-ish debut Little Joe stars Ben Whishaw and Emily Beecham in a story set in the world of genetic engineering (left); Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire (with its all female cast) and Justine Triet’s Sibyl a psychotherapist themed drama which has distinct echoes of Ozon‘s l’Amant Double. Infact, 13 of the 51 filmmakers (about 25%) are women. And Thierry intends to continue with the trend.

Alejandro González Iñárritu, who won the festival’s directing prize for Babel in 2006 will head up the jury. This year’s official poster (above) pays tribute to the director Agnès Varda, who died last month at age 90, and features an image from her final film La Pointe Courte. And for the first time ever, the opening film Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die will also play in competition. Styled as a zombie comedy is has a superb cast: Adam Driver, Bill Murray, Chloë Sevigny and Tilda Swinton.

Also in the main competition is Pedro Almodovar with Pain and Glory described as a fictionalised auto-biopic. He’s be nominated before but never won the Palme so it would be a feather in the Oscar winner’s cap. Canadian Xavier Dolan is back with a Quebec-set drama Matthias and Maxime. Il Traditore is Marco Bellocchio’s drama about Tommaso Buscetta the first mafia informant in 1980’s Sicily. Ira Sachs’s Frankie is set in the bewitching town of Sintra which will add another dimension to the story starring festival doyenne Isabelle Huppert along with Brendan Gleeson, Marisa Tomei, Greg Kinnear and Jérémie Renier. Romanian filmmaker Corneliu Porumboiu tries his hand at comedy with The Whistlers which unites him once again with Vlad Ivanov (Hier and Sunset). Ladj Ly is the only first time filmmaker on the comp list and he brings a drama expanded from his 2017 short entitled Les Miserables about the Seine-Saint-Denis anti-crime brigade. Veteran favourites The Dardennes Brothers will be there will Muslim-themed Young Ahmed. Malick’s A Hidden Life (aka Radegund) explores the life of Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian conscientious objector to the Third Reich who was executed in 1943 and contains final performances from Michael Nqyvist and Bruno Ganz, sadly no longer with us.

Other directors returning to competition include Oh Mercy, a Roubaix-set crime drama from Arnaud Desplechin and a family drama from South Korea’s Bong Joon-ho (Okja). And Cannes regular Kleber Mendonça Filho co-directs his latest (with Juliano Dornelle), a horror film entitled Bacurau.

Un Certain Regard sidebar has films from Catalan auteur Albert Serra – Liberté – and The Wild Goose Lake, a Chinese thriller by Diao Yinan (Black Coal, Thin Ice). Bruno Dumont’s follow up to Maid of Orleans story Jeannette (2017) is simply called Joan of Arc. 

And where would Cannes be without the megastars of the Riviera? Double Oscar-winning Claude Lelouch claimed the Palme d’Or back in 1966 with the iconic Un Homme et Une Femme. And he follows this up with the same classic duo in The Best Years of a Life (Out of Competition) uniting Jean-Louis Trintignant with Anouk Aimée. Veteran heavyweights Abel Ferrara and Werner Herzog also join the party.

TV-wise there will be a chance to sample Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn’s 10-parter  Too Old to Die Young. Venice started the TV-streaming service trend, and Cannes has now joined the bandwagon.

Thierry Frémaux left the press conference with his usual cheeky promise that other titles will soon be announced. And everyone was excited to hear that these could include Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood exploring the final years of the Golden Era with a starry line-up of Al Pacino, Leonard DiCaprio, Dakota Fanning and Margot Robbie.

For the time being no Netflix films will be included in the Palme d’Or competition, indeed the streaming giant does not have a film ready in time to be presented this year. Martin Scorsese has declared that special affects have delayed his entry of The Irishman which was very much on the cards for Thierry Frémaux and Pierre Lescure, and will now most likely appear at Venice.

Other regulars and possible contenders are Steven Soderbergh’s The Laundromat, the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems and the latest from Noah Baumach and Ad Astra from James Gray. So watch this space. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | 14 -25 MAY 2019

Jury

Alejandro G. Iñárritu

Elle Fanning

Maimouna N’Diaye

Kelly Reichardt

Alice Rohracher

Enki Bilal

Robin Campillo

Yorgo Lanthimos

Pawel Pawlikowski

 

Dragged Across Concrete (2018) ***

Dir: S Craig Zahler | Mel Gibson, Vince Vaughn | Thriller | US, 16o;

S Craig Zahler’s latest thriller lacks the slick, pared-down momentum of his previous outing Brawl in Cell Block 99. Overlong and often ponderous it nevertheless carries some weight in the social message it pushes forward. But two hours and 40 minutes is pushing it too far.

Mel Gibson (Lurasetti) and Vince Vaughn (Ridgeman) are cops who decide to play some criminals at their own game by disturbing a suspect’s love nest during a drug raid, giving him a bloody nose. Their boss (Don Johnson) gets to hear about it from a neighbour’s video footage, and decides to suspend them. Both have major family commitments so they turn the tables on the law to raise some much needed spondulix. Ridgeman’s plan is to make a quick buck by staking out a local safe house, and stashing aside some filthy lucre. Lurasetti is not keen on the plan, but goes along for the ride.

Suffice to say, it all goes pear-shaped and there follows a rather drawn out denouement involving another strand to the storyline. The action sequences are entertaining, particularly the one involving the slow dissemination of their vehicle. And it’s quite clear, once again, where Zahler’s sympathies lie. MT

NOW ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE from 19 APRIL 2019

Greta (2018) Netflix

Dir. Neil Jordan. US/Ireland. 2018. 98 mins.

Neil Jordan’s latest drama Greta has the basis to be something much greater, but  chooses the silly route, becoming creepy too soon. Luckily Isabelle Huppert’s blood-curdling turn as a lonely widow saves the day.

Falling between comedy and horror this enjoyable pulp thriller throws a spanner into the works of seriously gripping psychodrama  – instead we get an over-baked absurdist potboiler with one or two electric shocks that will have you screaming out loud. The moral of the story is: one good turn doesn’t lead to another.

Jordan and Ray Wright (The Crazies) have co-written a script that melds Hollywood slickness with European arthouse subversiveness deftly rendered in DoP Seamus McGarvey’s eye-popping visual wizardry, with a small role for Stephen Rea. Chloë Grace Moretz is naive Ivy League graduate Frances who shares a comfortable Brooklyn brownstone with her more savvy friend Erika (Maika Monroe). One days she finds a smart-looking handbag on the subway and duly heads to the home of its owner – one Greta Higed – who inhabits a small secluded house in a Manhattan backwater. A soignée Isabelle Huppert (Greta) opens the door to a cosy French country interior, although it later transpires she is originally from Hungary.

It turns out that well-meaning Frances has recently lost her mother and is feeling isolated emotionally and unhappy with her father’s new relationship. She is instantly drawn to Huppert’s faux bonhomie and the two bond, Greta missing her own daughter, who apparently lives in Paris. A few espressos later they are swearing undying allegiance to each other, all too much too soon. To add further credibility to her caring side, Greta adopts a dear old dog (Morton) on his last legs in a nearby sanctuary. Alarm bells ring. Huppert does her best not to let this descend into a schlocky psycho-scenario but it does, and she knows it, but is having a lovely time with her role. She is also the only woman with normal lips, the others having blown theirs up with fillers. Jordan is having fun with his soundtrack – a blend of classics from Vivaldi to some smaltzy French chansons, just the right background for a ‘girls only’ night in where the femme fatale cooks up some recipes Frances hadn’t bargain for: “Good, no?” says Greta, an evil glint in her eye as she morphs into mean mummy – spouting fluent Hungarian – just to add menace to the mix.

Jordan occasionally makes some bad decisions disrupting Huppert’s subtly crafted character performance and misjudging the mood. One example is the restaurant scene that starts with chilling elegance and is ruined by cack-handed melodrama. Greta is a surprising departure from Jordan’s usual fare and will certainly appeal to the mainstream crowd with its devilish humour and slap in the face thrills. MT

NOW ON NETFLIX

The Caretaker (1963) **** Bfi Flipside

Dir.: Clive Donner; Cast: Alan Bates, Donald Pleasence, Robert Shaw; UK 1963, 105 min.

A play that changed the face of modern theatre and made Harold Pinter’s name, The Caretaker remains one of Pinter’s most famous works. Featuring original production cast members Donald Pleasence and Alan Bates, the film adaptation is sensitively directed by Clive Donner (Rogue Male) and was shot by Nicolas Roeg. It will be released by the BFI in a Dual Format Edition on 15 April 2019, presented with a variety of extras, and on iTunes on 29 April.

The Caretaker was also an early version of celebrity crowdfunding, with Elisabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and Noel Coward among the co-producers. With clear echoes of Joseph Losey’s The Servant from the same year (Pinter also scripted, based on a novel by Robin Maugham), The Caretaker is a power play as well as a psychological menage-a-trois. But whilst the titular servant in the Loosey film wins the battle with his master and his fiancée, the title character in The Caretaker looses out against the alliance of two brothers.

Hobo Mac Davies aka Bernhard Jenkins (Pleasence) is picked up from the street by Aston (Shaw), who takes pity on him on a frosty night, and invites him into the dilapidated home he , shares with his brother Mick (Bates). But having set foot in his bedsitter room, which has been used as a dumping ground for broken domestic appliances, Davies turns out to be opportunistic and aggressive at the same time: bullying the hyper-sensitive Aston, who has been the victim of electro-shock treatment during his teenage years. Davies also spins him a porkie about having to get to  Sidcup, to retrieve his ‘papers’ – a bogus excuse which provides a rich vein of humour. Despite being a tramp with no possessions or any way of financing him life, he has a high opinion of himself, and is extremely demanding and choosy finding fault in Aston’s generous attempts to accommodate him: particularly with regards to footwear. Alan Bates plays Aston’s cocky older brother Mick (Bates), who dreams about tuning the ramshackle house into a luxury penthouse – whilst Aston had mentioned a much more realistic project to Davis: the building of a shed in the garden, where Aston could use as a workshop. But Davis soon enthrals Aston with his stories of follies de grandeur – and the need to get to Sidcup to fetch his ‘references’. Private Eye’s column ‘Great Bores of Today’ could have been based on Pinter’s hilarious road references.

Even though, Mick throws a few coins at Davies feet, which the in the room is a small Buddha statue, which Aston cherishes. Trying to get to grips with Davies, Mick smashes the stature, whilst the former tries to get Aston to give him control over the household, relegating his brother. A knife suddenly turns up, but slowly the brothers form an alliance against Davies. Aston throws him out of the house, but even though Mick picks him up in the morning, after a Davies is shivering from the cold, Aston turns his back literally on Davies, who has returned to the house: Aston keeps out the light blocking from the window and condemns Davis to the darkness he came from.

Richard Donner (Here we go around the Mulberry Bush) directs the sparse action with great sensitivity, but DoP Nicolas Roeg steals the show, using all tricks in the trade to conjure up always new light and shadow games, in which the three protagonists are caught like in a spider’s web. Pleasance is really creepy as the ever-changing Davis, and Bates acts out his his psychotic tendencies with menace. But Robert Shaw makes the strongest impression, as the permanently tortured victim of intrusive medical treatment, which has robbed him of any idenity. AS

Dual Format Edition (DVD/Blu-ray) release on 15 April 2019, and on iTunes on 29 April

   

Red Joan (2018) ****

Dir.: Trevor Nunn; Writer: Lindsay Shapiro | Cast: Judi Dench, Sophie Cookson, Tereza Srbova, Tom Hughes, Stephen Campbell-Moore, Ben Miles, Freddie Gaminara, Stephen Boxer; UK 2018, 101 min.

Best known for his theatre work, Trevor Nunn tackles a meaty wartime spy thriller set in the present day, and adapted from a novel by Jennie Rooney. Old-fashioned but thoroughly enjoyable, Red Joan tells the story of real life KGB operative Melita Norwood, a sensational Judi Dench, with an enigmatic Sophie Cookson playing her younger self.

Norwood who was finally arrested in her eighties, starts out at a physics student in 1930s Cambridge. Nunn’s construct of parallel action between a five-day interrogation by MI5 in 2000 and the past works seamlessly, leaving the audience time to reflect.

Joan Stanley (Cookson) is a rather timid and over-adjusted student, but after meeting German immigrants Sonia (Srbova) and and her handsome cousin Leo (Hughes), she is drawn into the world of communist sympathisers – mainly because she has fallen in love with the tousle-haired Leo. She is critical of Leo’s absolute subordination to the Stalinist dogma, but she is on “his side” – after all, the Soviet Union was an ally of Britain and the USA. During the war Joan is recruited into a highly secret project: Britain’s attempt of building the atomic bomb. Whilst Leo and Sonia, working undercover for the KGB, are pestering her to reveal secrets to them, Joan resists, and falls in love with the head of the project, a married Max Davis (a convincing Campbell-Moore). Max, gallantly, refused to have an affair with Joan, and wants to wait for a divorce. This throws Joan back to Leo, and she starts to give him photographed copies of he research documents. During a search of the laboratory, Kierl (Boxer) based on the real life life spy Klaus Fuchs, is caught; whilst the officer searching Joan’s bag is too embarrassed to go further after finding her (deliberately placed) sanitary towels. William Mitchell (Gaminara), who will later make a career in the Foreign Officer and leads MI5 to Joan, is another one of the ring. There are personal secrets to be discovered, like the real relationship between Leo and Sonia, and finally Joan admits all to Max, who is wrongfully accused of being a spy. His reaction will alter Joan’s life for good.

DoP Jack Nicholson and PD Christina Casali have combined in creating a picture perfect Cambridge in the 1930s and the world of laboratories and secret hiding places. Nunn always directs with great nuance – never straying into melodrama or cliché: Joan’s inner life is enough to go by. The overall message is of romantic intrigue, a turmoil of souls and an entanglement into history, not so much by choice, but by circumstance.

 Dench brings out Joan humanity, she is neither a hero nor a villain: just an ordinary woman influenced by personal experience – rather than dogma – and an emotional yearning to belong. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs (seen in archive footage) finally push her over the edge, but so does the death of her beloved father. Growing up in a man’s world, she is diminished and demoted to a tea lady (in spite of her first class degree in physics). Nunn shows her at the coalface of men’s emotional immaturity, bulldozing their way forward – whatever the ideology or the workplace. Her barrister son Nick (Miles) is ready to decry her, questioning her motives for a while. But Joan explains how convinced she was back then of ensuring peace by creating nuclear deterrence between the superpowers, placing a bomb in both their hands. To her it seemed the most logical solution. And Joan’s actions emerge a triumph of emotional individualism over (any) form of male inspired nationalism or ideology. AS

SCREENING NATIONWIDE FROM 14 APRIL 2019   

Edvard Munch on Film

A new exhibition reunites the Norwegian Expressionist painter Edvard Munch with his creative contemporaries, putting his work into context with European influences from Art Nouveau, Expressionism and Symbolism.

Edvard Munch (1863-1944) was a famous pioneer of modern art, best known for his iconic image of The Scream. His idiosyncratic expression of raw human emotion reflects many of the anxieties and hotly debated issues of his times, yet his art still still resonates today.

Edvard Munch: love and angst focusses on Munch’s remarkable and experimental prints – an art form which made his name and at which he excelled throughout his life. The 83 artworks on show together demonstrate the artist’s skill and creativity in expressing the feelings and experiences of the human condition – from love and desire, to jealousy, loneliness, anxiety and grief.  

Other highlights of the exhibition include the eerie but remarkable Vampire II which is generally considered to be one of his most elaborate and technically accomplished prints; the controversial Madonna, an erotic image which features an explicit depiction of swimming sperm and a foetus and provoked outrage at the time.       

The exhibition also shows how Munch’s artistic vision was shaped by the radical ideas expressed in art, literature, science and theatre in Europe during his lifetime. His most innovative period of printmaking, between the 1890s and the end of the First World War, coincided with a great period of societal change in Europe which Munch experienced through constant travel across the continent on the vast rail network. The exhibition will pay particular attention to three European cities that had major influence on him and his printmaking – Kristiania (Oslo), Paris and Berlin. A small selection of Munch’s personal postcards and maps are used to give a flavour of Munch’s journeys.

Munch suffered all his life from a deep-felt sense of anguish, possibly due to the death of his mother when he was only five, and his sister when he was still a young teenager. These traumas clearly shaped his emotional world and affected his relationships with women: His prints demonstrate his passion, but also his fear, of women. Separation and isolation from those he held dear led to a state of anxiousness, but he was also aware that these feelings where the key to his creative expression. Later he went on to say: “For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art”.

Psychology was all the rage in the late 1890s with advent of Freud’s ‘discoveries’ and literature and culture carried much of the responsibility for popularising the ideas and practices of this rather decadent period in Europe. This trend only magnified Munch’s trauma and he made free expression of his obsession with and fear of female power and the sense of suffocation and entrapment it brought to him. He had many affairs but fled from marriage and commitment. Munch admitted in later life that his visual ideas were directly inspired by the pattern of love, infidelity and despair experienced by his friends in Kristiania (Oslo) whose loose-living, chaotic lifestyles exposed the dark side of the Bohemian dream. His images of passion and jealousy recall the emotions surrounding their affairs, and reflect memories of his own turbulent first relationship with a married woman, Milly Thaulow.

The Scream (1893) print – suggests that the image depicts a person hearing a scream, rather than a person screaming – was undoubtedly his most famous work probably inspired by a rare, wavy cloud formation seen only in Northern Europe. In a twist of fate, Munch sister Laura was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1894, and institutionalised in a hospital near the site of The Scream on the road to Ekeberg.  The English translation reads “I felt a great Scream pass through nature”.But a similar pose of a screaming head, with hands cupped around it, appeared in an early work recalling the death of his mother, as he stands by her bedside, looking out in sheer desperation and misery.

During his life Munch spent much time in Paris and Berlin where in 1892, he was invited to exhibit his paintings in the recently formed German Empire. Berlin was Europe’s industrial boom city, ruled over the ambitious Kaiser Bill (Wilhelm II). Grand avenues gave the impression of military order but bohemian undercurrents ran just below the surface, alongside Europe’s strongest workers’ movement. His exhibition horrified the traditional art world, but was much admired by the Avantgarde with the scandal helping him to launch his international career.

Clearly Munch’s work and his friendships with the Swedish playwright and painter August Strindberg, Toulouse Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, Max Klinger, Vincent Van Gogh and German philosopher and writer Friedrich Nietzsche could provide rich potential for cinema yet sadly only a few filmmakers have been inspired. The first was a British director Peter Watkins whose rather stolid made for Norwegian TV  drama Edvard Munch (210 mins, 1974)) captures the mournfulness of the artist, chronologically charting his traumatic early life fraught with illness and death, leading on to his ostracisation in traditional art circles and his cafe society days with nihilist Hans Jaeger in Oslo and Strindberg in Berlin.

The second is Munch 150 (90 mins, 2013) Ben Harding’s factual documentary that travels to Oslo where it goes behind the scenes to show some the mounting a major exhibition of over 150 works devoted to the national hero. It then tours Norway to provide an in-depth biography of a man whose work captures the zeitgeist of the mid-19th century right through until the German occupation of his homeland in the Second World War.

Edvard Munch’s prints is the largest in the UK for 45 years. | British Museum

Edvard Munch (1974) on AMAZON PRIME | EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA

MUNCH 150 | EXHIBITION ON FILM

 

Edvard Munch (1974)

Writer|Director: Peter Watkins | Biopic | Norway /Sweden | 210min | Drama

In the ultimate biopic of Norway’s most famous artist, Peter Watkins sketches a profoundly atmospheric cinéma vérité portrait of 19th century Kristiania (now Oslo) where the expressionist painter (Geir Westby) grew up in a protestant middle class family with two brothers and three sisters in 1863.

His mother was to die when he was five, inauspiciously shaping his introspective life in a society where sickness and death were prevalent amongst the young. Munch himself nearly died of a haemorrhage aged 13  and legalised prostitution and child labour were the norm offering the artist plenty of scope to draw on for his iconic paintings. “Illness, insanity and death were the black angels that watched over my cradle and accompanied me every day of my life”. It seemed inevitable that this milieu of grief and nihilism would culminated in his ultimate expression of anxiety ‘The Scream’ thirty years later.

A fly on the wall camera introduces the Munch family, Watkins’ slow and deliberately didactic narration presents their lives in a factually informative way, making use of the painter’s own diaries and key historical events of the era. Peter Watkins is well known for his dispassionate treatment of often inflammatory subjects and his biopic is a leisurely two-hour affair that immerses us in the era and the artist’s own world which ran contrary to the establishment, his work being described as ‘ugly and deranged’ in a critical assault that continued for most of his career. Munch was simply expressing his feelings in a visual way using a “nervous, dissolving treatment of colour”.

The scenes of his love affair with Mrs Heiberg (a graceful Gro Fraas), a married woman without children, are sensually rendered in the romantic fashions of the era and provide a welcome counterpoint to those featuring Munch’s sombre childhood marked by grief and illness: “Sex is the only human pleasure that spares man from ultimate loneliness”: Munch describes his relationship with Mrs Heiberg as making him feel much calmer although the affair was not to last.

From then on Munch’s brushstrokes are shown scratching and scraping at the canvas as his work becomes more impressionistic, and Watkins cuts back to scenes of him weeping pitifully. Watkins’ treatment gets increasingly more manic and dreamlike as the film progresses echoing Munch’s troubled state of mind with an evocative use of flashback and cuts. At a time where all of the major artists are still involved in exterior depictions: Cézanne, Van Gogh and Renoir, Munch was painting groundbreaking symbolist works that transcended all external reality to express innermost feelings and emotion.

His critics stood by and laughed at the canvasses. Hurt and confused by their negativity Munch withdrew from the world during the 1888s while his fellow artists died of syphilis, consumption, suicide and tuberculosis. But Munch gains strength again in the early 1890s as his work takes on more detail and clarity of vision. Still obsessed with Mrs Heiberg, he marries in hast but then leaves for Paris. His diaries maintain that his inner pain is clearly the origin of his creativity: “Without anxiety and illness I should have been like a ship without a rudder”. With Edvard Munch Peter Watkins presents an epic work of historical and artist genius that is still unparalleled. MT

NOW ON MUBI | ON BLURAY COURTESY OF EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA |

Loro (2018) ****

Dir: Paolo Sorrentino | Paolo Sorrentino, Umberto Contarello | Cast: Toni Servillo, Elena Sofia Ricci, Riccardo Scamarcio, Kasia Smutniak, Euridice Axen, Fabrizio Bentivoglio, Roberto De Francesco, Dario Cantarelli, Anna Bonaiuto, Alice Pagani, Mattia Sbragia | DoP: Luca Bigazzi |Biopic Drama 151′ 

Director Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty) exposes the hedonistic emptiness of Italian mainstream culture in this entertaining and sumptuously scenic sensual satire on Silvio Berlusconi. 

And once again Toni Servillo is the star turn and spot on as the man himself. Bringing his colossal charisma and a chink of humanity to this ebullient portrait of a leader who is foremost a salesman. It’s a film about the much-devalued power of seduction. We first meet Silvio after his government has been blown out in the elections and he needs to win back his prime position. This will be achieved by his superlative seduction technique and prepares to persuade six senators to join his party, so he can to be top dog again: “In love, you betray. In politics, you change your mind.” And this proves to be a piece of cake.

The international version conflates the director’s original two-parter into a parade of preternatural vulgarity. But there’s something compelling about the way it all plays out that is gripping until the finale. This is no dry old political pot-boiler, but an all-singing all-dancing affair where the flamboyant, flirtatious four times president (and now leader of Forza Italia) loves to party at all times. And Sorrentino knows that Italian audiences love to party too. And so the thrust of this biopic is party-time in Italy as never before (and never mind the debut-ridden economy or the Mafia): bare-breasted babes and buff boys gyrate in vertiginous coastal villa: Sardinia is seen at its most glamorous and recherché. Meanwhile, Berlusconi, when not partying or indulging in his famous Bunga-bunga games, likes most Italians, loves to seduce. And there’s an extraordinary scene where he does just that – and nobody even takes their clothes off.

Toni Servillo, has already tucked caricatures of Giulio Andreotti (Il Divo), and a compulsive gambler Gorbaciof under his belt. As ‘Berlusco’ his disingenuous perma-smile is a legend in its own lunchtime. Meanwhile his wife Veronica Lario (Elena Sofia Ricci) looks on disdainfully as cool and calming as pistachio ice-cream. Luca Bigazzi’s luscious cinematography and Stefania Cella’s spectacular interiors compliment Carlo Poggioli fabulous costume design.

The condensed cut brings a better clarity to the prostitution ring run by Sergio Morra (Riccardo Scamarcio)and his wife Tamara (Euridice Axen) and Berlusconi’s subtle distancing from his boring long term marriage to the supercilious Veronica. But it also brings into focus a narrative whose slackness contrasts sharply with the endless pertness of the bottoms and boobs on show. But this surfeit of uproarious partying eventually feels sad and vacuous also emphasising  the delusional qualities of Berlusconi’s own ego, showing him to be a narcissist and showman who deep need to be loved and admired is eventually laid bare by the fully dressed object of his ongoing affections (Alice Pagani).

We are fully aware that modern European mainstream culture is a vision of x-factor trashy tawdriness but at least in Italy there’s a certain style and enjoyment to the gaudiness. And for the most part Sorrentino’s tongue is firmly in his cheek as he showcases the endless marketing of sex as the best way to achieve the ends on the slippery pole to riches and success. There is no suggestion in any way that these girls don’t know what they are doing. They’re actually empowered by their looks and that sexiness is propulsive in a world where youth, fitness and beauty is the key to success. And it’s still the way the world goes round, whatever anyone else might suggest, a machiavellian mind and a killer instinct is the icing on the cake. Sorrentino and Umberto Contarello’s script still points out that it’s not what you know, but who you know, and laugh in the face of Veronica’s claim that her long term-husband is “pathetic”. And we do too. However depressing that may be.

Sorrentino brings us firmly back to reality with sequences showing the earthquake that destroyed the city of L’Aquila where a statue of Christ is solemnly lifted to safety from a ruined church. This is clearly a link to the real ‘them’ and seems an appropriate way to close this bacchanalian feast. MT

LORO IS OUT ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM 19 APRIL 2019

 

Fugue | Fuga (2018) Kinoteka 2021

Dir: Agnieska  Smoczynska | Cast: Gabriela Muskała, Łukasz Simlat, Małgorzata Buczkowska, Zbigniew Waleryś, Halina Rasiakówna, Piotr Skiba, Iwo Rajski | Poland/Czech Republic/Sweden 2018, 100 min.

Agnieszka Smoczynska re-unites with DoP Jacub Kijowski and actor Malgorzata Buczkowska who together made The Lure an international success. In Fugue, they are joined by writer Gabriela Muskala, who also  plays the lead role of Kinga, a woman suffering from severe post-traumatic amnesia.

We first meet Kinga staggering onto the platform of a station where she promptly collapses, having urinated infront in full view of the other passengers. Clearly she has lost her mind, and spends the next two years in a psychiatric ward in a Warsaw hospital, where she makes a brief appearance on TV, in the hope that someone might identify her. And they do. She is soon re-united with her husband Krystzof (Simlat) and four-year old son Daniel. Her name is Alicja, but strangely, no one appears happy to have her back, least of all Daniel. The only thing she is sure of is her credit card PIN number she and immediately makes an application for a new Identity Card. Her mysterious family friend Ewa (Buczkowska) is clearly so much more that than this, but Smoczynska keeps her cards close to her chest, revealing little in this enigmatic but captivating mystery drama. Eventually Alicja starts to re-adjust to home life with her husband, but a sudden accident in their car seems to trigger   Alicja’s memory and gradually a whole picture slowly develops of their life before the train incident. It emerges that her husband had successfully divorced her and wanted sole custody of Daniel.

In her follow up to The Lure, Smoczynska offers another convoluted and enigmatic drama: there are moments of supernatural evidence, where Alicja’s home environment appears completely alien to her. Particularly the green bathroom looks eerily like a fish tank (drawing comparisons with The Shining’s Room 237). The country house has a weird and haunted feel to it, and Alicja seems to be a prisoner within its walls, he family and even her son treating her with hostile suspicion.

Fugue is an allegorical story of a woman who is unsure of her position in the world, retreating from motherhood, and drifting between various states of being. Gabriela Muskala gives a brilliant tour de force in the leading role of this unique and beguiling Polish arthouse drama. AS.

KINOTEKA 2021 | Premiered during UN CERTAIN REGARD | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | 8-19 MAY 2018

The White Crow (2018) ***

Dir: Ralph Fiennes | Writer: David Hare | Cast: Oleg Ivenko, Adele Exarchopoulos, Ralph Fiennes, Raphael Peronnaz, Chulpan Khamatova, Sergei Polunin, Calypso Valois, Louis Hoffman, Olivier Rabourdin | UK | Biopic Drama | 122′

Ralph Fiennes’ third feature – in which he also stars – is an ambitious and classically-styled biopic of the Russian ballet legend Rudolf Nureyev’s defection to the West in 1961.

Quite why David Hare decided on a fractured narrative to tell the maverick Russian dancer’s life is not clear. And it certainly doesn’t intensify the storyline. The dancer’s life had so much dramatic heft that a straightforward chronicle would have seen it steaming ahead rather than shunting occasionally into the sidings. Drama is also provided by the sheer verve of Nureyev himself as played by professional dancer Oleg Ivenko in an extraordinary screen debut as one of the 20th century’s most celebrated dancers whose rise to fame was justified by his remarkable talent and legendary status. At the helm, Ralph Fiennes captures the zeitgeist and stultifying atmosphere of a Soviet Russia still languishing behind the Iron Curtain. He also conveys the elegantly sleek conservatism of France during the 1960s. France may have invented ballet but the East provides the energy and gusto and this comes through in Ivenko’s ballet sequences that echo the spirit of Nureyev and enliven this graceful but sober drama. Fiennes’s performance as ballet master Alexander Pushkin is immaculate and exudes a calm dignity that is delightful to watch, he also appears to be proficient in Russian. This together with a strong support cast and mise en scène more than compensate for the flawed narrative structure. Adèle Exarchopoulos brings allure and intensity to her rather buttoned down role as Chilean heiress Clara Saint, who announced herself as a friend of André Malraux, and  who comes to Nureyev rescue in the final scenes. And Olivier Rabourdin (Taken) makes for a mesmerising chief of Police during the heart-pounding denouement at Le Bourget Airport in Paris when Nureyev dramatically claims political asylum.

Those from incredibly harsh beginnings with nothing to lose often rise to fame and fortune. And Nureyev was no exception. We are appraised of his background in the film’s early scenes where his mother gives birth to him on a train in Siberia in 1938. But despite his remarkable talent as a dancer it was unlikely that he would ever have made it to the international stage without his ego, utter determination and bloodymindedness, showcased to ample and often darkly humorous effect in The White Crow, along with his cultural voraciousness: once in Paris he devours every bit of local culture he can lay his hands on from the Louvre to the Follies Bergères. Wilful in the extreme, he ignores his superiors, rails against everyone in authority and no Westerner seems to bat an eyelid in letting him have his way, with the exception of Clara who stares him down in icy disdain after a restaurant debacle. But his communist ‘handlers’ still shadow him everywhere (and this still happens today in communist China) and his wilfulness leads to him not being allowed to dance on opening night in the Champs Elysees theatre.

On a tour stop in Moscow with a local ballet company, Nureyev auditions for the Bolshoi and gets in but then picks holes in their classical techniques, decided to try instead for the Mariinsky Ballet school in St Petersburg where he becomes a protegé of Alexander Pushkin, the eminence grise of the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet. Pushkin invites him to stay in the apartment he shares with his wife, who discovers the only way to disarm the young man’s insolence. All in all this is an accomplished and entertaining arthouse drama and hopefully lead to Fiennes handing the script of his next film as well as the direction. MT

SCREENING NATIONWIDE 7 April 2019

 

 

 

Werner Herzog Retrospective at VISIONS DU REEL 2019

Grizzly_Man_3-e1374581107236

Throughout 50 years of filmmaking, one of the greatest directors of all time, Werner Herzog,  continues to impress with his unflinchingly creative vision of humanity and its future.

Encounters_at_the_End_of_the_World_2-e1374580394553

My_Best_Fiend-e1374580306483The retrospective will also screen My Best Fiend (on his volatile relationship with collaborator, Klaus Kinski); Grizzly Man; Little Dieter Needs to Fly and Into the Abyss, that further examine his probing reflections  “why do people do bad things?”, an attempt to get to the core of the human condition. MT

VISIONS DU REEL 5-13 APRIL 2019 | Nyon, Switzerland

Amazon Adventure 3D (2017) ***

Dir: Mike Slee | Carl Knutson, Wendy MacKeigan | Cast: Calum Finlay, Ed Birch, Billy Postlethwaite, Robert Daws, Louis Partridge | Docudrama 46′

A new science detective story shows how a naturalist and explorer from Leicester provided the vital proof to help Darwin finally publish his controversial theory of natural selection, the greatest scientific explanation for the development of life on Earth.

Aimed at all audiences but particularly suitable for children this colourful, concise award-winning film combines an eco-documentary with an appealing true story that sees two young Englishmen follow their passion into the depths of the unknown, 15o years ago in the Victorian era.

Henry Bates grew up in Leicestershire where his family ran a stocking factory. But Bates’ dream was to pursue his interest in insects and how they managed to survive their often hostile environment with its many predators. Together with his friend Alfred Wallace he raised finance from a local insurer Sami Stevens and the two set off to the Amazon jungle where for 11 they risked life and limb to find out how species changed.

After a month at sea the men finally arrive at the Brazilian coast where they head for the Amazon river. In order to pay for their expenses they compile a daily catalogue comprising hundreds of butterflies. But their quest to find evidence that species can change wouldn’t be quick or easy. Si they decided to split up in order to cover more of the massive rainforest. Gradually evidence began to emerge. They soon discovered the sloth, and insects camouflaged as snakes. Infact, almost every living creature seemed to be in a disguise to avoid being eaten while it got to eat more. The expedition was fraught with difficulty as Bates suffered from malaria and Wallace eventually returned home after being shipwrecked in the North of the Brazil. But he managed to continue his work in the Far East, thanks to the insurance money from his accident. Meanwhile, Bates hired a native guide who introduced him to locals, who we meet face to face.

Impressive camerawork and 3D effects plunge us into the heart of the jungle, with detailed maps guiding us along the way. After six years Bates finally discovers a Longwing butterfly with six legs rather than four. It avoided being eaten due to its bitter taste. For every Longwing there was a matching mimic. The black, red and yellow colours marked it out a species in flux. And once back in Leicester in 1869 Bates was able to provide Darwin with enough evidence to prove how each had changed to constitute a new species in order to survive. In all, 8000 species were discovered by Bates. He never went back to the Amazon but his legacy lives on. Today scientists have finally been able to discover the genetic process involved in the mutation of species. MT

AMAZON ADVENTURE 3D at the BFI IMAX, and at the Cineworld IMAX in Glasgow from 15th April. Amazon Adventure is an epic and inspirational true story of a British explorer set in the heart of the amazon rainforest.

Shakespeare Wallah (1965) **** Bluray

Dir.: James Ivory; Cast: Shashi Kapoor, Felicity Kendall, Madhur Jaffrey, Geoffrey Kendall, Laura Liddell, Jennifer Kapoor; India 1965, 115 min.

This is the second feature of writer/director James Ivory and producer Merchant Ivory, co-scripted by the latter’s wife Ruth Prawar Jhabvala; the trio would go on with opulent productions like Heat and Dust and Howard’s End, describing the fate of strong women in male-dominated, authoritarian societies.

This is about change and belonging: The Buckingham parents Tony (G. Kendall) and Carla (Liddell) tour India with a travelling group of players, including their daughter Lizzie (F. Kendall),  bringing Shakespeare to a country changed beyond belief after the British left for home. But the change is not only a cultural one; Indians are saying goodbye to their own heritage in a post-colonial era that replaced Shakespeare with Bollywood and old palaces of Maharajas with hotels. Lizzie, who plays Ophelia and Desdemona on stage, falls for Indian playboy Sanju (Kapoor), who also has a mistress: Bollywood actress Manjula (Jaffrey). While the Buckinghams and their plays become more and more tacky, Manjula represents a modern India, which is aggressively taking the place of the old – be it Indian or British. Manjula commits a faux-pas on purpose: she arrives at the theatre with only ten minutes of Othello to go. But the nomadic players have no recourse, they are redundant in a country where they don’t belong any more. They are rootless, like Ruth Wilcox in Howard’s End. “Everything is different when you belong to a place. When it’s yours’, says Carla Buckingham wistfully. Her daughter has never set foot on her “home” country.

Kendall’s and Lidell’s experience with their own touring company have been an inspiration for the feature, stage and reality overlap. When Tony (as Othello) talks endlessly to himself, before facing Desdemona for a last time and in the real world, Manjura enters with aplomb. Finally, with Feste’s song in “Twelfth Night”, the “rain raineth”everything away, it becomes not only a summing up for the play, but the fate of the actors, swept away by history.

The misty black and white images express the evocative fragility of the narrative, there is much to admire, apart from the acting – Madhur Jaffrey would win the Prize for Best Actress at Berlin Film Festival in 1965. The score is by none less than Satyajit Ray. His long-time collaborator, DoP Subrata Mitra, conjures up sensitive images of a  group of Thespians who are lost, languidly suffering a maudlin nightmare. Ironically, Shashi Kapoor’s marriage to Felicity Kendall’s sister Jennifer (who made an uncredited appearance) was one of long-lasting happiness until her death aged 50. AS

NOW ON BLURAY from 15 April 2019 COURTESY OF THE BFI

iTUNES RELEASE ON 29 APRIL 2019

Yuli (2018) ***

Dir: Icíar Bollaín | Carlos Acosta, Santiago Alfonso, Carlos Enrique Almirante, Keyvin Martinez, Laura De la Uz | Biopic Drama 104

Cuba is the dazzling backdrop to this ‘all singing all dancing’ traditionally-styled biopic that vivaciously explores the rags to riches route to the international stage of its best known living export Carlos Acosta, now an celebrated ballet dancer. Based on his 2007 memoir No Way Home, it stars Acosta himself looking back on a career that has gone from minor to major striking nearly every thematic chord in life’s libretto from childhood poverty to paternal domination, racial discrimination, political turmoil and self realisation through artistic endeavour, under the glare – and glory of Castro’s regime.

Teaming up for the third time with her English husband and scripter Paul Laverty (I, Daniel Blake) Spanish director Icíar Bollaín (The Olive Tree) creates the irrepressibly vibrant milieu of modern Cuba where Acosta is seen rehearsing for a show that chronicles his life in the medium of dance. He is then transported back – by means of a red-bound scrapbook – to memories of his childhood where as ‘Yuli’ the cheeky young Acosta (Nuñes), named after the Cuban Santéria religion, is growing up in an impoverished barrio of Havana, with his white mother Maria (Perez) and his black father Pedro (Alfonso) who we first meet dragging Yuli away from a brilliant break-dancing routine with his pals.

The draconian Pedro has set his sights on better things for the wayward whippersnapper, and soon he is forcing him into a formal training despite the boy’s natural inclination to join a football pitch rather than the stage of the respectable Cuban School of Ballet where he soon fetches up, his talent capturing the imagination of his teacher Chery (De la Uz), who encourages him into a strict regime of training.

The years go by and the grown-up Carlos (Keyvin Martínez) finds himself travelling to London to take up an offer he soon manages to refuse, missing the warmth of his native Cuba which is by now in political meltdown. Back home, his father and Cheryl point him in the direction of dance rather than ballet – despite an approach from the Royal Ballet.

Laverty’s script tiptoes lightly over Maria of the rest of the family – alluding to mental illness for his older sister Berta (Doimeadíos) – but no love stories for Carlos, despite his popularity with the opposite sex. Knowing how well-received father/son relationships are (Boyhood, Field of Dreams etc) maybe Laverty and Bollain have decided to put Carlos and Pedro in the limelight of a story of male inspiration, particularly as it is a black one, although the decision to have Pedro give a diatribe on the slavery question in Cuba seems awkward, and strangely misplaced.

Bollaín injects plenty of joie de vivre into this sun-filled optimistic portrait with its terrific dance routines and sweeping cinematography. And although Laverty’s script sometimes follows a schematic road the performances overcome this, with Olbera Nuñes and Acosta himself the standouts. Yuli provides flamboyant entertainment for ballet lovers and mainstream audiences alike, enlivened by the presence of Acosta having so much fun. MT

NOW ON RELEASE FROM 8 April 2019 | WORLD PREMIERE SAN SEBASTIAN FILM FESTIVAL 2018

 

Khrustalyov, My Car (1998) ***** Bluray

Dir: Aleksei German | Wri: Joseph Brodsky | Comedy Drama USSR, 147′

Named after the apocryphal exclamation of Soviet security chief Lavrentiy Beria as he rushed to Stalin’s deathbed, this raucously, rip-roaring ride through Soviet history captures the anticipation and anxiety in the Moscow air, as the Soviet despot lay dying.

In January 1953, the Vladimir Ilin’s camera thrusts us right into a surreal snowbound Moscow where Stalin still rules like the ‘man of steel’ of his nickname. An alcoholic military surgeon, General Yuri Georgievich Klensky (Yuri Tsurilo), finds himself a target of the “Doctors’ Plot”: the anti-Semitic conspiracy accusing Jewish doctors in Moscow of planning to assassinate the Soviet elite. Captured, arrested and marked for the gulags, Yuri enters an Hieronymus Boschean hell where characters abuse each other, one stubbing a cigarette out on another. Sexual acts are degenerative and ubiquitous but caught off camera, dialogue random as the characters come and go, fight and wrestle in the dizzying dystopia. At one point Yuri wipes his nose and moustache on his wife’s fur coat. The fractured narrative of this demonic, chaotic, histrionic yet delicately poetic dark comedy captures the madness of a desperate era where everyone had lost the plot.

Filmed in high-contrast monochrome by Vladimir Ilin and directed by Aleksei German (Hard to Be a God), Khrustalyov, My Car! went on to win multiple awards long after its premiere at Cannes where it picked up the Palme d’Or. wildly provocative when it was screened at the 1998 Cannes film festival, despite being championed as the best film of the festival by the president of the Cannes jury that year, Martin Scorsese. A one-of-a-kind collision of nightmare and realism, German’s film is presented here in a new restoration with a wealth of illuminating extras. MT

ON BLURAY 29 APRIL 2019 COURTESY OF ARROW 

Vladimir Ilin won Best Cinematographer at the NIKA Awards 2000

 

The Song of Bernadette (1943) **** Bluray release

Dir: Henry King | Writer: George Seaton | US Drama 156′

The Song of Bernadette is a perfect film for Lent. And while Jesus Christ is wandering about in the wilderness having his faith tested, so is Sister Bernadette in this rare Hollywood film that explores the thorny theme of spiritual belief and religious conviction. Clearly one for the believers, then. But this earnest classic went on to win no less that four Academy Awards and Golden Globes for Best Drama and Best Director for Henry King (Love is a Many-Splendoured Thing), and made a star out its leading lady Jennifer Jones.

Based on the best-selling historical novel by Franz Werfel, the film chronicles the life of 14-year-old Bernadette Soubirous, who began seeing visions of the Virgin Mary in Lourdes, France in 1858. When news of Bernadette’s vision first spreads through the town, there are those who decry her as a nutter, while others wholeheartedly believe –particularly when the spring that erupts near the grotto that housed the visitations contains water that seems to have miraculous healing properties. Eventually her priest (Charles Bickford) and the Roman Catholic Church become convinced of her beliefs and welcome her into a convent.

The film has an interesting cast: alongside Jones there is Vincent Price, Lee J. Cobb, Charles Bickford, and Gladys Cooper. It also enjoys the sumptuous visuals and lighting techiniques of Arthur C. Miller (How Green Was My Valley) who won the Oscar for Best Art Director and Interior Decoration.

Whatever your personal feelings on the matter (and please suspend them and cast your mind back to the 1940s) The Song of Bernadette is an earnest attempt to capture the essence of conviction: not only its power to heal mind and body, but also to inspire leadership. And King’s attempts to convey this do occasionally wander into the realms of melodrama (not helped by Alfred Newman’s ridiculously over-bearing religious score – needless to say he won an Oscar). That said, this is a touching and intimate portrayal of a young French girl’s spiritual journey from her vision to the healing spring at Lourdes. Her gentle strength of purpose provides a leading light and succour to many others. The film version also puts a positive spin on Franz Werfel’s rather reverent novel on which George Seaton’s script is based.

The Song of Bernadette tempers raw realism to offer up a soft-edged and dignified religious narrative. This mammoth undertaking had a cast of 104 actors including five doctors (one aptly named ‘Dr LeCramps’). Rene Hubert’s does wonderful things with the black and white ecclesiastical robes. And Gladys Cooper is particularly convincing in her intense portrayal of  Mistress of Novices, Marie-Therese Vauzous. In her screen debut as Bernadette, Jennifer Jones is perfectly cast as an innocent, wide-eyed wonder. There is also a role for Vincent Price as the vehement Prosecutor Vital Dufour. MT

Amazon https://amzn.to/2BBlQU9  | 8 APRIL 2019 

 

Ether | Eter (2018) **** Kinoteka Film Festival 2019

Dir/Wri: Krzysztof Zanussi | Cast: Jacek Poniedzialek, Zsolt Laszlo, Andrzej Chyra, Ostap Vakulyuk, Maria Ryaboshapka, Stanislav Kolokolnikov, Malgorzata Pritulak, Rafal Mohr, Victoria Zinny

Krzysztof  Zanussi dissects a sinister episode from early 20th century medical history in this gripping, classically-styled drama that sees a disgraced doctor (Jacek Poniedzialek) abusing science to gain control.

The theme is topical enough, that of dumbing down and confusing the population while the major powers take control. Since the era of communism, the ‘Polish Great’ directors have been well-versed in couching their political messages in subtle ways, as here in this rather genteel arthouse drama stylishly photographed by DP Piotr Niemyjski, whose lighting gives ethereal touches in just the right places.

The opening scene explores in detail Hans Memling’s 1467 tryptich ‘The Last Judgment” hinting at the haunting religious undercurrent to the storyline. But the main narrative focuses on the debonair doctor who is running a series of experiments with ether, a safer anaesthetic replacement to the drug, chloroform. During the process he decides to casually rape his female patient after knocking her out with the new-fangled substance. Leaving her for dead, he escapes but is captured, arrested and eventually committed to exile in Siberia, whence he takes up a post for the military on the border of the Ukraine and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Poniedzialek plays his role with icy detachment and deadly dedication showing how nothing will stand in the way of his scientific research. Clothed in either white overalls or black leather with gloves to match, he cuts a sinister figure in this remote backwater, pushing his patients beyond their pain thresholds with his new drug, far from the prying eyes of decency. All this to the tune of Wagner’s opera Parsifal, as the doctor hunts for his own holy grail.

This doctor is a entirely focused on his methods for domination. An ascetic, detached character he clearly has a God complex subjecting his patients to pain and bewilderment, mirroring the atrocities of the First World War (that was on its way). The doctor here is in complete contrast to the dedicated medic in Aleksey Balabanov’s Morphine (2008) who was using a drug to bring relief to the agony of his patients 150 miles north of Moscow, during the Bolshevik revolution. Our Polish doctor also makes use of the services of a poor devout Catholic boy called Taras (Ostap Vakulyuk) who gives up his father’s corpse for medical science then discovers him later embalmed in the doctor’s museum.

Some of the scenes are deeply disturbing. In one the doctor delivers a tiny crying baby only to smother it minutes later, telling the mother it would have died anyway. In another, he injects a soldier with a substance that makes him a fierce and fearless fighter, biting his wrestling components, until the doctor calls for a straight-jacket.

The final scenes comes with an explanation: “The Secret Story” that tracks back to the religious aspects of the story and introduces a previously low-key figure who appears to be the grim reaper himself. Ether ends in the rain-soaked mud of WWI where Zanussi examines the question “Does suffering have a meaning?”. Clearly the doctor has made a pact with God but has lost his soul in the meantime. MT

KINOTEKA POLISH FILM FESTIVAL | 4 -18 APRIL 2019

 

Mr Topaze (1961) **** BFI Flipside

Dir: Peter Sellers | Wri: Pierre Rouve | Cast: Herbert Lom, Billie Whitelaw, Leo McKern, Peter Sellars, John Le Mesurier, John Neville, Joan Sims | Michael Gough | Comedy Drama | 97′

Peter Seller’s debut as a director is a rather lyrical bittersweet 1960s version of a Marcel Pagnol play adapted for the screen by Pierre Rouve with wit and insight. Playing the lead with a drôle debonair melancholy, Sellers is a well-meaning provincial teacher desperate to do the right thing and marry his love Ernestine (a foxy Whitelaw). He prides himself on his integrity but puts his foot down at giving higher marks to the grandson of a wealthy baroness (Martita Hunt). He is fired (by Leo McKern) as a result, and then led astray by Herbert Lom’s snide and corrupt government official, Castel Benac, who with his mistress and actress Suzy (Nadia Gray cutting a dash in a series of soigné rigouts) intend to set up a dodgy financial business using Topaze  (“He’s an idiot I like him”) as the malleable managing director. The moral of the tale is that money is power. And Topaze eventually discovers this.

At the time Sellers was going through a divorce and relied on the film to keep him said. But despite his time of trauma, the film’s success lies in its happy ending that confirms what many have discovered. It’s not the money that makes you happy but the freedom it offers: So when Topaze is asked “Has money bought you happiness? he answers “I’m  buying it now!”.

First entitled I Like Money (a song by Herbert Kretzmer gracefully performed by Nadia Gray swathed in furs) the film was chosen by the British public in an online vote in 2016 to be digitised by the BFI National Archive. It certainly proves its crowd-pleasing qualities with some enjoyable performances from Gray, McKern and Le Mesurier, although Sellars sadly reigns himself back too much leaving Lom to shine as the comedy standout. MT

DUAL FORMAT EDITION (BLURAY/DVD) ON 15 APRIL 2019 

Monument (2018) *** Kinoteka Film Festival 2019

Dir.: Jagoda Szelec; Cast: Dorota Lukasiewicz, Paulina Lasot, Karolina Bruchnicka, Jacub Gola; Poland 2018, 108 min.

Director/writer Jagoda Szelek (Tower: A bright Day) casts students from the famous Lodz Film School in her sophomore feature, a non-narrative exercise in power and human misery. The ritualistic nature of Monument shines a light on how we chose to remember the past.

Twenty young people have high hopes about embarking on their internship in the hotel business. But before the programme kicks off, one of them has already gone missing. The draconian manager takes a nonchalant approach and hands round their name identification badges: there are ten Pawels and nine Anias. “The customers are not interested in your names, they want to enjoy themselves”, the manager retorts sternly, when asked for a reason.

The job is pretty dreary. The film becomes a study in surreal depersonalisation. The women have to clean the rooms, and the toilets. Moral is low – apart from one young man, who tries to ingratiate himself with the nameless manager, who acquires the nickname “witch’ from his fellow interns. Even though he is rude about them behind their backs, the manager is unimpressed, humiliating him in front of an ‘Ania’, who comes up with good plan to re-organise the work schedule. The women talk about their childhoods, particularly about their relationships with their mothers; while the boys tell each other rather unfunny jokes and fight. Two of them have sex. The place is falling apart, rats run wild down in the cellar, and one of the women faints. In this enigmatic endeavour times seems to stand still. It is never made clear if the missing young man is the only survivor of a fatal bus crash, or if the other have entered a ‘Huis Clos’ a in Sartre’s play. But their relationships are strained, they only unite in hating the “witch”. The final ritualistic dance is a strange exercise in exorcism.

DoP Przemyslaw Brynkiewicz’s black and white images are stunning: the realistic environment of the hotel, the suites, kitchen and laundry are in total contrast to the dark cellar, the moody atmosphere of the rubbish bins and the gloomy, foreboding cellar, where rats scuffle around unaware of the human denizens. But in spite of the overlaying realism of these task-bound interns, there are echoes of The Shining as the past meets the present. Szelec has certainly made a singularly unique feature, which does not need to be categorised to be watched with admiration and a certain awe. AS

KINOTEKA FILM FESTIVAL 4 -18 APRIL 2019  

   

Sodom and Gomorrah : The Legend of Sin and Punishment (1922)

Dir: Michael Curtiz (as Mihaly Kertesz) | Cast: Georg Reimers, Victor Varconi, Lucy Doraine, Walter Slezak | Austria 140′

Although reputedly originally three hours long, the version screened at the Austrian Cultural Forum mercifully clocked in at just two hours. Of the cast, the actor whose name remains most familiar today is a very young Walter Slezak (Michael) as ‘the young sapling’, ironically so young and slender as to be completely unrecognisable from his later films.

After a dreary modern story that comprised the first half, the film picks up considerably when the Ammonites lay waste to Gomorrah in scenes in which it looks as though people are actually getting hurt (and knowing director Mihaly Kertesz – as he was then known – they probably were). Reputedly the most expensive Austrian movie ever made, Sodom und Gomorrha was the centrepiece of an ambitious run of historical spectaculars on the Italian and US model, shot by Alexander Kolowrat’s “Sacha-Film-AG” in the Laeser mountains outside Vienna. The outing brought its director to the attention of Jack Warner of Warner Bros, who signed him up in 1925.

His name now simplified to ‘Curtiz’ he returned to the biblical spectacular with Noah’s Ark in 1928, but with the exception of the risible The Egyptian in 1954, his epics thereafter were usually Westerns. @Richard Chatten

NOW ON AMAZON

 

Pet Sematary (2019) Netflix

Dir.: Kevin Kölsch/Denis Widmayer; Cast: Jason Clarke, Amy Seimetz, Jete Laurence, Hugo and Lucas Lavoie, John Lithgow; USA 2019, 101 min.

Stephen King’s Pet Sematary is not by his most enduring novel by chance: Even 36 years after publication it is still quietly overpowering. Directors Kölsch and Widmayer have triumphed (with writer Jeff Buhler) where Mary Lambert’s 1989 film version failed. They have taken out the cheese, included some wry humour and concentrated on the overlaying guilt and redemption theme. Apart from a ten-minute hiatus of near parody at the end, this would have been a neo classic.

Dr Louis Creed (Clarke) and his wife Rachel (Seimetz) move away from their hectic life in Boston to a rural home in Maine. Their two children Ellie (Laurence) and Gage (H. and L. Lavoie) just as enchanted as their parents with the rural idyll. Louis even jokes that it beats the graveyard shift at Boston General – but soon the graveyard for pets,  in the grounds of their 50-acre property, takes over their lives. Having watched a procession of children bury their pets, the Creed’s cat Church (short for Churchill) is run over by a speeding truck, and Rachel, still traumatised by the death of her sister Zelda from spinal meningitis, tells her daughter their feline friend simply ran away.

After Church’s burial, the purring pussy comes back as an aggressive predator. And their neighbour Jud is reminded that the native Americans deserted the area because the reincarnations of their own dead. But tragedy strikes again on Ellie’s birthday when she is run over by a petrol tanker. Once again, Louis buries her in the cemetery, ignoring what happening to Church. Ten minutes of spectacular schlocky bad taste nearly ruin this stylish arthouse horror, before the closing shot resets the tone and saves the day.

British DoP Laurie Rose works magic with his overhead shots to produce intense images of the woods, conjuring up terrifyingly claustrophobic shots of the Creeds’ house. Particularly gruesome are the scenes with Rachel’s sister Zelda, who gets stuck in a food lift. Rachel is somehow the main protagonist and catalyst, guilt makes her overprotective of her daughter and drives the action on into the past. Somehow, the American dream family comes unstuck, as it often does with Stephen King. John Lithgow again convinces with a truly frightening performance, with solid support from the others. AS 

NOW ON NETFLIX

https://youtu.be/zK0LNzU2TQI

 

The Keeper (2018) ***

Dir: Marcus H Rosenmüller | Biopic Drama, 120’

This worthy attempt at Anglo-German entente cordiale is a film of two halves, rather like the game at its heart. The Keeper is not sure whether it wants to be a wartime love story, a football drama or a tepid tale of karmic revenge. In the end it’s all three – but far too long: after the first hour, the tension has died down and we can’t imagine what remains to be said: The heroine has met her match, and scored.

The Keeper tells the true story of Nazi paratrooper Bert Trautmann (Kross) who became Manchester City’s goalkeeper just after the Second World War. But when he arrives at a PoW camp at St Helen’s just outside Manchester, the mood is hostile and the locals are traumatised by loss. The young German soldier is also suffering emotionally, haunted by the images of a little boy whose life he failed to save. But when he sets eyes on the football manager’s daughter Margaret (Mavor), who is already spoken for by a local lad, the chemistry between them sizzles, and he decides all is fair in love and war. And  Trautmann certainly has some ball skills – not to mention his blue-eyed good looks – which warm the cockles of Margaret’s heart, and the rest is history.

Having established Trautmann’s credentials as a goodie, with him (almost) becoming ‘one of the boys’, the second half of the film concerns his signing to Manchester City where he fetches up in October 1949, accompanied by his wife. It soon emerges via journalists digging around for dirt, that Trautmann was awarded the Iron Cross, a medal that had become a Nazi symbol during the 1930s – so the German footballer once again finds himself back-footed in the community, despite his crafty footwork on the pitch. Ironically, he then strikes up a solid friendship with the local Rabbi, who is inspired by Margaret’s efforts to speak up for her husband amid local hostility. Gradually Trautmann gains popularity as he bonds with local players and wins matches. The football scenes are the strongest element of this second half, with seamless CG crowds creating a rousing atmosphere for the likeable goalie. But then the film goes off in another direction to focus on the tragedy of Trautmann, the family man. And although this brings us full circle, by tying in this personal tragedy with that of the little wartime boy, somehow the drama fails to score top marks structurally with its lack of a real focus. Despite its flaws, Rosenmuller creates just the right atmosphere in postwar Lancashire with its glorious surrounding countryside. Performances are solid across the board, and Freya Mavor and David Kross – who smoulders in an Aryan way – make convincing lovebirds. Even if football isn’t your game, this is a watchable and good-looking wartime story. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE NATIONWIDE

 

Happy as Lazzaro (2018) *****

Writer/Dir: Alice Rohrwacher | Cast: Alba Rohrwacher, Adriano Tardiolo, Agnese Graziani, Luca Chikovani, Sergi Lopez | Italy | Drama 125′

Al Rohrwacher brings tenderness and curiosity to her delicately compelling fables set amongst rural communities in her homeland of Italy. Her latest Lazzaro Felice has clear resonance with the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini and won Best Script at Cannes in 2018. Her previous a languid pastoral The Wonders (2014) followed a family of beekeepers in 1970s Tuscany. In her debut Corpo Celeste (2011)  a young girl challenges religious morality in the southern town of Reggio Calabria.

Happy as Lazzaro is time-bending tale that uses poetic realism to enliven the rather depressing theme of corruption and crime in contemporary Italy. Again Rohrwacher uses Super 16mm to establish a retro aesthetic of sepia and muted senape and to re-create a nostalgic feeling for the past and times gone by in the dilapidated village of Inviolata where a traditional family of sharecroppers still serve the Marchesa Alfonsina de Luna. Although sharecropping has been illegal since the 1980s, their loyalty to their corrupt mistress is born out of habit, and because it suits them to maintain the status quo: It’s what they’ve always done. This recalls a past (and possibly a present in some areas) where a feudal system of sorts still exists, and Italy’s now decadent royal family (Vittoria Emanuele) are still acknowledged, paid homage to and addressed by their titles. So the villagers go about their leisurely business lacking the imagination or motivation to move on, and respecting the powers that be in this remote, sun-baked backwater that seems stuck in the past. And Lazzaro is the man with a heart of gold who is simply too good for this world, let along for this job. A saintly soul, Lazzaro is almost too good for this world, is left with the duties no one else wants to do, such as picking giant guarding the chicken coop from wolves. The Marchesa’s fecklessly lazy young son Tancredi, decides to play a trick on mother, for not giving him his inheritance early, and he sees that Lazzaro’s gentle nature and naive nature will make him perfect for a plan to defraud her. Lazzaro is naturally in thrall to the boy, out of deference, to his status. Tancredi then fakes his own kidnapping, hiding out in the undergrowth around the village expecting his mother to cough up the million lire ransom he has demanded. Naturally things don’t go according to plan and Lazzaro falls through a time-warp – in a tonal shift that Rohrwacher pulls of with aplomb – ending up in another world, set against a corrupt urban sprawl where he wanders dreamlike (and there is a certainly a surreal quality to these sequences) amongst unscrupulous characters as a nightmarish future unfolds around him. Lazzaro at this point takes on the semblance of a Christ-like spiritual figure – it’s a performance of great subtlety and luminance that has to be seen to be believed. This transformation to saint, or even ghost seems to represent the soul of the Italian nation overcome by decadence and the perils of modernity. It also raises the everlasting conundrum: how long can a person continue to be good when continually challenged by evil. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 5 APRIL 2019 NATIONWIDE

 

A Clockwork Orange (1971) 4K restoration

Dir.: Stanley Kubrick; Cast: Malcolm McDowell, Patrick Magee, Warren Clark, James Marcus, Michael Tarn, Adrienne Corri, Carl Duering, Miriam Karlin, Michael Gover, Anthony Sharp; UK/US 1971, 136 min.

Now celebrating its 50th anniversary, Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s 1962 decline-of-civilisation novel, A Clockwork Orange, remains a chilling, thrilling and unsettling cinematic vision of nihilistic violence and social control.

The brutal socio-political satire was a big success for Kubrick taking £618K at the UK box office on its opening weekend in January 1972. Burgess’s oeuvre of over thirty novels is overshadowed by A Clockwork Orange. The author claimed writing was merely a “jeu d’esprit, just for money, finishing the novel in three weeks”. But during WWII his first wife Lynne had been raped by American soldiers, which led to a miscarriage.

Set in a futuristic Britain, teenager Alex DeLarge (McDowell) is the leader of a teenage quartet called the ‘Droogs’. Brutal and psychopathic, they enjoy wreaking havoc after school. Alex is the gang-leader keeping Dim (Clarke), Georgie (Marcus) and Pete (Tarn) under the cosh: disobedience is immediately repressed with violence. After a fight with a rival gang, they break into the Hertfordshire home of writer Alexander (Magee), reducing him to a cripple and raping his wife Mary (Corrie) while warbling “Singing in the Rain”.

Next day, Alex, a keen Beethoven fan who lives with his parents in a garish high-rise, plays truant from school. Later the Droog break into the house of “Catlady” (Karlin), a yoga freak, who Alex kills with the bust of his beloved Ludwig. Arrested and imprisoned in a masterfully performed series of scenes demonstrating just how draconian the authorities were back then, Alex is offered the chance of submitting himself to a new-fangled therapy “the Ludovico treatment”, which aims to ‘reset’ his mind, making him averse to violence and sex. The therapy has the desired effect. But in one of the films, selected by Dr. Brodsky (Duering), Beethoven’s Ninth is played, making Alex feel nauseous when he hears the music. After a demonstration by the Interior Minister (Sharp), during which Alex faints at the sight of a naked woman, he is released. But his parents do not want him back, they have rented his room to a male lodger, who now fulfils their parenting needs. So Alex is forced onto the streets for a touch of his own medicine.

Attacked by an old hobo, whom he had punched up in his Droog days, he is saved by two policemen – Dim and Georgie. They drive him into the countryside, beat him senseless and leave him for dead. Half-crazed, Alex finds himself once again on the doorstep of Mr. Alexander’s house, who is wheelchair-bound, and widowed. Strangely, Alexander does not recognise Alex without his Droog outfit, instead he publishes articles in his defence, claiming he is a victim of the government’s inhuman treatment. But when he hears Alex crooning that same song of the original attack, his trauma resurfaces and he finds a way of getting his own back by playing Beethoven’s music. Alex jumps out of the window. The fall resets the therapy, and soon Alex returns to his evil ways.

The minister promises to help, accusing Alexander of cruelty, and uses Alex in his campaign to quieten down critics of his government. Alex wakes up in a hospital with broken bones. While undergoing a series of psychological tests, Alex finds he no longer abhors sex and violence. The Minister arrives and apologises to Alex, offfering to take care of him and get him a job in return for his cooperation with his election campaign and counter-offensive. As a sign of goodwill, the Minister brings in a stereo system playing Beethoven’s Ninth. Alex then contemplates violence and has vivid thoughts of having sex with a woman in front of an approving crowd, and thinks to himself, “I was cured, all right!”

So what is the message behind A Clockwork Orange? Obviously it’s a film open to individual interpretation but there a few clear themes running through the narrative: crime and retribution; personal responsibility; the nature of forgiveness.

DoP John Alcott widescreen images, using frog eye lenses, show the bad taste of the 1970s aesthetics in all its glory, presenting us with a dystopia of mind-blowing crassness. McDowell is the prince of darkness, his long false eyelashes giving him a satanic look. With gang violence erupting in Britain on a large scale – Kubrick himself received death threats and asked Warner Brothers to withdraw the film from circulation for  good. One victim of this ban was the famous repertoire cinema “Scala” in Pentonville Road, which showed A Clockwork Orange in 1993 and had to close the same year for good, after rising rents and the prohibitive legal costs of Kubrick’s legal team led to insolvency. AS

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE | 4K RESTORATION | IN CINEMAS from 17 September 2021

 

 

 

Lizzie (2018) **** | Bfi Flare 2019

“Lizzie Borden took an ax and gave her mother 40 whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father 41.”

Dir: Craig William Mcneill | Bryce Kass | Cast: Chloë Sevigny, Kristen Stewart | Drama | US

The story of Lizzie Borden has always fascinated with its macabre murder story that over time has spawned numerous TV series the best starred Elizabeth Montgomery as the New England axe murderer who was tried and acquitted in 1893 of slaughtering her father and stepmother. This claustrophobic domestic drama directed by Craig William Macneill from a script by Bryce Kass, persuades us that it was actually due to her gender that she was let off: the jury couldn’t believe a well-heeled gentlewoman could do such a thing. But there are many downsides to being Ms Borden in the late 19th century. LIZZIE not only imagines an intriguing and plausible lesbian twist to proceedings, it also reveals how her draconian and misogynist  father was partly responsible for his own demise by dominating her, serially raping her housekeeper (Kristen Stewart is mesmerisingly glum) and then leaving her repugnantly obnoxious uncle (Denis O’Hare) in charge of her inheritance. No wonder Mr Borden got wacked.

Kass adopts a fractured narrative that opens in the aftermath to the twin murder, then traces back to reveal a story that informs the final scenes. And although this is a traditionally-crafted and rather bland-looking affair, its slowly draws you in to its compelling storyline mainly due to the brilliance of its international cast. We have Chloë Sevigny in the leading role: an unmarried, wilful but sympathetic pigeon-fancier. She gives a commandingly confident performance and we really feel for her because of the calm and intelligent way she handles herself, never giving in to histrionics or melodrama, despite suffering from epilepsy – quite the opposite – in the final denouement she appears unaffected by what she has done. She warms immediately to Kristen Stewart’s Irish housemaid Bridget who is respectful and diffident, tolerating Mr Borden’s nighttime visits with sombre forbearance. Their lesbian chemistry is convincing but quite why the filmmakers contrived it is questionable. There’s scant evidence that the real Lizzie was a lesbian, but due to being closeted away it’s quite possible that it was the only sexual outlet available, and the two are clearly very protective of one another. Ruth Shaw has a small role as Lizzie’s dour stepmother, but she makes a decent go of it.

There’s a dark wittiness to Sevigny’s brushes with the menacingly pompous Mr Borden (Jamie Sheridan), and their intellectual sparring makes us root for her, as he emerges a brutish coward rather than a family man of integrity with one of the “biggest fortunes in New England”. And although Stewart seethes with a quiet rage, Sevigny excels in a more difficult role, exerting a calm allure as the troubled Lizzie.

Although the ending is hardly a mystery, the film maintains an powerful air of suspense as it moves to the inescapable finale, adding another dimension to this true crime story, by attempting to examine the whys and wherefores. LIZZIE is certainly harrowing to watch, and although we don’t see the murders, we hear them as the violence provides a much-needed cathartic release after all the injustice that’s been witnessed. A sad and rather mournful drama that certainly bring greater understanding to this almost mythical episode of American social history. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 14 DECEMBER 2018

Mélo (1986) *** Bluray release

Dir: Alain Resnais; Cast: Sabine Azéma, Pierre Arditi, André Dussollier, Fanny Ardant; France 1986, 112 min.

Mélo, based on the play by French author Henri Bernstein (1876-1953), has already been filmed three times, before Alain Resnais (Hiroshima, mon Amour), adapted it for the screen in a theatrical version, which proved again that the director prefers style over contents.

This doomed love story sees married couple Romaine (Azéma) and Pierre (Arditi) live in the Parisian suburb of Mont Rogue, where they invite Marcel (Dussollier), Pierre’s friend from the conservatoire, for supper. Since their youth, the men’s careers have taken very different directions: Pierre is a member of a not all to prestigious orchestra, while Marcel is a violinist of some renown. But when it comes to their love life, roles are reversed: Pierre is happy with Romaine, but Marcel doesn’t really trust women with his heart, making happiness impossible. The kittenish Romaine, much more mature than her husband, in spite of him treating her like a child, falls for Marcel, and after a musical beginning in his posh Parisian flat, they begin a torrid affair. The naïve Pierre closes his eyes to everything, and even after Marcel returns from a tour, he still overlooks his wife’s absences. It is unclear whether Romaine tries to poison her husband, but cousin Christiane (Ardant) appears on the scene, and the desperate Romaine commits suicide. An epilogue desperately tries to make Marcel admit the truth.

Renais is known for his stagey approach and love of theatrical formats. Before every new scene, there is a curtain opening, and no fourth wall: Resnais reminds us that he is directing a play: the film outings by German director Paul Czinner (Germany 1932, UK 1937), seemed dated at release, but fifty years later, the conflicts are even more arcane. But Resnais’s aesthetic rigour, and Charles Van Damme’s static, long shots echo Last Year in Marienbad  and Manoel de Oliveira’s films, keep the audience interest until the final denouement. Azéma (who would marry Resnais twelve years later), is the centre of attention, her confusion makes her much more sympathetic than Arditi and Dussollier, who both are somehow wooden and one-dimensional. Ardant brings in some rigour, certainly a woman who knows what she wants. Mélo is very much a melodrama from a bygone era. AS

ON BLURAY FROM 8 APRIL 2019 COURTESY OF FETCH.FM

 

 

Winterlong (2018) ***

Dir: David Jackson | UK Drama | 90′

TV director David Jackson’s bleak look at dysfunctional Britain sees a mother abandon her son to live with her lover.

Sixteen year old Julian (Harper Jackson) is left with his estranged father Francis (Francis Magee), an ageing hippie who lives in a caravan, scratching out a living doing ‘odd jobs’. A fragile bond develops between them but is soon blown apart when tragedy strikes a second time.

Winterlong is tonally all over the place: drifting from social realism to quasi- romantic comedy, with a set of facile caricatures and dialogue to match. We feel sympathy for Julian as the most relatable character, despite his young years, having to contend with puerile adults when strong parenting is what he needs. He feels like a bewildered bystander, while the adults take centre stage with their nonsense. Not much backstory is provided for either father or son, but Francis is clearly a mess, a selfish womaniser who rocks a battered deerstalker and takes pot shots at wildlife, fancying himself as an 18th century highwayman who’s wandered onto the set of Midsomer Murders. And as Winterlong plays out that’s what it reminds us of. How can any sane adult in Britain have a line like: “I’m out here on my own because it’s safer that way”. Where does he think he is: Afghanistan?

Once Francis’ girlfriend Carole appears the story starts to take shape. With a positive outlook and her head screwed on, she demands Julian has a proper roof over his head (well, a plastic caravan one), then disappears back to Belgium, wearing a coke can ring – all Francis can offer from his forages through the ‘dangerous’ woods. Then in wanders batty Barbara (Doon Mackichan), the new neighbour and soi-disant ‘opera singer’ whose desperation for Francis puts all middle-aged women to shame. A weak romance rears its head between Julian and Taylor (Nina Iceton) serving the final melodramatic scenes, but never really coming to anything. Despite its tonal inconsistencies, Winterlong makes a strong statement: It’s a sad reflection on adults seen through innocent children’s eyes – clearly they deserve better. Atmospherically filmed in the Sussex environs of Rye, and accompanied by Rob Lane evocative occasional score, Winterlong is a wake-up call for modern parents. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 29 MARCH 2019

Out of Blue (2018) ****

Dir.: Carol Morley; Cast: Patricia Clarkson, Mamie Gummer. Toby Jones, Jonathan Majors, James Caan, Jackie Weaver; US/UK 2018, 110 min.

Carol Morley (Dreams of a Life) is a British auteur who brings so much more to her films that just the narrative. Her screen version of Martin Amis’ novel Night Train is a genre hybrid– noir in this case – and existentialism. Out of Blue is as enigmatic as its title and New Orleans is the shadowy setting where detective Mike Hoolihan (Patricia Clarkson) investigates the murder of astrophysicist Jennifer Rockwell (Gummer).

Rockwell is found dead in a planetarium where she’d given a speech the day before about Black Holes. Early clues lead to two main-suspects: Ian Strammi (Toby Jones) manager of the site, and Duncan Reynold (Majors), Rockwell’s lover and co-worker. But Hoolihan feels instinctively that the solution to the crime will lead her back into the past where Space will offer clues. A recovering alcoholic with a captivating cat (who steals many a scene) Mike nevertheless loses it completely when cornered by her own past, and performs a drunken semi-striptease on a bar table. Rockwell’s parents are also involved: Colonel Tom (Caan) – who may or may not be the suspect of a past murder spree – and her mother Miriam (Weaver), who has her own dark guilt complex, are not helping Hoolihan, neither are Rockwell’s twin brothers. When the tragedy unravels, more questions emerge, and even physical identities start to look questionable: as Jennifer says in her final lecture “our nose and our hands may not be from the same galaxy”.

The film’s main characters’ identities seem to emanate from a different past, and nothing fits any more. Out of Blue is very much Nicolas Roeg territory: his son Luc is also a producer. Morley’s narrative leads gradually leads us ‘out of this world’, where Rockwell felt much more at home than on this planet – never mind her rather dysfunctional family set-up. And Hoolihan herself is hiding behind her policeman’s (sic) mask, denying both gender and past. DoP Conrad W. Hall’s images play on tones of the colour blue: we race through the film like the night train of Martin Amis’ novel (on which it is loosely based): from the night sky to the cream receptacle found at the crime scene, and the murky metallic-grey of crimes past, everything leads to the indigo blue of cosmic Black Holes.

Morley is clearly interested in the who-done-it, but she also asks questions about human nature; and all her protagonists have something significant to hide. And she never lets them get away with it – the raison d’être of their life (or death) is always more important than the circumstances of the discoveries. To paraphrase the feature title: Blue is the new Noir. The director never gives in or compromises: the existential ‘why’ is her reason for filmmaking, the result may not be to everyone’s taste, but it satisfies an audience hungry for answers outside our immediate Universe. AS

IN ARTHOUSE CINEMAS FROM 29 MARCH 2019 

Pet Sematary – the novel and the film versions

Stephen King’s terrifying novel, Pet Sematary was written back in 1983 and King then collaborated on the script with Mary Lambert directing a big screen adaptation in 1989. To celebrate the 30th anniversary release of the original Pet Sematary (1989) film, we’re looking into the key differences between the novel and the movie adaptations. With the latest film version out on March 29th  – how do they differ, and which is better?

Ellie or Gage Creed

In Stephen King’s terrifying novel and the 1989 version of Pet Sematary, the youngest Creed, Gage, is killed by a monster truck. This is a crucial element to the narrative as the loss of their son is the catalyst for the haunting events that unfold later. However, in Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer’s 2019 version of Pet Sematary, Gage’s older sister Ellie is the one to be hit by the truck. 

In many ways this has a marked effect on the storyline, as Dennis Widmyer explained in a recent interview: changing the death to be that of the older child adds more psychological layers to the narrative. Ellie Creed understands what she becomes whereas Gage in the novel and the 1989 version is unaware, making it more unsettling and haunting. 

Zelda, Rachel Creed’s Sister 

Rachel Creed’s sister is a significant and haunting character in all versions of the Pet Sematary story, yet she is portrayed in different ways. In both Stephen King’s novel and the upcoming film adaptation, Zelda is described and portrayed as a 10-year-old girl with spinal meningitis. However in the 1989 version, Zelda is played by an adult male actor, which is debatably one of the most hair-raising elements in the film. Either way, Zelda’s horrific deterioration and lonely death is one of the most terrifying elements of the story.

Timmy

Timmy Baterman is a 17-year-old boy killed during World War II and then affected by the curse of the Micmac burial after his father laid him there. Timmy appeared ‘normal’ at first, but then we soon find out that Timmy didn’t return from the dead with a soul. Timmy’s tale is only alluded to in the novel and the 1989 adaptation, although it’s not mentioned in the upcoming adaptation. Instead we get to know the protagonists a little better.

Regional Accents 

A smaller yet crucial difference in terms of being true to the novel is the loss of the Maine accent. Stephen King clearly details in the novel that the Creed’s neighbour and keeper of the Micmac burial ground, Jud Crandall, has a very heavy Maine accent.  However, in the 2019 version, Oscar-nominated actor John Lithgow (Jud) whom does not take on the Maine accent. He recently stated in an interview that he believes Jud has evolved into “a more serious character” since the novel, casting a distinct slur on regional accents.  

THE 2019 VERSION IS IN CINEMAS ON 29 MARCH 2019 

PET SEMATARY (1989) is on 4K ULTRA HD AND BLU-RAY™ MARCH 25.

At Eternity’s Gate (2018) Netflix

Dir: Julian Schnabel | Cast: Willem Defoe, Oscar Isaac | US Drama | 111’

Julian Schnabel’s training as an artist informs another of his portraits of creativity like Basquiat, Reinaldo Arenas and Jean Dominique Bauby. With At Eternity’s Gate he turns his camera on the tragedy of Vincent van Gogh with this luminous vision of the artist’s final days in Provence.

There have been many broad brush insights into the painter’s troubled life recorders on the big screen; the most recent, Loving Vincent (2017) attempted a living painted drama of the Dutchman, while Van Gogh: A New Way of Seeing (2015) explored the prodigious correspondence with his brother Theo. The reason to see this one is Willem Dafoe’s fabulous fleshing out of the artist in his febrile, sun-drenched final days after the breakdown of his fraught friendship with Gauguin (an unremarkable Oscar Isaac).

Schnabel captures the glowering intensity of Van Gogh’s desperate descent in paranoia but also portrays the artist as a gentle introvert who was as much misunderstood as maligned by the petit parochialism of his Provençal neighbours.

Benoit Delhomme’s hand-held camera hovers around feverishly and vivid yellow predominates. Intense and intimate close-ups pan out into flaming widescreen vistas vibrating in the summer heat. The worst element is Tatiana Lisovskaya’s screeching score that will make you run for the exit. It over-eggs the already over-baked picture of dismay and despair..

Jean Claude Carriere writes with Schnabel and Louise Kugelberg (the latter also his co-editor) to sketch out the broad strokes of the narrative which opens in Paris in the late 1880s where van Gogh is an already an outsider amongst the Artistes Independents du jour. His financier and brother Theo (a well-cast Rupert Friend) cannot sell his avant-garde works, Vincent opining: “God made me a painter for people who are not born yet”. Only Gauguin appreciates his talent but the two are incompatible as housemates. 

“Go south, Vincent,” Gauguin tells him when van Gogh complains of rainy skies and fog, whereupon he moves to Arles where he discovers his yen for landscapes which glow and shimmer in the heat as Delhomme’s visuals capture the textures of roots, earth, leaves as well as the soft windswept pastures. We feel for Vincent when a schoolteacher (Anne Consigny) openly mocks his work in front of her kids, and after a violent outburst he is sent away from the town, admitting his fear of going mad – but it could be that he just hates people and prefers solitude, which is understandable amongst these cackling idiots.

With Gauguin he enjoys a companionable time until success takes him to Paris whereupon van Gogh starts to unravel emotionally with the famous ear incident. A doctor (Vladimir Consigny) suggests some therapy, that merely confines the artist to a straitjacket. Ironically this comes at the same time as an influential Paris art critic praises his work as uniquely sensual. Meanwhile a priest (Mads Mikkelsen in thoughtful mode) damns his vision and calls his work ugly. 

This sensuous re-imagining of the artist’s final days belongs to Dafoe whose craggy features and piercing blue eyes convey a lost and melancholy soul whose  sensitivity and artistic genius have now made him a household name . MT

NOW ON NETFLIX. TRAILER courtesy of Curzon Cinemas | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2018 Winner Best Actor: Willem Dafoe

3 Faces (2018) ****

Dir: Jafar Panahi | Drama | 100’

Even though Jafar Panahi’s latest 3 FACES tries to challenge Iran’s massive macho culture with a feminist film, the feeling that remains after the curtain has fallen is of a deeply ingrained male-dominated society where women are still quietly championing the male of the species, while giving lip service to feminism. 

Jafar Panahi was unable to leave Iran to present his thoughtful drama which was made on a shoestring, and none the worse for it, beautifully reflecting the arid mountain landscapes of the Turkish-Azeri speaking area of Iran, where he drives, as himself, with actor Benhaz Jafari, trying to find the girl, Marziyeh Rezaie, who appears to have killed herself in mobile footage witnessed in the film’s histrionic opening scene, and sent to Mrs Jafari the night before.

The title refers to three women, actresses from pre revolution Iran, the present and the future. With 3 FACES Panahi hopes to deliver a feminist message to encourage women to be positive about their choices. The modern world challenges traditions in this rural backwater where men are virile and women remain behind close doors. When the pair arrive in the mountain village, it soon emerges that the girl was actually crying wolf. But she is distraught that her family have forbidden her from taking up a place at a prestigious conservatory in Tehran, and she apologises profusely to Mrs Jafahi for the upset caused.

The tone is solicitous and rather worthy, and we are then treated to various local twee vignettes that demonstrate male supremacy and female submission. What works best here is the footage of farm stock, being herded, and the plight of a prize bull who has collapsed on the road while on his way to inseminate a load of horny heiffers. Once again this demonstrates how grateful females should be to exist in the world of male strength and virility.

Meanwhile back to young Marziyeh who has been forced into an engagement to dampen down hopes of an acting career (“we don’t want any entertainers here”). The third face, former actress, dancer Shahrazade, active during the Shah Pahlavi’s reign, now lives alone in a tiny hut outside the village never gets any screen time. Apparently bitter and twisted, she is now a reclusive artist who is pictured the following morning painting in a distant field. 

There is a great deal to enjoy in all the performances: Panahi is laid back and louche as the soigne man from the big city; Behnaz Jafari (A House Built on Water) is an impulsive emotional woman with a hot temper that quickly gives way to tactile warmth. Little Rezaie is a sparky, confident girl who wears her heart on her sleeve. This is a captivating little film that glows with an upbeat message of hope. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 29 MARCH 2019 | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | JOINT BEST SCRIPT WINNER  2018

 

The Tag-Along (2015) ** UK Taiwan Film Festival 2019

Dir.: Cheng Wei-hao; Cast: Wei-ning Hsu, River Huang, Liu Yin-Shang, Ming Hua-Pai; Taiwan 2015, 93 min.

Cheng Wei-hao’s horror flick is a decent debut feature but horrific it is not. Based on an old rural myth and written by Shih-Keng Chien, it set up Wei-Hao up for greater things, including a sequel, Tag Along II (2017), which scored at the box office. While the original is low on thrills, its horror elements being far too benighted,  monsters being rather too benign, Ko-Chin Chen’s atmospheric camerawork help to keep us all interested.

Estate agent Wei (Huang) lives with his grandmother Ho Wen (Shang), who spoils him rotten. His long-time DJ girlfriend Shen(Hsu) is keen on her independence Wei wants to marry and have children. The feature opens with a ‘Missing Persons’ poster of Wei’s auntie Shui (Pai), one of many who suddenly disappear. But in her case, she returns seemingly unharmed, only for Ho Wen to disappear under stranger circumstances, involving a girl in a red dress. Wei meanwhile has mortgaged his grandmother’s house to buy a luxury apartment in order to keep Shen on side, but it has the opposite effect, and then Wei disappears with his grandmother later re-appearing. Shen discovers Wei in the depths of the forest, where he is captured by evil-doers the guise of babies and monkeys.

All well and good but certainly not remotely scary and the mixture of hyper realism and horror fails to catch fire: the creepy little critters are more cute than frightening. Finally, the finale is like an advert for marriage and childbearing, somehow spoiling a diffuse project even more. 

Tag-Along II is more of the same with the director, scriptwriter and DoP collaborating once again. This follow-up sees four women in search of their missing children; again the emphasis and directive is on childbearing: any women not taking part will be punished. Needless to say the ending opens the possibility for a third part. AS

SCREENING DURING UK TAIWAN FILM FESTIVAL 2019

London Turkish Film Week | 24-30 April 2019

London Turkish Film Week is back for a second year running in the luxurious surroundings of the Regent Street Cinema and various other well-known venues across the capital. From 24 -30 April a selection of recent dramas and documentaries will be accompanied by talks and a chance to meet the directors and cast.

Turkish cinema is known for its captivating widescreen dramas that reflect the cultural diversity and magnificent scenery of a vibrant nation that stretches from Europe to Asia.

The festival opens with Can Ulkay’s epic TURKISH ICE CREAM (2018) a rousing, rather clichéd melodrama inspired by real events that took place in a small Australian town in 1915 during the Gallipoli landings. Two Turkish nationals are trying to get back to their homeland with their families. Seen from a Turkish point of view – and naturally depicting the Allied Forces as inveterate baddies – the brutal action scenes depict the futility of war, from both sides. The emphasis here is on action rather than characterisation: so although nearly everyone dies, we don’t really care, as we never got to know them in the first place. Carrying on the war theme there is CICERO (2018) a drama based on Ilyas Bazna, one of the most famous WWII spies who worked for Nazi Germany while employed as a butler to the British Ambassador, Hughe Montgomery Knatchbull Hughessen, in neutral Turkey during the mid 1940s.

The Golden Tulip winner 2017 YELLOW HEAT (Sari Sicak) sees an immigrant family desperate to survive in their traditional farm amid encroaching industrialisation. The multi-award winning drama YOZGAT BLUES (2013), set in small town Anatolia, is one to watch for its outstanding performances and smouldering cinematography. Banu Sivaci’s THE PIGEON (main image) won best director at Sofia Film Festival 2018 and is another impressive arthouse tale of a boy finding peace with the animal kingdom, away from the dystopian world in small-town Adana, Southern Turkey. And finally MURTAZA another beautifully crafted and resonant parable about the importance of traditional values in the mountains of Malatya.

Other features and shorts reflect the usual Turkish themes of town versus country, tradition versus the modern world, and the role of women in enlightened society. Another highlight will be Ahmet Boyacioglu’s latest film THE SMELL OF MONEY a tense and startling exposé of financial corruption in contemporary Turkey. And last but not least, a panel of industry professionals will debate the future of the big screen At the Flicks of Netflix? at the Regent Street Cinema on 26th April.

LONDON TURKISH FILM WEEK | 24 – 30 APRIL 2019

The Haunting of Sharon Tate (2019) *

Dir/Wri: Daniel Farrands | Cast: Hilary Duff, Jonathan Bennett, Lydia Hearst, Pawel Szajda | Horror | 87′

Which ever way you look at it, The Haunting of Sharon Tate is a dreadful film, and a bad idea. Not only does this schlocky drama insult the memory of Tate and her former husband Roman Polanski, it also re-imagines her tragedy as a surreal flight of fancy, changing the course of its terrible reality.

Sharon Tate is made out to be a loopy, histrionic lightweight prone to fantasising about her own murder on a regular basis, and obsessed by thoughts of her husband’s putative infidelity. Infact, she was a promising actor who had made a name for herself in The Man from U.N.C.L.E (1965), Valley of the Dolls (1967) and Twelve Plus One (1969) alongside Orson Welles (1969). Polanski was in London at the time finishing off a script so he could join his wife for the birth of their first child together. She was 26. It was one of the most gruesome Hollywood events, and another shocking time for Polanski who had lost his parents during the Holocaust. He has now been married for 30 years to French actor Emmanuelle Seigner.

As Quentin Tarantino found out a few years ago with his Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, making a feature film about Tate’s demise was always going to be a tricky endeavour. And we all remember the disaster that was Oliver Hirschbergels’ Lady Diana, despite Naomi Watts’ sterling effort. Well this is actually worse because it demeans Tate, and those who also died on that fateful August in 1969 in Benedict Canyon. Hardly surprising then that her sister has distanced herself from the whole project. At least a documentary form could have re-examined the facts and made some intelligent contribution to the events, told evocatively in Vincent Bugliosi’s book Helter Skelter.

Here Daniel Farrands uses a fractured narrative to question Tate’s presence of mind by exploring the idea that she (played here by Hillary Duff) was experiencing premonitions about her own slaughter in a series of horrific re-occuring nightmares. And that her final hours did not result in death at the hands of the Mansons, but in some kind of aggravated break-in which sees her walking away into the countryside. Meanwhile the Mansons are pictured as baleful zombie-like killers, peering through windows before they eventually made their move. You couldn’t make it up – but Farrands did, with a feature that’s clearly intended for a teen audience who may not appreciate the gravity of the source material.

Apparently, Farrands gets his title from a throwaway quote Tate gave in an interview where she reportedly said: “Yes, I have had a psychic experience – at least I guess that’s what it was – and it was a terribly frightening and disturbing thing for me”. She went on to say that the dream featured Jay Sebring or herself “cut open at the throat”.

Well, we all have bad dreams about losing our own body parts, or people we love – sometimes in tragic ways. But you’ve got to be pretty crass to make a second rate horror flick about such things actually happening in the light of a real and dreadful calamity. The film is not cinematic or remotely compelling. Most of the action takes place in semi-darkness, the flashback scenes repetitive to the point of boredom – the whole thing is uninspiring. Duff, Jonathan Bennett and Lydia Hearst do their best with a threadbare script, in a film that deserves to be haunted by the ghost of Charles Manson himself. MT

AVAILABLE ON DIGITAL DOWNLOAD FROM 8 APRIL 2019

The Crossing (2018) **

Dir.: Bai Xue; Cast: Huang Yao, Ka Man Tong, Elena Kong, Sun Yang, Ni Hongjie; China 2018, 99 min.

In his flawed feature debut Bai Xue does a great job of exploring activities on the border between mainland China and Hong Kong. But the convincing cast is hampered by a clichéd script with almost no dramatic heft – the usual verve of a first film seems to be confined to production values.

The story revolves around a young Chinese student Peipei (Yao) who has just turned sixteen. Everyday she crosses the border to Hong Kong from her home in Shenzhen. Feeling diminished by the more affluent students in the former British colony, particularly her best friend Jo (Tong), and keen to travel with her on a much-dreamed of  trip to Japan, PeiPei joins a smuggling ring headed by a female version of Fagan in the shape of Mrs. Hua (Kong). But things don’t go according to plan. Jo’s boyfriend Hao falls in love with her, and then Peipei falls foul of the border police.

DoP Piao Songri offers a surprising contrast between small town China and the glitter and lights of Hong Kong and Peipei is caught between the two. Her  workaholic father and hard-drinking and gambling mother (Hongjie) are busily involved in their own lives. Every time Peipei crosses the border, Xue freezes the frame: the demarcation zone is set. Peipei is a danfei, that is the child of a Hong Kong citizen and a Chinese national, but she juggles her identities without really overcoming the naivety and spontaneity of adolescence. Clearly she is no match for the scheming Mrs. Hua, who preys on her young thieving victims, soon making them reliant on her for a decent income. But Xue dwells too long on the teenagers’ aimlessness, which is repetitive and unimaginative, along with the love triangle, which is never really explored and too conventional to go with the free-flowing camera movements, and the accelerated tempo of the action. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 22 March 2019

           

The Snatch Thief (2018)

Wri/Dir.: Agustin Toscano; Cast: Sergio Prina, Daniel Elis, Leon Zelarrayan, Liliana Juarez, Camila Plaate, Pila Benitez Vibart; Argentina, Uruguay, France 2018,  Drama, 93 min.

Set in his home town of Tucuman in northern Argentina, Agustin Toscano’s twisty tale of a thief and his victim is spiked with mordant humour.

Social services have broken down in this poverty stricken town, the police are on strike, and Miguel (Prina) is at the end of his tether. His six-year old son Leon (Zelarrayan) lives with his mother Antonella (Plaate), waiting for child support. So Miguel and his friend Colorao (Elias) turn to crime, out of sheer desperation, using Miguel’s motorbike for a snatch-job. But their victim clings on to her bag and is dragged along for several minutes, behind them. Leaving her for dead the two run off and split the money. But Miguel feels bad and decides to visit the woman in hospital, finding her identity card in the stolen purse. Elena is alive – just, but has lost her memory. Posing as a nephew Miguel inveigles himself into her life in an clever conceit that Toscano pulls off with aplomb, his convincing plot-line playing on its plausible characters caught in a folie à deux: Miguel is a master of avoiding responsibility and Elena uses him, fully aware of his guilt. The pair make an odd couple, driving the plot forward with their intransigence and childish temper tantrums. In a way, they are both kids living in a world of wishful thinking.

DoP Arauco Hernandez Holz handheld camera searches the dark interior of Elena’s flat for every source of light, but somehow it always stays dark – like the murky world of the crime-fuelled encounter. Toscano manages a last twist – ending his humanistic play on a high note. A strong cast and imaginative direction of this simple but never simplistic storyline proves once again that a low budget need not stand in the way of a really gripping drama.  

THE SNATCH THIEF | BEST FILM, FIRST PRIZE | BERGAMO FILM MEETING 2019 | UBI BANCA

 

 

 

A Decent Man | Un Om La Locul Lui (2018) *** | Bergamo Film Meeting

Dir.: Hadrian Marcu; Cast: Madalina Constantin, Bogdan Dumitrache, Arda Gales; Romania 2018,93 min.

Hadrian Marcu’s debut feature sees a man very much out of his depth emotionally when it comes to women, and especially the two women in his life. Somehow this guy finds himself in an impossible situation and retreats into the background, hoping that the women take charge. Marcu cleverly shows how  professional women often end up drawing the short straw in their emotional choices.

Based on a novel by Petru Cimpuescu, this is a classic example of how men can be highly competent in the workplace but fall apart when it comes to their private lives. And the main character does just that. And this being Romania it’s unlikely to end well. Petru, an engineer, has got involved with two women: Laura (Gales) is a doctor and pregnant with his child, and Sonia (Constantin) is the wife of his colleague who dies when the car they are travelling in goes off the road, in the film’s early scenes. Feeling stressed out and guilty Petru puts Sonia first. Soon enough, nurses in the hospital inform Laura of Petru’s infidelity, and she throws him out of her flat. Clueless and adrift, Petru hides behind Sonja, hoping for the best.

This is a very confident debut by Marcu, who never lets the action get out of hand, avoiding sentimentality as well as histrionic scenes. Dumitrache is ideal for the role of the rather hesitant Petru, who cannot do right for doing wrong. Yes, he is decent, but his emotional intelligence is limited, he wants to have his cake and eat it. When confronted by Laura, he is like a little boy who wants the teacher to let him off failing his exam. The genders seem to live a very segregated life in contemporary Romania: Petru enjoys the company of co-workers, but when he is with Laura or Sonja, or even his mother, he becomes emasculated and insecure, avoiding conflict. keeping the women apart, compartmentalising their existence, living a double life, which crashes down, when Laura learns the truth. But he has still not learnt from his mistakes, and hopes that the decision will be made for him.

DoP Adrian Silisteanu uses a handheld camera for intimate effect, keeping close to the protagonists. Even their homes tell the storyline: Petru lives in a mess; whilst Laura is a proper homemaker – even though her work is as challenging as his is. Overall, it seems Marcu has re-invented the sub-genre of male malaise, but his careful detailing and string construction of the narrative arc marks him out to be a filmaker with a future. AS

WINNER | BEST DIRECTOR | BERGAMO FILM MEETING 9-17 MARCH 2019

 

The Kindergarten Teacher (2018) ****

Dir.: Sara Colangelo; Cast: Maggie Gyllenhall, Parker Sewak, Gael Garcia Bernal, Daisy Tahan, Sam Jules, Michael Chernus, Ajay Naidu, Rosa Salazar; USA 2018, 96′.

Director Sara Colangelo (Little Accidents) won a Sundance directing award for this spry psychological thriller that takes constantly surprising turns.

Adapted from Nadav Lapid’s script of his French/Israeli feature of the same name (Haganenet), this is no Hollywood re-make – in fact, it was Lapid who approached the producers. By a stroke of luck, Maggie Gyllenhall (who also produced) was cast in the lead, and the result is a fascinating character study, full of ambivalence and obsessive longings.

Lisa Spinelli, having just turned forty, feels unfulfilled on many levels. Travelling to work every day on the ferry between Staten Island and Manhattan, she looks forlorn and lost in her daydreams. Husband Grant (Chernus) is a bear of man, but lazy of body and mind. Her teenage children Laine (Tahan) and Josh (Jules) are an obvious disappointment to Lisa: Laine is just interested in the latest fads, and thinks her mother’s a dinosaur. Josh is even worse, and is giving up school to join the US-Army. To counter all this, Lisa has joined a poetry group – but alas, her talents are limited, and teacher Simon (Bernal) expresses his doubts politely. Enter five-year old Jimmy (Sewak), one of Lisa’s pupils, who suddenly spouts lines of poetry, which are well beyond his tender age. Lisa is thrilled, asking Jimmy to phone her, whenever a poem is ready, and the little boy responds eagerly. And it’s not difficult to understand why: he is neglected by his divorced father Nick (Naidu) who runs a shady nightclub, and his lackadaisical  babysitter Becca (Salazar), who got the job because she gets laid by his father.

In her poetry class, Lisa passes off Jimmy’s work is her own, which leads to a quick romp with Simon (Bernal), who is suitably impressed. To get more access to Jimmy, Lisa tells Nick that Becca is often late for picking-up time, and Nick fires her, only too happy that Lisa is volunteering to look after Jimmy until he fetches him in the evening. But Nick also makes it clear he expects his son to excel in sports and business, rather than try to pursue an artistic career, like his impoverished relatives. Then everything slowly unravels towards a tense finale.

Colangelo traces Lisa’s growing obsession step by step. Creativity is her only way of escape, but it’s hard for her to realise that she is dilettante –  as Simon puts it blandly. She channels all her yearnings into Jimmy, in an effort to save both him and herself. Family and society, dominated by social media, are a great disappointment to her, and Jimmy’s father Nick, is just another materialist ignoramus. Throwing all her past life away, she has to save Jimmy from the same fate that has destroyed her. She ignores her responsibilities as a teacher (and as a human being) and becomes obsessed with Jimmy being a prodigy. Lisa, who has been so gentle and rational all her life, suddenly sees Jimmy as an embodiment of herself – and is determined that he won’t suffer the same fate as she has.

DoP Pepe Avila del Pino pictures Lisa’ descent with his subtle camerawork. The rides on the ferry are a study in melancholy, and her classroom is a real work of art, light and shadows creating a nuanced moodiness. But this is Maggie Gyllenhall’s feature: she never puts a foot wrong, going seemingly unobtrusively forward from an ideology of art as a saviour, to a a full blown psychosis. Colangelo supports her aptly, particularly with a great solution at the ending: she never denounces Lisa or the relationship between her and Jimmy, which somehow survives. Kindergarten Teacher is not perfect, but portrays a specific ambiguity which is as endearing as it is dangerous. AS

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE from 8 MARCH 2019       

   

                                     

                       

Under the Silver Lake (2018) **

Dir: David Robert Mitchell | Cast; Sibongile Miambo, Riley Keough, Jimmy Sampson, Andrew Garfield | Fantasy Comedy  | US |

David Robert Mitchell rose to international fame with his breakout horror hit It Follows which showed at Cannes several years ago. His latest is a trippy fantasy neonoir dream with the same feel and disturbing undertones as David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive but none of the brilliance, and far too much indulgent navel-gazing. What carries you through the druggy hotch potch of wacky vignettes is Andrew Garfield’s captivating turn as a down on his luck LA creative, who resorts to voyeurism and sexual shadow-play as his mind wanders lazily through the backwaters of LA’s Silver-Lake area. But after a promising opening the film’s fascinating potential disintegrates into an incoherent and sprawling mindfuck punctuated by Hollywood references. There is far too much unfocused creativity gushing from Mitchell’s gifted pen in UNDER THE SILVER LAKE, and it ends in a messy gloopthis time. That said, he’s certainly a filmmaker worth watching out for. MT

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM 15 MARCH 2019

 

Girl (2018) ****

Dir: Lukas Dhont | Drama | Belgium | 97’

Adolescence is a terrible time of bewildering choices, sexual urges and obsession with appearance. Those ardently drawn to find a mate are the most cruelly punished, as others keep quietly buttoned down by insecurity or jealousy. Who knows what is happening physically at puberty, especially when bodies and minds feel confused about gender.

No one has expressed this better and more naturally than Belgian director Lukas Dhont with his latest feature GIRL, about a boy who wants to be a ballerina. This gender fluid teenager is played with thoughtful ease by 15 year old cisgender actor Victor Polster in a down to earth gem that rivals a A Fantastic Woman in every way.

Lara (Polster) has moved with her French-speaking father Mathias (Arieh Worthalter) and younger brother (Oliver Bodart) to study at Belgium’s most famous dance academy. So there are two important episodes that the teenager must face: preparing for transition, since she was born in the body of a boy, and working to become a professional ballet dancer. But Lara has all the support of her entourage including her family and new friends, and this is underlined in a tricky moment when the female students are asked whether they mind sharing their dressing room with their new colleague. This is all handled with consummate skill, and Lara soon settles in.

Dhont rose to fame with his titles Headlong and L’infini also set in the dance world and here he conveys Lara’s struggles through subtle body language and looks – there is a fascinating scene where Lara uses white tape to flatten her pelvic area in preparation for a skin tight ballet costume. While Lara is excited about the upcoming surgical operation, having been prepared by a Flemish psychiatrist (Valentijn Dhaenens), who does not want Lara to suffer any longer in the wrong body, his father Mathias is actually more nervous about his son’s hospital visit and the risks it involves.  

A tense tone sets in in the film’s second half where Lara suspects the hormones are not working, but this is down to impatience more than anything more serious.“You want to be a woman straight away,” Lara’s father says, “but you are an adolescent too”. The two then share one of the film’s most touching tête a tête’s. The film works best during these tender moments when we feel for the characters and their dilemma. These are crucial in preparing the audience for the startling finale, and Girl could have done with more of them. That said, Dhont manages to dovetail Lara’s physical transformation with her emotional adaption – no mean feat. 

This is very much Polster’s film and although the support cast feel natural and well-prepared, what really makes this enjoyable is the actor’s strong background in dance which is elegantly captured by strong visuals from DoP Frank van den Eeden, who focuses on the physicality and agility of the dance moves.MT

In cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema FROM 15 March 2019 

Ray and Liz (2018) ****

Dir: Richard Billingham | Cast: Justin Salinger, Ella Smith, Patrick Romer, Deidre Kelly, Tony Way, Sam Gittins, Joshua Millard-Lloyd | UK | Drama |107′

Turner prize-nominated Richard Billingham doesn’t miss a trick in portraying the squalid splendour of his early life in Birmingham during the early Seventies in his debut drama RAY & LIZ, premiering here at Locarno Film Festival.

Five years in the making, this impressively-tooled arthouse piece is not for the feint-hearted: In one scene the family dog makes quick work of some vomit spewed out after an enforced drinking spree. But this all adds to the glorious texture of his childhood experiences in the Black Country recorded fondly for posterity and in tribute to his parents, from collected photographs.

The Political undertones of the era are not swept under the grimy council house carpet but hardly forced in your face either. The Seventies were desperately difficult years for Britain, both politically and economically, and although Harold Wilson got the country back to work, it came at the price of inflation at almost 30%, the decade ending with Jim Callaghan’s humiliation at the hands of the unions in the Winter of Discontent and Margaret Thatcher taking over as prime minister in 1979.

We first meet Ray (Patrick Romer) sipping some kind of lethal home brew out of a plastic bottle after a night’s sleep, fully clothed, in his dismal bedroom. It’s a pitiful sight and we feel for him, yet he seems content enough although lost in his thoughts. As the narrative slips back and forward from Billingham’s early years to this final memory of his father, still in a council property and separated from his mother, there are poignant moments but also those that are painful to watch, such as when his “soft” uncle Lol is beaten senseless by his mother (with her shoe). And the cockroach-ridden mildewed walls and filthy ‘front room’ in their council flat makes grim viewing, as does the disgusting sight of bloated and chain-smoking Liz on one of her shouty outbursts. But the film is never maudlin. Welcome bursts of cheeky humour occasionally lurk round the corner even in this God-forsaken highrise hovel with its menagerie of invited and uninvited animals, such as the time when little Jason poured chilli powder into his father’s mouth while he was asleep. 

There are also echoes of Terence Davies in this social realist memoire. Ray lost his job when the kids were small and his reduced masculine pride sees him making himself scarce or – even useful – around the place in contrast to his surly, stroppy wife who spends her time flower arranging. The period detail here is extraordinary, almost to the point of cliché. It’s as if Billingham has sat down and made a list of every single item he remembered from his upbringing, and then painstakingly placed it on the set and in the dialogue which is rich in local expressions recalling the era. Not an appealing film to watch but an honest, authentic and heartfelt reflection of a point in time and place. MT

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE | PREMIERED AT LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2018

https://vimeo.com/281967728

Border (2018) *****

Dir : Ali Abbasi | Fantasy Drama | Sweden | 104’

BORDER is one of those bracingly original films. Melding fantasy and folklore while teetering on the edge of Gothic horror it manages to be cleverly convincing and unbelievably weird at the same time. Fraught with undercurrents of sexual identity and self-realisation this gruesome rites of passage fable is another fabulous story with enduring appeal for the arthouse crowd and diehard fans of low-key horror. Based on a short story by Let the Right One In creator John Ajvide Lindqvist it is Ali Abbasi’s follow up to Shelley and his first with writing partner Isabella Ekloff.

Tina (Melander) has always been an outsider because she suffers from her neanderthal physical appearance of flaring nostrils and a facial gurning movement that marks her out to have the heightened sensory perception of an animal. She feels a particular affinity to the wildlife near her comfortable cabin in the heavily forested woods between Finland and Sweden, and can sense when deer or moose are about to cross the country road. As a customs officer, she also has a keen awareness for criminality but feels diminished by her ‘otherness’ and is desperately lonely, Meanwhile, her live-boyfriend Roland (Jorgen Thorssen) treats her like a pair of old carpet slippers and is more interested in his pack of dobermans.  

One day Tina spots an unusual traveller going through customs. He looks like her male double and Tina feels a palpable attraction to Vore (Eero Milonoff). Judging from the contents of his luggage he could be an entomologist, but on further examination this is not all he appears to be. Has Tina found love for the first time, or just somebody who feels familiar? There’s a tone of optimism on the romantic front, and also workwise as Tina’s sensory talents see her becoming the key investigator in the hunt for a local paedophile.

Abbasi masterfully manages the subtle strands of his storyline while keeping the tension taut and a dark humour bubbling under the surface. Melander’s Tina is a gentle and almost submissive character who keeps her tale between her legs, and we feel for her even when her confidence makes her more assertive after meeting Vore. This confidence enables her to confront her elderly father – who has clearly duped her since childhood – and her useless boyfriend. A rare curio that keeps you guessing all the way to its unexpected finale. MT

NOW ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE from 8 March 2019

Rosie (2018) ***

Dir.: Paddy Breathnach; Cast: Sarah Greene, Moe Dunford, Ellie O’Halloran, Ruby Dunne, Darragh McKenzie, Molly McCann, Pom Boyd; ROE 2018, 86 min.

There’s clearly a housing crisis in Ireland. Paddy Breathnach (Viva) and writer Roddy Doyle (The Van) low-key affair drama sees a family of six literally living out of their car, after their rented home was sold by their landlord. All Dublin council can do is provide a list of emergency shelters, which are usually booked out.

Rosie (Greene), the titular heroine and her partner John Paul Brady (Dunford) have put their belonging with friends and relatives, stuffing their car with the bare necessities along with four children. The resulting tale unfolds over sixteen hours, but seems much longer: Rosie trying to organise the kids, whilst John Paul washes dishes in a posh restaurant. Spending a fortune on the mobile, phoning the hotels and hostels on her list, Rosie becomes a picture of insouciance, even though every ‘No vacancy’ brings them nearer to a night spent in a parking lot.

The children take the ordeal very differently: four-year old Madison (McCann) is only concerned with Peachie, the rabbit – as long as she can cuddle up to him, the world is fine. Alfie (McKenzie) is six and sees everything as an adventure, he is often uncomfortable, but one can imagine him putting up the same resistance to compliance in a household under a roof. The two eldest, eight-year old Millie (Dunne) and her sister Kayleigh (O’Halloran) suffer the most, while Kayleigh leaves school and stays with her old neighbours, the panicky parents spending most of the day trying to track her down, and nearly losing the father’s job. Rosie’s mother (Boyd) owns a house large enough to house her daughter’s family but there are issues between them: Rosie claims to have been sexually molested by her now deceased father, and her mother wants her to recant before letting the family into the house. Rosie puts pride before comfort, and with another day over the chances of finding accommodation drastically diminish.

With a story like Rosie, it’s difficult to imagine how Dublin gets to be called the ‘Boom Town’ of Europe. Housing stock is either rare, or the price range outside the budget of normal families. Breathnach shows the struggle of a ordinary folk, caused by no-one in particular, but causing mass despair– without much hope for the future. DoP Cathal Watters underlines the narrative with a handheld camera, catching the family’s perpetual motion. Low on storyline and budget, echoing its theme, Rosie is still a watchable drama. AS

ON GENERAL RELEASE NATIONWIDE from 8 March 2019 .

 

    

 

Everybody Knows (2018) ***

Dir: Asghar Farhadi | Cast: Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Barbara Lennie, Ricardo Darin | Drama

Penelope Cruz is the star turn of the off kilter drama. Returning to Spain from Argentina with her two teenagers, Laura is back to celebrate her sister’s Irene’s wedding. Husband Alejandro (Ricardo Darin) soon follows, and she also reconnects with an old boyfriend (Bardem) as events take a less sunny turn.

Farhadi (A Separation) directs from a script written in Farsi and translated into Spanish, which he learnt phonetically.Tepid as a psychological thriller with a telenovela-esque twist, the film’s strength and most of its attraction lies in the three dynamic central performances and the picturesque 16th century setting in the town of Torrelaguna (Madrid) which is very much a character in itself, gloriously brought to life in Jose Luis Alcaine’s zinging images. Everybody Knows provides fascinating insight into traditional Spanish country life, exposing deep fault-lines of internecine resentment, provincial pettiness and mean-spirited grudges.

The plot revolves round a secret “everybody knows” (except Laura herself) about former flame Paco (Bardem) who was devastated when she left. The whole affair seems connected to a local kidnapping that took place years previously, revealed in some newspaper cuttings that just happen to be left around in Irene’s bedroom. Soon, menacing letters start to arrive demanding money, and threatening Irene not to contact the police. This unpleasantness also lays bare a long-standing dispute between Laura’s curmudgeonly father and Paco going back years.

Laura’s absence has kept all this at bay but now it comes into full focus, re-opening old family wounds that had never really healed. Strangely nobody seems to acknowledge or discuss the perpetrators of the original kidnapping, and although this slight plothole is glossed ovrr by the polished performances of the strong cast, still remains a nagging question mark in our minds.

This is a mildly intriguing drama that rolls on despite its narrative flaws which are significantly diminished by the undeniable slickness of Farhadi’s confident direction and complemented by the lead trio in brilliant form. MT

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM 8 MARCH 2019

Sink the Bismarck (1960) **** Bluray release

Dir: Lewis Gilbert | Cast: Kenneth Moore, Dana Wynter, Carl Mohner, Laurence Naismith | UK, Wartime Drama 97′

British post-war cinema was fraught with films depicting how we triumphed with our Allies. And one of the most successful and stylish was this 1960 epic featuring actual combat footage. Lewis Gilbert bases his spectacular action thriller on real events that took place when British warships set off to eliminate the pride of the German fleet, the Bismarck, in the North Atlantic. Kenneth Moore is the star turn as the British naval officer tasked with leading the 1940s mission, and putting duty first when still recovering from his wife’s death in an air raid. Sink the Bismarck depicts the human story behind the war effort, showing respect for the enemy, and commemorating the courage of our own brave soldiers, and the unsung ‘backroom heroes.’ This thrilling and authentic adventure drama also features the cruiser HMS Belfast (now preserved on the Thames in London) which was used to depict the cruisers involved in Bismarck’s pursuit. MT
ON RELEASE FROM 11 MARCH 2019 COURTESY OF EUREKA FILMS 

The Prisoner (1955) **** Blu-Ray

Dir: Peter Glenville | Wri: Bridget Boland | Cast: Jack Hawkins, Alec Guinness | UK, Drama 95′

Jack Hawkins and Alec Guinness are the dynamite duo driving this intellectually daring and morally complex thriller forward. With its themes of pride and betrayal, The Prisoner is based on Irish Catholic novelist Bridget Boland’s play of the same name, embellished by a rousing minor love story that bubbles along under the surface of its main plot line involving an inquisition between Guinness’s ‘Cardinal’ and Jack Hawkins ‘Interrogator’ that takes place in solitary confinement in an unspecified totalitarian Eastern European country under siege. The outdoor scenes are pure social realism, but the interiors benefit from John Hawkesworth’s elegant set design. Guinness exudes a peerless subtlety as the breathtakingly sinuous man of God interrogated, tortured and broken – with equal finesse – by a charismatic Jack Hawkins. Benjamin Frankel’s sinister occasional score compliments the slow-burning narrative directed with stylish aplomb by Peter Glenville (Becket, Term of Trial) and photographed by DoP Reginald H Wyer in velvety black and white. This is a fine British film ripe for rediscovery. MT

OUT ON BLURAY 11 MARCH 2019 |

Irma la Douce (1963) **** Tribute to Andre Previn (1929 – 2019)

Dir.: Billy Wilder; Cast: Shirley MacLaine, Jack, Lemmon, Lou Jacobi, Bruce Yarnell; USA 1963, 149 min.

Three years after The Apartment, Wilder re-united Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon, along with his DoP Joseph LaShelle and PD Alexander Trauner (Les Enfants du Paradis) for this funny, endearing feature, set in Paris. Irma looks dated with its stagey Sixties settings and florid interiors, and it’s not quite as biting as the black-and-white New York satire, but Irma La Douce was nevertheless Wilder’s last original work: re-makes and self-indulgence dominated the last, rather shallow seven films until 1981.

Andre Previn won the Oscar for Best Music Score for his original compositions. Irma La Douce is based on the play by Alexandre Breffort, Wilder and his regular co-writer I.A.L. Diamond tell the story of sex-worker Irma (MacLaine), who falls for disgraced ex-cop Nestor Patou (Lemmon), whose attempts to reform the local call girls lose him his job.  Irma’s pimp  His aim in life was to reform the district’s call-girls. But after losing his job, he tries to make an honest woman out of Irma, who gives all her earnings to her pimp Hippolyte (Yarnell), who Patou beats up. angry about this state of affairs that he floors the pimp – and is terrible surprised that Irma now wants to work for him. Bartender Moustache (Jacobi) lends him 500 Franc, so he can play his own double, an English Lord, who only wants to sleep with Irma. But whilst Patou spends the nights with Irma, he has to work during the day in an abattoir, carrying dead pigs. Finally, he has to kill the Lord off – but now, his ex-colleges are wanting him for murder.

Today, Irma is a little quaint, and certainly a little too long at two-and-a-half hours running time. But at the time, it was very brave. The Hays Code was not fooled, and called the feature “a coarse mockery of virtue”. And the Catholic Church send priest to the shooting, wanting to make sure, that no blasphemy happened during the wedding scene. But apart from the above mentioned production values – including Andre Previn’s score – the feature belongs to MacLaine and Lemmon, who just have enough empathy which each other, to pull the unbelievable story off. As for Wilder, he was, for the last time the “Bürgerschreck” (the bogeyman of the establishment) he so badly wanted to be. AS

Amazon  https://amzn.to/2S2SA23 Zavvi http://po.st/Zbg2UO

RELEASE DATE 18 MARCH 2019

https://youtu.be/spQpwM97ea0

Schindler’s List (1993) *****

Dir: Steven Spielberg | Writer: Steven Zaillian | Cast: Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes, Embeth Davidz, Caroline Goodall | US Biopic Drama, 195′

Based on a novel by Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List is possibly Spielberg’s most noble arthouse classic, and certainly as memorable as Jaws. In German-occupied Poland, 1939, an opportunistic German businessman turns humanitarian hero by saving his Jewish workforce of some 1100 after witnessing their persecution by the Nazi Germans. Certainly this was Liam Neeson’s finest hour in the lead role of Oskar Schindler. Nothing he has done since has quite reached the heady heights of his break-taking performance as the Czech factory owner, who ends up penniless. The grainy camerawork gives an immediacy to the tragedy of brutal, casual slaughter of innocents. Kingsley, too, is tremendous as Stern, the crafty accountant; and would go on to better things, as would Fiennes as Goeth, the steely leader of Plaszow camp. Spielberg’s direction is masterful in bringing clarity to the incomprehensible darkness of the Holocaust unfolding bleakly in this black and white chronicle of wartime wickedness. Crucially, Schindler’s List brought the Holocaust to younger, mainstream audiences, many of whom would witness for the first time the grim fate of victimised Jews, and would be shocked to the core, Janusz Kaminski’s images seared to the memory. MT

SCHINDLER’S LIST 25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION | NOW OUT FOR THE FIRST TIME ON 4K ULTRA HD, BLURAY AND DVD | 25 FEBRUARY 2019 | includes bonus features.

The Aftermath (2018) ****

Dir: James Kent | Cast: Keira Knightley, Jason Clarke, Alexander Skarsgård | UK Drama 108′

Best known for his coming-of-age love story Testament Of Youth James Kent offers another ravishingly stylish tale of love that explores tangled emotions of guilt, lust and pride in a post war ménage à trois. In an elegant Belle Epoque villa in the environs of bombed-out Hamburg in 1945, Keira Knightley, Alexander Skarsgård, and Jason Clarke come together as unexpected bedfellows. And Clark is surprisingly the most romantic of a trio dealing with the complexities of loss, both of the people and the places they hold dear. Adapted for the screen by Anna Waterhouse and Joe Shrapnel from Rhidian Brook’s novel, one of the strongest elements of The Aftermath is its rounded critical gaze on both the Germans and British characters who emerge initially as an unlikeable bunch, but grow more appealing as we appreciate the tragedy that has touched them all, in different ways. And this lush characterisation is also one of the most engrossing aspects of the film, along with its immaculate period detailing, the visual glamour coruscating amid the dour deprivation and devastation of war and human brutality.

Keira Knightley plays Rachael the spiky and staunchly anti-German wife of war-weary Colonel Lewis Morgan (Clarke) and they meet again as she steps off the train in the opening scene. Not having seen him for years and not particularly excited to be re-united: they share the loss of their only son killed in a bomb blast in London, and Lewis clearly holds her responsible. Not consoled at the prospect of living in a luxuriously appointed mansion full of Avantgarde artworks and Art Deco objets, she greets the buff former owner, architect Stephan Lubert (Skarsgård), with barely concealed disdain. They are to share his family’s opulent residence, and Lewis graciously offers him the attic whence he retires with his little daughter, Frieda (Flora Thiemann). Frosty exchanges and flare-ups are to follow. Both Knightley and Skarsgård’s characters are sexually frustrated and when Col. Lewis is called away for a few days, they fall into each other arms to enjoy a lustful but unconvincing encounter between the sheets. It’s understandable: Lubert has lost his wife and Rachael is continually donning sexy underwear (and one of her girlish grimaces) only to be rebuffed by her husband’s need to attend to his duties, which include cross-examining prisoners or war. One of these is (Albert) who feels a particular resentment to the occupying forces and Lewis himself, and this hatred provides the key to a satisfying narrative twist in the final stages. Colonel Morgan is up to his neck in negotiations with the German resistance Nazi ‘88’ movement, without much support from his bibulous, unpleasant sidekick Major (Martin Compston) who is typical of the kind who inhabits these situations, along with his prissy wife (Kate Phillips) who will soon pick up on Knightley’s frisky new demeanour and follie à deux. Meanwhile, Albert (Jannick Schumann) has also become close to Lubert’s difficult, dark horse of a daughter who steals Lewis’s treasured cigarette case bearing a photo of his son, and offers it to Albert as a keepsake.

The Aftermath gradually builds to a tumultuous and convincing final act where we really start to care about the characters and their future. Jason Clarke is the eponymous alpha male who emerges victoriously, through integrity and commitment, to bear a heart of gold. Skarsgård provides solid eye candy as the loving father and soul mate manqué, and Keira is just as she always is, gracefully distant. MT

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE 1 MARCH 2019

The Hole in the Ground (2018) **

Dir: Lee Cronin | Writer: Lee Cronin, Stephen Shields | Cast: Kati Outinen, Seana Kerslake, James Quinn Markey | Horror, 90′ Ireland

The fabulous Finnish actor Kati Outinen lends her screen presence to this rather threadbare thriller about mother and son’s search for a fresh start in life.

A Hole in the Ground certain looks atmospheric but Lee Cronin and his scripter’s slim storyline makes it feel more like an extended short than a full blown horror feature, A more imaginative narrative would have lend this the life blood to wake up and scare us senseless, but not even Kati and an able can re-animate this tired corpse with not enough meat on its bones, so we have to contend with the usual clichés, a hackneyed score and jump scares that have been round the block too many times before.

Mother Sarah (Kerslake) and her son Chris (Marley) fetch up in a village but fail to heed a strange woman’s warnings of doom and gloom. When things go bump in the night, Chris runs off to hide in the titular hole in the woods, but that’s not the only void. Sarah is told that “her child does not belong to her”, and soon finds out this is true. She fights to get her son back – we don’t know where from exactly, but all’s well that ends well (apart from the feature). MT

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM 1 MARCH 2019

 

Starring Barbara Stanwyck | Retrospective | BFI 2019 | February – March

The STARRING BARBARA STANWYCK season offers a chance to see one of Hollywood’s most successful and memorable actors of all time, whose career spanned more than four decades. The season will include an extended run of Preston Sturges’ hilarious comedy The Lady Eve (1941), also released in selected cinemas by the BFI on Friday 15 February. During March, the season will highlight the breadth and depth of Stanwyck’s characters, whether in classics or in less familiar, rarely screened titles.

Diva, grande dame and femme fatale, Stanwyck adapted to any genre, be it comedy, melodrama or thriller. Her natural wit and raw emotion was particularly resonant in her Westerns, where she played  resourceful, confident women holding their own in a male-dominated world. The BFI are screening 3 examples in March. Her first western Annie Oakley (George Stevens, 1935) was based on the life of ‘Little Miss Sureshot,’ one of the most famous sharpshooters in American history; Stanwyck oozes confidence in her portrayal of the determined and spirited protagonist. Cecil B. DeMille brought a characteristically epic sense of scale to the western with Union Pacific (1939), about the construction of the First Transcontinental Railroad. Mixed in with the historical elements is a love triangle between a troubleshooter, a gambler, and a train engineer’s daughter played by Stanwyck. The director was mesmerised by her performance, and she became one of his favourite stars. In Forty Guns (Samuel Fuller, 1957), a late-career highlight for Stanwyck, she portrays a wealthy landowner exerting influence over an Arizonian township by commanding a staff of 40 men. Beautifully shot and packed with psychosexual subtext and directed with bravura, Samuel Fuller’s western influenced a generation of filmmakers, including Godard.

In the delightful screwball-mystery-romance The Mad Miss Manton (Leigh Jason, 1938), a scatty but canny heiress (Stanwyck), whose claims to have discovered a murder are dismissed by the police, enlists a working-class journalist to help prove her case. Ball of Fire (Howard Hawks, 1941), follows a nightclub dancer who needs to lie low, and a house shared by eight professors provides the ideal hideout. Inspired by the story of Snow White and boasting razor-sharp dialogue and perfect Hawksian comic timing, Ball of Fire is another classic screwball comedy. Written by a master of screwball – Preston Sturges – Remember the Night (Mitchell Leisen, 1940) sees a New York attorney (Fred MacMurray) take pity on a shoplifter he’s prosecuting. He gets her out on bail and invites her to his family home for Christmas – which somewhat complicates their relationship. There is genuine chemistry between Stanwyck and MacMurray in their first film together, an amusing and affecting blend of courtroom drama, road movie and romance. The pair reunited for another tale of adulterous temptation There’s Always Tomorrow (Douglas Sirk, 1955); he’s a toy manufacturer feeling neglected by his family, and she is the ex-employee whose return to Pasadena reignites illicit passions. Forbidden (Frank Capra, 1932) sees her playing a librarian falling for an unobtainable man.

Barbara Stanwyck, Adolphe Menjou, Ralph Bellamy, Dorothy Peterson

Two more Frank Capra films will screen in March – in The Miracle Woman (1931) Stanwyck plays a minister’s daughter who, following the death of her father,  teams up with a conman to stage evangelical shows in which she performs ‘miracles’. Meanwhile Meet John Doe (1941) sees her play a journalist who invents a story about a tramp planning to commit suicide in protest of the state of the world. The resulting interest forces her paper to get someone to fit the role and the man they find (Gary Cooper) instantly becomes a celebrity – and a political pawn. Completing the season will be screenings of Sorry, Wrong Number (Anatole Litvak, 1948), a noir thriller adapted by Lucille Fletcher from her acclaimed radio play, focusing on a wealthy, rather complacent, bedridden woman who overhears a conversation involving a planned murder. (All images are strictly the property of the BFI, and not to be copied)

SCREENING AT THE BFI, SOUTHBANK | FEBRUARY – MARCH 2019 | BFI WEBSITE

Oscar Foreign Language Academy Awards 2019

Nine films were on the short list for the coveted Academy Awards Foreign Language title at the end of last year: Some are well known (COLD WAR, CAPERNAUM, SHOPLIFTERS) but AYKA comes from a country where there is hardly any structure let alone financing available for filmmakers, so Kazakhstan’s entry should be particularly applauded.

Denmark: The Guilty (Gustav Möller)

Möller’s feature debut premiered at Sundance in January 2018, winning the audience award in the world cinema dramatic competition. The entire film takes place in the claustrophobic confines of a Copenhagen emergency services station, where a former police officer (Jakob Cedergren) has to deal with gruelling telephone calls from a kidnapped woman.

Germany: Never Look Away (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck)

von Donnersmarck is very well thought of in German cinema circles and has a previously won in the category back in 2007 for his Cold War spy thriller The Lives Of Others. His latest sees an art student involved in a difficult situation at his college. We reviewed the film at Venice where it premiered in August 2018.

Poland: Cold War (Pawel Pawlikowski)

Pawlikowski’s film opened in Cannes Competition in 2018 and won him a best director prize. Searingly beautiful, it chronicles a love story between two people from different walks of life, set against the backdrop of the Cold War in the 1950s in various cities in Europe. Pawlikowski has previously won this award back in 2015 for his war-themed drama Ida – but his multi-faceted films have been arthouse staples since he started out in the 1980s with his TV fare (Open Space and From Moscow to Pietuschki in 1990), his first feature was The Stringer (1998).

Colombia: Birds Of Passage (Cristina Gallego, Ciro Guerra)

An arthouse title that explores the narco-trafficking industry and its profound effects on Columbian society. Gallego and Guerra’s film opened Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes in 2018 but their breakout success was with Embrace Of The Serpent (with Guerra directing, Gallego producing).

Mexico: ROMA (Alfonso Cuarón)

WINNER ACADEMY AWARDS 2019

Cuarón’s latest is a semi-autobiographical take on his own Mexico City upbringing, focusing on a middle-class family and their live-in housekeeper. With so many interesting stories coming out of Mexico, this is Cuarón’s first nomination in the category, although he has been nominated for six Oscars previously, winning best director and best editing for Gravity in 2014.

Japan: Shoplifters (Hirokazu Kore-eda)

Kore-eda’s cheeky story of a family living on on its uppers won the Palme d’Or in 2018.

Kazakhstan: Ayka (Sergey Dvortsevoy)

Living in abject poverty in Moscow, a young Kyrgyz woman tries to survive after abandoning her newborn, to return to her job. It premiered in the official Competition at Cannes in 2018.

Lebanon: Capernaüm (Nadine Labaki)

After her lively social drama Caramel, Labaki’s Cannes 2018 Competition entry is a more heavyweight but enjoyable story for its humanity and insight. Shot on the streets of Beirut using non-professional actors, the story follows the fate of a precocious but endearing 12 year-old boy who takes his parents to court.

South Korea: Burning (Lee Chang-dong)

Lee’s Cannes Competition title was the favourite amongst the critics at Cannes last year. It’s a psychological thriller but also a subtle love story based on Haruki Murakami’s short story Barn Burning.

THE AWARDS TOOK PLACE in Los Angeles on 24 February 2019 

Sauvage (2018) ***

Dir.: Camille Vidal-Naquet; Cast: Felix Maritaud, Eric Bernard, Marie Seux, Philippe Ohrel; France 2018, 99 min.

Felix Maritaud blazes through this stunning sortie into the life of young rent boys in Strasbourg, focusing on their aimless, dangerous and lonely lives. The harsh psychological realism is complimented by explicit sexual encounters, which often border on the abusive.

He plays Leo a rent boy in his early twenty who lives purely for the moment, using drugs, clients, petty crime and lots of day-dreaming to get through each day. That changes when he meets Ahd (Reinard), a fellow male prostitute and falls in love with him. Leo is not worried that Ahd is actually looking for a ‘sugar-daddy’ long term, and asks Leo to do the same: “That’s the best that can happen to us”. But Leo is stubborn, chasing Ahd down and endangering his relationship with an older man. After being sexually assaulted by two others who cheat him out of his money to boot, Ahd does Leo a last favour, beating up one of them and stealing his money, which he shares with Leo. But all the stress has taken its toll on Leo’s health, and a female physician (Seux), one of the few women in the feature, consoles him with maternal affection. This scene stands out in contrast to the film’s opener, when Leo is examined by a ‘doctor’, who turns out to be a client working for the IRS, who enjoys the role play. After Ahd has left for Benidorm with his lover, Leo finally follows his advice- after a particularly brutal (off-screen) encounter with a client known for his sadistic tendencies. His middle-class ‘protector’ Claude (Ohrel) wants to take him to Montreal for a new start in life – but does Leo really wants to be saved?

Leo shows all the symptoms of emotional regression due to neglect: he is a doleful child looking for love in all the wrong places, because society has marginalised him. Sauvage is not just about sex: it also shows the tenderness in a gay relationship, particularly when Leo goes with a man old enough to be his father: Leo cuddles him, both men getting more out of the encounter than penetration alone would have provided. But Leo is already a very fragmented character: he spends hours alone in the woods near the male gang’s pick-up place, and then over-compensates with hectic behaviour at parties and in dance clubs. His day dreams of emotional security are shattered in reality – and he has himself to blame. Solitude is his way back into childhood, while his waking hours are a nightmare of humiliation and deception. Leo doesn’t know how to connect these two selves, and the lack of concurrent identity makes him alien to himself.

SAUVAGE is an impressive first feature for writer and director Camille Vidal-Naquet. DoP Jacques Girault contrasts Leo’s dual existence with nightmarish images of the time spent with his clients, the aimless wandering in the streets, and the haven of tranquillity in the sunny woods. Vidal-Naquet is always non-judgemental, avoiding sentimentality at all costs. The result is a rather melancholic walk on the wild side. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 1 MARCH 2019 NATIONWIDE

Hannah (2017)

Dir: Andrea Pallaoro | Cast: Charlotte Rampling, Andre Wilms, Jean-Michel Balthazar, Luca Avallone | Drama | Italy | 95′

Charlotte Rampling gives an extraordinary performance in this intimate portrait of a woman coming to terms with her loss of identity after her husband (Andre Wilms) is sent to imprison for a crime that has caused the breakdown of her family.

Andrea Pallaoro’s sophomore feature keeps us wondering what has happened to cause such emotional devastation all round. Hannah battles to face an uncertain future late in life and at a time where she feels unable to bounce back with the positivity of youth, and has lost her former place in society. Soul-searching her way forward from a past that is ambiguous and unresolved. The status quo has been devastated, and we are intrigued to discover the image portrayed in the photographs she is seen destroying.

Her marriage is clearly over, and her son will no longer speak to her due to circumstances beyond her control after events she had noting to do with, and she has also lost her connection with grandson Charlie (Savinin), who is told not to speak to her in a devastating scene where she brings him a homemade cake for his birthday party. Unable to cope she  dissolves in floods of tears. Later her swimming club membership is revoked without explanation. And she is left humiliated. She clearly knows the reason why.

Rampling carries the film through each slow-burning scene. Wandering aimlessly through streets in Brussels and along a beach in Knocke she is a picture of broken a life. And we feel for her. Shattered by  anguish and pitiful in her loneliness, Rampling makes the film both compelling and quietly devastating. In an effort to keep going and survive what has gone before, Hannah joins a self-help group practising the Alexander Technique, and keeps house for a woman whose own son appears to be blind. Despite this work, Hannah seems to be highly intelligent and full of graceful manners suggesting she has somehow come down in the world, from a well-to-do household. Her son is well-spoken and her own behaviour suggests good breeding.

Clearly Pallaoro had something in mind along the lines of Chantal Ackerman’s Jeanne Dielman. Hannah’s emotional fragmentation leads to her to a (symbolic) meeting with a beached whale on the beach at Knokke Heist – showing a helplessness on Pallaoro’s part, which cannot be overcome by Chayse Irvin’s stylishly cold and forbidding visuals. They show a wintry landscape, forlornly mirroring Hannah’s state of mind. MT

Andrea Pallaoro was born in Trento, Italy. He received his BA from Hampshire College before going on to study film directing at the California Institute of the Arts. His credits as director include the short Wunderkrammer (08) and the feature Medeas(13). Hannah (17) is his latest film.

NOW ON RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE VENUES | premiered at VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2017

Foxtrot (2017) ****

Dir: Samuel Maoz |Drama | Israel, Germany, France, Switzerland / 113’ | cast: Lior Ashkenazi, Sarah Adler, Yonatan Shiray

A grieving father experiences the absurd circumstances around the death of his son, in this latest critical reflection on military culture from Israeli filmmaker Samuel Maoz (Lebanon). Foxtrot is a story of bereavement and denial of guilt, played against the background of a middle-class Jewish family in Tel-Aviv.
Michael Feldman (Ashkenazi) and his wife Dafne (Adler) live in a spacious, expensively decorated apartment in the midst of the capital. When they learn of the death of their soldier son Jonathan (Shiray), Dafne faints, whilst her husband is cold and aggressive, even kicking the family dog, who wants to console him. When it later transpires that Jonathan is alive after all, Michael still behaves like a psychotic, showing no relief that his son is coming home. He insults his wife, daughter, brother and army officers, and insists on seeing his son again. With the help of a general, Jonathan is whisked away from a road block where he and three others soldiers has just shot four innocent Palestinians in their car; the young soldiers mistaking an empty beer can for a grenade.
The general who orders Jonathan’s release is also in charge of the “cleaning-up” operation: the Palestinian car is literally buried by a bulldozer: Jonathan’s final sketch, which ends up on the wall of his parent’s apartment, shows the operation. Later his mother will interpret the drawing as herself (the car) being swept away by her bulldozing husband. Which, in a way is true, since Michael is hiding a terrible secret from his family: when he was an officer in the army, he was guilty of causing the death of many of his men, causing him to remain emotionally detached from his family, and letting his frustration out on Max, the dog, who suffers from internal bleeding from his master’s frequent kickimg. But Michael is not able or willing to come clean – only a late and tragic twist will allow him him to confess his guilty secret to his wife.
The Feldman’s are representative of many Israeli families in a country at war for nearly 70 years. “This is war, and shit happens in war” says the general to the soldiers after the incident. Moaz captures the absurdity of this permanent conflict in amusing scenes at the roadblock, mixing phantasy with reality, and contrasting the hell of war, with the Feldman’s  sombre family dwelling: both existing in a parallel universe that has seemingly nothing in common. But it is the denial of emotional connection to those at home that forces Israeli soldiers to keep on killing and being killed. This schizophrenic situation has gone on for so long that it is seen as the new normal. Foxtrot is a passionate appeal to a whole country, to put an end to the situation. Samuel Maoz’s debut feature, Lebanon (which won the Golden Lion at the 2009 Venice Film Festival), was set during the 1982 Lebanon War, and shot almost entirely inside of a tank. Foxtrot, his second feature, steps away from that fevered claustrophobia to tell another maddening story of war and conflict, but this one on a much broader canvas. AS

NOW ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE

Cinema Made in Italy 2019 |

CINEMA MADE IN ITALY is back in London to kick off the Spring with the latest crop of Italian films. The 9th edition takes place at Cine Lumiere and is supported by Istituto Luce Cinecitta and the Italian Cultural Institute.

LORO ****

Director: Paolo Sorrentino Cast: Toni Servillo, Elena Sofia Ricci, Riccardo Scamarcio, Kasia Smutniak, Euridice Axen, Fabrizio Bentivoglio, Roberto De Francesco, Dario Cantarelli, Anna Bonaiuto | 150′

Paolo Sorrentino’s savage political satire is a powerful portrait of controversial Italian public figure Silvio Berlusconi and his inner circle. | UK release date: 19 April 2019

EUFORIA ***

Director: Valeria Golino | Cast: Riccardo Scamarcio, Valerio Mastandrea, Isabella Ferrari, Valentina Cervi, Jasmine Trinca, Francesco Borgese, Francesco Pellegrino, Andrea Germani, Marzia Ubaldi | 120′

Valeria Golino’s second film as a director explores brotherly love through two very different siblings. It stars her on/off partner Riccardo Scamarcio as one of two brothers brought together through adversity when one falls dangerously ill. Matteo is a man of means in central Rome, Ettore is a primary teacher in their provincial hometown. Beautifully photographed in the eternal city, Euforia ultimate predictability is rescued by the strength of its dynamic performances.

RICORDI? ***

Director: Valerio Mieli | Cast: Luca Marinelli, Linda Caridi, Giovanni Anzaldo, Camilla Diana, Anna Manuelli, Eliana Bosi, David Brandon, Benedetta Cimatti, Andrea Pennacchi, 106′

After success with her debut Ten Winters this touching love story explores the ups and downs of this emotional journey for two young lovers Luca Marinelli and Linda Caridi.

LUCIA’S GRACE (Troppa Grazia) ***

Director: Gianni Zanasi | Cast: Alba Rohrwacher, Elio Germano, Hadas Yaron, Giuseppe Battiston, Carlotta Natoli, Thomas Trabacchi, Daniele De Angelis, Rosa Vannucci, Elisa Di Eusanio, Davide Strava | 110′ 

Alba Rohrwacher blazes through this upbeat ecumenical drama that sees single working mother Lucia juggling her life between motherhood, an emotionally exhausting romance, and her work as a land surveyor. When she discovers that an ambitious new building project will have devastating effects on the locale, she debates whether to challenge the project when up pops a mysterious woman, claiming to be the Madonna and offering to support Lucia in flagging up her concerns, and suggesting the construction of a church as an alternative. This whimsical affair offers cheap laughs as an alternative to trusting its strong psychological elements, but Vladan Radovic’s lively camerawork and a strong cast carry it through in the end.   

THE GUEST (L’Ospite) ****

Director: Duccio Chiarini | Cast: Daniele Parisi, Silvia D’Amico, Anna Bellato, Federica Victoria Caiozzo aka Thony, Milvia Marigliano, Daniele Natali, Guglielmo Favilli : 96′

Sofa-surfing is the theme of this coming of age drama about the ups and downs of modern day love and commitment phobia. Guido (Daniele Parisi) is a 38-year-old academic who is writing a pot-boiler on Italo Calvino. But his girlfriend girlfriend (Silvia D’Amico) is having none of it, and puts an end to their flagging relationship forcing him to out of his cosy existence to face some uncomfortable truths through the experiences of lodging with his friends and family. Insightful and enjoyable  .

THE MAN WHO BOUGHT THE MOON ( L’Uomo che compró la Luna) ***

Director: Paolo Zucca |Cast: Jacopo Cullin, Stefano Fresi, Francesco Pannofino, Benito Urgu, Lazar Ristovski, Angela Molina |  103′

This off the wall spy-themed buddy movie from Sardinia stars Jacopo Cullin as a secret agent tasked with investigating a claim that one of his compatriots has bought the Moon as a gift for his girlfriend. Teaming up with his fellow Sardinian Badore (Benito Ugo) the pair set off to infiltrate the Sardinian community and investigate the ludicrous idea in a surefire but engagingly silly caper.

WHEREVER YOU ARE (Ovunque Proteggemi) ***

Director: Bonifacio Angius |Cast: Alessandro Gazale, Francesca Niedda, Antonio Angius, Anna Ferruzzo, Gavino Ruda, Mario Olivieri | 94′

Bonifacio Angius won the Junior Jury Award at Locarno for Perfidia (2014) and returns with this impressively perceptive drama about a middle-aged ‘mammalone’ with a drinking problem. Burning a hole in his mother’s pocket with his failed singing career, he has a mental breakdown and is taken to hospital, where he meets Francesca (Francesca Niedda), a young mother with drug issues. The two fall madly in love and set off on an eventful odyssey to redeem each other by reclaiming Francesca’s daughter who has been taken in to care. 

NOTTI MAGICHE ****

Director: Paolo Virzì |Cast: Mauro Lamantia, Giovanni Toscano, Irene Vetere, Giancarlo Giannini, Eugenio Marinelli, Marina Rocco, Paolo Sassanelli, Roberto Herlitzka, Regina Orioli, Andrea Roncato, Giulio Scarpati, Simona Marchini, Annalisa Arena, Ornella Muti, Jalil Lespert, Paolo Bonacelli | 125 ‘minutes

Ornella Muti makes a welcome return in Paolo Virzi’s playfully affectionate black comedy that explores the mysterious drowning of a film producer in the River Tiber. The main suspects are three young aspiring scriptwriters, and their outlandishly spirited alibis form the basis of an entertaining exploration that takes us back to the golden years of Italian cinema and a moving and magical trip through the backstreet of Rome

THE CONFORMIST (Il Conformista) *****

Director: Bernardo Bertolucci | Cast: Jean-Louis Tritignant, Stefania Sandrelli, Gastone Moschin, Enzo Tarascio, Fosco Giachetti, José Quaglio, Yvonne Sanson | 118′

A wonderful chance to see this classic cult thriller adapted from a novel by Alberto Moravia. Set in 1938, it tells the story of an aristocratic would-be fascist who is sent to Paris to murder his former, anti-fascist philosophy tutor. Jean-Louis Tritignant is supremely sinister in the role of Marcello Clerici, whose demeanour is an eternal reminder of the banality of evil. It was an instant hit when it was released in 1970, and some say it is one of the most poetic and influential films ever made, beloved by film-makers the world over.

WE’LL BE YOUNG AND BEAUTIFUL (Saremo Giovani e Bellissimi) ***

Director: Letizia Lamartire | 92 minutes)

In the early 1990s, 18-year-old Isabella (Barbora Bobulova) was a pop star. Two decades later she’s still on the road singing the same old songs with her son Bruno (Piavani) on guitar. But nothing can last for ever and soon the ties that bind will also unravel in this bittersweet and often poignantly moving musical love story.

CINEMA MADE IN ITALY | LONDON 2019 | 26 FEBRUARY – 3 MARCH

 

Old Boys (2018) ****

Dir: Toby MacDonald. Wri: Luke Morris and Luke Ponte | UK, Sweden. 2017. 96mins | Alex Lawther, Denis Ménochet, Jonah Hauer-King, Pauline Etienne | 96′

Alex Lawther plays a game of emotional subterfuge in this gentle comic riff on Cyrano de Bergerac set in the rolling West Susssex downs where he is a gifted public school boy at Caldermount (actually Lancing College).

The feature debut from director Toby MacDonald sees sweet but scrawny scholarship pupil Amberson (Lawther) caught in a low-key love triangle between Agnes (Etienne) and the brawny but brainless Winch(Jonah Hauer-King); Both puplis have the hots for the only girl in this ‘boys own’ setting, where pubescent hormones are running wild, but looks – not personality – hold the key to success. Amberson is totally humiliated by his lowly position on the school’s pecking order. Creatively driven his schtick is doodling in pencil and his heroes are Kubrick and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (“love is not looking at each other, it’s looking in the same direction”).

There’s a whiff of familiarity with the subject matter that suggests from the early scenes of boarding school ‘absurdism’ that the filmmakers have been here before. And this ribbing humour and taut script will appeal to young and older audiences alike. Lawther holds court throughout with his particular ‘old head on young shoulders’ vulnerability. The twenty something star of Ten Things I Hate About You feels mature beyond his years, with his subtle knowing glances and emotional depth.

The boys endure endless bouts of brutal banter and physical privation in the spartan school surroundings. Sports are de rigueur: cricket, rugby and a game called ‘streamers’ which takes place in the nearby river. Brimming testosterone levels go into overdrive when Agnes arrives on the scene with her frustrated father Babinot, the new French master (Denis Ménochet in fine form). And Amberson, the butt of the ‘streamers’ contests, meets her head-on wearing a pair of sodden pyjamas.

Although the two form a tentative friendship, Agnes only has eyes for Winch, who can’t string two words together, let alone satisfy his pubescent urge to ask the girl out. So it falls to Amberson and his gift of the gab to broker a deal between the love-struck teens. He crafts a series of contemporary billets doux on cardboard placards, filming Winchester reciting these on a video recorder (it’s still the ’80s). This effort on his friend’s behalf gains Amberson instant brownie points with the most popular boy in the school, and his social capital instantly goes into the ascendent. Secretly ruing his vicarious romantic overtures, Amberson then takes a poignant back seat in the proceedings, while Winch woos the wilful French girl, with hilarious results.

There’s a lot to enjoy in this occasionally amusing and rather old-fashioned film with its echoes of Gregory’s Girl. The direction and editing could be tighter but it’s an impressive debut feature and carried peerlessly by Alex Lawther. MT

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM 22 FEBRUARY 2019

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Capernaum (2018)***

Dir: Nadine Labaki | Drama | 105’

Nadine Labaki sprung to fame with her delightfully upbeat debut Caramel, set around a women’s hair salon in Beirut Set. Here she casts non-professional actors in a politically themed fable that sees a child resorting to the strong arms of the law.

This multi-awarded Oscar hopeful has the same warm, stylish look as her previous two features but is a much more accomplished film that puts a watchable spin on dour social realism although it does not quite reach the heights of perfection as the script resorts to disingenuous pandering in the slack final section. Subject-wise we are back to Daniel Blake territory although this is a much better crafted film than the one that bagged Ken Loach the top  Cannes award several years ago and CAPERNAUM does not bludgeon the life out of your with its agitprop hammer. There are similarities too with Slumdog Millionaire in its upbeat fervour powered by cute and captivating performances from its newcomer children.

Labaki structures her film round a trial, although this is not a courtroom procedural and most of the action is set in the chaotic streets or in cramped interiors where 12 year old Zain (Zain Al Rafeea), who looks more like 8, is already serving a prison sentence for stabbing, is now suing his parents for bringing him into the world. One of several siblings, his parents never registered his birth. Despite cocky indignation and a bristling sense of entitlement to his rights, he is a likeable kid who lives with his parents Souad (Kawthar Al Haddad) and Selim (Fadi Kamel Youssef). Rather than school, he goes out to sell fruit juice in the market, where he also collects tramadol which the family grind into clothes-washing water which is then passed to Zain’s prison-serving elder brother. Although these circumstances are all quite startling to Western viewers, they are sadly run of the mill for millions all over the world. But medication here in the Lebanon seems to be free at the point of collection, a fact which is difficult to believe.

After his younger sister Sahar is sold in marriage by his parents. Zain runs away and comes across Rahil (Yordanos Shiferaw), an Ethiopian cleaner who is in Lebanon illegally. He offers to look after her toddler while she is at  work but she later disappears leaving the two to fend for themselves in what turns out to be quite an adventure.

This is a watchable drama with some endearing turns from the ensemble kiddy cast who conjure up an intoxicating chemistry considering their lack of experience. But the star of the piece is Rafeea as the cheekily adamant Zain, a tribute to kids everywhere who feel life has dealt them an unfair start, and who set out to put matters right. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE from 22 February | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | Jury Prize Winner 2018

 

Two for Joy (2018) ****

Dir: Tom Beard | Samantha Morton, Billie Piper, Daniel Mays, Badger Skelton | UK Drama | 89′

A family’s problems come to a head in Tom Beard’s chilly slice of seaside social realism that sees three kids confronting their inner demons on a caravan site. It’s a grim scenario: Samantha Morton’s Aisha is a mother dealing with the aftermath of her husband’s death and the prospect of having her children taken into care. Vi (Emilia Jones) the elder, suggests a few days holiday in their caravan where the younger, Troy (Badger Skelton), befriends another girl whose mother Lillah (Billie Piper) is also feeling pretty low. Luckily, Uncle Lias injects a cheerful note to the proceedings, but the clouds soon gather on the horizon.

Made on a shoestring budget but none the worse for it, this contemplative arthouse is a study of unalloyed misery and disorientation of the silent type – and this is what Morton does best. May and Piper provide compassionate support and the kids bring a maturity to their roles that does them proud. The English countryside in summer is bleak and dreary but delicately so: pastel seascapes, misty fields, clouds drift by in picture postcard Dorset. A small and compassionate gem MT

OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 25 February 2019

 

The Lady Eve (1941) *****

Dir: Preston Sturges | Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda, Eric Blore, Charles Coburn, Eugene Pallette, William Demarest | US Drama 94′

In one of Preston Sturges’ most enjoyable romantic dramas Barbara Stanwyck (1907—90) dusts down her comedy talents to play an opportunistic con woman with a chink of humanity still glinting in her steel-plated armour. As one of a trio of classy card sharks Jean embarks on a tantalising tease to snare the awkward heir to a brewery fortune, but falls for him along the way.

Henry Fonda is the dapper but rather dopey heir to millions, Charles Pike, whose life has been devoted to snakes until he gets ensnared by Stanwyck’s feminine charms on a cruise liner making its way back from South America. Disarmed by Charles’ gallant but rather clumsy charisma, Jean mends her ways in a performance that sees her as a crook, but also a seductress with a vulnerable streak into the bargain. Travelling with her father (Charles Harrington and his valet), Jean is suddenly aware that playing her cards right is more important now that ever, and her father advises her accordingly: “Don’t be vulgar, Jean. Let us be crooked, but never common.” But Henry Fonda plays the most redeeming characters in this delicious drama. He remains vulnerable and sincere throughout because, like all young men who are madly in love, he remains focused on the void in his heart that only Jean can fill.

Stanwyck is terrific in this screwball comedy romance where she is funny but also graceful and sardonic. After seducing Charles she then toys with his heart as the narrative unspools in  unexpected ways that add to the dramatic tension despite the modest running time. After boy meets girl and then loses her, boy then falls for another girl who is really the same one – when Jean poses as “Lady Eve Sidwich.” Here the film moves on from its seaborne setting to Charles’ family pile in the country where another crook in the shape of her “uncle” Sir Alfred McGlennan Keith (Eric Blore), agrees to accommodate Jean, allowing her to complete her seduction and her swindle. Meanwhile, Charles’ trusty bodyguard Muggsy (William Demarest) has already rumbled Jean’s game: ”It’s the same dame!”. But Charlie can’t – or won’t – believe him, and follows Jean in her trap, amid a series of pratfalls, like a faithful love-struck puppy..

Barbara Stanwyck (1907-90) was one of the most hard-working actresses of her era  (Golden Boy, Stella Dallas, Baby Face) but always wanted a comedy role and Preston Sturges (1898-1959) eventually gave it to her and she excels herself throughout. Fonda manages to be comical while exuding a strong masculine presence. And his looks and stature are elegantly showcased by Edith Head’s impeccable designs. The script, based on a story by Monkton Hoffe, is wittily adapted for the screen by Sturges and there are hilarious scenes especially during the country visit. As Peter Bogdanovich said himself “You can’t get a better romantic comedy than The Lady Eve”. MT

COMING TO THE BFI AND ARTHOUSE CINEMAS 15 FEBRUARY 2019

Farewell to the Night (2019) *** Berlinale 2019

Dir: André Techiné | Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Kacey Mottet Klein, Oulaya Amamra, Stephane Bak, Kamel Labroudi, Mohamed Djouhri, Amer Alwan, Jacques Nolot | Drama, French 91’ 

Catherine Deneuve always gives star quality to her films but she feels rather miscast here as a horse trainer and almond farmer who finds out her grandson has been radicalised. 

Farewell to the Night is rather a bland film that makes nothing of the incendiary dramatic potential of the jihadist plot line. Instead it plays down the affaire to focus on the beauty of the story’s rural surroundings in Techiné’s French Pyrénees birthplace where the almond blossoms are in full flower and a magical solar eclipse takes place in the opening scene. All this contrasts with the outrage of the homegrown jihadist movement and its protagonists Alex (Mottet Klein) and his childhood sweetheart Lila (Oulaya Amamra) who are also discovering first love. Clearly this is a film for all the family, and Techiné directs with a paternalistic eye. 

Alex’s radicalisation has already taken place when the film begins, so we feel little engagement with his character and the reasons for his becoming a jihadi, and this could have enriched the storyline, particularly if young people are the film’s intended audience. It’s worth noting that Both Alex and Lila have dysfunctional backgrounds. His mother died in an accident and he blames his father, who has moved to Guadaloupe with his new family. The trauma has affected his schooling in Toulouse but he comes across as a cocky and committed young man with a clear determination to make a future with Lila, and has converted to Islam to please her. Deneuve plays Muriel with a haughty stiffness and lack of conviction. She runs the farm and equestrian school with her North African business partner Youssef (Mohamed Djouhri), but feels more at ease in the company of a young Syrian ex-fighter (Kamel Labroudi as Fouad) who comes looking for work and, despite his criminal background, actually turns up trumps. Techiné and Lea Mysius co-script this father facile affair that once again highlights the director’s keenness for stories about French-Arab culture. And he adopts a non-judgemental and rather procedural approach to Alex and Lila’s plan to join forces with ISIS recruiter Bilal (Stephane Bak), to raise finance for their jihadist cause. This involves raising a substantial amount of cash for weapons and equipment, and Alex steals part of the money from Muriel. He claims that this is kosher as she is technically an infidel. But their plan will go awry in the rather tame finale. 

There’s a clunkiness to the film’s flow particularly noticeable in the lunch scene which abruptly cuts into a clandestine jihad meeting, where Alex sports white robes and takes orders from an Islamic preacher (Amer Alwan, who collaborated with Techine on the storyline), while Lila dons a hijab for the first time. Techine softens her character by giving her a job as a gentle carer in a nursing home – one of the most caring you’ll probably ever have occasion to meet. MT

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL | SPECIAL GALA 2019

Breve Historia del Planeta Verde (2019) *** Berlinale | Panorama 2019

Dir: Santiago Loza | Drama: Argentina, Brazil, Spain, Germany | 90′
Santiago Loza was born in Cordoba, Argentina in 1971 where his edgy, award-winning dramas such as La Paz, Lips and Strange go down well with the arthouse crowd. There’s a Lynchian quality to his latest, a stunningly surreal story that revolves around Trans woman Tania who discovers her favourite grandmother has died peacefully after spending her final years with an alien. With two friends in tow Tania sets off across rural Argentina to bring the creature back to its origin. But when they arrive at Granny’s home in the depths of a petrified forest, the reality is even more bizarre than expected. Powerful childhood memories come flooding back to Tania. And the alien being is not the only surprise they encounter.
There are echoes of Amat Escalante’s 2016 feature The Untamed and even cult classic ET to this thrilling road movie that also works as a lyrical horror mystery. We never know what to expect. And Loza achieves this sense of discombobulation and dislocation with a mixture of magic realism, slo-mo camerawork, photo montage and an eerie electronic and ambient score that wafts us into the unknown depths of the dark continent, blending the commonplace with the utterly absurd, strange and uplifting: literally and metaphorically. Loza’s unique cinematic language and delightfully delicate visual style make this an ethereal experience. MT
BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL | PANORAMA SECTION | 7 -17 FEBRUARY 2019

Out Stealing Horses (2019) *** Berlinale 2019

Dir/Wri: Hans Petter Moland | Cast: Stellan Skarsgard, Bjorn Floberg, Tobias Santelmann, Jon Ranes, Danica Curcic | Norway, Drama, 122′

Stellan Skarsgard has retired to the Norwegian woods after the death of his wife, when the past comes back to visit him in Hans Petter Moland’s overwrought but enjoyable coming of age drama that revolves around a circle of guilt.

Nature and breathtaking-taking landscapes dominate a tale that opens in the small cosy cabin where Trond spends his days reflecting on the past and the fragility of memory and loss. Leavened with gentle humour this complex and evocative story sashays back and forth from the 1940s until 1999, adapted from a novel by renowned Norwegian writer Per Pettersen.

Trond’s rural idyll soon ends when he comes across his neighbour Lars (Bjorn Floberg), and he  recognises him from his youth. In flashback the teenage Trond (Jon Ranes) is spending the summer with his timber merchant father (Tobias Santelmann) in another remote part of the woods. Trond also strikes up a friendship with a troubled boy called Jon (Sjur Vatne Brean) who feels responsible for the death of his young brother, killed in a freak accident the previous day. His adolescent curiosity provides the subtext for a sexual awakening that permeates this visually stunning film. And this comes to a head when he meets Jon’s mother (Danica Curcic) at the family funeral, and later at a local event. But his fantasies are interrupted when he discovers, to his chagrin, that his father is having a full blown affair with Jon’s mother, and has been since the two were in the resistance movement together. Another tragedy then takes place during a logging session on the river. Moving the freshly cut timber downstream to be sold in Sweden, Jon’s father is badly injured. From thereon the two men’s animosity towards each other seethes in a drama more interested in atmosphere and surroundings than in creating a dramatic and suspenseful storyline.

Trond is the only character whose arc feels developed and convincing. And Skarsgard and Ranes really flesh out his character in a meaningful way, both bringing a brooding  intensity to this thoughtful but troubled man. The scenes they inhabit are meaningful, the rest if just pretty pictures for over two hours. MT

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL 2019 | SILVER BEAR FOR OUTSTANDING ARTISTIC ACHIEVEMENT 2019

 

 

Buoyancy (2019) *** Berlinale 2019

Dir.: Rodd Rathjen; Cast: Sarm Heng, Thanawut Kasro, Mony Ros; Australia 2019, 94 min

Rodd Rathjen’s feature debut has a worthy but not always convincing narrative. A teenage boy from Cambodia tries to find work in Thailand, but ends up being one of 200,000 boys from South- East Asia to ‘contribute’ six billion $ for unpaid work in the fishing industry of Thailand. More often than not, they will never see their homeland again.

Fourteen year-old Chakra (Heng) slaves away in the rice fields with his father and brother Kravaan, who is being groomed as the heir. Chakra only wants to find a girl friend, but is rejected because of his low social status. Fed up with the whole set-up he finally snaps and travels with smugglers to Thailand.  There he will have to work a month for free, to pay for the cost of the transport. But on the ramshackle trawler, where the catch is substandard seafare (to be processed into dog food), Chakra soon find out this is a life sentence of hard work. One of his fellow workers tells Chakra they “they are already” dead. The ship’s captain, Rom Ron (Kasro) and his second in command punish the crew mercilessly for any disobedience, and bind them in chains, before throwing them into the sea. Chakra’s neighbour, who is losing his mind, is bound with ropes and thrown into the water, whilst the captain brutally manhandles Chakra at the so the propellers catch Kea. More tragedy will follow.

Rathjen keeps strictly to a one-to-one realism, and DoP Michael Latham catches the doomed atmosphere on the trailer in moody images. But somehow the ending undermines what has been said before, leaving the audience with a muted reaction. MT

BERLINALE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 7-17 FEBRUARY 2019

A Tale of Three Sisters (2019) *** Berlinale 2019

Wri/Dir: Emin Alper | Cast: Cemre Ebuzziya, Ece Yuksel, Helin Kandemir, Kayhan Acikgoz, Mufit Kayacan, Kubilay Tuncer, Hilmi Ozcelik, Basak Kivilcim Ertanoglu | Turkish, 108’

A tale of Three Sisters seems like a step backwards for Emin Alper who started his career with the outstanding psychodrama Beyond the Hill. Frenzy followed promisingly, an Istanbul set story of political turmoil.

This folkloric family fable sees him back in another rural part of Turkey, in an Anatolian mountainside village cut off from the modern world. Here three daughters are trying to escape to the capital Ankara, but are thwarted by their poor skillset and the domineering men in their lives.

Almost like a Grimm’s fairy tale the feature is imbued with a mythical quality tethered in old world customs and beliefs. There is even a village idiot who somersaults down the valley with a macabre grin – and teeth to match. But the lack of a gripping storyline sees the film rambling on for nearly two hours without a strong dramatic arc to keep us engaged.

Life goes on as it always has in this village unable to learn by its mistakes. The men drink coffee while the women look after the home. The eldest sister Reyhan (Cemre Ebuzziya) has just had a baby boy and is married to Veysal (Kayhan Acikgoz), a superstitious, embittered loser who we first meet tending his sheep on a cold winter’s night. He soon abandons the herd when confronted by two men looking to buy the fold. And his cowardly nature is the key to the second of the film’s minor tragedies unfolding in the underwhelming finale. Death, birth and illiteracy are the main setbacks for women in this patriarchal set up

Havva (Helin Kandemir), the youngest, and the middle sister Nurhan (Ece Yuksel) seem unable to be trusted with kids and have been dismissed from their care-giving jobs in Ankara by wealthy urbanite Mr Necati (Kubilay Tuncer) who controls everyone’s lot in the village. They have taken part in the Bessemer tradition whereby girls from poor families go to wealthier ones. But due to State changes these girls often never get away again and are abandoned forever in old world poverty. Their kindly widowed father, Sevket (Mufit Kayacan), is determined to find the girls other positions although they are semi-illiterate. 

Before going back to Ankara, Necati enjoys an hilltop raki picnic with Sevket and the village chief. But an unfortunate contretemps develops with Veysal ending in a punch up. Angered and resentful, the herder goes home where he also upsets Reyhan with tragic consequences.

Shot on the widescreen the magical mountain panoramas dominate along with the hostile terrain and climate. DoP Emre Erkmen works wonders with the glowing interiors where dramatic colours compliment the girls’ heightened emotions echoed in the lilting tunes of folk singers and a tremulous violin score. MT

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL 2019 | COMPETITION

Ghost Town Anthology (2019) **** Berlinale 2019 | Interview

Dir/Wri: Denis Côté | Fantasy Drama | Canada, 97′

Auteur Denis Côté explores the aftermath of tragedy in remotest Quebec where the supernatural coalesces with the everyday lives of a blighted rural community.

Well known for his off-piste forays into Canadian backwaters Ghost Town most reassembles his Locarno Golden Leopard winner Curling (2010). There are also tonal echoes of his debut Drifting States, and even Xavier Dolan’s Tom a la Ferme, which was visited by a similar existential angst. Cote bases his story on the novel by Laurence Olivier, who also co-wrote the script. Silence reigns throughout the film apart from an occasional droning sound which adds to the doleful sense of gloom.

Ghost Town Anthology is an unremittingly bleak affair scratching at the edges of horror but settling instead for a mournful mood throughout; its dysfunctional characters stuck in the icy grip of inertia. When Simon Dubé drives his car at full throttle into a wall of cement, the entire population clings together, while a vortex of wind and snow rages through their flatlands home of Irénee-les-Neiges, a place of 200 odd people.

And odd is the operative word. After the crash a handful of kids play around the wreckage, wearing masks reminiscent of Edvard Munch’s Scream. They are the recurring human motif throughout the film, their identity revealed in the finale. At the funeral chirpy mayor Diane Smallwood (Diane Lavallée) fronts up vehemently despite the mood of despair, determined to raise the morale of her townsfolk with a firm belief in allegiance. “my door is always open”. But in vain. Angered by an offer of bereavement support from the local council, she reacts with thinly veiled hostility when the Muslim therapist arrives in the shape of Yasmina (Sharon Ibgui).

Simon leaves behind a family of three: his mother Gisele (Josee Deschenes) and father Romuald (Jean-Michel Anctil) are numbed by the grief and gradually go their own separate ways, suffering in silence. Simon’s look-a-like brother Jimmy (Robert Naylor) is left in state of shock. A coy George and Mildred style couple – Louise (Jocelyne Zucco) and Richard (Normand Carriere) – offer tea and sympathy to timid live-alone single Adele (Shelley Duvall lookalike Larissa Corriveau) who Richard describes as “a few lightbulbs short of a chandelier”. But her fears seem valid enough: she heard thuds and whispering voices in their house, and ends up suspended by own disbelief. Pierre (Hubert Proulx) owns the village bar and wants to keep his partner happy by offering to do up a dilapidated house at the end of the street, until they discover it was the scene of a brutal murder years earlier. And soon the regular appearances of random figures in the gloaming seem to point to the existence of ghosts from the past. A handheld camera conveys the unstable nature of the experience, but also the ephemeral quality of life.

Jimmy actually sees Simon at close quarters by the ice hockey pitch. Yet he has visited his embalmed body in its temporary morgue, awaiting burial, come the thaw. Romuald picks up a hitchhiker who bears a striking resemblance to his son. Adele also sees one of the masked children surrounded by static figures in the distance. There’s nothing baleful or malevolent about these people, lending them further credibility in the scheme of things. And their low key presence seems to lend credence to the Christian belief that the dead are always amongst us. Despite the bleakness that’s a comforting takeaway. MT

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL 2019 | IN COMPETITION

 

 

 

 

God Exists, Her Name is Petrunya (2019) ** Berlinale 2019

Writ/Dir: Teona Strugar Mitevska | Drama, Macedonia 100

Teona Strugar Mitevska’s fifth feature sets off with an intriguing concept and title but gradually peters out unable to maintain its initial momentum. All the themes are worthy and in place: Petrunya is overweight, unmarried and still living at home with her parents in her late thirties. Her masters degree in history is no help to finding a proper job.

Petrunya is not short of gutsy self-belief , largely due to her indulgent father who always supports her. But her traditional mother wants her to marry, and even serves her breakfast in bed. The possibilities for romance seem thin on the ground in this rural backwater and her meeting with a young police office also fails to ignite. 

Virginie Saint-Martin captures the grim realities of modern life in the drab riverside location of Štip, to the south east of capital Skopje, where Orthodoxy dominates – along with the men of the village. When Petrunya secures an interview at a local factory the owner first makes a pass and then insults her when rejected. On her way home she dives into the river to retrieve a wooden cross that conveys luck when caught as part of the religious men-only ceremony. Petrunya then makes off with the cross and the ensuing ruckus plays out in a skimpy narrative that turns on the question of whether religion or law is more important in Macedonia.  But this debate quickly loses steam – and our patience – due to an underdeveloped script, making promising lead Zorica Nusheva’s role all the more difficult. MT

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL 2019

37 Seconds (2019) *** Berlinale 2019 | Panorama

Dir.: Hikari; Cast: Mei Kayama, Misuzu Kanno, Shunsuke Daito, Makiko Watanabe, Minori Hagiwara; Japan 2019, 115 min.

Award-winning short-filmmaker Hikari has directed, written and co-produced her first feature 37 Seconds, a passionate but sometimes cloying portrait of cerebral palsy sufferer Yuma. Confined most of the time to a wheelchair, she is at the mercy of an over-protective mother who is afraid of being left behind, should her daughter gain independence.

Yuma (Kayama) is a gifted Manga artist whose work is exploited by her cousin Sayaka (Hagiwara), passing Yuka’s drawings off as her own and paying her a pittance in return. Yuma’s mother Kyoko (Kanno) is only interested in keeping her daughter under her own control, giving her no room to develop. Yuka’s father is absent, we learn later, when Yuka is visiting her twin sister Yuka in Thailand, that Kyoko has burned his letters and drawings to Yuma. She rebels and sends her portfolio to another publishing house where she is advised by the female editor, to have a sexual experience first if she wants to draw her Manga adventures. Yuma sets off to the Red Light district of Tokyo, hiring a male prostitute to have sex with – an experiment which goes wrong. She then meets sex workers Mai (Watanabe) and Toshiko (Kumashino) who take care of her, the latter travelling with her to Thailand to meet Yuka. Although Kyoko has tried to cut Yuma off from everyone but Sayaka, she has gradually come to terms with her daughter being a successful, independent human being, despite her disability.

The acting is impressive, particularly Kayama (who in real life is a social worker for cerebral palsy sufferers), and Kanno, who excels in her portrait of an overbearing mother, interdependent with her daughter. DoPs Stephen Blahut and Tomoo Ezaki enlivens the film with some impressive panorama shots of Tokyo and the Thai countryside, and always finds new angles to show Yuma’s fight for independence. But Hikari’s script is often too simplistic and far-fetched in her portraits of the altruistic sex workers. 37 Seconds (the time Yuma failed to breathe after being born) suffers also from a self-indulgent running time, but the rosy-coloured happy ending would have made Hollywood proud. AS

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL 2019 | PANORAMA

   

   

Hellhole (2019) **** Berlinale 2019

Dir.: Bas Devos; Cast: Alba Rohrwacher, Willy Thomas, Hamza Belarbi, Lubna Azabal, Mieke de Grotte; Belgium/Netherlands 2019, 87 min.

Bas Devos is back with another hybrid feature, a vision of urban anxiety and alienation. The feature works as an installation where actors represent Brussels’ lost souls, very much like his 2014 Berlinale winner Violet. 

Inspired by the Brussels’ subway bombings of March 2016 Devos shows us a world out of synch. Often the images break down totally: we get a black screen. Other intervals include long shots of the skies. We watch young immigrants from the Middle East, at school and playing football. “Brussels is called the Jihadi capital of Europe. It would be better to bombard us”. One of the youngsters is Mehdi (Belarbi). He lives with his parents and two younger siblings on a council estate. His older black sheep of the family Ahmed Ahmed puts him in a no-win situation: stealing their grandmother’s jewellery, so he can pay his debts. Mehdi resists. Another bewildered soul Samira (Azabal) makes the only spoken statement of the entire feature the rest are elliptical images: “Violence for me used to be pixels on TV, now I can feel that I can touch it”.  

Meanwhile, Wannes is in a permanent state of angst, unable to get hold of his son Boris, a fighter pilot stationed in the Middle East. He tries to reach him via Skype, but the connection always breaks down. In the Mall, the brutalist architecture and cement walls close in on the shoppers creating a claustrophobic hell. Wannes has a sister, Els (de Grotte), whose husband is dying. The doctor alleviates his last hours of life. The siblings share an unspoken closeness. But closer still is his German Shepherd, who sleeps on his bed. 

Alba (Rohrwacher) is convincing as a vulnerable woman with an eating disorder. Working as a translator with the EU, she is having a break from her fiancée who lives in Rome. Alba picks up a one-night stand on a strobe-lighted dance floor, and sends him away after sex. She knows her fiancée will do the same. When she has faints at work, the fear of something sinister leads her to ask Wannes for advice, but is not convinced she has brain tumour. “The internet says so”. 

It turns out that Mehdi couldn’t find the jewellery – or at least that’s what he tells Ahmed in the Mall. He sits down depressed as two armed soldiers tell him to “keep his backpack close to his body”. At the end Wannes gets a long message from Boris explaining his job: “All images are stored and filed away. There is nothing more to it”. The camera circles a fight plane, like a commercial.

Hellhole unfurls in the city’s drab interiors. Often we get still photos – humans, seem secondary, mostly talking behind glass, in disjointed conversations. Breath-taking and original, Hellhole is like the portrait of a space station, run by aliens, as humans become more and more impersonal. AS

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL 2019

 

A Private War (2018) ****

Dir.: Matthew Heinemann; Cast: Rosamund Pike, Jamie Dornan, Tom Hollander, Stanley Tucci; UK/US 2018, 110 min.

As bio-pics go, Matthew Heinemann City of Ghosts) makes a decent stab at showing the ambivalence of his courageous real life heroine, this case American-born war correspondent Marie Colvin (1956-2012). Strangely enough, it’s not the war scenes that look artificial, but the scenes of Colvin’s private life that sometimes look downright clumsy. But Rosamund Pike’s brilliance as Colvin overshadows everything.

Bookended by scenes from Homs (Syria), where Colvin was targeted and killed by Syrian forces in 2012, just after giving a passionate report about the Assad’s Syrian genocide, Heinemann goes about the last twelve years in Colvin’s life with a parallel montage of her private and professional life. Having lost an eye covering the war between the Tamil Tigers and the Government in Sri Lanka in 2001, she returned to London to receive the Foreign Reporter of Year award for her work at The Sunday Times, whose editor Sean Ryan (Hollander) is featured thoughout the narrative as an personal friend. (The real Colvin was married twice to Patrick Bishop, and to war correspondent Juan Carlos Gummuccio, who killed himself). After discovering the mass graves of POWs from Kuwait in Iraq, meeting freelance photographer Paul Conroy (Dornan) and reporting from Marjah in Afghanistan, Colvin had a mental breakdown, and sought help for PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). A wealthy new lover (Tucci) offered her a way out, but she returns to work  with Paul and does one of the last interviews with Mohamed Gaddafi, whom she had met as a very young journalist, before her last assignment in Homs.

Based on the Vanity Fair article by Marie Brenner and written by Arash Amel, Private War shows Colvin as having an addictive personality: to alcohol (since the age of fifteen), nicotine and war, but not necessarily in that order. The recurring images of the horror she witnessed – one aspect of PTSD is that these images are not ‘stored’ in the part of the brain where normal memories reside, but have ‘intruded’ in the here and now – making everything worse. Colvin was afraid of growing old – perhaps even more than of dying young. She had an image of herself that she needed to defend and save at all cost. And wanted to filter out the horrors of war, for her readers. But she was also aware of the nature of these readers: a pampered Western audience, ready to cry and give donations, but then equally prepared to forget and return to the safety of their lives. Colvin suffered from these contradictions as much as she suffered from her own: she wanted to make a difference, but at times she could only function with the help of drugs and casual sex – “I always end up with the psychopaths”. But she was a noble warrior, and deserves to be remembered. Heinemann got it just right: A private War is not a monument, but a tribute. AS

NOW ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE from 16 February 2019

 

Monsters (2019) *** Berlinale | Forum 2019

Dir: Marius Olteanu | Drama, Romania

In a digitalised age of social media reality and perception drift further and further apart. In his feature debut Romanian writer-director Marius Olteanu challenges our perceptions by questioning the gap between who we really our and the persona we project onto others. It’s a fascinating and timely premise and one that Olteanu treats cinematically and quite inventively in this often claustrophobic drama that follows a married couple during 24 hours in the capital Bucharest. It also explores the clash between traditional social values in this predominantly Catholic country and individual needs, particularly sexual desires. And the increasing intolerance of minorities.

Dana and Arthur are a popular couple who have been together for almost 10 years. Yet individually they struggle with their inner demons and have few close friends. It’s almost as if they can only function by keeping up a strict facade of togetherness when what they really want is something quite different. And accepting this with tolerance and understanding might actually be a greater form of love than that defined by sexual expression.

Using the academy ratio and filming in intimate close-up, often from the confines of tight spaces, such as the taxi where Dana spends the night while Arthur wanders around the city and pursues various encounters, this is a drama that focuses closely on its lead characters and doesn’t let them get away from their own, often uncomfortable feelings of angst, frustration, ennui and even coiled paranoia. Structured in three parts: one focuses on Dana, one on Arthur and the third examines their joint dynamic. The first two parts play out on the same night, when the couple, avoid going home, preferring to spend the night in the company of strangers. Dana goes to the length of paying a taxi driver to stay with her in the car for the night, while Arthur wanders around the city and decides to meet a man through a dating app. However, the following day, as much as they have tried to avoid it, they must now face reality. There is a voyeurish quality to this arresting first feature that allows us space for our minds to wonder what is means to love and to be free to explore and find satisfaction, while quietly contemplating a couple in a crisis of their own in  contemporary Romania. MT

BERLINALE 2019 | Forum Section | 7-17 FEBRUARY 2019

A Colony | Une Colonie (2019)

Dir: Geneviève Dulude-De Celles | Cast: Émilie Bierre, Jacob Whiteduck-Lavoie, Robin Aubert, Irlande Côté, Noémie Godin-Vigneault, Cassandra Gosselin-Pelletier

Life isn’t easy, as two sisters soon find out in this impressionistic French Canadian coming-of-age drama about teenage angst and sibling rivalry in the outskirts of Quebec. The film also deftly raises the more provocative profile of Canada’s colonial past, without making a meal of it.

It all begins when the youngest girl Camille (Irlande Côté) sees a chicken being pecked to death in the field behind the family’s new home. She is visibly upset by the animal’s suffering, but rather than offering sympathy and support, her new school friends mock and taunt her for her sensitivity towards animals. Later, her older sister Mylia (Émilie Bierre) explains it away as ‘the law of the jungle’. And this metaphor plays out as the delicately drawn story unfolds.

Ironically Mylia emerges as the more introspective of the two girls, discovering boys in her new school and experimenting with clothes and make-up. Looking a bit like a teenage Dakota Johnson, Bierre is convincing as the diffident teen who strikes up a rapport with a slightly older school friend Jacinthe (Cassandra Gosselin-Pelletier) — who encourages her to push the boundaries with alcohol and boyfriends. But Mylia’s not quite ready for all this and finds her thrills in other directions. Soon she meets Jimmy (Jacob Whiteduck-Lavoie), a thoughtful and creative boy who lives with his grandmother in a local Indigenous community, and through whose character the director touches on Canada’s Euro-centric view of history in a feisty classroom encounter.

With remarkable performances from its young cast, particularly the two sisters, Une Colonie doesn’t try to find easy or schematic ways of portraying growing up, and shows that teenage fun doesn’t have to rely on rampant sex and drugs, especially when home life is unsettled and bewildering. Instead, she offers a poetic riff on so-called ‘rainbow parties’, classroom antics,  and amorous encounters, showing how girls really think, talk and interact at this adolescent time of life. And there are some genuinely moving scenes throughout this cinema vérité gem. An easy-going score of contempo beats and some glowing camerawork completes this teen arthouse package which is suitable for audiences of 13 upwards.

NOW ON BERLINALE GENERATION 2019 PREMIERE

Hormigas (2019) **** Berlinale 2019 | Forum

THE AWAKENING OF THE ANTS (EL DESPERTAR DE LAS HORMIGAS)

Dir.: Antonella Sudasassi Furnis; Cast: Daniela Valenciano, Leynar Gomez, Isabella Moscoso, Avril Alpizar, Kyrsia Rodriguez, Carolina Fernandez; Costa Rica 2018, 94 min.

Antonella Sudasassi Furnis has embellished her short film El Despertar de las Hormigas exploring the gradual emancipation of a seamstress who lives with her blokeish husband and two daughters in small town Costa Rica where the family is everything.

There’s pressure on all sides for Isabel (Valenciano) to have a third child – husband Alcides (Gomez) and his domineering mother talk of nothing else at a family gathering. But Isabel has enough on her plate: daughters Valerie (Moscoso) and Nicole (Alpizar) are demanding, and since Alcides is not much help, Isabel has to cater single-handedly for their needs. Then there is granny, who takes off with children one day, without letting Isabel know. She is livid, but Alcides sides with his mother: she only means well and wants to help. Still under the maternal cosh, Alcides is not a great provider: his casual work doesn’t  feed the family, and only Isabel’s skills with the sewing machine makes it possible for them to survive. Nevertheless, Alcides wants a son (sic!) and dreams about building a house for them all, despite not enough enough for the bare essentials. He life revolves around a macho group of men: when Isabel watches him playing football with relatives at another family event, she might as well be watching her own son. Best friend and client Mireya (Fernandez) is on the pill, because her doctor told her it would sort out her gynaecological problems. So Isabela follows suit, without telling Alcides. After a vivid dream where she runs her own business, she decides to make some changes.

Most interesting here are the family dynamics: and it’s the other women who are constantly on at Isabel to Isabel is procreate. Women are socially competitive, and vying with each other for children and wealth. But the couple’s sex life is dire: Isabel prefers to masturbate whilst her husband sleeps next to her, and when she is having sex with him, she looks at the ceiling, waiting for him to finish. Her great love – for the moment – is dealing with fabrics and designs, hoping to one day run her own shop.

DoP Andres Campos lets the camera follow Isabel every step, she is at the centre of every colourful scene, the panning shots capturing her very basis surroundings and transforming them into something special, a she dreams about her future. This might be a simple story, but the director has created a passionate and intense portrait of a young woman trying to break away from a suffocating family life. AS

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL 7-17 FEBRUARY 2019

The Golden Glove (2019)

Dir: Fatih Akin | Drama | Germany, 2019 | 102’

There are brief echoes of Reiner Werner Fassbinder’s Fear Eats the Soul in the opening scene of The Golden Glove. This schlocky sortie into the squalid life of a serial killer also brings to mind Ulli Lommel’s cult thriller The Tenderness of Wolves. But that’s where the comparison ends. These films offered another string to their bow. Akin’s thriller just revels in its own ghastliness, descending into a desolate world of bars and pick-up joints where in 1970s West Germany, Fritz Honka was a voracious sexual predator, butchering his victims at will.

Chilling it is not, nor remotely terrifying. The true story plays out as a pointlessly gory procedural recording each death with sensationalist fervour. Blood, gore, body parts and disgusting lavatories – you’ll laugh and shake your head at the mindless depravity of it all. 

Rather than explore the psychological profile of this demon, Akin just pictures the gruesome daily grind of Fritz Honka, a Hamburg psychopath who kept dismembered body parts of prostitutes in his attic flat in the red light district of St Pauli. When visitors complained about the smell, Honka blamed his Greek Gästarbeiter family that lived downstairs “and didn’t work”. There’s no attempt to humanise the murderer or to probe his inner life or backstory. Honka remains a cypher from beginning to end.

This is a film that doesn’t serve anyone – least of all its victims. It takes a swipe at racism and ageism but forgets to condemn misogyny. But as the credits roll, the films suddenly turns sentimental offering up poignant portraits of the real women who died – as if suddenly coming to its senses in a bid to do the right thing. We go home without understanding or clarification. A tawdry tribute to those who died.@MeredithTaylor

NOW ON MUBI

 

The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea (2019) *** Berlinale 2019

Dir: Syllas Tzoumerkas | Cast: Angeliki Papoulia, Youda Boudali, Hristos Passalis, Argyris Xafis | Drama | Greec | 120′

There is a sisterhood in Greece, according to Tzoumerkas. This hysterically overwrought melodrama takes place in a swampy eel-farming backwater in the west of Greece, where two woman live out their own personal trauma. Elisabeth is an alcoholic single-parent police chief, Rita (co-writer Boudali) is the subdued soul sister of a local ‘rock star’. They are brought together after the tragic death of a lounge singer. Worn out and world-weary Elisabeth is neverless as sharp as a nail. Drinking heavily she smokes like a chimney throughout this lagubrious eel-themed affair.

Rita’s bullying brother Manolis (Hristos Passalis) is a slippery eel of another kind. He runs a nightclub where he uses her as a hostess to deal drugs through his establishment. Close to his mother he is also a pampered narcissist with dreams of international stardom. But his mistake is also to mock Mesalonghi in a song he sings at the club one night.

And it all ends in tears on the beach in the small hours. But not before bizarre bacchanalian orgies involving drugs, drinks and multiple orgasms enjoyed by Manolis and his friends. Rita is sadly drawn into this dysfunctional debacle and somehow Elisabeth tunes into her pain and decides to help her in the intense finale. Heavy stuff. MT

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL | 7-17 FEBRUARY 2019

Acid (Kislota) (2019) **** Berlinale 2019 | Panorama

Dir: Aleksandr Gorchilin | Drama: Russia 97′

Russian actor turned director Aleksandr Gorchilin (The Student) steps behind the camera for this boldly cinematic and uncompromising look at contemporary Russia through the eyes of a group of friends in the capital, Moscow.

Don’t be misled by the title being a reference to the drug-infused times of the last century. The Acid of the title refers the corrosive liquid used by one of the group in his art sculpting studio. By way of experimentation, one of them idly decides to take a gulp of the substance  and ends up in hospital with a nasty burn. The acid in question also provides a nifty metaphor for the moral bankruptcy amongst these sybaritic young things, who are literally being eaten away from inside by their decadent lifestyle that indulges in a freewheeling, non-committal lifestyle – and of course, they blame their parents. As one of them quite rightly points out: “Our problem is that we have no problems”. Their days consist of a bit of yoga, computer work and aimless sex or dancing in the city’s ubiquitous nightclubs.

Gorchilin’s debut feature is more impressionist that narrative-driven, but there is a loose and engaging plot line at work: Sasha and Petya are your average young Muscovites drifting through their twenties dabbling in drugs, music and casual relationships. Sasha in particular feels disempowered by his lack of potential in any direction, and his recent break-up with Vika has left him diminished. He comes under more pressure when his mother comes to stay in the high-rise flat he shares with his grandmother. Naturally she knows better – and is also vegetarian – and she tries to instil confidence in her son while maintaining the moral high ground. But the suicide of one their friends provides the wake up call for them to wake up and smell the coffee, and make some definite plans for the future.

Pleasantly scoreless and elegantly framed and shot around Moscow, making great use of the city’s urban panoramas and stylish domestic interiors. Performances are strong, and Filipp Avdeev (Leto) makes a convincing Sasha bristling with indignation one minute and bewilderment the next. ACID provides another worthwhile snapshot of modern Moscow, not as bleak as the one we experienced in Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless but quite desperate nevertheless, but a far cry from the gritty realism of Alekesy Balabanov. MT

BERLINALE 2019 | 7-17 FEBRUARY 2019  | Winner of the debut concourse at the 2018 Kinotavr festival.

My Extraordinary Summer with Tess (2019) **** Berlinale | Generation Kplus 2019

Dir: Steven Wouterlood | Anna Woltz, Laura van Dijk | Cast: Jennifer Hoffman, Hans Dagelet, Terence Schreurs, Guido Pollemans, Sonny Coops Van Utteren |

South Holland (Zeeland) has some fabulous islands and white sandy beaches and provides a sun-baked summer setting for this coming of age story based on the book by Anna Woltz and directed by Steven Wouterland, one of Variety magazine’s 10 Europeans to watch.

Young teenager Sam (plucky newcomer Sonny Coops Van Utteren) arrives with his family and gets to know Tess who is slightly older than him, and on holiday with her feisty mother. The two will spend more and more time together after Sam’s older brother Jorre is confined to a wheelchair on day one of the summer holidays, with a broken leg.

Wouterlood and his cinematographer Sal Kroonenburg create a terrific sense of place in the glorious soft dunes and wide-open windswept seascapes of Zeeland. It’s a back to nature sort of place where cycling, wind-surfing and horse-riding are the order of the day. And the the two muck about on the beach, getting to know each other, Sam is a thoughtful young teen and clearly more emotionally mature than Tess gives him credit for, when he warns her not to flirt with his brother, who has a girlfriend back home. But the mood soon becomes more introspective when Tess lets on that her father is no longer on the scene, and she’s not sure where he is. For his part, Sam admits that he worries about being alone and outliving everyone else, as the youngest in his family. For that reason, he’s practicing being alone and developing a sense of sell-reliance he calls “aloneness training”. But Tess soon cheers him up with her very own madcap scheme involving a quiz. This appeals to Sam who is a mine of useless information. And suddenly being alone is not an option anymore. But despite all this Sam makes a drastic decision that puts his close friendship with Tess in jeopardy. It will change Tess’s life forever.

With an original score that very much sets the tempo for this footloose adventure, MY EXTRAORDINARY SUMMER is an upbeat film that handles its tonal shifts with dexterity and is not afraid to explore more serious themes such as loneliness, love and even death. There are moments of fun, frivolity and sadness too in a well-crafted story suitable for the over 10s. MT

AWARDED A SPECIAL MENTION BY THE INTERNATIONAL JULY AT BERLINALE | GENERATION KPLUS 2019 | 7-17 FEBRUARY 2019

Querência (2019) **** Berlinale 2019 | Forum

Wri/Dir: Helvecio Marins Jnr | Drama, Brazil, 90′

Helvecio Marins’ ravishing debut plays out in the style of a cinema vérité Western imbued with the unique customs and flavours of its picturesque locale in Minas Gerais between Brazilia and Rio de Janeiro on the Rua Urucuia.

Working with a cast of locals, Marins takes great pleasure in creating an atmosphere of bucolic bonhomie in a tale that unfolds langorously in the burnished landscapes of the pampa where God-fearing farm-manager Marcelo Di Souza has grown up raising his Nelore cattle – and he knows them all by name. Their characteristic boney hump and ability to resist blood-sucking insects is particularly suited to the arid planes of Brazil. Marcelo’s other love is the Temme Terra rodeo, where he often announces the competing riders with the ditty: “White, Black, Indian, we are all Brazilian”. This rural community prides itself in solidarity, and there’s little trust for the country’s political leadership. Marcelo is proud of his upbringing but sadly other members of his family have been tempted away by more lucrative work in Rio and Brasilia. And slowly it emerges through casual conversation with his friend Kaic Lima that not everything is as perfect in this rural idyll as Marcelo would have us believe. While he was at the rodeo one night, robbers broke into his  farm and around 100 of his precious cattle were stolen.

In Querência, director Helvécio Marins shows a melancholy hero whose life is in disarray, but who still remains true to himself. Directed with mature confidence and style Marins’ refrains from being overly dramatic and focuses on the textural richness of his subject matter who enjoy an attractive traditional lifestyle in the countryside, and one that’s fast disappearing. It’s a portrait that connects with the narrative of small communities threatened by survival all over the world. And like a fine garment Marins’ film is embellished and decorated with loving textural references and anecdotes that make the journey more involving and pleasurable that the rather enigmatic open final. Long takes and fluid camerawork captures elegant vignettes silhouetted against the darkness or a glowing campfire. And moments of loneliness often contrast with the hurly burly of the rodeo, scored by O Grivo’s award-winning music and bathed in the lush richness of the warm South.  MT

BERLINALE 2019 | FORUM | 7-17 FEBRUARY 2019

*Nelore were originally brought to Brazil from India, where they got their name from the Nellore district in Andhra Pradesh.

Boy Erased (2018) **

Dir.: Joel Edgerton; Cast: Lucas Hedges, Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe, Joel Edgerton, Xavier Dolan, Britton Sear; USA 2018, 114.min.

After his promising first feature Gift, Joel Edgerton overreaches himself with this disjointed drama lacking the emotional heft that the weighty subject matter deserves. And while some scenes have impact, for the most part Boy Erased feels rather clunky and underwhelming.

Edgerton bases his narrative on the memoirs of Garrad Conley, one of 700 000 gay minors who have become the victims of the Christian Conversion Therapy, still practiced in 36 US states. Lucas Hedges plays teenage Jared Eamons coming to terms with being gay in his highly conventional Baptist family. His father Marshall (Crowe), is a bigoted Baptist preacher and his hairdresser mother Nancy (Kidman), too weak to stand up to him in an effective way. Just before he goes starts college, Jared breaks up with his girl friend on account of his sexual motivations and finds himself paying for his sins at a fundamental Christian Conversion Institution, run by the vicious fanatic Victor Sykes (Edgerton). And Jared is not alone is feeling the wrath of God in this insufferable hell hole, joined by one dimensional characters like John (Dolan) and Cameron (Sear), who does his best to be a pal, before committing suicide.

Both Crowe and Kidman ham it parlously, and Kidman is particularly unconvincing as Nancy. Hedges is the standout, doing his best to flesh out Jared’s character despite his crass lines. DoP Eduard Grau’s attempts to break down the stultifying atmosphere with some fine camerawork, but to no avail. Edgerton seems very much at home with the schlock-horror environment of his debut, but he shouldn’t be let loose – for a long time – with material which deserves a serious approach. AS

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE from Friday 8 February 2019

  

Sundance Film Festival | Award and Winners 2019

Sundance announced its awards last night after ten extraordinary days of the latest independent cinema. Taking place each January in Park City, snowy Utah, the festival is the premier showcase for U.S. and international independent film, presenting dramatic and documentary feature-length films from emerging and established artists, innovative short films, filmmaker forums. The Festival brings together the most original storytellers known to mankind. In his closing speech President and Founder Robert Redford commented: “At this critical moment, it’s more necessary than ever to support independent voices, to watch and listen to the stories they tell.” Over half the films shown were directed by women and 23 prizes were awarded across the board including one film from a director identifying as LGBTQI+

This year’s jurors, invited in recognition of their accomplishments in the arts were Desiree Akhavan, Damien Chazelle, Dennis Lim, Phyllis Nagy, Tessa Thompson, Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Yance Ford, Rachel Grady, Jeff Orlowski, Alissa Wilkinson, Jane Campion, Charles Gillibert, Ciro Guerra, Maite Alberdi, Nico Marzano, Véréna Paravel, Young Jean Lee, Carter Smith, Sheila Vand, and Laurie Anderson.

The U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Documentary/China | Dirs: Nanfu Wang/Jialing Zhang,

 photo by Nanfu Wang.

ONE CHILD NATION After becoming a mother, a filmmaker uncovers the untold history of China’s one-child policy and the generations of parents and children forever shaped by this social experiment.

The U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic/USA | Dir/Wri Chinonye Chukwu

 

photo by Eric Branco

CLEMENCY: Years of carrying out death row executions have taken a toll on prison warden Bernadine Williams. As she prepares to execute another inmate, Bernadine must confront the psychological and emotional demons her job creates, ultimately connecting her to the man she is sanctioned to kill. Cast: Alfre Woodard, Aldis Hodge, Richard Schiff, Wendell Pierce, Richard Gunn, Danielle Brooks.

The World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Documentary: Dirs: Tamara Kotevska, Ljubomir Stefanov | Macedonia

HONEYLAND – When nomadic beekeepers break Honeyland’s basic rule (take half of the honey, but leave half to the bees), the last female bee hunter in Europe must save the bees and restore natural balance.

The Souvenir| photo by Agatha A. Nitecka.

The World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic | UK | Dir/wri: Joanna Hogg

THE SOUVENIR: A shy film student begins finding her voice as an artist while navigating a turbulent courtship with a charismatic but untrustworthy man. She defies her protective mother and concerned friends as she slips deeper and deeper into an intense, emotionally fraught relationship which comes dangerously close to destroying her dreams. Cast: Honor Swinton Byrne, Tom Burke, Tilda Swinton.

The Audience Award: U.S. Documentary, | USA  Dir: Rachel Lears:

KNOCK DOWN THE HOUSE — A young bartender in the Bronx, a coal miner’s daughter in West Virginia, a grieving mother in Nevada and a registered nurse in Missouri build a movement of insurgent candidates challenging powerful incumbents in Congress. One of their races will become the most shocking political upset in recent American history. Cast: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The Audience Award: U.S. Dramatic, U.S.A. Dir/Wri: Paul Downs

BRITTANY RUNS A MARATHON — A woman living in New York takes control of her life – one city block at a time. Cast: Jillian Bell, Michaela Watkins, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Lil Rel Howery, Micah Stock, Alice Lee.

The Audience Award: World Cinema Documentary/Austria: Dir: Richard Ladkan

SEA OF SHADOWS/Austria – The vaquita, the world’s smallest whale, is near extinction as its habitat is destroyed by Mexican cartels and Chinese mafia, who harvest the swim bladder of the totoaba fish, the “cocaine of the sea.” Environmental activists, Mexican navy and undercover investigators are fighting back against this illegal multimillion-dollar business.

The Audience Award: World Cinema Dramatic/Denmark Dir: May el-Toukhy

QUEEN OF HEARTS — A woman jeopardises both her career and her family when she seduces her teenage stepson and is forced to make an irreversible decision with fatal consequences. Cast: Trine Dyrholm, Gustav Lindh, Magnus Krepper.

 

The Audience Award: NEXT, Alex Rivera, Cristina Ibarra

THE INFILTRATORS / U.S.A. (Directors: , Screenwriters: — A rag-tag group of undocumented youth – Dreamers – deliberately get detained by Border Patrol in order to infiltrate a shadowy, for-profit detention center. Cast: Maynor Alvarado, Manuel Uriza, Chelsea Rendon, Juan Gabriel Pareja, Vik Sahay.

The Directing Award: U.S. Documentary | USA Dirs: Steven Bognar and Julia

AMERICAN FACTORY  — In post-industrial Ohio, a Chinese billionaire opens a new factory in the husk of an abandoned General Motors plant, hiring two thousand blue-collar Americans. Early days of hope and optimism give way to setbacks as high-tech China clashes with working-class America.

The Directing Award: U.S. Dramatic U.S.A. Dirs: Joe Talbot, Screenwriters: Joe Talbot,

THE LAST BLACK MAN IN SAN FRANCISCO — Jimmie Fails dreams of reclaiming the Victorian home his grandfather built in the heart of San Francisco. Joined on his quest by his best friend Mont, Jimmie searches for belonging in a rapidly changing city that seems to have left them behind.

The Directing Award: World Cinema Documentary NOR | Dir: Mads Brüggerwas

 photo by Tore Vollan.

Cold Case Hammarskjöld / Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Belgium — Danish director Mads Brügger and Swedish private investigator Göran Bjorkdahl are trying to solve the mysterious death of Dag Hammarskjold. As their investigation closes in, they discover a crime far worse than killing the Secretary-General of the United Nations.

The Directing Award: World Cinema Dramatic | Spain (Dir/Wri: Lucía Garibaldi,

THE SHARKS / Uruguay, Argentina – While a rumour about the presence of sharks in a small beach town distracts residents, 15-year-old Rosina begins to feel an instinct to shorten the distance between her body and Joselo’s. Cast: Romina Bentancur, Federico Morosini, Fabián Arenillas, Valeria Lois, Antonella Aquistapache.

The Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award: U.S. Dramatic USA | Dir: Pippa Blanco

SHARE— After discovering a disturbing video from a night she doesn’t remember, sixteen-year-old Mandy must try to figure out what happened and how to navigate the escalating fallout. Cast: Rhianne Barreto, Charlie Plummer, Poorna Jagannathan, J.C. MacKenzie, Nick Galitzine, Lovie Simone.

U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Moral Urgency| USA | Dir: Jacqueline Olive

ALWAYS IN SEASON — When 17-year-old Lennon Lacy is found hanging from a swing set in rural North Carolina in 2014, his mother’s search for justice and reconciliation begins as the trauma of more than a century of lynching African Americans bleeds into the present.

A U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award: Emerging Filmmaker USA : Liza Mandelup

JAWLINE — The film follows 16-year-old Austyn Tester, a rising star in the live-broadcast ecosystem who built his following on wide-eyed optimism and teen girl lust, as he tries to escape a dead-end life in rural Tennessee.

A U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Editing USA : Todd Douglas Miller

APOLLO 11 — A purely archival reconstruction of humanity’s first trip to another world, featuring never-before-seen 70mm footage and never-before-heard audio from the mission.

U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Cinematography | U.S.A. Dir: Luke Lorentzen

MIDNIGHT FAMILY / Mexico/DOC — In Mexico City’s wealthiest neighbourhoods, the Ochoa family runs a private ambulance, competing with other for-profit EMTs for patients in need of urgent help. As they try to make a living in this cutthroat industry, they struggle to keep their financial needs from compromising the people in their care.

SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 2019 | 23 JANUARY – 3 FEBRUARY 2019

Burning (2018) Mubi

Lee Chang dong, Oh Jung mi | 143’ | South Korea | Drama 

Burning sees a rich guy and an honest worker compete for the affections of an enigmatic young woman in a mysterious slow burner that sizzles with a seductive spell and intoxicates for over two hours with its captivating storytelling and strikingly atmospheric score by Mowg.

‘A literary adaptation’ can sound warning bells but this standout psychological thriller breathes life into a short story from Haruki Murakami, adapted by Lee and his co-writer Oh Jung-mi who keep things deceptively simple yet alluring with a thematically rich ride set to Hong Kyung-pyo’s sumptuous cinematography, and enfused with themes of privilege, class, stifled creativity and revenge.

Lonely budding writer Jongsu comes from a poor and dysfunctional family background and works as a deliveryman near the North Korean border where he is unexpectedly invited into the bed of his former school friend Haemi who asks him to look after her cat during her upcoming trip to Africa. But she comes back with an unassuming new guy in the shape of Korean hotshot Ben (Yeun Steven), who seems rather too smooth to be true. But then the story becomes more complex. Jongsu (Yoo Ah-in) realises he’s really fallen for the charming but insecure Haemi (Jun Jong-seo), who remembers his harsh comments on her appearance back in the day, and has since had plastic surgery.

A loose friendship soon develops between the threesome, and for a while the story hums along gently mulling over its cultural references and glorying in its low key placid perfection. But all is not well in paradise and the tone takes a sinister turn after Ben confesses to being somewhat of a pyrotechnic with a penchant for greenhouse burning, and we witness this in a startling bonfire that blazes away in silence providing at unsettling visual counterpoint to the love story inflaming romantic desires when Haemi suddenly goes missing, and the two men become locked head to head in the violent clomax. With dynamite performances from the trio this is an elegantly crafted mystery thriller from a Korean master at the top of his game. MT

NOW ON MUBI

Transnistra (2019) | **** IFFR Rotterdam 2019

Dir: Anna Eborn | Doc, 93′

There’s a breezy insouciance to this slice of realism set in the tiny unrecognised state of Transnistra, which split from Moldova after the civil war in 1992. Atmospherically shot on gritty 16mm, it follows a group of close friends and their emotional ups and downs from the sultry days of summer to the bitterly cold winter. Technically the country doesn’t exist at all and that mood uncertainty is conveyed by Anna Eborn’s freewheeling approach to her narrative and a seductive occasional score of woozy jazz tunes and ambient sounds that convey a feeling of surreal dispossession. Far from the buzz of modern life and social media, they shoot the breeze and hang out amid crumbling Soviet buildings. You get the impression the Transnistrans don’t really care what happens now or in the future, beyond their secluded bubble, as long as they can enjoy life in this peaceful softly wooded wedge of land on the Black Sea south of Ukraine and North East of Romania.

There’s a still strong Soviet vibe to the infrastructure and Transnistra has its own police force, currency and army. And they make proud soldiers as we see them graduating from military school to the sounds of a full band and stage appearance, and there are congratulations all round. Russian is their language and the red and green flag sports a sickle but that’s as far as it goes. Eborn’s watchable, un-judgemental fourth feature portrays a happy little ‘country’ content to jog along proudly for as long as it can. And after all, love is still love wherever you are in the world. MT

ROTTERDAM FILM FESTIVAL | 23 Jan – 3 Feb 2019 | VPRO BIG SCREEN WINNER

 

The Boys in the Band (1970) **** Bluray release


WDir: William Friedkin | Writer: Mart Crowley | Drama  | 118’

Fifty years ago, this milestone in Queer cinema The Boys in the Band was considered highly controversial, although in retrospect it’s seems rather quaint with Mart Crowley’s priceless dialogue making it all worthwhile (apart from the groundbreaking use of the C-word), particularly Leonard Frey’s Harold gets some caustic remarks.

William Friedkin would go on to make The French Connection a year later, and The Exorcist just after that (in 1973) but this is a beast of another colour and sees a group of gay men grow increasingly antagonistic after enjoying an alcohol fuelled party in a spacious Upper East Side apartment, especially after Harold arrives.

Based on Crowley’s play, and featuring the original cast, it stars a sterling selection of gay actors Kenneth Nelson, Peter White, Cliff Gorman and, of course, Leonard Frey. The play premiered off-Broadway in 1968, just as the gay rights movement was gaining momentum and aimed to portray a candid view gay life, although it sparked mixed reactions amongst the gay community for its negative stereotyping of limp-wristed and bitchy victims of their sexuality. William Friedkin’s faithful 1970 screen version, has become a cult classic. But when all is said and done, LGBTQ equality has pathed the way to a better acceptance of what went before, and the piece can now be appreciated for it depiction of an oppressed group of any kind, and is by turns brutally amusing, compelling and dark.

The film plays out as a chamber piece echoing its original scale. Led by the single Michael (Nelson), a Catholic alcoholic from Mississippi and set in his ostentatious bachelor pad. Michael is throwing a birthday party for his difficult friend Harold (Frey), who eventually turns up high, with a brilliantly bombastic monologue: “What I am, Michael, is a 32-year-old, ugly, pockmarked Jew fairy — and if it takes me a while to pull myself together and if I smoke a little grass before I can get up the nerve to show this face to the world, it’s nobody’s goddamn business but my own.”

Other guests include Donald (Combs), Michael’s ex who comes back to NY to visit his shrink.  Hank (Luckinbill) is a bisexual teacher  (Tuc Watkins), who’s now with photographer Larry (Prentice) although the relationship is strained by Larry’s promiscuity. Bernard (Reuben Greene) is the token black guy and seems the most brooding of the group. Into the party drops Michael’s straight college friend Alan (Peter White), who is on the verge of tears over his own failing marriage. His reluctance to leave nods to an ambivalence in his own sexuality, and hints that he might be hiding an uncomfortable truth from himself.

According to Friedkin, this was “one of the few films I’ve made that I can still watch”. Released 50 years after its Broadway debut – a year before the infamous Stonewall Riots – The Boys in the Band still has the power to shock. MT

NOW ON BLURAY FROM 11 FEBRUARY 2019 with interviews with Mark Gatiss, and commentary from William Friedkin himself | COURTESY OF SECOND SIGHT 

 

An Impossible Love (2018) ****

Dir.: Catherine Corsini; Cast: Virginie Efira, Niels Schneider, Jehnny Beth, Estelle Lescure; Belgium/France 2018, 135 min.

Best known for her Lesbian drama La Belle Saison director/writer Catherine Corsini’s screen adaptation of Christine Angot’s novel plays out like an historical thesis on feminism. Starting in the late 1950s in the small French town of Chateauroux, Corsini tells the story of a brief but passionate love affair that turns into a long-term war between Rachel and Niels. Their daughter Chantal will suffer tragically from her father’s contempt for her mother.

When Rachel (Efira), a clerk, meets the upper-middle class Niels (Schneider) they are attracted to each other. But it soon becomes clear he’s just interested in sex, while Rachel is an incurable romantic and falls for the “man of the world”. Niels leaves her, making it clear he’s not interested in marriage. But when Rachel gives birth to a daughter, Chantal (who is played by four actors during the film), Niels refuses paternity, so Rachel has to settle for “father unknown”, which hurts her much more than being left behind with Chantal. The two adults barely talk, but Niels tells Rachel en-passant, that he has married a wealthy German woman “who will look after him”. By the time Chantal (Lescure) reaches adolescence, the picture has changed with alarming consequences for all concerned.

An Impossible Love is sometimes heartbreaking. Rachel has such low self-esteem from the beginning, she does not ask anything for herself: she does not expect Niels to ever recognise her as an equal. But she hopes that her daughter will have a better life, if she can persuade Niels to give her his name. She is well aware how disturbed Chantal is after her frequent visits to her father a teenager, but she is adamant not to rock the boat.  

DoP Jeanne Lapoirie, who worked with Corsini on La Belle Saison, has gracefully recreated the atmosphere of the 1950s and early 1960s, when women were (the supposed) passive victims of men. The images show Rachel seemingly living in a “pink world with fluffy clouds”, in which she surrenders he whole identity to Niels. The latter is cold and manipulative, always yearning for his ‘freedom’, committed only to his own progress. If one compares Rachel with the adult Chantal, one sees the difference. Progress, so Corsini, has been made, but at what cost:  since Chantal had to carry the burden of her mother’s lack of self-esteem. Even though sometimes over-didactic, Corsini achieves her goal of showing the long, ongoing struggle for emancipation.  AS 

NOW SHOWING at http://Curzoncinemas.com and selected arthouse venues | Previewed at BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2018

https://youtu.be/B-2QL8tjP2I

   

End of Season (2018) **** IFFR Rotterdam FIPRESCI award winner

Dir.: Elmar Imanov; Cast: Rasim Javarov, Zulfiyya Gurbanova, Mirmousum Mirzazade; Germany/Azerbaijan/Georgia 2019, 92 min.

Elmar Imanov’s first feature is a homage to Antonioni. Set in Baku on the Black Sea, Imanov not only re-creates the atmosphere of many features of the Italian master, he also revitalises Antonioni’s main theme – the marginalisation of women – in a very up-to-date fashion. His intimate slow-burner is a carefully constructed and memorable low budget gem.

Samir (Javarov) and his wife Fidan (Gurbanova) are living in a Baku high-rise, after their son Mahmud (Mirzazade), a web-designer, has fled the nest. Things are really over for this couple, relationships-wise: Côté Samir loafs around,all day. His wife, a doctor, contemplates a move to Berlin, where she has been offered a job. Samir tries to sabotage her move, it’s still unclear if  Mahmud is actually his son. The three of them go on a trip to the Black Sea, Sami and Fidan attacking each other in their usual passive-aggressive way: Whilst the men doze off, Fidan suddenly disappears. Later a male body is found in the sea – and she suddenly vanishes too, Fidan then re-appears in the Baku flat the next day. But Samir is still grumpy, not believing her story that she nearly drowned. “Are you not happy that I am alive?” asks Fidan. But Samir still cannot trust her, not able to let go of his victim-role. Son Mahmud is no help either: he is critical of his father, and treats his girl friend with the same disdain: he is unable to commit, and is somehow relieved when she signals the end of the relationship. Leaving us with an open-ended finale, Imanov lets the camera search for some meaning.

DoPs Berta Valin Escofet and Driss Azhari conjure up a languid atmosphere where the bleached colours softly melt into the horizon. The resonance with Antonioni is clearly felt: landscape dominates and reduces the protagonists to minor roles. Fidan is the only person of substance, the simply men chasing the chimera of freedom. END OF SEASON is an intimate play of emotions, small gestures – often more meaningful than words. There are also shades of Sartre’s Huis Clos, the trio living in a perpetual state of alienation in their stultifying dynamic. Imanov conjures up quiet desperation which we watch with a certain fascination. We leave  with the feeling that Imanov is a rising talent. AS

OTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | 2019 | FIPRESCI AWARD 2019

Crucible of the Vampire (2018) **

Dir: Iain Ross-McNamee | Cast: Neil Morrissey, Charles O’Neil, Katie Goldfinch, Angela Carter | 96′ | UK Horror, Vampire.

Crucible of the Vampire is a rather pale attempt to re-create the traditional fare made by Hammer in the 1960s and early 1970s. The plot is familiar (but required three writers, Ross-McNee, Darren Lake and John Wolskel, who penned Blonde, Busty & Keane) – a naive, young blond (Goldfinch) goes to a 17th century Manor House in rural Shropshire. This time the blond’s clever too, some kind of minor archeologist sent there by her boss to examine the remains of a broken 17th century pot whose owner, a putative sorcerer we witness being accused of all sorts of Devilry, and strung up, in the opening scene. Isabelle (Katie Goldfinch) is apparently oblivious to the goings on in the house where she is made to drink a potion on her first night with the resident couple and their coquettish daughter, who appears to be lesbian, and later has no trouble seducing Isabelle, who has so far resisted the advances of her boyfriend, wanting to remain ‘pure’ until marriage. Clearly, it was just his technique that was lacking, rather than her resolve. More dark revelations unfold with Neil Morrissey’s friendly local farmer offering his manly protection to our heroine, who is seemingly unaware of the dangers surrounding her, until it’s too late. A nice try, and quite watchable. Iain Ross-McNamee certainly succeeds to a degree. But where’s the tinkly organ music, and some of the acting is predictably as twee as the premise. But that’s the whole point, I guess. MT

OUT ON  1 FEBRUARY 2019

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The Gold-Laden Sheep & the Sacred Mountain (2018)

Dir: Ridham Janve | India, drama | 97′

A mysterious “Sacred Mountain” in the Himalayas is the focus of Ridham Janve’s seductive first feature that won the Silver Gateway award at last year’s Mumbai Film Festival and was selected for Rotterdam’s Bright Future Sidebar.

Spiked with subtle humour and an atmospheric ambient score The Gold-Laden Sheep shows him to be a skilful storyteller in a film that works as a realist moral fable, a sinuous thriller and a stylish monochrome nature mystery with a slow-burning narrative that unfolds in the stunning landscape of the remote Dhauladhar mountain region .

While tending his flock, an old shepherd hears news about a local plane crash and is determined to cash in on the booty, remembering stories of other accidents that have yielded their treasures to the hills. Blinded by greed, he leaves his skiving side-kick to tend the sheep and lambs while he goes in search of the wreckage and – with any luck – the crock of gold. Naturally, things don’t end well for any of them, least of all the lambs.

The cast of newcomers from the Ghaddi community add a convincing feel to this carefully crafted debut that tells through its long takes and fluid camerawork a touching tale about their respect for nature and the holiness of the mountain, which, if disturbed, will change life forever. MT

NOW ON MUBI | ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2019 

 

God of the Piano (2019) Digital release

Dir: Itay Til: Cast: Naama Pries, Ron Bitterman, Shimon Mimran, Andy Levi | Drama | Israel 80′

Anat is a young woman who will let nothing get in her way, least of all accidents of nature, in this tightly-scripted and quietly chilling first feature from Israeli director Itay Tal. Prepare to be shaken and stirred.

This study of obsession brings to mind the so-called ‘tiger’ mothers who are so focused on achieving their goals, the well-being of their family is secondary, as long as everything goes according to plan. Sadly these women often come from high-performing backgrounds themselves, and such is the case with pregnant concert pianist Anat (a superbly slick Naama Pries from Laila in Haifa), whose waters break while she’s on stage.

Anat ignores this call of nature until the end of her piece, the liquid slowly pooling round her feet. But when she discovers her chortling baby has hearing difficulties, she takes the sinister step of swapping him over with another child in the hospital birthing room.

Control freaks have been vividly portrayed in arthouse cinema of late, recent examples are Calin Peter Netzer’s Golden Bear winner Child’s Pose (2013) where a mother does her utmost to change the course of law for her son. Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2016) also reworks this thorny theme with a similar cold visual aesthetic and unlikeable central character. In fact, Tal’s film is full of unpleasant types, cyphers whose means to an end makes them frighteningly real in these success-focused times.

Anat’s family are all accomplished musicians including her new son Idam, who plays like a professional pianist from the early scenes – despite his lack of genetic connection with the rest of the family. Her son’s music career gradually becomes the focus of Anat’s days, coaching him as he learns to compose and perform. Even sex with her husband goes out of the window (she is seen half-heartedly pleasuring him with her hands) as she transfers her amorous efforts to composer Shimon Mimran – the only character here with charisma – who gamely offers to help the boy with his composing.

Sex with Mimran seems to satisfy Anat more than anything else in her life: it’s as if she’s finally been fed after starving for years. But rather than trusting her intuition and taking things further with this interesting man, Anat suppresses her own needs and rushes off to promote her son to the next stage of his career.

Alarm bells ring when the local hearing-impaired centre tries to get in touch, Anat eradicating any further communication from them, even visiting the clinic to make sure they strike Idam’s records from their books. Anat’s father is a fiercely competitive man and his reaction to Idam’s talent is quite chilling: rather than encouraging the boy he seethes with anger at Idam’s perfect performance of a piece he wrote at the same age. Although we cannot like Anat’s character, we start to understand her motivations, and the strain she’s under to compete in this unforgiving family environment. A slick and enjoyable thriller and a brilliant debut from Itay Tal. MT

NOW ON iTUNES AMAZON VUDU FANDANGO ON DEMAND DVD | ROTTERDAM FILM FESTIVAL PREMIERE | Big Screen Competition 2019 

 

Une Jeunesse Dorée (2019) *** IFFR Rotterdam 2019

Dir: Eva Ionesco | Drama,

Writer-director Eva Ionesco made her debut in Roman Polanski’s horrifying drama The Tenant in 1976. Since then she has made her way into directing. Her second feature is an enjoyable if hollow semi-autobiographical hark back to her disco days at one of Paris’ most legendary nightspots in the late 1970s.

The Palace nightclub was synonymous with stylish couture from Karl Lagerfeld, St Laurent and Missoni. It was also the time of Human League, Grace Jones and Brian Ferry, And this where our young impoverished heroine Rose (Galatea Bellugi) comes to dance with her artist boyfriend Michel (Lukas Ionesco). Both are looking to make their name in the world, and finance the rest of their lives. And this is where they run into decadent ‘beau-monde’ duo Lucile (Isabelle Huppert) and Hubert (Melvil Poupaud), in their fifties and eager for new experiences. Fired up by a cocktail of youth, cash and charisma, the couples feed off each other in an orgy – both literal and metaphorical – of coke and champagne-fuelled sexual encounters – decked out in the latest couture – and Isabelle Huppert is as sexy as her much younger counterpart Bellugi. After rocking the dance floor they all repair back in a Jaguar to Lucile’s soigné chateau in a the country where the young ones are eager for money and contacts, while the older pair paw them with unwanted sexual advances, to spice up their flagging libidos. 

This retro drama is very much a family affair, and it makes for an entertaining drama, if rather glib in its louche emptiness and threadbare script. Ionesco deftly captures the Seventies zeitgeist, but narrative-wise the drama plays out with no surprises. And while Huppert holds court with her sterling support, Poupard also holds sway with his graceful nonchalance, the young two providing alluring eye candy as the doomed and clingy lovers, caught between a desire to succeed and a need to be loved. 

Une Jeunesse Dorée feels slightly overlong at just under two hours, but despite the flagging plot line, expert camerawork comes courtesy of Claire Denis regular Agnès Godard, and there are cossies to die for including ubiquitous sequins and floor length furs from the designers Jurgen Doering and Marie Beltrami. The girls lie back lustfully in Agent Provocateur lingerie and Huppert even flashes her tits and utters outré lines such as: “Hubert has a very beautiful penis, and he knows how to use it”. Now that’s a showstopper, if ever there was one. MT

ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | 23 JAN – 3 FEB 2019

Magnetic Pathways (2019) | **** IFFR Rotterdam 2019

Dir.: Edgar Pera; Cast: Dominique Pinon, Alba Baptista, Pauko Pires, Ney Matograsso, Albano Jeronimo; Brazil/Portugal 2018, 90 min.

Avant-garde Portuguese auteur Edgar Pera follows his weird and wonderful adaptations of Rio Turvo and O Barao with this mystery drama screening as part of a retrospective of his work here at Rotterdam International Film Festival.

Again he indulges in the creation of a Lynchian universe, where past and future amalgamate in an anarchic dance of loss and angst, all held together by the overwhelmingly monstrous images of DoP Jorge Quintela.

Elderly Raymond (Pinon) lives a nightmarish life without escape: he is either drowning in his dreams, or running helpless and disorientated through a dystopian Lisbon. His main obsession is his daughter Caterina (Baptista) who is getting married to Danio (Pires), one of the henchman of the autocratic regime, which runs on the lines of Orwellian surveillance, the TV anchor giving out the orders for the day. During his nightly sorties Raymond encounters the past and present Portugal, meeting among others General Spinola (Jeronimo), who was one of the Generals in the successful revolution of 1974, before he turned against the socialist government and joined Ex-president Caetano and his fellow generals in exile. Raymond is never quite sure if he is living through the period of post- or past revolution. Raymond falls under the spell of Andre Leviathan (Matograsso), a mixture of religious leader and revolutionary. But Raymond develops a jealous obsession with Caterina and Danio. When the couple have sex, Raymond kills Danio with a knife, only to wake up with a feeling of joy despite realising that Caterina would have never forgiven him. 

Whilst the couple are on a barge, Raymond jumps into the water, but is rescued. Fearing the worst, he is amazed not to land up in prison, but back home, which by now resembles a brothel.

Dissolves dominate this spectacular poem of male madness: Raymond is straight out of L’Age d’Or, and Lisbon is a rather drab background, the city’s modern architecture An emblem for the soul destroying world of the Regime. The religious fanaticism of the President echoes Bunuel; Raymond’s hallucinations are the reflection of male impotence. Some music by Manoel de Oliveira embellish this unique feature, directed by a masterful and uncompromising Pera. AS

SCREENING as part of the EDGAR PÊRA Retrospective | IFFR 23 January – 3 February 2019

X&Y (2019) **** IFFR Rotterdam 2019

Dir.: Anna Odell; Cast: Anna Odell, Mikhael Persbrandt, Shanti Roney, Thure Lindhardt, Trine Dyrholm, Sofie Grabol, Jens Albinus, Vera Vitali, Per Ragnar, Ville Virtanen; Sweden/Denmark 2018, 112 min.

Artist and filmmaker Anna Odell (The Reunion), the enfant terrible of the Nordic film scene, is back with a new feature. X & Y is a star studded ensemble peace, which explores hidden female/male identities. Odell came to prominence in 2009 with her student project Unknown Woman, 2009-349701:  in a life performance in Stockholm, she acted out her psychotic breakdown and suicide. She was later fined for this, but insisted it was not about her own experience in the Swedish Mental Health system, but an attack on the power structures within the institutions. 

X & Y is tamer in comparison, even though structure and topic are extremely (thought) provoking. Odell plays a female director who fancies macho film star Mikhael Persbrandt, who has just published a memoir in which he tackles his image. Odell has chosen three actors for herself and Persbrandt, to play the alternative personalities of the lead couple: Grabol (brilliant as always), Albinus and Vitali act out Odell’s alternate personalities, whilst Roney, Lindhardt and Dyrholm (matching Grabol’s performance) are the alter egos of Persbrandt. Two psychologists, Ragnar and Virtanen try to help the octet come to terms with Odell’s cryptic and basic script.

Odell, to give her credit, holds her own in a star studded cast. After the opening chapter, in where Odell and Persbrandt get close up and personal, the Alter-Egos take over, and start attacking or lusting after their counterparts. Best are the scenes when the leading couple is represented by a different gender actor, showing that the ambivalence of feelings like jealousy, dominance and sexual obsession are not as gender specific as one might think. In the play, Odell is always behind with the script, infuriating her cast. The actors sleep in two groups, and Odell, who has manufactured a frisky animal costume for herself, becomes sexually aggressive with the trio in her bed. Finally, at a re-union month later, it turns out she is pregnant with an “art-child”, obviously drawing on her recent experience of giving birth. Odell, always the provocateur, stated in an interview that, “she is looking forward to introducing her own child to Lars van Trier, who is also the product of an artistic relationship”. 

 X & Y is provocative, but stays inside a concept: every person has three identities: the self, the one we would like to be, and the way we are seen by others. These identities often differ often, and Odell works it out without shrinking from exposing herself. A great ensemble helps, as well as DoP Daniel Takacs, whose images range from distant froideur to aggressive close-ups. Odell’s temper tantrums still are still hard to take, but she is more much reflective now, without having lost the talent to excite.

SCREENING AT ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | 23 Jan – 3 Feb   

The Best of Dorien B (2019) *** IFFR Rotterdam 2019

Dir: Anke Blonde | Cast: Kim Strauwaerts, Dirk van Dijk, Peter De Graef | Belgium, Drama | 106’

Anke Blonde’s contemporary portrait of loneliness in a seemingly busy and successful life will be familiar. And THE BEST OF DORIEN B’s subdued aesthetic and slow pace reflect a deep-felt dissatisfaction within its heroine’s  humdrum existence in an ordinary town in Belgium. Viewed from the outside wife and mother Dorien has everything to live for: a loving husband, three healthy boys and a vocation she always dreamed of: caring for animals in a busy veterinary practice. 

So what’s missing? A real connection. It feels like everyone is projecting their own needs onto her capable shoulders. But Dorien just plods on oblivious. With no-one to confide in while she soaks up the draining negativity of her parent’s emerging marriage crisis and her vet husband’s previous infidelity with a colleague – which seems to be far from over – she soldiers on. In her deft feature debut, the Belgian director reveals the deep cracks in a perfect facade. And then Dorien’s world crashes down. And from this personal crisis comes an epiphany moment for the former wildchild to bring the focus back firmly to her own hopes and dreams. This thoughtful comedy drama with its sensitive nuanced performances – particularly from lead Kim Snauwaert – plays its serious side lightly but makes a firm point: that sometimes we need to be selfish in order to keep on supporting those whose depend on us. Playing to packed audiences in Rotterdam’s Big Screen Competition line-up it certainly seem to strike a chord.  MT

ROTTERDAM FILM FESTIVAL | BIG SCREEN COMPETITION | 23 Jan-3 Feb 2019

Dirty God (2019) ** Rotterdam Film Festival 2019

Dir: Sasha Polak | Cast: Vicky Knight, Eliza Brady-Girard, Rebecca Stone, Jake Wheeldon | Drama | 104′

Londoner Jade has to come to terms with being disfigured by her partner in this English languages debut of filmmaker Sacha Polak. Dirty God is uncompromising – but somewhat blurs the boundaries between openness and voyeurism.

This is the astonishing debut for Vicky Knight who who suffered scars from burning as a child, and acts with great passion. We see her emerging from hospital, her face and upper brutally scarred by the acid, she returns to the East London council estate, where her mother Lisa (Kelly) is waiting with Jade’s daughter (Brady- Girard), who is driven to tears when her mother tries to cuddle her. And Polak’s non British status allows her to see things from refreshing angle in contrast to the usual sink estate realism and this also gives her character a sense of vulnerability and verve that feels convincing despite the film’s narrative flaws and the weak support cast. The resonance with Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank is clearly felt, but Polak’s film has an upbeat sense of hope and a more refreshing visual allure despite its downbeat setting.

Jade’s mother Katherine Kelly) works from home turning around stolen luxury items. She is also supported, up to a point, by her best friend. Jade’s ex is awaiting arrest for the assault on her, an act that has clearly reduced her potential to be an accomplished and sexually attractive woman. And Jade suffers from nightmares in which her ex sports a crow’s suit. Clearly the scars are psychological as well as physical

DoP Ruben Impens is unsparing, showing every detail, although some of the dream sequences are clunky. But this is clearly newcomer Knight film and she carries it with passion and honesty, raising the question: when does honesty becomes an embarrassment? After all, Knight is a real victim, but a feature film is still a work of fiction. It is not easy to decide where do come down in this argument. At best, the ambiguity is open to interpretation, with the audience making up their minds. AS

FROM 7 JUNE 2019 NATIONWIDE

 

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The Man Who Surprised Everyone (2018) **** IFFR Rotterdam 2019

Dir: Natasha Merkulova, Aleksey Chupov | Cast: Evgeniy Tsiganov, Natalya Kudryashowa, Yuriy Kuznetsov, Vasiliy Popov, Pavel Maykov, Aleksey Filimonov, Elena Voronchikhina, Maksim Vitorgan | Drama | Russia Estonia France | 105’

Russian directing duo Natasha Merkulova and Aleksey Chupov tackle a thorny subject with deftness in this classically styled and  surprisingly moving arthouse drama that had its premiere in the Orizzonti sidebar at Venice Film Festival 2018

LGBT issues are still viewed with hostility back home in Russia but the leads are completely convincing in their subtlely nuanced and solemn portrayal of a modern couple coping with extremely challenging conditions in a remote rural outpost.

Egor is a respectable family man who we first meet navigating his boat along the Siberian Taiga where he works as a forest ranger looking out for poachers. He and his wife Natalia are expecting their second child when Egor discovers he has terminal cancer but keeps his wife in the dark about his imminent death. But this is not the only secret the thoughtful middle-aged man harbours, and the filmmakers gradually draw us in establishing the couple’s joint and several feelings of joy for her, and mounting grief and unease for him: Egor must bear alone the double burden of his cancer trauma and his nascent sexual yearnings that will certainly require his wife’s forbearance. When he tells Natasha she persuades Egor to seek further help in looking for a cure. But no traditional medicine or shamanic magic can save him. Finally, left with no other option, he makes a desperate attempt to escape the reality of his death by channelling his feelings into self-identifying as a woman with initial alarm to his close community, followed by anger, disbelief and acceptance by Natasha, and we feel for both of them. His family and the local society now have to accept his new self.

Moody rain-soaked settings and subdued interiors add to the feeling of angst and quiet desperation as the couple struggle on trapped by poverty and Natasha’s ageing and ailing father in a scenario that will be feel familiar to many.

This is a grim and provocatively complex tale that needs clever handling and one that could have gone severely awry with disastrous consequences without the skill of a competent directing team. But instead clever scripting, skilful handling of the complex issues at stake and sensitive performances make for an absorbing feature and one with considerable dramatic heft as we wait for the startling denouement that requires a certain leap of faith but one that feels plausible and satisfying in the circumstances.MT

ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2019

Berlinale Competition films announced | Berlinale 2019

The full competition line-up and special films for this year’s Berlinale have now been announced. The festival opens with Lone Scherfig’s THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS and runs from the 7th February until the 17th. 

Vying for the Golden Bear, there are three Asian films: Zhang Yimou’s One Second, (China) Farewell My Son Wang by Xiaoshuai (China) and Öndög by Wang Quan’an (Mongolia). From Canada, festival regular Denis Côté wiIl bring his latest drama Ghost Town Anthology Israeli director Nadav Lapid brings his world premiere: Synonyms. The rest are from all over Europe. 

There are 20 world premieres this year in Berlin, and 16 films vying for the Golden Bear of which 6 are directed by women.

BERLINALE GOLDER BEAR – hopefuls and Competition films:

The Kindness of Strangers by Lone Scherfig (Denmark / Canada / Sweden / Germany / France) – Opening film. Andrea Riseborough, Caleb Landry Jones and Bill Nighy star in Scherfig’s 20th film exploring the lives of four people in crisis.

The Ground beneath My Feet, by Marie Kreutzer (Austria)

Kreutzer’s first film The Fatherless won her an honourable mention at Berlinale 2011. Her latest drama follows a high powered woman has everything under control until a tragic event forces her life to unravel.

So Long, My Son (Di jiu tian chang) by Wang Xiaoshuai (People’s Republic of China). Once again the social and economic changes in China from the 1980s until the present day are pulled into the spotlight through the experience of two couples.

Elisa y Marcela (Elisa & Marcela) by Isabel Coixet (Spain), The first recorded lesbian marriage is the subject of this black and white biopic from Catalan director Isabel Coixet.

The Golden Glove, Der Goldene HandschuhFatih Akin was born and grew up in Germany from Turkish parentage. His first literary adaptation is a crime thriller that traces back to Hamburg in the 1970s where a rampant serial killer was at large. (Germany / France) God

Exists, Her Name is Petrunya, (Gospod postoi, imeto i’ e Petrunija)  by Teona Strugar. The  male population of a Macedonian seaside town is scandalised when a young local woman decides to enact a traditionally men-only religious ceremony, but Petrunya holds her own in this unusual drama from award-winning director Teona Strugar Mitevska. Brings to mind Sworn Virgin. (Macedonia / Belgium / Slovenia / Croatia / France)

Grâce à Dieu (By the Grace of God) by François Ozon (France). French provocateur Ozon is back in Berlin with this portrait of three men who decide to challenge a Catholic priest who abused them many years previously.

I Was at Home, But by Angela Schanelec (Germany / Serbia). Franz Rogowski is the star of this Germany drama that revolves around a teenager whose brief disappearance changes the lives of his local community.

A Tale of Three Sisters (Kız Kardeşler)by Emin Alper (Turkey / Germany / Netherlands / Greece). The knock-on affects of unsuccessful adoption is the thorny theme of this drama from Emin Alper, whose award-winning, incendiary thrillers Frenzy and Beyond the Hill have delighted previous Venice and Berlinale festival-goers.

Mr. Jones by Agnieszka Holland (Poland / United Kingdom / Ukraine). Two years ago Polish director Holland won the Silver Bear with her eco-drama Spoor. She’s back in the competition line-up with a thriller about the Welsh journalist who broke the news to the Western media about the 1930s famine in the Soviet Union. Vanessa Kirby, James Norton and Peter Sarsgaard star.

Öndög by Wang Quan’an (Mongolia). Wang Quan’an is no newcomer to Berlinale. In 2010 he  won the Silver Bear for his drama Apart Together, and the Golden Bear for Tuya’s Marriage in 2006.

La paranza dei bambini (Piranhas) by Claudio Giovannesi (Italy). A gang of teenage boys terrorise the streets of Naples in this thriller based on Robert Saviano’s novel Gomorrah.

Répertoire des villes disparues (Ghost Town Anthology) by Denis Côté (Canada). It’s always a pleasure to see Denis Côté’s films – this inventive Canadian maverick was last in town with Boris Without Beatrice. Here he’s back with a fantasy drama set in the aftermath of a tragic incident in a small isolated town

Synonymes (Synonyms) by Nadav Lapid (France / Israel / Germany), with Tom Mercier, Quentin Dolmaire, Louise Chevillotte. Lapid follows his 2014 drama The Kindergarten Teacher with a story about a young Israeli man who absconds to Paris with his trusty dictionary as companion.

Systemsprenger (System Crasher) by Nora Fingscheidt (Germany) a drama focusing on an unruly kid who terrorises everyone around her, not least the child protection services.

Ut og stjæle hester (Out Stealing Horses) by Hans Petter Moland (Norway / Sweden / Denmark). Moland brought his politically incorrect thriller In Order of Disappearance to Berlin in 2014. His latest, Out Stealing Horses also stars Stellan Skargard as a grieving widow whose past comes to the present when he moves out to the depths of the Scandinavian countryside.

Yi miao zhong (One Second) by Zhang Yimou (Red Sorghum) People’s Republic of China ). Always extravagant and visually alluring, Zhang Yimou’s stylish films win awards across the board. Fresh from Venice 2018 and the Golden Horse Festival where his latest Shadow won the top prize. He tries his luck again at Berlinale 2019 with this story that sees a film buff befriending a homeless female.

Berlinale Special at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele

Peter Lindbergh – Women Stories – Documentary
Germany
by Jean Michel Vecchiet (Vies et morts d’Andy Warhol, Basquiat, une vie, 6 juin 1944, ils étaient les premiers)
World premiere

Berlinale Special Gala at the Friedrichstadt-Palast

Photograph
India / Germany / USA
by Ritesh Batra (The Lunchbox, Our Souls at Night, The Sense of an Ending)
with Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Sanya Malhotra, Farrukh Jaffar, Geetanjali Kulkarni, Vijay Raaz, Jim Sarbh, Akash Sinha, Saharsh Kumar Shukla
European premiere

You Only Live Once  – Die Toten Hosen – Tour 2018 Documentary – World Premiere
Germany
by Cordula Kablitz-Post and concert director Paul Dugdale (Taylor Swift)

In Competition – Out of Competition

L’adieu à la nuit (Farewell to the Night) by André Téchiné (France / Germany) – Out of competition with Catherine Deneuve, Kacey Mottet Klein.
Amazing Grace realised by Alan Elliott (USA) From 1970s Warner footage – Documentary, out of competition

Marighella by Wagner Moura (Brazil) – Out of competition

The Operative by Yuval Adler (Germany / Israel / France / USA) – Out of competition

Varda par Agnès (Varda by Agnès) by Agnès Varda (France) – Documentary, out of competition

Vice by Adam McKay (USA) – Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Steve Carell, Sam Rockwell, Tyler Perry – Out of competition

Berlinale Special films:

ANTHROPOCENE: The Human Epoch by Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier, Edward Burtynsky (Canada) – Documentary
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by Chiwetel Ejiofor (United Kingdom)
Brecht by Heinrich Breloer (Germany / Austria)
Celle que vous croyez (Who You Think I Am) by Safy Nebbou (France)
Es hätte schlimmer kommen können – Mario Adorf (It Could Have Been Worse – Mario Adorf) von Dominik Wessely (Germany) – Documentary
Gully Boy by Zoya Akhtar (India)
Lampenfieber (Kids in the Spotlight) by Alice Agneskirchner (Germany) – Documentary
El Norte (The North) by Gregory Nava (USA 1984)
Peter Lindbergh – Women Stories by Jean Michel Vecchiet (Germany) – Documentary
Photograph by Ritesh Batra (India / Germany / USA)
Watergate – Or: How We Learned to Stop an Out of Control President by Charles Ferguson (USA) – Documentary
Weil du nur einmal lebst – Die Toten Hosen auf Tour (You Only Live Once – Die Toten Hosen on Tour) by Cordula Kablitz-Post, concert director Paul Dugdale (Germany) – Documentary

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL 2019 | 7-17 FEBRUARY 2019 

The Mule (2018) ***

Dir: Clint Eastwood | Writ: Sam Dolnick | Cast: Bradley Cooper, Clint Eastwood, Manny Montana, Taissa Farmiga | US Thriller | 118′

Clint Eastwood digs up the story of American horticulturalist Leo Sharp and shovels it out as a plodding but endearing drama about a geriatric, green-fingered drug mule.

Most people won’t have heard of Leo Sharp. He was a popular plantsman who tended his award-winning day-lilies until his business went belly up in the digital age. Directing from Nick Schenck’s laboured script, Clint Eastwood plays him as savvy entrepreneur Earl Stone, who seizes the opportunity to finance his dwindling days by becoming a driver for the Mexican Sinaloa Cartel.

The life and soul of any gathering, stone is an old school charmer for whom work is always a pleasure but family a chore –  and we feel his pain as he potters around in a state of perpetual regret for disappointing his nagging wife (Dianne West) and daughter. Infact, all the women in The Mule are seen in a negative light either nagging or as gaiety girls flashing their assets –  his grand-daughter is the exception (Taissa Farmiga gets the best female role).  Maybe there’s more of Clint in Stone than he’d like to admit.

And that’s not all. The DEA (in the shape of Bradley Cooper and Michael Peña) are on his tail, at a snail’s pace. Cooper does his stuff with consummate ease and follows Stone across the scenic landscape and the two compare notes on family faux pas. And clearly Clint relishes his role as he sallies forth on the open road, singing out loud at the wheel of his truck, a rather sly old curmudgeon one minute, and twinkly-eyed Roué the next. And what man wouldn’t when offered a threesome with Mexican babes.

The Mule is a slow roadie with a wonderful central performance from a Hollywood great. Still rocking into his nineties and in command of his faculties. There are few politically incorrect moments – and for a man who grew up in the 1940s you’ve got to appreciate how times – and attitudes – have changed. And when he delivered his acceptance speech at the Day-lily awards, Clint should have quoted Dorothy Parker’s famous line: “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think”. That said, The Mule is a respectable movie. And Clint is still a legend. How many of us can say that? MT

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM FRIDAY 29 January 2019

Edgar Pêra – A genuine original | Retrospective IFFR 2019

There is no filmmaker like Edgar Pêra (b.1960). His work may be an acquired taste but it is always inventive and Avant-garde referencing his heroes in creative ways and keeping the past alive. The Portuguese auteur often pays tribute to Dziga Vertov, Branquinho da Fonseca and Fernando Pessoa – but always in an ingenious way – transforming their ideas into bizarre and refreshing features, some will screen in a retrospective at the Rotterdam International Film festival 2019

Edgar Henrique Clemente Pêra first studied psychology, but soon realised his vocation in Film at the Portuguese National Conservatory, currently Lisbon Theatre and Film School.  But it was the work of Russian director Dziga Vertov that made him pick up a camera in 1985, and his strange visual style and quirky dark humour found an outlet in twisted arthouse fare that is completely unique. He has made over 100 films for cinema, TV, theatre dance, cine-concerts, galleries, internet and other media, and his latest mystery drama Caminhos Magnetiykos screens at Rotterdam International Film Festival in 2019.

His love of music influenced his work in the mid 1980s, and he filmed Portuguese rock bands in a Neo-realist, ‘neuro-punk’ style. In 1988, Pêra shot a film in the Ruins of Chiado, a neighbourhood in the heart of Lisbon, decimated by a large fire that year. In 1990 Reproduta Interdita was shown at the Portuguese Horror Film Festival, Fantasporto. In 1991, his documentary short raised the profile of Portuguese modernist architect Cassiano Branco – The City of Cassiano, (Grand Prix Festival Films D’Architecture Bordeaux). But from thereon his penchant for the weird and radically different took over.

In 1994, Pêra’s first fiction feature Manual de Evasão LX 94/Manual of Evasion (for Lisbon 1994 Capital of Culture), channelled the aesthetic legacy of soviet constructivist silent films, with what the filmmaker called “a neuro-punk way of creating and capturing instantaneous reality”. The film has divided the critics in Portugal and abroad. It will be also screened at the retrospective Rotterdam Film Festival 2019.

In 1996 Edgar Pêra started an ambitious project which would take four years to edit. The surreal comedy feature entitled, A Janela (Maryalva Mix)/The Window (Don Juan Mix), premiered at the Locarno Festival in 2001. From then on Pêra’s work, veered towards a more emotional style, but still kept the emphasis on non-realist aesthetics and eccentric humour. Pêra’s 2006 retrospective at Indie Lisboa won the festival prizes for Best Feature, Best cinematography and Audience Award: Running at just over an hour,: Movimentos Perpétuos/Perpetual Movements is a cine-tribute to legendary Portuguese guitar composer and player Carlos Paredes. Critic and programmer Olaf Möller wrote that “Pêra is too different from everything which we regard as ‘correct’, ‘valid’ within the culture of film, ‘realistic’ in a cinematic, socio-political way. Put more precisely: Edgar Pêra is different from everything that we know about Portugal”.

O Barão  is an adaptation of Branquinho da Fonseca’s short story, premiering in 2011 at the International Film Festival Rotterdam it won the Gold Donkey Award. In 2011 he also started experimenting with the 3D format. His most controversial film yet, Cinesapiens is a short drama, a segment of 3x3D , described by our critic Michael Pattison as “an assaultive triptych that caused walkouts when it premiered at Cannes in 2013”. It forms part of a trio with two other films by Jean-Luc Godard and Peter Greenaway at La Semaine de la Critique in Cannes.

In 2014 Pêra directed two 3D films, Stillness and Lisbon Revisited. Stillness was considered by many as  “astonishingly offensive”. Lisbon Revisited, with words by Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, premiered at the Locarno Festival. Pera’s first commercial success came in 2014 with pop comedy feature Virados do Avesso/Turned Inside Out. This was followed by Espectador Espantado/The Amazed Spectator, a “kino-investigation about spectatorship” which premiered at Rotterdam Film Festival, 2016 and was also the title of his PhD thesis. In 2016 his Delirium in Las Vedras, about the Portuguese Carnival in Torres Vedras, premiered in Rotterdam and São Paulo 2017.  And in 2018, O Homem-Pykante Diálogos Kom Pimenta, about the poet Alberto Pimenta, was shown for the first time at IndieLisboa. Caminhos Magnéticos/Magnethick Pathways, starring Dominique Pinon, will also be shown during his retrospective this year at Rotterdam International Film Festival.

ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2019 | 23 JANUARY – 3 FEBRUARY 2019

The Baron (2011) O Barao *** | IFFR Rotterdam 2019

Dir: Edgar Pêra   Script: Luis Costa Gomes  Novel: Branquinho da Fonseca |Cast: Nuno Mela, Marcos Barbosa, Leonor Keil, Marina Albuquerque | 94mins   Portugal   Neuro-Gothic Horror

Dark, demonic and weirdly witty: Edgar Pera’s The Baron is an experiment in neuro-Gothic horror based on the novel by Branquinho da Fonseca and inspired by a film destroyed in the 1940s by the Fascist dictatorship under Salaza – who in the same amusing vein met his death falling off a deckchair.

Edgar Pêra shot the images and then apparently waited for the footage to lead his imagination into a world of ghastly horror surrounding a visit of a school inspector to the strange and beastlike Baron played masterfully by his longtime collaborator Nuno Melo whose hypnotic chant ‘Aqui Quem Manda Sou Eu’ (I’m the one in charge here) will haunt you, pavlonian-style long after the closing titles roll.

To Edgar Pêra sound is a vital element in his films: here in this low budget piece, the soundtrack is crucial in conjuring up a highly mystifying atmosphere to a simple storyline that echoes Mary Shelly’s Dracula. Pêra has Costa Gomes’s script to hand but uses it for reference only so the dialogue is largely improvised. The Baron himself is a Portuguese Nosferatu with Nuno Melo’s butch bone structure playing the leading role in contrast to Klaus Kinski shard-like talons and tombstone teeth. Rather than a hovering, tentative ghoul, he has a frighteningly dominatingly physicality and Kafkaesque presence and is clearly also a womaniser strangely under the thumb of his maid Idalina, played with succubus-like charm by Leonor Keil. If you do get a chance to see this one, grab it! MT

NOW SCREENING AT ROTTERDAM FILM FESTIVAL 2019| The Baron won the Gold Donkey at Rotterdam Film Festival 2011 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Destroyer (2018 **

Dir: Karyn Kusama | US Thriller | 121’

You will gawp at Nicole Kidman’s transformation in this rather bleak and messy crime thriller cum character study of a lovelorn woman whose desperate past derails her future. It comes as a shock from an actor who is used to playing vulnerable and smart but always beautiful women.

Karyn Kusama has finally given Kidman the chance to play a broken, badass bitch in Destroyer. And it’s a dynamite performance that may look unappealing but certainly strikes home. As Erin Bell, her baleful, sinister stare haunts nearly every frame and coiled anger springs out unexpectedly – this antiheroine is not out to please anyone. After a messy opening act where Kusama establishes the storyline, a fractured narrative seesaws backwards and forwards from the late 1980/90s to present day LA, Destroyer pictures Kidman as hapless antiheroine Detective Erin Bell, whose youth was spent going undercover with her partner/lover Chris (Sebastian Stan) to infiltrate a band of robbers, headed up by glib psycho Silas (Toby Kebbell). But when Silas reappears on the scene, she’s determined to put an end to his antics, which have been carrying on since back in the day. But something else happened – Erin fell in love, madly. And that love, or loss of it on a fateful day that unspools in the satisfying final act, has made her into the woman she is in the current day.

And while her character is utterly believable in both the past and the present, it’s in the unravelling of the story – particularly in fin de siècle LA, that things sometimes feel unconvincing and rather anodyne, given the nature of crime-ridden LA. But Kidman’s detective is hard-hitting, intelligent and unafraid to be unpopular – easier when you’ve got nothing to lose, or live for. And that’s the essence of her character. And although occasionally she overstates her violent vehemence in the context of what’s going on around her, teetering on the edge of caricature, it’s a corruscating performance and one to be proud of.

Sadly this is a step back for Kusama whose brilliant thriller The Invitation (2015), was a shocker with a humane face. Here the band of brigands are almost laughably louche and lightweight, in complete contrast to Kidman’s detective character. And although they try to inject menace into proceedings, all we feel from them is disdain. The only refreshing contrast is a vignette from arch villain who sparks out interest, but not for long.

Kidman is so hard-bitten and bitter you start to feel uncomfortable watching her. Especially in scenes with her daughter’s nasty boyfriend, or jerking off a terminally ill low-life when she’s desperate for a lead. At the end of the day, Destroyer is an unpleasant, empty kind of film. It goes through the motions, but leaves you cold – and glad it’s all over.  MT

ON RELEASE FROM FRIDAY 25 JANUARY 2019

Love Sonia (2017) ***

Dir.: Tabriz Noorani; Cast: Mrunal Thakur, Riya Sisodiya, Adil Hussain, Mano Bajpayee, Richa Chadha, Freida Pinto, Sai Tamhankar, Raj Kummar Rao, Demi Moore; India 2018, 120 min.

Tabrez Noorani was the line producer of Slumdog Millionaire and Life of Pi. His debut is slick but over reliant on titillation to raise awareness of the sad plight of sex-trafficking victims in India. 

Each year over 100 000 girls and women are sold or abducted in the Indian sub continent, many of them held in captivity under terrible conditions. Scripted by Ted Caplan and based on a true story by Noorani, Love Sonia is certainly is full of passion, but the aesthetics are based on his former work, and his upfront hyper-realistic approach often collides with his message.

Sisters Sonia (brilliant debutant Thakur) and Preeti (Sisodiya) live with their hardworking parents 1400 miles north of Mumbai. Their father (Hussain) is always in debt, blaming his lack of sons for his misfortune. When he finally snaps, Preeti is sold to his main debtor Anjali (Tamhankar) who works on commission for the pimp Faisal (Bajpayee) and promises to find the girl a maid position in Mumbai. Sonia is traumatised by the loss of her sister, and begs Anjali to be allowed to join her. Anjali takes the naïve Sonia by her word, but when she arrives in Mumbai, Faisal immediately sees a profit in re-selling the virgin Sonia, ordering her to perform ‘only’ fellatio, and later agrees for her to be anally raped. Faisal is supported by Madhuri (Chadha), whom he treats with contempt: she is his toy, aware that he can send her back to please the customers. Meanwhile, Rashmi (Pinto) is raped by her husband, so that he can marry her and sell her on to Faisal. Sonia is finally sold to a bidder in Hong Kong, and shipped to LA, where her story continues.

After a poetic opening, Noorani forces the tempo, and while cruel details do have a place, he sometimes oversteps his mark. Overall, his voyeurism contradicts his message. This is very much Slumdog, with another script. Apart from Faisal, none of the protagonists are really fleshed out. Polish DoP Lucas Bielan (A Grain of Truth), supports Noorani’s approach with a Bollywood bling approach, and although the cast tries their best to get the message over, the film’s racy, overblown credentials are self-defeating. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 29 JANUARY 2019

Nina (2018) **

Dir.: Olga Chajdas; Cast: Julia Kijowska, Eliza Rycembel, Andrzej Konopka; Poland 2018, 122 min.

This hit and miss debut drama from Polish filmmaker Olga Chajdas struggles with an illogical narrative, despite some positive elements. 

French teacher Nina (Kijowska) desperately wants a child despite her failing marriage to Wotjek (Konopka), a car mechanic. In order to find the ideal surrogate mother the couple embark on a bizarre strategy: reversing their car into a prospective surrogate’s car, they then offer the victim a cost free repair at Wotjek’s garage and make a connection. And it’s during one of these ill-conceived escapades that Nina meets Magda (Rycembel), an airport security guard with an active lesbian sex life. Nina falls head over heels for the androgynous young woman but Wotjek, feeling left out, reacts with a violent assault on Magda. Nina then gets cold feet, after a confrontation with one of Madga’s ex-lovers with the whole debacle culminating in a positive conclusion. 

Strangely enough some of strongest scenes in NINA take place away from the central lesbian love affair. But while the lovers somehow lack a certain chemistry, Rycembel’s performance as the hot to trot initiator of the sensitive sexual encounter scenes has a lot going for it. And this is what makes Nina unique in spite of its hapless narrative. DoP Tomasz Naumiuk does a great job of recording the wild goings on with his mobile handheld images. There are also some extremely beautiful snowy landscapes.

At Rotterdam Film Festival 2018, where NINA won the VPRO Big Screen Award, Chajdas talked about the repressive new government and the lack of a gay club scene in Poland – so so she makes this a more colourful feature of her drama than reality permits.  AS

ON RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS from 29 JANUARY 2019

Mary Queen of Scots (2018) ****

Dir: Josie Rourke | Wri: Beau Willimon | Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Margot Robbie, Jack Lowden, Joe Alwyn, Angela Bain, Thon Petty, Adrian Lester, Adrian Derrick-Palmer, Ian Hart, Simon Russell Beale, David Tennant, Brendan Coyle | Drama | US/UK/ 134′

MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS is the second film this year that deals with the complicated lives of women in power. In Yorgos Lanthimos’s sassy black comedy Queen Anne falls under the spell of her two female courtiers but manages to prevail despite her reduced mental and physical circumstances. Josie Rourke’s toys convincingly with the truth in her spectacular but sensitive drama that explores the thorny relationship between two 16th century Queens at opposite ends of the British Islands – Mary in Scotland and Elizabeth in Southern England. In some ways these show how women at the top can be lionised and then swiftly victimised: all three female monarchs are highly intelligent and intuitive but they are also totally alone, and crucially vulnerable because of their gender. And the salient fact that emerges in both these films is that regal women – or any female leaders for that matter – are betrayed by their own kind – and not just their menfolk – in their fight to prevail (‘wise men wasted on the whims of women’).

As director of the Donmar Warehouse Lisa Rourke’s approach is theatrical and exquisitely visual in her screen debut. This is a lavishly mounted and magnificent saga that straddles the majestic Scottish landscape and also the lush intimacy of the interior scenes. The 16th century is seen from a uniquely feminine focus. And Rourke appreciates the sensibilities in question that only a woman could appreciate: the great sadness at the heart of Elizabeth I is her inability to procreate and this makes her a vulnerable character with a fatal flaw, despite her abiding strength of character and acute intelligence. Power for women in that era lay in their fertility and also their fecundity. And Mary is fully aware of this and uses her biology to get the better of Elizabeth, at least for a while. And when they finally meet, in a dreamlike scene where gossamer curtains continually conceal Elizabeth from her rival, the meeting is not confrontational but essentially full of regret and commiseration – although neither backs down from their position of residual power. Beau Willimon (Netflix) brings his unique brand of TV theatricals to the party with behind the scenes skulduggery.

The film opens as the 18-year-old widowed and still virgin Mary (Ronan) returns to Scottish shores after a sexless marriage to François – who was apparently too scared to perform his manly duties. Her half- brother (James McArdle) is temporarily on the throne, and not ecstatic to see her, for obvious reasons, and Protestant cleric John Knox (Tennant) is highly vocal in his dislike of her. Her Catholicism is the divisive factor, as is her unwillingness to stroke male egos (“one moment does not make a man”). Her cousin and rival Elizabeth (a regal Margot Robbie) is also unhappy to have her back in Britain, as she is a rightful heir to the throne and Elizabeth is childless, but concedes that Mary will come next. But those around them are not happy about the possible outcomes, and their scheming sets in motion a series of events that are now ‘history’.

Rourke and Willimon’s subtly salacious backdrop to the intrigue makes this neatly condensed historical thriller compelling but also highly plausible. And Rourke keeps the tension mounting and the pace tight throughout in her masterful first feature. There are no long monologues or endless pontifications – and she deftly dovetails the various plot-lines together while stitching sensually intimate scenes into the narrative and also staging short-lived but spectacular battle scenes. Costumes and hairstyles feel both ancient and edgily Avantgarde. And a sexual frisson seems to sizzle throughout the entire cast.

Obviously there will be bleats from historical purists, but this is an imagined drama not an historical recreation. As Mary, Ronan feels perfectly cast and polished, her porcelain prettiness suffused with ethereal delicacy, and yet she is resolute and pragmatic to the last. After being seduced by Darnley’s charm – hardly surprising given that her smouldering libido has been unquenched by a sexless short marriage – she quickly susses him out to be a bisexual airhead with feet of clay and an eye to the main chance – but realises she must also bear a child by him – as soon as possible. She also fathoms out the way to do this is through domination, and he responds.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth gets a dose of small pox – transforming Robbie from a regal stunner to a dried-up crone – but still radiates an inner strength and an outer vulnerability which brings out the Queen’s thoughtful introspection and her deep regret at having to be “a man”. And the final scene sees her holding her own, despite Mary’s persistence as a Stuart. This is a finely-tuned but mesmerising arthouse drama that manages its modern viewpoint without losing site of its elegant antiquity. MT

From 18 JANUARY 2019

Rotterdam Film Festival | 23 January – 3 February 2019

Rotterdam is one of the largest shipping ports in Europe and forms part of the prosperous oil-trading triangle known as ARA, along with Amsterdam and Antwerp. Rotterdam is the cradle of Modernism from the 1930s onwards and although it was almost completely destroyed during the Second World War (apart from the iconic Sonneveld House Museum which still remains, built in the Nieuwe Bouwen style). The vibrant Dutch city takes pride in its Avant garde and Art Nouveau architecture and buildings such as the Cube House (left), Kunsthal Museum and the Erasmusbrug Bridge (below) making it a magnet for design lovers – and cineastes alike.

This year’s Rotterdam Film Festival takes place from 23 January until the 3rd February with the latest World premieres running alongside 4 sections entitled Bright Future, Voices, Deep Focus and Perspectives – and a cutting-edge arts programme to add a cultural dimension to the 10 days, and this year includes SLEEPCINEMAHOTEL a one off project by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and never before seen outtakes from Sergei Parajanov’s masterpiece The Colour of Pomegranates (196

The 2019 jury comprises Chilean filmmaker and artist Alfredo Jaar; Daniela Michel, festival director of Morelia Film Festival; Katriel Schory, former director of the Israel Film Fund; Pimpaka Towira, Thai filmmaker/producer and programme director of Singapore Film Festival; and Italian filmmaker Susanna Nicchiarelli. The festival’s Big Screen Competition awards a prize of €30,000 to its winning director whose film will be guaranteed a theatrical release in the Netherlands, as be broadcast on the Dutch public TV network NPO.

Sacha Polak’s Dirty God will open the festival.

T  I G E R   C O M P E T I T I O N

Sons Of Denmark, Ulaa Salim, 2019, Denmark, world premiere

No coração do mundo, Gabriel Martins Alves/Maurílio Martins, 2019, Brazil, world premiere

Take Me Somewhere Nice, Ena Sendijarević, 2019, Netherlands/Bosnia and Herzegovina, world premiere (left)

Present.Perfect., Shengze Zhu, 2019, USA/Hong Kong, world premiere

Sheena667, Grigory Dobrygin, 2019, Russia, world premiere

Nona. If They Soak Me, I’ll Burn Them, Camila José Donoso, 2019, Chile/Brazil/France/South Korea, world premiere

Koko-di Koko-da, Johannes Nyholm, 2018, Sweden/Denmark, international premiere

Els dies que vindran, Carlos Marqués-Marcet, 2019, Spain, world premiere

B I G   S C R E E N   C O M P E T I T I O N

Bangla, Phaim Bhuiyan, 2019, Italy, world premiere

The Best of Dorien B., Anke Blondé, 2019, Belgium, world premiere

God of the Piano, Itay Tal, 2019, Israel, world premiere

Hail Satan?, Penny Lane, 2018, USA, international premiere

Joel, Carlos Sorín, 2018, Argentina, European premiere

Queen of Hearts, May el-Toukhy, 2019, Denmark, European premiere

Transnistra, Anna Eborn, 2018, Sweden, world premiere

X&Y, Anna Odell, 2018, Sweden/Denmark, international premiere

ROTTERDAM FILM FESTIVAL | 23 JANUARY – 3 FEBRUARY 2019 

Beautiful Boy (2018) ****

Dir: Felix van Groeningen | Drama | 110’ | US 2018

Based on a best-selling memoir by journalist David Sheff, BEAUTIFUL BOY explores a teenage boy’s descent into crystal meth addiction. It’s a film that pulls no punches, but which avoids excessively wallowing in the physical misery of drug use. Instead, the focus is on the wider circumstances of the boy’s addiction and, specifically, the impact that it has on his father. It’s a personal, refreshing approach which makes the boy’s decline all the more moving.

An intelligent teenager with a bright future, Nic Sheff (Timothée Chalamet) is nevertheless anxious and alienated, and he starts using drugs to help him fill the void that he feels inside. Sensing a problem, his father (Steve Carell, playing David Sheff) checks Nic into a rehab facility, but the success of the treatment is short lived – ‘relapse is part of recovery’, we’re repeatedly told, and Nic’s sense of emptiness makes him a repeat user. His choice of drug doesn’t help – as an expert explains to David, the recovery rate for crystal meth addicts, as a percentage, is in the single figures.

Playing Nic, Chalamet brings a sympathetic charm to a role which borders a little on cliché – that of the tortured, gifted artist-turned-junky – but the film belongs to Steve Carrell, who excels as the caring father who feels increasingly helpless in the face of his son’s steady decline. Following his turn as a grieving father in Richard Linklater’s recent masterpiece Last Flag Flying, Carrell seems to be moving away from the comedic roles which made his name and carving out a specific dramatic niche all for himself.

Given that it’s the relationship between father and son, rather than son and drugs, that forms the core of Beautiful Boy, the film’s scope widens out, becoming a study of family dynamicsand the way that David’s preoccupation with Nic consumes him, dominating his life and impacting his relationship with his younger children (Nic’s step-siblings): scenes such as the one showing a distracted David failing to watch his younger son swimming reach beyond the drug-addition narrative. But as David struggles with his guilt and his inability to pull Nic from the gutter, the major question that arises is: can you ever really help other people, or can they only help themselves?

Quiet and understated, the film deserves praise for its non-sensationalist approach. Though at times he brings in a touch too much sentiment (including the use of the John Lennonsong which gives the film its title), director Felix Van Groeningen handles the non-linear, elliptical narrative with a commanding efficiency. If the film’s factual closing titles make its ultimate message all too clear, one can’t help but feel it’s an effective film which serves as a pertinent reminder of the devasting and wide-reaching effects of drug use – not only on the users themselves, but also on those who love them. ALEX BARRETT

NOW ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE

London Unplugged (2018) ***

Dirs: ‘Dog Days’(George Taylor), ‘Felines’ (George Taylor), ‘Unchosen’ (Nicholas Cohen, Ben Jacobsen), ‘Club Drunk’ (Mitchell Crawford), ‘Mudan Blossom’ (Qi Zhang, Natalia Casali and Kaki Wong), ‘Pictures’ (Rosanna Lowe), ‘Little Sarah’s Big Adventure’ (Andrew Cryan), ‘Shopping’ (Layke Anderson), ‘The Door To’ (Andres Heger-Bratterud), ‘Kew Gardens’ (Nicholas Cohen) Interlink segments (Nicholas Cohen) | UK Drama | 78′

London Unplugged is a portmanteau exploration of female centric stories, some more convincing than others, but all of them focusing on London’s diverse communities. Tied together by Nicholas Cohen’s cinematic interlinking segments, the various vignettes are a refreshing take on the usual themes of opportunity, compromise and loneliness that make up modern living in one of Europe’s most eclectic capitals.

George Taylor’s mysterious opening story ‘Dog Days’, sees two strangers connect in a waterside frolic. Likewise light-hearted is Mitchell Crawford’s remarkable animation entitled ‘Club Drunk’ describing the goings on in a playground after dark. Layke Anderson’s ‘Shopping’ is an enjoyably insightful one-hander that takes place in a sex shop, and offers a feel-good message.

There are the usual economic, racial and migration stories, amongst them Nick Cohen and Ben Jacobson’s ‘Unchosen’ which sees a hapless Iranian refugee fighting for asylum in the chosen city of his dreams. The plight of the homeless is explored with humour in Qi Zhang, Natalia Casali and Kaki Wong’s ‘Mudan Blossom’. Whilst “Pictures’ is a musically-themed piece that follows a struggling singer living on the breadline, based on a 1917 short story by Katherine Mansfield.

By contrast, George Taylor’s ‘Felines’ feels forced and rather amateurish, despite Juliet Stevenson’s efforts to portray a cat-loving carer. The film finishes with Nick Cohen’s  ‘Kew Gardens’, another literary adaptation this time from Virginia Woolf. Cohen’s discursive, episodic story of a real-life female athlete brings the whole thing together neatly although rather soullessly, providing an undercurrent of positive and negative, as she runs from east to west expressing the upbeat and the downbeat vibes of the metropolis. MT

VARIOUS ARTHOUSE VENUES FROM FRIDAY, 18 JANUARY 2019

Buffalo Boys (2017) *

Dir.: Mike Wiluan; Cast: Yoshi Sudarso, Ario Bayu, Tio Pakusadewo, Reinout Bussemaker, Happy Salma; Indonesia, Singapore 2018, 102 min.

Mike Wiluan tries hard to make his homeland’s Oscar entry a touchstone for every Western every made. The end result is a stylish but soulless mishmash that reaches new heights of voyeurism, sadism, and violence – with almost continuous sword and gun fights, martial arts, and fisticuffs a plenty.

Even the narrative is over-wrought: Indonesian princes Suwo (Sudarso) and Jamar (Bayu) have been raised in California by their uncle Arana (Pakusadewo), who fled to the USA after his brother Hamza, a Sultan, was killed in Indonesia by Dutch colonial forces, led by the villainous Van Trach (Bussemaker). We are introduced to the brothers learning how to be good cowboys and gun fighters, before travelling with their uncle to Indonesia, to avenge their father in the early 1860s. Siding with suppressed villagers, they soon come to the attention of Van Trach; a pervert who spends his time whipping and raping his servant Seruni (Salma), who turns out to be Arana’s wife. Needless to say, all is resolved in a showdown, when the good ones punish the villains. The less said about this valiant attempt, the better: Performances across the board are one-dimensional and DoP John Radel’s widescreen images are as second-hand as the rest of the ensemble – apart from the sadistic misogyny, which is truly remarkable – even for the Wild West AS

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM 18 JANUARY

Climax (2018) *** Home Ent release

Dir: Gaspar Noé | Drama | 97′

The Argentinian provocateur is now in his fifties but still loves to see the worse in people, as his latest ‘thriller’ shows. This nihilistic metaphor for modern youth starts with a group of young Parisian dancers sharing the joy of their art through a series of video vignettes in the wake of their US tour. This all plays out on TV screen sunk into a bookshelf of bizarre titles ranging from suicide manuals to DVDs of Possession, Harakiri and Schizophrenia. With its ghastly blood red and green tinged camera work, Climax is a well-executed but unedifying affair that’s best left for the horror crowd or those who enjoy a touch of dirty dancing – and I mean dirty.

Shot in fifteen days and opening with the final credits – the camera erupts onto a dance floor basking in gory neon where skanky-looking types writhe and wriggle to the sounds of ‘Supernature’ – all spinning out in one hypnotic take. Scantily clad and in various states of undress the disco divas then move to the sidelines to share inane banter along the lines of: “you’re so fucking fake”. The dancing grows more frenetic after they unwittingly imbibe LSD spiked Sangria. And this is where the film finally descends into a nadir of full-blooded decadent debauchery.

Neither seductive nor particularly interesting, this devilish chamber piece may be a delight to Noe’s fanbase, but others will find it sad to see society’s bases impulses played out as a soi-disant arthouse piece.  Shirking a coherent narrative, the film’s throbbing electronic beats appeal to the darker more reptilian impulses of the human brain. As the camera plummets and soars, the desire to vomit grows stronger. Couples copulate and urinate in the name of art. Noé’s schtick is growing tiresome. Can we play at something else? MT

DVD and BLURAY | 21 January 2019 courtesy of Arrow Films 

https://we.tl/t-Rnh1zai4tW

 

 

Sundance Film Festival | 24 January – 3 February 2019

In Park City Utah, ROBERT REDFORD and his programmer John Cooper set the indie film agenda for 2019 with an array of provocative new titles. This year’s selection has the latest documentaries from Alex Gibney and Kim Longinotto (Shootin the Mafia). There will be biopics about Harvey Weinstein, Stieg Larsson (Millennium Trilogy), designer Halston, and tragic actor Anton Yelchin. English director Joanna Hogg’s latest drama The Souvenir will compete in the World Dramatic section, and Shia LeBoeuf’s scripting debut Honey Boy will compete in the US Dramatic section.
PREMIERES 2019 | D R A M A T I C 

After The Wedding

Isabel (Michelle Williams) has dedicated her life to working with the children in an orphanage in Calcutta. Theresa (Julianne Moore)…
Dir/Writer: Bart Freundlich

Animals

Would-be writer Laura (Holliday Grainger) and her free-spirited bestie Tyler (Alia Shawkat) share a messy Dublin apartment and a hearty…
Director Sophie Hyde Writer Emma Jane Unsworth

Blinded by the Light

1987, Margaret Thatcher’s England. Javed, a 16-year-old British Pakistani boy, lives in the town of Luton. His father’s recent job…
Director Gurinder Chadha, Writer Sarfraz Manzoor, Gurinder Chadha, Paul Mayeda Berges

Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile

1969. Ted (Zac Efron) is crazy-handsome, smart, charismatic, affectionate. And cautious single mother Liz Koepfler (Lily Collins) ultimately cannot resist…
Director Joe Berlinger. Screenwriter Michael Werwie

I Am Mother

Shortly after humanity’s extinction, in a high-tech bunker deep beneath the earth’s surface, a robot named Mother commences her protocol….
Director Grant Sputore, Screenwriter Michael Lloyd Green

Late Night

Katherine Newbury (Emma Thompson) is a pioneer and legendary host on the late-night talk-show circuit. When she’s accused of being…
Director Nisha Ganatra. Screenwriter Mindy Kaling

Official Secrets

Based on the book , tells the true story of British secret-service officer Katharine Gun, who during the immediate run-up…
Director Gavin Hood, Screenwriter Sara Bernstein, Gregory Bernstein, Gavin Hood

Paddleton

An unlikely bromance between two misfit neighbors becomes an unexpectedly emotional journey when one of them is diagnosed with terminal…
Director Alex Lehmann. Screenwriter Alex Lehmann, Mark Duplass

Photograph

Rafi works as a street photographer in frenzied Mumbai, snapping improvised portraits for tourists at the city’s landmarks. When his…
Director Ritesh Batra. Screenwriter Ritesh Batra

Relive

Los Angeles detective Jack Radcliff fields a distressed phone call from his niece Ashley and rushes to the rescue—only to…
Director Jacob Estes Screenwriter Jacob Estes, Drew Daywalt

Sonja – The White Swan

Before there were the Ice Capades, there was Sonja Henie. In 1936, Henie has three Olympic gold medals and ten…
Director Anne Sewitsky. Screenwriter Mette Marit Bølstad, Andreas Markusson

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind

Young William Kamkwamba lives with his family in rural Malawi, where he attends school regularly and shows great aptitude for…
Director Chiwetel Ejiofor Screenwriter Chiwetel Ejiofor

The Mustang

Roman Coleman (Matthias Schoenaerts) is a tightly wound convict fresh out of solitary confinement at a maximum security prison in…
Director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre. Screenwriter Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, Mona Fastvold, Brock Norman Brock

The Report

Senate staffer Daniel Jones is assigned the daunting task of leading an investigation into the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program….
Director Scott Z. Burns. Screenwriter Scott Z. Burns

The Sunlit Night

Summer is off to a terrible start for Frances (Jenny Slate). Her art project fails, her boyfriend unceremoniously kicks her…
Director David Wnendt. Screenwriter Rebecca Dinerstein

The Tomorrow Man

Retiree Ed Hemsler (John Lithgow) spends his quiet days watching the news, checking internet forums, and preparing for the end…
Director Noble Jones. Screenwriter Noble Jones

Top End Wedding

Lauren and Ned are engaged. They are in love. And they have just ten days to find Lauren’s mother (who…
Director Wayne Blair. Screenwriter Joshua Tyler, Miranda Tapsell

Troop Zero

Nine-year-old oddball Christmas Flint (Mckenna Grace) is obsessed with space and making contact with the aliens of the universe. When…
Directors Bert&Bertie. Screenwriter Lucy Alibar

Velvet Buzzsaw

In the cutthroat world of fine-art trading and representation, up-and-coming agent Josephina (Zawe Ashton) stumbles across a secret weapon: hundreds…
Director Dan Gilroy. Screenwriter Dan Gilroy
PREMIERES 2019 | D O C U M E N T A R Y
The Brink / U.S.A. (Director: Alison Klayman, Producer: Marie Therese Guirgis) — Now unconstrained by an official White House post, Steve Bannon is free to peddle influence as a perceived kingmaker with a direct line to the President. After anointing himself leader of the “populist movement,” he travels around the U.S. and the world spreading his hard-line anti-immigration message. World Premiere
ASK DR RUTH (2019) 

Don’t let her small status fool you. She may be under five feet tall but Holocaust survivor Dr Ruth Westheimer is a force to be reckoned with, as chronicled by Ryan White in his documentary portrait of the noteworthy sex therapist.

Dir: Ryan White.

Halston

Fashion designed Halston combined talent, notoriety and sheer gorgeousness to become a legend. From humble beginnings in Des Moines, Iowa this doc explores his meteoric rise to fame.

Dir: Frederic Tcheng

 Love, Antosha

Prolific young actor Anton Yelchin was wise beyond his years and influenced around him to strive for more.

Dir: Garret Price

Marianne & Leonard

Is a beautiful yet tragic love story between Leonard Cohen and his Norwegian muse Marianne Ihlen.

Dir: Nick Broomfield

 Merata: How Mum Decolonised the Screen

In the 1970s Merata Mita broke through barriers of race, class and gender.

Dir/writer: Hepi Mita

Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool

Using words from Miles Davis’ Autobiography, Stanley Nelson’s biopic offers insight into our understanding of the legendary musician.

Dir: Stanley Nelson

 Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Mollu Ivins

With razor-sharp wit, outspoken journalist and firecracker Molly Ivins took on the good-old-boy corruption in the political establishment

Dir: Janice Engel. Writer: Janice Engel, Monique Zavistovski

The Great Hack

Have you ever filled out an online survey? Do you wonder why you received ads for products

Dir: Karim Amer, Jehane Noujam Wri: Erin Barnett, Pedro Kos, Karim Amer

The Inventor: Out for blood in Silicon Valley

Elizabeth Holmes arrived in Silicon Valley with a revolutionary medical invention. She called it “the Edison”

Director: Alex Gibney

 Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am

After a stint as an editor early in her career, this American writer got the measure of publishing.

Dir: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

 Untouchable

The inside story of the meteoric rise and monstrous fall of movie titan Harvey Weinstein is laid bare.

Dir: Ursula Macfarlane

Words from a Bear

When N Scott Momaday won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize, it marked one of the first major acknowledgements of Native America.

COMPETITION TITLES | U S   D R A M A T I C

Before You Know It

Stage manager Rachel Gurner still lives in her childhood apartment—along with her off-kilter actress sister, Jackie; eccentric playwright father Mel;…
Director Hannah Pearl Utt. Screenwriters Hannah Pearl Utt, Jen Tullock

Big Time Adolescence

It’s funny: humans have been growing up for a really long time, but somehow we still suck at it. Just…
Director Jason Orley. Screenwriter Jason Orley

Brittany Runs A Marathon

Brittany Forgler is a funny, likeable, 27-year-old hot mess of a New Yorker whose trashy nightclub adventures and early-morning walks…
Director Paul Downs Colaizzo. Screenwriter Paul Downs Colaizzo

Clemency

How do you salvage your marriage when you are struggling to salvage your soul, your sense of self, and your…
Director Chinonye Chukwu. Screenwriter Chinonye Chukwu

Hala

Hala is her father’s pride and joy. Dutiful and academically gifted, she skillfully navigates both her social life as a…
Director Minhal Baig. Screenwriter Minhal Baig

Honey Boy

When 12-year-old Otis starts to find success as a child television star in Hollywood, his ex-rodeo-clown father returns to serve…
Director Alma Har’el. Screenwriter Shia LaBeouf

Imaginary Order

For Cathy, life as she’s always known it seems to be slipping away. Her sense of significance is crumbling as…
Director Debra Eisenstadt. Screenwriter Debra Eisenstadt

Luce

It’s been ten years since Amy and Peter Edgar (Naomi Watts and Tim Roth) adopted their son from war-torn Eritrea,…
Director Julius Onah. Screenwriter JC Lee, Julius Onah

Ms. Purple

In the dark karaoke rooms of Los Angeles’s Koreatown stripmalls, Kasie works as a girl, a young hostess paid to…
Director Justin Chon. Screenwriter Justin Chon, Chris Dinh

Native Son

Bigger “Big” Thomas, a young African American man, lives with his mother and siblings in Chicago. Half-heartedly involved with a…
Director Rashid Johnson. Screenwriter Suzan-Lori Parks

Share

After a night of partying, high-school sophomore Mandy discovers that a series of cell-phone videos of her—half-dressed and semiconscious—have gone…
Director Pippa Bianca. Screenwriter Pippa Bianco

The Farewell

After learning their beloved matriarch has terminal lung cancer, a family opts not to tell her about the diagnosis, instead…
Director Lulu Wang. Screenwriter Lulu Wang

The Last Black Man in San Francisco

Jimmie Fails has one hope in life: to reclaim the majestic Victorian house his grandfather built. Every week, Jimmie and…
Director Joe Talbot. Screenwriter Joe Talbot, Rob Richert

Them That Follow

In the rugged wilderness of Appalachia, the members of an isolated community of Pentecostal snake handlers led by Pastor Lemuel…
Director Britt Poulton, Dan Madison Savage. Screenwriter Britt Poulton, Dan Madison Savage

The Sound of Silence

A self-taught scientist, Peter (Peter Sarsgaard) works in New York as a “house tuner”—a unique, highly specialized profession he’s invented….
Director Michael Tyburski. Screenwriter Ben Nabors, Michael Tyburski

To The Stars

In a god-fearing small town in 1960s Oklahoma, bespectacled and reclusive teen Iris endures the booze-induced antics of her mother…
Director Martha Stephens. Screenwriter Shannon Bradley-Colleary
US   D O C U M E N T A R Y  

Always in Season

Claudia Lacy wants answers. When her 17-year-old son, Lennon, was found hanging from a swing set in Bladenboro, North Carolina,…
Director Jacqueline Olive

American Factory

In 2014, a Chinese billionaire opened a Fuyao factory in a shuttered General Motors plant in Dayton, Ohio. For thousands…
Director Steven Bognar, Julia Reichert

APOLLO 11

NASA’s vaults open for the first time to spill this exquisite, never-before seen audio and 70 mm film footage of…
Director Todd Douglas Miller

Bedlam

is the first major documentary to explore the crisis in care of severely mentally-ill citizens. Set in Los Angeles,…
Director Kenneth Paul Rosenberg

David Crosby: Remember My Name

We’re all acquainted with archetypal rock bio-doc tropes: the unexpected rise to stardom, calamitous love affairs, a descent into drugs,…
Director A.J. Eaton

Hail Satan?

What kind of religious expression should be permitted in a secular nation? Holy hell, something is brewing! Just a few…
Director Penny Lane

Jawline

Austyn Tester—handsome and 17—feels oppressed by the confines of life in his small hometown in Tennessee. But in the online-streaming…
Director Liza Mandelup

Knock Down the House

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a young, bold Puerto Rican bartender from the Bronx, works double shifts to save her family’s home from…
Director Rachel Lears

Midnight Family

With striking vérité camerawork, drops us directly into the frenetic nighttime emergency ecosystem of Mexico City. In the midst of…
Director Luke Lorentzen

Mike Wallace Is Here

Deemed the “enemy of the people” by our current president, journalism in America is on the chopping block. Lies, fake…
Director Avi Belkin

Moonlight Sonata: Deafness in Three Movements

Irene Taylor Brodsky builds on her powerful first feature (Audience Award winner at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival) by delving…
Director Irene Taylor Brodsky

One Child Nation

In order to expose rampant human-rights abuses, filmmaker Nanfu Wang fearlessly confronted Chinese government agents in her 2016 Sundance Film…
Director Nanfu Wang, Jialing Zhang

Pahokee

Four high-school students, Na’Kerria, Jocabed, Junior, and BJ, embark on their senior year in Pahokee, a small Florida town on…
Director Ivete Lucas, Patrick Bresnan

TIGERLAND

In the span of only a handful of generations, the tiger has been transformed from a venerated creature with a…
Director Ross Kauffman

Untitled Amazing Johnathan Documentary

It begins as a documentary about “The Amazing Johnathan,” a uniquely deranged magician who built a career out of shock…
Director Ben Berman

Where’s My Roy Cohn?

Roy Cohn personified the dark arts of twentieth-century American politics, turning empty vessels into dangerous demagogues—from Senator Joseph McCarthy to…
Director Matt Tyrnauer
WORLD CINEMA   D R A M A T I C 

Dirty God

After a vicious acid attack leaves half her body covered in scars, Jade (Vicky Knight) must come to terms with…
Director Sacha Polak. Screenwriter Sacha Polak, Susanne Farrell

Divine Love

In the Brazil of 2027, where raves celebrate God’s love and drive-through spiritual-advice booths have become the norm, Joana holds…
Director Gabriel Mascaro
Screenwriter Gabriel Mascaro, Rachel Daisy Ellis, Esdras Bezerra, Lucas ParaÍzo

Dolce Fine Giornata

Maria Linde, a free-spirited, Jewish Polish Nobel Prize winner, lives in Tuscany surrounded by warmth and chaos in her family’s…
Director Jacek Borcuch. Screenwriter Jacek Borcuch, Szczepan Twardoch

Judy & Punch

In the rough-and-tumble town of Seaside (nowhere near the sea), villagers flock to Punch and Judy’s marionette theatre. Though Punch…
Director Mirrah Foulkes. Screenwriter Mirrah Foulkes

Koko-di Koko-da

Three years after their daughter Maja’s eighth birthday was interrupted by sudden tragedy, Elin and Tobias embark on a mirthless…
Director Johannes Nyholm. Screenwriter Johannes Nyholm

Monos

Belonging to a rebel group called “the Organization,” a ragtag band of child soldiers, brandishing guns and war names like…
Director Alejandro Landes. Screenwriter Alejandro Landes, Alexis Dos Santos

Queen of Hearts

Anne, a successful lawyer, lives in a beautiful modernist home with her two daughters and physician husband, Peter. Yet when…
Director May el-Toukhy. Screenwriter Maren Louise Käehne, May el-Toukhy

The Last Tree

Femi, a British boy of Nigerian heritage, enjoys a happy childhood in Lincolnshire, where he is raised by doting foster-mother…
Director Shola Amo. Screenwriter Shola Amoo

The Sharks

Rosina ticks away the days of a restless summer in her sleepy beachside town until she sights an ominous dorsal…
Director Lucía Garibaldi, Screenwriter Lucía Garibaldi

The Souvenir

Between script pitches and camera setups, Julie hosts a film-school cohort party where she meets a mysterious man named Anthony….
Director Joanna Hogg. Screenwriter Joanna Hogg

This is not Berlin

As Mexico anticipates the 1986 World Cup, 17-year-old Carlos is less interested in soccer and more interested in listening to…
Director Hari Sama. Screenwriter Rodrigo Ordóñez, Hari Sama, Max Zunino

WE ARE LITTLE ZOMBIES

One sunny day, four young strangers—Hikari, Ikuko, Ishi, and Takemura—meet by chance at a crematorium. They have all recently lost…
Director Makoto Nagahisa. Screenwriter Makoto Nagahisa
WORLD CINEMA.  D O C U M E N T A R Y

Advocate

Israeli human-rights lawyer Lea Tsemel is a force that won’t be deterred. Having defended Palestinians against a host of criminal…
Director Rachel Leah Jones, Philippe Bellaïche

Cold Case Hammarskjöld

In 1961, United Nations secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld’s plane mysteriously crashed, killing Hammarskjöld and most of the crew. . It’s understood…
Director Mads Brügger

Gaza

Facing the serene Mediterranean Sea, 17-year-old Karma Khaial stands at the water’s edge and senses freedom. But in Gaza, the…
Director Garry Keane, Andrew McConnell

Honeyland

In a deserted Macedonian village, Hatidze, a 50-something woman in a bright yellow blouse and green headscarf, trudges up a…
Director Ljubomir Stefanov, Tamara Kotevska

Lapü

On a windy night in the Colombian desert, a young Wayúu woman named Doris sleeps in her hammock and dreams…
Dirs Juan Pablo Polanco, César Alejandro Jaimes. Writers Juan Pablo Polanco, César Alejandro Jaimes, María Canela Reyes

Midnight Traveler

In 2015, after Hassan Fazili’s documentary aired on Afghan national television, the Taliban assassinated the film’s main subject and put…
Director Hassan Fazili. Writer Emelie Mahdavian

Sea of Shadows

The Sea of Cortez is facing total collapse because of a war at sea. Mexican drug cartels have discovered the…
Director Richard Ladkani

Shooting the Mafia

In the streets of Sicily, beautiful, gutsy Letizia Battaglia pointed her camera straight into the heart of the Mafia that…
Director Kim Longinotto

Stieg Larsson – The Man Who Played With Fire

Since his untimely death, Stieg Larsson has become one of the world’s most famous authors. His Millennium Trilogy— and its…
Director Henrik Georgsson. Screenwriter Henrik Georgsson

The Disappearance of My Mother

Benedetta Barzini is a revered Italian model who shattered stereotypes by becoming a journalist and professor and gained notoriety by…
Director Beniamino Barrese. Screenwriter Beniamino Barrese

The Edge of Democracy

Once a nation crippled by military dictatorship, Brazil found its democratic footing in 1985 and then, in 2002, elected a…
Director Petra Costa. Screenwriter Petra Costa

The Magic Life of V

Wizards, magic spells, and heroic sword battles are just fantasy for some, but for Veera they’re a meaningful part of…
Director Tonislav Hristov. Screenwriter Tonislav Hristov, Kaarle Aho
SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL | 24 JANUARY – 3 FEBRUARY 2019 | PROGRAMME COURTESY OF THE SUNDANCE INSTITUTE 

La Villa (2017) | The House by the Sea

Dir: Robert Guediguian | Cast: Ariane Ascaride, Jean Pierre Darroussin, Anais Demoustier Robinson Stevenin, Yann Tregouet | Drama | France | 107′

Robert Guediguian offers a paean to Provence in the 1970s when three siblings: famous actress Angèle (Ascaride), Armand (Meylan) and Joseph (Daroussin) all hark back to a jeunesse dorée at their father’s seaside villa, he has since suffered a debilitating stroke.

Armand is possibly the most stable of the trio. He has been running the local restaurant for the past two decades. Joseph pines for the good old days of the PCF, which makes him morose and depressed. The film plays out very much in line with a Checkov play where the past must be resolved before life can go on. Joseph too must face the music; his dance with a much younger fiancée Bérangère (Demoustier) must come to an end. Angèle is still mourning the drowning of her only child, and has fallen for a younger fisherman Benjamin (Stevenin), a fan of her stage appearances since he was a teenager. Neighbour Yvan is the only one in a ‘good place’ emotionally – the young doctor is in town to visit his elderly parents. Late catalysts to the party are Yvan’s parents and the appearance of three child refugees.

Director and co-writer Guediguian marks his 19th collaboration with his wife Ariane Ascaride, staying on familiar ground: he gently sketches out the older characters’ longing for the past, and the contemporary fast lane that young ones like Bérangère and Yvan cling to: for them decisions about the future are easy because they have one. Benjamin is somewhere in the middle – he is a romantic dreamer, who yearns for a life shaped on the past. Property speculators circle the coast line like vultures, Joseph cannot even put his memoirs in order. The three siblings are keen to keep the place and the restaurant open, they have to admit that nearly all their old neighbours has cashed in on the property boom. The refugee children at least provide Angèle with a sort of closure.

The ensemble acting is reliable, and DoP Pierre Milon (The Class) is kept busy, panning and tracking the hilly countryside, nature being the only stable element among the coming and going of humans who, with few exceptions, don’t appreciate the beauty of the stunning landscape. AS

Robert Guédiguian was born in Marseille. Many of his early films, including À la via, à la mort (95) and La Ville est tranquille(00), screened in the Director’s Spotlight programme at the 2002 Festival, and he returned to TIFF with his subsequent features Mon père est ingénieur (04), Le Voyage en Arménie(06), and Neiges du Kilimandjaro (11). Other credits include Le promeneur du champ de Mars (05), L’armée du crime (09), and Une histoire de fou (15). La Villa (17) is his latest film. AS

NOW ON RELEASE FROM 11 January | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2017 première.

Colette (2018) **

Dir.: Wash Westmoreland; Cast: Keira Knightley, Dominic West, Denise Gough, Eleanor Tomlinson; USA/UK 2018, 111 min.

This early years of French novelist Colette are adapted here for the screen by director Wash Westmoreland, Richard Glatzer and Rebecca Lenkiewicz; yet all three somehow fail to evoke the essential French story: and while everything said rings true, there is a total lack of emotional resonance: the script fails to get the nuances right: this adaptation is neutered, particularly when it comes to sex. Poor Keira Knightley’s Colette is a one-dimensional character with no inner life,  just a series of phrases.

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (Knightley) was born in small village in Burgundy in 1873. In the film we meet her, twenty years later, in her parent’s house with her intended, the Parisian publisher Willy (Dominic West). Willy (real name Henry Gautier-Villars) agrees to marry her despite her lack of dowry and after an illicit roll in the hay, literally – and sweeps her off to the capital. Colette soon finds out that her literary figure of a husband does not even write his books and articles: this is done by his friends, with his name is on the cover and soon Colette joins the “writing factory”, and because of Willy’s life style (lover, car, lavish bon-viveur) money is always in short supply. Colette’s first literary effort is “Claudine at School” based on her own experiences in a girl’s school with – by today’s standards – modest sexual undertones. Nevertheless, it was a success, and three more Claudine novels followed. Willy, fourteen years older than his wife, encouraged her to have lesbian relationships, among them with the wealthy, married American Georgie Raoul-Duval (Tomlinson), and the aristocratic Marquise de Belbeuf (Gough), called Missy. The latter, “a person like none other” joined Colette on the stage where their kissing was seen as scandalous, ending their collaboration. By then, Colette had grown tired of Willy, who had sold the rights to the ‘Claudine’ novels and tried (in vain) to have her authorship erased. So she left him to toured with the theatre, before publishing La Vagabonde in 1910, the start of her own successful literally career (culminating in ‘Gigi’ (1944).

Colette is verbose and predictable, all the characters, especially the pompous Willy, say what is expected of them. In a narrative that spans some 17 years, no-one seems to change– there is definite lack of character development. The feminism is degraded to a few cliches; Westmoreland cannot make up his mind if wants to direct a historical sex-rom-com or a LGTB feature. DoP Giles Nuttgens (What Maisie Knew) gives us bland images showing an idealised Paris, which never even existed. Overall Colette is just the opposite of its heroine: slow-burning, conformist, spiked with voyeuristic sex. AS

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE

 

     

Stan & Ollie (2018) ****

Dir: Jon S. Baird | Cast: Steve Coogan, John C. Reilly | Comedy Drama

When Stan & Ollie begins, the eponymous duo – that is, Laurel and Hardy themselves – are flying high. It’s 1937, and they are major Hollywood stars – but they are also under contract to producer Hal Roach and, as a result, are being underpaid. Ollie is broke, suffering from an expensive divorce and a gambling addiction, while Stan feels hard done by. He wants to own their films, like Chaplin owns his, and suggests they ask Roach for a better deal. Ollie, however, is content to carry on, not wishing to rock the boat – he has debts to pay, and can’t risk alienating Roach. So, instead, he splits acrimoniously from his long-term partner, and makes a film for Roach without Stan beside him.

16 years later, now ageing and ailing, the duo reunite for a stage tour of the UK, hoping the trip will help them launch production on a film about Robin Hood. As the tour gets underway, they perform in small venues to even smaller audiences. In an attempt to turn things around, they hit the publicity trail and, in doing so, remind the public of their appeal. Audiences soon grow, but old resentments and failing health threaten to undermine the stability of their newly revived success.

As Stan and Ollie, Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly are superb, perfectly capturing the infectious energy that made Laurel and Hardy so likeable, while simultaneously conveying the gamut of emotions that occur as their fortunes rise and fall. Though their loving wives (brilliantly portrayed by Nina Arianda and Shirley Henderson) do their best to care for the men, and get many of the film’s funniest lines while doing so, it’s the bromance between Stan and Ollie that forms the heart of the film, turning their bittersweet story into a touching meditation on friendship, show business and the art of getting old. The pair are driven by a compulsion to create, even as circumstances – and their own health – conspire against them. As Ollie himself puts it, what else are they going to do?

Throughout the film, the ageing comedians are confronted time and again with comments about how wonderful it is that they’re still going after all these years, and still doing the same material over and over. Such backhanded compliments perfectly encapsulate the poignant tone of the film, but the words also ring true – as Stan & Ollie proves, even after all these years, the material still works. Alex Barrett

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE

The Upside (2017) ***

122’Dir: Neil Berger | Cast: Brian Cranston, Nicole Kidman | Kevin Hart | US Drama | 

Neil Berger’s slick big budget remake rides roughshod over some serious themes and its own narrative flaws, but thanks to Brian Cranston at the wheel central role. But after a clunky first act, The Upside does improve, and culminates in an enjoyable drama.  

Cranston plays philosophical, philanthropic, paraplegic Philip who has amassed a small fortune the hard way, but is now confined to his glossy Manhattan penthouse due to a hang-gliding accident. But not only is Cranston’s Philip richer and more sassy, he’s also streets ahead in the acting stakes compared to his co-stars Nicole Kidman who plays an obsequious business manager, and Kevin Hart his full-time carer. The Upside is always going to come up and finish second to the original which was the most successful French language film of all time in Spain, Germany, Denmark, Brazil and Mexico to name a few countries. This was all largely due to the intensively moving way it presented its subject matter.

Phil is mainly depressed because he’s recently lost the love his life and the film opens with the tawdry search for someone to look after him now she’s gone. But when the crass and bungling Dell appears on the scene his bullishness somehow strikes a chord with Phil, even though the ex-con appears entirely unsuitable for the job. It soon emerges that Phil’s made the right choice. Dell’s down to earth attitude (think Eddie Murphy’s Trading Places) and refusal to be politically correct chimes with Philip’s own maverick qualities: the two have great chemistry as fearless, free-thinking individuals, and that’s why they hit it off together in this inspirational drama about friendship, forgiveness and the indomitable human spirit.

The Upside hits some high notes with its breath-taking setting: New York has never looked so majestic in widescreen skyscapes and the glitzy interiors of Phil’s lavish home. The Bronx too looks commanding and this is where predictably we meet Dell’s chuntering girlfriend and his sparky son . And there are some well-choreographed car chases with Dell at the wheel of Phil’s fleet of Ferraris and Porches. There’s humour to be had in the situational nuances: Phil’s po-faced neighbours are lampooned and so are his bathroom facilities (a shower that speaks German). Nicole Kidman is glacially prim and proper as the house manager, and certainly doesn’t convince as Phil’s potential love interest. But we soon realise he’s a true romantic who loves women and being in their company. And he’s started an old-fashioned ‘pen-pal’ courtship into the bargain.

Even though The Upside (and the original French film) is loosely based on a real story, the formulaic narrative leaves nothing to the imagination and very much toes the party line that Dell is a ‘jackass’ who’s taken the easy life of crime, and now suddenly starts admiring classical opera and developing painting skills akin to Jean Michel Basquiat. Director Neil Burger (The Illusionist, Limitless) and screenwriter Jon Hartmere have some insightful comments to make and there are a few laughs, but that doesn’t negate the film’s racial undertones, and or the slightly glib treatment of Phil’s infirmities. The Upside slightly manipulates with its charming glibness but Cranston gives things a much needed shot of nuanced dynamism, and this is what ultimately makes The Upside fly. MT

OUT on 12  JANUARY 2019

New Year, New Films | 2019 in focus

2019 gets off to an impressive start with two extraordinary arthouse dramas both releasing in January. Timothée Chalamet plays a young man struggling with addition in Felix Van Groeningen’s  A Beautiful Boy and Saoirse Ronan gives a dynamite performance as the tragic Mary Queen of Scots in a mesmerising historical epic from theatre turned screen director Lisa Rourke. There’s plenty more to look forward as the New Year gets under way, here are a selection of arthouse features and documentaries releasing in 2019.

Bergman: A Year in the Life 

The focus of Jane Magnusson’s European Award winning documentary is 1957, arguable the zenith of  Ingmar Bergman’s career when he released two on his most acclaimed dramas The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, a TV film and four plays. It’s an impressive film that reflects Bergman’s mammoth contribution to the world of film and theatre. 25 January 

Burning 

Some critics went wild for this psychological thriller from South Korean director Lee Chang-dong. Certainly alluring, the enigmatic arthouse piece is based on a story from Haruki Murakami about a barn-burning weirdo and his struggle to win the girl of his dreams. 1 February 1st

Birds of Passage

In his follow-up to Embrace of the Serpent Ciro Guerra is joined by his wife Cristina Gallego for this arthouse chronicle of the emergence of the drugs trade in his native Colombia. Spring 2019

Can You Ever Forgive Me? 

Melissa McCarthy takes plagiarism to extraordinary ends as Lee Israel, a New York writer struggling to make ends meet – eventually by criminal means. Marielle Heller and Nicole Holofcener offer up an absorbing dark comedy drama that also stars Richard E Grant. Opens February 1st

Sometimes Always Never 

One of my favourite British films this years was this amusingly cheeky indie drama – it will make you laugh and contemplate your own life too. Love, ageing, loneliness and emotional fulfilment all deftly intermingle in a ‘detective’ drama about a father (a thoughtful Bill Nighy) and his two sons, one of whom has disappeared. Set in the rain-soaked Ribble Valley, there’s a soft melancholy to the muted visuals and the quintessentially English storyline, crafted by Frank Cottrell Boyce (The Railway Man). A subtle film film but an enjoyable one.

Border

Writer John Ajvide Lindvist’s arthouse oddity has the same fresh originality as his vampire thriller Let the Right One In, ten years on. The Swedish social satire is a romantic parable that blends fantasy, mystery and horror and won the top prize at this year’s Cannes ‘Un Certain Regard’. March 8th

High Life

Claire Denis is the latest auteur to try her hand with a Sci-fi drama. And she succeeds. This one stars Robert Pattison and Juliette Binoche and premiered at Toronto to wrapt applause. Early spring 

On the Basis of Sex

In the second film about noted US jurist Ruth Bader Ginsburg (RBG is already on release)– Felicity Jones stars as the fearsome feminine judge and activist who has broken down barriers since the 1950s, and continues to do so with her subtle charm and incisive intellect. February 8th   

Float Life a Butterfly

Carmel Winters’s won the FIPRESCI Discovery Prize in a drama that follows the ambitions of a young and feisty boxing enthusiast (Hazel Doupe) in 1960s Ireland. Spring 2019

Green Book

Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen star in this enjoyable road movie that delighted critics both at Marrakech and Toronto. It follows a suave African-American pianist (Ali) and a New York bruiser (Mortensen) to America’s Deep South on a voyage of discovery – of themselves and the racial tensions of the 1960s. 1 February 2019 

The Young Picasso 

Exhibition on Screen chronicles the early years of the Spanish painter, from his birth in Malaga to  his international recognition in Paris in his mid thirties. Informative and a must for art lovers. 5 February 2019

Greta

Isabelle Huppert had a low profile in 2018, but she’s back with a vengeance in Neil Jordan’s critically divisive drama that explores the relationship between a young girl (Chloe Grace Moretz) and Huppert’s lonely widow. 19 April 2019

The Irishman

When Martin Scorsese offered a lifetime Tribute to his great friend Robert De Niro at Marrakech Film Festival , The Irishman was the talk of the town. Scorsese’s latest film will be releasing on Netflix, 

The Mule

Another Hollywood luminary – now in his 90s – Clint Eastwood will hit cinemas at the end of January 2019 with his 143rd film – in which he also stars. The Mule is a high-octane thriller set in the US drug trade  January 25th

The Sisters Brothers

Jacques Audiard casts Joaquin Phoenix and John C Reilly in this sensitively-scripted buddy movie that sees the titular brothers embark on a Wild West odyssey, based on Patrick deWitt’s western novel. Skilfully avoiding a macho approach, this is insightful and great fun. April 5th

Woman At War

Benedikt Erlingsson follows his unusual equine-themed drama Of Horses and Men with another innovative tale from his native Iceland that sees an ambitious eco warrior in the shape of a middle-aged woman strike out for the environment. 3 May 2019

Too Late to Die Young

Dominga Sotomayor’s languorous Chilean family drama was a big hit at Locarno 2018, and takes place during the summer of 1990 while the country was making a dangerous bid for democracy.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Quentin Tarantino latest, another highly-anticipated controversial caper tackles the thorny theme of Hollywood during the Charles Manson era. Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio star. July 26

The Woman in the Window

Based on A J Finn’s bestseller, Joe Wright and Tracey Letts create an intriguing crime thriller that explores urban angst, loneliness and voyeurism in contempo New York. Julianne Moore, Gary Oldman and Amy Adams star.

The Lady Eve

We can always rely on the classics, especially when Preston Sturges, Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck are concerned. Re-released by Park Circus this screwball comedy with a social message  is possibly one of the most enjoyable films you’ll see in February, and makes for perfect Valentine viewing. 15 February.

BEST INDIE AND ARTHOUSE FILMS TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2019

 

 

Under the Tree | Undir Trenu (2018) **** | Dual format release

Dir.: Hafstein Gunnar Sigurdsson; Cast.: Steinthor Steinporsson, Edda Bjorgvinsdottir, Sigurdur Sigurjonsson, Lara Johanna Jonsdottir, Pornsteinn Bachmann, Selma Bjornsdottir; Iceland//Denmark/Poland/Germany 2017, 89 min.

In this urban satire, Hafstein Gunnar Sigurdsson (Rams) pulls off a comedy feat: he makes us laugh at our own petty mindedness that can at any moment send us hurtling into a cataclysmic abyss. A great ensemble showcases this a tour-de-force of middle-class nimby-ism with the same dark humour as Rams.

It all starts with a male embarrassment: husband Atli (Steinporsson) is surprised by his wife Agnes (Jonsdottir) in the early morning, masturbating to pornographic images on his laptop featuring him and and – or so he claims. Agnes throws him out, not knowing that his next place of residence back with his parents – will soon be a war zone. After the loss of Atli’s brother, who is heading for suicide, his mother Inga (Bjorgvinsdottir) has been suffering from depression, and has chosen the next-door neighbours Konrad (Bachman) and Eybjorg (Bjornsdottir), as an object for her deflected self-hatred. Konrad and Eyborg, not unreasonably, want the huge tree on his parents’ property trimmed, at it blocks the sun from their front porch. Whilst Inga’s husband Baldvin (Sigurjonsson) is ready to compromise, Inga herself does not want to sacrifice a leaf – she craves war, to release her pent-up emotions. After Atli moves in, living in a tent in the garden, his parent Persian cat disappears without a trace and Inga is convinced the neighbours have abducted her. Since said neighbours own a proud German shepherd, Inga takes matters in her own hand: impersonating Eybjorg at the vets, she has the animal put to sleep and, after taxidermy, puts it at the front door of the hatred neighbours. When husband Baldvin criticises her action as over the top she tells him “at least they know where he is, unlike me” – referring to the missing body of her son. When Konrad, in the middle of the night, takes his saw to the titular tree, he sets in motion a bloody Shakespearean tragedy.

Violence simmers under the suface: Atli cannot stand the thought of Agnes getting custody of their four-year old daughter Asa: who he abducts from Kindergarten and later smashes his wife’s mobile after harassing her at her workplace. But unlike his mother, Atli is too phlegmatic to escalate the conflict, listening to his father’s compromise solutions – but one can see a family resemblance. Though the director never forgets to show us the funny side: at a tenants’ meeting in Agnes’ flat, she complains about Atli being there, blurting out at the meeting “Atli masturbates to the images of his girlfriend. That’s not alright, isn’t it?”, to which the male half of a couple, whose nightly, noisy lovemaking keeps the neighbours awake, responds with a curt “why not, it’s okay”.

Under the Tree is full of dialogue chock-full of witty one-liners as startling as they are absurd: but underneath there lurks a nimbyism and an intolerance of anyone who is not perceived as showing their own values. By the end, Sigurdsson, fed up with  humans, leaves the last ‘meow’ to the cat. AS

DUAL FORMAT RELEASE | 14 JANUARY 2019 | COURTESY OF EUREKA  

King of Thieves (2018) *** Home Ent release

Dir: James Marsh | Cast: Michael Caine, Jim Broadbent, Tom Courtenay, Paul Whitehouse, Michael Gambon, Ray Winstone, Charlie Cox | UK Thriller |

James Marsh casts the diamond geezers of British acting as perps who bring their woes and their wiles to the table in planning their final felony – that actually took place over the Easter weekend in 2017. Joe Penhall’s script pieces together newspaper footage to provide a convincing account of a caper that’s more plodding than racy, often over-emphasising its veteran credentials in a narrative that focuses on settling scores rather than offering thrills. Michaels Caine and Gambon are certainly entertaining to watch, with Paul Whitehouse pulling off a comedy performance to remember. But Jim Broadbent is the real revelation as a sardonic softy whose sheep’s clothing disguises him as the real wolf of the pack. MT

OUT ON DIGITAL DOWNLOAD ON 14 January 2019 | BLURAY/DVD 21 January 2019

 

 

 

The ABC Murders (2018) | BBC TV

Dir: Alex Gabassi | Wri: Sarah Phelps | Cast: John Malkovich, Shirely Henderson, Rupert Grint, Tara Fitzgerald, Eamon Farren, Andrew Buchan, Bronwyn James, Eve Austin | Thriller | UK

1933 is the setting for this fraught and febrile thriller that opens in a dingy London boarding house.  Shirley Henderson (as Mrs Marbury) welcomes a travelling salesman in the shape of Eamon Farron’s sinuously reptilian Alexandre Bonaparte Cusp who carries a suitcase suspiciously containing women’s tights and a typewriter whose percussive keys forms the pounding score that drives the narrative forward. Meanwhile, John Malkovich fails to convince as a sinister and rather constipated Hercule Poirot investigating the series of gruesome alphabet murders – so called for the capital letters A.B. and C left beside the corpses.

In an attempt to keep give this adaptation a contemporary feel, the usual zenophobic Brexit references are all there – but they just interfere with the solid storyline established by Agatha Christie and classily adapted for the screen by Sarah Phelps. Poirot’s credentials are brought into question by his new boss Inspector Crome (Rupert Grint), as the authorities fail to recognise the Belgian immigré in London. He’s certainly a shadowy character who could well serve for the killer himself. And his hard to pin down accent proves an annoying distraction from the murder investigation of a nasty blond waitress Betty Bernard (Eve Austin) who has denigrated her own sister (Bronwyn James), and Cusp into the bargain.

This TV thriller has more style that substance but it’s enjoyably auteurist all the same. Director Alex Gabassi moves deftly within the first episode to finger the main suspects and there’s a glossy allure to Joel Devlin’s images that conjure up the sickly claustrophobic atmosphere of a dangerously divided interwar Britain shot to pieces and still shaking from the horrors of social deprivation and shell shock, but still trying to put on its best bib and tucker. Apart from the typewriter motif, there’s a rather good score by Isobel Waller-Bridge, (sister of Phoebe). Great stuff for the Christmas holidays in three well-paced episodes from 26 until 28 December 2018. MT

ALSO AVAILABLE ON BBC iPLAYER. 

3 Films in praise of Julien Duvivier

Julien Duvivier (1896-1967) was a prominent French film director largely active between 1930-1960 and best known for his early silent films and thrillers such as Pépé Le MokoLa Bandera, Life dances on, and Marianne de ma Jeunesse. He began life as an actor but after a disaster on stage, he moved on to write and direct, later relating the incident in his 1939 film La fin du Jour, with Michel Simon playing his character.

After working for Andre Antoine at Gaumont, Duvivier directed his first film in 1919. His early work was often religious in nature: La Tragédie de Lourdes, and La Vie Miraculeuse de Thérèse Martin which explored the Carmelite saint Thérèse de Liseux. Gaining experience with seminal French directors Marcel l’Herbier and Louis Feuillade, his first successful drama David Golder (1931) was a rags to riches story of an ambitious Polish Jew who falls foul of his wife. In 1934 Duvivier began a collaboration with Jean Gabin that would see them working together in The Imposter (1944), Pépé Le Moko, and La Belle Equipe (They Were Five). Like his countryman Jacques Tourneur, Duvivier moved to Hollywood and enjoyed the experience working with Charles Boyer, Edward G Robinson, Henry Fonda and Tyrone Power. But like Tourneur he eventually went back to France where he often cast Fernandel, Alain Delon, George Sanders and Michel Simon in his dramas.

Revered by legends such as Ingmar Bergman and Jean Renoir, Duvivier is still one of the greatest figures in the history of French cinema and possibly the most neglected, due to the uneven yet thematically varied nature of his work. Critic Michael Atkinson sees the poetic realist pioneer as “a victim of auteurism, ignored for generations by critics who saw…his output as the work of an able journeyman without signature or invention,” Duvivier, Atkinson argues compellingly, “rarely let a dull or unevocative shot pass through his camera,” and his films “fairly leap and swoon with visual cogency, surprising compositional drama, and a quintessentially French embrace of narrative life, equal parts funeral and fete.” Despite all this, his best films are stellar and treasured by cinefiles all over the world. He died in a car crash in 1967.

Julien Duvivier taps into post-war France’s paranoia in PANIQUE (1944), a long unavailable thriller, adapted from a Georges Simenon novel. Proud, eccentric and anti-social, Monsieur Hire (Michel Simon) has always kept to himself. But after the body of a woman turns up in the Paris suburb where he lives, he feels drawn to a pretty young newcomer to town (Viviane Romance), discovers his neighbours are only too ready to be suspicious of him, and is framed for the murder. Duvivier’s first outing after his return to France from Hollywood, sees the acclaimed poetic realist applying his consummate craft to darker, moodier ends. Led by two deeply nuanced performances, the tensely noirish Panique exposes the dangers of the knives-out mob mentality, delivering a pointed allegory of the behaviour of Duvivier’s countrymen during the war.

ON BLURAY AT AMAZON

But Julien Duvivier’s 1956 thriller DEADLIER THAN THE MALE  (Voici les temps des Assassins) somehow manages to outdo them all when it comes to violent women in film Noir: Catherine (Delorme) is the daughter of the drug depending Gabrielle (Bogaert), and tries to escape from the milieu by marrying the restaurant owner Andre Chatelin (Gabin), who has divorced her mother. Telling him that Gabrielle is dead, the scheming Catherine succeeds in marrying the much older man, who soon learns that his wife is lying about her mother. He more or less imprisons her with her mother Antoinette (Bert), also a restaurant owner, who kills her chicken with a whip – which she also uses on Catherine. The frightened woman asks Andre’s friend, the student Gerard (Blain), to kill her husband, but when he refuses, she kills him. Her end – by the fangs of a particular vicious animal – is particularly gruesome. Again, the images of Armand Thirad are undeserving of this blatant ideology.

ON BLURAY AT AMAZON 

The notorious Pépé LE MOKO (Jean Gabin, in a truly iconic performance) plunges into the gangster underworld as a wanted man: women long for him, rivals hope to destroy him, and the law is breathing down his neck at every turn. On the lam in the labyrinthine Casbah of Algiers, Pépé is safe from the clutches of the police–until a Parisian playgirl compels him to risk his life and leave its confines once and for all. One of the most influential films of the 20th century and a landmark of French poetic realism, Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le moko is presented here in its full-length version. AVAILABLE FROM CRITERION COLLECTION | Amazon Prime

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Born Yesterday (1950) Bluray release

Dir.: George Cukor; Cast: Judy Holliday, Broderick Crawford, William Holden, Howard St. John; USA 1950, 103 min.

Based on the Broadway play of the same name by Garson Kanin, and scripted by Albert Mannheimer, Born Yesterday is not one of George Cukor’s most dynamic features. The film’s plus side is Judy Holliday, who, reprising her Broadway role, won Best Actress at the Oscars. But Cukor’s direction is a little impersonal, and the feature never quite breaks free from its theatrical origins.

Harry Brock (Crawford) is a crook and a mini-tycoon, arriving in Washington with his mistress Billie Dawn (Holliday), to bribe a politician. Helped by lawyer Jim Devery (St, John), he sets in motion a great scheme, but suddenly decides that Billie isn’t good enough just as she is (an ex-revue girl), and should be  be educated to a higher standard to make worthy marriage material: wants her as a wife – not for love, but for insurance purposes: he has made over some properties to her, and a wife cannot testify against her husband. Journalist Paul Verral (Holden), does a fine job of her re-education – before an emancipated Billie upsets the applecart.

There are several reasons why Born Yesterday doesn’t really catch fire: first of all, the 1950 drama has not aged well; and lines like “Yes, you are right, I am stupid and I like it” (Billie) and “Maybe I slapped you a couple of times” (Harry) are not funny today, even though they may have raised a titter back in the day. Secondly, there is an awful lot of preaching going on, and DoP Joseph Walker (who extensively worked for Capra and Hawks) cannot do much to liven up the proceedings. Even Holliday’s sparkling, Oscar worthy performance is questionable: she is hardly a match for Bette Davis (All about Eve) or Gloria Swanson (Sunset Boulevard). Far too verbose and sanctimonious, Cukor’s direction falls between a screwball comedy and a muted pre-feminist manifesto, leaving a rather stuffy and stultified box of tricks. AS

AVAILABLE ON BLURAY from 21 JANUARY 2019      

The Passenger (Professione: reporter) (1975) **** Antonioni Retrospective

Dir.: Michelangelo Antonioni; Cast: Jack Nicholson, Maria Schneider, Jenny Runacre, Ian Hendry; Italy/France/Spain 1975, 126 min. 

In nearly all of Antonioni’s features the leading protagonists go missing: Aldo in El Grido jumps from the tower to his death, Anna in L’Aventura simply disappears on an island, having simply evaporated into thin air. And then there is his long time muse, Monica Vitti, who loses her identity during Deserto Rosso and L’Eclisse. In Professione: reporter, journalist David Locke has already lost his self identity before the film starts; assuming the guise of dead man only underlines his inner emptiness. Antonioni’s third and final feature in English, after Blow Up and Zabriskie Point, is dominated by the images, the camera circles around a man between two deaths.

David Locke (Nicholson) the titular character, lands in a desert outpost in Chad, trying to interview rebels, the heat makes him indolent. With his wife and adopted son behind in London, along with his TV producer, Locke has hit rock-bottom. He can’t even believe in his profession anymore: having sold out to market forces. Finding the corpse of colleague, who has died of a heart attack in his derelict hotel room, Locke only needs one glance at the dead man’s face to realise he could easily pass as Robertson – not that he’s particularly interested in impersonate him more than anyone else. In Roberton’s blue shirt, we watch Locke swap their passport  photos – as the fan on the ceiling bears witness. 

Finding a plane ticket to Munich in Robertson’s belongings, David flies to Germany, after a short incognito visit to London. In Munich he picks up a weapons catalogue from an airport locker, and is met by two men who give him an envelope containing a substantial amount of money. David has replaced Robertson as a gun-runner, serving a revolutionary African group. A further meeting in Spain is agreed by the the trio. Meanwhile, in London, Locke’s wife Rachel (Runacre) and his producer Martin Knight (Hendry) try to contact Robertson, to enquire about David’s state of mind when he died. In an editing room, Rachel watches clips from her husband’s old documentaries, including one featuring a brutal shooting. In Barcelona, Locke manages to avoid his wife, the police, and the two African clients. He meets a nameless architecture student (Maria Schneider), and they go round Gaudi buildings together. They set off for a meeting with the Africans in Algeciras, an oil port in southern Spain. Their relationship is in the here and now, but Locke, sensing the danger of having to evade the trio , shakes her off, promising a meeting in Tangiers. But when he arrives in the Algeciras hotel, she is waiting for him in the room. “What do want with me?”, he asks her exasperated, before the last act of the drama, underplayed, as undramatically  as possible – just like the rest of the feature. 

Locke hardly says a word in this monosyllabic film: conversations are fragmented, the last part play out like a silent film. The only reality is nature, as the protagonists’ significance shrinks away. The last seven minutes belong completely to Luciano Tovoli’s masterful camera: it pans through the grilled window of Locke’s room, and out into the piazza in front of the hotel; looking around, before returning to the room before everyone else: as in Cronaca di un amore the eliptical movement symbolises death. It is like watching the whole feature again. AS

Michelangelo Antonioni Retrospective | BFI | January 2019

https://youtu.be/him17sDL2wE

 

Bird Box (2018) **

Dir: Susanne Bier | Sandra Bullock, John Malkovich, Sarak Paulson, Travante Rhodes, Jacki Weaver | Sci-fi thriller | 124′

Susanne Bier is a well known as one of Denmark’s most distinguished auteurs. Her themes are universal in nature but their focus is intimate and often family-based, both on her TV and in big screen outings. As one of the original Danish Dogme pack, her drama Open Hearts brought her into the international spotlight in 2002. Bier was also the first female director to win a Golden Globe, an Academy Award, an Emmy Award and a European Film Award.

This time, to her credit, she has decided to experiment with a dystopian sci-fi drama . Structurally flawed and not particularly enjoyable, despite its starry cast, BIRDBOX is a laudable effort but not one of her best. Sandra Bullock plays Malorie, a run of the mill artist who has converted her small flat into a studio and is expecting the imminent arrival of a baby. But her ordinary life is catapulted into bizarre and tragic circumstances when a wave of unexplained mass suicides in Romania and Siberia turns the world upside down. Everywhere people display what newscasters term “psychotic behaviour” in the post-apocalyptic meltdown. Cars crash for no reason, and pedestrians wander willy nilly onto main roads, or shoot themselves in the head. To add to the weirdness of it all, Bier’s narrative jerks backwards and forwards showing Malorie’s reaction in the present to the madness that has gone before. Clearly this all resonates with a contemporary scenario where people have lost sight of their goals. This translates into a storyline where humans must protect their eyesight at all costs when outdoors, and are forced to be blindfold for fear of facing their worst nightmares.

Bullock is superbly cast exuding all the pragmatism and resilience she’s well known for (in Gravity and Speed) but for some reason she’s also looking after two children who are clearly not hers. And why the pregnancy into the bargain? The film opens well with the cataclysm but then descends into torpor in the claustrophobically awkward second act which takes place in a house where Malorie is hiding with arch misery-guts John Malkovich’s Douglas and a retired soldier (Rhodes). Later joining them is a sinister but chipper Tom Hollander. This interior strife clearly echoes what’s happening outside, and is only briefly leavened by Douglas’ discovery of a cache of booze. But even when the action moves into the forest the whole scenario is unconvincing. BIRDBOX brings nothing new to the dystopian apocalypse party, apart from the blindfolds – which are a distraction. Clearly the dark forces causing all the mayhem are inspired by Medusa’s Gorgon, but this all seems too far-fetched and strung out. Full marks for trying but let’s hope Bier returns to form in 2019. MT

STREAMING ON NETFLIX FROM 21 DECEMBER 2018

The 12th Man (2017) ***

Dir.: Harald Zwart; Cast: Thomas Gullestad, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Marie Blockhus, Mads Sjograd Pettersen; Norway 2017, 135 min.

Dutch director Harald Zwart, best known for Agent Cody Banks and The Karate Kid, surprises  us with a gritty WWII feature that lionises intrepid Norwegian resistance fighter Jan Baalsrud, who escaped the Nazis in his home country after an ordeal lasting months. Already filmed in 1957 as Nine Lives, Zwart shows how the solidarity of the Norwegian people was key in helping their courageous countryman to survive, against the odds.

Baalsrud (Gullestad) is part of a twelve man commando sent from Great Britain to Norway, to sabotage the airfields of the Nazi occupants. But the Norwegians are caught before having time to use their explosives, and all but Baalsrud are captured, tortured and shot. Even though Baalsrud has been shot in the foot, he escapes into the treacherous mountain landscape where  two brothers in the small town of Manndalen (Troms County) come to his aide, SS Officer Kurt Stage (Meyers) is in hot pursuit. Meyers prides himself in having caught every resistance fighter in his region, but he becomes so obsessed with Baalsrud that his Ego cannot countenance a defeat. After hiding under rocks and in a hut in the mountains, starving and fighting gangrene, Baalsrud finally makes his intrepid way to Sweden.

Very much in the vain of Fred Zinnemann’s The Seventh Cross (1944), based on a novel by Anna Seghers recounting the fate of seven KZ inmates who flee the camp, The 12th Man is all about making the right choices: The men and women of Manndalen risked their lives to help Baalsrud so that he could become a symbol for their resistance against the Nazis. In real life, Stage was executed in 1947, whilst Baalsrud, who died in 1988, is buried next to Aslak Fossvool in Manndalen, played in the film by T.P. Munch, who fed him in his rocky hide-out but died of diphtheria four weeks after Baalsrud’s escape.

Zwart pulls out all the stops in an action drama that really maxes out the Germans’ brutality against their courageous counterparts. DoP Geir Hartly Andreassen triumphs both in close-up and in the spectacular panoramas of the towering mountains, the final escape is a well-choreographed masterpiece. Whilst relying on action and adventure elements, The 12th Man always keeps us questioning which side we would have chosen. AS

The 12th Man in select Cinemas & Digital HD 4th January and on DVD 7th January

Tribute to Richard Lormand (1962-2018)

It is with great sadness that we pay tribute to one of our greatest supporters, film consultants and readers Richard Lormand who has died aged 56.

During a long and distinguished career Richard was a leading light in international communication, film publicity and marketing, specialising in launches at the Berlin, Cannes, Locarno and Venice festivals, and just recently, Marrakech 2018 where he was preparing the 17th edition, when he died.

LOCARNO credit

Richard was a true professional and always a pleasure to work with. He handled world premieres for numerous award-winning films, including Maren Ade’s TONI ERDMANN, Ildiko Enyedi’s ON BODY AND SOUL, Fatih Akin’s IN THE FADE and SOUL KITCHEN, Alice Rohrwacher’s THE WONDERS and HAPPY AS LAZZARO, Christian Petzold’s BARBARA and PHOENIX, Samuel Maoz’s LEBANON and FOXTROT, Lav Diaz’s THE WOMAN WHO LEFT, Ritesh Batra’s THE LUNCHBOX, Takashi Miike’s 13 ASSASSINS and BLADE OF THE IMMORTAL, the Taviani Brothers’ CAESAR MUST DIE, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s UNCLE BOONMEE, Jerzy Skolimowski’s ESSENTIAL KILLING, Amos Gitai’s RABIN, Lucrecia Martel’s ZAMA and LA CIENAGA, Alexander Sokurov’s RUSSIAN ARK and FAUST, Jafar Panahi’s THREE FACES and THE CIRCLE, and Takeshi Kitano’s ZATOICHI and HANA-BI.

Richard was part of the press consultancy team of Locarno Festival and the producing teams of Mitchell Lichtenstein’s cult favourite TEETH, HAPPY TEARS (starring Demi Moore, Parker Posey, Ellen Barkin and Rip Torn) and ANGELICA (starring Jena Malone and Janet McTeer). He was also a producer on Amos Gitai’s DISENGAGEMENT, starring Academy Award-winning actress Juliette Binoche.

Born and raised outside Lafayette, Louisiana, Richard was the son of a Japanese mother and a native French-speaking Cajun American father. He began his career as a reporter/journalist for Reuters in New York City, then went on to work for the Cannes Film Festival (France), Taormina Film Festival (Italy), Torino Film Festival (Italy) and the Viennale/Vienna Film Festival (Austria). Richard also wrote and directed the 1994 award-winning short TI-BOY’S WIFE/LA FEMME DE TI-BOY (Clermont-Ferrand, Locarno, Torino).

His charisma, warmth and professionalism are rare in these days of increasingly faceless public relations, focussing on ‘hits’ and ‘likes’ on social media. Passionately driven by genuine talent and strong stories, Richard often took chances with small independent films and invested his time and talent to make sure they were noticed. His was a personal approach, genuine and always with heart. We shall miss him so much. MT

RICHARD LORMAND

Life Itself (2018) *** Amazon Studios

Dir.: Dan Fogelman; Cast: Oscar Isaac, Olivia Wilde, Antonio Banderas, Laila Costa, Sergio Peris-Mencheta, Annette Benning, Samuel L. Jackson, Olivia Cooke, Alex Monner, Mandy Patinkin; USA 2018, 118 min.

Universally panned after its TIFF premiere in September, director/writer Dan Fogelman’s Life Itself is a study in loss, told in five chapters under the headline “Unreliable Narrator”. Often grandstanding and a little too verbose, Fogelman has nevertheless tried something different – and does not deserve the contempt from the newspapers that reward every Super-Hero feature with five stars.

Samuel L. Jackson is the unreliable narrator number one. He tells us that Will (Isaac) is seeing his shrink (Bening) due to his wife Abby (Wilde) leaving him. After Bening is killed off by a bus, Jackson bids us good-bye leaving us in the hands of a more reliable, female narrator whose identity will be disclosed in chapter five. We now learn the truth. It was really pregnant Abby who was run over by that bus, but not before giving birth to daughter Dylan. Anyhow, Instead of looking after his daughter Will commits suicide, leaving Dylan in the care of her grandfather (Patimkin) – grandmother and pet dog making an equally swift exit. No wonder why Abby behaves rather aggressively in Chapter 2. For the next instalment we switch to Spain where farmhand Javier (Peris-Mencheta) marries the beautiful Isabella (Costa). The couple have a son, Rodrigo, whom the family takes to New York for a holiday which ends in tragedy. Trauma follows, and Javier’s boss Saccione (Banderas), who has always lusted after Isabella, pays for Rodrigo’s psychiatric treatment and Javier leaves. We should mention that fatal illness rears its head in this ch apter, whilst Rodrigo goes to study in New York and meets – you’ve  guessed it. The final instalment reveals the identity of the narrator, putting all lose ends together.

The whole idea is far better than the execution, and the literary comparisons don’t always work. Still, there are moments of emotional bravado, and the ensemble acting is brilliant. DoP Brett Pawlak tries to undercut the rollercoaster of sentiments with muted colours, few close ups and panning panorama shots. All in all, Fogelman has bitten off more than he can chew, his skills are obviously too limited to do his concept justice, but the overall effect makes it – just – a better than average proposition. AS

Life Itself is released in cinemas and Sky Cinema on 4 January 2019

The Favourite (2018) *****

Dir: Yorgos Lanthimos. UK/Ireland/USA. 2018. 119 mins.

The Favourite is going to be a firm favourite with mainstream audiences and cineastes alike. This latest arthouse drama is the Greek auteur’s first to be written by Deborah Davis and Aussie Tony McNamara who bring their ‘English’ sensibilities to this quixotic Baroque satire that distills the essence of Kubrick, Greenaway and Molière in an irreverent and ravishingly witty metaphor for female treachery.

Set around 1710 during the final moments of Queen Anne’s reign it presents an artful female-centric view of courtly life seen from the unique perspective of three remarkable women, while on the battlefields England is at war with the French. Besides its period setting, The Favourite coins a world with exactly the same credentials as our own Brexit and Trump era.

Sparklingly witty and endlessly amusing this is a film that could play on forever yet still feels fresh and invigorating even after two hours. There is a charming subtlety and lightness of touch that is saucy and arch but never gross or uncouth with its references to Restoration Comedies of the era: Marivaux, Pope and Swift – while feeling completely contemporary and dernier cri.

Twenty years in the making with Lanthimos attached to the project since 2009, The Favourite is based on an original screenplay by Davis developed by Australian writer McNamara and is guilded by luminous performances from Rachel Weisz, Emma Stone amd Olivia Colman (as the Queen). Stone is a distant cousin of Weisz’s Lady Marlborough and comes to the court rather down on her luck and looking for protection. Slowly she weedles her way into the crippled and ailing Queen’s affections in a triumphant trajectory of treachery.

Colman plays Queen Anne (who reigned until 1714) with vulnerability and charisma as a whiny, insecure monarch. The Duke Of Marlborough has just won a crucial battle gainst the French during the War of Spanish Succession. The Whigs are gaining ground against the landowning Tories under Robert Harley (Nicholas Hoult is superb).

The whole affair centres around the battle for power between these three women who are pivotal in the success of life at court and subsequently the country. The sumptuous interiors are shot in candlelight adding intrique and a Gothic frisson to Robbie Ryan’s stunning camerawork, his fish-eye lenses evoking a sense of menace and claustrophobia. Sandy Powell creates some seriously sexy costumes and the glory is topped off with an occasionally discordance original score from Purcell, Handel Vivaldi and British composer Anna Meredith, MT.

NOW ON RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | BEST ACTRESS: Olive Colman | Grand Prix Venice 2018

Roma (2018) ***

Dir.: Alfonso Cuaron; Cast: YalitzaAparacio, Marinade Tavira, Nancy Garcia, Fernando Grediaga, Veronica Garcia, Jorge Antonio Guerrero; USA/Mexico 2018, 135 min

Alfonso Cuaron’s sumptuous semi-autobiographical love letter to the woman who influenced his early life unfurls during a year in Mexico City. It’s 1970 and middle-class medics Sofia and Antonio have four children, three spirited boys and a girl. Meanwhile Cleo and Sofia live high up in the attic, trying to keep the emotionally unstable household together.

Cuaron cleverly establishes the key credentials of the bourgeois set up where people drive enormous cars they can’t even park, and Sofia (de Tavira) is no different. Stressed from Antonio’s frequent absences for work – today he’s off to Montevideo – she earns a decent salary as a biochemist, but has no passion for it.  As it turns out, Antonio (Grediaga) will only be gone for a week, but has secretly returned with his mistress. Meanwhile the rest of the family – along with caring grandmother Teresa (V. Garcia) – are off to spend Christmas on a nearby country estate, where Cleo (Aparacio) and Adela (N. Garcia) will celebrate in the staff quarters. Sofia makes the children write letters to their father, begging him to return, Cleo discovers she’s pregnant by boyfriend Fermin (Guerrero) who is part of a right-wing militia. In a terrifying scene during the Corpus Christmas massacre meeting, Fermin appears briefly in a nearby department store where the women are buying a cradle. He denies fathering Cleo’s child, and is dragged away by his friends to beat up students in the street. Everyday life goes on in this leisurely story of middle-class Latin America – it’s an evergreen saga that plays out like a tele-novela but with a transcendence that somehow lifts out of the ordinary. Cuaron pulls out all the stops, and the glorious 65mm black-and-white images reflect tension on all levels. Sofia and her mother Teresa are the caring matriarchs. Husband Antonio is seen as cruel, petty and vindictive. Cleo and Adela are the willing victims of class and conditioning, the outside world is shown is a hostile backdrop. Cuaron never breaks with any clichés, but he is unable to be understated and analytical due to his personal links to the narrative. In contrast, Mexican director Lila Aviles’, The Chambermaid is a moving yet detached portrait of a hotel worker, echoing similar themes. Roma is graced with some scintillating performances, particularly from newcomers Yalitza Aparacio as Cleo, and Nancy Garcia as Teresa. Overall the bottom line here is that Cuaron’s a brilliant DoP, a good director but a lousy script-writer. AS

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE | MARRAKECH FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | GOLDEN LION WINNER VENICE 2018

https://youtu.be/vhWut6jTA8o

Cold War (2018) ***** Winner Best Film | European Film Awards 2018

Dir: Pawel Pawlikowski | Cast| Joanna Kulig, Tomasz Kot, Borys Syzc, Agata Kulesza, Cedric Khan, Jeanne Balibar | Drama | Poland

This beguilingly sexy and sad paean to disillusioned romantics everywhere portrays the euphoria we yearn for but cannot always sustain. Cold War spans a decade from the 1940s to the1960s where two lovers are caught inextricably in a web of passion and pain in a peripatetic relationship that saunters back and forth between Paris, Warsaw and Yugoslavia between pianist Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) and singer-dancer Zula (Joanna Kulig). Pawlikowski deftly handles love’s heartaches, high and lows with supreme grace and elegance.

Apart from the dazzling artistry – each frame is a sultry masterpiece – one of the most atmospheric elements and one that becomes a character in itself is the music, from Polish and Slavic folksongs to Chopin, Gerswin and Chuck Berry bringing back memories of Polish fare of the 1950s and 1960s scored by Andrzej Trzaskowski and Krzysztof Komeda, but also unites drama with his documentary fare such as Serbian Epics (1992)

Shot in Academy-ratio, Lukasz Zal’s velvety black and white cinematography evokes the 16mm of the era, and its Iron Curtain sensibilities link it to Pawlikowski’s Oscar-winning gem Ida, although this is a more upbeat affair. Love and longing are themes that flourish throughout the director’s films from his time in England, where he shot Last Resort (2000) and My Summer of Love (2004), and the ephemeral nature of The Woman in the Fifth (2011). Pawlikowski’s work also has affinities with the films of Czech New Wave director Hugo Haas. The only subtle flaws is the abrupt departure of Wiktor’s lover Irena (Agata Kulesza)who either leaves through her disgust of Stalin or on seeing her partner caught in the fire of his new flame. But this by no means detracts from its sublime beauty as a concise yet richly-textured piece of work, and every gorgeous handmade tapestry has its endearing flaws. Flowing yet episodic, Cold War is melancholy but endlessly captivating.

Wiktor and Zula are united by music while he and Irena are curating an ethnomusicological project for dancers which morphs into an the Mazurek Ensemble, an agitprop of the Soviet regime promoting the Aryan heritage of the Poles. Lust envelops them but Kaczmarek’s career keeps him trapped in Communist Poland and when the ensemble travels to East Berlin to perform, Wiktor decides to defect to the West pleading Zula to come with him to Paris. The two profess undying love but flighty Zula bails at the last minute and stays behind in the East. Although she a mercurial woman she lacks the social confidence that Wiktor has inherited from his more grounded bourgeois background.

There is a deliciously spicy vignette where Jeanne Balibar plays Wiktor’s Parisian lover while Zula arrives at the party claiming to have married a Sicilian glass blower from Palermo. But it is clear that Wiktor and Zula are soul mates whose love transcends time and place. They are eventually drawn back together at the end of the 50s but their love cannot exist in this Cold War world with its privations, poverty and political regime. MT.

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE AT CURZON AND SELECTED ARTHOUSE VENUES | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL |BEST DIRECTOR AWARD 2018

London Turkish Film Week 2018 | 12 -16 December 2018

If there’s a common thread that runs through Turkish cinema it lies in the vast nation’s landscape and nature that shapes and often divides human relationships. And nowhere is this more so than in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Palme d’Or winner WINTER SLEEP (2014), set in the Anatolia’s mountain region of Cappadocia. Whilst the mountains represent freedom, his human characters fight it out in a claustrophobic hotel. Men are usually out of touch with their emotions in all of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s films, and Winter Sleeps anti-hero Aydin is no exception. A former actor, living from his inherited wealth his property portfolio makes him a feudal lord, even though he sees himself more as an intellectual. Living with his much younger wife Nihal and recently divorced sister Necla, Ceylan confronts him with his weaknesses, peeling away his persona away layer by layer. Ceylan pays homage to Bergman and Bresson in the long, vicious arguments between Aydin, his wife and sister where the camera catches them in shot/contra-shot movement, the close-ups showing hurt on the women’s faces, and Aydin’s sarcastic smile. Echoing Bresson in Au hazard Balthazar, Ceylan uses Schubert’s piano sonata no. 20 to score the sequences between Aydin and his wife – the region’s wild horses serve as a metaphor for their seething discontent; in a more generous mood Aydin has freed one of the beasts to return to the wild. Ceylan’s intensity never lets up, leaving WINTER SLEEP as an unforgettable chronicle of human psychological warfare, amidst a towering landscape.

GRAIN (2017), directed by Semih Kaplanogu (Honey), is based on a chapter from the Quran, but can easily compete with the best of Hollywood’s dystopia. A scientist working for an all-powerful Corporation, flees into the wasteland surrounding the heavily controlled city, to find a supply grain uncontaminated by GM. There he meets a stranger, who leads him to a secret location in the rugged terrain where they eventually find what they are looking for. Giles Nuttgens’ stark black-and-white camerawork conveys a post-apocalyptic world, dwarfing the human element. An enigmatic narrative scratches to be heard in this devastated landscape where Ufo-like fighter planes hunt down the characters like animals. Kaplanogu’s symbolism echoes Tarkovsky as his protagonists are overwhelmed by the destruction of nature, a strong ‘end of days’ feeling, where fragmentation triumphs over the human weak attempts to save themselves and the planet.  A terrifying and prescient drama. 

In her debut HICRAN AND MELEK, director Esra Vesu Ozcelik explores the true meaning of female emancipation in a discursive drama set in a small rural community where Iman’s daughter Hicran hopes to find a decent job and a fulfilling marriage. Her childhood friend Melek left a decade ago for Istanbul, where she’s been working in a night club. But her abusive boyfriend has driven her back home. The two women look at their lives but never really find any answers. Again, the landscape is shown as a feature of personal identification.

Dervis Zaim’s DREAM is by the far the most ambitious feature of this year’s programme. Sine is an architect who very much sides with Prince Charles’ traditionalist views in her dislike of contemporary building design. But she is driven to eventually distraction when no-one will support her latest scheme for a cave-like mosque. Suffering from stress and insomnia, she goes into in a sleeping clinic. The treatment has a profound effect on her psychologically and physically: her four different identities then focus on one goal: to finish the project. Based on the ‘Seven Sleepers’ myth, Dream is not only a feminist manifest, but a coruscating critique of contemporary architecture.

LONDON TURKISH FILM WEEK | 12-16 DECEMBER 2018

 

          

Orphée (1949)*****

Dir: Jean Cocteau | Drama | France | Jean Marais, Maria Casarès, François Périer, Marie Déa | 95′

Jean Cocteau’s modern version of the Orpheus myth still retains its poetic magnetism and astonishing freshness despite a primitive post-war budget that features Cocteau’s delicately drawn astrally inspired opening credits. But this adds to the film’s allure just as it did four years earlier with La Belle et La Bête, also made on a shoestring budget.

There is a dreamlike logic to Cocteau’s narrative that combines with Nicolas Hayer’s inventive camera angles and Jean d’Eaubonne’s set design to give the film a fantasy feel where Orphée (Jean Marais) is transformed into a Left Bank singer obsessed with an enigmatic raven-haired demon princess (Maria Casarès) who captures his imagination inspiring him to follow her into the underworld.

Cocteau brings his talents as a novelist, playwright and artist together to impress his longtime mentor Diaghilev in a gleaming mythological drama whose contemporary resonance is clearly felt throughout the sumptuous production featuring a glittering cast of French talent and his own partner Marais. Particularly enjoyable is the scene where we take a backseat in a chauffeur-driven a Rolls Royce Fantom Cloud for a mystery journey through the French countryside

Orpheus and Eurydice (Déa) are lovers. We first meet the tousle-haired Orphée in the opening scene at the ‘Café des Poétes’ where the postwar Left Bank credentials are effortlessly established with writers and creative types shooting the breeze over Gauloises and Pastis. Death soon arrives in the shape of the Princess (Casarès) making her presence known gracefully in her black Rolls-Royce. Over the car’s radio the BBC’s coded instructions to the Resistance ring out. Meanwhile in Hell lurks the shadow of the German Gestapo. In Cocteau’s version of the story Orpheus and Eurydice are saved by Death’s self-sacrifice along with her soigné assistant Heurtebise.

Orphée has a mildly melodramatic tone, a lightness of touch and an appealing wit that complement the gorgeousness of its mise en scène making Cocteau of most admired and revered filmmakers of his own generation and the New Wave. So much so that Truffaut produced his  sixth and final film, Le Testament d’Orphée, which reunited most of the cast of Orphée and is dedicated to the Nouvelle Vague.

“Quite apart from its symbolism Orphée is tells a mystical adventure, sustaining a balance between the real and the magical and maintaining its hypnotic rhythm beyond the first scene in the poets’ café, at the end of which Orpheus goes off with the Princess in her car, and slowly building up a poetic and beguiling atmosphere – creating a fascinating dramatic arc as the mirror opens, the Princess appearing and disappearing again in the streets of Paris while Orpheus desperately pursues her, the motor cyclists shoot past along the dusty road, as the radio echoes its impenetrable messages in the car. The original tagline called it  – “The immortal thriller”.  

Cocteau replaces the arbitrary force which death represents in Greek mythology by human figures with human desires and feelings.  The Princess loves Orpheus: Heurtebise loves Eurydice: both sacrifice their love, knowing it cannot successfully be pursued. Poets have always been obsessed with death: here, death also falls in love with poets. The symbols, the mysteries and the powers of death must by their vibrant nature be “living”. The princess is a tragic creation despite her haunting beauty and Gothic allure. Auric’s recurring flute score is eerily evocative along with the striking drum rhythms of the Bacchantes, making this fantasy drama both ravishingly elegant and chilling’.

The magic of cinema is sensationally realised in Jean Cocteau’s darkly enigmatic Orphée, one of the great masterpieces of the French avant-garde. Newly restored by SNC (Groupe M6), Orphée returns to the big screen on 19 October 2018, released by the BFI in selected cinemas UK-wide and screening at BFI Southbank from 22 October as part of The Deep Focus season on the French Fantastique. 

Simultaneous bluray and iTunes release on 21 January 2019 

 

Berlinale 2019 – First competition films announced

Opening this year with Lone Scherfig’s The Kindness of Strangers, the 69th Berlinale Film Festival (7-17 February) has announced the first competition films which include the latest from regulars François Ozon, Denis Côté and Fatih Akin.

Serbian director Angela Schanelec will present her latest film I Was at Home, but, and Emin Alper will be there with A Tale of Three Sisters, a follow up to his dazzling drama Beyond the Hill

Also competing is The Ground Beneath my Feet from Austrian filmmaker Marie Kreutzer.

In the Berlinale Special Gala Section there is Gully Boy from Zoya Aktar (India), Heinrich Breloer’s drama Brecht which stars Trina Dyrholm and Tom Schilling and Charles Ferguson’s documentary on the Watergate scandal

COMPETITION 

Der Boden unter den Füßen (The Ground Beneath My Feet) Austria/World Premiere

by Marie Kreutzer (The Fatherless, We Used to be Cool)

with Valerie Pachner, Pia Hierzegger, Mavie Hörbiger, Michelle Barthel, Marc Benjamin, Axel Sichrovsky, Dominic Marcus Singer, Meo Wulf

Der Goldene Handschuh (The Golden Glove) Germany/France/World Premiere

by Fatih Akin (Head On, In the Fade)

with Jonas Dassler, Margarethe Tiesel, Hark Bohm

Grâce à dieu (By the Grace of God) France/International Premiere

by François Ozon (8 Women, In the House)

with Melvil Poupaud, Denis Ménochet, Swann Arlaud, Éric Caravaca, François Marthouret, Bernard Verley, Martine Erhel, Josiane Balasko, Hélène Vincent, François Chattot, Frédéric Pierrot

Ich war zuhause, aber (I Was at Home, but) Germany / Serbia/World Premiere

by Angela Schanelec (The Dreamed Path, Marseille)

with Maren Eggert, Franz Rogowski, Lilith Stangenberg, Jakob Lassalle, Clara Möller

Kız Kardeşler (A Tale of Three Sisters) Turkey / Ger/ Neth/ Greece/World Premiere

by Emin Alper (Beyond the Hill, Frenzy)

with Cemre Ebüzziya, Ece Yüksel, Helin Kandemir, Kayhan Açikgöz, Müfit Kayacan, Kubilay Tunçe

Répertoire des villes disparues (Ghost Town Anthology) Canada/World Premiere

by Denis Côté (A Skin So Soft, Bestiaire)

with Robert Naylor, Josée Deschênes, Jean-Michel Anctil, Larissa Corriveau, Rémi Goulet, Diane Lavallée, Hubert Proulx, Rachel Graton, Normand Carrière, Jocelyne Zucco

Berlinale Special Gala at the Friedrichstadt-Palast 

Gully Boy /India/ World Premiere

by Zoya Akhtar (You Won’t Get This Life Again, Lust Stories)

with Ranveer Singh, Alia Bhatt, Kalki Koechlin, Siddhant Chaturvedi, Vijay Raaz, Amruta Subhash, Vijay Verma 

Berlinale Special at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele

Brecht /Germany / Austria/World Premiere

by Heinrich Breloer (The Manns – Novel of a Century, Buddenbrooks – The Decline of a Family)

with Burghart Klaußner, Tom Schilling, Adele Neuhauser, Trine Dyrholm, Mala Emde, Franz Hartwig, Friederike Becht, Ernst Stötzner, Lou Strenger

Watergate – Documentary/USA/Euro Premiere

by Charles Ferguson (No End in Sight, Inside Job)

with Douglas Hodge, Jill Wine-Banks, Dan Rather, Lesley Stahl, Richard Ben-Veniste

MORE FILMS WILL BE ANNOUNCED IN THE COMING WEEKS

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) **** Restoration

Dir.: Frank Capra; Cast: James Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore, Henry Travers; USA 1946; 130 min.

Director/co-writer Frank Capra wanted foremost “to combat atheism” when he filmed Philip Van Doren’s 1939 novella The Greatest Gift in 1946. Later he acknowledged “the feature developed a life of its own”, becoming everyone’s favourite Christmas movie since about 1976. But on its release, critics were rather unkind – on top of it, RKO lost half a million dollars at the box office. Bosley Crowther of the NYT wrote: “the weakness of this picture is the sentimentality of it—its illusory concept of life. Mr. Capra’s nice people are charming, his smalltown is a beguiling place, and his pattern for solving problems is most optimistic and facile. But somehow, they all resemble theatrical attitudes, rather than average realities.”

Nevertheless Frank Capra’s films always have a basis in reality and a moral tale to tell and despite the schmaltz, the reason this film is so universally popular, especially during the holiday season it that it endorses the important facts of life that we know are worth remembering: Don’t give up; Appreciate what you have – you could lose it, and loved-ones are more important that material riches (yes, this is a difficult one!)

In the small town of Bedford Falls George Baily (Stewart) lives with his wife Mary (Reed) and their three children. George not only saved his brother Harry from drowning as a child, he also worked hard for the community and has spent his entire life sacrifices himself for others in a job he’s never enjoyed doing. But it’s only when he nearly loses his life, that he really learns to appreciate again.

As usual, the eventual cast was a long way from the original proposals: Before Stewart, Henry Fonda and Cary Grant where considered to play George, whilst Jean Arthur and Ginger Rogers were also in the running before Donna Reed got the part. In her autobiography Rogers wrote her refusal of the Mary role might be “foolish, you say?”

On the 89 acre set of the RKO ranch in Encino, dogs, cats and pigeons roamed freely. The Main Street was 300 yards long, the equivalent of three city blocks. At the Oscars in 1946, William Whyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives swept the board, winning Best Picture (Samuel Goldwyn), Best Director for Whyler, Best Actor for Fredrick March and Best Editor for William Hornbeck. 

It’s a Wonderful Life won in the technical category, due to the success of Russell Shearman. who invented a new method to produce artificial snow. Until then, this ‘snow’ consisted of cornflakes, coloured in white. But the crunching noise of the actors walking on the flakes, made re-dubbing of these scenes necessary. Shearman used water, soap flakes, foamite and sugar, to save the re-dubbing. DoPs were Capra regular Joseph Walker and the (then) very young Joseph Biroc, who finished his long and outstanding career for Wim Wenders’ Hammett in 1982.

The last word should go to the FBI who wrote a memo after the premiere along these lines: “With regard to the picture It’s a Wonderful Life, the film represented rather obvious attempts to discredit bankers by casting Lionel Barrymore as a ‘scrooge-type’ so that he would be the most hated man in the picture. This, according to sources, is a common trick used by Communists”. Indeed. AS

NATIONWIDE and all over Europe from 30 November 2018

Werner Herzog: Retrospective at Visions du Réel 2019

WERNER HERZOG’S WORK WILL BE CELEBRATED FOR THE 50TH EDITION OF VISIONS DU RÉEL

Visions du Réel, International Film Festival Nyon, will pay tribute to one of the world’s major filmmakers during its 50th edition. It is Werner Herzog who will be awarded the Sesterce d’or Prix Raiffeisen Maître du Réel during the 2019 edition of the Festival (5–13 April 2019). In partnership with the Cinémathèque suisse and the ECAL. The audience will meet the legendary film director at a Masterclass on 9 April and screenings of a selection of films, as well as his latest feature-length film, Meeting Gorbatchev (co-directed with André Singer), will have a Swiss premiere.

Werner Herzog was born in 1942 in Munich, Germany and has been living between the Bavarian capital and Los Angeles since 1984. A leading figure of the post-war New German Cinema, he has directed about 70 films.

Moving freely between different forms and processes, fiction and documentary, as a filmmaker whose approach is as philosophical as it is physical, Herzog constantly aspires to “walk to the ends of the earth” (The Dark Glow of the Mountains). At times omnipresent, at times leaving room for others, between heroism and testing limits (Herakles, his first short film in 1962, or The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner), megalomania (Aguirre, the Wrath of God or Cobra Verde, two of the five films made with the actor Klaus Kinski), and a certain taste for madness and the absurd, the filmmaker explores and surveys beings and places, not without humour or (self)derision (Encounters at the End of the World). Author of more than a dozen prose works, he has worked with Isabelle Adjani, Nicolas Cage, Christian Bale and Nicole Kidman among others and won the award for Best Director at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival for his masterpiece Fitzcarraldowww.visionsdureel.ch/festival/maitre-du-reel-2019

50th edition of Visions du Réel: 5—13 April 2019 | Werner Herzog in Nyon will be communicated in March 2019.

JOY (2018) **** Marrakech International Film Festival 2018 | Winner Etoile d’Or

Dir.: Sudabeh Mortezai; Cast: Joy Anwulika Alphonsus, Precious Mariam Sanusi, Angela Ekeleme Pius, Jane Okoh; Austria 2018, 100 min.

German born writer/director Sudabeh Mortezai (Macondo) spent her youth in Vienna and Teheran before studying film at UCLA. Her second feature is centred around Nigerian women sold by their families as sex-workers to Europe. In the prologue, we see the local shaman performing the ‘Juju’ ritual on one of these young women: the victims have to leave an intimate part of themselves behind so they don’t run away, and send money home regularly.

We meet Joy (Alphonsus) on a dark night in Vienna where she is soliciting. Next to her stands young Precious (Sanusi), who has just arrived from Nigeria and does not want to sell her body, in order to pay back Madame (Pius), whom she owes 60,000 Euros. Back in the flat where the girls live in cramped  conditions, Madame holds Joy responsible for Precious’ attitude and tells her that her debt will increase if she doesn’t encourage the young girl to work harder. For good measure, Precious is than raped by two men, her cries of help going unanswered. The brutal treatment makes Precious fall into line and she becomes the highest earner of the group. Madame expresses her thanks by selling her for a profit to Italian pimps. 

Meanwhile Joy and Precious are continually pestered by their families to send more money home. Joy’s family ‘invents’ a fake illnesses so her clients will take pity and pay her extra.  And Precious’ mother asks her to sleep with more more men: “Can you imagine, the woman who gave birth to me wants me to do do that!” Joy, who has a daughter Chioma (Okoh), for whose upkeep she pays a nanny, is sent with Precious to the Italian border, keeping her passport. Precious asks her many times to relinquish the passport, so that she can escape. But Joy is well aware that Madame’s vengeance would be be grim, and she reminds Precious: “This is a game of survival of the fittest. I would kill you if I needed to. Do not trust me!”. Her calculation proves right when Madame ‘releases’ her, which is not so generous as it looks since new and younger girls have arrived from Nigeria.

The director takes a detached approach throughout. The gruesome details of the women’s suffering – Joy is bleeding heavily after being raped by three men, but Madame does not allow her to seek medical help. The whole circle of violence, starting in Nigeria is repeated over and over again, because the authorities in Austria want Joy to testify against Madame, but won’t grant her immediate asylum.

JOY explores a real and continuous nightmare that is happening all the time, in nearly every European city. Shot starkly by DoP Clemens Hufnagl, mostly at night, the few interior scenes reveal the misery and fear that haunts women daily. A depressing but worthwhile film that won the Etoile d’Or at this year’s MARRAKECH FILM FESTIVAL. MT

MARRAKECH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | WINNER GOLDEN STAR MARRAKECH | WINNER LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2108

 

An Elephant Sitting Still | Da Xiang Xi Di Er Zuo (2018)

Dir.: Hu Bo; Cast: Zhang Yu, Peng Yuang, Wang Yuwen, Liu Congxi, Ling Zhenghui, Zhnag Xialong; China 2018, 230 min.

Written, directed and edited by the Chinese director Hu Bo, his award-winning debut is an immersive masterpiece and also his  last film: he committed suicide at the age of just 29, just before the end of shooting.

The action takes place during a single suspenseful day, from dawn to dusk, where the train to the Northern Chinese city of Manzhouli is about to depart. The only noticeable feature in this miserable backwater is an elephant, who, according to rumour, simply sits and watches the world go by.

The symbolic creature draws all sort of people from the surrounding villages: There is young Wei (Yuang), abused by his venal father who father lost his job for taking bribes. Wei’s friend Li (Zhenghui) is accused by Yu (Xiaolong) of stealing his mobile ‘phone. But Li protests his innocence, and Wei defends him. At school, Yu corners the two boys on a staircase and Wei is seriously injured after a scuffle.

This is a community on its knees and at each other’s throats, forced into crime and misdemeanour by harsh economic circumstances. The sins of the parents are meted out on their kids. Wei is in love with Huang (Yuwen) but her troubled mother has projected her own fears onto the young woman causing problems for them both, and Huang to cheat on Wei with the vice-dean of the school whose luxury apartment seems to exist in a parallel universe to the rest of city.

Their secret relationship has been outed by Li, whose phone images of Huang and the teacher, have now gone viral on the internet. The teacher throws Huang out of his flat, blaming her for jeopardising his career. At home Huang is hassled by the teacher’s wife who accuses her of ruining her marriage. And so it goes on, a series of interconnected stories of misery, mistrust and pain all gracefully crafted. A poetic epilogue sees Wang, his granddaughter, Huang and Wei at the station: their train to Manzhouli has been cancelled, forcing them to take several replacement buses to their destination.

Unfolding like one of Balzac’s novels from La Condition Humaine, Hu Bo keeps the narrative going, always finding new angles, plot lines and twists. Everything is elegantly elliptical as the main protagonists meet again and again under new circumstances, completely out of their control. They are always in motion, the city providing a beguiling backdrop to their rat-like existence. In their alienated indolence the young become victims of their elders, who prove poor role models.

Chao Fan’s camera pans relentlessness over the sordidness of it all, tracking the protagonists through the minefield of misdemeanours, like a prowling beast. Even Bela Tarr, always on the lookout for a backdrop of utter desolation, would be impressed by the machinations of Elephant; and there are shades of the Hungarian director’s Werckmeister Harmonies in the the lack of substantial interplay between these characters who glide through the swamp of the city without finding an identity: nothing sticks to them, as they drowning in the quagmire. Fan’s delicately rendered camerawork leaves a great deal to the imagination: the background often distorted in a filmic milkyway. And most impressive of all, we never notice the substantial running time: Hu Bo invites us to live with these characters, and we become part of their world.

A monumental undertaking, to be remembered as a part of film history and with utter regret for being Hu Bo’s sole feature output. A team of China’s FIRST Film Festival, who co-funded Elephant, finished the saga of despair and alienation the way Hu Bo had envisaged it. Elephant won the FIPRESCI Prize at the Berlin Film Festival (Forum section) along with a string of awards at Festivals all over the world including The Golden Horse Awards in Taiwan, Asia’s equivalent to the Oscars. The copyright of An Elephant Sitting Still is now with his parents. AS

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO 

The Load | Teret (2018) *** Marrakech Film Festival 2018 | Winner Best Director

Writer/Dir. Ognjen Glavonić |  Drama | 98’

Ognjen Glavonić won various awards for Depth Two, a documentary about the grim discovery of war graves in his native Serbia. THE LOAD is his debut drama that fought its way out of the country inspired by the region’s 1999 NATO onslaught to tell another story from this harrowing period of Balkan history, a quietly devastating one that haunts with its slow burning revelation looming tragically out of the dreary landscape of longterm war.

This is a place full of dour-faced officials going through the motions in a country were hope has been washed away with the winter rain and bombs still cascade in the distance like incendiary stars. A few roadside blossoms tell us spring has arrived and tired-looking truck driver Vlada (Leon Lucev) is making his daily grind towards Belgrade from Kosovo with a load locked in his beaten-up lorry, the contents unknown. His instructions are clear : no stopping or diversions, he must keep a low profile until he reaches his destination.

On his way the journey starts uneventfully but at a crossing a smouldering car crash has blocked the the route to the capital. And a rather blasé teenager hitchhiker Pava (Pavle Čemerikić) offers to show him the way to his destination, tempting Vlada to bend the rules. As it happens Pava is clueless about map-reading, but doesn’t really mind that he has let Vlada down. Clearly, he represents the younger generation, shielded from the coldface of war from protective parents like Vlada, who, inured to disappointment and setbacks, motors on resigned, his face etched with the gruelling inevitability of his lot and eventually the pair start to bond.

The tone is brooding, morose and vaguely doom-laden as the men push on framed in close-up and on the widescreen by Tatjana Krstevski whose superb washed out visual also featured in Depth Two).  The two men drive on until Paja blithely announces his departure to hitchike to German and look for better things. But nature of his Vlada’s business requires him to be responsible and slowly the gruesome truth dawns making the inevitable realisation all the more haunting. MT

WINNER BEST DIRECTOR | MARRAKECH FILM FESTIVAL 2018 

aKasha (2018) **** Marrakech International Film Festival 2018

Dir: Hajooj Kuka | Cast: Abdallah Ahur, Ganja Chakado, Ekram Marcus, Kamal Ramadan | Drama | 78’

Akasha is the feature debut of South Sudanese documentarian Hajooj Kuka, Set in the Nuba Mountains in 2011, the energetic unorthodox comedy love story plays our over 24 hours in a war-torn rebel-held area of Sudan where the soldiers are keen to recruit young men to fight for their cause. Cockily charismatic Adnan (Ramadan) is not having any of it: a revolutionary both in his attitude to life and his guise as a soldier revelling in having shot down a MiG fighter plane with his favourite AK47 called ‘Nancy’. In order to avoid being corralled into the round-up (or “kasha”), he and his mate Absi (Chakado) decide to dress as women, much to the chagrin of Adnan’s long-suffering girlfriend Lina. But that’s not all Adnan, also experiments with the local weed to surreal effect in a flip and fun-loving and colourful caper that doesn’t take itself too seriously and is refreshingly anti-war. MT

IN COMPETITION | MARRAKECH FILM FESTIVAL 2018  | LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2018

 

Lynne Ramsay at the Marrakech International Film Festival 2018

We spoke to Competition Jury member Lynne Ramsay to talk about her latest project and the film that most impressed her as a child growing up in Glasgow.

Known for her ground-breaking dramas RATCATCHER (1999), MORVERN CALLAR (2002) and WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN (2011),  her latest film YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE won Best Screenplay (ex-aequo) and Best Actor for Joaquin Phoenix at Cannes Film Festival 2018. (she asked not to be recorded due to a heavy cold).

LYNNE RAMSAY | MAMOUNIA HOTEL | MARRAKECH FILM FESTIVAL 2018

https://vimeo.com/305775148

 

The Giraffe (2018) ** Marrakech International Film Festival 2018

Dir: Ahmed Magdy | 75’ | Drama, Egypt

Ahmed Magdy was the star turn in Ahmad Abdalla’s lively musical drama Microphone (2010), Giraffe is his first feature film after three short documentaries and a notable acting carreer. Magdy also wrote the script for the film, which has Amr Hosny, Shaza Moharram, Haidy Qousa, Salma Hassan, Rasha Magdy, Mohamed El-Badawy and Osama Gawesh.

THE GIRAFFE follows the rather lost and lonely character of Ahmed who roams around a ghostly Cairo, mostly at night. It’s an aesthetically appealing mood piece with some creative camera angles and a strong sense of place but the potent visual allure is not enough to carry its vague dramatic arc and shady characterisations. In the Egyptian city of disenchanted drifters, we are led to believe that Ahmed is trying to save a stranger in urgent need of an abortion but doesn’t tells us why, although it does highlight an Egyptian healthcare in crisis. The story drifts from one scene to the next and offers no real dramatic heft to retain our attention, despite its short running time. A plotline involving a giraffe that has disappeared from Giza Zoo also feels unconvincing and Ahmed appears to be lost in his own surreal madness without any plausible backstory. The female characters seem equally lost in their own issues: two appear to be seeking abortions but again this strand is enigmatic and largely unresolved and sadly does nothing to bolster the encouraging message of female empowerment that it coming out of the festival, supporting the film community across the Arab world. Magdy has a powerful artistic vision and THE GIRAFFE would work very well as a short but as a feature length drama it needs a stronger script to carry its potential message forward. MT 

SCREENING DURING MARRAKECH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2018 

Capernaum (2018) *** Marrakech International Film Festival 2018

Dir: Nadine Labaki | Drama | 105’

Nadine Labaki gained international acclaim with her delightfully upbeat debut Caramel, set around a women’s hair salon in Beirut. Here she casts non-professional actors in a politically themed fable that sees a child resorting to the strong arm of the law. Just before the film screened at this year’s Marrakech Film Festival the news broke that the film would represent the Lebanon at the Academy Awards 2019.

This Cannes Jury Prize winner, and Golden Globe 2019 hopeful has the same stylish look as her previous two features but is a much more accomplished film that puts a watchable spin on dour social realism, although it does not quite reach the heights of perfection as the script resorts to disingenuous pandering in the slack final section. Subject-wise we are back to Daniel Blake territory although this is a much better crafted film than the one that bagged Ken Loach the Palme d’Or award several years ago. It also has to be said that CAPERNAUM does not bludgeon the life out of you with an agitprop hammer, despite a rather manipulative feel to proceedings. There are similarities too with Slumdog Millionaire in its upbeat fervour powered by cute and captivating performances from its newcomer children, and particularly from its lead Zain Al Rafeea.

Labaki structures her film round a trial, although this is not a courtroom procedural and most of the action is set in the chaotic streets or in cramped interiors where 12 year old Zain (Al Rafeea), who looks more like 8, is already serving a prison sentence for stabbing, is now suing his irresponsible parents for bringing him into the world. As one of several siblings, his parents never registered his birth. And all they seem to do is have children who they are unable to support and nourish, or even love. Despite cocky indignation and a bristling sense of entitlement to his rights, Zain is a likeable kid who lives with his parents Souad (Kawthar Al Haddad) and Selim (Fadi Kamel Youssef). Rather than school, he goes out to sell fruit juice in the market, where he also collects tramadol which the family grind into clothes-washing water which is then passed to Zain’s prison-serving elder brother. Later this tramadol water comes in as a usual way of earning money when Zain strikes out on his own. Although these circumstances are all startling to Western viewers, it has to be said that they are sadly run of the mill for millions of kids all over the world. But medication here in the Lebanon seems to be free at the point of collection, a fact which is difficult to believe given the current opiod crisis in the US and Europe.

After his younger sister Sahar is sold in marriage by his parents. Zain runs away and comes across Rahil (Yordanos Shiferaw), an Ethiopian cleaner who is in Lebanon illegally. This strand introduces a migrant theme to the narrative which also feels timely. Zain offers to look after Rahil’s toddler while she is at  work but she later disappears leaving the two to fend for themselves in what turns out to be quite an adventure.

This is a watchable drama with some endearing turns from the ensemble kiddy cast who conjure up an intoxicating chemistry considering their lack of experience. But the star of the piece is Rafeea as the cheekily adamant Zain, a tribute to kids everywhere who feel life has dealt them an unfair start, and who set out to put matters right. MT

MARRAKECH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | IN COMPETITION 2018

Irina (2018) **** Marrakech International Film Festival 2018

Dir.: Nadejda Koseva; Cast: Martina Apostolova, Hristo Ushev, Kasiel Noah-Asher, Irina Jambonas, Alexander Kossev, Krassimir Dokov; Bulgaria 2018, 96 min.

Nadejda Koseva’s debut drama very much echoes the work of her compatriot Kristina Grozeva (The Lesson). Carried by talented newcomer Martina Apostolova in the title role, Koseva portrays a woman’s struggle with men and society in general. Unflinching and always ready to challenge inequality, Irina is full of passion and drive – but she must also discover what it means to love and to forgive.

Irina (Apostolava) is caught in a poverty trap. She works part-time in a restaurant near the capital Sofia, while work-shy husband Sasho (Ushev) is a stay at home father. Returning there one day, she surprises Shaso on the hop with her sister Lyudmila (Noah-Asher) but decides to turn a blind eye and instead invites the two for a drink: “I’m giving a party, I’ve been fired”. Shortly after, Shaso gets his comeuppance during a robbery at the nearby coal-mine, and is buried under the collapsed pit props. Irena saves his life, but suspects that their neighbour Varlam (Dokov) might have been responsible for the accident. But life goes on with Irina desperate for work but unsuccessful for the most part . After trying her luck as a prostitute, she answers a newspaper ad, and agrees to become a surrogate mother for payment. The wealthy couple, Eva (Jambonas) and Bozhidar (Kossev), are living in a parallel universe in Sofia, but Irina has nothing but contempt and judges them harshly. Another tragedy will bring her life firmly into focus.

For most of the time, Koseva conveys her message non-verbally, but in the opening scene, when Shasho badgers her for sex (but is happy to drink instead the beer Irina stole for him), she voices her unhappiness: “I wish I wasn’t alive”. Later on, symbolic gestures are enough: Bozhidar offers her a lift home from her gynaecological appointments in Sofia, but she prefers to take the bus. We see her refusal to be driven from the outside of the car, its windows one of many partitions, like that of the doctor’s office, which show her dis-enfranchisement. Somehow, these systemic fractures see Irina as a rank outsider trying to make her mark.

Apart from Apostolova’s strong performance, Kiril Prodanov’s striking images show that wealth can also be a trap: the many mirrors and alcoves are again partitions which shield  the inhabitants from the outside world. Koseva directs with great verve and confidence in this watchable debut, building on the experience gleaned from her short films. AS

IN COMPETITION | MARRAKECH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2018      

 

 

Rojo (2018) **** Marrakech Film Festival 2018

Dir: Benjamin Naishtat | Cast: Alfredo Castro, Dario Grandinetti, Andrea Frigerio, Diego Cremonesi | Drama | Argentina | 109′

Benjamin Naishtat captures the existential angst of Argentina’s Dirty Wars era in a sinuous thriller that chews over some weighty social themes and distils them into this subtle smalltown crime drama.

ROJO follows his previous moody titles History of Fear (2014) and The Movement (2015). His fascination is exploring the psychological effects of instability: what happens to ordinary people and their relationships during political turmoil? The pre-title scene sees a series of people gradually emerging from a house bearing armfuls of valuables and pieces of furniture. Meanwhile, it’s Saturday night in Rio Seco, a town about 500 miles North of Buenos Aires. Local lawyer Claudio (a quietly- assured Dario Grandinetti) is waiting for his wife (Andrea Frigerio) in a busy local restaurant when an impatient single diner (Diego Cremonesi) demands he vacate the table. The situation soon escalates into a frosty contretemps but Claudio refuses to rise to the bait, calmly returning to the bar where he delivers an articulate verbal put down. But it doesn’t end there. After they leave the restaurant the man pursues them with bizarre consequences, and the story flips to three months later. This tight-knit middle class community is gradually exposed as one of astonishing volatility, a moral morass of intrigue and sculduggery: a brilliant metaphor for the state of the country in general during the country’s Dirty Wars of the mid 1970s. Chunks of land are being bought somewhat illegally, law-abiding locals are becoming minor crooks, and people are disappearing without reason – with no questions asked – as a pervasive paranoia creeps like wildfire through the unsettled community. ROJO lurks in a murky Seventies aesthetic, Naishtat creating a climate of menacing fear with a screeching score of strings (from Vincent van Warmerdam) and some cleverly crafted slo-mo sequences that suggest  docudrama. Uncertainty and danger loom at every corner in a clammy climate of fear and mistrust. 

In the final hour, Alfredo Castro’s seedy detective Sinclair insinuates himself into the scenario investigating the murder of the man in the restaurant “el hippie” who, it emerges, is also related to one of Claudio’s close friends Mabel. Channelling Colombo with his stealthy exits and sudden reappearances for “one more thing”, Sinclair sets the lawyer’s nerves on edge in an uncanny set-to that is alarming and totally unexpected. It’s a superbly sinister performance from Castro who sets the cat amongst the pigeons – without any justification, Claudio feels culpable yet has nowhere to go. As the various subplots intertwine the story hints at wider implications for the nation as a whole and Naishtat keeps the tension tightly wound in this unnerving and intriguing thriller. MT. 

IN COMPETITON AT MARRAKECH FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | BEST DIRECTOR WINNER San Sebastian 2018 

 

Urgent (2018) **** Marrakech International Film Festival 2018

Dir. Mohcine Besri. Switzerland-Morocco. 2018. 85 mins

A Casablanca hospital is the setting for this auteurish and visually appealing arthouse drama that connects a group of Moroccans from different walks of life and touches on universal themes of healthcare in crisis and how it affects the community’s physical and emotional wellbeing. URGENT is Moroccan writer-director Mohcine Besri second feature and his Golden Star hopeful at Marrakech Film Festival 17th edition. 

On a Casablanca motorway flyover a man is contemplating suicide when rather than trying to talk him out of his resolve a passing wayfarer simply asks him for his pack of cigarettes a then his scarf.  

Besri affecting drama establishes a graceful rhythm in its narrative of connecting stories and is gently moving without resorting to sentimentality or melodrama. His scientific training has given him a sense of spatial awareness and each corner of the frame is constantly put to use in providing interest throughout although the pace slackens in the final act. This subtle narrative inconsistency provides the subtle humour throughout, especially when the man’s suicide is thwarted by a lorry-full of unsuspecting sheep, which then causes a traffic jam where we meet the rest of the characters and the action moves to the more intimate setting of the hospital where the drama plays out before returning to its original location. 

Writing with Cécile Vargaftig Besri introduces to local fisherman Driss (Rachid Mustapha) and his wife Zahra (Fatma Zahra Banacer), who have come to the hospital with their little son Ayoub who is in danger of losing movement in his legs. The hope is that Driss’s brother Houcine (Saïd Bey), will provide for the treatment by paying them back a loan. Clearly this is not going to happen but Houcine feels guilty and the hospital cannot provide treatment for free due to stretched resources, and so they all prepare for the worst.

Meanwhile Ali, the motorway man, is recovering from his sprains and confiding in the hospital staff about his reasons for wanting to end his life. Clearly ‘heartache’ is the reason “but not a woman” and Besri wisely leaves this enigma hanging in the air: They won’t let you die in peace. And when you want to live…”

The hospital is packed with patients and their families but 

unwisely Besri lets his antihero Saïd Bey’s Houcine off the hook. URGENT is full of interesting interactions, a sort of arthouse version of BBC TV’s Casualty soon develops this enjoyable and affecting story elliptically to its close. MT

MARRAKECH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2018

All Good (Alles is gut) ***

Dir: Eva Trobisch | Cast: Aenne Schwarz, Andreas Dohler, Tilo Nest, Lina Wendel | Germany |

Eva Trobisch’s All Good, is about the dark night of the soul in the aftermath to unimaginable tragedy. Something happens, we think we can deal with it, and it goes away – at least for a while – only to return with a vengeance, as grief, anger and finally depression overwhelm and repress the human spirit.

After an ordinary night out at a school reunion Janne (Aenne Schwarz) is raped by a seemingly innocuous old school friend. Martin (Hans Löw) is now a professional, corporate type who duly accompanies her back home after the party. Both are a little tipsy but the evening did not hint at romance or even mild flirtatiousness. So it’s odd that Martin, almost as an afterthought – decided to makes a move.  After a sustained attempt at seducing her, Janne finally acquiesces to Martin’s advances – the scene is well played and captures all the nuanced undertones of an unwanted encounter. In the full light of day, Janne reflects with distaste and then mild anger at Martin’s presumptuousness. But feels awkward about discussing it with her boyfriend Piet (Andreas Döhler) who’s absorbed in his own dramas.

In her feature debut, which won Best Newcomer at Locarno 2018, Trobisch uses these subtle shifts in human response to create a thoughtful and absorbing drama that kicks over the ashes of suppressed anguish with worthwhile insight and impressive command. All Good is just that, Janne fronts up well to her trauma but what lies beneath is quite a different scenario. And Janne’s  increasing and unacknowledged exasperation turns slowly to simmering rage.

At work, Janne’s new boss (Tilo Nest) is also preoccupied with his own issues, and so she goes about her work with resignation and determination not to let the episode overwhelm her as a young, intelligent and independent woman in the 21st century. But life but goes on and Janne will not give up. A surprisingly mature debut with some strong performances, especially from Aenne Schwartz in the lead. MT

MARRAKECH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | IN COMPETITION 2018

 

 

The Dead and Others (2018) **** Marrakech International Film Festival 2018

Docudrama | 114’ | Brazil/Portugal

Directed by Palme d’Or winner João Salaviza and Renée Nader Messora, THE DEAD AND THE OTHERS is an extraordinary docudrama based on their experiences of living for nearly a year in Pedra Branca, a village inhabited by the indigenous community of the Kraho people in Northern Brazil. The Kraho very much want to continue their way of life and traditions in their rural community, striving to be self-sufficient. Their plight very much connects with a global narrative of survival for small communities all over the world.

Fifteen year old Ihjãc has been suffering from nightmares since he lost his father and in the opening scene he walks through the rain forest in the light of the moon. A distant sound of chanting comes through the palm trees. His father’s voice calls him to the waterfall. It is now time to organise the funeral feast so his father’s spirit can depart to the village of the Dead and mourning can cease. Although his baby son Tepto was born in the local hospital, Ihjãc still spends most of his life with his family in the remote forest and although the village elders are urging him to fulfil his duty to undergo the crucial process of becoming a shaman, Ihjãc escapes back to the local town to avoid the transition. There, far from his people and culture, he faces the reality of being an indigenous native in contemporary Brazil.

With its themes of loss, displacement and cultural identity, this is an masterful if rather overlong piece of filmmaking that feels woozily impressionistic but also strangely urgent in its message, glowingly conveyed in vibrant high contrast cinematography MT

SCREENING DURING MARRAKECH FILM FESTIVAL | VIEWS FROM MOROCCO AND THE Ottoman Empire | THE 11th CONTINENT

Marrakech Film Festival 2018 | Conversations with….

To celebrate the 17th edition – 30 November to 8 December – MARRAKECH FILM FESTIVAL has introduced an interactive new talk series.

CONVERSATION WITH is an initiative that offers a space for expression, exchange and reflection with screen legends and film luminaries:

Martin Scorsese (b.1942, US)

Director, writer, actor and producer is one of the most influential directors working today and also one of the most generous in his support of talented emerging filmmakers. In a multi-award winning career spanning nearly 60 years his work has been inspired by his early life growing up with Italian parents in New York City in crime dramas such as Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976) and Goodfellas (1990), and his own religious faith as in Silence (2016) and The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). He has captured the spirit of legends such as boxing supremo JakeLaMotta in Raging Bull (1980), Howard Hughes in The Aviator (2004) and the Dalai Lama in Kundun (1997). His animated feature Hugo (2011) was dedicated to his daughter Francesca. His thriller Cape Fear (1991) has one of the most frightening performances in film history courtesy of his long time collaborator Robert De Niro (Max Cady) and Shutter Island (2010) that was his stylistic tribute to both Out of the Past (1947) and Vertigo (1958). His other regular collaborators have been Leo DiCaprio and Bernhard Herrmann who created iconic scores for Taxi Driver and Cape Fear. His latest crime drama The Irishman based on the death of Jimmy Hoffa, is shortly to be released on Netflix.

Guillermo Del Toro (b. 1964, Mexico)

Del Toro started making programmes for Mexican TV before he directed and produced his first feature film Dona Herlinda and Her Son (1986) at the age of 21. Learning his make-up techniques from The Exorcist’s Dick Smith he got his first break in 1993 with Cronos which went on to win the FIPRESCI prize at Cannes. Since then he has won two Oscars in 2018 for The Shape of Water, a remake of Jack Arnold’s Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). He is currently working on a documentary about the filmmaker Michael Mann.

Cristian Mungiu (b. 1968, Romania)

Screenwriter, director and producer Cristian Mungiu rose to international fame in 2007 with his bleak drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days that shocked audiences with its raw depiction of backstreet abortion in communist Romania. He was the first Romanian director to win the Palme d’Or. Since then he has made a series of films exposing moral degradation in Romanian society. Beyond the Hills (2012) won his Best Screenplay at Cannes in year of its release, and his thorny depiction of family life Graduation followed four years later winning his Best Director at Cannes 2016 (ex aequo with Olivier Assayas for Personal Shopper). 

Yousry Nasrallah (b.1952, Egypt)

Born into a Coptic Christian family in Cairo, Nasrallah started his career as a film critic in Beirut in the late 1970s, soon becoming assistant  to Youssef Chahine whose company Mirs would go on to produce his films that focus on Socialism, Islamic fundamentalism and expatriation. His award-winning debut Summer Thefts (1985) was described as “the only non-ideological film on Nasserism in Egypt”. El Medina (1999) describes the struggle for creative realisation of a young Egyptian actor and After the Battle competed for the Palme d’Or in 2012.

Agnes Varda (b.1928 Belgium) 

Director, writer and photographer Agnes Varda has made over 50 films in her celebrated career. She was born in Belgium but moved to France as a baby before settling in Paris where she eventually married Jacques Demy and became one of the protagonists of the French New Wave with her feature debut La Point Courte (1951). She went on to make a series of award-winning dramas focusing on life and love: Cleo de 5 a 7 (1962), Le Bonheur (1965); L’une chante, l’autre pas (1977) and Jacquot de Nantes (1991) a biopic drama dedicated to her husband. Her latest documentary Faces Places (2017) is a rural ride through France.

Robert De Niro. (b. 1943, US)

One of the greatest actors of all time, Robert De Niro grew up in Manhattan where he launched his acting career in Brian De Palma’s The Wedding Party at the age of 26. By 1974 he had won the New York Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actor in Bang the Drum Slowly, the National Society of Film Critic for Mean Streets, and the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for The Godfather, Part II. In 1980 he won his second Oscar, as Best Actor, for Raging Bull.

De Niro’s next project will be Netflix’s The Irishman in which he stars and is producing with Martin Scorsese, for their ninth collaboration. In 2009, De Niro received the Kennedy Center Honor for his distinguished acting and the Stanley Kubrick Award from the BAFTA Britannia Awards. De Niro was honored with the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the 2011 Golden Globe Awards. He served as the jury president of the 64th Cannes Film Festival.

De Niro is also known for his Tribeca Production company and the Tribeca Film Festival, which he founded with Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff. Through Tribeca Productions, De Niro has developed projects on which he has served as producer, director and actor. Tribeca’s A Bronx Tale in 1993 marked De Niro’s directorial debut. De Niro also directed The Good Shepherd in 2006.

During the interview De Niro confessed to not liking smoking on set. And has never had trouble keeping his personal life, personal. “Don’t bring your drama to the set, put it into your performance”.

https://vimeo.com/303947159/d498bda114

Cannes Film Festival Creative Director Thierry Fremaux.

Thierry Fremaux has come a long way since joining the Lumiere Institute in Lyon. The Fast-talking artistic force behind Cannes also directs, along with (president) Bertrand Tavernier, the Lyon-based Lumiere Festival that each year celebrates the vitality of classic film (restored films, retrospectives and tributes). Fremaux has even made a film about the brothers (LUMIERE 2016). who were the first filmmakers with their ground-breaking invention, the cinematograph. The legendary brothers not only invented the technique of making film, but also the art and the way of bringing people together in a theatre. Thierry explains how the aim of the Lumiere Festival was to connect the past with the present – as digital internet platforms, and mobile phones now compete with the classic way of crafting films. To be ‘healthy’ with contemporary cinema we have to look to the past, and that is why Lumiere came about – back in 2009

As artistic director at Cannes his work is much more difficult than it was 30 years ago, not simply because of the volume of films presented to the festival (the team selects the line-up down from over 1800 films) but also the sheer variety. And if Cannes misses a potential new auteur then this becomes a big deal – not just a small faux pas. As he explains: “Cannes is an international festival set in France and we try to embrace the ever-widening variety of film from across every continent. In the 1990s film noir was being re-invented in Hong Kong by Phil Joanou (State of Grace), inspired by Pierre Melville. Each time a young filmmaker makes a breakout hit – the spotlight will be on him, and we can’t afford to miss that”. “Pan’s Labyrinth came as a big shock to many festival goers, as it was the kind of style that had never really been invited before, and it really surprised people about the way forward we were taking – also with animation and with documentary”. Most films “choose” Thierry rather than the other way round, as passionate filmmaking eventually shows through, as much as talent. But certain films will never be right for the competition. “You have to ask the question – is it good or not for the film to be in Cannes. Also is it suitable for the audience – or for the press – we have in Cannes”. 

At the moment Thierry works with a group of 8, sometimes 10 people to make the final Cannes selection (equally split by gender). “The culture of making films is not that same for a man as for a woman so gender equality is absolutely vital as we move to 2020. This year’s Cannes selection was criticised but we have a duty to put new names on the map. And we have to adapt Cannes for the future and to make it comfortable for the audience and the press”. Clearly there will more changes, but Thierry assures us that they will be for the better. MT

MARRAKECH FILM FESTIVAL | 30 NOVEMBER – 8 DECEMBER 2018 | INTERVIEW AT THE MAMOUNIA HOTEL POOLSIDE, MARRAKECH 2018

 

 

Khartoum (1966)*** Dual Format release

Dir: Basil Dearden | Wri: Robert Andrey | UK, 1966 | 134′ | Historical Action Drama

KHARTOUM is the kind of spectacular, rousing historical adventure that doesn’t get made anymore, certainly not along the same lines as Basil Dearden’s star-studded epic that exposes English colonialism, religious fanaticism, heroism and sacrifice in a magnificent visual masterpiece. Back in the day, it all seemed perfectly harmless to our innocent childhood eyes as we sat round the telly oblivious to the political incorrectness. And that wasn’t the worst thing: it later emerged that over a hundred horses were severely injured or killed immediately during the battle scenes, due to unethical stunt methods of the time.

Sir Laurence Olivier actually plays the Arab fanatic Muhammad Ahmad, whose troops massacre thousands on British-led Egyptian forces in 1880s Sudan. He truly believes he is the Mahdi, choses by the profit Mohammed’s to topple the Anglo-Egyptian rule. Meanwhile, Legendary Major General Charles George Gordon (Charlton Heston was nearly a foot taller than the General himself) is sent by Prime Minister William Gladstone (Ralph Richardson) to save the city of Khartoum from the Mahdi, but is given only one aide in the shape of Richard Johnson), and limited support from the British government that sent him there. Intrepid til the last he faces a fearless opponent determined to create a new empire. Gordon sees that further bloodshed is imminent.

With impressive battle sequences given greater weight by philosophical and moral debates about the righteousness of military action, Khartoum is a widescreen extravaganza and was the final film to be shot using Ultra Panavision 70 (and screened theatrically in Cinerama) until Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight in 2015. And it’s an extraordinary endeavour with its masterful performance from a heavyweight cast of actors at the top of their game. Perfect entertainment for a drizzly afternoon or a long winter’s night – if you’re not an animal lover!

FROM 3 DECEMBER | COURTESY OF EUKEKA MASTERS OF CINEMA

Amazon https://amzn.to/2DbNZTh

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Mug – Twarz (2018) Bfi player

Dir: Malgorzata Szumovska | Michal Englert | Cast: Mateuz Kosciukiewiczz, Agnieszka Podsiadlik | Drama | Poland

In this salacious social critique of her homeland, filmmaker Malgorzata Szumovska captures the zeitgeist of rural Poland with a strangely moving story involving a scruffy metalhead builder who is forced to reevaluate his life after a tragic accident at work.

Twarz means mug/face in Polish. It refers to the central character Jacek (Mateusz Kosciukiewicz), who still lives in the lakeside town of Western Polish town of Świebodzin with his petty, provincial family. Despite best intentions to move to London with his floozy fiancée Dagmara (Gorol), Jacek is put off by his brother in law’s zenophobic stance on things and Brexit doubts. Only his sister seems to be on his side.

Jacek is building something he believes in – a statue of Christ the King, and the tallest representation of the saviour so far. But a dreadful fall derails his future and his face is so badly injured that he needs life-changing surgery: the local priest (Roman Gancarczyk), his fiancée Dagmara, and the rest of the family will have to chip in to the expensive medical bills. And the result may be quite different from the Jacek they knew and loved. And the after effects are quite different, although by no means as bad as the family feared. That said, even his mother (Anna Tomaszewska) refuses to accept his new look (cleverly photographed by Michal Englert who also co-wrote the script). But when Dagmara shuns him, her rejection strikes to core of his being as a lover and man. Only his sister (a superb Agnieszka Podsiadlik) is there to help with his rehabilitation.

Szumovska cleverly navigates tonal nuances from realism to comic fantasy in a film that is competently performed, utterly compelling and thematically rich with its reflection on consumerism, identity and prejudice. The film also tackles religious belief and the nature of human suffering symbolised by Jacek’s dignified forbearance under the gaze of an all-seeing Jesus Christ. MT

NOW ON BFI PLAYER from 15 OCTOBER 2021 | SILVER BEAR GRAND JURY PRIZE BERLINALE 2018
PRESS CONFERENCE 

Pajaros de Verano (2018) **** Marrakech Film Festival 2018

Dir: Ciro Guerra |Dir/Prod: Cristina Gallego | Drama | Colombia | Cast: | Carmina  Martínez, Jhon Narváez, José Acosta, José Vicente Cotes, Juan Martínez, Natalia Reyes | 110’

Embrace of the Serpent (2015) was the first Colombian feature to be nominated for an Oscar© and won Ciro Guerra the Art Cinema award at Directors’ Fortnight. The Bogota born director returns with his fourth and most ambitious film today PAJAROS DE VERANO (Birds of Passage) that explores the origins of the Colombian drug trade through this epic yet spiritual  multi-layered story about an indigenous Wayuu family of farmers turned drug-traffickers become involved in the booming business of selling marijuana to the American youth in the 1970s. But from a tiny seed of discontent passion and honour collide, and a fratricidal war breaks out that will put their lives, culture and ancestral traditions at stake.

Working this time in colour with his DoP David Gallego, Guerra creates a fabulous sense of place in the arid windswept plains of Colombia’s Guajira desert, where a deep unsettling feeling continually pervades the heady atmosphere with Leonardo Heiblum’s ground-breaking ominous soundscape.

Embrace of the Serpent writer Jacques Vidal and co-scripter Maria Camila Arias structure the story around five songs: Wild Grass 1968, The Tombs 1971, Prosperity 1979, The War 1980 and Limbo following the age-old traditional rags to riches and then tragedy formula. That said, this is an inventive and refreshingly original film whose poetic nature is continually punctuated by episodes of brutal violence and down to earth characters echoing recent South American fare such as Lucrecia Martel’s Zama, and Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja, and anchoring Birds firmly in historical reality despite its lyrical and often dreamlike folkloric overtones.

In this strongly matriarchal set-up, themes of capitalism vie with those of spirituality showing how both can breed antagonism if left unchecked, and this is eventually what transpires when male machismo and greed topples this delicate human society with tragedy and loss the inevitable outcome. Occasionally marred by uneven pacing BIRDS OF PASSAGE is nevertheless a startling achievement marking out Ciro Guerra and his co-director Cristina Gallego as growing talents on the South American scene. MT

 

MARRAKECH FILM FESTIVAL 2018

 

Red Snow | Akai Yuki (2018) **** Marrakech International Film Festival 2018

An island community is still haunted by the mysterious disappearance of a little boy 30 years after he went missing, in this spookily stylish Japanese crime thriller. 

Premiering at Marrakech Film Festival RED SNOW is the feature debut of Sayaka Kai known for her award-winning short Ondine’s Curse (2014). The young auteur quickly establishes a sinister mood in the eerie snowbound location where her troubled characters are all victims of their own past and still fraught with pent-up emotion and debilitating psychological scars that threaten to break out and reveal a truth too ugly to bear.

Themes of unreliable memory, child abuse and mental illness play out in the sober, icy landscapes where Takumi went missing three decades previously leaving a mood of anger, bitterness and mistrust amongst the broken inhabitants. 

The main suspect is an eccentric female cleaner with an abusive childhood – seen in repetitive flashbacks where we witness the cruelty of her sociopathic mother. Not only is she generally unpopular with the rest of the islanders, but she is also in a toxic relationship with an older man who is purportedly her pimp. And the more Takumi’s brother urges her to share her recollection of what happened, the greater her reluctance to discuss the crime, or even talk about her memory of it. 

But when a reporter arrives on the island to investigate the cold case, clues and truth start to mingle with a trail of other unsolved crimes including insurance fraud and a devastating fire. It soon appears that Takumi’s reclusive brother, a talented lacquering specialist with a workshop close to the desolate shores, could also be involved in the disappearance. 

There are distant echoes of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman of the Dunes to this baleful piece that seems to languish in its own misery. YAS-KAS’ atmospheric score sets a sober tone occasionally giving way to scenes of lingering silence thats seems to accentuate the bleakness of the remote settings. Sayaka Kai makes use of a re-occurring luxuriant red motif that connects the lushly lacquered boxes with the blood of Takumi’s presumptive murder that stains the mournful flashbacks haunting his brother’s dreams and memories, and recalling that fateful day when he left home on a brief errand. 

A strong cast supports lead Masatoshi Nagase as the man trying to solve the mystery. RED SNOW’s visual aesthetic is way beyond what we can usually expect from Japanese first features marking Sayaka Kai as a talented auteur in the making. MT

WORLD PREMIERING AT MARRAKECH FILM FESTIVAL 2018

Yomeddine (2018) *** Marrakech Film Festival 2018

Writer|Dir: A B Shawky | Egypt | Drama | 97’

YOMEDDINE (Judgement Day) is a coming of age road drama where two outcasts discover the harshness of the real world outside the lepper colony where they have spent most of their tragic lives. Funded by kickstarter, A B Shawky based his film on real people he met at the Abu Zaabal Leper Colony while filming his awarded documentary The Colony: childless leper Beshay and his schizophrenic wife; Hamed, the legless former truck driver, and Nubian boy Obama. After the death of his wife, we re-join Beshay and his apprentice Obama (Ahmed Abdelhafiz) on a journey south in a donkey cart, to trace the rest of Beshay’s family and find out why his father abandoned him there as a child.

A gentle sardonic humour saves YOMEDDINE from descending into sentimentality, even though the two’s sad plight may often have you close to tears. Newcomer Gamal plays Beshay (who is no longer contagious) with vulnerability and amusing self-deprecation, and the down to earth Obama tags along on the mission.

Poverty and religion are the themes that run through this slim but poignant story. Having been judged all their lives for their looks, when will they be judged for their personalities? Obama is more confident than Beshay but the two share an appealing rapport. During their trip they encounter all sorts of nefarious characters along the way, and although there’s no strong narrative, this watchable film ambles gently on as we enjoy the rapport of the characters and the simple storyline enriched by the passing Egyptian landscapes – that veers off the beaten track, offering sites that are unfamiliar to most. YOMEDDINE is a restrained piece of work that may not travel far, but there is a powerful charm to its journey. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 8-19 MAY 2018 | IN COMPETITION

Tulip Fever (2017)

Dir.: Justin Chadwick; Cast: Alicia Vikander, Christoph Waltz, Dane de Haan, Judi Dench, Holliday Granger, Tom Hollander; USA/UK 2015, 110 min.

Based on the novel of the same name by Deborah Moggach and written by Tom Stoppard, Tulip Fever is a story of a loveless marriage and a disillusioned romantic set against the tulip mania that raged in the first half of the 17th century. Moggach was inspired by the Dutch paintings of the Golden Age, and the film evokes their opulent yet lugubrious surroundings.

The background to this intimate drama is the speculative madness of “tulip fever”: rare bulbs are bought and sold in frenzied bidding, their value often exceeding gold.

A fascinating film could be made this Seventeenth Century Amsterdam’s equivalent of the South Sea Bubble and the Wall Street Crash, but this isn’t it.

The troubled production was charted in the press like that of Cleopatra’ over half a century earlier and, rather like that, the end result is good-looking (the tulips standing out from the general murk as little splashes of colour like the fish in ‘Rumble Fish’) but garrulous and uninvolving; but mercifully a lot shorter.

Being a twenty-first century historical film it contains plenty of unsexy sex and vertiginous steadicam photography; and as in ‘Cleopatra’s day a big historical epic wasn’t complete without a cameo by Finlay Currie, so the cast today inevitably includes Judi Dench.

The camera hovers moodily over the dark interiors, the narrow alleyways and canals seem to be all like traps, it is never really light, the weather seems to be foul all the time – creating a mood of morbidity, in spite of the wealth displayed. Vikander is brilliant in her mood changes, her intimate scenes contrast vividly with manic plotting; in the end, when cornered, she runs wild like a woman possessed.

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE

The Old Man and the Gun (2018) ****

Dir: David Lowery | Cast: Robert Redford, Sissy Spacek | US Drama | 93mins

This mellow arthouse movie is a tongue in cheek tribute to gentlemen villains everywhere. The perfect antidote to crime thrillers, THE OLD MAN & THE GUN shoots the breeze with Robert Redford’s real life career criminal Forrest Tucker, reflecting over his glorious life of bank robbery. With its themes of ageing gracefully, living life to the full and being true to ourselves The Old Man and The Gun is a wistful experience enriched by polished performances from its well-oiled leads Spacek and Redford.

Redford’s Forrest Tucker is already into his 60s when we meet him in 1981 during a genteel crime spree in the Midwest. Approaching his banking targets he simply produces a gun and asks for the money. With a dozy detective on his trail in the shape of Casey Affleck (as John Hunt) Tucker is meanwhile casually turning his thoughts to romance and dating a rather sceptical woman called Jewel (Spacek), who’s not quite sure what to make of the charming old roué.

The Old Man is Lowery’s follow-up to his rather dour haunting fantasy A Ghost Story. But although both share that undercurrent of navel-gazing introspection that has mulling over the meaning of life, this is a much more upbeat affair that nevertheless packs a powerful undercurrent of tension in its final scenes. The real life Tucker was well into his 80s when he died in 2004. And there’s something faintly laudable about his method of making a living. No-one ever gets hurt, and there’s no deception, although Tucker possesses a steely resolve in his recidivism — Lowery plays on that most disarming of human qualities: the element of surprise. Tucker maintains a genial charm throughout, always cutting to the chase but with charisma in spades. And he slowly builds a convincing relationship with Jewel, who’s attracted to his magnetism despite her better judgement, always aware that at some point she be short-changed.

Old Man has a criminal pulse but it’s a steady one. Craftily, Lowery has us believe that Old Man will be a cat-and-mouse game between Hunt and Tucker. But then he film turns into a much more subtle affair, building rich characterisations of the smiling but steely villain and his half-hearted oppressor, Old Man plays out as a slow-burning study of criminal motivation and mutual respect. Affleck’s Hunt is bemused and mildly fascinated by what makes Tucker tick. And there’s one scene where the two meet in the bathroom that really showcases this charm offensive between the two men. But Hunt’s more interested in staying home with his wife, and mentoring his kids on police methods rather than rushing around frenetically chasing wrongdoers.

The Old Man owes its immense charm to Redford who is really brilliant as the twinkly- eyed thief. There’s deep sadness and longing behind the warmth of his wry smile, rather than any desire to hurt or deceive. His atavistic urge to escape and re-offend is clearly rooted in his childhood – it’s at his very core and keeps him alive.

Joe Anderson’s grainy Super 16mm visually gives the film that retro feel. Daniel Hart’s loose-limbed tuneful score puts a rosy spins on proceedings — Spacek barely conceals her clear affection for the loveable cad, but also the fear that she may lose him to pastures new.   Tucker is a leopard who has no intention of changing his spots. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 7 DECEMBER 2018

Teatro de Guerra (2018) * * *

Dir/Writer: Lola Arias | Doc | Argentina, Spain 2018

The Falklands War (1982-84)  took the lives of 655 Argentinian and 255 British soldiers. It ended in Argentina’s military defeat and in territorial claims on both sides that remain contentious to this day.
Experimental in nature, this frank and often moving film essay from Argentinian artist and filmmaker Lola Arias tries to discover if past trauma can ever be resolved by collectively revisiting the memories by giving soldiers from both sides a chance to explore their feelings and even re-enact their experiences 34 years after hostilities officially ended. This is an illuminating piece of filmmaking that puts us at the cutting edge of the combat through face to face interviews; news footage and staged episodes of the conflict enacted by those who actually took part.

Now in their early 50s, the 12 veterans from both sides, bear their souls in a piece that swings between moments of anguish and absurd comedy. At one point the men even break into song and perform together in a rock band, emoting and finding a cathartic outlet for their anxiety from the past. This makes for an interactive cinema – the soldiers finding a space to release their trauma and viewers experiencing the full throttle of their pain – and even elation. An engaging piece of cinema that grapples with the coal face of conflict in new and inventive ways. MT

NOW ON RELEASE AT SELECTED CINEMAS | BERLINALE 15-25 FEBRUARY 2018 | BERLINALE FORUM PRIZE | ECUMENICAL JURY | CICAE ART CINEMA AWARD

 

Ça C’est l’Amour (2018) *** Marrakech Film Festival 2018

Dir.: Claire Burger; Cast: Bouli Lanners, Sarah Henochsberg, Justine Lacroix, Cecile Remy-Boutang, Celia Mayer; France/Belgium 2018, 98 min.

Claire Burger joint project Party Girl won the Camera d’Or in 2014. Her debut as solo director is another passionate family story, but this one suffers from thematic over-loading and a certain lack of structure, despite a fine central performance from Bouli Lanners. Just as the French title implies – “That is what love is” – Burger shows true love in all its forms: from the obsessive and  possessive to the pre-sexual, always reminding us, that none of these is ideal.   

Set in Forbach, northern France, where the Belgian filmmaker spend her formative years, this starts off as the usual dysfunctional family affair. Working in local government Lanners is a bumptious father to daughters Nikki (Henochsberg) and Frida (Laxroix). His regular spates with his long-suffering wife Armelle (Remy-Boutang) who works in the theatre, finally prove too much  and she walks out suddenly, leaving Mario in the lurch. Nikki is seventeen, and ready to fly the nest – despite Mario’s severe reservations. Nikki keeps boyfriend Nazim at a distance – after a kiss she tells him “not to get any ideas”. Tomboy Frida, the younger, wants to be ‘Daddy’s girl’ but also leave home for good. She has a more complicated relationship: girl friend Alex (Mayer), might be more experienced in love, but she can be a pain in the neck for Frida, who wants total acceptance. Mario is unable to come to terms with living without Armelle, following her to the theatre and making it clear that he expects her go come back. Meanwhile, his relationship with his daughters deteriorates. Clearly something will have to give, not only in the lives of these Belgians – but also in the film’s running time. There is really too much going on in her over-stuffed narrative where marginal characters are introduced – and incidents at Mario’s workspace spiral out of control. Real Love simply runs out of space. The inter-familiar conflicts, as presented in first act are just about enough. Burger somehow fails to find a structure to do justice to her main characters. That said, there’s plenty of humour to save this from veering into a dire lecture about role models. Lanners excels in the comedy moments – the same goes for Henochsberg and Lacroix, the latter leaving the strongest impression on the feature. Burger’s error’s are mostly due to her lack of experience: we can certainly look forward to more from her in future.

SCREENING DURING MARRAKECH FILM FESTIVAL 2018

     

Vmayakovsky (2018) ****Russian Film Week 2018

Dir: Alexander Shein | 115’      

“For you, cinema is just a spectacle, for me – almost a world view.” declared the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (1993 – 1930) who as well as being a socialist ‘rock-star’ performer was also an actor of the silent cinema era (The 1918 The Ladyand the Hooligan, his only surviving film, can be watched on YouTube.) Mayakovsky was part of the Russian Futurist movement believing that art and society would reject the past and strive for a new consciousness. His multi-faceted and contradictory personality was clearly the result of a troubled beginning, and his life went on to be accordingly unorthodox. Yet director Alexander Shein has managed brilliantly to employ a non-linear and iconoclastic style for VMayakovsy that captures (though often it can barely contain) this incendiary poetic talent now mythologized, alongside of Pushkin, in modern Russia.

VMayakovsky opens with a group of actors in a studio rehearsing a film script about Mayakovsky. Gradually they assume the appropriate characterisation of the poet and the people who knew him: body language, manners and revolutionary language start to emerge. This is intercut with fictionalised documentary footage of Lilya Brik (The poet’s muse and lover played by Chillopan Khamatova) as an elderly invalid reflecting on her past. One amusing moment has a gift arriving from perhaps Mayakovsky’s daughter. Lilya’s carer says it’s a package form someone called Saint Saens but it’s not the French composer, but Yves Saint Laurent. Real documentary footage of protesters in modern Moscow; recitals of Mayakovsky’s verse, social gatherings, meetings and a recreation of a Mayakovsky play keep bursting into the film. This becomes a dazzling, energetic collage of impressions and incidents that doesn’t sidestep things into an obvious drama-doc. There’s no excessive use of 1930s documentary footage or any Shostakovich ‘theme related’ music. Shein maintains a restless pace for VMayakovsky – for it’s an experimental film intent on destroying the bio-pic.

VMayakovsky is two hours long: after an hour of arresting cinematic effects its biographical data is realised as a kind of ‘theatrical tableaux’ with occasional filmed exteriors. This shift of tone deepens the film and the superb performance of Yuri Kolokolnikow (As Mayakovsy) reveals him to be a tragic character. Mayakovsky was admired by Lenin yet viewed with suspicion by Stalin and The Russian Association of Proletarian Writers: eventually falling completely out of favour with his audience and the authorities who began to detest experimentation in the arts.

There’s a marvellously satirical scene where the workers are collecting the autumn crop of apples performed against a backcloth of Stalinist Palace of Culture architecture. A close friend informs Mayakovsky that he’s been awarded a state apartment to live in. But cautions him that his writings need to conform to the new social order. This army companion (Who is also being pressured) has a fellow writer colleague of Mayakovsky released from jail and then agonises over Mayakovsky’s unwillingness to change his art. Stalin’s totalitarian world is soon conveyed as a theatre audience of complaining hats, without heads, wittily grouped in a surreal space.

VMayakovsky isn’t an easy film to watch and not everything works. Why is real footage of Communist North Korea shown? What are the crowd, in present day Moscow, actually protesting about?  And why leave out Mayakovsky’s film acting? Yet in spite of some excluded and not properly thought-through ideas, VMayakovsky provokes, stimulates and entertains: rather than an audience beginning to fully understand Mayakovsky, they experience a poetic force called Vladimir Mayakovsky who was a very vulnerable man.

VMayakovsky is a terrific achievement that reminded me of some of the film experimentation that we took for granted from the early sixties to the mideighties (Hans-Jurgen Syberberg, Jacques Rivette and the better side of Ken Russell are an obvious influence on Shein.) Sadly Shein’s feature isn’t on any form of limited release. It’s had a few University screenings in London and you can now only catch it if you take a train to Glasgow, Cambridge or Oxford this winter.

I saw VMayakovsky at a cinema inside a large London bank. The director introduced the screening, telling us that it was a joke that his film was being screened in a bank as he himself had just become bankrupt. Buying a ticket may not help to keep Alexander Shein financially afloat: yet your support could just spur him on to produce more work like the remarkably assured VMayakovsky. Alan Price © 2018       

SCREENING DURING RUSSIAN FILM WEEK | 2018

 

The Forest | Les (2018) **** Russian Film Week 2018

Dir.: Roman Zhigalov; Cast: Oleg Shibayew, Natalia Rychkova, Oleg Feokzistov, Maria Avramjova, Vladimir Malyugin; Russia 2018, 97 min.

Roman Zhigalov’s feature debut is a glum, violent and dramatic passion play. In a village surrounded by dense forest, murder, rape and arson seem to dominate the troubled community, in a microcosm of Putin’s Russia. This an important portrait of Russian society, despite its over-accentuated sombre realism. 

Sixteen-year old Danila (Shibayew) lives with oppressive mother Galina (Avramkova) and brutal father Pasha (Feokzistov). Cut off from society he has a problem adjusting to school life and is bullied for his sullen manners and total lack of interest in girls. 

Meanwhile, Pasha lusts after Katya (Rychkova), even promising her to leave his family if she gives in. Katya’s husband Kolka (Malyugin) is an alcoholic with physical and emotional impairments. Little does Pasha know that Danila shares his taste for women and is much more successful than his father in finding favour with Katya. While Pasha are his mates in a battle to prevent the local Mafia buying his sawmill for a knock-down price, one of Danila’s female classmates is gang raped by boys from the district capital, and after Galina surprises her son and Katya in flagrante, she asks her husband to take action. Events eventually spiral out of control in scenes of unrelenting and sometimes graphic, but never gratuitous violence. 

Somehow here, society has taken a step backwards, with greed and lust coming to the fore at every opportunity. The local Mafia seems to represent the regime’s semi-criminal mode of government, and their power is much greater than that of the local administration. Pasha is warned – in vain – by the local mayor to sell his sawmill to the mafia: “You remember what happened in 1989 with the land of the kolkhozes”. Violence against women seems to be the norm, men of all ages still see them predominantly as sex objects, to be conquered and discarded at will.

DoP Yury Sergeyev captures the rural violence with intense close-ups and panoramic shots of the landscape. The human presence seem to offend nature, spoiling its beauty in every possible way. Rychkova is the only positive figure, and her humble humanity is constantly abused by the rest of the protagonists. Zhigalov might have sometimes overdone his orgy of violence, but in the end he succeeds in his message, showing a Russia falling back into the senseless savagery of the eighteenth century.AS

RUSSIAN FILM WEEK 2018 

 

Tides (2017) **

Dir.: Tupaq Felber | Cast: Jon Foster, Robin Isaac, Simon Meacock, James Zubari, Amanda Rawnsley |  UK 2017, 100′

Tupaq Felber’s monochrome musings of four friends touring the canals of southern England is impressively shot but too banal to really make the same meaningful impact as, say, Andrew Kötting’s stylish Swandown, another recent British ‘roadie’

This blokish (+ a token girl) bonding trip certainly shoots the breeze and takes a long time to get going – the boat-owner’s instructions to the crew tell you everything you never wanted to know about canal boats. TIDES nearly comes to a standstill when they all get drunk and incoherent. Amanda (Rawnsley) is the only woman on board, for a fleeting visit. There are some nasty comments about Amanda’s parsimonious behaviour which soon surface when she justifiably tries to get out of paying nearly £200 for food and boat rental for just one night. The male crew then meander around in the water and it soon becomes clear that Jon (Foster) is dealing with a personal tragedy – but neither he or his mates shed any light on the circumstances. The only concrete fact that emerges about actor Simon (Meacock), married with a young child, is that his part as a ‘suspects’ in a long-running soap-opera, will soon be ‘killed off’ leaving him presumably without any means of financial support. A confident debut, TIDES would make a great twenty-minute short, but the narrative never comes near to justifying the lavish running time.

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE 7 DECEMBER 2018 | Tupaq will also attend a special preview and Q&A with the cast on 4 December at the special barge cinema

Witnesses (2017) Svideteli **** Russian Film Week 2018

Dir.: Konstantin Fam; Cast: Oksana Fandera, Filipp Yankousky, Mariya King, Lenn Kudrjawski, Uliana Elina, Vyacheslav Chepurchenko; Russia/Belarus/Czech Republic/France/Poland/Israel 2017, 100 min.

Konstantin Fam’s drama debut is a trilogy of short films, shot between 2012 and 2017, its intertwined structure featuring human protagonists and mute witnesses of the Holocaust. This is probably the first major Russian feature concerning itself with Russian Jewish victims of the Shoah, since the topic was one of the taboos during Stalinism. Impassioned and powerful, it manages to avoid dramatics, concentrating on the details of the tragic events. 

Shoes (Tufelki) is set in a small Russian town, featuring its characters from the knees downwards. The titular female shoes, optimistically coloured red, belong to a woman who will end up in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Her shoes are now in the Museum of the former Camp, picked from a mountain of abandoned footwear. The camera traces her life through the other shoes she encounters: the happy shop owner who gives her the shoes for free; the little shoes of her daughter; and then the military boots of the German invaders, forcing her into an overloaded cattle truck. And then the military shoes of the German guard, who, we are left to surmise, closes the gas chamber hermetically. Devoid of dialogue, just background noise, and symphonic music, creating an eerie ballet. 

Brut (Brutus) features the young shop owner of the first episode, Rozanna (Fandera), who is given a German Shepherd dog by her husband. The cute puppy develops into a loveable pet, but after the German army arrives, Jews are not allowed to have pets any more. Horst (Yankousky) an outwardly harmless looking SS man, with a model family, takes Brutus away, and Rozanna is forced to surrender “her only friend”. Horst trains the friendly Brutus to be a ‘killer dog’, but when the soldier is transferred to a Concentration Camp, he meets Rozanna, again but strangely fails to recognise her. In a bid to escape, Rozanna is then shot by Horst, but Brutus recognises Rozanna. This is in many ways the most cruel of the episodes, because Horst tries to transfer his murderous instincts to a defenceless animal, whose true nature survives, in spite of everything.  

Violin (Skrypka) chronicles the instrument’s history. First given to a Jewish boy by his father in early 1930s Nuremberg, the violin ends up in contemporary New York. We discover why a Swastika is stamped inside the instrument, in a concentration camp where an officer is asked by his superior “to gather the best musicians for the Camp Orchestra”. Finally through a bizarre series of events, the violin is played at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, perhaps a rather conciliatory ending, but an inventive Holocaust story that plays a thoughtful and plangent tune.

Kam’s (unplanned) structure works very well throughout, showing the various ways in which silent witnesses can bring a message from the past for all of us. Fam avoids any didactic lectures, and concentrates on the small details, which can make such a difference. The DoPs (too many to name), create a convincing  atmosphere; Shoes in particular is highly innovative and hauntingly captures our imagination. Witnesses never tries to be sentimental – but makes an extraordinary emotional impact: demonstrating the wilful distraction of the world of ordinary people.

 SCREENING DURING RUSSIAN FILM WEEK | UNTIL 2 DECEMBER 2018    

The Song of the Tree (2018) Talinn Black Nights 2018

Dir: Aibek Daiyrbekov | Musical Drama | 93′ | Kyrgyzstan

THE SONG OF THE TREE is a sumptuously vivid story about a woman’s ardent love for a man and our deep connection with home. Based on real and mythical stories passed down from one generation to another, it is also Kyrgyzstan’s first musical film, set and filmed in this magnificent scenic country.

It follows the story of a feisty young man (Esen,Omurbek Izrailov)) who falls foul of his mountain community over time old issue of honour, after stealing some meat, which leads to the felling of a secret tree. Humiliated, he decides to leave with his love Begimai (Saltanat Bakaeva) but after they are  intercepted, the lovesick loner becomes hellbent on revenge. 

The musical elements embellish the nomadic narrative rather than driving it forward, the songs are gracefully performed and, despite subtitles, the story more or less tells itself pictorially to those who hate reading the bottom line. And there’s plenty here to enjoy. Filmmaker Aibek Daiyrbekov tells his tale against the stunning widescreen backdrop of the Tien Shan range of mountains. But there is an intimacy to the story that retains our interest throughout and this often involves a singing vignette in the foreground.

Set during the 1800s the film really conveys the stridence and casual violence of these exotic people who think nothing of whipping their adversaries savagely and pulling out daggers, without a ‘by your leave’. There are some spectacular chase scenes on horseback – one in particular sees a horse roll over and over down a sandy valley. Daiyrbekov keeps our attention on the lovers story (despite the odd subplot) and this eventually culminates in a face-off between between Esen and Oguz (Jurduzbek Kaseivov), the man who cut down the tree and murdered his brother.

There’s nothing particularly unique about the plot line but Daiyrbekov’s directing and mise en scene and Akzhol Bekbolotov’s camerawork is absolutely glorious and visually exquisite. Meanwhile Zholdoshbek Apasov’s compositions and use of local instruments give the film a lyrical quality that adds to its enjoyment. With a modest running time of 93 minutes, this is a worthwhile addition to Kyrgyzstan contemporary cinema. MT

SCREENING DURING TALINN BLACK NIGHTS FILM FESTIVAL 2018

https://vimeo.com/300254926

 

 

Disobedience (2017) ***½

Dir: Sebastian Lelio | Cast: Rachel Weisz, Rachel McAdams, Alessandro Nivola | Drama | Argentina | 110min

Sebastian Lelio’s latest is a dour and stifling drama worth watching only for Rachel Weisz as a refreshingly liberated soul who has broken free from her repressive upbringing in a Jewish orthodox community in Golders Green and the Suburb.

Once again Lelio explores female sexuality in its various guises – his lively Berlinale Golden Bear winner Gloria saw a vivacious middle aged divorcee discover her newfound freedom in modern day Montevideo; his second Berlinale winner A Fantastic Woman followed the fallout for a trans woman after her lover dies suddenly in Buenos Aires. Based on the novel by Naomi Alderman, and cleverly adapted by Rebecca Lenkiewicz (Ida) and Lelio himself, Disobedience is a subdued and antiseptic affair stuck in a passionless winter of discontent in a grim suburban setting -Lelio’s visual energy washed away by the drab aesthetic of the film’s locale and it’s rather mawdlin story line. .

Rachel McAdams plays against type as the orthodox Esti, who harbours a sexual secret signalled by the tonal gloom of the films’ opening scenes in the family home: even though her rabbi husband Dov’s adoptive father Rav – a pillar of the community – has just died, there is clearly a skeleton in the cupboard making this couple subdued. To pay her respects to her father, successful photographer Ronit Krushka (Weisz) turns up energetically from New York to the surprise of everyone assembled – she left under a cloud years ago – and her reappearance sets passive aggressive tongues wagging and kippahs askew.

This intriguing set of affairs initially builds up a stealthy level or tension that soon gives way to tedium in the overplayed twists and turns of the rather unconvincing reveal. As Ronit, Rachel Weisz brings a welcome breath of fresh air to this buttoned-up milieu with some witty one-liners and knowing glances. Alessandro Nivola’s Dov is rather likeable and really resonates as the conflicted and cuckholded religious heir to his highly-regarded adoptive father ‘the Rav’ Krushka (Anton Lesser). But McAdams is the least convincing of the lead trio in a difficult one-dimensional role as a rather mousy and mumsy character whose repressed passion never really catches fires – and her three children are strangely completely absent from this family-centric environment. That said, the Orthodox Jewish set-up is brilliantly captured and authentic to last detail. Disobedience is mildly intriguing in its portrayal of religious orthodoxy and its contradictions in contemporary London. But as a love story it leaves you as cold as last week’s chopped liver. MT

OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 30 NOVEMBER 2018

Embargo (2017) *** Utopia Portuguese Film Festival 2018

Dir.: Antonio Ferrera; Cast: Filipe Costa, Claudia Carvalho, Laura Matos; Portuga/Spain/Brazil 2010, 83 min.

Antonio Ferrara specialises in stories of the absurd – his 2018 feature The Dead Queen is based on a historical novel about a 14th century Portuguese king who had his mistress disinterred, so that she could become Queen. Embargo is a far lighter affair that follows Nuno, a madcap inventor.

Based on the novel by Jose Saramago, Ferrara pictures his hero Nuno (Costa) in the midst of a fuel crisis in contemporary Portugal, selling his revolutionary shoe scanner to everyone who shows a mild interest. He works part time on a hot dog stand, and his long-suffering girl friend Margarida (Carvalho) has to labour full time and look after their two children. Even though Nuno is hellbent on making his device a commercial success customers, nobody has any idea what practical use it could have. Eventually after various trials and tribulations, Nino is sacked from his day job and goes on the hunt for a toy rabbit, to make his daughter Sara (Matos) happy.

Nuno is a loafer par-excellence. Charming and funny, he could be the ideal companion – if he could earn a living. But his obsession with his machine takes over more and more of his life. Made on a shoe string budget, this debut of Ferrara is a labour of love, where crew and cast made up for the lack of budget with much enthusiasm and passion, even. There are some holes in the narrative, but Embargo is fun to watch, without the claim of being anything but light entertainment. AS

http://www.utopiafestival.org.uk

Yanks (1979)**** Dual format release

John Schlesinger’s YANKS, a moving and romantic WWII tale of love starring Richard Gere and Vanessa Redgrave is based on Lancashire born Colin Welland’s original story, he also wrote the script.

Colin Welland was one of England’s finest film and TV writers best known for The Dry White Season (1989), Chariots of Fire (1981) and numerous popular TV series including Play for Today and Armchair Theatre. He also appeared in Kes (1969); Straw Dogs (1971) and Villain (1971).

Capturing all the subtle emotional complexity that marked Schlesinger out as a one of our finest directors, this captivating social drama is imbued with English sensibilities of the local characters that contrast so eloquently with the looser and more playful US soldiers, YANKS is full of sweepingly romantic moments and amusing interludes that show how easily petty resentments or racial differences could easily catch fire in the heat of the moment inflaming hearts and minds fraught with the stresses of wartime occupancy.

Ambitious yet intimate YANKS is a World War II epic that won BAFTAs for Best Costume Design (Shirley Russell) and Best Supporting Actress (Rachel Roberts). John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy, Far from the Madding Crowd) went on to get the Evening Standard British Film Award in 1981. Crucially, his drama focuses on the human angle, avoiding battle scenes to explore the romantic and social entanglements between the locals and the U.S. soldiers stationed in a small town in Greater Manchester just before the Normandy landings of 1945. The American G.I.s set female hearts aflutter across the social divide: in one amusing scene in a train station Mollie (Wendy Morgan) cries”Excuse me, I’m pregnant!”. A woman quickly responds: “So is half the bloody town, love!”.

Gere is particularly charismatic as Sgt. Matt Dyson, falling for Lisa Eichhorn’s delicate heroine Jean Moreton who misses her fiancée Stan overseas. Redgrave is wealthy socialite Helen, engaged in an affair with a gallant captain (William Devane), while desperate to remain faithful to her husband serving in the British Navy. Sergeant Ruffelo’s romantic interlude with Mollie (Wendy Morgan) shows how romance can be heightened by wartime adversity when love and lust helped to counteract the stress and uncertainty of conflict.

Schlesinger had a rare gift for capturing romantic desire and yearning in a typically understated English way, and Yanks was a personal passion project for director whose success with Marathon Man (1976) here allowed him free creative rein. Although the film never really caught fire upon initial release, here is emerges as a soaring classic wartime romance that really deserves to be revisited – hankies at the ready. MT

YANKS NOW AVAILABLE COURTESY OF EUREKA MODERN CLASSICS on 3rd December 2018.

Amazon https://amzn.to/2B4L3GS
Zavvi http://po.st/uNQqq9

Pina (2011) Bluray and Home Ent release

Dir: Wim Wenders | Germany, 2011 | Doc | 113′    

PINA is an amazing and lavishly attractive musical that combines 3D to heighten our enjoyment of a series of dance sequences filmed by Wim Wenders and featuring the celebrated dancer Pina Bausch in her Tanztheater in Wuppertal in the southern Ruhr valley, Germany.

The German choreographer died in June 2009 at the age of 68 just as she was starting her collaboration with Wim Wenders but he so believed in the project that he continued with Pina’s versions of Vollmond, a dance that centres on water splashing in a rock pool, Stravinsky’s exotic expressionist piece The Rite of Spring; Kontakthof, where rhythmic movements are inspired by a heightened naturalism; and the dynamic routine Café Müller, where six dancers move around in a restaurant as they rearrange the tables and chairs. West End Blues sees the troupe in full evening dress with lounge suits and long flowing gowns as they move to the jazz syncopations of Louis Armstrong and his band. The dances often break out into the nearby streets where they swirl around using the backdrop of the monorail and green spaces as inspiration for their graceful compositions. Ever inventive this is one of Wenders’ most memorable and enjoyable films along with Wings of Desire and the cult classic Paris, Texas. MT

PINA RELEASES ON BLURAY FROM 12 NOVEMBER 2018 and on DVD on CURZON ON DEMAND

The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1975): The Personal is Political

Dir.: Volker Schlöndorff, Margaretha von Trotta; Cast: Angela Winkler, Mario Adorf, Jürgen Prochnow, Dieter Laser, Heinz Bennett, Hannelore Hoger, Rolf Becker; Federal Republic of Germany 1975, 106’.

Based on a novel by Nobel-Prize winner Heinrich Böll, Volker Schlöndorff (The Tin Drum) and Margaretha von Trotta (Paura & Amore) offer a searing critique of Germany in the mid 1970s. The film is set during the reign of  the vicious but politically naïve and often ridiculous Baader-Meinhoff gang. They were a handful of ‘fighters’ who gave the government and mass media the excuse to hunt down anybody who was critical of the security forces manned by many ex-Nazis at that time. The press campaign was led by former SA man Axel Springer and his numerous newspapers (Bild Zeitung among them), employing the same staff who created caricatures for the Nazi press.

Carnival time in Cologne: Katharina Blum (Winkler) joins the merry dance and picks up Ludwig Götten (Prochnow). They spend the night together in Katharina’s flat, but she is woken up in the morning by armed special units breaking down her door. They are looking for Ludwig, who is supposed to be a deserter, anarchist and bank robber. But Ludwig has vanished and Katharina is mercilessly interrogated by police detective Beizmenne (Adorf) and later Distriict Attorney Hach (Becker). Katharina prefers to be locked in than being in the presence of these men. But things get worse for her: Tötges (Laser) a journalist for a national newspaper, ”researches” Katharina’s private life and puts together a story (more lies than facts) about her being the bride of an anarchist. He even interviews her mother, hours before her death in a hospital. Katharina gets no help from her friends: the laywer Dr. Blorna (Bennett) and his wife, the architect Trude (Hoger), or her former lover Bornas, who is afraid that his good reputation might suffer. Released from prison, Katharina is visited by Tötges, who tells her “you are a well-known personality now, you can make a lot of money. But we have to stay on the ball, we have to give the readers more and more”.

The crisis in the Federal Republic ended, somehow symbolically, in October 1977,when the Baader-Meinhoff gang kidnapped and killed Hanns-Martin Schleyer, the leader of the CBI in West Germany, who had been a high-ranking officer in the SS, and served a three-year prison sentence after WWII. By now, the Baader- Meinhof was declared a ‘criminal organisation’, the same as the SS had been declared by the Allies. When the Baader-Meinhoff trial started in 1977, the house of Heinrich Böll was surrounded by special units, not surprisingly, since one newspaper had declared “the Bölls are more dangerous than the Baader Meinhofffs”.

True to the page, Blum is “a busy conformist, who tries to do her best to advance”. She is essentially a good person who is caught in the crossfire. The directors also work out that the mass hysteria was mainly directed against the liberal sympathizers (“Sympathisanten”), and that the Baader-Meinhoff gang was used – like the Red Brigades in Italy who kidnapped and killed Aldo Moro, was ready to include the Communists in government – by old and new Fascists to cement their political comeback in both countries.

The ensemble acting is brilliant, and DoP Jost Vacano (who later made a career in Hollywood with features like Total Recall) creates stunning images of a country at war with a democracy forced on them by the Allies. AS

THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL: Four films by MARGARETHE VON TROTTA – beautifully restored and released by STUDIOCANAL as part of a NATIONWIDE tour from 12 November 2018 until January 2019

Marrakech Film Festival 2018 | This year’s line-up..

The Marrakech International Film Festival has now revealed its 17th edition line-up  which runs from 30 November until the 8 December 2018.  

The competition focus is on international independent cinema, showcasing the latest from the Middle East: Mohcine Besri’s URGENT, Nejib Belkhadhi’s LOOK AT ME, and THE GIRAFFE from Egyptian filmmaker Amed Magdy. These will compete alongside sophomore and award-winning titles from this year’s international festival circuit. The 14 titles include London Film Festival winner JOY (Sudebeh Mortezai), Warsaw Film Festival awarded IRINA (Nadejda Koseva) and ALL GOOD (Eva Trobisch) which won the Best First Feature prize at Locarno 2018. Six of the films competing for the Marrakech Etoile d’Or (Gold Star) are directed by women.

The festival opens with a gala screening of Julian Schnabel’s AT ETERNITY’S GATE (above) starring Willem Dafoe as Vincent Van Gogh. There will also be another chance to see Alfonso Cuarón’s Venice Golden Lion winner ROMA, Peter Farrelly’s GREEN BOOK which stars Viggo Mortensen, and Nadine Labaki’s CAPERNAUM, which won the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

There will be 17 special screenings including Gonzalo Tobal’s THE ACCUSED and Paul Dano’s WILDLIFE. Also on the specials list is EXT. NIGHT the latest drama from Ahmad Abdalla (Microphone (2010), Heliopolis (2009). Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego’s enchanting BIRDS OF PASSAGE will also be there (below).

A new strand entitled THE 11th CONTINENT aims to highlight local Moroccan fare in its Panorama section. Amongst others there will be the recent Cannes Doc Alliance winner SRBENKA, Brazilian documentary THE DEAD AND THE OTHERS, Lee Chang-dong’s Cannes breakout hit BURNING, Austrian historical drama ANGELO fresh from San Sebastian, and my personal favourite Locarno 2018 thriller TEGNAP (YESTERDAY) . 

The outdoor screenings in the famous JEMAA EL FNA square will include Martin Scorsese’s Dalai Lama drama KUNDUN (1997), Brian De Palma’s THE UNTOUCHABLES (1987), Youssef Chahine’s ALEXANDRIA, AGAIN AND FOREVER (1989) and there will be classics from Agnes Varda, Martin Scorsese, Robin Wright and Robert De Niro in the tributes section. MT

COMPETITION

GOOD GIRLS (Las niñas bien) | Mexico By Alejandra Márquez Abella

JOY | Austria By Sudabeh Mortezai

DIANE | USA By Kent Jones

THE LOAD (Teret) | Serbia, France, Croatia, Iran, Qatar By Ognjen Glavonić

THE CHAMBERMAID (La camarista) | Mexico By Lila Avilés

RED SNOW (Akai yuki) | Japan By Sayaka Kai

LOOK AT ME (Fi ‘ainaya  Regarde-moi) | Tunisia By Nejib Belkhadhi

IRINA | Bulgaria By Nadejda Koseva

VANISHING DAYS (Màn yóu) | China By Zhu Xin

URGENT (Tafaha al-kail | Une urgence ordinaire) / Morocco, Switzerland By Mohcine Besri

ROJO | Argentina, Brazil, France, the Netherlands, Germany By Benjamín Naishtat

AKASHA | Sudan, South Africa, Germany, Qatar By hajooj kuka

THE GIRAFFE (La ahdun hunak) | Egypt By Ahmed Magdy

ALL GOOD (Alles ist gut) | Germany By Eva Trobisch

THE MARRAKECH FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | 30 NOVEMBER – 8 DECEMBER 2018

Shoplifters (2018) ****

Writer/Dir: Hirokazu Koreeda | Cast: Kirin Kiki, Lily Franky, Sosuke Ikematsu | Drama | South Korea |121′

Hirokazu Koreeda’s portrait of parenting, After the Storm, has much in common with this perceptive and often ambiguous satire about a family of small-time crooks and the misguided theft they commit for compassionate reasons, but with devastating consequences. SHOPLIFTERS is a worthwhile addition to the auteur’s preoccupations with family life, father and motherhood – both real and imagined, and is possibly his best work so far.

In Tokyo, part-time workers Osamu (Lily Franky) and his wife Nobuyo (Sakura Ando) complement their meagre income with a sideline in shoplifting. Aided and abetted by son Shota (Kairi Jyo), they often swipe groceries from the local store near the flat they share with fellow grifter Noboyu (Sakura Andô), teenager Aki (Mayu Matsuoka) and grandma Hatsue (Kirin Kiki), who turns the most lucrative tricks of the lot.

One day they take pity on an abused and timid teenager called Juri (Miyu Sasaki), offering her board and lodging in their already cramped home. This simple act of kindness is the catalyst for change in the family dynamic unleashing previously hidden motivations that range from short-sightedness to self-aggrandisement, and even narcissistic pride.

A tonal shift from upbeat bonhomie to gloomy sadness takes place in the film’s third segment when the family anticipate their emotional loss and start to fear the backlash of their rash altruism, and its damning formal retribution. Kore-eda and his cast bring out  tremendous pathos in this well-meaning family, and while we feel for them as do-gooders, – in the true sense of the word – they are crucially also law-breakers. And this is the J B Priestleyan crux of this upbeat and cleverly-crafted caper reflecting the subtle nuances of Japanese society. MT

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM 21 November 2018 | CANNES WINNER | PALME D’OR 2018

Marrakech International Film Festival | 30 November – 8 December 2018

Marrakech International Film Festival (FIFM) is back this year under the artistic control of its newly appointed director Christoph Terhechte. It will run from 30 November until 8 December 2018.

Terhechte comes with considerable arthouse experience and impeccable credentials. He was director of Berlinale’s Forum section from 2001 to 2018 and also a member of the Berlinale Competition selection committee.

This year’s 17th Edition will also honour Robert De Niro, Agnès Varda and Robin Wright along with Moroccan filmmaker Jillali Ferhati. The festival president is James Gray. International stars in the shape of Martin Scorsese, Guillermo del Toro, Cristian Mungiu, and Yousry Nasrallah will also be gracing the Moroccan city and Medina. Along with Cannes luminary Thierry Fremaux.

US director James Gray will head the International Competition jury which includes actress Dakota Johnson (50 shades of Grey, Suspiria), Indian actress Ileana D’Cruz (Barfi!), Lebanese filmmaker and visual artist Joana Hadjithomas (I Want to See), British director Lynne Ramsay (We Need To Talk about Kevin, A Beautiful Day), Moroccan director Tala Hadid (House in the Fields), French director Laurent Cantet (The Class– Palme d’Or 2008), German Actor Daniel Brühl and Mexican director Michel Franco (April’s Daughter).

From November 30th to December 8th, these nine celebrities will select the recipient of L’Étoile d’Or 2018 among the 14 first and second feature films in competition.

The Marrakech International Film Festival has been one of the biggest events devoted to Moroccan cinema and the locality offers favourable conditions for global film production. Since its inception in 2003 the most prestigious names in world cinema have been hosted and celebrated in Marrakech and include Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Marion Cotillard and Johnny Halliday. Back in the day, Winston Churchill and Agatha Christie made Marrakech their winter holiday destination and were hosted at the world famous La Mamounia Hotel.

With its fabulous climate, medieval walled Medina dating back to the Berber Empire, exotic palaces and lush gardens (Yves St Laurent designed the Majorelle), Marrakech is the ideal location for an international winter film festival. MT

30 NOVEMBER-8 DECEMBER 2018 | MARRAKECH | MOROCCO

 

Anna’s War | Voyna Anny ****. | Russian Film Week 2018

Dir.: Aleksey Fedorchenko; Cast: Marta Kozlava; Russia 2018, 74 min.

Marta Kozlava makes a stunning debut as a six-year old Jewish girl hiding from the Nazis in Silent Souls director Aleksey Fedorchenko’s minimalist feature that follows a six-year old Jewish girl hiding from the Nazis.  Despite a limited script, ANNA’S WAR is full of harrowing images and the austere story-telling avoids the emblematic overload of many Holocaust features.

Anna (Kozlava) has to drag herself from under the body of her mother in a mass grave in the Soviet Union in 1941. The German soldiers have installed themselves in village school and this is where Anna eventually fetches but her ordeal is not over. To avoid recapture she has to disappear up the chimney of a disused fireplace in the building. And this is where the story unfolds as the little girl fights for survival amongst the debris, using the Nazi’s recently installed two-way mirror to keep an eye on them even though she is too young to understand their activities. She drinks water from a glass of paint brushes, makes a coat for herself from the fur of a stuffed wolf, and eats the rats she catches in a trap, sharing her food with a friendly cat and watching as the Nazis put pins to identify their newly captured territories on a map.

Anna wanders the whole house at night, stumbling into a Christmas party where the soldiers are celebrating at a table full of food. A German soldier is too drunk to question her appearance, and gives Anna a gingerbread Swastika she takes to her hiding place, but eventually spurns. This is the only tokenistic faux-pas in Fedoschneko’s otherwise realistic treatment. But Anna also finds a revolver, which comes in handy later, when one of Russian clerks is coming up the ladder over the fireplace, to destroy a pigeon nest. Anna points the revolver at him, and he does not give her away. Much later, the murky darkness lightens and Anna takes out the pins on the military map, whilst we listen to the first sounds of music.

ANNA’s WAR will bring to mind The Diary of Anne Frank and Tarkovsky’s war child Ivan. Apart from Kozlava’s remarkable performance, credit should go to DoP Alisher Khamidkhodjaev who creates a hauntingly macabre setting full of frightening images and worthy of German impressionist cinema. Anna is a heroine with a small ‘h’ but her ingenuity and survival instinct in overcoming her tragic predicament is an inspiration to children everywhere. MT

SCREENING DURING RUSSIAN FILM WEEK 2018

Jumpman (2018) Podbrosy **** Russian Film Week 2018

Dir.: Ivan I. Tverdovsky; Cast: Denis Vlasenko, Anne Slyu, Daniil Steklov; Russia/ROI/France/ Lithuania 2018, 87 min.

Ivan I. Tverdovsky follows up his zany Zoology with a darker feature, another harsh critique of Putin’s Russia. Very much in the mould of Loveless, Jumpman is a portrait of callous exploitation, the young victim literally sold by his mother to perform life-threatening stunts, just to fill her pockets and those of her cronies.

Sixteen years ago Oksana posted her newborn Denis through the baby-hatch of an orphanage where he has lived ever since, handicapped by a rare disease, congenital analgesia, which affects his ability to feel physical pain, and needs to be medically controlled. Now, forbidden from taking care of her son, Oksana (Slyu) tricks the orphanage staff, literally kidnapping little Denis (Vlasenko) and taking him home. It soon emerges that Oksana’s motive is anything but motherly. Denis does not fee pain when injured (his mates in the orphanage played some cruel games with him), and is trained to jump on cars so his mother’s friends can extort cash from the driver. First in line is Denis’ ‘instructor’ policeman Kusnetzov (Steklov), who drives a police vehicle alongside the one earmarked for the ‘accident’, and is first on the scene when Denis lays motionless on the ground. Kusnetzovs’s mother is a doctor at the hospital where Denis is taken by an ambulance crew (also on the make). But the most profitable jobs go to Judge Olga and the bribed defence lawyer. The driver is forced to pay up a huge sum of money – and Denis gets hardly a penny, after everyone else has taken their share. At home his mother treats him more like a lover, running around half naked in a drunken state, even trying to seduce him. That all changes after Denis puts his foot down –  and this leaves only one solution.

Jumpman is a portrait of a society corrupt on every level, a society where the most vulnerable victims are treated like commodities – whether they are rich, poor or just disenfranchised.. When Denis finally quits, Kusnetzov spits in his face: “We’ll find another one, the city is full of trash like you.” AS

RUSSIAN FILM WEEK | LONDON 25 November -2 December 2018 | BERLINALE 15-25 FEBRUARY 2018 | KARLOVY VARY FILM FESTIVAL | 29 JUNE – 7 JULY 2018

 

Core of the World (2018) **** Russian Film Week 2018

Dir: Natalia Meshchaninova | Drama | Russia, Lithuania | 123′

Best known for her debut The Hope Factory, Natalia Meshchaninova’s award-winning sophomore feature is an acutely observed and thoughtfully performed story of emotional disorder that unfolds in a remote dog-breeding facility in Russia.

Writing again with Boris Khlebnikov (they co-scripted Arrhythmia) and her real life partner Stepan Devonin, who also plays Egor, this latest drama combines tenderness, regret and yearning in a troubled vet who finds his animals easier to live with than his co-workers. Egor breeds special hunting dogs (Alabais, also known as Central Asian Shepherd dogs) using domesticated foxes in their training. He is empathetic rather than sentimental towards the animals in his care.

Devonin’s training as a vet informs his role as Egor and he brings a tenderness but clear focus as Egor. When he learns that his mother has died of heart problems related to alcohol abuse, it becomes abundantly clear that there are issues with his childhood relationship. And when his aunt arrives uninvited with a bunch of his mother’s photography, Egor brazenly tells her to “fuck off” a stance that flies in the face of his previously rather quiet and thoughtful behaviour. His troubled personality issues will soon surface in abundance, although rather late in the story. Clearly Egor has escaped into his work in this peaceful forest location, where he tends a dog who has just been brutally mauled with extreme dedication. He is also keen to ingratiate himself with his tough and overbearing boss Nikolai (Dmitriy Podnozov) who has been running the family training facility for several generations.
The dog-training involves the dogs chasing down small wooden tunnels – representing real burrows – where the dogs come into contact with the foxes and a tussle takes place, confirming the canine’s suitability for hunting. Although neither animal appears to come off any the worse for their order, the practice has attracted negative attention from the animal rights brigade who arrive at the gates to protest. Nikolai tells them: “go away children”.
Meanwhile, Egor starts to have feelings for Nikolai’s daughter Dasha (Yana Sekste) who shares the family house with  her son Ivan (a strong debut from Vitya Ovodkov), There are humorous exchanges and they all seem to rub along very well, and Egor continues to tend his injured dog Belka, patiently teaching her how to swim in the nearby far-flowing river. Alhtough he’s clearly able to communicate affectionately with his dogs, Egor has real problems handling his relationship with Dasha but his feelings are palpable and he is clearly drawn to her physically. And although Nikolai seems to rule the roost, Egor’s latent anger eventually rears up again when he’s  pushed to the limits. And it’s the animal activist who finally set the cat amongst the pigeons in a very well-thought out and imaginative plotline that has tragic consequences. MT
CORE OF THE WORLD won the Grand Prix and Best actor awards at the Kinotavr festival in Sochi, and is now screening during RUSSIAN FILM WEEK 2018
https://youtu.be/6dCINvqGnuk

 

The Wild Pear Tree | Ahlat Agaci (2018)****


Dir/Writer: Nuri Bilge Ceylan/Ebru Ceylan | Cast: Serkan Keskin, Hazar Erguclu, Ahmet Rifat Sungar | Drama | Turkey/France/Germany/Bulgaria/Macedonia/Bosnia and Herzegovina/Sweden 2018 | 188′

For some the countryside is a retreat where hopes and dreams merge with solitude and recovery. For a father and a son in THE WILD PEAR TREE the sweeping landscapes of Western Turkey’s Marmara region are a place of shattered hopes and despair.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan imbues his melancholy mood piece with the usual visual richness in a slow-burning saga that revolves around aspiring writer Sinan (Aydin Dogu Demirkol) who returns from army service to his native village to raise the money to publish his first book. But his father’s debts catch up with him and put a stop to his personal aspirations. Running at a little over three hours, this long-awaited follow to Winter Sleep and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia takes the customary languorous and discursive pace. The wide screen splendour also makes time for quietly intimate moments but there is no melodrama or ‘major developments’ in a film that plays out contemplatively as the story naturally unfolds.

Sinan is not particularly glad to be back home in the small rural village of Çan, where he holds the community in disdain. But his father Idris’ gambling has spiralled out of control causing his mother and sister to do without, so Sinan starts to do the rounds of friends and family in search of finance for his literary endeavour.

Contrary to the title, a wild pear tree never features in the film, and there is no love lost between Sinan and his father Idris, their relationship slowly deteriorating for obvious reasons. There is a sense of longing for urban civilisation, and while the film takes much delight in the convincingly creditable characterisations and conversation pieces, which are quietly enjoyable, often philosophical (even a little bit over talky at times), it’s clear that Sinan is no more enamoured with this rural idyll than when he reluctantly arrived.

Ceylan returns to the evergreen signature themes that have been present in his work since the beginning and have gained him a reputation and a strong following, along with his elegantly crafted widescreen style and well-rounded character studies. And there is always a touch of dry wit to lighten proceedings while grounding them in community, local politics, moral and ethical issues and family concerns.

In some ways, his latest is an expansion of his FIPRESCI and Golden Tulip winner Clouds of May (1999) and has the same ripe quality of visual sumptuousness throughout. Dermirkol plays Sinan as a vaguely unsympathetic character whose ennui with his family and rural life simply demonstrates an ardent need to get on with his aspirations rather than indicating a deeply flawed personality. But maybe they are one in the same. Ceylan eyes his antihero in a detached and observational way that makes him really convincing as a representative of his generation. In contrast to the self-sacrificing heroes of the early 1900s, Sinan is a full-fledged 21st century man. MT

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM 30 NOVEMBER 2018 | Cannes Film Festival Premiere

Promise at Dawn (2017) *** UK Jewish Film Festival 2018

Dir.: Eric Barbier; Cast: Charlotte Gainsbourg, Pierre Niney, Pavel Puchalski, Nino Schiffman, Catherine McCormack, Jean-Pierre Daroussin; France/Belgium 2017, 131 min.

Eric Barbier’s screen adaptation of PROMISE AT DAWN has been embellished to a length that does no favours to the original story or the audience, for that matter. Charlotte Gainsbourg comes to the rescue as the enterprising actress turned hotelier in a tour de force of Jewish motherhood.  

Romain Gary penned the wildly romantic novel in 1960 based on his mother’s life of self-sacrifice raising him in Vilnius (then part of Russia) in the early years of the 20th century. During the course of the film, Gary is variously played by Pavel Puchalski (as a child), Nemo Schiffman (as a teenager) and finally Pierre Niney, as a young man.

We first meet Roman Kacew during one of his mother’s many crisis. Nina is an actress turned struggling dressmaker who turns to her actor friend Alex Gubernatis for support, despite his alcoholism. Posing as Parisian couturiers, the two boost their potential amongst High Society Vilnius and business blossoms overnight, leaving Nina to spend more time with her son. The boy shows a talent for drawing, but Nina wants him to be rich and famous. The wayward young Roman (Niney) soon falls in love with Valentine but her brothers beat him up and call him a “dirty Yid”,  causing Nina’s to business falter, and she succumbs to diabetes. By now it’s 1934 and the family moves to Nice for the climate, taking  over the running of a hotel. But Roman’s eye for the girls soon sees him back in Paris, where Law studies are hampered by his Jewish credentials and philandering ways. Finally he joins the French Air Force, becoming a victim of Anti-Semitism and the only one of 300 cadets not promoted to officer status. Needless to say, Nina battles on undeterred, ever hopeful of making a success of her son in the diplomatic service.

Bookended by scenes featuring Gary’s first wife, the English author Leslie Blanch (McCormack), Barbier’s version loves grand sequences, and Glynn Speeckaert’s aerial battle scenes are particularly impressive. Gainsbourg plays Niney off the screen: his Roman is the weakest of the three characterisations. Promise at Dawn, is certainly high octane in stark contrast with Jules Dassin’s more thoughtfully moving 1970 version of the original.  MT

THE UK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL 2018 |

 

 

 

 

 

 

3 Days in Quiberon * * * (2018)

Dir/Wri: Emily Atef | Cast: Marie Baumer, Birgit Minichmayr, Charly Hübner | Germany | Drama | 115′

Award-winning German director Emily Atef’s breezy black and white playful portrait self-indulgently explores the brief sejour in the Britanny seaside resort of Quiberon of one of Europe’s most famous but now fading stars as she attempts to detoxify. At only 42, Romy Schneider’s career was on the wane and she was to die not long afterwards (in 1982). It soon becomes clear that the garrulous diva – a luminous Marie Baumer – is battling demons of all kinds and desperately missing her two children, a baby girl and a teenager who refuses to live with her.

The focus here is the two-day interview with Stern magazine German journalist Jürgs whose crafty attempts to get her to open up about the death of her first husband, who had committed suicide two years earlier, and her tortured relationship with her mother, who allegedly colluded with the press, finally pay off after plying the diva with copious amounts of white Chablis.her best friend arrives to offer support but the two soon fall out.

This playful drama takes inspiration from the glorious maritime setting of a modernist beachside hotel, and is anchored by four thoughtful performances, particularly from Bäumer who bears an uncanny resemblance to Schneider. Thomas Kiennast’s luminous photographs help to recreate a distinct Seventies feel. An enjoyable but rather superficial riff on the nature of celebrity, love and friendship. MT

NOW ON RELEASE NATIONWIDEFROM 16 NOVEMBER 2018

Marrakech Film Festival | Industry Initiatives 2018

THE ATLAS WORKSHOPS | MARRAKECH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2018

The Atlas Workshops are an Industry and Talent Development Programme taking place at the 17th Marrakech International Film Festival, from December 2 to 5, 2018. Wholly dedicated to cinema from Africa and Middle-East, the workshops are a creative and professional platform to support filmmakers as well as a place for exchange between international professionals and regional talents.

This initiative has been designed to assist regional emerging regional directors who are currently preparing their first, second, or third feature-length narrative or documentary films. For this first edition, eight projects in development and six films in post-production, originating from nine countries, have been invited to take part.

They will benefit from a tailor-made day-long consultation with professionals who will provide them artistic feedback, as well the Industry point of view. At the end of the workshop, a jury will award a Development Prize of 10 000 € and a postproduction Prize of 20 000 € to the best projects.

The Atlas Workshops are also intended to explore questions surrounding film distribution in the region. In parallel with panels dedicated to sharing views on audience development as well as the circulation of films from Africa and the Middle East, the members of the Network of Arab Alternative Screens, which brings together 20 cinema screens across Arab-speaking countries, have been invited to convene, in the Atlas framework, in order to meet with attending professionals, as well as the talents who are presenting their projects.

Finally, the Atlas Workshops consider the process of composing music for films, in a session intended not only to encourage selected filmmakers to think about the musical universe of their films, but also to foster regional artistic collaboration by introducing talented score composers to their filmmaking peers.

In partnership with Netflix, the Atlas Workshops is delighted to gather in Marrakech from December 2 to 5, 150 Moroccan and international professionals in order to champion talents from Africa and the Middle- East.

THE 14 PROJECTS SELECTED FOR THE ATLAS WORKSHOPS, Marrakech International Film Festival

• THE DAY I ATE THE FISH by Aida Elkashef (Egypt) – documentary
• EUROPA « Based on a true story » by Kivu Ruhorahoza (Rwanda) – fiction
• IT’S FAR AWAY WHERE I MUST GO by Karima Saidi (Morocco) – documentary
• KILOMETERS 60 by Hassen Ferhani (Algeria) – documentary
• THE WOMEN IN BLOCK J J by Mohamed Nadif (Morocco) – fiction
• WE ARE FROM THERE by Wissam Tanios (Lebanon) – documentary
8 projects in developement
• PLUM SEASON by Rim Mejdi (Morocco) – fiction

• LES DAMNES NE PLEURENT PAS by Fyzal Boulifa (Morocco) – fiction
• LAUNDRY by Zamo Mkhwanazi (South Africa) – fiction
• THE NIGHTS STILL SMELL OF GUNPOWDER de Inadelso Cossa (Mozambique) – documentary
• IN THE RIVER TRAP by Nicolas Sawalo Cisse (Senegal) – fiction
• QUEENS by Yasmine Benkirane (Morocco) – fiction
• THE RIVER RUNS RED by Rami Kodeih (Lebanon) – fiction
• VUTA N’KUVUTE (A Tug of war) by Amil Shivji (Tanzania) – fiction

MARRAKECH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | 2018

Dead in a Week (Or Your Money Back) (2018) **

Writer/Dir.Tom Edmunds. UK. 2018. 90 mins

A watchable British cast explore the meaning of life in Noirish comedy that never quite catches fire despite some powerful elements. Dead in a Week is the feature debut of writer/director Tom Edmunds whose his message certainly has evergreen appeal: ‘love makes the world go round in life’s comedy of errors, and we leave stage when we’re least expecting it.’

Aneurin Barnard stars as William, an aspiring writer and lifeguard who has tried nine times to kill himself. The latest attempt – from a London Bridge – is swiftly averted by Tom Wilkinson’s passing hitman Leslie who describes himself as a one-man euthanasia clinic – a clever idea and one that could easily take off in today’s grim world. For the princely sum of £2,000 he offers to kill the soulful writer within a week, paid upfront, “for obvious reasons”. Leslie’s offer has a ring of sincerity to it, and once the two have come to an arrangement, William’s creative juices go into overdrive, galvanised into penning a paper back-style crime thriller chronicling the whole affair.

Leslie’s Raymond Chandleresque pretensions are the only thing saving him from his dreaded retirement in suburbia with a wife whose only raison d’être is needlepoint (She: “I’ve come out of my comfort zone to do a cushion cover, He: “isn’t that more comforting?”). The problem is, Leslie face the sack unless he keeps up his quota of kills for The British Guild Of Assassins. In a zeitgeisty subplot the Eastern Europeans are encroaching on his market, with Ivan (Velibor Topic) recently winning, ‘Hit Man Of The Year’. Leslie is a worried man.

Meanwhile, love comes to William in the shape of his pulchritudinous publisher Ellie (a persuasive Freya Mavor) and suddenly ‘living’ seems a better option than dying. But can he get out of his contract contract with Leslie, who is hell bent on killing him, for his own reasons.

Despite his thoughtful and often hilarious premise, Edmunds never quite manages the film’s changes of tone and mix of styles. A sweary interlude with Leslie’s bolshy boss at the Guild (Christopher Eccleston) feels completely out of place with Leslie and Penelope’s twee domestic idyll that’s more Seventies TV soap opera than this modern day angry outburst. And William’s Byronesque existentialism is convincing but rather too profound for the comedy treatment it’s given. Tom Wilkinson’s deadpan performance of exasperation and tetchiness is a convincing portrait of middle- aged angst and one of the drama’s strongest assets.

On the downside Dead In A Week makes flippant side-swipes at dementia, ageing and even motor neurone disease (a tasteless Michael J Fox joke) and the pace starts to slacken when the story becomes more convoluted. These flaws are largely down to inexperience. Edmunds has some good ideas, he should trust his instincts and avoid over-complicating his plot lines. Dead In A Week’s flippant tone is often too derogatory for themes expressed by its thoughtful characters in a drama that rather toys with very real trauma. MT

NOW ON RELEASE FORM 16 NOVEMBER 2018

The Workshop (2017) ****

Dir: Laurent Cantet | Writer: Robin Campillo | France | Cast: Marina Fois, Matthieu Lucci | 114min | Drama

Laurent Cantet follows his middle-aged rumination Return to Ithaca (2014) with an equally unsettling but darker teenage drama that takes place in a multi-cultural summer school in Provence. Youth is a subject he’s covered before in his Palme d’Or winner The Class (2008) but here the region’s working class past come back to haunt the instability of the present providing an intoxicating mix of emotions in a tense, intelligent and socially relevant drama.

The film follows Antoine who is taking part in summer school in rather downtrodden town of La Ciotat, where he hopes to write a crime thriller novel with the help of a well-known author Olivia Dejazet (Marina Fois).  Joined by seven other local teenagers from the town which has seen better days as a centre for shipbuilding – today the docks just service luxury yachts.

Whilst most of the students are critical of Dejazet’s Parisian “snootiness”, they still co-operate  – apart from Antoine (Lucci). He is provocative to both teacher and co-students, shocking them with a piece of gruesome writing, describing a mass-killer, and told in the first person singular. Downtime is spend hanging around the area, in one instance with an unlicensed firearm.  Antoine has already been playing the popular video game “The Witch3: Wild Hunt”,  where he choses the role of a Viking killer-for hire. Malik (Rammach), a young Muslim woman, is Antoine’s fiercest critic, as he continues to undermine the project, upsetting everyone with his unruly attitude. Dejazet feels hopeless – not used to open racism and Antoine’s perverse love of violence – then she tries to help him. But her efforts end in a traumatic encounter, and Antoine gives himself away: he describes the main motive of the Bataclan perpetrators as boredom, a very astute projection, considering his activities with other far-right friends.

Antoine might not have the intellectual prowess of Drieu La Rochelle, the nihilist hero of Louis Malle’ s Le Feu Follet, but there are certain parallels: both men prefer male company, the home-erotic undertones are very clear. Like many fascists, they are obsessed with death and suicide (La Rochelle killed himself in 1945 after being a collaborator), and their relationship with women tends to be antagonistic: their masculine pride does not allow them to come emotionally close to women. Antoine is a gun for hire, his phantasies of obliteration are as much directed at himself as others.

Regular collaborate Robin Campillo, who also worked on Entre les Murs with Cantet, constructs an ambivalent relationship between Dejazet and Antoine: both are aware of their social differences, but in spite this they are somehow attracted to one another. Their relationship develops into a separate story, whilst the other six students try to write their own crime novel. DoP Pierre Milon uses impressive panoramic shots, showing the empty docks, then returning to the intimate scenes of collaborate writing, without breaking the fluent movement. Cantet’s direction is  sensitive, he never denounces Antoine, seeing him as a victim of change: once he would have found a spiritual home with the dock workers, but now he is alienated and bitter. L’Atelier is a story of disenfranchisement, and storytelling – with the author as teacher, but one who’s not always in control.

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM 16 NOVEMBER 2018

 

 

9 to 5 (1980) **** BFI re-release

Dir.: Colin Higgins; Cast: Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Dolly Parton, Dabney Coleman, Sterling Hayden; USA 1980, 109 min.

Colin Higgins’ revenge comedy 9 to 5 is in many ways a symbol for the way Hollywood produces films – not only in the past, but very much today. Take an engaged female scriptwriter (Patricia Resnick) who has written “a dark comedy” about female harassment in the workplace. It is produced by the company of the leading star (Jane Fonda), who is afraid that “the women would not be sympathetic enough”. And then, the coup-de-grace, put a male director (Colin Higgins ) in charge (literally), who told Resnick “I write by myself, I am not going to write with you. I believe, there is one captain on (the) set, the director. If you want to visit on set once and have lunch, that’s fine”. The result was 9 to 5. Higgins was gay and died of AIDS aged 47. 

Three women meet in the offices of Consolidated Industries: Violet Newstead (Tomlin), the efficient office manager hoping to be promoted to management level; Doralee Rhodes (Parton), secretary to her sexist, scheming and downright nasty boss Franklin Hart Jr. (Coleman) The trio was completed by newcomer Judy Bernly (Fonda), newly divorced and still broken-hearted.

Hart lusts madly after Rhodes who gives him the cold shoulder. He ‘employs’ an office snitch who sits in the toilet cubicle, noting down the conversations of the staff on toilet paper. The three women spring into action after Hart overlooks Newstead for a promotion, choosing a man instead. Newstead finds out her boss is embezzling money from the company, but the papers they need as proof will only be available in two week’s hence. So they kidnap Hart and imprison him in his own empty house. Meanwhile he has sent away his wife on a long holiday so he can pursue his secretary. Although Hart escapes, putting the stolen merchandise back, his boss Tinsworthy (Hayden) is so taken by the changes Newstead has made to office life in Hart’s name (gliding working hours, on site-crèche, equal payment for both genders) that he promotes Hart to a senior position in Brazil, with Newstead replacing him.

Higgins (The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas) created a farce, including Warner Brother cartoons and over-the-top dream sequences. Roger Ebert wrote after the premiere “Nine to Five is a good-hearted, simple-minded comedy that will have a place in film history, I suspect, primarily, because it features the movie debut of Dolly Parton”. Later he concedes “it also has a dash of social commentary”. One can see, that Fonda/Higgins succeeded in “making the social message more palatable”. 

Whilst Fonda is planning a sequel, Resnick is more realistic: “In some ways we have moved forward a little bit, but one of our political parties seems to be trying to undo what little we’ve been able to do. The other thing is that so many people think all this has been settled.’ After Resnick was involved in a musical version of 9 to 5 on Broadway, most male journalists opined: “Well. None of these issues are a problem in contemporary life, so how are women of today going to relate to it all?” Well there have been some changes: You cannot sexually harass someone as obviously, and we do not call people ‘secretaries’. Apart from that, life goes on as it always did. But people would kill to work just from 9 to 5.” AS

SCREENING FROM 16 NOVEMBER 2018 NATIONWIDE

 

    

Russian Film Week 2018

Russian Film Week is back for the third year running. From 25 November to 2 December the event will take place in London at BFI Southbank, Regent Street Cinema, Curzon Mayfair and Empire Leicester Square before heading to Edinburgh, Cambridge and Oxford.

The eight-day festival celebrates a selection of award-winning new dramas, documentaries and shorts, bridging the gap between Russian cinematography and the West with the aim of building bridges rather than enforcing tensions. The festival will culminate in the Golden Unicorn Awards. This year’s selection has certainly upped its game and comes thoroughly recommended. Particularly worth seeing is Rashomon re-make THE BOTTOMLESS BAG, a magical mystery drama, in black and white.

Russian Film Week opens with Avdotya Smirnova’s prize-winning historical drama THE STORY OF AN APPOINTMENT (prize for Best Script at Russia’s main national film festival Kinotavr). Based on real life events, it follows an episode from Leo Tolstoy’s life. The opening night will be held at the largest screen in the UK – Empire IMAX Leicester Square.

Other seasonal highlights include Kirill Serebrennikovэ’s Cannes awarded biographical film LETO (Summer) and SOBIBOR, Russia’s foreign-language film Oscar submission 2018. The film is the debut feature for actor-turned-director Konstantin Khabensky, and focuses on events in the titular Nazi extermination camp during 1943. The film also stars Christopher Lambert and Karl Frenzel. Danila Kozlovsky, known for his role in BBC series McMafia (2018) and numerous Russian blockbusters, will present his debut project, sports drama TRENER (‘Coach’).

The festival c Golden Unicorn Awards ceremony, including the Best Foreign Film About Russia. British actor Brian Cox will head up the jury. The awards ceremony is in aid of Natalia Vodianova’s Naked Heart Foundation.

Russian Film Week and the Golden Unicorn was founded in 2016 by Filip Perkon with a group of volunteers on a non-profit basis. From 2017 the festival supported by the Russian Ministry of Culture, Synergy University, and the BFI.

RUSSIAN FILM WEEK 2018 | 25 NOVEMBER – 2 DECEMBER 2018

Winter Hunt (2017) ** UK Jewish Film Festival 2018

Dir.: Astrid Schult; Cast: Carolyn Genzkow, Michel Degen, Elisabeth Degen; Deutschland 2017, 75′

Winter Hunt is an earnest attempt to address the crimes of the Holocaust. Unfortunately the drama is hampered by the inexperience of its crew and cast. Trying to come to terms with the guilt of the Nation’s involvement has one again proved too much for these German filmmakers. They try to keep it real, but are simply not up to the task: and come across as worthy artisans of their craft, when mastery is required.

The film starts off in thriller territory. A young woman called Lena (Genzkow) is investigating the case of Nazi war criminal and KZ guard Anselm Rossberg (M. Degen), who now lives in a remote wooded location with his daughter Maria (E. Degen), after his recent trial. On the pretext of a faked car accident, Lena forces her way into his property where a verbal exchange of lies and counter-arguments sees the old man plead his innocence. She is soon overpowered by the father and daughter, confessing to be his granddaughter, and opening the way for a rather far- fetched fatal resolve.

Schult tries too hard to ‘make something happen’, but has nothing new to bring to the Holocaust story  – her implausible narrative is shot through with plotholes. The pervasive haunted-house atmosphere gives Winter Hunt the impression of one of those Sherlock Holmes dramas of the 1940s. DoP Katherina Bühler tries in vain to give this parlour piece an atmospheric shot in the arm, but the acting can’t save this worthy endeavour: clumsily raised voices are the rule, and flaying limbs and dramatic hand gestures fail to convince us of their anguish. Sadly, this is a rather amateur affair. AS  

UK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL | 8 NOVEMBER – 27 DECEMBER 2018

The Marvellous Mabel Normand **** BFI Comedy Genius 2018


The BFI’s upcoming COMEDY GENIUS SEASON features a new set of four shorts starring the queen of silent comedy, Mabel Normand.

Mabel Normand (1892-1930) had a short but eventful life: she was a pioneer of Silent Movies as a star actress (in 220) and director (in 10) between 1910 and 1927. Working alongside Charlie Chaplin, she ended up saving his career at Mack Sennetts’ Keystone – the producer wanted to sack him. Normand also developed Chaplin’s ‘tramp’ screen personality. But she was, more or less, accidentally involved in the murder of William Desmond Taylor and the shooting of Courtland S. Dines, as well as being a friend (and co-star) of ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle, whose life was a series of scandals. Normand suffered for a long time from TB, interrupting her career and leading to her early death at the age of 37.

Mable’s Blunder (1914) 

Dir.: Mack Sennett, Cast: Mabel Normand, Mack Sennett, Harry McCoy, Charles Bennett, Eva Nelson; USA 1914, 13 min.

Mable’s Dramatic Career (1913)

Dir.: Mack Sennett; Cast: Mable Normand, Mack Sennett, Alice Davenport, Virginia Kirtley; USA 1913, 14 min.

His Trysting Places (1914)

Dir.: Charlie Chaplin; Cast: Charlie Chaplin, Mabel Normand, Mark Swain, Phyllis Allen; USA 1914, 32 min.

Should Men walk Home (1927) 

Dir.: Leo McCarey; Cast: Mabel Normand, Creighton Hale, Eugene Pallette, Oliver Hardy; USA 1927, 35 min

Mabel’s Blunder is a screwball comedy of cross-dressing. Mabel (Normand) bizarrely ends up being fancied by her fiancée (Bennet) and his father Harry (McCoy) – in a bizarre turn of events that naturally sees her compromised and embarrassed.  But things get worse when the fiancée’s sister (Nelson) arrives and is also keen on her own brother. Far too fond – in the eyes of Mabel- who doesn’t realise what’s going on, and suspects she has a rival. Mabel changes into male clothing and teaches both men a lesson. Directed by Mack Sennett, this is a turbulent but elegantly comic sketch.

Sennett was also the director of Mabel’s Dramatic Career, in which Normand plays a maid in love with the young Master of the house (Sennett) whose mother (Davenport) really prefers a real ‘lady’ for her son. Mabel is dismissed, but makes a career in the movies. This leads to great unhappiness on the part of the son, when he see his ex-flame on the cinema screen. The final scene is a showcase showdown.

In His Trysting Places Charlie Chaplin directed himself and Normand as couple who fall foul of a comedy involving a mix-up in coats. Chaplin is supposed to get a bottle for the couple’s daughter, but takes the wrong coat in a pub. Mabel finds a letter for a rendezvous in the pocket. She throws a fit. At  the same time, the owner of the coat (Swain) meets his girl friend  (Allen) in the park. She finds a baby-bottle in his coat pocket, and suspects that he has a child with a rival. The helter-skelter of the solution is mad slapstick but hilarious and brilliantly timed.

Should Men Walk Home, directed by Leo McCarey (for producer Hal Roach) is Normand’s penultimate feature. Also known as Girl Bandit, Mabel plays an upmarket lady robber, who together with her friend (Hale), tries to rob a wealthy man during a party. A detective (Pallette) stumbles through the film, always missing the clues, whilst Oliver Hardy has a small, but poignant role as a guest. When it comes to farce, McCarey was one of the best directors, and the finale even features an underwater sequence. Avantgarde and beautifully carried off.

SCREENING AS PART OF BFI’s COMEDY GENIUS season NATIONWIDE from 9 November 2018

Budapest Noir (2017) *** UK Jewish Film Festival 2018

Dir.: Eva Gardos; Cast: Krisztian Kolovratnik, Reka Tenki, Janos Kulka, Adel Kovats, Franziska Töröcsik; Hungary 2017, 94 min.

Veteran director Eva Gardos (An American Rhapsody) serves up a slick but conventional noir spoof that offers decent entertainment despite its cliche-ridden script. There are too many holes in the narrative, the brothel scenes are voyeuristic, and without any knowledge of the complex Hungarian history of the era, audiences will find it hard to understand what’s going on. But BUDAPEST NOIR looks simply stunning and serves as a perceptive study of Hungarian fascism and Anti-Semitism.

In October 1936, Hungarian Prime Minister Gyula Gömbös, had died of cancer in Munich. His body was received in Budapest with full military honours (Gömbös had boasted about his fascist credentials). Crime reporter Zsigmond Gordon (Kolovratnik) meets an enigmatic young woman in a restaurant, who tells the waiter that the journalist will pick up her bill. When he finds her note to him, promising to pay back the money, the womanising journalist’s interest is aroused – only to discover her murdered a few days later. But when her body then disappears from the morgue, Gordon makes his own inquiries against the advice of the authorities. He finds out that the girl in question, Fanny (Töröcsik), is the daughter of Andras Szöllosy, a wealthy Jewish coffee importer with links to the government. He converted to Catholicism, and started a lucrative business with Nazi Germany. Helped by his on/off girl friend Krisztina (Tenki), a photographer who had just had an assignment in a German camp (sic), Gordon finds out that Fanny’s father had driven his daughter into prostitution, forbidding her to see her Jewish boyfriend, because of his fears for her future. But after Fanny had become pregnant in a high-class brothel, her situation deteriorated. And when Gordon finally catches up with Fanny’s parents, he mother Irma (Kovats) reacts dramatically.

Sad to say, Hungarian Fascists were as brutal as their Germans counterparts. The ruling Regent, Admiral Horthy, felt superior to Hitler, who had spent a decade in a dosshouse. Gömbös, Horthy’s Prime Minister, wanted two nations to be more closely allied, whilst Horthy only supported Hitler without reservations after the outbreak of WWII, when Hungarian troops fought on the side of the Axis.

It is ironic that Horthy was deposed by Hitler when it came to the deportation of the 400 000 Hungarian Jews in 1944 – it turned out that the Hungarian fascists (Pfeilkreuzler) and the population as a whole, did not share Horthy’s reservation, they enthusiatiscally assisted the Germans to send the Jews to the death camps.

There are scenes of open Anti-Semitism in Budapest Noir: in one scene, a bar singer croons a song composed by a Jew, and some Anti-Semites in the audience attack him. Gordon stops them, but the real fighter is his Krisztina, who leaves him for London, to show her death camp images in an exhibition “because over there are people who really care”. The Szöllosy’s family history is typical for Jews of the region: many had converted to Catholicism, trying to deny their Jewish heritage, and, like Fanny’s father, would marry their offspring to anybody but a Jew. Gordon represents the cynical by-stander, who is only after a good story, he does not mind taking a beating, but is totally non-committed on a personal and political level. Strangely enough, Budapest Noir is – in spite of its obvious faults – a mirror of a society where the points for the future genocide are being put in place. AS

SCREENING DURING UK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL 2018 |

Wildlife (2018) ****

Writer|Dir: Paul Dano | Cast: Carey Mulligan, Jake Gyllenhaal, Ed Oxenbould | Drama | US | 105’

A teenage boy experiences the breakdown of his parents’ marriage in  Paul Dano’s crisp coming of age family drama, set in 1960s Montana, and based on Richard Ford’s novel.

Although once or twice veering into melodrama, actor Dano maintains impressive control over his sleek and very lucid first film which is anchored by three masterful performances, and sees a young family disintegrate after the husband loses his job.

WILDLIFE has a great deal in common with Retribution Road (2008), its similar theme of aspirational hope for a couple starting out on their life in a new town, in this case Great Falls, Montana. But here the perspective is very different – in Wildlife, the entire experience is seen from the unique perspective of a pubescent boy, Joe, played thoughtfully by young Australian actor Ed Oxenbould (The Visit).

There’s an old-fashioned quality to the film that very much works to its advantage. The date is 1960 and in the mountains behind the family house a forest fire is raging, with warnings that it could well spread to the town centre if not controlled by rangers, who Jerry Brinson (Gyllenhaal) decides to join at a wage of only a dollar an hour, after much moping around the house when he loses his job on the local golf course. This comes as a big surprise to his wife Jeannette (Mulligan), an earnest homemaker who believes in her husband’s desire to make more of himself, and she sees this as a step backwards, career-wise. Meanwhile, Joe signs on as an apprentice to a local portrait photographer, a part-time job he takes to while doing very well in his school work.

Dano and his co-writer Zoe Kazan, stick to a clean, straighforward narrative but there’s a subtle brooding tension at play, and while Joe seems emotionally grounded and resilient (a tribute to his parents), Jerry and Jeannette are less so: although Jerry’s character is the most underwritten of the three, there’s a haunted quality to him as a straightforwaed dad who suddenly implodes after the shock of his firing. Jeannette also starts to lose her own sense of equilibrium:. “What kind of man leaves his wife and child in such a lonely place?,” Jeanette casts around for emotional ballast in an much older wealthy man, Warren Miller (Bill Camp), who she meets while giving swimming classes.

In some ways this fragmented behaviour is character-forming for Joe, his parents have clearly given him a rock solid babyhood, and so he can weather the shocking fliration scenes that take place between Millar and his mother, and his loss at his father’s temporary abandonment, although he finds it all difficult to fathom. This is not a film about adult infidelity and abandonment, but about how a teenage perceives and deals with it, and as such it is beautifully restrained and supremely elegant – the audience is required to suspend disbelief and take a trip back to teenagehood and the bewildering experience it offers. Dano makes the denouement an enigmatic affair, leaving the door open to hope, while acknowledging the inevitable. MT

NATIONWIDE FROM 9 NOVEMBER 2018

Treeless Mountain (2008) *** London Korean Film Festival 2018

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Dir.: So-yong Kim; Cast: Hee Yeon Kim, Songhe Kim, Lee Soo Ah, Mi-hyang Kim, Boon Tak Park; USA/South Korea 2008, 89 min.

Two young children are passed around like parcels in So-yong Kim’s touching but unsentimental study of child development and sisterly love.

This thoughtful study of childhood trauma relies largely on its delicate visuals and great subtlety to explore the little girls’ world with a charming lightness of touch.

In Seoul, six-year old Jin (Yeon Kim) and her younger sister Bin (Songhe Kim) live with their mother (Lee Soo Ah) in reduced circumstances. Their father is no longer on the scene, forcing their mother to take them to the country where they will live with their great-aunt (Mi-hyang Kim), who just happens to be an alcoholic. Eventually, they are dumped on their elderly grandparents who run a farm.

The story revolves around their changing relation dynamic. At first, Jin is the strong one, bolstered by her school life and feeling of superiority. But when her mother decides to leave, Jin starts wetting the bed – a clear sign of insecurity. Not surprisingly, Bin is less affected by the new surroundings in her aunt’s house, and while Jin continues to wet the bed, their aunt mistakenly blaming her little sister for it.

Bin soon becomes the practical one, catching grasshoppers and roasting them to sell. She also finds a good way of filling their mother’s pink piggy bank with the coins for her speedy return. But Jin becomes introverted, desperate to see her mother, who never appears despite her promise. And so the kids wait in vain on the treeless mountain, before Jin declares “Mummy has told a big lie.”

Bin soon loses all enthusiasm, whilst Jin perks up, once again asserting her authority as the older girl. On the farm, their caring grandmother (Boon Tak Park), takes over the motherly role the kids desperately need, offering them the patience they will need to develop into secure teenagers.

This sensitive hommage to Bresson’s Mouchette and Jacques Dillon’s Ponette, Treeless Mountain lets Anne Misewa’s exquisite camerawork do the talking, concentrating on the intricate expressions of childhood joy and dismay. A moving exploration of childhood that makes a lasting impression. AS

London Korean FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | 

     

   

Outlaw King (2018)

Dir.: David Mackenzie; Cast: Chris Pine. Florence Pugh, Billy Howle, Stephan Dillane, Aaron Taylor-Jones; US/UK, 132 min. 

Director David Mackenzie (Hell or High Water) and his four scriptwriters have made this history book of medieval wars between Scots and English into a legend of machismo – but in the end the rivals all emerge as anti-heros, and all is drowned in blood and mud.

In 1304, after the end of William Wallace Revolution,. Robert the Bruce (Pine) attempts to unify the Scotts  tribes to fight Edward I (Dillane), who has seized the Scottish throne for himself – instead of appointing a promised Scottish successor. As a sign of the new alliance, Edward I allowed Robert the Bruce to marry Elizabeth de Burgh (Pugh), daughter of the powerful Earl of Ulster. But after the death of Edward I, his son, the Prince of Wales (later Edward II of England), captured and imprisoned Elizabeth, who was not willing to divorce Robert.

Robert’s fury is fed by the treachery of a Prince of Wales, who was once his close friend. After many years of imprisonment, Elizabeth was re-united with Robert, and they had three children. The many ambushes culminate in the Battle of Loudoun Hill (1307), the show-piece of the feature, and turning point of the campaign for an independent Scotland – even though the war would last another twenty years.

Together with his second in command, James Douglas (Taylor-Jones), Robert is shown as ruthless and risk-loving. The action scenes are repetitive and cruel: at one point during the Battle of Loudoun, spikes are used by the Scots to pierce the bodies of the English horses.

Outlaw King is redeemed by a handful of scenes that are worth watching – between Elizabeth and Robert (who is rather gentle with his young wife) – and these provide a counterpoint to the endless monotone warring, although Mackenzie ruins it with an embarrassing sex sequence. At least Elizabeth is shown as being as stubborn and bloody-minded as her husband, and Pugh excels in another strong female role.  

Cut down from the 146 minutes of the version shown at TIFF, Outlaw King is still far too long. DoP Barry Aykroyd captures the fighting scenes with great power, but in the end, the over-kill is tiring. AS

ON Netflix


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For Vagina’s Sake (2017) London Korean Film Festival 2018 ***

Dir: Kim Bo-ram | S. Korean Doc | 73′

FOR VAGINA’S SAKE takes a coyly humorous approach to a bodily function that happens to half the world’s population. A woman will lose over 10 litres of blood during her reproductive years. And while in North East Asia menstruation is still often seen as an embarrassing occurrence, Dutch women treat periods much more pragmatically according to this worthwhile but rather scatty South Korean documentary debut from Kim Bo-ram.

Boram has certainly done her research and uncovered a wealth of information about this vital bodily function, uncovering startling facts from the Dark Ages and followed it through with up to date political developments. It’s a shame then that her film is hamstrung by its choppy editing, flipping backwards and forward and flitting around like a butterfly on heat, it eventually becomes exasperating in the final scenes. It’s also focused almost entirely on women in their twenties and early thirties in Holland and South Korea.

A dinner discussion in Holland reveals that young Dutch woman go for basic applicator-free protection, while in South Korea some are still scared to insert a tampon (afraid that it may get lost) in a country where periods are still taboo and anatomical ignorance is frankly shocking. We then meet an 80 year old Korean woman whose first period came after she marred at 18, and who then went on to produce five or six daughters. In those days sanitary towels consisted of natural cotton balls wrapped in cotton material. Tied with strings round the woman’s waste they often fell down, causing horrific embarrassment. And this humiliation and fear connected with staining a public seat or losing a pad in the street is still a woman’s worst nightmare today.

There follows a potted historical and religious background which verges on the macabre (if not downright misogynistic). We learn than ancient Japan women were thrown into communal pits of menstrual blood and allowed to drown, whereas in China those who gave birth would apparently go to Hell (?). Menstrual blood was considered a puny female attempt at producing sperm.

The second part of the documentary focuses on politics developments and taxes that apply to feminine hygiene products, with a discussion on the contemporary developments in sustainable protection (material pads, sea-foam, and an overlong diatribe about the menstrual cup and its advantages.

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For Vagina’s Sake uses a mixture of interviews and delicately-drawn animations to put its information across and is both subjective and observational. Graphic images dovetail with lighter more frivolous hand-draughted visuals. Fast-paced and fluffy and rather than serious and analytical – the film becomes more inspirational and empowering for its contributors as it presses on. Certainly a worthwhile film to show to teenagers and students from all nationalities who may be suffering in silence, rather than learning about a shared and very natural female experience. MT

SCREENING DURING THE London Korean FILM FESTIVAL 2018

Microhabitat (2017) **** London Korean Film Festival 2018

Dir.: Jeon Go-woon; Cast: Esom, Ahn jae-hong, Choi Deok-moon, Kang Jin-ah, Kim kuk-hee, Kim Jae-hwa, Lee Sung wook; South Korea 2017, 104 min.

Jeon Go-woon’s spirited road movie sees a city girl determined to keep her independence while her friends cow-tow to tradition in contemporary Seoul. The original title ‘Little Princess’ better describes this thoughtful story of materialism versus spiritualism.

Miso (a brilliant Lee Som) may be getting on a bit, but can’t afford to heat her tiny studio flat, on her salary as a housemaid. When the rent goes up together with the price of cigarettes, she makes a dramatic decision: to move out and indulge in her favourite brand of whisky, and to keep on smoking. But what price freedom? Her boyfriend Hans-sol (jae-hong) lives in a male-only dormitory, so she can’t go there – they even have to give up having sex. Schlepping around with her belongings, like a bag lady, Miso asks her former band members for help. First off is ambitious office worker Moon-yeong (Jin-ah). She is curt and unapologetic: “I am too irritable to lie with someone”. Next is former vocalist Roki-i (Deok-moon), who now lives with his old-fashioned parents. His mother is keen on the idea. Clearly Miso is the just the right match for her son: “she can clean, and that’s all a woman needs to do”. Roki-i’s certainly keen on Miso. But she can’t deal with being hemmed in with his family, so once again it’s time to move on. The next port of call is her girlfriend Hyeon-jeong (Kuk-hee) whose husband tells his wife “to shut up and cook”. And so it goes on.

Go-woon’s refreshing debut is very much a riff on the traditional versus the modern way of South Korean life. It contemplates the difficulties and isolation of the spiritual way of life, in contrast to the more easier and socially acceptable option of materialism. Freedom may be more nourishing for the soul, but is tough on the body: It’s all very well following your heart in your twenties, but the process becomes tougher as the years go by, and when old age looms around the corner. Esom’s former band-members had their flings with music in their twenties, but they have given up on an inner life, swapping it for opportunism – with different degrees of success.

DoP Tae-soo Kim’s images of Seoul are just breathtaking: the city glitters at night, but during daytime it looks rather drab –  just like Miso’s former friends. Shot in fifteen days, with a rather loose script – Go-woon wanted to convey the humour and absurdity during of the shoot. Microhabitat is a little gem: fast moving yet imbued with gentle insight. This intimate picture of a woman’s determination to follow her dreams at all costs is full of humour and irony. AS

MICROHABITAT OPENED THE LONDON KOREAN FILM FESTIVAL 2018

    

  

French Film Festival UK (2018)

A nationwide festival of recent and classic French film that takes place from 7 November until mid December 2018.

From cult classics such as Alain Delon starrer The Unvanquished (1964), to Jean Luc Godard’s Cannes awarded Image Book (2018) there are 50 films to choose from at various venues all over the UK from London to Edinburgh and Belfast to the provincial cities of Bristol and Dundee.

FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL UK 7 NOVEMBER UNTIL 16 DECEMBER 2018

The House That Jack Built (2018) ****

Writer/Dir: Lars von Trier | Cast: Uma Thurman, Matt Dillon, Riley Keough | Thriller |  Bruno Ganz | 155′

Controversy has always surrounded auteur Lars von Trier and his critically acclaimed work lives up to his reputation as a maverick talent, fuelling fierce debate and attracting attention from his devoted fans. And he is up to his tricks again refusing to be cowed by the controversy that got him ‘persona non grata status’ seven years ago.

This time he offers up the provocative portrait of a serial killer wreaking hell in the 70s world of America’s Pacific North West. THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT confirms the director has no intention of mending his ways, although it’s never quite clear whether he intends to be a mischievous as he appears. That said, he has clearly managed to wind some viewers up with walks out at the Cannes world premiere of the film. And with various allusions to Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao and Idi Amin a mild mannered approach was never going to be the balm needing to heal the wounds of previous damage he caused. 

Anti-Americanism and misogyny are the themes firmly in the forefront of this new and naughty endeavour that has Matt Dillon in the lead role as Jack, a sociopathic criminal who subjects women and kids to a sadistic fate that would put even the Moors murders in the shade, while simultaneously moaning: “why is it always the men’s fault”. The narrative clearly runs contrary to the current polemic over sexual misconduct. Lars was never going to be acquiescent in this regard but his gorefest feels like he’s upping the ante big time! And while there are plenty of sympathisers, there are also the detractors. So the choice is yours.

THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT is certainly a film to see, despite its indulgent running time. And it is worth remembering that over the years, the Danish maverick has created some memorable roles for women, assuring Emily Watson a legendary turn in Breaking The Waves, Bjork for Dancer in the Dark, and Charlotte Gainsbourg for Melancholia. In this new outing the victim to feel sorry for is Riley Keough — but von Trier cuts the victim characterisations down to a bare minimum, so as a result we know and feel little for them. They are merely there to serve the narrative’s ploy of putting a spanner in the works of the gender war that is currently raging. 

The film is seen from the perspective of Jack and the hidden voice of his mentor/shrink Verge (Bruno Ganz), who remains in the dark until he finally emerges into the limelight as Dante after some 60 killings have been reported, escorting Jack through the circles of Hell, Divina Comedia style. 

The killing spree is conducted dispassionately by Jack. It kicks off with an deliberately unlikeable motorist (Uma Thurman) who meets her maker in a surprisingly bloodless way, after showing a gross sense of entitlement to Jack, after her car breaks down. Von Trier judiciously leaving the gore to our imagination, we actually feel more empathy with Jack than the woman. The next victims are a recently bereaved widow, then Sofie Grabol and her sons, forced to enjoy a picnic before being unceremoniously ‘taken out’. The director is also clearly taking a swipe at elements of our indifferent and uncaring society that allow victims to go unaided when in peril. The ‘dumb blond’ girlfriend is the next to go, in a killing that mirrors that of Sharon Tate. But each time Lars desire to inflame the recent feminist lash-back is almost overdone and certainly too glaringly obvious to be taken seriously. 

Dillon plays Jack with suave insouciance, boredom even. Nitpicking over details such as bloodstains on the carpet – he has a cleanliness fetish – and as his trail of carnage grows, he experiments with the slowly growing mound of bodies in his cool room.

The mid section of the film is devoted to a treatise on art and its value in society – which is all a bit too arcane to be edifying in the context of a murder movie – and the constant musical motif of Bowie’s ‘Fame’ becomes a tad tiresome after a while. This detour gives nods to Glenn Gould, William Blake, gothic cathedral architecture, the work of Hitler’s favourite architect Albert Speer. A vignette about dessert wine production feels like an echo of the Silence of the Lambs fava beans episode. Ganz’s Verge is a soothing Peter Cook style psychiatrist who assures Jack that his feelings are all consistent with his personality profile as a psycho. JACK’s editor Molly Malene Stensgaard interposes archive material at various salient intervals to add ballast to the ongoing diatribe between Jack and Verge, but there is nothing particularly exciting about cinematographer Manuel Albert Claro’s grainy handheld camera work or choice of visual aesthetic, although he captures the final descent into Hell inventively.

A great deal of the film actually feels quite tedious. JACK is neither a crime procedural or a gripping character study, and when the film’s title is finally fleshed out – quite literally – we are all ready to go home. MT

NOW ON RELEASE FROM 2 NOVEMBER 2018

London Korean Film Festival 2018

Launching its 13th edition, the London Korean Film Festival (LKFF2018) is back with a full programme of films and special events at various arthouse cinemas in the London area. 
Korea is regularly in the world news cycle of late due to some tense international political machinations. This year’s festival moves from this global outlook to an intimate view of the day-to-day lives and struggles of ordinary people. The Regent Street cinema will play host to this year’s Gala Premiere 1 November with Microhabitat Jeon Go-woon’s award-winning drama that follows the trials and tribulations of a female city worker in Seoul. There will also be a chance to see The Return that premiered at Rotterdam Film Festival 2018, and Hong Sang-soo’s Locarno 2018 Best Actor winner Hotel By the River. 
Celebrating its 13th Anniversary LKFF runs from 1- 14 November in London before taking highlights around the country with its annual UK Tour, the festival will feature an in-depth Special Focus entitled A Slice of Everyday Life, along with an exciting mix of UK and International premieres, guests and events across a diverse set of strands; Cinema Now, Women’s Voices, Indie Firepower, Contemporary Classics, Artists Video, Animation and Shorts.

KOREAN FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | PROGRAMME 

UK Jewish Film Festival 2018

The 22nd edition of the  UK Jewish Film Festival this year runs from 8th-22nd November 2018 at cinemas across London, Manchester, Leeds, Nottingham, Brighton and Glasgow.

The programme features a Philip Roth Retrospective in tribute to the much loved author, with a screening of three cinematic interpretations of his work: Goodbye, Columbus; Human Stain and Portnoy’s Complaint.

Other strands include: The Alan Howard International Documentary Strand, Israeli Cinema, Made in Britain, European Cinema, Education Programme, The Sound of Silence providing a spectacular journey back to the 1920s with beautifully restored classic films, Across the World – from Argentina to Russia in 15 days.

Films in Competition for the Dorfman Best Film Award are: The Accountant of Auschwitz, Foxtrot, 2017/Samuel Maoz); Promise At Dawn (2017/Eric Barbier); Three Identical Strangers (2018/Tim Wardle); The Waldheim Waltz (2018/Ruth Beckermann/Berlinale Doc Winner); and Working Woman (Isha Ovedet/2018).

The jury presided by Michael Kuhn includes Anita Land, Clare Binns, Andrew Pulver, Henry Goodman and Michael Rose.

Best Debut Feature Award contenders are: Closeness (2017/Kantemir Balagov/FIPRESCI prize winner, Un Certain Regard, Cannes 2017); Doubtful (2017/Eliran Elya); Driver, Outdoors (2017/Asaf Saban); Red Cow (2017/Tsivia Barkai) and Winter Hunt.

Claudia Rosencrantz will lead this jury.

Up for Best Screenplay Award is: Budapest Noir (2017/Eva Gardos), Death of a Poetess (2017/Dana Goldberg/Ephrat Mishori), Foxtrot, Promise At Dawn, To Dust (2017/Shawn Snyder) and Winter Hunt. Jury headed by Nik Powell.

The Opening Night Gala on the 8th November at BFI Southbank is the UK Premiere of Working Woman, directed by Michal Aviad and starring Liron Ben Shlush, Menashe Noy and Oshri Cohen. This film has been nominated for the Dorfman Best Film Award. Released in 2018, this cautionary tale could hardly be more appropriate in the current climate, and follows an ambitious career woman who struggles with harassment in the work place.

The Closing Night Gala, Eric Barbier’s Promise At Dawn will take place on 22 November at Curzon Mayfair and stars Pierre Niney with Charlotte Gainsbourg (Best Actress Cesar Nomination) playing the overbearing Jewish mother in a powerful adaptation of Romain Gary’s memoir.

The Centrepiece Gala is the London Premiere of Three Identical Strangers, directed by Tim Wardle won the Special Jury prize at Sundance Film Festival and involves three men raised by their respective adoptive families within a hundred-mile radius of each other. These siblings Robert Shafran, Eddy Galland and David Kellman were oblivious to the fact that each had two identical brothers until a chance meeting brought them together, aged 19, for the first time since birth. MT

UK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL | NATIONWIDE | 8-22 NOVEMBER 2018

Artes Mundi 8 Award | National Museum Cardiff

THE NATIONAL MUSEUM in Cardiff is playing host to the UK’s largest international art prize Artes Mundi. From the 26 October until 24 February 2019 the exhibition showcases the five finalists competing for this coveted award.

Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul has joined the list with his latest work INVISIBILITY, a short film melding cinema with contemporary art and riffing on the signature themes that permeated Cemetery of Splendour (2016) and his 2006 debut Syndromes and a Century. Also short-listed for this year’s Artes Mundi award is French-Moroccan artist and filmmaker, Bouchra Khalili. Her short film Twenty-Two Hours took part in this year’s BFI London Film Festival. 

In Twenty-Two Hours, Bouchra Khalili (left) considers how celebrated French writer Jean Genet was invited by the Black Panther Party to secretly visit them in in the U.S in 1970. The film features Doug Miranda, a former prominent member of the Black Panther Party. Echoing BlacKKKlansman, the film questions how we might transmit the historical voice of resistance into the present.

This year’s selection has been distilled from over 450 entries, from 86 countries. The judging committee includes Anthony Shapland, creative director of Cardiff’s g39 gallery. Artes Mundi is a charity founded in 2002.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Apichatpong’s work deals with memory, personal politics, and social issues in his native Thailand. With over 40 films under his belt, and still only 48, he is a Cannes Film Festival regular, where he won the Palme d’Or in 2010 for his fantasy drama Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, and the Jury prize for Tropical Malady in 2004. Cemetery of Splendour (2015/above) was selected to World premiere in the arthouse Un Certain Regard sidebar, and his love story Blissfully Yours won the UCR award in 2002. His surreal and enigmatic open-ended outings evoke the essence of his homeland through mysterious narratives that often remain unsolved, and are best savoured rather than explained. These fables often have a political undercurrent that we can take or leave, depending on our mood. The past and the present co-exist, and while the focus is general Thai history and folklore, the features have a universal quality exploring love and loss, tradition and the supernatural. His rich reveries explore dreams, nature, and sexuality, alongside Western perceptions of Asia. His recent outing Ten Years in Thailand (2018) is a collaboration between three of his compatriots, and premiered during this year’s Sitges – Catalonia Film Festival.

Experimental in nature, Mysterious Object at Noon (2000) is a film of captivating beauty that blends facts and fiction in a story passed from one person to another, Blissfully Yours (2002)is a languid affair that sees two illegal Burmese immigrants enjoys a leisurely afternoon at a remote rural backwater, in the politically charged location between Thailand and Myanmar). One of them is suffering from the after affects of hiding from the authorities in a septic tank. Tropical Malady (2004) sees a love affair gently blossom in the twilight zone between reality and the spirit world, and Uncle Boonmee (2010) also deals in this dreamlike world when a dying man communes with his family, past and present, roaming to the north of Thailand where spends his final days in the birthplace of his first life. Syndromes and a Century (2006) and psychic drama Cemetery of Splendour (2016) both deal with patients and their carers in a rural hospital setting in lush jungle. Bangkok and a countryside clinic is also the backdrop to the unconsummated love story Syndromes and a Century, one of  Weerasethakul’s more accessible films. Music plays a vital role in his features. More often than not, his lulling melodies and soft refrains complement the dreamlike narratives that ask us to abandon ourselves to reverie – and go with the flow. In Mekong Hotel (2012) guitar music accompanies a shifting tale of fact and fiction between a vampire and her daughter in a hotel situated by the Mekong River. Ambient sound in also a used to recreate the intensely sensuous nature of the early scenes of Syndromes and a Century. Traditional folks songs also feature in this autobiographical work that explores the director’s early days at home with his medic parents.

Moroccan-French artist Bouchra Khalili works with film, video and mixed media. Her focus is on ethnic and political minorities examining the complex relationship between the individual and the community. She is also a Professor of Contemporary Art at The Oslo National Art Academy and a founding member of La Cinematheque de Tanger, an artist-run non-profit organisation based in Tangiers, Morocco. She was the recipient of the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship from Harvard University (2017-2018). Her latest film installation is Twenty-Two Hours (2018).

The three other short-listed artists are: Anna Boghiguian, Otobong Nkanga and Trevor Paglen. The prize will be awarded in January 2019.

NATIONAL MUSEUM CARDIFF | 26 OCTOBER – 24 JANUARY 2019  ARTES MUNDI

 

 

Made in Prague | Czech Cinema 100th Anniversary

This October marks the 100th year anniversary of the foundation of Czechoslovakia. The celebrations begin with an opening night gala screening of Jan S. Kolár’s silent epic St Wenceslas from 1929; accompanied by a musical ensemble specialising in medieval polyphony.

The 22nd MADE IN PRAGUE Festival showcases the best of contemporary Czech cinema cherry picked from international film festivals’ circuit. It features Barefoot by the Oscar-winning director Jan “Kolya” Sverak; Insects, the legendary filmmaker Jan Svankmajer’s swansong; the UK premiere of Martin Sulik’s drama The Interpreter starring the Oscar-winning director of Closely Observed Trains Jiri Menzel and German star of Toni Erdmann Peter Simonischek, fresh from the 2018 Berlinale. Also screening will be Olmo Omerzu’s Winter Flies, winner of the 2018 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival Director’s Prize. Complemented by Vit Klusak’s The White World According to Daliborek, a hilarious stylised documentary portrait of a Czech neo-nazi, and Cervena, Olga Sommerova’s portrait of a vivacious 92-year-old world famous opera singer, the mixture of fiction and documentaries with accompanying debates and Q&A showcases the best of Czech cinema mapping the country’s past and current achievements.

MADE IN PRAGUE | Czech Centre London and other venues across the city, including the Barbican, Design Museum, Regent Street Cinema, Tate Modern, UCL, plus others.

 

Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot (2018) **

Dir: Gus Van Sant | Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Jonah Hill, Rooney Mara, Jack Black, Udo Kier | Biopic | US 113′

Joaquin Phoenix plays a recovering alcoholic artist in Gus Van Sant’s latest drama. And it’s a gruelling journey padded with scenes of fuzzy humour, based on the autobiography of prolific cartoonist John Callahan whose drawings lighten the load. Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot chronicles the aftermath of an accident which leaves him quadriplegic, his doodles providing a creative outlet for his bitter frustration and struggle to come off the wagon, in a reduced physical state. On and off screen lover-cum-nurse Annu (Rooney Mara) gives him affectionate support along with John (Joaquin Phoenix) his patron, gay philanthropist Donnie (Jonah Hill). Feelgood but toothless, Don’t Worry is also quite tedious to watch as the frequent flashbacks shows the before and after, Phoenix often wallowing in self-pity and milking his melancholy for all he can get. But there are amusing scenes where he rides his wheelchair in traffic and up skateboard ramps. When it comes to paraplegic comedy dramas, Kills on Wheels (2016) did it better, along with the outstanding Untouchable (2011).

Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot tries to be touching and soulful in its portrait of loss and redemption. But despite its strong cast, it just adds insult to injury. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE

Possum (2018) ****

Dir: Matthew Holness | Cast: Sean Harris, Alun Armstrong | 82′ | UK |

Writer-director Matthew Holness’ impressive feature debut is given considerable resonance by outstanding performances from Sean Harris as a traumatised puppeteer locked in toxic turmoil with his abusive uncle (Alun Armstrong).

Very much genre festival fare and unlikely to appeal to mainstream audiences this low-budget psychological thriller scratches at the edges of horror telling a tale of childhood trauma and abuse revisited on an adult puppeteer Philip (Harris) who desperate to escape the emotional clutches of his noncey uncle Maurice (Armstrong) who still holds him in thrall after decades of abuse following the death of his parents in a fire. In this lugubrious labour of toxic trauma, Philip tries to eradicate his childhood – represented by a spindly, spider-like puppet (the head is an replica of the actor’s) – while perpetually playing out a macabre dance of desperate dysfunction with his uncle. Philip detests Maurice yet can’t live without him: a momentary failure to locate the demon despot in their grimy shared coffin of a crib sends him spinning into full blown psychosis. 

Set in dank and desolate part of the Norfolk marshes this atmospheric tribute to the British nasty fare of the Seventies often feels quite stagey in its interior settings which take place in a decrepit, boarded-up 1930s hovel, but the surrounding locations really bring home what it meant to grow up in an England of second rate secondary modern schools where family members and figures of authority still inspired dread in those whose lives they controlled.

Returning to his childhood home as a 50-year old the outwardly morose and troubled Philip still recalls each painful flinch of his abusive upbringing as fleeting expressions of trauma haunt his pinched face, like passing clouds on a stormy night. His wiry body is contorted and tortured by the terror of his young days; shoulders and hands writhing and gurning in memory of the misery. And we feel for him despite his ghastly appearance and unappealing persona.

Slim of narrative but rich in atmosphere this slow-burning shocker gradually throws up clues to the past in an enigmatic storyline that occasionally feels repetitive in the first two acts despite a meagre running time of 82 minutes. But the final denouement pays off with its gratifying themes of retribution and redemption. 

This splendidly stylised horror outing is shot on 35mm by DoP Kit Fraser, complete with a scary score from the Radiophonic Workshop (which formerly provided the sounded effects for Dr Who – Holness is best know for his TV work). But Possum really belongs to Sea Harris giving him full rein to his flex his considerable talents as one of the best British actors on the contemporary scene. MT 

OUT ON 26 OCTOBER 2018

 

The Hate You Give (2018) ****

Dir.: George Tillman jr.; Cast: Amanda Steinberg, Lisa Carter, Russell Hornsby, Algen Smith, KJ Apa, Sabrina Carpenter, Common, Anthony Mackie; USA 2018, 133 min.

Director George Tillman jr. (Faster) and his screen writer Audrey Wells have made a brulliant job of adapting the novel The Hate U Give, avoiding clichés and easy answers in this case of another shooting of a black youngster by a white police officer. Instead of solutions, Tillman explores the issues through a teenager representing both communities: she – and other young people – are the victim of a fight they did not chose.

Starr Carter (a brilliant Amanda Steinberg) lives with her family in the black neighbourhood of Garden Heights. Every morning she puts on the uniform of her prestigious prep school and becomes somebody else. Her boyfriend Chris (Apa) and ‘bestie’ Kayleigh (Carpenter) are both white, as are the majority of the students. Starr’s mother Lisa (Hall) has insisted on her choice of school. She wants security for her daughter. Her father Maverick‘Mave’ (Hornsby) is deeply politicised, Black Panther leaflets are all over the house. Starr’s half brother is also very much into his black identity. As a small child, Starr has been the key witness of her classmate’s shooting by the black drug lord (Mackie), who rules Garden Heights with an iron fist. History will soon repeat itself, when Starr is in the car with childhood friend Khalil (Smith) who is shot dead by a white police officer, who mistook a hairbrush for a piece. But, as black officer Carlos (Common) explains to Starr and her father, this is not a simple case because the officer suspected that Khalil was a drug dealer (which he actually was), and reacted in self defence.

When Mave asks Carlos if he would have shot Khalil, the officer nods. “But, if the person in question would have been a white man in a Mercedes, would you have shot too?”, asks Mave. Carlos replies that he would have asked the white man to raise his hands. This double standard is not a question of race, but of tribal law: police officers of all colours are used to dealing with drug lords like the one running the black neighbourhood. It does not matter to them, in the moment of confrontation, that the huge majority of the black population is equally afraid of the drug dealers. Nevertheless, a heated street battle is being fought, and Mave is not only fighting the police, but the black drug dealers, who suspect him of collaborating with the police. In the final analysis, Amanda surmises that hate and violence is not only a question of race.

Stylishly shot on the widescreen and revealing personal close-ups, Steinberg carries the feature with extreme maturity: she is a girl of divided loyalties. And must find a world where she can live in peace with both sides.

Without lecturing, Tillman tries to ask questions. And the audience has to to answer. And there’s no easy answer here, only an acknowledgement that the fault lines run much deeper than the agitators on both sides want to admit. At the same time, The Hate U give is a full-blooded thriller, and in spite of the length, it sustains its suspense. And the real triumph is the marriage of genre aesthetics and articulate political content. AS

NATIONWIDE FROM 22 OCTOBER 2018 | SCREENING DURING BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2018

Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) Tribute to Terence Davies

Dir: Terence Davies | UK Drama | 83′

Davies’s epic, musical celebration of the working class evokes a late 40s to late 50s cultural space. This was  soon to be replaced by more individualist post 1963 space where there existed, in certain areas of Liverpool, communal values and social cohesion.

All that celebration of feeling (Distant Voices, Still Lives is a visceral and passionate work) comes hurtling back with vivid memories of a lost culture. It wasn’t all good, nor that bad, just considerably more honest and trusting. A lot of life was regimented, ordered and repressive yet authority had still managed to resist the effects of intense commercialisation. 

By 1988 we could look back wistfully at the better, and more authentic, aspects of those far distant voices and still lives – with “still” meaning organically centred or fixed by memory – and wonder what the film was saying about us in the present. By the eighties some of us sensed that society had become a hard and rapaciously driven market culture. 

Now in 2018 we can more thoughtfully analyse, to the point of mourning, the family and neighbourhood values that Distant Voices, Still Lives both celebrates and critiques. Those values may be now corroded, or even lost to us (Brexit is looming) but such a deep expression of the communal found perhaps its greatest, and most un-patronising, expression in Terence Davies’s eloquent film. Alongside such British films as Powell’s A Canterbury Tale, Losey’s The Servant and Anderson’s If…it’s a masterpiece and a landmark picture about English identity, class, aspiration, emotion and power. 

There is no linear narrative. The story is simple. A family’s reaction to a tyrannical father (brilliantly played by Pete Postlethwaite.). His death. The mourning. New life for the family as they grow up, marry and have children. The celebration of that fact. Growing old. The vicissitudes of extended family life where patterns of domestic abuse are dolefully repeated. Things forgiven. Put up with. Then, from the women, the fighting back. Whilst the men remain both complacent and shaken.

The film consists of two parts with the Still Lives section being filmed two years after the Distant Lives half. It’s a cyclic memory film indebted to Alain Resnais (minus the cerebral) and with a warmth that we get from Jean Renoir (all the performances of Distant Voices, Still Lives feel more ‘lived’ than acted.) Impressions, fragments, epiphanies, words and gestures are rigorously bonded by two musical soundtracks. 

We have the music of popular culture, such as O Mein Papa, Love is a Many Splendid Thing, blues, classical art and folk song (O Waly Waly) Vaughan Williams’s 3rd symphony, choral music, radio comedy and the shipping forecast amongst others.

That eclectic line-up functions as both counterpoint and relief to the song repertoire of ordinary people at home or in pubs singing their hearts out. Such popular songs as Taking a Chance on Love, I Love the Ladies and Dreamboat. Yet not just hearts but also minds are revealed as Terence Davies skilfully uses song with a dualism to both masquerade and expose his characters’ thoughts. 

Take the moment when actor Angela Walsh sings her solo “I Wanna be Around to pick up the pieces when somebody breaks your heart” it’s especially affecting when you realise she is unhappily married. None of the community singing ever becomes mannered or sentimental. Its pitch-perfect delivery keeps delving into character motivation – raw, soulful and compassionate utterances: collective and individual needs are voiced and move the film’s people on, in time and space, through beautifully shot and composed scenes. (Interestingly the fierce father never gets to sing with a group. His only lone singing moment is when he’s shown cleaning the coat of a pony in a barn, watched by a secret audience – his children when very young.) The musical genres of opera, operetta and the MGM musical (adored by Davies) giving his film the structure of a hybrid, autobiographical ballad. And complementing this extended song (both joyful and heartbreaking) are some masterly tracking shots.

One breathtaking example is one where a daughter weeps for her dead father and the camera moves along into darkness, followed by lit candles and the Catholic family together celebrating Christmas. States of death, belief, innocence and forgiveness are effortlessly trailed in front of you like a cine-poem (Terence Davies greatly admires T. S. Eliot.) Watching it again I thought of the working class voices of the pub scene in The Waste Land and flash forwarded to Davies’s 2008 Liverpool documentary Of Time and The City where Davies himself reads excerpts from Four Quartets as his camera tracks over the waterfront’s Royal Liver building at night.

I return to the year and month the film was released – September 1988. My father died aged 79 in May of that year. I wrote a short film script about him. It was called A Box of Swan and was accepted and broadcast on BBC2 in October 1990. Pete Postlethwaite was cast in the film as the older son having to deal with the funeral arrangements of his father. 

My own real father wasn’t like the violent man portrayed by Postlethwaite in Distant Voices, Still Lives. But when I witnessed the domestic violence depicted in Davies’s film I thought of my long dead Uncle Harry. He was a morbidly religious man and did what the father did in the film – beat his daughter and wife with a broom in the coal cellar. I thought of my poor Aunt Edie. And not just how art, as the cliché goes, imitates life but can tighten your memory’s hold on the cruelty of real actions. 

Yet cinema can also have a powerful redemptive charge. And Davies’s courageous film is of that high order of filmmaking. I don’t know if he knows, along with Eliot, the poetry of W.B.Yeats but the working class rituals and habits of Distant Voices, Still Lives make me think of lines from his poem A Prayer for my Daughter.

 “How but in custom and ceremony 

  Are innocence and beauty born?” 

You don’t have to know any of this poetry to appreciate the film, for it has its moving and cinematic own. And is, without me really needing to say, wonderfully acted by all concerned, a technical triumph (now beautifully re-mastered) very sad, very funny and resolutely affirmative – once seen it’s unforgettable. Alan Price©2018     

TERENCE DAVIES 1945-2023 | RETROSPECTIVE | VIENNALE 2021 | 21-31 OCTOBER

Edie (2018) *** Home Ent release

Dir.: Simon Hunter; Cast: Sheila Hancock, Kevin Guthrie, Amy Mason, Wendy Morgan; UK 2017, 102 min.

Oscillating between embarrassing and clumsy, Simon Hunter plays a tune with another inter-generational dalliance, this one sees a 83-year woman climbing a mountain in the Scottish Highlands, but wastes the great talent of lead Sheila Hancock.

After the death of her tyrannical husband, confined to a wheelchair for thirty odd years of their marriage, his widow Edie (Hancock) is on the verge of being packed off to a care home by her daughter Nancy (Morgan). Their relationship has always been strained so instead Edie decides to fulfil a burning ambition to scale the mountain in the Scottish Highlands, a trip originally planned with her father before he died. Her controlling husband had since managed to scupper the plans.

Leaving a slightly diffident message for her daughter, Edie heads North where she meets young Jonny (Guthrie), who sells her his services as a guide and paraphernalia from his sport shops. But his overbearing girlfriend Fiona (Mason) becomes jealous when Jonny takes a shine to Edie, impressed by her enterprising ambition to conquer one of Scotland’s most challenging peaks (Suilven), to make up for years of marital bitterness and resentment.

In this tale of life-affirming tale of redemption Simon Hunter certainly captures the magical beauty of the Highlands as well as the slightly comic camaraderie between Guthrie and Hancock, who is magnificent as Edie. But there are also some slightly misjudged moments such as when Edie attends a raucous party with Jonny’s loutish friends, made up like a caricature of a much younger woman. The film also verges into the realms of luxury travelogue, when Edie stumbles during a storm into a glamorous ‘hut’ with a blazing fire, and is fed porridge by the silent owner, things start to feel rather over-egged – or maybe over-salted? Which ever way, this is way over the top, even for a mountain drama. AS

Home entertainment | on blu-ray and DVD from 29th October 2018

Dogman (2018) ****

Dir: Matteo Garrone | Ugo Chiti | Adamo Dionisi, Francesco Acquaroli, Edoardo Pesce, Laura Pizzirani | Drama | 120′ | Italy

Matteo Garrone’s terrific revenge thriller returns to his own stamping ground of Caserta with a richly thematic and compulsive exploration of male rivalry in a downtrodden dog eat dog football-playing community barely scratching a living.

Life has always been tough in this neck of the woods, infested by gangland influences: it is a terrain that Garrone knows and describes well in his 2008 feature Gomorrah. A brutal brotherhood controls this bleak beachside wilderness where everyone relies on each other to survive.

At the heart of Dogman is a tour de force turn from actor turned director Marcello Fonte who plays an endearing and diminutive dog grooming supremo who, although popular and kind, has formed a toxic twosome with local hoodlum and sociopath Simone, a thorn in his side who is always dragging him into trouble. Marcello’s wife has cleared off and left him to care for his young daughter Sofia (Alida Baldari Calabria) –  and dog-grooming hardly makes ends meet, so to keep Simone sweet he supplies him with cocaine and courtesies, though secretly he wishes him dead.

Marcello possesses the same innate goodness as Lazzaro in Rohrwacher’s drama that played earlier in the competition line -up. And he’s gifted and patient with the dogs brought into his shop, and in one scene he actually goes out of his way to rescue a chihuahua who has been nearly frozen to death in a botched robbery.

Garrone uses similar ‘good and evil’ themes as Scorsese in his New York street thrillers where one good person is perpetually trying to redeem the others, against the odds, and often at his own expense. Marcello is keen on his friends and is popular and wants to keep it that way, but Simone is a liability and one day will lead him to tragedy.

This is a gritty and violent film and often unbearably so, but there are moments of heart-rending tenderness between his Marcello and his dependants, where tears will certainly well up. Fonte won Best Award at Cannes for his skilful portrayal that switches subtly from sad loner to desperado.

Garrone sets the desolate scene resonantly with his brilliant lighting and inventive camerawork, this time working with DoP Nicolai Bruel, who paints this part of Italy with an almost gothic desperation highlighted by Michele Braga’s mournful musical score. MT

NOW ON BFI PLAYER | BEST ACTOR AWARD MARCELLO FONTE | CANNES 2018

https://youtu.be/LI2JE_xjAaY

Yuva (2018) *** Warsaw Film Festival 2018

Dir/scr: Emre Yeksan | Drama | Turkey. 2018. 119′

From the depths of Southern Anatolia comes this exploration of subsistence in the wild. And although it very much connects with the narrative of the survival for remote communities; in this case, it sees a man trying to disconnect from his human companions in order to pursue life on his own in nature.

YUVA is writer/director Emre Yeksan’s follow-up to Körfez. Set in the heart of a wooded wilderness, Yuva relies on minimal dialogue and an evocative ambient soundtrack to guide us through a sensory rather than plot driven story of Veysel (Kutay Sandikci) who has left his urban past behind, along with his family, to seek solace in nature and the animal kingdom, Veysel is attempting to rewind his own process of evolution as a human, and so make a purer connection with his natural surroundings.

The verdant lushness of the scenery and the extraordinary otherworldly peace and quiet are the most pleasurable elements that Yeksan conveys together with his commendable sound designer and composer Mustafa Avci. Veysal appears out of the undergrowth carrying an injured animal to the base of a tree that will provide an enigmatic touchstone to this experimental drama (along with a red cross painted on the trunk), as the story unfolds. Veysel is clearly at one with his surroundings, hardly uttering a word until he is roused from his relaxed state of mind by his brother Hasan (Eray Cezayirlioglu) who arrives with some groceries and supplies. Clearly these two are close and very fond of one another and this is shown through kind gestures, one to the other. But the suggestive supernatural elements (poetic realist dreamscapes) are never properly developed. The pace soon quickens into something more febrile in the second act when this rural idyll is disturbed by the arrival of builders – the curse of modern day life – and their guns make it clear that Veysel is not welcome. Anyone who lives in an urban setting knows how miserable life becomes once the developers arrive with their schemes to make money, and more importantly noise and disruption, and this is will resonate with a worldwide audience. The coming of these sinister interlopers sees Veysel drawn back into the human sphere from which he has tried to detach himself. Perhaps Yeksan is hinting at a metaphor for a negative political climate, or even just the simple encroachment of family concerns that threaten to cloud our lives when we aim to escape for some respite.

YUVA eschews a traditional narrative and is experimental in nature, working best as a meditation in its woodland habitat, entrancing us with the ethereal sense of place captured by Jakub Giza’s mesmerising camerawork and breathtaking visuals that lull us into a sense of calm. When the ever loudening sound of chainsaws starts to rupture the placid serenity of it all, Veysel’s motivations seem entirely justified in his desire to escape. Yeksan creates a timely and innovative drama that echoes our atavistic human need to connect with nature, and to seek the peace that will contributes to our collective mental health. MT

SCREENING DURING WARSAW FILM FESTIVAL | 12-21 OCTOBER 2018

Cladagh (2018)**** LFF 2018

Dir: Margaret Salmon | Doc | UK | 40′

Starfish, cup coral, langoustine, dolphins, Herring gulls and Gaelic verse: these are a few of Ullapool’s favourite things, along with the limpid seas and emerald hillsides that make this Scottish Highland settlement, warmed by the North Atlantic Drift, such an important port and tourist destination.

CLADAGH is a lyrical portrait of indigenous habitats and species, as well as human interactions with the sea, in and around the remote coastal town in northwest Scotland. But the film is more than just a documentary – it’s a sensory experience that lulls us into the gentle rhythms and the ebb and flow of its maritime way of life that imbues in its inhabitants a natural softness that has sadly disappeared from the urban sprawl. Wandering through the cobbled streets in the June sunshine, children dance on the key-side while older residents take in the glorious sea views. A local school gathers for a ceilidh accompanied by solo musicians, and then back to the shore for an underwater dip in the cool Atlantic where a variety of local sea animals enjoy their unpolluted habitat.

Director Margaret Salmon, who made the hyper realist fantasy drama Eglantine (2016) develops her worthwhile and enchanting filmic forays into the natural world that started with P.S. in 2002, and continued with Everything That Rises Must Converge (2010); Enemies of the Rose (2011); Gibraltar (2013); Pyramid (2014) and Bird (2016), amongst other titles. Very much festival fare, but valuable in their thoughtful exploration of the British Isles, and often further afield. MT

SCREENING DURING BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL | 10-21 OCTOBER 2018

Evelyn (2018)

Dir: Orlando von Einsiedel | UK Doc | 95′

A quietly moving exploration of grief is set in the Highlands of Scotland and the glorious summer seascapes of Cumbria where a family attempt to recover from their loss.

Orlando von Einsiedel’s the documentary debut follows a Oscar nomination for his short film Virunga, and he builds on that experience with something much more intimate and personal and also experimental: with so much grief to process he frequently questions his ability to complete the project given the feelings that surge up during film-making. As such, Evelyn is very much a cathartic experience for Orlando, as well as a testament to tragic bereavement and coming to terms with all.

When his brother, newly diagnosed with schizophrenia and suffering intense depression, took his own life at the age of 18. The eldest of the four, Orlando and his other two siblings have buried the trauma. His parents divorced after completing the family, long before the tragedy happened. Over a decade after the suicide, the family set out on a hiking tour, joined at one point by their rather pompous German father and Evelyn’s two best friends, to reflect on his death and life.

Sometimes when people die we imbue them with qualities they did not possess and this is certainly the case for Evelyn’s father who subtly casts aspersions for what happened on his family – particularly on daughter Gwendolyn, that almost suggests that his son would have survived had he gone to Germany. But on a more positive note, it is Evelyn’s close friends who bring the most warmth and clarity to this family buttoned down by their unreleased grief. Evelyn is a worthwhile and beautifully captured exploration of collective emotional grief.MT

NETFLIX

 

The Nightshifter (2018) **** LFF 2018

Writer/Dir: Dennison Ramalho | Cast: Daniel de Oliveira, Claudia Jouvin, Fabiula Nascimento, Bianca Comparato | Horror | Brazil | 110′

Communing with the dead its nothing new. For thousands of years people have been contacting their loved ones in the afterlife for guidance and reassurance, but in this evocative and darkly inventive Brazilian chiller a morgue worker takes a step too far.

Stênio (Daniel de Oliveira) works on the night shift in the central morgue of Brazil’s violent southern capital, Porto Alegre. Street brawls, venal crime and knifings provide him with a blood-soaked work load. And once the Stryker saw has done its postmortem job, Stênio makes small talk with the cadavers, relaying  their final thoughts or family messages before they go six feet under. But one dead body shares an idle rumour that Stênio’s wife is cheating on him. Riddled with suspicion, he take matters into his own hands, so breaking the strict code of the dead and bringing a tragic curse on his entire family.

Stênio, a generous-hearted father of two, works hard to make ends meet so why has his wife, feistily played by Fabiula Nascimento, turned against him? Odete seemed happy enough making cakes for her friend’s business but now she claims his whiff of ‘eau de corpse’ has put her off his advances. But she showers her affections on her lover who rewards her with new clothes. Perhaps poor Stênio needs to spend less time talking to bodies and more time pleasing his family.

Andre Faccioli’s garish visuals establish the neon-lit gang-ridden streets of Porto Alegre where sirens screech and brutal death is a nightly occurrence. Stênio is driven mad as the corpses pile up in this tricksy narrative that twists and turns like a murderer’s dagger. Macabre overhead shots see him sweeping up the bloody waste, as the gurneys overflow with gore and slaughtered bodies. Meanwhile, his homelife is just as messy; son Edson is going off the rails and daughter Ciça is frightened. The claustrophobic morgue closes in him; mangled corpses burst out of their ‘fridges. At night his cramped flat feels like a coffin, and the tension is palpable in this sordid metaphor for Brazil’s modern malaise.

In his directing debut Dennison Ramalho doesn’t rein back from the grimness of it all: Quite the reverse, there’s a subversive humour to The Nightshifter – be it ever so dark. This noirish fantasy horror lingers perpetually in the penumbral hours, relishing and regaling in the seemier side of an existence where life and death become one big twilight zone where the dead seem to hold sway over the living. MT

SCREENING DURING THE BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | 10-21 October 2018

https://youtu.be/ogiPV2hafbo

Bad Times at the El Royale (2018) ***

Writer/Dir: Drew Goddard | Cast: Dakota Johnson, Jeff Bridges, Lewis Pullman | Jan Hamm, Cynthia Erivo, Chris Hemsworth | US Drama | 141′

Drew Goddard moves from a Cabin in the Woods to a hotel straddling Nevada and California in his over-stuffed Neo-noir saved by a dynamite cast. Set in Lake Tahoe hotel during the Nixon era, a bold attempt to tribute Tarantino is laudable but over-ambitious, and although El Royale juggles a fistful of plots in its fractured narrative the result is unwieldy and far too long. The central figure is Jeff Bridges’ Reverend Flynn, a gangster posing as a man of the cloth who has returned to El Royale for his ill-gotten gains, in the shape of a briefcase of dollars, years later. His fellow guests at this jaded establishment with two-way mirrors include an ebullient salesman (Jon Hamm); a mysterious gun-toting femme fatale (Dakota Johnson) and Cynthia Erivo’s brilliant lounge singer who keeps giving forth with those strong-voiced solos which will soon come in handy, plotwise. There’s a seething paranoia abroad reflecting the febrile political era and each character seems locked in their own private hell, not least the timid bell boy (Lewis Pullman’s Miles Miller) as who is the real dark horse of the El Royale. And when the story’s almost done, along comes a cocky Chris Hemsworth channelling Charles Manson in an ill-advised final chunk to the proceedings – he’s determined to get his hands on the loot. It all looks stylish and slick and the acting is superb, yet for all this mystery and money (clearly the budget was huge) there’s no satisfaction to be had in the protracted ending. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 12 October 2018 NATIONWIDE

22 July (2018) ***

Dir.: Paul Greengrass ; Cast: Anders Danielsen Lie, Jonas Strand Gravli, Jon Oigarden, Hilde Olausson; Norway/Iceland/USA 133 min.

British director/co-writer Paul Greengrass (United 93) imagines what actually happened during the Norwegian tragedy of 22. July 2011, when right-wing nationalist Anders Behring Breivik killed 69 children on the island of Utoya. Earlier in the day, he had already killed eight passers-by with a bomb in the diplomatic quarter of Oslo. The main focus here is aftermath on the island, and Greengrass ends with a moving court scene.

Anders Breivik (Lie) is a narcissistic killer who prepares for his atrocities meticulously – as if the world were already watching him. After the bombs go off near government offices, he sets out for the island of Utoya, where the Youth Section of the Norwegian Labour Party is meeting. After the killing spree Breivik is contained, treating the policemen who arrest him, with cold distain, as if to say “you should be helping me, not putting me in jail”. In prison, Breivik asks for a well-known liberal lawyer, Geir Lippesad (Oigarden), who takes on his defence, even though he is emotionally repelled by his new client. Lippesad was forced to move his children out of their local schools, as fellow parents could not understand him defending a monster like Breivik. The latter had never actually met a single member of the local Norwegian fascist scene. One of its leaders, who had communicated with Breivik via the internet whilst playing video-games (!) describes him in court as a loner, not worthy of being one of the movement’s leaders – whilst also condoning his actions. Breivik’s mother (Olausson) tries to apologise for what has happened, but blames it all on uncontrolled immigration.

After the attack, Greengrass then switches his focus to Viljar (Gravli), who has been close to death after being shot by Breivik, on the island. Learning to walk again, and living in fear of the shrapnel pieces near his spine moving and killing him, he confronts his attacker in a cathartic court scene. Breivik’s isolation and loneliness contrasts sharply with the solidarity of his family and fellow-survivors.

Apart from an over-schematic script, 22. July is laudable largely because Greengrass avoids sensationalism, and concentrates on the personalities of those involved. Lie gives a brilliant performance of the isolated, arrogant and self-controlled killer, who is unable to feel empathy for anybody – apart from himself. DoP Pal Ulrik Rokseth’s images treat the events like a documentary, keeping the audience involved without becoming over-emotional. This portrait of a self-obsessed, human killing machine traces all the ambiguity of his complex personality, without reaching a conclusion. AS

NOW ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE

Austrian Films at the BFI London Film Festival 2018

 

 

AUSTRIAN FILMS BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL

Austrian cinema is always a worthwhile presence at the BFI London Film Festival, and this year is no exception with Sudabeh Mortezai’s streetwise drama JOY featuring in the main competition.

JOY (2018) Tuesday 16 & Wednesday 17 October

Sudabeh Mortezai (Macondo, LFF 2014) presents a vital and hugely affecting drama that tackles the vicious cycle of sex trafficking in modern Europe.

ANGELO (2018) Wednesday 17 & Thursday 18 October

The powerful story of Angelo Soliman, a forced Europeanised African who makes his way through Viennese society in the early 18th century without ever belonging.

STYX (2018) Thursday 11 & Saturday 13 October

A professional woman’s solo sailing journey turns into a deadly serious ethical dilemma in this unusual and taut political allegory. (*Germany-Austria co-production)

TWENTY-TWO HOURS  (2018) Tuesday 16 October

Bouchra Khalili’s meditation on revolutionary histories considers the poet Jean Genet’s secret 1970 visit to the United States at the invitation of the Black Panther Party. *Germany-USA-Norway-Austria co-production Screened in conjunction with PROMISED LANDS, directed by Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa. Austria-Germany-Uganda 2018. 19min

YOMEDDINE (2018) Thursday 18, Saturday 20 & Sunday 21 October

Egyptian filmmaker A.B. Shawky makes his feature debut with this utterly unique road movie which charts the friendship between a leper and a young orphan. *Egypt-Austria co-production

BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | 10-21 OCTOBER 2018 

First Man (2018) **

Dir.: Damien Chazelle; Cast: Ryan Gosling, Claire Foy, Jason Clarke, Olivia Hamilton, Patrick Fugit, Derek Stayton, Corey Stoll; USA 2018,  135 min.

Based on the novel by James R. Hansen and scripted by Josh Singer, director Damien Chazelle’s follow-up to the overrated La la Land, is a mixture of Buddy movie and historical comic-strip, painting a picture of a time where everything was still OK in the USA. But like Lala Land, Chazelle has no gift for good storytelling: everything about his narrative is episodic, there are some stunning scenes, but they never form a whole, or bridge the gap between the personal and the factual in this space adventure story, which sometimes feels quite clunky.                     

Set between 1961 and 1969, First Man tells the story of Neil Armstrong (Gosling), the titular first man to set foot on the moon. Neil and his wife Janet (Foy) lose their baby daughter to a brain tumour, and we all know immediately where her wristband will end up. Most of Neil’s mates – Kyle Chandler (Stayton), Corey Stoll (Aldrin) and Elliot See (Fugit) come across as cyphers. Only Edward Higgins (Clarke) and his wife Pat (Hamilton) are fleshed out convincingly, but Higgins is written out half-way through, dying in a fire during a test run with two colleges. 

Ryan Gosling is not the ideal choice, being too introverted for the part, stonewalling his emotions, the actor’s face betraying his real feelings. In the end Janet has to force him to tell his two sons, that he might not return alive from the Apollo flight. Lots of time is wasted with technical explanations, the running time could have easily been cut by thirty minutes. We get newsreel flashes about the Vietnam War and other newsworthy topics of the period, but the real issues are never tackled. For example, Wernher Von Braun, the program director, was a staunch Nazi in charge of the V-Weapons in WWII, who used slave-labour, for which his boss Sauckl was executed, Von Braun’ status was changed from ‘committed Nazi’ to ‘Neutral’. It is true that the USSR also used Nazi scientists for their Sputnik programme, initiating the joke “We speak German in Space”. Last, but not least, Chazelle never challenges the validity of the whole undertaking: what did Armstrong’s fellow astronauts really die for? The scientific value of the Apollo project was limited, but the political victory over the USSR – who had won the first leg of the space race – was immense. One could expect at least expect some form of statement from the filmmakers.            

Overall First Man is as disjointed as it is patriotic, centred around a male culture of bonding which is never questioned. The political issues of the 1960s are used merely as a backdrop, the only important aspect is the male world order, which is re-enforced continuously. An undistinguished feature, told with the simplicity of a Boys-Own adventure. AS 

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | 28 AUG – 9 SEPT 2018 | NATIONWIDE FROM 12 October 2018

1945 (2017) ***

Dir: Ferenc Török | Cast: Péter Rudolf, Bence Tasnádi, Tamás Szabó Kimmel, Dóra Sztarenki, Ági Szirtes, József Szarvas | Drama | Hungary 2017 | 91 min

Best known for his 2001 comedy drama Moscow Square, Ferenc Török has continued to hone his skills in TV work in his native Hungary. His latest film is an unsettling war-themed drama that takes place on the Hungarian puszta during the blistering heat of August 1945 where the local chemist is getting ready for his son’s wedding. In the sleepy afternoon torpor, two strange men arrive on the scene – and no one is glad to see them. As news of the Sámuels’ arrival seeps through the streets like a bad odour, these orthodox Jewish men dressed in black walk solemnly behind a horse drawn carriage, where their two wooden boxes – like children’s coffins – conceal a mysterious cargo. Clearly something has happened here that has left a sinister whiff of fear for all concerned, not least because of the local’s poor treatment of their Jewish neighbours during the war years. And as they past re-visits the present, the villagers know exactly why they should be scared.

Meanwhile, preparations for the evening wedding are underway. But the bride Kisrózsi (Dóra Sztarenki) is no virgin – she left her good-looking boyfriend Jancsi (Tamás Szabó Kimmel) to pursue a better offer from Arpad, who owns the profitable chemist store. But Arpad’s mother Anna (Eszter Nagy-Kálózy) has rumbled her and is well aware that Kisrózsi and Jancsi are still lovers. This appears to be a community seething in hatred, mistrust and envy, that comes from the outside and from within as they tolerate the constant strain of Soviet occupation.

The tone is very much like that of a darkly comic Midsommer Murders, as the Samuels’ tale intriguingly unfolds amidst a climate of fear and doom. Török and co-writer Gábor T. Szántó base their narrative on Homecoming, a short story where a guilty village serves as a metaphor for national shame, with each character determined to keep their secret in the face of the enemy they have wronged. DoP Elemér Ragályi’s beguiling black and white visuals recreate the 1940s in a mystery that relies on its ominous atmosphere and the strength of its performances, rather than dialogue, to tell a tale of vengeance and dishonour in post war Hungary.MT

NOW SCREENING NATIONWIDE from 12 October 2018

 

 

Two Plains and a Fancy (2018) LFF 2018

Writers/Dirs: Lev Kalman, Whitney Horn | Cast: Benjamin Crotty, Laetitia Dosch, Marianna McClellan, Maria Cid Avila, Alex Decarli, André Frechette III, Libby Gery, Michael Murphy, Travis Nutting, Kim-Anh Schreiber, Logan Boyles | US Drama | 88′

Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn’s “spa western” is a certainly a whimsical curio. A mannered yet inspired period piece it’s set in the Colorado desert in the late 1890s but has characters that are straight out of modern day Brooklyn and smoke dope and utter lines such as “Do you take American Express?”. Along with Laetitia Dosch, it also has the latest buzzworthy star of the indie circuit Benjamin Crotty – whose short film The Glorious Acceptance of Nicolas Chauvin won the Mantarraya prize at this year’s Locarno.

Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn rose to the public gaze with their debut title L for Leisure which is set 100 years later than Two Plains but seems to feature similar fey characters to this quirky drama which takes place over three days in September 1893, after the start of the so-called ‘Denver Depression’. The film also has the same look as Blazing Saddles, without the laughs or the raciness.

To it’s credit, Two Plains doesn’t take itself seriously. There are some rather odd production inconsistencies which are clearly intentional: the signage along the desert route is all freshly painted and the cast are squeaky clean from their rough ride in the dusty landscape and occasionally speak French, eat saucisson and brie for their lunch and have ridiculous names such as Ozanne Le Perrier (Laetitia Dosch with broad French accent), Alta Maria Sophronia (Marianna McClellan) and Milton Tingling (Benjamin Crotty). After a dip in the first spa waters they encounter, their lunchtime conversation focuses on the supernatural and John Atkinson and Talya Cooper’s Sci-Fi style score suggests an ominous, surreal presence in the locale.

But this never develops into a tangible strand in the oddball narrative and the group carry on in a their dilatory fashion in search of the next spa retreat, their bizarre prandial conversations starting to become more and more irritating: amongst other banal subjects they discuss first world concerns such as back-pain, and whether to conduct a séance – which they eventually do – clearly the writers are taking the Micky out of contemporary creative types. Sophronia leads the candlelit seance with a script that sounds more like a post-yoga meditation exercise than the real McCoy. But that’s all part of the ‘humour’. Two Plains & a Fancy is a jokey experiment of a comedy that will either have you dashing for the exit early or rolling in the aisles. MT

SCREENING DURING BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | 10-21 OCTOBER 2018

 

Columbus (2017) ****

Dir.: Kogonada; Cast: John Cho, Haley Lu Richardson, Parker Posey, Michelle Forbes, Rory Culkin; USA 2017, 104 min.

Seoul born director Kogonada is a visual artist known for his documentaries. Columbus is his visually alluring and quietly affecting debut feature exploring the human soul in crisis with great sensitivity and a transcendent feeling of stillness and calm. Set in Columbus, Indiana and underpinned by three fine performances, it is also a love letter to modernist architects Eero Saarinen, I.M. Pei and Richard Meier, whose modernist buildings lend an air of cool contemporary splendour to the bland Mid-West.

Jin (John Cho) arrives from Seoul to look after his estranged father who has suffered a stroke the night before delivering a lecture on modernist architecture. Harassed by his editor and irritated by his Korean family commitments, Jin is drawn back in to the complex world of his father’s assistant Eleanor (Posey), a crush from his younger days. To gain some perspective he wanders around the campus where he comes across Casey (Richardson) as young graduate caring for her sick mother. Casey’s friend Gabriel (Culkin), is another young man lost in a void, hiding behind great words but clinging to the past.

Kagonada makes great use of the impressive buildings and the way they elicit a subtle or profound emotional response from their human counterparts in this  unique study in psychogeography, a subject that has been tackled before in documentary form but rarely as a feature. Each shot is a complex study in how the built environment  impacts on the human element as the protagonists react sensitively to the vibes of the mainly glass-fronted structures and the spaces that surround them. 

The two main protagonists seem trapped in their minds, but Casey feels liberated and inspired by some of these remarkable buildings that move her to dance, cry and sing: in this way architecture provides a means of escape from her days worrying about her mother. Jin feels unmoved by the buildings: he is a more pragmatic character but both are trapped in the security of inertia and familiar routine. 

Casey uses her mother as a reason to postpone decisions about her future, and Jin blames his father’s omnipotent presence for his own underachieving, loneliness and his dysfunctional relationship with Eleanor as the narrative’s dramatic arc slowly points to a solution.

DoP Elisha Christian (In Your Eyes) creates an otherworldly reality inviting us in from the outside as the protagonists glide around aimlessly, like fish in a bowl. Sometimes the atmosphere feels eerie as the buildings take over, dominating everything with their commanding presence, dwarfing and deafening the human element. Columbus is unique in its near transcendental approach, and asks for some patience, but rewards the audience with an extraordinary experience.

NOW ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE AT ARTHOUSE VENUES. 

The Cannibal Club (2018)

Dir/Writer: Guto Parente |Ana Luiza Rios, Tavinho Teixeira | Thriller | Brazil | 75′

Satire is a dish best served with a slice of human flesh in this brilliantly dark, baroquely stylish Brazilian thriller from award-winning filmmaker Guto Parente, who co-directed My Own Private Hell. 

Ana Luiza Rios and Tavinho Teixeira play a wealthy couple in Forteleza who get more than they bargained for due to their carnivorous conniving. In this poor and crime-ridden corner of Brazil, the idle rich live a glorious lifestyle: the sun shines, their private villas are post-modernist and beach-fronted, and there’s more than enough obliging staff to cater to their fantasies, which invariably involve a ménage à trois with a good-looking servant who is then served up for dinner with a glass – or two – of Brazilian Syrah.

Gilda and Otavio are still desirable, along with their coterie of moneyed friends who include bisexual captain of industry Borges (Pedro Domingues). Octavio runs a successful company and belongs to a male only club who regularly meet over dinner to pontificate about the ills of modern life, followed by post prandial porn of the live and sensually Grand Guignol type.

Teixeira’s Octavio is particularly unappealing, an arrogant creep who finally gets his just deserts in the florid finale. Parente’s confidently vulgar narrative is so shamelessly bold it verges on the ridiculous. But The Cannibal Club makes for compulsive viewing punctuated by Fernando Catatau’s tango-style score and the lush backdrop of Fortaleza  Social connections are paramount, desires of the flesh are an hourly preoccupation. Orifices and appetites are voracious and must be filled and satisfied in an elegantly brutal way. And the razor sharp editing of some scenes is particularly masterful thanks to Luiz and Ricardo Pretti who contribute to this success of this slick, succinct and satisfying psychodrama. MT

NOW on BFI PLAYER  | LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2018 PREMIERE

 

Major Arcana (2018) *** Raindance Film Festival 2018

Dir: Josh Melrod | US | Drama | 82’

A simple back to nature tale but none the worse for that, what MAJOR ARCANA really needs is a shot in the arm – ironic considering one of its central themes is addiction. Josh Melrod’s low budget indie sees a jobbing carpenter Dink (Ujon Tokarski) seek solace back in his home town in Vermont where building a wooden cabin serves as a kind of therapy for his long-term drug and money problems. Serendipity has him meeting up with an ex-girfriend Sierra (Tara Summers) who seems to share his troubled past – and is clearly glad to see him again despite their rather frosty surprise re-encounter which will provide the only spark in this gently smouldering tale. Dink’s father has left him a sizeable chunk of property including 52 acres of land that provides the film’s bosky location and cinematographer Ramsey Fendall’s freshly limpid visuals make best use of the lushly verdant landscape with a river running through it. The only thorn in Dink’s side is an alcoholic mother desperate for cash in this everyday story of countryfolk where life goes on but nothing really happens. MT

RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 2018

https://vimeo.com/273335814

My 20th Century (1989) Bfi Player

Writer/Dir: Ildiko Enyedi | Cast: Dorota Segda, Oleg Yankoskiy, Paulus Manker, Gabor Mate, Peter Andorai | Drama | Hungary/West Germany | 104′ 

Enyedi’s intoxicating sensual concoction trips lightly but engagingly over one of the most fascinating and transformative periods in world history – the dawn of the 20th century, seen from the intriguing feminist perspective of two Eastern Europeans, identical twins Dora and Lili, who are born in a simple country household on the evening Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb in 1880. With technology rapidly advancing, could women’s rights ever hope to keep pace?

The orphaned identical twins will take completely different paths in life to discover a world dominated by men where they both nevertheless manage to thrive through their guile and intelligence. One becomes the enticing courtesan/mistress of Oleg Yankoskiy’s Capitalist Z, the other plays take the road less travelled as a radical revolutionary militant. Dorota Segda plays both women in a delicate tour de force that embraces the different possibilities now open to womenkind in a brave new world where their increased agency offers a sense of hope at the turn of the century. She shows how women can succeed if they really put their mind to it.

Still only 34 at the time, Enyedi’s complex but languid fractured narrative seems to amplify the film’s dramatic potential while DoP Tibor Máthé’s sumptuous visual wizardry pays filmic tribute to cinema itself, with the support from the Hamburg Film Board.

Russian star Oleg Yankovsky (Nostalghia) provides romantic support to both women in the lead male role – his slightly exotic looks adding allure to the convincing love scenes. He plays the enigmatic Z. The magical elan of this fairytale-style is further enhanced by twinkling stars and a tinkly original score from Laszlo Vidovszky.

The thematically rich storyline features a variety of animals: a dog in a laboratory sees a vision of the future; a zoo-bound chimpanzee describes how it came to be captured. There is a definite sense of wonder, euphoria and discovery that reflects the true avant-garde nature of the early 1900s – never has art or culture been so radically ground-breaking in the intervening years.

Imaginative and endlessly fascinating to watch this extraordinary debut won Enyedi the Camera D’Or at Cannes in 1989. She continues to experiment on a more realistic but visionary level with On Body and Soul that won the Golden Bear at Berlinale 2017 and just recently at with the overlong but admirable Story of My Wife (2021). MT

4K restoration of MY 20TH CENTURY made possible by BFI awarding funds from National Lottery.

 

 

 

Tehran Taboo (2017) ****

Dir.: Ali Soozandeh; Animation; Elmira Rafizadeh, Bilal Yasar, Zahra Amir Ebrahimi, Negar Mona Alizadeh, Arash Marandi; Austria/Germany, 2017, 96 min.

First time director Ali Soozandeh shows us the seedy tightly-belted underbelly of life in Tehran, where drugs, illegal sex and all sorts of corruption are still part of a daily routine. Using rotoscoped characters and a mixture of 3D and drawn backgrounds, he creates a vibrant picture of a place full of psychotic men and women punished for their hypocrisy.

The central character is Pari (Rafizadeh), a prostitute who takes her mute son Elias (Yasar) with her to work. The first sequence is symbolic of all what follows: Pari is giving a man a blowjob in the front of the car, whilst Elias is sitting in the back, experimenting with an condom. Suddenly, Pari’s customer spots his daughter on the pavement, she is walking hand-in-hand with a boyfriend. The customer, enraged, shouts at the young man calling him a pervert. He pushes Pari aside, and crashes his car.

Pari is trying in vain to get Elias enrolled at a special needs school. But her attempts are unsuccessful, because her husband is serving a long jail sentence for drug-dealing (“I gave them 20 million to avoid the death penalty, now they want ten million for my freedom”), he refuses to sign the application form and will not allow Pari a divorce. When she asks the clerical Judge Adel to help her, he denies her rights – but finds a nice flat for her where he can visit at his leisure, loving the rough sex she provides. In the apartment block Pari where poses as a nurse, we meet Sara (Ebrahimi), who’d rather work as a teacher than have children with her repressive husband Mohsen. Sara looks after Elias, while Pari uses Judge Abdel to get her son into a school. A third narrative strand involves Donya (Alizadeh), who has a one-night stand with musician/DJ Babak (Marandi) and needs an operation to have her hymen replaced for her marriage the following week. When Pari tries to help both Sara and Donya, she discovers that both women have secrets that will lead to their undoing.

Soozandeh makes great use of mirrors and other reflective backgrounds to show the reality, hiding behind the action in front. A typical example of male society is Sara’s father-in-law, a diabetic, who uses Elias to fetch the hidden chocolate from the shelves. He watches pornographic films in Elias’ presence – but is alert enough to quickly switch the TV channels to the state-controlled news as soon as Sara comes into the room. Although the narrative is sometimes too heavy-handed, Soozandeh succeeds in painting a picture of male debauchery and violence behind the curtain of religious purity. MT

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 6 OCTOBER 2018

Le Cahier Noir | The Black Book of Father Dinis (2018) *** San Sebastian 2018

Dir: Valeria Sarmiento | Chile | Drama | 113′

Valeria Sarmiento follows her Locarno curio La Telenovela Errante (2017) with a classically-styled lavishly-mounted 18th century drama that follows the petripatetic exploits of an (unknowingly) aristocratic Italian nursemaid Laura (Lou de Laâge) after her employer dies in mysterious circumstances leaving her in sole charge of an infant son Sebastian.

Based on a literary work by Chilean novelist Camile Castelo Branco, and adapted for the screen by Carlos Saboga, this sedate and ambitious affair establishes an air of intrigue and uncertainty with an sinister orchestral score as Laura is hotly pursued by the saturnine  Marquis Lusault (Niels Schneider), who quickly ravages her before rakishly marrying someone of better birth – or so it initially appears – until Laura’s real heritage is revealed by  Stanislas Merhar’s priest with an ill-fitting wig. The drama then takes off across Europe visiting a series of sumptuously decorated stately palaces with little to distinguish whether they’re in France, Italy and England. No expense is spared in the costume department although everyone shares the same sepia-tinted lipstick (including the men).

Gracefully performed by its accomplished ensemble cast, The Black Book is an elegantly rendered potboiler that pays homage to Sarmiento’s late husband Raúl Ruiz, sharing the same sombre pacing as his masterpiece Mysteries of Lisbon (2010) while also referencing Sarmiento’s 2012 Lines of Wellington (prepared by Ruiz) although not its breadth of subject matter. A solid and engaging drama. MT

SAN SEBASTIAN FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | 21 – 29 SEPTEMBER 2018

 

School’s Out | l’Heure de la Sortie (2018) **** LFF 2018

 

 

Dir.: Sebastian Marnier; Cast: Laurent Lafitte, Emmanuelle Bercot, Luana Bajrami, Victor Bonnel; France 2018, 103 min.

Sebastian Marnier follows his debut Irreproachable with an impressive adaption of Christophe Dufosse’s novel of the same name. Set in a posh secondary school, it has very much in common with John Wyndham’s novel The Midwich Cuckoos, filmed twice as Village of the Dammed in 1960 and 1996.

Supply teacher Pierre Hoffman (Lafitte) is called to St. Joseph’s College, after his predecessor, Capadis, jumped out of the window during a lesson. Hoffman is soon confronted by a group of six very gifted students who have formed a secret society led by Apoline (Bajrami) and Dimitri (Bonnel). This lot don’t seem concerned about what happened to Capadis; they regularly meet in a disused quarry. to perform daring acts and beat each other up – they seem to be immune to pain. Apoline accuses Hoffman, who is gay, of fancying Dmitri. But this is really to get rid of Hoffman on the grounds of his collection of video tapes recording the group’s activities. One of Hoffman’s fellow teachers, a music instructor and choir mistress called Catherine (Bercot), seems to be the only teacher that understands the group. It emerges that her family were killed in a car accident, while she was driving. Dimitri and his group invade Hoffman’s privacy in revenge for him snooping on them. After the finals, the six hijack a bus in a bid to crash it into the quarry. Hoffman escapes by the skin of his teeth, but the stunning finale gives answers to the many questions which have piled up.

Shot by DoP Romain Carcanada, the visuals have a glacial quality, as if everything was set in a frozen climate, despite the stifling summer heat. But this seems to mimic the icy coolness of the group of six. Hoffman is shown as a tortured soul, detached and lacking in any real identity. Bajrami and Bonnel lead with a maturity well beyond their age in this tense and gripping thriller. AS

SCREENING DURING LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | 10-21 OCTOBER 2018

 

A Star is Born (2018) Netflix

Dir.: Bradley Cooper; Cast: Lady Gaga, Bradley Cooper, Sam Elliot, Rafi Gavron; USA 2018, 135 min.

In his debut as a director and co-writer, Bradley Cooper offers a soppy Hollywood melodrama just the right side of tasteful – but only just. The forth remake of the narrative, based on a 1932 story by William A. Wellman and Robert Carson, is slightly superior to the Streisand/Kristofferson version of 1976, but very much in the shadow of Cukor’s 1954 outing starring Judy Garland and James Mason.

As expected with such a high profile cast, everything has to be much larger than life – or to put it simply, American. Clichés cannot be big enough, Ally’s rise can’t be too meteoritic, or the fall of Jack(son) Maine more utterly self-destructive. These are the rules of the game in Hollywood, and even for a mere 36 Million Dollars (not that much by today’s standard), you have to show where the money went.

As a director, Cooper has the decency to put Lady Gaga first, and apart from Jack’s last scene (rather ham-fisted), and some truly awful bathroom scenes which are cringeworthy in the extreme, he allows himself rather a moderate redneck performance, leaving Diva Gaga much space to go over the top. Yes, Jack beat up the man whose wife he seduced even when nearly totally blotto. But we’ve seen Cooper in much worse performances, like American Sniper. He tries to keep the tempo up, and some of the chases really create mayhem.

The support cast is actually, not surprisingly, more realistic than the lead pair: Sam Elliot as Jack’s brother Bobby, his long suffering manager, and Ally’s minder and executive Rez (Gavron) feel very contemporary. Bobby is resigned, his Honest-to-God, I’ve-seen-it-all attitude helps Ally to overcome the sadness of her loss, and Rez is very much his efficient younger counterpart: the ice-cold CEO who saves the day with algorithms and applied psychology.

The main criticism is the running time: 135 minutes is simply too generous in re-telling the not so particularly original story of a B-Picture with the budget of something much, much more. In the end, these production values make A Star is Born just above average. AS

NOW ON NETFLIX

    

Crystal Swan | Khrustal (2018) ****

Dir.: Darya Zhuk; Cast: Alina Nasibullina, Yuriy Borisov, Swetlana Anikey, Ivan Mulin, Ilya Kapanets; Belarus/USA/Germany/Russia 2018, 93 min.

Darya Zhuk 1996-set feature debut shows how little Belarus has changed in the intervening years. Alina Nasibullina is the star turn as a disc jockey in Minsk who dreams of emigrating to Chicago, birth place of House Music. Although her performance takes on a farcical form, the comedy here is really gallows humour – vitriolic and bitter.

Velya lives with her museum curator mother (Swetlana Anikey) who like many in the older generation, yearns for the “good old” days on the Soviet block. The freedom they fought for has brought only insecurity. When Law graduate Velya gets sick and tired of the system and her childish and attention seeking boyfriend Alik (Borisov) she forges Visa documents from the US-Embassy in Minsk, somehow managing mess up her (non existent) employment details. The telephone number actually belongs to a family in a traditional factory town in the countryside, so she sets off to put things right. There she comes up against matriarch Alya who is deaf from blowing crystal in the local factory. Her oldest son Stepan (Mulin) takes a shine to Velya who plays along; having paid the phone bill, she is eagerly awaiting a call from the embassy with a glowing character reference. After Stepan rapes her, Velya goes back to Minsk with another lost soul, his younger brother Kostya.(Kapanets). Alik has moved in with her mother. But all is not lost.

Zhuk directs with great verve and energy, mastering the quickly changing narrative with considerable aplomb. Nasibullina is very much a central European version of Cindy Looper, a misfit in a country with a nostalgia for a brutal past. Velya is by no means a heroine, but a vulnerable victim of her rash spontaneity. DoP Carolina Costa avoids dour realism, crafting this flight for freedom with vibrant colours and inventive angles. 

The only black mark is the LFF’s decision to place Crystal Swan in the festival’s “Laugh” strand: a woman’s rape is anything but funny. Perhaps the selection committee, led by a woman, should take note of IMdb, where the film is rightly classified as “Drama”. AS

LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | 10 -21 OCTOBER 2018 | Karlovy Vary 2018

 

 

The Wife (2018) ***

Dir: Bjorn Runge | Cast: Glenn Close, Jonathan Pryce, Christian Slater | Drama

Bjorn Runge (Happy End) and Jane Anderson’s screen adaptation certainly lacks the teeth of Meg Worlitzer’s acrimonious original – their schematic and conventional approach avoids the novel’s acrimony to bring us just another relationship melodrama despite the screen dynamism of Glen Close and Jonathan Pryce. 

We first meet Joan (Close) and Joe Castleman (Pryce) in 1992 – having just had sex – celebrating his winning the Nobel Prize for literature, they are rolling around in bed like teenagers. It all seems too good to be true – and so it turns out. Their daughter Susannah (Regan) will soon give birth to a son David (Irons) who will fail to outshine his father, in his own writing career. On the flight to Stockholm for the award ceremony, a nagging little voice belonging to journalist/writer Nathaniel Bone (Slater) whispers in his ear, suggesting the great man may have not written the novels by himself. Flashbacks into the life of young Joan (Starke) and Joe (Lloyd) confirm the truth: it was Joan who wrote the whole oeuvre, but in the 1960’s ‘it was easier’ to launch a career as a white, male Jewish genius.

In Stockholm Joe again puts on his charm, trying to seduce young photographer Linnea (Korlof), who could be his grand-daughter. Joan, has seen it all and doesn’t bat an eyelid, reminding him to take his blood pressure tablet, whilst she’s having a long talk with Bone, who’s own research threatens to spill the beans. Joe pays homage to her in a very conventional way in his acceptance speech, ignoring the script the two had agreed between themselves. So naturally, his wife is not amused and leaves  him, setting in motion a dramatic finale where the crux of the matter is once again swept under the carpet.

The topic of female spouses “helping” their husbands to turn out classics is nothing new, Count Tolstoy being a case in point. And closer to home, T.S. Elliot and his wife Vivienne is another example: Elliot later ‘disposed of’ her into a mental hospital, where she died unrecognised. But Runge is eager to show how complicit Joan was in the act of fraud – totally forgetting that this compliance was/is often the only way for women to survive and thrive in society. The female counterpart has always had to carry a huge part of the guilt, be it rape or literary fraud. Whilst the settings of the ‘60s flashbacks are spot on, the endgame in the posh hotel world is false because it deflects from the real conflict. DoP Ulf Brantas tries to outdo Italian cameramen of the 60s, but only succeeds in rehashing the classics. Glenn Close struggles all the time to find a voice, but is submerged by a script which gives her no chance to make her point. A wasted opportunity but an enjoyable romp. MT

ON GENERAL RELASE FROM 28 SEPTEMBER 2018

Padre (2016) **

Dir.: Giada Colagande; Cast: Giada Colagande, Willem defoe, Franco Battiato, Miarina Abramovic; Italy/USA 2016, 93 min.

Director/co-writer/star Giada Colagande (Open My Heart) does away with a tangible narrative in this thoughtfully languorous and stunningly captured meditation on death and bereavement, divided into seven chapters with seemingly symbolic headlines suck as “Free from illusion, new motives develop for every act and thought”. Colagrande relies on an associative structure where storytelling is replaced by episodes from the family history, but all she achieves is enigma, which beguiles initially but not for the film’s entire running time. 

In a seaside suburb of Rome, Giulia Fontana (Colagrande) is mourning the sudden death of her father Giulio (Battiato), a well known artist. Skyping with her mother (Abramovic) is one form of release, but Giulia is also comforted by a circle of close friends and amongst them is James (Dafoe) who is staging a mixed-media theatre production in which Giulia has a part. These sequences help to enliven the drama’s narrative torpor adding much-needed texture to what is otherwise rather bland.

After dark, delicately realised visions of her father haunt the house they once shared in happier times, and she tries to keep him alive by reading letters and meditation exercises until the film’s intriguing denouement leaves her at peace. Giulio’s penchant for Asian mysticism and doctrines relating to the soul’s afterlife resonate powerfully in this ancient setting. Giulia is also drawn to a mysterious local art studio where she frequently rummages around in treasures and antiquities eventually uncovering its inner sanctum in the final scenes.  

DoP Tomasso Borgstrom always finds new angles to show off the atavistic beauty of Rome in a contemplative visual treatise that gets lost in a fog of words and graceful poses from her long-haired Persian cat Cosmo. MT

PADRE WILL BE RELEASED IN 2019

Olivier Assayas | Early Films | On Bluray

DISORDER (DÉSORDRE) (1986) ***

Dir.: Olivier Assayas; Cast: Wadeck Stanczak, Ann-Gisel Glass, Lucas Belvaux, Remy Martin, Corinne Dada, Etienne Dacla, Etienne Daho, Philippe Demarle, Juliette Maihe, Simon de Bosse; France 1986, 88 min.

After editing Cahiers du Cinema and writing scripts, among them two for Andre Techiné, Assayas’ debut feature is a playground for lost souls in limbo. Three members of a band, Yvan (Stanczak), Anne (Glass) and Henri (Belvaux, a future director himself) rob a music shop but Yvan loses his nerve and kills the owner. The tone is chaotic and it’s clear that the trio will never be the same again, haunted by their own neurosis, self-doubt and self-obsession. There all react in different ways: Anne is traumatised by the murder; Ivan and Henry go on as if nothing has happened. But Anne soon distances herself from the other two, appalled by their blatant denial. Henri and Yvan get on with the daily running their band. Drummer Xavier (Martin) loses his girl friend band member Gabirel (de Bosse), whilst Ivan falls in love with Cora (Dacla), the manager’s girl friend. Henri is finally overcome by the darkness that has literally defeated him, leaving the rest behind with their doubts, affairs and long phone calls.

What starts as a Bonnie & Clyde drama soon morphs into a classic riff on the soul-searching that would continue to appear in his work: instead of the police (who never appear) we get the inner selves of the protagonists, desperately clinging on to the idyllic days they have left behind in the music shop. Shot in London, Paris and New York, by Assayas’ regular Denis Lenoir (Winter’s Child, Demonlover), whose images are the reflections of the tormented trio, everything rushing by frenetically. Perhaps most memorable are the long sessions in the phone box. Disorder is a modern Dostoyevsky.

WINTER’S CHILD (L’ENFANT DE L’HIVER) (1989) ****

Dir.: Olivier Assayas; Cast: Michel Feller, Clothilde de Bayser, Marie Matheron, Jean-Philippe Escoffey, Anouk Grinberg, Gerard Blain; France 1989, 85 min.

Winter’s Child, the director’s second feature, is a logical follow-up to Disorder. Set in a familiar milieu (the theatre), Assayas once again visits spiritual and emotional stagnation . Stephane (Feller) and Natalie (Matheron) are running out of steam as a couple. Casting around for away to revitalise their relationship they make the mistake of having a child – and this actually makes things worse. Stéhane leaves Natalie during the pregnancy and has a short affair with Sabine (de Bayser), a young set designer. Sabine likes Stéphane, but has just left a passionate relationship with actor Bruno (Escoffey). Sabine shuttles between her two lovers until Bruno rejects her once again, even asking her to leave the theatre so they can be rid of one another, once and for all. This endless chopping and changing goes on until Sabine threatens then with a gun one New Year’s Eve.

Assayas shows how adults are so often prone to emotional immaturity where affairs of the heart are concerned: narcissism predominates, a lack of commitment parades as spontaneity. Natalie’s motherhood at least allows her to progress to adulthood. These characters are brutal and self-pitying at the same time, changing their outlook on life and relationships change as often as their underwear. Winter’s Child would have benefited from the title of the Fassbinder’s first feature: Love is Colder than Death. Assayas certainly makes great progress in the three years between Disorder and Winter’s Child, the latter being an analytical portrait of self-centred emotions, mistaken for love in this brilliant La Ronde of self-deceit. AS

ON BLURAY FROM 8 OCTOBER COURTESY OF ARROW FILMS 

    

Kings of the Road (1976) Bluray release

Dir: Wim Wenders | Cast: Rüdiger Vogler, Hanns Zischler | Drama |

The final part of WIM WENDERS’ loose trilogy of road movies (following on from Alice in the Cities and Wrong Move), KINGS OF THE ROAD has been hailed as one of the best films of the 1970s and remains Wenders’ most remarkable portrait of his own country.

After driving his car at high speed off a road and into a river, losing all his worldly possessions, Robert Lander (Hanns Zischler) hitches a ride with Bruno Winter (Rüdiger Vogler), who travels across Germany’s hinterland repairing projectors in run-down cinemas. Along the way, the two men meet people whose lives are as at odds with the modern world as their own. In attempting to reconcile their past, the two men find themselves increasingly at odds with each other.

KINGS OF THE ROAD is a meditation on the passing of the age of great cinema, an acute study of life in post-war Germany and to this day remains one of Wim Wenders’ most accomplished films.

WINNER – FIPRESCI PRIZE 1976 | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 1976 | RESTORED/REMASTERED IN STUNNING 4K | Commissioned by the Wim Wenders Foundation and supervised by director Wim Wenders

The Big Lebowski (1998) re-release

Dir.: Joel & Ethan Cohen; Cast; Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Julianne Moore, David Huddleston, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Tara Reid, John Turturro; USA 1998, 117 min.

The twentieth anniversary screening of The Big Lebowski reminds us how unique the Cohen Brothers’ features once were, cramming modern classics like Fargo, Barton Fink, Millers Crossing and Blood Simple. into the first twelve years of their prolific output. But in the twenty years gone by since The Big Lebowski, there are just two productions standing out from the crowd: No Country for Old Men and A Serious Man (2009) – and really nothing much in the last decade, although The Ballad of Buster Scruggs looks amazing but it’s more a portmanteau of ideas than a story – and there’s was even a dud in the shape of Hail Caesar! 

The Big Lebowski is about three American men who have lost their way after the Vietnam War and are either totally inept and lazy: The Dude Lebowski (Bridges) lies in his bathtub for hours smoking weed with candles burning down; the bitter Walter Sobchak (Goodman), who knows everything better than anyone else, but is really just an incompetent bully, or the timid Theodore ‘Donny’ Kerabatsos who hides a deeply disturbed, childish soul. Being Americans and used to living in permanent denial, they hide their troubled personalities behind what they believe is a funny persona, but it’s really just sad. Their only way to hang on to real life lies is through their obsession with bowling, spending most of their time in the bowling alley, bickering and fighting with anybody who comes along. And Jesus Quintana (Turturro) is one of their adversaries, dressing in a lilac romper suit he’s even more obsessed with bowling than the other three. When some inept small-time gangsters mistake the Dude Lebowski for the millionaire of the same name, and urinate on his carpet (“it holds the rooms together”), The Dude seeks out his namesake (Huddleston), who is wheel-chair bound and dominated by his twenty-something wife Bunny (Reid) and his slightly older daughter Maude (Moore). After stealing an expensive Persian rug under the nose of Lebowski’s assistant Brandt (Hoffman), The Dude is soon visited by the latter, to deliver one million dollars to Bunny’s kidnappers. Clearly no kidnapping has actually taken place, the trio sets out to deliver the money, but fails miserably. Meeting Maude, who is into sexual therapy based on Reich’s theory of the Orgone, is interesting for The Dude, but the narrative passes our heroes by, and leaves them carrying the can – with tragic consequences.

The directors always manage to keep the comical elements true to life – a difficult task, considering that the three would-be-sleuths seem to overlook every clue being thrown at them. Their reduced and totally self-centred personalities leave them open to being exploited by anyone. But they stagger on, always on the outlook for an onslaught from their imagined enemies – which never comes in the way they imagined it will. Living in their world of total seclusion from reality, they create their own downfall – their self-destruction a symptom of their personality disorder. They generate a permanent world of slapstick: much sadder than it is funny, but it fits in with the wider picture of society the Cohens are painting: the self-inflicted trauma of the Vietnam War, never discussed and covered up by every president from Reagan onwards, has ruined the soul of a nation –  the three ‘blind mice’ in The Big Lebowski are only the first step towards Trump’s America. The audience might laugh – but the last laugh is on them. AS

THE BIG LEBOWSKI IS BACK ON THE BIG SCREEN COURTESY OF PARK CIRCUS IN SELECTED TERRITORIES THROUGHOUT 2018 | For cinema listings and further details check here:

photo credit: UNIVERSAL PICTURES

 

The Third Wife (2018) ****

Dir.: Ash Mayfair; Cast: Ngyuyen Phuong Tra My, Tran Nu Yen Khe, Thu Huong Maya, Le Vu Long, Nguyen Tranh Tam; Vietnam 2018, 83 min.

Ash Mayfair (aka Nguyen Phuongh Anh) left Vietnam at the age of thirteen to study film at RADA in London and New York. Her debut is a surprisingly mature and meticulous drama that focuses on the many-layered exploitation of the women in a feudal household in late 19th century Vietnam.

May (12 year-old Ngyuen Phuong, no relation to the the filmmaker), is married at the age of fourteen to feudal lord Hung (Long), and has to share their home with his first two wives Ha (Yen Khe) and Xuan (Huong Maya). May soon becomes pregnant and competes with Ha and Xuan to bear a son to the master. Sadly she fails and gives birth to a daughter, Ha saving her life with an impromptu caesarean carried out with a kitchen knife. Gradually May is drawn to Xuan while Hung’s son (Tanh Tam) rebels against his father and his dominating regime: he refuses to touch his child bride Tuyet during their wedding night – dishonouring her in the eyes of her family. The young girl hangs herself on a tree, overlooking the river. Gradually, May becomes accustomed to the male dominated household and closes ranks with Ha and Xuan. In spite of her youth, she is already resigned to a life with no real choices. Lien, one of Ha daughter’s, cuts off her long hair in protest – but her gesture is only symbolic.

DoP Chananun Chotrumgroj’s camerawork is sublime, impressionism dominates, particularly Monet’s paintings spring to mind in a soft haze of pink, yellow and blue; every frame a jewel box, a new adventure. The mournful piano music scored by Ton That An heightens the melancholic narrative; the souls of the women are slowly drowning in beauty. But even though The Third Wife won prizes all over the globe (Toronto, San Sebastian, Minsk, Chicago and Cairo), there is something missing. Compared with most other newcomers, Mayfair seems already to be the finished article: the main message of her feature is resignation and suffering, there is no rebellion. Somehow one does expect a little wildness from a first film – but The Third Wife, has very little spirit in its perfection. It is comfortably executed, like a minor etude, playing out without sharp edges let alone barbed wire. AS

SAN SEBASTIAN FILM FESTIVAL 2018

   

The Comfort of Strangers (1990) **** Dual Format release

Dir: Paul Schrader | Writer: Harold Pinter | Cast: Christopher Walken, Natasha Richardson, Helen Mirren, Rupert Everett | US Thriller | 104′

Perhaps better named ‘Never Trust a Stranger’ this unsettling cult thriller sees Colin (Everett) and Mary (Richardson) head to Venice to spice up their jaded sex life. But the trip will also lead to tragedy putting an end to the sensual piquancy they hoped for.

Harold Pinter wrote a winning script that explores the more exotic avenues of sexuality through the couple’s chance meeting with a generous but often brutally playful aristocratic Robert (Walken) and his submissive wife Carol (Mirren). The sultry Venetian ambiance lulls them into a devil may care sense of adventure as they endure a bizarre evening with this strange couple in their magnificent palazzo after which Colin and Mary discover a new zest for each other that melds with obliging uneasiness to comply with Robert’s wishes. Not put off by this second encounter, they surrender to a third get together with devastating consequences. There is seemingly no limit to their naivity which can only be put down to a distinct lack of judgement, and a foolhardiness resulting from their innate English politeness. Schrader’s gracefully paced slow-burner exerts a beguiling yet sinister torque on the viewer, while impressive performances make for an engrossing if unsettling watch, amplified, in hindsight, by Richardson’s untimely death less than a decade later. This is a stifling erotic thriller enriched by Dante Spinotti’s camerawork surrounding us in the richly torpid environment that is Venice in Summer, Gianni Quaranta’s sensuous sets showcasing scenes of stultifying horror. MT

OUT ON DUAL FORMAT FROM 24 SEPTEMBER 2018 | BFI releases are available from all good home entertainment retailers or by mail order from the BFI Shop Tel: 020 7815 1350 or online at www.bfi.org.uk/shop

l’Année dernière a Marienbad (1961) Bluray DVD and digital download

Dir.: Alain Resnais; Cast: Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, Sacha Pitoeff; France/Italy 1961, 94 min

Alain Resnais co-founded the Nouveau Roman movement in the early 1950s going on to win the Palme d’Or with this stylishly somnambulist drama scripted by Alain Robbe-Grillet.

In a splendid Bohemian villa, gorgeously attired guests are enjoying an  languorous cocktail party. A young woman (Delphine Seyrig) is approached by a man (Albertazzi), who wants to elope with her. Apparently they met at the same place the previous year, had an affair, and she let him to believe they would run away together. But this woman is already spoken for by another lover (Pitoeff) who tries to intervene, without success.

The setting is luxurious, treasures and works of art dominating every shot, but the sinister organ music by Francis Seyrig references the doom that lies ahead. Our elegant couple sashay around languidly as if intoxicated by the allure of their sublimely dreamlike surroundings, the enigma of their relationship echoing all around as they ignore the world outside. This soigné world of treasures and culture would soon go up in flames, like the victims of the holocaust.

Resnais filmed at Schleissheim and Nymphenburg castles, built by Ludwig II the King of Bavaria not far from the former Concentration Camp Dachau. The actor Françoise Spira (who would commit suicide at the age of 36), used her 8mm camera to capture “the shooting of Last Year in Marienbad“. Among the material (lost for many decades), where shots of the actors and crew visiting the remains of the concentration camp. Whilst Spira did not shoot inside the camp, her images show the complete indolence of the German population living nearby, who were completely unfazed by the mass murder happening in their midst. When the 8 mm material was re-discovered, German director Volker Schloendorff (who had been a mere second-assistant director during the shooting of Last Year), re-edited the material and added a commentary. The historic implications are clear. Resnais and DoP Sacha Vierny tried to re-create the shots of their famous documentary Nuit et Brouillard. And whilst Resnais’ contemporary comment (“Could I direct this feature whilst the Algerian War was going on?”) reflects his way of of thinking, the highly-stylised pre-WWII atmosphere in Europe not only dominates throughout the drama but reflects on Resnais’ own role as a pure connoisseur of culture when he arrived in Paris in 1940. He was a by-stander during the German occupation, until visits to Austria and Germany “left me no chance, and it became clear why the faces of the French police during the deportations where eradicated  in films and photos”.

Far from being an artificial work of art for the sake of it, Last Year is very much in line with Resnais’ output of the time, set between Hiroshima mon Amour (1959) and La Guerre est Finie (1966). WWII and The Spanish Civil War are shown from a personal angle, and Last Year is really a study of denial and ignorance, which would lead to the outbreak of both the conflicts. The gorgeous aesthetic – however hypnotising –  it is a metaphor for the apathy of a world which is about to be obliterated. AS

NOW AVAILABLE ON BLURAY, DVD AND DIGITAL DOWNLOAD COURTESY OF STUDIOCANAL

Extras

New: ‘RESNAIS and ROBBE-GRILLET – The wanderers of imagination’

Interview with Film Historian Ginette Vincendeau

2 short films by Alain Resnais: ‘THE STYRENE’S SONG’ and ‘ALL THE MEMORY OF THE WORLD’

‘In the Labyrinth of Marienbad’

Restored Trailer

BD only: Documentary on Alain Robbe-Grillet

ON BLURAY COURTESY OF STUDIOCANAL FROM 17 SEPTEMBER 2018 

 

Eye of the Needle (1981) *** Bluray release

Dir: Richard Marquand | Cast: Donald Sutherland, Kate Nelligan, Christopher Cazenove, | Action Drama | UK |

EYE OF THE NEEDLE is an ambitious wartime spy thriller set on the Isle of Mull and based on Ken Follett’s novel adapted for the screen by Stanley Mann. It was one of several big screen outings made by the British TV director Richard Marquand along with Jagged Edge and Return of the Jedi.

Evergreen themes of passion vs marital allegiance are bought sharply into focus when a stranger arrives on the remote Scottish Island en route to Germany with secrets that will stop the D-Day Invasion. Donald Sutherland’s ruthless spy is the outsider who inveigles himself into the household of Lucy (Kate Nelligan) and her ex-RAF husband David (Christopher Cazenove) who is wheelchair bound after a car accident pictured in the early scenes in an idyllic English countryside. But can illicit passion survive the harsh realities of war? This is a gripping and energetic affair, with appealing performances from Cazenove and Nelligan as the conflicted couple, but somehow Donald Sutherland never feels attractive enough to appeal to this lonely woman, and despite his best efforts to bring charisma to the role, he just remains a weirdly unlikeable psychopath.

After a brief prelude in the summer of 1940, Sutherland’s unsavoury German spy called Faber -”Needle” is his codename – finds out that the Allied invasion of Europe will take place in Normandy. But while he’s about to relay this information to his superiors he is shipwrecked on Storm Island (Mull) and rescued by Lucy and David, who is threatened by his steely presence in their family home.  Meanwhile, Faber goes straight for the jugular when he realises that the couple’s marriage is in trouble largely due to David’s feelings of inadequacy, and it’s not longer before he has cast a spell over Lucy with a combination of his powerful persona and bedroom skills. Their passionate affair then becomes the central focus, the spy story taking a back seat with its rather inevitable and unsurprising showdown as Lucy comes to her senses – and there’s nothing like a drab morning in Scotland for staging a wake-up call.

But it’s Kate Nelligan who you’ll remember, nearly three decades after the film’s initial release. It’s a shame her feature film career never really went further than TV work because she brings a remarkable tenderness to her role as Lucy. As war romance thrillers go, Richard Marquand certainly made an impressionable one. MT

OUT ON DUAL FORMAT FROMT 24 SEPTEMBER 2018 | BFI releases are available from all good home entertainment retailers or by mail order from the BFI Shop Tel: 020 7815 1350 or online at www.bfi.org.uk/shop

https://youtu.be/tZTWyNrWkqk

The Captain (2018) Der Hauptmann ****

Writer/Dir: Robert Schwentke | Cast: Max Hubacher, Milan Peschel, Frederick Lau, Waldemar Kobus | Wartime Thriller | 118′

Best known for Divergent and The Time Traveler’s Wife, Robert Schwentke’s first German-language feature for 15 years is a shocking depiction of the dark recesses of the human mind when left to its own devices after emotional trauma has robbed it of all decency.

This gruellingly uncomfortable watch is told through the real-life story of a young German soldier who deserts his unit during the last knockings of the Second World War when he assume the rights but not the responsibilities of of a high-ranking official whose guise he assumes after a chance discovery.

We meet Willi Herold (Hubacker) trudging laboriously through a widescreen rolling landscape in search of something to eat. Mud-splattered and worn down after hiding in the roots of a tree after his chase through the forrest that is straight out of Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night. Herold is now desperately looking for something to eat. What he finds is a suitcase containing the pristine uniform of a Nazi captain. Confidently assuming this new guise complete with monocle, Herold goes on to command a motley crew of survivors on an odyssey into the nadir of destruction and debauchery.

Far from Noirish this startlingly lit arthouse shocker takes time in establishing its horrific storyline as Private Herold transforms into an emotionally detached psychopathic killer. A hauntingly spare score, jagged angles and claustrophobic interiors echo German Expressionism at its finest as the camera leers down on Gothic townscapes and cowers up at the frightening faces of these demonic deserters at the crumbling of the Third Reich.

A dynamic cast of Germany actors are led by the diminutive Max Hubacher channelling Bob Hoskins in Long Good Friday with touches of Daniel Craig. After subjugation, he discovers domination. And he likes it. Barking orders at his subordinates and giving his hostages the full two barrels, the tension gradually mounts as he convinces everyone he’s taking order from the Führer himself. Milan Peschel plays his adjutant, calmly obeying him but secretly despising him. There’s a madcap quality at play here, although realism dominates in the dialogue and acting.

The Captain must surely be the definitive anti-war film with its over-arching themes of futility and gratuitous violence and the final scenes shows British complicity in the act of war, but not a drop of blood is ever shed. Chillingly devoid of genuine camaraderie save that of the togetherness of joint slaughter this is an exquisitely stylish, gratuitously violent, quintessentially German absurdist parody with its homage to The Night Porter in the deranged denouement. MT

In UK cinemas from 21 September 2018

11 Films to See at the BFI London Film Festival 2018

 

The lineup for the 2018 BFI London Film Festival has been announced, and the public box office is open. The 12-day festival will show over 225 feature-length films from all over the globe – so here are some of the best we’ve seen from this year’s international festival circuit.

WILD LIFE (2018)

A teenage boy experiences the breakdown of his parents’ marriage in Paul Dano’s crisp coming of age family drama, set in 1960s Montana, and based on Richard Ford’s novel. Although once or twice veering into melodrama, actor turned filmmaker Dano maintains impressive control over his sleek and very lucid first film which is anchored by three masterful performances, and sees a young family disintegrate after the husband loses his job. WILDLIFE has a great deal in common with Retribution Road (2008), with its similar counterpoint of aspirational hope for a couple starting out on their life in a new town – in this case Great Falls, Montana. But here the perspective is very different – in Wildlife, the entire experience is seen from the unique perspective of a pubescent boy, Joe, played thoughtfully by young Australian actor Ed Oxenbould (The Visit).

WOMAN AT WAR (2018) – SACD Winner, Cannes Film Festival 2018

Benedict Erlingsson’s follow-up to Of Horses and Men is a lively, often funny eco-warrior drama that follows a single woman taking on the state of Iceland with surprising results. Lead actress Haldora Geirhardsdottir has an athletic schedule, running and hiding in the countryside, with helicopters and drones circling overhead. With a magnificent twist at the end, Woman at War doesn’t pull its punches: There are shades of Aki Kaurismaki, the dead pan humour taking away some of the tension of the countryside hunt for Halla. And Erlingsson makes a refreshing break from tradition in the super hero genre by casting a middle-aged woman, who is also super-fit, in the central role.

THE FAVOURITE (2018) Best Actress, Olivia Colman, Venice 2018.

The Favourite is going to be a firm favourite with mainstream audiences and cineastes alike. This latest arthouse drama is his first to be written by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara who bring their English sensibilities to this quixotic Baroque satire that distills the essence of Kubrick, Greenaway and Molière in an irreverent and ravishingly witty metaphor for women’s treachery. Set around 1710 during the final moments of Queen Annes’s reign it presents an artful female centric view of courtly life seen from the unique perspective of three remarkable women while on the battlefields England is at war with the French. Despite its period setting The Favourite coins a world with exactly the same credentials as that of Brexit and Trump.

SUNSET – FIPRESCI Prize Venice 2018 

Laszlo Nemes follows his Oscar-winning triumph Son Of Saul with another fraught and achingly romantic fragment of the past again captured through his voyeuristic camera that traces the febrile events leading up to the shooting of Emperor Franz Ferdinand that changed the world forever Set in Budapest between 1913 and the outbreak of the First World War, Sunset reveals a labyrinth of enigma, intrigue, hostility, greed and lust as the central character played by Juli Jakab (Son of Saul) guides us through scenes of ravishing elegance and cataclysmic violence. What seems utter chaos gradually becomes more clear as the spiderweb is infiltrated. Nemes pays homage to the late Gabor Body whose Narcissus and Psyche, are the obvious touchstones to Sunset. On an historical level, Mathias Erdely’s images conjure up the fin-de-siècle fragility in the same way as Gabor’s masterpieces. 

BORDER – Winner, Un Certain Regard, Cannes 2018 

BORDER is one of those bracingly original films. Melding fantasy and folklore while teetering on the edge of Gothic horror, it manages to be cleverly convincing and unbelievably weird at the same time. Fraught with undercurrents of sexual identity and self-realisation this gruesome rites of passage fable is another fabulous story with enduring appeal for the arthouse crowd and diehard fans of low key horror. Based on a short story by Let the Right One In creator John Ajvide Lindqvist it is Ali Abbasi’s follow up to Shelley and his first film with writing partner Isabella Ekloff. Abbasi masterfully manages the subtle strands of his storyline while keeping the tension taut and a mischievous humour bubbling under the surface.

DOGMAN Best Actor, Marcello Forte, Cannes 2018 | Palm Dog Winner 2018 

Matteo Garrone’s terrific revenge thriller returns to the filmmaker’s own stamping ground of Caserta with a richly thematic and compulsive exploration of male rivalry and belonging in a downtrodden, criminal-infested, football-playing community scratching a living in a seaside backwater. Life has always been tough in this neck of the woods, infested by gangland influences: it is a terrain that Garrone knows and describes well in his 2008 feature Gomorrah. A brutal brotherhood controls this bleak coastal wilderness where everyone relies on each other to survive. Dogman a gritty and violent film and often unbearably so, but there are moments of heart-rending tenderness – between his Marcello and his doggy dependants – where tears will certainly well up. Fonte won Best Award at Cannes for his skilful portrayal that switches subtly from sad loner to daring desperado.

MADELINE’S MADELINE  

Josephine Decker’s inventive, impressionistic dramas – Butter on the Latch (2013) /Though Wast Mild and Lovely (2014) are an acquired taste but one that marks her out as a distinctive female voice on the American indie circuit. And here she is at Sundance again with a multi-layered mother and daughter tale that is probably her best feature so far. With a stunning central performance from newcomer Helena Howard and a dash of cinematic chutzpah that sends this soaring, Madeline’s Madeline is a thing of beauty – intoxicating to watch, compellingly chaotic with a potently emotional storyline.

MUSEUM – Best Script Berlinale 2018

Alonso Ruizpalacios’ follow-up to his punchy debut Guëros, sees two wayward young Mexicans from Satellite City robbing the local archeological museum of its Mayan  treasures – simply out of boredom. MUSEUM is an offbeat but strangely captivating drama that gradually gets more entertaining, although it never quite feels completely satisfying, despite some stunningly inventive sequences and three convincing performances from Gael Garcia Bernal, Simon Russell Beale and Alfredo Castro (The Club). It’s largely down to local Mexican incompetence that these two amateurish dudes (Bernal/Ortizgris) get away with their heist in the first place. But what starts as a so-so domestic drama with the same aesthetic as No!, slowly starts to sizzle with suspense as the director deftly manages the film’s tonal shifts to surprise and even delight us – this is a film that deserves a watch for its sheer wakiness and inventive chutzpah. 

IN FABRIC 

Impeccable red talons slide a flick knife across a box to reveal its contours, a beautiful silky dress that can kill. Peter Strickland’s latest, highly-anticipated oddball feature again stars Sidse Babett Knudsen (The Duke of Burgundy) in a haunting ghost story that follows the fate of this bedevilled garment as it passes from owner to owner, with tragic consequences against the backdrop of the winter sales in a busy department store. This is a gem of a giallo with Strickland’s signature soundscape dominating, just as it did in Berberian Sound Studio. 

THE WILD PEAR TREE – Palme d’Or, Cannes 2018 

Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s long-awaited follow-up to Winter Sleep melds his classic themes of family, fate and self-realisation into a leisurely and immersive 3-hour narrative that won him the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes. This is a sumptuous, visual treat to savour but you’ll never actually see a pear tree. 

THEY’LL LOVE ME WHEN I’M DEAD (2018)

There should be a sub-genre dedicated to films about the multi-talented force that was Orson Welles. Here Morgan Neville (Best of Enemies) has his turn with a focus on the final fifteen years of the director Welles as he pins his Hollywood comeback on a film called The Other Side of the Wind, a film within a film sees an ageing director trying to complete his final oeuvre. Welles’ film starring John Huston and Peter Bogdanovich was a hotchpotch of brilliance and tedium, in equal parts. Neville’s doc offers new insight into the creative legend with clarity and charismatic flourishes that would make Welles turn in his grave…with approval. MT

SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS

AQUARELA: Victor Kossakovsky, Eicca Toppinen; BEEN SO LONG: Tinge Krishnan, Michaela Coel, George Mackay, Nadine Marsh-Edwards, Amanda Jenks; FAHRENHEIT 11/9: Michael Moore; THE HATE U GIVE: George Tillman Jr, Amandla Stenberg, Angie Thomas; MAKE ME UP: Rachel Maclean; OUT OF BLUE: Carol Morley, Patricia Clarkson; PETERLOO: Mike Leigh; RAFIKI: Wanuri Kahiu; THEY SHALL NOT GROW OLD: Peter Jackson 

OFFICIAL COMPETITION

BIRDS OF PASSAGE: Ciro Guerra, David Gallego; DESTROYER: Karyn Kusama; HAPPY AS LAZZARO: Alice Rohrwacher; HAPPY NEW YEAR, COLIN BURSTEAD.: Ben Wheatley; IN FABRIC: Peter Strickland; JOY: Sudabeh Mortezai; THE OLD MAN AND THE GUN: David Lowery; SHADOW: Zhao Xiaoding; SUNSET: László Nemes; TOO LATE TO DIE YOUNG: Dominga Sotomayor

FIRST FEATURE COMPETITION

THE CHAMBERMAID: Lila Avilés; THE DAY I LOST MY SHADOW: Soudade Kaadan; HOLIDAY: Isabella Eklöf; JOURNEY TO A MOTHER’S ROOM: Celia Rico Clavellino; ONLY YOU: Harry Wootliff; RAY & LIZ: Richard Billingham; SONI: Ivan Ayr; WILDLIFE: Paul Dano, Zoe Kazan, Carey Mulligan

DOCUMENTARY COMPETITION

DREAM AWAY: Marouan Omara, Johanna Domke; EVELYN: Orlando von Einsiedel; JOHN MCENROE – IN THE REALM OF PERFECTION: Julien Faraut; THE PLAN THAT CAME FROM THE BOTTOM UP: Steve Sprung; PUTIN’S WITNESSES: Vitaly Mansky; THE RAFT: Marcus Lindeen; THEATRE OF WAR: Lola Arias, David Jackson, Sukrim Rai; WHAT YOU GONNA DO WHEN THE WORLD’S ON FIRE?: Roberto Minervini; YOUNG AND ALIVE: Matthieu Bareyre.

THE BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL | 10-21 October 2018

 

 

 

 

The Good Girls | Las Ninas Bien (2018)** Toronto Film Festival 2018

Dir.: Alejandra Marquez Abella; Cast: Ilse Salas, Flavio Medina, Paulina Gaitan; Mexico 2018, 93 min.

Alejandra Marquez Abella structurally flawed sophomore feature is an anthropologist’s dream: based on characters by Guadelupe Loaeza, a group of bitchy, upper-middle class Mexican wives who fight over the best caterer at the crowning of their entire existence: having Julio Iglesias for dinner. Led on by lead Sofia, the rest are mere cyphers and the episodic structure doesn’t help in keeping viewers engaged for the ninety minutes.

Sofia (Salas), loathes her South-American heritage: and sending her three children off to summer camp, she warns them “don’t hang out with Mexicans”. A European background is really all she and her competitors crave for. Sofia’s parties are real productions, and she seems to have married her husband Fernando (Medina) largely  because of his family’s Spanish heritage. Everything is a competition for Sofia, the smallest detail could lead to a loss of face amid her rivals. But we are in the early Eighties and the Mexican Peso suddenly bottoms out. As Sofia and her circle rely on imported goods, this is a major catastrophe. So when credit cards get refused politely and the servants don’t get paid, doom is imminent. To make matters worse, Sofia’s only real competitor, noveau-riche Ana Paula (Gaitan), is still quids in. Her default-position is resigned acceptance, but with the Peso tumbling further, even this seems to be too much.

Salas is always brilliant, cool and contained, she carries the film as much as she is able to. DoP Daniela Ludlow succeeds in conjuring up this lush environment of petty mini-me’s in meltdown, always keeps everything close and personal, despite the widescreen format. As a chickflick study of vanity and self-deceit this would be brilliant – as a feature it lacks emotional depth and an absorbing dramatic arc. AS

TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL | 6 – 16 SEPTEMBER 2018
 

4 Films from Margarethe von Trotta (1975-86)

The first female director to win the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, Margarethe von Trotta (1942) is to thank for some of the most trailblazing films over the past five decades. Von Trotta’s wonderfully complex and outspoken female characters have undoubtedly inspired those taking centre stage in films by contemporary directors such as Jane Campion, Andrea Arnold, Lynne Ramsay and Lone Scherfig. One of the most gifted – but often overlooked – directors to emerge from the New German Cinema movement at the same time as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog – von Trotta has never shied away from topics that resonate with contemporary lives and provoke revolutionary discussion. The power of mass media, historical events, radicalisation and women’s rights, have all been visible elements in her films since the politically turbulent 1970s.

As part of their ‘Margarethe von Trotta Revisited’ programme, Barbican will welcome Margarethe von Trotta for a ScreenTalk on 2 Oct to discuss her illustrious career, following a screening of her 1986 Palme d’Or nominated film Rosa Luxemburg, in a newly restored print. This will be complemented by two further screenings from her body of work, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum and The Second Awakening of Christa Klages (also in new prints). The German Sisters will join the nationwide tour in November and December.

ROSA LUXEMBURG (1986)

Rosa Luxemburg is Margarethe von Trotta’s remarkable biopic of one of the most fascinating figures in modern European political history. Having fought for women’s rights and to revolutionise the state in early 20th century Poland and Germany, the Marxist revolutionary Luxemburg (1871-1919) formed the famous Spartacist League, later the Communist Party of Germany. After a failed uprising, Luxemburg was murdered in Berlin at the age of 47. The film traces Luxemburg’s political and moral development from journalist and author to dissenter from the party line and imprisoned pacifist. Portrayed masterfully by von Trotta regular Barbara Sukowa (also known from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Lola), Luxemburg’s character comes alive on screen with a depth and complexity than her public image as a militant revolutionary might lead us believe.

THE LOST HONOUR OF KATHARINA BLUM (1975)

Young housekeeper Katharina falls for a handsome man at a party – who unbeknownst to her is a criminal on the run from the police. The night she spends with the alleged terrorist is enough to bring her quiet life into ruins and bring her under police surveillance. Now the exploited subject of cheap newspaper sensationalism, Katharina becomes a target of anonymous phone calls and letters, sexual advances and threats, all testing the limits of her dignity and sanity. Directed with her then-husband Volker Schlöndorff (The Tin Drum), The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum is a powerful yet sensitive adaptation of Heinrich Böll’s controversial novel. A stinging commentary on state power, individual freedom and media manipulation, the film feels as relevant today as on the day it was released in 1975. 

THE SECOND AWAKENING OF CHRISTA KLAGES (1978)

The solo directorial debut of Margarethe von Trotta, the film tells of a young woman who, to finance her daughter’s day-care centre, robs a bank. On the run, she is pursued by the police and more mysteriously by a young woman who was her hostage in the bank raid. Shot on a shoestring budget, this compelling and convincing film was also one of a handful of contemporary films that responded to the events surrounding the national terrorist collective Baader-Meinhof, a topic that von Trotta kept referring to in her later work (such asThe German Sisters).

THE GERMAN SISTERS (1981)

Based on the real life story of the Enslein sisters, this is the purest expression of Margarethe Von Trotta’s combination of the personal and the political.  Juliane (Jutta Lampe) is a feminist journalist, arguing for abortion rights; Marianne (Barbara Sukowa) is a terrorist revolutionary in a Baader-Meinhof type group. As Marianne’s political activism begins to take a personal cost, Juliane is stricken between her politics and her need to protect her sister and her family. But when Marianne is imprisoned, Juliane is forced to confront the realities of the harsh power of the state. Von Trotta’s first collaboration with her muse Barbara Sukowa (who she would make the protagonist of six more of her features) was selected by Ingmar Bergman as one of his favourite films of all time.

BARBICAN SCREENINGS

Rosa Luxemburg & ScreenTalk with Margarethe von Trotta

West Germany 1986, dir Margarethe von Trotta, 124 mins

2 Oct 18.30, Barbican Cinema 2

The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum + intro by Margarethe von Trotta

West Germany 1975, dir Margarethe von Trotta & Volker Schlöndorff, 84 mins

3 Oct, 18.30, Barbican Cinema 2

The Second Awakening of Christa Klages

West Germany 1978, dir Margarethe von Trotta, 93 mins

6 Oct, 16.15, Barbican Cinema 2

PREMIERING AT BARBICAN 2-6 OCTOBER 2018 | NATIONWIDE TOUR FROM NOVEMBER

 

The Nun (1966/67) ****

Dir: Jacques Rivette | Cast: Anna Karina, Liselotte Pulver, Francisco Rabal, Micheline Presle | Drama | France | 140′

Jacques Rivette is famous for his playful features such as Céline and Juliette go Boating, and his one and only excursion into mainstream fare, La Religieuse (1966), based on a Diderot novel, is also full of anarchic fun and was almost banned due to its salaciousness, but went on to be nominated for the Palme D’Or in the year of its making. Suzanne Simonin (Anna Karina), is incarcerated in a cloister against her will and soon falls foul of not one, but three Mother-Superiors who respectively treat her sadistically, tenderly, or as an object for plain lesbian lust – but Suzanne stays pure. This anti-clerical romp was very popular at the box office and served as a liberating force for Karina giving her the emotional impetus to finally divorce JL Godard after having completed their last collaboration, Made in USA, in the same year. AS

IN ARTHOUSE VENUES NATIONWIDE FROM 27 JULY 2018 with a HOME ENT release planned for September 2018 | COURTESY OF STUDIOCANAL

 

Angel (2018) *** Toronto Film Festival 2018

Dir: Koen Mortier | Cast: Vincent Roitiers, Fatou N’Diaye | Belgium | Thriller | 103′

A fateful encounter between a Senegalese sex worker and a world-famous Belgian racing cyclist subverts our expectations in director Koen Mortier’s (Ex Drummer) slim but atmospheric thriller.

Angel is a lushly cinematic love story pays homage to Claire Denis but lacks the sociopolitical underpinnings of her superior work. It speaks the universal language of love across the social divide where for one dreamlike night two souls meet but do not find nirvana the following morning.

Where once tribal forces held sway Senegal is now dominated by Islam and sex workers are considered low in the social pecking order, prostitute Fae (Fatou N’Diaye) meets Thierry (Vincent Rottiers) a world-renowned Belgian racing cyclist whose career has attracted scandal because of his substance abuse. Taking a break with his brother in Dakar, Thierry meets Fae in a night club, and tries to reconcile his feelings of lust with those of love at first sight. He has never paid for sex nor is he attracted by the prospect. Fae’s beauty and elegant allure captures his imagination and the two share en extraordinary encounter. But it soon becomes clear that Thierry is a damaged despite his outwardly superior professional credentials.

With its woozy surreal sensuality and hypnotic fractured narrative Angel envelopes us into an intoxicating world where nothing is a it seems as reality and fantasy collides. Its emotional arc is familiar yet exotic, touching yet troubling provocative exploration of how words can be as powerful as the realm of this senses when we fall in love. MT

TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | 10 SEPTEMBER 2018

 

Blindspot (2018) **** Toronto Film Festival 2018

Dir.: Tuva Novotny; Cast: Pia Tjelta, Oddgeir Thune, Anders Baasmo Christiansen, Nora Mathea Æien, Ellen Heyersdahl, Per Frisch; Norway 2018, 102 min.

Tuva Novotny’s impressive and unflinching debut documents every parent’s worst nightmare. Shot in two long takes, we witness the suicide attempt of the teenage schoolgirl Thea, and the reactions of her family, as they try to cope with something they cannot understand. The most used phrase returning again and again, is “that Tea was happy”.But when an unexpected catastrophe happens, everything about their life is called into question.

Maria (Pia Tjelta), Anders (Anders Baasmo Christiansen), and their two children — Tea (Nora Mathea Øien) and son Bjorn enjoy a settling and happy life in Oslo. We during an average day playing handball at school, and walking home with her friend Anna (Heyersdale) and greeting her (step)mother Maria (Tjelta) and her little brother Bjorn in their third floor apartment, where she makes herself a sandwich, before writing a short note in her diary. She then jumps out of window. 

The second part features Maria – the camera focuses on her grief after finding her unconscious daughter in front of the apartment block. Her father Hasse (Frisch) comes to help her, calling an ambulance which takes her to hospital and the trauma team. The arrival of her biological father Anders (Christiansen) makes everything even more fraught as he is aggressive, insisting on seeing his daughter. We learn from him that Thea’s birth mother Line killed herself and was found by her daughter and father. Martin brings bad news, 

The experience of bereavement by parental suicide of children and young teenagers is not well understood, as evidenced by the lack of empirically supported interventions for this underserved sector of the population. All we know is that “there are extra layers of bereavement” for this group. The process of healing is not much helped by the fact that children have an “omnipotent” perspective and feel responsible for the death of the parent. Children under eighteen who suffer parental bereavement are three times more likely to commit suicide as children with living parents. And, for reasons not understood, girls are three times more likely to have traumatic reactions to parental suicide than boys.

DoP Jonas Alarik treats the narrative like a documentary, there is nothing superfluous in his images, particularly the close-ups are impressive, as well as Maria’s ride in the ambulance, when she is trying to understand how his could have happen to her “happy” daughter. Anders might have given a little clue, reporting at the hospital that Thea told him when she was younger “Daddy, when I die. I turn into a lovely flower you can pick and put on to the window sill”. A heart braking study of grief, flawlessly executed by Nowotny.

TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | 7 SEPTEMBER 2018

 

 

Reinventing Marvin (2017) ***

Dir.: Anne Fontaine; Cast: Finnegan Oldfield, Jules Porier, Gregory Gadebois, Catherine Mouchet, Charles Berling, Vincent Macaigne, Catherine Salée, Isabelle Huppert; France 2017, 115 min.

Director/co-writer Anne Fontaine (Coco Before Chanel) is one of the most diverse French directors, and Reinventing Marvin is again a step into new territory – this time an LGTB theme carried by a brilliant cast. Sometimes uneven, over-didactic and certainly too long, Reinventing Marvin is still a film to remember.

Fontaine switches for most of the narrative continuously between the youth of hero Marvin Bijou (Marvin Jewel in English) in a village in Northern France, and the more adult young man who makes a career on the Parisian stage having changed his name to Martin Clement. Young Marvin (Porier) has the most miserable of childhoods: his parents are at best neglectful, and at worse abusive: father Dany (Gadebois) calls him a faggot blaming the mother (Salée) for the boy’s effeminate behaviour. And his is older brother, an out-and out homophobic, is most aggressive towards Marvin. At school Marvin is mercilessly bullied and sexually abused. Coming to his aid is the principal, Madeleine Clement (Mouchet), who helps him discover his acting talents. After drama school the older Marvin (Oldfield) goes to Paris where, after his coming out, he meets theatre director Abel (Macaigne), who becomes sort of a surrogate father for him. Soon Marvin adds a sugar daddy to his collection of father-substitutes – the wealthy Roland (Berling) who introduces him to Isabelle Huppert, who partners him on stage, performing his play based on the rants of his real father, who provides for an eye-opening encounter in the denouement.

Based (but not credited) on the autobiography En finir avec Eddy Belleguele by the writer Edouard Louis, who also changed his name after an oppressive childhood, Reinventing Marvin is a rich tapestry of passion and fraught emotions. Avoiding melodrama, Fontaine steers her project with the right detachment, but falls into the trap of repeating and sermonising. DoP Yves Angelo uses a richly-hued palette for the countryside but his Paris images are foremost a melancholy brown. Both Porier and Oldfield are brilliant and Gadebois shines in all his scenes, showing just enough vulnerability behind his bully-mask. Somehow the introduction of Huppert rings slightly false – just one fairy tale too much. Even still, Reinventing Marvin is a heartfelt and convincing life story of change and rehabilitation. AS

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 14 SEPTEMBER 2018

  

SAF (2018) **** Toronto Film Festival 2018

Dir.: Ali Vatansever; Cast: Saadet Isil Aksoy, Erol Afsin; Turkey/ Romania/Germany 2018, 101 min.

Ali Vatansever’s SAF is a paean to a lesser known part of Istanbul, where the denizens of the Fikirtepe district are hounded out of their homes to make way for luxury apartment blocks. Kamil’s story is symbolic of the uprooting and exploitation of ordinary working people who then resort to racism when they are unable to fight or even identify their real enemies. SAF also reminds us that racism is rife in every corner of the world where the old guard must now accommodate the newcomers.

We first meet Kamil (Afsin) at the gates of a building site. He’s a decent bloke trying to defend a Syrian émigré against his Turkish colleagues who call him a “filthy Arab who wants to take our jobs away”. The truth is Syrian workers are paid less than the native Turks, who call them scabs. Kamil finally gets a job on another building project, replacing the Syrian bulldozer driver Ammar, laid off due to a shoulder injury. At home, Kamil’s wife Remziye (Aksoy) is saving her paltry wages so she can afford to have a baby. Remziye works for a wealthy Turkish family in one of the newbuild luxury blocks. But Remziye also starts bending the rules upsetting her husband when he discovers her taking more than their fair share from the communal vegetable garden. “It does not matter that the others do it”, he tells her.

But his troubles at work are only just beginning: Kamil doesn’t have a licence to operate the bulldozer (unlike Ammar) and the licence fee – more or less a bribe to the bureaucratic authorities – is pretty steep. Fatih won’t lend him the money but the two strike a deal to try and get rid of Ammar. But after the plan goes wrong, Kamil disappears. The final scenes are played out through Remziye’s perspective.

Vatansever’s detached style never resorts to melodrama or sentimentality in showing how innocent people are often helplessly caught up in rapid social change, Their racism is ugly but is just a deflection of their own fears. Kamil tries his best to stay neutral, but in the end he is so overwhelmed by a family demanding he bends the rules for their own advantage.  SAF is carried forward by the sheer brilliance of Saadet Isil Aksoy whose Remziye acts in an enlightened and humanitarian way when the chips are down. DoP Vladimir Panduru shows the ugliness of poverty but also the lyrical poetry that lies between the tracks. With echoes of Barnet and Pudovkin’s early films. SAF is as impressive as it’s low key, Aksoy’s presence giving it a magical touch. Ali Vatansever demonstrates how less can be so much more. AS          

TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL 2018                    

 

     

Retrospekt (2018) **** Toronto Film Festival 2018

Dir.: Esther Rots; Cast: Circe Lethem, Martijn van der Veen, Lien Wildermersch, Teun Luijkx; Netherlands/Belgium 2018, 101 min.

Esther Rots’ follow-up to Can Go Through Skin is a portrait of psychological self-destruction told through three time-lines keeping the audience enthralled but also questioning the role of its plausible characters.

Mette (Lethem) is a busy working mother who runs a domestic violence support centre while coping with the latest addition to her  family, a daughter Michelle. Her marriage is under strain with her husband Simon (van der Veen) often away on business. Aware that Lee (Wildermersch) is also having trouble with her violent boyfriend Frank, she invites the young woman to help in the centre and stay with her during one of Simon’s long absences. Needless to say, Frank finds out where Lee is hiding and when Simon returns on the same night, confrontation in unavoidable and tragic consequences ensue leaving Mette wheel-chair bound but paradoxically bringing her closer to her estranged father – who is also in a wheelchair and suffering from dementia. The pair chatting to each other in their wheelchairs, is one of the highly symbolic scenes of this affecting indie features from the Dutch writer and director.

DoP Lennart Hillege deftly manages two different styles: from hyper-realism to women-in-peril scenes where the traumatise Mette, tries to get her mind around what really happened. The continuously changing time-frames help to crate an atmosphere, where the truth –  Rashamon-style –  becomes more and buried in an ecliptic avalanche questioning our initial perceptions of the protagonists during the course of the narrative. With its score of Brecht-like songs by composer Dan Gesin, Retrospekt is a haunting and enigmatic character study. AS

TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL 2018

A Tramway in Jerusalem (2018) *** Venice Film Festival 2018

 Israel is a complex nation of multiculturalism – and none better to convey this than author/ filmmaker Amos Gitai in his fraught and frustrating drama A Tramway in Jerusalem.

His characters seem trapped on a freewheeling journey to nowhere, going round and round on what seems like an endless trip on London’s Circle Line – the fact is they’re all in the same boat: gentiles, Hasidic Jews, Ashkenazim, Sephardim, Israeli Arabs, Palestinian Muslims and Palestinian Jews. Gitai’s embraces the chaotic nature of these Semitic people – they argue, cajole, console, sing and debate – but they are rarely silent.

The film opens with a smiling woman singing an operatic song, a man plays the oud. Mathieu Almaric slouches back on a seat with his son, visiting the city for the first time he is delighted to be there finally. A group of Hassidic men chant a religious chorus. This series of sketches trundles along offering a taster for those who have never been to the country but have heard a lot about it – and it’s very different on the inside. One Palestinian woman has a Dutch passport through marriage, another has lived abroad but they share common ground. Anyone without an Israeli passport usually gets a hard time, and Gitai shows this happening to the Palestinian woman. There is even a Catholic Priest (Pippo Delbono) who rambles on incoherently. And black humour features too – the Jews have survived by sending themselves up. In the funniest sketch, a mother is lamenting her son’s lack of a wife, he listens – rapt, while all around their fellow passengers banter and debate the issue off screen. This is Israel in microcosm. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2018

Phoenix (2018) ** Toronto Film Festival

Dir.: Camilla Strom Henriksen; Cast: Yiva Bjorkaas Thedin, Caspar Falck-Lovas, Maria Bonnevie, Sverrir Gudnason, Ellen Sandal, Renate Reinsve; Norway 2018, 86 min.

First feature of writer/director Camilla Strom Henriksen’s debut feature is a variation on The Cement Garden, in this case siblings Jill and Bo are forced to grow up too quickly by parents who fail them at every turn. Despite some terrific performances, the script loses intensity in the final third.

Teenager Jill (Thedin) is used to looking after her divorced mother Astrid (Bonnevie) and much younger brother Bo (Falck-Lovas). Astrid is desperate to succeed as a painted and insists that the whole flat is permanently cast in semi-darkness, the many-layered curtains letting in little light. She spends most of her time in bed, dependent on alcohol and prescription drugs. Her friend Ellen (Sandal) talks the local museum’s director into giving Astrid a chance: she is the only applicant for a job. Jill tries to make her mother’s first public appearance in a long time a success, buying her a white blouse. But Astrid is scathing about her daughter’s efforts: “You make me look like a director’s wife, why don’t don’t you wear it yourself, you are so proper”.

Then father Nils (Gudnason), a musician, promises to visit on Jill’s birthday. Jill is ecstatic, ready to be pampered for once. But she soon finds out, that her mother skipped the interview and later finds her dead in the basement. Not wishing to ruin her birthday Jill locks the cellar door and pretends that her mother is missing. Unfortunately for both Jill and the audience, the night out with her father and his new girl friend Kristin (Reinsve), turns out to be a disaster culminating in the admission that he is not going to tour Brazil for six months, but starting a prison sentence for drunk driving. After this bombshell, Phoenix starts to lose its narrative thrust.

Thedin is brilliant in her role as parenting teenager who morphs into a much older act to ‘seduce’ her father in taking her with him to Brazil. DoP Ragna Jorming creates some surreal images in the darkened flat where Jill sees – literally – monsters creeping around. The scenes in the ultra modern hotel where Nils takes his children are overcooked but chime with the plot’s loss of direction. As long as the action stays indoors, Strom Henriksen can not do wrong – afterwards, alas it all crumbles. AS

TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL 2018

https://youtu.be/jk0bA3sf8-Q

Capri-Revolution (2018) ** Venice Film Festival 2018

Dir.: Mario Martone; Cast: Marianna Fontana, Reinout Scholten van Aschat, Antonio Folletto, Maximilian Dirr; Italy/France 2018, 121 min.

Mario Martione does his homeland a disservice with a turgid and distinctly un-revolutionary Golden Lion hopeful. Set on the island of Capri in the run up to the First World War this is a didactic drama which even manages to make a nudist colony look bland and boring. But worse is the misogyny with which he treats his main-protagonist.

In 1914 twenty year-old Lucia (Fontana) enjoys a bucolic island existence looking after the family’s herds of goats, but when her father dies, her grumpy older brother decides to marry her off to a rich widower, thinking first and foremost about the financial benefits for the family. Soon both brothers are off to war, and Lucia joins a nudist colony, despite warnings from the locals that they are  “devils”. There she falls under the spell of painter and commune leader Seybu (van Aschat), a composite of the German painter Karl Diefenbach who led a commune on Capri between 1900 and 1913 and his compatriot, the artist Joseph Beuys, who had not even been born in 1914.

Seybu teaches Lucia to read and soon she is multi-lingual. But the local doctor Carlo (Folletto) hopes to win Lucia’s affections, the two men fiercely stating their points in the duel between science and art. This becomes very boring with sentences like ”There is only matter and spirit, there is no duality”. Furthermore, Herbert (Dirr), a psychotherapist, tries to interfere with the all the women in order to make them more compliant towards the male egos. Lucia soon has enough and wants “to go back to dancing in the woods”.

DoP Michele D’Attanasio tries his best to conjure up a sapphic image of beauty and nature, but this is a drama much too verbose to allow our imagination to wander – dialogue getting in the way.  Martone insists that everything is debated in a principled discussion, creating the climate of a business seminar. There is no lust – in spite of the naked bodies – and art is just another subject to be discussed to the death. Fontana tries her very best, but the males around her dominate. This is a sprawlingly endless mosh-mash, Martone even managing to botch the ending. AS

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2018

 

 

      

The Summer House (2018) Les Estivants | *** Venice Film Festival 2018

Dir: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi. France/Italy. 2018. 127mins |

Actor-director Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s reworks familiar territory in her latest comedy drama where she plays a vulnerable woman obsessed with a feckless younger man. This time she adds farce to the histrionics sending herself up as the delightfully dizzy delusional central character. You have to admire her cheekiness in this well-observed but flimsy piece of fun.

At the beginning Anna (Tedeschi) is tottering over a Parisian bridge with her sulky lover Luca (Riccardo Scamarcio), on the way to a cafe. Joining them is a serious be-suited man and a divorce proceedings  immediately spring to mind: they are actually attending a film financing meeting where filmmaker Anna freely admits to rehashing her plot when questioned by the team. Considering arch re-hasher Frederick Wiseman is on the panel this comes as a feminist jibe and we actually warm to her, and if you’re a fan of her formula (A Castle in Italy etc) then The Summer House is for you.

The Summer House has the advantage of some seriously sumptuous settings: this time we visit the Cote d’Azur and a gorgeous belle époque Villa surrounded by lavender-scented gardens where her real mother Marisa Borini (resembling her other daughter Carla Bruni) plays her onscreen ma, and the daughter she adopted with Louis Garrel, Oumy Bruni Garrel, is Anna’s daughter – exuding all the saucy sense of entitlement you would expect. Co-scripted by Tedeschi, Agnès de Sacy and Noémie Lvovsky, this upstairs/downstairs affair features the problems of the staff along with those of the guests – although the characterisations are shallow and rather trite – and often descends into implausible farce failing dismally as an attempt to engage us in an exploration of the human condition in all its splendour and desperation.

Bruni Tedeschi’s younger partner Luca does not join them, after hinting at a new romance, so the start of the holiday is blighted by emotional telephone outbursts and the usual melodramatic meltdowns. Anna’s alcoholic sister Elena (Valeria Golino) tries her best in an awful role where she whines and whimpers between drunken episodes as the wife of the villa’s much owner, ageing businessman Jean (Pierre Arditi). Meanwhile, Lvovsky also stars as Anna’s divorced writing partner Nathalie who appears to be recovering from some failed romance in a role that never materialises into anything meaningful.

Ever brimming with hope that her romance with Luca can be reanimated, there is much humour to be had in the way Anna swings from kittenish charisma to snarling witchery, her frustration seething under a well-disguised gamine fluffiness. Tedeschi’s attempt to introduce a sexual molestation strand to the narrative falls on deaf ears – whether this is another jibe on the #metoo theme is left to our individual interpretation. Gorgeous to look at, if mostly exasperating, The Summer House is more of the same fresh air from a familiar face. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2018

The River (Ozen) *** Venice Film Festival 2018 | Orizzonti

Dir/scr: Emir Baigazin. Kaz-Pol-Nor. 2018. 108mins

This spare and rhythmic final film in Kazakh auteur Emir Baigazin’s Asian trilogy serves as a simple but mesmerising metaphor for the dangers of the digial world exploring themes of repression, release and discovery in a remote corner of Kazakhstan.

Following on from Harmony Lessons (Uroki Garmonii,2013) and The Wounded Angel (Ranenyy Angel, 2016), The River (Ozen) captivates with its austere and gracefully composed sequences in a parable that seethes with expectation throughout its spare dramatic arc establishing its appeal to arthouse audiences from the opening scenes when we first meet the brothers in their dusty, windswept village where earthy sepia and bleached khaki prevails in Baigazin’s stark aesthetic.  

Five brothers cower under the obdurate cosh of their draconian father (Kuandyk Kystykbayev) who imposes a spartan regime of hard work and strict discipline. Like many austere fathers his intentions are protectionist rather than cruel, and the reason for this will soon become clear when a newcomer arrives in the village to disrupt the peaceful existence.

The oldest son Aslan (Zhalgas Klanov) is expected to act as second in command to his father and teach his brothers how to read and write. Unlike his father he offers some light relief to his siblings allowing them to swim in the fast-flowing river nearby, the benefits of nature are clear and the dangers self-apparent, Meanwhile in the outside world beyond their home the benefits of progress are more ambiguous,

This questionable garden of Eden is soon destabilised when Kanat (Eric Tazabekov) breezes into the village one day. Dressed in flashy yellow socks and a silver anorak, this bright young stranger also rocks a pair of headphones and carries a bleeping tablet. The boys are amazed by his swanky attire and intrigued by his computer with its News channel and games. 

The River is fraught will religious motifs from the Bible amongst them a wooden cross in the shaped scarecrow, and this all presages doom for the boys’ rural sanctuary. This is a the film whose spare credentials and minimalism belie its rich thematic content that make it an incisive and satisfying look at progress and loss of innocence. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | Best DIRECTOR | ORIZZONTI 2018

Emma Peeters (2018) Venice Film Festival 2018 | Giornate degli Autori


Dir.: Nicole Palo; Cast: Monia Chokri, Fabrice Adde, Stephanie Crayencour, Andrea Ferrol, Anne Sylvain, Jean Henri Compere, Abdre Ferreol; Belgium 2018, 90 min.

Nicole Palo’s second feature is a charming but fluffy comedy about a Belgian would-be actress plagued by her embarrassing parents and fashion faux pas. Shot idyllically, mostly in Belleville Monia Chokri’s portrayal of the titular heroine is an impressive performance. 

Emma (Chokri) is in her mid-thirties and has made the decision to throw in the towel on her acting career in Paris and radically also to end her life. After visiting a funeral parlour – wearing her usual faux-sheep coat and looking very sheepish indeed – she attracts the attention of the owner Alex (Adde), whose struggle with reality is just as troubled. A good-bye visit to her annoyingly banal parents (Sylvain/Compere) in Belgium is followed by several unsuccessful attempts to get rid of her cat Jim, who clings on (clearly loving her jacket). And her friends are no great help either: Stephanie (Crayencour) is a blond, vacuous version of Emma (but a success with men of all sexual orientations) and is only interested in her friend when she wants to borrow her tiny flat to sleep with married men. Her ‘best friends’ Bob and Serge, gay hairdressers, think that a new haircut may lift her spirits. After Mum and Dad turn up for an uninvited visit, we begin to understand Emma’s pain. And when Alex finally gives Emma the promised suicide pill, we know that a happy-end awaits all concerned: Stephanie is pregnant by Bob and/or Serge, and Emma will be the god-mother.

There are shades of the late Solveig Ansbach here (Queen of Montreuil), but without her love of detail and anarchic complications. Palo just goes for the most obvious laughs, using Belleville as a background and creating a succharine atmosphere. On top there are half-baked characters like Bernadette (Ferreol), a lonely old woman who not well-disposed towards Emma. At best this quirky comedy drama could be described as endearing. AS

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | GIORNATE DEGLI AUTORI 4 SEPTEMBER 2018

 

Sunset | Napszallta (2018) ***** Venice Film Festival 2018

Dir.: Laszlo Nemes, Cast: Juli Jacob, Vlad Ivanov, Hungary/France 2018; 142 min

Laszlo Nemes follows his Oscar-winning triumph Son Of Saul with another fraught and achingly romantic fragment of the past again captured through his voyeuristic lens tracing the febrile events leading up to the shooting of Emperor Franz Ferdinand that changed the world forever

Set in Budapest between 1913 and the outbreak of the First World War, Sunset reveals a labyrinth of enigma, intrigue, hostility, greed and lust as by Juli Jakab(Son of Saul) guides us through scenes of ravishing elegance and cataclysmic violence. What seems utter chaos gradually becomes more clear as the spiderweb is infiltrated.

Cultured beauty Irisz Leiter (Jacob) arrives in Budapest from Trieste, where she retreated after her parents’ death in a mysterious fire at their famous hat atelier. Irisz hopes to secure a position there but the enigmatic manager Oszcar Brill (Ivanov), asks her to leave immediately. Somehow she inveigles her way into the company, desperately looking out for her long lost brother Kalman, who is in hiding, having murdered Count Redey. It soon emerges he has joined the Hungarian Nationalists in their bid to overthrow the House of Habsburg, whose ruling base in Vienna in on the verge of toppling with the murder in Sarajevo of the Austrian Crown at the hand of a Serbian nationalist. Irisz’ search for her brother is continually thwarted by Brill, who is literally selling his female employees as courtesans to the Court in Vienna. Her desperate quest culminates in the trenches and the demise of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Nemes pays homage to the late Gabor Body whose Narcissus and Psyche, echo in Sunset. On an historical level Mathias Erdely’s images conjure up the fin-de-siecle fragility in the same way as Gabor’s masterpiece. In contrast, Nemes sets his epic in Budapest (and not in the countryside) conveying the crumbling decadence in the urban settings. There is surreal horror in the street scenes – characters spring out of the shadows like animals – or even vampires. After dark utter chaos rules. As daylight dawns the Habsburg police try to enforce order. Irisz emerges as ‘Alice’, but her wonderland is uncertain and menacing. Courage and a strong sense of her innate dignity will see her through but her place in the world will be destroyed forever in a narrative that very much chimes with today’s sense of cultural identity. Sunset is an everlasting testament to the past, the present and our uncertain future. A masterpiece that will need more than one viewing. As/MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | FIPRESCI WINNER 2018

Suspiria (2018) ** Venice Film Festival 2018

Dir.: Luca Guadagnino, Cast: Dakota Johnson, Tilda Swinton, Mia Goth, Cloe Grace Moretz, Lutz Ebersdorf; USA/Italy 2018, 152 min.

Luca Guadagnino follows his much praised Call Me By Your Name with a rather confused and overloaded vision of Dario Argento’s horror classic, using the original script by Argento and Daria Nicoldi, re-written by David Kajganich (A Bigger Splash). 

Unfortunately the Kajganich has added new material, setting the narrative in Berlin at the height of the Baader Meinhof crisis. A running time of 152 minutes also tests the audience severely.

In the dank Autumn of 1977, Susie Bannian (Johnson) arrives from Ohio at the famous Dance School TANZ, near the Wall in West Berlin. There is an unsettling atmosphere at the academy, the two leading teachers Blanc (a luminously sinuous Swinton) and Markos are fighting for supremacy, the conflict a battle of life and death. Susie soon becomes the lead dancer, relegating Patricia (Moretz) and Sara (Goth) to the lower echelons of the troupe.

When dancers start to disappear, the sinister infighting turns more and more bloody. Enter Dr. Joseph Klemperer (Ebersdorf), a relict from WWII, who is still searching for his Jewish wife sent to the Concentration Camp Teresienstadt, where she was killed. The psychiatrist feels deep guilt over her death. As the nastiness at the Academy unfurls, a Witches’ Coven is uncovered and Klemperer’s role becomes more and more murky – in tune with this muddled affair. 

DoP Sayonbhu Mukdeeprom creates magnificently macabre images, but in the long run this is not enough to save Susperia from emerging an awkward mixture of two films, both competing for our attention. The acting is also mixed, with Swinton being head and shoulders above the rest (quite literally) in achieving visionary eminence. In the end the German history lesson loses out to the horror strand, but the brake comes too late. A needless remake where less would have been so much more. AS

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2018

Peterloo (2018) ***

Dir/Writer: Mike Leigh | Cast: Maxine Peake, Rory Kinnear | Historical Drama | UK | 154′

Mike Leigh’s PETERLOO is a lavishly mounted period drama that delivers in robustly verbose detail the story of the massacre that took place in Manchester on 16th August 1816 when cavalry charged into a crowd of some 80,000 members of the public demanding parliamentary workplace reform.

While Leigh’s epic slowly builds to its climactic carnage scenes, which are brutally realistic without resorting to gratuitous gore, it expansively explores both sides of the conflict between the British aristocracy and the rebellious working classes in a plodding way that destroys dramatic tension as it trundles through its bloated running time of two and a half hours. With incendiary performances from its sterling cast – Rory Kinnear and Maxine Peake are splendidly vehement – this is certainly one of Leigh’s most heartfelt dramas, and clearly a personal moral crusade that charts a gritty and violent episode from the socio political history of England. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 2 NOVEMBER 2018 | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW 2018

C’est La Vie! ***

Dir: Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache | Cast: Jean-Pierre Bakri, Suzanne Clement, Gilles Lellouche | Comedy | France | 90′

Following their international success with Untouchable, Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache are back again – this time with a comedy that fizzes with feelgood fun largely due to lead Jean Pierre Bacri and his signature brand of deadpan no-nonsense insouciance. He plays wedding planner Max whose days are dedicated to making any wedding a big success – even when mayhem is threatening to take over behind the scenes. Meanwhile he’s juggling an unhappy wife and a demanding girlfriend (Suzanne Clément).

Joining him in this well-structured occasionally funny affair are Gilles Lellouche, Benjamin Lavernhe and Jean-Paul Rouve. Hélène Vincent makes the most of her cameo role as the mother of the groom. The story follows Max and his employees as they organise a sumptuous wedding in a magnificent 17th century château. Side-shows in the form of short sketches add interest to the central narrative which focuses on the lavish wedding preparations for Pierre (Lavernhe) and Héléna (Judith Chemla). Predictably, despite Max’s efforts to keep everything under control proceedings never go exactly to plan – to his chagrin.

Impeccable pacing aside, this is a mixed bag comedy-wise: some scenes are more amusing than others and there are some awkward moments. Gilles Lellouche makes a great success of his diva-like wedding singer as does Benjamin Lavernhe as the exacting groom. Less convincing is Rouve’s wedding photographer or Kevin Azais’ waiter with a sideline in off-duty policing. Bacri holds it all together with his superb delivery and timing as he tries to control his bolshy assistant Adèle (Eye Haidara). But the funniest scene is saved for the end as the party really kicks off when the groom’s efforts to surprise his new wife backfire – with hilarious results. MT

ON RELEASE AT SELECTED CINEMAS NATIONWIDE.

L’EnKas (2018) *** Venice Film Festival 2018 | Orizzonti

Dir: Sarah Marx | Cast: Sandrine Bonnaire | Sandor Funtek | Drama | 85′

L’EnKas is a lucidly imagined slice of contemporary social realism described by its director Sarah Marx as “socially aware”. Her intention was to make a film about “ordinary people who weren’t born bad but who have had to follow illegal paths”. In other words, these are not natural born criminals but those who commit crime when the going gets tough. And although she takes no moral stand with her well-paced observational feature debut, its premise departs from a cock-eyed moral standpoint although its subject matter is as old as the hills. And her main character Ulysse (an impressively convincing Funtek) certainly gets off on the wrong footing, when he arrives home fresh out of prison for a minor offence. His main concern is to make as much money as possible but he is confronted by a stack of unpaid bills and a mother (Sandrine Bonnaire as you’ve never seen her before) who suffers from depression and needs treatment. So he comes up with a plan with his best friend, David. Selling a mixture of water and Ketamine, obtained from a contact who works in a Veterinary surgery, the two travel from rave to rave selling the drug mixture from their food truck.

And it’s a short-sighted idea that naturally sees the pair in trouble as their dreams crash and burn and their world comes toppling down. Meanwhile troubled mother Gabrielle is having private psychiatric care. Fresh and full of naturalistic performances L’EnKas is a strong debut that gets inside the simplistic minds of naive people, who fall, get hurt, get back up again, contradict themselves and have their own reasons for doing so. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | 29 AUGUST – 9 SEPTEMBER 2018 | ORIZZONTI

The Seagull (2018)

Dir: Michael Mayer | Cast: Annette Bening, Saoirse Ronan, Corey Stoll, Elizabeth Moss, Billy Howle, Brian Dennehy, Michael Zegen; USA 2018, 98 min.

Director Michael Mayer (A Town at the Edge of the World) is more at home on Broadway than behind the camera, where he has clipped this vision of Chekhov’s play down to 98 minutes – the average stage outing is well over two and a half hours. There’s something missing here, but a brilliant ensemble at least makes everything enjoyable.

On their country estate near Moscow, fading actor Irina (Bening) gets together with her older brother Sorin (Dennehy), a retired civil-servant who is also on his last legs. They are joined by her lover, the mediocre but popular writer Boris Trigorin (Stoll) who is obsesse with the cult of his own personality. With them is Irina’s son Konstantin (Howle) a so-so symbolist writer who yearns to get away from the torpor or the countryside. He is in love with Nina (Ronan), a young woman from a neighbouring estate, who dreams of a career on the stage. Schoolteacher Mikhail (Zegen) is soft on Masha (Moss), who puts him down in public and is secretly in love with Konstantin. 

Irina’s post-oedipal relationship with her son erupts on the evening of the amateur performance of his absurdist play, which his mother mocks. Konstanti lowers the curtain prematurely while, Nina, acting her heart out, attracts Trigorin’s attraction. Irina and Konstantin spend the next day sulking like teenagers and Nina confesses her dreams to an infatuated Trigorin. But Irina has no truck with Trigorin, blackmailing him emotionally before literally fleeing the estate, dragging Trigorin with her, leaving all love conundrums unsolved.

Two years later it emerges that Nina ran away from home to have a child with Tregorin, which later died leaving him to slink back sheepishly to Irina. Her acting career is reduced to a third rate repertoire company, travelling around Russia third class (“with all the peasants”). Konstantin fares slightly better, still remaining deeply unhappy, whereupon Nina opts to return to the stage. Meanwhile, Masha has married Mikhail, but not even their baby has softened Irina’s heart, she longs for Konstantin. But after all these ups and downs between the sheets from town to country, a resolution eventually seems inevitable.

The play’s premiere in 1896 was a complete disaster, and Chekhov wanted to give up writing for the stage altogether, but Stanislavski’s production two years later was a great success – luckily, Chekhov had changed his mind.

Whilst Mayer (and script writer Stephan Karam) manage to convey the main characters’ desire for drama, they are unable to point to a wider existential trauma. Nobody is exactly a spring chicken – apart from Nina and Konstantin, they all behave like moody, self-obsessed teenagers. They all behave like actors using their craft to gain the smallest of advantages. Trigorin is the main example, he discards Nina like an object. Mayer fails to show the inner emptiness of his main protagonists – any idealism expressed by Nina or Konstantin is rebuffed and exploited by the elders. There’s also a lack of melancholy, the subtext is missing.

DoP Matthew J. Loyd’s cinematography evokes the lush countryside and lake. The costumes and interiors show a meticulous attention to the era. Saoirse Ronan is a brilliant Nina, only surpassed by the splendidly scheming Irina, Bening changing moods like a chameleon. Unfortunately, Mayer never manages to grasp the essense of Chekhov’s multi-layered play. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 6 SEPTEMBER NATIONWIDE                               

Venice Film Festival 2018 | La Biennale

Alberto Barbera has announced a stunning line-up of highly anticipated new features and documentaries in celebration of this year’s 71st edition of Venice Film Festival which takes place on the Lido from 28 August until 8 September 2018. 30% of this year’s films are made by women which sounds more positive. Obviously the festival can only programme films offered for screening.

The festival kicks off on the 28th with a remastered 1920 version of THE GOLEM – HOW HE CAME TO BE (ab0ve) complete with musical accompaniment. This year’s festival opening film is Damien Chazelle’s biopic of Neil Armstrong FIRST MAN. There are 21 features and documentaries in the main competition which boasts the latest films from Olivier Assayas (a publishing drama DOUBLE LIVES stars Juliette Binoche), Jacques Audiard (THE SISTERS BROTHERS), Joel and Ethan Coen’s 6-part Western THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS, Brady Corbet’smusical drama VOX LUX; Alfonso Cuaron with ROMA; Luca Guadagnino’s SUSPIRIA sees Tilda Swinton playing 3 parts; Mike Leigh (PETERLOO), Yorgos Lanthimos with an 18th drama entitled THE FAVOURITE; Carlos Reygadas joins from his usual Cannes slot; and Julian Schnabel will present AT ETERNITY’S GATE a drama attempting to get inside the head of Vincent Van Gogh. Not to mention Laszlo Nemes’ Budapest WW1 drama NAPSZÁLLTA, a much awaited second feature and follow up to his Oscar winning Son of Saul.

The out of competition selection is equally exciting and thematically rich. There is Bradley Cooper’s directing debut A STAR IS BORN (left), Charles Manson-themed CHARLIE SAYS from Mary Herron; Amos Gitai’s A TRAMWAY IN JERUSALEM, and Zhang Yimou’s YING (SHADOW). And those whose enjoyed S Craig Zahler’s dynamite Brawl in Cell Block 99 will be pleased to hear that his DRAGGED ACROSS CONCRETE adds Mel Gibson to the previous cast of Jennifer Carpenter and Vince Vaughn. There will be an historic epic set in the time of the French Revolution: UN PEUPLE ET SON ROI features Gaspart Ulliel and Denis Lavant (who also stars in Rick Alverson’s Golden Lion hopeful THE MOUNTAIN) , and Amir Naderi’s MAGIC LANTERN which has the wonderful English talents of Jacqueline Bisset. And talking of England, Mike Leigh’s much gloated over historical epic PETERLOO finally makes it to the competition line-up

Documentary-wise there’s plenty to enjoy: Amos Gitai’s brief but timely A LETTER TO A FRIEND IN GAZA; Francesco Patierno’s CAMORRA which explores the infamous Italian organisation; Frederick Wiseman this time plunders Monrovia, Indiana for his source material; multi-award winning Russian documentarian Viktor Kossalkovsky will present his latest water-themed work AQUARELA; Ukrainian Sergei Loznitsa’s film for this year’s festival is PROCESS (he’s the Ukrainian answer to Michael Winterbottom in terms of his prodigious output) this time focusing on the myriad lies surrounding Stalinism.

Out of Competition there are also blasts from the past including a hitherto unseen drama directed and co-written by Orson Welles and his pal Oja Kodar, starring Peter Bogdanovich and John Huston; and Bosnian director Emir Kusturica is back after his rocky time On The Milky Road with EL PEPE, UNA VIDA SUPREMA. 

And Malaysian auteur Tsai Ming-liang also makes a welcome return to Venice with his drama YOUR FACE. A multi-award winning talent on the Lido, his 2013 Stray Dogs won the Special Grand Jury Prize and Vive l’Amour roared away with the Golden Lion in 1994 (jointly with Milcho Manchevski’s Pred dozhdot).

Venice has a been a pioneer of 3D and VR since the screening of GRAVITY which opened the festival in 2013 amid much mal-functioning of 3D glasses at the press screening, and this year’s VR features include an excerpt from David Whelan’s 1943: BERLIN BLITZ which will be released ithis Autumn. This VR showcase experience is an accurate retelling of the events which happened inside a Lancaster bomber during one of the most well documented missions of World War II using original cockpit audio recorded 75 years ago. The endeavour is expected to be released on the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Oculus Go, Google Daydream, Samsung Gear VR and Windows Mixed Reality platforms. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | 28 AUGUST – 9 SEPTEMBER 2018 

 

 

 

The Children Act (2017) ****

Dir: Richard Eyre | Writers: Richard Eyre, Ian McEwan | Cast: Emma Thompson, Stanley Tucci, Fion Whitehead | UK Drama | 105′

THE CHILDREN ACT is the kind of chewy intelligent drama you’d expect to made by a French director with its adult themes all sprinkled lightly with thoughtful insight and some of the wittiest lines this Summer, if not this year.

This is mainly due to Emma Thompson who plays Fiona Maye, a judge who must decide whether to force a blood transfusion on a patient  – just short of his 18 birthday – who has refused treatment due to being a Jehovah’s Witness.

But in her personal life things are more cut and dried. When her husband (a thoughtful Stanley Tucci) broaches the subject of having an affair she simple tells him to pack a bag. And so he does. The narrative beats as it sweeps until it comes to the more subtle differences between ethical and moral dilemmas. And that’s where Justice Maye has her work cut in navigating the subtle complexities of what The Law states and what her heart dictates. Justice May is a fabulous role that could also have been played by Kristen Scott Thomas – but Emma Thompson carries it off with that knowing insouciance tempered with deep empathy that shines out in each scene and carries the film through some awkward moments when it could have come of the rails ending up in sentimental sidings. The essence here is entertainment. Richard Eyre and his co-writer McEwan (on whose book the film is based) have managed to touch on some thorny issues without going for an out and out crusade and keeping the narrative firmly focused on Maye and her fully-rounded but conflicted life as a High Court Judge dealing with a difficult time in her marriage and some buried emotional baggage. Stanley Tucci has a less rewarding role as her husband who can’t work how to seduce her anymore, away for the absorbing and demanding nature of her work. As such he comes across as an acolyte who could appear lightweight and rather superfluous but clearly has the maturity to realise that his love and warmth is what carries her through. It’s a tricky role, but Tucci pulls it off. Fionn Whitehead is terrific as the troubled boy and there’s a leanness to the narrative and dialogue that keeps you on your toes without ever pressing the point. In the early scenes Eyre quickly establishes the couple’s professional credentials: in the high octane world of Law, she is an articulate decision-maker; he a talented lecturing professor. But their life is in crisis due to time management of their demanding careers. Hers is more demanding than his.

The film also offers an intriguing and convincing look inside the contemporary legal system, tripping lightly over the day to day issues that confront a judge from taking off her MaxMara coat at chambers to getting home and gracefully kicking off her Roger Vivier shoes for a strong glass of red. And naturally our Emma pulls this off with aplomb and is a delight to look at times resembling her mother Phyllida Law. Both still ravishing.

Eyre underlines two important things in THE CHILDRENS ACT: that what kids really need is wise inspiration rather than limitless personal freedom. And that sometimes it is cruel to be kind – despite our best intentions. And despite the film’s minor flaws – and they rest largely with you’re own judgement – this is enjoyable. MT

OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 24 AUGUST 2018

 

 

San Sebastian Film Festival 2018

The San Sebastian Film Festival is Spain’s only A-list event running from 21 September until 29th in the North West Spanish town, often known by its Basque name of Donostia. This year celebrating its 66th edition, a selection of Spanish titles and international fare competes for the Golden Shell Award in venues such as the Kursaal and the Victoria Eugenia theatre. 

Joining the main competition will be the latest from Alfonso Cuaron, Jacques Audiard and Jia Zhangke also join the lineup of features already announced: Bradley Cooper’s A Star Is Born, in which he portrays a musical who falls for a struggling artist (Lady Gaga), Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman and Damien Chazelle’s First Man starring Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong, the first astronaut to walk on the moon, and Claire Foy. The film premieres at Venice where it open the festival running from 28 August 2018 on the Lido

This is the first time that Spike Lee will compete for an award in San Sebastian. His film BlacKkKlansman, the story of an African-American policeman who infiltrates the Ku Klux Klan, won the jury grand prix honor at Cannes and the audience award at the Locarno Film Festival. Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma, also premieres at Venice, it is the story of a maid working in a middle-class district of Mexico City in the early 1970s.

THIS YEAR’S COMPETITION LINE-UP

EL AMOR MENOS PENSADO

JUAN VERA | ARGENTINA 

After 25 years of marriage, Marcos and Ana question themselves deeply on the subject of love, the nature of desire and faithfulness, making a decision that will change their lives forever.

 

ANGELO

MARKUS SCHLEINZER | AUSTRIA – LUXEMBOURG 

The story of Angelo, an African born in the 18th century, who is brought to Europe at the age of 10. Now a servant in the court of enlightened nobility, he skilfully employs his otherness to become an appreciated guest and attraction for the members of high society. Being close to the emperor, he decides to marry Magdalena, a young maidservant with whom he falls in love.

DER UNSCHULDIGE / THE INNOCENT

SIMON JAQUEMET | SWITZERLAND – GERMANY 

Ruth works in a neuroscience research lab, despite coming from an extremely traditionalist and conservative Christian family. She suddenly finds herself facing her past when her former lover reemerges after twenty years in jail, prompting her to question her feelings, her life and eventually even her faith.

EL REINO

RODRIGO SOROGOYEN | SPAIN – FRANCE 

Manuel, an influential deputy secretary of a regional government who has everything going his way for making the leap into national politics, sees how his perfect life falls to pieces after news leaks of his involvement in a corruption ring with Paco, one of his best friends. While the media starts reporting the extent of the scandal, the party closes ranks and only Paco comes …

ENTRE DOS AGUAS | ISAKI LACUESTA | SPAIN 

Isra and Cheíto are two Roma brothers: Isra was sent to prison for drug dealing and Cheíto signed up for the Marines. When Isra is released from prison and Cheíto returns from a long mission, they return to San Fernando. The reunion between the siblings brings memories of their father’s violent death when they were only boys. Twelve years have passed since La Leyenda del tiempo…

HIGH LIFE.

CLAIRE DENIS

FRANCE – GERMANY – UK – POLAND – USA 

Deep space. Beyond our solar system. Monte and his daughter Willow live together on board a spacecraft, in complete isolation. A solitary man, who uses his strict self-discipline as protection against desire (his own and that of others), Monte fathered the girl against his will. His sperm was used to inseminate Boyse, the young woman who gave birth to the girl.

ILLANG: THE WOLF BRIGADE

KIM JEE-WOON

SOUTH KOREA 

In 2029, after the governments of North and South Korea announce a 5-year plan to reunify the country, strong sanctions by the world’s most powerful nations cripple the economy and lead to a hellish period of chaos. With the appearance of an armed anti-government terrorist group called The Sect which opposes reunification, the President creates a new police division called …

LE CAHIER NOIR / THE BLACK BOOK

VALERIA SARMIENTO

FRANCE – PORTUGAL 

This is the story of the late eighteenth-century adventures of a singular couple formed by a little orphan with mysterious origins and his young Italian nurse of similarly uncertain birth. They lead us in their wake, from Rome to Paris, from Lisbon to London, from Parma to Venice. Always followed in the shadows, for reasons we don’t know, by a suspicious-looking Calabrian

QUIÉN TE CANTARÁ

CARLOS VERMUT

SPAIN – FRANCE 

Lila Cassen was the most successful Spanish singer of the nineties until she mysteriously vanished from one day to the next. Ten years later Lila is preparing her triumphant stage comeback; however, shortly before the long-awaited date she is involved in an accident and loses her memory. Violeta’s life is dominated by her conflictive daughter Marta. Every night she finds escape..

ROJO

BENJAMÍN NAISHTAT

ARGENTINA – BRAZIL – FRANCE – NETHERLANDS – GERMANY 

In the mid-70s, a stranger arrives in a quiet provincial town. In a restaurant, for no apparent reason, he sets about attacking Claudio, a well-known lawyer. The community supports the lawyer and humiliates the stranger, who is thrown out. Later, on the way home, the man intercepts Claudio and his wife Susana once again, determined to wreak his terrible revenge on Claudio.

VISION

NAOMI KAWASE

JAPAN – FRANCE 

Jeanne leaves for Japan in search of a rare medicinal plant. During the trip, she meets Tomo, a forest ranger, who accompanies her on her quest and guides her through the traces of her past. 20 years ago, in the forests of Yoshino, Jeanne lived her first love.

YULI

ICÍAR BOLLAÍN

SPAIN – CUBA – UK – GERMANY 

Yuli is the nickname given to Carlos Acosta by his father, Pedro, who considers him the son of Ogun, an African god and a fighter. As a child Yuli avoids discipline and education, learning from the streets of an impoverished and abandoned Havana. His father, however, has other ideas, and knowing that his son has a natural talent for dance, sends him to the National Ballet Schoo…

GIGANTES

ENRIQUE URBIZU, JORGE DORADO

SPAIN 

OUT OF competition

For decades the Guerrero brothers have controlled the flow of drugs from the peninsula to the rest of Europe. Now they’re faced with one of the most crucial moments in their history. The eldest brother, Daniel, is released from jail after fifteen years, eager to recover his place in the family. The world Daniel left behind no longer exists. His father Abraham is sick, ..

DANTZA

TELMO ESNAL

SPAIN 

Special Screenings

The storm breaks after a hard day’s work in the fields. When the rain eases off life springs up from the previously barren land. Fruit grows and ripens, survives disease and becomes the apples which give life to cider. Then comes the time to harvest, offer toasts and celebrate love. A story about the cycle of life and death, the fight for survival. Where the passage of time…

TIEMPO DESPUÉS

JOSÉ LUIS CUERDA

SPAIN – PORTUGAL 

Special Screenings

In 9177, give or take a thousand years (there’s no point in being finicky about these details) the whole world, and, according to some authors, the universe too, has been reduced to a single Representative Building and squalid suburbs inhabited by all of the out-of-work and hungry in the cosmos. One of the down and outs, José María, decides that by facing up to the difficul…

SAN SEBASTIAN FILM FESTIVAL

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SAN SEBASTIAN FILM FESTIVAL | 21 – 29 SEPTEMBER 2018

 

Witness for the Prosecution (1957) **** Bluray release

Dir: Billy Wilder | Writers: Billy Wilder, Harry Kurnitz, Lawrence B Marcus | Cast: Marlene Dietrich, Tyrone Power, Charles Laughton, Elsa Lanchester, John Williams, Torin Thatcher, Norma Varden, Una O’Connor | US Crime Drama | 116′

A veteran British barrister takes on a slippery client in Billy Wilder’s twisty courtroom triumph based on Agatha Christie’s international stage success.

WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION is an enjoyable classic masterpiece that blends humour, intrigue and stunning performances from an outstanding cast lead by Charles Laughton as the bombastic diehard Sir Wilfred Roberts (Laughton), who is determined not to be outwitted by his charmingly glib client the putative murderer Leonard Vole (Power) whose steely wife Christine (Dietrich) plays a vixen with a heart of gold. Wilder and his co-writer Harry Kurnitz lace this deliciously intoxicating cocktail with their signature witty one-liners that pretty up this elegantly pleasing theatrical courtroom drama with its robust legal underpinnings and insight into England in the late 1950s, the distant echoes of WWII and Colonialism adding gusto to the storyline.

The film was nominated for six Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director and was reportedly praised by Agatha Christie as the best adaptation of her work she had seen. MT

AVAILABLE ON BLURAY COURTESY OF EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA FROM 10 SEPTEMBER 2018

BlacKKKlansman (2018) ****

Dir: Spike Lee | Cast: Adam Driver, Topher Grace, Laura Harrier, Ryan Eggold, Corey Hawkins | Biopic Crime Comedy | US |

Spike Lee’s latest film follows Ron Stallworth, an African-American police officer from Colorado, who successfully managed to infiltrate the local Ku Klux Klan.

BlacKkKlansman champions the Black Lives Matter brigade and is Spike Lee’s most engaging film in years, playing out as a straightforward 1970s style tale that sees a Black rookie detective get close up close and personal with the KKK, by posing as a potential punter over the ‘phone then sending his white colleague along to do the honours. Adam Driver plays game in fine form.

There shades of Shaft here and other blaxploitation films of the era, but the accent is on comedy and irony rather than outright thriller, although Lee has done his research seriously offering plenty of historical detail and some archive footage from the Charlottesville riots from August last year, and the camera swivels firmly in focus of President Trump, and DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation.

The white supremacists are a nasty bunch, as you can imagine, and no one escapes their vitriol which is aimed at Jews and anyone not of Aryan blood. Topher Grace plays David Duke, the head honcho of the local branch, the film also features Black characters who are racist such as Patrice..

After joining the surprisingly racist Colorado Springs Police department, his first mission is to attend a Black Power meeting addressed by Stokely Carmichael/Kwame Ture. Here he meets and falls for Angela Davies Patrice (Laura Harrier). The film then charts his progress to infiltrate and bring down the KKK organisation in scenes where the tone is taut but always firmly upbeat. With lowkey natural performances from leads Adam Driver and John David Washington, and a stellar score of ‘70s hits, this is an enjoyable, informative and undivisive drama and certainly worthy of winning the Palme d’Or. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | GRAND PRIX WINNER 2018

Bad Samaritan (2017) ****

Dir.: Dean Devlin; Cast: David Tennant, Robert Sheehan, Jacqueline Byers, Carlito Olivero, Kerry Condon, Tracey Higgins; USA 2018, 110 min.

Unjustly panned by major US outlets, this tight little B-movie directed by Dean Devlin (Geostorm) might not re-invent the neo-noir genre, but it has, thanks to writer Brandon Boyce’ (Apt Pupil), enough clever plot elements to keep the audience entertained. And  David Tennant’s well educated Ivy-League villain is truly frightening.

Sean (Sheehan) and his mate Derek (Olivero) work as car valets for a restaurant – but they have a nifty robbery sideline that keeps them flush: One of them motors via GPS to the house of the victim, and collects the loot, before returning the car before the pay check is exchanged. Enter Cale Erdenreich (Tennant), snotty and arrogant, who leaves his Maserati in the care of Sean (Sheehan), who has just come across Erdenreichs’s new credit card, which he gleefully activates. But his elation turns to horror when he finds a young woman (Condon) bloodied and held captive in a house they intended to rob. Sean miraculously morphs from small-time crook to upright citizen, promising to save the distraught victim. Which is easier said than done: first, the police don’t believe his story, only FBI agent Fuller (Higgins) takes him seriously. But the main obstacle is Erdenreich: cute and well-versed in alluding the police (via a flashback we see him kill a horse and its trainer as a teenage boy), and Sean is no match for him – at first. But after Erdenreich has beaten up Sean’s girl friend Riley (Byers) so badly that she has to be treated in Intensive Care, the hunter becomes the hunted.

Tennant makes the most of his psychotic serial-killer: he tells himself and his victims he is actually “correcting” them, breaking them in like the horse in the flashback. Like a true psychotic he believes he’s doing society a favour by murdering people who are “beyond correction”. Sometimes there’s a crack in the facade – when Erdenreich suddenly veers off script, hurling obscenities at his victims. But mostly, he is very much in control: in one scene, we see him, gun in hand, watching Sean under the shower. But instead of shooting, Erdenreich puts the safety on, mouths “poof” and leaves smiling.

DoP David Connell’s widescreen images pay homage to Portland/Oregon; his use of the electronic gear in the cat-and-mouse game between Cale and Sean is truly impressive. Devlin, producer of Godzilla and Independence Day, occasionally goes over but with a character like Erdenreich, this seems only logical. Finally, in classic noir tradition, there is a neat final twist: the filmmakers take on board a psychopath’s need to rid the planet of undesirables – wherever they find them. AS

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM 24 AUGUST 2018

 

The Guardians (2017) ****

Dir.: Xavier Beauvois |  Cast: Nathalie Baye, Iris Bry, Laura Smet, Cyril Descours, Gilbert Bonneau, Olivier Rabourdin, Nicolas Girand, Mathilde Viseux; France 2017 | 134′

Xavier Beauvois imagines the heroic sacrifices made by the women left at home during the Great War (1914-18) and shows shows that he has come a long way since his kitchen-sink debut feature Nord (1991). Based on the 1924 novel by Gouncourt winning author Ernest Perochon, and stunningly shot by Caroline Champetier, THE GUARDIANS is a celebration of female emancipation, played by a brilliant ensemble cast led by Nathalie Baye as a compelling matriarch.

Widow Hortense (Baye) is left in charge of the Paridier farm after her sons Constant (Girond) and Georges (Descours) are sent to the Front; they are soon joined by her daughter Solange’s (Smet) husband Clovis (Rabourdin). Helped by her father Henri (Bonneau), Hortense not only manages the farm-hands, but works the land herself in a bid to ensure that their livelihood continues while the men make occasional visits from the Front. In spite of her best efforts, she has to hire a newcomer, the orphan Francine (the outstanding debutant Bry) who is not only a good worker, but initiates the acquisition of a tractor and a harvesting machine. When Georges comes back from the front for a week, he falls in love with Francine to the chagrin of local girl Marguerite (Viseux) who was favoured by Hortense to marry her son.

Without making an idyll of nature, Champetier frames every shot with great care making fabulous use of the transcendent light, so that the soft hues of the terroir form a glowing backdrop to the toiling humans  The predominantly female workers are gracefully framed as they toil away in the fields and even though their work is gruelling, there is always a certain rhythmic elegance at play. This is a complete contrast to Riefenstahl’s Olympia films where female athletes were shown in short, hectic clips, focusing on an immediate target, like robots robbed of their human qualities. Beauvois lets the camera linger, allowing the scenes to play out naturally. Admittedly, there is some self-indulgence, which manifests itself in the running time, but like Thomas Hardy, some novels need to be transferred to the big screen in their full length – and this is one. Lusciously photographed, but poignant in its dramatic conflicts, THE GUARDIANS is almost a masterpiece. AS

Now SCREENING nationwide in arthouse cinemas courtesy of Curzon

The Senator | Chappaquiddick (2017) *** | Digital HD DVD

Dir John Curran | Cast: Jason Clarke, Kate Mara, Ed Helms, Jim Gaffigan, Clancy Brown, Taylor Nichols, Olivia Thirlby, Bruce Dern | US | Political Drama | 97′

The Senator looks swanky enough with its Ivy League Sixties aesthetic but as a gripping account of when Ted Kennedy (Clarke) had a car accident in Chappaquiddick, Martha’s Vineyard that led to the death of campaign worker Mary Jo Kopechne (Mara), it’s a pretty flaccid affair.

And that’s no fault of these two versatile actors – Jason Clarke is a dead ringer for Ted, and Mara makes a cool but brief appearance as Mary Jo – or a decent cast that includes veteran Bruce Dern who do their utmost to serve this legendary incident in American 20th century history, that, on the face of it, offers luridly exciting dramatic potential with its themes of adultery, sexual shenanigans, cover-ups and dirty politics in an era fraught with glamour and intrigue. Not least is the fact that Ted Kennedy kept the whole thing under wraps from the authorities – or even his advisors, for a 10 whole hours, even enjoying a night’s sleep before spilling the beans about the mishap and his colleague’s disappearance.

Yet Curran plays all these explosive elements down to offer a sober, morose, almost worthy, drama that adopts a near religious respect to the scandal that rocked the final knockings of the Sixties, and debatably put paid to Ted’s Kennedy’s political career. In the event, the whole episode was buried under the breaking news of the first moon landing two days later.

Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan’s debut script plays out like a tame crime procedural maintaining that because the tragedy took place on Kennedy home soil in Massachusetts, it was possible to stage manage the incident and keep the incendiary potential underwater, drowning most of the scandal along with its sorry victim, who was only 28 at the time. What is not played down however is the strongly patriarchal influence of a frail Joe Kennedy (Bruce Dern) who continued to pull rank on his son: despite being semi-gaga and confined to a wheelchair he manages to deflate his progeny with a potent allure.

Curran and his writers make no attempt to elaborate or delve deeper into the well-known facts – that Ted was offering Mary Jo a lift home from an ordinary campaign evening when his car left a bridge and somersaulted into the shallow river below. Kennedy escaped but did not rescue Mary Jo, claiming amnesia brought on by shock. After getting a metaphorical clip round the ear from pater during a telephone call where he asks for advice, Ted then disappears into the bosom of his family as advisors close ranks around him.

What transpires, unsurprisingly, is that this powerful US scion appears to be above the law: Curran shows Ted to be a rather spineless individual whose ill-conceived decision to don a neck brace for Mary Jo’s funeral also proves him to be rather narcissistic and lacking in integrity. In the event, Kennedy pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of a crash causing personal injury and got away lightly with a two-year suspended sentence.

With its sonorous score by Garth Stevenson, The Senator offers decent but rather lacklustre viewing, and while it will certainly enlighten those not familiar with the story, it hardly sets the night on fire with what could have been an incendiary political thriller. MT

NOW ON DIGITAL HD AND DVD from 20 AUGUST 2018

 

 

Temptation Harbour (1947) ****

Dir: Lance Comfort | Cast: Simone Simon, Robert Newton, William Hartnell, Margaret Barton | Noir Thriller | UK |

The story of Temptation Harbour is straightforward but morally complex. One night a railway signalman on the quay observes two men suspiciously embarking from a ship. Later he witnesses a fight between the men for possession of a suitcase. A man is deliberately pushed into the water and the killer runs off. The signalman retrieves the suitcase to discover it contains £5000 in banknotes. The police are not informed. He hides the case in his house. Conflicts concerning family trust, the appearance of a femme fatale and further violence ensue.

Lance Comfort’s Temptation Harbour (1947) is one of three film adaptations of Georges Simenon’s novel L’homme de Londres: Newhaven-Dieppe. The other two are Henri Decoin’s L’homme de Londres (1931), and Bela Tarr’s The Man from London (2007). The 30’s French version is moody but stolid (An earnest voice-over ‘guilty conscience’ and a chanson-singing prostitute almost sink the production.) The Tarr film is brooding and metaphysical. Brilliantly shot in black and white but mysteriously abstracting Simenon’s story: making it more a Bela Tarr experience than a noir-thriller. Only the British film, Temptation Harbour comes closest to Simenon’s fatalism where his icy sympathy is tempered by the sensitive direction of Lance Comfort. Whilst a sense of the French cinema of the 30s and 40s (Quai Des Brumes and La Bête humaine) aids the atmosphere.

Film noir is a highly influential force in cinema: depicting a treacherous world of darkness and pessimism where characters engage, or deliberately strain your sympathy. Not normally a world in which much compassion is shown to those who do wrong. The word “generosity” doesn’t come readily to mind for its heroes, villains or even victims. Yet the noirish-stained Temptation Harbour has a warmly rounded sympathy for its signalman protagonist Bert Mallinson (Robert Newton) and his involved people, daughter Betty Mallinson (Margaret Barton) side-show performer Camelia (Simone Simon) and “the man from London killer” Jim Brown (William Hartnell). The emphasis is placed on vulnerability, understandable corruption and stress: all are highlighted instead of noir’s usual amorality, obvious greed and sweet revenge.

The degree of tenderness that Lance Comfort brings to this dark melodrama is remarkable. Bert Mallinson, Betty Mallinson and Camelia are played out as subtle variations of innocence and experience. Bert is basically a decent man who holds onto the £5000 realising it would be impossible to earn so much in a lifetime of work. Betty is a kind daughter who (in her father’s eyes) does wrong by stealing some kidneys from the butcher’s she works at – a small misdemeanour, but enough for Bert to momentarily ‘flaw’ her character. Camelia is an unhappy orphan of the war, now trapped into playing the part of a ‘radio-active mermaid’ beauty in a tacky fairground act. She want to escape and tries to seduce Bert, with his suitcase of money, for this is her only means to return to a comfortable life in France. Even the killer Mr.Brown is treated with compassion once we learn the circumstances that led him to crime – a distressed Mrs.Brown (Joan Hopkins) is brought in for questioning by an ex-detective, Inspector Dupre (Marcel Dalio)

Temptation Harbour pays homage to both Jean Renoir and De Sica. Renoir for the film’s overall intense sympathy and De Sica for the lovely attention to detail and atmosphere that Comfort brings to the scene involving daughter Betty as she prepares her father’s breakfast. The camera accompanies her in a manner echoing the long sequence featuring the maid preparing for the day, in De-Sica’s Umberto D.

The film’s father/daughter relationship is handled with tender insight and affection. The rupture of this family bond emotionally breaks the recently widowed signalman, as much as his futile holding onto the money and a final act of self-defence. Robert Newton is excellent as the conflicted father. Margaret Barton (who began her film career as the tearoom waitress in Brief Encounter) gives a superb performance that is both heartfelt and poignant.

Bleak tale though it is, Temptation Harbour has humorous episodes. Irene Handl’s fake playing of the piano at the show and Simone Simon’s bored and detached delivery of her theatrical patter are beautifully comedic. It’s a perfectly cast film but not quite note perfect. There’s an extended voice-over by Robert Newton – the director ought to have trusted his actor to suggest character dilemma through looks. Yet this is a slight flaw in a moving and exciting film.

It seems that betrayal, error and the confused aspiration to a better life spill out from the family to encompass the needs of the other characters. It’s just after the Second World War and people are still poor and desire transformative social change. Lance Comfort and co-scriptwriter Rodney Ackland (author of the play Absolute Hell (1952) set in a club on the eve of the 1945 general election) plant this sub-text into their crime film. A better life, to remain decent people, avoid messes like the one Bert Mallinson has got himself into, and improve themselves, are their aspirations making up a redemptive goal – not in a religious sense – but for a deserved material well being. The urgent need to escape from an austere Britain of rationing and ‘making things do’ hangs over everyone.

“How by 1945, at the apparent birth of a new world, did the ‘activators’ – politicians, planners, public intellectuals, opinion-formers – really see the future? And how did their vision of what lay ahead compare with that of ‘ordinary people?’ The overlaps and mismatches between these two sets of expectations would be fundamental to the playing out of the next three or more decades.” Austerity Britain 1945-51 – David Kynaston

Temptation Harbour works as a social critique; film noir; domestic drama and crime movie. Visually stunning camerawork by Otto Heller creates much fine and appropriate shading of the foggy harbour and the house and hotel interiors. Mischa Poliansky’s music is very effective – particularly in the heart-rending final moments: Father locks up the house and says goodbye to his daughter, the music surges in and up with a Rachmaninov-like tone and power.

Temptation Harbour is rightly regarded as Lance Comfort’s best work and for me should be viewed alongside Cavalcanti’s They Made Me a Fugitive – also photographed by Otto Heller. It’s fascinating to compare the Fugitive spiv-corrupted London with the dangerous Folkestone of Temptation Harbour, as both were released in 1947. Fugitive has a demobilised RAF pilot Clem Morgan, played by Trevor Howard, drawn into a world of crime. Both Morgan and Mallinson seek justice either in the form of regained dignity (Fugitive) or deserved materialism (Harbour) and are impatient for the new world to deliver. Unfortunately Cavalcanti’s disillusioned ex-serviceman and Comfort’s corrupted signalman are left at the end with their fate uncertain (Only in The Man from London version of Simenon’s novel and L’homme de Londres is Mallinson sort of let off, by the police inspector, from his ‘crime’.)

The film has not been available until recently due to issues with the Simenon family estate, Temptation Harbour can now be viewed on the BFI online player for a small rental charge. I saw it this month at a one-off screening at the Southbank and their beautiful archive print, of what is probably a minor masterpiece, really ought to be released on blu-ray. Alan Price©2018

TEMPTATION HARBOUR IS AVAILABLE ON BFI PLAYER

Gangbyun Hotel (Hotel by the River) *** Locarno International Film Festival 2018

Dir/Scr Hong Sang-soo. South Korea. 2018. 96mins

The meaning of life seeps through the quietest moments of Hong Sang-Soo’s GANGBYUN HOTEL (HOTEL BY THE RIVER), a poetic cocktail of family dysfunction and random rendezvous laced with the Korean auteur’s idiosyncratic brand of humour and charismatic charm.

This slow-burning winsome affair sees a famous poet Younghwan (Ki Joobong) in retreat by the Han River where he is overwhelmed by a melancholy introspective state of mind as he contemplates the wintry landscape. Convinced he is going to die, he calls his two sons to reminisce and reflect with him in his Ingvar Bergmanesque final hours as snow softly falls outside. It seems that Younghwan wants to bring a conciliatory conclusion to their lives together but Kyungsoo (Kwon Haehyo) and film director Byungsoo (Yu Junsang) are keen to put their side of the story, as the trio josh a mild tiff breaks out that leads to some revelations and soul-searching. Younghwan quietly slips off to the bathroom as the others temporarily lose contact with their father, fearing the worst, while the old man was merely relieving himself.

In a quiet bedroom, somewhere else in the waterside hotel, two other troubled souls are drawn together: Sanghee (Kim Minhee) is tearfully getting over a relationship as her friend Yeonju (Song Seonmi) consoles and comforts her. But when they meet Younghwan strolling through the snow his rather embarrassing compliments about their appearance lift the mood from sadness to shared hilarity and suppressed giggles.

Enriched by the usual combination of cryptic dialogue and whimsical non-sequiturs, Gangbyun Hotel is a peaceful, reflective drama, endearingly warmed by the placid equanimity of these human resolutions. DoP Kim Hyung-ku’s bleached out and beautifully framed compositions of the snowy landscape resemble minimalist Japanese Hugusai paintings. MT

BEST ACTOR WINNER – KI JOOBONG | LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2018

 

The Glorious Acceptance of Nicolas Chauvin (2018) **** Locarno Film Festival 2018

Dir.: Benjamin Crotty; Cast: Alexis Manetti, Antoine Cholet, Pauline Jacquard, Caroline Deruas; France 2018, 26 min.

Winner of the Mantarraya award at this year’s Locarno Film festival, Benjamin Crotty’s quirky exploration of everything French is cleverly conceived and inventive, both aesthetically and in its execution. THE GLORIOUS ACCEPTANCE is a social and political satire – somewhere between stand-up and Black Adder – biting and highly entertaining. It makes fun of said Chauvinism, but it also pampers to it. A true original.

Nicolas Chauvin (Manenti), legendary one-eyed farmer-soldier of the Napoleonic Wars, comes back to receive an imaginary award while regaling us with a potted history of his grim and glorious career during an outlandish stage appearance that could have been drawn from the tradition of Roman theatre, or even the alazon of Ancient Greek comedy. We’re then transported back to the place of his purported birth in 1820, the navel port of Rochefort. Derring-do was clearly the done thing for this original chauvinist who displays his excessive and unreasonable patriotism, emerging as quite the hero by bravely jumping off battlements and diving into moats without a by your leave to escape the clutches of a glass-eyed chain-mailed enemy, who later kills Nic’s charming female companion (Caroline Deruas). The two men then fiercely debate Chauvin’s psychological identity – did he repress his Oedipus complex and project his mother’s faults onto others, so creating so his paranoia? Another scene change sees him in a bar where he dallies with his next conquest (Pauline Jacquard): all this after a hymn, however barbed, to everything French, Messi plays football on the big screen. Finally, we are back on the stage where Chauvin thanks everybody from Eurosport to François Holland, bearing in mind the president sold weapons worth 8.3 billion in 2016. The elitist classes know no shame. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | 1-10 AUGUST 2018

A Land Imagined (2018) *** Golden Leopard winner | Locarno 2018

Dir: Yeo Siew Hua | Drama | 95′ 

A Land Imagined could have been rather a good noirish thriller, judging from the early scenes which see a slightly sleazy Singapore detective hot on the heels of a missing migrant worker in Singapore’s crowded commercial district. What follows is a moody and sensuously cinematic arthouse drama with a subtle moral message that initially would have us believe that those who fetch up in this rich island seeking to improve their lot are somehow hard done by – or even meet a sticky end. Actor writer and director Yeo Siew Hua instead subverts expectations opting instead for a more unstructured approach that mirrors the film’s title but results in a downbeat outcome that will disappoint those hoping for twists and turns and a satisfying denouement.

Lonely reclamation construction worker Wang Bi Cheng (Liu Xiaoyi) has disappeared after forming a virtual friendship with a mysterious gamer. Detective Lok (Peter Yu) is the world weary cypher who gives nothing away in his search for the missing man, as gradually his trail loses focus as he aimlessly scours the streets and kicks a beer bottle along the sand-dunes at night. Wang is in no hurry to get away as he wanders in a febrile trance through sad cyber-cafes. His Bangladeshi co-worker and friend Ajit (Ishtiaque Zico) is one of the only decent, likeable characters here, the other human link is Mindy (Luna Kwok), a whip-smart cafe worker who offers him feisty company but is certainly no fool. Wang feels his chances rapidly melting away in the quicksand of this existential corner of Hell. The tone is ominous as the story drifts dreamily in a neon-lit goldfish bowl.

DoP Hideho Urata paints the working districts of the affluent hub of South Asia as an unsettling mirage where all is not what it seems. Lights twinkle softly in the distant nightscapes seen from the pearl white beaches of the reclamation land; but the sand has been imported from Malaysia. Mounds of aggregate and cement loom up like pyramids in the dusky night air. The breezy jazz score somehow allays our fears that this will not end well for our migrant worker, while groups of Bangladeshi workers dance themselves into a frenzy with mournful tunes from back home.

Lok’s attempts to get under the skin of his quarry in an effort to bring his search to a conclusion but in the end the drama drifts without any questions being answered, leaving us to ponder the existence of another artificial world created by a disenfranchised workforce uprooted from their homes and families and sucked into a meaningless existence of that serves no purpose other than to simply stay alive. MT

SCREENING IN COMPETITION | LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2018

Birds of Passage (2018) ****

Dir: Ciro Guerra |Dir/Prod: Cristina Gallego | Drama | Colombia | Cast: | Carmina  Martínez, Jhon Narváez, José Acosta, José Vicente Cotes, Juan Martínez, Natalia Reyes | 110’

Embrace of the Serpent (2015) was the first Colombian feature to be nominated for an Oscar© and won Ciro Guerra the Art Cinema award at Directors’ Fortnight. The Bogota born director returns with his fourth and most ambitious film today PAJAROS DE VERANO that explores the origins of the Colombian drug trade through this epic yet spiritual  multi-layered story about an indigenous Wayuu family of farmers turned drug-traffickers become involved in the booming business of selling marijuana to the American youth in the 1970s. But from a tiny seed of discontent passion and honour collide, and a fratricidal war breaks out that will put their lives, culture and ancestral traditions at stake.

Working this time in colour with his DoP David Gallego, Guerra creates a fabulous sense of place in the arid windswept plains of Colombia’s Guajira desert, where a deep unsettling feeling continually pervades the heady atmosphere with Leonardo Heiblum’s ground-breaking ominous soundscape.

Embrace of the Serpent writer Jacques Vidal and co-scripter Maria Camila Arias structure the story around five songs: Wild Grass 1968, The Tombs 1971, Prosperity 1979, The War 1980 and Limbo following the age-old traditional rags to riches and then tragedy formula. That said, this is an inventive and refreshingly original film whose poetic nature is continually punctuated by episodes of brutal violence and down to earth characters echoing recent South American fare such as Lucrecia Martel’s Zama, and Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja, and anchoring Birds firmly in historical reality despite its lyrical and often dreamlike folkloric overtones.

In this strongly matriarchal set-up, themes of capitalism vie with those of spirituality showing how both can breed antagonism if left unchecked, and this is eventually what transpires when male machismo and greed topples this delicate human society with tragedy and loss the inevitable outcome. Occasionally marred by uneven pacing BIRDS OF PASSAGE is nevertheless a startling achievement marking out Ciro Guerra and his co-director Cristina Gallego as growing talents on the South American scene. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 8-19 MAY | DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT

 

Those Who Work (2018) **** Locarno International Film Festival 2018

Dir/Writer: Antoine Russbach, Emmanuel Marre | Switzerland,Belgium | Cast: Olivier Gourmet | August 2018 | 100′

Premiering here at Locarno Film Festival, this hugely enjoyable and absorbing drama from Swiss director Antoine Russbach is uplifted by a compelling performance from Olivier Gourmet as Frank, a dedicated father of five who devotes his life to work in cargo shipping.

A strong narrative is the key to this modest parable and what starts as a potential hijack thriller in the style of Tobias Lindholm’s recent outing, soon develops into a richly thematic character study about a man’s tough decision during a crisis that loses him his job and potentially everything else he holds dear and eventually leads to some deep soul-searching. Deeply shaken, betrayed by a system to which he has given everything, Frank (Gourmet) finds his back against the wall but his tough upbringing and committed work ethic keeps him grounded in reality with a feelgood outcome that feels satisfying and rewarding in this world of political correctness.

In Frank’s world there are only two types of people: those who work to achieve a level of success so they can look after and provide for those who enjoy the benefits of the standard of living that he is able to provide. A risk-taker and a pragmatist who takes pride in the ability to deliver his company’s goods on time and with a healthy profit margin, Frank is a both a hero and an anti-hero, depending on which side of the fence you stand on this thorny issue. But to his credit, he is a self-made and self-reliant worker who has risen from an extremely modest rural background. He’s is also a calm and diligent father who always gives his kids time and consideration, particularly his youngest Mathilde (Adele Bochatay in a thoughtful debut). His wife is an understanding and devoted homemaker who cares for their comfortable house in the outskirts of Antwerp and the couple enjoy a happy marriage. Inadvertently, his kids have developed a sense of entitlement and have grown to expect the things their father can provide: the latest mobile phone and a luxurious swimming pool – but this is par for the course of today’s affluent society. And men are most fulfilled when they can are successful in their chosen careers and can provide for their family.

When the crew of his one of his container vessels inadvertently fails to spot a migrant on board, Frank is forced to make a decision in order to save his clients and his company considerable losses, and the delay of the cargo. In short, the shops will not get their goods in the time and the consumer will suffer with higher prices. The unwelcome interloper on board thought he was heading for Europe – not further afield – and has started to freak out on board, frightening to cause a mutiny amongst the sailors and disrupt the smooth running of the vessel with his suspected outbreak of Ebola virus. It’s a terrible dilemma and Frank deals with the crisis calmly and in a pragmatic way that nevertheless contravenes human rights and company guidelines. Although commercially he has saved the day, in the aftermath he becomes a scapegoat, falling from grace with his employers and his family. There follows a dark night of the soul, but Frank makes it through to the morning thanks to his steely resolve and a strong need to protect and look after his family. Antoine Russbach has made a supremely intelligent and powerful moral parable that deserves to be seen by all the family. MT

FILMMAKERS OF THE PRESENT | LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | 1-11 August 2018

 

The Guest (2018) ***

Dir.: Duccio Chiarini; Cast: Daniele Parisi, Sylvia d’Amico, Mivia Marigliano, Sergio Peirattini, Daniele Natali, Thony, Anna Bellato; Italy 2018, 93 min.

Duccio Chiarini’s portrait of Italian middle-class malaise is familiar all over Western Europe. Thirtysomethings show a depressing lack of commitment – particularly the men. What starts as a romcom rapidly dives into melancholy meditation on modern life.

We meet wannabe write and occasional substitute teacher Guido (Parisi), naked between the legs of his girl friend Chiara (d’Amico). Clearly copulation has taken place, and Guido is looking for the burst condom. After finding it, Guido votes they should go for a baby, rather than the ‘morning after’ pill – knowing full well that Chiara is opposed to the idea: ”I have to have done something with my life before having a child”. And it’s true, neither of them has a good job, despite Chiara’s two MAs, her stint as a tour guide, and Guido’s book on Calvino, which is still waiting for publication. Nothing seems to work in their relationship either: the car is broken down, but there’s no money to repair it. And Guido’s mother (Marigliano) is still buying his underwear, as Chiara points out, although he’s pushing forty. Chiara is considering a decent offer in Canada but is unsure how to broach the topic.  And this is the beginning of the end of their relationship, because Guido suspects that Chiara is seeing another man.

The focus then changes to Guido, who becomes the hero: sofa-surfing with his parents and various friends, and stalking Chiara in the meantime. His mates aren’t faring any better. Dario (Natali) has fallen in love with another woman and is about to leave girl friend Roberta (Thony), a cardiologist. “We met via Tinder”, is Dario’s lame excuse, telling Guido to have a look at Chiara’s emails. Pietro and the pregnant Lucia (Bellato), are more negative than happy about their baby, and Lucia is competing with Guido for a literary grant. This is modern life, according to Guido’s mother: “You throw away, we mend”.

Guido and his generation see relationships and careers as transient. Self-obsessed, the men in particular, fail to grow up or even learn from their mistakes. Chiarini is an insightful observer, and DoP Baris Ozbicer’s camera finds always new angles for the emotional distress of the protagonists. Overall, the feature is more entertaining than philosophical, the director too well-meaning to produce anything with sharp edges. AS

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2018

 

 

Gangbyun Hotel (Hotel by the River) *** Locarno International Film Festival 2018

Dir/Scr Hong Sang-soo. South Korea. 2018. 96mins

The meaning of life seeps through the quietest moments of Hong Sang-Soo’s GANGBYUN HOTEL (HOTEL BY THE RIVER), a poetic cocktail of family dysfunction and random rendezvous laced with the Korean auteur’s idiosyncratic brand of humour and charismatic charm.

This slow-burning winsome affair sees a famous poet Younghwan (Ki Joobong) in retreat by the Han River where he is overwhelmed by a melancholy introspective state of mind as he contemplates the wintry landscape. Convinced he is going to die, he calls his two sons to reminisce and reflect with him in his Ingvar Bergmanesque final hours as snow softly falls outside. It seems that Younghwan wants to bring a conciliatory conclusion to their lives together but Kyungsoo (Kwon Haehyo) and film director Byungsoo (Yu Junsang) are keen to put their side of the story. As the three of them banter, a mild tiff breaks out that leads to some revelations and soul-searching. When Younghwan quietly slips off to the bathroom for rather a long time, the others immediately fear the worst. Meanwhile the old man was merely relieving himself.

In a quiet bedroom, somewhere else in the waterside hotel, two other troubled souls are drawn together: Sanghee (Kim Minhee) is tearfully getting over a relationship as her friend Yeonju (Song Seonmi) consoles and comforts her. But when they meet Younghwan strolling through the snow his rather embarrassing compliments about their appearance lift the mood from sadness to shared hilarity and suppressed giggles.

Enriched by the usual combination of cryptic dialogue and whimsical non-sequiturs, Gangbyun Hotel is a peaceful, reflective drama, warmed by the humour and bonhomie of these endearing interactions. DoP Kim Hyung-ku’s bleached out and beautifully framed compositions of the snowy landscape resemble minimalist Japanese Hugusai paintings. MT

BEST ACTOR WINNER – KI JOOBONG | LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2018

 

Menocchio 2018 *** Locarno International Film Festival 2018

Dir: Alberto Fasulo | Drama | Italy | 103′

Alberto Fasulo’s lavishly mounted imagined drama, having its premiere here at Locarno Film Festival, examines the ethical and moral issues surrounding the purported heresy of Domenico Scandella (1532–1599), also known as Menocchio, a miller from Montereale, Italy, who in the 16th century was tried by the Inquisition for his unorthodox religious views, and burnt at the stake.

Fasulo won the top prize at Rome 2013 with Tir. This, his fourth film is a costumed period piece that plays out from the POV of the inquisition’s interrogator as he encourages Scandella’s friends and associates to denounce the honest miller. Fasulo invites us into a God-fearing world where the close-knit community are dominated by the Catholic Church and potently in thrall to their religious convictions.

This exquisitely-crafted arthouse has the look and gravitas of the films of Italian masters such as Olmi or even the Taviani brothers. Each frame is elegantly composed telling the simple chronological storyline. Much of action takes place in the cloistered candlelit confinement of the ancient prison where Menocchio, his draw expression captured in the flickering candlelight, is interrogated about his views and beliefs that question the virgin birth. And Menocchio repeatedly sticks to his principles refusing to ask for forgiveness or change his mind, knowing full well that fatal punishment awaits him. These scenes contrast with the fresh and summery outdoors of the Friuli region were his associates are put to the test, some of the speaking in the region’s dialect.

Performed by a cast of mostly non-professional actors Menocchio is a quality drama that while shedding light on a little-known episode in history really needed the charismatic charge of a well-known actor to raise its worthwhile subject matter. MT.

IN COMPETITION | LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2018

 

Alice T. (2018) **** Locarno International Film Festival 2018

Dir: Radu Muntean |  Drama | Romania | 105′

Romanian New Wave director Radu Muntean follows his existential thriller One Floor Below (2015) with a similarly slow-burning contemporary portrait of narcissism and disenchanted Bucharest youth premiering at Locarno Film Festival 2018.

Drawing comparison with Uli Edel’s Christiane F, teenage Alice T is pretty, petulant and out of control. Adopted as a baby from a Rumanian orphanage she is constantly finding ways to market herself for personal empowerment and spends her directionless days hanging out with mindless friends, taking selfies, a cigarette casually in her hand. Their focus is on boys and soon Alice is pregnant, sparking a furious row with her adoptive mother (Mihaela Sirbu from Aferim!) who suffered to have her own kids but now accepts her daughter’s right to have the baby. Spurred on by this petty victory against her mother, Alice at first feels more in control; she has a weapon against her mother, a new identity and a mission to accomplish – that of motherhood. Her mother warms to the pregnancy and gradually the family are on board supporting her too. Alice finally feels she’s got somewhere with her life, but soon becomes bored with the idea of having a baby which may take the focus off number one.

Andra Guti is really impressive in her debut as Alice and Muntean, writing with two regular male collaborators (who are all fathers), keeps his distance from his anti-heroine as the observational story gradually unspools. What starts as a sad reflection on modern womanhood and the loss of feminine could have transformed into something warmer and more mature on Alice’s part. But that’s not the point. And soon her abusive narcissism resurfaces as she casts around for more attention, another power fix. This transformation is so subtle it takes a while to fully take on board the true depth of Alice’s self-centredness as the prime focus of her mother’s doting and undivided attention, calling to mind that same dedication seen by the mother in fellow Romanian Calin Peter Netzer’s 2013 drama Child’s Pose.

This female centric storyline highlights the focus on domestic trivia where low level issues form the centre of everyday conversations. The camera hangs over these scenes to the point of tedium, emphasising the sheer vacuousness of Alice’s existence. There are no hopes or dreams for anything outside this narrow domain. And Alice is not encouraged to aspire but shielded from any kind of challenge, so she is unable to learn by her mistakes on a road to nowhere. Her bad reports at school are openly questioned by her mother in the face of authority, pointing to a system where children can do no wrong, but will never really amount to anything. After the pregnancy is confirmed, her mother decides that her daughter will take some time out for the pregnancy, but this only leaves more of a vacuum in the teenager’s feckless existence and she needs to be the centre of attention.

Tudor Lucaciu’s camera pictures the scene around Bucharest and the coast in master shots and long takes showing how Alice can be anything to anybody as she casts her spell over strangers and acquaintances alike. The male characters remain unexplored and are mostly seen as bemused outsiders just trying to get on with their lives. And the finale comes as a fait accompli leaving Alice just as bewildered and lost as she must have felt back in that orphanage, and even less sure of herself than she was at the start. This is a drama that will make your blood boil. MT

IN COMPETITION | LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 1-11 AUGUST 2018 | Due to release next year in the UK

Separate Tables (1958) **** bluray release

Dir: Delbert Mann | Writer: Terence Rattigan, John Gay | Cast: Deborah Kerr, Rita Hayworth, David Niven, Burt Lancaster, Gladys Cooper, Cathleen Nesbitt, Felix Aylmer, May Hallett, Rod Taylor Audrey Dalton | UK | Drama | 100′

Based  on the one act plays “Table by the Window” and “Table Number Seven” by Terence Rattigan. This intimate and exquisitely-crafted character drama from Marty director Delbert Mann shows darker noirish shadows lurking behind its chic and gracefully turned out long-term residents staying at the Beauregard Hotel in the English seaside resort of Bournemouth, in the late fifties. 

The hotel manager is the prim and dignified Miss Pat Cooper (Wendy Hiller) who seems to be involved with Burt Lancaster’s recovering alcoholic. But it soon emerges that the troubled writer is actually still in love with his beautiful but insecurely narcissistic former wife (a glowing Rita Hayworth) who – on a dynamic-changing rebound – makes a smouldering entrance amongst the assembled guests, an unhappy assortment of troubled misfits, loners and fakes who welcome the chance to have the company of fellow souls as they dine at separate tables, all elegantly attired by costumier Edith Head. David Niven plays the part of a Walter Mitty major, a delusional phoney who tries to impress the emotionally fragile and histrionic Deborah Kerr, styling himself as a war hero. Deborah is accompanied by her brittle and overbearing mother (Gladys Cooper). 

Considered controversial at the time it all feels rather quaint but its underlying themes of emotional dysfunction, family breakdown, lost love and broken dreams are enduring and just as meaningful now as they ever were, and John Gay’s thoughtful script (complimented by David Raksin’s atmospheric score and Charles Lang’s pristine cinematography) never resorts to melodrama or sensationalism in expressing them as the narrative gradually reaches a satisfying conclusion with the ensemble cast giving some really fabulous performances. This is English classic cinema at its best. MT

AVAILABLE ON BLURAY | DVD FROM 20 AUGUST 2018

Agnès Varda – Gleaning Truths | 3 – 5 August 2018

GLEANING TRUTHS: AGNÈS VARDA is a UK wide touring programme from Friday 3 August in Curzon Soho. Comprising eight films and spanning six decades, the season celebrates Agnès Varda’s work in the build-up to the release of Oscar nominated Faces Places on the 21 September. The tour follows on from the extensive BFI Southbank season in June and takes the work of this pioneering filmmaker to audiences across the UK. 

The touring programme is launching on Thursday 2nd August with a 35mm screening of Cléo from 5 to 7pm at the Curzon Soho, plus panel discussion on Film, Fashion, and the Female Gaze. The panel will be hosted by The Bechdel Test Fest, an on-going celebration of films that pass the Bechdel Test.

La Pointe Courte 

France 1955. Dir Agnès Varda. With Philippe Noiret, Silvia Monfort. 80min. Digital. EST. PG 

Agnès Varda’s first feature, a precursor to the French New Wave, signals her future stylistic and thematic interests. Set in a working-class fishing village, the story moves between the daily struggles of the villagers and a young married couple from the city contemplating their failing marriage. With stunning cinematography, this striking debut demonstrates Varda’s exquisite sensibility as a photographer. 

Cléo from 5 to 7 Cléo de 5 à 7

France-Italy 1962. Dir Agnès Varda. With Corinne Marchand, Antoine Bourseiller, Dominique Davray. 90min. Digital. EST. PG
In pop singer Cléo, Varda created an iconic female protagonist. Wandering the streets of Paris, Cléo goes on a journey of self-discovery as she awaits the results of an important medical test. Moving and lyrical, Cléo from 5 to 7 is Varda’s breakthrough feature and a French New Wave classic, best enjoyed on the big screen.

Le Bonheur 

France 1964. Dir Agnès Varda. With Jean-Claude Drouot, Claire Drouot, Marie-France Boyer. 80min. Digital. EST. 15 Thérèse and François lead a seemingly pleasant married life, until he begins an affair with another woman, supposedly to enhance their mutual enjoyment. In her first colour feature, Varda becomes not only an observer of human behaviour and a commentator on the sexual revolution of the 1960s, but also a painter, utilising her palette on screen to enhance the story to great effect.

One Sings, the Other Doesn’t 

France-Venzuela-Belgium 1977. Dir Agnès Varda. With Thérèse Liotard, Valérie Mairesse, Robert Dadiès. 120min. Digital. EST. 12A
Set against the backdrop of the women’s liberation movement, the film charts the friendship between two women over the course of 15 years. Suzanne and Pauline lead very different lives, but what unifies them is their commitment to women’s rights. A deeply personal film for Varda, it combines elements of a musical (with lyrics written by the director herself) with Varda’s usual blend of fiction and documentary.

Vagabond 

France 1985. Dir Agnès Varda. With Sandrine Bonnaire, Macha Méril, Yolande Moreau. 106min. Digital. EST. 15. A Curzon Artificial Eye release
A powerful and heartbreaking account of a defiant and free-spirited woman. Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, Vagabond is a cinematic landmark that introduced one of the most intriguing, complex and uncompromising female protagonists in modern cinema. Sandrine Bonnaire, who debuted in Maurice Pialat’s À nos amours, gives a remarkable performance as the independent and rebellious Mona, who drifts through the South of France. The first scene shows Mona’s death, and so Agnès Varda tells her story through Mona’s interactions with the cross-section of French society she met in the last few weeks of her life. These encounters reveal people’s preconceptions around women’s place in society, personal freedoms within social structures, and the value of work – issues that still resonate more than 30 years after the film’s release.

Jacquot de Nantes 

France 1991. Dir Agnès Varda. With Philippe Maron, Edouard Joubeaud, Laurent Monnier. 120min. Digital. EST. PG 

This is Varda’s first film celebrating her late husband, French filmmaker Jacques Demy. With her signature style of mixing fiction with documentary, Varda beautifully reconstructs Demy’s adolescence and his love of theatre and cinema, using his memoirs as reference. Initiated during Demy’s last year of life and released after his death, Jacquot de Nantes is a touching portrait of a talented filmmaker-in-the-making. 

The Gleaners & I 

France 2000. Dir Agnès Varda. 82min. Digital. EST. U
Armed with a digital camera, Varda travels through the French countryside and Parisian streets to celebrate those who find use in discarded objects. Throughout, she finds affinity as a gleaner of images, emotions and stories, and expands a poetic exploration of gleaning into an innovative self-portrait. This seminal work, referred to by Varda as a ‘wandering- road ocumentary,’ explores her creative process and approach to making film and art.

The Beaches of Agnès 

France 2008. Dir Agnès Varda. 110min. Digital. EST. 18
A cinematic memoir of Varda’s personal and artistic life, told by the director herself on the eve of her 80th birthday. In a witty and original way, Varda weaves archive footage, reconstructions and film excerpts with present-day scenes to chart her life, including childhood, the French New Wave period, and her marriage to Jacques Demy. Inventive, emotional and reflective, this autobiographical essay celebrates Varda’s artistic creativity and curiosity about life.

SCREENING AT CURZON LONDON 3-5 AUGUST 2018 LONDON

Sibel (2018) **** Locarno International Film Festival 2018

Dirs/Writers: Cagla Zencirci, Guillaume Giovanetti | Cast: Damla Sonmez, Erkan Kolcak Kostendil, Meral Çetinkaya, Emin Gürsoy, Elit Iscan | Drama | 95′

Turkish village life is shamelessly exposed by defiant nature girl Sibel in this ravishingly rocking fable from directing duo Zencirci and Giovanetti premiering here at Locarno Film Festival 2018. 

SIBEL is another of the directing duo’s studies examining freedom and belonging following on from Noor (2012) and Ningen (2013). This tightly-scripted and perfectly-paced suspense fable also draws similarities with Reha Erdem’s escape-themed Jin (2013) that explored the perilous life of a Kurdish guerrilla girl on the run in the Anatolian mountains, but in this more intimate drama the setting is the isolated Black Sea town of Kuskoy in Northern Turkey known for its whistled language which adapts standard Turkish syllables into piercing tones that help the scattered locals to communicate long distance when working in the steep hillsides. Eric Devin’s widescreen camerawork conveys the magnificence of this lushly forested region.

And it’s here that Sibel lives with her authoritarian father and wayward younger sister Fatma. It’s a really powerful performance from Damla Sonmez who must be the first actor to whistle her part: strong-willed Sibel is mute from birth but has a closer bond with her father who has seen no reason to remarry much to the chagrin of the local small-minded women who marginalise and menace the young woman for her feral beauty and the freedom that her so-called ‘handicap’ allows. And we feel for her.  With women like these in the community it’s hardly surprising that menfolk would want to keep them down. Sibel is ostracised by every one of them, including her sister. One particularly resonant scene sees Sibel crying silently up at camera, but her speechlessness also works to her advantage allowing her to develop self-reliance and single-mindedness that sets her apart from the others as one of the two strong female characters in the narrative. The other is her bohemian  aunt who lives alone on the hillside encouraging her to follow her instincts: “women get their power from nature” These scenes in the forest provide a refreshing antidote to the female-centric plot-line that portraying the traditional local life that is dominated by the women folk’s need to subjugate themselves to a male-domination. And it’s into this natural habit that Sibel regularly retreats to spend time reflecting and also to hunt down a mysterious wolf threatening the village. It soon transpires that this wolf is really a metaphor for the immigrant outsider feared by the villagers. But soon a stranger does emerge, in the shape of fugitive Ali (Erkan Kolcak Kostendil) who will complete Sibel’s journey to self-realisation in this tense and stunningly filmic arthouse piece.  MT

IN COMPETITION | LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | 1-11 AUGUST 2018

 

 

 

Diane (2018)*** Locarno International Film Festival

Dir/Writer: Kent Jones | Cast: Mary Kay Place, Jake Lacy, Estelle Parson, Andre Martin, Deirdre O’Connell, Phyllis Summerville, Ray Iannicelli US | 90′

Kent Jones has made some dynamite documentaries: Hitchcock Truffaut, A Letter to Elia; Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows. His feature debut is an earnest and perceptive drama about an ordinary woman forced to find inner strength when her family crumbles around her. Diane could also be a US version of our long-running BBC4 series The Archers with its cheesy and occasionally awkward moments of ‘raw’ sincerity very on the maudlin. It pictures Diane padding around in a pink fluffy housecoat making chicken casserole to take to a sick friend, or having one margarita too many while unwinding in the local bar. This is not Hollywood or New York but somewhere like Denver Colorado where the characters sit around in thick cardies, pouring tasteless coffee into giant mugs and reminiscing over the dead and dying in their local community. What saves it and actually makes it rather watchable is the impressive cast that Jones has assembled: Mary Kay Place gives a subtle but stunning performance as the titular heroine a divorced do-gooder whose son (Jake Lacy) has lost his way. Deirdre O’Connell is wonderfully convincing as her cousin Donna dying from cancer, and Andrea Martin simpers as her trusted friend. The whole thing plays out like ‘an every day story of countryfolk’ (The Archers’ tagline), as they support one another, do good in the community and occasionally argue but gradually work through their issues. Diane is never hard-edged, but honest and straightforward, despite occasionally striking a bum note – the scenes exploring Diane’s spiritual quest feel rather bogus as does the character of her aunt  Mame (Estelle Parsons does her best). All in all, this is a well-played and acutely observed domestic drama that reflects, in part, the world we now live in. MT

SCREENING AT LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 1-11 AUGUST 2018

Diane (2018) ***

Dir/Writer: Kent Jones | Cast: Mary Kay Place, Jake Lacy, Estelle Parson, Andre Martin, Deirdre O’Connell, Phyllis Summerville, Ray Iannicelli US | 90′

Kent Jones has made some dynamite documentaries: Hitchcock Truffaut, A Letter to Elia; Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows. His feature debut is an earnest and perceptive drama about an ordinary woman forced to find inner strength when her family crumbles around her. Diane could also be a US version of our long-running BBC4 series The Archers with its cheesy and occasionally awkward moments of ‘raw’ sincerity veering on the maudlin side. It pictures Diane padding around in a pink fluffy housecoat making chicken casserole to take to a sick friend, or having one margarita too many while unwinding in the local bar. This is not Hollywood or New York but somewhere like Denver Colorado where the characters sit around in thick cardies, pouring tasteless coffee into giant mugs and reminiscing over the dead and dying in their local community. What saves it and actually makes it rather watchable is the impressive cast that Jones has assembled: Mary Kay Place gives a subtle but stunning performance as the titular heroine, a divorced do-gooder whose son (Jake Lacy) has lost his way. Deirdre O’Connell is wonderfully convincing as her cousin Donna dying from cancer, and Andrea Martin simpers as her trusted friend. The whole thing plays out like ‘an every day story of countryfolk’ (The Archers’ tagline), as they support one another, do good in the community and occasionally argue but gradually work through their issues. Diane is never hard-edged, but honest and straightforward, despite occasionally striking a bum note – the scenes exploring Diane’s spiritual quest feel rather bogus, as does the character of her aunt Mame (veteran star Estelle Parsons does her best). All in all, this is a well-played and acutely observed domestic drama that sympathetically reflects the world we live in now. MT

Premiering at Locarno 2018 | Screening during MARRAKECH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2018

The Last Movie Star (2017) *

Dir.: Adam Rifkin; Cast: Burt Reynolds, Ariel Winter, Clark Duke, Ellar Coltrane, Chevy Chase; USA 2017, 94 min.

Adam Rifkin has had a mix career in movies and TV, coming up with features like Dawn of Sex (original title Homo Erectus), and here shows an ageing Burt Reynolds in the worst possible light.

Keeping the best part for starters, we first meet elderly actor Vic Edwards (Reynolds) in the waiting room of a vet’s practice where he will later be told that his dog must be put down. Driving back to his sprawling mansion, we do feel for him. But Rifkin makes sure that our sympathy won’t last. Talking to his buddy Sonny (Chase) in an outdoor restaurant – where no woman escapes their lascivious glances – Edwards tells him about his invitation to Nashville to receive a lifetime award. He’s not keen to go but Sonny eventually talks him into making the all-expenses-paid trip and he is soon met at the airport by Lil (Winter), a millennial Goth pestered by an abusive and two-timing boyfriend. 

In Nashville, Edwards is aghast at the shabby hotel but even more by the venue of his prize giving: a backroom of a bar where Lil’s brother Doug (Duke) and Shane McAvoy (Coltrane) lead the proceedings. After a pathetic ‘ride’ on a rocking horse meant for children, even Edwards has had enough, and wants to be taken back to the airport. But seeing a motorway exit leading to his hometown of Knocksville, he changes his mind, and revisits old haunts: his family home and the football stadium, before meeting his first wife in a care home. “Having made peace” with his past, he can return to Sonny and ogling young women.

This choice cinematic experience with its themes of nostaligia and last chances is made considerably less bearable by interludes from two Reynolds films (Smokey and the Bandit/ Deliverance) spliced into the narrative. This allows the older Reynolds to talk to his young alter-egos. The Last Movie star is beyond saving: Cheesy, sentimental, cliché-ridden and utterly sexist, it’s certainly a contender for “Turkey of the Year”.

COMING TO DIGITAL ON 20 AUGUST 2018

The Escape (2017) ***

Dir.: Dominic Savage; Cast: Gemma Arterton, Dominic Cooper, Francis Barber, Jalil Lespert, Marthe Keller; UK 2017, 101 Min

Known mostly for his TV work Dominic Savage’ second feature suffers mainly from a rather characterisation of Tara, a brilliant Gemma Arterton who lives a rather banal existence hemmed in by her emotionally vacant husband and two in a two lively children in an outer London suburb.

The opening scene sees her nearly in tears making love to her husband Mark (Cooper). The fact is, she can hardly stand him she can hardly stand him athough he appears entirely satisfied with his life- a house, two children, a well paid job and an attractive wife. But he is desperately insecure and relies on her judgement about what to wear for an important meeting. 

It seems that both are social climbers – Tara’s mother Allison (Barber), tells her daughter in a working class accent ‘not to rock the boat’ – in her eyes Tara is a success – having brought her up as a single mum. But Allison provides the only insight into Tara’s past and present: there are no references to what went on in her life before, or why she is so feels so totally isolated – after all, both children spend their days in a perfect environment for Mums to socialise and share the child minding. But Savage focuses his storyline on the repetitive here and now of this nuclear family, offering scant food for thought. 

On an excursion to London’s Southbank, Tara life is suddenly transformed when she buys a book about the tapestries of ‘The Lady and the Unicorn’ and decides to join an art class, much to the bewilderment of Mark, who somehow would like to make her happy, but has neither the knowhow or the imagination. After a fractious outburst at the children, blaming them for her predicament, Tara finally snaps and sets off for Paris on the Eurostar and this is where the narrative starts to derail. A meeting with a hunky photographer Philippe (Lespert) leads to several night of lust whereupon she discovers his secret and rapidly down-spirals into depression mode, and the arms of Anna (Keller), who tells Tara to give family life another chance in a different environment. 

An enigmatic second ending complicates matters even more. Somehow you get the feeling that The Escape should have been set in the early sixties when housework and childcare were suffocating women and there was little scope for escape. But because men have not much evolved much since then, women face the same issues surrounding personal satisfaction even today, but they have learned to cope better with inequality.

Arterton does her best with this rather limiting role. DoP Laurie Rose conjures up imaginative scenario of life in suburbia – but overall The Escape feels like a worthy Play-for-Today – without the cutting edge

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM 2 AUGUST 2018

Hearts Beat Loud (2017) **

Dir.: Brett Haley; Cast: Nick Offermann, Kiersey Clemons, Toni Colette, Ted Danson, Sasha Lane, Blythe Danner; USA 2018, 97 min.

Best known for his comedy drama The Hero (2017, Brett Haley’s latest HEARTS BEAT LOUD adds music to the formula, but a minimalist storyline and cardboard characters make it hard going at over 90 minutes.

Frank Fisher (Offermann) is one of those life-long middle-aged loafers unable to let go of his dream of a music career. Meanwhile his relationship with his daughter Sam (Sasha Lane) is fraught by efforts to talk the budding medical student into postponing her studies to join him in his musical endeavours. But Sam is a smart cookie and the death of her mother in a cycling accident, leaving Frank in charge of her education, has taught the teenager a lesson – to ignore her father.

Since the death of his wife, Frank has had a series of unsatisfactory relationships probably due to his role model in mother Marianne (Danner), who has recently been arrested for shoplifting. Things with his landlady cum girlfriend Leslie (Colette) are even more strained, and his record shop has gone bankrupt. Only his old friend Dave (Danson), who has run a bar for over thirty years, seems to understand Frank, since he too lives in the (Woodstock) past. Somehow Haley must have felt that his old-fashioned musical numbers needed some contemporary characters to re-invent them but the ones he has created don’t really move the narrative forward, since they’re all entrenched in their cliché-ridden existence. DoP Erin Lin tries for a sort of melancholic nostalgia with brown and light blue dominating the picture, but this can’t save an undercooked script which might have worked better as a thirty-minute vignette AS

NATIONWIDE FROM 3 AUGUST 2018

Sicilian Ghost Story (2017) ****

Dirs/scr Fabio Grassadonia, Antonio Piazza| Italy/France/Switzerland, 2017. 122′

Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza made their names with Mafia thriller Salvo at Cannes several years ago, and returned in 2017 with another Sicilian-set slow-burner that adds teenage romance and Gothic fantasy to their signature Mafiosi mix to create this modern day Romeo & Juliet styled fantasy drama.

This is a stunningly crafted, magical fairytale enriched and heightened by the visual wizardry of Luca Bigazzi (The Great Beauty) but despite its touching storyline and convincing performances SICILIAN GHOST STORY is slightly overlong in telling the truth-based tale of teenager Giuseppe Di Matteo (Gaetano Fernandez) who was kidnapped in 1993 in order prevent his Mafia supergrass father, Santino, from spilling the beans. His ordeal is seen through the eyes of little Luna (Julia Jedlikowska), who holds a constant candle for her schoolfriend so bright, that the two form a psychic connection throughout his captivity, as he clings to her letter as his guiding light to salvation.

With its echoes of Grimm’s Fairytales (the enchanted wood) and Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (through the girl’s red duffel coat) the directors pay homage to best examples of fantasy meets reality. The film also recognises the fact that children escape into a world of fantasy when reality becomes too traumatic for them to cope.

Bigazzi intensifies the drama with his masterful techniques enhancing the vibrancy of Sicily’s landscapes and interiors with heady and luscious hues. At atmospheric soundtrack harnesses the ambient sounds of the forest to amazing effect. And newcomers Julia Jedlikowska and Gaetano Fernandez bring extraordinary intensity to their roles as Luna and Giuseppe in this thematically well-managed and haunting slice of Sicilian recent history. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 3 AUGUST 2018

The Producers (1968) | Bluray

Dir: Mel Brooks | Cast: Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder, Estelle Winwood | US Comedy | 90′

Mel Brooks’ debut feature is a flagrant  New York Jewish comedy so gross it is actually hilarious and hammy in the extreme – in the best tradition of American Burlesque. Set in Broadway is stars Zero Mostel as Max Bialystock a failing theatre producer forced to flatter a series of rich widows in order to finance his plays. When timid accountant Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder) is brought in to do his books, he inadvertently reveals to Bialystock that under the right circumstances, a producer could make more money with a flop than a hit. So Bialystock cajoles Bloom into helping him achieve this end and together they come up with what they consider to be a sure-fire disaster waiting to happen – a musical version of Adolf and Eva’s love story entitled ‘Springtime For Hitler’. 

Directed by legendary filmmaker Mel Brooks (Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles), and starring Zero Mostel (The Front), Gene Wilder (Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory) and Estelle Winwood (Murder By Death), The Producers was adapted for Broadway in 2001, starring Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, and went on to win a record 12 Tony Awards.

THE PRODUCERS new 4k restoration from the original negative screens nationwide on August 5 2018 in celebration of the film’s 50th anniversary. The Oscar-winning feature will also include a very special Mel Brooks introduction from Turner Classic Movies. MT

The Producers will be released in UK cinemas for one day only on August 5th, and then on DVD/Blu-ray/EST on September 10th 

The Apparition (2018) ***

Dir.: Xavier Giannoli; Cast: Vincent Lindon, Galatea Bellugi, Patrick d’Assumcao, Anatole Taubman; France 2018, 144 min.

In his follow-up to Marguerite, Xavier Giannoli again bites off rather more than he can chew: The Apparition is a mixture of Dan Brown and the eternal question of God’s existence, played out against a backdrop of European cities and war-torn countries in Africa and the Middle East.

Pretentiously divided into chapters, it stars Vincent Lindon as traumatised war reporter Jacques who develops hearing difficulties and loses his best friend, a photographer, during an assignment somewhere in the Middle East.

On his return to Paris, Jacques is asked to investigate an apparition in the Carbarat region of France where 18-year old Anna (Bellugi) claims to have seen the Virgin Mary. The sighting has given rise to a cult and Jacques decides to form a committee to question Anna, who has lived most of her life in foster families. Father Borrodine (d’ Assumacao) seems to profit most from the cult, which is commercially exploited by Anton (Taubman), a Christian version of an advertising guru. 

Suddenly the narrative changes course radically, Jacques morphing into a sleuth to find out more about Anna’s past and unearthing a murder and letters to her from a refugee camp in Africa. The icon discovered by his dead friend makes a reappearance. Although the mystery surrounding the apparition seems to have been cleared up, Anna is nevertheless in danger, having discovered too much. Sadly, the audience is still in the dark with too many questions unanswered, and even the overgenerous running time does not allow for the plot-lines to gel.

DoP Eric Gautier’s widescreen shots would do any travel advert proud, but like the script, everything feels rather formulaic. Arvi Part (one of four composers) gives this hybrid travelogue just the right blend of quasi-religious background music for the decent but sprawling religious crime drama. AS

IN ARTHOUSE CINEMAS FROM 3 AUGUST 2018

Leo comes Alive | Leo McCarey Retrospective

Although Leo McCarey (1898-1969) was feted during his career winning three Oscars and nominated for a further 36 (!), he seems to have fallen out of fashion. Today he is remembered for just three outings: The Marx Brother’s 1933 vehicle Duck Soup (pictured), An Affair to Remember (1957), actually a remake of his superior Love Affair from 1937, and the The Awful Truth. To my knowledge, there are no book-length biographies currently in print, rather odd, if you consider that McCarey directed 23 decent features.

Our critic Richard Chatten remembers first discovering An Affair to Remember back in the seventies when it was dismissed simply as a glossy but inferior Fox remake by McCarey of his own thirties classic. The reputation the more recent film now possesses probably owes more to the title song and to the fact that everyone in You’ve Got Mail – itself a remake of The Shop Around the Corner – encountered by Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan claims to have seen An Affair to Remember and to have loved it, rather than to its intrinsic merits. Due to those anomalies that film history is often prone to, the latter film is now perversely accorded the status of a ‘classic’, with the original now languishing in undeserved obscurity.

After ‘High School’ McCarey actually started out as a prize fighter before bowing to the will of his father and studying law at USC. Enterprisingly he then took over a copper mine, but the venture went bankrupt and his career as a lawyer also faltered. He next turned his hand to song-writing but although he composed over a thousand songs during his lifetime, he would have been unable to make a living from the craft.

In 1919 came his lucky break as assistant to Tod Browning at Universal. Later joining the Hal Roach Studio, he made it from gag man to Vice President. But more importantly, he was to pair Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in these ventures. McCarey’s checkered life experiences provide rich material for his films: Bing Crosby would play a failed songwriter in Love Affair, there is boxing content both in The Milky Way (1936) and The Bells of St. Mary (1945). Whilst liking “a little bit of the fairy tale” in his films, McCarey became a director of features just as the sound system was launching, giving him the opportunity to work with stars early on in his career. And there was always a steely side of reality imbedded in his escapist endeavours: The Kid from Spain (1932) with Eddie Cantor, Belle of the Nineties (1934) with Mae West, Six of a Kind (1934) with WC Fields and Milky Way with Harold Lloyd.

Often criticised for being ‘a director of great moments’, McCarey made it to the big time as a serious filmmaker in 1935 with Ruggles of Red Cap. Charles Laughton plays a British butler who has to serve two American ‘Nouveau Riche’ social climbers when his master ‘loses’ him in a card game. Ruggles is a blueprint for what would follow: the absurd interactions of protagonists who either try to help or undermine each other, but always with the same result: chaos.

In 1937 McCarey won his first Oscar for The Awful Truth. It stars Irene Dunne and Gary Grant (his first great success; he actually had a cunning resemblance to McCarey), as a separated couple, who try to help each other, finding a new partner, but only succeeding only in sabotaging their best efforts. It says a lot about McCarey, that he “would have rather won for Make Way for Tomorrow, shot in the same year. Make Way is the story of Lucy Cooper (Beulah Bondi) and her husband Barkley (Victor Moore) who find out on the day of their family reunion that their house is foreclosed. They move in with their middle-aged children, but separately: Mum with son George, Barkley with daughter Cora. This is, in spite of the situational humour, a real tragedy, and would inspire the great Japanese director Ozu for his Tokyo Story.

After winning his second and third Oscars for Going my Way (Best Original Script and Best Director), the story of a popular Irish priest Chuck O’Malley (Crosby), who is more interested in boxing and songs than the lecturing; Good Sam in 1948 marked the beginning of his decline. Between 1948 and his death in 1969 McCarey would only direct five more features: alcohol, drugs and illnesses taking their toll. Somehow the humanist got lost in the perfidious way of Un-American-House Committee witch hunts. My Son John (1952) is the sob story of a mother who discovers that her titular son John (Robert Walker, who died before shooting was complete), is a communist. Not much better is The Devil Never Sleeps (aka Satan Never Sleeps), his last feature from 1962 where a native Christian missionary woman in China is raped by a communist soldier who later recants his ideology and helps her to flee the country.

Whilst McCarey’s detractors are entitled to point out that he is by no means an auteur in the sense of Hitchcock or even Capra (with whom he shares many parallels), this was mainly due to the breadth and versatility of his career which started out in slapstick and ended in social commentary. To McCarey images are mostly secondary; rhythm and sound dominate throughout his oeuvre. But the themes and motifs feature throughout make him unique in the canon of the American cinema. @AndreSimonoviesz

A major LEO McCAREY retrospective formed part of LOCARNO Film Festival 2018  

In Harmony | En Equilibre **** (2016)

Dir: Denis Dercourt | Cast: Cecile de France, Albert Dupontel | France | Drama | 82’

Two magnetic performances (not to mention a great supporting act from stallion Othello) make this elegantly crafted uplifting drama really watchable. Based on the true story of paralympian Bernard Sachsé, a stunt horse trainer who suffers life-changing injuries, it stars Albert Dupontel) as Marc, paralysed from the waist down after an accident on a film set. It turns out that his insurance loss adjuster Florence (Cecile de France) has a sideline as a former professional pianist playing just the kind of tunes that the good-looking rider enjoys as the two gradually fall in love while fighting over the claim resolution.

Set in the glorious countryside of Brittany in springtime, this cleverly written and well-paced story shows how two people can come together through their artistic appreciation of one another. Florence is attracted by Marc’s courage and self-belief in pursuing his dreams, and also his appreciation of the skills that she herself has neglected in order to pursue a safer, more traditional life as a working mother. But it’s not all straightforward, and seasoned director Denis Dercourt adds a twist to his tale that creates a soupçon of dramatic tension as the film trots satisfyingly towards its final denouement. An inspiratonal, feelgood film with some moving moments. MT

NOW AVAILABLE ON DVD FROM ICARUS FILMS 

 

The Heiresses (2018) ****

Dir: Marcelo Martinessi | Cast: Margarita Irun, Ana Ivanova, Ana Brun

Paraguayan actress Ana Brun won a Silver Bear for her dignified portrait of loss and loneliness in Marcelo Martinessi’s finely-tuned first feature.

The Heiresses shares similar thematic concerns with a number of recent South American features recalling a gilded past such as  Jorge Thielen Armand’s Caracas-set La Soledad (2017) and Argentinian drama Tigre (2017) that played at last year’s East End Film Festival.

Living in reduced circumstances in a well-appointed but shabby apartment in the capital Asuncion, Chela (Brun) has been forced slowly to sell off her prized heirlooms in legal negotiations handled by a trusted friend, Carmela (Alicia Guerra), to save her debt-ridden but considerably more jovial partner of 30 years Chiquita (Irun) who is threatened with a spell ‘inside’. Martinessi’s elegant script enigmatically weaves tentative romantic undertones and female solidarity into his texturally rich and atmospherically evocative storyline often transporting the introspective Chela into a dreamlike reverie consistent with her daily dabbling as a painter.

But an unexpected request from her more flush and considerably less guarded next door neighbour Pituca ( Maria Martins) ushers in a gradual change of circumstances allowing Chela to step out of the sidelines and into the limelight as she slowly regains confidence and a new sense of direction availing herself of a long disused Mercedes to ferry local ladies who lunch to and from each others homes for games of bridge and social tittle tattle. And it is during these leisurely afternoons that the drama gains a gently humorous twist and an opportunity for Chela to broaden her social and romantic inclinations, and to come into contact with the languorously seductive Angy (a feline Ana Ivanova).

Delicately drawn in subdued tones and sombre interior settings The Heiresses is an intimate female-centric affair that draws seething suspense from its hauntingly enigmatic minor-key and acutely observed characterisations of the former elite going about their elderly lives in leafy and affluent Asuncion. But danger is never far away in the over-crowded streets and backwaters of the city.

Men are absent but frequently alluded to in invariably dismissive or even derogatory tones: for what they haven’t done or have done badly, not only on a personal but on a national level. By definition women have learnt to be resilient, forbearing and generally self-reliant and there is considerable warmth and solidarity amongst them, and even though the usual bouts of bitchiness occasionally creep in they are tripped over lightly and soon forgotten. The gay pair have ceased to be close in the intervening years of financial hardship (“have you used my toothbrush again” Chela chides Chiquita) but still cling fastidiously to their routines and rituals: the hair coiffed and perfumed; the jewellery proudly displayed; the morning coffee meticulously prepared and served by the willing housekeeper (Nilda Gonzalez), each cup and accoutrement in its correct place or there’s hell to pay. And it’s these rigorous daily moments that hold their lives together, while everything seems to be gradually falling apart.

Chiquita’s eventual spell in the local women’s prison provides seamy contrast to their sedate life behind domestic doors where the splendour of yesteryear is reduced to ghostly shadows and peeling paper on the wall where once hung masterpieces and family treasures. And when Chela mobilises the ancient Mercedes there’s still a certain diffidence until she gets herself back into gear. But soon her distant memories of the glory days seep back as the casual nonchalance of Angy’s feral joie de vivre proves intoxicating. And it’s here that The Heiresses draws comparison with Sebastian Lelio’s Gloria, as Chela’s slow but sure emergence from emotional confinement finally starts to emerge again quietly but defiantly in this nuanced, slow-burning but compelling drama. MT

NOW ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM 10 AUGUST 2018

 

 

It Happened Here (1965) | dual format re-master

Dir: Kevin Brownlow/Andrew Mollo | Cast: Pauline Murray, Sebastian Shaw, Bart Allison, Reginald Marsh, Derek Milburn | Drama | UK | 93′

Made on a shoestring budget – and none the worse for it – Brownlow/Mollo’s Neorealist re-imagining of a Nazi invasion of Britain is plausible and chilling: even though the event never happened. Financed by Tony Richardson and his Woodfall Film Production Company, it was shot in 16mm and 35mm, with a mainly amateur cast and incredible attention to detail.

Eight years in the making – Brownlow was only 18, Mollo 16 when they started – IT HAPPENED HERE pictures the whole scenario in the wake of the British retreat from Dunkirk in 1940 where the German army are strongly resisted at first, but finally crushed, lacking outside support. Then in 1944, it reappeared and the result sees history being re-written with Germany winning the Second World War with England under occupation.  MT

SCREENING AT BFI SOUTHBANK ON 23 JULY AT 18.00 FOLLOWED BY A DISCUSSION WITH KEVIN BROWNLOW AND ANDREW MOLLO TO MARK BROWNLOW’S 80TH BIRTHDAY | DUAL FORMAT RELEASE NOW AVAILABLE.

 

 

Maurice (1987) ****

Dir.: James Ivory | Writer: James Ivory, Kit Hesketh-Harvey | Cast: James Wilby, Hugh Grant, Rupert Graves, Phoebe Nicholls, Ben Kingsley, Denham Elliot; UK 1987, 140 min.

James Ivory’s second E.M. Forster adaption (framed by Room with a View and Howards End) is a melancholic gay love story, set in the years before WWI. Forster had written the novel in 1914 (two revisions followed), but it was only published a year after his death in 1971, when homosexual relationships were decriminalised in the UK. Whilst sharing a Silver Lion for Best Director for Ivory at the Venice Film Festival in 1987, the public reception was muted – the time for a mainstream feature about gay relationships had not yet arrived.

Starting in Cambridge in 1909, students Maurice (Wilby) and Clive (Grant) fall in love. Maurice is a romantic dreamer, but Clive is much more composed, and certainly draws the line when it comes to physical contact: his idea of a relationship is strictly platonic. He soon settles into his privileged  background, focusing on his career as a Tory MP with his timid wife Anne (Nicholls). Maurice, having been thrown out of Cambridge, becomes a stockbroker in his father’s business, but is still fighting with his gayness. He consults a doctor (Denholm Elliot), who declares him fit for marriage, and a hypnotist (Kingsley) – but he is unable to reconcile his innate feelings. He becomes a regular visitors to Clive and Anne’s estate – just to be near his object of desire – and eventually Maurice falls for a young farmhand Alec Scudder (Graves), who is set to emigrate to Argentina, but soon changes his mind, and Maurice gives up his society life for true love.

James Ivory wrote Maurice with Kit Hesketh-Harvey, rather than his usual writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvla – and repressed love and class barriers are the central themes. Shot at King’s College Cambridge and Palladian House in Wiltshire, these backgrounds assumed increasing importance as the narrative unfolds. DoP Pierre Lhomme (Camille Claudel, Cyrano de Bergerac) lets the light play over the sunny meadows, misty rivers and majestic stately homes. This is the England of the upper classes; where love, and passion, are stifled behind traditional closed doors. There is more excitement during the cricket match than in any of the relationships portrayed: therefore Maurice’s decision is much easier to comprehend. Unable to find satisfaction in his own background, he risks and jeopardises everything for love elsewhere. 

Thirty years after its premiere, Maurice still has emotional impact: like all true classics, it transcends time, and delivers a portrait of a society very much alive still today: behind the beauty of the exterior, lays the same problem: an England which has very little place for intimacy and passion – even though sex has become an commodity, like everything else. And outside the metropolis, homophobia is still a common currency, together with an increasing xenophobia. Ivory excels in portraying the beauty and the spiritual emptiness, side by side: E.M. Foster had to hide his sexual orientation until his death at the age of 91, and all of the director’s adaptations of his novels show protagonists hiding and appeasing society in this green and pleasant land. AS

A NEW 4K RESTORATION IS BACK IN CINEMAS AT BFI SOUTHBANK AND CINEMAS NATIONWIDE FROM 27 JULY 2018

        

Iceman (2017) ***

Dir/scr: Felix Randau. Germany/Italy/Austria. 2017. 97 mins

Felix Randau opts for a rather unimaginative approach in this imagined drama about the final days of Alpine warrior Otzi, whose perfectly preserved body was found in 1991, over 5,000 years after he perished in an Italian glacier. With its captivating Alpine scenery and visceral depiction of life back then ICEMAN is nevertheless convincing and we do feel for Otzi and the savage world he inhabits.

This is Randau’s third feature and easily his most ambitious both in scope and budget and it provides solid entertainment for those keen on natural history and truth-based stories from way back when, recalling films like Pathfinder (1987) or even The Revenant (2016) and might inspire other filmmakers to try a more dynamic approach with a film about the 3,000 year old Ur-David, a red-haired Eurasian discovered in China, or our own Lindow Man whose remains emerged from around 2,000 years ago in a peat bog in Cheshire,

The characters here speak an untranslated version of the Rhaetic language but this actually works to the film’s advantage capturing our imagination about this ancient community of nomads, and providing a more peaceful, almost meditative experience.

We first meet Kelab (Jurgen Vogel) who lives in a cave with his pigs, goats and fur-clothed family, foraging for nourishment in the local forests. There appears to be a spiritual element to their existence, and one day while out hunting, his wife and son are brutally slaughtered leaving only their baby who Kelab takes with him on his journey into the snowy South Tyrol wilderness to find the holy shrine of Tineka.

Venturing into the breathtaking beauty of windswept mountain peaks and rugged snowscapes Kelab struggles on in the wilderness as the film turns into a gripping fight for survival when a dramatic fall into a deep crevasse saves him from the spears of two vicious warriors. An eerie atmospheric score ramps up the tension as Kelab fights on, Jurgen Vogel giving a nuanced performance that considerably adds to what might have been a rather unreachable character. It’s a scenic and cinematic experience and a brilliant depiction of the sheer basic savagery of life in that grim Neolithic world. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 27 JULY 2018

La Belle et la Bete (1946) Bluray and Prime Video


Dir, Writer: Jean Cocteau | Cast: Jean Marais, Josette Day, Mila Parély, Nane Germon, Michel Auclair, Marcel André | 96min | Fantasy Drama | French with English subtitles

LA BELLE ET LA BÊTE is one of the most amazing fantasy films ever made, drawing you into its Gothic spell and enchanting beauty.

Jean Cocteau was a visionary intellectual and one of the creative geniuses of the 20th century.  A poet, writer, painter and filmmaker, the dreamlike nature of his work is perhaps best showcased on the silver screen.  Given the climate of austerity, shortages and widespread power-cuts when the film was being shot during the end of the Second World War, it seems even extraordinary – and nothing less than a work of art.  And although some of its effects may appear unremarkable to contemporary audiences, its mesmerising style and ambience was unlike any other film that had gone before.

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Based on a fairytale by Madame Leprince de Beaumont, there is something delightfully innocent yet sophisticated about this fable with its dark Freudian implications. Light of touch and ethereal in atmosphere – evoked by Henri Alekan’s sensual cinematography (assisted by Rene Clement) – there is nevertheless a sinister undertone to proceedings enhanced by Georges Auric’s haunting music, placed in a Gothic setting in the French countryside where La Belle lives with her family not far from the bewitched chateau of La Bête, inspired by Gustave Doré.  In LA BELLE ET LA BÊTE, Cocteau (who was 60 at the time) asks us to suspend our disbelief as adults and return to childhood with all its magic and mystery.

La Belle’s father is a refined merchant who has fallen on difficult times. Lamenting their reduced circumstances, La Belle’s two nasty sisters Felicié and Adélaide (played with coquettish petulance by Mila Parély and Nane Germo) and sneering brother Ludovic (Michel Auclair) constantly diminish her. Suitor Avelante (Jean Marais) who also plays La Bete, prancing around in his regal splendour in one scene, before descending into brutish behaviour in the next – fangs bared and eyes glistening: very much the epitome of the modern alpha male. His make-up alone is a masterpiece. The costumes were designed by Lanvin and Pierre Cardin.

There’s an experimental feel to the film with its trance-like episodes as La Belle glides through the corridors of La Bête’s bewitched Château, with its draperies wafting eerily and mysterious statues coming to life in the glint of lighted candelabras and goblets of wine:  There are even ‘electric’ gates and an enchanted white horse: Le Magnifique, whose rider’s wish is its command. This is the stuff of dreams; there a magic mirrors, and gauntlets that transport the wearer from one place to another. La Bête is a sad figure, almost like that of Count Dracula; forced to live a life without love entombed in a nocturnal doom, and forced to beg each night at seven for La Belle’s hand in marriage.  The answer will surprise you. Avant-garde fantasy coalesces with the peerless disciplines of traditional methods and drama, even teaching the American cinema of the day some tricks that it never thought possible. MT

LA BELLE ET LA BETE IS ON BLURAY and PRIME VIDEO

 

 

Blossom Valley (2018) **** Karlovy Vary Film Festival 2018

Dir.: Laszlo Csuja; Cast: Reti Laszlo, Berenyi Bianca, Kozma Karoly; Hungary 2018, 83 min.

The original Hungarian title of Laszlo Csuja’s debut drama is symbolic: Viragvölgy is the last stop on a children’s railway that runs through Buda Heights and the woods near Budapest.

BLOSSOM VALLEY’s impressive cast of non-professionals, Laszlo Reti (a former Special Olympics skating champion) and Bianka Berenyi) performer and lead singer of Cannibal EU are largely the reason why this eerie, melancholic and angst-ridden road fairytale won the Grand Jury Price of the ‘East – West Section” of this year’s Karlovy Vary Film Festival.

Just for the hell of it, feisty Bianka (Bianka Berényi) has decided to kidnap a baby but she soon meets young Laci (László Réti), who provides a calming influence despite having been declared mentally unfit to make his own decisions. The couple and their new baby settle into a family unit of sorts and – after stealing a caravan – the police are soon in hot pursuit of the trio.

Bianca is a borderline sociopath who loves nothing more than attention and mischief. Like Laci, she has issues with regressive development, but unlike him – naïve and wanting to please – she has a certain malice, which is hidden behind a childlike demeanour. Her attention span is limited, she must be entertained and worshiped permanently. Contrary to her ex-boyfriends, who see her at a nuisance, Laci adores her non-stop, accepting most of her changing moods.

Mentored by Enyedi Ildico (On Body and Soul, last year’s Berlinale winner), Csuja, very much like Enyedi, goes all out to achieve a frightening atmosphere managing the film’s tonal shifts with surprising dexterity and adding a punk rock twist to the mix. The baby – played by two sets of twins, one actually named Laura – is in constant danger, but the ‘parents’ are too focused on themselves, even though there are some moments of closeness and intimacy. The impulsive Bianca and the love smitten Laci are always a step away from disaster.

Gergely Vass’s images are full of saturated colours, the scenes in the countryside are full of magic and the car journey’s a nightmare, but there are moments of grim social realism too. All said and done though, this zany drama belongs to the leading actors. MT

GRAND JURY PRIZE WINNER | EAST OF WEST | KARLOVY VARY FILM FESTIVAL 2018

The Receptionist (2017) ***

Dir.: Jenny Lu; Cast: Shiang-chyi Chen, Fan Shixuan, Shuang Teng, Teresa Daley, Sophie Gopsill, Joshua Whitehouse, Stephen Pucci; UK/Taiwan 2016, 102 min.

Needs must when the Devil drives comes to mind in describing Jenny Lu’s grim but timely exploration of migrant’s shattered dreams dedicated to Anna, a woman from mainland China, whose life ended in tragedy after seeking a better life. 

Set mainly in a dingy ‘massage parlour’ near Heathrow and told from the perspective of Tina, the titular onlooker, The Receptionist pictures the lives of several young migrant workers in contemporary London.

Tina (Daley) and her boyfriend Frank (Whitehouse) are  graduates struggling to pay back their student grants and coping with the high rent of their miniscule flat. Tina’s job-seeking experiences are futile – who wants another literature graduate? When Frank is sacked, Tina takes the job she had rejected in the first place: receptionist to ‘Madame’ Lily (Gospsill), whose tawdry house near Heathrow Airport is the setting for this exploitation drama. When Tina arrives, Lily already has two sex-workers toiling for her: the mature, having-seen-it-all Sasa (Chen), and the the pixie-like Mei (Shixuan), who pretends that it’s all a game. At first, Tina is aloof – treating Sasa and Mei with contempt and grudgingly obeying Lily, who always finds new jobs for Tina – such as duct-taping the windows “ so that the neighbours cannot smell the sex”. But Tina prefers writing up her diary – an activity totally out of place given the setting. 

Relationships are complicated by Sam (Pucci) Madame Lily’s much younger ‘toy lover’, who not so secretly yearns for some “freebies”. When Anna (Teng), a woman in her mid-thirties arrives, Tina turns her allegiance to the sex workers, joins “their side” against her employer. Anna is a naive country girl and has no idea what she letting herself into. Her family has paid a huge sum of money so that she can work in the UK – and everybody back home relies on this financial support. She soon finds out from Sasa and Mei that abortions are not safe at all, even an anaesthetic is seen as a luxury. Unable to cope, Anna looses the will to live. The ending itself is poetic but never sentimental and cannot hide what has gone on before.

The director’s debut drama shows a passionate concern for her story and never lets up on realism, without resorting to explicit sex or nudity. DoP Gareth Munden captures the prison atmosphere with great flair and the ensemble acting is brilliant. Whilst there are some structural difficulties, The Receptionist is more than well-meaning, showing the fate of invisible women from another world being pushed to the margins and beyond. AS

NATIONWIDE FROM 20 JULY 2018

Pin Cushion (2017)***

Dir: Deborah Haywood | Cast: Lily Newmark, Joana Scanlan | UK | Drama |

The age-old subject of bullying is tackled here with tender aplomb by first time writer director Deborah Haywood in her poignant mother daughter buddy movie currently doing the festival rounds and now at Rotterdam International Film Festival.

Iona (Lily Newmark) and her mother Lyn (Joana Scanlan) are trying for a fresh start in a new town, but their close relationship soon comes under pressure largely due to Lyn’s physical challenges, causing Iona to retreat into her own fantasy world in a bid to escape the constant teasing and ridicule from schoolfriends. The deftly entitled PIN CUSHION is very much a contemporary tale highlighting the often claustrophobic nature of today’s nuclear family where mothers often see their world entirely through their daughter’s experiences rather than reaching out for emotional and intellectual fulfilment in their own peer group, partner or even the workplace. While we have every sympathy for Lyn (Scanlan), her life totally revolves around Iona – they share the same hobbies, and even a bed! Not only does this cramp Iona’s style by preventing her developing at school with kids her own age, but it also discourages her mother from reaching out to contacts in her local community which could in turn benefit both mother and daughter, lending her more respect all round. Scanlan’s brilliant performance as a kindly and caring parent is what really makes PIN CUSHION so enjoyable as an insightful look inside the brutally miserable world of the bullied and abused. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE

Vertigo (1957) Remastered *****

Dir.: Alfred Hitchcock; Cast: James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara del Geddes, Tom Helmore; USA 1957, 128 min.

VERTIGO is based on The Living and the Dead by the French duo Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac set in France in the 1940s. Henry-Georges Clouzot had adapted their previous novel for Les Diaboliques, but Hitchcock was unhappy with Alec Coppel’s original script and asked the San Francisco based Samuel Taylor for a re-write.

Filming took place between September and Christmas 1957, the 1958 summer release of Vertigo was either a critical or box-office success – and Francois Truffaut gave it just six pages (out of 300) in his ‘Definitive Study’ Of Hitchcock.

James Stewart plays police officer John ‘Scottie’ Ferguson who is plagued by agoraphobia after an accident that kills a fellow officer. Even his artist girlfriend Midge Wood (del Geddes), cannot seem to get through to him after the tragedy, then an old school, ship owner Gavin Elster (Helmore) asks him to keep an eye on his wife Madeleine (Novak), who is suicidal, and believes she is a re-incarnation of Charlotta Valdes, who committed suicide in 1857 aged 26. Elster reveals to Scottie that, unbeknown to his wife, Madeleine is Charlotta’s great-grand daughter. Scottie starts following Madeleine, and saves her from drowning near the Golden Gate Bridge. The two fall in love, and afterwards drive together to Muir Woods, Cypresse Point and finally the missionary of San Juan Bautista, where Madeleine confesses  love for Scottie, before climbing the steeple whence she falls to her death, Scottie unable to save her due to his phobia. 

Scottie becomes clinically depressed and Midge visits him during his confinement but spoils everything painting a garish portrait of herself as Charlotta Valdes; the real painting hanging in the Legion of Honour Museum, which Scottie visits regularly. Despairing, he meets the shop assistant Judy Barton from Salina, Kansas, who is a brunette, but resembles Madeleine, who was a blonde, eerily. Scottie is trying to remake Judy into Madeleine, but stumbles on a deadly secret: Elster has used him, and it was the real Madeleine Elster, who got killed at the missionary. Scottie drags Judy to San Juan Bautista to make her confess, but ends up losing her a second time.

Hitchcock regulars DoP Robert Burks, editor George Tomasini and particularly composer Bernhard Herrmann make Vertigo a standout success and his most mature masterpiece. The director had cast Vera Miles in the leading role, but to his annoyance, she got pregnant. Whilst Kim Novak brilliantly fills her shoes, Hitchcock told her on the first day of shooting that he would not tolerate her “pre-conceived ideas”. 

San Francisco provides an eerie backcloth to this alienating drama, deeply Anti-Proustian in its conception, maintaining that memory is free and floods back in every detail. Here Hitchcock sees memory as just a distortion: however hard Scottie tries to re-invent Madeleine, she remains Judy under the glaring green light of an advertising sign. Vertigo is a double murder, both crimes committed by the most tragic of Hitchcock’s heroes. AS

Park Circus is delighted to announce the Presenting Alfred Hitchcock season with an opportunity to explore Alfred Hitchcock’s signature style in the year that Vertigo celebrates its 60th anniversary. 

Vertigo will screen in a new 4K restoration at the BFI, Southbank and at cinemas across the UK from 13 July. The film will also be released in international territories.

Locarno 71 | Film Festival Preview

Artistic director Carlo Chatrian has unveiled his final line-up with an exciting eclectic selection of titles spanning mainstream and arthouse fare due to run at the picturesque Lake Maggiore setting from the 1st until 11th August 2018.

Piazza Grande will screen celebrated Filipino filmmaker Lino Brocka’s Maynila Sa Mga Kuko Ng Liwanag alongside Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansmanactor, David Fincher’s Se7en and Blaze the latest film from actor turned auteur Ethan Hawke who is also to be honoured with an Excellence Award at this year’s jamboree.

There are two documentary premieres of note, screening out of competition, the first, Walking on Water (Andrey Paounov) explores the work of Bulgarian artist Christo whose Mastaba is currently gracing The Serpentine in London’s Hyde Park, the second is Etre et Avoir director Nicolas Philibert’s De Chaque Instant that looks at the life of nurses as they prepare for a lifetime of service. 

Amongst the feature debuts to world premiere is Aneesh Chaganty’s  Searching, and an animated film Ruben Grant – Collector from Slovenian artist, filmmaker and Berlinale winner Milorad Krstic, 

Hardly catching his breath since his last film Hong Sangsoo joins the International Competition line-up with Gangyun Hotel (Hotel By The River), Abbas Fahdel’s latest Yara, Radu Muntean’s follow up to One Floor Below – Alice T, Dominga Sotomayor’s Tarde Para Morir Joven, Sibel, from Turkish director duo Çagla Zencirci and Guillaume Giovanetti, and Britain’s Richard Billingham with his debut Ray And Liz.

Playing in the Filmmakers of the Present strand there is Siyabonga from South African directorJoshua Magor, a poetic feature showcasing the lavish landscapes of a nation riddled with poverty and crime.

This year’s Honorary Leopard is to go to Bruno Dumont who will present the world premiere of his mini-series Coincoin Et Les Z’inhumains screened on the Piazza after the award ceremony.

Retrospectives are always something to look forward to and Locarno 71 dedicates its classic spot to screwball comedy director Leo McCarey, with Carey Grant starrer The Awful Truth (1937) headlining the selection.

The Piazza Grande provides the biggest outdoor screening area in Europe and will be the setting for Vianney Lebasque’s festival opener Les Beaux Esprits and closing film I Feel Good from Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kerverne. MT

LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2018

The Chapman Report (1962)

Dir: George Cukor | Writer: Wyatt Cooper/Irving Wallace | Cast: Efrem Zimbalist Jr, Shelly Winters, Jane Fonda, Claire Bloom, Glynis Johns, Ray Danton, Ty Hardin, Andrew Duggan, John Dehner | Comedy Drama | US | 125′

Jane Fonda remains highly attractive at eighty starring recently in the wholly unworthy Book Club (2018), in which the tome raising temperatures is Fifty Shades of Grey. In the fifties it was Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953) that was stirring the pot with its jaw-dropping revelations about the passions simmering among suburban American womenfolk, and provoked a run of best-selling ‘exposés’ like Peyton Place which duly hit the big screen in glossy but bowdlerised form, including Irving Wallace’s fictionalised 1960 version of the Kinsey report called The Chapman Report; also promptly filmed with a cast including a young Miss Fonda (in her third film), whose character is ironically the one who’s frigid. (Her role was also the one that suffered the most from Darryl Zanuck’s post-production chopping and changing and feels as if there’s quite a bit missing – and not just orgasms.) 

As befits the veteran gay Hollywood director George Cukor (who in 1939 had directed the all-women The Women), the result is elegantly mounted with meticulous colour design by the pioneering fashion photographer of the 20’s and 30’s George Hoyningen-Huene and the cast all immaculately dressed by veteran costume designer Orry-Kerry (also both gay, surprise, surprise). It also – like Sex in the City – boasts eye candy for both gay men and straight women in the form of a trio of hunks played by Ty Hardin, Corey Allen and Ray Danton, while the husbands played by Harold J Stone and John Dehner are portrayed as solid but unexciting. However, the hunks let all the women down (is this based on Cukor’s own experience of men?), with Hardin proving a big kid, Allen a jerk, and Danton under the thumb of his lawful wedded.

The acting is uniformly good, with doe-eyed Glynis Johns (happily still with us) providing most of the laughs and Claire Bloom and Shelley Winters the tears. As the one who’s getting too much sex rather than not enough, Bloom as a tormented drunken nymphomaniac (complete with her own film noir lighting) is heart-wrenching (she would soon be playing a lesbian in The Haunting), but her tragic fate underlines the actually rather conservative mores of the film as the married women return to their husbands and Miss Fonda finds salvation in the form of marriage to researcher Ephraim Zimbalist Jr.  Along with Jane Fonda, Claire Bloom is still acting. She’s in a film called Miss Dali, which premiered at the Guadalajara International Film Festival in March 2018.

Cameraman Harold Lipstein’s hot colours, the plush settings and – especially – Leonard Rosenman’s febrile score all also conspire to evoke Vincente Minnelli’s earlier, extremely eccentric melodrama set in an up-market sanatorium, The Cobweb (1955). Richard Chatten.

AVAILABLE ON DVD

 

 

The Piano (1993) | Re-Release

Dir.: Jane Campion; Cast: Holly Hunter, Harvey Keitel, Sam Neill, Anna Paquin; New Zealand, Australia, France 1993; 121 min.

As a landmark in film history, few features can measure up with Jane Campion’s epic The Piano: in only her third outing (after many successful short films) as full-length motion picture writer/director, she tackled all: feminism, racism and above all, sexual relationships. She won an Oscar for Best Director, The Piano got the nod for Best Picture and most wondrous at all, she was the first  – and, 25 years later – still the only woman recipient of the Palme d’Or, albeit sharing it with Chen Kaige’s Farewell my Concubine. 

Scottish widow Ada (Hunter) has been traumatised by the death of husband, who was killed, standing next to her, by lightning. As a result, she has lost her voice. Her father marries her off to Stewart (Neill), a farmer, living in the jungle: he picked her from a mail order catalogue. Ada, a former opera-singer like her late husband, arrives at the unwelcoming beaches of mid-nineteen century New Zealand with daughter Anna (Paquin) and her price possession: the titular piano. Stewart does not care about the instrument, and leaves its transportation to his second in command, Baines (Keitel), a native of the country. Ada, withdrawn from reality, falls in love with Baines, after the latter makes it clear to him, that she is more than a sex object for him. Stewart, jealous and out of control, extracts bloody violence; promising more, if Ada is seeing Baines again. One of the main features is the role of Ada’s daughter Anna, who, whilst loving her mother, sides with Stewart: she yearns for a stable home. Like young Helene in Chabrol’s Les Noces Rouges, she inadvertently gives away the game, whilst intending to help her mother.

Sumptuously photographed by British cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh (who collaborated with Campion on An Angel at my Table and The Portrait of a Lady), and  an eerie score by his compatriot Michael Nyman, The Piano seems head and shoulders about contemporary cinema. Alas, Jane Champion would never again be so brave and daring: apart from the Henry James adaption The Portrait of A Lady (1996) and the Keat’s bio-pic Bright Star (2009), both more sturdy than innovative, little can be said of her more recent output. It seems, like she was frightened by her own boldness – like a comet who bloomed to early and imploded. AS

ON RE-RELEASE IN ARTHOUSE CINEMAS  in CELEBRATION of its 25th Anniversary | | 16th July 2018

  

First Reformed (2017)***** | Sundance London

Dir: Paul Schrader | Cast: Ethan Hawke, Amanda Seyfried | US | Thriller | 108′

Paul Schrader’s FIRST REFORMED is a sleek and elegant beast; economical, eco-themed and uncompromising yet firing on all cylinders, powered by Ethan Hawke as an anguished Christian minister fraught with spiritual and existential thoughtfulness.

The film’s richly textured themes of religious tradition, radicalisation and global warming underpin a graceful story of faith, hope, despair and finally love, redeeming all. And we wrestle and ruminate with Hawke on his personal journey from a sombre starting point to a place of peace in a rich character study that sees Schrader back on form after his ill-advised experiments with The Canyons and Dog Eat Dog.

Hawke is Toller, a sorrowing military chaplain whose marriage has failed due to the death of his son. In a white wooden-clad church in upstate New York, he has a new start in life leading a congregation that includes Mary (Seyfried), a pregnant woman who seeks his moral support over her activist husband Michael (Philip Ettinger). It soon emerges that Michael wants to get rid of their child due to his disenchantment with the corporate world he holds responsible for climate change and pollution.

There are comparisons here with Schrader’s script for Taxi Driver and Light Sleeper which also explore despair and disenchantment, although Toller is a much more down to earth decent character than John LeTour (Defoe) and Travis Bickle (De Niro) from the outset, and only seems to lose his sense of direction when his health deteriorates, and cancer becomes a possibility, leading him into a dark place of soul-searching made blacker by a tragedy involving Mary and Michael.

Toller also becomes convinced that a local businessman, sponsoring the church renovations, is actually responsible for environmental pollution on a large scale, and this presents a moral dilemma that further challenges the minster’s troubled state of mind. As the film slides between reality and somewhere more sinister. he desperately tries to lead his followers maintaining respect, compassion and dignity. Seyfried plays Mary as an open and honest woman whose motivations at first seem enigmatic but soon become clear as the two share a mutual sense of desperation and denial. There are strong performances also from Cedric the Entertainer, as a Toller’s ecclesiastical mentor and Esther, a fellow pastor who falls foul of Toller, despite her best intentions, inspiring one of the film’s most killer lines: ” I despise you: you bring out the worst in me”. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE | PREVIEW SCREENING DURING SUNDANCE LONDON

Racer and the Jailbird (2017)

Dir: Michael R Roskam | Cast: Matthias Schoenaerts, Adele Exarcholpoulos | Belgium | Crime Drama | 130′

Best known for his glowering Flemish thriller Bullhead, Michael Roskam is back again for the forth time with Belgian heavyweight Matthias Shoenhaerts who plays smalltime gangster Gigi in this classy high octane ‘amour noir’ thriller set on the race track.

The opening scenes introduce us to Gigi Vanoirbeek early days of danger where his father used to a fierce Alsatian to discipline him. Things have moved upmarket for Gino, who now operates in the luxury car market where he falls for young racing driver Bibi Delhany (Adèle Exarchopoulos). Their sexual chemistry is incendiary and love is spurred on by their risk-taking personalities, despite their wildly different backgrounds.

This is a stylishly fluid piece of kit and wonderful to watch as Roskam and his stars hold our attention and the action-packed hour that sparks on all cylinders fired up by the fizzing fervour of the pair’s glamorous lifestyle. But then Roskam makes an abrupt left turn, just as he did in Bullhead, and the adrenaline runs out as plot lines blur and the vehicle gradually trundles off the tracks.  This is no fault of Schoenhaerts whose mesmerising physical presence is matched by Exarchopoulos cutsy charm both in and out of bed they are a perfect couple but the script can’t sustain 130 minutes of their lust as the romance peters out with his sociopathic lies about ‘business travel’ to cover his back, and her life-challenging down-spiral after smelling a rat. Clearly Gigi has a built-in factory default that limits his reliable shelf life but Bibi can’t let go until she starts to lose her own mind and friends come to the rescue.

As a story of doomed love this feels terrifically convincing but Roskam doesn’t know how to call it a day and add fuel to his fire. That said, this is definitely one to watch with its firebrand finale courtesy of ace DoP Nicolas Karakatsanis. MT

Michaël R. Roskam was born in Flanders. He studied at the St. Lucas Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels and the Maurits Binger Film Institute in Amsterdam. His directorial credits include Bullhead (11), which received an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, and The Drop (14), which played the Festival. Racer and the Jailbird (17) is his latest film.

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2017 |

 

I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians (2018)*** Winner | Karlovy Vary 2018

Writer/Dir: Radu Jude | Cast: Ioanna Iacob, Alex Bogdan, Alexandru Dabija, Lon Razia| Drama | Romania | 140′

After his contemplative paean to Romania’s lost Jews (Dead Nation), and Berlinale winner Aferim!, a drama exploring life in 19th century Jewish settlements, Radu Jude is back with another playfully bolshy and bruising indictment of ethnic cleansing, this time concerning the events leading up to the Holocaust.

Romania was as a Nazi ally – along with several other European countries – and it’s a subject that is close to his heart, and one that has divided his homeland. The film’s title refers to the words spoken by the Council of Ministers in the Summer of 1941 that announced another episode of genocide, this time on the Eastern Front. History always repeats itself and Radu Jude choses to depict this tragic era with a dark and spiky farcical doc-drama that recreates the tragic events on the Eastern Front preceding the Holocaust 

Set in contemporary Romania this experimental film within a film takes the form of a theatre production incorporating archive footage, lengthy critical diatribes Godard style, all driven forward by the feisty character of Mariana Marin (Ioana Iacob in her debut). This is a comprehensive and ambitious piece of meta-filmmaking but its sprawling verbosity and indulgent running time makes it sometimes heavy going.  

We first meet Mariana in the grounds of Bucharest’s National Military Museum as she is preparing to stage her outdoor theatrical extravaganza based on the tragic events of Autumn1941 when Romanian troops joined Nazi forces to wipe out some 30,000 Jews in the Ukrainian city of Odessa. The military dictator Ion Antonescu had sanctioned the routing before going over to the German side in 1944. In the event roughly 400,000 Jews, Roma gypsies and other ethnic minorities were massacred. 

As in many other European countries, antisemitism is still rife even today and this sentiment is echoed during Mariana’s rehearsals when some of the non-professional extras voice their concerns about acting alongside Roma gypsies and even challenge her version of events as proceedings almost turn into a bun fight. Meanwhile, Mariana’s complex love life with her married airline pilot Stefan (Serban Pavlu) is threatening to cause 

Also taking part in the production is Romanian theatre veteran Alexandru Dabija (Afterim!) who plays Movie and tries throughout to pacify the public by appealing to Mariana to adopt a less controversial take on the Odessa massacre, namely one that doesn’t offend Romania’s wartime heroes. Sparks fly as the two engage in a dialogue that pays homage to Hannah Arendt, Elie Wiesel, Steven Spielberg,  Leni Riefenstahl et al in lively scenes captured by handheld cameras accompanied by an ambient score. Not an easy film to engage with but a worthwhile effort to bring these controversial events to the public domain. However, with its 140 minute running time this is a docudrama that may prove commercially unviable for most arthouse cinemas and will likely find its viewers on home entertainment front MT

CRYSTAL GLOBE | EAST OF THE WEST | KARLOVY VARY INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | 2018

The Butterfly Tree (2018) **

Dir:Priscilla Cameron; Cast: Melissa George, Ed Oxenbould, Ewen Leslie; Sophie Lowe; Australia 2017, 97 min.

Priscilla Cameron’s debut feature looks terrific, but the Australian filmmaker cannot restrain her self-indulgence in a drama that flails madly between cheap melodrama to symbolic overdrive – and to make matters worse, shares t the worst aspects of the male view when it comes to the description of the female body.

In Queensland, college lecturer Alan (Leslie) has recently lost his artist wife and is drowning his sorrows in  bed with his creative writing student (Lowe), while his jealous son Fin (Oxenbould), looks on, somehow blaming his father for his mother’s death. Fin is a loner who collects butterflies, and it’s through this hobby that father Alan comes into contact with the enchanting but ditzy ex-chanteuse Evelyn (George) who enjoys roller-skating in flowery dresses, designed by Chrissy Flannery.

But the father/son relationship between Fin and Alan rapidly deteriorates, Oedipus meeting teenage lust, when the boy discovers a roll of film showing Evelyn in all her naked glory. Evelyn’s backstory is never alluded to, apart from a brief appearance of an ex-husband. And needless to say, Cameron script never reaches a satisfactory conclusion, the ending is tame and so very Hollywood – for which Butterfly Tree is meant to be a calling card.

Apart from Flannery who gives it his best, Cameron has to thank DoP Jason Hargreaves and PD Charlie Shelley to ensure that her debut is not a total write-off. Hargreaves conjures up ravishing dreamlike images, mostly with overhead shots. Meanwhile Shelley constructs an ethereal reverie for Evelyn and Fin to inhabit, that relies a little too heavily on influences from Baz Luhrman. And she is unable to convincingly realise the traumatic death of Fin’s mother, it being just another number in the cabinet of obscurities. Butterfly Tree is partly based on her short Beetle Feeders; but it might be worth using a script-writer for her next outing: her obsession with obscure desires is not enough to tackle really traumatic experiences with a restraint they deserve. AS

The Butterfly Tree will be released in selected cinemas nationwide (UK & Ireland) from 13 July 2018.

The Guilty (2018) Karlovy Vary Film Festival 2018 ***

Dir: Gustav Moller | Doc | Danish | 85′

If you enjoyed Locke (2013) then The Guilty will come as a disappointment. Running along similar lines as Steven Knight’s gripping ‘phone-call drama, this rather bland affair from Danish director Gustav Muller focuses entirely on a uniformed official speaking into a headset in an emergency call center, The Guilty  intrigues but never quite hits the high notes of the Tom Hardy dominated thriller – not least because Olivia Colman and Ruth Wilson added that extra ‘je ne sais quoi’ to the proceedings.

In his feature debut, filmmaker Moller gives us a tense time, but 85 minutes is too long to be looking at a little known actor wearing a blue shirt, as we drift off into a reverie about what to have for dinner after the film. There will no doubt be some viewers who will find this a winner, namely the Ecumenical Jury at Baltic Debuts Film Festival (2018) who awarded it their prize. But with an English-language script and a more starry performance (Tom Hardy?) this could well be terrific.

The narrative revolves round a demoted former officer Asger Holm (a decent Jakob Cedergren) who has the task of answering distress calls, the first is from a man claiming he’s been mugged by a woman in his car. As the camera slides back to reveals Holm’s monitor, and location is the red light district, this is somewhat of a non- starter. Then comes a stressed out woman’s voice (Jessica Dinnage, who we never see) speaking from inside a car, claiming she’s been abducted and forced to leave her children at home. All this is reflected through Holm’s facial expressions viewed intensively through Jasper Spanning’s intimate camera shots, with the sound effects of cries and traffic noises in the background. Lighting is sombre and almost sinister, as he sits in the semi-darkness giving a slight Noirish feel to the piece. Emil Nygaard Albertsen’s script is tightly packed, although the ultimate reveal doesn’t quite have the dramatic heft we’re hoping for. Clearly Holm is looking to redeem himself and make up for his past misdemeanours, and this extra dimension adds grist to the mill in firing up his desire to save the woman’s life. MT

KARLOVY VARY FILM FESTIVAL 2018

Swimming with Men (2018) **

Dir: Oliver Parker | Writer: Aschlin Ditta | Cast: Charlotte Riley, Rupert Graves, Rob Brydon, Nathaniel Parker,  Adheel Akhtar, Thomas Turgoose, Daniel Mays, Jim Carter | UK Comedy | 96′

Oliver Parker is clearly feeling for middle-aged men. His latest film is a  comedy that means well in tackling marriage breakdown and mid-life crisis from a male perspective. It sees Rob Brydon’s bored accountant Eric driven neurotic by his partner’s new success in politics (Jane Horrocks in fine form), while he sits on the sidelines, a disillusioned accountant – so what’s new?. The only thing that makes Eric happy is a dip in the local swimming baths where he bumps into a motley crew of jaded men also down on their luck, but not all past it. Agreeing to keep their personal lives strictly off-poolside, they gradually begin to find the life aquatic gives them a reason for living again. And limbering up with the encouragement of coach Susan (Charlotte Riley) they discover that swimming in sync is the answer to their woes, but not their flabby waistlines. So off they go to Milan.

Sound great, doesn’t it? And you could see where Parker was coming from. The problem is that the direction and writing are the only things out of sync in a comedy of woes that needed to be much tighter and funnier. There are some heartfelt performance from a brilliant British cast (Christian Rubeck is luminous as the token German),  and you can’t help feeling for these guys, particularly Luke (Rupert Graves) and (Thomas Turgoose). But there are hardly any laughs to be had from Ditta’s script, which mostly just feels embarrassingly over the top, or miserably maudlin, and too many lingering close-ups are nobody’s idea of fun.

SWIMMING WITH MEN | nationwide From July 6.

Diamonds of the Night | Demanti Noci (1964) | Karlovy Vary Film Festival 2018

Dir.: Jan Nemec; Cast: Ladislav Jansky, Antonin Kumbera, Ilse Bischofova; Czechoslovakia 1964, 63 min. 

This debut feature of director/co-writer Jan Nemec (1936-2016) is based on a short story by Arnost Lustig, to whom Nemec also turned for his graduation film at the famous FAMU filmschool in Prague. Shot in black-and-white with a mostly handheld camera by DoP Laroslav Kucera (Death of a Fly), Diamonds is one of the first examples of Czech feature films heralding the ‘New Wave’, which would be snuffed out by the Soviet invasion of 1968.

Set in 1944, two Jewish teenagers (Jansky/Kumbera) escape from a train destined to deliver them to Dachau KZ, and into the wooded hills. They are soon chased by a group of ‘Volkssturm’ or elderly soldiers (a bit like our own Home Guard) who had been called up for service by the desperate German Fascists. The boys’ flight is shown in parallel montages with their rather mundane past and fractured memories, not always in chronicle order, which not only adds heart-pumping suspense but also considerable poignance, as we feel for the boys in the plight. When they encounter a farmer’s wife, Jansky contemplates killing or seducing her in a dream sequence. But instead he steals a loaf of bread, and they make off again. Finally, the boys are rounded up by the cackling Germans, and are about to be shot, but not before the old gaffers enjoy their ‘hunting’ feast. Nemec ends the feature on a very ambiguous note: with the boys being spared their fate, or as walking away as ghosts.

Nemec got into trouble with the Stalinist censors because of his use of surreal Bunüel-like sequences, with  ants eating up everything around them. The director was accused of ‘Formalism’ by the authorities. His next feature, A Report on the Party and their Guests (1966), was seen as an affront to the ruling Party, and would have got him into more trouble, had The Prague Spring not intervened.

Oratio for Prague(1968) was Nemec’s answer to the invasion, and he was unable to direct any more films before he was exiled in 1974. He tried to establish himself in the USA and France, among other countries, but not as a filmmaker, he became a pioneer of video films. After 1989, he got back to his homeland and directed Code Name Ruby (1997), which won the Golden Leopard in Locarno. Later in life, whilst still working, he was critical of the current president Milos Zeman, whose anti-liberal laws Nemec opposed, sending his medals, received from President Havel, to Zeman –  completing the sad story of a truly liberal filmmaker, caught up in different form of authoritarian regimes. AS

CZECH CLASSICS | KARLOVY VARY FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | 29 JUNE – 7 JULY 2018

  

 

 

 

 

Volcano (2018)

Dir: Roman Bondarchuk | Writer: Dar’ya Averchenko, Alla Tyutyunnyk | Cast: Serhiy Stepansky, Viktor Zhdanov | Comedy Drama | 106′

Roman Bondarchuk honed his craft during the Maidan uprising as co-director of the documentary Euromaidan followed by Ukrainian Sheriffs his tragicomic look at  lawless village life. His feature debut is a visually alluring, darkly sarcastic, wildly nostalgic portrait of quiet desperation set in a surreal backwater.         

In one of the most impressively-crafted opening sequences of this year, Lukas (Stepansky) an OSCE interpreter from Kiev, disembarks from a ferry in a car escorting four delegates that promptly breaks down on the road to a conference in the city of Beryslaw (Kherson). With no mobile signal, he stumbles off despondently looking for help in what seems like a forgotten Ukraine, abandoned after the collapse of the Soviet Union, of which it had been a part. The only sign of modern life is a dam that provided electricity   but at a human cost in flooding local villages – to whose memory the feature is dedicated. 

Lukas soon finds himself in a dusty smallholding where he meets Vova (Zhadanov), an ageing veteran of the Soviet system, and once was the director of a fishing collective. “After 1989”, he complains to Lukas, “they grabbed everything and paid me off with glue, and there’s no market for it”. Vova sees Lukas as his ticket out of the daily misery. But the two women in his household are dead against him leaving: his possessive mother (Sotsenko), who drove away Vova’s wife accusing her of infidelity, and an attractive daughter Marushka (Deilyk), who is keen for to him stay, for other reasons. Desperate to break away from this timewarp, Lukas’ existential angst takes over and after losing his belongings at a raucous party, he is beaten up by two soldiers, waking up in a deep manmade hole in the ground, from which there is no escape. After Vova rescues him, Lukas will have to make a choice. 

VOLCANO is clearly a metaphor for the current status quo and the contradictions of modern Ukraine echo all around: “Weren’t you a hero of Maidan?”, Lukas demands to know from Vova. The answer is, of course “yes’, but the reality of everyday life in this war-torn country is anything but heroic: this is a society stuck in the dark ages of the early 20th century – despite mobile ‘phones. Wages are so low that hardly anyone bothers to work, living on bribes and petty crime. While hating the Russians for stealing their country, they ambiguously hark back to a time of order and stability, paid for by repression. 

DoP Vadim Ilkov catches this nostalgia evocatively on the widescreen, and the under-water shots of the flooded villages are particularly impressive. Bondarchuk directs with great sensibility, never denouncing his protagonists, who are seen as children asked to play adults in a world whose rules they do no understand any more. The director tells the slow-burning story of loss and self-determination: the traditions that once made them proud are distant memories as they cling on to the  void between a past and a present they fear, not to mention a future of more uncertainty. Moving and passionate. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 10 November 2021 | PREMIERED AT KARLOVY VARY 2018

The Cranes are Flying | Letyat zhuravli (1957) ***** | Karlovy Vary 2018

Dir.: Mikhail Kalatozov; Cast: Tatjana Samoylava, Aleksey Batalov, Vasily Merkuryev, Aleksandr Shvorin; USSR 1957, 95 min

“That’s love – a little shared insanity”

THE CRANES ARE FLYING portrays a dark time with such playful elegance and grace. Its everlasting themes of love, war, and courageous sacrifice run through a story of longing that turns on the simple premise of a letter not read. This was to become the same plot device in Katatozov’s Letter Never Sent that followed in 1960.

Mikhail Kalatosov (1903-1973) led Soviet cinema back to the lyricism of Pudovkin and Eisenstein, and away from the hollow realism and personality cult of the Stalin era in a drama that used a purely cinematic idiom that accentuated graceful visual composition. The director owes much to the collaboration of DoP Sergei Urussevsky and editor Marya Timofeyeva – even though the stunningly beautiful actress Tatjana Samoylava in the centre role of Veronika got most of the attention at the Cannes Film Festival in 1958, where The Cranes won the Golden Palme and Samoylava Best Actress.

Boris (Batalov) and Veronika are deliriously in love at the outset of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Boris secretly joins the Red Army, to defend the Motherland, but is soon declared missing at the front. Veronika does not learn of the news until after her parents are killed in an air raid, when she moves in with her Boris’s father Fyodor (Merkuryev), a surgeon and his brother Mark (Shvorin). Mark declares his love for Veronica, and the shock of her loss sees agreeing to marry Mark after he rapes her during a bomb blast. As the windows shatter in on the couple, Tatiana walks through the broken glass, the scene morphing into the mud-drenched battlefield where we witness Boris’ demise, his final moments cascades down a staircase with Tatiana dressed in white for their wedding day. When Fyodor learns that Mark has bribed the authorities to avoid being drafted, he throws him out of the house. Veronica’s happiness turns to misery, but Samoylova’s face remains as ravishingly beautiful in anguish as in pleasure. Saving a child from the wheels of a military vehicle she devotes herself to his care moment, but never gives up on Boris when she is finally given the letter hidden in the toy squirrel that Boris’ left for her before his departure. Only at the end of the war does she finally accept that Boris is dead, giving the flowers she brought for him, to the returning soldiers.

Kalatosov (I am Cuba, Letter Never SenT) breaks many taboos of the Stalin period – where it was unthinkable to admit that citizens bribed officials so that they could avoid going to the front. Rape, even in this poetic form, was never shown before. And a heroine, who even seriously thought of suicide  – never mind being a second away from it – had no place in a cinema throttled to death by censorship.

Urussevsky’s often handheld camera is extremely mobile, and his moody black-and-white images depicting a private and public world in chaos are unforgettable. Dialogue is spare but speaks volumes. Samoylava’s heartfelt acting is never sentimental, and Kalatosov helps the re-birth of Soviet cinema with glorious scenes depicting the first hour after the revolution. Without any exaggeration, The Cranes  deservedly buried Stalinist film culture on the muckheap of history, where it belongs. AS/MT

CLASSICS | KARLOVY VARY INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | 29 JUNE – 7 JULY 2018

53 Wars (2018) Karlovy Vary International Film Festival 2018 ****

Dir: Ewa Bukowska | Drama | Poland | 79′

Ewa Bukowska’s stunning feature debut is a visceral impressionist portrait of anxiety, longing and psychotic meltdown seen through the eyes of a woman whose husband is a war correspondent in Chechnya. Based on a best selling book by Grazyna Jagielska, Bukowska builds up a collage of snatched memories, archive footage, thoughts and scenes from the couple’s life together and apart to palpably convey how it really feels to yearn passionately and to fear desperately for a loved one until it hurts, quite literally.

Anchored by a quivering, neurotic tour de force by Magdalena Poplawska (she also appears in this year’s festival’s Panic Attack) this tightly scripted and searingly affective psychological thriller mesmerises during its compact running time. Bukowska makes use an evocative score of romantic tunes, requiems, electronic buzzings and moments of deafening silence as she deftly manages the subtle tonal shifts between the heart-pounding good times when the couple are united, during love-making and with their little son, and those of sheer, dry-mouthed palpitating terror when Anka imagines Witek (Michal Zurawski) dead or on a gurney in some foreign hospital.

Eventually dark dread and purple passion meld into one chasm of terror as Anka downloads her angst-ridden neurosis to everyone in her sphere  – summed up in an extraordinary scene where her head-splitting palpitations are chanelled into a builder’s jammering drill in the street outside. She begs him to stop – but the angst is inside her own head. Later she threatens an innocent woman passer-by in a hijab to ‘stay away from her husband”. Stylishly captured in intimate close-up and on the widescreen by DoP Tomasz Naumiuk this is an inventive and unique way to show how anxiety can eventually take over and become completely destructive. Clearly fear eats the soul. MT

KARLOVY VARY FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | 29 JUNE – 7 JULY 2018 | EAST OF THE WEST

Suleiman Mountain (2017) | East of West Grand Prix | Karlovy Vary Film Festival 2018

Dir; Elizaveta Stishova | Cast: Daniel Daiybekov, Turgunai Erkinbekova, Perizat Ermanbaeva | Drama | Kyrgyzstan | 101′

Enlivened by offbeat humour and vibrant widescreen images reflecting the rugged beauty of this wild Central Asian nation, SULEIMAN MOUNTAIN is the first feature from Russian filmmaker Elizaveta Stishova. Largely funded by European finance this appealing arthouse drama explores an unconventional journey of discovery – both literal and metaphorical – for its passionate central characters: a woman, her long-lost son and husband and his other younger wife. In a drama fraught with tense uncertainty and often brutal rituals involving folklore and shamanism – a scene involving an unconscious woman is particularly alarming – Kyrgyzstan emerges as a region caught between the modern world and one of ancient traditions where women – predictably – get a rough deal as they compete vehemently for the attention of self-seeking macho men, in the hope that somehow, by smothering them with love and attention, they can make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Sadly, twas ever thus.

Kazakhstani actor Asset Imangaliev plays the maverick male at the centre of the story, who cleverly plays his two wives off against one another. Karabas is an opportunistic adventurer who cons his way through life veering from violent outbursts to twinkling smiles as he tries to charm the pants off everyone he meets. Recently reunited with the couple’s thoughtfully endearing son Uluk, his older wife is a healing soul, desperately trying to hold the family together, while her coltish younger rival is also pregnant with Karabas’ child.

Kyrgyzstan initially feels exotic and remote, but the touching human story at its core is as familiar and everlasting as the hills. Stishova has certainly made a watchable and lively debut. MT

EAST OF THE WEST 2018 | KARLOVY VARY FILM FESTIVAL 2018

 

Reflections in the Dust (2018) ***

Dir.: Luke Sullivan; Cast: Sarah Houbolt, Robin Royce Queere, Aldo Fedalo, Ali Aitken; Australia 2018, 75 min.

Young Australian director/writer Luke Sullivan (You’re Not Thinking Straight) really pushes the boundaries out in this ominous post-aplocalyptic tale that combines elements of documentary and fiction by doing away with a conventional narrative, and casting a severely sight-impaired actress Sarah Houbolt, who is suffering from Hallermann/Steiff syndrome, in the lead role. And he succeeds. REFLECTIONS IN THE DUST breathes through claustrophobic, vivid imagery accompanied by an unsettling soundtrack.

In this tragic portrait of loneliness, we first meet Freckles (Houbolt) muttering ‘I don’t believe in love because I’ve never seen it’ to a faceless interviewer in the opening moments of the film. She ekes out an existence with her father who is an ageing paranoid schizophrenic clown (Queere) near a lakeside swamp, where the  act out a father daughter relationship, scavenging for food from washed up detritus. The clown oscillates between tenderness and aggression towards Freckles, who often blackens her face with shoe polish, and plays with an action man toy who she talks to like a child. One day she meets a moustachioed stranger in a beret, who reveals that her ‘Mom’ died in a circus accident, but the clown becomes aggressive towards the man and tells him to: “Go back! You are mad”. And later when a gypsy woman (Aitken) brushes Freckles’ hair lovingly, the clown sinks into a catatonic stupor, as he loses his adopted identity, acting out in bizarre ways: swinging a hammer, biting a tree and licking its bark. As fear, paranoia and anger consume these lost souls, the film sporadically switches between this fictional world and increasingly traumatic real-life interviews, until it reaches a shocking conclusion.

 It would be too easy to compare Reflections to a Beckett play or a drama by Tarkovsky, but Sullivan’s docu-drama is unique. This is total dystopia where everything is reduced to its lowest common denominator. The central characters play out base identities in re-enacting family life – symbolically, the few pieces of simple furniture slowly sink into the swamp.

DoP Ryan Barry-Cotter uses very little light for his grainy black-and-white images, and it comes as a shock when garish colour images occasionally flood the screen for a few seconds. But what really stands out is Houbolt’s tour de force that conveys the anguish of person lost in a world of voices and vague images. The ex-paralympian swimmer is simply stunning in her expressionist angst, in a performance that will resonate for a for a very long time.

Director Luke Sullivan is at the forefront of the next generation of Australian filmmakers. At a remarkably young age, he is now in the company of renowned Australian directors including Phillip Noyce (Rabbit-Proof Fence), Warwick Thornton (Samson and Delilah) and David Michôd (The Rover) who have previously screened at Karlovy Vary. MT

World premiere at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival 2018 | IMAGINA 

History of Love (2018) *** | Special Mention | Karlovy Vary Film Festival 2018

Writer/Dir: Sonja Prosenc | Cast: Dorothea Nadah, Kristoffer Jonah, Zita Fusco, Matja Vasti | Drama l Slovenia Norway | 106’

History of Love is a visually alluring mood peace with an enigmatic storyline that intrigues but never gets under the skin of its central character, despite a committed performance from Dorothea Nadah.

While exploring the various stages of family bereavement, an underlying enigmatic cat and mouse game plays out between the central character Iva and her mother’s ‘lover’ which ultimately fails to convince but provides food for thought in her denial phase when she is seeking someone to blame for the traumatic loss.
Seventeen-year-old Iva (an impressive Dorothea Nadrah) is in the process of coming to terms with the death of her mother. Influenced by this deep personal sadness and by the discovery that she didn’t know everything about her parent, she slowly immerses herself into a strange, almost dreamlike world where water is a recurring motif symbolising the ebb and flow or emotions.
Sonja Prosenc’s second feature is dominated by a sombre and reflective tone and a distinctive poetic style that uses visual impressionism to tell its loose-limbed, structureless story. She also makes good use of sound with an occasional elegiac classical score and soft ambient sounds conveying the shock, grief, denial and finally anger of post bereavement trauma.
The film captures the bosky riverside surrounds of its lush Slovenian locations creating a great sense of rus in urbis as Iva wanders around trying to come to terms with her grief. Discovering her mother’s things: a favourite scarf or a letter, delayed in the post, sends her spiralling into unspoken melancholy but the film is light on dialogue and never resorts to open displays of sadness or histrionics preferring to emote through Mitja Licen’s stunning visuals, a strong score and deftly managed tonal subtleties. MT
 
SPECIAL MENTION | KARLOVY VARY FILM FESTIVAL 2018
https://youtu.be/kjcg-6rSip4
 
 

Loves of a Blonde (1965) | Lasky Jedne Plavovlasky | Karlovy Vary Film Festival 2018 |

Dir.: Milos Forman; Cast: Hana Brejchova, Vladimir Pucholt, Vladimir Mensik, Milada Jezkova, Josef Sebanek; Czechoslovakia 1965, 90 min.

Loves of a Blonde, the second feature film by director/co-writer Milos Forman, who died this April age 86, is a bleak comedy about sex – but mostly about the absence of it. But couched in this seemingly innocuous little gem is a subtle and subversive critique of Stalinism that kept Eastern Europe under the cosh – politically and socially – during the grim 1960s, before the Prague Spring – for a while – put an end to it all.

In a small Czechoslovakian town, dominated by a shoe factory, the Forman attempts to inject a little fun  by inviting some soldiers to a ball, dominated by women who outnumbered the male of the sex by a staggering 16:1 ratio. But instead of hunky young men, pot-bellied reservists came to town, and gave those women no satisfaction at all. But there is one exception in the shape of Andula (Brejchova), who falls for Milda (Pucholt) the band’s pianist of the band, who comes from Prague. During their ‘accidental’ encounter Milda almost injures himself, trying to shut the blind and after the tender one-night stand, the musician goes back to Prague, and back to his parents. But that’s not the end of it, when Andula turns up with her suitcase to py him a visit, the whole debacle turns into the most hilarious ménage-à-trois in film history.

Almost three generations of viewers have been cheered as well as moved by this amusing tale which bears all the attributes of modern storytelling – a plot without classical dramatisation, an open ending, and straightforward characterisation. Even very early on in his career, Miloš Forman had already proved he was capable of creating an impression of sheer authenticity.

Visually Blonde is un-remarkable, shot in creamy, grainless, black and white by DoP Miroslav Ondricek who accentuates the shadows and the claustrophobic interiors of this rather touching scenario, where the working class are seen as an amorphous mass, struggling to gain individuality in a system where instead of collective joy, grey misery dominates but with a solidarity that is strangely comforting despite its hopelessness. Forman would repeat his melancholy chronicle of stunning mediocrity in his next feature The Fireman’s Ball. AS

LOVES OF A BLOND | KVIFF OPENING FILM IN TRIBUTE TO MILOS FORMAN | 29 JUNE 2018 | FIREWORK DISPLAY 

  

 

Adrift (2017)

Dir.: Baltasar Kormakur; Cast: Shailine Woodley, Sam Chaflin; USA 2018, 96 min.

Icelandic director Baltasar Kormakur (Everest) creates another human struggle with nature: this   time a couple of drifters come up against a hurricane – and, low and behold – it’s the woman who rescues the man and keeps the boat afloat.

Based on a true story and Tami Ashcroft’s book, Woodley plays the heroine with great gusto and endless stamina. Her mate Richard Sharp (Chaflin) is most of the time inactive, suffering serious internal injuries and a shattered leg after the hurricane struck. Writers Aaron and Jordan Kendell and David Branson Smith have overcome a structural problem by intercutting the drifting period (not much happens) with scenes from the past five years, after these two free spirits met in San Diego. Both are running away from traumatic childhoods: Tami’s mother was just fifteen when she gave birth to her, and Sharp’s mother committed suicide when her son was seven. Tami is particularly keen on keeping her independent status when a wealthy elderly couple, friends of Richard, ask them to sail their luxury boat from Tahiti to California, she is at first reluctant. But Richard talks her into it, and so the fateful journey begins.

DoP Robert Richardson, an Oliver Stone (JFK) and Tarantino (Kill Bill) regular, skilfully pictures the horror of waves crushing into the small space of the boat: often it looks like a phone box tossed into the ocean – not the luxury sailing boat of before. Tami is at the centre of action, riffling through the rubbish to find food, after having rescued Richard from clinging to a plank. Afterwards she keeps the boat afloat, using duct-tape to repair the holes. After Richard falls into a delirium, she nurses him while he whinges “ I wish you had never met me, you would not be in trouble”. Full of stoism Tami accepts her role of saviour and martyr, convincing herself that she will survive.

Both actors have been part of dystopian teenage features like The Hunger Games, but this much more intimate enterprise suits them better. Their chemistry helps to carry the feature, which, to be honest, doesn’t really bring anything new to the shipwreck survival sub-genre. But to have a female lead (in the true sense of the word) does make a difference in perception. Together with Richardson’s stunning under-water images, they succeed in making Adrift a cut above the rest. AS

NOW ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE

 

Edinburgh Film Festival 2018 | Award Winners

THE MICHAEL POWELL AWARD FOR BEST BRITISH FEATURE FILM

The winner of the prestigious Michael Powell Award for Best British Feature Film, which honours imagination and creativity in British filmmaking, went to British filmmaker Matt Palmer’s debut feature, CALIBRE, which received its World Premiere at the Festival.

The winner was chosen a Jury comprised of Ana Ularu, Jason Connery and Iain de Caestecker

THE AWARD FOR BEST PERFORMANCE IN A BRITISH FEATURE FILM

The award for Best Performance in a British Feature Film went jointly to actresses Liv Hill and Sinead Matthews for their roles in JELLYFISH and was also selected by the Michael Powell jurors.

 

THE AWARD FOR BEST INTERNATIONAL FEATURE FILM

The award for Best International Feature Film went to Cyril Shäublin’s THOSE WHO ARE FINE, which received its UK Premiere at this year’s Festival. The winner was chosen by the International Jury comprised of Gráinne Humphreys, Simin Motamed-Arya and Yung Kha.

THE AWARD FOR BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE FILM

The award for Best Documentary Feature Film went to Kevin Macdonald’s much-anticipated WHITNEY. This year’s jury was comprised of Gaston J-M Kaboré, Nada Cirjanic and Kate Muir.

EDINBURGH FILM FESTIVAL 20 June – 1 July 2018

Leave No Trace (2018) ****

Dir: Debra Granik | Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie, Ben Foster | US Drama | 109′

A wayfarer father (Foster) and his teenage daughter (Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie) are the focus of  Debra Granik’s cogent coming of age docudrama that explores – without judgement or melodrama – the close but often problematic bond between parent and teenager as they go about their day-to-day existence ‘eco-warrior-style’ in the lushly wooded US Pacific coastal area.

LEAVE NO TRACE avoids dramatic conflict in its pragmatic approach to telling a contemporary story that harks back to an atavistic era of hunter gatherers portraying with complete naturalness and finesse the pair’s daily existence as they forage for food, seek out warmth and shelter, relying completely on local flora and fauna for all their creature comforts. And for a while it seems an enviable and harmonious way of life until Tom (Thomasin) grows tired of roaming around and hungers for something more – both physically and emotionally – as she discovers that nesting and belonging suits her better than avoiding society and being constantly on the move. Whether this is a male or female state of mind is a subject for consideration in this – on the surface – simple but thematically rich piece of filmmaking. Tom’s coming of age evolves as naturally as the landscape surrounding her. Clearly her father is a loner, whereas Tom is much more garrulous – clearly a product of her nature rather than her parental nurturing.

What also emerges here is a picture of rural America at its most original state: a collection of people who came together and forged a close community looking after each other in what could ideally be described as basic socialism. But when the state intervenes in the form of social care our hackles begin to rise at this seemingly unnatural intrusion into their state of grace.

With this quietly unassuming indie gem Granik questions and explores complex human dynamics: our desire for privacy and autonomy within our families, communities and even within ourselves is constantly evolving and being challenging by officialdom. LEAVE NO TRACE is a small gem that is larger than life. MT

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM 29 JUNE 2018

 

Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms (2017) ****

Dir.: Mari Okada (Co-director Toshya Shinohara); Anime with the voices of Manaka Iwami, Miyh Irino, Ai Kayano; Japan 2018, 115 min.

This debut anime by writer/director Mari Okada (who scripted Anthem of the Heart) is a stunning and moving portrait of an immortal teenager to coming to terms with inevitable loss of her close friends and family. Maquia (Iwami) belongs a to the clan of the Iolphs, elf-like creatures, who live forever, locked in their teenage years. A fiercely proud and loyal people, their heritage is preserved and passed on in their craft of weaving, called Hibbiol. But the Iolphs’ secret of immortality is coveted by a neighbouring kingdom, and Maquia’s friend Leilla is captured and forced to marry the Crown Prince of the Royals after they ambush the Iolphs. Leilla soon bears him a child who she is not allowed to see. 

Meanwhile Maquia wonders around lost in the world of the humans, depressed and disorientated. Finding a baby boy, whose mother was killed by the King’s forces, Maquia adopts him and calls him Erial (Irino). The remainder of the story involves Maquia’s development from child to adult, stuck in her teenage body and overcoming existential angst. There are delightfully rendered scenes of the countryside, where mother and son spend an enchanting time together. But when they move to the capital, their relationship becomes complicated with Maquia staying a teenager and her son growing up. Gradually the two come to terms with each other in the moving finale that is considerably enhanced by Kenji Kawai’s original score. 

Okada avoids romanticising her story, concentrating on the fate of her heroine and her struggle to find an identity in the human world in a wonderfully emotional feature dominated by memory and loss. AS

ON GENERAL RELEASE ROM 27 JUNE 2018

 

New Directors for the Berlinale

The Berlinale turns over a new leaf as Carlo Chatrian takes over as artistic director and Mariette Rissenbeek as executive director of the International Film Festival starting in 2020.

Carlo Chatrian, born in Turin in 1971, is a film journalist and has directed the Locarno Film Festival since 2013, where he has proved that he can successfully curate and lead an art house audience festival. He stands for an artistically ambitious mix of programming and for a focus on discovering new talents. He and the new executive director, Mariette Rissenbeek, will head the Berlinale starting in 2020. Mariette Rissenbeek (born in Posterholt, The Netherlands in 1956) has long headed German Films, the information and advising centre for the international distribution of German films, as managing director. Her successful career in the film industry makes her the ideal choice for this position: She has many years of experience in working with all the important film festivals around the world and has an extensive network of national and international contacts in the film industry.

BERLINALE 2019 | 7 – 17 FEBRUARY 2019

 

Allure (2017) ** bluray release

Dir.: Carlos and Jason Sanchez; Cast: Evan Rachel Wood, Julia Sarah Stone, Denis O’Hare, Maxim Roy; Canada 2017, 105 min.

Carlos and Jason Sanchez’ feature debut is an overblown melodrama lacking any serious theoretical background deserving of this sensitive topic of sexual abuse. Well acted by the two leads, this sensationist psychodrama relies on Sara Mishara’s eclectic images to convey atmosphere. 

Laura (Wood), a woman in her late twenties, works as a cleaner in her father William’s business. She is introduced to us having rough, anonymous sex with a stranger. On one of her cleaning jobs, she meets sixteen year old Eva (Stone), whose controlling mother Nancy (Roy), wants to move her out of her childhood home so they can join her new boyfriend in his place. Somehow Eva falls for Laura, and instead, moves in with her. Laura obviously suffers from severe Bi-Polar symptoms and is hardly the ideal partner, but Eva stays with her as a toxic relationship develops. Slowly a role reversal takes place as Eva starts to mother Laura who seems more and more imbalanced, eventually becoming the sexual victim of two men. It appears that Laura has been sexually abused by her father (O’Hara) who at one point tries to apologises for his behaviour. But since we are never quiet sure of the past, the enigmatic narrative just veers into a series of meaningless, melodramatic encounters.

It is well known that abuse victims create a circle of violence in their own lives, trying helplessly to re-create the situation of the original dysfunction. But Allure is so one-dimensional that Laura’s relationship with Eva is simply shown as a homophobic nightmare. This simplistic approach often spoils the positive production values, and Mishara’s moody images using filters to highlight the nightly atmosphere of threat, are a case in point. Wood and Stone put on a bravura performance, but ALLURE still fails to convince, deserving a more mature and less sensationalist approach. AS .

NOW OUT ON BLURAY COURTESY OF EUREKA FILMS AND VIDEO

Tim Robbins | Honoured at Karlovy Vary Film Festival 2018

Oscar-winning Tim Robbins will be celebrated at this year’s Karlovy Vary Film Festival with a Crystal Globe for his Outstanding Contribution to World Cinema as an actor, director, screenwriter, producer and musician. Robbins won his Academy Award for his performance as Best Supporting in Mystic River (2003) and was later nominated for a best director Oscar for Dead Man Walking (1995). 

Tim Robbins grew up surrounded by artists from an early age and began his acting career on the New York stage with the experimental theatre ensemble The Actor’s Gang, which under his guidance earned widespread audience acclaim and more than a hundred critics’ awards. 

This early success led to various roles in TV and a film career that flourished with his performance in Ron Shelton’s popular sports film Bull Durham (1988). Proof of his undeniable talent followed with his role in the drama Jacob ’s Ladder (1990), and Robbins went on to work with legendary indie director Robert Altman – taking the sardonic lead role in Altman’s The Player (1992) which won him a Golden Globe and the Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival. 

Honing his skills behind the camera, Robbins’ directorial debut was the impressive drama Bob Roberts (1992 left) which he scripted, co-scored (with his brother David), and also appeared in the title role, singing many of the songs himself.  And the following year he was back with Robert Altman to film Short Cuts (1993). The ensemble cast won a Special Golden Globe and also took home the Volpi Cup from the Venice Film Festival. 

There followed appearances in the Coen brothers’ The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), another outing with Robert Altman (the comedy from the world of fashion Prêt-à-Porter, 1994), and his work with Frank Darabont on The Shawshank Redemption (1994), which was nominated for seven Oscars. In 1996 Dead Man Walking earned him an Oscar nomination for best director, while his partner Susan Sarandon won an Oscar for best actress. His next auteur outing, Cradle Will Rock (1999) above, which premiered at Cannes, explored the relationship between the individual artist and society during a tumultuous time in the U.S. though this time in another era. As with Dead Man Walking, Robbins produced, and the music was written by his brother David. 

After Stephen Frears’s romantic comedy High Fidelity (2000) and Michel Gondry’s bizarre Human Nature (2001) – based on a script by Charlie Kaufman – Robbins appeared in one of his most successful roles – in Clint Eastwood’s crime drama Mystic River (2004), for which both Robbins and lead actor Sean Penn won an Oscar and a Golden Globe. Recently Robbins has appeared in Marjorie Prime (2017) and HBOs The Brink (2016) and Here And Now (2018). 

KARLOVY VARY FILM FESTIVAL | 29 JUNE – 7 JULY 2018 | TIM ROBBINS WILL PRESENT BOB ROBERTS and CRADLE WILL ROCK and perform with his ensemble The Rogues Gallery Band. 

In the Fade (2017) ***

Dir: Fatih Akin | Cast: Diane Kruger| Drama | German | 104min

IN THE FADE is a hard film to watch after the events of Manchester, Westminster amongst many others. In it Diane Kruger plays a plain-talking hard-edged mother trying to cope with the death of her Kurdish husband and small son, murdered by a bomb in their German home town.

Since his gritty debut Head-On Turkish-German director Fatih Akin has remained faithful to his indie style and his ethnic-rooted dramas in a another film that is incessently grim, as the events would suggest. But none its characters are at all likeable accept, strangely. the German father of one of duo of bombers, who are purportedly neo-Nazi sympathisers.

Kruger’s Katya has married Nuri, a convicted drugs dealer, in prison. Clearly in love, the devastation she feels in the aftermath is palpable. And it’s a strong performamce, Kruger’s first in her native German. A really spiteful courtroom procedural records a unjust verdict and Katya repairs to the seaside to heal. Or so it would appear. It actual fact, in keeping with her tough persona, she’s pursuing the bombers to a small Greek resort. The film is a subtle as a mallet, and about as enjoyable as being hit by one. Diane Kruger won Best Actress at Cannes for her histrionic performance. MT

NOW ON RELEASE FROM 22 JUNE 2018

 

 

Totem (2018)

Dir.: Jakub Charon; Cast: Karol Bernacki, Malgorzata Krukowska, Joanna Majstrak, Milan Skrobic, Michal Sobota, Jolanta Juszkiewicz; Poland 2017, 118′.

Director/writer Jakub Charon has chosen the milieu of small town gangsters in his native Poland for his debut feature, an uneven and often ultra-brutal thriller that suffers from its incoherent script and a self-indulgent length.

Brothers Dziki (Bernacki) and Igor (Sobolweski) have an uneasy relationship: the much younger Dziki served a two years sentence for his brother, and on his return, he expects some reward, particularly, for looking after their mentally unbalanced mother (Juszkiewicz) and his brother’s baby. To complicate matters, Dziki is secretly in love with Ewa (Majstrak), who helps him looking after mother and baby. But Dziki is also in charge of his brother’s prostitutes and one in particular is Dagmara (Kruskowska), who he fancies. After Dagmara is raped by clients, she opens up about a heist Igor has planned involving a huge stash of narcotics from the powerful Serbian Mafia. Dziki’s friend Olaf (Skrobic) tries to help, but after a seemingly endless bloodbath, he and Igor meet a tragic end. Dziki sets the parental home ablaze before a last, unnecessary, act of violence closes this testosterone driven debut.

The continuous onslaught of gratuitous rampant violence makes TOTEM a tough watch to sit through – it’s clear what Charon had in mind, but he fails miserably as it careens out of control. The acting is convincing, and DoP Piotr Pawlus does a great job behind the camera – but in the end his images are as overblown as the whole project, a mixture of parody and overkill, which has about as many redeeming features as the male protagonists.AS

TOTEM | OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT AWARD for Best Narrative Feature | CALCUTTA INTERNATIONAL CULT FILM FESTIVAL 2018 

 

Wadjda (2012) Mubi

Dir/Wri: Haifaa Al Mansour | Cast: Reem Abdullah, Ahd, Waad Mohammed | 98′ | Arabic with subtitles

Wadjda is a jewel in the crown of contemporary Middle Eastern film. The first full-length feature to be shot entirely in Saudi Arabia, it’s also directed by a Saudi woman. Despite the vast wealth of that country, it was impossible to raise finance for such a venture.  So the funds came from Europe and the feature was backed by the Sundance Institute.

In the modern world of Saudi, there’s nothing religiously radical or precious about Wadjda. She is a fiercely independent ten-year-old, as bright as a button and way ahead of her time.  Living with her mother in a dusty suburb of Riyadh, she goes to school but sees her studies as a means to an end: to win the school prize so she can buy a bike and race the boys instead of taking the taxi provided by her father.  He visits occasionally but has another ‘wife-in-waiting’, hoping that this one will provide him with the prize of a son. But Wadjda would rather be making wristbands and recording music discs and selling them for a profit than waiting to be married off to a local man.

Al Mansour’s clever script reflects every subtle nuance of Muslim society and Waad Mohammed’s charismatic turn as Wadjda is full of insight, wit and cheekiness marking her out to be a talent in the making. Supported by a cast of newcomers and seasoned actors: her onscreen mother Reem Abdullah and Ahd as headmistress Ms Hussa give performances of considerable allure.  Lutz Reitemeier’s cinematography brings clarity and precision to the visuals.

The story is set against the backdrop of a society where women are the isolated chattels of men and merely exist to provide offspring. Woman are highly competitive with each other, gossiping and policing the sisterhood’s moral and religious probity with an eagle eye and a sharp tongue. And whereas in Western society women compete in a machiavellian way for desirable males, in Saudi society this competition is right out there in the open and their only raison d’être in life.

Wadjda is a touching and playful portrait of a spunky little girl – but more than that it’s a fascinating insight into a society with medieval values in the 21st century, and not all are to be dismissed as outdated. But even after all the dust has settled on its novelty value, this is a drama to be reckoned with on the international arthouse scene. MT

NOW ON MUBI | Haifaa Al Mansour was Head of the Dino De Laurentis Jury at VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2013

Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) ***** | Bluray Limited Edition

Dir.: Rainer Werner Fassbinder; Cast: Günter Lamprecht, Gottfired John, Barbara Sukowa, Hanna Schygulla; West Germany/Italy 1980, 940 min.

This captivating 15 hour odyssey is Fassbinder’s adaption of Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel of the same name. It is the story of two men who can not admit their love for each other, and go on to destroy themselves and the women they become involved with. At the same time, it is a symbol of advancing Fascism in the Germany of the Weimar Republic – of which Döblin (1878-1957), a practising psychiatrist and novelist, became a victim himself, and was punished with emigration for being Jewish.

Berlin Alexanderplatz is often compared to James Joyce’s Ulysses and Don Passos’ Manhattan Transfer, two contemporary novels where the protagonists play a major part. Fassbinder has translated the associative structure of the text into an impressionistic portrait of the German capital, where half-sentences and poster texts mix with a permanent flowing traffic: a city which never sleeps, everything dazzles and glimmers. But the chaos of words, sounds and thoughts covers the growing infection with the Fascist bacillus, a regime which promised a new order of certainties.

Franz Biberkopf (Lamprecht) has just been released from prison, after serving four years for strangling his girl friend Ida. He is forbidden by the Police to live in certain areas of Berlin because the milieu might make a recidivist of him. Franz is working as a hawker, selling necktie holders, but he has not the gift for the gab, and finds it impossible to make ends meet, so he is talked into selling the Nazi newspaper Der Volkische Beobachter, even though some of his Jewish contacts warn him of the consequences. Unfortunately, Franz does not want to take on board their efforts to protect him and he sinks further and further into the negative influence of this misguided political movement, where robberies are supposed to benefit the NSDAP, but more often than not serve only the perpetrators. Franz gets to know his nemesis Reinhold (John), a sort of underground leader. Reinhold get quickly bored of his girlfriends, and Franz “inherits” them. One of them is Eva (Schygulla), who once worked for Franz on the streets of Berlin. But his true love is Mieze (Sukowa), who is only too glad to lose Reinhold as her pimp. But Reinhold is jealous of Franz’ chance of a happiness, and he murders Mieze, before throwing Franz from the back of a truck, after a robbery. Franz survives, but loses his right arm – ironically, he cannot perform the ‘Heil Hitler’ greeting anymore. An epilogue sees Franz recovering from his psychosis in a closed psychiatric ward where he suffers from nightmares: dreaming of the atomic bomb and other Armageddon-like events. In the end, he is prepared for work in a Fascist society, but becomes very much a prisoner of the system.

This impressive endeavour, described as the longest film in history at 900-plus minutes, is photographed brilliantly by Xaver Schwarzenbeger (Querelle, Lilli Marlen). With a cast and crew of over a hundred, most of them Fassbinder regulars – such as composer Peer Raaben and editor Juliane Lorenz – Berlin Alexanderplatz is the director’s greatest opus: the homoerotic element of German Fascism symbolised by the bi-polar love-hate relationship between Franz and Reinhold, causing (self) destruction first on a private, then on a worldwide level. AS

AVAILABLE from Second Sight as a LIMITED EDITION BLURAY BOXSET ON 23 JULY 2018 | Complete with a luxury 60 page perfect bound book. 

SPECIAL FEATURES FOR LIMITED EDITIONLimited edition deluxe box set (2000 copies only)

  • ‘Fassbinder: Love Without Demands’ – The acclaimed 2015 feature length documentary by ChristianBraad Thomsen
  • Berlin Alexanderplatz – A Visual Essay by Daniel Bird
  • ‘A Mega Movie and its Story’ documentary by Juliane Lorenz
  • ‘The Making of Berlin Alexanderplatz’
  • ‘The Restoration’ documentary including ‘before and after’
  • The Original Recaps
  • Berlinale 2007 trailer
  • 60-page perfect bound book featuring new essay by Cahiers Du Cinema’s Stephane du Mesnildot andarchive material by Wim Wenders, Thomas Elsasser and Christian Braad Thomsen

 

Stanley, A Man of Variety (2016))

Dir.: Stephen Cookson; Cast: Timothy Spall; UK 2016, 83 min.

As much as we all love the veteran actor Timothy Spall, his one-hander Stanley, a Man of Variety, co-written by Stephen Cookson (My Angel), is simply a vanity project and the total opposite of the title: a portrait of a mental patient, wasting away in a derelict psychiatric ward.

Stanley also suffers from its unstructured script – hardly a narrative, but a series of numbers, held together by the slightest of content: Stanley fantasises about his past, his never totally explained transgression, only wanting to leave the ward to visit his daughter’s grave. Apart from his parents, Spall also acts out the personas of popular British actors: Max Wall, Alistair Sim, Margaret Rutherford and Noel Coward to name a few. They mostly berate poor Stanley, who is lost in his world of cleaning the ward and watching old VCR cassettes – if he can find the tokens for the meter.

Stanley veers helplessly between parody and self-satire; everything between Tarkovsky and Carry-On is plundered, but all seems oddly second-hand, like Spall’s imitations. One suspects that Cookson/Spall had Rober Hamer’s Kind Hearts and Coronets in mind, but Alec Guinness was helped by a great ensemble of the very best – and a proper script based on a brilliant novel. DoP Ismael Issa tries very hard to jazz the whole thing up, but it’s difficult to find coherence when the script is merely a collection of notes. Stanley resembles a work in progress – but very much like the first draft. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 15 JUNE 2018

Picturehouse Entertainment presents Stanley, A Man of Variety exclusively at Picturehouse Central from 15th Juneand at Picturehouse Cinemas nationwide on 26th June for Discover Tuesdays

Current Screenings + Q&As with Timothy Spall

15th-22nd June – Picturehouse Central, London (with Q&A on 24th June)
27th June – Phoenix Cinema, East Finchley (with Q&A)
30th June – Cambridge Arts Picturehouse (with Q&A)

 

A Ciambra (2017)

Dir.: Jonas Carpignano; Cast: Pio Amato, Koudous Seihon, Iolanda Amato, Damiano Amato, Rocco Amato; Italy/USA/France/Sweden 2017, 118 min.

Jonas Carpignano’s casts non professionals in this companion piece and follow-up to his debut Mediterranea, a lively all singing all dancing immigration drama that revolves around a family of Romas who live in an enclave of Gioia Tauro in Calabria, .

Voluble teenager Pio (Pio Amato) is the youngest in the family of jailbirds, idolising his brother Cosimo (Damiano Amato) who has already served time, as has his father Rocco (Rocco Amato), he mixes easily in the multi-cultural milieu of fellow Romas, local Italians and African refugees, and the rest of their clan are under house arrest. Mother Iolanda (Iolanda Amato) keeps the family together, and Pio is a afraid of her – but not enough to stop his various criminal activities. Pio’s only confidant is Ayiva from Burkino Faso, who lives in the African section of the town and is played by the only professional actor, Kudos Seihon. Pio’s loyalities are put to the test when he discovers his clan is planning a robbery at Ayiva’s “warehouse”; but he’s proud to be a Roma and keeps his mouth shut, respecting his brother’s words: “when you are in prison, you are respected, even by the Italians, but nobody respects the Africans”.  Carpignano keeps his distance from his characters, never judging them and allowing their macho, misogyny full rein. That said, the clan live in abject poverty, crime clearly doesn’t pay for these canny immigrants. This approach works up to a point. Realism is fine, but it has to encompass more than one dimension. There are shades of The Dardenne Brothers in Tim Curtin’s handheld camerawork which follows each scenes through to the end, although the brothers take their narrative rigour from showing society as a whole, not indulging in the cul-de-sac actions of one section of the community.  Overall, A Ciambra pulls out all the stops aesthetically, allowing the audience to enjoy the ride rather indulgently, and with a dangerous lack of reflection. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 18 JUNE 2018

 

Iron Monkey (19930 | **** Bluray release

Dir: Yuen Woo-ping | Action drama | China | 90′

Yuen Woo-ping’s kung-fu classic is a breathtaking action adventure from perhaps the greatest action choreographer of all time, Yuen Woo-ping’s Iron Monkey combines innovative special effects and remarkable fight choreography with a classic story of courage, honour and sacrifice, all doused in deliciously dark humour.

Wong Kei-ying (Donnie Yen; Ip Man, Rogue One), a physician and martial artist, is mistaken for a masked vigilante known as the Iron Monkey (Yu Rong-kwong); a Robin Hood style hero who has been robbing the wealthy local officials in order to provide medical treatment for the poor. The two men must team up to defeat a corrupt political regime, and protect the lives of the people whose cause they champion.

NOW OUT ON BLURAY FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER COURTESY OF EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA FROM 18 JUNE 2018

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) **

Dir.: J.A. Bayona; Cast: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Daniella Pineda, Justice Smith, Rafe Spall, Toby Jones, Isabella Sermon, James Cromwell, Geraldine Chaplin, James Cromwell; USA/Spain 2018, 128′.

Director J.A. Bayona (A Monster Calls) and his regular, fellow Catalan DoP Oscar Faura have delivered the fifth instalment of the Dino franchise, with Fallen Kingdom being the middle piece of a trilogy. Despite some visually stunning set pieces (and a budget to match), the script by Colin Trevorrow and Derek Connolly is as weak as their work for Fallen Kingdom’s predecessor Jurassic Park (2015).

This new outing sees the dinosaurs on the Isla Nublar threatened by an erupting volcano. Dino lovers Owen Grady (Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Howard), still lack a convincing chemistry and are called back into a rescue mission with their sidekicks Dr. Zia (Pineda) and Franklin (Smith). Unbeknown to the quartet, back in Lockwood Mansion Sir Benjamin (Cromwell) is dying and his wicked CEO Eli Mills (Spall) has teamed up with Super-Baddie Gunnar Eversol (Jones), to trade the surviving dinosaurs to the highest bidders so they can be genetically altered and used as fighting machines. After Lockwood’s  death, his granddaughter Maise (Sermon) takes over the good fight having lost her last ally, a Mrs. Danvers-like housekeeper (Chaplin). While the auction of the rescued animals is in full swing, Maise is finally joined by the foursome in her fight to thwart the greedy usurpers.  

Shot in CinemaScope (240:1 ratio) with an Arri Alexa 65, digital debutant Faura deftly masters the mix of animatronix and CGI, using older lenses in place of the latest ones – as digital’s lack of depth tends to look hyper real. Having said this, the folio on the island does appear to be a little bit too rubbery….  

There’s nothing really new here: once again we get a reprise of the fight between the good flying dinosaur (Blue, Grady’s lead Dino) and the baddie reptile; and when they eventually fall through yet another glass roof, there’s a maddening sense of déja vu. Fallen Kingdom never makes its mind up if it wants to be a disaster movie or a Bond flic with a great finale. The 128 minutes running time outstays its welcome without any justification for doing, and the ending, prepping us for a planned third outing of the rebooted franchise, is only secured by a mind blowing act of unbelievable wilfulness. AS

IN CINEMAS FROM FRIDAY 8 JUNE 2018

Darkest Hour (2018) **** Bluray release

Dir: Joe Wright | Cast: Gary Oldman, Kristen Scott Thomas | Lily James | Ben Mendelsohn, Ronald Pick-up | Biopic Drama | UK

Darkest Hour is to be believed, Britain’s destiny was actually decided during a tube journey from St James’ Park to Westminster on the 28th May, 1940 when the war cabinet met to make a pivotal but in the end winning agreement to continue resisting Hitler’s inexorable plans to invade the British Isles.

English director Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour follows on from Jonathan Teplitzky’s Churchill which concentrates on the hours leading up to the invasion of Normandy. They are both worthwhile and weighty films deriving considerable dramatic heft from these crucial and compelling moments during the Second World War.

The film opens as Parliament is returning a no-confidence vote against Neville Chamberlain’s shaky leadership (he was suffering from cancer), in favour of fellow Conservative Winston Churchill who is played with considerable conviction and aplomb by Gary Oldman in a performance that won him an academy award at the year’s Oscars. Ironically the US film came away empty handed but won a BFDG award for production design.

Although Churchill was seen as a bumptious drinking man – and he wasn’t a well man himself, he nevertheless got up and finished first in the charisma stakes and the rest is history. While all around him – including the weakened King George VI were clammering for Britain to strike a deal with Germany and retire graceful from the fray, Churchill confidently led the country to victory through a precarious series of potholes from Hitler’s imminent invasion through to winning the war. Strangely Clement Attlee doesn’t feature at all, but that’s for another film.

This is a beast of a role and Oldman takes it on masterfully – deftly playing up the vulnerable ego-driven empathiser, he makes for a sleeker and more dapperly upbeat Churchill than Brian Cox’s blustering bull of a man, although they both have their moments in creating an indomitable English hero who is still much treasured in the Nation’s collective memory. And it falls to Joe Wright and his writer Anthony McCarten to turn the action around from the fateful tube journey and a time of desperation to the successful end game with their rather clunky plot device.

The distinguishing factor about Darkest Hour is the atmospheric way Wright catapults us back into 1940 with the extraordinary look of the film. From the scenes in Buckingham Palace, in Parliament and even in Churchill’s intimate domestic rooms we are surrounded by the gloominess of the era, daylight shafting in through windows onto characters dwarfed by the enormity of what was at stake. Lit by Bruno Delbonnel’s terrific cinematography the walls and wood-panelling soars up around us, making us feel small in the scheme of things.

Impressive also are the performances: Ben Mendelsohn makes a stutteringly good George complaining of being “harshly tweeted” (he probably would have been had twitter been invented at the time). And Kristin Scott Thomas is gracefully deferential of her husband, much less forceful but, strangely, just as convincing as Miranda Richardson’s Clemmie. Lily James gets a small but perfectly formed and even amusing cameo as Churchill’s secretary Elizabeth Layton.

But at the end of the day it is Oldman’s Churchill that powers this forward. His alluring way with words and his charismatic showmanship energises this biopic sending it soaring into the annuls of Second World War film archive. MT

NOW ON BLURAY

Edinburgh International Film Festival | 20 June – 1 July 2018

Artistic Director Mark Adams unveiled this year’s programme for Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF), with 121 new features, including 21 world premieres, from 48 countries across the globe.

Highlights include Haifaa al-Mansour’s long-awaited follow-up to WadjdaMARY SHELLEY, with Elle Fanning taking on the role of Mary Wollstonecraft, the World Premiere of Stephen Moyer’s directorial debut, THE PARTING GLASS, starring Melissa Leo, Cynthia Nixon, Denis O’Hare, Anna Paquin (who also produces), Rhys Ifans and Ed Asnerand an IN PERSON events with guests including the award-winning English writer and director David Hare, the much-loved Welsh comedian Rob Brydon and star of the compelling Gothic drama THE SECRET OF MARROWBONE, actor George MacKay, as well as the Opening and Closing Gala premieres of PUZZLE and SWIMMING WITH MEN.

BEST OF BRITISH

This year’s Best of British strand includes exclusive world premieres of Simon Fellows’ thriller STEEL COUNTRY, featuring a captivating performance from Andrew Scott as Donald, a truck driver turned detective; comedy classic OLD BOYS starring Alex Lawther; the debut feature of writer-director Tom Beard, TWO FOR JOY, a powerful coming-of-age drama starring Samantha Morton and Billie Piper; oddball comedy-drama EATEN BY LIONS; striking debut from writer and director Adam Morse, LUCID, starring Billy Zane and Sadie Frost; Jamie Adams’ British comedy SONGBIRD, featuring Cobie Smulders. Audiences can also look forward to a special screening of Mandie Fletcher’s delightfully fun rom-com PATRICK.

AMERICAN DREAMS 

This year the AMERICAN DREAMS strand has the quirky indie comedy UNICORN STORE, the directorialOscar-winning actress Brie Larson in which she stars alongside Samuel L. Jackson and Joan Cusack; the heart-warming HEARTS BEAT LOUD starring Nick Offerman; glossy noir thriller, TERMINAL, starring and produced by Margot Robbie and starring Simon Pegg and Dexter Fletcher; IDEAL HOME in which Paul Rudd and Steve Coogan play a bickering gay couple who find themselves thrust into parenthood; 1980s set spy thriller starring Jon Hamm, THE NEGOTIATOR; and PAPILLON, starring Charlie Hunnam and Rami Malek.

EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVES

Notable features include 3/4  Ilian Metev’s glowing cinema verity portrait of family life. Malgorzata Szumovska’s oddball drama MUG that explores the aftermath of a face transplant; Aida Begic’s touching transmigration tale NEVER LEAVE ME highlighting how young Syrian lives have been affected by war; actor-turned-director Mélanie Laurent’s fourth feature DIVING, and Hannaleena Hauru’s thought-provoking THICK LASHES OF LAURI MANTYVAARA and the brooding and atmospheric drama THE SECRET OF MARROWBONE starring George MacKay, Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Heaton, Mia Goth and Matthew Stagg.

WORLD PERSPECTIVES 

This offer a fascinating snapshot of developing world-cinema themes and styles such as BO Hu’s epic Chinese drama AN ELEPHANT SITTING STILL; Berlinale award-winning South American dram THE HEIRESSESGIRLS ALWAYS HAPPY, a touching but darkly funny tale of a Chinese mother and daughter and Kylie Minogue starrer FLAMMABLE CHILDREN , a raucous comedy set in Aussie beachside suburbia in the 1970s. THE BUTTERFLY TREE starring Melissa George and Ben Elton’s THREE SUMMERS starring Robert Sheehan and set at an Australian folk music festival.

DOCUMENTARIES

This year’s EIFF programme features a strong musical theme from Kevin Macdonald’s illuminating biopic WHITNEY, about the life and times of superstar Whitney Houston; GEORGE MICHAEL: FREEDOM – THE DIRECTOR’S CUT narrated by George Michael himself and ALMOST FASHIONABLE: A FILM ABOUT TRAVIS directed by Scottish lead-singer Fran Healy. Audiences will be inspired by the creativity of Orson Welles in Mark Cousins’ THE EYES OF ORSON WELLES; HAL, a film portrait of the acclaimed 1970s director Hal Ashby; LIFE AFTER FLASH, a fascinating exploration into the life of actor Sam J. Jones.

DOWNRIGHT STRANGE

As the sun sets, audiences will be able to journey into the dark and often downright strange side of cinema, with a selection of genre-busting edge-of-your-seat gems including: the gloriously grisly psychosexual romp PIERCING starring Mia Wasikowska; the world premieres of Matthew Holness’ POSSUM and SOLIS staring Steven Ogg as an astronaut who finds himself trapped in an escape pod heading toward the sun; dark and bloody period drama THE MOST ASSASSINATED WOMAN IN THE WORLD and the futuristic WHITE CHAMBER starring Shauna Macdonald.

FOCUS ON CANADA 

The country focus for the Festival’s 72nd edition will be Canada, allowing audiences to take a cinematic tour of the country and its culture, offering insight as well as entertainment, from filmmakers new and already established. HOCHELAGA, LAND OF THE SOULS is an informative look at Quebec’s history; but possibly best to avoid the unconvincing FAKE TATTOOS opting instead for WALL, a striking animated essay about Israel from director Cam Christiansen and FIRST STRIPES a compelling look into the Canadian military from Jean-Francois Caissy.

Weather permitting, the Festival’s pop-up outdoor cinema event Film Fest in the City with Mackays (15 – 17 June) will kick off the festivities early, with the 72nd Edinburgh International Film Festival running from 20 June – 1 July, 2018.

Tickets go on sale to Filmhouse Members on Wednesday 23 May at 12noon and on sale to the public on Friday 25 May at 10am. www.edfilmfest.org.uk.

 

 

King of Hearts (1966) ***

 Dir.: Philippe de Broca; Cast: Alan Bates, Genevieve Bujold, Pierre Brasseur, Micheline Presle, Jean-Claude Brialy, Adolfo Celi; France/Italy 1966, 102′

Director Philippe de Broca (1933-2004) was assistant director to Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut, before setting out to direct thirty features; which, like King of Hearts were mainly light-hearted entertainment, but this is notable for its legendary English star Alan Bates. The director’s most popular outing, The Man from Rio (1964), was a sparkling adventure escapade starring Jean-Paul Belmondo.

Set in the French town of Marville in the last days of WWI, Scottish Private Plumpick (Bates) is sent by by his buffoonish commander Colonel MacBiberbrook (Celi) to defuse a bomb in the city, evacuated by the Germans who have intercepted Plumpick’s carrier pigeons, and are waiting for him in the deserted town. Running for his life, Plumpick takes refuge in the local asylum, where the patients greet him with adoration after learning, from the Germans soldiers, that he was the King of Hearts. Soon the patients from the asylum change into fancy dress, imitating the French court and a real brothel. The courtiers, among them General Geranium (Brasseur) and The Duke De Trefle (Brialy), want to crown Plumpick in the derelict church. But he falls for the virgin whore Coquelicot (Bujold), having been introduced to her by Madame Eva (Presle). After defusing the bomb, Plumpick watches the patients celebrate his great ‘firework’. But the explosion brings the two fighting armies back, and the patients run back to the asylum, where they are joined by Plumpick, who, having survived the.

With bears, lions and cycling monkeys running wild in the town after being liberated from their cages by the patients, this is a riotous romp, even though it was a disaster at the box office in France. It also bombed in the USA, but during the Vietnam war it went down a storm on the campuses. It now feels dated but the great ensemble acting and the production values are first class. DoP Pierre Lhomme (Camille Claudel) and composer George Delerue (The Last Metro, Day for Night) also go to make this anarchic cult classic solid entertainment. AS

KING OF HEARTS in cinemas NATIONWIDE (UK & Ireland) on 8 June 2018

My Friend Dahmer (2017) ****

Dir.: Marc Meyers; Cast: Ross Lynch, Anne Heche, Dallas Roberts, Alex Wolff, Tommy Nelson, Harrison Holzer, Vincent Kartheiser; USA 2017, 107 min.

Marc Meyers (Harvest) scores a winner with this brilliant screen adaptation of ‘Derf’ Backderff’s comic book tracing the final year of the legendary serial killer Jeff Dahmer.

Meyers’ work is best known in the US but this fascinating biopic thriller resonates far and wide due to the universal appeal of its gruesome subject matter. Born in Wisconsin, Jeffrey Dahmer grew up in the small town of Bath, Ohio, where Meyers captures the final year at college before his fragmented psyche exploded, leading to the murders of seventeen young men. Disney star Ross Lynch is cast against type turning in an excruciatingly realistic performance that brings with it an understanding of what drove Dahmer to murder, cannibalism and necrophilia. And the idea that society does not produce serial killers, but is in some way responsible for their existence – soon begins to percolate through the subconscious.

Dahmer’s senior year at Revere High School ran from 1977-78. And we learn how his role as an outsider was pre-determined by his dysfunctional family life where the atmosphere was fraught with discord: Father Lionel (Roberts), a chemist, and his wife Joyce (Heche) argue non-stop: Joyce is undergoing psychiatric treatment for her belligerent attitude to almost everything, but mainly her family. Only Jeffrey’s younger brother Dave (who name was changed due to legal anonymity), seems to find parental approval, largely due to the masculine attributes he shares with father: Both revel in the seclusion of the laboratory, avoiding social interaction, despite Lionel asking his son to develop a more outgoing attitude.

At school, Jeffrey’s obsession with dead animals is well known, he collects carcasses and dissolves them in acid, playing with the bones. His three ‘friends’ Derf (Wolff as the future comic book author), Neil (Nelson) and Mike (Holzer) make full use of Jeffrey’s willingness to be the class clown: they even pay him to perform his antics, which run to mock epileptic seizures and cerebral palsy routines in the local Mall. But Jeffrey is no fool: he is perfectly aware that he doesn’t belong and takes to drinking spirits and developing an early gay crash on a jogger (Kartheiser), who nearly becomes his first victim. Aware of his sexual orientation, Dahmer is condemned to silence, since there is no opportunity to discuss or explore his sexuality in this macho mid-western state  – and little has changed, even today. And so, Jeffrey ‘sleep-walks’ into his first murder, picking up a hitchhiker three weeks after his graduation (another milestone unacknowledged by his family).

From today’s perspective, it seems incredible that the early warning signs of Jeffrey’s fragmentation were not picked up at school, and that a court should find him “mentally sane” to stand trial in 1991. His murder by a fellow inmate serves as a sad but logical epitaph to a life in which the troubled 34 year-old actually kept the remains of some his victims for company. Meyers’ detached case study shows Jeffrey Dahmer as a spectator, looking in on his own life. He is unable to identify with anything alive, his sexuality making him even more of an outcast. His cerebral intelligence was no help: his pent up emotions were so over-powering that he could only find an outlet in physical cruelty, in revenge for being locked out of everyone’s life. DoP Daniel Katz’s wide-screen images underline the joyless grey world he experienced, an arctic emotional landscape. Lynch’s peerless performance underlines the fact that Dahmer was actually handsome, but lacked the wherewithal to connect physically or emotionally with anyone alive. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 1 June 2018

 

The Knack..and how to get it (1965) | Bluray release

Dir: Richard Lester | Cast: Rita Tushingham, Ray Brooks, Michael Crawford, Donal Donnelly | Comedy | UK

It’s indicative of our more conservative century that in 2001 the Wallflower Critical Guide appreciated the creative cinematography and editing of The Knack, but then said it disrupted the storytelling. That’s ridiculous. The bare storyline of The Knack makes for a comedy pitched exactly in tune with its technique: a style conveying zany behaviour, sexual freedom and cheeky irreverence. Never a case of disruption but a familiar eruption of the visual approach associated with director Richard Lester. 

Sandwiched between the two Beatles films, A Hard Day’s Night and Help, The Knack is very much a Sixties production. Amazingly, it won the 1965 Cannes Palme D’Or and has become one of the ‘swinging’ 60s films that people either love or hate. I like it, but with a few reservations. Blow-Up is the other 60s film now lazily described as ‘swinging’. Antonioni’s film doesn’t swing but provokes and mystifies: a film of its time yet also magisterially timeless; whereas The Knack has begun to look dated: caught in its own charming time capsule.

Colin (Michael Crawford) is a schoolmaster with little sexual experience of women. His friend Tolen (Ray Books) is a smug and conceited womaniser. He has the knack of seduction. Colin wants it too. Only with the disruptive arrival of Nancy (Rita Tushingham) on the scene does it seem possible that Colin’s inhibitions will be swept away by a potential girlfriend.

The Knack was adapted by Charles Wood from a play by Ann Jellicoe. I’m not sure how much of the dialogue is Jellicoe’s and how much is Wood’s. What is apparent is a strange and strained tone of both awkward misogyny and exhilarating energy. You disapprovingly groan at Tolen’s remark that women are ‘just skirt’ and that “skirt is meat”, and his assertion that “girls don’t get raped unless they want it.” These attitudes are powerfully counterpoised by Nancy’s assertive dialogue. As Tolen approaches, intent on rape, Nancy blasts out, “Mr. Smarty, Smarty, tight trousers – just you don’t come near me!” whilst her constant asking to be directed to the YWCA becomes a repeated knack leitmotif. Will the YWCA ever preserve Nancy’s virginity?  

The Knack is a semi-absurdist mishmash of Wood/Jellicoe lines that manage to attract and repel. And Lester directs his actors to speak in a frenetic, questioning manner as if they were tearing through the text of Beckett’s Godot – not anxiously waiting for redemption but running up and down stairs intent on sexual gratification.

If The Knack hadn’t been so perfectly cast then I don’t think I would be giving it very much critical attention. Michael Crawford, Ray Brooks, Donal Donnelly and Rita Tushingham deliver wonderfully winning performances. The film might be an uneven, if brilliantly photographed, fantasia on sexual drives, but I strongly identified with the frustrations and ambitions of its very likeable and very human characters. 

The comedy sometimes fall flat – both the child-like lion taming scene and the wheeling of a bed, through the London streets, are over-long – but when The Knack’s comedy works, it becomes an appealing bundle of anarchic energy. And British films are always in need of a good dose of that. Alan Price.

NOW ON BLURAY TO CELEBRATE BFI’s WOODFALL: A REVOLUTION IN BRITISH CINEMA 

Special features

Product details

RRP: £19.99/ Cat. no. BFIB1292 / Cert 15

UK / 1965 / black and white / 85 mins / English language with optional hard-of-hearing subtitles / original aspect ratio 1.66:1 / BD50: 1080p, 24fps, PCM dual mono audio (48kHz/24-bit) / DVD9: PAL 25fps, PCM mono audio (48kHz/16-bit)

 

Pandora’s Box (1928)***** New Digital Restoration

Dir.: G.W. Pabst; Cast: Louise Brooks, Fritz Kortner, Franz Lederer, Carl Götz, Alice Roberts, Daisy d’Ora, Alice Roberts; Germany 1928, 135 min.

Based on two plays by the German playwright Frank Wedekind (Earth Spirit/Pandora’s Box), there had been already a stage, screen and musical version of the story, and Pabst was set to cast Marlene Dietrich in the title role of his own version, having failed to find his ‘Lulu’.

Luckily for him, and for the millions who have watched the feature, his first choice 22 year-old Louise Brooks (a trained dancer) telephoned just in time from Hollywood to accept the role. Pabst had seen her playing a circus artist in Howard Hawks’ A Girl in Every Port, and Paramount had ignored his request to borrow her. Only after she quit Paramount ((“just for the hell of it”), did Bud Schulberg tell her Pabst had offered her the part. And ten minutes later, when she cabled Pabst her agreement – Marlene Dietrich was waiting in the director’s office.

Lulu (Brooks) is a modern femme fatale, and a naïve child all rolled into one. Full of allure and sultry seductiveness: her first pimp Schigolch (Götz)is hiding on the balcony of her flat, when her lover, Dr. Peter Schön (Kortner) arrivesHe ist the editor of a big newspaper and engaged to the aristocratic beauty Charlotte (O’Ora). After spotting Schigolch, he is delighted to discover that Lulu wants to star in a variety show, helped by Schigolch and the strongman Rodrigo Quast. But on the evening of the first night, Lulu throws a tantrum: she is not going to perform in front of her lover’s fiancée. When Lulu seduces Schön, Charlotte and Schön’s adult son Alwa (Lederer), who is secretely in love with Lulu, make their way into the backroom of the theatre. The editor has no choice now – he has to marry Lulu. On the night of their wedding, there is a drunken scene on the couple’s bed, involving Quastand Schigolch. The newly wed husband asks Lulu to shoot herself, to save him from becoming a murderer – but in the struggle for the gun he is killed. Lulu is found guilt of manslaughter, but escapes with Alwa, Schilgoch and Quast. The trio soon runs out of money, ending up pennyless in London, where Lulu meets her end at the hands of Jack the Ripper.  

Not only did Pabst introduce Louise Brooks as the modern sex beast, he also casts, perhaps for the time in film history, a lesbian protagonist: Countess Anna Geschwitz( Roberts), who is, like all men, equally smitten by Lulu. But she is no wallflower – managing to murder Quast, who wants to give Lulu away to the police for money.

Pandora’s Box was not successful at the box office, even Kracauer is dismissive of the piece believing Wedekind’s plays to be “really essays”’, lifeless and lacking visual strength. In the USA, the ending was changed: instead of being murdered, Lulu joins the Salvation Army.

Brooks would stay in Europe, starring next in Pabst’s Diary of A Lost Girl, before returning to the USA, where she ended her screen career in 1938, to become a writer. Pabst himself would never reach the same heights, retuning to Nazi Germany in 1939, and ruining his reputation. But Pandora’s Box, the result of chance and the unique historic constellation of culture in the Weimarer Republic, will live on forever! AS

 

 

 

l’Amant Double (2017) ***

Dir: François Ozon | Cast: Jeremie Renier, Marine Vacth | Drama | France | 104min

François Ozon is back with a meandering 90s-style erotic thriller that starts as an upbeat, intriguing psychodrama hinting at hidden depths, but then loses its sting in the final stages. Poking fun at its female-centric themes, the film opens with an eye-watering gynaecological close-up – if only the script was as tight as its heroine’s tooshie.

The female anatomy belongs to pouting pixie-like minx Chloe (Marine Vacth) who is bored in her new job at a trashy art museum. Just as well, because her love life is complex and full of energetic sexual encounters that kick off when she falls for her dishy psychoanalyst Paul (Jeremie Renier). But when they move in together Chloe is alarmed to discover Paul is not who he seems. Firking around in his things she finds his passport with a different name and realises her lover has an analyst twin brother, which at first he denies. Pretending to need therapy, she tracks down the identical sibling (Renier flips deftly between the two), and soon they too are having rampant sex.

Ozon’s twin theme recalls the obsessive psycho thrillers of Brian De Palma and Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers and even The Brood, where emotional confusion casts doubt on the central character’s state of mind. This is Marine Vacth’s second collaboration with Ozon since she sprung to fame in his 2013 drama Young and Beautiful, and here she plays a similar type who is slightly disdainful and dissatisfied with her life. Despite Paul’s amorous and easy-going nature, Chloe is curiously drawn to the more difficult character of his brother – Jeremie Renier excels in both roles. Ozon, as playful as ever, then resorts to his box of kinky tricks as Chloe turns dominatrix, in a twist obviously worked into the narrative to delight French audiences – who love this kind of thing. From then on L’AMANT DOUBLE broadens into an exploration of Chloe’s gynaecological and psychosexual issues, scuppering the suspense and  the impact of the ultimate reveal.

Thank God for Jacqueline Bissett whose vignette spices up the dragged out denouement, and Myriam Boyer who brings some light relief as the nosy neighbour with a penchant for cats. If only Ozon would return to his more satisfying early thrillers, such as Under the Sand (2000)Swimming Pool (2003) or the serious dramas such as Frantz (2016).

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 1 JUNE 2018

 

Ismael’s Ghosts (2017) **

Dir: Arnaud Desplechin | Cast: Marion Cotillard, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Louis Garrel, Mathieu Amalric | Hippolyte Girardot, Alba Rohrwacher | Drama | 110min | France

Cannes 70th Anniversary got off to a wildly pretentious start with Arnaud Desplechin’s sprawling fantasy melodrama made watchable by sparkling performances from two of France’s leading female stars: Marion Cotillard and Charlotte Gainsbourg.

The histrionic storyline follows Matthieu Amalric, in his usual tortured turn as a neurotic chain-smoking writer whose wife Carlotta (Marion Cotillard) was declared missing 20 years previously. Emotionally unstable, he falls for Charlotte Gainsbourg’s charming and calming single astrophysicist, whose cross to bear is raising her disabled brother – who never actually appears.

Into this budding romantic mêlée plops the delicately distraite adventurist Carlotta who has been wandering the globe, much to the chagrin of her dying father and her husband.  She now turns up out of the blue to reclaim her husband and have his baby. Is she a ghost or a real person, do we really care? She puts a spanner in the works for all concerned – and only to illuminate Ismael’s ambivalence about what he really wants from a partner, and out of life in general. At this point Desplechin’s adds a exotic twist to proceedings involving Louis Garrel, who plays a diplomat hired by the French government, to a mythical North African country with his new bride, a playful Alba Rohwacher. And this is where the film loses its way (and our interest) as it slips backwards and forwards, careening between sparks of quirky humour, wild reverie and erotic moments where Cotillard reveals all but, judiciously, Gainsbourg remains gracefully un-décolletée – and strangely more interesting and appealing – as Ismael’s true love).

Funny how Déplechin’s female characters are eminently more interesting but only ever exist to serve his one-dimentional men. That said, there is much to admire in this hotchpotch: a sweepingly romantic score that punctuates the occasional moments of intrigue, Irina Lubtchansky’s intricate camerawork that conveys claustrophobia in tight corridors, and soaring delirium in widescreen shots; but nothing ultimately hangs together. ISMAEL’S GHOSTS is best remembered as a vehicle for Garrel, Gainsbourg, and Cotillard, and some flashes of momentary brilliance in a rather disturbed nightmare . MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 1 JUNE 2018

The Dam Busters (1955) | 75th Year’s Celebration | Home Ent Release

Dir: Michael Anderson | Writer: R C Sheriff | Cast: Richard Todd, Michael Redgrave, Ursula Jeans, Basil Sydney, Ernest Clark | Aventure Drama | UK | 124′

British classic, The Dam Busters was directed by the late Michael Anderson (Logan’s Run) from a script by R C Sheriff (Goodbye, Mr Chips) exploring the legendary true story of Commander Guy Gibson and his elite squadron, The Dam Busters (1955). The film captures all the thrilling action and suspense of the magnificent exploits of a group of young pilots and their crews, charged with taking out the supposedly impenetrable Ruhr river dams of Germany with an ingeniously designed bouncing bomb. Starring Richard Todd as Gibson and Michael Redgrave as scientist and engineer Dr Barnes Wallis, the film also immortalised composer’s Eric Coates’s masterpiece: The Dam Busters March.

The impact of The Dam Busters on modern filmmakers spans the decades: director George Lucas hired the film’s special effects photographer Gilbert Taylor to work his magic on the original Star Wars; and The Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson has long been attached to a remake, based around a screenplay by actor/writer Stephen Fry.

THE DAM BUSTERS DVD / Blu-ray / EST and Collector’s Edition | Courtesy of STUDIOCANAL’S Vintage Classics label from June 4th, with a host of extras including an exclusive‘Making of The Dam Busters’ documentary. The Collector’s Edition will include the feature in 1.37 and 1.75 aspect ratios, a 64-page booklet, a rare aerial photographic print of the Möhne Dam following the raid (signed by the surviving members of the original 617 Squadron), an RAF Chastise Lancaster Bombers poster and a set of 5 art cards. Pre-order here: https://amzn.to/2I4z400

Tony Richardson and his New Wave Wonder

Woodfall Film Productions was founded in 1958 by English director Tony Richardson (1928-1991), the American producer Harry Saltzman (later of James Bond fame) and the English author and playwright John Osborne, whose play Look back in Anger was filmed by Richardson in 1959 as the opus number of the company that championed the British New Wave. So it’s only fitting that Richardson should finish the circle in 1984 with Hotel New Hampshire, creating a sub-genre of dram-com, which was later developed by Wes Anderson.

The Entertainer featured Laurence Olivier in the title role, reprising his stage role from the Royal Court, co-written by John Osborne from his own play. There is nothing heroic about Olivier’s Archie Rice: he is a bankrupt womaniser, exploiting his long suffering wife Phoebe (de Banzie) and using Tina Lapford (Field) – who came second in the Miss Britain contest – and her wealthy family to prolong his stage career. Not even the death of his son in the Suez conflict can deter him from his vain pursuit of a long dead career. Using his father – who dies on stage – for his own advantage, Archie sinks deeper and deeper. There is a poignant scene with his film daughter Jean (Plowright), whom he asks: “What would think, if I married a woman your age?” and Jean answers exasperated “Oh. Daddy”. At the end of productions, Olivier would marry Plowright, after his divorce from Vivien Leigh. Shot partly at Margate, this is a bleak portrait of show business, shot in brilliant black and white by the great Oswald Morris (Moby Dick, A Farewell to Arms).  

Set in a desolate Manchester, A Taste of Honey would make a star of the lead actor Rita Tushingham. She plays 17-year old school girl Jo, who is totally neglected by her sex-mad mother Helen (Bryan), who only has time for her fiancée Robert (Stephens). Jo gets pregnant by the black sailor Jimmy (Danquah), who soon leaves with his ship. Jo befriends the textile student Geoffrey, a brilliant Murray Melvin, who is not sure about his sexual orientation. He looks lovingly after her, before Helen returns, after having been rejected by Robert. She shucks Geoffrey out, and pretends to look after her daughter and the baby, whilst having one eye on the next, potential suitor. A Taste of Honey is relentlessly gloomy and discouraging. Photographed innovatively  by Walter Lassally, who would become a Richardson regular.  

Written by John Osborne, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner again created a new star: Tom Courtenay in the titular role as Colin, a young, working-class petty criminal. After being caught by the police, he lands in up in Borstal, which is run by the posh Ruxton Towers (Michael Redgrave). The vain headmaster loves nothing more than to prove his theory that hard labour and physical exercises will reform his juvenile clients. Colin has a talent for running, and Towers trains him to beat the best of the Public School runners, in the annual competition.  Teased by his mates as ‘teacher’s pet’, Colin strives hard to fulfil his potential – but, in one of the great endings in film history, he has the last laugh, making a complete fool of Towers. Again shot in grainy black-and-white by Lassally, The Loneliness of the Long Distant Runner is a classic of the new genre of kitchen-sink dramas.  

Nothing could be more different than Richardson’s next project, the historical romp Tom Jones, based on the novel by Henry Fielding. Albert Finney is the bumptious titular hero, who is nearly hanged due to the schemes by his adversary Bliflil (the debut for David Warner). With a great love story involving Sophie Western (York) and her father (Griffith), there are some great performances by Edith Evans, Joan Greenwood and Diane Cilento. Like his auteur Richardson, Lassally changes style effortlessly in this colourful wide-screen bonanza. It would garner an Oscar for Richardson, and was a huge success at the box office: the slender budget of £467000 pounds would result in a cool 70 million takings. AS

NOW AVAILABLE FROM THE BFI THIS CLASSIC BOX SET SERIES IS PACKED WITH QUALITY EXTRAS

Blu-ray RRP: £79.99 / Cat. No. BFIB1296 / Cert 15

UK / 1959-1965 / black and white & colour / English language with optional hard-of-hearing subtitles / 921 mins (+ extras)/ original aspect ratios / 24fps, 1080p / 7 x BD50 & 2 x BD25 / Blu-ray: PCM mono audio (48kHz/24-bit)

DVD RRP: £69.99 / Cat. No. BFIV2113 / Cert 15

UK / 1959-1965 / black and white & colour / English language with optional hard-of-hearing subtitles / 885 mins (+ extras)/ original aspect ratios / 24fps, PAL / 9 x DVD9

 

 

La Signora senza Camelie (1953) **** Dual Format release

Dir: Michelangelo Antonioni | Drama | Italy

From the opening credits of La Signora Senza Camelie we’re in very recognisable Antonioni territory. First, a close overhead shot of a young woman pacing up and down the street at night: she’s hesitant, anxious and uncomfortably placed against an architecture that appears to disturb her. On the soundtrack we hear a melancholic title theme composed by Giovanni Fusco (Who later worked with Antonioni on L’avventura, L’eclisse and Il Deserto Rosso). Then the woman enters a cinema to catch the final moments of her latest film. As she watches herself, singing in a nightclub, Signora’s filmic intersection of life and art undemonstratively signals what will be the cause of the woman’s continuing stress – the capricious and uncaring Italian film industry of the 1950s.

Clara Manni (Lucia Bose) is a beautiful-looking shop assistant now transformed into a film starlet. After Clara’s first successful film, the movie executives propose a project entitled “Woman Without a Destiny.” Attempts are made to make the film more erotic and provoke the censor. Producer Gianni Franchi (Andrea Checchi) persuades Clara to marry him and commence with the new production. The film does well but Gianni objects to the sexual exploitation of his wife. Upset by the studio’s control of her talent and image, Clara walks out of the marriage and requests a part in a more artistic film. A version of the Joan of Arc story is completed, but is badly received. Clara is shaken by the ordeal and continues to strive for serious roles.

Hollywood would have treated this storyline with either black satire (Sunset Boulevard) or sophisticated critique (The Bad and the Beautiful). But not Antonioni. In interviews he’s said that it was not the workings of film production that interested him but the personality, or soul, of an actress, praised then denigrated by forces that prevent her self-realisation.

Lucia Bose was also the leading actress in Antonioni’s first film, Cronica di un Amore. This masterly debut feature contained outstanding acting from Bosse and the supporting cast. La Signora Senza Camelie is a cooler and less intense affair. Yet both films are companion pieces in so far as they eloquently convey the despairing looks of Bose –prefiguring the haunting look of later Antonioni women such as Jeanne Moreau and of course the incomparable Monica Vitti. It’s a look not of victimisation but of outward betrayal; a vulnerable face revealed to the world: but subtly concealing both a determination and strength to be respected for your inner worth. Men also struggle in Antonioni’s films but it is the women who appear more resilient in situations and relationships that threaten moral vacuity and loneliness. 

Bose’s performance is superb at capturing such intense disappointment. But is she not too middle class and sophisticated to project the fate of a humble shop-girl? Both Gina Lolibrigita and Sophia Loren where choices for the parts: sadly Antonioni couldn’t get either actress. Yet ‘miscast’ or not, Bose brings much nuanced depth of feeling to her character. 

Without Bose, Antonioni’s camerawork and the photography of Enzo Serafin the story of La Signora Senza Camelie might have collapsed into melodrama or worse, soap opera. Antonioni may not have wanted Lucia Bose, but he ably guides her to deliver a radiant performance, making the final ten minutes of the film touching and transcendent.  

In one scene Clara is shown reading Pirandello. And it’s from Pirandello that Antonioni begins to comment on the complex realities of identity. Antonioni’s seamlessly ‘light’ and graceful direction integrates the disenchantment of the business of living with the industry of film production and its commercial imperative to manufacture dreams and illusions.  

Already within a conventional narrative Antonioni is an auteur bringing both rigour and spontaneity to an overworked plot. A short story by Cesare Pavese is better realised in his next brilliant feature Le Amiche and once we reach L’avventura Antonioni’s  technical control is completely assured, here plot evaporates and abstraction triumphs. 

Admirers of Antonioni have to see La Signora Senza Camelie. For it remains a fascinating springboard for the ideas of Antonioni’s great films of the 1960’s, which have a modernity that hasn’t dated, remaining just as urgent and pressing as we make difficult ethical decisions in our new century. Those Italian writers, artists, socialites, intellectuals, businessmen and poor Anna (Still gone missing on the island in L’avventura) really matter. There’s never definitive closure in Antonioni’s world but continual exploration. Alan Price ©2018   

NOW AVAILABLE ON DUAL FORMAT COURTESY OF EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA

Zama (2017) Bfi Player

Dir: Lucrecia Martel | Argentina, Brazil / 115’ | cast: Daniel Giménez Cacho, Lola Dueñas, Matheus Nachtergaele, Juan Minujín

Argentinian auteuse Lucrecia Martel (The Headless Woman) makes a welcome return with a subtle and sumptuously beguiling fantasy peepshow where one man’s mind unravels in mysterious 18th century South America.

Tired of waiting for the King to transfer him to his wife in Buenos Aires, a Creole officer of the Spanish Crown embarks on a perilous bid to return to his family while around him his fellow officers scheme and disemble. Based on an adaptation of Antonio Di Benedetto’s 1956 Latin American classic, this cinematic soupçon offers creative insight into Spanish colonial history through its central character Don Diego de Zama (Daniel Giménez Cacho) who slowly loses his grip on reality and descends into paranoia in a remote and savage outpost somewhere in Paraguay.

Sensually deprived and desperate for home, Zama falls prey to the South American sirens including Lola Duenas’s lacivious noblewoman, and a local Indian with whom he fathers a crippled child. Martel seduces with her gorgeously costumed cavalcade as we strain to make out the enigmatic storyline through a closeted and voyeuristic lens amid exotic birdsong and strange beasts including a volatile pet llama. Beyond the invidious perils of the settlement lies a land of savagery populated by dangerous masked tribes and a wild Portuguese warrior named Vicuna, whom Zuma is tasked with capturing in a perilous final attempt at a glorious transfer back to civilisation in Spain.

Drawing comparisons with other recent films from South America such as Jauja (Lisandro Alonso) and Embrace of the Serpent (Ciro Guerra). ZAMA is an extraordinary historical adaptation. Gleaming like Pandora’s Box and striking like a cobra, Martel offers a dizzyling distallation of the dying days of Don Diego de Zama. MT

ON BFI PLAYER

1987: When the Day Comes (2017) Korean Film Festival

Dir: Jung Joon-hwan | Political Thriller | South Korea |

With an impressive ensemble cast and polemic real-life story, director Jang Joon-hwan’s powerful portrayal of the events that led to Korea’s historic June Democratic Uprising was as much a hit with audiences as it was with critics when it stormed the box-office at the start of this year.

In 1980s South Korea, the military regime of President Chun Doo-hwan pushes the masses to breaking point with its widespread corruption and oppression. In 1987, a series of events will be set in motion through which the heroic actions of ordinary people from all walks of life result in nationwide protests, altering the course of the nation’s history forever.

When a student protester dies under police interrogation, the order is given to quickly cremate the body, effectively burying the evidence. Unfortunately for Director Park (Kim Yoon-seok, The Fortress), the head of the Anti-Communism Investigations Bureau in Seoul desperately trying to cover up the crime, Prosecutor Choi (Ha Jung-woo, Assassination) is not playing ball. Suspecting foul play, Choi refuses the request and insists on an autopsy. When it’s discovered torture was the likely cause, the race is on to bring the crime to light. Prison guard Han (Yoo Hai-jin, Confidential Assignment) his niece Yeon-hee (Kim Tae-ri, The Handmaiden) and idealistic student Han-yeol (Gang Dong-won, A Violent Prosecutor) are just some of the ordinary people who put their lives on the line to uncover the truth.

Highly regarded director Jang Joon-hwan (Save the Green Planet, 2003) has made his most ambitious film to-date with this fast-paced, tightly plotted political thriller based on the shocking true events of 1987 Korea. Like last year’s A Taxi Driver, 1987: When the Day Comes gives the blockbuster treatment to a turbulent period, resulting in an exciting thrill-ride of a film that never loses sight of the human drama at its core. Korean Film Festival Review

HEADLINING UK KOREAN FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | Teaser Screenings | Monday 18 June  | Picturehouse Central

Ayka | My Little One (2018) **** | Cannes Film Festival | In Competition

Dir: Sergei Dvortsevoy | Wri: Gennadiy Ostrovskiy | Cast: Samal Yeslyamova | Drama | Kazakhstan | Dop Jolanta Dylews

After giving birth in a squalid Moscow hospital minutes before, a young woman trudges back through blinding snow to pluck chickens in a factory outlet. Sound like your kind of film? This harrowing hunk of social realism is the delicately drawn follow-up from the man who rose to international stage with his tender Kazakh Un Certain Regard winner Tulpan back in 2008. 

Writer-director Sergey Dvortsevoy returns to the Croisette with this competition hopeful AYKA, a much more morose affair anchored by a carefully considered performance from Samal Yeslyamova, that won her Best Actress at Cannes, and who also played the main character’s sister in Tulpan.  Chased along the icy streets and tawdry interiors by awarded DoP Jolanta Dyweska’s handheld camera AYKA has the same chaotic feel as the Dardenne brothers’ Rosetta (1999). Here our back-footed heroine has had to abandon her baby to battle against a callous country populated by criminal landlords, corrupt employers, poverty and disdain. And we feel for her. 

Dvortsevoy and his co-writer Gennadi Ostrowski, trip backwards and forwards offering inklings into the Kyrgyzstani woman’s background in a drama whose themes of social injustice and transmigration are not hammered into place but lightly alluded to in a tale that makes us focus more on Ayka’s blood-stained postpartum hardships (which are not for the feint-hearted) and her fearsome fight for survival in a place where she is neither wanted nor welcome. Some of the scenes make for gruesome viewing but this is a brave and ballsy film that begs for an audience and certainly deserves one. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | BEST ACTRESS WINNER 2018

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Dogman ***** (2018) | Cannes Film Festival | Best Actor Award

Dir: Matteo Garrone | Ugo Chiti | Adamo Dionisi, Francesco Acquaroli, Edoardo Pesce, Laura Pizzirani | Drama | 120′ | Italy

The second Italian hero of Cannes Film Festival appears in Matteo Garrone’s terrific revenge thriller that returns to the filmmaker’s own stamping ground of Caserta with a richly thematic and compulsive exploration of male rivalry and belonging in a downtrodden criminal-infested football-playing community scratching a living.

Life has always been tough in this neck of the woods, infested by gangland influences: it is a terrain that Garrone knows and describes well in his 2008 feature Gomorrah. A brutal brotherhood controls this bleak beachside wilderness where everyone relies on each other to survive.

At the heart of DOGMAN is a tour de force turn from actor turned director Marcello Fonte who plays an endearing and diminutive dog grooming supremo who although popular and kind, has formed a toxic twosome with local hoodlum and sociopath Simone, a thorn in his side who is dragging him constantly into trouble. Marcello’s wife has cleared off and he has a young daughter Sofia (Alida Baldari Calabria) to look after –  and dog-grooming hardly makes ends meet, so to keep Simone sweet he supplies him with cocaine and courtesies, though secretly he wishes him dead.

Marcello possesses the same innate goodness as Lazzaro in Rohrwacher’s drama that played earlier in the competition line -up. And he’s gifted and patient with the dogs brought into his shop, and in one scene he actually goes out of his way to rescue a chihuahua who has been nearly frozen to death in a botched robbery. In short, Garrone uses similar ‘good and evil’ theme as Scorsese in his New York street thrillers where one good person is perpetually trying to redeem the others, against the odds and often at his own expense. Marcello is keen on his friends and is popular and wants to keep it that way, but Simone is a liability and one day will lead him to tragedy.

This is a gritty and violent film and often unbearably so, but there are moments of heart-rending tenderness – between his Marcello and his dependants – where tears will certainly well up. Fonte won Best Award at Cannes for his skilful portrayal that switches subtly from sad loner to desperado.

Garrone sets the desolate scene resonantly with his brilliant lighting and inventive camerawork, this time working with DoP Nicolai Bruel, who paints this part of Italy with an almost gothic desperation highlighted by Michele Braga’s mournful musical score. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL  2018| BEST ACTOR AWARD MARCELLO FONTE

The Gentle Indifference of the World (2018)**** | Cannes Film Festival 2018

Dir: Adilkhan Yerzhanov | Writer: Roelof Jan Minneboo | Cast: Sultan Abzalov, Tulemis Alishev, Dinara Baktybaeva, Kulzhamilya Belzhanova | Drama | Fr/Kazakhstan |

Roelof Jan Minneboo is a Dutch writer and script doctor who works with budding independent filmmakers to give their distinctive stories a voice. He has done this so far with the late Somalian director Abdi Jama for Queleh, with Georgian director George Ovashvilli’s Corn Island which went on to win the main prize at Karlovy Vary in 2014 and with Armenian Ilgar Najaf whose Pomegranate Orchard (2017) picked up a several awards last year for his story of a prodigal son. This is his second collaboration with Kazakh filmmaker Adilkhan Yerzhanov, after the director won the Free Spirit Award at Warsaw for his debut  The Owners (2014).

The title’s logline: Love will always be above life, fear, death and money, is an encouraging start and The Gentle Indifference of the World never disappoints with its captivating style and unusual narrative inspired by Kazakh Steppe legends. Each frame of this stunningly filmed piece of cinema is an absolute gem, once again embracing the free-spirited and unique cinematic voice that is Yerzhanov, directing with inventive conviction in a strangely poetic and offbeat thriller. Unexpected humour, gentleness and violence emerge from the bizarre yet simple tale about feisty Kazakh folk who are not afraid of taking the law into their own hands in the big sky countryside of the lle Alatau Steppe and in the corrupt city of Almaty.

After her father’s sudden death, the central character Sultanat (a gracefully charismatic Dinara Baktybaeva) is forced to move from her idyllic rural home to Almaty to raise money to pay off family debts so her mother can avoid a prison sentence. With only her faithful friend Kuandyk (Dyussembaev) for emotional support, city life proves tough for this ravishing beautiful young woman and even when her uncle comes up with a suitable husband to do the honours financially, Sultanat soon finds him wanting. She has been close friends with the faithful but penniless Kuandyk since they were little, but can their bond survive in the tough urban setting where cold reality lurks at every turn, and love must triumph over money and power which continually trump its survival? An extraordinary and evergreen story, beautifully told. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 8 – 19 MAY | UN CERTAIN REGARD

 

 

 

Burning (2018)

Lee Chang dong, Oh Jung mi | 143’ | South Korea | Drama 

Lee Chang-dong’s sees a rich guy and an honest worker compete for the affections of an enigmatic young woman in his mysterious slow burner that sizzles with a seductive spell and intoxicates for over two hours with its captivating storytelling and strikingly atmospheric score by Mowg.

‘A literary adaptation’ can sound warning bells but this standout psychological thriller breathes life into a short story from Haruki Murakami, adapted by Lee and his co-writer Oh Jung-mi who keep things deceptively simple yet alluring with a thematically rich ride set to Hong Kyung-pyo’s sumptuous cinematography, and enfused with themes of privilege, class, stifled creativity and revenge.

Lonely budding writer Jongsu comes from a poor and dysfunctional family background and works as a deliveryman near the North Korean border where he is unexpectedly invited into the bed of his former school friend who later returns from a trip to Africa with suave but unassuming new boyfriend in the shape of Korean hotshot Ben (Yeun Steven), who seems rather to smooth to be true. But then the story becomes more complex. Jongsu (Yoo Ah-in) has really fallen for the charming but insecure Haemi (Jun Jong-seo), who remembers his harsh comments on her appearance back in the day, and has since had plastic surgery.

A loose friendship soon develops between the threesome and for a while the story hums along gently mulling over its cultural references and glorying in its low key placid perfection. But all is not well in paradise and the tone takes a sinister turn after Ben confesses to being somewhat of a pyrotechnic with a penchant for greenhouse burning, and we witness this in a startling bonfire that seethes in silence. This heats up the whole affair with Haemi going missing and the two men coming head to head in a violent climax. With dynamite performances from the trio this is an elegantly crafted thriller from a Korean master at the top of his game. MT

NOW ON BBC | IPLAYER | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL FIPRESCI PRIZE 2018

Sir (2018) | Critics’ Week 2018

Dir: Rohena Gera | Drama | India | 97′

Documentarian Rohena Gera’s fiction debut is a refreshing and delicately drawn character drama, a love story that takes place in modern day Mumbai between two likeable people from opposite ends of the social spectrum, one is rich the other poor.    

Ratka is a young widow whose dicey new single status has for forced her to find work in the city. So she moves from her rural village to work as housekeeper for a wealthy young man whose wedding has recently been called off. “Sir” is clearly feeling emotional and Ratka suggests to his mother that the wedding presents be kept in her room to spare him further heartache. There they fester as a constant reminder of his and her marital failure.

The lovelorn Ashwin is gradually soothed by Ratka’s kind and thoughtful personality, so different from the spoilt prima donnas from his own milieu. Impressed by her drive and ambition to become a tailor, he offers her time out to train. His own work as a writer seems like a vanity project in contrast and most of his time is spent lolling around feeling sorry for himself and secretly ashamed at his lack of ambition.

Gera makes great use of Mumbai’s pulsing metropolis as a backdrop for the pair’s palpable chemistry as sexual tension slowly catches fire between them. But Ratka’s personality is the stronger of the two and Gera takes time to flesh out her emotional qualities and sparky intelligence leaving Ashwin as a rather one-dimensional cypher with only the machismo consistent with his status to define him. Clearly something’s gotta give, and in order to bring these two together between the sheets in an elegant manner Gera has to employ a narrative device that ends up being unconvincing. That said, SIR is a watchable film and was justly awarded a prize at the Cannes Critics’ Week sidebar. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | SEMAINE DE LA CRITIQUE

Manto (2018)**** | Un Certain Regard | Cannes Film Festival 2018

Dir.: Nandita Das; Cast: Navazuddin Siddiqui, Rasika Dugal, Tahir Raj Bhasin, Rajshiri Deshpande; India/France 2018, 112 min.

Nandita Das’ follows her stunning debut Firaaq, with a passionate bio-pic of Indo-Pakistani writer and author Saadat Hasan Manto (1912-1955), whose life was a constant struggle against censorship under British colonial rule and in the newly created Pakistan, whence he fled  from Bombay. Rather daringly, Das has integrated five of his short stories into the narrative, that are proof of Manto’s radicalism.                       

The first is Dus Rupay where a young girl from the slums is sold to two wealthy men for the afternoon: they play with her on the beach, before abusing her. Das covers the time between 1946 and 1950, with Manto (Siddiqui) working as a scriptwriter for Bollywood in Bombay, where feels very much at home before the partition. He and his wife Safia (Dugal) mourn their dead son, but are comforted by their two young daughters. Manto shows his morbid nature on his gravestone: “Here lays Saadat Hasan Manto, wondering if he is the better storyteller or God is!” Manto invariably sides with women in his writings, and it is no accident that he was a good friend of the feminist writer Ismat Chugtai (Despande), who also found herself in the British courts. When asked why he is writing about sex-workers, and not the British repression, Manto answers: “Aren’t they part of society too?”

After the partition, Manto’s friendship with the film star Shyam Chadda (Bhasin) comes to an end when an angry Muslim mob in Pakistan attacks the actor’s Hindu family in Pakistan, making them flee to Bombay, “I could kill you”, says Chadda to Manto – and even though he takes it back, the writer knows his time is up, and he moves to Lahore. But there is little to stimulate him in the Pakistani city, and he is soon in court defending himself for another shot story (Cold Meat), considered obscene. Even though he wins the court case, Manto does not feel at home in Lahore, and his drinking lands him in rehab. Symbolically, he is like the man in one of his stories who remained in no-mans land between the two states, having written “Two or three years after Partition, it occurred to the governments of India and Pakistan to exchange their lunatics, like they had exchanged their criminals. The Muslim lunatics in India were sent to Pakistan, and the Hindu and Sikh lunatics in Pakistani asylums were to be handed over to India.”

MANTO’s stylish aesthetic is photographed by Kartik Vijay in semi-sepia, and Siddiqui gives a subtle splendour to his turn as the caustic, low-level depressive writer who cannot adjust to his new homeland due to his humanist nature. Melancholic, sombre and despondent, he drinks himself to death at only 42. Writing was his life, he even gave up the typewriter to use only pens because he felt they were more pure. AS

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL – UN CERTAIN REGARD 2018

Lazzaro Felice | As Happy as Lazzaro 2018 | Best Script Cannes 2018

Writer/Dir: Alice Rohrwacher | Cast: Alba Rohrwacher, Adriano Tardiolo, Agnese Graziani, Luca Chikovani, Sergi Lopez | Italy | Drama 125′

Al Rohrwacher brings tenderness and curiosity to her delicately compelling fables set amongst rural communities in her homeland of Italy. Her latest Lazzaro Felice won Best Script at Cannes this year, her previous a languid pastoral The Wonders (2014) followed a family of beekeepers in 1970s Tuscany. In her debut Corpo Celeste (2011)  a young girl challenges religious morality in the southern town of Reggio Calabria.

Happy as Lazzaro is time-bending tale that uses poetic realism to enliven the rather depressing theme of corruption and crime in contemporary Italy. Again Rohrwacher uses Super 16mm to establish a retro aesthetic of sepia and muted senape and to re-create a nostalgic feeling for the past and times gone by in the dilapidated village of Inviolata where a traditional family of sharecroppers still serve the Marchesa Alfonsina de Luna. Although sharecropping has been illegal since the 1980s, their loyalty to their corrupt mistress is born out of habit, and because it suits them to maintain the status quo: It’s what they’ve always done. This recalls a past (and possibly a present in some areas) where a feudal system of sorts still exists, and Italy’s now decadent royal family (Vittoria Emanuele) are still acknowledged, paid homage to and addressed by their titles. So the villagers go about their leisurely business lacking the imagination or motivation to move on, and respecting the powers that be in this remote, sun-baked backwater that seems stuck in the past. And Lazzaro is the man with a heart of gold who is simply too good for this world, let along for this job. As saintly soul, Lazzaro is left the duties no one else wants to do, such as picking giant guarding the chicken coop from wolves. The Marchesa’s fecklessly lazy young son Tancredi, decides to play a trick on mother, for not giving him his inheritance early, and he sees that Lazzaro’s gentle nature and naive nature will make him perfect for a plan to defraud her. Lazzaro is naturally in thrall to the boy, out of deference, to his status. Tancredi then fakes his own kidnapping, hiding out in the undergrowth around the village expecting his mother to cough up the million lire ransom he has demanded. Naturally things don’t go according to plan and Lazzaro falls through a time-warp – in a tonal shift that Rohrwacher pulls of with aplomb – ending up in another world, set against a corrupt urban sprawl where he wanders dreamlike (and there is a certainly a surreal quality to these sequences) amongst unscrupulous characters as a nightmarish future unfolds around him. Lazzaro at this point takes on the semblance of a Christ-like figure – and it’s a performance of great subtlety and placidness that has to be seen to be believed. This transformation to saint, or even ghost seems to represent the soul of the Italian nation overcome by decadence and the perils of modernity. It also raises the everlasting conundrum: how long can a person continue to be good when continually challenged by evil. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 9 – 21 MAY 2018

BlacKkKlansman (2018) | Cannes Film Festival | Grand Prix winner

Dir: Spike Lee | Cast: Adam Driver, Topher Grace, Laura Harrier, Ryan Eggold, Corey Hawkins | Biopic Crime Comedy | US |

Spike Lee’s latest film follows Ron Stallworth, an African-American police officer from Colorado, who successfully managed to infiltrate the local Ku Klux Klan.

BlacKkKlansman, champions the Black Lives Matter brigade and is Spike Lee’s most engaging film in years, playing out as a straightforward 1970s style tale that sees a Black rookie detective get close up close and personal with the KKK, by posing as a potential punter over the ‘phone then sending his white colleague along to do the honours. Adam Driver plays game in fine form. 

There shades of Shaft here and other blaxploitation films of the era, but the accent is on comedy and irony rather than outright thriller, although Lee has done his research seriously offering plenty of historical detail and some archive footage from the Charlottesville riots from August last year, and the camera swivels firmly in focus of President Trump, and DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation.

The white supremacists are a nasty bunch, as you can imagine, and no one escapes their vitriol which is aimed at Jews and anyone not of Aryan blood. Topher Grace plays David Duke, the head honcho of the local branch, the film also features Black characters who are racist such as Patrice..

After joining the surprisingly racist Colorado Springs Police department, his first mission is to attend a Black Power meeting addressed by Stokely Carmichael/Kwame Ture. Here he meets and falls for Angela Davies Patrice (Laura Harrier). The film then charts his progress to infiltrate and bring down the KKK organisation in scenes where the tone is taut but always firmly upbeat. With lowkey natural performances from leads Adam Driver and John David Washington, and a stellar score of ‘70s hits, this is an enjoyable, informative and undivisive drama and certainly worthy of winning the Palme d’Or. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | GRAND PRIX WINNER 2018

Fugue | Fuga (2018) **** | Cannes Film Festival 2018 | Un Certain Regard

Dir: Agnieska  Smoczynska | Cast: Gabriela Muskała, Łukasz Simlat, Małgorzata Buczkowska, Zbigniew Waleryś, Halina Rasiakówna, Piotr Skiba, Iwo Rajski | Poland/Czech Republic/Sweden 2018, 100 min.

Director Agnieszka Smoczynska re-unites with DoP Jacub Kijowski and actor Malgorzata Buczkowska who together made The Lure an international success. For Fugue, they are joined by writer Gabriela Muskala, who also plays the lead, Kinga/Alicja, a woman suffering from severe post-traumatic amnesia.

We first meet Kinga staggering onto the platform of a station where she promptly collapses, having urinated infront in full view of the other passengers. Clearly she has lost her mind, and spends the next two years in a psychiatric ward in a Warsaw hospital, where she makes a brief appearance on TV, in the hope that someone might identify her. And they do. She is soon re-united with her husband Krystzof (Simlat) and four-year old son Daniel. Her name is Alicja, but strangely, no one appears happy to have her back, least of all her Daniel. The only thing she is sure of is her credit card PIN number she and immediately makes an application for a new Identity Card. Her mysterious family friend Ewa (Buczkowska) is clearly so much more that than this, but Smoczynska keeps her cards close to her chest, revealing little in this enigmatic but captivating mystery drama. Eventually Alicja starts to re-adjust to home life with her husband, but a sudden accident in their car seems to trigger   Alicja’s memory and gradually a whole picture slowly develops of their life before the train incident. It emerges that her husband had successfully divorced her and wanted sole custody of Daniel.

In her follow up to The Lure, Smoczynska offers us another circuitous and enigmatic drama: there are moments of supernatural evidence, where Alicja’s home environment appears completely alien to her. Particularly the green bathroom looks eerily like a fish tank (drawing comparisons with The Shining’s Room 237). The country house has a weird and haunted feel to it, and Alicja seems to be a prisoner within its walls, he family and even her son treating her with hostile suspicion. Fugue is an allegorical story of a woman who is unsure of her position in the world, retreating from motherhood, and drifting between various states of being. Gabriela Muskala gives a brilliant tour de force in the leading role of this unique and beguiling Polish arthouse drama. AS.

UN CERTAIN REGARD | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | 8-19 MAY 2018

Foam at the Mouth | Ar Puma uz Lupam (2017) *** | Cannes Market 2018

Dir.: Janis Nords; Cast: Vilis Daudzins, Ieva Puke, Raimonds Celms, Indra Brike; Latvia/Poland/Lithuania 2017, 80 min.

After tackling the thorny subject of child crime in his Berlinale Grand Prix winner Mother I love You, Janis Nords comes to Cannes Market with an atmospheric thriller that scratches at the edges of horror set in a remote Latvian community where women are the only civilising influence in a community where man and beast converge.

The women here are a tough bunch and none more so than physiotherapist Jana (Puke), whose ex-cop husband Didzis (Daudzius) has lost part of his left leg is and only employable as a dog handler. To makes matters worse, the challenge to his masculinity has reduced Didzis to an hostile neurotic who feeds off his three Alsatians’ aggression, showing them affection in return, particularly his favourite Gina. The neglected Jana is surprised by her own sexual frustration that surfaces while treating seventeen year old Roberts (Celms) at the gym where she practices, and this incident provides a inventive vein of dark humour and tension to the intriguing narrative. Driving home one night, Jana and Didsis collide with a rabid boar which leaves its infected blood dripping from their truck bumper, and the dogs sniff this out. What follows is a harrowing hunt for the rapid beasts, which attack some students of the school. Meanwhile, Didzis tracks down an enemy of his own, in the shape of Roberts, whose mother soon emerges as a repressive zealot, as the grim storyline reveals that everyone’s life in danger from either from the animal kingdom or the human one.

Matthew A. Gossett’s script is taut and mischievous complimented by DoP Tobias Datum suggestive images, mainly shot at night and in the gloaming when the difference between dogs and humans is distinguishable only by their form. This is a thriller where testosterone driven males and infected dogs seem to be at war at all costs. Foam is more than just symbolic: under the superficial veneer of civilised society, men are deteriorating into atavistic creatures, just like local wild dogs. Made a shoestring, and none the worst for it, FOAM is really frightening at times, as Nords plays on the darkest fears of the human psyche in this tense little B-picture, which would make Sam Fuller proud.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | MARKET SECTION | Winner of the Moscow Critics’ Award

Shoplifters (2018)**** | Cannes Film Festival | Winner Palme d’Or (2018)

Writer/Dir: Hirokazu Koreeda | Cast: Kirin Kiki, Lily Franky, Sosuke Ikematsu | Drama |121′

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s portrait of parenting, After the Storm, has much in common with this perceptive and often ambiguous satire about a family of small-time crooks and the misguided theft they commit for compassionate reasons, with devastating consequences. SHOPLIFTERS is a worthwhile addition to the auteur’s preoccupations with family life and father and motherhood – both real and imagined, and is possibly his best work so far.

In Tokyo, part-time workers Osamu (Lily Franky) and his wife Nobuyo (Sakura Ando) complement their meagre income with a sideline in shoplifting. Aided and abetted by son Shota (Kairi Jyo), they often swipe groceries from the local store near the flat they share with fellow grifter Noboyu (Sakura Andô), teenager Aki (Mayu Matsuoka) and grandma Hatsue (Kirin Kiki), who turns the most lucrative tricks of the lot.

One day they take pity on an abused and timid teenager called Juri (Miyu Sasaki), offering her board and lodging in their already cramped home. This simple act of kindness is the catalyst for change in the family dynamic unleashing previously hidden motivations that range from short-sightedness to self-aggrandisement, and even narcissistic pride.

A tonal shift from upbeat bonhomie to gloomy sadness takes place in the film’s third segment when the family anticipate their emotional loss and start to fear the backlash of their rash altruism, and its damning formal retribution. Koreeda and his cast bring out  tremendous pathos in this well-meaning family, and while we feel for them as do-gooders, – in the true sense of the word – they are crucially also law-breakers. And this is the J B Priestleyan crux of this clever and beautifully crafted caper reflecting the subtle nuances of Japanese society. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | WINNER | PALME D’OR 2018

https://youtu.be/3zJ3_JZnH_Q

Alone at my Wedding (2018) | Acid – Cannes Film Festival 2018

Dir.: Martha Bergman; Cast: Alina Ioana Serban, Tom Vermeir, Rebecca Anghel, Viorica Tudor, Marian Samu; Belgium 2018, 120 min.

Martha Bergman’s debut feature is a wild ride, undertaken by young mother Pamela – a brilliant Alina Ioana Serban – a Roma from a small Romanian village, who is picked up on the internet by a shy, middle-aged Belgian.

We first meet Pamela in the middle of a freezing winter. She lives in a basic hut with her grandmother (Tudor) who looks after her baby daughter (Anghel), dragging the poor mite around unceremoniously in all conditions. 18 year old Marian (Sama) is  also called on to look after the baby, despite his desperation to leave the village, and the country altogether.

This picture of discontent is tempered by the arrival in her life of French speaking Belgian Bruno (Vermeir), and Pamela makes a swift departure to be with him, leaving Pamela with her grandmother. Pamela’s French is very poor, and Bruno, who is stiff but well meaning (“I respect you, you are not a commodity”), has great difficulties in communicating with her. Not content with spending her time with her new boyfriend, Pamela starts looking looking for a job and Bruno teaches his wife-to-be French. 

Bruno seems somewhat of an ingenue where romance concerns but soon the couple are sleeping together. But Pamela cannot bear to be contained, she has a one-night stand with another Roma in a car, and the two are picked up by the police. When Pamela is returned to Bruno, he is angry that the police arrested her. But when he finds out why, he throws her out, but soon relents. His parents arrive, and there is an embarrassing dance scene to Roma music. But what really makes Pamela happy is the arrival of a brand new television, she seems to be a creature of simple pleasures.  

Also co-written by fellow director Katell Quillevere, the script is refreshingly different; there are some dream sequences between Pamela and her grandmother, who dies, soon after singing the titular song: and Pamela is far from complimentary calling the old woman “a whore, like her mother”. All said and done, it is Serban who carries the feature, as much untamed as she is unfocused, Pamela is always ready for another opportunity for mischief-making, like the teenager she really is. DoP Jonathan Ricquebourg (The Death of Louis XIV) uses vibrant visuals in the scenes featuring Pamela, underlining her vivacity, and a more sombre palette for the grey reality Pamela holds in contempt. Whilst sometimes uneven, Bergman shirks narrative conventions for an upbeat tale of Roma life, in contrast to the usual victim stories we have come to expect.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | ACID SELECTION 2018 

   

Jeune Femme (2017)

Dir.: Leonor Serraille; Cast: Laetitia Dosch, Gregoire Monsaingeon, Soleymane Seye Ndiaye, Natalie Richard, Erka Sainte, Lila-Rose Gilberti; France 2017, 97 min.

La Femis graduate Leonor Serraille, won the Camera d’ Or at Cannes 2017, is a for this wild debut: its main protagonist Julia  – an excellent Laetitia Dosch – is nothing like the fragile, delicate damsel in distress of countless French features, but a steamroller of a personality: ready to bury anything in her way – including herself.  

Serraille introduces her heroine head on, literally: splitting her forehead, ramming it against the door of her ex-lover Joachim Deloche (Monsaigeon), a photographer, who had made a career modelling her, but has now discarded the young woman on their return to Paris. After a decade in Mexico, Julia has returned to France broke, homeless and looking after Joachim’s cat, a fluffy Persian. She is picked up and rescued, by mistake, by a young woman who believes she is a former school friend, who had heterochromic eyes, just like Julia, whose irises are green and hazel. 

After Julia’s rescuer discovers her mistake, she and the cat are homeless again Thus begins an emotional rollercoaster ride, in which Julia has to adapt like a chameleon to ever changing situations. Her mother (Richard), blames her: “you are just like your father, you leave me alone”. Finding a place to sleep on the sofa of an elderly man, is no solution either; after being told, that he does not like to sleep alone, Julia tells him “to buy himself a teddy bear” and moves out. Answering an ad, Julia then gets a job as a baby sitter, and is allowed to sleep in the maid’s chamber in the attic. This is eventful film full of gleeful energy but Seraille avoids romanticising the predicaments Julia finds herself in. The gender relations are always at the centre, ranging from rough sexual harassment to absurdity (Ousmane falling asleep whilst Julia is undressing him). Serraille, who was pregnant during shooting, never idealises her main protagonist: Julia is not a victim, but her stubborn fight for absolute autonomy results in her having sometimes a part in her own downfall. AS

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 19 MAY 2018

The Load (2018) | Directors’ Fortnight | Cannes Film Festival 2018

 Writer/Dir. Ognjen Glavonić |  Drama | 98’

Ognjen Glavonić won various awards for Depth Two, a documentary about the grim discovery of war graves in his native Serbia. THE LOAD is his debut drama that fought its way out of the country inspired by the region’s 1999 NATO onslaught to tell another story from this harrowing period of Balkan history, a quietly devastating one that haunts with its slow burning revelation looming tragically out of the dreary landscape of longterm war.

This is a place full of dour-faced officials going through the motions in a country were hope has been washed away with the winter rain and bombs still cascade in the distance like incendiary stars. A few roadside blossoms tell us spring has arrived and tired-looking truck driver Vlada (Leon Lucev) is making his daily grind towards Belgrade from Kosovo with a load locked in his beaten-up lorry, the contents unknown. His instructions are clear : no stopping or diversions, he must keep a low profile until he reaches his destination.

On his way the journey starts uneventfully but at a crossing a smouldering car crash has blocked the the route to the capital. And a rather blasé teenager hitchhiker Pava (Pavle Čemerikić) offers to show him the way to his destination, tempting Vlada to bend the rules. As it happens Pava is clueless about map-reading, but doesn’t really mind that he has let Vlada down. Clearly, he represents the younger generation, shielded from the coldface of war from protective parents like Vlada, who, inured to disappointment and setbacks, motors on resigned, his face etched with the gruelling inevitability of his lot and eventually the pair start to bond.

The tone is brooding, morose and vagually doom-laden as the men push on framed in close-up and on the widescreen by Tatjana Krstevski whose superb washed out visual also featured in Depth Two).  The two men drive on until Paja blithely announces his departure to hitchike to German and look for better things. But nature of his Vlada’s business requires him to be responsible and slowly the gruesome truth dawns making the inevitable realisation all the more haunting. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT 2018

 

How to Talk to Girls at Parties (2017)

Dir: John Cameron Mitchell | Cast: Nicole Kidman, Elle Fanning, Alex Sharp | 100min | US | Musical RomCom

John Cameron Mitchell’s absurdly unconvincing ‘punk-retro’ musical is based on a short story by Neil Gaiman. It imagines a late ’70s London where aliens in psychedelic costumes infiltrate a corner of Croydon and create havoc by seducing kids at a local disco, where they vomit in their mouths. Elle Fanning is one of the aliens. How she got suckered into the project God only knows, but she tries her best and falls for the other only good about the film – the male lead gamely played by Alex Sharp. Sandy Powell’s costumes are worth a mention too.

Sadly these aliens are ‘programmed to self-destruct’ so the charmingly honest love story at the heart  of this charade sadly ends in tears. Clearly the director knows nothing about punk or late ’70s London so the whole thing feels like amateur dramatics staged by teenage filmmakers wandering onto the set of  Some Mothers do ‘Ave ‘Em – with a good deal of angry swearing thrown in for good measure. One to miss. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE

 

Cold War | Zimna Wojna (2018) | Cannes Film Festival | IN Competition


Dir: Pawel Pawlikowski | Cast| Joanna Kulig, Tomasz Kot, Borys Syzc, Agata Kulesza, Cedric Khan, Jeanne Balibar | Drama | Poland

This beguilingly sexy and sad paean to disillusioned romantics everywhere portrays the euphoria we yearn for but cannot always sustain. Cold War spans a decade from the 1940s to the1960s where two lovers are caught inextricably in a web of passion and pain in a peripatetic relationship that saunters back and forth between Paris, Warsaw and Yugoslavia between pianist Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) and singer-dancer Zula (Joanna Kulig). Pawlikowski deftly handles love’s heartaches, high and lows with supreme grace and elegance.

Apart from the dazzling artistry – each frame is a sultry masterpiece – one of the most atmospheric elements and one that becomes a character in itself is the music, from Polish and Slavic folksongs to Chopin, Gerswin and Chuck Berry bringing back memories of Polish fare of the 1950s and 1960s scored by Andrzej Trzaskowski and Krzysztof Komeda, but also unites drama with his documentary fare such as Serbian Epics (1992)

Shot in Academy-ratio, Lukasz Zal’s velvety black and white cinematography evokes the 16mm of the era, and its Iron Curtain sensibilities link it to Pawlikowski’s Oscar-winning gem Ida, although this is a more upbeat affair. Love and longing are themes that flourish throughout the director’s films from his time in England, where he shot Last Resort (2000) and My Summer of Love (2004), and the ephemeral nature of The Woman in the Fifth (2011). Pawlikowski’s work also has affinities with the films of Czech New Wave director Hugo Haas. The only subtle flaws is the abrupt departure of Wiktor’s lover Irena (Agata Kulesza)who either leaves through her disgust of Stalin or on seeing her partner caught in the fire of his new flame. But this by no means detracts from its sublime beauty as a concise yet richly-textured piece of work, and every gorgeous handmade tapestry has its endearing flaws. Flowing yet episodic, Cold War is melancholy but endlessly captivating.  

Wiktor and Zula are united by music while he and Irena are curating an ethnomusicological project for dancers which morphs into an the Mazurek Ensemble, an agitprop of the Soviet regime promoting the Aryan heritage of the Poles. Lust envelops them but Kaczmarek’s career keeps him trapped in Communist Poland and when the ensemble travels to East Berlin to perform, Wiktor decides to defect to the West pleading Zula to come with him to Paris. The two profess undying love but flighty Zula bails at the last minute and stays behind in the East. Although she a mercurial woman she lacks the social confidence that Wiktor has inherited from his more grounded bourgeois background. 

There is a deliciously spicy vignette where Jeanne Balibar plays Wiktor’s Parisian lover while Zula arrives at the party claiming to have married a Sicilian glass blower from Palermo. But it is clear that Wiktor and Zula are soul mates whose love transcends time and place. They are eventually drawn back together at the end of the 50s but their love cannot exist in this Cold War world with its privations, poverty and political regime. MT.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 8-19 MAY |BEST DIRECTOR AWARD

Ash is Purest White (2018) Mubi

Dir: Zhangke Jia | Cast: Tao Zhao, Fan Liao, Xiaogang Feng | Drama | China | 140’

ASH IS PUREST WHITE portrays the eventful relationship between a Chinese petty criminal and the woman whose loyalty to him never dies. This rolling contemplative saga occasionally veers off the beaten track with its indulgent running time of 141 minutes but will still appeal to the director’s ardent followers, featuring the same rough-edged characters who we first meet in 2001 and follow until the bittersweet denouement on New year’s Eve 2018.

Star of Shanxi’s creative community, Jia Zhang-ke trained as an architect near his native mining town of Fenyang, just South of Beijing, and brings his aesthetic flair and some magnificent landscapes to this lasting love story set in a dying era. The director’s forte is his graceful way of portraying China’s traditional way of life with its penchant for ceremonial drumming and white-gloved officials, with the chaotic new era vibrantly captured in Eric Gautier’s resplendent camerawork.

Opening in 2001in his Shanxi homeland, his wife and regular collaborator Zhao Tao plays the confident delicate local beauty Qiao, who frequents the nightclub of her boyfriend Guo Bin (Liao Fan/Black Coal, Thin Ice). And she is no arm candy, establishing herself as a keen advocate of the traditional jianghu codes of loyalty while embracing the modern world, spryly dancing to Village People’s YMCA. 

Respectful of her ageing father she is more playfully assertive with Bin, and when he is assaulted by thugs on motorbikes, she manages to save him by firing shots into the air in a brutal scene that really takes your breath away, but also secures her a spell in prison where she is unwilling to grass on her boyfriend about the ownership of the firearm.

The second act is an upbeat affair that follows Qiao’s release in 2006, and treats us to a sumptuous journey down the Yangtze River in another nod to the sinking glory of the old China versus the brash new world. Qin has proved a feckless boyfriend and is no longer on the scene, but Qiao is keen not to let him slip away so easily, after her sustained loyalty. And when she is robbed of her cash and passport, she bounces back cleverly in some amusing scenes where she gate-crashes a wedding to enjoy the banquet, desperate for food. Qiao finally confronts Bin in a soulful and moving episode that is visually captivating for its exquisitely calm contemplation of the end of their romance. 

As we leave Qiao she is running a gambling hall, and Bin is back in her life, attracted to her strength of character and tenacity. The two actors are mesmerising to watch in their commandingly restrained yet natural performances, exuding a fascinating chemistry that will remain in the memory for a long time after the credits have rolled. MT

NOW ON MUBI

 

Foam at the Mouth | Ar Puma uz Lupam (2017) *** | Cannes Market 2018

Dir.: Janis Nords; Cast: Vilis Daudzins, Ieva Puke, Raimonds Celms, Indra Brike; Latvia/Poland/Lithuania 2017, 80 min.

After tackling the thorny subject of child crime in his Berlinale Grand Prix winner Mother I love You, Janis Nords comes to Cannes Market with an atmospheric thriller that scratches at the edges of horror set in a remote Latvian community where women are the only civilising influence in a community where man and beast converge.

The women here are a tough bunch and none more so than physiotherapist Jana (Puke), whose ex-cop husband Didzis (Daudzius) has lost part of his left leg is and only employable as a dog handler. To makes matters worse, the challenge to his masculinity has reduced Didzis to an hostile neurotic who feeds off his three Alsatians’ aggression, showing them affection in return, particularly his favourite Gina. The neglected Jana is surprised by her own sexual frustration that surfaces while treating seventeen year old Roberts (Celms) at the gym where she practices, and this incident provides a inventive vein of dark humour and tension to the intriguing narrative. Driving home one night,  Jana and Didsis collide with a rabid boar which leaves its infected blood dripping from their truck bumper, and the dogs sniff this out. What follows is a harrowing hunt for the rapid beasts, which attack some students of the school. Meanwhile, Didzis tracks down an enemy of his own, in the shape of Roberts, whose mother soon emerges as a repressive zealot, as the grim storyline reveals that everyone’s life in danger from either from the animal kingdom or the human one.

Matthew A. Gossett’s script is taut and mischievous complimented by DoP Tobias Datum suggestive images, mainly shot at night and in the gloaming when the difference between dogs and humans is distinguishable only by their form. This is a thriller where testosterone driven males and infected dogs seem to be at war at all costs. Foam is more than just symbolic: under the superficial veneer of civilised society, men are deteriorating into atavistic creatures, just like local wild dogs. Made a shoestring, and none the worst for it, FOAM is really frightening at times, as Nords plays on the darkest fears of the human psyche in this tense little B-picture, which would make Sam Fuller proud.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | MARKET SECTION

Cannes Classics 2018

 

This year’s Cannes Classic sidebar has one or two priceless gems glittering in its antique crown. Apart from well-known legends: Ozu’s Tokyo Story, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Wilder’s Apartment, Varda’s One Sings, The Other Doesn’t and Bondarchuks’ War and Peace, there are some worthwhile lesser known features not be missed.

To start with, there is Henry Decoin’s Beating Heart from 1940, a fitting tribute to leading star Danielle Darrieux, who died last year aged 100. The couple were married while filming this screwball comedy, which was remade in Hollywood in 1946. Darrieux plays Arlette, a young girl running away from a reform school, only to join a school for pick-pockets, run by a Fagin-like character. He instructs her to steal an ambassador’s watch, but Arlette falls in love with him. Like in most of Decoin’s well-structured films, the tempo plays a big role. Decoin was often overlooked as a director, largely because of his rather uneven output, but his post-war noir masterpieces like La Chatte (1958) are really stunning. 

Jacques Rivette is famous for his playful features such as Céline and Juliette go Boating, but his one and only excursion into mainstream, La Religieuse (1966), based on a Diderot novel, is full of anarchic fun. Suzanne Simonin (Anna Karina), is incarcerated in a cloister against her will, and soon falls foul of not one, but three Mother-Superiors: they treat her sadistically, tenderly, or as an object for plain lesbian lust – but Suzanne stays pure. This anti-clerical romp was very popular at the box office, and served as a liberating force for Karina who finally got a divorce from JL Godard after having acted in their final collaboration, Made in USA, in the same year.

Hyenas (1992), directed by Senegalese filmmaker Djibri Diop Mambety (1945-1998), is a re-telling of the Durrenmatt play ‘Der Besuch der alten Dame’ (Visit of an old Lady). Set in an impoverished African village, the old lady in question is very rich – but she has not forgotten how her lover (now the Mayor) had treated her when she was pregnant with his child. She asks the townsfolk a simple question: do they want to participate in her wealth and punish the guilty man, or would they prefer clean hands and poverty. Colourful and very passionate, this adaption of a Swiss play works very well in its African setting.

Diamonds of the Night. Adapted from a short story by Arnošt Lustig, Diamonds in the Night follows two boys (Ladislav Jánsky and Antonín Kumbera) on the run through the forest after escaping a train taking between concentration camps. Showing in the Cannes Classics sidebar, it tributes the Czech New Wave director Jan Nemec whose concept of “pure film”, urged audiences to relate their own experience to the ephemeral fractured narrative he masterfully puts together in this cinematic wartime escape drama..

Youssef Chahine (1926-2008), Egypt’s most famous director, was very critical of radical elements of the Muslim faith. Destiny (1997)  is set in the 12th century in the Spanish province of Andalusia, then ruled by Muslims. The Caliph appoints the liberal philosopher Averros as a high court judge. But his wise and humane judgement become the butt of criticism by a group of radical Muslims, who want to banish the Caliph, using Averros as a means to and end. After a long inner struggle, the Caliph sends the philosopher into exile, but the radicals lose out: Averros’ rule of law has gained popularity all over the province. Chahine, as always, directs with great sensibility, and a brilliant use of colour. 

Finally, there is La Hora de los Hornos (The hour of the Furnace) from Fernando Solanas, a documentary which could only be shown in his homeland of Argentina in 1973, five years after its premiere in 1968. Exploring a central theme of worldwide insurrection, from student unrest in the USA to Czech resistance against the Soviet invasion, Solanas paints a picture of an utopian liberation. Even Argentina, which never really had the slightest hope of a proper democracy – never mind a revolution – is shown as ripe for revolution on behalf of the working masses. Running for over four hours, La Hora is a document of hope, well-structured, passionate and idealistic – but unfortunately overtaken by a grim reality. Still, it is a worthwhile, monumental effort.  AS

THE FULL CLASSICS LINE-UP                 

Beating Heart (Battement de cœur) by Henri Decoin (1939, 1h37, France)
2K Restoration presented by Gaumont in association with the CNC. Image works carried out by Eclair, sound restored by L.E. Diapason in partnership with Eclair.

Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves  by Vittorio De Sica (1948, 1h29, Italy)
Presented by Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna, Stefano Libassi’s Compass Film and Istituto Luce-Cinecittà. Restored by Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna and Stefano Libassi’s Compass Film, in collaboration with Arthur Cohn, Euro Immobilfin and Artédis, and with the support of Istituto Luce-Cinecittà. Restoration carried out at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory.

Enamorada by Emilio Fernández (1946, 1h39, Mexico)
Presented by The Film Foundation. Restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive and The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project in collaboration with Fundacion Televisa AC and Filmoteca de la UNAM. Restoration funded by the Material World Charitable Foundation. The film will be introduced by Martin Scorsese.

Tôkyô monogatari (Tokyo Story / Voyage à Tokyo) by Yasujiro Ozu (1953, 2h15, Japan)
Presented by Shochiku. Digital restoration by Shochiku Co., Ltd., in cooperation with The Japan Foundation. For the 4K restoration, the duplicated 35mm negative was provided by Shochiku, managed by Shochiku MediaWorX Inc. and conducted by IMAGICA Corp. French distribution in theaters: Carlotta Films.

Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock (1958, 2h08, United States of America)
Presented by Park Circus. 4K digital restoration from the VistaVision negative done by Universal Studios. The film will be screened at the Cinéma de la Plage (Movies on the Beach).

The Apartment by Billy Wilder (1960, 2h05, United States of America)
Presented by Park Circus with the co-operation of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. 4K digital restoration from the original camera negative. Digital restoration completed by Cineteca di Bologna, Colour Grading by Sheri Eissenburg at Roundabout in Los Angeles. Supervised on behalf of Park Circus by Grover Crisp.

Démanty noci (Diamonds of the Night) by Jan Němec (1964, 1h08, Czech Republic)
Presented by the National Film Archive, Prague. The restoration was done by the Universal Production Partners studio in Prague, under the supervision of the National Film Archive, Prague.

Voyna i mir. Film I. Andrei Bolkonsky (War and Peace. Film I. Andrei Bolkonsky) 

by Sergey Bondarchuk (1965, 2h27, Russia)
Presented by Mosfilm Cinema Concern. Digital frame-by-frame restoration of image and sound from 2K scan. Producer of the restoration: Karen Shakhnazarov.

La Religieuse (The Nun)

by Jacques Rivette (1965, 2h15, France)
Presented by Studiocanal. 4K restoration from the original camera negative. Sound restauration from the sound negative (only matching element). Works carried out by L’immagine Ritrovata laboratory under the supervision of Studiocanal and Ms. Véronique Manniez-Rivette with the help of the CNC, the Cinémathèque française and the Fonds culturel franco-américain.

Četri balti krekli (Four White Shirts) 

by Rolands Kalnins (1967, 1h20, Latvia)
Presented by National Film Centre of Latvia. 4K Scan and 3K Digital Restoration from the original 35mm image internegative and print positive materials mastered in 2K. Restoration financed by the National Film Centre of Latvia, the restoration made by Locomotive Productions (Latvia). Director Rolands Kalnins in attendance.

La Hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces) 

by Fernando Solanas (1968, 1h25, Argentina)
Presented by CINAIN – Cinemateca y Archivo de la Imagen Nacional. 4K Restoration from the original negatives, thanks to Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales (INCAA), in Buenos Aires. With the supervision of director Fernando “Pino” Solanas. French Distribution: Blaq Out. Fernando Solanas in attendance.

Specialists / Gli specialisti)

by Sergio Corbucci (1969, 1h45, France, Italy, Germany)
Presented by TF1 Studio. Full version previously unseen restored in 4K from the original Technicolor-Techniscope image negative and French and Italian magnetic tapes by TF1 Studio. Digital work carried out by L’Image Retrouvée laboratory, Paris / Bologne. French theater distribution: Carlotta Films. The film will be screened at the Cinéma de la Plage (Movies on the Beach).

João a faca e o rio (João and the Knife)

by George Sluizer (1971, 1h30, the Netherlands)
Presented by EYE Filmmuseum, Stoneraft Film in association with Haghefilm Digital. A full 4K restoration of the original 35mm Techniscope camera negative shot by Jan de Bont. By bypassing the originally required analogue blow up to Cinemascope, this digital restoration presents a direct-from-negative colour richness and image sharpness never seen before.

Blow for Blow

by Marin Karmitz (1972, 1h30, France)
Presented by MK2. Restoration carried out by Eclair from the original negative in 2K with the help of the CNC and supervised by director Marin Karmitz. The film will be re-released in French movie theaters on May 16th, 2018. Marin Karmitz in attendance.

L’une chante, l’autre pas (One Sings the Other Doesn’t)

by Agnès Varda (1977, 2h, France)
Presented by Ciné Tamaris.
The film will be screened at the Cinéma de la Plage (Movies on the Beach) with Agnès Varda in attendance.
2k digital restoration from the original negative and restoration, color grading under the supervision of Agnès Varda and Charlie Van Damme. With the support of the CNC, of the fondation Raja, Danièle Marcovici  & IM production Isabel Marant, with the support of Women in Motion / KERING. International Sales MK2 films. Distribution in theaters: Ciné Tamaris (the film will be released in France on July, 4th, 2018).

Grease

by Randal Kleiser (1978, 1h50, United States of America)
Presented by Park Circus and Paramount Pictures. 4K digital restoration from the original camera negative. The film will be screened at the Cinéma de la Plage (Movies on the Beach) with John Travolta in attendance.

Fad,jal

by Safi Faye (1979, 1h52, Senegal, France)
Presented by the CNC and Safi Faye. Digital restoration carried out from the 2K scan of the 16mm negatives. Restoration made by the CNC laboratory. Safi Faye in attendance.

Five and the Skin (Cinq et la peau)

by Pierre Rissient (1981, 1h35, France, Philippines)
Presented by TF1 Studio. 4K restoration from the original camera negative and the French magnetic tape by TF1 Studio with the support of the CNC and the collaboration of director Pierre Rissient. French distribution in theaters: Carlotta Films. Pierre Rissient in attendance.

A Ilha dos Amores (The Island of Love)

by Paulo Rocha (1982, 2h49, Portugal, Japan)
Presented by Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema. 4K wet gate scan of two 35mm image and sound interpositives struck in a Japanese film lab in 1996. Digital grading was made by La Cinemaquina (Lisbon, Portugal) using a 35mm distribution print from 1982 as a reference. Digital restoration of the image was made by IrmaLucia Efeitos Especiais (Lisbon, Portugal).

Out of Rosenheim (Bagdad Café)

by Percy Adlon (1987, 1h44, Germany)
Presented by Studiocanal. 4k Scan and restoration. Work led by Alpha Omega Digital in Munich and carried out under the continuous supervision of director Percy Adlon. Original negative, kept in Los Angeles in excellent condition, processed in Munich for scanning and image by image restoration. The film will be screened at the Cinéma de la Plage (Movies on the Beach) with Percy Adlon in attendance.

Le Grand Bleu (The Big Blue)

by Luc Besson (1988, 2h18, France, United States of America, Italy)
Presented by Gaumont. A 2K restauration. Image work carried out by Eclair, sound restored by L.E Diapason in partnership with Eclair. A screening organized to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the screening of the film opening the Festival de Cannes in 1988. The film will be screened at the Cinéma de la Plage (Movies on the Beach).

Driving Miss Daisy

by Bruce Beresford (1989, 1h40, United States of America)
Presented by Pathé. 4K restoration made from 35mm original image and sound negatives. Restoration carried out by Pathé L’image Retrouvée laboratory (Paris/Bologne) with the collaboration of director Bruce Beresford.

Cyrano de Bergerac

by Jean-Paul Rappeneau (1990, 2h15, France)
Presented by Lagardère Studios Distribution. Scan from the original negative and 4K restoration carried out by L’Image Retrouvée for Lagardère Studios Distribution with the support of the CNC, the Cinémathèque française, the Fonds Culturel Franco-Américain, Arte France–Unité Cinéma, Pathé et Mr. Francis Kurkdjian. French distribution in theaters: Carlotta Films (in progress). Jean-Paul Rappeneau in attendance.

Hyenas

by Djibril Diop Mambety (1992, 1h50, Senegal, France, Switzerland)
Lamb

by Paulin Soumanou Vieyra (1963, 18 min, Senegal) Presented by La Cinémathèque de l’Institut français, Orange and PSV Films. Digital restoration made from 2K scan of the 35mm negatives. Restoration carried out by Eclair.

El Massir (Destiny) 

by Youssef Chahine (1997, 2h15, Egypt, France)
A preview of the full retrospective which will take place at the Cinémathèque française in October 2018, the film will be presented by Orange Studio and MISR International films with the support of the CNC, fostered by the Cinémathèque française. 4K restauration at Éclair Ymagis laboratory by Orange Studio, MISR International Films and the Cinémathèque française with the support of the CNC. The film will be screened at the Cinéma de la Plage (Movies on the Beach).

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 71st EDITION | 8 -19 MAY 2018

Wildlife (2018) | Critics’ Week | Cannes Film Festival 2018

Writer|Dir: Paul Dano | Cast: Carey Mulligan, Jake Gyllenhaal, Ed Oxenbould | Drama | US | 105’

A teenage boy experiences the breakdown of his parents’ marriage in  Paul Dano’s crisp coming of age family drama, set in 1960s Montana, and based on Richard Ford’s novel.

Although once or twice veering into melodrama, actor Dano maintains impressive control over his sleek and very lucid first film which is anchored by three masterful performances, and sees a young family disintegrate after the husband loses his job.

WILDLIFE has a great deal in common with Retribution Road (2008), its similar theme of aspirational hope for a couple starting out on their life in a new town, in this case Great Falls, Montana. But here the perspective is very different – in Wildlife, the entire experience is seen from the unique perspective of a pubescent boy, Joe, played thoughtfully by young Australian actor Ed Oxenbould (The Visit).

There’s an old-fashioned quality to the film that very much works to its advantage. The date is 1960 and in the mountains behind the family house a forest fire is raging, with warnings that it could well spread to the town centre if not controlled by rangers, who Jerry Brinson (Gyllenhaal) decides to join at a wage of only a dollar an hour, after much moping around the house when he loses his job on the local golf course. This comes as a big surprise to his wife Jeannette (Mulligan), an earnest homemaker who believes in her husband’s desire to make more of himself, and she sees this as a step backwards, career-wise. Meanwhile, Joe signs on as an apprentice to a local portrait photographer, a part-time job he takes to while doing very well in his school work.

Dano and his co-writer Zoe Kazan, stick to a clean, straighforward narrative but there’s a subtle brooding tension at play, and while Joe seems emotionally grounded and resilient (a tribute to his parents), Jerry and Jeannette are less so: although Jerry’s character is the most underwritten of the three, there’s a haunted quality to him as a straightforwaed dad who suddenly implodes after the shock of his firing. Jeannette also starts to lose her own sense of equilibrium:. “What kind of man leaves his wife and child in such a lonely place?,” Jeanette casts around for emotional ballast in an much older wealthy man, Warren Miller (Bill Camp), who she meets while giving swimming classes.

In some ways this fragmented behaviour is character-forming for Joe, his parents have clearly given him a rock solid babyhood, and so he can weather the shocking fliration scenes that take place between Millar and his mother, and his loss at his father’s temporary abandonment, although he finds it all difficult to fathom. This is not a film about adult infidelity and abandonment, but about how a teenage perceives and deals with it, and as such it is beautifully restrained and supremely elegant – the audience is required to suspend disbelief and take a trip back to teenagehood and the bewildering experience it offers. Dano makes the denouement an enigmatic affair, leaving the door open to hope, while acknowledging the inevitable. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 8-19 MAY 2018 | CRITICS’ WEEK |

 

Yomeddine (2018) | Cannes Film Festival | In Competiton

Writer|Dir: A B Shawky | Egypt | Drama | 97’

YOMEDDINE (Judgement Day) is a coming of age road drama where two outcasts discover the harshness of the real world outside the lepper colony where they have spent most of their tragic lives. Funded by kickstarter, A B Shawky based his film on real people he met at the Abu Zaabal Leper Colony while filming his awarded documentary The Colony: childless leper Beshay and his schizophrenic wife; Hamed, the legless former truck driver, and Nubian boy Obama. After the death of his wife, we re-join Beshay and his apprentice Obama (Ahmed Abdelhafiz) on a journey south in a donkey cart, to trace the rest of Beshay’s family and find out why his father abandoned him there as a child.

A gentle sardonic humour saves YOMEDDINE from descending into sentimentality, even though the two’s sad plight may often have you close to tears. Newcomer Gamal plays Beshay (who is no longer contagious) with vulnerability and amusing self-deprecation, and the down to earth Obama tags along on the mission.

Poverty and religion are the themes that run through this slim but poignant story. Having been judged all their lives for their looks, when will they be judged for their personalities? Obama is more confident than Beshay but the two share an appealing rapport. During their trip they encounter all sorts of nefarious characters along the way, and although there’s no strong narrative, this watchable film ambles gently on as we enjoy the rapport of the characters and the simple storyline enriched by the passing Egyptian landscapes – that veers off the beaten track, offering sites that are unfamiliar to most. YOMEDDINE is a restrained piece of work that may not travel far, but there is a powerful charm to its journey. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 8-19 MAY 2018 | IN COMPETITION

Mean Streets (1973) | Masterclass with Martin Scorsese | Cannes Film Festival 2018

“You don’t make up for your sins in Church. You do it on the streets. You do it at home.  The rest is bullshit, and you know it”

Mean Streets was an autobiographical feature with Harvey Keitel’s character loosely based on Scorsese’s father’s relationship with his younger brother, played by Robert De Niro, who was always in and out of jail. Scorsese explores themes of responsibility and obligation, pondering where they end, and if they ever do in a society based on strong moral ties and close relationships, such as his own strict Catholic upbringing, in a tough working class neighbourhood of Queens, where he suffered from asthma. With no books or money, music and visits to the cinema became his abiding influences. In the film, he asks:. How do good people exist in a bad society, and can they still remain good surrounded by evil. Bad people, too, are often capable of extreme acts of kindness and generosity, so where do the boundaries lie? Most of his work closely examines his close relationships with other men, who were a particular feature of his own life, and he is most familiar with these male bonds: brother; cousins, fathers and friends.He is also interested in exploring compassion in society and how difficult it is to care for others who are challenging and cannot see the light, such as his father’s younger brother.

Before making a film, Scorsese generally locks himself away for 2 weeks and draws the entire thing on paper which he then shows to his DoP. He considers the minute geography of the film he’s working on, examining all the angles thoroughly before starting. His latest film has so many scenes, he has started working more closely with the actors, and making things comfortable for the them, often person by person. 

Robert De Niro phrase YOU TALKING TO ME happened as a pure accident while they were rushing to finish a scene, but it’s become legendary. Another happy accident was Joe Pesci’s line: “ou think I’m funny? These all happened due to time constraints. There has to be laughs during the filmmaking process because the anxiety and tension of making the dark stuff is harrowing, he makes music films as a way of balancing things out. MT 

Dir.: Martin Scorsese Cast: Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, David Proval, Amy Robinson, Jody Foster; USA 1973, 112 min.

Imagine being told by a fellow director you admire, that “you have just spent a year of your life making a peace of shit” – Martin Scorsese was told exactly this by John Cassavetes, after he’d watched Scorsese’s Box Car Bertha (1972). Cassavetes suggested that his next film should resemble his debut feature Who’s that Knocking at my Door? (1967), set in the Italian/American community in New York. Scorsese followed the advice and directed MEAN STREETS – the rest, as they say, is history.

MEAN STREETS (original title ‘Season of the Witch’) takes it title from a Chandler essay: “But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid”. Based on Scorsese and Robert de Niro’s personal experiences in “Little Italy”, MEAN STREETS is a “passion play” – not only because of the religious undertones but also in the sense of the anger and violence displayed. Charlie (Keitel, who had starred in Who’s that Knocking) is in love with money, Teresa and God – in a constantly changing priority. But Charlie’s life is complicated by his best friend Johnny Boy (De Niro), a psychotic gangster who prefers to keep his cash for clothes, instead of paying back his creditors, who will eventually get their own back on him.  Charlie not only has to look after Johnny, he also has to hide his love for Teresa (Robinson), an epileptic girl, who happens to be Johnny’s niece. And then there are Charlie’s relatives, wanting him to take over the family restaurant – very much against his will. The violence escalates after Johnny insults the loan shark Michael once too often. When he, Teresa and Charlie head out of town for a holiday they are ambushed and a professional killer (Scorsese) peppers their car with bullets. Unlike Glenn Ford who comes too late to save his wife from the burning car, in Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat – which Charlie’s uncle is watching on TV; Charlie leaves the severely injured Teresa in the car.

Amazingly MEAN STREETS was shot mainly in Los Angeles, Scorsese – the crew only spent six days in New York. The physical and emotional violence is best symbolised by Jodie Foster’s child prostitute, Iris. Foster was just eleven at the time the film was shot, and her older sister Connie had to body-double for her in the sexually explicit scenes. MEAN STREETS is the key to all Scorsese’s crime films: metaphors and quotes have vie with the violence, the integrated score(often overlaying the fighting – ironically), seventies hits such as ‘Be My Baby’ and ‘I Looked Away’, religious themes and the lack of male engagement, leading to the brutal conclusion of total annihilation.

Whilst MEAN STREETS was not a success at the box office, the New York Times’ film critic wrote after the premiere: “No matter how bleak the milieu, no matter how heart breaking the narrative, some films are thoroughly, beautifully realised, they have a kind of tonic effect that has no relation to the subject matter. Such a film is Mean Streets”. Amen. AS

MARTIN SCORSESE MASTERCLASS FOR HIS CAROSSE D’OR | THEATRE CROISETTE | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2018| NOW OUT ON DUAL FORMAT | BLURAY COURTESY OF MASTERS OF CINEMA

Sheffield Doc Fest | 7 – 12 June 2018

Sheffield Doc/Fest celebrates its 25th edition this year with a diverse programme that features not only documentaries but also interactive and immersive projects, including 7 virtual reality installations in the Alternate Realities Exhibition and works by the British collaborator duo Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard (20,000 Days on Earth), along with the usual industry talks. 

The festival opens on 7 June with the world premiere of Sean McAllister’s A Northern Soul that sees the director reflect on changes to his Yorkshire hometown: a city divided by Brexit and simultaneously celebrated as UK City of Culture, hit by austerity. 
Amongst the other features to look out are:
A DISTANT BARKING OF DOGS | Dir: Simon Lereng | 91′
While the war in Ukraine and Russia rages on beyond their village, a simple family go about their ordinary life in this gentle observational story that won the First Appearance award for its director at IDFA 2017
A WOMAN CAPTURED | Dir: Bernadett Tuza-Ritter | 89′ 
Slavery is a European invention, and still exists, or so we’re led to believe in this extraordinary story about who a woman down on her luck who  becomes trapped and abused in a more manipulative woman’s household. Is this really slavery or just one person’s power over another? You decide.
CENTRAL AIRPORT TEMPELHOF | Dir: Karim Ainouz | 97′
Director Karim Ainouz finds a dark, ironic vein of humour in Berlin’s defunct city airport where massive hangers house Germany’s emergency asylum seekers, where the local Germans do their best to accommodate their new arrivals.
OBSCURO BAROCCO | Dir: Evangelia Kranioti | 60′
A visually ravishing metamorphosis takes place under the gaudy lights of the Rio de Janeiro carnival in this Berlinale (2018) Teddy Award winning documentary that explores the transgender world of the Brazilian capital.
FLOW (World Premiere, Chile) Dir:  Nicolas Molina | 82′
FLOW observes the human connection between two rivers: the Ganges in India and the Biobio in Chile. It proposes a poetic journey blending both civilisations through the flow of one great river.
SHEFFIELD DOC FESTIVAL 7-12 JUNE 2018

Tully (2018) ***

Dir.: Jason Reitman; Cast: Charlize Theron, Mackenzie Davis, Mark Duplass, Ron Livingston, Elaine Tan; USA 2018, 96 min.

Tully, the third cooperation for director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody – after Juno and Young Adult – is a realistic, bitter-sweet study of suburban family life near New York, and a flirt with the supernatural, which will not be disclosed (no spoilers). Apart from the lame ending, the two strands form an exciting unity, held together by the female leads Charlize Theron (Young Adult) and Mackenzie Davis (Always Shine).

We meet Marlo (Theron) heavily pregnant in her third trimester – and not loving it at all. Theron was either over-committed to her role, or her fat-suit is superior to anything seen so far. But Marlo has to carry the whole weight of the new arrival, the third, and not a happy accident. “I feel like an abandoned trashbag” and My body looks a relief map for a war-torn country” are some of her choice comments. The reason for the overload is mainly husband Drew (Livingston), who is more absent than present, and has substituted their sex-life for nocturnal marathons on the Play Station. Her brother Craig (Duplass) is higher up the bourgeois ladder, and offers to pay for a night time nanny; whilst his perfectly trim wife Elyse (Tan) puts her foot in with comments “I had to crawl to the gym in my last month of pregnancy”. Needless to say, Craig and Elyse have a couple of perfect children, who love their greens, whilst Marlo’s daughter Sarah and son Jonah would prefer something more filling like pizza. Sarah’s reaction to the new arrival is a loss of self-esteem, and to compound matters, Jonah is about to be kicked out of kindergarten because his parents pretend that he is just “quirky”, rather than on the autism spectrum.

After the birth of Mia, and some sleepless nights amidst the rising domestic chaos, Marlo decides to accept her brother’s offer of help: Enter Tully (Davis), an optimistic, practical angel of competence, who not only liberates Marlo from the nightly child duties, but brings order into the household.. But there is a slight android quality about Tully, enhanced by her androgynous looks. We suspect the worst, when Tully helps Marlo to spice up her sex-life, wearing a waitress uniform, one of Drew’s beloved fetishes. But nothing comes out of this encounter, and soon Marlo and Tully become a unit. After a night-out in Brooklyn, Marlo’s old haunt, Tully announces suddenly, that she has to leave.

Certainly, Cody’s script is the soul of this feature, her dialogue is witty; and well-informed by her own experience of motherhood. One of her next projects, titled Barbie, is a live action film about a doll from Barbie Land, who is expelled from this universe and has adventures in the real world. With Tully Cody asks whether motherhood has to be the end of an independent life – is the old Marlo of Brooklyn dead or, can she be re-animated?

DoP Eric Steelberg’s images work best during the chaotic time in Marlo’s household and the confrontations between Marlo and the kindergarten teachers. But sometimes, like the whole project in the end, he finds too many comprises, choosing soothing colour schemes, avoiding more innovative angles. Tully could have been a great feature, but taking back so much of the critique at the end, spoils the whole enterprise. 

OUT ON RELEASE THIS FRIDAY, 4 MAY 2018

The Young Karl Marx (2017) ***

Dir: Raoul Peck |France / Germany / Belgium | Drama | 112 min · Colour

Interesting to discover that, according to Raoul Peck (I am Not Your Negro), the young and unemployed Karl Marx lived on the money of a capitalist he despised, while writing his community treaty Das Capital, and fathering two children. This is one of many revealing facts uncovered in this worthy period drama – which is rather pleased with itself despite being about as enjoyable as a wet weekend with Diane Abbott and one of her migraines.

Played convincingly by August Diehl (Salt), the 26 year old lived with his heiress wife Jenny in exile in Paris, where he is pictured as a rather arrogant flaneur habitually in debt and plagued by existential anxieties. Initially dismissing German factory heir Friedrich Engels (Stefan Konarske) as a dandy, the pair go on to develop a veritable bromance when Marx discovers Engels has just published a study on the miserable impoverishment of the English proletariat, and has distanced himself from his father – despite remaining on the payroll, hence financing Marx.

From then on this becomes a political procedural as the pair, assisted by Jenny and Engel’s factory shop steward wife Mary Burns (Hannah Steele), continue to work tirelessly and admirably to provide a theoretical foundation for revolution and to improve workers’ rights and abolish child labour. Soon their aim is not merely to interpret the world, but to change it with a work entitled Critic of the Critical Critique and subsequently, the Communist Manifesto.

Pascal Bonitzer’s brisk workmanlike script follows a linear narrative; Alexei Aigui (I am Not Your Negro) and animates it with an earnestly dramatic score, with unimaginative visuals conveying the drabness of Victorian England to great effect in a rather lacklustre but informative period drama. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 4 MAY 2018

 

Canada Now | 3-6 May 2018

CANADA NOW 2018 is a showcase of New Canadian Cinema in the UK, beginning with a weekend of screenings and events from the 3rd – 6th May at the Curzon Soho, featuring outstanding new pieces of filmmaking alongside a brand new digital restoration of a repertory classic. From Sunday July 1st 2018, in celebration of Canada Day, the films will begin a nationwide tour of cinemas and venues across the UK. Here is the line-up in full. 

ALL YOU CAN EAT BUDDHA | Ian Lagarde, 2017 85′

This oddball vacation comedy curio starts off well but rapidly goes pear-shaped, largely due to the flaccid pacing and increasingly imploding narrative that follows a holidaying man who develops a mysterious appetite and supernatural powers in an all-inclusive resort in the Caribbean.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFEZOCD_ufk

BLACK COP  | Cory Bowles, 2017 – 91′

A black police officer turns activist and seeks revenge on his own colleagues after  being egregiously profiled and assaulted by them, in this stylish and intermittently engaging political satire by actor-director Cory Bowles (Trailer Park Boys). 

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHLDGsZRELA

CARDINALS | Grayson Moore & Aidan Shipley, 2017 – 84 mins

Years after murdering her neighbour under the guise of drink driving, Valerie returns home from prison to find that the son of the deceased has lingering suspicions. An impressive, well-acted debut despite its tonally uneven denouement.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjOw0ug3Bqw

HOCHELAGA, LAND OF SOULS, HOCHELAGA, TERRE DES ÂMES | François Girard, 2017 100 *

Oscar winner François Girard (The Red Violin), returns with an ambitious time-travelling fantasy spanning eight centuries of layered indigenous, colonial, and contemporary histories. Starring Vincent Perez and Linus Roache, this works best as an intriguing piece of historical voyeurism rather than as a cogent drama exploring the aftermath of a sinkhole opening up in a downtown Montreal football stadium causing the city’s past and present to intersect.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oArz1hEwwtY

*Touring programme only

I’VE HEARD THE MERMAIDS SINGING  | Patricia Rozema, 1987 – 81′

Patricia Rozema’s Cannes-awarded debut feature – a charming, whimsical story about a waifish daydreamer with artistic aspirations – is now an arthouse classic and one of the most profitable Canadian films ever made, and an important milestone in both queer cinema and the development of Canadian film industry.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INzNbLSo7A4

LET THERE BE LIGHT  | Mila Aung-Thwin, Van Royko, 2017 – 80′

Directed by Mila Aung-Thwin (The Vote) and Van Royko (Kodeline), this unconvincing documentary attempts to explore fusion research and how it may help solve the global energy crisis.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IicYGhFEII8

MARY GOES ROUND  – Molly McGlynn, 2017 – 87′ 

Establishing Molly McGlynn as a talent in the making, her debut feature centres on a substance abuse counsellor (Mary/Aya Cash) with a drinking problem. After getting arrested for drink driving and losing her job, Mary returns to her hometown where she is forced to come to terms with her estranged father and form a bond with her teenage half-sister whom she’s never met. Although over-melodramatic at times, Mary Goes Round has its heart in the right place. 

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqI4pQh1jEA

MEDITATION PARK | Mina Shum, 2017 – 94′

The reason to see this upbeat relationship drama is for Cheng Pei Pei’s superb turn as a devoted wife and mother, who questions her marriage when she discovers an orange thong in her husband’s pocket. Her efforts to find out the truth send her on an unexpected journey of liberation. Sandrah Oh (Grey’s Anatomy) is also terrific.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GQhbqJcjjM

RUMBLE: THE INDIANS WHO ROCKED THE WORLD | Catherine Bainbridge & Alfonso Maiorana, 2017 – 103′

RUMBLE: The Indians Who Rocked the World is a well-structured, resonant music biopic to light a profound and missing chapter in the history of American music: the Indigenous influence. Featuring music icons Charley Patton, Mildred Bailey, Link Wray, Jimi Hendrix, Jesse Ed Davis, Buffy Saint-Marie, Robbie Robertson, Randy Castillo and Taboo, RUMBLE shows how these pioneering Native musicians helped shape the soundtracks of our lives.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hovJUoyxulc

VENUS | Eisha Marjara, 2017 *

Eisha Marjara’s articulate, absorbing, and lively gender shifting comedy, Venus, is the witty tale of Sid (featuring New York-based actor Debargo Sanyal in a brilliant performance), a transitioning woman whose life takes a surprising turn when a 14-year-old boy named Ralph arrives at her door with the surprising announcement that he is her son.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsL6QLUae8o

*Touring programme only

CANADA NOW | 3-6  MAY 2018 | CURZON LONDON | 1 July onwards NATIONWIDE TOUR

Mary and the Witch’s Flower (2018) **** | Meari to Majo No Hana

Dir.: Hiromasa Yonebayashi; Anime with the voices of Hana Sugisaki, Ryonosuke Kamiki, Yuki Amani, Fumiyo Kohinata; Japan 2017, 102 min.

In 2014 the worldwide fanbase of the much-loved Studio Ghibli was saddened to hear of its demise. Three years later, we’re delighted (and relieved) to confirm that its successor Studio Ponoc has produced a knockout first outing: nearly all the crew of Mary and the Witch’s Flower are Ghibli veterans, starting with director/co-writer Hiromasa Ynebayashi (The SecreteWorld of Arietty, When Marnie was There).

Like many other Ghibli productions, Mary and the Witches Flower is based on a children’s novel by British/American women writers – this time Mary Stewart’s The little Broomstick (1971). It follows Howl’s Moving Castle (Dianna Wynne Jones), Ursula K. Le Gun’s A Wizard of Earth Sea (filmed as Tales from Earthsea), Mary Norton’s The Borrowers (filmed as The Secret World of Arrietty) and Joan Robinson’s Marnie was There. 

In this contemporary soci0-political allegory, Mary Smith (Sugisaki) is living with her great aunt Charlotte (a former witch) in the placid backwater of Redmanor, where all the local kids are on vacation and Mary’s parents are working on a project far away. Mary encounters Peter (Kamiki), who is a few years older than her and has more freedom to roam around town. She also meets cats Tib and Gib who lead to her finding the broomstick and the equally potent magic flower, setting her on the way to a kingdom in the clouds, ruled by the malicious Madam Mumblechook (Amani) and her evil sidekick Doctor Dee (Kohinata). They are running a school of magic – Mary is initially mistaken for a new student – but their real goal in their Frankenstein-like laboratories, is to put the whole universe in danger by changing animals and humans alike into ugly zombie-like creatures who will obediently following their command (anyone read The Bell Curve?). Although Mary has rather low self-esteem, she soon discovers her fighting spirit, rescuing Gib and Peter from being transformed into zombies, finally taking on the deadly duo in a splendid takedown finale.

The character designs and certain action scenes are familiar from former Ghibli productions but, contents-wise, there is a stark difference: the antagonistic forces of many Ghibli productions where never as evil as Mumblechook and Doctor Dee, who are truly Bond villains, ready to put the whole World in danger; their schemes of biological mutations reminding us of the worse medical ‘experiments’ in the Nazi camps of WWII and some of today’s political regimes.

But this rather harder edge does not deflect from the overall impression of wonder and magic and when the heroine starts believing in herself, she soon becomes a building light and inspiration for others. After thirty years of Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli,  his former collaborators now carry the flame to a new beginning in the form of Pomoc studio. AS

Altitude Film Distribution and Studio Ponoc are proud to present, Mary and The Witch’s Flower is releasing in UK and Irish cinemas nationwide, in both dubbed and subtitled forms, from 4th May, with a One Night Only preview of the subtitled version on 10th April 2018.

Cannes Film Festival 2018 | On the Croisette – off the cuff update

Festival bigwig Thierry Frémaux warned us to expect shocks and surprises from this year’s festival line-up, distilled down from over 1900 features to an intriguing list of 18 – and there will be a few more additions before May 8th. The main question is “where are the stars?” or better still “Where is Isabelle Huppert” doyenne of the Croisette – up to now. The answer seems to be that they are on the jury – presided by Cate Blanchett, who is joined by Lea Seydoux, Kristen Stewart, Denis Villeneuve, Robert Guédiguian, Ava Duvernay, Khadja Nin, Chang Chen and Andrey Zvyagintsev.

Last year’s 70th Anniversary bumper issue seems to have swept in a more eclectic and sleek selection of features in the competition line-up vying for the coveted Palme D’Or. There are new films from veterans Jean-Luc Godard (The Image Book), Spike Lee (BlacKkKlansman) and Oscar winner Pawel Pawlikowski (Cold War), and some very long films – 9 exceed two hours. Three female filmmakers make the main competition in the shape of Caramel director Nadine Labaki with Capernaum, Alice Rohrwacher with Lazzaro Felice and Eve Husson presenting Girls of the Sun. Kazakh filmmaker Sergei Dvortsevoy rose to indie fame at Cannes Un Certain Regard 2008 with his touching title Tulpan, and he is back now in the main competition line-up with a hot contender in the shape of AYKA or My Little One. 

Scanning through the selection for British fare – the Ron Howard “directed” (Thierry’s words not mine) Solo, A Star Wars Story stars Thandie Newton, Paul Bethany and Emilia Clarke but no sign of Mike Leigh’s Peterloo. And although Matteo Garrone’s Dogman is there and is a hot contender for this year’s Palme, the much-awaited Jacques Audiard latest The Sisters Brothers, and Joanna Hogg’s hopeful The Souvenir Parts I and II are nowhere to be seen- but Lars von Trier is still very much ‘de trop’ on the Riviera, or so it would seem. Thierry is still thinking about this one. And on reflection he has now added The House That Jack Built – out of competition.

Apart from Godard, there are two other French titles: Stéphane Brizé will present At War, and Christophe Honoré’s Sorry Angel – in competition, and these features will open shortly afterwards in the local cinemas – to keep the Cannois happy. The Un Certain Regard sidebar has 6 feature debuts in a line-up of 15. And the special screening section offers Wang Bing’s Dead Souls with its 8 hour running time  allowing for a quick petit-dej on the Croisette before the following days’ viewing starts!

It Follows director David Robert Mitchell will be in Cannes with his eagerly anticipated follow-up Under the Silver Lake. And Chinese auteur Jia Zhangke  brings another Palme d’Or hopeful in the shape of Ash is Purest White, starring his wife and long-term collaborator Tao Zhao.  First time director A B Shawky presents the only debut feature in the competition strand Yomeddine – a leper road movie from Egypt – and it’s a comedy!. Iranians Jafar Panahi (Three Faces) and Asghar Farhadi (Everybody Knows) also make the list – with Farhadi’s film starring Penelope Cruz and husband Javier Bardem and opening the festival this year.

So out with the old guard – Naomi Kawase included – and in with the new – is Thierry’s message this year. Let’s hope it’s a good one. And stay tuned for more additions and coverage from the sidebars Un Certain Regard, ACID, Semaine de la Critique and Directors’ Fornight. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 8 -22 MAY 2018

COMPETITION LINE-Up

EVERY BODY KNOWS – Asghar Farhadi

AT WAR - Stéphane Brizé 

DOGMAN – Matteo Garrone

LE LIVRE D’IMAGE – Jean-Luc Godard

NETEMO SAMETEMO (ASAKO I & II) (ASAKO I & II) – Ryusuke Hamaguchi

SORRY ANGEL – Christophe Honore

GIRLS OF THE SUN – Eva Husson

ASH IS PUREST WHITE – Zia Zhangke

SHOPLIFTERS – Kor-eda Hirokazu

CAPERNAUM – Nadine Labaki

BUH-NING (BURNING) – Lee Chang-Dong

BLACKKKLANSMAN – Spike Lee

UNDER THE SILVER LAKE – David Robert Mitchell

THREE FACES – Jafar Panahi

ZIMNA WOJNA/Cold War – Pawel Pawlikowski

LAZZARO FELICE – Alice Rohrwacher

LETO – Kirill Serebrennikov

YOMEDDINE – A B Shawky

KNIFE + HEART – Yann Gonzalez

AYKA –  Sergey Dvortsevoy, director of Tulpan, winner of the Prize Un Certain Regard in 2008.

These two films by Yann Gonzalez and Sergey Dvortsevoy are both directors’ second feature. It will be their first time in Competition.

AHLAT AGACI (THE WILD PEAR TREE) – Nuri Bilge Ceylan, winner of the Palme d’or 2014 for Winter Sleep.

The Competition 2018 will be composed of 21 films.

SHADOW – Zhang Yimou (out of competition)

THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT – Lars von Trier (out of competition)

_______________________________________________

 71st CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 8-20 MAY 2018

 

 

Lean on Pete (2017)***

Dir: Andrew Haigh | Great Britain / 121’ | Cast: Charlie Plummer, Steve Buscemi, Chloë Sevigny

Andrew Haigh (Weekend, 45 Years) directs Steve Buscemi and Chloë Sevigny in a rather uneven rites of passage Pacific western about a boy who bonds with an old racehorse, and based on the novel of the same name by Willy Vlautin.

This is a film to be seen for its captivating performances rather than its meandering narrative that abandons the central soulmates (fifteen year old Charlie and his horse Lean on Pete) midday through to explore how the teen resorts to petty crime in order to survive as an orphan. We first meet him living alone with his sweary Dad Ray (Fimmel) in Portland,Oregon; Ray loves his sensitive son, but is too selfish to care for him since his mother left town due to Ray’s philandering. So when a vengeful husband kills Ray, Charlie is left alone and desperate to find his aunt Margy, who fell out with Ray, for obvious reasons. Teaming up with the disreputable horse trainer Del (Buscemi in fine fettle), the two are soon joined by jockey Bonnie (Sevigny), leaving Charlie in the cold again, when Bonnie takes over Del’s attention. So Charlie sets off on a mission to save the ageing racehorse, Lean on Pete, who is bound for Mexico – an euphemistic term for the slaughter house. Their soulful journey across the luminous desert landscape is painful for both, and ends in tragedy, leaving Charlie on an elusive quest for aunt Margy in Laramie, Wyoming.

LEAN ON PETE is a lightly-plotted family film, apart from the animal tragedy. Magnus Nordenhof Jonck’s stunning images make up for an unsatisfying storyline that starts full of promise then Peters out, limping aimlessly for two full hours. Haigh tries to see the good in everyone, often stepping over the line to out-and-out sentimentality, but his central character does not deliver. Professionally produced and well-acted, particularly by Plummer, who won the De Laurentis Prize in Venice for Best Newcomer Actor, LEAN ON PETE is not only lean of plot; but all the social realist rough edges are polished too: Charlie keeps a stiff upper lip and takes it on the chin, but somehow his soul takes a short cut into rocky terrain rather than finding redemption in pastures new. Some critics called it “a modern Huckleberry Finn” – but that would be insulting to Mark Twain.

OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE from 27 APRIL 2018

The Wound | Inxeba (2017)


Dir: John Trengrove | Writers: John Trengove, Thando Mgqolozana, Malusi Bengu | Cast: Nakhane Touré, Bongile Mantsai, Niza Jay Ncoyini (Kwanda) | DoP Paul Özgür | Music
João Orecchia |South Africa | 88 min · Colour

Best known for his TV series Hopeville and his short film iBhokhwe (The Goat) that tackled the subject of male circumcision, this is John Trengrove’s feature film debut and explores the experiences of a typical young factory worker in an extraordinary contemporary story that feels as if it could have taken place a hundred years ago. THE WOUND proves that an all-male environment can generate a dramatic range of tender and aggressive emotional expressions, where the taboo of homosexuality and masculinity are concerned.

Xolani (played by singer Nakhane Touré) is from the Xhosa, a South African tribe inhabiting the areas round Cape Town and the Eastern Cape. Every year he travels to a remote region in the mountains to take part and act as a care-giver in an annual circumcision ceremony. Women are not permitted to join the activities where the men paint their bodies in alarming designs using white ochre, as they immerse themselves in a coming of age rites of passage. One of the men Xolani meets is Kwanda, a middle class boy from Joburg undergoing his initiation, sensitive and perceptive, the young man quickly picks up on Xolani’s own homosexual identity.

This a gripping and immersive film that slowly generates tension from the mens’ needs to comply with their traditional environment while also satisfying their own emotional and sexual impulses. It gradually emerges that the melancholy Xolani is also there to cement his rather one-sided relationship with fellow married care-giver Vijami. But contrary to our expectations, Kwanda actually supports Xolani’s secret and idolatrous bond with Vijami rather than exposing him, adding another twist to this textured storyline. The magnifcent scenery, compelling narrative and subtle characterisations make this a watchable drama and a strong directorial debut for Trengrove. THE WOUND would make in interesting companion piece to Ousmane Sembene’s female circumcision story MOULAADE. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 27 APRIL 2018 | NAKANE IS PROMOTING HIS NEW ALBUM ‘YOU WILL NOT DIE’

 

 

 

 

Modern Life is Rubbish (2017) **

Dir: Daniel Jerome Gill | Cast: Josh Whitehouse, Jessie Cave, Ian Hart, Steven Mackintosh, Freya Mavor, Tom Riley | Musical Drama | UK | 114′

Daniel Jerome Gill is clearly a fan of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. Modern Life  is Rubbish makes a brave attempt to re-create Stephen Frears’ 2000 cult classic drama, that sees a young couple come together through their shared love of music, only to part ten years later, falling out of love.

Gill’s endearing but lightweight film lacks the charisma and zinging chemistry brought to the original by John Cusack and Iben Hjelje – not to mention the sensational script – to make it another breakout hit. Modern Life works best as a stinging reminder of the economic climate of its time as the world entered the late 1990s recession, Its sparkling string of musical hits by Blur, The Smiths, Oasis, and Radiohead considerably enhance the film’s entertainment and nostalgia value.

As Liam and Natalie, Josh Whitehouse and Freya Mavor are gently appealing: he, an old-school struggling musician who believes in his worth and his art; and she, an uptown aspiring art designer (of album covers) who lacks conviction, despite a megawatt smile. We first meet them in the rather morose opening scene whence the drama sashays backwards and forwards – to the time they first clapped eyes on each other, in a record shop, gradually showing them falling in love, as opposites attract. Liam’s inability to embrace the modern corporate world make him an appealing embodiment of anti-corporate culture, his disdain for social media is palpable: He refuses to own a smartphone or an iPod and is proud of his tangible record collection on vinyl. Natalie is more pragmatic, casting aside her artistic hopes for the advantages of pecuniary gain, to work in advertising. But her heart is clearly not in it – at the opening night of her first gig in an art gallery, the two realise they are not quite cut out for each other when Natalie explains: “We’re doing a viral campaign for the gallery” and Liam chips in: “a load of wank, if you ask me”. That said, the soundtrack that first defined their relationship keeps pulling them back together.

Taking its title from Blur’s 1993 album, the film is a pure satirical trip to its era, working best as a testament to the late 1990s, rather than as a believable story of frontman Liam and his weak attempts to make it with his band Headcleaner, his lack of finances being the major cause of the pair’s eventual rift. The scenes involving Steven Mackintosh, Will Merrick and Ian Hart feel laboured and generic (although Hart gives a stonking turn as the band’s agent), but when Whitehouse (a real guitarist) takes to the stage in a live performance, the film gets a shot in the arm, in lucid sequences filmed by cinematographer Tim Sidell.

Strangely, it’s the viral success of the band that finally makes Liam a name, and this leads to the inevitable, and a rather bittersweet, finale for the lovers in this ultimately enjoyable trip down memory lane. MT

OUT ON RELEASE from 4 May 2018

 

 

 

Beast (2017) ***

Dir: Michael Pearce | Cast: Jessie Buckley, Johnny Flynn, Trystan Gravelle | UK | 107′ | Thriller

Two troubled souls are drawn together in this twisted and intriguingly intelligent psychological thriller debut from British TV director Michael Pearce.

On a Jersey beach during her birthday celebrations, Moll (Jessie Buckley) breaks away from the fraught family gathering drawn to a tousled-haired wayfarer Pascal ((Flynn) who is implicated in a series of murders rocking the island. Tour guide Moll is far from squeaky clean but her vulnerable, wide-eyed appeal provides a suspenseful counterpoint to Pascal’s sensitive knowingness; such a breath of fresh air compared to her boring police officer boyfriend Cliff (Trystan Gravelle). Moll still lives at home with her dementia-ridden father and dominating martyr of a mother Hilary, a feisty Geraldine James, who is holding everything together – including the church choir – while clearly favouriting supercilious brother Harrison (Oliver Maltman). To add insult to injury, sister Polly (Shannon Tarbet) has just announced her twin pregnancy on Moll’s special day. Clearly there is more to Moll than meets the eye, but Pearce keeps us guessing about her dark secret which is cleverly reflected through her family’s harsh and controlling attitude towards her. There is also something gently sinister about the prickly Pascal who prowls around with a hunting rifle while the two grow closer complicit in their shared orbit of shadowy darkness; Moll’s unhappiness piqued by the sense of danger and romantic thrill that gradually comes to a head in the final beachside denouement. BEAST is a subtle thriller that skates around the edges of melodrama and horror primped by Benjamin Kracun’s luminous images and superbly nuanced performances from Geraldine James, Jessie Buckley and Johnny Flynn as the tense lead trio. MT

NOW ON RELEASE FROM 27 April 2018

 

 

 

Marty (1955) | Dual format release

 Dir.: Delbert Mann; Cast: Ernest Borgnine, Betsy Blair, Esther Minicotti, Joe Mantell; USA 1955, 90 min.

Based on the TV play by Paddy Chayevsky, who would later script Network (1976), Delbert Mann won both the 1955 Oscar and the Palme d’Or in Cannes for his debut feature (he had directed the original TV Playhouse production with Rod Steiger and Nancy Marchand).

Ernest Borgnine won an Oscar for his thoughtful performance in this  independent production (Hecht/Lancaster) which had a mini-budget of USD 300 000 but grossed over five million US Dollars at the box office. It was a follow-up to his impressive turn as the sadistic sergeant in From Here to Eternity,

Director Delbert Mann was an intellectual with a TV background, restricting his Hollywood output to a few, but memorable, features such as The Outsider (1961). His career would lead him back to TV, a medium which gave him more freedom than the Hollywood studio system. Shot in brilliant blackand-white by the veteran Joseph LaShelle (Laura, The Apartment), Marty is a chamber piece, which g set in the Bronx, during two days between Christmas and New Year’s Day: Marty (Borgnine) is an affable but rather thick-set butcher, who is mistreated both by his mother (Minicotti) and his “best friend” Angie (Mantell), a superficial misogynist. They both criticise 34year old Marty for not being married, but would rather keep him under their control, to suit their own needs. Up to a certain point, Marty plays ball, talking in the Mickey Spillane style  – but deep down he is aware of his lack if appeal to the opposite sex, his social clumsiness: he is the anti-hero, and he knows it. When he meets Isabel (Blair), a schoolteacher who has just been stood up on a blind date, the two outsiders slowly find happiness together – in spite of their shyness and awkwardness.

In an era dominated by big, colourful blockbusters from Hollywood, fighting the advent of TV with more and more sensational technical innovations and lame, simplistic plots, often featuring invincible male heroes, Marty was the antithesis to all these adventures: escapism, which never engaged the audience brains, so they would not forget where they had parked the car. Marty and Isabel were anything but the heroic winners, which sailed through the feature, but ordinary working people, whose problems were rooted in a society, where interaction between the genders where stereotype, and “a good line” was more important than a reliable character. Angie is the classical example of male insecurity, who is only too happy, to transfer his helplessness onto Marty. Having said this, Marty relies very much on the witty dialogues by Chayevsky, who identifies the conflict with the lines between the two friends: Angie trying to keep Mart at his side, as a fellow man, who never wants to grow up, and lives in the phantasy land of hard-boiled detective novels.

After winning an Oscar for her part in Marty, the Spanish director Juan Antonio Bardem would cast Blair in his subversive anti-Franco feature Calle Mayor, where she plays another unfortunate female in a story about three bored young men, one of whom pretends to be in love with her, while his friends support this illusion. Sixty years later, Marty’s humane message is still strong, and the acting is outstanding, avoiding sentimentality at all times as its simple appeal shines through. 

NOW OUT ON DUAL FORMAT COURTESY OF EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA

 

 

 

Sundance London 2018 | 31 May – 3 June

Once again Robert Redford brings twelve of the best indie feature films that premiered in Utah this January, with opportunities to talk to the filmmakers and cast in a jamboree that kicks off on the long weekend of 31 May until 3 June.

Desiree Akhavan picked up the Grand Jury Prize for her comedy drama The Miseducation of Cameron Post in the original US festival, and seven films are directed by women along with a thrilling array of female leads on screen, and this year’s festival champions their voices with Toni Collette (Hereditary) amongst the stars to grace this glittering occasion taking place in Picturehouse Central, Leicester Square. Robert Redford will also be in attendance.

An Evening With Beverly Luff Linn (Director: Jim Hosking,

Screenwriters: Jim Hosking, David Wike) – Lulu Danger’s unsatisfying marriage takes a fortunate turn for the worse when a mysterious man from her past comes to town to perform an event called ‘An Evening With Beverly Luff Linn For One Magical Night Only’.

Principal cast: Aubrey Plaza, Emile Hirsch, Jemaine Clement, Matt Berry, Craig Robinson

Eighth Grade (Director/Screenwriter: Bo Burnham) – Thirteen-year-old Kayla endures the tidal wave of contemporary suburban adolescence as she makes her way through the last week of middle school — the end of her thus far disastrous eighth grade year — before she begins high school.

Principal cast: Elsie Fisher, Josh Hamilton

Generation Wealth (Director: Lauren Greenfield) – Lauren Greenfield’s postcard from the edge of the American Empire captures a portrait of a materialistic, image-obsessed culture. Simultaneously personal journey and historical essay, the film bears witness to the global boom–bust economy, the corrupted American Dream and the human costs of late stage capitalism, narcissism and greed.

Principal cast: Florian Homm, Tiffany Masters, Jaqueline Siegel

Half the Picture (Director: Amy Adrion) – At a pivotal moment for gender equality in Hollywood, successful women directors tell the stories of their art, lives and careers. Having endured a long history of systemic discrimination, women filmmakers may be getting the first glimpse of a future that values their voices equally.

Principal cast: Rosanna Arquette, Jamie Babbit, Emily Best

Hereditary (Director/Screenwriter: Ari Aster) – After their reclusive grandmother passes away, the Graham family tries to escape the dark fate they’ve inherited.

Principal cast: Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff, Ann Dowd, Milly Shapiro

Leave No Trace (Director: Debra Granik, Screenwriters: Debra Granik, Anne Rosellini) – A father and daughter live a perfect but mysterious existence in Forest Park, a beautiful nature reserve near Portland, Oregon, rarely making contact with the world. A small mistake tips them off to authorities sending them on an increasingly erratic journey in search of a place to call their own.

Principal cast: Ben Foster, Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie, Jeff Kober, Dale Dickey

The Miseducation of Cameron Post (Director: Desiree Akhavan, Screenwriters: Desiree Akhavan, Cecilia Frugiuele) –1993: after being caught having sex with the prom queen, a girl is forced into a gay conversion therapy center. Based on Emily Danforth’s acclaimed and controversial coming-of-age novel.

Principal cast: Chloë Grace Moretz, Sasha Lane, Forrest Goodluck, John Gallagher Jr., Jennifer Ehle.

Never Goin’ Back (Director/Screenwriter: Augustine Frizzell) –Jessie and Angela, high school dropout BFFs, are taking a week off to chill at the beach. Too bad their house got robbed, rent’s due, they’re about to get fired and they’re broke. Now they’ve gotta avoid eviction, stay out of jail and get to the beach, no matter what!!!

Principal cast: Maia Mitchell, Cami Morrone, Kyle Mooney, Joel Allen, Kendal Smith, Matthew Holcomb

Skate Kitchen (Director: Crystal Moselle, Screenwriters: Crystal Moselle, Ashlihan Unaldi) – Camille’s life as a lonely suburban teenager changes dramatically when she befriends a group of girl skateboarders. As she journeys deeper into this raw New York City subculture, she begins to understand the true meaning of friendship as well as her inner self.

Principal cast: Rachelle Vinberg, Dede Lovelace, Jaden Smith, Nina Moran, Ajani Russell, Kabrina Adams

The Tale (Director/Screenwriter: Jennifer Fox) – An investigation into one woman’s memory as she’s forced to re-examine her first sexual relationship and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive; based on the filmmaker’s own story.

Principal cast: Laura Dern, Isabelle Nélisse, Jason Ritter, Elizabeth Debicki, Ellen Burstyn, Common

Yardie (Director: Idris Elba, Screenwriters: Brock Norman Brock, Martin Stellman) – Jamaica, 1973. When a young boy witnesses his brother’s assassination, a powerful Don gives him a home. Ten years later he is sent on a mission to London. He reunites with his girlfriend and their daughter, but then the past catches up with them. Based on Victor Headley’s novel.

Principal cast: Aml Ameen, Shantol Jackson, Stephen Graham, Fraser James, Sheldon Shepherd, Everaldo Cleary

SURPRISE FILM! Following on from last year’s first ever surprise film, the hit rap story Patti Cake$, Sundance Film Festival: London will again feature a surprise showing.  No details as yet, but it was a favourite among audiences in Utah, and with just one screening this will be among the hottest of the hot tickets. The title will be revealed only when the opening credits roll. My bets are on Gustav Möller’s The Guilty, which picked up the World Cinema Audience Award back in January; or possibly Rudy Valdez’ drug documentary The Sentence, or it could even be Burden, which took the US Dramatic Audience Award for its story of a love affair between a villain and a woman who saves his soul. 

SUNDANCE LONDON RUNS FROM 31 MAY – 3 JUNE 2018 | TICKETS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Obey (2018)| *** Tribeca Film Festival 2018 | 21-28 April 2018

Dir.: Jamie Jones; Cast: Marcus Rutherford, Sophie Kennedy Clark, T’Nia Miller, James Atwell, Sam Gittins; UK 2018, 93 min.

Jamie Jones’ feature debut takes place during the London riots in August 2014, after the police killing of Mark Duggan in North London. Black teenager Leon has a hard time, seeking refuge in a small gang, while his mother sinks deeper and deeper into alcohol dependency. But when Jones introduces Twiggy, a young white middle-class woman, who supports the urban youth, the narrative takes a radical change from the usual “hard-luck” story of young black males.

Until he meets Twiggy, the only thing Leon (Rutherford) enjoys is boxing in a dilapidated local gym. His mother Chelsea (Miller) has shacked up with a violent boyfriend called Chris (Atwell), who beats up both mother and son. Meanwhile, Twiggy (Kennedy Clarke) meanwhile, runs around with a camera, taking photos of the gang and police violence. Living in a squat with boyfriend Anton (Gittins), she makes a wild entrance, kissing another woman at a party – but this does not deter Leon from falling for her. Being mocked by his gang members for fancying “Blondie”, Leon goes on a houseboat trip with Twiggy and Anton, interrupting the near-permanent street violence for a romantic outing. After a fight with Chris, Leon enters Twiggy’s flat, and she looks after his wounds, whilst Anton has a deep post-coital sleep. When the police storm the squat in the morning, Anton is arrested, but Leon and Twiggy escape, indulging in alcohol and weed in Leon’s flat where they consummate their relationship. But when Leon wakes up, Twiggy is gone and he later discovers the truth about his lover as the story down-spirals into a violent finale.

DoP Albert Salas handheld camera captures the chaotic violence and Leon’s emotional turmoil. The moment he leaves the security of his gang, he loses his personal perspective and self esteem. Seeing Twiggy as a sort of life-boat, which might take him out of the permanent misery, he fails to grasp that this woman is not only white (which makes him a traitor in the eyes of his peers), but a middle class one at that – one of the do-gooders, who protest against their own privileged status by making a guest appearance in the ghetto-like slums, before returning with her boyfriend to the safety of suburbia when the going gets too rough. Obey is by no means perfect, but superior to many features of the same sub-genre. AS

WORLD PREMIERE IN COMPETITION AT TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL | NEW YORK 2018

The World is Yours (2018) ***


Dir: Romain Gavras | Writers: Noe Debre, Romain Gavras, Karim Boukercha | Cast: Isabelle Adjani, Vincent Cassel, Francois Damiens, Karim Leklou, Norbert Ferrer | Comedy Crime | France | 100′

Romain Gavras’ rambunctiously glossy gangster comedy is stashed with French household names and beats as it sweeps towards a preposterous finale. Best known for his music videos for the likes of Jaz-Z, this energetically stylish comedy is full of French verve and punchy argot making it less accessible for non-French speakers with its raucous, over-the top absurdity. Isabelle Adjani and Vincent Cassel boost a brash and ballsy plotline that sees a North African crime syndicate dream of better things from their humble Paris council flats. A Prophet‘s Karim Leklou (Fares) is the surprising standout as a feisty grifter who is desperate to make some cash so he can retire to the sun. Meanwhile his unmanageable matriarch Danny (Adjani) has her own hair-brained schemes, so it’s up to mid-mannered Fares and his motley crew to make it all happen. Bonkers but delightful if you like this kind of French caper. MT

NOW SHOWING AT CINE LUMIERE FROM 25 APRIL 2019 | QUINZAINE 2018

Never Steady, Never Still (2017) ****

Dir/Writer: Kathleen Hepburn | Cast: Shirley Henderson, Nicholas Campbell, Theodore Pellerin | Canada. 2017. 110′.

At the heart of this haunting portrait of family dissonance is Shirley Henderson’s dramatic performance as a dignified independent woman brought to her wits’ end by Parkinson’s disease. And if ever there was a location the echoed the mournful storyline it is the alienating lakeside landscapes of snowbound British Columbia, Canada, where this intimate exploration of strained but resilient kindred spirits unfolds in Kathleen Hepburn’s resonant debut, brought to life by DoP Norm Li’s impressive 35mm camerawork.

As films go this is a gruelling and devastating watch despite its worthwhile intentions. Judy (Henderson) is only in her fifties but has been struck down with the debilitating neural affliction and inured to the constant suffering since early in her marriage to  to Ed (Nicholas Campbell). And the pair live in mutual affectionate acceptance of one another despite the restrictions Judy’s illness has posed on their relationship. Not so their 19-year-old son Jamie (Theodore Pellerin) who is a sexually frustrated angry young man, at odds with himself and everyone round him in his male-orientated work in Alberta’s oil business. And in some ways this makes a man of him, although he is clearly troubled and drifting aimlessly through life, occasionally seeing his only friend Danny (Jonathan Whitesell). When he does meet a girl his opening gambit is along the lines of “do you like to fool around?”.

When his parents come under pressure at home, it’s clear that Jamie must knuckle down and offer support. In some ways Jamie’s mental state (never steady, never still) seems to channel his mother’s physical disability but clearly he’s been affected by the restrictions of his upbringing in feeling affection for his mother, but repelled by physical contact with her. So his attempts to engage with women his age are fraught with ambivalent awkwardness. He has brief encounters with a prostitute and local school girl local girl Kaly (Mary Galloway). Hepburn avoids sentimentality or melodrama using instead the quietly moving emotional heft of Judy’s devastating illness and compassion for her son as the dramatic counterpoint to his deeply troubled mental state in this stunning first feature. MT

PREVIEWING AT EAST END FILM FESTIVAL | 15 APRIL 2018 and On general release from FRIDAY 20 APRIL 2018

https://youtu.be/3a6ca9bm6NA

The Marriage (2017) East End Film Festival 2018


Dir.: Blerta Zeqiri; Cast: Alban Ukaj, Adriana Matoshi, Genc Salihu, Vjosa Abazi; Albania/Kosovo 2017, 97 min.

Blerta Zeqiri’s debut feature is set in Kosovo’s capital Pristina and features – surprisingly – a gay/straight ménage-a-trois. Shot in warm colours by the handheld camera of DoP Sevdije Kastrati, The Marriage always comes up with new twists, keeping us engaged throughout

We first meet Bekim (Ukaj) and his finance Anita (Matoshi) at the border between Kosovo and Serbia, where this Kosovar couple is waiting to identify the bodies Anita’s parents, who were killed in Kosovo War of 1999. This gruesome scene in a makeshift tent is a pitiful sight especially as Anita cannot identify her parents. On the way home in their car to Pristina, were Bekim runs a bar and Anita works in fashion shop, they discuss of Nol (Genc), a musician, who had a successful career in Paris and has now come back to their village. Anita is well aware of the friendship between the two men, but does not know that they have been lovers for a long time. In Bekim’s bar, both men lie to Anita, claiming hat they are depressed because Nol had to give up the love of his life – the implications are clear, that this person is a woman. Later Bekim goes a step further, and tells Anita that Nol is the lover his married sister Zana (Abazi).

What emerges is a story of lies and obfuscation based partly on shame – Islam takes a hard line decrying homosexuality – but this is compounded by a man’s inability to be straight and honest with his wife. Nol too is clearly is confused and is unable, despite his feelings, to be frank with Bekim, refusing to leave the village with and start again in France.

The gay sex is very graphic, on the whole Blerta never shrinks from showing a realistic picture of the male relationship. The atmosphere in the bar scene is testosterone-laden, and when Bekim is approached by a  man who wants to use his bar for an LGBT celebration, Bekim refuses and leaves the table angrily. Neither Bekim’s nor Anita’s extended family has an idea about Bekim’s sexual orientation, gaydom is unacceptable for them. Zeqiri never shrinks from showing the duplicity, Bekim’s fear and betrayal are always played out in the crassest possible way. This is a very brave debut, with brilliant ensemble acting and realistic ending. AS

SCREENING DURING EAST END FILM FESTIVAL 2018

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2018)

Dir: Mike Newell | Writer: Kevin Hood, Thomas Bezucha, Don Roos, Annie Barrows (novel) | Cast: Lily James, Matthew Goode, Jessica Brown Findlay, Michiel Huisman, Tom Courtney, Katherine Parkinson, Glen Powell, Penelope Wilton | 124′ | UK

Mike Newell’s screen adaptation of a chicklit novel is as over-stuffed in the early scenes as its title suggests, but stick with it and you’ll be won over by this moving story of book club camaraderie made memorable by its dazzling performances and appealing characters. What’s more, you’ll be rushing to visit the picturesque island in the English Channel, and you might even join a book club.

It all starts in 1946, when an plummy young novelist Juliet Ashton (James) is struggling for inspiration and about to set off on a book tour with her agent Sidney (Matthew Goode in superb form). A surprise fan letter or sorts from a Guernsey resident Dawsey (Michiel Hiusman) captures her imagination, so leaving Sidney and her American boyfriend in the lurch, she sets off instead to the former Nazi-occupied Channel Island, intrigued by this interesting man and his book club with a rather strange name. It soon turns out that Dawsey is rather a dish himself, and his potato pie society was formed out of necessity during an encounter with German soldiers on a post-curfew night out.

Newell and his team have captured the verdant lushness of summer and the settings and period details are ravishingly recreated, and its inhabitants turn out to be delightful as well. Plot-wise there is sufficient intrigue and dramatic heft to keep our interest stimulated, the dialogue delicately pokes fun in all the right places, and the support cast are really charming and genuine: Katherine Parkinson is convincingly amusing at an loopy earth-mother and Tom Courteney as the amiable postmaster. Penelope Wilton overdoes it slightly as the mother who’s lost her daughter, in a lukewarm subplot that whilst adding a scintilla of wartime intrigue and realism, feels somewhat submerged by the upbeat nature of the main storyline. This is about the positiveness of collaboration and community, rather than the negativeness of division and conflict.

And although Juliet’s enthusiasm and free-spiritedness drives the narrative forward at first, the romance that develops at its heart untimately feels unconvincing as lovers have no palpable chemistry whatsoever. Luckily the strength of the other performances generates enough enjoyment to carry this through, despite this rather fluffy and schematic ending. MT

The Leisure Seeker (2017) ***


Dir: PAOLO VIRZÌ | Drama Italy / 112’ |cast: Helen Mirren, Donald Sutherland

Paolo Virzi’s drama is based on the novel by Michael Zadoorian and stars Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland in a timely tale about an elderly couple looking for one last hurrah on a bittersweet final road trip that gives full throttle to Dylan Thomas’ redolent words: “Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Those on their last legs will heartily appreciate the sentiment  embodied and expressed here with feeling by Donald Sutherland and Helen Mirren, who share a palpable onscreen chemistry as the amiable pair embarking on their odyssey with the full knowledge that this is likely to be their last together, and is fraught with ups and downs, and memories both good and bad.

The English-language debut of Italian director Paolo Virzì (Like Crazy), The Leisure Seeker sees Ella (Mirren) dying of cancer and John (Sutherland) stumbling on the foothills of Alzheimer’s disease. Neither is remotely interested in quietly fading away in a nursing home or hospice, at least not until they are forced to. So they hit the road in their vintage car on a trip from Boston to Florida with John behind the wheel. This is a tribute to a life lived to the fullest by people who have are cognisant of their plight; it is never maudling or downbeat but admits the inevitable with grace and good humour. The film also offers up an eventful travelogue of this part of America, brimming with insight into how the world has changed as they pass through the cities that have shaped and punctuated their time together. Keats put it rather well when he said: “Live life to the lees” – it’s a quote that acknowledges a life lived pleasurably and with gusto, and this is the feeling that permeates this entertaining tribute, offering a little taster of what’s come for all of us, and a timely reminder to make the most of it while we can. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE |

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2017 | IN COMPETITION

 

Let the Sun Shine In | Un Beau Soleil Intérieur (2017) Mubi

Writer|Dir: Claire Denis, Christine Angot | Cast: Juliette Binoche, Gérard Depardieu, Valéria Bruni Tedeschi | 94min | Comedy drama

Claire Denis’ talents extend across the genres – her terrific comedy debut Un Beau Soleil Intérieur starring Juliette Binoche, Gérard Depardieu and Valéria Bruni-Tedeschi sees a trio of Parisians keen to find love the second, third (or possibly even) twentieth time around. Previously known as Des Lunettes Noires, a more edgy and intriguing title that conveys the romantic pleasures of the time discretely known as ‘un certain age’, this drôle and triumphantly upbeat satire will make you chuckle knowingly, rather than laugh out loud.

Binoche plays Isabelle, a recently divorced mother in her early fifties keen to rediscover the buzz of sex and lasting love again and all the other things that make ‘la vie du couple’ worth living, after the pressures of raising a family or struggling to build a life. Surrounded by a series of smucks – to put it politely – she feels that romance is already a thing of the past. Isabelle is ‘special’ in that mercurial way that becomes amusingly familiar as Denis’ insightfully intelligent narrative unfolds. She has reached a time when wisdom and experience enriches everyday life, but when it comes to love we are still often teenagers.

Isabelle welcomes the familiar routines of daily life, but so do the men she encounters, particularly one pompous banker (Xavier Beauvois) who is the ultimate control freak and useless in bed. But she falls in love all the same, due to her newfound ability to tolerate even the worst of what’s left men-wise. The banker is clearly unable to leave his wife, so Isabelle moves on to Sylvain (Paul Blain), a louche and sensual man she meets in a bar where they dance to they strains of “At Last’  – and of course you know this is just another dream. Then there is alcoholic actor (Nicolas Duvauchelle) who satisfies her sexually but is too fond of himself to far for anybody else. Isabelle is looking for chemistry but also someone from her ‘milieu’, but at this stage in the game most  available men are single for a reason: they are either geeks or deeply unattractive, but totally unaware of it. And ex-husband François (Laurent Grevill) still serves as a ‘friend with benefits’, occasionally popping back on the scene, although her daughter is only glimpsed briefly.

Apart from the acutely observed witty script, the emotional nuances of Binoche’s performances are what makes this so enjoyable. Un Beau Soleil never takes itself too seriously, and is a complete departure from her dramas such as Beau Travail and White Material, and is probably most like her 2002 outing Friday Night. And the final scene where she visits Gerard Depardieu’s psychic is such a perceptive interplay between clever dialogue and intuitive performances it’s a joy to behold. MT

NOW ON MUBI

 

 

 

Truth or Dare (2017) **

Dir.: Jeff Wadlow; Cast: Lucy Hale, Tyler Posey, Violette Bene, Hayden Szeto; USA 2018, 100′.

Director/co-writer Jeff Wadlow is behind the popular Purge franchise with together  Blumhouse Productions, and has tried the same thing with Truth or Dare with an that ending hints at a sequel, but is its audience gullible enough. On present form, the answer is probably yes.

On their final Spring Break, a group of college students take a vacation in Mexico, where they are lured into a Truth or Dare game by a mysterious stranger in a spooky church cellar. Retuning home, they soon discover that the game has followed them. If any of the participants refuses a challenge; lies or fails a dare task, she/he is dead. The first victim, Ronnie sets the tone: he is dared to show all, standing up on the pool table, but chickens out. The demon punishes Ronnie with sudden death: he falls of the table and crashes his head in. Perhaps not the most sensational start to a killing spree; but even though blood is not spared, it soon turns out that Truth or Dare is more interested in the hidden secrets of its participants. Does goody-two-shoes Olivia (Hale), who rather would have rather spent a week doing humanitarian work than go to Mexico, really fancy Lucas (Posey), the philandering boyfriend of Olivia’s best friend Markie (Beane)?. And has Olivia also a hand in the suicide of Markie’s father? And then there is Brad (Szeto), who can’t confess to his homophobic cop-father that he is gay, and is duly killed by his Dad’s fellow-cop. Finally. Olivia gets on a trip to Mexico to interview a mute ex-nun, the sole survivor of a massacre in the church where the ordeal first started.

Symbolic for the whole enterprise is a scene where one of the afflicted has to drink a bottle of spirits whilst walking on the roof of the house, spikes looming, and her helpers running along the house with a mattress. Truth or Dare is anything but frightening – very much Scooby Doo meets Gossip Girl. AS

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 16 APRIL 2018

Big Fish and Begonia (2017) *****

Directors: Xuan Liang, Chung Zhang | Chinese Anime | Mandarin | 106′

A delicately drawn and ravishingly beautiful Chinese anime enveloped in the same social concerns and passion for folklore as Studio Ghibli and drawing comparison with Spirited Away. The shape-shifting fantasy tells a tender rites of passage tale of love and yearning between the spiritual and animal kingdom. With good triumphing over evil, Big Fish & Begonia is a fable with weighty themes that will enchant and absorb adults, but with a cute and lovable story for younger audiences with its subtle blend of 2D and CG animation, superbly rendered in a rainbow palette of hand-drawn images.

Epic in its thematic richness, Xuan Liang and Chung Zhang’s indie project is very much a labour of love that gradually came together over a period of 12 years due to financing constrictions . This version is in Mandarin with English subtitles gives a more atmospheric feel to the piece and follows the aged narrator as she looks back wistfully at her teenage years, and the time when she as Chun (Guanlin Ji) was forced to leave her spiritual home and return for a week long ‘rite of passage’ back to the real world where she takes the form of a dolphin. Shortly arriving beaming up to this surprisingly beautiful human kingdom she gets trapped in fishermen’s nets and is rescued by a soulful human man called Kun (Xu Weizhou) who tragically perishes during the ordeal leaving Chun moved to repay him for his sacrifice and bravery by seeking the help of the spirit world, and leaving a MacGuffin in the shape of a small mouth organ.

What follows is both touching and mesmerising: Chun is given the chance to forfeit part of her own life and she diligently searches for her saviour in a magical repository for human spirits, guarded by a one-eyed mahjong-playing old hag, who rules the territory and bristles with wickedness. Chun’s spiritual connection with Kun (who takes the form of an adorable baby dolphin) drives the narrative forward – the two’s souls are intertwined in a love match that very much captures the words of Noel Coward and could serve as an alternative retro title: “Time and Tide can never sever Those whom love has bound together”. And this is the bond that keeps the pair united throughout all their endless trials and tribulations. Themes of fate and destiny come into play again and again, and the mesmerising storyline delivers a powerful message: that mortals must make sacrifices on a spiritual level if they want to change the course of destiny.

Meanwhile, Chun has an admirer in the real world (Shangqing Su), a young man who travels with her for her week’s trial, and stays by her side, hoping for his love to be reciprocated by his acts of derring-do and sacrifice: he wrestles a two-headed snake and dives into a disgusting cesspit – but Chun regards him as a brother figure, her heart is already taken by Kun, and she is totally absorbed in her selfless efforts to get him back into her human world.

Xuan Liang and Chung Zhang have together created a fabulous fantasy fable based on Chinese Daoist culture and folklore, complete with traditional temples and furniture inspired by the Southern Chinese traditional design and architecture (although it’s filmed in Beijing and much of the settings also echo this region). Chun even wears earrings made of jade. Water is once again the symbol of emotion, re-birth and creation and forms a nurturing and flexible conduit between the real and spiritual world we inhabit. This is an awe-inspiring and adorable anime, the final scene leaves us with a message of hope: in a tribute to both the strength and the everlasting tenderness at the heart of true love. MT

OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 18 APRIL 2018

 

 

Malaga Film Festival | 13 -22 April 2018

The 21st Edition of Malaga Film Festival kicks off later this week with the accent on Spanish and Latin American titles. All screenings are shown in Spanish and their original languages.

The Official competition awards the Golden Biznaga to the winning title and there is also a strong documentary strand of 46 features (including World Premieres) and a sidebar screening 72 shorts. Malaga festival is easily accessible, taking place in the smattering of Belle Epoque and arthouse cinemas of the Old Town, in the shadow of the city’s Alcazaba. These comprise the large Cervantes Theatre (for the opening gala), the Albéniz Cinema and the Echegaray Theatre, and the events are well-attended by the locals and a small international crowd. Tickets are reasonably priced at 6 euros making the festival a worthwhile weekend destination for Spanish speakers, after the Easter crowds have left.

MALAGA FILM FESTIVAL | 13-22 APRIL 2018

 

 

Canada Now Festival | 3-6 May 2018

CANADA NOW festival brings the best of new Canadian cinema to the Curzon Soho London, before a ten-film national tour of the UK .

The festival opens with the London premiere of RUMBLE: THE INDIANS WHO ROCKED THE WORLD, a searingly entertaining feature documentary exploring the Indigenous influence on blues, folk, jazz, rock, rap and metal. The Festival will close with LET THERE BE LIGHT, a documentary based on the true story of how scientists from 37 countries have come together in the south of France in an attempt to build the most complex machine ever attempted: An artificial sun.

Alongside seven premieres, CANADA NOW also includes a repertory screening of Patricia Rozema’s 1987 masterpiece I’VE HEARD THE MERMAIDS SINGING. 

This second edition tackles a broad range of stories, from issues of race in BLACK COP, to matters of the heart in MEDITATION PARK and from addiction drama in MARY GOES ROUND to matters of divine intervention in ALL YOU CAN EAT BUDDHA.

CANADA NOW | MAY 2018 | NATIONWIDE 

A Gentle Creature (2017)

Dir: Sergei Loznitsa | Cast: Vasilina Makovtseva |143min | Drama

A Gentle Creature is a short story by Dostoevsky, narrated by a middle-aged pawnbroker whose wife kills herself. The tale was first adapted by Robert Bresson in 1969 as his first colour film. Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa’s sombre screen adaptation is a disquieting psychodrama that imagines the bitter frustration of a descent into Hell for its central character, an earnest young woman trying to track down her husband in the intractable Russian prison system.

This parable about contemporary bureaucracy and human rights it is also a cynical takedown of ‘everyman’. The woman, played thoughtfully by Vasilina Makovtseva, has decent intentions that lead her into a nightmarish journey that never ends. The film works on two levels: as a Kafkaesque psychological thriller and a brazen indictment of Russian society. A bit long at over two hours but deadly potent none the less.

From her ramshakle cottage in the middle of nowhere, the woman sets off to personally re-deliver a parcel of homemade food and clothing, returned to her by the prison authorities. The claustrophobic bus journey is fraught with vile and unhelpful characters who bicker and bait each other, spouting vile opinions that provide rich insight into Russian society and its current concerns. The most memorable scene is a mesmerising dream sequence that glistens with shades of Kubrick s Eyes Wide Shut offering the characters she meets along the way an opportunity to expound on the greatness of Mother Russia, but this culminates with a brutal rape scene as the woman is driven away in a van, full of misguided hope of visiting her husband. Loznita’s  modern day ‘Dante’s Inferno’ has no happy end. It is a mournful but moving reflection on the misery of mankind and the unkindness of strangers populating our broken society. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 16 APRIL 2018

 

 

 

 

Custody (2017) ****

Dir|Writer: Xavier Legrand | Denis Menochet, Lea Drucker, Thomas Gioria, Mathilde Auneveu | 93’

A broken marriage leads to a bitter custody battle in this intense family drama than won the coveted Best Director award at Venice for Xavier Legrand.

There have been some superb movies made about custody battles. This riveting drama from French actor-director Xavier Legrand is certainly among the best, braced by the filmmaker’s unerring authority and sense of what to do next, scene after scene, as the family at its centre splinters into chaos.

As Custody opens, Miriam and Antoine Besson have just divorced. Their young son, Julien, sits in family court reading out a letter denouncing his father. His sister, Josephine, having recently reached the age of majority, is not part of the dispute. Antoine is described as a violent monster, yet in court appears to be a model of calm reserve. Despite Miriam’s appeals for sole custody — also Julien’s preference — the judge gives the parents shared custody. And Antoine is not a two-dimensional beast. He tries to re-establish a relationship with a son who feels paralyzed by the competing emotional demands of his father and his mother, who will stop at nothing to remove both Julien and herself from her ex-husband’s life.

Custody is harrowing and complex, a domestic nightmare that unfolds to reveal an inventory of abuses both overt and subtle. Denis Ménochet and Léa Drucker are finely attuned to these demands as Antoine and Miriam, while Thomas Gioria inhabits the haunted Julien with heartwrenching naturalism. Legrand dissects the Bessons’ family dynamic coolly, with impressive restraint and intuition, yet still evokes profound sympathy for his protagonists. The result is mesmerizing.

Xavier Legrand is a French actor, writer, and director who received his training at the National Conservatory of Paris. His short film Just Before Losing Everything (13) was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short. Custody (17) is his debut feature film.

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 13 APRIL 2018

 

House Without Roof (2017) **** | East End Film Festival 2018

Dir.: Soleen Yusef; Cast: Mina Sadic, Sasun Sayan, Murat Seven, Wedad Sabri, Ahmet Zirek; Iraq/Germany/Qatar 2016, 117 min.

Writer/director Soleen Yusef was born to Kurdish parents, and emigrated to Germany with her family when she was nine. The intricate script is one of the highlights of this self-assured and densely plotted debut, a convincingly fraught road movie, which is actually her graduation film from the Baden-Würtemberg Film School.

After the fall of Sadam Hussein, Kurdish siblings Liya (Sadic), Jan (Sayan) and Alan (Seven) are not getting on well in their new life in Germany. Their mother Gule (Sabri) wants to go back with them  to their Kurdish homeland, but the rather wayward Alan will have nothing of it. Gule dies suddenly and her Will reveals the request to be buried next to her husband – a hero from the war against Iraq in 1990 – on Kurdish soil. The three siblings cannot agree about anything so make their separate ways back to Duhok, where Liya meets a taxi driver, who will play a significant role in the forthcoming odyssey. They all finally come together in the house of uncle Ferad (Zirek), and it becomes clear that well-balanced Jan (whose wife is expecting a child back in Germany) has a secret. When Ferad categorically denies the siblings the right to bury their mother next to their father, the real facts starts to emerge about this so-called father who was anything but a hero: he was a traitor who took his own life. Their final journey back to the village is fraught with ups and down as the truth is finally revealed.

Yusef deftly masters her material, keeping the plot together, despite near-surrealistic incident made more bizarre by the awkward trio conversing in German. Liya, whose name means ‘Patience’ in translation, is just the opposite. DoP Stephan Burchardt’s lively handheld camera creates the right look for this topsy-turvy family drama, mixing close-ups mixed with long panning shots over the glorious landscape. Sadic leads the brilliant cast, never wavering from her efforts to put her foot down in a male dominated society – even if she has to copy some bad habits of the opposite sex. AS

SCREENING DURING EAST END FILM FESTIVAL 2018

Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts (2017) **** | East End Film Festival 2018

Dir: Mouly Surya  Writer: Rama Adi| Drama | Indonesia | 92′

There a dark humour to this feminist parable set in the enchanting widescreen skyscapes and exotic shady interiors of a remote Indonesian village in the South Pacific, where revenge is a dish best served with calm and a dash of strychnine by the central character Marlina, played gracefully and with deadpan conviction by Marsha Timothy.

Although Mouly Surya’s third feature is a modern story from a Muslim country it feels distinctly stuck in the Dark Ages, certainly where attitudes towards to the fairer sex are concerned. Played out in four segments, as the title suggests, the film explores how a young widow deals with the aftermath of being robbed of her livestock and then raped by seven bandits who seem to think they have done her a favour. Clearly the pleasure is hers, as we discover early on in this amusingly arcane tale.

Yunus Pasolang’s limpid lensing and Zeke Khaseli and Yudhi Arfani’s redolent trumpet soundtrack often bring to mind a Sergio Leone Western, albeit one set in Sumba Island, to the north east of Australia. This languid drama takes its time and is surprisingly gentle and poetic in contrast to its violent subject matter. There are also touches of surreal artistry at play: in one scene Marlina is followed down the dusty road in the sweltering heat by her headless rapist – or perhaps it’s just a mirage. But the tone is gently upbeat, the pace leisurely but bristling with a low level tension as the story unfurls in a seemingly lawless community where casual violence is prone to rear its head at any given moment, and not just on the part of the male population.

Indonesian men clearly think themselves the superior sex, and are a querulous and unsympathetic lot, but women are not always supportive of each other either, in the Solomon Islands. Marlina is plainly irritated by the heavily pregnant Novi (Dea Panendra) who talks none stop and insists on following her to the Police station in the hope of protection and further attack from the rest of the gang. Marlina’s gruesome package is clearly a talking point amongst locals during their bus journey — but the pair eventually reach their destination despite in an eventful journey that’s as breathtaking as it is satisfyingly weird. MT

EAST END FILM FESTIVAL | 2018 | 12 April 2018

Tigre (2017) | East End Film Festival 2018 ***

Dir: Silvina Schnicer/Ulises Porra Guardiola | Drama | Arg | 90′

Although a mother and son reunion is at the heart of this atmospheric debut from Argentinian duo Silvina Schnicer and Ulises Porra Guardiola, it is the rapport and shared histories of the female characters that makes this so engaging and enjoyable.

TIGRE follows sixty-something Rina and her friend Elena back to the ramshackle family estancia where they hope to enjoy an extended get together in the Tigre Delta. The sweltering humidity and local mores of the lush tropical river setting lend a surreal almost sinister undertone to proceedings. But this is not just a summer retreat, Rina needs the help of her estranged son to stand firm against the developers, who are threatening to take over land which has always been in their family and part of their heritage. And it’s this thorny thread that drives the narrative forward, providing an astringent tension in contrast to the relaxed reveries of the female characters.

TIGRE  shares similar thematic concerns with fellow Argentinian Milagros Mumenthaler’s The Idea of a Lake and there are also comparisons to be drawn with Jorge Thielen Armand’s recent docu-drama La Soledad in which a family’s last bastion, a dilapidated villa in Caracas, provide a fitting metaphor for Venezuela’s current economic crisis. Armand’s poetic paean to his grandparents home is a mournful one full of exotic birdsong, and here too the ambient sounds of nature provide the necessary calm to comtemplate this issues at play. Clearly, property and home are the salient elements in a woman’s life when menfolk are absent or unreliable, as they appear to be again here in Argentina. Unfortunately, the directors weaken the film’s dramatic heft with a preponderance of disparate elements, that while offering intrigue, detract from the central narrative. Despite all this and the film’s rather tricksy ending, TIGRE is a beguiling and lushly cinematic feature underpinned by its weighty social and cultural themes. MT

SCREENING AT EAST END FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | 15 APRIL 2018

Ash is Purest White (2018) ****

Dir: Zhangke Jia | Cast: Tao Zhao, Fan Liao, Xiaogang Feng | Drama | China | 140’

ASH IS PUREST WHITE portrays the eventful relationship between a Chinese petty criminal and the woman whose loyalty to him never dies. This rolling contemplative saga occasionally veers off the beaten track with its indulgent running time of 141 minutes but will still appeal to the director’s ardent followers, featuring the same rough-edged characters who we first meet in 2001 and follow until the bittersweet denouement on New year’s Eve 2018.

Star of Shanxi’s creative community Jia Zhang-ke trained as an architect near his native mining town of Fenyang, just South of Beijing, and brings his aesthetic flair and some magnificent landscapes to this lasting love story set in a dying era. The director’s forte is his graceful way of portraying China’s traditional way of life with its penchant for ceremonial drumming and white-gloved officials, with the chaotic new era vibrantly captured in Eric Gautier’s resplendent camerawork.

Opening in 2001 in his Shanxi homeland, his wife and regular collaborator Zhao Tao plays the confident delicate local beauty Qiao, who frequents the nightclub of her boyfriend Guo Bin (Liao Fan/Black Coal, Thin Ice). And she is no arm candy, establishing herself as a keen advocate of the traditional jianghu codes of loyalty while embracing the modern world, spryly dancing to Village People’s YMCA.

Respectful of her ageing father she is more playfully assertive with Bin, and when he is assaulted by thugs on motorbikes, she manages to save him by firing shots into the air in a brutal scene that really takes our breath away, but also secures her a spell in prison where she is unwilling to grass on her boyfriend about the ownership of the firearm.

The second act is an upbeat affair that follows Qiao’s release in 2006, and treats us to a sumptuous journey down the Yangtze River in another nod to the sinking glory of the old China versus the brash new world. Qin has proved a feckless boyfriend and is no longer on the scene, but Qiao is keen not to let him slip away so easily, after her sustained loyalty. And when she is robbed of her cash and passport, she bounces back cleverly in some amusing scenes where she gate-crashes a wedding to enjoy the banquet, desperate for food. Qiao finally confronts Bin in a soulful and moving episode that is visually captivating for its exquisitely calm contemplation of the end of their romance.

As we leave Qiao she is running a gambling hall, and Bin is back in her life, attracted to her strength of character and tenacity. The two actors are mesmerising to watch in their commandingly restrained yet natural performances, exuding a fascinating chemistry that will remain in the memory for a long time after the credits have rolled. MT

NOW ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM 26th APRIL 2019

 

Radiator (2014) | Home Ent Release

Writer/Director: Tom Browne | Cast: Daniel Cerquiera, Gemma Jones, Richard Johnson Leonard | 80mins  UK   Drama

Many of us will be familiar with the story at the heart of Tom Browne’s astonishing debut RADIATOR. A three-hander, it takes place in a ramshackle house in the Cumbrian countryside where middle-aged Daniel’s parents are coping with life in their 80s. Leonard, his father (Richard Johnson, sadly no longer with us), is unable to get upstairs anymore and has taken up residence on the sofa, issuing orders, and frustrated at not being in control anymore. Mariah, (a touching turn from Gemma Jones), potters endlessly around the domestic muddle, her confusion possibly down to senile dementia – she is a kindly but a desperate figure. Daniel’s personal life is far from satisfactory (he is played convincingly by Daniel Cerqueira who co-wrote the screenplay), yet he feels permanently at odds with the situation, powerless as he probably did as a child, and guilty now as an adult, taking time off work to support them, whilst being the permanent whipping boy of his curmudgeonly dad. Venturing into the village, he bumps into a neighbour who chides him further for his lack of parental support.

Tom Browne’s story resonates deeply with us all, or will eventually, as our parents become our own badly-behaved children. Just like Daniel, we grapple with our own lives and our own, often troubled, offspring. Middle-age turns into a three-pronged assault course, unless we have been bereaved already.

In Browne’s case the film is based on his own reality, with the actors playing his own parents. The narrative mirrors our own experience, and offers up empathy and strangely, a feeling of relief: a gut-wrenching feeling of pity, an overwhelming desire to help, an occasional feeling of anger at our parents’ self-centredness, a niggling feeling that this will be us one day: a desperate need to be with them as much as possible – in case they die any minute – yet a powerful reluctance not to lose the threads of our own difficult, lives. Old age is the coalface where we really get to know our parents; in the frustrations of dressing and handling their oblutions, and we argue over domestic detritus as they subtly or overtly undermine us, due to their own feelings of helplessness or even disappointment – as Leonard does here with Daniel. What he makes clear in this often poignant drama, is that parents are not going to change or even listen to our efforts or suggestions – the die is cast and we are still, in their minds, incapable children – their children, although we are now affectively their parents. No amount of shouting or arguing will change the way they have always behaved, we just have to accept and understand.

Affectingly, Browne has set the film in his parents’ house, still almost untouched since their recent deaths. It provides interesting food for thought, unless you’ve already choked on its unpalatable reality. MT

NOW ON ITUNES AND AMAZON FROM 2 APRIL 2018 | RADIATOR WON THE AUDIENCE AWARD AT GLASGOW FILM FESTIVAL 2014 

 

 

The Big City (1963) (Mahanagar) | Bfi Big Screen Classics

Dir/Writer: Satyajit Ray (Based on a short story by Narendranath Mitra) | Cast: Madhabi Mukherjee, Anil Chatterjee, Haren Chatterjee, Sefalika Devi, Prasenjit Sarkar, Vicky Redwood | 131′   Drama | Bengali with English subtitles

Satyajit Ray found international fame with his 1955 Palme D’Or Winner Pather Panchali. Sombre in tone and intimate in feel, The Big City is another of the director’s big screen classics: an enduring story with universal themes that carries a message of hope.

 

In 1950s Calcutta, a simple family’s dynamic shifts gradually when the wife and mother takes a job to supplement the family income during a period of social and economic upheaval. In her debut role for the legendary director, Madhabi Mukherjee is quietly appealing and brings a warmth and authenticity to her role as a woman whose primary aim is to be loving and supportive to her son Pintu (Prasenjit Sarkar), husband Subrata (Anil Chatterjee) and his elderly parents. But Subrata’s ego and pride are challenged by Arati’s new-found confidence in the workplace, placing a strain on their homelife and calling into question his status as breadwinner and head of the household. With great subtlety and perception and an atmospheric score, Satyajit Ray tenderly evokes how change can affect the status quo in a marriage, sending ripples of discontent that are capable of causing family breakdown. Arati is a sensitive and unselfish woman, and with her considerable charm Ray illustrates how she cleverly keeps the family together by massaging men’s egos, without rocking the boat. A low-key delight. MT.

from JULY 22 AND SELECTED UK WIDE CINEMAS  BFI SOUTHBANK 

 

Look Back in Anger (1959) | Woodfall – A Revolution in British Cinema

Dir: Tony Richardson | Script: John Osbourne, Nigel Neale | Cast: Richard Burton, Claire Bloom, Mary Ure, Edith Evans, Gary Raymond, Donald Pleasance | Drama | UK | 98′

In the 1950s the disaffected English working class had nowhere to vent their bitterness but their own cramped front rooms. And this is where Tony Richardson’s New Wave slice of social realism unspools (1959), based on John Osbourne’s original play, written three years earlier. The pair had just formed Woodfall Film Productions with their producer Harry Salesman, and LOOK BACK IN ANGER was Woodfall’s debut and Richardson’s first feature film and part of the so-called sub-genre of “Kitchen sink dramas” – a phrase coined by critic David Sylvester in his 1954 article about English trends with particular reference to an expressionist painting by John Bratby. The description somehow travelled over to the medium of film.

Electrifying in its portrayal of a marriage on the rocks in a squalid London attic, the film represented British kitchen sink drama at its most vehement; a scorching script and convincing characters fleshed out by Richard Burton’s tour de force, as the miserably chippy Jimmy Porter, who takes out the frustration of his mindless existence as a market trader on his long-suffering and gentle wife Alison (a suitably worn down Mary Ure) whose twee friend Helena, is a budding actress (Claire Bloom is perky form). Keeping the peace, or at least trying to, is his amiable but rather dozy lodger, Cliff (Gary Raymond), the perfect foil for Jimmy’s cantankerous mien. We all know the scene, it’s a rainy Sunday afternoon with nothing to do but read the papers and drink tea. Alison, to her credit, is doing some ironing, while her husband rants and raves in despair and intellectual frustration, their once passionate union has hit the buffers, mired in Jimmy’s resentment of her background of privilege, and sheer hatred of Phyllis Nelson Terry’s ‘Mummy’. But Jimmy is rude just for the sake of it. An endless drivel of mocking rhetoric pours out of him for want of anything better to do, apart from lazily playing his trumpet. Rather than channel his fury into a worthwhile cause, he rails at the darkness of his perceived hopelessness, seeking the monopoly on suffering, bereavement and the moral high ground on personal loss.

Richard Burton feels far too old for the part, but turns in a blazing portrayal of sheer malevolent anger, couching – as it often does – a deeply depressed individual desperate to make something more of his life, yet capable of individual acts of decency, such as his defence of market trader colleague Kapoor against the spiteful racism the Hindu untouchable encounters on the part of Jimmy’s compatriots, policed by Donald Pleasance’s officious warden Hurst. In actual fact, Jimmy is a poster boy for 21st century social media outbursts, a man with an erudite opinion on everything, but with little real life experience. At the opposite end of the scale is Edith Evans’ glowing portrait of Ma Tanner, a woman from the Victorian generation whose cheerful puritan work ethic and public-spiritedness was honed by her wartime experiences. This Victorian theme is further amplified by the moving musical interlude featuring the Salvation Army Band: William Booth’s Methodist/Christian humanitarian organisation. ‘The Sallies’ captured the zeitgeist of that post war era, alongside the film’s everlasting themes of racism, class, social deprivation and misogyny. At the time, Tony Richardson’s iconic film was viewed as ground-breaking and revolutionary, whereas now it seems rather a quaint and purist representation of England in the late Fifties. MT

LOOK BACK ANGER in cinemas from 8 APRIL 2018

WOODFALL – A REVOLUTION IN BRITISH CINEMA | A season of films defining the BRITISH NEW WAVE‘s incendiary brand of social realism | Bluray releases from 5 June 2018 

There’s Always Tomorrow (1956) | April on MUBI

Dir.: Douglas Sirk; Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Fred McMurray, Joan Bennett, Gigi Perreau, Judy Nugent, William Reynolds); USA 1955, 94′.

Douglas Sirk’s reputation soared after the end of his Hollywood career in 1959 –the German born émigré’s melodramas of the 1950s German became the blue print for many filmmakers in the 1970s, one of them being Rainer Werner Fassbinder. There’s Always Tomorrow had already been made in 1934 by Edward Sloman, Sirk’s version is based on the novel by Ursula Parrot, who had ten of her books adapted for the Hollywood screen. Whilst Sirk is mostly remembered for Imitations of Life, this feature, as subversive as anything shot in the 1950s in the dream factory, is sadly neglected.

Metty’s grainy black-and-white photography, his expressionistic use of angles, are one highlight of this feature, but let’s not forget Ursula Parrot, the novelist. Apart from being extremely successful, she was also quite a tearaway. In 1943, at the age of 43, she went off with a soldier who was about to be locked up for narcotic offences, right under the nose of the Military Police. Later released on bail, when cross-examined, she said that she  “acted on impulse, and anyhow, the soldier in question was a damn good guitar player”. Somehow, it makes sense that Sirk, another outsider in Hollywood, should be the one to bring her work onto the screen.

Clifford Groves (McMurray) runs a toy factory and is married to Marion (Bennett); their three children Vinny (Reynolds), Ellen (Perrault) and Frankie (Nugent) complete the happy middle-class family. Vinny, their oldest, is a mixture Playboy version of James Dean; Ellen is a fashion-obsessed teenager and Frankie, the youngest, a precocious wannabe ballet dancer. But whilst Clifford is in control of his work life, his emotions are all over the place – and not always with his family. Sirk often depicted his child characters as selfish, materialistic and obnoxious: shades of Veda in Curtiz’ Mildred Pierce. Whilst a voice-over recounts  the narrative, DoP Russell Metty’s camera pans in on opulent middle-class suburbia where shadows gradually loom, with a distinct whiff of noir. The weather is lousy – California, no less – and Clifford sets out for Palm Beach to secure a lucrative contract. Enter Norma Vale (Stanwyck), an ex-flame of Clifford, who is now a successful fashion designer – and a divorcee. At this point, Double Indemnity comes to mind, and Sirk makes this very clear: the feeling is very much like The Clock (1945), another noir feature. Norma is everything that Marion is not: lively, vivacious and more importantly, full of praise for Clifford and his achievements. Whilst they are sipping their cocktails poolside, Norma has become the dream girl for Clifford. But the audience knows that dreams rarely come true. And soon Vinnie appears with his girl friend Ann, and another couple. The foursome soon leave, but it is too late. Back home, Clifford feels the boredom even more, but worse, Vinnie wants to know the details of his father’s relationship with Norma, seeking the help of his sister Ellen. His insolence nearly costs him his girl friend Ann, who warns him to lay off. Like his father, Vinnie is clearly inferior to the woman in his life. At one point, Clifford looks at his children through the bannister of the staircase: we do not know if they are in prison, or the other way round. Tears signal the end: in this case Norma’s, in a plane flying over the Groves house. AS

IN THE REALM OF MELODRAMA: MUBI IS HOSTING A RETROSPECTIVE of DOUGLAS SIRK’s FILMS IN APRIL

Wonderstruck (2017) ***

Dir: Todd Haynes | Cast: Julianne Moore, Toby Jones, Michelle Williams | Amy Hargreaves | US | Drama | 120min

Scripted by Brian Selznick based on his 2011 novel, Todd Haynes follows his gorgeously sumptuous Carol with twee and self-indulgent schmaltz. It follows similarly nostalgic lines, the childhood wonder and magic connected to happy memories of the past. But the retrospective often magical reveries finally emerging in a narrative voiceover require us to marvel at the serendipity of fate. Often we remember what we chose to and clothe it in swathes of golden glory. Wonderstruck is by no means a bad film but it often feels disingenuous and sentimentally saccharine – it is a film that congratulates itself it a glow of smugness composed of an intertwining narrative that sashays back and forth about two aurally-impaired children who grow up at different moments in time, who are lonely and head for the bright lights of the city away from the unhappiness of their rural homes.

Ben (Oakes Fegley) is a troubled kid from Gunflint, Minnesota whose single mother (Michelle Williams) was killed in a car crash before he got to know the identity of his father. When he hits the big time arriving in 1970s New York (a lovely imaginative scenes and one of the best in the film) he finds a book with a message to his mother from a person called Danny and decides to follow up on the address written there. The narrative then flips back to 1927 where Rose (Millicent Simmonds) is entranced by a Hollywood silent movie star Lillian Mayhew (Julianne Moore). Rose also makes her way to the big City to see her idol perform on the stage. And the two stories collide through their characters’ mutual fascination with the Museum of Natural History. Rose’s strand is the weaker and least convincing of the two. To say that her love of silent movies is connected to her deafness is rather glib and completely overlooks the vital component of orchestral accompaniment that brings this form alive. Although Ben’s strand is more engaging it lacks the ability to deal with major plotholes and inconsistencies that culminate in its absurd denouement. Wonderstuck is certainly well-meaning but ends up being worthy and caught up with its own importance in some of the longueurs in the museum. MT

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 6 APRIL 2018

 

 

Walk This Way | European Hidden Gems Collection 2018

Walk this Way brings a new season of selected arthouse titles to enjoy at home on VoD. These are films that have found critical claim on the festival circuit and are now available to view online before they get a theatrical release.

HOME (Belgium 2016) sees 17 year old Kevin out of prison and into his aunt’s house where he starts an apprenticeship in her local store. Kevin gets on well with his cousin Sammy and his circle of friends, and soon meets John whose mother is in a crisis. From Venice Orizzonti Best Director  Fien Troch

Renars Vimba’s impressive debut MELLOW MUD (2016) deals with the loneliness, disillusionment and first love as seen through the eyes of an orphaned teenager living in the remote rural beauty of Latvia with her grandma and young brother. But when tragedy strikes out of the blue, Raya (Elina Vaska) is forced to face consequences that even an adult would find challenging. Crystal Bear Winner | Generation 14plus Berlinale |  

WALK THIS WAY WILL DISTRIBUTE 34 FILMS IN 8 COUNTRIES ON GLOBAL PLATFORMS ITUNES, GOOGLE PLAY, AMAZON, SONY in the Original Versions with English Subtitles | from 9 April 2018 

 

Thoroughbreds (2017) ***

Dir.: Corey Finley; Cast: Olivia Cooke, Anya Taylor-Joy, Anton Yelchin, Paul Sparks, Francis Swift; US 2016, 91′

THOROUGHBREDS is an impressive debut by director Corey Finley, who adapted the stylish neo-noir thriller from his own play. It’s a razor sharp portrayal of the set it sends up, but just a little bit to sleek to be totally convincing.

In wealthy, rural Connecticut, school friends Amanda (Cooke) and Lily (Taylor-Joy) are re-united by Amanda’s mother (Swift), who has sensed that Lily is an outcast after killing a sick horse in a very gruesome way. Amanda is fully aware of this, and she tries to lure Lily into a plot to murder her obnoxious stepfather Mark (Sparks) who wants her to go to a college for mal-adjusted students instead of one of her choice. Lily comes up with a great idea involving local lowlife Tim (Yelchin, superb in his last role). The pair try to trick Tim into doing the deadly deed, but he gets cold feet at the last minute. After accusing Amanda of being “not high on empathy” – fair statement – Lily is asked not to drink a knock-out cocktail by Amanda, who mixed it. But Lily is hell-bent on proving that she can outdo her friend.

The teenagers are a merciless duo, not really evil but full of malicious intent stemming from the privileges of their upbringing. There is also a good amount of believing all sort of half-baked theories, and finally, in Lily’s case, a sense of morbidity – drawing comparison with Heavenly Creatures. Yelchin is brilliant in the role of the sex-offender who seems to fall into the trap set for him, but just in time gets his neck out of a noose so carefully designed for him by the girls. Amanda’s step-dad is very menacing, the sounds of a rowing machine he seems to be addicted to, mix eerily with Erik Friedlander’s atonal score. Lyle Vincent’s handheld camera shows the teens’ disturbing dialogues against the opulent backdrop: the night time is their favoured setting, during the day they fade, like vampires, into a washed-out blue. Finley directs with great panache, his characters all more or less damaged, are trapped from the get-go. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 6 APRIL 2018 NATIONWIDE

The Passionate Friends (1949) *****


Dir: David Lean | Writer: David Lean, Eric Ambler; Stanley Haynes, David Lean (both adaptation); H.G. Wells (novel) | Cinematography: Guy Green | Cast: Ann Todd, Claude Rains, Trevor Howard, Isabel Dean, Betty Ann Davies | UK | Drama | 95′

Before embarking on his widescreen epics, this romantic drama was Lean’s first filming foray outside the UK when he replaced Ronald Neame as director, due to clashes with Ann Todd. For his part, Lean had been having an affair with Todd for some time and the two would eventually marry sometime shortly after filming The Passionate Friends which competed in Cannes on the year of its release.

Travelling to Chamonix and Lake Annecy in Switzerland The Passionate Friends tells a similar love story to that of Brief Encounter (1945) although on this occasion the focus is on the ménage à trois rather than simply the couple in love, although all three characters here are aware of each other and essentially out of control concealing their emotional distress with a graceful sense of propriety and aplomb. The classic English rose Ann Todd stars as a woman who has one last flirt with the man she had fallen in love with (Trevor Howard’s Steven), before marrying Claude Rains’ rich banker for stability, wealth and social position. While on her luxurious Swiss holiday awaiting her husband’s arrival, Todd’s Mary Justin reflects on her previous lover who has been (unknowingly) booked into the hotel room next to hers. Mary had refused to marry Steven fearing their sexual passion would stifle her emotional integrity, and therefore her freedom to operate as an individual. With Howard she enjoys an affectionate companionship, but it she really as emotionally independent in her marriage as she imagines? In their thoughtful script, Lean, his co-writers and H G Wells explore how habit, affection and compatibility can be just as emotionally bonding as sexual passion, where marriage is concerned.

Captured in Guy Green’s box-fresh black and white camerawork, the elegant London interiors contrast with the magnificence of the Swiss lakeside settings to offer an enjoyable moral drama, and although it lacks much of the tear-jerking emotional undertow of Brief Encounter, The Passionate Friends is unexpectedly moving largely due to Claude Rains’ impeccable performance as the financier, Howard Justin. It is also notable for H.G. Wells’ romantic storyline that explores different kinds of loving and commitment – quite a departure from his usual Sci-fi writing but displaying a consummate understanding of male and female psychology – and Lean successful employs the use of flashback to achieve considerable dramatic tension, particularly in the final denouement.

Ronald Neame was not the only one to have issues with Todd. According to David J. Skal in the biography Claude Rains: An Actor’s Voice: “Rains disliked Todd, who he felt had wasted everyone’s time through her prima donna behavior with Neame over the script and Neame’s direction. As Lean later told his biographer, Kevin Brownlow, “I said I was going to stop the picture. We couldn’t go on spending money at that rate. We had commitments to Claude Rains, and we had permission to pay him in dollars. You don’t realise how difficult that was. That had to be a top-level decision. He’d already been sitting there doing nothing for most of the time he’d been in the country.” In addition to his dislike of Todd, Rains was also concerned about Lean’s personal life which seemed to be slipping over onto the set and affecting the picture. He also knew that Lean was seeing a psychoanalyst at the time which didn’t bode well. Yet, Rains recognized Lean’s immense talent and said, “I can’t say enough about the man as a director. He’s magnificent.” (TCM).

NOW AVAILABLE ON BFI PLAYER AND DVD

 

Heimat – A German Chronicle (1984) | Bluray release

Dir.: Edgar Reitz; Cast: Marita Breuer, Dieter Schaad, Michael Lesch, Rudiger Weingang, Eva Maria Bayerswaltes, Karin Rasenack, Michael Kausch, Peter Harting, Jorg Richter, Jorg Hube, Gudrun Landgrebe, Gertrud Bredel; West Germany 1984, 924 min.

Edgar Reitz was originally intending to publish Heimat as a semi-autobiographical novel but a meeting with producer Joachim von Mengershausen inspired him to film this as a chronicle of Germany’s wartime social history set in the imaginary village of Schabbach, from 1919 to 1982. He was especially keen to avoid the phoney undertones of the US soap opera ‘Holocaust’ (which ironically went down very well with German TV audiences). HEIMAT (1984) is an epic achievement that captures the turbulent years of postwar economic hardship, the rise and fall of Nazism, The Second World War and the decades that followed through the prism of traditional family life rather than through the eyes of Germany’s leaders, politicians, or creatives. Marita Breuer gives a wonderful performance as the woman at the centre of it all, holding the family together as a daughter, wife and matriarch from childhood to old age.

The story begins after Germany’s routing in the Second World War that sees Paul Simon (Lesch) returning to his family in Schabbach, where he escapes the confines of the small community by building a radio and escaping into world events. He falls in love with Apollonia, but later marries Maria (Breuer). His brother Eduard (Weigang), panning for gold in a nearby river, catches pneumonia and never really recovers and is sent to Berlin for treatment. Paul suddenly ups and leaves and Maria is left with the children.

Eduard falls in love with social climber Lucie (Rasenack), who runs a brothel and talks him into joining the SA. Back in the village, another member of the Simon clan is imprisoned in a KZ, for his Communist Party leanings. Maria has now fallen in love with the engineer Otto Wohlleben, but a letter from Paul, who is living in the USA, destroys any future for them. When Paul finally remerges, arriving in Hamburg, he cannot enter the country due to to his name being misconstrued as being ‘Jewish’ – and he has no proof of his Aryan ancestry. Meanwhile Otto is defusing bombs at the front when he learns that Maria has borne him a son called Hermann who he will meet for the first time at the end of the war, when American troops arrive in the village, after the Allies’ victory in 1945, bringing with them a sense of normality – and food. Paul finally returns from the USA, his big limousine is the talk of the village. But his return is not celebrated by everyone and he soon goes back, missing the funeral of his grandmother Katherinna (Bredel). Maria lives her life through her son Hermann who is interested in music and poetry. He eventually falls for Klärchen, who is eleven years older than him. Paul has since sold his company to the Americans for a huge profit, and channels his success into helping Herman with his musical career.

The shoot ran from 1981, and took 18 months, before 13 months of editing resulted in a 15-hour potted version, down from 18 hours of rough-cut. Over ten million West Germans watched the eleven episodes. Thanks to DoP Gernot Roll, a later cinema version was internationally successful, the seemingly arbitrary changes from colour to black-and-white and back giving the chronicle of the years between 1919 and 1982 an added feature. The main premise of HEIMAT was to show how ordinary people – in this case the Germans – can easily embrace a murderous regime such as Nazism, and even in a small village like Schabbach, could tolerate the existence of the concentration camps, almost turning a blind eye. These same people went on to embrace consumerism, this time following in the footsteps of the Americans. Reitz would follow Heimat with The Second Heimat (1992), Heimat – Fragments – The Story of the Women in Heimat (2006) and Home from Home (2013) – all together another 30 hours viewing, premiered at the Venice Film Festival, which became Reitz’ second home.

HEIMAT | 30 APRIL 2018 | Newly restored version for the first time on Blu-ray as Heimat Limited Edition Box Set courtesy of Second Sight. Restored from the original negative by The Edgar Reitz Film Foundation, the set comes complete with a limited-edition luxury 50-page soft cover book and features a vast array of brand new bonus features including Edgar Reitz’s two-hour documentary ‘prologue’ to Heimat and interviews including Edgar Reitz and Marita Breuer  Weigang.

 

 

The Dinner (2017) *** DVD release

Dir.: Oren Moverman; Cast: Richard Gere, Laura Linley, Rebecca Hall, Steve Coogan, Charlie Plummer, Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick, Miles J. Harvey, Cloe Sevigney; USA 2017, 120 min.

Oren Moverman (Time out of Mind) is the third director to brings Herman Koch’s 2009 novel to the screen. By introducing more characters and a reflection of the battle of Gettysburg, he delivers less punch than his predecessors Menno Meyjes and Ivano de Matteo who stayed very close to the original where two sets of parents try to cover up their offsprings’ serious crime History teacher Paul (Coogan) is not keen to join his wife Claire (Linley) at a posh restaurant, for dinner with his brother Stan – who is running for governor – and his second wife Kate (Hall). The rivalry of the brothers is well documented in flashbacks, along with a meeting at the scene of the deciding battle of the American Civil War, where both men reflect on the dominance of violence in American history. Little does Paul know that the dinner guests are well aware of the ghastly murder committed by his son Nick (Plummer) and Stan’s offspring Rick (Davey-Fitzpatrick), burning a homeless to death. The dinner courses are used as chapter headings, and the hilarious serving ceremony by an army of waiters brings light relief to the brutal contents. Stan’s PA, who is in the lobby, also interrupts the discussions, since a vote in House and the forthcoming elections have to be organised. Surprisingly, Stan is alone in wanting the teenagers punished. The others invent excuses, and in the end, Paul goes so far as to try to kill his brother’s adopted son Bean, who is awre of the crimes. The evening ends in pandemonium, the protagonists stripped of their bourgeois masks, defending their tribe with violence, like a pack of wild animals.

The problem here is that Moverman dilutes the plot, with references to Paul’s mental illness, and Stan mentioning the history of these health issues in the family. Furthermore, the introduction of Stan’s first wife Barbara (Sevigney) in the flashbacks, makes this meal feel overstuffed and verbose: more theatre than film, as Coogan, particularly, milking his role for what its worth. DoP Bobby Bukowski (Arlington Road) uses film-noir elements in the restaurant scenes, creating an unreal atmosphere. Moverman’s mealy-mouthed treatment results in a bloated  affair that drifts around desperate for the concentrated flavour of the novel. AS

DVD release on Monday 2nd April.

Mellow Mud | Es Esmu Seit (2016) | European Hidden Gems Collection

Dir.: Renars Vimba; Cast: Elina Vaska, Andžejs Jānis Lilientāls, Edgars Samitis, Ruta Bitgere, Zane Jancevska; Latvia 2016, 106 min.

Renars Vimba makes his filmmaking debut with an intense coming-of-age story, brilliantly acted by Elina Vaska who brings emotional depth to the subtle changes between tomboyishness and womanhood. Vimba too directs with a spare economy that never overstates the pent-up emotions of his heroine.

Seventeen-year old Raja (Elina Vaska) and her much younger brother Robis (Andžejs Jānis Lilientāls) are left to fend for themselves after tragedy touches their modest life in rural Latvia, leaving them bereft of their parents and at the mercy of their difficult grandmother (Bitgere), who soon after succumbs to a heart attack. Raja decides to bury the old woman, telling nobody of her demise, not even their social worker (Jancevska). But sudden responsibility for her brother and the family’s orchard, which she takes over at the expense of her education, is a sobering experience. With a bit of resourcefulness and strong English skills Raja decides to enter a nationwide English competition which she wins, to surprise of everyone, apart from herself. The prize is a trip to London and a short-lived affair with her teacher (Edgars Samitis), which is doomed, largely due to their age difference. Baffled and hurt, Raja sets off to London to find her mother, who left her address on an envelope. Meanwhile, Robis is taken into an orphanage after the social worker finds out they are both orphans.

Drawing comparisons with the work of Ian McEwan (Cement Garden), the Dardennes Brothers, and the black-and-white images of 1960s British Realism, DoP Arnar Thor Thorisson uses bleached, muted colours, and shades of grey to underpin this lean affair that tackles thorny issues of childhood abandonment and prescient resignation. The London scenes are extremely powerful, Raja shrinking literally in the harsh and hectic life of the metropolis. This is a melancholic journey about loss, disillusionment and the total absence of adult responsibility.

SCREENING DURING THE EUROPEAN HIDDEN GEMS FILM COLLECTION

 

 

 

 

Crowhurst (2017) ****

Dir: Simon Rumley | Cast: Justin Salinger, Amy Loughton, Haydn May, Marcus May, Austin May, Agatha Cameron Kettle | UK | Drama | 104′

Following on from Colin Firth’s portrayal of Donald Crowhurst in The Mercy, comes Simon Rumley’s biopic drama casting Justin Salinger in the role of the lone British yachtsman who disappeared while sailing round the world in 1968.

This is the strange but true story of a wannabe hero who bottled out without leaving a message when his attempt to circumnavigate the globe hit troubled waters. His poorly prepared vessel and delayed late autumn start didn’t help matters. Marooned in the middle of nowhere he threw in the towel when the elements conspired against him. James Marsh’s The Mercy was a decent stab at the story and enjoyable enough largely due to Colin Firth and Rachel Weisz in the lead roles. But Rumley’s low budget psychological drama is by far a better film. Leaner, meaner and infinitely more moving, it cuts straight to the chase with some salient, snappily edited opening scenes that see the entire endeavour from Crowhurst’s unique point of view. Spare on dialogue, it’s a plucky prequel to the descent into doom. Salinger’s Crowhurst is a pullover-ed Walter Mitty character whose ambition far outreaches his talent. With an ailing business on his hands, his first concern is winning the money, and his ego explodes buoyed up by the prospect of being a hero – from the safety of his chintzy armchair in Teignmouth. While Firth’s Crowhurst was more internalised about the drawbacks, trying to contain his anxiety and hide it from his family; Salinger bluffs things over with a misplaced bravado that often gets the better of him in the wee small hours when he sobs into his wife’s comforting bosom.

After the stress of the preparation, the bleached out sailing sequences are the dreamlike impressionistic focus of this trip to the nightmarish depths of claustrophobic despair. Told through the intricate details of his domestic hell inside the boat: sleepless nights, tinned food, broken equipment and flooding – all this is set to a minimal ambient score of electronic beeps and echoes as the haunting loneliness of his dread and anxiety eventually leads to the epiphany moment where he morphs into maniacal Mitty mode before madness and misadventure eventually blow his mind and puncture his spirit after a solitary slap up lunch on Christmas Day. While, on dry land, his bloated agent, wife and back-up team give rousing renditions of “Jerusalem”, ” Silent Night” and “I Vow to the My Country”, Mr Mitty is having a ghostly last tango in Argentina. MT

NOW ON RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS FROM 23 MARCH 2018

 

 

The Batchelors (2017) **

Dir.: Kurt Voelker; Cast: Josh Wiggins, J.K. Simmons, Julie Delpy, Odeya Rush; USA 2017, 97 min.

Kurt Voelker follows Park with the ultimate phoney Hollywood tearjerker that spouts endless American optimism totally ignoring any basic psychological principles on its way to its sugar coated happy-end, which is revealed shortly before the story has got underway.

After the premature death of his wife, Bill Ponder (Simmons) decides to take up a teaching job at a friend’s school in California, along with his teenage son Wes (Wiggins). No sooner have they arrived before Wes takes a shine for beauty-queen Lacy (Rush), when Julie Delpy’s French mistress (Carine) puts the two of them in a homework team. After a punch up in the cafeteria. Lacy leaves her macho boyfriend for Wes and Bill eventually falls for Carine after an unbelievably ignorant psychotherapist prescribes one drug too many drugs – and electro-shock treatment also fails – Bill is ready for a foursome in the sun – but not before Wes has won the cross-country run against the odds and has Lacy to promise him to stop self-harming. Yes, the production values are passable, but any film featuring a classroom nervous with the victim (Bill) foaming at the mouth, cannot be taken seriously. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 29 MARCH 2018

Happy End (2017) ***** | Home Ent release

Dir: Michael Haneke | Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Jean-louis Trintignant, Toby Jones, Mathieu Kassovitz, Franz Rogowski, Fantine Harduin Drama | 110min

HAPPY END is Michael Haneke’s satirical exploration of a rich family of industrialists whose dysfunctional daily lives become linked to the turbulent ongoing immigration nightmare that is Calais, thanks to the son and putative heir of the Laurent family’s building firm.

The ironically entitled HAPPY END joins Haneke’s film oeuvre with impeccable production values, sophisticated interiors and elegant performances from a starry ensemble cast, including veteran Louis Trintignant and, of course, Isabelle Huppert. This is a typical Haneke film: all his classic themes coalesce in a slow-burning treat, with an exquisitely judged script. Themes here include voyeurism, family guilt, shame, and revenge with social media and onscreen messaging topically enlightening the narrative and adding to a gritty subtext behind the beautifully manicured domestic scenes. In one involving and impromptu moment musicale for the scion’s 85th birthday (Trintignant as Georges Laurent), the female musician, a chelloist, is conducting a covert porn exchange with Thomas Laurent – revealed only to the audience as it scrolls down on his onscreen messenger.

Isabelle Huppert plays Anne Laurent, the chatelaine of the family’s Belle Epoque residence (complete with Moroccan staff) who has recently taken over the construction business from her ageing father Georges, who is stumbling on the foothills of decrepitude, and desperate to die, while actually being healthy, despite his advanced years. Recently engaged to Toby Jones’ English lawyer, and tasked with handling a UK deal involving the business, her son, Pierre (Franz Rogowski), is a non-starter prone to drunken outbursts, and her brother Thomas (Kassovitz) has a new wife, a baby and a savvy little daughter, (Harduin) from a previous marriage, who has broken into his computer and sussed his game.  So far, so dysfunctional. Meanwhile, we are treated to glimpses of the migrant crisis on the streets of the coastal city and an industrial accident on one of the Laurent’s main construction sites.

This is a malevolent movie that wears its unsettling credentials discretely hidden under its haute couture outerwear, and as in all Haneke’s fare, we know the ending will be far from happy, but provide first class entertainment from start to finish. MT

NOW ON BLURAY/DVD | 26 MARCH 2018

I Got Life | Aurore (2017)

Dir.: Blandine Lenoir; Cast: Agnes Jaoui, Sarah Suco, Lou Roy-Lecollinet, Pascale Arbillot, Thibault Montalembert; France 2017, 89 min.

French cinema continues to cock a snoot at the popular myth that cinematic love affairs end in middle age with this typical Gallic story centred around 50 year old Aurore, whose daughters leave the nest, only to return, and whose best friend is a raving feminist. Aurore’s answer to all this is to go for broke and re-connect with the love of her life, after her husband leaves her in the lurch. I GOT LIFE  is a deft mixture of comedy, farce and feminism. The characters are stronger than the uneven plot, with an episodical structure not helping this rather lightweight affair, despite some great comedy turns. Agnes Jaoui is particularly good as the menopausal mid-lifer whose attempts at getting back on the career ladder have been scuppered by her husband clearing off – and taking with him her unpaid job as his administrator. A job in a bar turns out to be a disaster: the owner insisting on calling her Samantha, “because it’s more sexy”. A string of disasters happen, one after the other. First of all her oldest daughter Marina (Suco) tells her that she is pregnant (“you don’t have to make the same mistakes I did” Aurore mumbles – making herself about as popular as Marina’s expanding girth). Then her youngest daughter Lucie (Roy-Lecollinet) decides to decamp to Barcelona with her boyfriend, abandoning her studies. And being with best girlfriend Mano (Arbillot) is not always fun either: Aurore has has agreed to help Mano sell flats by pretending to be an interested client in a bid to attract some real applicants. But when events spiral out of control Aurore settles for the charms of her first love Totuche (Montalembert), her first love,  who turns up like a bad penny – as Marina’s gynaecologist doctor. And although Totuche is reluctant to play romantic ball second time around, it all pans out well in this watchable romcom, photographed by Robert Guediguian regular Pierre Milon (The House by the Sea). Sadly, the jokes are very much hit and miss. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 23 MARCH 2018

Gholam (2017) ***

Dir.: Mitra Tabrizian; Cast: Shahab Hosseini, Nasser Memarzia, Corinne Skinner-Carter, Tracie Bennett; Iran/UK 2017, 89′

Exile and alienation are at the heart of Mitra Tabrizian’s impressively stylish debut. This existential London drama is shot with mostly natural light, at night and dusk very much  along the lines of Melville’s The Samurai. 

Gholam (Hosseini) is an Iranian ex soldier who makes a meagre living as a cab driver who occasionally helping his mechanic friend out (Memarzia) in his spare time. He keeps very much to himself but often eats at his uncle’s restaurant, where he meets two different sets of Iranian exiles who are keen to muscle into his life. At a price, they would guarantee him a return to Iran to be re-united with his family. But Gholam rejects all offers, and prefers the company of strangers, like an elderly black woman (Skinner-Carter), who he often gives a lift in his cab. Waiting in front of her house, he meets Mrs. Green (Bennett), who looks after a broken-hearted old lady who has recently lost her grandchild. The two rival exile groups become more and more assertive in their pursuit of Gholam, even contemplate his assassination. But Gholam choses his own fight: and after he loses his job over a petty customer complaint,  he goes after them.

DoP Dewald Aukema paints a saturnine portrait of London’s twilight zone where the gloomy streets are often deserted as cars and creatures of the night hurry by – Gholam is one of them; either driving his cab, or drifting aimlessly, his zest for life gradually seeping into the pavement cracks as nightmare and reality fuse into a dreary existence. Only the music of the childhood can comfort him, but his search for self-annihilation is a noble one: his life has been lived, and he does not want another chapter of this ghostly existence.
Rather like her compatriot Abbas Kiarostami, Tabrizian is a famous photographer who regularly exhibits in Tehran. This stunning debut marks her out as the most remarkable newcomer in a long time, directing with great sensitivity and aesthetic aplomb. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 23 March 2018

Van Gogh: A New Way of Seeing | Courthauld Gallery Exhibition 2022

Director: David Bickerstaff | With the staff and curators of the Van Gogh Museum, Vincent Willem Van Gogh | Jamie de Courcey (as Van Gogh) | 96′ Docudrama  UK

“Life is short and Art is long, we must wait patiently while trying to sell our skin decently” Vincent Van Gogh

 

In tribute to the 125th Anniversary of the artist’s death in 1890, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam re-organised their extensive collection showcasing the eventful life of one of their most important National artists. These portraits are now on show in London’s Courthauld Gallery as a standalone show. Whereas the Dutch exhibition paired his masterpieces alongside those of his artist contemporaries with the intention of offering a deeper understand of Vincent Van Gogh’s life and work in the context of Post-Impressionism in late 19th Century. The Courthauld curators seek to dispel the notion that Van Gogh’s self-portraits were simply outpourings of raw emotion as the artist faced himself in the mirror. Van Gogh considered portraiture as one of the highest forms of art and his self-portraits were a vital testing ground for his abilities. Bringing together a representative group of these paintings at the Courtauld Gallery  aims to showcase Van Gogh’s artistic development and the ways in which he used self-portraiture to shape his style and his image.

Celebrating the artist’s life without sensation, or dumbing-down, the film of the Dutch exhibition is fascinating way to enjoy Van Gogh and the museum from the perspective of his real life and creative development. Previously shrouded in myth and misunderstanding, the painter’s ‘oeuvre’ is carefully unveiled by art experts, curators and historians. Senior Researcher Louis Van Tilborgh, is particularly insightful with his views on Van Gogh’s deep religious conviction and the protestant work ethic that drove him on to be one of the most prolific of artists, creating over 450 paintings in a ten year period, many of which are now considered masterpieces. Vincent Willem Van Gogh, his great grandson, shares family photos and the vast collection of letters, written between Vincent and his younger brother Theo, that are key in revealing his innermost thoughts, hopes and dreams throughout a short but productive life.

Directed by David Bickerstaff, a trained artist who also works as a professional actor. VAN GOGH is one of several ‘gallery’ films he has made focusing on art, including Girl with a Pearl Earring. The docudrama looks behind the brushwork of his paintings, watercolours and sketches and is fleshed out with vignettes (Jamie de Courcey plays Van Gogh) imagining his trauma and intimate feelings as he struggled to make sense of his life.

Even for those who are not particularly interested in his art, the film offers an affecting portrait of a creative life, showing how this ordinary man was born into a middle class family in 1893, gradually realising his desire to develop his skills at 27 after training at art dealer in The Hague, London and Paris. Unlike his brother Theo, who supported him financially for much of his life, Vincent was not cut out for the business world. His deep religious conviction led to him becoming a pastor and missionary in a poor mining community in Belgium where he connected with the locals through his sensitivity and emotional nature. He started to sketch the poverty of his surroundings as a means of relating his new life in Belgium to his brother Theo during their their close correspondence. But painting followed after five years of experimental sketching and watercolours. His first important work was The Potato Eaters (1885) during which he worked with the Barbizon group, a Realist art movement that ventured outdoors (with the benefit of paint in tubes) to reflect the lives of workers engaged on the land, coining the phrase painting ‘en plein air’.

But Van Gogh suffered from poor health due his emotional instability. Moving to Arles, in the belief that the climate would be benefical, his work was enriched by the dazzling colours and strong sunlight. Plans to form a collective of artists in Provence, where he shared a house with Gauguin for several months, failed when the couple fell out over ‘artistic differences’. Here Van Gogh produced some of his most important paintings: Starry Night, Sunflowers and The Bedroom in Arles. After only ten years of developing his craft, he died in 1890 from a self-inflicted gun shot wound. In his final summer in Auvers sur-Oise, he painted 80 pictures, the last being Tree Roots, an oil painting that seems to represent the tortuous tangle of feelings expressing his desire to find a way forward and connect with the world outside. His phrase “Life is short and Art is long, we must wait patiently while trying to sell our skin decently”, will certainly ring true with most creatives today.

VAN GOGH: A NEW WAY OF SEEING looks at the artist and his lesser known works. David Bickerstaff’s camera brings to life the artist’s vivid energy and his desperate struggle that every artist can understand and engage with. A slightly over-bearing soundtrack is the only distraction in this otherwise enjoyable and comprehensive piece of filmmaking. MT

http://EXHIBITIONONSCREEN.COM

The Structure of Crystal | Struktura Krysztalu (1969) | Kinoteka 2018

Dir.: Krzysztof Zanussi; Cast: Barbara Wrzesinska, Jan Myslowicz, Andrzej Zarnecki; Poland 1969, 75 min.

In his feature debut, Polish veteran Krzysztof Zanussi examines the nature of friendship and male rivalry and explores whether a bond of shared history can still reunite us years later, or whether change and the passage of time is destined to drive us apart. The Structure of Crystal is an caustic psychodrama that has been compared to the work of Bresson, a filmmaker Zanussi very much admires.

Jan (Myslowicz) is a highly regarded chemist who has left the fast lane and competitive life of Warsaw behind to marry a local schoolteacher and earth mother, Anna (Wrzesinska) in a country village. Anna’s remote family home provides an idyllic retreat for the couple and their two children and for a time life is good. Until they invite another chemist and former colleague, Marek (Zarnecki), to stay. Marek has worked in the USA, and his photos of New York provide a bracing contrast to the couple’s placid rural existence. But the two men are soon arguing over work issues and Anna is a little bit too flirty with this man from ‘the big smoke’, although she also complains about the men’s “egoistical” attitude. Jan starts to come over as a martyr, trying to justify his country existence on environmental grounds, over his life in Warsaw. He tries to undermine  his rather racy city colleague taking the moral high ground– the usual male rivalry is played out but Jan is unsure whether he’s made the right choice. Zanussi, who studied chemistry himself (“I loved chemistry, but it did not love me”) was a documentary filmmaker before he turned his talents to filmmaking and this is borne out in DoP Stefan Matyjaszkiewicz’s long panning shots that circle the protagonists, showing them as objects in the domestic environment – the human interaction intruding upon the peaceful, balanced rhythm of the setting. A reflective and humane ‘Kammerspiel’. AS

SCREENING DURING KINOTEKA POLISH FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | LONDON

Shirley, Visions of Reality (2013)**** | Bluray release


Director: Gustav Deutsch | Cast: Stephanie Cumming, Christoph Bach, Tom Hanslmaier, Florentin Groll, Elfriede Irrall | Austria | Drama | 89′

In Shirley, Visions of Reality Austrian architect and filmmaker Gustav Deutsch daringly imagines a story behind thirteen of Edward Hopper’s most famous realist portraits of American life during the 1930s.

The Iconic artist was probably best known for his urban and rural scenes of detachment such as “Nighthawks’ and ‘New York Movie’. Deutsch opens each vignette – literally tableaux vivants – with a pithy news bulletin setting the scene for the unfolding, fictitious story of an actress whose unique experience takes place in New York from 1931 – 1963, and is immaculately filmed by cinematographer Jerzy Palacz, and gracefully performed by Canadian actress Stephanie Cumming (who looks rather like Jessica Chastain), her voiceover delivering the story from her unique POV. Her boyfriend Steve occasionally appears but remains silent but expression-filled.

Deutsch maintains the same calm frigid detachment from his subject matter. In this discrete and beguiling curio, the intrinsic feel of Hopper’s work is maintained by the garish brightness of starkly colourful interior scenes, envisioning a life beyond the isolation depicted in the soulless settings, occasionally accompanied by Christian Fennesz’ atmospheric score. In “New York Movie” Shirley muses vacantly over the life of a bored cinema usherette while “Intermission” sees her actually watching a French film with the comment: “intermission, like waking up from a dream”. Shirley projects no personality and is merely a elegant cypher frozen in an eerie time-warp as she muses reflectively over the historic milestones of the Depression, the Second World War, Civil Rights Activism and Vietnam, somehow creating a quiet sense of suspense in this sensuous and strangely affecting film.  MT

ON BLURAY DOUBLE PLAY COURTESY OF EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA | 19 MARCH 2018

 

2 Films by Marta Meszaros and Miklos Jancso

Although Bela Tarr is perhaps the most widely known Hungarian film director, arguably the greatest Hungarian filmmakers of all time are Marta Meszaros (Diary for my Children) and Miklos Jancso (My Way Home), who died in 2014. Married between 1958 and 1968, they had three children: one of them, director of photography Nyika Jancso (Jancso’s son from a former marriage), who worked regularly for both directors, and the couple’s granddaughter Anna Jansco, a producer, introduced these two films at a recent screening laid on in London by the Hungarian Cultural Forum.

It was interesting to hear that both Meszaros (*1931) and Jansco (1921-2014), had started out as Newsreel directors, followed by many years as documentary filmmakers before they embarked on features. Meszaros had a particularly hard time getting into film school, and women directors were more or less unheard of in 1950s Hungary. The fact that she had her youth in the USSR worked to her favour, and she was given a place at the prestigious VGIK film academy in Moscow. Diary for my Children (the first part of the trilogy Diary for my Lovers and Diary for my Father and Mother) was finished in 1984, but languished on the back shelf as its harsh critique of Stalinism was deemed not suitable for Hungarian audiences. Luckily, it was screened for the selection committee of the Cannes Festival, were it was shown in competition, winning the Grand Prix (and runner-up to Wenders’ Paris, Texas) in 1984. Meszaros, who had already won the Golden Bear in Berlin 1975 for Adoption, was now, together with her ex-husband Jansco, the new face of Hungarian cinema.

DIARY FOR MY CHILDREN (NAPLO GYERMEKEIMNEK) | Dir.: Marta Meszaros; Cast: Zsuzsa Czinkoczi, Anna Polony, Jan Nowicki, Pal Zolnay; Hungary 1984, 106 min.

With its strong autobiographical undertones Diary for my Children opens with a homecoming: young Juli (Czinkoczi), her ‘aunt’ Magda (Polony) and ‘grandfather’ Nagypapa (Zolnay) land in 1947 Budapest on their return from exile in the USSR. But Juli’s real parents are dead: her father (Nowicki), a well-known sculptor, has vanished in one of Stalin’s purges, her mother has also perished. Somehow Nagypapa and Magda, who is a very committed Stalinist, bought their survival with an oath of silence, but Juli holds Magda responsible for her father’s death. Magda’s friend Janos, also played by Nowicki, has chosen to work in factory, instead of for the Party, a mistake that will cost him dearly. Meanwhile, Juli steals Magda’s cinema pass, and spends her days in the cinema, instead of at school. Janos is finally arrested for not toeing the Party line, and Juli moves out of Magda’s opulent apartment, to look after Janos wheelchair-bound son, working in a factory. Originally, Meszaros had planned to end with a scene from Mikheil Chiaureli’s 1950 propaganda film The Fall of Berlin, (showing Stalin, played by regular ‘Generalissimo’ actor Mikheil Gelivani, as a God-like figure in his white uniform) – but the feature had since been banned, and the authorities did not wanted to be reminded of the situation. Diary is shot in impressive grainy black-and-white by Nyika Jansco, who remembers to this day how nervous he was about doing his best.

MY WAY HOME | Dir.: Miklos Jansco; Cast: Sergei Nikomenko, Andras Kozak; Hungary 1964, 108 min.

Miklos Jansco’s work is usually very symbolic and inaccessible, often getting him into trouble with the censors for the dreaded ‘Formalism’. My Way Home, his third as a director, is one of the most personal features.  Set during the last days of WWII near the Hungarian border, it tells the story of the teenage Hungarian soldier Joska (Kozak) who is captured first by the fleeing Nazis, then the advancing Russians. Whilst serving the Russians as an agricultural worker, he befriends the Soviet soldier Kolja (Nikonenko), who is dying slowly and painfully from a stomach wound. They herd the cows together, but when Kolja starts bleeding internally, Joska is unable to get to a doctor in time due to his being mistaken for a German national. Shot in the black-and-white with a austerity that echoes the work  of Bresson, My Way Home is a reflection on humanity’s capacity for violence as well as forgiving. AS

 

Krzysztof Zanussi | Retrospective | MUBI January -March 2018

Krzysztof Zanussi

Born in 1939 in Warsaw, Poland, Krzysztof Zanussi is s documentary and feature film director. He studied Physics and Philosophy at University and graduated from Lodz Film Academy in 1966. Member of the jury at the Venice Film Festival in 1981. Member of the jury at the Sundance Film Festival in 1986.

We recently talked to Krzysztof whose latest film FOREIGN BODY was released in 2015. A retrospective of his films is currently showing on MUBI.

F  Let me first say how much I enjoyed ILLUMINATION (1973) I take it you didn’t have any issues with the censors on this film?

KZ Oh, but yes I did. There was a whole scene cut from it. In the original film, there was a scene of university demonstrations, from 1968, where the students demonstrated in support of their tutors.  I wrote it in and got it past the script censor, because it is easy to disguise things in a script, but then the film is screened in the Ministry of Culture too and then they make cuts. There still remains a still (photograph) of Retman demonstrating in the final film, which I argued to keep and anyone who knew those times would understand the context when they view the film.

F I understand ILLUMINATION isn’t autobiographical(?) but you were filming about things you knew about.. studying Physics as you did..

Illumination_6 copyKZ Yes, my life is very different, the film does not reflect what was happening to me at all, but of course I knew Physics.. you meet a partner…

F Why did you study Physics?

KZ I studied Physics, as in fact the lead character Retman states in the film ILLUMINATION, because I felt I wanted something that was certain in life. Then I moved over to Biology, as many of us did then.. I did get interested in Genetics, right back then, at the start of things and could already see the great good it might potentially do, but also of course, the great bad too. My father used to say to me ‘don’t believe anything any tutor tells you, except the Maths and the Physics teacher’. I like Biology …and many other subjects, but they are all supposition and opinion.

F You have a very interesting look to ILLUMINATION your DoP was very good…

KZ: Yes, yes (Edward Klosinski); he was wonderful. He also shot The Promised Land. He passed away recently (2008).

F Wonderful film. Starts out like a Chekov play and then just opens out to something massive. You met at film school?

KZ Yes, we studied together.

F And the style.. it appears to me that you were juxtaposing a cinéma verité with a highly stylized form: something quite revolutionary then

KZ Yes, I had been very influenced by the French New Wave… I wanted a documentary feel for some of it; to make it feel real.

F And what did you shoot on?

KZ: 16mm blown up to 35mm. We always shot 16mm as it was much cheaper. We had access to Kodak Eastman stock, which we loved. We felt very lucky. With only a very limited ratio. We only had enough (film) for 1 or 2 takes, so if nothing went drastically wrong, you moved on.

F This must have been good for the actors.. focussing them too when there was a take..?

KZ: Well, of course the actors knew this was always the case, so… (they were used to it). One time I was working with a famous French actress and we did a couple of takes and we were moving on and she said ‘was that ok’? And I said ‘yes, of course’, because she wasn’t convinced… she had stumbled over a line, but she soon learnt how it was to film in Poland! 

Camouflage_12F: Also in the “Martin Scorsese Selects” strand, tell us about CAMOUFLAGE. How do you see this film in hindsight?

K.Z.: Well, CAMOUFLAGE is one of the about forty films I have directed, and they are all my dear children. And I can say, that I have not any favourites. But CAMOUFLAGE had a very strong resonance from the audience when it was shown, almost forty years ago. And today, I am told by the audience, that it has not lost any of its actuality. And I did hoped so much, that this would not be the case. But when I was young, I was more optimistic, I thought that opportunism and corruption were just part of this particular system we lived in, but now I know better.

F: Yes, one tends to blame the system for what is, unfortunately, human nature. What about THE CONSTANT FACTOR, from about in the same period, the two films only three years apart.

Constant_Factor_3 copyK.Z.: It is somehow the same topic, about an idealistic man, in a corrupt society, who tries to preserve his ideals. Which is very difficult, if you are not a hypocrite. Later on in life, I revised my ideas about this topic, and made a sort of sequel to the old film, five years ago, Revisited, even with some of the old actors. And I thought, I was much too hard in my judgement in CONSTANT FACTOR, not about the main character, but the people caught in the system. Because now, I can, see that the main character in the old film, which whom I identified at the time, is quite inhuman. He loves ideals, but not humans. Today I would be more tolerant towards human weaknesses. If I could speak for this main character in THE CONSTANT FACTOR, I would say now ‘sorry’ to my colleagues, I was too tough on you.

F So, going back, you studied Physics and then you went to Film School…

KZ I went to film school for three years and then they threw me out..

F How long is the course?

KZ Five years. But you see I was studying the Nouvelle Vague, I was on set with Claude Chabrol, Jacques Truffaut… seeing, learning from them how they made films… very fluid, without camera set ups and improvising with actors. Completely different from how we were taught at school. So I came back to film school and made my end of year film using these Nouvelle Vague methods before anyone.. my tutors.. knew what Nouvelle Vague was! So of course they failed me.

F Because you hadn’t used ‘correct’ camera set-ups and lighting and stuff?

KZ Exactly..

F So what did you do?

KZ Oh, well I had to take the year again effectively. And I understood I just had to make a film in the style my tutor wanted and I passed.

F I’m interested in what influenced you.. You were born at the start of the war.. do  you remember much about it? Did it have an impact on you?

KZ Well, I of course made a few films about the war but not many..

F Yes, but I mean personally, did it affect you?

KZ Yes. Very much. I think. I remember walking down the street and the person walking next to me being shot dead and just carrying on walking, knowing that person was dead and would be buried in a few hours. You always remember these things. But the death of animals had a bigger impact than the death of humans.

F What do you mean?

KZ I saw a horse hit by napalm. On fire and you couldn’t tell what was… And a dog.. we were passing by this tall building and there was a fire on the first floor, but up on the fifth floor, on the balcony was a dog and I knew the dog was going to die. That no one was going to put the fire out.

F So, even though you didn’t actually see it happen, see it die, the knowledge that this dog would die in an hour or so..

KZ Yes, exactly. It made a big impact on me.

F What inspires you to make films? You must have been asked this question many times over the years.

KZ Many times.. yes and I have stock answer… but.. Fear. Fear is a great motivator.

F Fear of what?

KZ Fear of many things. Of being lonely… of not connecting with people. I mean, you wouldn’t be sitting here, we wouldn’t be talking, if it wasn’t for the fact that I have made films.

F True..

KZ Fear of not achieving anything. It stopped me being stuck in myself; Got me out there and allowed me to test my version of humanity and ask others whether they saw or felt the same things. How others receive a film is always different.

F Because people bring with them their own filter, their own baggage through which they view the film. When you make a film, it becomes something else, something separate to you, that somehow belongs to others too. You have to let it go.

KZ Exactly. And it is notable sometimes with different countries how they perceive a film. I had a retrospective in Thailand and there the metaphysical aspects of the characters problems didn’t interest the audience at all, but his situation was everything. They related to that, but not at all to the other. But you can’t tell them what your film is about.

F Where else have you been with your films?

Illumination_8KZ Not much to the US or China or Russia, but I went to Cuba. I met Fidel Castro with ILLUMINATION.

F Oh wow. How did that come about?

KZ; Well, they wanted to show the film out there, but it needed to be passed by Castro first, before it could be shown and he didn’t have a screen up at his house, so he came down to see it and I was banned- everybody was banned from being in there, except a few close people, but I spoke a little Spanish, so when I knew there was going to be this screening, I just went along and told them I was invited as the filmmaker and no one could say anything, so they of course let me in, so I sat down and then the worst nightmare of any director happened; Just a few minutes in and the projector broke down, the film broke..

F It just snapped…?

KZ Yes, so the lights come up and Fidel sees me and he is very angry and wants to know what I’m doing there… So I ask him what he thinks of the film and he says he doesn’t like it much, but we talk and he agrees to see some more, so they fix it and he watches some more and then he sees it all the way through to the end.

F And..?

KZ Well, he still doesn’t like it and he cannot understand how the Politburo in Poland has allowed me to make it, but he likes that it is about science… about Physics. So, he decides to let them screen the film, in the hope that it might persuade people to study science.

F  That’s amazing. So.. he’s quite open-minded then, to allow it, even though he didn’t like it…

KZ Well, I think he is more just a pragmatist.

F Do you have a favourite film?

KZ Ah. No. it isn’t fair. All films are like your children and you love them all.

F: In 1982 you won the “Golden Lion” in Venice for A YEAR OF THE QUIET SUN. This film seems somehow forgotten today.

K.Z.: I don’t know. It had a very good run in the United States, but it might not have been so extensively shown in Great Britain. But A Year of the Quiet Sun is one of my dearest films.

F.: You stated in an interview, that when you were a producer at “Tor” Studios in the 1980s, you had, despite the censors, a partial autonomy. How come?

K.Z.: Yes, from 1956 onwards, this is true. Before that, we had the Marxist system really implemented one hundred percentage. But that system was falling apart, it was really brutal. But afterwards it became more tolerant, lenient and flexible.

F.: So, as an artist, where did you think you had the greater freedom, under the communist system or the capitalist one?

K.Z.: (laughs) You should never compare one disease with another. First of all, the free market economy produces more chances for everybody. But, we have to find another way of life, because we cannot go on growing like we do. The planet will not stand for this. We will have to concentrate more on spiritual growth, than on material.

F: In 1996 you made your most autobiographical film, AT FULL GALLOP. How did it feel, revisiting your childhood?

K.Z.: I wanted to make this film much earlier, but after I wrote the first 30 pages of he script, it became clear, that this would never pass the censors. But it was very exciting, as it must be for every artist, to re-visit his youth. I had another script, about a different time of my life, which the BBC was interested in, but it came never to fruition. But coming back to At Full Gallop, it was ridiculous was happened in those early years after the war in Poland. Even horse riding was forbidden, because it was deemed to be bourgeois. You could breed horses, but riding was forbidden, because it was supposed to be repressive: the human was on top of the horse.

Foreign Body_1

F: Your newest film, FOREIGN BODY, which was premiered in 2014, caused quite a commotion. Why?

K.Z.: Well, I never thought I could be so angry again, I thought, in old age, I would get more tolerant. But there it is: in the old days, we were really fighting for freedom, and today the young people are selling their freedom to the corporation. What for? They are selling their souls, not their work. So, this film is the voice of anger. Because human relationships are suffering because of this attitude, people become inhuman. But there were great protests against the film, because people like to work for the corporations, and for the material freedom they gain this way. And I also made references to Judeo-Christian ethics, which are not as dried up, as some think. So, that’s the bone of contention.

F.; So you were disappointed in global capitalism?

K.Z.: No, I never had any illusions, about the perfect system. I believe that every person has a space, and he has to be as human as possible. And the fabulous rich ones do not need to be so rich, to have a human space they can live in satisfactory.

Citizen3F.: Finally, a question about the ‘ordinary’ anti-Semitism in Poland. I have watched Jerzy Stuhr’s CITIZEN which I very much liked. I believe that this was the first Polish film to confront ‘ordinary’ anti-Semitism, for a very long time.

K.Z.: That is a very complex question. There are explanations, not excuses. Poland had a huge minority, nearly three million Jews, ten percentage of its population. This is incomparable with any other nation in Europe. The ugly part of anti-Semitism in Poland is that many peasants got richer because of the victims of the holocaust. This sense of guilt makes people aggressive again. You hate somebody you profited from.

F.: And the role of the Catholic Church in this question?

K.Z.: Until ten years ago, when Pope John-Paul II died, there was no anti-Semitism, but now, there are some parts of the Catholic Church, who regrettably, are indulging again in anti-Semitism.

A RETROSPECTIVE OF ZANUSSI’S FILMS ON MUBI | JANUARY – MARCH 2-18 | HIS LATEST FILM ETER IS IN POST PRODUCTION 

BFI Flare Film Festival | 21 March – 1 April 2018

London is the setting for the UK’s longest running LGBTQ film event which began in 1986 as Gay’s Own Pictures. Since then it has also become the largest LGBTQ film event in the UK with this year’s edition boasting 56 feature films, an expanded industry programme, selected films on BFI Player VOD service, and a series of special events and archive screenings. With its partner fiveFilms4freedom it offers LGBT short films for free across the world and promoted through the British Council’s global networks.

Opening the festival this year is Talit Shalom-Ezer’s poignant lesbian love story MY DAYS OF MERCY written by Joe Barton, who scripted TV’s Troy, and featuring Kate Mara and Ellen Page. The European premiere of moral fable POSTCARDS FROM LONDON is the closing gala, telling a revealing story of a suburban teenager (Harris Dickinson) arriving in the West End where he falls in with a gang of high class male escorts ‘The Raconteurs’. Set in a vibrant, neon-lit, imaginary vision of Soho, the film works as a beautifully shot homage to the spirit of Derek Jarman and a celebration of the homo-erotic in Baroque art, and is Steve McLean’s long-awaited follow-up to his 1994 Sundance and Indie Spirit-nominated drama POSTCARDS FROM AMERICA. This year ‘Second Chance Sunday offers the opportunity to watch the on-demand repeat screenings of the audience festival favourites.

Other films to look out for are Rupert Everett’s Oscar Wilde-themed passion project THE HAPPY PRINCE in which he also stars alongside Colin Firth and Emily Watson. Robin Campillo’s rousing celebration of AIDS activism 120 BPM. MAURICE, a sumptuous restoration of the 1987 adaptation of E M Forster’s gay novel starring James Wilby and Rupert Graves. THE WOUND, an illuminating South African story of initiation in a rural village.

On the documentary front it’r worth seeing TOMORROW NEVER KNOWS that explores how a transgender Alzheimer’s patient deals with the harrowing inevitable, and ANTONIO LOPEZ 1970 a compelling and vibrant portrait of the bisexual illustrator who changed the fashion world. 

Avant-garde Berlinale Teddy feature HARD PAINT presents a startlingly cinematic look at how a college drop-out deals with his needs, and Locarno favourite, a saucy Sao Paolo-set vampire drama GOOD MANNERS approaches its love story with hand-crafted tenderness and visual allure.

There will also be another chance to see Francis Lea’s Berlinale awarded GOD’S OWN COUNTRY; Billie Jean King’s thrilling account of her fight for equality in women’s tennis BATTLE OF THE SEXES and the one of the best films of 2017 CALL ME BY YOUR NAME. 

BFI FLARE FILM FESTIVAL | LONDON 21  March – 1 April www.bfi.org.uk/Flare

 

 

An Actor’s Revenge (1963) | DVD/Bluray release

Dir: Kon Ichikawa | Drama | Japanese with English subs | 113′

Thirteen years ago I visited Tokyo and saw a Kabuki play at their National Theatre. I was captivated by the long, elongated structure of the stage and its carefully assembled musicians and actors deliberately creating a stylised composition akin to, and obvious progenitor, of wide-screen cinema. Immediately I thought of Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress. And then Kon Ichikawa’s remarkable An Actor’s Revenge.

There have been many period films drawing upon Kabuki within strong storylines. Mizoguchi’s marvellous The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums is perhaps the most outstanding. But An Actor’s Revenge is most successful at drawing the viewer in to create the dual illusion of watching a play whilst experiencing a film, where each cinematic flourish of action is seamlessly fused with a theatrical gesture. Ichikawa skilfully avoids kitsch or camp excess (admittedly An Actor’s Revenge has a pulp fiction quality, yet I would distance myself from critics who underline its ‘fun’ and sense of the absurd, whilst playing down the poignant elements of the story).

The film is set in the late 1830s. Yukitaro (Kazuo Hasegawa) is a male actor who plays female roles and his stage name is Yokinojo. Whilst in Edo, acting in a play, he notices in the audience the three men who were responsible for the death of his mother and father. He is persuaded by the Hirutaro (Raizo Ichikawa), the head of the acting troupe, to take revenge on the murderers. Yet Yukitaro decides to drive them to a ‘theatrical’ madness before killing them (he announces his revenge will be “a flamboyant performance”). Unfortunately he is emotionally sidelined by the daughter of one of the guilty men. Namiji (Ayako Wakao) is genuinely attracted to Yukitaro and desires a romance. Initially, he sees her attention as a pretence to trapping him but gradually realises that she is sincere. Yokitaro’s revenge is achieved but on the way it is challenged by erotic attraction and the self-mocking criticism of a thief Hojin (Shintaro Katsu) who is continually pursuing the actor.

You could easily make out a case for An Actor’s Revenge being over-plotted and confused, making the viewer uncertain of its pitch and tone – how seriously are we expected to take these events? Are they only artifice – implausible theatrical happenings? If you succumb to the film’s visual style (impossible not to) Ichikawa’s film is an involving aesthetic delight. An Actor’s Revenge may lack Mizoguchi’s tragic intense view of the acting life, but its own viewpoint of life as a bitter theatre of – maybe made-up – destructive affairs is still compelling.

The film is completely set in the studio, making for a superb staging of action that intensifies its heightened theatrical ‘reality.’ This is a valid Ichikawa world where performers are cunningly immersed in the idea of performance (without ever being self-consciously aware of the effect they are striving to achieve). An Actor’s Revenge then becomes an intoxicating concoction when astonishing camerawork and a jazzy, lounge-lizard soundtrack are added to the mix.

For me, the fight scenes are thankfully the antithesis of modern martial arts productions. Swords glint and flash, choreographed against an inky blackness and have such abstract power – a ‘now you see the blade and now you don’t’ tease. And a scene where two thieves using a lasso to capture their victim is thrilling and balletic. All this is stunningly composed and edited with fantastic precision.

Kazuo Hasegawa reprieves a role he played in the 1935 film version directed by Kinugasa, and is terrific in conveying the contradictions of a Kabuki actor not always in control of his revenge plan or able to see its consequences. A rival actor says he is “A pale-face cross between a man and a woman” Yukitaro has an indeterminacy of sexual presence. You cannot take your eyes off him. Nor can his young lover – the beautiful Ayko Wakao – who is both elegant and touching.

Ichikawa’s tale often heads for a potential artistic divorce yet he technically keeps turning the key in the lock to hold the tension between melodrama and an expressive form that exhilarates. In the history of scope cinema An Actor’s Revenge has to be of the first order. To coin a pun – the imaginative scope of its use of scope still displays a mise en scene of considerable power. ALAN PRICE©

AVAILABLE ON DVD/BLURAY | 26 MARCH 2018 | BFI.ORG.UK

Mary Magdalene (2018) **

Dir.: Garth Davis; Cast: Rooney Mara, Joaquin Phoenix, Tamar Ramin, Chiwetel Eljofor; UK/Australia 2018, 120’.

This biblical story about the first Christian proto-feminist must at one time have seemed a very good idea for a run at the Oscars’ in a drama that re-unites Australian director Garth Davis, star Rooney Mara and producer Harvey Weinstein of Lion’s fame. Unfortunately, we all know what happened, and Mary Magdalene gets re-scheduled fo the run-up to Easter, hoping that audiences will fall for the total elimination of the Prince of Darkness’ central role in this feature.

Mary Magdalene (Rooney) is a public-spirited member of the small Jewish fishing community in a country invaded and ruled by the Romans. She works hard, delivers babies and has a social conscience – but she does not want marriage, even though her father has tried his best. The Talmud supports the total subservience of women and Mary yearns for a way out. Then along comes Jesus of Nazareth (Phoenix) and his band of apostles, who preach social justice and a religion of love and understanding instead of the old-fashioned God of Thunder and Wrath. Mary Magdalene becomes Jesus’ confidant, and the males, particularly Peter (Eljofor), becomes jealous: “You are weakening us Mary” exclaims Peter. Mary Magdalene is very much into a more soul-centred revolution, not the violent social uprising the apostles have in mind. On the way to Jerusalem, we witness the usual miracles such as the raising of Lazarus, before things go wrong in the capital city. Interestingly, Judas is not so much a traitor in this version of the gospel, as rather an ambivalent character. In the end, after the crucifixion, Mary Magdalene is expelled by the male apostles – only for Peter to found a Christian religion repressing women as much as Judaism, with one of the early Popes in 591 declaring Mary Magdalene a prostitute, a slanderous lie which was overturned by the Catholic Church only in 2016.

Davis goes for dignity – the opposite of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of Christ – and (the real life couple) Rooney and Phoenix act accordingly, all looks and whispered wisdom. But the result is a badly under-cooked, anaemic feature, with no intellectual or emotional impact. DoP Craig Fraser makes atmospheric use of the landscape of Sicily and Southern Italy: the bleached colours and the black granite are perfectly captured – but Helen Edmundson and Philippa Goslett’s script is simply too tame to rouse the audience from a bemused detachment. AS

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM 16 MARCH 2018

The Square (2017) Bfi player

Dir|Writer: Ruben Ostlund | Cast: Dominic West, Elisabeth Moss, Terry Notary, Linda Anborg, Claes Bang | Drama | Sweden\Denmark\US | 131′

Swedish director Ruben Ostlund won the Palme D’Or in 2017 with this startling satire on modern society, the moral of which is simplistically: don’t lose your mobile phone. Not a very helpful caveat but one that leads to the downfall of the film’s central character, a suave gallery owner who provides the prism through which Ostlund explores the state of Sweden’s art world and, more widely, its sociopolitical and national identity, going forward – as they say.

This is a frightening and ambitious thriller not only for its thematic richness but also for its resonant characters, darkly comic moments and relevance to modern life. As in his 2014 hit Force Majeure, Ostlund’s is a tale of guilt and responsibility but also political correctness and freedom of speech in the light of Sweden’s influx of migrants, and all this conflates for provocative watch but also a nail-bitingly tense one that will possibly leave you shattered and shaken – it did me.

Claes Bang plays the aptly named Christian, a sympathetic, sophisticated and broadminded gallery owner keen to keep at the cutting edge of art world. But several of his outré ideas backfire leading to a catastrophic chain of events and his downfall. The first is connected to an iniative called The Square: a space in the museum’s courtyard which allows ‘freedom of expression’ for all, provided that they abide by society’s ‘rules’. But a shocking PR stunt upsets the status quo, and he is forced into fire-fighting mode to save the reputation of the museum. The second leads to one of the most unsettling scenes in the film – and this occurs during a high level fund-raising dinner – calling into question his integrity.

It all starts when Christian discovers his wallet and mobile have been stolen while he is protecting a woman from the advances of a hostile man, outside Stockholm’s central station. Encouragingly, sources provide a catchment area – a block of flats – where his stuff is supposedly located and after requesting his belongings be returned they miraculously emerge leaving him with a feeling of largesse towards mankind. But after an ill-advised one night stand with Elizabeth Olsen’s American journalist, who has interviewed him that day, things start to go awry in a bizarre way, and seem linked to the robbery, highlighting the film’s racial dimension. As the museum director Claes Bang is suberb in a difficult and nuanced role where he is required consistently to present a professional face in the light of personal controversary and workplace mayhem, and we feel for him. Without disclosing the entire storyline, this is an intriguingly complex and shocking thriller, sumptuously crafted and full of inventive elements and subtle performances that will stay in your memory for a very long time. MT

ON BFI PLAYER FROM 19!May 2022

 

 

Butterfly Kisses (2017) **** Kinoteka Film Festival 2018

Dir.: Rafael Kapelinski; Cast: Theo Stevenson, Rosie Day, Liam Whitling, Byron Lyons, Thomas Turgoose, Charlotte Beaumont; UK 2017, 89 min.

Polish born director Rafael Kapelinski, who studied with Andrei Wajda in Lodz and got an MA from the NFTS, has directed a disturbing, haunting debut feature, which in many ways – not least due to Nick Cooke’s brilliant black-and-white images DoP Nick Cooke – resembles Michael Winterbottom’s first feature Butterfly Kiss from 1995.

Written by Greer Ellison, Butterfly Kisses is set in a South London estate where the three main characters, teenagers Jake (Stevenson), Kyle (Whiting) and Jared (Lyons), spend their days aimlessly gorging on internet porn and in a bar run by Shrek (Turgoose), which has an in-house drug dealer. This is mainly about showing off to each other, and, like a couple after 40 years of marriage, scoring points. Fathers are absent in the army, or literally dying. But Jake is worse off, because his friends know that he is still a virgin – the only one of the trio – in spite of his rather pretty good looks. When Zara (Day) moves into the tower block, Jake, ogling her from his window, gets a part-time job looking after her much younger sister Amy (Beaumont). After Kyle and Jared talk Zara into sleeping with Jake, we learn his dark secret: From here on onwards, Butterfly Kisses steams like a derailed train into oblivion.

Saving us from any graphic horrors, Kapelinski makes watching this even more painful. Nathan Klein’s score relies heavily on the organ, underlining the apocalyptic narrative. A voice-over by Kyle at the start of the feature, tells us about a day in school, when everyone put an anonymous confession  into a box, the contents were then read out aloud, each not knowing who had written what. Stealing Mars bars from the old owner of the corner shop seemed just like the internet porn – a mild transgression compared with Jake’s dark secret. Butterfly Kisses shows us that the clichés of life on council estates, are just the fruits of juvenile neglect – not the true evil lurking behind Jake’s boyish features. AS

KINOTEKA POLISH FILM FESTIVAL 7 – 29 MARCH 2018

Season of the Devil (2018) ***** | Berlinale 2018

Dir.: Lav Diaz; Cast: Shaina Magdayao, Piolo Pascual, Pinky Amador, Hazel Orencio, Noel Santo, Domingo, Bart Guingona, Joel Saracho; Philippines 201, 234′

No director working today symbolises the face of contemporary auteur cinema quite like Lav Diaz, who wrote, directed, produced, composed and edited Season of the Devil, his third feature in twelve months and follow-up to Lullaby to a Sorrowful Mystery which was twice as long and took last year’s Silver Bear at Berlinale. The Woman who Left, went on to win the Golden Lion in Venice the previous year, in 2016.

Like his contemporary Bruno Dumont, (Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc), the radical Filipino indie filmmaker works as his own composer creating a subversive musical format for his chronicle of jungle warfare in the Philippines of the 197os. But his musical approach is Brecht, mixed with Démy, and overall, Season – at least in spirit – has much in common with Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing. The musical style is disconcerting; the harmonies are repetitive and set to a recurrent chorus of ranting moans, aggression and desolation.

Filmed in Malaysia, Season of the Devil tells the story of rebel poet Hugo (Pascual) and his wife Lorena (Magdayao), a foreign doctor who, exasperated by the widespread suffering arising out of the decade-long civil war (brought about by President Ferdinand Marcos’ deployment of the Para-Military wing of his 70 000 strong Civilian Home Defence Forces), had left Hugo in order to help the community of Barrio Ginto, a small outback town where Marcos’ goons were running riot. Setting up a clinic, Lorena encounters Kwago (Amador), whose husband and son have been abducted and murdered. The village elder (Guingona) is powerless. He knows – along with the audience – that resistance is useless, after watching a couple of assassins on a motorbike gunning down a student and hanging a sign on him that says:” I am a rebel, don’t imitate me”. The military leader (Saracho) is supported by his second in-command, a lieutenant (Orencio) and the sinister Narciso (Domingo), a man with – literally – two faces, one of them representing Ferdinand Marcos. Narciso has the task of establishing a “new Church” on the island: but in reality he only recycles old lies of ghost and other superstitions. He blames the rebel forces for being in league with these apparitions, and holds them to account for the murder and violence committed by his functionaries. We only see these gangsters in a cohort; they are too cowardly to face the population on their own. The men rape and torture, and after a warning, they abduct Lorena. Her ordeal – not shown graphically – is a sad but masterful highpoint of Season. Hugo has gone mad after Lorena’s disappearance, and finally travels to Ginto, to learn about his wife’s fate.

Season of the Devil is a challenge to projectionists because of the unusual 1.50:1 aspect ratio: it is somewhere in the middle of 4:3 and 16:9, nearly like a 1:2. Visually, this is a startling film: DoP Larry Manda mixes the director’s trademarks of static shots, a shady monochrome palette, long shots and deep staging and live recoding on-set, with indoor shots, only lit by a single light source. Sometimes, protagonists “step out of the picture”, crossing the unmarked line, which is the demarcation in mainstream cinema.

Season of the Devil will stay with you for a long time. And so it should: current Filipino President Duterte, who had buried the body of President Marcos in the National Hero’s Cemetery, has unleashed a Para-military force Marcos would have been proud of. And, in 2016, after the killing and rape of Jacqueline Hamill, an Australian missionary in the town he was presiding over as mayor: he told supporters “Son of a bitch, she looked like an American actress. They lined up for her rape. Was I angry because she was raped? Yes, that’s one thing. But she was so beautiful. I think, the mayor should have been first”. And on 10..3.18, The Guardian reported that Duterte had put the name of Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, a UN Human Rights Investigator, on a list of “Maoist Rebels”, who are due to be hunted down by Duterte’s Special Forces. But do not fear, President Duterte has pity for female fighters: “We will not kill you. We will just shoot you in the vagina”.

BERLINALE | COMPETITION | 15 -25 FEBRUARY 2018

My Golden Days | Trois Souvenirs de ma Jeunesse *** (2015)

Dir.: Arnaud Desplechin | Cast: Mathieu Almaric, Lou Roy-Lecollinet, Quentin Dolmaire, Pierre Andrau | France 2015 | 123’| Drama

Arnaud Desplechin is certainly one of the most maddening European directors: His idiosyncratic style, extreme detachment and hyper-ambivalent narratives always miss perfection by a small fracture – but it is a decisive one. And that is probably why this has simmered on the back burner for three years before its current release. Desplechin never seems to mature: his newest film MY GOLDEN DAYS, a sort of prequel to Ma Vie Sexuelle (1996), is once more an example of unfulfilled promise.

In chapters and an epilogue, we learn everything about Paul (Quentin Dolmaire): his unstable mother, who committed suicide when he was eleven, his father, who never got over the tragedy, young Paul’s adventure in the USSR, when he helped a Jew to emigrate, donating his passport. Set in Roubaix, were the director grew up, the main chapter is about the relationship between the teenager Paul (Almaric) and Esther (Roy-Lecollinet in a stunning debut). Paul falls in love with Esther, who has many suitors, but is still very insecure. Paul fights off rivals like Kovalki (Andrau), but when he goes to Paris to study, Esther, becoming more and more fragile without Paul, goes to bed with Kovalki – not so much for passion, but reassurance. In the epilogue, Paul accuses Kovalki of being traitorous, never seeing the point that he left Esther alone. Paul too is unfaithful (seven lovers), but this hardly counts – Desplechin’s misogyny is unruffled after all these years.

Mathieu Almaric is again Paul Dedalus, but Emannuelle Devos’ part of Esther is taken up by the young Lou Roy-Lecollinet. It says much for the film, the director and the male star that Roy-Lecollinet, born in the year Ma Vie Sexuelle was made, comes over hardly any more immature than Almaric, who is thirty years her senior. Whilst Almaric should get all the praise, Desplechin falls into the same trap once again: his witty and perfect dialogues only carry the film so far and the make-believe, that the protagonists resemble human beings, wears thin after an hour.

The leads display fantastic insights into each other lives, but their letters are incredible immature context wise – written by the urbane 54 year old director, and not starry-eyed lovers from the provinces. Further more, Desplechin mentions topics like the cold war, anthropology and the problems of the developing world with encyclopedic knowledge, displaying a wisdom which has no place in the world of his teenage lovers. As in most of Desplechin’s films, the characters are treated like rats in a laboratory, the all-knowing voice-over representing the director’s point of view.

It is sad that these great actors and the wonderful images of Irina Lubtchansky are in the hands of a man who believes in his own perfection, but lacks basic empathy with anyone else: Arnaud Desplachin’s aesthetic brilliance will never be enough, his near-autistic inter-activity with real humanity stands between him and real greatness. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 16 MARCH 2018

Macbeth (2018) ***

Dir.: Kit Monkman; Cast: Mark Rowley, Akiya Henry, Al Weaver, Dai Bradley; UK 2017, 12

Kit Monkman creates a MACBETH for our times: part-experimental arthouse-cinema, partly a futuristic version of Games of Thrones, his adaptation of the Scottish play is shot entirely on green screen, with background matte painting effects and CGI creating a fleeting world where the camera roves seemingly at will through multiple stages, the action unfolding simultaneously.

Although this film’s aesthetics are anything but realistic, but the acting is physical to the point of open brutality. Macbeth (Rowley) and Lady Macbeth (Henry) are madly obsessed with each other: their lovemaking and post-coital deliberations make them look very much like the Noirish coupling of Laurie and Bart in Joseph H. Lewis’ Gun Crazy: Sex and violence rule their lives in equal parts, and once again, it is the female who is more dangerous than the male. That said, Macbeth does not need any encouragement, he is, after all, a young, successful general. His relationship with Banquo (Weaver) is that of rivalry and hidden admiration. Both are entrenched in violence. But Macbeth not only murders centre stage, but also casually: the slaying of Macduff’s wife is shown at the margin of the frame (again shades of Lewis).

Diverse themes often intermingle: sex and battlefield scenes are woven into each other, the audience always alerted to new thrills that dovetail into one another. Sometimes we lose lose perspective altogether: is the moon inside our outside Macbeth’s bedroom? Then there is the projectionist/porter (Bradley) running a 1909 silent film version of the play directed by Mario Caserini. He seems to function solely in his role as keeper of the past while the main-action might be set any time in the future. Grey and green pre-dominate, the blood-red crimson spurts like arrows into the murky mire of Scotland’s winter. Still looking for a distributor, Monkman’s visionary version of MACBETH is a worthwhile addition to the Scottish play’s canon. AS

SCREENING FOR ONE NIGHT ONLY 23 APRIL 2018 | SHAKESPEARE’ BIRTHDAY HERE   

Paris Square | Praça Paris (2017) ** | Rio Film Festival

Dir.: Lucia Murat; Cast: Grace Passo, Joana de Verona, Alex Brasil, Digao Ribeiro; Portugal/Argentina/Brazil 2017, 110 min.

Director/co-writer Lucia Murat (Another Love Story) has made her name as a documentary filmmaker so it comes as no surprise that her observations about class, gender and education in contemporary Rio de Janeiro are by far the strongest part of this feature. When it comes to story telling, Praca, Paris somehow lacks the same conviction. The film follows Gloria who has arrived in Rio to study the effects of violence on the local community, and hoping to work through her troubled past growing up in a favela. She consults Camila (de Verona), a young psychotherapist writing her MA thesis, as a patient and case-study subject. But the doctor-patient relationship soon comes under strain as social tensions rise to the surface and power dynamics shift in a high-stakes mind game. At the beginning, it is Gloria, who does not open up to Camila, but slowly the dynamics change: when Camila learns more and more about Gloria’s traumatic childhood, it is she who withdraws. Gloria is financing her stay by working as a lift operator in the university building, but it soon emerges that she killed her father after enduring years of sexual abuse on his part, and that the family has kept his death a secret. The most influential character here is her brother Jonas (Brasil) who is serving time on drug related charges, and still has an enormous influence on the criminal scene, even from behind bars. When Gloria’s boyfriend Samuel (Ribeiro)  tries to resolve her conflict with Camila, violence again erupts.

This rather enigmatic psychological drama takes its name from one of Rio’s great meeting places and DoP Guillermo Nieto uses great sensibility in contrasting the beauty of the park and the tranquillity of the university buildings with the jungle of the Favelas. There is no attempt to gloss over the abject poverty, or the lawlessness by men like Jonas, who use women to make a living. It’s a shame therefore that the narrative lacks the necessary vigour to support the tragic contradictions of this social reality. AS

PRACA, PARIS won Best Actress (Grace Passo) | Best Director at Rio Film Festival and is looking for distribution in the UK. 

Wonder Wheel (2017) ***

Dir/Writer: Woody Allen | Cast: Kate Winslet, Jim Belushi, Justin Timberlake, Juno Temple, Jack Gore, David Krumholtz | US | Melodrama | 101′

When the world desperately needs a slice of his comedy genius Woody Allen delivers a miserable melodrama, a metaphor for modern life – or perhaps it’s just the mood he is in with the current wave of abuse allegations rocking Hollywood.

So he returns to the 1950s and his childhood days in Coney Island where sad and frustrated housewife Ginny (Kate Winslet) is living out her life, but not her dreams. The Neon-lit shadow of the Ferris wheel sheds a Lucozade-tinged light on the chintzy interiors of the home she shares with her pyromaniac son (Jack Gore), obese husband Humpty (Belushi) and his newly-arrived daughter Carolina (Juno Temple), a marked woman who has just left her gangland husband. Ginny and Humpty are overblown alcoholics and there’s no joy in their lives, but while he is content with his fishing trips and games with the guys, Ginny is an unfulfilled actress wasting her life waitressing in their boardwalk clam diner. Then she falls for a perma-tanned literary-minded lifeguard in the shape of Micky, a desperately miscast Justin Timberlake.

To be frank, this is Ginny’s fillm and without the voluptuous emotional heavyweight Winslet, the film would fail to resonate. She is the meaty Maine lobster in this claustrophobic clam bake-off, with Belushi the French fries, Timberlake the healthy salad and Juno Temple the frothy vanilla milkshake. We’re persuaded that Mickey lives in Greenwich village where he reads Eugene O’Neill, but he’s strait outta modern Memphis and unconvincing in this role. The two fall in lust until Ginny gets heavy and Carolina frolics into focus whereupon Mickey is smitten, realising the reality of the age-gap. “When it comes to love, we often turn out to be our own worst enemy” is one of the more telling lines.

Wonder Wheel is a shade overlong with some scenes lingering uncomfortably, but the redolent musical choices and perfect-pitched performances are convincing and heartfelt. Vittorio Storaro’s wizardry with his colour wheel bathes everything in a neon-suffused technicolour rainbow tracking Ginny’s emotional ups and downs as the wheel spins from orgasmic bliss to histrionic meltdown. The placid rain-soaked beachscapes provide thoughtful contrast and relief to this bold and believable portrait of a woman driven to the edge. And you feel for her. MT

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM 9 MARCH 2018

Mom and Dad (2017) ****

Dir.: Brian Taylor | Cast: Nicholas Cage, Selma Blair, Anne Winters, Zackary Arthur, Robert Cunningham, Samantha Lemole | USA 2017 | 86′.

Director/writer Brian Taylor, co-creator of Gamer and Crank, delivers the perfect American nightmare: what would happen TV stations all gave up the ghost, and sent coded messages ordering loving middle-class parents to kill their off-spring?. This is not simply a schlock horror movie: it is set very much in the psychological reality of suburban America, where parental love and even sacrifice is the stable diet of all sugar-coated Hollywood films.

Parents Brent (Cage) and Kendall (Blair) are fighting middle-age disappointment: he is frustrated by his reduced means:“Ten years ago I earned 145 000$, now it 45 000$”), she is driven crazy by her attempts to look twenty again. Meanwhile son Josh (Arthur) is still in pre-puberty, and daughter Carly (Winters) drives her parents mad, as the teenager from Hell, her placid boyfriend Damon (Cunningham) is the only one not getting in her way. When the TV incident occurs, Kendall is in hospital, where her sister Jenna (Lemole) is giving birth to a baby – which she immediately tries to kill – Kendall, not yet affected by the curse, helps to save the newly born. But at home she joins her husband in a mad pursuit to kill Josh and Carly – their rage so virulent, that they overlook the body of the housekeeper’s child, murdered by the mother. Damon does his best to defend the children, who are locked in the cellar, while Mum and Dad come up with a new idea: poisoning by gas. When Brent’s parents arrive in midst of the chaos, the former finds out, that old age is not a barrier to child murder.

What make Mom and Dad so realistic is the use of exactly the same aesthetics used by Hollywood to promote the nuclear family: all is clean, antiseptic, feelings (apart from Carly) are repressed, everything is secondary to getting the show on the road every morning: impressing the neighbours and keeping up the gold-standard of superficiality and intellectual banality. This dream, perpetuated in the media, is now simply turned on its head: It is now the most efficient child killer who is top of the ratings. This is a role written for Nicholas Cage, who rises demon-like to the occasion, with Blair not far behind. The American home is a battle-field devastated by the forces of parental revenge. DoP Daniel Pearl indulges in a pastel colours prelude to the gory terror of the uprising: the schoolyard scenes are a terrific example of parental mob violence. Even the ending delivers a refreshing twist – anything but a new beginning. Provocative and brave, Mom and Dad is a incendiary tour-de-force of America’s middle-class dreams descending into Hell. AS

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM 9 MARCH 2018

Rex (2017) * * | DVD

Dir: Gabriela Cowperthwaite | Cast: Kate Mara, Ramon Rodriguez, Tom Felton, Bradley Witford, Edie Falco | US Biopic Drama | 116′

Gabriela Cowperthwaite is best known for her impressive documentaries features Blackfish (2014) and City Lax: An Urban Lacrosse Story (2010) but her debut drama teeters between mawkish melodrama and war docudrama, barking up the wrong tree in creating a fitting tribute to Rex and many other brave animals who have served us during wartime. Even committed dog lovers will find it difficult to sympathetise with her efforts to channel a woman’s existential angst and emotional breakdown into the story of a fearless, committed and intelligent canine who saw active service as her military combat dog in the American Forces during the Iraq war. Cowperthwaite’s documentary experience really shines during the stunning combat scenes on location, but once Leavey returns home the sentimentality sets in and the result is frankly trivial and unconvincing. A superb cast is headed by Kate Mara who does her best as Ms Leavey in a difficult role that actually puts the dog in the invidious position of having to share its deserved tribute as a soldier rather than a domestic companion with the brilliant but clearly troubled Marine corporal Megan Leavey. MT

NOW OUT ON DVD  | 19 MARCH 2018 | LIONSGATE

Four films by Sasha Guitry (1936-38)

The New Testament  (Indiscretion) | Dir.: Sacha Guitry; Cast: Sacha Guitry, Jacqueline Delubac, Belly Daussmond, Gerald Christian Zacher; France 1936, 96 min.

Let’s Go Down the Champs Elysées /Remontons Les Champs Elysées | Dir.: Sacha Guitry; Cast: Sacha Guitry, Jacqueline Delubac, Robert Pizani, Jean Perier; France 1938, 100 min.

My Father Was Right/Mon Père Avait Raison  | Dir.: Sacha Guitry; Cast: Sacha Guitry, Jacqueline Delubac, Gaston Dubosc, Paul Bernard, ; France 1936, 81 min.

Let’s Make a Dream/Faisons un Rève | Dir.: Sacha Guitry; Cast: Sacha Guitry Jacqueline Delubac, Raimu, France 1936, 96 min.

French director/writer Sacha Guitry (1885-1957) was prolific: he wrote 124 plays, directed 36 films, published over 900 strongly opinionated columns, and was also active as a painter and sculptor. Born in St. Petersburg to French parents, his mother soon left Sacha’s womanising father Lucien, after he more or less kidnapped young Sacha (who birth name Alexandre Georges Pierre) to take him on a tour of Imperial Russia.

 

As a result, Sacha developed a strong father obsession, even going as far as to marry Charlotte Lyses, one of his father’s many mistresses. He was married five times, his wives after Lyses were invariably decades younger. An outspoken misogynist, he once stated: “We cannot count on women to love their children”. During the German occupation of France, he lived a lavish lifestyle, very much in contrast with the rest of the French population. He also director De Jean D’Arc A Philippe Petain in 1943, trying to justify Marshall Petain, who led the Vichy government allied to Germany. After the liberation, he was jailed for collaboration, but later released without trial, his reputation was tarnished for good, but he blamed the media for his downfall.

The themes that repeatedly occur in his work are those of death and ageing. He was obsessed with hedonistic pursuits and his films were invariably centred on unfaithful love affairs amongst the rich and landed gentry. The women tended to come of worst in the scheme of things. In Lets Make a Dream, Guitry explores the Anna Karennina syndrome in a ‘grass is always greener’ affair with an unsuspecting female conquest. As The Lover/Seducer, delivering his lines like “bullets” – he goes off the idea of The Wife after he successfully luring her away,(Jaqueline Delubac, his wife from 1935-39 is the star of four films in this collection) and the couple fall asleep without making love. Next morning, The Husband (Raimu) turns up, but not to challenge him to a duel, as The Lover had feared, but to confess his own waywardness. The Lover then goes off the idea of marriage to The Wife.

The New Testament/La Noveau Testament (1936) is rather a stiff affair that struggles to escape the stagey feel of its original stage format. Thematically typical of these four features,  it stars Guitry as Doctor Marcellin a sanctimonious character whose is eventually foisted by his own petard over a Will and a complex love triangle involving his wife Lucie (Betty Daussmond) who is  having an affair with the son of the Doctor’s former lover. In the same vain is My Father is Right: Guitry is Charles Bellanger, a man who passes his mistrust of women onto his son Maurice (Bernard) and it comes back to bite him, after his wife Germaine (Daussmond) returns after 20 years. Let’s Go Down the Champs Elysees is actually Guitry’s history lesson and tribute fable to the famous Boulevard from 1617 onwards. Sadly it lacks the wit of Story of a Cheat with the narrative rigour of Pearls of the Crown, but provides some entertainment. There is a great double role for Guitry as the schoolmaster, lecturing his Secondory School class and as Louis XV, who is very much afraid of dying. Finally, Robert Pizani excels in the roles of the composers Richard Wagner and Jaques Offenbach. Of all features, Lets Go Down the Champs Elysees is by far the most filmic, which is hardly surprising, since Guitry was foremost a playwright and theatre director.

Outside France, Guitry’s work has not always travelled well. That said, his plays are still popular throughout France and regularly find a stage airing. AS

SACHA GUITRY COLLECTION | ARROW DUAL FORMAT

A Fantastic Woman * * * (2017) | Bfi Flare Film Festival 2018

Dir: Sebastián Lelio | Chile / USA / Germany / Spain | Spanish | Drama | 104′ · Colour

A story of love and loss is a wrapped around a gutsy portrait of transgender alienation in Sebastian Lelio’s fifth feature and follow-up to his Golden Bear winner Gloria. It has won him considerable acclaim including an Oscar (2018) since its Silver Bear win at Berlinale 2017.

Suave middle class business man Orlando (Francisco Reyes) has left his attractive wife for a strong-jawed woman 20 years his junior. Marina (Daniela Vega) is a talented singer and transgender. After a romantic birthday celebration together the two return home where Orlando is taken ill and dies on the way to hospital. This is naturally a terrible shock for Marina but nothing compared with what is to come in the aftermath of the tragedy. The whole family are clearly threatened by Marina’s sexual identity and the way Orlando has abandoned them. Soon she is under police scrutiny and vilified by all his family who want her out of his home and barred from the funeral tribute.

Daniela Vega gives an impressive central performance venting powerful expression to the full emotional spectrum experienced by the newly bereaved, as well as humiliation over the treatment she receives from his family. Marina is not a particularly likeable character – the strong and convincing support cast even less so – but she expresses dignity and forbearance given the circumstances and the acts of cruelty that follow. This is a watchable and intriguing drama where once again Lelio displays a natural understanding of female characters who are at odds with mainstream society in contemporary Chile. Santiago provides a lush backdrop to the action and the musical choices suffuse the film with a melancholy that permeates through to the final resonating scene. MT

SCREENING DURING BFI FLARE FILM FESTIVAL ON 1 ST APRIL 2018

Kinoteka 2018 | 7 – 29 March 2018

London hosts KINOTEKA Film Festival for the 16th year running. This year celebrates 100 years of Polish independence with the latest cutting edge cinema and some lesser known archival gems now ripe for rediscovery, along with Q&As, masterclasses and musical entertainment. The festival also offers unique insight into Poland’s rich cultural history through cult classics, biopics, women in cinema and a drama from the liberated Nazi concentration camps. And some distinctly contemporary drama that captures the zeitgeist of Poland in the 21st century such as Rafael Kapelinski’s 2017 scabrously dark drama Butterfly Kisses.

The Opening Night Gala commemorates the life of Krzysztof Krauze and his fruitful partnership with wife/co-director, Joanna Kos-Krauze with a screening of Karlovy Vary Award-winning Birds Are Singing in Kigali, a film exploring the life of two women who escape the genocide in Rwanda. There will also be a another chance to see her 2013 biopic drama Papusza that follows the rise and fall of gypsy-poetess Bronislawa Wajs, widely known as Papusza. And Urszula Antoniak’s award-winning drama Beyond Words.

NEW POLISH CINEMA IS A WOMAN:

This year’s contemporary strand has a particularly focus on female directors. Anna Jadowska’s Wild Roses depicts a mother’s loneliness and struggle to come to terms with her life. Kasia Adamik’s Amok follows the true story of a committed murderer who incriminates himself by writing a novel revealing the killing. There will also be a chance to see the UK premiere of Maria Sadowska’s biopic Sztuka Kochania about the Polish sexologist Michalina Wislocka, who wrote the bestseller The Art of Loving – the first published guide to sexual health from behind the Iron Curtain.

#PL100INDEPENDENCE

This strand offers an opportunity to delve into the archives for some cult classic dramas, comedies and rare Polish silent films. Aleksander Hertz’s Bestia (1917) stars Pola Negri as a wild girl who escapes her parents’ clutches only attract the attentions of a married manJan Nowina-Przbylski’s black and white comedy Love Manoeuvres (1935) sees a couple desperate to get out of an arranged marriage, in a fitting double bill with Juliusz Gardan’s cross-dressing comedy Is Lucyna A Girl? (1934) about a young woman who defies social norms to become an engineer. The celebration will also include an immersive 1920s style ballroom party, featuring special cocktails and a DJ.

CELEBRATING JEWISH-POLISH CINEMA

This year’s festival showcases the rich contribution of Jewish talent in Polish cinema. Kinoteka joins forces with Polish National Center for Jewish Film, to screen a 1937 Yiddish film (Der Purimshpiler) The Jester. The Southern Polish interwar story follows a troubadour who who arrives  in a small village where he upsets the status quo by falling for his new employer’s daughter. Wartime is also the central theme in The Reconciliation, Maciej Sobieszczański’s post-war drama set against the backdrop of the recently liberated Nazi concentration camps that were then used by the Communist party to imprison and eliminate traitors.

Krzysztof Zanussi will be back again this year ‘in conversation’ about one of his earliest films, The Structure of Crystal (1969) (17 March, ICA). Andrzej Klimowski, one of Polish most celebrated graphic designers will be in town for a masterclass aimed at new and emerging filmmakers looking to create poster artwork. He designed this year’s festival poster.

SUPPER CLUB CINEMA

On 23 March, Kinoteka hosts a gourmet evening featuring the delicious cuisine of rising chef Flavia Borawska, accompanied by a film screening of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s classic Double Life of Veronique.

Closing Night Gala – Henryk Szaro’s epic love story The Call of the Sea (1927) has been digitally restored and will play with a specially-commissioned live score performed by a five-piece ensemble led by pianist and composer Taz Modi, at the Barbican.

FESTIVAL GUESTS 

Jakub Gierszał (TBC)

The leading man in three films in this years’ New Polish Cinema segment. In 2012, he won the EFP Shooting Star prize at the Berlin International Film Festival and since then has worked steadily in both Poland and abroad.

Joanna Kos-Krauze

With only four director and writer’s credits in her dossier, Kos-Krauze is already one of the most talked about Polish filmmakers working today. She tells truthful stories about times gone by and people who made a small but culturally significant impact. Kos-Krauze will introduce Papusza (2013) and take part in a Q&A following a screening of My Nikifor (2004) at BFI Southbank on Thursday 8 March.

Maria Sadowska

Director, writer and actress, Sadowska is a triple threat in the industry today. Her latest film, The Art of Loving will be screened at Regent Street Cinema on 11th March. The Story of Michalina Wisłocka (2017) was nominated for a Golden Frog and Golden Lion at the Camerimage and Polish Film Festivals respectively.

Krzysztof Zanussi

Director, writer and Polish film legend, Krzysztof Zanussi has been making films since he was nineteen years-old and now at seventy-eight he’s showing no signs of stopping. The director has eighty-one credits to his name so far, including Ether which he’s currently filming.

KINOTEKA 2018 | 7 -29 MARCH 2018

Rainbow (2017)

Dir.: Paolo Taviani; Cast: Luca Marinelli, Valentina Belle, Lorenzo Richelmy, Anna Ferruzzo; Italy/France 2017, 84 min.

In Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s elegant historical drama, a doomed love-triangle, gets caught up in the tumultuous upheaval of the Second World War and the partisan resistance in Italy. Written by the brothers and based on the 1963 novel by Beppe Fenoglio, Paolo Taviani’s direction is a nostalgic outing  celebrating  the pre-WWII past, but with little to say about the fighting between partisans and Black-Shirts.

Milton (Marinelli) is fighting with the partisans in the winter of 1944/5, when he stumbles upon a villa in the remote countryside once the scene of his love affair for the beautiful Flavia (Belle). They were both students at the time, and loved to play old records. But Milton was jealous of fellow-student Giorgio (Richelmy), who also lusted after the young woman. Entering the villa, Milton meets the housekeeper (Ferruzzo), who remembers him from the olden days. She praises him, but has little to say about Giorgio, who, often visited Flavia after Milton left the scene, making it clear that, “nothing bad happened”.  In the middle of the civil war, Milton tries in vain to thrash things out with fellow partisan Giorgio, who been taken prisoner by the Fascists.

DoP Simone Zampagni creates lovely images of the stylish interiors and rough mountain landscapes, but Taviani never comes to grips with the story: it is really like two films in one, with the director and his co-writing brother distinctly preferring the glorious setting of the past to the mudslinging fighting and intrigues played out at the HQs of both Fascist and partisans. But worse, everything said about war, friendship and jealousy is just trite and banal. Rainbow dies a slow, beautiful death, losing itself in the permanent fog of this beautiful but visionless piece of nostalgia. AS

CINEMA MADE IN ITALY | 7-11 MARCH 2018 | LONDON UK

Cinema Made in Italy Festival 7 -11 March 2018

CINEMA MADE IN ITALY returns to London’s Ciné Lumière, showcasing the latest releases from Italy complete with film-maker Q&A sessions. This year’s line-up includes eight new Italian films and a 1977 classic title A SPECIAL DAY (Una Giornata Particolare), directed by the late maestro Ettore Scola and starring Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni.

SCREENING PROGRAMME – CINEMA MADE IN ITALY 2018

RAINBOW – (UNA QUESTIONE PRIVATA)  6.30 pm  | 7 March           

Intro and Q&A with Paolo Taviani (director)

AMORI CHE NON SANNO STARE AL MONDO | 6.15 pm | 8 March

Intro and Q&A with Francesca Comencini (director)

HANNAH | 6.30 pm  | 9 March 

Intro and Q&A with Andrea Pallaoro (director)

LOVE AND BULLETS | 8.40 pm  | 9 March 

Intro and Q&A with Antonio and Marco Manetti (directors)

THE INTRUDER | 6.30 pm  | 10 March               

FORTUNATA | 8.40 pm | 10 March 

 

Intro and Q&A with Jasmine Trinca (actress)

A SPECIAL DAY | 2.00 pm | 11 March 

CINDERELLA THE CAT | 4.00 pm | 11 March         

Intro and Q&A with Alessandro Rak (director)

UNA FAMIGLIA | 6.30 pm  | 11 March 

Intro and Q&A with Sebastiano Riso (director)

VENUE AND BOX OFFICE INFORMATION

CINEMA MADE IN ITALY | LONDON 7-11 MARCH 2018 

 

 

 

The Interpreter (2018) * * * * * | Berlinale 2018 Special

Wri/Dir: Martin Šulík | DoP: Martin Štrba | German, Slovak, 113′ | Cast: Peter Simonischek, Jiří Menzel, Zuzana Mauréry, Anita Szvrcsek, Anna Rakovská, Eva Kramerová, Réka Derzsi, Attila Mokos, Karol Šimon, Igor Hrabinský | World premiere | Drama

Peter Simonischek senses danger when he opens the front door of his elegant Vienna appartment to a well-dressed Jiří Menzel, who later emerges as the interpreter Ali Ungár in this war-themed drama levened by the same piquant humour the Austrian actor brought to Maren Ade’s satire Toni Erdman. A Slovakian Jew, Ali lost his parents during the war, and has tracked down the whereabouts of the SS officer responsible for their deaths. Georg (Peter Simonischek) quickly informs him that his father is dead. The atmosphere gently thaws as the pair gradually discover that the war has deeply affected them both in quite different ways. And Ali is not the only one keen to trace his roots. Georg recalls an eventful childhood filled with pride at his often absent officer father. Ali’s memories are swathed in dark shadows of loss and humiliation and he is still deeply traumatised by the loss of his parents. Keen to maintain his distance from a man he considers his vicarious enemy, he agrees to take Georg back with him to Slovakia charging a daily fee as his interpreter, and the two set off on an illuminating, and often tenderly moving journey to the past and themselves.

The Interpreter is above all a penetrating and poignant character piece punctuated by picaresque humour, Martin Šulík and co-scripter Marek Lescák deftly and sensitively conflate tragedy with comedy with meaningful results. Unlike the inflammatory Black 47 (2018) which revisits history stirring up hatred and stoking anger, The Interpreter is a far more conciliatory piece that seeks to promote understanding and pouring healing balm over still-smarting wounds in an enlightening exploration of a lesser known episode of the Holocaust – at least to more Western audiences. Martin Strba’s stylish camerawork captures sleek Viennese interiors and the transcendent tranquility of the Slovakian countryside in Spring.

The Second World War and its devastating effects are not the central thrust of the narrative, The Interpreter is a tribute that offers a refreshing take on events seen from the perspective of a generation who clearly remember things differently. The reveal in the final scene doesn’t come as a game-changer but offers further insight into the minds involved: Ali’s personality has been shaped by mistrust from childhood, but Georg is more instinctual in his reaction to events, which clearly mark him as the past unfolds. Both Menzel and Simonischek are brilliant in their depictions of men who are the products of their circumstances. Midnight Run and The Odd Couple spring to mind. Both men are endearing is their respective ways: Georg a wily, ebullient, womaniser; the curmudgeonly Ali proves an old-fashioned ally, but nobody’s fool. War has no winners or losers here but deeply effects us all. MT

BERLINALE 15-25 FEBRUARY 2018

https://vimeo.com/254993281

Circle (2018) * * * * | Berlinale 2018


Writer/Dir/DoP.: Jayisha Patel; Documentary with Kushbu Devi, Chandna Devi, Shabha Devi; UK 2018, 14 min.

India is the World’s 6th largest economy and yet many aspects of society still linger in the Dark Ages, as seen here in Javisha Patel’s poetic documentary, that had its world premiere at Berlinale 2018.

Set in contemporary Uttar Pradesh, CIRCLE is a lament for the plight of young women in many parts of India who still fall victim to rape and beatings within their own families. Their punishment is meted out by their grandmothers who have suffered the same fate, and collude with their menfolk in perpetuating and enforcing a culture of misogyny in a society which remains locked in the past. Luminously shot and elegantly framed, Patel’s film is sombre in tone but never mawkish in focusing on the emotional journey of Kushbu who has stoically internalised her grief and humiliation; almost inured to the status quo. While women are going about their work in the fields, men are seen as bystanders, hanging about in leisurely groups, as in the opening shot. Over the housework, Kushbu discusses her feelings after the brutal assault by four men who kidnapped and blindfolded her, taking her to a remote field. She claims even the police woman beat her up, forcing her to change her plea. Minimal dialogue conveys that life is a living hell with her grandmother’s demands. But little change is in sight. One of the women states clearly that “she will punish the young woman who will marry into her family, the same way”. Later, Kusbhu is married off in an elaborate ceremony to a pre-teen she has never met. Symbolically the wedding takes place without score or dialogue, the children staring around, bewildered. A passionate and poignant film.

BERLINALE 15-25 FEBRUARY 2018

Lemonade * * * * (2018) | Berlinale 2018 | Panorama

Dir: Ioana Uricaru | Cast:  Mălina Manovici, Steve Bacic, Dylan Scott Smith, Milan Hurduc, Ruxandra Maniu | Romania, Canada, Germany | Drama | 88 min

Ioana Uricaru directs this absorbing immigration truth-based drama from a linear script she co-wrote with Tatiana Ionascu and with the support of Palme d’Or winner Cristian Mungiu and Canadian finance. Exposing the often ugly corrupt and officious underbelly of US officialdom, it follows Mara, a nurse from Romania, who marries one of her patients (Daniel/Dylan Smith) while on a working visit the USA, and tries make her new life with her husband 3 year old son legal and above board. With a sensitive central performance from Mălina Manovici whose winning personality as Mara makes for an absorbing watch, this intelligent film conflates a New Wave drama with a taut psycho-thriller, managing its tonal shifts with surprising dexterity.

When the police ask Mara if Romanian is an Arabic language, you realise the depth of ignorance we are dealing with is ludicrous. But this is not the worse part: Mara’s aggressively inappropriate immigration official (a sleazy Steve Bacic from TV’s Arrow) asks her for a blow-job; and during a hospital visit, she is give an injection without her consent  “because it’s free”. Yet the arm of the law comes down heavily when she leaves Dragoš alone in the appartment. It then emerges that her husband Daniel has a ‘criminal record’ from abusing a minor. Despite all this Mara presses on obdurately remembering the Romanian saying: “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade”. Luminously lensed by Friede Clausz, this is a well-paced debut that doesn’t overstay its welcome, from a talented female team. MT

BERLINALE 15 -25 FEBRUARY 2018 | PANORAMA

Touch Me Not (2018) Berlinale 2018 | Winner Golden Bear

Dir.: Adina Pintilie; Cast: Laura Benson, Tomas Lemarquis, Christian Bayerlein, Grit Uhlemann, Adina Pintilie, Hanna Hoffman, Seani Love, Irmena Chichikova; Romania/Germany/France/Bulgaria/Czech Republic, 2018, 123 min.

Written, directed and edited by first time feature filmmaker Adina Pintilie, this surprise winner of the 2018 Berlin International Film Festival has split critics and audiences alike. The key to the mis/understanding of this fictional sex-based documentary may lie in Pintilie’s own background. At 38, she is the director of the Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival (BIEFF). Her award-winning short films fall into the category of “Fine Art” documentaries.

In this unique film the focus is Laura Benson and her exploration, through sexual therapy, of her deep-held anger and frustration. Pintilie does away with the fourth wall, participating both behind and in front of camera. The colour white dominates giving the feature a documentary feel, only disrupted by the soundtrack which destroys the illusion of realism, although the naturalistic performances make us feel like voyeurs in a candid and highly intimate sexual interaction. This is an uncomfortable film to watch. Many may find the degree of physical and emotional oversharing deeply off-putting, 

Laura visits a tattooed male prostitute who undresses for her and later masturbates. Laura looks on in barely disguised lust, and later smells his sperm in the bed. Then Laura meets Hanna Hoffman, a transsexual prostitute who also doubles up as Sex-Therapist. Hanna playfully romps on the bed, talking about her breasts who are named Lilo and Gusti, the former being the more sensitive one. She also fondles her penis through a pair of Y-fronts. Hanna is also involved in music and appreciates Brahms, like Laura’s hospitalised father. In a clinic two mwn who feel let down by their bodies: Christian Bayerlain, who suffers from Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA) and is visited by Tudor (Lemarquis), who has been completely hairless since the age of 13, due to Alopecia Universalis. Tudor (if I had a choice, I would choose not to have hair, because it’s just another form of disguise”) is still in love with his ex-girl-friend (Chichikova), whom he sometimes stalks at night.

Ironically, Christian’s penis is one of the parts of his body which functions perfectly, and he is keen on sex, because before it makes him feel more than just “a brain, floating around with no body”. After meeting an other sex-therapist (Love), who brings out in predilection for strong physical interactions, suddenly asks the director to change places with her. Pintilie acquiesces, admitting “that this a tough place to be in. I feel lots of fear, of being looked at, judged. When you screamed with anger, I knew the feeling very well.” To which Laura answers “Did I scream for you?”.

The only criticism here is a rather superfluous scene in a sex club where some of the participants meet. Otherwise Pintilie stays the course in this permanently questioning roleplay of transference and projection: like an orthodox Freudian, she claims sex to be the the centre of our lives. Sex being influenced by our hopes and denials –  foremost, of our past, parental and otherwise. There is no escape, and Pintilie is brave enough to join the fray in a film that teeters of the brink of but never oversteps the mark. Where the demarcation lines of documentary and fiction are, is never revealed. But the director, with the help of DoP George Chiper-Lillemark – who punctiliously clinical images give the impression of ongoing scientific research in some futuristic laboratory – succeeds in bringing in bringing Laura’s odyssey to a successful, surprising and moving conclusion. AS

BERLINALE GOLDEN BEAR WINNER 2018 | 15 – 25 FEBRUARY 2018

Mug (Twarz) **** (2018) | Berlinale 15-25 February 2018 | Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize

Dir: Malgorzata Szumovska | Michal Englert | Cast: Mateuz Kosciukiewiczz, Agnieszka Podsiadlik | Drama | Pol |

In the latest salacious social critique of her homeland, filmmaker Malgorzata Szumovska captures the zeitgeist of rural Poland with a strangely moving story involving a scruffy metalhead builder who is forced to reevaluate his life after a tragic accident at work. 

Twarz means mug/face in Polish. And refers to the central character Jacek (Mateusz Kosciukiewicz), who still lives in the lakeside town of Świebodzin (Western Poland) with his provincial-minded and petty family. Despite intentions to move to London with his floozy fiancée Dagmara(Małgorzata Gorol), Jacek is put off by his brother in law’s zenophobic stance on things and Brexit doubts. Only his sister seems to be on his side.

Jacek is building something he believes in – the statue of Christ the King, which is currently the tallest representation in the World. But a dreadful fall derails his future and his face is so badly injured that he needs life-changing surgery: the local priest (Roman Gancarczyk), his fiancée Dagmara, and the rest of the family will have to chip in to expensive, ongoing medical bills for a man who may be quite different from the one they knew and loved. Even his mother (Anna Tomaszewska) refuses to accept his new look – which is by no means monstrous (cleverly photographed by Michal Englert who also co-wrote the script). But worse of all, Dagmara shuns him. Only his sister (a superb Agnieszka Podsiadlik) is there to help with his rehabilitation.

Szumovska masterfully manages the tonal nuances from realism to comic fantasy in a film that is competently performed, utterly compelling and thematically rich with its reflection on consumerism, identity and prejudice. She also reflects on religious belief an the nature of human suffering symbolised by Jacek’s dignified forbearance under the gaze of an all-seeing Jesus Christ. MT

BERLINALE 15-25 FEBRUARY 2018 | SILVER BEAR GRAND JURY PRIZE
PRESS CONFERENCE 

The Tree | Drvo * * * (2018) | Berlinale 2018

Dir: Andre Gil Mata | Petar Fradelic, Sanja Vrzic, Filip Zivanovic | Bosnia| Portugal | 104′

Admirers of slow cinema will delight in this beautifully crafted laborious drama from Portuguese auteur Andre Gil Mata. It follows an old man whose task is to collect water in war-torn Bosnia. At a snail’s pace, the old boy leaves his ramshackle hovel and painstakingly makes his way down to the river’s edge while doing his rounds collecting bottles from the houses he passes on the way. Accompanying him on this meticulous journey through swirling snow is his faithful canine. The sound of bombs and artillery sound in the distance, signalling some kind of conflict in this timeless, dark and gloomy setting. The tone is best described as Fadoesque. After nearly an hour he reaches the river where a boat awaits him as he gingerly sets off gliding gradually through the moonlight and mist. After a while, he sees a figure on the riverbank who then hurries off into the distance, and the man climbs ashore. It would be churlish to say that this feels like watching paint dry, but it certainly does. There are many who delight in this filmmaker’s fare which has echoes of Hungarian master Bela Tarr in its gentle rhythm and cadence. Some find it all mesmerising while others describe the experience as akin to “pulling teeth” or even “Chinese torture”.  In the right mood, it is certainly somnolent. The riverside figure who ran away later emerges as the man’s companion on his return journey, water bottles replete. And this languidly morose segment is regaled with unintelligible dialogue. Cineastes often conflate slow cinema with profundity, and this is certainly the case here.  The Tree will prove delightful for some, purgatory for others. You decide. MT

BERLINALE 15-25 FEBRUARY 2018

Khook | The Pig (2018)*** | Berlinale 2018


Dir/Writer: Mani Haghighi | Cast: Hassan Majooni, Leila Hatami, Leili Rashidi | Comedy | Iran

Narcissism is rife in the creative world and Iranian filmmaker Mani Haghighi (A Dragon Arrives) mines its funny side in this surreal screwball satire. The Pig’s Telenovela-ish style and garish visual aesthetic may not appeal to everyone, and some of the arcane humour may just go over Western viewers’ heads in sending up the Iranian middle classes who spend their days on the tennis court or channel their artistic energy into louche fancy dress parties (styled here by designer Negar Nemati’s in vibrant pinks and reds), hamstrung by the government’s strict censorship controls.

In downtown Tehran a serial killer is on the loose, but he doesn’t pick any old victim – the heads he decapitates belong to famous film directors, and black-listed helmer Hasan Kasmai (Hasan Majuni) is furious that he’s still alive, and despite his mother’s assurances that he deserves to die on account of his brilliance, Hasan remains petulant at being ignored especially as one of victims is Rakshan Bani-Etemad, who has championed women’s issues and bravely challenged the censorship code.

Haghigi’s political piece – which he also produced – sees Iran as a matriarchal society where men are adored and cosseted, particularly by their mothers and wives, who have the last word. Hasan is really just a grouchy Grufalo whose bedroom is cluttered with rock posters and man toys and whose affair with Shiva (a gently humorous Leila Hatami) is doomed to fail due his inactivity film-wise. Despite its flaws and rather unsatisfactory ending, The Pig is a brave attempt to send up Iranian politics and poke affectionate fun at ego-driven artists without offending. It will either win your heart or do you head in. MT

BERLINALE 15-25 FEBRUARY 2018

The Happy Prince (2018) *** Berlinale 2018

Dir: Rupert Everett | Cast: Colin Firth, Rupert Everett, Emily Watson

Rupert Everett has made no secret of his appreciation for the British playwright Oscar Wilde having played him in various film and stage adaptations with The Happy Prince being the latest. His debut as director and writer draws comparisons with the theatre outing The Judas Kiss where the focus is Wilde’s controversial relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas – better known as Bosie – a crime that led to several years in a hard larbour camp for which the writer received a posthumous pardon last year.

Taking its title from Wilde’s fairy tale parable about the friendship between a statue and a swallow finding the Kingdom of Heaven after sacrificing their worldly treasures – Wilde is pictured in the opening scene reading this bedtime story to his children in flashback, and at the end, to his protégées, a pair of French urchins (Benjamin Voisin and Matteo Salamone).

In between Everett avoids a straightforward narrative opting for an impressionistic hagiographic hotpotch of visually alluring vignettes that follow Everett’s Wilde as the self-indulgent raconteur of his own decadent final years as a raddled Victorian roué in exile roaming the flesh pots of France and Italy on a flight of fancy, courtesy of a generous allowance from his estranged and undeservedly berated wife Constance (Emily Watson). During this interlude, Wilde emerges as a bloated narcissistic lush mourning his unfinished love affair with the rather fey Bosie (Colin Morgan), while dallying with the more reasonable Robbie Ross, his literary agent. He eventually reunites with Bosie in scenes that suggest their affair is fired as much by lust as by mutual understanding. Everett makes the decision to flip from French to English accentuating the rather pretentious tone of the piece and detracting from the moments of coruscating wit that pepper Wilde’s caustic repartee.

Although the result is an ethereal feast for the eyes this is a film far too floaty and dramatically unsubstantial to sustain the attention for its 103 minutes, despite some sterling underpinnings from Everett himself, Colin Firth as Wilde’s old habitué Reggie Turner and a thoughtful but underwritten Emily Watson. MT

IN CINEMAS FROM 18 June 2018 | Berlinale 2018 review

The Touch (1971) * * * | Ingmar Bergman Retrospective 2018

Dir.: Ingmar Bergman; Cast: Bibi Andersson, Elliot Gould, Max von Sydow, Sheila Reid; Sweden/USA 1971, 115′.

Sometimes, a ‘neglected’ feature is in fact no masterpiece, even if directed by a genius like Ingmar Bergman: THE TOUCH, the director’s first English language film has not aged well, and suffers from an unevenness which is a-typical for the filmmaker. But despite its flaws this tale about a three year long ménageà-trois, featuring a bourgeois Swedish couple from a provincial town, and an enigmatic, slightly disturbed Jewish archaeologist, caught the headlines nearly fifty years ago.

Karin (Andersson) and her husband Andreas (von Sydow), a doctor in the local hospital, live with their two children and a cute dog named Bobby in a clean and modernist style house outside the town’s medieval walls. Karin is house-proud and obsessed with running the household, often to the point of caricature. Andreas is a workaholic, who is as self-contained and detached as the house and as clean as his operating theatre. He loves his wife but their relationship is traditional  – he is the breadwinner, she the hausfrau who looks after their well-behaved children, all fitting in with his working hours. In this perfectly orderly set-up comes David Kovac (Gould), an English-speaking archaeologist, who is working at a site in the town. He falls in love with Karin, who meets him for the first time, in floods of tears, after the death of her mother. For Karin this is an exciting escapade rather than a passionate sexual adventure. Their sexual relationship is procedural rather than lustful at first, and the relationship is anything but smooth: the self-obsessed David (who tried to commit suicide just before meeting Karin), is moody as well as (self)destructive, and Karin has the direct, ingenuous approach of the true ingenue. Karin seems fascinated by him, because he is the total opposite of her husband, needy and out of control. He becomes another child, awakening in her feelings of motherhood, and in the end, she is pregnant, and follows David to England, where she meets his sister Sara (Reid), who suffers from a muscular disease, and is totally dependent on her brother. Perhaps, Karin can see her own position reflected in Sara, because she finally comes to a decision.

THE TOUCH suffers from Gould’s overplaying his part, whilst Andersson and von Sydow are just perfect. The constant chance from Swedish to English feels unnatural. But it is mainly Bergman’s script, which is also much too overwrought and verbose, undermining the emotional credibility of the narrative. We are never really convinced that a rational and unemotional woman like Karin, could fall for a man-child like David and tolerate his moods for such a long time. She might see in the younger man a son, she never had – but again we cannot believe, that she would fall so completely apart like she does. The few scenes with Sara seem like an appendix, somehow one expects her to contribute more to shed light on her brother’s simply too enigmatic personality. It is perhaps also the timing, that explains that THE TOUCH is so overlooked – it was followed by two Bergman masterpieces: Cries and Whispers and Scenes from a Marriage. AS

SCREENING DURING BFI INGMAR BERMAN RETROSPECTIVE JANUARY – MARCH 2018 when it will simultaneously be available on BFI Player, The Touch will be released on DVD/Blu-ray by the BFI on 23 April. This will be the first time that it has ever been released on DVD anywhere in the world. For more information on all the BFI’s Ingmar Bergman activity see here.

 

Black 47 * (2018) Berlinale 2018

Dir: Lance Daly | Cast: Hugo Weaving, James Frecheville, Stephen Rea, Barry Keoghan, Freddie Fox | Ireland | Drama

Lance Daly’s dreary historical revenge drama revisits the peak of Ireland’s potato famine (1847) from the perspective of a raw and wretched Irish ranger who has served the British Army abroad. The malcontent has a particular axe to grind in this story, and his weapon of choice is a vicious shortened sabre that slices through anyone who gets in his way when his plans to escape the rain-soaked Emerald Isle for pastures new in America are scuppered.

Martin Feeney (a deeply sinister looking Frecheville), has deserted the Imperial army and finds his way back to Ireland to find his family has been largely wiped out and his brother hanged by the local English judge. His neighbours are now outcasts in their own country and Feeney launches a bitter vendetta, clearly posing a a threat to the powers that be. So along comes Captain Hannah (Hugo Weaving) who is tasked by the English, against his will, to track Feeney down.

If Daly’s plan was to worsen British Irish relations further by drudging up a miserable period of the nation’s past, at least he could have made a better more well-balanced job of it than this rather predictable, one-sided and cliche-ridden piece of cinema. The Great Famine was clearly a complete nightmare for both sides. Ireland had become part of the United Kingdom in 1801 but sectarian divisions between Protestants and Catholics causing religious wars during the 17th century had been made worse by the country’s prevailing economic problems in the 19th century and a general fall in global food prices, and Britain’s change to free trade in the 1840s only really benefited the industrialised North where Protestants predominated. The South relied on agriculture and was badly affected by the Famine which was exacerbated by poor weather. So torrential rain, religious differences and the well-known Colonial arrogance of the era, coalesced to create an unmitigated human disaster. It’s only reasonable that a decent tribute should be made but BLACK 47 was no the way to do it. It shows how Irish families were dying, while the English overlords were mercilessly exporting the little grain that was produced, and to make matters even worse, new eviction laws wreaked havoc among the poverty-stricken population producing the equivalent wide-scale homelessness and mortality seen – on a much larger scale – during Stalin’s policy of collectivism.

In this rather clumsy affair, the English are naturally painted as baddies, the cast are forced to be caricatures of pompous prigs, with the most unspeakably racist dialogue to deliver, which they do with aplomb, but flounder with the native Gaelic. There is the Boris Johnson-quiffed officer Pope (Freddie Fox) and his subaltern (Barry Keoghan from The Killing of a Sacred Deer) ). Even Jim Broadbent plays against his normal liberal type as the sneering snob Lord Kilmichael. Irishman Stephen Rea kisses the proverbial Blarney Stone as a wandering troubadour Conneely, who offers to help the English with his ‘lore of the land’. From the get-go  you wouldn’t trust him to post a letter, and he’s perfect in the part giving a peerless performance as a sly and slippery savant, flight of foot and mind.

And what a gift this story could have been if more equitable hands had mined the rich vein of dramatic potential in this land of misty seascapes, rich folklore and canny characters smouldering in wait for the British army. Instead we get a one-sided and schematic narrative with the English painted as unremitting rogues and a support cast of zombie-like faceless Irish freaks drifting around in bleached-out set pieces. Each scene is as predictable and the last. The only part with any real nuance, aside from Stephen Rea’s, is Hugo Weaving’s Hannah. There is breadth to his character and he plays the dark horse ’til the final hurdle. But what a travesty the rest of it is. Clearly Black 47 is intended as a flag-waving crowd-pleaser for the Irish, but it is a lazy, feel-bad movie for British audiences, opening old wounds and striking another blow for diplomacy, offering little hope for reconciliation over events that happened in the dim and  distant past. MT

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | 15 – 25 FEBRUARY 2018

The Prayer * * * (2018) | Berlinale 2018


Dir: Cedric Kahn | Fanny Burdino | Cast: Anthony Bajon, Damien Chapelle, Alex Brendemuhl, Hanna Schygulla | Drama | France | 107′

Best known for his 2004 drama Red Lights, based on Georges Simenon’s novel, French filmmaker Cédric Kahn returns to Berlin with this traditional but drifting coming of age love story that explores the road to salvation for a teenage boy who joins a Christian retreat after becoming lost in a world of drugs and drinking.

Newcomer Anthony Bajon leads an impressive cast that includes Damien Chapelle and Hannah Schygulla’s mother superior, and while he makes a great screen debut expressing the confusion and anguish of puberty, the real star of the film is Bruno Dumont’s regular DoP Yves Cape whose widescreen images evoke the fresh verdance and soul-regenerating benefits of the Auvergne in springtime. MT

BERLINALE 15-25 FEBRUARY 2018 | SILVER BEAR Best Actor | Anthony Bajon

The Cranes Are Flying | Letjat schurawli (1957) Berlinale Classics 2018

Dir.: Mikhail Kalatozov; Cast: Tatjana Samoylava, Aleksey Batalov, Vasily Merkuryev, Aleksandr Shvorin; USSR 1957, 95 min.

Mikhail Kalatosov (1903-1973) led Soviet cinema back to the lyricism of Pudovkin and Eisenstein, and broke with the hollow realism and personality cult of the Stalin era. The director owes much to the collaboration of DoP Sergei Urussevsky and editor Marya Timofeyeva – even though the actress Tatjana Samoylava, in the centre role of Veronika, got most of the attention at Cannes Film Festival in 1958, where The Cranes won the Palme D’Or and Samoylava Best Actress.

Boris (Batalov) and Veronika are a happy couple when Germany invades the Soviet Union in June 1941. Boris immediately joins the Red Army, to defend the Motherland, but is soon killed at the front. Veronika is unnaware of his death, and after her parents are killed in an air raid, she moves in with her uncle Fyodor (Merkuryev), a surgeon, and his cousin Mark (Shvorin), a pianist, who rapes Veronica during an air raid, and she is forced to marry him. When Fyodor discovers that Mark has bribed the authorities to avoid being drafted, he throws him out of the house. Veronica wants to commit suicide, but is saved at the last moment, when she spots an abandoned child, needing her help. Only at the end of the war does she accept that Boris is dead, giving the flowers she brought him to the returning soldiers.

Kalatosov (I am Cuba, The Red Tent) breaks many taboos of the Stalin period – where it was unconscionable to admit that citizens bribed officials in order to avoid conscription. Rape, even in this very nuanced form, had never been shown before. And a heroine, who even seriously contemplated suicide  – never mind being a second away from it – had no place in a cinema throttled to death by censorship.

Urussevsky’s often handheld camera is extremely mobile, and his moody black-and-white images glow in depicting a private and public world in chaos. Samoylava’s heartfelt acting is never sentimental and Kalatosov helps the re-birth of Soviet cinema by going back to the masters of the first hour after the revolution. Without any exaggeration, one can say that this feature deservedly buried Stalinist film culture in the muckheap of history.

AS
*****

Teatro de Guerra (2018) * * * | Berlinale 2018 Forum

Dir/Writer: Lola Arias | Doc | Argentina, Spain 2018

The Falklands War (1982-84)  took the lives of 655 Argentinian and 255 British soldiers. It ended in Argentina’s military defeat and in territorial claims on both sides that remain contentious to this day.
Experimental in nature, this frank and often moving film essay from Argentinian artist and filmmaker Lola Arias tries to discover if past trauma can ever be resolved by collectively revisiting the memories by giving soldiers from both sides a chance to explore their feelings and even re-enact their experiences 34 years after hostilities officially ended. This is an illuminating piece of filmmaking that puts us at the cutting edge of the combat through face to face interviews; news footage and staged episodes of the conflict enacted by those who actually took part.

Now in their early 50s, the 12 veterans from both sides, bear their souls in a piece that swings between moments of anguish and absurd comedy. At one point the men even break into song and perform together in a rock band, emoting and finding a cathartic outlet for their anxiety from the past. This makes for an interactive cinema – the soldiers finding a space to release their trauma and viewers experiencing the full throttle of their pain – and even elation. An engaging piece of cinema that grapples with the coal face of conflict in new and inventive ways. MT

BERLINALE 15-25 FEBRUARY 2018 | BERLINALE FORUM PRIZE | ECUMENICAL JURY | CICAE ART CINEMA AWARD

 

Cross My Heart | Les Rois Mongols (2018) | Berlinale 2018

Dir.: Luc Picard; Cast: Milya Corveil-Gauvreau, Henry Picard, Anthony Bouchard, Alexis Guay, Clare Coulter; Canada 2017, 101 min.

Director Luc Picard (Esimesac) and  Nicole Belanger adapt her book into a moving feature about children caught up in the world of adults and their often heartless pragmatism.

At the height of the ‘October Crisis’ in Canada, when separatists of the FLQ (Quebec Liberation Front) kidnapped and killed the Deputy Prime Minister Pierre Laporte on October 17th 1970, four children from Montreal took a leaf out of the book of adult politics and staged their own kidnapping. Teenager Manon (Corveil-Gauvreau) overhears her mother talking to a social worker about her plans to separate her kids to the care of foster parents: their father is dying of cancer, and the mother is near a nervous breakdown. During the father’s illness, Manon and Mimi often stayed at their aunt’s house with their two cousins. Martin has a crush on Manon,  a good Catholic girl. She first asks Jesus for help, but after nothing happens, loses her faith. Martin, on the other hand, promises to help. Inspired by the actions of his student brother Paul, he suggests a kidnapping might put paid to the break up of Manon’s family. The two teenagers abduct a wheelchair-bound neighbour (Coulter) and escape into a cabin in the north of the country, taking the enthusiastic Mimi and Denis with them. But they leave the ransom note – a near exact copy of the actual kidnapping demand, signed Family Cell instead of Chernier Cell. Later, in the cold cabin, the five bond after a shaky beginning: the old lady is a good grandmother to the little boys in spite of her lack of French, and the teenagers make it to the first kiss, before the police intervene. Manon is put into a home for juvenile delinquents – but her quest to free her brother is only a step away from becoming reality.

Picard describes the different worlds of adults and children with much imagination: they just want to be adults before their time. Their naivety and lack of judgement leads them to behave it a way that may work in the world of kids, but not in a world corrupted by adult scheming. The biggest difference between these two universes is adult adjustment – which children like Manon and Mimi – see as treachery. All four young actors are brilliant, and DoP Francois Dutil’s images are the stunnung stuff of fairy tales. The world of the adults is suitably grey and brown; the kids’ kingdom full of vibrant brillliance. This is a film for children and adults who still see themselves as kids, at heart. And who haven’t forgotten the power of make believe and magic. AS

BERLINALE 14 -24 FEBRUARY 2018 | Crystal Bear for the Best Film Generation Kplus

Grass (2018) | Berlinale 2018 Forum

Dir: Hong Sangsoo | Drama | Cast: Kim Minhee, Jung Jinyoung, Ki Joobong, Seo Younghwa, Kim Saebyuk, Ahn Jaehong, Gong Minjeung | Korea 2018 | Korea, 66 min

GRASS is Hong Sangsoo’s shortest film so far but he returns once again to familiar territory, this time in black and white, a exploring the dynamic between men and women when they first meet. And this one is as light-hearted as ever and takes place in a single location in the Korean capital of Seoul: a cafe with classical music. Strains of Wagner and Schubert can be heard as his regular muse Kim Min-hee, but this time there’s a twist. The heroine is using the other customers in the place as characters in a series of stories, even adapting their conversations for the dialogue while the food and Korean soju flows.

BERLINALE 15-25 FEBRUARY 2018

After the Storm (2016) | Bluray release

Director| Writer: Kore-Eda Hirokazu | 117min | Drama | Japan | Cast: Hiroshi Abe, Yoko Maki, Taiyo Yoshizawa, Satomi Kobayashi. Cert tbc, 120 mins.

There are some really witty and perceptive moments in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s AFTER THE STORM, this is one of his more underplayed and subtle films that celebrates the comforting simplicity of everyday family life. Lighter and less sentimental than I Wish (2011), Like Father, Like Son (2013) and Our Little Sister (2015), this is a genial film with a gentle feelgood vibe as it explores the inter-generational conflict without ever being hard-egded or judgemental in doing so.

Ryota (Hiroshi Abe) is having a difficult time of being a son and a father. A failed writer and budding private detective in Kiyose (Kore-eda’s home town) he feels unfulfilled with his role as a voyeur in other people’s marriages and is working on another book. An expert gambler, most of his cash goes on feeding this habit and we’re led to believe it was responsible for his marriage breakdown to Kyoko (Yoko Maki), and jeopardising payments to his young son Shingo (Taiyo Yoshizawa).

Mourning the recent death of his father, Ryota frequently goes home to his canny old mother   Yoshiko (Kilin Kiki), from whom he steals lottery tickets and food whilst hoping to build bridges towards a closer relationship. The storm of the title is actually the 23rd typhoon to hit Tokyo in 2016 and it’s gradually making its presence known in nearby Tokyo. This act of God means that Ryota will have to spend the night with his mother with his ex-wife and son and sparks the beginnings of a poignant family rapprochment that is both humorous and delicately sad.

This is a well-crafted domestic drama where some of the comedy focuses on food preparation with surprising authenticity. It one scene Ryota attempts to eat his mother’s home made sorbet: “this has a refrigerator smell” – Japan may be a different cuisine and culture, but this well-observed  comment will be familiar to everyone. MT|

NOW AVAILABLE ON BLURAY FROM 19 FEBRUARY

Figlia Mia (2018) **** | Berlinale 2018

Dir: Laura Bispuri | Francesca Manieri | Cast: Valeria Golino, Alba Rohrwacher, Udo Kier, Sara Casu | Drama | Italy

A new crop of talented directors have breathed life into contemporary Italian cinema, with fascinating stories capturing the country’s vibrant history and regions. Paolo Sorentino’s The Great Beauty and The Consequences of Love are set in Rome and Ticino; Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by your Name/A Bigger Splash champion Emilia Romagna and Pantellaria, and Alice Rohrwacher’s The Wonders takes place in Tuscany, but and all luxuriate in their stunning scenery and unique sense of place. Laura Bispuri follows her debut Sworn Virgin – a story of a woman who travels from Albania to modern day Milan, with this gut-wrenching motherhood ménage à trois, marking her out as a distinctive cinematic voice with her stories of women coping in challenging circumstances.

FIGLIA MIA is set in summertime Sardinia, amongst a simple fishing community in an ancient coastal setting. This is about a little girl called Vittoria who suddenly senses that a woman she gets to know during her school holidays (Angelica, Alba Rohrwacher in a career best) is actually her real mother – rather than Tina (a captivating Valeria Golino) the loving woman she’s grown up with. Angelica is irresponsible but charismatic: one of those women who lives and loves for the moment – mostly out of control, and incapable of looking after her dogs and horses, let alone another human being. At first, like in a love affair, Vittoria falls for Angelica’s sense of fun, but is always glad to return to the calm security Tina provides. And as Vittoria becomes more obsessed with Angelica, Tina, feels jealous and threatened.

Bispuri’s narrative unfurls in an unhurried fashion while the women instinctive play their parts – this is a deeply affecting tale that will resonate with anyone who’s been affected by the issues at stake. Themes of identity, belonging and loss all macerate in the heady heat of this sweltering Mediterranean island, where a tightly-knit community are thrown together for better and for worst. The only character who holds the power is Angelica, and she couldn’t give a damn. While Tina’s desperate fear of losing her child, her feminine identity, and also of being humiliated, are powerfully expressed in Golino’s visceral tour de force. Sardinia corruscates in Vladan Radovic’s  stunning cinematography, its potent emotion and windswept beauty recalling the Taviani Brothers’ Padre Padrone another memorable Italian inter-generational tale of the ties that bind and threaten to divide. MT

BERLINALE 15-25 FEBRUARY 2018

https://vimeo.com/255511153

 

Entebbe * * (2018) Berlinale 2018

Dir: Jose Padiha | Writer: Gregory Burke | Cast: Rosamund Pike, Daniel Bruhl, Eddie Marsan | Thriller | 107′

7 Days in Entebbe (July 1976) felt more like 2 weeks in this hard slog of a thriller that cruises rather than soars, never mustering any real suspense. Despite some terrific performances from its stellar cast – and particularly Eddie Marsan for the best Hebrew accent this site of the Mediterranean – the direction is sluggish with most of the film’s running time spent on debate between hijackers and planning on part of bewigged and besuited politicians. Daniel Bruhl is bland as the ideological head of the German Revolutionary Cells that was purportedly one of the nation’s most dangerous leftist terrorists groups. Rosamund Pike does her best with a rather frosty role as his accomplice. Most of the time she looks frightened to death.

Any hostage tragedy offers rich dramatic potential, yet this feels like a detached procedural that fails to excite or entertain. There’s a terrific turn from Nonso Anozie as bumptiously sinister dictator Idi Amin. And the vaguely related dance routine that headlines the start and finale of the film is a welcome idea that gives a kick up the backside to this otherwise lacklustre affair. MT

BERLINALE 2018 | 15 -25 FEBRUARY 2018

Eva (2018) * * * | Berlinale 2018


Dir: Benoit Jacquot | Gilles Taurand | James Hadley Chase | Cast Isabelle Huppert, Gaspard Ulliel, Julia Roy | Drama | France | 100

Benoit Jacquot (‘A Single Girl’) and Isabelle Huppert (‘Elle’) are together in this enjoyable but unconvincing adaptation of James Hadley Chase’s sixties bestseller Eva.

Annecy is the snow-capped setting for this often unsettling menage a trois that would have us believe that a good-looking young gigolo (Gaspard Ulliel) leaves his luscious blond babe (Julia Roy) and falls in thrall to an ageing geisha girl (Isabelle Huppert) whose stick is ‘treat ‘em mean to keep ‘em keen.

But what starts an alluring affair rapidly loses its way. That said It’s typically French, flirty and fun. Jacquot and scripter Gilles Taurand’s version opens as wannabe something Bertrand (Ulliel), is tending to the needs of a dying writer – whether as carer or call boy is never made clear here. As the old man chokes, Bertrand makes off with his manuscript of a play entitled Passwords, hoping to make it to the bright lights which he does with his wealthy girlfriend in tow. But the second play poses a problem and his producer (Richard Berry) is becoming impatient.

Despite its light-hearted overtones there’s a menacing Hitchockian undertow that keeps the noirish tension tight and ticking over as the action unfurls with its rather unsavoury characters that definitely have a retro twang of the Sixties. Isabelle Huppert does her stuff with perky aplomb but we never really buy into the dicy dynamic between her and Ulliel which eventually leads to his undoing. quickly becomes an obsession that will ruin his life in a drama, that while entertaining to a certain extent is ultimately rather empty.

BERLINALE 15-25 February 2018 | COMPETITION

Horizon (2018) * * * * Berlinale 2018

Dir.: Tinatin Kajrishvilli; Cast: George Bochorishvilli, Ia Sukhitashvilli, Jano Izoria, Lika Okroshvilli, Nana Datunnashvilli, Sergo Buiglishvilli; Georgia/Sweden 2018, 105 min.

Director/co-writer Tinatin Kajrishvilli (Brides) creates an atmospheric, elegiac portrait of lost love and self-destruction. Set mainly in the ravishing countryside of Georgia, Horizonti is full of passion and longing, a paean to the past that echoes a Chekov play.

Still in his thirties, Giorgi (an impressive George Bochorishvilli) lives a life straight out of the 19th century. Separating from his wife Ana (Ia Sukhitashi) has been a traumatic process – at heart he is a brooding, disillusioned romantic and he retreats to the coast where the region’s swamps and lakes suit his gloomy temperament. Ana has left him for Nico (Buiglishvilli) so Giorgi now takes refuge in the company of elderly Georgians who also mourn the old country.

There is Larisa (Datunashvilli), who dies on the eve of her journey to attend a wedding in the city: she does want to leave the slightly crazy Valiko, who always lets the chicken run free – and plays billiards alone. Only Jano (Izoria), a friend from George’s past, and Marika (Okroshidze) are of Georgi’s generation. But even though Ana has made it clear she is going to marry Niko soon, Giorgi does not want to accept reality: he always uses their two sons as an excuse to visit Ana, whose wedding to Nico is now imminent.

They spend a miserable time in a hotel near the sea, before Giorgi sets out to bury himself for ever in an outpost near the lakes.The snowy countryside is breath-taking, Irakli Akhalkatsi’s visual are mostly widescreen impressionistic paintings: a wounded animal, George becomes one with the landscape. Doom-laden from the beginning, he even looses his zest for hunting and starts drinking again. There is a symbolic walk along the seaside, Ana with her new husband  Niko, and the two children. At the end it is Ana who is lost in the boat, taking her back to the city: Giorgi was like a feral animal, who liked to roam – she certainly loved him once, but now she has finally set him free. AS

BERLINALE 15-25 FEBRUARY 2018

Damsel (2018) | Berlinale 2018

Dir: David Zellner | Nathan Zellner | Cast: Robert Pattinson, Mia Wasikowska, David Zellner, Robert Forster, David Zellner | Comedy Western | US | 113′

David and Nathan Zellner’s Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter was a strange and subtly humorous mid-West mystery drama that screened at Berlinale in 2014. The brothers are back at Berlin again this year with a full on comedy Western that totally upends conventions and challenges gender roles. It stars Robert Pattinson, Mia Wasikowska and Robert Forster.

DAMSEL is playful and beautiful to look at in its stunning Goblin Valley Utah setting, but its efforts to be inventive is really what really appeals, apart from a brilliant off the cuff script and, despite from the gun-toting and the darker themes of lovelorn loneliness, there’s an upbeat frisky playfulness that has much in common with Cat Balloo and Altman’s McCabe and Mrs Millar.

The film opens as a jaded Christian missionary (Foster) is bemoaning his efforts to proselytise the Native Indians, While waiting for a stagecoach back East, a pithy tete a tete plays out with a young man (a thoughtfully appealing David Z) who’s heading West, after tragedy, to look for a new start.  Suddenly something weird then happens and a more carefree mood carries us  through to a windswept beach in Oregon where Samuel Alabaster (a jaunty Pattinson), has arrived with a miniature Palomino pony Butterscotch, and is making his way into a redneck town where he meets up with David Zellner as the newly-styled Parson Henry.

With his jaunty charm and chipper breeziness Samuel is a man a with a mission – he’s got a proposal in mind and wants the parson to come with him, offering a generous reward. The two head off to the remote home of Samuel’s true love Penelope (Mia Wasikowska) where, brimming with excitement, he intends to make her his bride. His cheeky bravado wins the parson’s trust during their eventful treck, but when they arrive at their destination, it soon becomes clear that Samuel has misjudged the mood romance-wise.

Penelope is a feisty individual but sadly she lack depth – and after the cheerful opening credits – where she’s seen dancing with Samuel in better days, Wasikowska soon becomes a storm cloud without a silver lining of any kind. David’s Parson Henry, meanwhile is a man looking for a mother, rather than a mission. He gives a sensitive performance but his character is so sweet and self-deprecating he’s rather to good for this world, and any other – for that matter. So Robert Pattison’s Samuel gets the juiciest role with he pulls of with great charm, and there are some terrific turns from the support cast. The Brothers’ quirky sense of humour is an acquired taste but its certainly unique and some of the comedic incongruity even echoes early scenes from Blazing Saddles. DAMSEL is a real breath of fresh air. MT

BERLINALE 15-25 FEBRUARY 2018

https://youtu.be/L6t07LFf5hQ

Museum (20180 | Berlinale Film Festival 2018

Dir: Alonso Ruizpalacios Cast: Gael Garcia Bernal, Leonardo Ortizgris, Alfredo Castro, Simon Russell Beale, Lisa Owen, Bernardo

 In Alonso Ruizpalacios’ follow-up to his punchy debut Gueros, two wayward young Mexicans from Satellite City are bored with their provincial life so decide to rob the local archeological museum of its Mayan and After treasures in an offbeat but strangely captivating drama that gradually gets more entertaining, although it never quite feels completely satisfying, despite some stunningly inventive sequences and three convincing performances from Gael Garcia Bernal, Simon Russell Beale and Alfredo Castro (The Club).

And it’s largely down to local Mexican incompetence that these two amateurish dudes (Bernal/Ortizgris) get away with their heist in the first place. But what starts as a so-so domestic drama with the same aesthetic as No!, slowly starts to sizzle with suspense as the director deftly manages the film’s tonal shifts to surprise and even delight us – this is a film that deserves a watch for its sheer wakiness and inventive chutzpah. 

It all starts in the early 1970s when Mexico’s rich heritage is being transported from original sites to provide interest in a brand new modernist museum in Satellite. During the Christmas holidays the two sneak away from their families and – in a terrifically tense robbery scene – slowly steal their plunder and make off through ventilation ducts when the alarm finally kick in. One of surreal effects is that Bernal imagines a vision of Pakal, a Mayan king, at the end of the tunnel.

Amazed at how easy it all was, the naive pair then set off to the Mayan site of Palenque to start liquidating funds through their various sources. On the way, they even get through border patrols who are more interested in Bernal’s celebrity (this is all part of Ruizpalacios and his his scripter’s quirky script). But their first hopeful Bosco (Bernardo Velasco), gives them the bum’s rush and they swiftly move on. Acapulco beckons and Simon Russell Beale’s vignette as a wealthy dealer is one of the scenes to savour, adding a certain upmarket whiff to proceedings, and the boys gets their knuckles rapped for wasting his time, retreating to a sleazy  nightclub and more playful fun – thing time involving Sherezada Rios (Leticia Bredice/The Difficult Life of an Easy Woman. 

Bernal plays it all with gusto in a role that sees him flipping from sweet-talking swindler to foolhardy fantasist when he switches off the headlights of their fast-moving car.

Quoting American shaman Carlos Castaneda, he indulges in some very Mexican fantasies about death, invincibility and warriorhood – then stupidly acts them out by switching off his headlights on a pitch-black highway. But reality finally bites in the satisfying denouement when he crashes down to earth with a clip round the ear from his father (a grave Alfredo Castro) forcing him to face his demons, and not only the ones he has stolen. MT

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL 2018 

The Absence of Love | Antonioni Retrospective 2019

Humans are intruders in the film world of Michelangelo Antonioni: they destroy the harmony of nature and society. Only when they act in solidarity with their fellow man do they have a chance to become part of something meaningful.

GENTE DEL PO (1943-47), shot not far from where Visconti was filming Ossessione, this is a short documentary, but in spite of its neo-realistic moorings, it is at the same time a personal statement: an effort to comprehend the world via the moving image. Not the other way round. Antonioni’s realism does not attempt to show anything natural, humane, dramatic, and particularly not anything like an idea, a thesis. Just memory forms the model for his art. Memory as images like photos, paintings, writing – they form the basis of his later work – an adventure, where the audience peels off the many layers, like off an onion: a painting, more than once painted over.

On the face of it Antonioni’s debut feature, Chronaca Du Un Amore (1950) is a film noir, like Visconti’s first opus Ossessione. The dominant feelings that would run through all his films are already in place – emotional neglect, alienation, existential angst and loneliness. Set in the director’s birthplace of Ferrara the drama follows ex-lovers Paola and Guido and their desire to do away with Paola’s rich husband Enrico Fontana. This is no crime of passion, because Paola and Guido are unable to make it as a couple  – but what they can do is profit from Fontana’s death. Life in the city is a reflection of the conspirators state of mind. Their neuroses is felt in the chaotic streets and the frenetic buzz of the cafes. The surreal urban jungle is a one of the main themes of Antonioni’s opus. And he observes his main protagonists when they area lone and in the dramatic scenes, creating an elliptical structure with these two dynamics points: action and echo. As Wenders said: “The strength of American Cinema is a forward focus, European cinema paints ellipses”.

I VINTI (1952) is set in three different countries (Italy, France and the UK), exploring the lives of three young criminals who steal not out of material necessity, but just for fun. But their crimes are and the involvement of the Police is just a backdrop to Antonioni’s main focus: his protagonists’ daily lives. As the crimes recede more and more into the background, the investigations peter out – shades of L’ Avventura and Blow Up.

In LE AMICHE (1955) Antonioni finds the structure for his features, seemingly overpopulated with couples and friends – who are all busy, but play a secondary role to their environment, in this case Turin. Clelia has come to open a designer shop and soon meets up with four other young women, all much wealthier than she is. Their changing couplings with men end tragically. Set between Clelia’s arrival in Turin and her leaving for Rome, LE AMICHE is a kaleidoscope of human frailty, in which the audience is waiting for something to happen, some sort of boy meets girl story, but when something really happens, it takes second place to the main thrust of the narrative and we become as disorientated as the characters themselves. Antonioni does not tell a story with a beginning and an end, he informs us, that the world can exist without stories. Because there is so much more to see in the city of Turin, as there will be in Rome: Clelia is only the messenger, sent out by Antonioni to be a traveller, not a story teller. She is his archetypal heroine.

Aldo, the central protagonist in IL GRIDO (1956/7) is the most untypical of all Antonioni heroes: he has been expelled from paradise, after his wife has left him. Refusing to really let himself go he sticks to his environment, travelling with his daughter in the Po Valley. Leaving his home town and looking back over a life dominated by the factory chimney, it is his past history which has forced him to leave. He becomes more and more marginalised: an outsider. And even when living near the river in a derelict hut, he becomes a victim of the environment – the same landscape, seasons and time he spent there. El Grido ends tragically, because Aldo (unlike most other Antonioni heroes) insists on keeping to his past: he does not want to cross the bridges which are metaphorically there to be crossed. And Aldo’s titular outcry becomes a good-bye, even though he is back home. Il Grido is also Antonioni’s return to neo-realism, another contradiction, because he was never really part of it.

L’AVVENTURA (1960) has four main protagonists, three of are human, but are dwarfed by the third – Liscia Bianca, a rocky island in the Mediterranean See. A group of wealthy Italians visit the island but when they want to lead they discover that one of their Anna is missing. Her boyfriend Sandro starts to look around , but soon becomes more interested in Claudia, Anna’s best friend. When they all leave, without having found Anna, Claudia and Sandro are ready to start a new life together. Antonioni is often compared with Brecht. In common with the German playwright, the characters he refuses to dramatise the narrative. Brecht’s actors do not identify with their roles and the audience is not drawn into the play, but left outside to observe. The same goes for Antonioni. Antonioni’s skill is that he first introduces time scale and environment, before developing the narrative, via the actions and words of the protagonists. The island’s waves provide the feature’s ambient score. The fragility of the emotions comes out in the way the protagonists talk –  but mostly they are at cross-purposes. The overall impression is not that of a modern film with sound, but of a very sad silent movie. At Cannes in 1960, the feature was mercilessly jeered at the premiere, but won the Grand Prix nevertheless – a rare case of the jury being ahead of the public.

In LA NOTTE (1960) allows us to share a day in the company of the writer Giovanni and his wife Lydia. When their friend dies in a hospital, they realise that their own love for each other has also been dead for quite a while. Antonioni uses his characters like figures on a chess board. They are real, but at the same time cyphers. He does not tell their story, but follows their movements from one place to an another. There is no interconnection between them and their environment. They have lost all feeling for themselves, others and the outside world. Their world is cold and threatening. Antonioni offers no irony or pity. He is the surgeon at the operating table, and his view is that of the camera: mostly skewed over-head shots. It is impossible to love La Notte. Whilst Antonioni was the first director of the modern era, he is also its most vicious critic.

When L’ECLISSE (1962) starts in the morning, it feels somehow like a continuation of La Notte. Before Vittoria (Vitti) ends her relationship with Francisco, she arranges a new Stilleben behind an empty picture frame. Next stop is Piero (Delon), a stockbroker. Vittoria is like Wenders’ Alice in the City: a child in a world of grown-ups, repelled by their emotional coldness. Piero, very much a child of this world, is all glib superficiality, his friend’s remark “long live the façade” sums it all up. The lengthy panorama shots show very little empathy with the eternal city, the more silent ones seem to convey a ghost town populated by worker ants, dwarfed by huge buildings. The music only sets in after the half way point of the film. The couple’s last rendezvous is symbolic for everything Antonioni ever wanted to show us: none of the two shows up, we watch the space where they were supposed to meet for several minutes. L’Eclisse will lead without much transition to Deserto Rosso, where Monica Vitti is Guiliana, wandering the streets, getting lost in a fog on a very unlovable planet.

DESERTO ROSSO (1963/4)

Guiliana: “I dreamt, I was laying in my bed, and the bed was moving. And when I looked, I saw that I was sinking in quicksand”. Guiliana’s world is threatening, everything is out of scale, the buildings in a nearby industrial estate are unbelievably tall. The machines in the factories, the steel island in the sea, and the silhouettes of the people around her are all closing in. We travel with her from this industrial quarter of Ravenna to Ferrara. She is never still, and by the end she is in front of a factory gate. In Deserto Rosso objects become blurred, they seem to be alive, making their way independently. The camera never leaves Guiliana during her nightmare, and we experience the world through Guiliana’s eyes: “It is, as if I had tears in my eyes”. 

In her son’s bedroom she sees his toy robot, the eyes alight. She switches it off – but this is the only action she is allowed to master successfully. There is always fog between her and everybody else, even her lover Corrado is “on the other side”.  Roland Barthes called Antonioni “the artist of the body, the opposite of others, who are the priests of art”. For once, Antonioni is at one with the body of his protagonist: Guiliana’s body is not like the many others, she will never get lost.

BLOW UP (1966)

A film to be seen only see once – and never again, in case you suffer the same fate as Thomas’ photos: Blow Up. Antonioni to Moravia: “All my films before this are works of intuition, this one is a work of the head.” Everything is calculated, the incidents are planned, the story is driven by an elaborate design. The drama, which is anything but, is a drama, perfectly executed. Herbie Hancock, the Yardbirds, the beat clubs, the marihuana parties, Big Ben and the sports car with radiophone, the Arabs and the nuns, the beatniks on the streets: everything is like swinging London in the Sixties: a head idea. Blow Up is Antonioni’s most successful feature at the box office – but not one of his best.

ZABRISKIE POINT (1969/70)

Given Cart Blanche by MGM, Antonioni produced a feature in praise of American Cinema. Zabriskie Point sees the birth of American Cinema from Death Valley. Antonioni has to repeat this dream for himself. But he had to invent his own Mount Rushmore, his Monument Valley, to make a film about the country in his own image. A car and a plane meet in the desert. The woman driver and the pilot recognise each other immediately. The copulation scene in the sand is a metaphor for the simultaneousness of the act, when longing and fulfilment, greed and satisfaction are superimposed. Then the unbelievable total destruction: the end of civilisation; Antonioni synchronises both events, a miracle of topography and choreography. This is Antonioni’s dream: the birth of a poem.

The TV feature MISTERO Di OBERWLAD (1979) and  IDENTIFICAZIONE DI UNA DONNA (1982) added nothing to Antonioni’s masterful oeuvre. After a massive stroke in 1985, left him without speech and partly paralysed there was BEYOND THE CLOUDS (1995), a collaboration with Wim Wenders, and Antonioni’s segment of EROS (2004). AS

ANTONIONI RETRO: THE ABSENCE OF LOVE | BFI JANUARY 2019 

 

 

The Colour of Pomegranates | Sayat Nova (1969) Bluray release

This heady, avant-garde cinematic reverie depicts the life of highly acclaimed 18th-century Armenian poet and musician Sayat-Nova (Vilen Galstyan) from childhood to his death, particularly focussing on his relationships with women. Glowing in a new bluray release, the sumptuously fantastical visual poem is said to serve as a metaphor for Parajanov’s own life. It was only officially seen in western cinemas in 1982 and immediately hailed as a masterpiece by cinephiles and critics alike. The director – who was to spend a large part of his creative life behind bars on account his sexuality and political beliefs – had spent the intervening years in prison with the authorities re-editing and diminishing his prized work.

Sergei Parajanov was influenced by Sergei Eisenstein and Alexander Dovzhenko and his highly stylised and dreamlike film blends new techniques such as the use of jump-cuts with exquisite tableaux often seen in  silent film to tell a story drenched in ancient Armenian art and folklore, and opening with a quote from a poem crafted by Sayat Nova: “I am he whose life and soul are torment”. His major contribution to the world of cinema was in raising the profile of his non-Russian Soviet heritage of Georgia, Armenia and Ukraine.

Parajanov was born in Soviet Georgia of Armenian parents in 1924 and started life as a musician before discovering film-making at the famous Soviet Russian All-Union State Institute of Cinematography film school in Moscow. He married in 1950 but his wife was sadly murdered the following year, possibly by her family on the grounds of religious scruples. A second marriage ended in divorce and precipitated a disenchantment with his own film oeuvre when he saw how Andrei Tarkovsky made use of dreams to present allegory in his extraordinary debut Ivan’s Childhood (1962).

In Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (1964) Parajanov once again depicts ancient traditions through a tragic but magical tale of doomed love set in the exotic wilds of the Carpathians.

In Pomegranates, Sofiko Chiaureli is cast in five both male and female roles, underlining Parajanov’s attitude to non-binary sexuality and artistic freedom. He then made two more films sealing his international success on the film stage, allowing him to travel abroad and embark on his final auto-biographical project Confession, before dying of cancer in 1990. MT

THE COLOUR OF POMEGRANATES | SPECIAL EDITION BLURAY FROM 19 February 2018 | COURTESY OF SECOND SIGHT DVD.

 

The Shape of Water (2017) * * *

Dir: Guillermo del Toro | USA / 119’ | cast: Sally Hawkins, Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, Doug Jones, Michael Stuhlbarg, Octavia Spencer

Last year’s Golden Lion for Best Film went to Guillermo del Toro for this utterly empty second-hand spectacle THE SHAPE OF WATER in a year where the jury and the programme largely lacked imagination (apart from Susanna Nicchiarelli’s NICO, 1988, who won the Orizzonti Award for her stunning biopic of the final years of the renowned model and musician Christa Pfaffen, played by a feisty Trine Dyrholm).

Del Toro’s very thin narrative of a mute woman falling in love with an amphibious creature, used by the CIA at the height of the Cold War, around 1962, is a total rip-off: it uses the main protagonists of Rachel Ingall’s 1986 novel MRS. CALIBAN, the creature itself is a replica of the titular CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON (Jack Arnold, 1954), and the story is a compilation of countless cold war spy movies of the Eisenhower era, when the Red menace was infiltrating the USA. Clearly no money was spared on design and images, but del Toro’s feature might not have won without the help of Annette Bening, Hollywood actress and – first female – jury president.

In a US government laboratory, two workers (Sally Hawkins and Oscar winner Octavia Spencer) uncover an horrendous secret experiment that the lonely and single Elisa (Hawkins) finds strangely alluring. It involves an amphibious creature (played by Doug Jones) who is infiltrated into the installation and comes under threat by the agent in charge (Michael Shannon), who intends to do away with the beast once it serves its purpose. But Elisa falls strangely in love with the sea creature and puts her own life in danger in her bid to ensure its survival, aided and abetted by her colleague Zelda (Octavia Spencer); her neighbour Giles (Richard Jenkins), and kindly scientist (Michael Stuhlbarg in his second strong role of 2017).

Serving as a subtle social critique, there’s a great deal to enjoy in this fluid fantasy film enriched by Alexandre Desplat’s majestic score, but it is by no means the jewel in del Toro’s crown that includes  gems such as Cronos (1993), The Devil’s Backbone (2001), Hellboy (04) and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), for which he received an Oscar nomination for screenwriting. AS

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 16 FEBRUARY 2018 | VENICE 2017 REVIEW

The Mercy (2017) ***

Dir: James Marsh | Writer: Scott Z Burns | Cast: Colin Firth, Rachel Weisz, David Thewliss, Ken Stott, Mark Gatiss, Finn Elliot | Drama | 101′

James Marsh captures the tragic Englishness of this sad Sixties maritime mystery about a decent man who loses his way.

Colin Firth and Rachel Weisz are utterly convincing as the loving couple at the heart of this watchable biopic about  the doomed attempt of amateur yachtsman Donald Crowhurst to compete in the notorious 1968 Sunday Times Golden Globe Race. Crowhurst’s story is an evergreen portrait of British sporting failure. Spurred on by middle-class ambition, and the desire to make something of his happy but humdrum existence, the competent sailer gets caught up in the headlights of potential fame, and fails – spectacularly. And somehow, only the English themselves can appreciate this also ran tragedy.

The Crowhurst story has spawned various theatrical and literary adaptations, and even a chamber opera: The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst. Eric Colvin plays him in Simon Rumley’s upcoming low budget indie thriller Crowhurst which purportedly features the actual vessel that set sail in the endeavour.

Without mining the stormy depths of the tale’s dramatic potential, The Mercy is a poignantly becalmed but strangely gripping family drama with its mystery hanging over us rather like that of the Bermuda Triangle, taking us back down memory lane to the quaint old days of the late 1960s where in the pleasant seaside town of Teignmouth, Devon. the Crowhursts are a respectable family with Donald desperately seeking to shore up his ailing business and educate his kids. Striking a rather bum note in the opening scene, Marsh then guides us through calm waters where Donald attends the annual London Boat Show attempting to sell a special kind of navigation device that nobody’s having. So he decides to turn his sailing hobby into a money-making exercise – the jackpot for the winner being £5,000 – around £70K in today’s money) raising finance via entrepreneur Stanley Best ( a reliable Ken Stott).  It’s an enterprising idea but Crowhurst foolhardily agrees to include his house in the if he fails to complete the race.

Firth is brilliantly cast as Crowhurst – blending just the right amount of pathos and self-belief in his portrait of an unsatisfactory businessman of a rather nervous disposition who can’t take pressure and lacks personal conviction (possibly due to his mother dressing him as a much wanted girl until the age of 17). His marriage is clearly happy and Rachel Weisz plays his wife as a typically supportive English rose, stalwart in her affections and a brilliant mum but rather passive and naive in a commercial sense, as most women were in the those days.

Nagged by doubt, but spurred on by the media circus and a PR man called Rodney Hallworth – a strangely comic turn from David Thewlis – there are clearly technical drawbacks with his boat which looks unsuitable even to cross a puddle let alone the Atlantic – but after ominous delays he finally sets out at the end of October. Follies de grandeur then subside as he encounters his own demons and slowly starts to fall apart off the coast of South America, realising there is no way back or forward in the bathetic denouement, which Marsh leaves suitably vague. We leave overwhelmed with that familiar feeling of sadness mingled with resignation both for Crowhurst and for British sportsmanship, and sympathetic for his wife, not a great role Weisz but one she plays with thoughtful grace. MT

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 9 FEBRUARY NATIONWIDE

The Interpreter (2018) | Berlinale 2018 Special

Wri/Dir: Martin Šulík | DoP: Martin Štrba | German, Slovak, 113′ | Cast: Peter Simonischek, Jiří Menzel, Zuzana Mauréry, Anita Szvrcsek, Anna Rakovská, Eva Kramerová, Réka Derzsi, Attila Mokos, Karol Šimon, Igor Hrabinský | World premiere | Drama

In Martin Šulík’s thriller, Peter Simonischek senses danger when he opens front door of his elegant Vienna appartment to a well-dressed old man Ali Ungár (Jiří Menzel), who later emerges the interpreter in this war-themed drama levened by the same piquant humour as the Austrian actor brought to last year’s standout Toni Erdman.  Orphaned by WW2, he has located the home of the SS Officer who might have killed his parents – or at the very least, knows the location of their final resting place. He instead meets Georg (Peter Simonischek) who informs him that he’s actually the son of the Nazi, and that his father is long dead. A darkly comic exchange follows and Ali heads home to Bratislava.

Ali is short of money and so he grudgingly agrees to meet Georg when he shows up, suggesting an expedition. Georg wants to visit the places his absent father spent time in during the war, and wants Ali to guide him – with a daily fee, naturally. Georg is surprisingly jovial considering he’s planning a tour of holocaust hotspots. This section of the film plays like a geriatric road trip, complete with a jaunty soundtrack. There’s an ironic detachment to the humour, but the tones grows more sober as the crucial nub of the narrative is revealed. A reveal very late in the game makes a delicious twist to proceedings but the film doesn’t hang its hat on this one turn of events.

Both Menzel and Simonischek are brilliant; each are endearing in contrasting ways. Georg is a louche and opportunistic ladies’ man, Ali a serious-minded traditional. Georg’s easy-going glibness collides with Ali’s buttoned up decency: the contradiction provides a frisson and a feels genuine and real. Flipping between comedy and tragedy, Martin Šulík’s buddy drama works through their war-themed conflicts – with a timely resonance that makes The Interpreter feels both retro and refreshingly contemporary. Two ageing men who are keen to free themselves from the past each with a different style but both private and, in a way, isolated. Jiří Menzel plays the role is world-weary and worldly-wise Ali, Peter Simonischek is Georg, the light-hearted maverick with a difficult secret past. The Interpreter is one the best thrillers to come along for some time. MT

BERLINALE SPECIAL PRESENTATION | BERLINALE 2018

https://vimeo.com/254993281

Dovlatov (2018) * * * | Berlinale 2018

Dir: Aleksey German Jr. | Cast: Artur Beschastny, Danila Kozlovsky, Milan Maric, Anton Shagin | 126′

Aleksey German Jr certainly knows how to create a stylish film. Under Electric Clouds was awarded a Silver Bear for Artistic Contribution for Cinematography in 2015, so it is a shame his latest offering about the literary heroes of Russia is another gorgeous cover to a rather empty book.

Set in 1971, it follows the festivities surrounding Leningrad’s October Revolution two decades after the death of Stalin, and is seen from the perspective of budding writer Sergei Dovlatov who, subsequently became a well known author read by millions. Here played by Milan Maric he has moved back in with his mother and is experiencing recurring dreams about Leonid Brezhnev. Communism is very much alive and kicking. But sadly, like a glossy magazine with juicy headlines, this filmic foray never really mines the dramatic potential of the weighty themes and characters it attempts to celebrate.

For all its aspirations Dovlatov is a pseudo intellectual schmooze that glories in an unknown breezy jazz score in the style of Krysztoff Komeda and some soigné cinematography, never quite convinces us of its characters’ desperate misery over their failure to get published. Łukasz Żal’s roving camera haunts the smoky venues where the literati glide endlessly engaged in alcohol-fuelled debate, but we feel little for their plight as real people. We’re expected to oh and ah as Pushkin, Dostoyevsky and Brodsky parade before us but despite their eventual acknowledgement as literary geniuses here they feel here like cardboard cutouts in a school play. Well-clothed and fed, they just swing around Moscow like a group of disenchanted uni students bemoaning their lack of a publisher. One or two dramatic moments puncture the day to day literary lock-down of these writers’ bland existence, but there are no standout performances to speak of: even Dovlatov remains a colourless cypher despite his intellectual pretensions, fecklessly neglects his kid and his intelligent wife (Helena Sujecka). An opportunity to lift the lid on the real lives and characters of these literary giants and the importance of their work has been sadly missed. MT

BERLINALE 15-25 FEBRUARY 2018 | SILVER BEAR for Outstanding Artistic Contribution | Costume and production Design

Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot (2018) ** Berlinale 2018

Dir: Gus Van Sant | Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Jonah Hill, Rooney Mara, Jack Black, Udo Kier | Biopic | US 113′

Joaquin Phoenix plays a recovering alcoholic artist in Gus Van Sant’s latest drama. And it’s a gruelling journey padded with scenes of fuzzy humour, based on the autobiography of prolific cartoonist John Callahan whose drawings lighten the load. Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot chronicles the aftermath of an accident which leaves him quadriplegic, his doodles providing a creative outlet for his bitter frustration and struggle to come off the wagon, in a reduced physical state.

On and off screen lover-cum-nurse Annu (Rooney Mara) gives him affectionate support along with John (Joaquin Phoenix) his patron, gay philanthropist Donnie (Jonah Hill). Feelgood but toothless, Don’t Worry is also quite tedious to watch as the frequent flashbacks shows the before and after, Phoenix often wallowing in self-pity and milking his melancholy for all he can get. But there are amusing scenes where he rides his wheelchair in traffic and up skateboard ramps. When it comes to paraplegic comedy dramas, Kills on Wheels (2016) did it better, along with the memorable Untouchable (2011).

Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot tries to be touching and soulful in its portrait of redemption. And despite its strong cast, it just adds insult to injury. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE | BERLINALE REVIEW 2018

Brotherhood of the Blades II * * * DVD release

Dir: Yang Lu | Action Drama | Korea | 120’

An action-packed prequel to the acclaimed 2014 original, starring CHEN CHANG (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Assassin), BROTHERHOOD OF THE BLADES II is sumptuously set in the late Ming dynasty of China, where Shen Lian (CHANG), a loyal warrior of the Imperial Guard, is searching for the truth behind a conspiracy that framed him.

Brotherhood Of Blades is gorgeous to look and engrossing to watch, its historical narrative fraught with intrigue and moral ambiguity. And although we never feel for the characters they certainly keep us entertained in glowing set pieces involving intense action and intricate swordplay where the camera darts back and forth, often at ground level looking up to the skies or in intimate close-up. Lavish emerald landscapes sparkle like priceless gems jostling with opluent period interiors. Moments of silence intensify the delicate fight sequences with echoes of House of Flying Daggers. Not a masterpiece but a competently crafted and entertaining Korean martial arts thriller. MT

BROTHERHOOD OF BLADES‬ 2: THE INFERNAL BATTLEFIELD to DVD ‪on 12th February‬ courtesy of Thunderbird Releasing

Willem Defoe | Berlinale Homage 2018

This year’s Berlin International Film Festival is awarding the American actor Willem Defoe with an Honorary Golden Bear in recognition of his career featuring over 100 performances and spanning nearly 40 years since his 1981 debut in Kathryn Bigelow’s debut drama The Loveless. His enormous technical range as an actor extends all the way from the personification of the unfathomably evil to the portrayal of Jesus of Nazareth. In addition to his celebrated cinematic appearances, Dafoe has also pursued a parallel career in theatre, his other passion.

Born in Wisconsin in 1955, Willem Dafoe began studying theatre formally at the age of 17. In 1977, he was one of the founding members of the renowned New York theatre ensemble “The Wooster Group”, where he remained a member for several decades. In addition to his activities on stage, Dafoe increasingly began to turn his attention to film work starting in the early 1980s. Walter’s Hill’s Streets of Fire (1984) was soon followed by William Friedkin’s police thriller To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) where he played ruthless counterfeiter Eric “Ric” Masters, a villain who will stop at nothing to rival his adversaries.

In 1986, Dafoe’s portrayal of Sergeant Elias Grodin in Oliver Stone’s anti-war drama Platoon would expose him to a wider audience. He received his first Academy Award nomination for his performance in the break-through film. Two years later, Martin Scorsese successfully recruited him to fill the leading role as Jesus Christ in his hotly debated literary adaptation The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). Still in the same year, Dafoe co-starred alongside Gene Hackman in director Alan Parker’s civil-rights-era drama Mississippi Burning (1988) (right). In the film, Dafoe plays a young FBI agent fighting against racism and the Ku Klux Klan.

Many multifaceted roles would follow, in films such as Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Wim Wenders’ In weiter Ferne, so nah! (Faraway, So Close! 1993) and The English Patient (1996). In the year 2000, Dafoe shined as Max Schreck in the horror film Shadow of the Vampire by director E. Elias Merhige. His brilliant turn as a member of the undead earned him his second Academy Award nomination.

In 2002 Dafoe appeared under the direction of Paul Schrader in the biopic Auto Focus. In 2004 Dafoe collaborated with director Wes Anderson on the latter’s The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. Parallel to these appearances, he slipped into the role of Norman Osborn, aka the villainous “Green Goblin”, three times for the Spider-Man movie franchise (in 2002, 2004 and 2007).

In 2009 Danish director Lars von Trier cast him as the male lead alongside Charlotte Gainsbourg in his psycho-thriller Antichrist – the film became the subject of controversy due to scenes featuring graphic sex and violence. In 2011 Dafoe put on an extraordinary acting performance once again as a lonely hunter in Daniel Nettheim’s thriller The Hunter. Three years later, in Abel Ferrara’s biopic (right) Pasolini Dafoe portrayed the Italian filmmaker in the final period of his life, shortly before his murder.

Last year Dafoe has appeared in Kenneth Branagh’s feature Murder on the Orient Express (2017). The German-American joint effort The Sleeping Shepherd (directed by Frank Hudec) is currently in pre-production. He has also finished filming under the direction of Julian Schnabel for At Eternity’s Gate, in which he plays Vincent van Gogh. Dafoe’s role in The Florida Project earned him both a nomination for the British BAFTA Awards and recently his third nomination for an Academy Award, in the category of Best Supporting Actor.

The ten films of the Berlinale Homage:

 

Antichrist (Denmark / Germany / France / Sweden / Italy / Poland 2009, Director: Lars von Trier)
Auto Focus (USA 2002, Director: Paul Schrader)
The Hunter (Australia 2011, Director: Daniel Nettheim) (image/left)
The Last Temptation of Christ (USA / Canada 1988, Director: Martin Scorsese)
The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (USA 2004, Director: Wes Anderson)
Mississippi Burning (USA 1988, Director: Alan Parker)
Pasolini (France / Italy / Belgium 2014, Director: Abel Ferrara)
Platoon (USA 1986, Director: Oliver Stone)
Shadow of the Vampire (USA / United Kingdom / Luxembourg 2000, Director: E. Elias Merhige)
To Live and Die in L.A. (USA 1985, Director: William Friedkin)

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL | 14 – 24 FEBRUARY 2018 

Berlinale Competition titles | 15-25 February 2018

The Berlin Film Festival  – Competition line-up complete

Directors including Benoit Jacquot, Gus Van Sant, Alexey German Jr, Małgorzata Szumowska, Thomas Stuber and Laura Bispuri will compete in this year’s Competition while Isabel Coixet and Lars Kraume feature in the Berlinale Special strand.

Berlinale will open for the first time with an animation feature, Isle of Dogs, by Wes Anderson, in a dazzling line-up of World premieres starring the likes of Joaquin Phoenix, Jonah Hill, Rooney Mara and Jack Black. For Alexei German Jr, this is his second Berlin’s competition title since Under Electric Clouds in 2015. He returns with a feature that follows several days in the life of Russian writer Sergei Dovlatov.

Jacquot’s thriller Eva, played by Isabelle Huppert, a playwright encounters a mysterious woman when he takes shelter in a chalet during a violent snowstorm. The feature is based on James Hadley Chase’s novel Eve is the sixth time the French director Jacquot and Huppert have worked together. Jeanne Moreau originally played her part in a 1962 adaptation directed by Joseph Losey. This latest version World premieres at Sundance in January. Stuber’s drama In The Aisles stars Toni Erdmann actress Sandra Hüller, while Bispuri’s drama Daughter Of Mine, explores a young girl’s relationship with both her biological and adoptive mothers. This is the second time Alexei German Jr’s work plays in competition since his 2015 feature Under Electric Clouds.

Meanwhile, Coixet’s drama The Bookshop sees British Actress Emily Mortimer playing a woman who decides, against polite but ruthless local opposition, to open a bookshop, a decision which becomes a political minefield.

Competition Line-up

U – 22 July (Norway) 

Dir: Erik Poppe (The King’s Choice)

Cast: Brede Fristad, Ada Eide, Andrea Berntzen, Ingeborg Enes

World Premiere

7 Days in Entebbe | USA/UK |

Dir: José Padilha (The Elite Squad, Garapa) |

Cast: Rosamund Pike, Daniel Brühl, Eddie Marsan, Lior Ashkenazi, Denis Menochet, Ben Schnetzer

World premiere – Out of competition

Ága | Bulgaria/Ger/France

Dir: Milko Lazarov (Otchuzhdenie) | Cast:Mikhail Aprosimov, Feodosia Ivanova, Galina Tikhonova, Sergey Egorov, Afanasiy Kylaev | World premiere – Out of competition

Ang panahon ng halimaw (Season of the Devil) | Philippines

Dir: Lav Diaz (A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery, The Woman Who Left)

Cast: Piolo Pascual, Shaina Magdayao, Pinky Amador, Bituin Escalante, Hazel Orencio, Joel Saracho, Bart Guingona, Angel Aquino,  | World premiere

Museo (Museum) | Mex | Dir Alonso Ruizpalacios (Güeros)

Cast: Gael García Bernal, Leonardo Ortizgris, Alfredo Castro, Simon Russell Beale, Bernardo Velasco, Leticia Brédice, Ilse Salas, Lisa Owen
World premiere

 

Unsane  | USA
By Steven Soderbergh (Traffic, The Good German)

Dir: Claire Foy, Joshua Leonard, Jay Pharoah, Juno Temple, Aimee Mullins, Amy Irving

World premiere – Out of competition

3 Tage in Quiberon 3 DAYS IN QUIBERON  

Germany / Austria / France
Dir: Emily Atef (Molly’s Way, The Stranger In Me)
With Marie Bäumer, Birgit Minichmayr, Charly Hübner, Robert Gwisdek, Denis Lavant
World premiere

 

Black 47 
Ireland / Luxembourg
By Lance Daly (Kisses, The Good Doctor)
With Hugo Weaving, James Frecheville, Stephen Rea, Freddie Fox, Barry Keoghan, Moe Dunford, Sarah Greene, Jim Broadbent
World premiere – Out of competition

Damsel 
USA
By David Zellner, Nathan Zellner (Kid-Thing, Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter)
With Robert Pattinson, Mia Wasikowska, David Zellner, Nathan Zellner, Robert Forster, Joe Billingiere | International premiere

 

Eldorado – Documentary
Switzerland / Germany
By Markus Imhoof (The Boat Is Full, More Than Honey)
World premiere – Out of competition

 

Las herederas (The Heiresses)
Paraguay / Germany / Uruguay / Norway / Brazil / France
By Marcelo Martinessi
With Ana Brun, Margarita Irún, Ana Ivanova
World premiere – First Feature

 

Khook (Pig)
Iran
By Mani Haghighi (Modest Reception, A Dragon Arrives!)
With Hasan Majuni, Leila Hatami, Leili Rashidi, Parinaz Izadyar, Ali Bagheri
World premiere

 

La prière (The Prayer)
France
By Cédric Kahn (Red Lights, Wild Life)
With Anthony Bajon, Damien Chapelle, Alex Brendemühl, Louise Grinberg, Hanna Schygulla
World premiere

Toppen av ingenting (The Real Estate)
Sweden / United Kingdom
By Måns Månsson (The Yard, Mr Governor), Axel Petersén (Avalon)
With Léonore Ekstrand, Christer Levin, Christian Saldert, Olof Rhodin, Carl Johan Merner, Don Bennechi
World premiere

Touch Me Not
Romania / Germany / Czech Republic / Bulgaria / France
By Adina Pintilie (Don’t Get Me Wrong)
With Laura Benson, Tómas Lemarquis, Christian Bayerlein, Grit Uhlemann, Hanna Hofmann, Seani Love, Irmena Chichikova
World premiere – First Feature

Transit
Germany / France
By Christian Petzold (Yella, Barbara, Phoenix)
With Franz Rogowski, Paula Beer, Godehard Giese, Lilien Batman, Maryam Zaree, Barbara Auer, Matthias Brandt, Sebastian Hülk, Emilie de Preissac, Antoine Oppenheim
World premiere

 

Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot  USA

By Gus Van Sant (Milk, Promised Land) | With Joaquin Phoenix, Jonah Hill, Rooney Mara, Jack Black, Udo Kier

World premieres at Sundance.

 

Dovlatov | Russian Federation / Poland / Serbia | World Premiere | Director: Alexey German Jr. (Paper Soldier, Under Electric Clouds | With Milan Maric, Danila Kozlovsky, Helena Sujecka, Artur Beschastny, Elena Lyadova

World premiere

 

Eva | France | World Premiere | Director: Benoit Jacquot (Three Hearts, Diary of a Chambermaid)  | With Isabelle Huppert, Gaspard Ulliel, Julia Roy, Richard Berry

World premiere

 

Figlia mia (Daughter of Mine) | Italy / Germany / Switzerland |  Director: Laura Bispuri (Sworn Virgin)  With Valeria Golino, Alba Rohrwacher, Sara Casu, Udo Kier | World premiere

 

In den Gängen (In the Aisles) | Germany | World Premiere | Director: Thomas Stuber (Teenage Angst, A Heavy Heart) | With Franz Rogowski, Sandra Hüller, Peter Kurth

 

 

Mein Bruder heißt Robert und ist ein Idiot  | Germany | World Premi| Direction: Philip Gröning (Into Great Silence, The Police Officer’s Wife | With Josef Mattes, Julia Zange, Urs Jucker, Stefan Konarske, Zita Aretz, Karolina Porcari, Vitus Zeplichal

Twarz (Mug) | Poland | Director: Małgorzata Szumowska (In the Name of, Body) | World Premiere  | With Mateusz Kościukiewicz, Agnieszka Podsiadlik, Małgorzata Gorol, Roman Gancarczyk, Dariusz Chojnacki, Robert Talarczyk, Anna Tomaszewska, Martyna Krzysztofik

World Premiere

 Berlinale Special Gala

The Bookshop  | Spain / United Kingdom / Germany Premiere | Director: Isabel Coixet (Things I Never Told You, My Life Without Me, The Secret Life of Words | With Emily Mortimer, Bill Nighy, Patricia Clarkson

 

 

 

Das schweigende Klassenzimmer (The Silent Revolution) | Germany | Word Premiere | Director: Lars Kraume (The People vs. Fritz Bauer) | With Leonard Scheicher, Tom Gramenz, Lena Klenke, Jonas Dassler, Florian Lukas, Jördis Triebel, Michael Gwisdek, Ronald Zehrfeld, Burghart Klaußner

Special at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele

 

 

Gurrumul – Documentary
Australia
By Paul Williams
International premiere – Debut film
In Cooperation with NATIVe

Viaje a los Pueblos Fumigados – Documentary
Argentina
By Fernando Solanas (The Hour Of The Furnaces, Tangos, The Exile Of Gardel, Memoria del saqueo – A Social Genocide)
World premiere

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | 15 -25 FEBRUARY 2018 | COMPETITION TITLES

 

The Ninth Cloud (2017) *

Dir.: Jane Spencer; Cast: Michael Madsen, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Megan Maczko, Elena Krausz, Sabina Akhmedova; Switzerland/UK 2014, 93′.

Sometimes films are kept on the shelf for a reason – The Ninth Cloud, a pretentious, verbose Nouvelle Vague rip-off set in Hackney, is a prime example. A male director would be rightly nailed to the cross for this febrile flop.

Three worlds collide when the dipsomaniac ‘damsel in distress’ Zena (Maczko) desperately tries and fails to channel Anna Karina in Band-à-Part (the big coat is a dead give-away). The flat she shares with pregnant Laura (Krausz) and over-sexed Helene (Akhmedova) is a viper’s nest, and no love is lost – later they are joined by a homeless woman.Zena is in love with Bob (Madsen), a pretend gay ‘artist’, who is actually married, but acts out meaningless scripts with his band of followers from the hostel in a derelict warehouse. The third set belongs to posh wannabes  led by Jean-Hughes Anglade (La Reine Margot) who reside in a hotel and fight it out like a bunch of cowboys. As it turns out, Bob is a not gay, and a con-artist to boot, and the scheme to raise money for a boy who lost his leg in the Congolese war is not only in very bad taste, but, like the whole enterprise, gradually peters out.

Bob and Zena talk non-stop about Les Enfants du Paradise with Jean Vigo and Rainer Maria Rilke who both died of broken hearts – but are equally at home on more basic territory: Zena telling her flat mates, that a man told her to touch his penis – the scene is repeated in images for the hard of hearing.

Shooting on the feature should have started in 2008, but the death of its star Guillaume Depardieu (to whom the film is dedicated) in the same year, postponed it for three years, and a two-year post-production did not help either; these may be contributory factors, but do not excuse this train-wreck of a feature. AS

NOW AVAILABLE ON ITUNES

Michael (1924) | New 2k Bluray release

Dir: Carl Theodor Dreyer | Writer: Thea von Harbou | Silent | 90′

Danish auteur Carl Theodor Dreyer is best known for his five major films made over a protracted career of 40 years from The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Vampyr (1932), Day of Wrath (1943), Ordet (1955) and Gertrud (1964). His output was hampered by lack of financing due to his unique cinematic vision which was viewed as  uncommercial and his perfectionism often made him unpopular to work with. But the result is an intensely stylish studies of human crisis or religious conviction.

The German drama MICHAEL (Mikael) was one such psychological drama exploring three characters involved in a love triangle. Variously released as Chained (in the US)  and The Story of the Third Sex, a more candid allusion to the film’s homosexual subtext, it features a mesmerising performance from Benjamin Christensen as “The Master,” an artist of international fame for his portrait of an art student Mikael (the sylthe-like Walter Slezak/Lifeboat), who awakens latent feelings of illicit desire while the two are tousling for the affections of an impoverished duchess who comes to have her portrait painted (the luminous Nora Gregor/The Rules of the Game). Such is the intensity of their smouldering rivalry that when The Master dies suddenly, Mikael comes under extreme public scrutiny as the perpetrator in his demise although it later emerges that he died from natural causes. This dreamlike silent drama leads on to a subtle subplot involving another tortured ménage à trois.

Filmed on a magnificent studio set, and in intimate close-ups where the characters often appear as if in a halo, silhouetted against the mysterious darkness, the piano accompaniment lends a sinister almost ghostly tension to the story. The meticulous camera moves with stealth drawing us in to the intrigue while maintaining an unsettling distance. Passion glows but never sizzles in Rudolph Mate and Karl Freund’s cinematography, Freund has his only role as an actor, in vignette, as an jovial art dealer. The film was scripted by Dreyer with Fritz Lang’s wife, Thea von Harbou (Metropolis, M), based on Herman Bang’s 1902 novel Mikaël. A real treat avant-garde gem.MT

Masters of Cinema  presents MICHAEL for the first time ever on Blu-ray | 12 February 2018

Green Book (2018) ****

Dir: Peter Farelly | Nick Vallelonga, Brian Hayes Curry | Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Mahershala Ali, Linda Cardelini, Sebastian Maniscalco | US Drama | 130′

An African American classical pianist and his Italian working class driver travel towards better understand in this charismatically crafted road movie from Peter Farelly (Dumb and Dumber).

Green Book is the latest in crop of racially aware films and certainly one of the most moving and enjoyable. It sees the suave classical musician and a bulky Bronx bouncer continually at odds in a stylish road movie that travels to greater understanding in the US Deep South of the Sixties. Paradoxically, the bouncer is white, the pianist black. But it doesn’t end there. There is also a delicately handled homophobic issue at play. The movie is given extra mileage and a hint of humour by a distinctive duo of Viggo Mortensen and Ali Mahershala.

The title refers to Victor Hugo Green’s The Negro Motorist Green Book, which was published annually from 1936-1966 to advise black travellers where they could safely graze and stay during the dangerous days of Jim Crow and the sundown laws. Nick Vallelonga bases his script on a real friendship that arose during a tour made by the regal musician Don Shirley (Ali) and his driver who remained close until their deaths in 2013. Being classically trained, the Jamaican-born Shirley could turn his hand to tinkling the ivories in any musical style from classic to impro music, and prides himself on his aristocratic background and fluency in several languages. But his Southern tour needs the protection of a white man and Viggo Mortensen’s straight-talking family geezer Tony Villalonga fits the bill.

In his latest drama Peter Farelly isn’t afraid to experiment or go to the dark side of racialism but also knows when to pull back. Sean Porter’s luminous cinematography really sets the night on fire with his glowing glimpses of New York, Alabama and Louisiana as the two motor south in their turquoise Cadillac.

Character-wise this is a knockout: Viggo Mortensen really inhabits the short-fused Italian who is never without a cigarette or a meal in his mouth. In contrast Mahershala exudes style and panache as the prim but troubled troubadour who lives in a penthouse above Carnegie Hall, decorated with his personal throne and elephant tusks. 

Musical references are plenty and Shirley “plays like Liberace but better.” and these musical sequences from Chopin to Jazz are so convincing we’re left wondering whether playing the paino is another of this Mahershala’s many talents. MT

Screening NATIONWIDE | MARRAKECH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2018 premiere

Locarno International Film Festival 2018

For the 71st Locarno Festival the British-Swiss design studio Jannuzzi Smith has created an abstract series of patterns to represent our symbol – the leopard. Drops of black ink spread on yellow paper, each forming one of the accidental compositions that will be used on posters, covers and animations for Locarno71.

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | 1-11 AUGUST 2018

London Critics’ Circle Film Awards 2018

FILM OF THE YEAR
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

FOREIGN-LANGUAGE FILM OF THE YEAR (left)
Elle

DOCUMENTARY OF THE YEAR (below left)
I Am Not Your Negro

BRITISH/IRISH FILM OF THE YEAR: The Attenborough Award
Dunkirk

DIRECTOR OF THE YEAR
Sean Baker – The Florida Project

SCREENWRITER OF THE YEAR
Martin McDonagh – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

ACTRESS OF THE YEAR:
Frances McDormand – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

ACTOR OF THE YEAR
Timothée Chalamet – Call Me By Your Name

SUPPORTING ACTRESS OF THE YEAR
Lesley Manville – Phantom Thread

SUPPORTING ACTOR OF THE YEAR
Hugh Grant – Paddington 2

BRITISH/IRISH ACTRESS OF THE YEAR
Sally Hawkins – The Shape of Water/Maudie/Paddington 2

BRITISH/IRISH ACTOR OF THE YEAR
Daniel Kaluuya – Get Out

YOUNG BRITISH/IRISH PERFORMER OF THE YEAR
Harris Dickinson – Beach Rats

BREAKTHROUGH BRITISH/IRISH FILMMAKER: The Philip French Award
Francis Lee – God’s Own Country

BRITISH/IRISH SHORT FILM OF THE YEAR
We Love Moses – Dionne Edwards

TECHNICAL ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Blade Runner 2049 – Dennis Gassner, production design

EXCELLENCE IN FILM: The Dilys Powell Award
Kate Winslet

Sundance Film Festival | 2018 | Award WINNERS

In Park City Utah, the SUNDANCE INSTITUTE founder ROBERT REDFORD and his programmer John Cooper set the indie film agenda for 2018 with a slew of provocative new titles for this year’s festival which ran from 18-28 January.

Among the newcomers were Paul Dano (with Wildlife) and Rupert Everett (with The Happy Prince) presenting their directorial debuts and new films from Desiree Akhavan: The Miseducation of Cameron Post and Gus van Sant: Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot starring Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara.

WINNERS – THESE ARE THE FILMS WHICH WILL BE CROPPING UP OVER THE NEXT YEAR IN LOCAL ARTHOUSE CINEMAS

The Kindergarten Teacher | DIRECTING AWARD | US DRAMATIC

U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Sara Colangelo, Producers: Celine Rattray, Trudie Styler, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Osnat Handelsman-Keren, Talia Kleinhendler) — Lisa Spinelli is a Staten Island teacher who is unusually devoted to her students. When she discovers one of her five-year-olds is a prodigy, she becomes fascinated with the boy, ultimately risking her family and freedom to nurture his talent. Based on the acclaimed Israeli film. Cast: Maggie Gyllenhaal, Parker Sevak, Rosa Salazar, Anna Barynishikov, Michael Chernus, Gael Garcia Bernal. World Premiere

The Guilty / Denmark | AUDIENCE AWARD | WORLD CINEMA DRAMATIC

(Director: Gustav Möller, Screenwriters: Gustav Möller, Emil Nygaard Albertsen, Producer: Lina Flint) Alarm dispatcher Asger Holm answers an emergency call from a kidnapped woman; after a sudden disconnection, the search for the woman and her kidnapper begins. With the phone as his only tool, Asger enters a race against time to solve a crime that is far bigger than he first thought. Cast: Jakob Cedergren, Jessica Dinnage, Johan Olsen, Omar Shargawi. World Premiere

Of Fathers and Sons / Germany, Syria, Lebanon | WORLD CINEMA GRAND JURY PRIZE | DOCUMENTARY

(Director: Talal Derki, Producers: Ansgar Frerich, Eva Kemme, Tobias N. Siebert, Hans Robert Eisenhauer) — Talal Derki returns to his homeland where he gains the trust of a radical Islamist family, sharing their daily life for over two years. His camera focuses on Osama and his younger brother Ayman, providing an extremely rare insight into what it means to grow up in an Islamic Caliphate. North American Premiere

On Her Shoulders / U.S.A | US DIRECTING AWARD – DOCUMENTARY

(Director: Alexandria Bombach, Producers: Marie Therese Guirgis, Hayley Pappas, Brock Williams, Bryn Mooser, Adam Bardach) — A Yazidi genocide and ISIS sexual slavery survivor, 23-year-old Nadia Murad is determined to tell the world her story. As her journey leads down paths of advocacy and fame, she becomes the voice of her people and their best hope to spur the world to action. International Premiere

The Miseducation of Cameron Post / U.S.A. | US GRAND JURY AWARD 

(Director: Desiree Akhavan, Screenwriters: Desiree Akhavan, Cecilia Frugiuele, Producers: Cecilia Frugiuele, Jonathan Montepare, Michael B. Clark, Alex Turtletaub) — 1993: after being caught having sex with the prom queen, a girl is forced into a gay conversion therapy center. Based on Emily Danforth’s acclaimed and controversial coming-of-age novel. Cast: Chloë Grace Moretz, Sasha Lane, Forrest Goodluck, John Gallagher Jr., Jennifer Ehle. World Premiere

Butterflies / WORLD CINEMA GRAND JURY PRIZE | DOCUMENTARY

Turkey (Director and screenwriter: Tolga Karaçelik, Producers: Tolga Karaçelik, Diloy Gülün, Metin  Anter) — In the Turkish village of Hasanlar, three siblings who neither know each other nor anything about their late father, wait to bury his body. As they start to find out more about their father and about each other, they also start to know more about themselves. Cast: Tolga Tekin, Bartu Küçükçağlayan, Tuğçe Altuğ, Serkan Keskin, Hakan Karsak. World Premiere

THIS IS HOME | AUDIENCE AWARD: US Dramatic / U.S.A., Jordan (Director: Alexandra Shiva, Producer: Lindsey Megrue) This is an intimate portrait of four Syrian families arriving in Baltimore, Maryland and struggling to find their footing. With eight months to become self-sufficient, they must forge ahead to rebuild their lives. When the travel ban adds further complications, their strength and resilience are put to the test. World Premiere

The Sentence / U.S.A | AUDIENCE AWARD | US Documentary

(Director: Rudy Valdez, Producers: Sam Bisbee, Jackie Kelman Bisbee) — Cindy Shank, mother of three, is serving a 15-year sentence in federal prison for her tangential involvement with a Michigan drug ring years earlier. This intimate portrait of mandatory minimum drug sentencing’s devastating consequences, captured by Cindy’s brother, follows her and her family over the course of ten years. World Premiere

BURDEN/AUDIENCE AWARD 2018 | US Dramatic

U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Andrew Heckler, Producers: Robbie Brenner, Jincheng, Bill Kenwright) — After opening a KKK shop, Klansman Michael Burden falls in love with a single mom who forces him to confront his senseless hatred. After leaving the Klan and with nowhere to turn, Burden is taken in by an African-American reverend, and learns tolerance through their combined love and faith. Cast: Garrett Hedlund, Forest Whitaker, Andrea Riseborough, Tom Wilkinson, Usher Raymond. World Premiere

NANCY / U.S.A.| WALDO SALT SCREENWRITING AWARD

(Director and screenwriter: Christina Choe, Producers: Amy Lo, Michelle Cameron, Andrea Riseborough) — Blurring lines between fact and fiction, Nancy becomes increasingly convinced she was kidnapped as a child. When she meets a couple whose daughter went missing thirty years ago, reasonable doubts give way to willful belief – and the power of emotion threatens to overcome all rationality. Cast: Andrea Riseborough, J. Smith-Cameron, Steve Buscemi, Ann Dowd, John Leguizamo. World Premiere

KAILASH | US GRAND JURY PRIZE  / U.S.A | DOCUMENTARY

(Director: Derek Doneen, Producers: Davis Guggenheim, Sarah Anthony) — As a young man, Kailash Satyarthi promised himself that he would end child slavery in his lifetime. In the decades since, he has rescued more than eighty thousand children and built a global movement. This intimate and suspenseful film follows one man’s journey to do what many believed was impossible. World Premiere. 

SEARCH / U.S.A. | THE AUDIENCE AWARD | NEXT

(Director: Aneesh Chaganty, Screenwriters: Aneesh Chaganty, Sev Ohanian, Producers: Timur Bekmambetov, Sev Ohanian, Adam Sidman, Natalie Qasabian) — After his 16-year-old daughter goes missing, a desperate father breaks into her laptop to look for clues to find her. A thriller that unfolds entirely on computer screens. Cast: John Cho, Debra Messing. World Premiere. WINNER: 2018 Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize.

Crime + Punishment / U.S.A. | SPECIAL AWARD FOR SOCIAL IMPACT

(Director: Stephen Maing) — Over four years of unprecedented access, the story of a brave group of black and Latino whistleblower cops and one unrelenting private investigator who, amidst a landmark lawsuit, risk everything to expose illegal quota practices and their impact on young minorities. World Premiere

Shirkers / U.S.A. | DIRECTING AWARD | World Cinema Documentary

(Director and screenwriter: Sandi Tan, Producers: Sandi Tan, Jessica Levin, Maya Rudolph) — In 1992, teenager Sandi Tan shot Singapore’s first indie road movie with her enigmatic American mentor Georges – who then vanished with all the footage. Twenty years later, the 16mm film is recovered, sending Tan, now a novelist in Los Angeles, on a personal odyssey in search of Georges’ vanishing footprints. World Premiere

And Breathe Normally / Iceland, Sweden, Belgium | DIRECTING AWARD | World cinema Dramatic

(Director and screenwriter: Ísold Uggadóttir, Producers: Skúli Malmquist, Diana Elbaum, Annika Hellström, Lilja Ósk Snorradóttir, Inga Lind Karlsdóttir) — At the edge of Iceland’s Reykjanes peninsula, two women’s lives will intersect – for a brief moment – while trapped in circumstances unforeseen. Between a struggling Icelandic mother and an asylum seeker from Guinea-Bissau, a delicate bond will form as both strategize to get their lives back on track. Cast: Kristín Thóra Haraldsdóttir, Babetida Sadjo, Patrik Nökkvi Pétursson. World Premiere

U.S. DRAMATIC COMPETITION
Presenting the world premieres of 16 narrative feature films, the Dramatic Competition offers Festivalgoers a first look at groundbreaking new voices in American independent film. Films that have premiered in this category in recent years include Fruitvale Station, Patti Cake$, Swiss Army Man and The Diary of a Teenage Girl.

American Animals / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Bart Layton, Producers: Derrin Schlesinger, Katherine Butler, Dimitri Doganis, Mary Jane Skalski) — The unbelievable but mostly true story of four young men who mistake their lives for a movie and attempt one of the most audacious art heists in U.S. history. Cast: Evan Peters, Barry Keoghan, Blake Jenner, Jared Abrahamson, Ann Dowd, Udo Kier. World Premiere

BLAZE / U.S.A. (Director: Ethan Hawke, Screenwriters: Ethan Hawke, Sybil Rosen, Producers: Jake Seal, John Sloss, Ryan Hawke, Ethan Hawke) — A reimagining of the life and times of Blaze Foley, the unsung songwriting legend of the Texas Outlaw Music movement; he gave up paradise for the sake of a song. Cast: Benjamin Dickey, Alia Shawkat, Josh Hamilton, Charlie Sexton. World Premiere

Blindspotting / U.S.A. (Director: Carlos Lopez Estrada, Screenwriters: Rafael Casal, Daveed Diggs, Producers: Keith Calder, Jess Calder, Rafael Casal, Daveed Diggs) — A buddy comedy in a world that won’t let it be one. Cast: Daveed Diggs, Rafael Casal, Janina Gavankar, Jasmine Cephas Jones. World Premiere. 

Eighth Grade / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Bo Burnham, Producers: Scott Rudin, Eli Bush, Christopher Storer, Lila Yacoub) — Thirteen-year-old Kayla endures the tidal wave of contemporary suburban adolescence as she makes her way through the last week of middle school — the end of her thus far disastrous eighth grade year — before she begins high school. Cast: Elsie Fisher, Josh Hamilton. World Premiere.

I THINK WE'RE ALONEI Think We’re Alone Now / U.S.A. (Director: Reed Morano, Screenwriter: Mike Makowsky, Producers: Fred Berger, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, Fernando Loureiro, Roberto Vasconcellos, Peter Dinklage, Mike Makowsky) — The apocalypse proves a blessing in disguise for one lucky recluse – until a second survivor arrives with the threat of companionship. Cast: Peter Dinklage, Elle Fanning. World Premiere

Lizzie / U.S.A. (Director: Craig William Macneill, Screenwriter: Bryce Kass, Producers: Naomi Despres, Liz Destro) — Based on the 1892 murder of Lizzie Borden’s family in Fall River, MA, this tense psychological thriller lays bare the legend of Lizzie Borden to reveal the much more complex, poignant and truly terrifying woman within — and her intimate bond with the family’s young Irish housemaid, Bridget Sullivan. Cast: Chloë Sevigny, Kristen Stewart, Jamey Sheridan, Fiona Shaw, Kim Dickens, Denis O’Hare. World Premiere

Monster / U.S.A. (Director: Anthony Mandler, Screenwriters: Radha Blank, Cole Wiley, Janece Shaffer, Producers: Tonya Lewis Lee, Nikki Silver, Aaron L. Gilbert, Mike Jackson, Edward Tyler Nahem) — “Monster” is what the prosecutor calls 17 year old honors student and aspiring filmmaker Steve Harmon. Charged with felony murder for a crime he says he did not commit, the film follows his dramatic journey through a complex legal battle that could leave him spending the rest of his life in prison. Cast: Kelvin Harrison Jr., Jeffrey Wright, Jennifer Hudson, Rakim Mayers, Jennifer Ehle, Tim Blake Nelson. World Premiere

Monsters and Men / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Reinaldo Marcus Green, Producers: Elizabeth Lodge Stepp, Josh Penn, Eddie Vaisman, Julia Lebedev, Luca Borghese) — This interwoven narrative explores the aftermath of a police killing of a black man. The film is told through the eyes of the bystander who filmed the act, an African-American police officer and a high-school baseball phenom inspired to take a stand. Cast: John David Washington, Anthony Ramos, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Chanté Adams, Nicole Beharie, Rob Morgan. World Premiere

Sorry to Bother You / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Boots Riley, Producers: Nina Yang Bongiovi, Forest Whitaker, Charles King, George Rush, Jonathan Duffy, Kelly Williams) — In a speculative and dystopian not-too-distant future, black telemarketer Cassius Green discovers a magical key to professional success – which propels him into a macabre universe. Cast: Lakeith Stanfield, Tessa Thompson, Steven Yeun, Jermaine Fowler, Armie Hammer, Omari Hardwicke. World Premiere

The Tale / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Jennifer Fox, Producers: Oren Moverman, Lawrence Inglee, Laura Rister, Mynette Louie, Sol Bondy, Simone Pero) — An investigation into one woman’s memory as she’s forced to re-examine her first sexual relationship and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive; based on the filmmaker’s own story. Cast: Laura Dern, Isabel Nelisse, Jason Ritter, Elizabeth Debicki, Ellen Burstyn, Common. World Premiere

TYREL / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Sebastian Silva, Producers: Jacob Wasserman, Max Born) — Tyler spirals out of control when he realizes he’s the only black person attending a weekend birthday party in a secluded cabin. Cast: Jason Mitchell, Christopher Abbott, Michael Cera, Caleb Landry Jones, Ann Dowd. World Premiere

WildlifeWildlife / U.S.A. (Director: Paul Dano, Screenwriters: Paul Dano, Zoe Kazan, Producers: Andrew Duncan, Alex Saks, Oren Moverman, Ann Ruark, Jake Gyllenhaal, Riva Marker) — Montana, 1960: A portrait of a family in crisis. Based on the novel by Richard Ford. Cast: Carey Mulligan, Ed Oxenbould, Bill Camp, Jake Gyllenhaal. World Premiere

U.S. DOCUMENTARY COMPETITION
Sixteen world-premiere American documentaries that illuminate the ideas, people and events that shape the present day. Films that have premiered in this category in recent years include Chasing Coral, Life, Animated, Cartel Land and City of Gold.

Bisbee ’17 / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Robert Greene, Producers: Douglas Tirola, Susan Bedusa, Bennett Elliott) — An old mining town on the Arizona-Mexico border finally reckons with its darkest day: the deportation of 1200 immigrant miners exactly 100 years ago. Locals collaborate to stage recreations of their controversial past. Cast: Fernando Serrano, Laurie McKenna, Ray Family, Mike Anderson, Graeme Family, Richard Hodges. World Premier

Dark Money / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Kimberly Reed, Producer: Katy Chevigny) — “Dark money” contributions, made possible by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, flood modern American elections – but Montana is showing Washington D.C. how to solve the problem of unlimited anonymous money in politics. World Premiere

The Devil yo KnowThe Devil We Know / U.S.A. (Director: Stephanie Soechtig, Producers: Kristin Lazure, Stephanie Soechtig, Joshua Kunau, Carly Palmour) — Unraveling one of the biggest environmental scandals of our time, a group of citizens in West Virginia take on a powerful corporation after they discover it has knowingly been dumping a toxic chemical — now found in the blood of 99.7% of Americans — into the local drinking water supply. World Premiere.

 

HalHal / U.S.A. (Director: Amy Scott, Producers: Christine Beebe, Jonathan Lynch, Brian Morrow) — Hal Ashby’s obsessive genius led to an unprecedented string of Oscar®-winning classics, including Harold and Maude, Shampoo and Being There. But as contemporaries Coppola, Scorsese and Spielberg rose to blockbuster stardom in the 1980s, Ashby’s uncompromising nature played out as a cautionary tale of art versus commerce. World Premiere

Hale County This Morning, This Evening / U.S.A. (Director: RaMell Ross, Screenwriter: Maya Krinsky, Producers: Joslyn Barnes, RaMell Ross, Su Kim) — An exploration of coming-of-age in the Black Belt of the American South, using stereotypical imagery to fill in the landscape between iconic representations of black men and encouraging a new way of looking, while resistance to narrative suspends conclusive imagining – allowing the viewer to complete the film. World Premiere

Inventing Tomorrow / U.S.A. (Director: Laura Nix, Producers: Diane Becker, Melanie Miller, Laura Nix) — Take a journey with young minds from around the globe as they prepare their projects for the largest convening of high school scientists in the world, the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF). Watch these passionate innovators find the courage to face the planet’s environmental threats while navigating adolescence. World Premiere. THE NEW CLIMATE

Kusama – Infinity / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Heather Lenz, Producers: Karen Johnson, Heather Lenz, Dan Braun, David Koh) — Now one of the world’s most celebrated artists, Yayoi Kusama broke free of the rigid society in which she was raised, and overcame sexism, racism, and mental illness to bring her artistic vision to the world stage. At 88 she lives in a mental hospital and continues to create art. World Premiere

The Last Race / U.S.A. (Director: Michael Dweck, Producers: Michael Dweck, Gregory Kershaw) — A cinematic portrait of a small town stock car track and the tribe of drivers that call it home as they struggle to hold onto an American racing tradition. The avant-garde narrative explores the community and its conflicts through an intimate story that reveals the beauty, mystery and emotion of grassroots auto racing. World Premiere

Minding the Gap / U.S.A. (Director: Bing Liu, Producer: Diane Quon) — Three young men bond together to escape volatile families in their Rust Belt hometown. As they face adult responsibilities, unexpected revelations threaten their decade-long friendship. World Premiere

The Price of Everything / U.S.A. (Director: Nathaniel Kahn, Producers: Jennifer Blei Stockman, Debi Wisch, Carla Solomon) — With unprecedented access to pivotal artists and the white-hot market surrounding them, this film dives deep into the contemporary art world, holding a funhouse mirror up to our values and our times – where everything can be bought and sold.World Premiere

Seeing AllredSeeing Allred / U.S.A. (Directors: Sophie Sartain, Roberta Grossman, Producers: Roberta Grossman, Sophie Sartain, Marta Kauffman, Robbie Rowe Tollin, Hannah KS Canter) — Gloria Allred overcame trauma and personal setbacks to become one of the nation’s most famous women’s rights attorneys. Now the feminist firebrand takes on two of the biggest adversaries of her career, Bill Cosby and Donald Trump, as sexual violence allegations grip the nation and keep her in the spotlight. World Premiere

THREE IDENTICALThree Identical Strangers / U.S.A. (Director: Tim Wardle, Producer: Becky Read) — New York,1980: three complete strangers accidentally discover that they’re identical triplets, separated at birth. The 19-year-olds’ joyous reunion catapults them to international fame, but also unlocks an extraordinary and disturbing secret that goes beyond their own lives – and could transform our understanding of human nature forever. World Premiere

WORLD CINEMA DRAMATIC COMPETITION
Twelve films from emerging filmmaking talents around the world offer fresh perspectives and inventive styles. Films that have premiered in this category in recent years include The Nile Hilton Incident, Second Mother, Berlin Syndrome and The Lure.

 

Dead Pigs / China (Director and screenwriter: Cathy Yan, Producers: Clarissa Zhang, Jane Zheng, Zhangke Jia, Mick Aniceto, Amy Aniceto) — A bumbling pig farmer, a feisty salon owner, a sensitive busboy, an expat architect and a disenchanted rich girl converge and collide as thousands of dead pigs float down the river towards a rapidly-modernizing Shanghai, China. Based on true events. Cast: Vivian Wu, Haoyu Yang, Mason Lee, Meng Li, David Rysdahl. World Premiere

HolidayHoliday / Denmark, Netherlands, Sweden (Director: Isabella Eklöf, Screenwriters: Isabella Eklöf, Johanne Algren, Producer: David B. Sørensen) — A love triangle featuring the trophy girlfriend of a petty drug lord, caught up in a web of luxury and violence in a modern dark gangster tale set in the beautiful port city of Bodrum on the Turkish Riviera. Cast: Victoria Carmen Sonne, Lai Yde, Thijs Römer. World Premiere

Loveling / Brazil, Uruguay (Director: Gustavo Pizzi, Screenwriters: Gustavo Pizzi, Karine Teles, Producers: Tatiana Leite, Rodrigo Letier, Agustina Chiarino, Fernando Epstein) — On the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, Irene has only a few days to overcome her anxiety and renew her strength before sending her eldest son out into the world. Cast: Karine Teles, Otavio Muller, Adriana Esteves, Konstantinos Sarris, Cesar Troncoso. World Premiere. 

Pity / Greece, Poland (Director: Babis Makridis, Screenwriters: Efthimis Filippou, Babis Makridis, Producers: Amanda Livanou, Christos V. Konstantakopoulos, Klaudia Śmieja, Beata Rzeźniczek) — The story of a man who feels happy only when he is unhappy: addicted to sadness, with such need for pity, that he’s willing to do everything to evoke it from others. This is the life of a man in a world not cruel enough for him. Cast: Yannis Drakopoulos, Evi Saoulidou, Nota Tserniafski, Makis Papadimitriou, Georgina Chryskioti, Evdoxia Androulidaki. World Premiere

The Queen of Fear / Argentina, Denmark (Directors: Valeria Bertuccelli, Fabiana Tiscornia, Screenwriter: Valeria Bertuccelli, Producers: Benjamin Domenech, Santiago Gallelli, Matias Roveda, Juan Vera, Juan Pablo Galli, Christian Faillace) — Only one month left until the premiere of The Golden Time, the long-awaited solo show by acclaimed actress Robertina. Far from focused on the preparations for this new production, Robertina lives in a state of continuous anxiety that turns her privileged life into an absurd and tumultuous landscape. Cast: Valeria Bertuccelli, Diego Velázquez, Gabriel Eduardo “Puma” Goity, Darío Grandinetti. World Premiere

RustRust / Brazil (Director: Aly Muritiba, Screenwriters: Aly Muritiba, Jessica Candal, Producer: Antônio Junior) — Tati and Renet were already trading pics, videos and music by their cellphones and on the last school trip they started making eye contact. However, what could be the beginning of a love story becomes an end. Cast: Giovanni De Lorenzi, Tifanny Dopke, Enrique Diaz, Clarissa Kiste, Duda Azevedo, Pedro Inoue. World Premiere

TIME SHARETime Share (Tiempo Compartido) / Mexico, Netherlands (Director: Sebastián Hofmann, Screenwriters: Julio Chavezmontes, Sebastián Hofmann, Producer: Julio Chavezmontes) — Two haunted family men join forces in a destructive crusade to rescue their families from a tropical paradise, after becoming convinced that an American timeshare conglomerate has a sinister plan to take their loved ones away. Cast: Luis Gerardo Mendez, Miguel Rodarte, Andrés Almeida, Cassandra Ciangherotti, Monserrat Marañon, R.J. Mitte. World Premiere

Un Traductor / Canada, Cuba (Directors: Rodrigo Barriuso, Sebastián Barriuso, Screenwriter: Lindsay Gossling, Producers: Sebastián Barriuso, Lindsay Gossling) — A Russian Literature professor at the University of Havana is ordered to work as a translator for child victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster when they are sent to Cuba for medical treatment. Based on a true story. Cast: Rodrigo Santoro, Maricel Álvarez, Yoandra Suárez. World Premiere

Yardie / United Kingdom (Director: Idris Elba, Screenwriters: Brock Norman Brock, Martin Stellman, Producers: Gina Carter, Robin Gutch) — Jamaica, 1973. When a young boy witnesses his brother’s assassination, a powerful Don gives him a home. Ten years later he is sent on a mission to London. He reunites with his girlfriend and their daughter, but then the past catches up with them. Based on Victor Headley’s novel. Cast: Aml Ameen, Shantol Jackson, Stephen Graham, Fraser James, Sheldon Shepherd, Everaldo Cleary. World Premiere

WORLD CINEMA DOCUMENTARY COMPETITION
Twelve documentaries by some of the most courageous and extraordinary international filmmakers working today. Films that have premiered in this category in recent years include Motherland, Last Men in Aleppo, Joshua: Teenager vs Superpower and Hooligan Sparrow.

A Polar Year / France (Director: Samuel Collardey, Screenwriters: Samuel Collardey, Catherine Paillé, Producer: Grégoire Debailly) — Anders leaves his native Denmark for a teaching position in rural Greenland. As soon as he arrives, he finds himself at odds with tightly-knit locals. Only through a clumsy and playful trial of errors can Anders shake his Euro-centric assumptions and embrace their snow-covered way of life. Cast: Anders Hvidegaard, Asser Boassen, Julius B. Nielsen, Tobias Ignatiussen, Thomasine Jonathansen, Gert Jonathansen. World Premiere

Anote’s Ark / Canada (Director: Matthieu Rytz, Producers: Bob Moore, Mila Aung-Thwin, Daniel Cross, Shari Plummer, Shannon Joy) — How does a nation survive being swallowed by the sea? Kiribati, on a low-lying Pacific atoll, will disappear within decades due to rising sea levels, population growth, and climate change. This exploration of how to migrate an entire nation with dignity interweaves personal stories of survival and resilience. World Premiere. THE NEW CLIMATE

The Cleaners / Germany, Brazil (Directors: Moritz Riesewieck, Hans Block, Screenwriters: Moritz Riesewieck, Hans Block, Georg Tschurtschenthaler, Producers: Christian Beetz, Georg Tschurtschenthaler, Julie Goldman, Christopher Clements, Fernando Dias, Mauricio Dias) — When you post something on the web, can you be sure it stays there? Enter a hidden shadow industry of digital cleaning, where the Internet rids itself of what it doesn’t like: violence, pornography and political content. Who is controlling what we see…and what we think? World Premiere

GenesisGenesis 2.0 / Switzerland (Directors: Christian Frei, Maxim Arbugaev, Producer: Christian Frei) — On the remote New Siberian Islands in the Arctic Ocean, hunters search for tusks of extinct mammoths. When they discover a surprisingly well-preserved mammoth carcass, its resurrection will be the first manifestation of the next great technological revolution: genetics. It may well turn our world upside down. World Premiere

MatangiMATANGI / MAYA / M.I.A. / Sri Lanka, United Kingdom, U.S.A. (Director: Stephen Loveridge, Producers: Lori Cheatle, Andrew Goldman, Paul Mezey) — Drawn from a never before seen cache of personal footage spanning decades, this is an intimate portrait of the Sri Lankan artist and musician who continues to shatter conventions. World Premiere

The Oslo Diaries / Israel, Canada (Directors and screenwriters: Mor Loushy, Daniel Sivan, Producers: Hilla Medalia, Ina Fichman) — In 1992, Israeli-Palestinian relations reached an all time low. In an attempt to stop the bloodshed, a group of Israelis and Palestinians met illegally in Oslo. These meetings were never officially sanctioned and held in complete secrecy. They changed the Middle East forever. World Premiere

Our New President / Russia, U.S.A. (Director: Maxim Pozdorovkin, Producers: Maxim Pozdorovkin, Joe Bender) — The story of Donald Trump’s election told entirely through Russian propaganda. By turns horrifying and hilarious, the film is a satirical portrait of Russian media that reveals an empire of fake news and the tactics of modern-day information warfare. World Premiere. 

 

Westwood / United Kingdom (Director: Lorna Tucker, Producers: Eleanor Emptage, Shirine Best, Nicole Stott, John Battsek) — Dame Vivienne Westwood: punk, icon, provocateur and one of the most influential originators in recent history. This is the first film to encompass the remarkable story of one of the true icons of our time, as she fights to maintain her brand’s integrity, her principles – and her legacy. World Premiere

A Woman Captured / Hungary (Director and screenwriter: Bernadett Tuza-Ritter, Producers: Julianna Ugrin, Viki Réka Kiss, Erik Winker, Martin Roelly) — A European woman has been kept by a family as a domestic slave for 10 years – one of over 45 million victims of modern-day slavery. Drawing courage from the filmmaker’s presence, she decides to escape the unbearable oppression and become a free person. North American Premiere

NEXT
Pure, bold works distinguished by an innovative, forward-thinking approach to storytelling populate this program. Digital technology paired with unfettered creativity promises that the films in this section will shape a “greater” next wave in American cinema. Films that have premiered in this category in recent years include A Ghost Story, Tangerine and A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night. Presented by Adobe.

306 Hollywood / U.S.A., Hungary (Directors: Elan Bogarín, Jonathan Bogarín, Screenwriters: Jonathan Bogarín, Elan Bogarín, Nyneve Laura Minnear, Producers: Elan Bogarín, Jonathan Bogarín, Judit Stalter) — When two siblings undertake an archaeological excavation of their late grandmother’s house, they embark on a magical-realist journey from her home in New Jersey to ancient Rome, from fashion to physics, in search of what life remains in the objects we leave behind. World Premiere. DAY ONE

A Boy, A Girl, A DreamA Boy, A Girl, A Dream. / U.S.A. (Director: Qasim Basir, Screenwriters: Qasim Basir, Samantha Tanner, Producer: Datari Turner) — On the night of the 2016 Presidential election, Cass, an L.A. club promoter, takes a thrilling and emotional journey with Frida, a Midwestern visitor. She challenges him to revisit his broken dreams – while he pushes her to discover hers. Cast: Omari Hardwick, Meagan Good, Jay Ellis, Kenya Barris, Dijon Talton, Wesley Jonathan. World Premiere

An Evening With Beverly Luff Linn / United Kingdom, U.S.A. (Director: Jim Hosking, Screenwriters: Jim Hosking, David Wike, Producers: Sam Bisbee, Theodora Dunlap, Oliver Roskill, Emily Leo, Lucan Toh, Andy Starke) — Lulu Danger’s unsatisfying marriage takes a fortunate turn for the worse when a mysterious man from her past comes to town to perform an event called ‘An Evening With Beverly Luff Linn For One Magical Night Only.’ Cast: Aubrey Plaza, Emile Hirsch, Jemaine Clement, Matt Berry, Craig Robinson. World Premiere

Clara's GhostClara’s Ghost / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Bridey Elliott, Producer: Sarah Winshall) — Set over the course of a single evening at the Reynolds’ family home in Connecticut, Clara, fed up with the constant ribbing from her self-absorbed showbiz family, finds solace in and guidance from the supernatural force she believes is haunting her. Cast: Paula Niedert Elliott, Chris Elliott, Abby Elliott, Bridey Elliott, Haley Joel Osment, Isidora Goreshter. World Premiere

Madeline’s Madeline / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Josephine Decker, Producers: Krista Parris, Elizabeth Rao) — Madeline got the part! She’s going to play the lead in a theater piece! Except the lead wears sweatpants like Madeline’s. And has a cat like Madeline’s. And is holding a steaming hot iron next to her mother’s face – like Madeline is. Cast: Helena Howard, Molly Parker, Miranda July, Okwui Okpokwasili, Felipe Bonilla, Lisa Tharps. World Premiere

Night Comes On / U.S.A. (Director: Jordana Spiro, Screenwriters: Jordana Spiro, Angelica Nwandu, Producers: Jonathan Montepare, Alvaro R. Valente, Danielle Renfrew Behrens) — Angel LaMere is released from juvenile detention on the eve of her 18th birthday. Haunted by her past, she embarks on a journey with her 10 year-old sister that could destroy their future. Cast: Dominique Fishback, Tatum Hall, John Earl Jelks, Max Casella, James McDaniel. World Premiere

Skate KitchenSkate Kitchen / U.S.A. (Director: Crystal Moselle, Screenwriters: Crystal Moselle, Ashlihan Unaldi, Producers: Lizzie Nastro, Izabella Tzenkova, Julia Nottingham, Matthew Perniciaro, Michael Sherman, Rodrigo Teixeira) — Camille’s life as a lonely suburban teenager changes dramatically when she befriends a group of girl skateboarders. As she journeys deeper into this raw New York City subculture, she begins to understand the true meaning of friendship as well as her inner self. Cast: Rachelle Vinberg, Dede Lovelace, Jaden Smith, Nina Moran, Ajani Russell, Kabrina Adams. World Premiere

We The AnimalsWe The Animals / U.S.A. (Director: Jeremiah Zagar, Screenwriters: Daniel Kitrosser, Jeremiah Zagar, Producers: Jeremy Yaches, Christina D. King, Andrew Goldman, Paul Mezey) — Us three, us brothers, us kings. Manny, Joel and Jonah tear their way through childhood and push against the volatile love of their parents. As Manny and Joel grow into versions of their father and Ma dreams of escape, Jonah, the youngest, embraces an imagined world all his own. Cast: Raul Castillo, Sheila Vand, Evan Rosado, Isaiah Kristian, Josiah Santiago. World Premiere

White RabbitWhite Rabbit / U.S.A. (Director: Daryl Wein, Screenwriters: Daryl Wein, Vivian Bang, Producers: Daryl Wein, Vivian Bang) —A dramatic comedy following a Korean American performance artist who struggles to be authentically heard and seen through her multiple identities in modern Los Angeles. Cast: Vivian Bang, Nana Ghana, Nico Evers-Swindel, Tracy Hazas, Elizabeth Sung, Michelle Sui. World Premiere

PREMIERES
A showcase of world premieres of some of the most highly anticipated narrative films of the coming year. Films that have premiered in this category in recent years include The Big Sick, Call Me By Your Name, Boyhood and Mudbound.

The Long Dumb Road / U.S.A. (Director: Hannah Fidell, Screenwriters: Hannah Fidell, Carson Mell, Producers: Hannah Fidell, Jacqueline “JJ” Ingram, Jonathan Duffy, Kelly Williams) — Two very different men, at personal crossroads, meet serendipitously and take an unpredictable journey through the American Southwest. Cast: Tony Revolori, Jason Mantzoukas, Taissa Farmiga, Grace Gummer, Ron Livingston, Casey Wilson, Ciara Bravo. World Premiere

Private Life / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Tamara Jenkins, Producers: Anthony Bregman, Stefanie Azpiazu) — A couple in the throes of infertility try to maintain their marriage as they descend deeper into the weird world of assisted reproduction and domestic adoption. When their doctor suggests third-party reproduction, they bristle. But when Sadie, a recent college dropout, re-enters their life, they reconsider. Cast: Kathryn Hahn, Paul Giamatti, Molly Shannon, John Carroll Lynch, Kayli Carter. World Premiere

A Kid Like Jake / U.S.A. (Director: Silas Howard, Screenwriter: Daniel Pearle, Producers: Jim Parsons, Todd Spiewak, Eric Norsoph, Paul Bernon, Rachel Song) — As married couple Alex and Greg navigate their roles as parents to a young son who prefers Cinderella to G.I. Joe, a rift grows between them, one that forces them to confront their own concerns about what’s best for their child, and each other. Cast: Claire Danes, Jim Parsons, Octavia Spencer, Priyanka  Chopra, Ann Dowd, Amy Landecker. World Premiere

Beirut / U.S.A. (Director: Brad Anderson, Screenwriter: Tony Gilroy) — A U.S. diplomat flees Lebanon in 1972 after a tragic incident at his home. Ten years later, he is called back to war-torn Beirut by CIA operatives to negotiate for the life of a friend he left behind. Cast: Jon Hamm, Rosamund Pike, Shea Whigham, Dean Norris. World Premiere

The Catcher Was a Spy / U.S.A. (Director: Ben Lewin, Screenwriter: Robert Rodat, Producers: Kevin Frakes, Tatiana Kelly, Buddy Patrick, Jim Young) — The true story of Moe Berg – professional baseball player, Ivy League graduate, attorney who spoke nine languages – and a top-secret spy for the OSS who helped the U.S. win the race against Germany to build the atomic bomb. Cast: Paul Rudd, Mark Strong, Sienna Miller, Jeff Daniels, Guy Pearce, Paul Giamatti. World Premiere

Colette / United Kingdom (Director: Wash Westmoreland, Screenwriters: Wash Westmoreland, Richard Glatzer, Producers: Pamela Koffler, Christine Vachon, Elizabeth Karlsen, Stephen Woolley) — A young country woman marries a famous literary entrepreneur in turn-of-the-century Paris: At her husband’s request, Colette pens a series of bestselling novels published under his name. But as her confidence grows, she transforms not only herself and her marriage, but the world around her. Cast: Keira Knightley, Dominic West, Fiona Shaw, Denise Gough, Elinor Tomlinson, Aiysha Hart. World Premiere

Come Sunday / U.S.A. (Director: Joshua Marston, Screenwriter: Marcus Hinchey, Producers: Ira Glass, Alissa Shipp, Julie Goldstein, James Stern, Lucas Smith, Cindy Kirven) — Internationally-renowned pastor Carlton Pearson — experiencing a crisis of faith — risks his church, family and future when he questions church doctrine and finds himself branded a modern-day heretic. Based on actual events. Cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Danny Glover, Condola Rashad, Jason Segel, Lakeith Stanfield, Martin Sheen. World Premiere

DAMSELDamsel / U.S.A. (Directors and screenwriters: David Zellner, Nathan Zellner, Producers: Nathan Zellner, Chris Ohlson, David Zellner) — Samuel Alabaster, an affluent pioneer, ventures across the American Frontier to marry the love of his life, Penelope. As Samuel, a drunkard named Parson Henry and a miniature horse called Butterscotch traverse the Wild West, their once-simple journey grows treacherous, blurring the lines between hero, villain and damsel. Cast: Robert Pattinson, Mia Wasikowska, David Zellner, Robert Forster, Nathan Zellner, Joe Billingiere. World Premiere

Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot / U.S.A. (Director: Gus Van Sant, Screenwriters: Gus Van Sant (screenplay), John Callahan (biography), Producers: Charles-Marie Anthonioz, Mourad Belkeddar, Steve Golin, Nicolas Lhermitte) — John Callahan has a talent for off-color jokes…and a drinking problem. When a bender ends in a car accident, Callahan wakes permanently confined to a wheelchair. In his journey back from rock bottom, Callahan finds beauty and comedy in the absurdity of human experience. Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Jonah Hill, Rooney Mara, Jack Black. World Premiere

Futile and Stupid Gesture / U.S.A. (Director: David Wain, Screenwriters: John Aboud, Michael Colton, Producers: Peter Principato, Jonathan Stern) — The story of comedy wunderkind Doug Kenney, who co-created the National Lampoon, Caddyshack, and Animal House. Kenney was at the center of the 70’s comedy counter-culture which gave birth to Saturday Night Live and a whole generation’s way of looking at the world. Cast: Will Forte, Martin Mull, Domhnall Gleeson, Matt Walsh, Joel McHale, Emmy Rossum. World Premiere

The Happy PrinceThe Happy Prince / Germany, Belgium, Italy (Director and screenwriter: Rupert Everett) — The last days of Oscar Wilde—and the ghosts haunting them—are brought to vivid life. His body ailing, Wilde lives in exile, surviving on the flamboyant irony and brilliant wit that defined him as the transience of lust is laid bare and the true riches of love are revealed. Cast: Colin Firth, Emily Watson, Colin Morgan, Edwin Thomas, Rupert Everett. World Premiere

Hearts Beat Loud / U.S.A. (Director: Brett Haley, Screenwriters: Brett Haley, Marc Basch, Producers: Houston King, Sam Bisbee, Sam Slater) — In Red Hook, Brooklyn, a father and daughter become an unlikely songwriting duo in the last summer before she leaves for college. Cast: Nick Offerman, Kiersey Clemons, Ted Danson, Sasha Lane, Blythe Danner, Toni Collette. World Premiere

Juliet, Naked / United Kingdom (Director: Jesse Peretz, Screenwriters: Tamara Jenkins, Jim Taylor, Phil Alden Robinson, Evgenia Peretz, Producers: Judd Apatow, Barry Mendel, Albert Berger, Ron Yerxa) — Annie is the long-suffering girlfriend of Duncan, an obsessive fan of obscure rocker Tucker Crowe. When the acoustic demo of Tucker’s celebrated record from 25 years ago surfaces, its release leads to an encounter with the elusive rocker himself. Based on the novel by Nick Hornby. Cast: Rose Byrne, Ethan Hawke, Chris O’Dowd. World Premiere

OPHELIAOphelia / United Kingdom (Director: Claire McCarthy, Screenwriter: Semi Chellas, Producers: Daniel Bobker, Sarah Curtis, Ehren Kruger, Paul Hanson) — A mythic spin on Hamlet through a lens of female empowerment: Ophelia comes of age as lady-in-waiting for Queen Gertrude, and her singular spirit captures Hamlet’s affections. As lust and betrayal threaten the kingdom, Ophelia finds herself trapped between true love and controlling her own destiny. Cast: Daisy Ridley, Naomi Watts, Clive Owen, George MacKay, Tom Felton, Devon Terrell. World Premiere

Puzzle / U.S.A. (Director: Marc Turtletaub, Screenwriter: Oren Moverman, Producers: Peter Saraf, Wren Arthur, Guy Stodel) — Agnes, taken for granted as a suburban mother, discovers a passion for solving jigsaw puzzles which unexpectedly draws her into a new world – where her life unfolds in ways she could never have imagined. Cast: Kelly Macdonald, Irrfan Khan, David Denman, Bubba Weiler, Austin Abrams, Liv Hewson. World Premiere

Untitled Debra Granik Project / U.S.A. (Director: Debra Granik, Screenwriters: Debra Granik, Anne Rosellini, Producers: Anne Harrison, Linda Reisman, Anne Rosellini) — A father and daughter live a perfect but mysterious existence in Forest Park, a beautiful nature reserve near Portland, Oregon, rarely making contact with the world. A small mistake tips them off to authorities sending them on an increasingly erratic journey in search of a place to call their own. Cast: Ben Foster, Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie, Jeff Korber, Dale Dickey. World Premiere

What They Had / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Elizabeth Chomko) — Bridget returns home to Chicago at her brother’s urging to deal with her mother’s Alzheimer’s and her father’s reluctance to let go of their life together. Cast: Hilary Swank, Michael Shannon, Blythe Danner, Robert Forster. World Premiere

DOCUMENTARY PREMIERES
Renowned filmmakers and films about far-reaching subjects comprise this section highlighting our ongoing commitment to documentaries. Films that have premiered in this category in recent years include An Inconvenient Sequel, The Hunting Ground, Going Clear and What Happened, Miss Simone?

Akicita: The Battle of Standing Rock / U.S.A. (Director: Cody Lucich, Producers: Heather Rae, Gingger Shankar, Ben-Alex Dupris) — Standing Rock, 2016: the largest Native American occupation since Wounded Knee. Thousands of activists, environmentalists and militarized police descend on the Dakota Access Pipeline in a standoff between oil corporations and a new generation of Native Warriors. This chronicle captures the sweeping struggle, spirit and havoc of a People’s uprising. World Premiere. THE NEW CLIMATE

Bad Reputation / U.S.A. (Director: Kevin Kerslake, Screenwriter: Joel Marcus, Producers: Peter Afterman, Carianne Brinkman) — A look at the life of Joan Jett, from her early years as the founder of The Runaways and first meeting collaborator Kenny Laguna in 1980 to her enduring presence in pop culture as a rock ‘n’ roll pioneer . World Premiere

Believer / U.S.A. (Director: Don Argott, Producers: Heather Parry, Sheena M. Joyce, Robert Reynolds) — Imagine Dragons’ Mormon frontman Dan Reynolds is taking on a new mission to explore how the church treats its LGBTQ members. With the rising suicide rate amongst teens in the state of Utah, his concern with the church’s policies sends him on an unexpected path for acceptance and change. World Premiere

Chef FlynnChef Flynn / U.S.A. (Director: Cameron Yates, Producer: Laura Coxson) — Ten-year-old Flynn transforms his living room into a supper club, using his classmates as line cooks and serving a tasting menu foraged from his neighbors’ backyards. With sudden fame, Flynn outgrows his bedroom kitchen and mother’s camera, and sets out to challenge the hierarchy of the culinary world. World Premiere

The Game Changers / U.S.A. (Director: Louie Psihoyos, Screenwriters: Mark Monroe, Joseph Pace, Producers: Joseph Pace, James Wilks) — James Wilks, an elite special forces trainer and winner of The Ultimate Fighter, embarks on a quest for the truth in nutrition and uncovers the world’s most dangerous myth. World Premiere

Generation Wealth / U.S.A. (Director: Lauren Greenfield, Producers: Lauren Greenfield, Frank Evers) — Lauren Greenfield’s postcard from the edge of the American Empire captures a portrait of a materialistic, image-obsessed culture. Simultaneously personal journey and historical essay, the film bears witness to the global boom–bust economy, the corrupted American Dream and the human costs of late stage capitalism, narcissism and greed. World Premiere. DAY ONE

Half The Picture / U.S.A. (Director: Amy Adrion, Producers: Amy Adrion, David Harris) — At a pivotal moment for gender equality in Hollywood, successful women directors tell the stories of their art, lives and careers. Having endured a long history of systemic discrimination, women filmmakers may be getting the first glimpse of a future that values their voices equally. World Premiere

Jane Fonda in Five Acts / U.S.A. (Director: Susan Lacy, Producers: Susan Lacy, Jessica Levin, Emma Pildes) — Girl next door, activist, so-called traitor, fitness tycoon, Oscar winner: Jane Fonda has lived a life of controversy, tragedy and transformation – and she’s done it all in the public eye. An intimate look at one woman’s singular journey. World Premiere

King In The Wilderness / U.S.A. (Director: Peter Kunhardt, Producers: George Kunhardt, Teddy Kunhardt) From the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 to his assassination in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. remained a man with an unshakeable commitment to nonviolence in the face of an increasingly unstable country. A portrait of the last years of his life. World Premiere

Quiet HeroesQuiet Heroes / U.S.A. (Director: Jenny Mackenzie, Co-Directors: Jared Ruga, Amanda Stoddard, Producers: Jenny Mackenzie, Jared Ruga, Amanda Stoddard) — In Salt Lake City, Utah, the socially conservative religious monoculture complicated the AIDS crisis, where patients in the entire state and intermountain region relied on only one doctor. This is the story of her fight to save a maligned population everyone else seemed willing to just let die. World Premiere

RBG / U.S.A. (Directors and producers: Betsy West, Julie Cohen) — An intimate portrait of an unlikely rock star: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. With unprecedented access, the filmmakers show how her early legal battles changed the world for women. Now this 84-year-old does push-ups as easily as she writes blistering dissents that have earned her the title “Notorious RBG.” World Premiere

Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind / U.S.A. (Director: Marina Zenovich, Producers: Alex Gibney, Shirel Kozak) — This intimate portrait examines one of the world’s most beloved and inventive comedians. Told largely through Robin’s own voice and using a wealth of never-before-seen archive, the film takes us through his extraordinary life and career and reveals the spark of madness that drove him. World Premiere

STUDIO 54STUDIO 54 / U.S.A. (Director: Matt Tyrnauer, Producers: Matt Tyrnauer, John Battsek, Corey Reeser) — Studio 54 was the pulsating epicenter of 1970s hedonism: a disco hothouse of beautiful people, drugs, and sex. The journeys of Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell — two best friends from Brooklyn who conquered New York City — frame this history of the “greatest club of all time.” World Premiere

Won’t You Be My Neighbor? / U.S.A. (Director: Morgan Neville, Producers: Caryn Capotosto, Nicholas Ma) — Fred Rogers used puppets and play to explore complex social issues: race, disability, equality and tragedy, helping form the American concept of childhood. He spoke directly to children and they responded enthusiastically. Yet today, his impact is unclear. Have we lived up to Fred’s ideal of good neighbors? World Premiere. SALT LAKE CITY OPENING NIGHT FILM

MIDNIGHT
From horror and comedy to works that defy genre classification, these films will keep you wide awake, even at the most arduous hour. Films that have premiered in this category in recent years include The Little Hours, The Babadook and Get Out.

Arizona / U.S.A. (Director: Jonathan Watson, Screenwriter: Luke Del Tredici, Producers: Dan Friedkin, Bradley Thomas, Ryan Friedkin, Danny McBride, Brandon James) — Set in the midst of the 2009 housing crisis, this darkly comedic story follows Cassie Fowler, a single mom and struggling realtor whose life goes off the rails when she witnesses a murder. Cast: Danny McBride, Rosemarie DeWitt, Luke Wilson, Lolli Sorenson, Elizabeth Gillies, Kaitlin Olson. World Premiere

Assassination Nation / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Sam Levinson, Producers: David Goyer, Anita Gou, Kevin Turen, Aaron L. Gilbert, Matthew J. Malek) — This is a one-thousand-percent true story about how the quiet, all-American town of Salem, Massachusetts, absolutely lost its mind. Cast: Odessa Young, Suki Waterhouse, Hari Nef, Abra, Bill Skarsgard, Bella Thorne. World Premiere

MANDYMandy / Belgium, U.S.A. (Director: Panos Cosmatos, Screenwriters: Panos Cosmatos, Aaron Stewart-Ahn, Producers: Daniel Noah, Josh Waller, Elijah Wood, Nate Bolotin, Adrian Politowski) — Pacific Northwest. 1983 AD. Outsiders Red Miller and Mandy Bloom lead a loving and peaceful existence. When their pine-scented haven is savagely destroyed by a cult led by the sadistic Jeremiah Sand, Red is catapulted into a phantasmagoric journey filled with bloody vengeance and laced with fire. Cast: Nicolas Cage, Andrea Riseborough, Linus Roache, Olwen Fouéré, Richard Brake, Bill Duke. World Premiere

Never Goin’ Back / U.S.A.  (Director and screenwriter: Augustine Frizzell, Producers: Toby Halbrooks, Liz Cardenas , James Johnston, David Lowery) — Jessie and Angela, high school dropout BFFs, are taking a week off to chill at the beach. Too bad their house got robbed, rent’s due, they’re about to get fired and they’re broke. Now they’ve gotta avoid eviction, stay out of jail and get to the beach, no matter what!!! Cast: Maia Mitchell, Cami Morrone, Kyle Mooney, Joel Allen, Kendal Smith, Matthew Holcomb. World Premiere

Piercing / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Nicolas Pesce, Producers: Josh Mond, Antonio Campos, Schuyler Weiss, Jake Wasserman) — In this twisted love story, a man seeks out an unsuspecting stranger to help him purge the dark torments of his past. His plan goes awry when he encounters a woman with plans of her own. A playful psycho-thriller game of cat-and-mouse based on Ryu Murakami’s novel. Cast: Christopher Abbott, Mia Wasikowska, Laia Costa, Marin Ireland, Maria Dizzia, Wendell Pierce. World Premiere

Revenge / France (Director and screenwriter: Coralie Fargeat, Producers: Marc-Etienne Schwartz, Jean-Yves Robin, Marc Stanimirovic) — Three wealthy married men get together for their annual hunting game in a desert canyon. This time, one of them has brought along his young mistress, who quickly arouses the interest of the other two. Things get dramatically out of hand as a hunting game turns into a ruthless manhunt. Cast: Matilda Lutz, Kevin Janssens, Vincent Colombe, Guillaume Bouchede, Jean-Louis Tribes. Utah Premiere

Summer of '84Summer of ’84 / Canada, U.S.A. (Directors: Francois Simard, Anouk Whissell, Yoann Whissell, Screenwriters: Matt Leslie, Stephen J. Smith, Producers: Shawn Williamson, Jameson Parker, Matt Leslie, Van Toffler, Cody Zwieg) — Summer, 1984: a perfect time to be a carefree 15-year-old. But when neighborhood conspiracy theorist Davey Armstrong begins to suspect his police officer neighbor might be the serial killer all over the local news, he and his three best friends begin an investigation that soon turns dangerous. Cast: Graham Verchere, Judah Lewis, Caleb Emery, Cory Grüter-Andrew, Tiera Skovbye, Rich Sommer. World Premiere

SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | PARK CITY, UTAH | JANUARY 2018 | 

Journey’s End (2017)

Dir.: Saul Dibb | Cast: Sam Claflin, Paul Bettany, Asa Butterfield, Toby Jones | UK | 107′

Saul Dibb (Suite Francaise) make great use of Simon Reade’s taut script to depict this gloomy WWI chronicle, set in a dugout at Aisne Northern France over a four-day period in March 1918.

Based on Vernon Bartlett’s novel and the seminal 1930 play by RC Sheriff, JOURNEY’S END is unrelentingly harrowing. And rather than creating a worthy and alienating throwback to the era, Dibb succeeds in connecting us to the present with well-formed and convincing characterisations of real people who we can relate to, an and feel for, rather than relics from another point in time. Powerfully projecting the narrative beyond the confines of its cramped surroundings, he also makes the threat of the impending air strikes ever-present and audible as a force just over the parapet where the men make their final tragic sortie, he also creates a love interest for Captain Stanhope in the shape of Raleigh’s sister who is captured in a pleasant vignette in her country drawing room, adding welcome contrast to the despondency in the dugout. Sam Claflin plays Stanhope, slowly losing his mind in a haze of whisky. But to everyone else he is a hero. The unit is held together by his second-in-command, Osborne (Bettany), a former schoolteacher, who is gentle and understanding, but somehow longs for his own death. Fresh from the training academy, Lieutenant Raleigh (Butterfield) pleads with his uncle, a general, to secure him a posting in Stanhope’s battalion. He admires Stanhope, who was an older pupil at his school, but nothing prepares him for what is to come. The German offensive keeps the tension as tight as the mens’ measly rations, and when Raleigh and Osborne are sent out with a handful of soldiers they manage to capture a German who will be cross-examined to confirm the exact date of the planned attack. This bloody undertaking is only the curtain-raiser for the mass slaughter that was to occur during the German bombardment. There are terrific performances, among them Toby Jones as the cook, trying to please everybody so he can stay out of the line of fire. DoP Laurie Rose (High Rise) captures the tortuous trenches where the men wait for their death. There have been many war films over the past century commemorating the mass slaughter with ultra-realism and picturing those horrifying days. But this is a grim record that really brings home the realisation that none of us is ever ‘entitled’ to peace or to happiness: We don’t have a right to anything. Remembrance is necessary, and every single record of the two World Wars offers another opportunity for us to recall the bitter events that finally united Europe. And how important that union still is. MT

ON GENERAL RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM 2 FEBRUARY 2018

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri (2017)

Dir: MARTIN MCDONAGH | United Kingdom / 110’ | cast: Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell, Abbie Cornish, John Hawkes, Peter Dinklage

In Martin McDonagh’s latest pithy social satire a frustrated and grieving mother antagonises her local police force calling to attention the lack of progress in the search for her daughter’s killer.
Confrontation is the name of the game in this unforgiving black comedy set in the Southern United States. Conflict is rife, incendiary arguments erupt, nearly everyone resorts to violence, be it for political or personal reasons. Grudging forgiveness sometimes follows, but not necessarily as a matter of course. Frances McDormand paints the heroine Mildred as an unlovable tyrant, in the smalltime, small-mindedtown of Ebbing. A divorcee, she has lost her teenage daughter, who was raped and left to  die almost on her doorstep. After a month, the terminally ill sheriff (Harrelson) has not come up with any suspects and the trail has gone cold, so Mildred pushes her own agenda forward, renting three billboards with a strong message accusing the sheriff of incompetence. This is not a particularly sensitive move but it’s an effective one, sending the townsfolk into quiet meltdown against the mother of three. Meanwhile, the much-liked Willoughby is dying of cancer. But Mildred’s vendetta knows no bounds and she finally takes her complaint further, leaving DC Dixon (a strong comedy turn by Rockwell) with terrible injuries. Strangely enough, Dixon seems to learn his lesson and channels his energy into re-opening the case. Dixon and Mildred begin a friendship, but not on the lines the late sheriff would be approve of.
McDormand is brazenly brilliant as the hard-bitten Mildred who conveniently forgets that she argued with her daughter on that fateful last evening, jokingly wishing that she would be raped for not following her advice. Race, gender, anger and forgiveness are the are all in the mix in this toxic town where casual violence is par for the course.  The narrative is anger-driven rather than goal-oriented, and the fun is very much in the process rather than the solution: this is no whodunnit. THREE BILLBOARDS is very dark, shot through with brutal stabs of humour: DoP Ben Davis catches the mood with his stark, widescreen images. This is Trump country, and the Confederate Flag rules. God help America. AS

Martin McDonagh was born in London to Irish parents. He is a renowned playwright and filmmaker, and won an Academy Award for his debut short, Six Shooter (06). He subsequently directed In Bruges (08) and Seven Psychopaths (12), which played at the Festival and received the Midnight Madness People’s Choice Award. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (17) is his latest feature.

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM FRIDAY 12 JANUARY 2018

Last Flag Flying (2017) **

Dir.: Richard Linklater; Cast: Steve Carell, Laurence Fishburne, Bryan Cranston, J. Quinton Johnson, Yul Vazquez; USA | 124′

It’s difficult to believe that LAST FLAG FLYING was directed and co-written by the filmmaker of Boyhood, Richard Linklater. Based on the 2004 novel by Darryl Ponicsan, who also wrote Last Detail (1970), later filmed by Hal Ashby, This is a tired road movie which vehemently contradicts its opening message in the sentimental closing stages. ‘Doc’ Shephard (Carell) is looking for his Vietnam buddies Richard Mueller (Fishburne), now a Reverend, and Sal Neaton (Cranston), an alcohol dependent bar owner. Shephard wants their support in burying his own son, who has been killed in Iraq, where he was on a tour with the Marines. Doc, who was a paramedic, actually tried to talk his son out of his decision. So the trio set out to bury Doc’s son in Arlington, bickering among themselves and the government, old and new, who send the soldiers into one mess after another. Meeting Washington (Johnson), a fellow soldier of Shephard junior, it then transpires that the young man was killed whilst buying Coca Cola for his buddies (it was actually Washington’s turn) – not the heroic death the army suggested. But slowly, despite being put off by a robotic Colonel (Vazquez), the Vietnam veterans get into the swing of things, and in the end come to an agreement that the young soldier’s death was heroic after all, ”because we are an okay country, even if the government sends young people out to die in foreign countries”. Very much inferior to Ashby’s Last Detail, of which it is supposed to be a sequel, LAST FLAG FLYING is much too wordy, the characters are one-dimensional, and the trip with the coffin across the country feels somehow awkward. A very unfunny road movie, with a dubious final message. AS

SCREENING AT ARTHOUSES NATIONWIDE | 17 JANUARY 2018

The Innocents: Madness and Desire in Gothic cinema

Madness and Desire in The Innocents 

We lay my love and I, beneath the weeping willow,
But now alone I lie, and weep beside the tree.

Singing O Willow Waly, by the tree that weeps with me,
Singing O Willow Waly, ’til my lover returns to me.

We lay my love and I, beneath a weeping willow,
but now alone I lie, Oh Willow I die, Oh Willow I die.

So begins one of the most chilling films of all time: Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961). The tune repeats throughout, a recurring refrain of terror, still capable of sending a chill down the spine over fifty years after the film’s release.

Although now rightly held as a great masterpiece of cinema, it wasn’t always so for The Innocents: upon release, the film was not an immediate hit – perhaps because it failed to feature either the camp fun of the early haunted house drawing room mysteries, or the shocking thrills then so in vogue. The film starred Deborah Kerr as the prim and proper governess hired to look after two children who she becomes convinced are haunted by a former governess Miss Jessel (Clytie Jessop) and a valet played by Peter Wyngarde, in one of his early film roles.

In the late 1950s, Hammer Films had redefined horror with The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula (1958), smashing onto the Gothic scene with blood, gore, sex – and colour. By contrast, the black and white restraint of The Innocents seemed to owe more to the psychological horrors of Val Lewton’s Snake Pit unit, who had created a spate of low budget masterpieces over at RKO Pictures during the 1940s. However, upon inspection, there may be more similarities between the Hammer output and The Innocents than there first appears.

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In Dracula, for instance, Hammer had focused on the sexual undertones of Bram Stoker’s novel, using the tale to explore the unfulfilled and unexpressed sexual desires of women living within a repressive, patriarchal Victorian society. In its story of a vicar’s daughter becoming governess to the estranged niece and nephew of a dashing playboy, who subsequently succumbs to either madness, desire or ghosts (depending on your interpretation), The Innocents can be read as a similar exploration into Victorian values and repression. In other words, Dracula and The Innocents share both genre and theme, and even their stylistic differences have perhaps been overplayed: like Dracula, The Innocents is both shocking and frightening, and even Jack Clayton felt that his portrayal of the beastly Peter Quint owed too much to Hammer (and many purists of Henry James – who wrote The Turn of the Screw, the novella on which The Innocents is based – appear to agree, rejecting the film as a cheapening of its source material).

It would seem, then, that what really distinguishes Dracula and The Innocents is their varying degrees of obliquity: where Dracula is hiked skirts and girls on beds, The Innocents is half-glimpsed men in misty towers. In making his film, Clayton was reportedly influenced by the essay The Ambiguity of Henry James (Edmund Wilson, 1934), the first part of which gives itself over to a detailed exploration of a theory which claims that ‘the young governess…is a neurotic case of sex repression, and the ghosts are not real ghosts at all but merely the hallucinations of the governess’. Freud, it’s fair to say, was in the air. Wilson also states that ‘nowhere does James unequally give the thing away: almost everything from beginning to end can be read equally in either of two senses’ – and thus we have the ambiguity of the essay’s title and, perhaps, the defining characteristic of Clayton’s approach to the material. For him, it was vital not to succumb fully to either interpretation, but instead to preserve this ambiguity.

To this end, then, he degraded film, shot through mist and frosted windows, and on many occasions (though not all, as is sometimes stated) shows first the governess’ terrified face, and then the ghosts – therefore implying the ghosts may well be only in her head (this ambiguity was also a key component of Deborah Kerr’s superb performance as the governess). Again following Wilson, we can note ‘that there is no real reason for supposing that anybody but the governess sees the ghosts’. Perhaps, therefore, what we are watching is not a ghost story, but a descent into madness. In some senses, this ambiguity (and specifically the refusal to posit the ghosts as real) ties The Innocents back into the original lineage of haunted house drawing room mysteries, in which natural answers were ultimately posited to explain away supernatural elements. Of course, the governess’ potential madness and the undercurrents of desire also tie the film into two other distinct strands of Gothic cinema.

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In the Gothic tradition, madness has been there since the beginning. It’s already there in early works of both literature (Jane Eyre, 1847) and cinema (The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, 1920). By the early 1930s, it’s a staple of the Classic Universal Horror cycle, simultaneously responsible for, and a response to, the monstrosities at the heart of Frankenstein (1932) and The Invisible Man (1933). It’s there too in Dracula (1932), as it had been in Stoker’s novel (interestingly, in their streamlining of the text, Hammer chose to jettison Renfield, the Count’s crazy underling, who, as performed by Dwight Frye, remains one of the most effective elements of Universal’s adaption; prior to Hammer, the character had also featured memorably in Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922), as he would do again in both Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)).

If, in Dracula, Renfield’s already mad mind is corrupted further by his dealings with the vampire Count, elsewhere madness is shown as the result of more natural and human causes. For instance, in The Hands of Orlac (1924) and Gaslight (1940), nefarious criminals strive to drive others to madness for the sake of – what else? – financial gain. Gaslight, though, can also be seen as belonging to what some have termed ‘Female Gothic’, a strand descended from the likes of the Brontë sisters, which serves to explore the subjugation of women to patriarchal authority (especially within the home). Gaslight’s director, Thorold Dickinson, has spoken of how he wished to undermine Victorian values and attitudes to women within the film, and thus a second clear link with The Innocents is formed: where Hammer’s Dracula ultimately reasserts the importance of Victorian family values, in The Innocents these values lead only to death.

The Shining

Death too, of course, is the fate ultimately suffered by Jack Torrance in The Shining (1980), surely still the greatest on-screen Gothic exploration into the disintegration of a mind. As Torrance, Jack Nicholson gives the performance of his career, so extreme a gurning gargoyle of a madman that cinematic madness is left with no place to go (or, indeed, to hide).

Much like madness, the theme of desire also dates back to the founding texts of the Gothic canon (we’ve already seen how it’s present in Dracula, and The Turn of the Screw itself dates back to 1898). The fact that much early Gothic fiction was written for, and by, women perhaps helps explain the recurring themes of sexual desires kept at bay by male-dominated Victorian society (let’s not forget that the turning point for the suffragettes was not until 1912). However, it’s also true that there was a tendency in early Gothic work – especially that belonging to the ‘Male Gothic’ tradition – to feature the female characters in minor roles, or as part of an ensemble. In cinema, this (male) tradition is perhaps best represented by the notion of the Scream Queen – the screaming heroine who faints when confronted with the beast, as most famously exemplified by Fay Wray in King Kong (1933).

Leaf

King Kong, of course, was made by RKO – the studio which, with producer Val Lewton, would help move horror away from the monster movies of Universal, and towards a more psychological approach. Indeed, Lewton’s 1942 Cat People (directed by Jacques Tourneur) concerns a young bride who believes she is cursed to turn into a killer cat whenever she becomes sexually aroused. If the premise and the studio-saddled title make it all sound rather daft, the film in fact remains one of the most haunting and beautifully played explorations into repressed desire, and the effects of such repression upon the repressed, in cinema history – second only, perhaps, to The Innocents.  @ALEX BARRETT

AVAILABLE THROUGH EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA | AMAZON.CO.UK, TALKING PICTURES TV

Daphne (2017) | Home Ent release

Dir: Peter Mackie Burns | Writer; Nico Mensinga | Cast: Geraldine James, Emily Beecham, Nathaniel Martello-White, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor | Comedy Drama | 88′ | UK

DAPHNE is a fresh and believable comedy about a spiky young Londoner who seems at odds with everyone and everything in her life. Played with verve by Emily Beecham, who won ‘Best Actress in a British Film’ at Edinburgh 2017 for her feisty take on today’s young womanhood, Daphne is the impressive feature debut of Peter Mackie Burns (Come Closer) who has the maturity to give the film a tongue in cheek lightness of touch that makes it so watchable. Nico Mensinga’s sparky script is fraught with witty insights capturing the capital’s contemporary snarky vibe.

Part of Daphne’s problem is her fractious relationship with her worldly-wise mother – a wonderful Geraldine James. She is also loath to admit her interest in the opposite sex, and fearful of rejection, she makes each flirty encounter a battleground, a move that only encourages prospective boyfriends, particularly Tom Vaughan-Lawlor’s Joe whose declaration of undying love sends Daphne running for cover, with a nonchalant ‘whatever’. To make matters worse, her job as a part time chef is going nowhere, especially Daphne down-spirals into self-destruction. We’ve all been there in various guises and DAPHNE certainly rings true. It’s a perky comedy drama that champions the kind of ennui emblematic of youth – boredom laced with episodes of vulnerability; a goalless existence borne with snappy impatience. Helped along by a breezy score from Sam Beste, DAPHNE is all about that mid-point in our twenties or thirties – that limbo-like state before we realise our full potential and where it could lead. MT

OUT NOW ON DIGITAL DOWNLOAD | DVD FROM 22 JANUARY 2018 |

 

7 Restorations | Berlinale Classics 2018

BERLINALE CLASSICS 2018: SEVEN RESTORATIONS WILL CELEBRATE THEIR WORLD PREMIERES. The Berlinale Classics section of the 68th Berlin International Film Festival will present the world premieres of a total of seven films in digitally restored versions.

WINGS OF DESIRE | Der Himmel über Berlin by Wim Wenders

Wim Wenders’ prize-winning classic Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire, Federal Republic of Germany / France 1987) returns to the screen in a new, digitally restored 4K DCP version. Two guardian angels keep watch over Berlin, until one of them falls in love with a mortal woman. He chooses to become human, giving up his immortality, and an entirely new world is revealed to him. The film was shot on both black-and-white and colour stock. At the time, that required several additional steps in the lab in order to produce a final colour negative, which was several generations removed from the camera negatives. This version, restored by the Wim Wenders Foundation, is based on the original negatives;

MY 20th CENTURY | Az én XX. századom by Ildikó Enyedi

Az én XX. századom (My 20th Century, Hungary / Federal Republic of Germany 1989), the feature debut of the winner of the 2017 Golden Bear, Ildikó Enyedi, is a complex, poetic fairy tale, and an homage to silent movies. Shot in black-and-white, the film follows the very different live of identical twins in Old Europe at the dawn of the 20th century. Using the original camera negative and the magnetic sound track, the film was digitally restored in 4K by the Hungarian National Film Fund – Hungarian National Film Archive, working with Hungarian Filmlab. Cinematographer Tibor Máthé (HSC – Hungarian Society of Cinematographers) supervised the digital grading.

Fail Safe by Sidney Lumet

Sidney Lumet’s thriller Fail Safe (USA 1964) is an impressive critique of the Cold War military doctrine. When an errant U.S. bomber threatens to destroy Moscow, the president calls the Soviet premier on the red phone to try to prevent a retaliatory nuclear strike. The film was restored in 4K under the aegis of Sony Pictures Entertainment and its head of restoration, Grover Crisp. The incomplete camera negative was supplemented with the use of a duplicate negative. Conforming the various different source materials presented a special challenge to the restoration team.

THE CRANES ARE FLYING | Letjat schurawli by Michail KalatosoV

Letyat Zhuravli (The Cranes Are Flying, USSR 1957) by Mikhail Kalatozov was Soviet cinema’s first international hit after World War II. Made during the period of liberalisation that followed Joseph Stalin’s death, this unusual black-and-white film’s expressionist images tell the tragic story of two lovers after Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. The film brought international fame to Mikhail Kalatozov and his lead actress, Tatiana Samoilova. Letyat Zhuravli was restored by Mosfilm under the leadership of general director Karen Shakhnazarov. The ditigal 2K restoration, on the basis of the original negative, was supervised by the head of restoration Igor Bogdasarov.

LIFE ACCORDING TO AGFA | HaChayim Al-Pi Agfa by Assi Dayan

Director Assi Dayan was lauded by the International Jury of the Berlinale in 1993 for the courage and honesty of his HaChayim Al-Pi Agfa (Life According to Agfa, Israel 1992). The film revolves around a Tel Aviv bar, where a world of bohemians, business people, junkies, tourists, pimps, and soldiers all meet. The events of a single night, captured in black-and-white photos, are a microcosm of a society that considers itself liberal and tolerant, but in which seemingly trivial actions can become explosive. The 4K restoration was produced by the Jerusalem Cinematheque – Israel Film Archive, where the negative was scanned. It was supervised by cinematographer Yoav Kosh and supported by the Israel Film Fund.

TOKYO TWILIGHT | Tokyo Boshoku by Yasujiro Ozu

With Tokyo Boshoku (Tokyo Twilight, Japan 1957), Berlinale Classics will provide a rare opportunity to see a largely unknown and seldom shown work by Yasujiro Ozu. The theme of the end of a family living together is one that Japanese directing maestro Yasujiro Ozu often reworks, and here he has given it a dramatic twist. In wintery Tokyo, a family’s silence leads to its breakdown. Tokyo Boshoku, considered Ozu’s most sombre post-war film, was digitally restored in 4K on the basis of the 35mm duplicate negative provided by the Japanese production company Shochiku, managed by Shochiku MediaWorX Inc. Colour correction was led by Ozu’s former assistant cameraman Takashi Kawamata and cinematographer Masashi Chikamori.

THE ANCIENT LAW | Das alte Gesetz by E.A. Dupont

The Berlinale Classics section will open on February 16, 2018, at 5 pm in the Friedrichstadt-Palast with the premiere of the Deutsche Kinemathek’s digital restoration of the 1923 silent film classic Das alte Gesetz (The Ancient Law) directed by E.A. Dupont. ZDF/ARTE commissioned French composer Philippe Schoeller to create new music for this version, which will be presented by the Orchester Jakobsplatz München with Daniel Grossmann at the podium.

The full programme of the Berlinale Classics section:

Das alte Gesetz (The Ancient Law)
Dir: Ewald André Dupont, Germany, 1923
World premiere of the digitally restored version
in 2K DCP

Az én XX. századom (My 20th Century)
Dir: Ildikó Enyedi, Hungary / Federal Republic of Germany, 1989
Presented by Ildikó Enyedi and Tibor Máthé
World premiere of the digitally restored version
in 4K DCP

Fail Safe
Dir: Sidney Lumet, USA, 1964
World premiere of the digitally restored version
in 4K DCP

HaChayim Al-Pi Agfa (Life According To Agfa)
Dir: Assi Dayan, Israel, 1992
World premiere of the digitally restored version
in 4K DCP

Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire)
Dir: Wim Wenders, Germany / France, 1987
Presented by Wim Wenders
World premiere of the digitally restored version
in 4K DCP

Letyat Zhuravli (The Cranes are Flying)
Dir: Mikhail Kalatozov, USSR, 1957
World premiere of the digitally restored version
in 2K DCP

Tokyo Boshoku (Tokyo Twilight)
Dir: Yasujiro Ozu, Japan, 1957
Presented by Wim Wenders
World premiere of the digitally restored version
in 4K DCP

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL WILL RUN FROM 14 FEBRUARY – 24 FEBRUARY 2018 

Mirror | Tarkovsky Retrospective ICA London

MIRROR is a stream-of-consciousness, totally without any narrative. The narrator, on his deathbed, looks back on his life. The only structure is the time-setting: pre-war, war and post-war. Mirror is the best example of the director’s  “sculpting in time” approach to filmmaking: images and sound (in this case classical music) melt into a memory lane in which the time frames are interchangeable. Sometimes the film is labelled as metaphysical and it is hardly surprising that the USSR censors even tried to ban any export of the film, helping to make it into a legend.

CURRENTLY IN RETROSPECTIVE AT THE ICA LONDON JANUARY 2018

The King’s Choice (2017)

Dir: Erik Poppe | Writers: Harald Rosenlow-Eeg, Jan Trygve Royneland | Cast: Jesper Christensen, Anders Baasmo Christiansen, Karl Markovics | History Biopic | Norway | 133′

Royalty makes a stand against Hitler in this solidly-crafted and deeply humanist Oscar hopeful from Norwegian director Erik Poppe.

Norway’s popular King Haakon VII (a dignified Jesper Christensen) is brought to his knees, quite literally, during three dramatic days in 1940 when he is presented with an unimaginable ultimatum from Nazi Germany: surrender or die. The action revolves during a diplomatic crisis that sees Norway suddenly and unexpectedly plunged into hostilities, despite neutrality and previous good relations with its invaders. The German’s approach, via the Fjords, is announced during Radio reports and telephone exchanges that telegraph Norway’s entrance into the Second World War.

Poppe’s film works both as an intimate portrait of a loving family man, who hailed originally from Denmark, and a rousing and visually stunning WWII epic illuminating a little known episode of Norwegian history. We get a glimpse of the ageing king from all aspects – he would go on to live for another 17 years despite declining health – playing with his grandchildren; dealing with matters of state and even engaging with a young soldier (Private Seeberg/Arthur Hakalahti) on the enemy battle lines. The tension quietly mounts as the Royal family are forced to separate. Haakon and his son, Crown Prince Olav are taken under cover of darkness to refuge, where the king makes his solitary final decision in a coruscating showdown with Karl Markovics’s bristling German envoy. THE KING’S CHOICE is a captivating cinematic adventure, despite its lengthy running time, largely due to impressive handheld camerawork, magnificent snowbound set pieces and the rousing human story at its core. MT

OUT ON DVD FROM 15 JANUARY COURTESY OF THUNDERBIRD RELEASING.

Lover for a Day (2017) ***

Dir: Philippe Garrel | Cast: Eric Caravaca, Esther Garrel | 77min | Drama | French

Philippe Garrel is back With another family affair that brings to a close his trilogy that started with Jealousy. This grainy black and white Parisian story is as sweet and light as a mini croissant and just as innocuous, showing slim insight into the mind of a woman despite a collaboration of four writers, including the veteran Garrel himself. If you enjoy his work it’s watchable enough, but rather too slight and generic to have general appeal. Daughter Jeanne (his own daughter Esther) finds herself at home again with Papa (Caravaca), as her first love affair ends abruptly. But family life is interupted by her father’s young lover Ariane (Chevillotte) who is a philandering part-time porn model. The intimate domestic trio discuss love, fidelity and friendship but not to any degree of satisfaction or insight, and Arianne frequently becomes jealous when father and daughter spend the evening together. There is a candid intimacy to the dialogue but it all feels rather trite. Esther is a natural, as is Caravaca, but Chevillotte’s Arianne struggles to feel authentic and her story is largely hollow and implausible. Even with a running time of 77 minutes LOVER fails to be involving often feeling like an amateur college piece; well-crafted but rather will of the wisp. MT

ON RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSES COURTESY OF MUBI | 19 JANUARY 2018

A Woman’s Life | Une Vie (2017)

Dir: Stephane Brize | Drama | France | 114min

Hot on the heals of his 21st century social drama, The Measure of a Man, that won the Cannes Best Actor Award in 2015, the adaptation of Guy de Maupassant’s first novel, is a painterly domestic tragedy set in 18th century Normandy that tackles similar social issues occuring 300 hundred years beforehand.

Intimate in scale (shot on Academy Ratio) and delicately appealing, A WOMAN’S LIFE follows Chemla’s bon chic bon genre heroine Jeanne from her teenage years until her mid forties, echoing the the kind of tortured tragedy familiar in all Maupassant’s work – in some ways he’s the French equivalent of Thomas Hardy in that his stories are firmly rooted in the landscape with a palpable feel for Gallic traditions. We first meet the heroine Jeanne (Judith Chemla) planting lettuces in the pottager of the Chateau she shares with her Baron father (Jean Pierre Darroussin) and Baroness mother (Yolande Moreau).

Brizé’s choice of the Academy ratio – used in silent film – embodies the closeted almost claustrophobic nature of Jeanne’s domestic environment full of love and laughter until she is introduced to her future husband, a flawed and improvished nobleman, Viscount Julien de Lamare (Swann Arland). Her life will never be the same again.

Working with his regular writer Florence Vignon, Brizé condenses the novel into an engrossing drama (just short of two hours) that quails away from the habitual mannered approach of classic period dramas to create a naturalistic and impressionist portrait that retains considerable dramatic heft, thanks to Anne Klotz’ suberb editing, while also being sensitive and delicately rendered in Antoine Heberle’s exquisite visuals that flip from vibrant summer days to the wretched, rain-soaked wintery ones that hint at doom and disaster from the beginning.

The film unravels in a succession of suggestive short scenes that sketch out episodes in the narrative leaving us to fill in the gaps with our own imagination and leave time for Jeanne to contemplate and process her thoughts and feelings. Married life with Julien is no bed of roses : when Jeanne finds her maid Rosalie’s bedroom empty in the night, a brief but melodramtic scene in the garden follows implying that Julien and Rosalie are up to no good. It soon emerges that Julien’s poor family traits are inbred.

True to the page, Brize reworks Maupassant’s mistrust of religion and the church in general: The consequences of Jeanne’s reliance on the family pastor (Francois-Xavier Ledoux) for moral guidance over her husband’s behaviour lead to more heartake involving her seemingly close friend and neighbour Georges de Fourville (Alain Beigel), whose wife, Gilberte (Clotilde Hesme) flirts with the cheating Julien.

The Baron, a strong but largely silent performance from Jean-Pierre Darroussin, is extremely vocal when it comes to his grandson (played by Finnegan Oldfield as a late teenager and beyond) who appears to have inherited his father’s profligacy and lack of integrity, but Jeanne turns a blind eye to these traits, investing her love in him and channeling all her hope for the future in his empty promises.

Judith Chemla (Camille Rewinds) gives a calm but resonating performance as Jeanne generating considerable empathy as she slowly absorbs years of sadness, loss and emotional turmoil to her considerable detriment as she reaches middle age. One again Stephane Brizé has made a powerful and immersive character drama, impeccably crafted and enormously moving. MT

NOW ON RELEASE FROM 12 JANUARY 2018

 

 

The Banishment | Izgnanie (2007) | bluray release

Dir: Andrey Zvyagintsev | Cast: Marie Bonnevie, Konstantin Lavronenko, Alexander Baluev | Russia | Drama | 118′ 

After critical acclaim with THE RETURN, Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s second feature kicks off with a gritty opening sequence that gives the early impression of an edgy and sinuous thriller with a potential for brutal violence. Not so. What we actually get is an unsettling social drama based loosely on a story by William Saroyan entitled The Laughing Matter.

Set in an indiscriminate time and place (could be the seventies, certainly Northerly, could be somewhere in Russia, it is actually Moldova) it has a ‘retro’ feel although we never get the answers to these questions. But this enigmatic quality and an ominous soundtrack adds to the suspence of this unusual film. The story centres on Vera, a timid and insecure mother (played by the Norwegian born actress Marie Bonnevie) and her relationship with Alexander and his brother Mark. It follows on from the tragic events of one summer when they take their two children to the country dacha for a family holiday, and certainly to lay low, although we never find out why. The general mood is one of tension and impending doom that soon descends into bewilderment as the sprawling story unfolds. Overlong and at times confusing, this is certainly not the masterpiece it led us to believe it would in the opening sequence, it is nevertheless a film that begs to be noticed for its cinematic impact and well-crafted performances. Meredith Taylor ©

OUT ON BLURAY |16 APRIL 2018 | ANDREY ZVYAGINTSEV

All the Money in the World (2017) ****

Dir: Ridley Scott | David Scarpa | Cast: Christopher Plummer, Michelle Williams, Mark Wahlberg, Romain Duris, Timothy Hutton, Charley Shotwell, Andrew Buchan | US | Biopic Drama | 132′

“There’s a purity to things, that I’ve never found in a human being” says the billionaire oil magnate John Paul Getty as he drools over his art treasures in Ridley Scott’s rip-roaring rollercoaster of a thriller that deftly explores the psychology behind the super rich. Yes, they are “different from us, they have more money” and they don’t want to part with a penny. Or so we discover in this lush biopic crime drama that takes us through the events surround the scandal. Apart from mistrust, this cinematic parable also explores the nature of power and of fear – a fear of letting amassed wealth drain away to the next generation.

Getty senior famously refused to pay the ransom demand for the release of his favourite grandson – then only 16. The film opens on a sultry summer evening in Rome (1973), where John Paul Getty III is bundled into a van by Calabrian gangsters. The tough old tycoon suspects the boy of colluding with his mother in the scheme, but also resents the power struggle and wants to avoid setting a precedent for kidnappings everywhere.

Gorgeous to look at – like flipping through a Seventies copy of Vogue or Tatler – this is an intoxicatingly visual romp through events. It also pictures the life of the glitterati at play and under pressure in their plush playgrounds. Richly adapted by David Scarpa from John Pearson’a paperback Painfully Rich: The Outrageous Fortune and Misfortunes of the Heirs of J Paul Getty. The story still has resonance for many who remember the spate of Red Brigade kidnappings (1973 – 1978), when kids of rich Italian industrialists – and often their entire families – were forced into exile in Switzerland.

Extraordinary also that Christopher Plummer was a last minute shoe-in for the disgraced Kevin Spacey: he slips into his role with the consummate ease of a python slivering over a plump leather setttee. Glinting and salivating over his precious art collection – as his oil empire ratchets up another million – he fondles the telex tape as if it were made of satin. There’s a touch of poetic licence to the drugged-up way Getty Senior’s son John (Andrew Buchan) is portrayed – in one scene he is wheel-chaired and comatose, but this gives more importance to Michelle Williams’s role as the smoothly delightful Abigail, his petite but deadly plucky wife and mother of kidnapped Paul (Charlie Plummer in another thoughtful turn). Mark Wahlberg plays his standard role as Chase, Getty’s CIA-trained negotiator and bodyguard. There is also a vignette for Olivia Magnani the silky brunette from Paolo Sorrentino’s sophomore feature The Consequences of Love (2004), she plays the wife of arch mobster Mammoliti (Marco Leonardi). The only slightly bum note is the over-sensationalised Italian kidnap sequences where Roman Duris does his best a good guy/gangster Cinquanta with a French accent and the swagger of League of Gentleman’s ‘Pop’. But that’s a small criticism of this lush and supremely enjoyable way to start 2018 filmwise, smug in the knowledge that money isn’t everything – but it helps MT

OUT ON RELEASE FROM 5 JANAUARY 2018

Rey (2017) ****

Dir: Niles Atallah | Biopic Drama | Chile/France | 91′

California-born, Chile-based Niles Atallah’s King (Rey) is a surreal imagined drama with roots in the largely forgotten history of Patagonia and based on the life of the French country lawyer Orélie-Antoine de Tounens (1825-1878), who travelled in 1860 to a remote part of southern Chile, where Mapuche Indians were in fierce battle for survival with Chilean military forces keen on expansion. Mapuche folklore told them to expect a white visitor who would help them  to unite their native Indian population in the region into the new Kingdom of Araucania and Patagonia, and so agreed to make him the hereditary monarch of this realm that is typically accepted as part of Chile and Argentina. The story of how far he got in realising his dreams is shrouded in mystery, but Atallah is not so much interested in facts, but in the mindset of the man who wanted to be King.

Told in five chapters and an epilogue, we first meet de Tounens (Lisboa) riding on horseback through the Patagonian wilderness, holding in his hand a self-made flag: the self-declared King is on the way to meet Mapuche chief Manil, to discuss the foundation of the kingdom. But Manil has died, and his son Quilipan, is not willing to meet Tounens, because he is a white man (winka) and the Gods would be angry if he stayed. Tounens is accompanied by the scout Rosales (Riveros), who soon betrays him to the Chilean authorities. Imprisoned, Tounens is put on trail; in the courtroom, everyone is wearing a mask. Tounens is accused of plotting the overthrow of the Chilean government with the help of France, supported by his fellow countrymen Lachaise and Desfontaines, who are “ministers’ in his cabinet. Threatened with the death penalty, Tounens is finally deported to France.

Atallah asks the question: why would a rather ordinary man from the Dordogne want to become the monarch of a wild region of South America? During his research, Atallah discovered how Tounens had promised the government in Paris a new colony, called “New France”, three times the size of the motherland, and full of mineral wealth. Yet to the director this is only part of the story, because nobody recorded the tale from the Mapuche’s perspective. Even today, along with the other indigenous inhabitants, the Mapuche don’t feel like being part of Chile or Argentina; they are discriminated against, and live in fear of the authorities.

Atallah has created the fictional aspect of history re-told in his own way: in 2011 he buried the film stock of 35mm, 16 mm and Super Eight in his garden, to see for himself what history does to film. Furthermore, he used stop-motion and puppetry in the deliriously feverish passages of his feature; on top, images are scratched and disfigured to give the feature the historic quality he was aiming for. Somehow reminiscent of the work of Guy Maddin, along with Eraserhead, Aguirre and Zama, Rey is inventively creative: a nightmare vision of history with a protagonist who created his own apocalypse. AS

PRINCE ANTOINE IV, the latest heir and pretender to the throne of Araucania and Patagonia died on December 16, 2017 aged 75. 

ON RELEASE AT ARTHOUSE CINEMAS FROM 5 JANUARY 2017

 

Tempestad (2016)***

Wri-Dir: Tatiana Huezo | DoP: Ernesto Pardo | Doc| Mexico | 105′

Tatiana Huezo’s structurally-flawed second feature explores the timely phenomenon of human trafficking and migration through the interweaving stories of two women in Mexico.

While one shares an emotionally subdued story of her conflicted life as circus clown and mother. The other tells of her relief to escape the trauma of a prison sentence for human trafficking that then led to her being locked her away so the government could be seen to controlling the country’s migration issue and keeping it out of the headlines. But although each woman’s story is powerfully emotive in its own right, the individual impact is strangely lost in Heuzo’s decision to disconnect the spoken narrative from the valuable images accompanying them, so limiting the ultimate clout of the revealing experiences central to this female road movie.

TEMPESTAD is a lyrical and often dreamlike socio-political study that speaks from the heart but feels strangely alienating to watch despite its human interest credentials. The visually arresting prize-winning footage of a rain-soaked bus journey through lush landscapes of the massive country bears little relation to Miriam’s voiceover which deals her harrowing time in the confines of a baking-hot male-dominated prison. We hear how she subsequently became one of Mexico’s “pagadores” in a corrupt system where her family was forced to pay for her upkeep in a non-government institution, in order to keep her story from surfacing. Clearly Miriam was unable or unwilling to appear on camera so her words play out on an audio-track over the footage featuring unknown people making their way on a similar journey across Mexico from Matamoros (on the Texan border) to Tulum, over a thousand miles away.

To make things even more confusing, Miriam’s story actually begins in the aftermath to her release from jail and then works backwards to explain how she got there. Then, half an hour into the film, we meet the middle-aged circus clown Adela going about her days combining work and looking after her children. There is no connection between the two women at this stage, but Huezo continues to cut between the two stories without revealing Adela’s involvement in the film, so further weakening the heft of her premise. This all becomes clear in the final denouement. Despite these serious structural errors, Ernesto Pardo’s stunning camerawork is to be applauded in this worthwhile portrait of human suffering that raises the profile of Mexico’s murky past. MT

ON RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS FRO, 5 JANUARY 2018

 

 

Women on Top | 2017

Hollywood may still be struggling with female representation as 2018 gets underway, but Europe has seen tremendous successes in the world of indie film where talented women of all ages are winning accolades in every sphere of the film industry, bringing their unique vision and intuition to a party that has continued to rock throughout the past year. Admittedly, there have been some really fabulous female roles recently – probably more so than for male actors. But on the other side of the camera, women have also created some thumping dramas; robust documentaries and bracingly refreshing genre outings: Lucrecia Martel’s mesmerising Argentinian historical fantasy ZAMA (LFF/left) and Julia Ducournau’s Belgo-French horror drama RAW (below/right) have been amongst the most outstanding features in recent memory. All these films provide great insight into the challenges women continue to face, both personally and in society as a whole, and do so without resorting to worthiness or sentimentality. So as we go forward into another year, here’s a flavour of what’s been happening in 2017.

It all started at SUNDANCE in January where documentarian Pascale Lamche’s engrossing film about Winnie Mandela, WINNIE, won Best World Doc and Maggie Betts was awarded a directing prize for her debut feature NOVITIATE, about a nun struggling to take and keep her vows in 1960s Rome. Eliza Hitman also bagged the coveted directing award for her gay-themed indie drama BEACH RATS, that looks at addiction from a young boy’s perspective.

Meanwhile, back in Europe, BERLIN‘s Golden Bear went to Hungarian filmmaker Ildiko Enyedi (right) for her thoughtful and inventive exploration of adult loneliness and alienation BODY AND SOUL. Agnieska Holland won a Silver Bear for her green eco feature SPOOR, and Catalan newcomer Carla Simón went home with a prize for her feature debut SUMMER 1993 tackling the more surprising aspects of life for an orphaned child who goes to live with her cousins. CANNES 2017, the festival’s 70th celebration, also proved to be another strong year for female talent. Claire Simon’s first comedy – looking at love in later life – LET THE SUNSHINE IN was well-received and provided a playful role for Juliette Binoche, which she performed with gusto. Agnès Varda’s entertaining travel piece FACES PLACES took us all round France and finally showed Jean-Luc Godard’s true colours, winning awards at TIFF and Cannes. Newcomers were awarded in the shape of Léa Mysius whose AVA won the SACD prize for its tender exploration of oncoming blindness, and Léonor Séraille whose touching drama about the after-effects of romantic abandonment MONTPARNASSE RENDEZVOUS won the Caméra D’Or.

On the blockbuster front, it’s worth mentioning that Patty Jenkins’ critically acclaimed WONDERWOMAN has so far enjoyed an international box office of around $821.74 million, giving Gal Godot’s Amazon warrior-princess the crown as the highest-grossing superheroine origin film of all time.

The Doyenne of French contemporary cinema Isabelle Huppert won Best Actress in LOCARNO 2017 for her performance as a woman who morphs from a meek soul to a force to be reckoned with when she is struck by lightening, in Serge Bozon’s dark comedy MADAME HYDE. Huppert has been winning accolades since the 1970s but she still has to challenge Hollywood’s Ann Doran (1911-2000) on film credits (374) – but there is plenty of time!). Meanwhile, Nastassja Kinski was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Honour for her extensive and eclectic contribution to World cinema (Paris,Texas, Inland Empire, Cat People and Tess to name a few).

With a Jury headed by Annette Bening, VENICE again showed women in a strong light. Away from the Hollywood-fraught main competition, this year’s Orizzonti Award was awarded to Susanna Nicchiarelli’s NICO, 1988, a stunning biopic of the final years of the renowned model and musician Christa Pfaffen, played by a feisty Trine Dyrholm. And Sara Forestier’s Venice Days winning debut M showed how a stuttering girl and her illiterate boyfriend help each other overcome adversity. Charlotte Rampling won the prize for Best Actress for her portrait of strength in the face of her husbands’ imprisonment in Andrea Pallaoro’s HANNAH. 

At last but not least, Hong Kong director Vivianne Qu (left/LFF) was awarded the Fei Mei prize at PINGYAO’s inaugural CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON film festival and the Film Festival of India’s Silver Peacock  for her delicately charming feature ANGELS WEAR WHITE that deftly raises the harrowing plight of women facing sexual abuse in the mainland. It seems that this is a hot potato the superpowers of China and US still have in common. But on a positive note, LADYBIRD Greta Gerwig’s first film as a writer and director, has been sweeping the boards critically all over the US and is the buzzworthy comedy drama of 2018 (coming in February). So that’s something else to look forward to. MT

CATE BLANCHETT WILL HEAD THE JURY AT 71st CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | 8-19 MAY 2018

 

 

 

 

Glory (2017)

Dir.: Kristina Grozeva, Petar Valchanov; Cast: Margita Gosheva, Stefan Denolyubov, Kitodar Todorov, Milko Lazarov, Ivan Savov); Bulgaria/Greece 2016, 101’

GLORY is a spare and rampantly funny satire on contemporary Bulgarian life – crowned with dynamite double twist denouement worthy of Frank Capra.

Groseva and Valchanov reunite with the cast and crew of their standout debut The Lesson. This time Margita Gosheva, is Head of PR Julia Staikova, for the Minister of Transport Kanchev, who has been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. When honest railwayman Tzanko Petrov (Denolyubov) finds a Million Lev in a bag on a deserted railways line and hands the money in, Staikova is all poised for a PR stunt: Petrov will be awarded a medal by the grateful Minister Kanchev (Savov); the whole ceremony captured on TV. But Petrov desperately needs a makeover and Julia’s team sets to work on his stutter. Then Petrov reveals that his fellow workers steal diesel fuel to top up their meagre salaries -, and is prepared to name names. But Kanchev’s lack of diplomacy lets the side down and, to make matters worse, Julia re-styles Petrov with a cheap digital watch, replacing his family heirloom – a Russian ‘Slava’ – which then goes missing. The timepiece is of great sentimental value to Petrov – a metaphor for the traditional Bulgaria – and he won’t be fobbed off with a replacement – that seems to embody all that’s glib about the new. Sadly Julia’s PR stunt goes from bad to worse when a local reporter takes up Petrov’s case. The PR woman emerges a self-seeking, control freak and Gosheva plays her with ruthless inflexibility – giving no quarter to her husband, or gruelling IVF injection schedule. Petrov, on the other hand, hails from a long-gone Bulgaria where Communism and a rural existence are now out of fashion. He’s not after money (just the 85 Lev he had picked up before finding the money bag), but his watch, with an engraving from his father – his only tangible link to the past. Well- paced and punchy, Glory culminates in a well-staged off-camera finale that perfectly caps everything that has gone before in this impressive feature. DoP Krum Rodriquez avoids total realism, always finding new ways to conjure up the cataclysmic difference between the worlds Julia and Petrov inhabit. Finally, the end is a brilliant exercise in off-camera violence, closing this impressive feature. Groseva and Valchanov pull the whole thing off with consummate skill: Who says, that the second film is always the most difficult?

GLORY IS NOW ON RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE VENUES | LOCARNO 2017 REVIEW.

 

Three Brothers | Tre Fratelli (1981) | Bluray release

Dir: Francesco Rosi | Drama | Italy | 113′

Films centred round the death of a parent can be an effective, if dramatically obvious, springboard for an exploration of family feeling. Grief, regret and resentment could potentially explode. Nothing of any melodramatic flavour occurs in Francesco Rosi’s Three Brothers. Here the mother’s funeral takes place near the end of the film, acting as an epilogue to its principal story of the coming together of the brothers.

Raffaele (Philippe Noiret) is a judge, living in Rome, presiding over a terrorist case for which he risks assassination. Nicola (Michele Placido) is a militant factory worker in Turin, whose marriage has failed. Rocco (Vittorio Mezzogiorno) works as a teacher in a correctional institute for boys based in Naples. The North and the South. And three brothers of different generations – aged in their fifties, forties and thirties – leaving the city to return to their countryside birthplace in the region of Puglia.

Early on we quickly realise that Rosi is schematically setting up the story to portray a divided nation under the shadow of the political events at the beginning of the 1980s. That Three Brothers represents a microcosm of Italian society and one of several planes in which Rosi explores culture and character, proving to be a rich seam for a critical humanist enquiry. His threads are angry terrorist threats and actions, industrial action leading to violence, religion presenting a false utopia and marital breakdown and stress. The chaotic tension for the brothers being aligned too, yet not placated, by the old father’s reflections (a magisterial performance from Charles Vanel) and Nicola’s young daughter’s innocence. All the characters live in their separate worlds. Yet Rosi wants them to connect not only through love but with a greater awareness of the problems and contradictions of a disturbed society.

Rosi fully admits to his didactic tone as follows:“Most people in Italy live in despondency and confusion, and in dealing with current situations one must do so with clarity, and risk seeming schoolmasterish.” This approach works well in the café sequence where Raffaele is questioned by the local villagers, watching the TV news about a terrorist incident, over what should be done. The spontaneous and concerned debate is brilliantly executed. It doesn’t work so well in Rocco’s dream sequence where he leads his boys to burn the objects of their poverty and create a false utopia (Deliberatively naïve though the scene may be it’s still artistically mismanaged.)

Rossi’s previous films Salvatore Giuliano (1963) or The Mattei Affair (1973) are overtly more political and angry works. Three Brothers is measured and lyrical. There are fantasy expressions of violence (A chilling assassination of the magistrate on a bus) but it is Rosi’s attempt to reconcile differences, examine conscience and mediate on death that gives Three Brothers its power. Critic Pauline Kael described it as“A wonderful film that moves on waves of feeling”. For once I agree with Kael. The quiet emotional resonance is realised by superb performances all round, the luminous photography of Pasqualino de Santis and the integrity of Rosi’s direction.

If not quite a masterpiece (Rocco remains an unexplored character – his answers to problems is flawed by an under-written script and the director’s occasional lurch into clumsy symbolism) the film contains so many unforgettably poetic moments. The framing of the three brothers, grieving for their mother, just before dawn in the house and courtyard, is a scene played out by as if they were a trio performing elegiac chamber music This almost forgotten film was nominated for an Academy Award. And has never before been available in a video format in the UK. It’s one of Rosi’s finest films. Alan Price©2017 ****

NOW AVAILABLE COURTESY OF ARROW FILMS & VIDEO

Napoléon (1927)

Dir|Writer|Prod: Abel Gance | Music: Carl Davis, Carmine Coppola, Arthur Honegger | Silent | 330min

One of the highlights of silent film is the digitally restored version of Abel Gance’s cinematic triumph NAPOLÉON. This magnificent film is enhanced by Carl Davis’ rousing score and technical touches to reveal the original tinting that make it feel edgy and contemporary enough for modern audiences as it approaches it centenary.

It portrays the early life of the legendary French soldier who was go on to make his mark in world for centuries to come. In opening scenes Napoleon Bonaparte is seen playing with his school friends in the snow, already asserting his powers of leadership in an impressive performance by Vladimir Roudenko. Albert Dieudonnéthen plays the adult Napoleon as he forges ahead with a successful military campaign in Italy. Running at over 5.5 hours, this is an absorbing and thrilling experience blending melodrama with moving musical interludes and combining intimate domestic scenes with full scale widescreen historical recreations that offer insight into the French Revolution and Italian campaigns of 1796. MT

Digitally restored by Photoplay Productions and the BFI National Archive, with a newly-recorded score, composed and conducted by Carl Davis, Napoleon (1927) comes to UK cinemas, DVD/Blu-ray and BFI Player | Back this December 2017 

Bingo: King of the Mornings (2017)

Dir.: Daniel Rezende; Cast: Vladimir Brichta, Leandra Leal, Tania Muller, Caua Martins, Ana Lucia Torres; Brazil 2017, 113′.

First time director Daniel Rezende, well known for his editing on features like City of God, offers up a vivid, almost lurid, but essentially empty biopic of actor turned children’s entertainer Arlindo Barreto, known here as Augusto Mendes. Very much in the style of a Tele novela, BINGO (aka Bozo) is larger than life, almost a caricature of his own caricature. In early 1980s Buenos Aires, we first Augusto Mendes (Brichta) getting by as an actor in soft-porn movies and bit-player in Tele novelas. But he craves fame, in order to impress his mother Marta (Torres) and much neglected son Gabriel (Martins). Somehow he lands the role of the clown Bingo in a morning-show for children’s television. Against the will of director Lucia (Leal), a born again evangelical Christian, he spices up his part and becomes an over-night sensation. But drugs and alcohol take their toll, and he gets the sack after nearly losing his life in a drunken debacle . But every cloud has a silver lining, particularly where Bingo is concerned. This Brazilian crowd-pleasing Oscar hopeful (it didn’t make the final list) uses every cliché in the book to put its message across. Certainly BINGO has its merits as a pure spectacle – Lula Carvalho’s eye-catching visuals are ferociously lively and colourful, but Rezende’s simplistic approach to the narrative makes Mendes’ conversion to religious zealot rather unconvincing: underlining the trusted caveat: Beware of features claiming to be “based on a true story”. AS

NOW ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM 15 DECEMBER

 

 

 

 

Mountains May Depart (2015)

Writer| Director: Jia Zhang-ke | Cast: Tao Zhao, Yi Zhang, Zijian Dong, Jing Dong Liang | 131′   Drama  China

“Time will transform mountains and rivers, but our hearts will remain the same “

Jia Zhang-ke’s MOUNTAINS MAY DEPART is an beguiling and ambitious piece of filmmaking from a Chinese director whose previous dramas A Touch of Sin and Still Life have inventively captured the changing face of modern China.

Opening as a feisty arthouse love story in the director’s hometown of Fenyang, in the mining province of Shanxi, south of Beijing, the film gradually morphs into a creatively expansive essay film on the future of a wealthy Chinese family and the challenges it faces in adapting to life in a globalised society of Australia. The narrative unfolds in three parts that take place in 1999, 2014 and finally 2025.

The central character Tao is celebrating the dawn of a new century to the rhythms of an old one, in the ancient streets of Fenyang. China has embraced Western capitalism and fast-forwarded itself into a rapid expansion which will see its economy eventually crash and burn within two decades. The new Gods are technological rather than spiritual: cars, machines and mobile phones: and the alienating power of communicating without interacting is strengthening its soul-destroying grip on society.

The director’s wife and longtime collaborator Zhao Tao (Still Life) plays Tao, a simple carefree country girl, in love with Liang (Liang Jingdong) a coal-miner, but is soon tempted into arms of nouveau rich entrepreneur Jingsheng (Zhang Yi), who takes over the mine where Liang is working and steals his girlfriend in the process. In true ‘Posh and Becks’ style, they name their firstborn “Dollar” in celebration of their wealth in this upwardly mobile lifestyle (Yuan Renminbi would have turned out to be a better name, in hindsight). Eventually the threesome cross paths again in the second act in 2014 where Tao is visibly transformed into a sad and introspective woman who realises the error in her ways, and is reduced to a state of deep depression following her father’s death. Dollar eventually comes full circle into the present day state of economic meltdown as his life spins sadly out of control, alienated from family and country, and working as a Deliveroo-style courier.

Nelson Lik-wai Yu’s visuals illuminate and enliven this powerfully intelligent and prescient indie which, despite an ill-judged English language third act, and a slightly clunky opening, resonates with a superb central performance from Zhao Tao.   MT

NOW ON RELEASE AT ARTHOUSE CINEMAS NATIONWIDE | 15 December 2017

What Will People Say (2017) | Dubai Film Festival 2017

Dir|Writer: Iram Haq | Cast: Adil Hussain, Maria Mozhdah, Ekavali Khanna, Rohit Saraf  | Norwegian/Urdu | 106′ | Drama

 Actor/director Iram Haq’s impressive sophomore title WHAT WILL PEOPLE SAY plays out as a grippingly atmospheric thriller in which a beautiful young Pakistani girl plays the enigmatic and wilful heroine. Screening as a world premiere at this year’s Toronto, it offers refreshing and intriguing take on what could otherwise have been just another story about cross cultural conflict and tragedy or even wander down a fashionable politically correct route.

 Nisha (Maria Mozhdah) is leading a double life — at home she is obedient to her traditional Pakistani father – played masterfully here by Adil Hussain (Lunchbox) – but to her friends she is a typical Norwegian teenager, hanging out in bars, dating and spending her time on her phone. But her father catches her flirting with a boyfriend upstairs in the family home one day and brings her world crashing down in a fit of anger, brutally disassociating himself from her behaviour, and taking her off to his family in Pakistan (the locations are actually India).

 Haq makes great use of an atmospheric soundtrack to telegraph doom and despair in this often sinister story which makes great use of its snowbound and exotic locations. India looks stunning in Nadim Carlsen’s beautifully composed shots captured both on the widescreen and in intimate jewel-like settings. Apart from the strong central cast, Haq uses periphery characters to warn of danger, tempt and tease a girl who rapidly has to adapt from her Western lifestyle to the world of a closeted and protected unmarried woman in a highly restrictive Muslim-dominated society.

 Sadly, Nisha is rather underwritten as a character – whether by intent in respect of cultural traditions or by omission – it’s never quite sure, but strangely this works to the film’s advantage and Haq makes her character come alive a way that feels both authentic and beguiling. Yer we feel for Hussain’s father figure who internally struggles with his duty as a traditional father requiring him to impose draconian measures on his daughter while he still clearly loves her – it’s a tough role but Hussain pulls it off with dignity, strangely evoking our respect and sympathy in this shocking and convincing arthouse parable that lifts the lid on a society that still adheres blindly to its traditions. MT

DUBAI FILM FESTIVAL | 6-13 DECEMBER 2017
https://youtu.be/b8_dBOzufWQ

The Man Who Invented Christmas (2017)

Dir: Bharat Nalluri | US-Ire-Can | Cast: Dan Stevens, Christopher Plummer, Jonathan Pryce, Morfydd Clark | Drama | 104′

The Man Who Invented Christmas is a brave attempt to explore the creative process that inspired Charles Dickens’ to pen A Christmas Carol, offering a behind the scenes look at one of England’s best known and most celebrated writers.

Enlivened by a sterling British cast led by a plausible and personable Dan Stevens as Dickens, Jonathan Pryce as his profligate father and Christopher Plummer as the curmudgeonly Scrooge, this is an atmospheric Christmas story that glows with quaint charm but is completely underwhelming as a dramatic narrative, laden down by wooden clichés that reduce the enduring appeal of the writer and his legendary novella.

In 1843 Dickens has suffered a set-back in his writing career and is casting around for creative ideas to finance his growing family and spendthrift father. In his darkest hour, tormented by his pregnant wife (Clark), beset by childhood fears and cherishing hopes for the future, he is visited by the prickly central character of his budding storyline about a mean old man who is disarmed and reborn by the true spirit of Christmas. Scrooge appears to him in supernatural form – as an embodiment of his past trauma – needling and nudging him into writing his novel, while the wolf is howling at the door.

Based on Les Standiford’s book of the same title, director Bharat Nalluri (Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day) does his very best to add another another glowing bauble to the cosy Dickensian Christmas cinema tree with this imagined drama that looks as spectacular as a glass decoration but feels just as hollow. Somehow, the more the film tries to portray Charles Dickens’ human fears and doubts and the methods behind his talent, the less authentic the author actually appears.Creative genius is an intangible and mysterious quality, and should remain just that. MT

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 1ST DECEMBER 2017

Suburbicon (2017)

Dir: George Clooney | Co-writers: Cast: Julianne Moore, Matt Damon, Oscar Isaac, Noah Jupe | Drama | US | 105′

Matt Damon and Julianne Moore star in this seductive but flawed satire that touches on social greed, marital dissatisfaction and insurance fraud. Directed by Clooney from a script by Joel and Ethan Coen, Suburbicon parades as a pastel and pristine 1950s family drama, but behind the scenes matters are going seriously awry in the moral compass of its squeaky clean citizens.

Gardner Lodge (Damon) is a family man who is clearly dissatisfied with his seemingly peaceful existence due to his desire for Margaret (Moore), his crippled wife’s live-in sister. Gardner and Margaret form a covert plan to stage a home invasion, collect the insurance money, and clear the decks of his wife (also played by Moore) and run away to Aruba. But the idea flounders due to the interference of Oscar Isaac’s shrewd loss adjuster – echoing TV detective  Columbo – and Gardner’s appealingly astute son (Noah Jupe).

This 1950s pastiche plays out in the style of a Noirish version of Mad Men that reveals a tawdry face racial hatred and marital disquiet behind the manicured gardens of this plastic paradise. Performances are pitch-perfect as the tale’s tone claws at the edges of unsettling paranoia. SUBURBICON is ultimately a suspenseful and highly entertaining film that throws its toys out of the pram in a misjudged melodramtic meltdown  in the final scenes.

George Clooney was born in Lexington, Kentucky. He is an Academy Award–winning actor, producer, writer, and director. His filmmaking credits include Good Night, and Good Luck (05), and the Festival selection The Ides of March (11). Suburbicon(17) is his latest film. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2017 REVIEW

Most Beautiful Island (2017) ***

Dir. Ana Asensio | Spain/US. 2017 | 80′ | Thriller

Many aspects of this true life tale of an ‘illegal alien’ Spanish grifting to survive in New York could come across as a little far-fetched, but its creeping paranoia also perfectly captures the climate of our increasingly unpredictable modern world. Based on the experiences of the film’s writer, director and star, it went on to win the grand jury prize at 2017’s South by Southwest.

MOST BEAUTIFUL ISLAND is best described as an urban thriller. Asensio’s Luciana is a desperate young woman who finds herself inveigled into situations she might have questioned and not counternanced in her native country, which she has fled in tragic circumstances. The pared down approach of dialogue and aesthetic adds to the film’s menacing allure where a brooding tension builds slowly towards the stark finale. From the early scenes there is a palpable feeling of dread when a confused Luciana is confronted by a hostile doctor who she consults about her feelings of nausea. We all know about the draconian rules surrounded the provision of health care in the US and this only adds to the sense of alienation. Surviving through a series of menial jobs – dressed as a chicken to promote a restaurant, and as a nanny to spoilt brats – Luciana cannot even rely on her self-seeking colleague, Olga, support or sympathy. And when Olga comes up with an offer Luciana cannot refuse, this does not arouse her suspicions. It involves lucrative work at an evening venue. All shoe has to do is dress up. Alarm beels ring when it emerges that the work could be both dangerous and humiliating. Our fears are borne out as she descends into the basement of a dodgy Chinese restaurant. No bags or mobile telephones are allowed at the venue, where she is urged by a threatening female master of ceremonies to ‘look like she is at a party’, while Luciana joins a group of similarly black-dressed young women who are each given a number and told to join ‘the game’.

There are shades of Eyes Wide Shut and even Frankie & Lola to this unsettling thriller which often sacrifices substance for atmosphere, the final denouement falling short of our expectations. Asensio uses a Super 16 camera to shoot her film, eking out a meagre budget to great effect. Jeffrey Alan Jones’ score is as mean and as sinister as the storyline of a claustrophobic but effectively scary feature debut. MT

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 16 NOVEMBER 2017

Heartstone (2016)

Dir/writer: Gudmundur Arnar Gudmundsson | Cast: Baldur Einarsson, Blaer Hinriksson, Dilja Valsdottir, Katla Njalsdottir, Soren Malling, Nina Dogg Filippusdottir | Drama | Iceland | 129′

In a remote Icelandic fishing village the hostile terrain provides a chilly counterpoint to the sexual awakening of two young teenagers in this movingly thoughtful if overlong feature debut. The young cast of newcomers is really what makes HEARTSTONE such an affecting drama, rather than its meandering narrative. We feel for them in their unsettling changes, but this would have held more more dramatic weight with a tighter edit. This is a small criticism for an impressive start. Writer-director Gudmundur Arnar Gudmundsson has really marshalled his material and created an impressive film that certainly shows great insight into the kids’ confused state of adolescence.

The story follows best friends Thor (Baldur Einarsson) and Kristjan (Blaer Hinriksson) are who are at a loose end in this remote outpost, and given to bouts of aggression, sadly directed at wildlife, but there is also a tenderness between the boys – and they are only boys – with Thor still really only a child. Despite the country setting, family life isn’t easy and Thor is constantly teased by his older sisters — Rakel (Jonina Thordis Karlsdottir) and the more creative Hafdis (Ran Ragnarsdottir), who has a penchant for Bjork. Their father has cleared off with a younger woman, leaving their mother (Nina Dogg Filippusdottir) unsettled emotionally as she casts around for another man. Kristjan’s father (Sveinn Olafur Gunnarsson) is rather butch and macho – clearly a homophobic and hard drinker. The boys have already tried their luck with girls: Beta (Dilja Valsdotttir), and her friend Hanna (Katla Njalsdottir). But their true colours slowly emerge (and I mean slowly) on a spiky camping trip – not least due to the undergrowth. There’s a memorably dramatic scene where Kristjan’s father takes the boys up a mountain side to search for gulls’ eggs but the pace slackens during the final scenes despite a certain poignance in the ending that makes this an impressive first feature. MT

NOW ON RELEASE FROM 17 NOVEMBER 2017 | VENICE 2016 REVIEW

Manifesto (2017)

Dir.: Julian Rosefeldt; Cast: Cate Blanchett; Germany/Australia, 94′.

Writer/director Julian Rosefeldt (The Creation) transposes his installation of the same name to the big screen with this tour-de-force of ideas held together by Cate Blanchett, who appears in 13 different incarnations, breathing life into the tenets of Dadaism, Futurism and Suprematism and others whose credos enlightened the 20th century.

To say this is an odd film, is not an understatement. Apart from the lack of narrative, words and ideas dominate – despite Christoph Krauss’ images (mostly panorama shots from high above), which are stunning. When watching, it definitely helps to have some knowledge of art history and its movements, since the funny side of it all can only be appreciated with this background. MANIFESTO is, after all, a head-idea; an artificial construct which can be deciphered with pleasure – but some knowledge is simply a pre-condition.

It starts off with Blanchett playing a tramp, declaiming the Communist Manifest by Marx and Engels. Later, she changes into a bourgeois housewife, who lectures her family with a tract on the superiority of Pop Art. Husband and children are required by hee to fold their hands as in prayer, while they are waiting for mother to finish so they can start eating the turkey. Blanchett also plays a Primary school teacher, not only adamant that her kids learn about Jim Jarmush’ golden rules of filmmaking, but reminding them too, what JL Godard preached: “It is not where you take things from – it is where you take them to”. For good measure, the little ones also learn about the Von Trier/Vinterberg Dogma Manifesto: only handheld cameras, no artificial light. Blanchett also gives a staggering turn as a ballet master, directing a camp Busby Berkeley imitation of glitzy Martian girls dancing to a text about money distribution. And finally, there are two Cate’s at the same time at work in a TV studio: One is the anchor, who interviews the second Cate, who seems far away in the pouring rain, being interviewed on Conceptual Art, based on the text of Sol de Witt. When the interview is over, we discover that Cate II was in the studio next door, where the rain machine is switched off after the questioning finishes. MANIFESTO is certainly a great work offering endless subject for discussion – and musings are guaranteed for those who are in the know. For the rest, Blanchett’s performance is simply staggering. AS

OUT ON RELEASE FROM 15 NOVEMBER 2017 NATIONWIDE

 

 

 

 

 

 

Murder on the Orient Express (2017)

Dir.: Kenneth Branagh; Cast: Kenneth Branagh, Johnny Depp, Judi Dench, Willem Dafoe, Penelope Cruz, Michelle Pfeiffer, Olivia Coleman, Leslie Odem jr; Malta/USA 2017, 114’

Director, producer and star Kenneth Branagh has filmed Michael Green’s script of Agatha Christie’s 1930s murder mystery MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS with the tragic earnestness of a Dostoyevsky novel. He never allows himself any sort of playfulness or improvisation, and the veteran Hollywood cast fails to animate this re-make of Sidney Lumet’s 1974 version of the crime novel which is dead on arrival on the screen.

Even Lumet, a much more innovative director than Branagh, struggled with the transformation of the page to the screen: after all, we have 12 suspects and just one setting – even though Branagh manages to let the cast out into the snow for a few minutes, after the train derails during a storm: he even manages to botch that outing, but more of that later. Branagh’s collaborators on Cinderella and Thor PD Jim Clay and Haris Zambarloukas are here again – the DoP using his 65mm lens to great wide-screen effect, but Branagh’s direction is as stale as the cast whose performances are stuffy and lacklustre – for the most part.

Johnny Depp’s rake Ratchett is Dillinger warmed-up, Judi Dench’s Russian princess is stiff and detached; Penelope Cruz plays her Spanish missionary with the gloom of eternal repentance; Willem Dafoe’s detective has the poker face we’d expect from a sleuth and Michelle Pfeiffer feels almost on her last legs. But Olivia Coleman is the standout giving real verve to her Hildegard Schmidt. Sporting a ludicrous moustache, Branagh is joylessly pompous as Hercule Poirot. In a nod to the 21st century, Sean Connery’s army colonel has been replaced by Dr. Arbuthnot (Odem), who also happens to be black.

Agatha Christie based her novel loosely on the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, and the director has chosen black and white for the Armstrong family-related flash-backs, but then also used the same for selected scenes on the train, muddling the narrative even further. There are too many embarrassing moments, worst of all the grand finale in the snow: Poirot has decided to seat all twelve suspects on a bench at the entrance to the train tunnel, like naughty kids waiting for a school detention. Despite a massive budget, this stolid costume drama looks like an exhibit from some crusty museum featuring the mummified characters from Norman Bates’ motel. AS

NOW ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE

Pingyao Impressions Theatre | Pingyao Film Festival 2017

IMG_6398 Imagine London’s Tate Modern museum. Then imagine it three times larger and you have Pingyao’s brand new theatre building designed by an architect schoolfriend of the Chinese independent filmmaker Jia Zhangke.

IMG_6399The two grew up in the walled Ming village and were determined to make a name for their world heritage birthplace – and they have certainly done it in style. This brand new theatre combines stylish design with state of the art technical wizardry to tell the tale of the ancient UNESCO walled city built over a thousand years ago in the province of Shanxi, four hours by bullet train south of Beijing.

IMG_6427 Zhang Yimou’s Impressions series is already well known for its world-class quality and inventive staging. While  other shows are happening outdoors in other parts of China, the indoor Pingyao version comes across as being a far more intimate and involving experience where we actively become a part of each scene with the actors appearing to speak directly with you, especially in the ‘street market’ set.

IMG_6420

This makes Impressions Pingyao unique and exciting as attendees are free to walk around the set and follow the action as it unfolds in various stagings in the vast space, as different spotlights track the sumptuously dressed characters in their delicately rendered vignettes that each have a individual stage setting.

IMG_6424It emerges that Pingyao history is rooted in its legendary banking system – banks have existed here for a millennium. The bittersweet human story unfurls against the backdrop of these traditions. Unique and utterly beguiling PINGYAO IMPRESSIONS is one of the exciting new creative aspects of contempo China uniting the past with the present day. MT

SCREENING IN PINGYAO DURING THE YEAR ZERO PINGYAO FILM FESTIVAL UNTIL 4 NOVEMBER 2017

Silence of the Lambs (1991) | BFI Thriller Series | Oct-Dec 2017

 Mandatory Credit: Photo by Everett Collection / Rex Features ( 411879fv ) 'THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS' - Anthony Hopkins - 1991 VARIOUS


Mandatory Credit: Photo by Everett Collection / Rex Features ( 411879fv )
‘THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS’ – Anthony Hopkins – 1991
VARIOUS

Dir. Jonathan Demme; Cast: Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Scott Glenn, Jame Gumb, Anthony Head, Brooke Smith; USA  114′

Jonathan Demme, who died this April at the age of 73, made some excellent films such as Philadelphia (1993) and Swimming to Cambodia (1987). But he will be best remembered for SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, which won Oscars for Best Film and Best Director. Based on the novel by Thomas Harris and written by Ted Tally, SILENCE is one of the few feminist thrillers of its era.

Centred around FBI agent Clarice Starling (Foster) who is sent by her boss Jack Crawford (Glenn) to interview imprisoned mass murderer and psychiatrist Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Hopkins). The idea is to get his imput with a new case: a serial killer, called Buffalo Bill, who skins his female victims. In a cat and mouse game, Clarice gets Lecter to tell her the name of the killer who once his patient. After having kidnapped Catherine Martin (Brooke Smith), the daughter of an US senator, Buffolo Bill (Gumb), is tracked down by Clarice.

Clarice is much more emancipated woman than she appears in the film. She is well aware that the older Crawford has an Electra crush on her but still calls him “Sir”, knowing she has the upper hand emotionally, slipping out of his command even though she is just a trainee in the last stages of her studies. Howard Shore’s score provides a foreboding undercurrent, reminiscent of Bernhard Herrman, throught her prisom encounters with Lecter which plays out as a cat-and-mouse game. Crawford has warned her never to disclose any personal information to the psychiatrist, Clarice makes a bargain with Lecter: she answers his questions, while he has to answer hers regarding the identity of Buffalo Bill. The outcome justifies her strategy, since Lecter is extraordinarily vain and fancies himself as her Svengali.

Buffalo Bill has a long history of childhood abuse, and is not happy in his body; he tried for a sex change operation, but was rejected because of his violent nature. He dresses as a woman, but feels only contempt for the female species. Catherine is held prisoner in a well, and her captor talks to his poodle about her, objectifying her with the impersonal  ‘it’. He takes great pleasure in making her use skin cream and starving her: all necessary for the skinning operation, which is his way of keeping a trophy. The use of a moth, which he pressed down his victims throat, brings Clarice closer to his whereabouts: a moth is a symbol of transition, something the killer wanted for himself. The American flag is a freqently occurring motif through the film: Clarice always finds one in Buffalo’s former dwellings. The last flag, which she discovers in the lair where he has killed and skinned his victims and skinned is small version, made for a child. AS

ON RE-RELEASE at BFI Southbank and cinemas UK-wide on 3 November 2017 to headline their THRILLER SERIES | BFI THRILLER: WHO CAN YOU TRUST October – December 2017 

Photo Credit: Photo by Everett Collection / Rex Features ( 411879fv )
‘THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS’ – Anthony Hopkins – 1991

The Death of Stalin (2017)

Dir. Armando Iannucci. Fr-UK-Bel | Comedy Drama | 106′

Armando Iannucci’s stylish Soviet satire plays out like a classic Mel Brooks comedy. This light-footed but abrasively cynical dramedy lays bare the grasping sculduggery of Stalinist Russia with a humour as bleak and bracingly vicious as the Gulags where nearly 10-20 million people lost their lives between 1929 and 1953. Our story kicks off in Moscow, where the cockney-tongued Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin) collapses in his state rooms, having suffered a fatal stroke.

Best known for The Thick Of It, In The Loop and Veep, Iannucci again exposes the ugliness of power and politics in a film that echoes the global crisis of faith in our leaders. But what really bolsters this lavish production is seeing so many fabulous actors all doing their stuff in enjoyable comic turns. Amongst Stalin’s coterie of counsellors there is Michael Palin (Vyacheslav Molotov); Steve Buscemi (Nikita Khrushchev); Simon Russell Beale (Lavrentiy Beria) and even Paul Whitehouse (Anastas Mikoyan); not to mention Dermot Crowley (Kaganovich). The humour lies in their need to pretend to be unanimously respectful of Stalin’s death while, behind the scenes, a farce plays out with  hilarious gags as they all jockey for position and copy with the petulant posturing from Rupert Friend and Andrea Riseborough as Vasily and Sventlana, Stalin’s kids.

Based on a graphic novel by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin, THE DEATH OF STALIN also shows how ordinary people were casually abused and manipulated by the powerful elite – this is a fascinatingly caustic comedy plays up the pitfalls of a regime that replaced an equally unequal set-up of the Tsars, who at least had taste!. These characters are dead ugly and thoroughly unlikeable, swinging around the vast and vacuous corridors of power, exposing the same loathsome view of Russia that transpires in Andrei Zvyagintsev’s contemporary drama LOVELESS; clearly nothing has changed in the intervening years; the tone here is breezier, but just as back-biting.

Rupert Friend’s Vassily does sail a bit close to the wind in his silliness, but Jason Isaac steps in with comic astringency as Army Chief, Georgy Zhukov. On the whole these politicians are as frighteningly convincing as a species as Jeremy Corbyn or even Michael Gove. Steve Buscemi’s Khrushchev is a clever conniver who gradually gets his way through a process of stealth and self-pity. Witty and throughly entertaining. MT

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM 20 OCTOBER 2017

 

Bitch (2017)

Dir.: Marianna Palka; Cast: Marianna Palka, Jason Ritter, Jaime King, USA 2017, 93 min.

Writer and director Marianna Palka (Good Dick) also stars in her anarchic portrait of a woman pushed aside by her husband once too often. BITCH is a slim but taut and deftly-handled feminist parable – the sheer pace and untamed aggression making it gripping and watchable.

Jill (Palka) runs home and kids for her husband Bill (Ritter), who works for a city corporation and is hardly ever home. Spending most of his time in the office, he sexually exploits a dependent co-worker into the bargain. When she gets sacked in a widespread office cull, Bill puts in a good word for her, but is rebuffed by the boss and vents his frustration on his wife, undeservedly calling her a bitch. Something snaps in Jill and she turns into a vicious virago, making life hell for husband and four children, whom she has served efficiently for so long. Moving into the cellar of the family home, Jill starts growling and behaving like a violent dog. The family is obviously shocked, and Jill’s sister Beth (King) suggests a psychiatric home. But Bill is against the idea – what would the neighbours think?. But his absence from work costs him his job, and when his lover arrives, inquiring caringly about his wellbeing, Jill ‘smells’ her presence and goes berserk. Scots actress Palka is astonishly convincing in both animal and human form, and shows how ultimately behaviour, rather than negotiation, is sometimes the only way to bring change. DoP Armando Salas assists with a handheld camera, capturing the human dog during long runs through the neighbourhood. The jazz score by Morgan Z. Whirledge is just right for this explosive tale which should send alarm bells to all males of the human variety. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 13 OCTOBER 2017

Goodbye Christopher Robin (2017)

Dir.: Simon Curtis |  Cast:Domhnall Gleason, Margot Robbie, Will Tilson, Alex Lawther, Kelly MacDonald, Stephen Campbell Moore; UK 2017, 107′.

In trying to tackle the complex relationship between Winnie-the-Pooh author AA Milne (1882-1956) and his son Christopher Robin, Simon Curtis (Woman in Gold) finds the guilty party: the boy’s mother Daphne (Margot Robbie). Aided by scriptwriters Frank Cottrell Boyce and Simon Vaughn, Dorothy ‘Daphne’ de Selincourt becomes a garish parody of a woman without a heart; although contradictory evidence found in the adult writing of C R Milne is written out.

Bookended by the two World Wars, the story opens with AA Milne (Gleason) in the West End Theatre scene of 1920, where flashbulbs remind him of his traumatic time in the trenches. Having written for the stage and the magazine Punch, Milne declares “I’ve had enough of making people laugh, I want to make them see”. Daphne had given birth to their son Christopher Robin, named ‘Billy Moon’ by his parents. The couple soon gravitate from London to Hartfield East Sussex, where AA Milne was to write his two most famous books Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928), illustrated by the Punch cartoonist EH Shephard (Campbell Moore), who visited the Milnes often and had a close relationship with the author, sharing post traumatic stress disorder.

Daphne is shown as an endlessly neglectful mother, seeking out out the brights lights of London’s social scene while leaving CR in the hands of his nurse Olive ((MacDonald). When Olive is on leave, Milne senior shows off his parenting skills in strange ways: when he finds his son on the table with knife and fork in his hands, he reprimands him “if somebody falls through the ceiling, they would injure themselves, drawing blood” – making sure the audience gets the wartime analogy. After the Winnie-the-Pooh books achieve worldwide success, Daphne decides to get in on the act, making hay out of Milne’s success despite being previously being on the verge of leaving him – she even sells one of his private poems to a newspaper, and gives her son short shrift when he tearfully complains “all these stories are just lies” – she retorts “There is no blubbing in this house”. A sentimental reconciliation between CR, returning from the war, and his parents shows Daphne again at her best: never in film history have you witnesses a mother less delighted by the survival of her son.

The dinner party conversation at the Milne house would make PG Woodhouse proud: Dinner guest: “I was at the Somme”, “How was it?” “Bad show”. Obviously, this only goes to emphasis how the British stiff upper lip kept the sensitive male in check. Clearly Curtis intends this as an indictment of the upbringing Milne’s children’s books revered, but is it really worthwhile, or even desirable, to criticise the values of the past through today’s spectrum? AA Milne is shown trashing his son’s room with a cricket bat, demonstrating that, unlike mother, he really regrets the rotten childhood he had forced on him. Whilst the PD department gets all the credit, GOODBYE is just too sweet and torpid – apart from its misogynist ideology – to keep even the most ardent Pooh fanbase engaged. Years from now this film will be forgotten, the books and poems will live on. AS

ON GENERAL RELEASE NATIONWIDE

Night is Short, Walk on Girl (2017)

Dir.: Masaaki Yuasa; Anime with the voices of Kana Hanazawa, Gen Hoshino, Hiroyuki Yoshino; Japan 2017, 93′

Masaaki Yuasa returns to the big screen with his first release in 13 years. Night is Short, Walk On Girl, based on the Manga by Tomohiko Morimi, is a variation on the One Night action Manga, itself the Oriental equivalent of Cornel Woolrich’s pulp novels featuring the doomed hero with just one night to prove his innocence and rescue his girl –while the clock ticks away. In this case, it’s the girl of the title, Ottome, meaning ‘girl with black hair’, who runs the show.

Set in Kyoto, Senpai (Hoshino), a shy senior college student from an upmarket background, is in love with teenager The Girl (Hanazawa) who keeps her feelings for him buttoned up. Senpai pursues her at every corner, but The Girl is much more streetwise than he is. After a mutual college friend’s wedding party, Senpai tries to find a seat near his paramour, but comes under attacked by a gang robbing him of his clothes, leaving Senpai deeply embarrassed and forced to beg strangers to lend him some underwear. The Girl, meanwhile, lucks out by winning a drinking contest with a God-like creature, Rihaku, thus liberating one of his debtors. As the night goes on, The Girl meets the ‘God of the old Books Market’ (Yoshino) along with Todo-son, an unhappy collector of erotic Japanese art, and a group of nihilists, who fall under her spell. A college theatre production turns into a out-out slapstick show, and, in the final section of this riotous night journey, The Girl fights tornados and icy hail, as the anime reaches its momentous finale

One word of warning: The title is completely misleading as The Girl never walks but rushes around madly, a tireless adventuress, seeking out excitement at every corner. Senpai is more contemplative and we learn a lot about the inner workings of his mind, where Ego and Id fight it out. There seems to be no ‘dramatic arc’ – this is a fairy tale told on speed. It would have been good to learn more about the innovative animation: for example, if people get drunk or act embarrassingly, their bodies are suffused by different shades of red, with Senpai being the main victim – but the subtitles don’t leave much time for admiration. The film’s characters are based on the drawings of the Manga by Yusuke Nakamura, and the director successfully marries this rather minimalist style with his overpoweringly fluid action scenes.

Some critics have accused Yuasa of celebrating Senpai as a stalker, but while he seems to be a bit of a control freak, he is very unsuccessful at it. Yuasa has stuck to the first sentence of the novel “This is not a story about me, it’s a story about her”. AS

OUT ON RELEASE FROM 3 OCTOBER IN CINEMAS NATIONWIDE

Stronger (2017) | Bfi London Film Festival 2017

Dir.: David Gordon Green; Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Tatiana Maslany, Miranda Richardson; USA 2017, 116 min.

Features based on true-life stories, particularly when terrorism is concerned, usually turn out to be questionable. But director David Gordon Green (Prince Avalanche) has plumbed new depths with the story of Jeff Baumann, who lost his legs in the terrorist attack during the Boston marathon in 2013.

Baumann (played by the film’s producer Gyllenhaal,) is a charmer, but a bum. He has split up with his girlfriend Erin (Maslany) for the third time, and after leaving work early to watch a Red Sox game, he knows that he has to it make up to her. So he promises to support her marathon run with a placard. Erin suspects that this will be the usual botched effort, but for once Jeff is on time – but in the wrong place. His efforts turn into a fight between Erin and his mother (Richardson), the alcoholic matriarch of a family of lazy underachievers. Only after Erin gets pregnant (we have to endure sex with violins playing), does mother give in: she delivers Jeff to Erin, complete with his artificial legs. But her middle class family refuse to tolerate sloppy underachievement.

On the positive side Jeff is shown around at sporting events just like a hero, and Green shows that this is an affront to Jeff’s sensibilities. But that’s about the only thing John Pollono gets right in his script based on Baumanm’s co-written memoir. Richardson is a caricature of a slovenly, over-protective mother, and the rest of the family are as one-dimensional in their drunken passivity, using the attention Jeff gets for endless selfie opportunities. Erin’s family are also stereotypical in their straightlaced lifestyle. Only once does STRONGER get behind the facade, when Jeff asks Erin: “why do you want me”. Sadly her martyrdom takes over again, and Jeff is literally delivered like a schoolboy from a bad home to the sanctity of proper discipline and achievement.

Green directs with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, DoP Sean Bobbitt keeps it simple with one to one realism and Michael Brook’s score is suited to the whole exercise with its sentimental meowing. AS

SCREENING DURING BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2017

The Road to Mandalay (2016)

Dir.: Midi Z; Cast: Wu Ke-xi, Kai Ko; Myanmar/Taiwan/France/Germany 2016, 108′

Burmese auteur Midi Z shares own experience in this doomed love story about two illegal immigrants escaping prison and poverty in Myanmar (from his home town of Lashio) to seek a brighter future in Thailand.“The young Burmese, feeling imprisoned in their home country, and regard Thailand as a place where they could set themselves free and have a brighter future. Nonetheless, they have no idea that they are very likely to be imprisoned again, and this time in a bigger place. I’m fortunate, if I hadn’t come to Taiwan to study, I might have ended up like one of the character in the film”.

Z, who has directed documentary films before switching to features, shows his skills in catching the smallest details, not only on the coalface of the factory, but also in the relationship between the two main characters. Guo is stoic, but has a grasp of reality, whilst Lianqing is dreaming of a bright future – but relying on Guo to make it happen. Guo shows respect for Lianqing’s innocence and does not even kiss her. They live like brother and sister, with Guo hoping for more, without verbalising his feelings during their dangerous trip from the Myanmar border to Thailand. They have paid the people-traffickers, who take them over the Mekong river into the ‘promised land’ (the titular Mandalay is more symbolic than real), the journey often interrupted to bribe border control and policemen. Guo, whom fellow travellers call ‘simple Guo’, falls in love with Lianqing at first side, and lets her travel in the front of the vehicle, taking her place in the boot, even though he has paid a higher price. After they arrived in the suburbs of Bangkok, he tries to get her a job in a restaurant, but the young woman has set her sights higher: she wants to work in the city, selling clothes. But since Lianquing has no identity papers, she fails with her application, and starts working washing dishes. Arrested during a police raid, Guo has to bail her out. But love cannot save Lianqing from her burning ambition which also leads to her fate in this brilliantly-acted drama of illegal immigration and unfulfilled amour-fou. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 29 SEPTEMBER 2017

Brimstone (2016)

Dir.: Martin Koolhoven; Cast: Dakota Fanning, Guy Pearce, Emily Jones, Carice van Houten; USA 2016, 148 min.

Dutch writer/director Martin Koolhoven brings a new chapter to the history of male-on-female violence depicted in film. That this all-out exploitation feature is sold as a feminist revenge story makes it even worse.

Set as a 19th century Western and told as an elliptical flashback story, BRIMSTONE is an ultra-violent, voyeuristic joy ride featuring a deranged Reverend (Pearce), who hunts down his daughter Liz (Fanning), to fulfil his God-given right to incest, quoting the biblical story of Lot and his daughters as an example. Having driven Liz’ mother Anna (Van Houten) to suicide, the Reverend then enjoys sex with his daughter who also happens to be his granddaughter. Liz has a long history of male-inflicted suffering in a brothel, where the film then features endless sequences that would look radical even on a common or garden porn site.

Koolhaven has a lot to answer for: why, for example, did he cast a six-year old girl and then give her the following dialogue: “Has your mother told you what a whore is?” Other scenes depict gratuitous violence directed towards women – did he really believe this is not exploitation at its worse? By all means hit at abuse to illustrate the point, but to over-expose it merely adds insult to injury. And to makes matters worse these scenes are almost wordless, the female characters having very little dialogue to express their feelings or concerns in defence of their treatment. Occasionally Koolhoven descends into self-parody in the scene where the Reverend tells his victims to be aware of men, describing them as “wolves in sheep’s clothing”. Filmed in panoramic shots by Dutch DoP Roger Stoffers, Brimstone breaks the records for disingenuous virtue-signalling AS

NOW ON MUBI

Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Director: David Lean |Script: Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson | Score: Maurice Jarre | Cast: Peter O’Toole, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Omar Sharif, Jose Ferrer, Claude Rains, Jack Hawkins, Anthony Quayle, Arthur Kennedy, Donald Wolfit, Zia Mohyeddin | UK/USA 1962  227′ | Adventure Drama

Based upon the writings of T. E. Lawrence entitled Seven Pillars Of Wisdom, a diary never meant for open publication, but allowed by his estate after his death, the making of Lawrence Of Arabia is a drama of epic proportions spanning three decades and worthy of a film in itself.

Alexander Korda kicked it all off in the 30’s, wanting Leslie Howard and then Walter Hudd as lead, but this all collapsed when the British Governor of Palestine at the time forbade ‘any large gatherings of Arabs’.  John Clements, Clifford Evans, Robert Donat, Laurence Olivier and even Cary Grant were also in the frame subsequently, as was Burgess Meredith in 1949 and then Alan Ladd. In 1952, Harry Cohn offered it to Powell and Pressburger, but they declined. Then, in 1955 Terrence Rattigan picked up the reins with Dirk Bogarde in mind and even got as far as location scouting in Iraq, only to have it all unravel as the King was assassinated and Iraq descended into revolution. When producer Sam Spiegel finally came aboard in 1959, he wanted Marlon Brando, but Brando backed out to go and do Mutiny On The Bounty

Alec Guinness was great, but too old, even though he played Lawrence in Rattigan’s well-received 1960 play Ross. Then it was to be Albert Finney, who infact undertook extensive screen tests, but eventually also backed out, citing that he didn’t want to be a star; frightened of what it would do to him as a person. He also, it had to be said, hated signing multi-picture deals.

Peter O’Toole had meanwhile appeared as a mere cameo in an otherwise forgotten film called The Day They Robbed The Bank Of England, which Lean saw, and knowing instantly that he had his man, even when Peter Hall refused to release him from his RSC contract in Stratford and Producer Sam Spiegel also initially rejected him.

As film commenced in Jordan, the script was in disarray, the original writer Michael Wilson, who had done such a fine job on Bridge On The River Kwai left the project, after a year working on the script in a state of high dudgeon. Robert Bolt was drafted in, at first purely to write only dialogue, on the back of his hit play A Man For All Seasons. But at one point, as the cameras rolled in the desert, with the script still incomplete, Bolt was gaoled for a month for marching in a CND demonstration and had to be extricated from gaol -against his own wishes- by Spiegel in order to complete the script (he wasn’t allowed to write it in prison).

There are legion stories emanating from the two-year(!) shoot, in Jordan, Spain and Morocco; of new talents cutting their teeth, like Freddie Young working with the new Super-Panavision camera with 70mm colour stock. The industrial kit needed to hold the massive cameras being lugged out into the desert, against the heat, the wind the sand and the flies… but, after all this, what we are left with is an extraordinary coming together of some amazing talent, from the writing to the design, the music, the costumes and the performances.

So, what of the new 4k digital formatted release? Well, It’s magnificent. One of the greatest films ever made, so crisp, clear and sharp, it could have been shot yesterday. Lawrence was nominated for ten Academy Awards and went on to win seven, including 1962 Best Picture and Best Director. Inexplicably, Omar Sharif, Peter O’Toole and writer Robert Bolt all failed to score. With Kwai, five years earlier also winning seven Oscars, David Lean really was at the top of his game and knew he wanted to capitalize on it. His next outing was called Dr Zhivago.

Bearing in mind he had come up through editing, having cut over 20 feature films prior to taking the helm as a Director, Lean later wanted to lose 40-minutes from Lawrence, but also knew he wouldn’t know where from- lest he lose the magic in the trimming.

So. What is Lawrence of Arabia all about? Seriously? Well, it’s about an eccentric Englishman who goes out into the desert, turns native, goes mad and then comes back home. All 227 glorious minutes of it. Go and see it for goodness sake and stop asking damn’ fool questions.

Is it any good? Well, I’ll leave you with several published quotes from the time of the original release: John Coleman, writing in the New Statesman- “none of it is good enough. Setting to one side the obligatory, contemptible music, the film never decisively makes its mind up what its after…”

Penelope Gilliatt “Two And A Half Pillars Of Wisdom…. A thoughtful picture with an intensely serious central performance, but it doesn’t hold together in great excitement.” New Yorker Andrew Sarris of The Village Voice- “Dull, overlong and coldly impersonal… hatefully calculating and condescending” The bottom line is, we all still remember  David Lean.

NOW ON NETFLIX

In Between (2016) | Ba Bahar

Dir.: Maysaloun Hamoud; Cast: Mouna Hawa, Sana Jammalieh,Shaden Kanboura, Mahmood Shalbi, Ahlam Canaan, Henry Andrawas; Palestine/Israel/France 2016, 102 min.

Maysaloun Hamoud’s portrait of three young, independent Arab women living in Tel Aviv captures the lifestyle of a new generation of Palestinian women, fighting prejudice from the Jewish majority and their own – religious fundamentalist, male dominated – families, regardless of their Muslims or Christian backgrounds.

Laila (Hawa), a successful lawyer; Salma (Jammalieh), a lesbian bartender; and DJ who shares a flat with  computer science student Nour (Kanboura) who is the shy one of the trio, avoiding the party-orientated lifestyle of her flatmates. Nour is also the heroine of the story. sharing her life with fiancé Wissam (Andrawes) who works for a Palestine charity in a small town. Wissam takes the high moral ground when talking to Nour or her family, but cannot hide his own insecurity when he encounters Laila and Salma, calling them ‘whores’. He is adamant that Nour moves out of the shared place, finding her alternative accommodation. But Nour rejects this offer and also his wish to bring the wedding date forward. Confronted with female resistance, Wissam loses his cool and rapes his fiancée brutally.

Laila and Salma make sure that Wissam does not get away scott-free. Naturally the wedding is cancelled, but both women have their own, very different problems with their partners. Laila is courted by a Jewish lawyer, but she knows only to well that he is messing her around “still waiting to present a kosher bride for his religious parents”. When she meets Ziad (Shalabi), a liberal Palestinian, the scene seems set for romance. But soon Ziad starts controlling behaviour: So she gives him the boot.

Salma has fallen in love with Dr. Dunya (Canaan), but this all ends in tears with her father promising to incarcerate her, when he discovers her lesbian life. He is running for re-election as mayor: “I can do without people finding out that my daughter is a lesbian”. Salma escapes, but the break with her Christian family is final. Along with these trials and tribulations, the women have to fight off daily discrimination from Jewish citizens, some of them showing their distain for Arabs openly. “We do not bite”, says Laila to a shop assistant, who is not very happy, to serve her and Salma.

IN BETWEEN is a very honest film with its themes of drugs and alcohol, and charged sexual atmosphere – these women are no suffering wallflowers – they pay the price for going against their familes of all denominations. It is a radical new beginning for the region; a growing number of relationships are now developing between unobservant Jews and Palestinians: fighting the good fight against all shades of fundamentalism with love. So despite of some structural problems, IN BETWEEN is one of those films which really deserved to be made, and seen. AS

Borg/McEnroe (2017)

Dir: Janus Metz Pedersen | Shia LaBeouf, Sverir Gudnason, Tuva Novotny, Robert Emms | Sports Biopic Drama | Sweden/Finland/Denmark | 100′

Janus Pederson’s drama of tennis rivals BORG/McENROE is actually far more exciting than the distant memory of their Wimbledon exchanges, if –  like me – you’re more interested in their personalities than the game itself. And that’s because tennis is a game of wits and psychology, perhaps more that any other sport, and these are two highly fascinating men, brought to life here appealing by Shia LeBoeuf, as McEnroe, and striking lookalike, Sverir Gudnason as Borg.

Compariing their respective rise to fame through fandom of the 1970s in Sweden and Queens, New York with gently humorous nostalgia as they both master their explosive neuroses, BORG/McENROE then goes straight for the jugular with an all out gripping finale showcasing that last epic match in July 1980 that rocked the world. Ronnie Sandahl’s makes us see how two very different characters actually shared similar strengths of perseverance, dedication and self-belief.

With its pounding score, this is a well-paced and luminously cinematic and absorbing watch not least for its compelling performances from LeBoeuf whose volatile but vulnerable appeal is far more magnetic than the memory of the real mercurial McEnroe (you cannot be serious!), making us feel for him and his private demons. In stark contrast, Gudnason’s nuanced charisma is every bit as mesmerising as he slowly generates an onscreen allure, transforming the captivatingly feline Swede into a magical sports hero. That said, this Nordic production is much more fleshed out in regard to Borg than McEnroe, and there are times when we’d like to have had more New York backstory about the New Yorker with his over-bearing father wittily played by Ian Blackman (Hail,Caesar!). Three different actors play the young Borg, including the young, his own son Leo, who is the most persuasive. Stellan Skargard exerts a masterful influence as his coach and former player, Lennart Bergelin. And Tuva Novotny is his gentle, chain-smoking fiancé Mariana Simionescu. Vitas Gerulaitis as a combative Robert Emms. MT

OUT ON 15 SEPTEMBER 2017

Disappearance (2017) Verdwijnen | Toronto International Film Festival 2017

Dir.: Boudewijn Koole; Cast: Rifka Lodeizen, Elsie De Brauw, Marcus Hanssen, Jacob Oftebro; Netherlands/Norway 2017, 92 min.

Set in the frozen Norwegian countryside, this chilling portrait of a dysfunctional family is a death dance, performed without mercy, leaving the audience devasted by the waste of human lives. But director Boudewijn Koole (Kauwboy) never allows any sentimentality to develop: he observes his characters with clinical detachment, withholding  judgement at all times.

Roos (Lodeizen) is an internationally renowned photographer who regularly visits her mother Louise (De Brauw) and half brother Bengt (Hanssen) in the Norwegian remote wilderness. We soon learn from Bengt that the last visit ended in a fight between mother and daughter, with Roos leaving, without saying good-bye to Bengt. The mother-daughter relationship seems beyond repair: When she was a little girl Roos chose to live with her father, after he left Louise for another woman. But Louise, a former ‘Wunderkind’ and now a piano teacher, is more concerned that Roos has given up the piano and chosen another profession. For Louise, this is a double betrayal – but one she can’t admit to. Struggling to gain her mothers acceptance, and feeling unloved, won’t confess to a serious illness. After a brief dalliance with her ex (Oftebro) in the back of his car, she nearly reveals her unspecified illness (we suspect cancer, because she is examines her breasts at length), but she finally opens up to her mother after another fight which ends badly. Strangely enough, Roos’ refusal to have further treatment, brings mother and daughter together, leading to an overwhelmingly moving finale.

There are some lyrical moments between Roos and Johnny on the ice, where they dance to the pop music of their youth, trying to recreate a past they have both left behind. Nature and animals seem, overall, to promise much more peaceful relationships than humans. Bengt uses Roos’ present of a very sophisticated microphone to bring the ice to “sing”. And Roos is very fond of her mother’s dogs – much more than of their owner. Neither Roos nor her mother are able to give each other unconditional love: they can only love their “mini-self’ in a non-adult way. But they deny their love to the grown-up versions of others. Mother and daughter are both familiar with the idea of loving, but are not able to accept that they are both very different people – and thus, each denies the other’s right to live a different way of life.

Koole has already collaborated with the writer Jolein Laarman on Kauwboy, and uses his script successfully to show, without spare dialogue, the inability of two adults to find a modus vivendi. DoP Melle van Essen’s landscapes are much more powerful than the struggling people who inhabit them, Disappearance is a study of denial, played out against the majestic backdrop of nature. AS

TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 7-17 SEPTEMBER 2017

 

7 Days | Sette Giorni (2016)

Dir/Writer: Rolando Colla | Cast: Bruno Todeschini, Alessia Barela, Marc Barbe, Linda Olsansky, Gianfelice Imparato | Drama |

A family wedding in Sicily unites two middle-aged Bohemians who arrive in a sleepy backwater to prepare for the festivities. This ravishingly langorous and deeply affecting Mediterranean arthouse escapade serves both as a love story and a celebration of Sicily and its people.

The Swiss director is best known for his rites of passage scamper Summer Games (2011) which did the rounds on the festival circuit recently. 7 DAYS explores a slow comfortable prelude to baggage-laden doomed love for its tousled twosome, played by Swiss Italian Bruno Todeschini/Delicacy) and Alessia Barela (Summer Games) who make for a convincing onscreen couple with their relaxed and deliciously sensual chemistry tempered by years of romantic disillusionment rather than the high-octane excitement of young lust.

Todeschini plays Ivan, a slightly dog-eared botanist who is instantly drawn to Alessia Barela’s Leventine looks as fashion seamstress Chiara, who is already committed with daughter of 17. Ivan’s brother Richard (Marc Barbe) is getting married and he has arrived early to organise the wedding festivities to Chiara’s best friend Francesca (Linda Olsansky). At first the ramshackle accommodation looks awful but gradually the two work together with the well-meaning locals and in things fall into to place – or not – their passion is fuelled by the pressure of preparing for the big day in the sweltering days and balmy nights in this wild seascape. We get to enjoy some local flora, fauna, history and traditional Sicilian culture, while the couple’s on/off romance sizzles often erupting in angry spats as they both get cold feet, despite the rising mercury. It’s an authentic rendering of late love where maturity and self-dependence are the enemies of the trust and laid back light-heartedness required for love to thrive, let alone develop into something workable and worthwhile and Crolla’s script offers some surprises along the way.

DoPs Lorenz Merz and Gabriel Lobos pull all out the stops in the magnificent locations making the best of the natural wilderness both above the waves and underwater, echoing the emotional rollercoaster of a sunny, often stormy, tale of late love. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 15 SEPTEMBER 2017

 

Soldiers: A Story of Ferentari | Toronto Film Festival 2017

SOLDIERS, A STORY OF FERENTARI (SOLDATI, POVESTE DIN FERENTARI)

Dir.: Ivana Mladenovic; Cast: Adrian Schiop, Vasile Pavel, Nicolae Marin, Cezar Grumarescu; Romania/Serbia/Belgium 2017, 120 min.

Ivana Mladenovic daring screen debut has an emotional directness which stuns and captivates throughout its two hour running time. Based on Adrian Schiop’s novel about a gay amour fou in one of the roughest suburbs of Bucharest, it combines gay and gypsy issues in a country not known for its tolerance towards minorities.

Schiop also stars as Adi, a shy introvert in his early forties, who is writing a PHD thesis on manele, the popular gypsy music. Adi has no idea that the Ferentari musicians are often exploited by the local mafia, who treat them like slaves. When Adi meets Borcan (Marin), one of the small time Mafiosi, he is introduced to his ‘servant’ Alberto ‘Berti’ (Pavel), a gypsy, who is about Adi’s age, and has spent more than half of his life in jail. Berti soon moves in with Adi, who shares a flat with his translator friend Vasi (Grumarescu) and his girl friend. Being rather naïve, Adi doesn’t appreciate that the couple find the rather rough ex-con difficult to deal and they soon move out, leaving Adi “to his hobos homos”.

Adi has to pay all the rent, and his financial pressure is compounded by Berti’s rampant slot machine habit. Whilst Adi tries to work for non-profit organisations to make up for Berti’s losses, his lover becomes increasingly need y and demanding, wanting permanent attention, and developing psychosomatic issues for Adi to deal with. But Adi enjoys the constant emotional neediness – it makes him feel important and after being dumped by his previous relationship. Before long though the two come to blows. Adi throwing Berti out of the flat, but then welcoming him back. Clearly he has become obsessed by him and needs to decide whether to end the relationship or continue with the toxic terror.

DoP Luchian Ciobanu has filmed the Soldiers on intimate close-up with a handheld camera creating a claustrophobia that feels convincing and real, capturing the confines of the small apartment. But even when the pair go out and about the camera follows them slavishly, showing how co-dependent their partnership really is. The poverty is grim, the streets lined with hovels which are sometimes ruthlessly removed by bulldozers. There is no political message here, Mladenovic’s fly on the wall treatment of this lost souls affair is shown relentlessly and passionately with no holds barred. Soldiers is an emotional rollercoaster, authentically performed and confidently directed. Mladenovic shows great promise for the future. AS

TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL | 7-17 SEPTEMBER 2017

Centre of My World (2017)

Dir.: Jakob M. Erwa; Cast: Louis Hofman, Sabine Timoteo, Philine Stappenbeck, Svenja Jung, Jannick Schümann, Alexander Gersak, Nina Proll; Germany/Austria 2016, 114 min.

Writer/director Jakob M. Erwa bases his latest film on Andreas Steinhöfel’s Coming-of-Age novel of the same name, with a good ensemble cast. Erwa is Austrian but one of many of his fellow countrymen to use the German language primarily to make a statement (‘Thesenfilm’). Erwa adopts an overly didactic approach that rathe undermines his viewers’ intelligence, treating the cinema like a lecture theatre. On top, there is more than enough narrative material in the novel, which carefully shortened and structured, could have avoided the unnecessary running time of nearly two hours, filled often with repetitive panning shots of the woods.

Seventeen-year-old Phil (Hofman) lives with his twin sister Diane (Stappenbeck) and mother Glass (Timoteo) in a “Märchenhaus” or ‘fantasy cottage’ near the woods. All they know about heir father is that he was American and number three on the list of her mother’s lovers, his name black-balled. Glass is still rather promiscuous and why she’s chosen to take her children to Germany remains open. Sister Diane is very good and training dogs, and was once arrested for telling a dog to attach its owner. Phil’s girlfriend Katja (Jung) is the polar opposite of her brother: she is fun-loving, whilst Phil is a worrier. When a new boy, Nicholas (Schümann) joins their class, Phil falls in love with him. They have rather awkward sex in the shower and Phil is too cowardly to tell Katja about his new lover at first, pretty soon she joins in the ménage-a-trois. But when Phil surprises the two having sex, he withdraws, telling Nicholas “that he wants him for himself”. At the same time, Diane keeps visiting her boyfriend in a coma in hospital, after he was injured during a storm. Her guilt feelings are compounded by an old family secret, and Phil feels that he has not only lost Katja and Nicolas, but also his sister. His erratic mother is no help, and he has to make a choice.

Erwa’s overly didactic approach feels rather condescending: too much philosophical spoon-feeding is self-indulgent, and mistakenly sees the cinema as a place for a lecture, rather than entertainment. There is more than enough narrative material in the novel, which, carefully shortened and structured, could have shortened the overlong running time stuffed with over-repetitive panning shots of the woods. Long dissolves and embarrassing slow-motion sequences echo the worst excesses of the 70s. Finally, the language: teenagers all over the world do not express themselves like Phil: “A small sliver of cold got between us”. And adults don’t talk to teenagers in parables about life as “a house with many rooms, some empty: “You lock your fear in one of the empty rooms”. What may work as “Bildungsroman” – and there are certainly parallels to the “Young Werther” – is simply too clumsy and lacks conviction on the screen. A little less would have been much more – plus a heavy dose of what is called understatement, avoiding a non-stop parade of over-the-top dramatics. AS

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 15 SEPTEMBER 2017

My Pure Land (2017)

Dir: Sarmad Masud | Suhaee Abro | Tayyab Ifzal, Eman Fatima | Drama | 93′ |

Sarmad Masud’s tense feature debut follows her earlier success with the Oscar and Bafta-nominated Two Dosas. Told from a female perspective, MY PURE LAND explores the standoff between a group of women and their menfolk over title to a family home they occupy in the depths of rural Pakistan.

As the drama unfolds, during a night of sustained gunfire and violent outbursts around the house, the narrative flips back and forth to supply the background details of this real-life story. Masud deftly develops the characters in a film that feels at times like an Eastern-based ‘Western’ in character, beautifully captured on the wide screen and in close-up in the interiors of the traditional home and prison by Haider Zafar.

The male aggravation comes mainly in the shape of uncle Mehrban, who considers it his God-given right to fight for the property, and will do his utmost to exert his authority over the women. His gung-ho attitude is responsible for the death of Nazo’s father and her brother.

These women are no wallflowers – particularly young Nazo, played with graceful feistiness by Suhaee Abro – and slowly develop from timid souls to fearless feminist protectors of their domestic domain learning to use guns and subterfuge. MY PURE LAND is an strangely haunting arthouse piece and its glowering intent is tempered by an atmospheric occasional score and poetic touches – such a soaring flock of doves – that seem to reflect the transient nature of life and the spirit of the dead. This is a slim but luminously crafted indie that makes the best of its low budget with some convincing performances and a satisfying narrative arc. MT

MY PURE LAND is on GENERAL RELEASE FROM 15 SEPTEMBER 2017

 

The Limehouse Golem (2016)

Dir: Juan Carlos Medina | Cast: Bill Nighy, Olivia Cooke, Eddie Marsan, Douglas Booth | Fantasy Horror \ UK | 104′

Compelling performances from Bill Nighy and Olivia Cooke fail to save this rather formulaic Ripper story with its florid Burlesque styling and a script as hammy and hackneyed as the Victorian vehicle of its name.

THE LIMEHOUSE GOLEM is based on Peter Ackroyd’s inventive 1994 novel ‘Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem’ interweaving the factual story of death by poisoning with the fictional macabre murders that menaced the East End of London during the 1880s. Best known for his Spanish language feature Insensibles Juan Carlos Medina directs from a lewdly over-stuffed script by Jane Goldman that pictures a set of poorly underwritten but intriguing Victorian characters in this two-pronged murder mystery with a final twist that panders to today’s penchant for gender-switching. A saturnine Bill Nighy stars as Inspector John Kildare – back-footed by allegations of homosexuality – is brought in to investigate an intractable series of gruesome murders so brutal as to suggest some mythical figure – a Jewish folkloric Golem – is at work in the backstreets of Victorian London. Kildare starts to find similarities between these murders and the domestic poisoning of failed playwright John Cree (Sam Reid).

The film opens as Cree is discovered dead by his wife Elizabeth (Cooke), the former “Little Lizzie” of music hall fame, who is also a marital bed-dodger, who employs the services of her Spanish maid to perform her marital duties. Naturally the finger of fate points in her direction due to her practice of preparing a nightly sleeping draught for her husband. But Kildare falls prey to Mrs Cree’s charms buying into her sob-story of childhood suffering from which she rose to respectability dragging herself up by her bodice strings only to be dragged down again in the public perception as the film’s femme fatale. She regales Kildare with stories of having been taken under the wing of cross-dresser and a music hall maestro Dan Leno (Douglas Booth) who’s catchphrase is “Here we are again!”. Desperately trying to forge her own acting career by associating with Eddie Marsan’s salacious stage manager “Uncle” in fierce competition with Maria Valverde’s  “Acrobatic Aveline” (Maria Valverde) from whose clutches she ‘won’ Mr Cree, she is played with skill and subtlety by Olivia Cooke in a difficult role.

Meanwhile everyone appears to be a suspect as Kildare’s ongoing investigations hurtle forward at breakneck speed – including Karl Marx (Henry Goodman) and the English novelist George Gissing (Morgan Watkins) all portrayed as sketchily as possible within the claustrophobic two hours – although there’s plenty of time for gore. Technically there is a great deal to enjoy in this closeted costume drama with its distinctly theatrical feel and lighting but it just feels predictable and a little bit like something we’ve all seen before. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 1 SEPTEMBER 2017

 

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Hotel Salvation (2016)

Dir: Shubhashish Bhutiani | Drama | 110′ | Cast: Lalit Behl, Adil Hussain, Navnindra Behl | India

In this appealing arthouse drama a 77 year-old grandfather Daya (Lalit Behl) dreams that his life is coming to an end and travels to the sacred site of Varanasi in order to prepare for his final days and achieve salvation according to his Hindu faith. His put-upon son Rajiv (Adil Hussain/Life of Pi) decides to accompany his needy father – more out of duty than desire – but the two gradually bond by the banks of the Ganges while the rest of us experience the inner workings of traditional Hindu life and the spirituality of this hallowed riverside location.

HOTEL SALVATION is the confident feature debut of Indian director Shubhashish Bhutiani who is best known in film circles for his Venice-awarded short Kush (2013). Working with a low budget and including gentle humour to avoid over-sentimentality the director highlights family tension throughout first between Daya and Rajiv and then between Rajiv and his own daughter Sunita (Palomi Ghosh) who is engaged to be married and keen to make her own way in life. Meanwhile, the stressed-out Rajiv is trying to run a business with his efforts being constantly undermined by the niggling demands of his father, who meanwhile is steadily befriending a wise woman of his own generation Vimla (Navnindra Behl). There is no controversy here as the intergenerational conflicts are gently smoothed over despite one frantic scene where the tempo is raised over Sunita’s love life, forcing Rajiv to get back home.

The HOTEL SALVATION in question refers to a rather ramshackle retreat in the heart of Varanasi where the elderly repair to review their lives and come to terms with their own mortality. It is a place of transformative tranquility where a sadhu presides over the daily prayer rituals which are never taken too seriously, as in a scene where the Daya on his last legs commands that the mourning musicians “sing in tune please”. Certainly an experience to relish HOTEL SALVATION is a treasure not to be missed. MT

OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE AT ARTHOUSE CINEMAS FROM 28 AUGUST 2017

 

Loving Vincent (2017) | BfI London Film Festival 2017

The 61st BFI London Film Festival has announced the UK premiere of LOVING VINCENT. Broadcast live from the National Gallery on Monday 9 October, audiences in cinemas across the country are invited to experience the film premiere and the following Q&A with special guests. Tickets go on-sale for the UK-wide screenings from Wednesday 23 August at LovingVincent.Film. Tickets for the National Gallery premiere go on sale on Friday 25 August (BFI Patrons and Champions from 11:30am, Members from 12:30pm) and to the public from 31 August, and will be available from the BFI.

LOVING VINCENT is a stunning, fully painted animated feature, starring Douglas Booth and Oscar-nominated Saoirse Ronan and directed by Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman. Loving Vincent explores the life and controversial death of Vincent van Gogh, told by his paintings and by the characters that inhabit them. The intrigue unfolds through interviews with the characters closest to Vincent and through dramatic reconstructions of the events leading up to his death. BFI REVIEW

THE BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 5 -15 OCTOBER 2017

Back to Burgundy | Ce Qui Nous Lie (2016)

Dir: Cedric Klapisch | Cast: Pio Marmai, Ana Girardot, Francois Civil, Jean-Marc Roulot, Maria Valverde, Jean-Marie Winling | 113′ | France | Drama

Cedric Klapisch (Paris) offers a fresh and funky wine-themed family drama along similar lines to the more sedate Bordeaux-set You Will Be My Son (Gilles Legrand) and the Beaujolais-soaked Saint Amour with Gerard Depardieu.

This time we are in Burgundy in a domaine inherited by three siblings in the shape of Jean (Pio Marmai); Juliette (Ana Girardot) and Jeremie (Francois Civil) whose father (Eric Caravaca – seen in flashback) is on his way out. Once again inheritance, family and business are the main concerns in this light-hearted film which offers insight into the workings of the wine trade in the glorious French countryside and a cameo role for Klapisch in the final scenes.

Jean has recently returned from Australia where he runs a winery with his Spanish wife Alicia (Maria Valverde) and the film is narrated and viewed from his perspective. Up to now Juliette has been running the estate with her younger brother Jeremie and the experienced manager and winemaker Marcel (Jean-Marc Roulot. Juliette has a rather underwritten role beyond her wine-making side, but Jeremy has married into one of Burgundy’s most prominent wine families headed by his overbearing father-in-law Anselme (Jean-Marie Winling) who like Niels Arestrup’s patriarch in You Will be My Son, doesn’t think his son-in-law is really up to the job – and he’s not far wrong. Jean, the more confident and charismatic of the sons – has his own business worries back home and a roving eye into the bargain for one Lina (Karidja Toure/Girlhood), that seems to suggest all is not well with his marriage. Jeremie ‘s issues lie more with his in-laws and wife (Yamee Couture), and he also feels resentful that Jean had been out of touch since their mother died five years earlier.

With its lively soundtrack, fabulous scenery and convincing plotlines Klapisch serves up a really well made and reliable premier cru Classé here. And despite the trio’s trials and tribulations,  the tone is always upbeat rather than maudlin. The narrative goes slightly off piste when it floats into the stormy waters of Jean’s relationship with Alicia, who turns up unexpectedly in the saggy third act. That said, Marmai really gives the drama its heart and soul, grabbing the glory in nearly every scene. The other two are more subtle, with Girardot’s Juliette struggling to convince her co-workers, and Civil’s Jeremie coming over as a little bit of a wuss. BACK TO BURGUNDY is an enjoyable and well-crafted film with its stunning scenery and vivacious score by Loik Dury and Christophe Minck giving a feeling of light-headed  joie de vivre. MT

OUT ON 1 SEPTEMBER AT ARTHOUSE CINEMAS NATIONWIDE

 

Return to Ithaca (2014)

Dir.: Laurent Cantet | Cast: Nestor Jiminez, Isabel Santos, Jorge Perugorria | France 2014, 95′ | Spanish with subtitles

As if we didn’t need a negative view of old age in our youth-centric society, Laurent Cantet’s contemplative character piece offers another one. RETURN TO ITHACA is a bittersweet good-bye to the ideas of youth; a meditation on approaching old age embued by feelings of utter despair all seen through the intimate revelations of a group of long-standing friends. Set in a roof-garden in Cuba one balmy summer night, the camera tries to offer emotional distance from the maudlin musings of its protagonists, with a script as stringent as it is depressing. Odysseus could have hardly felt more negative than Amadeo. Cantet (The Class) one again evokes a masterful merger of the personal and the political.

Amadeo (Jiminez), a writer, returns to Cuba after 16 years exile in Spain. Four of his best friends give him a welcome-back on the roof tops overlooking Havanna. But soon Amadeo outlives his welcome: his friends blame him indirectly for their life at home. Rafa, a painter, who can’t paint any more, is particularly angry. Tania (Santos), an ophthalmologist now living in Miami, can’t live on her earnings and needs the support of her children. And Eddy (Perugorria) is a minor functionary of the ruling party, an opportunist, who might be convicted soon for fraud; though he has supported his friends with money and jobs. Another friend has lost his job as an engineer, and works for the black market. Not that Amadeo had a great time in Spain in his first years – but for his friends he has lived in paradise. Soon the mood softens, and their common political past is discussed. All of them were idealistic followers of the Castro regime, but one by one they lost their enthusiasm, and opposed their masters – apart from Eddy, who lived the good life as a party member, whilst supporting his friends in the “inner opposition” materially.

This reflective arthouse piece will naturally have more appeal to the older generations than their younger counterparts. The Cuban adults here are the parents of children who have either left the country, or are planning to get out; the two generations have nothing in common: the parents, who have seen the pre-communist Cuba, exploited by the USA, hanker after their lost ideals; whilst the kids just want out. They all have a common resentment against the regime, not understanding why Amadeo wants to return. AS

NOW ON RELEASE FROM 25 AUGUST 2017 | REVIEW FROM VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2014

 

Your Name (2016)

Writer|Dir:  Makoto Shinkai

Cast: Ryunosuke Kamikim Mone Kamishiraishi, Ryo Narita, Aoi Yuki, obunaga Shimazaki, Kaito Ishikawa, Kanon Tani, Masaki Terasoma

If you’re missing Studio Ghibli, then Makoto Shinkai’s runaway anime ‘love story’ will certainly fit the bill, even though it doesn’t quite match up to the subtly magical humanist undertow achieved by the legendary Hayao Miyazaki and Mamoru Hosoda. Billed as a Sci fi fantasy, this body-swapping romp is a sheer delight, even if the ending may leave you perplexed. It tells the story of a Tokyo schoolboy and girl who undergo weird out-of-body experiences just when a comet is passing over Japan.  But when they try to meet up back in their own bodies, real romance turns into a bittersweet and often strangely humorous affair. YOUR NAME is strangely similar in its narrative to the recent Swedish film Girls Lost. 

The comet element also vaguely echoes Japan’s 2011 tragedy when a tsunami and an earthquake wreaked havoc on the population. This is conveyed in a startlingly gorgeous opening sequence where earthbound missiles fall through the sky like incandescent fireworks. Fragments of the comet alight in the countryside where Mitsuha is living with her grandma, in a cottage beside a lake. But Mitsuha craves other bright lights: those of Tokyo, where Taki (Ryunosuke Kamiki) is working as a waiter in the evenings after school. One day he wakes up in Mitsuha’s body, complete with breasts and other female attributes. Needless to say, Mitsuha is coping with Taki’s male bits and finding school quite a challenge, especially going to the loo. But her intuition works well when as Taki, she has a crush on a older girl.  Several times they actually wake up, and eventually manage to fathom out what is going on with their bodies.  It soon emerges that Mitsuha is actually three years ahead of Taki, living before the disaster that destroyed her town and many of neighbours.

Although Shinkai’s multiple plotlines start becoming rather confusing, largely due to memory loss that occurs when the two morph back into their own bodies, this is an impressive anime feature. And although some of the musical choices feel rather out of place with the dreamy status quo, this delightful and delicately rendered visual feast is appealing and entertaining to watch. MT

OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 18 November 2016 at VUE AND ODEON CINEMAS

 

 

Bushwick (2017)

Dir: Cary Murnion/Jonathan Milcot | Writer: Nick Damici | Cast: David Bautista, Brittany Snow, Chrisian Navarro, Arturo Castro | Drama | 93′ | US

BUSHWICK operates from the faintly outlandish idea that this Brooklyn suberb has been invaded by a faceless military coup forcing its denizens to defend themselves in order to survive. It never gets out of the shadow of this weak plot and questionable premise.

The action follows Lucy (Brittany Snow) and her medic turned janitor boyfriend (Dave Bautista) who have arrived back in her hometown to meet her parents. They emerge from the underground to discover that war has broken out and that a private militia is attempting to force the president to accept the secession of a number of Southern States. Don’t expect to be entertained by witty dialogue here. After a casual conversation in the opening scene the pair’s exchanges are reduced to “Oh my God”, “fuck” and “I feel really weird, like” and a range of other surprised expletives. Clearly, they had their earphones on for the previous weeks/months and failed to notice any political changes during their amorous wanderings. Didn’t Lucy’s parents warn them what to expect when they arrived in Brooklyn?

Directing from a script by Nick Damici, the filmmakers expect us to go along with this constantly unravelling scenario in a political thriller that’s about as tension-fuelled as a stroll in Prospect Park. Our heroes: Lucy, her boyfriend and her sister, seem to be incredibly emotional and stressed out by the ‘insurgency’ but there is really very little real fighting to be had in the streets of Bushwick apart from the odd punch-up and the hum of hovering aircraft, it’s also very dark.

Politically there seems to be some confusion as to who our heroes are fighting against; is it White Supremacy, Hasidic Jews or even Zombies shooting from a graveyard (in one scene) – which is at best ludicrous. This half-baked political narrative is not helped by predictable characters and lacklustre cinematography in street scenes that feel stagey rather than convincing for an action thriller. What could have been an opportunity to make a shrewd political and social statement just misfires radically from the outset. The ensemble cast are unremarkable, not even Bautista (Guardians of the Galaxy) can inject any real macho charisma here. MT.

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 25 AUGUST \ EST TVOD 28 AUGUST 2017

 

Mimosas (2016)

Dir: Oliver Laxe | Writer: Santiago Fillol | Drama | 96min | French and Arabia

In medieval Morocco, two nefarious tribesmen are tasked with accompanying a dying sheikh through the treacherous Atlas Mountains in Oliver Laxe’s eerily hypnotic arthouse drama.

Best described as a meditation on the strength of religious faith, this proves to be a gruelling journey – both physically and metaphorically – but it is resonant and ravishing to watch in its and spartan simplicity, and set to an atmospheric occasional score it has the striking otherworldly quality of Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972) and Last Days in the Desert (2015). 

The travellers Saïd (Saïd Aagli) and Ahmed (Ahmed Hammoud) are eventually aiming for the ancient city of Sijilmasa, which is the ancestral home of the sheikh and where he intends to be buried. But death does not wait and reaches him during his final journey on a bleak mountainside. The caravaneers, fearful of the mountain, refuse to continue transporting the corpse.

In a parallel narrative, set in the modern world, a couple of taxi drivers who are modern incarnations of Ahmed and Shakib, fight for the job of taking the sheikh to his final resting place in their rickety vehicles. Shakib is chosen. Once again, his assignment is clear: he has to help the accidental caravaneers to reach their destination.

As the caravan travels, so the mostly reluctant tribesmen diminish in number, as one is drowned in fast-flowing river, as the troup come under fire from bandits, French Spanish director Brings his experience of living in Morocco to bear in a thoughtful drama that sometimes feels elliptical and difficult to connect with for the uninitiated. But there is plenty to enjoy in Laxe’s magnificent visuals and the film connects loosely with Ben Rivers’ 2015 film The Sky Trembles and The Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers (2015), which featured Part of the shooting of MIMOSAS.

The cast of newcomers provide convincing performances and only occasionally angry outbursts disturb the tranquility of this placid and relaxing drama enhanced by Mauro Herce’s resplendent cinematography. MT

REVIEWED AT CANNES | WINNER, THE CRITICS WEEK GRAND PRIZE 2016 |

The Untamed | La Region Selvaje (2016)

Dir: Amat Escalante | 100min | Fantasy drama | Mexico Denmark |

Amat Escalalnte follows his Cannes-awarded Heli with a community based sci-fi fantasy drama inspired by the machismo, homophobia and misogyny of his native Mexico.

THE UNTAMED is an obscure and unsettling piece that deftly manages its tonal shifts – from grim social realism to sinister fantasy – in a mysterious narrative slowly unfolds, taking its characters to unexpected places while leaving them firmly rooted in contemporary Guanajuato, weighed down by their reality of poverty, overcrowding and crime.

In the outskirts of a town a large crater has opened up filled with animals that appear to have been affected by an extraterrestrial force. One of these has morphed into a benign tentacled creature capable of giving ultimate sexual satisfaction to the women who visit its cabin in the woods. But the creature can also turn nasty, like a disgruntled male. In this way, THE UNTAMED could work as a metaphor for Mexican oppression and the dire social issues facing the country, or for any other Western country caught in the current climate of political and social uncertainty.

We first meet Veronica (Simone Bucio) a willowy waif in the throws of ecstacy, courtesy of our alien-like tentacled tempter in his darkened cabin. This is one of the most bewildering scenes of the film and is captured by the same cinematographer who worked on Nymphomaniac. In a further twist, the creature is being looked after by a weird couple who are purported to possess psychic powers.

Meanwhile, back in town, young mother of two Ale (Ruth Ramos) is being abused by her husband Angel (Jesus Meza), a brutish civil engineer in a sexual relationship with her brother Fabian (Eden Villavicencio), who works in the local hospital where Veronica turns up later with a strange wound on her torso. The two are clearly attracted to one another and decide to meet up later, where it emerges that Fabian is unhappy with Angel.

The trio’s situation grows all the more desperate due to the Sci-fi occurences in the nearby woods: nothing is clear, everything seems to be degenerating both ecologically and societally for the country and its people who are caught in the grip of circumstances beyond their control.Despite the underwritten characters, Escalante’s attempts to chanel Mexico’s serious social issues into this Sci-fi drama are convincing and exciting marking him out as one cinema’s most visionary contemporary filmmakers.  MT

NOW ON BFI PLAYER

 

 

 

Napping Princess (2017)

Dir.: Kenji Kamiyama; Anime; Voices of: Mitsuki Takahata, Shin’nosuke Mitsushima, Tomoya Maeno; Japan 2017, 110 min.

Director/writer Kenji Kamiyama (Ghost in the Shell) continues his critique of Japanese society with NAPPING PRINCESS, an Anime featuring Kokone, a teenage schoolgirl who has to clean up not only the contemporary world, but also a parallel world of sorcerers and monsters. Kamiyama makes impressive use of the Isekai genre – where protagonists have a double life in another world – showing that modern society is not that much different from other eras.

Instead of studying hard for her university entrance examine, Kokone (Takahata), regularly oversleeps and often manages on to fall asleep during lessons. In her vivid dreams, she believes that she is Ancien, the unruly daughter of the King of Heartland, who rebels against her car-obsessed father: every citizen has to drive a brand new vehicle, the production line is active 24/7. Workers are punished for lateness, even though the traffic is near to standstill. When Colossos, a giant mechanical monster appears, the King orders the building of transformer-likes machines which are pedalled from the inside by workers. Ancien, helped by the pirate Peach, makes full use of her magic powers, but is hunted down by the King’s evil mandarin Watanabe, who wants to exile the sorceress for good. Meanwhile, in the ‘real’ world problems also mount up: just before the opening of the Tokyo Olympics in 2020, her hipster father Kijita (Maeno), masquerading as a car mechanic, has finished the computer programme for pilotless cars, which will transport guest and athletes during the games. The programme had been started by Kokone’s mother, who had left her father, the CEO of a big car manufacturing company, who was then unwilling, to invest in pilotless cars. After the death of his wife, Kijita has completed the software program. The Watanabe-like Deputy CEO of Kokone’s grandfather’s company, now tries to usurp his boss, trying to lay his hands on the program. When Kokone realises, that Ancien is not herself, but her mother, she has another ally and can fight back successfully on both fronts, being also helped by her class mate Miori (Mitsushina).

Also known as Ancien and the Magic Tablet (much more appropriate than this rather silly title), Kamiyana connects the two worlds perfectly: the equivalent protagonists complementing each other’s characters to the full. But the main premise is that Kokone is a perfect role model: very much in love with technology, and adept and successful at using it, just like the male protagonists. She uses her emotional intelligence to deal with the opposite sex, who are unable to empathise. The only criticism of NAPPING PRINCESS is that the back-story is told over the rolling end-credits and not integrated into the main Anime.

ON RELEASE: 16th August 2017  A full list of sites can be found here:

http://nappingprincessmovie.co.uk/

 

 

Patti Cake$ (2017)

Dir: Geremy Jasper | Cast: Danielle Macdonald, Bridget Everett | Siddarth Dharanjay | Drama | 108′

PATTI CAKE$ follows a common formula: a depressed and overweight girl has aspirations of making it in the music business with hopes kindled by the likes of X Factor. This is not New York City but the backwaters of New Jersey, where our heroine’s day job is in a bottom-feeders downtown bar.

With the buzz around celebritiy status, these kind of ‘talent discovery’  films are becoming predictably schematic: on one level they feed the dreams of the disenchanted, but in a world where everyone can become a star, the firmament gets rather overheated. And this is the case with PATTI CAKE$ which is sparky, well-made and cinematic, a bit saggy in the middle – you may doze off – but otherwise perfectly decent. The main character Patti, also known as Killer P, Dumbo and Patricia (newcomer Danielle MacDonald) is, as usual, bored with her humdrum existence at home with skanky mom Barb (Bridget Everett) and fag-smoking grandma (Cathy Moriarty) who is laid up in bed unable to pay her medical bills. So far, so convincing. Patti’s best mates with the local chemist Hareesh (Siddharth Dhananjay) who joins around with her when she comes in for grandma’s drugs, then joins her in a sudden outlandish ‘star-quest’ to the Big City.

But where is the evidence of Patricia’s musical talents, or grafting towards a career in that direction? Apart from noting down a few lines in a notebook, there is no backstory or history that makes us want to root for her as a budding star, or any great tunes – for that matter. Patti’s dream rapper is also a fictional star, rather than a real one, and a cypher into the bargain, adding further bum notes to this musical drama. Then we’re led to believe that her Black mate and ‘enabler’ Bob, aka the Antichrist, is some charismatic mystical charmer who ends up having little to say – let alone sing or play.

After a few setbacks, the action culminates in a showcase rap competition where her mother is grafted in to aid and abet proceedings with her trusty lung power, consoling the teary two in a crowd-pleasing finale. PATTI CAKE$ works as light entertainment but certainly no standout, as we were led to believe by the Sundance hype earlier on this year. MT

ON RELEASE 1 SEPTEMBER 2017

 

Prick Up Your Ears (1987) | Re-release

Dir.: Stephen Frears; Cast: Gary Oldman, Alfred Molina, Vanessa Redgrave, Frances Barber, Julie Walters, Wallace Shawn; UK 1987, 105 min.

Portraying the relationship between playwright Joe Orton and his lover and erstwhile collaborator Kenneth Halliwell, director Stephen Frears relies on a brilliant script by Alan Bennett, based on the Orton biography of John Lahr. But it is not the brutal ending, in the summer of 1967, which shocks up most but the seamy atmosphere dominating London at the time, a far cry from the “swinging’ myth of the late Sixties: instead, Frears’ London is a sordid mixture of repression, provinciality and squalidness.

Joe Orton (Oldman), coming from a lower-middle class family in Leicester, met Kenneth Halliwell, six years his senior, when they were both studying at RADA in 1951. Halliwell had a cultured and sophisticated middle-class education, and Orton, whose highest achievements were in shorthand typing, had never met anyone quite like him before.  During the course of their relationship, the tables were turned, and new power structure emerged; with Orton not only becoming a successful playwright, but also spreading his wings sexually, cottaging in the seedier parts of Islington, which at the time was still quite run-down.

For a decade, Orton and Halliwell had collaborated writing novels and plays (which are lost), but after both men were convicted to six months imprisonment, in 1962, for defacing highbrow literary works they stole from the local library (Halliwell decorated the walls of their bedsit with collages torn from the book’s pages), Joe developed a new creative energy, which set him apart from Halliwell. As Orton’s agent Peggy Ramsey (a playful Vanessa Redgrave) put it, “Halliwell became the first wife”, being discarded after the success of the ‘husband’.

Some scenes are set in Orton’s home in Leicester, where we meet his sister (and executor) Leonie (Barber) and mother Elsie (Walters in an early caricature). Again, it is surprising, that the ambience of Orton’s family home is not that much different that of the couple’s flat in Noel Street, Islington. And the meetings between Ramsey and John Lahr (Shawn), are more gossiping sessions than literary discourse. When Ramsey gains access to the flat after the murder/suicide, she steals Orton’s diary and Halliwell’s final note: “If you read this, all will be explained. P.S. Especially the latter part”. Even after the gruesome find, Ramsey acts with an egoistical meanness, which is symptomatic of many of the film’s characters.

Oldman is superb as the cocky Orton, who, after all the repression of provincial Leicester, is hell bent on enjoying himself in London. Not to demean Leicester, which has spawned many a talent: Richard and David Attenborough; Michael Kitchen; Graham Chapman; Bill Maynard; Kate O’Mara; Una Stubbs; Julian Barnes, Sue Townsend and Frears himself, to name a few). Whilst aware of Halliwell’s deteriorating mental health, Orton does not see the danger signs: whilst on holiday in Morocco, Halliwell violently destroys Orton’s typewriter. Orton, as narcissistic as Halliwell, seems to get younger during the narrative, whilst Halliwell succumbs to early mid-life depression. Molina’s terrific Halliwell cannot believe that life is slipping through his fingers: he is literally shrinking as a personality, whilst Orton grows into a public figure, even meeting Paul McCartney and writing a film script about the Beatles.

The ending is tragic, but somehow logical: Halliwell feels his life is being diminished by Orton – who is also demeaning his sexually, he cannot bear the reminder of his own failure – in contrast to Orton’s success – neither can be live with the fact that he killed his ‘other half’. Frears’ direction is absorbing, capturing the sadness of a tragic love story and well as the caustic humour the two enjoyed until things went wrong. AS

ON RELEASE COURTESY OF PARK CIRCUS FROM AUGUST 5 2017

Lift to The Scaffold (1959) l’Ascenseur a l’Echafaud | Jeanne Moreau Tribute

Dir.: Louis Malle | Writers: Louis Malle/Roger Nimier | Novel: Noel Calef | Score: Miles Davis | DoP: Henri Decae | Cast: Jeanne Moreau, Maurice Ronet, Lino Ventura, Georges Poujourly, Yori Bertin | France, 92 min     Drama

Unlike the rest of the Nouvelle Vague directors, Louis Malle was a seasoned documentarian (The Silent World), before he made his first feature Lift to the Scaffold based on a book he just happened to pick up in a station in Paris. In the same way, the film’s narrative relies very much on chance.

Lift_to_the_Scaffold_(1958)_pic_3

The historical connections are pivotal: In 1957 the French Indochina war had ended three years previously, and the Algerian War of Independence was entering its third year. There was, as usual, a great amount of money to be made from wars, and arms-dealing was a major factor in the French economy. Both the perpetrator Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet/Plein Soleil) and his victim and boss Simon Carala knew each other from their time in the army. Both men have a shady past and an unscrupulous present. Meanwhile Carala runs an outfit that is not altogether straightforward, underlined in a conversation between the men before tragedy strikes.

But the is Jeanne Moreau’s film.  As Florence Carala, and Tavernier’s mistress she really believes in the passion behind the crime passionelle, whispering into her lover’s ear: “We will be free, it has to be” before Julien enters the company premises, giving himself a perfect alibi, before committing his crime. Passing it all off as a suicide, Tavernier forgets a vital element. He goes back into the building but is caught in the lift on his way down.

Lift_to_the_Scaffold_1 copy

Florence spends the whole night wandering through the streets of Paris, intoxicated by despair before her arrest as a prostitute; a second, much younger couple enters the scene: Veronique (Bertin) works in flower shop, and her immature boyfriend Louis (Poujourly) who epitomises the Nouvelle Vague antihero: young, feckless, aimlessly sliding into criminality with his poor choices. While Tavernier is stuck in the lift, he steals his car and sets out with Veronique to a motel in nearby Normandy, where they meet a middle-aged German couple.

After a champagne-fuelled evening, Louis shoots the husband dead, stealing his Mercedes to return to Paris where the two “commit” suicide with sleeping pills. But the romantic gesture leads only to a few hours sleep before Florence turns up, having tracked them down in an attempt to clear Tavernier’s name.

Henry Decae’s grainy black and white photography is understated and hauntingly impressionistic evoking the forthcoming doom.

Merc

When Florence drifts aimlessly through the Paris night, he puts the camera into a pram and follows her from the ground upwards. His ‘Paris’ must have been the Godard’s inspiration for Alphaville. Tavernier’s ‘prison’ in the lift is rendered with shades of Bresson. And in the way Decae pictures the stylish cars he makes it obvious why they are the phallic extensions for men: cleaning capsules of desire, ready to transport away from reality. Miles Davis music score is the most resonant part of this melancholic film – it underscores the loneliness of the two women, and the macho materialism of the males. And to top it all, there is Lino Ventura’s detective, calculating, heartless – an extreme misogynist, who loves trapping people, using modern technology with sadistic glee.

What sets out as a love story with a murder, ends in a bloodbath and a trible murder, shattering illusions, and leaving us with regret. The portrait of a lonely place, where immature men hold sway, and women follow simperingly in their wake, with no place to go in this cruel and hapless Brave, New World.

NOW ON BFIPLAYER

 

 

Land of Mine | Under Sandet (2015)

Dir.: Martin Zandvliet; Cast: Roland Moller, Laura Bro, Mikkel Boe Folsgaard, Emil Buschow, Oscar Buschow, Louis Hofman; Denmark/Germany 2015, 100 min.

Denmark is one of the few countries emerging from WWII with a measure of credit: mainly for its resistance against Nazi Germany and particularly its defence of its Jewish population. But writer/director Martin Zandvliet (A Funny Man) has uncovered a post-war incidence which somehow tarnishes the unblemished humanistic record of this Scandinavian country.

Set on the Western Danish coast just after the end of the Second World War, LAND OF MINE tells the story of Sergeant Rasmussen (Moller) in charge of a group of German teenage soldiers commanded to clear the coast of about two million mines placed by the German who expected the Allies (wrongly) to land there. Sergeant Rasmussen fosters open hatred towards the Germans: he obviously has been witness to the atrocities of the Nazis in his country.

Near the barracks, Karin (Bro), a Danish woman lives with her little daughter and supports the sergeant’s hostile attitude towards the POWs. For some reason, the teenagers are not being fed and Rasmussen starts to steal provisions for them – initially to help them work more efficiently. But after the first casualties, Rasmussen becomes aware that these young conscripts are hardly the experienced Nazi soldiers and SS troopers whose murderous regime he had to live under during the war. Rasmussen relaxes his regime, even gives the young men a day off. But this all changes when his dog is blown up by a mine in a coastal district declared “clean” by the Germans. More teenagers are killed before they risk themselves to save the life of Karin’s daughter, who has veered off into an un-cleared section of the beach. When his superior Lt. Ebbe (Foolsgaard), a hardliner, wants Rasmussen to transport the four survivors to clear another district, the Sergeant – who had promised the boy that they could go home – has to make a decision.

LAND OF MINE is an essay on forgiveness: highly controversial, since the relatives of the victims of the Nazi-terror are still alive, together with some survivors of the concentration camps. But Zandvliet makes clear that these teenage conscripts had no choice – and whilst the higher echelons of the Nazi party and army fled before the liberation, these young soldiers were left behind. Over 2000 were made to pay the debt for their elders, in clearing the mines, more than half of them were injured or killed during the process. Moller’s Rasmussen is a fine character study: his emotional changes show a decent man who is still suffering from the trauma of the occupation, but is still willing to give his humanistic Ego a chance, even against his own military authorities. DOP Camilla Hjelm Knudsen, the wife of the director captures a desert-like landscape where some of the alienated and isolated teenagers would sometimes rather commit suicide than go on living. Never didactic, LAND OF MINE keeps the audience engrossed with the gripping shifts of emotion for all parties concerned. AS

SHOWING AT CINEMAS FROM 4 AUGUST 2017

Victim (1961) | re-release

Dir: Basil Dearden | Writers: Janet Green & John McCormick | Cast: Dirk Bogarde, Sylvia Syms, Dennis Price, Nigel Stock, Peter McEnery, Donald Churchill, Anthony Nicholls, Hilton Edwards, Norman Bird, Derren Nesbitt, Alan MacNaughton, Noel Howlett, Charles Lloyd Pack, John Barrie, John Cairney, David Evans | UK / Drama / 100min

VICTIM was the second – and achieved by far the greatest impact – of a trio of topical “problem pictures” made by the team of producer Michael Relph and director Basil Dearden from screenplays by Janet Green. Sapphire (1959) had been about race relations, and Life for Ruth (1962) about religion. Of the three, VICTIM had had the most clearly defined purpose behind it, which was the repeal of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 criminalising homosexuality – described in the film as “The Blackmailer’s Charter” – as recommended by the Wolfenden report of 1957.

Janet Green (1908-1993) had read the report, and while the government of Harold Macmillan – for reasons made only too apparent by VICTIM itself – was dragging its heels, she, with her husband and co-writer John McCormick, anticipated Costa-Gavras’s Z (1969) in employing the conventions of a fast-moving, entertaining thriller to make a serious political film that packs a lot into a trim 100 minutes; embellished by handsome London locations and noirish interiors, by veteran cameraman Otto Heller (responsible for the visual impact of other classics like Peeping Tom and The Ipcress File).

It’s easy now to mock VICTIM for being dated, but politicians and other public figures today still dread the power without responsibility triumphantly wielded by our tabloid press. The role of the redtops in the fear and paranoia depicted in VICTIM is occasionally mentioned in passing; and just two years later the field day the Sunday papers had with the revelations that came out in court about the activities of our social betters during the trial of Stephen Ward vividly convey what Melville Farr could look forward to at the conclusion of VICTIM . On 9 November 1998 – over thirty years after decriminalisation – The Sun was still stoking the flames with its classic front page headline “Are we being run by a gay Mafia?”. In the United States VICTIM was refused a seal of approval by the Production Code Administration, and this remarkable passage in Time magazine that greeted its US release in February 1962 is worth quoting at length:

“What seems at first an attack on extortion seems at last a coyly sensational exploitation of homosexuality as a theme – and, what’s more offensive, an implicit approval of homosexuality as a practice. Almost all the deviates in the film are fine fellows – well dressed, well-spoken, sensitive, kind. The only one who acts like an invert turns out to be a detective. Everybody in the picture who disapproves of homosexuals proves to be an ass, a dolt or a sadist. Nowhere does the film suggest that homosexuality is a serious (but often curable) neurosis that attacks the biological basis of life itself.”

VICTIM was released bearing an ‘X’ certificate, and the era it depicts now seems as remote as the war years: a time when the police drove Bentleys and ‘phone boxes still had a button B. But anybody who considers the issues it raises moribund should remember that as I write there are about a dozen countries in the world today where homosexuality is punishable by death. One only needs look at the debate (and the language) the film continues to provoke in forums like YouTube to be reminded of how this issue still polarizes society, and that there are plenty of bigots still out there, irately convinced that they’re being muzzled by political correctness; “our crime”, as Lord Fullbrook puts it, “damned nearly parallel with robbery with violence”. While Eddy complains that “Henry paid rates and taxes…but they knew he couldn’t go out and call the cops”, it’s interesting to be reminded that one of the blackmailers accused the police of “Protecting perverts” even when homosexuality was illegal, and back in 1961 could firmly be of the opinion that “They’re everywhere, everywhere you turn! The police do nothing. Nothing!!”.

VICTIM goes out its way to avoid sensationalism, and it is precisely because it in every other respect so resembles a conventional black & white crime film of the period that one can still feel the shock audiences must have experienced in 1961 when Inspector Harris deceptively casually asks Farr “you knew of course that he was a homosexual?”, followed by the eye-watering statistic that at the time “as many as 90% of all blackmail cases have a homosexual origin”. If it seems too genteel for 21st Century tastes, the scene in which Derren Nesbitt wrecks Charles Lloyd Pack’s shop still provides a literally shattering reminder of the barely contained physical violence always ready to rear up from behind the prejudice now known as “hate crime”.

The casting of Dirk Bogarde makes the film what it is. Several other actors (including Jack Hawkins, James Mason and Stewart Granger) had understandably already turned down the role, but Bogarde accepted without hesitation; and on so many levels the film is inconceivable without him. (Anyone who thinks it was the first time he’d played a homosexual onscreen, however, plainly hasn’t seen the film he made immediately prior to it, The Singer Not the Song.) Almost as bold on Bogarde’s part was that in VICTIM he was for the first time playing his age – 40 – although this is more than compensated for by the fact that he never looked more debonair and distinguished than he does here. The entire cast obviously cared about their roles, right down to the smallest parts (as frequently happened in those days, veteran character actor John Boxer as the amiable policeman attempting to comfort Boy Barrett in his cell, and John Bennett – who in the opening episode of ‘Porridge’ was the prison doctor who asked Fletcher if he had ever been a practising homosexual – as “the bloke in the pinstripe”, make vivid impressions without being included in the cast list at the end). Although the blackmailers themselves are often described in accounts of the film as “a ring” or “a gang”, there in fact turn out to be only two of them; a pair of bloodcurdling ghouls worthy of the Addams family – the grinning, cheerfully amoral Derren Nesbitt and his vengeful associate piously convinced that “Someone’s got to make them pay for their filthy blasphemy.” As Inspector Harris (a superb performance by John Barrie) says to his stern Scottish sergeant (John Cairney), “I can see that you’re a true puritan, Bridie…there was a time when that was against the law, you know.”  Richard Chatten

VICTIM IS NOW SHOWING IN CINEMAS NATIONWIDE COURTESY OF PARK CIRCUS

Wish Upon (2017)

Dir.: John Leonetti | Cast: Joey King, Ryan Philippe, Shannon Purser, Alice Lee, Mitchell Stuggart, Josephine Langford | US 2017 | 90min.

Director John Leonetti (Annabelle) directs Barbara Marshall’s clever script about teenage angst and crass materialism as a horror flick with depth. Unfortunately, the majority of the cast lets him down badly.

Claire (King), whose mother committed suicide when she was a child, is a very unhappy teenager at High School. She simply craves male attention and female admiration – but only her two friends June (Purser) and Gina (Lee) give her any support. After a catfight with blonde school-queen Darcie (Langford) in the school cafeteria, Claire’s Dad gives her a Chinese music box he found in the rubbish bin, which turns out to fulfil the seven wishes of its owner. Spontaneously, Claire wishes that Darcie will simply “rot away”.

Strangely, Darcie wakes up with very serious health problems – then Claire’s dog dies under mysterious circumstances. The pattern repeats itself Claire whose wish for a monster-inheritance and the love of Paul (Slaggart) come true, but people close to her die gruesome deaths. With one wish left, even Claire has twigged what is going on – but just a everything seems to go back to normal, a brilliant coup-de-grace is delivered.

WISH UPON shows the majority of teenagers to be self-obsessed big spenders. And Claire, like the majority of her peer-group, goes for nothing but looks in her choice of boy-friend: Paul is as empty-headed as possible. June and Gina are only too happy to go on a spending spree with Claire after her newly found wealth, and it seems more than odd that June should ask Claire “Why did you not wish for a cure of cancer?” – even though she has a point.

DoP Michael Galbraith (My Big Fat Greek Wedding) finds original angles on death by lift and kitchen equipment – to name a few – and Leonetti manages to find the right mixture of suspense and critique. But the cast lets the whole show down: swinging arms and rolling eyes are the main forms of expression, which is a pity because it takes away an underlying seriousness to what could have been a terrific mystery horror film. AS

 

Howards End (1992) | ***** Re-release

Dir.: James Ivory; Cast: Emma Thompson, Anthony Hopkins, Helena Bonham-Carter, Vanessa Redgrave, Samuel West, Nicola Duffett, Jemma Rgrave, Joseph Bennett, James Wilby, Prunella Scales, Adrian Ross Magenty, Susie Lindeman; UK/Japan/USA 1992, 140 min.

Based on E.M. Forster’s classic 1910 novel, HOWARDS END is a towering achievement considering the team that made the film – apart from the actors, of course – were not British. American James Ivory got together with Indian Ismail Marchant and asked Polish Ruth Prawer Jhabvala to write the script, which won her an Oscar. Together they evoke English sensibilities to make a film that feels more English than the current state of affairs, harking back to an era of values that have now more or less disappeared. It remains the most successful Forster screen adaptation, and for quite a modest budget.

HOWARDS END is the story of three families: the Wilcox clan, a wealthy industrialist family, the (German) Schlegels, progressive Bohemians in the Bloomsbury mould and the ever so humble middle class couple Leonard and Jackie Bast, forced together through necessity rather than love. Set just before the outbreak of the First World War, which would change Europe forever, the story explores the subtleties of the English class system: a delicately balanced affair so gracefully nuanced in Prawar Jhabvala’s intelligent scirpting.

The Schlegel family meet the Wilcox’s at a party where the youngest of the three siblings, Helen (Bonham-Carter) grows close to Paul Wilcox (Bennett), exchanging a midnight kiss. Since Paul, as the youngest brother “has no money of his own”, he is set to seek his fortune in Nigeria so the engagement has no future. Later Margaret Schlegel (Thompson), the oldest and most responsible of the siblings, bonds with Ruth Wilcox (Redgrave) over the value of spirituality and the dying Ruth leaves her family home, Howards End in Hertfordshire, to Margaret. Her husband and soon to be widower Henry (Hopkins), the unchallenged patriarch of the family, incandescent with discrete rage, burns his wife’s hand-written will, with the support of his daughter Evie (Redgrave) and trumped up son Charles (Wilby) and fiancée Dolly (Lindemann). Touched by the kindness of city clerk Leonard Bast (West), who lends Helen his umbrella to shelter from the rain, a socially awkward friendship develops between Bast and the Schlegels who make an ill-advised suggestion regarding his employment, that will later regret.

Margaret is in no doubt of her position as an ageing single woman and sensibly grows closer to Henry who falls back on her stalwart emotional support soon after Ruth’s demise. The two marry and at the wedding party of Charles and Dolly, Leonard Bast and his wife Jackie (Duffett) make their presence known, in no uncertain terms. An embarrassing truth then emerges that destabilises Henry and he threatens to call his wedding off. Meanwhile Helen,  frustrated and left on the sidelines when her siblings move on, unwisely takes up the Bast’s cause, queering the pitch and crossing the fine line between social milieux as the final chapter of the saga enfolds.

Forster’s novel cleverly illustrates both strong and reckless leadership: Margaret takes responsibility for her sister Helen, who is always embroiling herself in emotional battles, which Margaret has to resolve. Her brother Tibby (Magenty), is a drip, but also a narcissistic student, plagued by the same self-importance indulgence as Helen. It falls to Margaret, to keep the capricious duo afloat. In contrast, Henry Wilcox is strong and pragmatic provided he has a female partner by his side. His children are, in very different ways, countermanded by his dominating authority, having had no chance to develop on their own strength of personality. When tragedy strikes and his position in the family is at risk, Henry tries to be conciliatory. Sitting tired and broken on the lawn, is metaphor and symbolic of the endgame: the slaughterhouse of the Great War. Finally, Leonard Bast is a man of principles, but has no means to realise them. From today’s perspective, Forster’s ending, that the meek should inherit the world – in this case Howards End – is rather wishfully optimistic. Yet in a clever way, this is what eventually happens. Emma Thompson’s brilliantly elegant performance as Margaret, cleverly negotiating her way through enemy lines to victory for all concerned, while maintaining a British stiff upper lip.

DoP Tony Pierce-Roberts (The Remains of the Day), conjures up lush and languid images of the countryside, and rather more detached and austere ones in the London scenes. The countryside is shown as a refuge for a dying era; the city a dark and rather Dickensian place of torment. Emma Thompson reigns supreme, whilst Hopkins is at his acid best. The doom-laden atmosphere prevails in the soft English summer settings, and Ivory makes sure that the emphasis is always on the second word of the title. MT

HOWARDS END IS BACK IN CINEMAS FROM 28 JULY 2017 | COURTESY OF THE BFI

The Music Room (1958) | Criterion Bluray release

Dir:. Saryajit Ray | India | Drama | 99min | B&W

THE MUSIC ROOM (Jalsaghar) is probably the most exotically opulent of Satyajit Ray’s films, sumptuously showcasing the traditional cultural references of his native Bengal.

Based on a short story by Tarasankar Banerjee, it tells of a rather arrogant 1920s Bengali aristocrat, Roy, who rides on his enormous ceremonial elephant, called Moti, and lives a closeted life during in his rambling palace overrun with bats and threadbare treasures, and determined to keep up appearances despite his gradually dwindling financial resources. Married to the graceful and long-suffering Mahamaya (Padmadevi), he intends to offer the finest tradional religious and cultural education to his son Khoka, mortgaging his wife’s precious jewels in the process. He is played with elegant restraint by Chhabi Biswas, who was to die several years later.

In the vast and crumbling music room of the palace, surrounded by portraits of his illustrious ancestors, he organises one last musical soiree serenaded by Calcutta’s most prestigious and sought after players, while he swallows his pride and drowns his sorrows in his servant’s handmade cocktails – a fly symbolically drowns in his glass as he stares mesmerised by the memories of his more illustrious past.

Meanwhile, his chief guest, Mahim Ganguli “I’m a self-made man, no pedigree” who has arrived for the evening in a car with a screeching horn, stretches out to throw the dancer Krishna Bai (exquisitely played by Rushan Kumari) a tip, but his arm is caught by the zeminder’s walking stick, reminding him of the protocol that his arriviste credentials have failed to recognise.

Subrata Mitra’s delicate lighting captures the joy and despair on the faces of Roy and his servant and evokes the magical riverside landscapes. And the music is evocative in recalling the ancient traditions of the aristocrat’s cultural heritage, offering fabulous entertainment in the process.

And although Ray seems in awe of his central character, what really comes across is their mutual respect, admiration and sadness for the death of this rich cultural past, and ultimately commanding our acceptance and sympathy for his pathetic but endearingly tragic hero. MT

OUT ON CRITERION NEW DIGITAL TRANSFER WITH UNCOMPRESSED MONAURAL SOUNDTRACK | INTERVIEW WITH SATYAJIT RAY (1984)

Screen Shot 2017-06-25 at 14.30.35

Scribe (2016)

Dir: Thomas Kruithof | Cast: Francois Cluzet, Denis Podalydes, Simon Abkarian, Alba Rohrwacher | Writers: Thomas Kruithof, Yann Gozlan | Thriller | 95min | French

You can’t help admiring Thomas Kruithof’s feature debut. It’s a rather stolid but quality conspiracy thriller starring Francois Cluzet (Intouchables) as a number-crunching former alcoholic who is forced into the shadowy underworld of political phone-tapping, desperate for work after his marriage breaks down. Kruithof is clearly nostalgia for the classic style of Sydney Pollack’s films of the 1970s. SCRIBE also has echoes of The Accountant.

Although thematically rather slim, this slick and stylish affair is watchable largely due to Cluzet’s quiet charisma and a reliably subtle turn from Alba Ruhrwacher who plays Sara, a vulnerable woman also struggling with post-addition. The two become romantically involved while Cluzet descends into a world of intrigue at the hands of his dodgy boss Clement (Podalydes), a man of mysterious motives who clearly has him by the short and curlies in this criminally charged environment.

Written by Kruithof and Yann Gozlan – who also collaborated on another enjoyable retro piece A Perfect Man – this is a noirish thriller that keeps its smouldering cards close to its chest while delivering intermittant bursts of tension, although the narrative is driven forward by unsettling atmosphere rather than plot twists. Stark Gordon Willis-style photography and Gregoire Auger’s terrifically suspensful score sizzles along in the background while Duval goes through his bewildering job often overhearing things he shouldn’t be privy to, such as details of a murder and suggestions of Middle Eastern political undercurrents. Clement’s purported sidekick (Simon Abkarian) drags him into the murky waters of a criminal twilight but Duval keeps on going despite warning signs that he should quit before the going gets dangerous. And eventually it does. SCRIBE is a sure-footed but safe debut. MT

SCRIBE is in cinemas and on demand from 21st July 2017

 

 

 

Julius Caesar at the Donmar Warehouse (2017)

Dir: Phyllida Lloyd | 120min | UK | Drama

Phyllida Lloyd’s rises to the challenge of filming The Donmar Warehouse’s all-female Julius Caesar production and she certainly pulls it off, allowing audiences everywhere to enjoy this audacious Shakespeare production. Not only only do we enjoy a ringside seat, but Lloyd ingeniously arms her cast with iPhones and adds her own inventive twists in the form of a drone that allows the action to be viewed from overhead, adding a touch of stealth and intrigue to the live event not only only making it feel as fierce and real as it did on the night, but dding value into the bargain – at half the price.

The film benefits from world class actors: Harriet Walter never shrinks from being gutsy in her performances and manages again here to evoke the butch manliness of Brutus,; Jade Anouka’s Mark Antony is restless and mercurial and Claire Dunne’s Octavius stands her ground in a powerful turn.

As the production reaches the final scenes, the camera draws us to the betrayal and deceit and Walter proves to be a fiery foil for Martina Laird’s Cassius, helped by the intimate stage lighting and the close proximity to their facial contortions reflecting exhilaration, anguish and the touching vulnerability of disappointment. Shakespeare fans and the arthouse crowd will certainly relish this inventive and cinematic version of the play. MT

OUT ON WEDNESDAY 12 JULY | FOR MORE INFORMATION FOLLOW THE LINK

The Last Word (2017)

Dir.: Mark Pellington; Cast: Shirley MacLaine, Amanda Seyfried, Ann’Jewel Lee, Philip Baker-Hall, Anne Heche, Thomas Sadowski; USA 2017, 108 min.

Director Mark Pellington does his best to direct a formulaic script from debut writer Stuart Ross Falk – and more often than not succeeds with the help of Shirley MacLaine and a great ensemble cast.

MacLaine plays cantankerous octogenarian ex-advertising executive Harriet Lauler living out her days in a sumptuous villa where her gardener, cook and hairdresser are constantly fall short of her expectations – and replaced by Harriet herself. Her instinct to control everything goes even beyond the grave: she enlists Anne (Seyfried), the obituary writer of the local paper in the fictional city of Bristol, to write a piece singing her praises. Unfortunately, the checklist Harriet presents to Anne does not quiet work out: the matriarch is neither loved by her family (ex-hubby and daughter), nor admired by co-workers. And there is absolutely nobody whose life she has touched for the better.

Caustic as always, Harriet tries to remedy this by finding somebody from the target group of “minority or cripple”. But when she encounters Brenda (Lee) in a home for children at risk, the little black girl is very much a match for Harriet. Anne was abandoned by her mother when she was three, and has developed at developed a thick skin for dealing with the likes of Harriet, but she takes a leaf out of Brenda’s book, and develops a friendly but firm approach to counter Harriet’s obsessional control. This all seems convincing but Harriet’s long-suffering daughter Elizabeth (Heche) and her forgiving ex-husband Edward (Baker-Hill) are not fully sketched out and sometimes reality is suspended: Harriet not only finding a job as a morning DJ for the local radio-station, but also managing to set up Anne with the boss of the station (Sadowski, Seyfried’s real life husband). And when Anne’s clapped-out Volvo gives up the ghost after an – aborted – meeting with Elizabeth, Brenda ends up sleeping between the two women in a motel room, after a moonlight bath in the near-by lake.

Still, MacLaine’s performance compensates and carries the film through its pitfalls. The hopeful message about the interaction of three very different generations of North American females is told with great panache, even though at times a little over-didactic. MacLaine’s unsentimental approach and witty, self-depreciating humour makes sure that the soppy side of THE LAST WORD never wins out. AS

IN CINEMAS FROM 7 JULY 2017

Tommy’s Honour (2017)

Dir: Jason Connery | Cast: Sam Neill, Peter Mullan, Jack Lowden | Drama | 111min | UK

Even if you feel that golf is ‘a good walk spoilt’ – as the saying goes, TOMMYS HONOUR is a surprisingly moving biopic about the game’s Scottish founding father and his champion son (both called Thomas Morris) who was the youngest player to win the Golf Open in 1868, aged just 17, and played here with cocky charm by Jack Lowden. 

TOMMY’S HONOUR is the fifth feature of Jason Connery, the son of another famous Scottish legend and Bond, Sean. The film works both as a historical tribute to the popular sport and as a coming of age portrayal of rebellious youth versus experience that plays out through the feisty relationship between the quietly deferential old school caddie Peter Mullan – whose ginger beard is almost a character in itself – and his confident blue-eyed maverick son. 

Fortunately, golf takes a back seat after the rather stolid male-dominated opening scenes, and just as we’re hoping for some intrigue it arrives in the shape of a flirtation between sparky Edinburgh waitress Meg, played by Ophelia Lovibond and young Tom, who eventually becomes his wife amid controversy about her dubious background. From then on, Tom’s rise to fame plays out against the glorious Highland settings of St Andrews, and seaside skyscapes of Musselborough, just outside Edinburgh. The most we get to see of the actual game is through the on-course confrontations between Morris and his rivals, as young Tom gets ‘a hole in one’ in all weathers.

TOMMY’S HONOUR succeeds largely for its cleverly paced tension as Lowden’s swaggering confidence is challenged by Mullan’s thoughtful dominance as a father whose mild-mannered influence quietly wanes. Together they bring flair to a film that otherwise might have been too clubby. MT

OUT ON 7 JULY 2017

 

Sage Femme | The Midwife (2017)

Dir: Martin Provost | France / Belgium 2017 | French | Drama  | 117 min · Colour

Auteur Martin Provost is known for beautifully-crafted classically-styled dramas specialising in the intricate interplay between his female characters in Cesar-awarded raphine and Violette (who was a pupil of Simon de Beauvoir).

Catherine Frot and Catherine Deneuve are the stars of SAGE FEMME – a more personal project for Martin Provost and a tribute to the women who brought him into the world after a difficult birth. As well as referring to a midwife, a ‘sage femme’ is also taken to mean one who is well-behaved and wise: Frot’s Claire is such a woman: dedicated, kind and no-nonsense, she comes up against Catherine Deneuve’s self-centred, frivolous, bonne viveuse Béatrice who has always got her own way in life, and is also Claire’s stepmother, whose erratic nature resulted in her husband’s suicide.

This is meat and bread and familiar territory for sophisticated viewers who will savour the delicious friction between the two women that has a surprisingly favourable outcome for them both. THE MIDWIFE also ventures into the less appealing genre of social realism in too many ‘too much information’ birth scenes: Provost would have been better focusing on the fluctuating dynamic between the witty and watchable Deneuve, Frot and her love interest, Olivier Gourmet’s gourmet truck driver. Béatrice initially emerges as a wealthy benefactor who has appeared on the scene to apologise to Claire for her behaviour back in the day, but it soon comes to light that the 70-something Béatrice has been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and is on her last legs. And soon she is also homeless. And guess who picks up the pieces?

There is a serious message here: that bringing the next generation into the world deserves calm, personal care rather than hightec machinery but the fun lies in the story of the older generation and here Provost successfully mines the rich dramatic treasures of this ménage à trois with perceptive characterisations complimented by Gregoire Hertzel’s breezily romantic compositions and the lush local scenery of the Il-de-France in early summer. THE MIDWIFE is less formal than his previous work but equally affecting as intelligent arthouse goes, capturing the rich and sensual pleasures of traditional France MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE | REVIEWED AT BERLINALE 9-19 FEBRUARY 2017 | IN COMPETITION (OUT OF COMPETITION

Song to Song (2017)

Dir: Terrence Malick | Cast: Ryan Gosling, Rooney Mara, Michael Fassbender, Natalie Portman, Cate Blanchett, Bérénice Marlohe | Drama | US | 129 mins

More twirling and swirling from Terrence Malick in Song to Song, formerly known as Weightless, which feels somehow more appropriate, given the style of content of his ninth feature. The episodic, fractured narrative begins with an ominous statement from its central character Faye (Rooney Mara, living up to the name): “I went though a period. And sex had to be violent” this ushers in more gliding set pieces from a gilded Austin lifestyle – but it could also be LA – featuring property porn, rock concerts and eternity pools and suggest a menage a trois between her two lovers, the loose-limbed Ryan Gosling and a menacing Michael Fassbender, while her father admonishes her gravely: “do you trust this man”, “your mother and I would like to come and visit with you”. “I can’t watch the birds, ‘cos we watched them together”. “I had to find my way out, of you”. It’s all brilliant stuff for a Hallmark greetings card.

This enigmatic scenario continues for 120 tortuous minutes much in the same vein as the others in this hastily flung together twosome of love triangles: To The Wonder and Knight of Cups. There are are all pretty much of a muchness. There’s plenty of throwaway glances, fond kisses and slavish embraces “sometimes the truth isn’t the right thing to say” is one of the more oblique lines Mara has to utter as she carelessly flirts her way between her suitors; all troubled, disingenuous and coy. “Sometimes, I admire what a hypocrit I am”.

Fassbender and Gosling appear to be working together in the music business but somehow Fassbender appears to have the upper hand having offered the lythe singer-songwriter a contract, yet there’s a hint of double-crossing from Gosling’s perspective. The best scene is a neon lit dance-floor routine set to My Little Runaway, but it’s all too brief. There’s lots of hugging and the trio clearly share a palpable on-screen chemistry. Then there’s Gosling’s vague ex who sounds strikingly like Merrill Hemingway in Manhattan. And John Lydon and Iggy Pop who also appear with non-singing cameos.

Despite the urgent fondling, teasing and febrile groping no real sex actually takes place making the whole thing feel pent up and unsatisfied. Specially as Faye (not only wanted it violently) but appears to be hoping to clinch a record deal from Fassbender, who’s also her boss. Meanwhile he’s having a thing with blond saccharine waitress Nathalie Portman – again no sex occurs beyond the caresses – as she exhorts him to “do want you want with me”. Dangerous stuff, but not. Then she tearfully breaks down as the scene flips into an obsidian black obscurity that cleverly switches to snatches of a black and white classic movie. Bond Girl Bérénice Marlohe appears briefly just to say to Faye “you face is so beautiful in the shadows” before planting a lesbian kiss on her ubiquitous white midriff. Gosling then moves on to a dalliance with Kate Blanchett’s Amanda (“just take me somewhere”), completing the second of the two love triangles.

Emmanuel Lubezki has fun with his lenses, particularly on the widescreen and in intimate close-up – the whole film looks utterly amazing, as you would expect from him. Devotees who worship at the Malick altar will be smitten, while others look on in glazed tolerance, waiting for Iggy, or even Lydon, to perform. Somebody in the crowd says: “I can go on for hours with one chord. Just one chord, hammerin’,” and that just about sums it all up. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 7 JULY 2017

 

Star Boys (2017) | Moscow International Film Festival 2017

STAR BOYS | KAIKEN SE KESTÄÄ)

Dir : Visa Koiso-Kanttila | Cast: Vili Saarela, Olavi Angervo, Antti Luusuaniemi, Pihla Viitala, Tomi Enbuska, Malla Malmivaara, Risto Tuorila |  Finland 2017 | Drama | 81 min.

Visa Koiso-Kanttlila is best known for his long career as a documentary filmmaker and his debut feature STAR BOYS is a bittersweet reworking of his teenage years where two worlds collide but love survives in his small Finnish seaside home of Oulu.

star_boysSet in the late 1970s, Vesa (Saarela) and his best friend Kaarlo (Angervo) appear to be ordinary teenage boys, growing up in a conservative town that provides the stable backdrop for their angst-ridden puberty. But when the Sixties sexual revolution arrives late to their neck of the woods, this stable existence – and that of their parents, threatens to implode. First of all, Vesa’s architect father Tapio (Luusuaniemi) and his wife Marje (Viitala) host a divisive Swingers party where the boy becomes eyewitness to some rather sordid goings on. But the gulf between Tapio and Marje is to widen further after the architect hatches a get rich quick plan to demolish Marje’s familly home and build a block of flats, much to the chagrin of Marje’s parents. Meanwhile Kaarlo is indirectly involved in the crisis, because his sculpture fanatic father Antero (Enbuska) is not willing to sign his name to a project that would most likely secure their financial future. Antero is punished for his nobleness, because his wife Ulla (Malmivara) leaves him and moves Kaarlo to Helsinki. The well-paced and drama eventually comes to a head on the local beach. Ulla has come down from Helsinki with Kaarlo, and the grown-ups stage another sex-party – which the boys fight – literally – with fire.

This is a darkly drawn coming of age story with a difference because the narrative is driven forward by the parents’ irresponsible actions rather than those of the teenagers, which would normally be the case.  Their social milieu could not be more sedate and conventional – but this lot behave like students at the height of the 1968 student liberation. Vesa and Kaarlo, like most young adults, want their parents to provide an emotional bedrock to withstand their own teenage insecurities. But the only stable element here is Vesa’s grandfather Olavi (Tuorila) who introduces his grandson to astronomy. So when he is turfed-out by his financially greedy son-in-law, Vesa is left alone, bewildered and hell-bound on revenge.

Made on a shoestring budget but none the worse for it, Koiso-Kantilla directs the ensemble with sure-footed confidence, and the boys are well cast and – not overly cute – and deserving of a special mention. Jarkko T. Laine’s camerawork provides an evocative sense of place for the glorious settings: calming images for the Hailuoto summer seascapes and the bleached out winter scenes. STAR BOYS often feels like a Finnish version of Les Enfants Terrribles but its heartfelt narrative still feels intimate and personal.

STAR BOYS | 39TH MOSCOW FILM FESTIVAL 2017

 

A Man Called Ove | En Man Som Heter Over (2016)

Dir.: Hannes Holm; Cast: Rolf Lassgard, Bahar Pars, Ida Engvoll, Filip Berg, Chatarina Larsson, Börje Lundberg; Sweden 2015, 116 min.

Veteran director/writer Hannes Holm (Adam and Eve) offers up an thoughtful but contradictory portrait of old age. His central character is a bitter widower unable to adjust to life alone. His wife was clearly the guiding light in their lives, but further relationships seem fated in this well-meaning but ultimately crowd-pleasing drama that ends up trying our patience.

Adapted from Swedish bestseller by Fredrik Backman, the film starts off on a pleasingly droll note but long extended flashbacks take the pleasure and tension out of a storyline where the main-protagonist is either a curmudgeonly bastard, shouting at people and animals all day while his partner looks smiling radiant, or a beacon of tolerance – taking in a gay young man who has been disowned by this father. Somehow there are too many contradictions. Ove (like the director) is stuck in a  Sweden of the 70s, when things were (outwardly) more simple, and he and his close friend Rune (Lundberg) could have fun competing which each with cars from Volvo and Saab.

The same messages are put forward in a much more convincing film The Happiest Day in the Life of Oli Mäki, that won last year’s Certain Regard Prize at Cannes. If you have a choice, this is the one to go for.

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE

 

Bridgend (2015) |Dual Format Release

Director: Jeppe Rønde |Writers: Jeppe Rønde, Torben Bech, Peter Asmussen |Cast: Hannah Murray, Josh O’Connor, Steven Waddington | Denmark Drama 99min

19429907_1481140108610583_7290979167310657879_nDanish tourist Jeppe Rønde arrived in Bridgend with a readymade tragedy-mystery on which to base his debut feature, which world-premiered in competition at the 44th International Film Festival Rotterdam this week. It was in the Welsh town, and across Bridgend County as a whole, that 79 suicides were recorded between 2007 and 2012. Most of the victims were teenagers and all bar one were by hanging. The local and national press were dumbstruck, while police found little evidence to link them together.

Though a fascinating and investigative documentary demands to be made about Bridgend’s suicides – one, perhaps, that goes some way in delving into its history as a mining town, and how the obliteration of this industry might in some way account for a general sense of purposelessness there – Rønde moves away from his award-winning background in non-fiction and instead lends his experience in television commercials to a fictionalised drama involving Sara (Hannah Murray), a Bridgend-born teen who returns after years away in Bristol with her single father Dave (Steven Waddington), the police officer tasked with investigating the local suicides.

Opening with the early-morning discovery of the twenty-third suicide, found by the victim’s own father, the film hurls Sara into the deep end: befriended by the latest victim’s pals, she’s the kind of doe-eyed lass who needs ‘pig’ (i.e. copper) explained to her, and is understandably freaked out when the group concludes a trip to their favourite lakeside idyll with a mourning ritual at the spot where the recently deceased was found hanging. When another unexpected suicide occurs within the group, Sara’s dad is justifiably concerned not only by the escalating tragedy but also by his daughter’s proximity to the clan’s more influential leaders – among whom he counts Jamie (Josh O’Connor), the son of the local priest and Sara’s new boyfriend.

Shooting on location with DP Magnus Nordenhof Jønck (who worked on A HIJACKING as well as Danish TV series BORGEN and THE KILLING), Rønde brings a dreamy atmosphere to proceedings, concentrating less on solving the suicides than on the tensions that characterise the three-way standoff between Sara, her pals and her dad. Unfortunately, Rønde and fellow scribes Torben Bech and Peter Asmussen seemingly have little to say about this dynamic. Indeed, BRIDGEND is less Scandinavian procedural than it is BROADCHURCH, or some other bereft three-part drama made for ITV.

Dave, apparently the only copper in town and lifted straight out of a scene from EMMERDALE, is barely a character at all (props to the wardrobe assistants who made him look like an extra from 1994 British serial THE CINDER PATH though!). Meanwhile, Sara and Jamie’s relationship develops by means of montages awash with French producer Mondkopf’s minimalist score, which renders dialogue conveniently inaudible as the youths frolic at the coast and in abandoned theme parks. When the characters are audible, their dialogue is ropey indeed.

Shock-cuts from an amplified soundtrack to virtually silent scenes and the presence of a horse called Snowy add both to the formal and narrative clichés – to say nothing of a voice-over rendition of Dylan Thomas’s ‘And Death Shall Have No Dominion’. Some problems are merely budgetary, of course: presumably, scenes in local cafés are so sparsely populated with extras because funding didn’t stretch that far. And while Jønck’s dank cinematography lends sheen to the morbidity, why do none of the houses have their lights turned on? Is it that these decisions were meant to provide an aesthetic approximation of unspoken trauma? Whatever the case, cinematic depictions of suicide have never been so unaffecting.

But deeper qualms persist. Barring its title and closing text, there’s little else to link BRIDGEND to the real-life suicides from which Rønde took inspiration. But his decision to make such an evasive work, one so dependent upon archetypes for its storytelling grit, is questionable in light of the very real tragedies that have haunted this town. Put another way, without the kind of subtly provocative satire of, say, Gus Van Sant’s ELEPHANT (2003), which prodded at some of the cited causes behind a real-life tragedy, there’s no real reason here why the film has to be linked to Bridgend at all. And it’s when the film hints increasingly at a horror template, implied by a palpable nastiness and chatroom gossiping (don’t any of these kids have phones?), that Rønde exposes himself as a fraud at worst and a hopelessly confused artist at best. MICHAEL PATTISON

BRIDGEND DVD BLURAY DUAL FORMAT RELEASE | AXIOM FILMS |  24 JULY 2017 | ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 21 JANUARY -1 FEBRUARY 2015

https://vimeo.com/126255323

 

Stalker (1979) | Criterion Bluray release

Dir.: Andrej Tarkovsky | Cast: Alexander Kaidanovski, Alisa Fejndlik, Natasha Abramova, Anatoli Solonitsyn, Nikolai Grinko | USSR 1979 | 163 min.

STALKER based on the novel ‘Roadside Picnic’ by Arkadi and Boris Strugatsky, was Andrej Tarkovsky’s fifth feature and imagines a mystical and enigmatic journey. Open to all kinds of interpretation, the production itself and the aftermath was fraught with strange incidents and tragic deaths. After filming the exterior scenes for over a year, it emerged that Tarkovsky wanted to re-shoot with a new cameraman Alexander Knyazhinsky, after falling out with his original DoP Gregory Rerbery (Mirror). But the controversy didn’t end there. It was also rumoured that much of the footage was actually lost. This was due to processing problems in the Moscow film laboratories who were not used to dealing with Kodak products. The shoot itself took place near Tallinn, Estonia (then part of the USSR), in a chemical plant that pumped poisonous liquids into the air that could well have contributed to the death of the actor Anatoli Solonitsyn from lung cancer. Tarkovsky himself died only seven years later in Paris, aged 54, of the same bronchial cancer as his wife Larisa Tarkovskaya – twelve years later.

STALKER has much in common with Solaris and although both portray a dystopian version of the future, STALKER is not an apocalyptic one. The camera introduces us to a room where a family of three are lying on a bed: Stalker (Kaidanovski), his wife (Fejndlik) and his legless daughter Martha (Abramova). This takes the form of a tableau vivant where the figures move. Stalker is a scout who leads visitors into ’The Zone’, an eerie moonscape of horror and beauty where something otherworldly has clearly happened. This could have been the result of a meteor, or the presence of Aliens, or simply natural forces requiring it to be cordoned off by police and soldiers. Whilst his wife does not want him to return to the Zone, Stalker is fascinated by the area and drawn involuntarily to it. His next two ‘clients’ are a writer (Solonitsyn) and a scientist (Grinko). They set out from a hostelry, and are nearly gunned down by police. By the time they enter the Zone, the black-and-white images are replaced by colour, but only for trees, fields and flowers, in contrast to the litter of an industrial wasteland ruining Nature’s beauty.

The trio’s odyssey could be termed a “journey of souls”, because Tarkovsky makes no difference between the inner and outer world of his protagonists. Whilst Stalker is obsessed by individuality, the Zone being the only reflection for his yearning for spiritual purity, the writer is full of nihilism and sees mankind from a cynical perspective. He has lost faith in himself, in his writings and is depressed because of his writer’s block. The scientist only wants to destroy what they are all looking for: A room, where the darkest wishes come true. Stalker and the writer are able to overpower the scientist, who wanted to make sure, that nobody could use the ‘Room of wishes’ for evil purposes. None of the three will enter the room after all. When they return, they seem to have not changed much: the three are the archetypes of the 20th century: the nihilist, the man of science and Stalker, the (lost) individualist.

At the end, Stalker’s wife raises a the question:“How would a life without any suffering work out? A life without suffering would also be one without happiness and hope.” This is as close as we come to an answer: an existence without highs or lows, based on technology, materialism or belief in scientific progress is doomed to an utter mediocrity. To be unreasonable, is to be alive. The myriad symbols of STALKER leave just one interpretation given by Tarkovsky himself: “In the end, everything can be reduced to one single element, which is all a person can count upon in his existence: the capacity to love”.

STALKER – available to buy on Blu-ray from 24th July 2017.
Credit: The Criterion Collection UK | @Criterion | #CriterionUK

Alone in Berlin (2016)

Director: Vincent Perez |Cast: Brendan Gleeson, Emma Thompson, Daniel Brühl, Mikael Persbrandt |Germany|France| UK

Brendan Gleeson and Emma Thompson make this rather plodding wartime drama watchable. They play the unhappy married couple at the centre of a piece of German wartime subversion in a flawed adaptation of Hans Fallada’s postwar novel set in Berlin.

This is Vincent Perez’ third film as a director. His ambitious but cinematically lacklustre piece explores how the tragic death of a child can turn an ordinary couple against the state with a petty crime involving the publication of anti-government slogans, printed on postcards and randomly left in public places. “Hitler’s war is the worker’s death”. Whereas nowadays this kind of detritus would be swept away into the trash (or recycling), Surprisingly in 1940 Berlin, due to the powerful grip that Nazism exerted on wartime Germany, most of the cards were actually handed into the authorities and the couple are arrested in a narrative that reflects on the moral and political intricacies of the postwar blame game.

Gleeson and Thompson have German accents – as does German born Daniel Brühl, who plays the most complex character in the film as Escherich, an ardent Nazi police inspector whose fierce doggedness is crushed after he falls foul of an SS officer during the investigation. Initially the whole thing feels forced and unconvincing despite the combined talents of Emma Thompson and Brendan Gleeson who do their best to deliver some really clunky lines and manage gradually to thaw their characters’ failing relationship through the conspiratorial brio of their joint endeavour, eventually breathing life into a bland but intriguing wartime drama that shines another spotlight on Nazi Germany. MT

NOW ON RELEASE | BERLINALE REVIEW 2016

Hampstead (2017)

Dir. Joel Hopkins. UK, 2017, 103 mins | Cast: Diane Keaton, Brendan Gleeson | US | Romcom | 104min

HAMPSTEAD is one of London’s oldest villages where ‘quaint’ boutiques (think Foxtons and Oxfam?) thrive a stone’s throw from Dickensian cottages and palatial mansions cushioned in the verdant lushness of the Heath. Joel Hopkins’ romcom follow-up to Last Chance Harvey (2008) is based on the true story of a modern day hermit (Harry Hallowes) who gained legal entitlement to his self-built hovel between Hampstead’s Kenwood House and The Ponds. But that’s where reality ends.

Hopkins’ fluffy film is full of middle-aged cyphers floating around in a fantasy world of the Seventies where they meet for coffee mornings and discuss worthy causes. But in the real place, this lot passed on decades ago to be replaced by the likes of Hugh Skinner’s fundraising nerd or smiling Romanians selling the Big Issue. Despite its champagne socialist credentials the village is now mostly home to wealthy Oligarchs, chic Chinese diplomats and suave Italian bankers, a place where blacked-out Range Rovers jossle with builders’ lorries narrowly – avoiding the double Bugaboo prams.

But back to the film, which has Diane Keaton’s awkward American widow spying Brendan Gleeson’s grizzly bohemian gent in his shack moments from her Heath-side home. Although the chemistry here is seriously lacking, Hopkins persuades us that the shabby chic Donald fancies Keaton as she scuttles around in her charity shop like a ditzy Victorian street urchin on speed. Lesley Manville is hilarious as her bossy neighbour Fiona, tasked with organising neighbourhood affairs. She is a character straight out of Country Casuals in Tewksbury or Harrogate – not Hampstead, I’m afraid.

The narrative torpor plods on as our twee ‘lovers’ fight for Donald’s right to stay in his home, keeping those nasty developers at bay. Meanwhile, Keaton’s financial woes are being sweatily massaged by Jason Watkins’ obsequious ginger accountant who would be more at home in a market town like Utoxeter than this savvy North London corner. The third ginger character here is Keaton’s son Philip (James Norton), who has no personality whatsoever despite being rather pleased with himself.

Poetic licence apart – and watching this is like sharing your home with a bunch of weird aliens – HAMPSTEAD could be forgiven if it were funny. But Robert Festinger’s script teeters from crass to cringeworthy, with no laughs to be had at all and a score that jars. The filmmakers have captured the rural idyll of the location: Parrokeets chirrup and roses bloom in the perpetual sunshine that beams, between cloudbursts, through the Oak tree’d lanes.

Will the ‘Notting Hill’ affect come to Hampstead as a result of this jaunty romcom? This American treatment will probably have the reverse effect on the village, sending potential buyers desperately in the other direction, amid cries let’s get out of this hellhole. MT

NOW OUT ON RELEASE FROM 23 JUNE 2017

Souvenir (2016)

Dir: Bavo Defurne | Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Kevin Azais | Drama | Belgium | 92min

Isabelle Huppert plays a chanteuse emerging from a long retirement in this slim but delightful musical romance from Belgium director Bavo Defurne.

Huppert holds our attention in a lightweight affair that conjures up the pleasure of this autumn/spring love story between Liliane a former Eurovision runner up and Jean (Kevin Azais) her 21-year old colleague at a pate factory where she gracefully manages to make her daily grind look satisfying, after a singing career that ended with the marriage and manager.

But Jean (Kevin Azais), who predictably still lives with his parents, has always held a candle for her and gently perseveres in in his romantic gestures, convincing her to sing at his boxing club knees-up. So convinced is he of her talents that he throws all his energy behind managing her come-back.

Defurne and his screenwriters craft an appealing show business drama with some poignant highs and lows as the Huppert and Azais manage a convincing chemistry – and we feel for them when Liliane’s old husband (Johan Leysen) makes a re-appearance on the scene. Perhaps Liliane was right to find another day job but Huppert’s perky rendition of Pink Martini’s Joli Garcon certainly deserves a toast.MT

ON RELEASE FROM 23 JUNE 2017

 

Churchill (2017)

Dir: Jonathan Teplitzky | Writer: Alex von Tunzelman | Cast: Brian Cox, Miranda Richardson, Richard Durden, Julain Wadham, John Slattery, James Purefoy, Danny Webb, Ella Purnell | Biopic Drama | UK | 98min

CHURCHILL is a commanding film of majestic images and thoughtful performances that seeks to imagine the man behind the legendary colossus and succeeds. This is a magnificent tribute to one of the greatest Britons of all time, Sir Winston Churchill.

Jonathan Teplitzky directs Alex von Tunzelmann’s sleek script that chronicles the tense twenty four hours before D-Day. Although the outcome is well known the tension is palpable in a moving  biopic that honours the protagonists involved in an epic interlude of wartime strategy and political manoeuvring that concluded the Second World War.

Brian Cox plays Churchill as a consummate politician; a humanistic man of the people; a respectful husband and ultimately a towering hero in a performance that occasionally feels like a caricature of the cigar-chomping, whisky drinking bulldog of a man who, despite bouts of arrogance, is not too vain to stand corrected. The only gripe here is his way of referring to ‘the Narsies’. We were at war with the Germans and that’s a fact, so let’s not get all politically correct about it in retrospect. As his wife Clementine Miranda Richardson is gracefully immaculate: an imperious English Rose as sharp as cut-crystal, and as inscrutable as sterling silver, she is his anchor and his rudder at times of crisis, while remaining cool as a quintessential cucumber. John Slattery (Man Men) plays an impressively masterful Eisenhower and Julian Wadham exudes class and integrity as Field Marshall Montgomery although James Purefoy is a little too fey as King George VI.

The story opens in June 1944 as the Allied Forces stand on the brink: a massive army is secretly assembled on the South Coast ready to cross the Channel and re-claim France under German occupation. Churchill tries to resist the D-Day plan, mindful of the errors of the Great War, the slaughter of Passchendaele, the Somme and Gallipoli, and – although he would go on to live another 20 years – is exhausted and overweight. Luckily Clemmie intervenes and the rest, as they say, is history. The only slight criticism of the film lies in the inclusion of a slight subplot which not only feels redundant -there is enough here to keep us absorbed – but also feels rather like melodramatic contrivance. Epic in scale and convincing in narrative CHURCHILL is a possibly the most memorable Briitsh film of the year. MT

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 16 JUNE 2017

 

 

Stockholm My Love (2016)

Writer|Dir: Mark Cousins | co-writer: Anita Oxburgh | Cast: Neneh Cherry | Musical Drama | 80min | UK

Best known for his 15-hour documentary The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Cousins describes his debut musical feature STOCKHOLM MY LOVE as a city symphony. It is also the acting debut of Neneh Cherry who appears in every frame as Alva, an architect interested in the way our environment effects us – Also known as psychogeography. Cousins has superimposed Alva’s tragic narrative onto her psychogeographic exploration of Sweden’s capital, giving this paean an elegaic and rather mournful feel until the sun eventually comes out and the colours brighten from wintery greys to limpid shades of blue and green, reflecting Alva’s more positive mood.

Neneh Cherry was born in Stockholm in the mid sixties, the daughter of a Swedish textile designer and a Sierra Leonean student who had come to study engineering. Drifting aimlessly through the pallid streets as Alva, memories of her trauma resurface as she tells her (absent) father about the fateful day her car hit and killed an old Swedish man called Gunnar whose dog had slipped its leash and ran into the main road. This terrible event colours her life: “killing you is killing me” she laments. Luckily the dog escaped and is re-imagined eating a ham sandwich on the tarmac.

Alva spends the first hour of the film emoting cathartically to her father as she recollects the sequence of events that lead to Gunnar’s death. And here we are reminded of the unsolved murder of Sweden’s social democrat premier Olof Palme who was gunned down outside a cinema in 1986. Walking down a road of simple two-story houses built in the western suburb of Vällingby (in the late 1940s) Alva explains that Olaf lived amongst the people, and this gives Cousins an opportunity to show where many of Stockholm’s immigrant community also thrive.

Compared to London’s streets these are sparsely populated. Attractive low rise buildings with large windows and balconies, often facing a green space, make some of our own council houses look grim in comparison – especially in the light of the grim events of June 2017. The sunless climate rather than the architecture is really to blame for making this place look miserable in Winter, especially for people who have come from much sunnier climes.

Sweden is known for its design excellence enriched by the finance from the Hanseatic League, and Stockholm is one of the few European capitals that avoided bombing during the 20th century’s wars. Contemporary buildings and those dating back to the 13th century associate well in their locations between Lake Malaren and the Baltic sea. Cousins tells how architects returned from abroad armed with ideas from the Islamic world and this is reflected in Ferdinand Boberg’s airy central mosque which has an Art Nouveau flavour and glass chandeliers dating back to its original shell built in 1903.

But what about Alva lifting her mood by wandering round Vallingby’s stunning shopping centre Kfem; the renovated historical brewery now housing Octapharma; Sweden’s very own Flat iron building at Central Station; the light-filled Waterfront conference halls; or the gleaming public swimming and sports facilities at Ericsdalbadet. All of these are fine examples of how public urban spaces can uplift and energise those who use them.

After a hour of Cherry’s ramblings, occasionally enlivened by a soundtrack of classical Swedish music by Franz Berwald, songs by ABBA’s Benny Andersson and five of Cherry’s own tunes, this soul-searching love letter feels somehow spartan and incomplete as a mood-reflecting exercise. STOCKHOLM MY LOVE is watchable but never really satisfies as a psychogeographic study nor as a musical drama. What it provides is a snapshot of a point in time in a road less travelled but as a symphony to the great Nordic town it feels somehow inadequate. There is much more to Stockholm than this bird’s eye view. MT

REMEMBERING OLOF PALME | 28 February 1986, Stockholm, Sweden

 

Weirdos (2016)

Dir: Bruce McDonald | Cast: Dylan Authors, Julia Sarah Stone, Molly Parker, Allan Hawco, Cathy Jones, Rhys Bevan-John, Vi Tang, Gary Levert, Stephen McHattie, Max Humphreys, Alex Purdy | Canada | Drama | 93min

Bruce McDonald’s fresh and tender indie is suffused with the foot-loose charm of the ’70s and a freewheeling score from . It follows a couple of young teenagers who take off across Nova Scotia to the coastal town of Sydney during one breezy Canadian summer.

This may not be Bruce McDonald’s most oustanding piece but it’s certainly an endearing one where Daniel MacIvor’s 1976 script captures the zeitgeist of a gentle era where teens were still innocent and squeaky clean but ripe for self-discovery. Kit (Dylan Authors) is fifteen and still seems unsure of his sexuality despite declaring himself openly “a fag” and “a weirdo” he clearly still has some issues to deal with. His grounded bestie Alice (Julia Sarah Stone) is also a budding girlfriend who has the upper hand emotionally speaking, along with his Andy Warhol like ‘spirit guide who appears from time to time, like a jester in a

The two rub along quite easily until it starts to dawn on that Kit is clearly gay. He’s an appealingly decent youngster who is kind but never sappy, offering Alice his hairdryer and looking genuinely crestfallen when she snogs a guy they meet on the beach.

When they eventually fetch up at Kit’s mother’s house the mood turns more serious as it emerges that clearly there are family issues at stake that explain why Kit is living with his father (an appealing macho Allan Hawco) and his strict but open-minded grandmother (Cathy Jones) rather than with his bipolar mother played Molly Parker in a reliably charming and volatile turn.

As the leads Authors Stone are brilliantly mismatched in their peachy-faced cuteness underpinned by a burgeoning realisation of their slightly dysfunctional families – Alice’s parents are separated, while it’s unsure what’s really going on with his. Although he’s unhappy living with his dad, the extent of his mother’s emotional issues indicate that his tricky adolescent state is probably still too fragile to cope with his mother and give her the support that she needs. WEIRDOS is a gently nostalgic coming of age drama that really conjures up the thrilling excitement and gut-churning bewilderment of adoleschence. MT

CANADA NOW FILM SERIES IS SHOWING AT CURZON CINEMAS beginning with a weekend programme from 15th to 18th June at the Curzon Soho. From Saturday July 1st 2017, in celebration of Canada Day, the films will begin a nation–wide tour of cinemas and become available to stream on Curzon Home Cinema.

 

 

 

 

 

Provenance (2017) | East End Film Festival

Writer|Dir: Ben Hecking | Cast: Christian McKay | Sophie Vega | 93min | Drama | UK

Ben Hecking’s feature debut is not the usual second rate UK crime thriller nor is it set on another sink estate. Delightfully, it’s a compact and suggestive love story that takes place in sun-drenched Provence, where a classical pianist in his early forties has left his career and marriage to start a new life in France.

This languorously enjoyable drama keeps its cards close to its chest and is also beautiful to look at: Hecking made his name as a cinematographer winning the Michael Powell Award in 2014 (for Hide & Seek). He directs his regular collaborators McKay who plays Jon Finch (and co-directs) and Macqueen who plays the man who threatens his peaceful existence in the village where his much younger lover Sophia (Vega) has just returned after a brief time away. We’re not told where or how they met or where’s she’s been for the past five months but that’s all part of the mystery that gradually unfolds as leisurely as a torrid summer afternoon with a nasty sting served with the sundowners. MT

EAST END FILM FESTIVAL | 17 JUNE | CONTINUES EVERY WEEKEND UNTIL JULY 2017

 

By the Time it Gets Dark (2017)

Dir: Anocha Suwichakornpong | Cast: Arak Amornsupasiri, Apinya Sakuljaroensuk, Achtara Suwan, Visra Vichit-Vadakan | Drama | Thai | 105min

Thai director Anocha Suwichakornpong’s latest film is a magical mood piece that calmly explores the nature of memory through lives traumatised by the government’s military-led massacre of student demonstrators in 1976 Bangkok.

Her characters are so deeply affected by the past that their bid to re-discover themselves in the present often skews their recollections as they grapple to find the truth and explore the nature of identity in a world floundering in sensory overload and media intervention. Often silent and meditative, Suwichakornpong’s film makes judicious use of a recurring musical motif that punctuates the often bewildering narrative that unfolds in three settings.

The story opens as a group arrives to pray and meditate in a large room with panoramic views of the surrounding verdant landscapes. In monochrome flashback, armed soldiers hold sway over their prone captives in a brightly staged setting that could be a prison or a memory of the massacre. The scene that follows pictures a couple strolling calmly in a woodland setting, the hostilities still fresh in their minds as they calmly discuss political activism.

Meanwhile her alter ego filmmaker Ann (Vichit-Vadakan) is preparing to make a feature film of the University massacre that took place nearly forty years previously. In the same rural house she prepares to interview her character Taew (Rassami Paoluengton) about her experiences during the fateful onslaught. But Taew sharply criticises Ann’s approach as lacking gravitas surrounded, as she is, by the trappings of her serene life in contemporary Thailand.

Ann realises she is totally ill-equipped to-create the trauma and  her mind starts to wander off into a reverie, and at this point the narrative becomes increasingly surreal with images of fast-growing vegetation marking the shift to another character Peter (Arak Amornsupasiri) a popstar and actor who is seen taking a flight to Bangkok where he settles down to read a film script in his modern condo. Then we are back to another glimpse of Ann (Inthira Charoenpura) and Taew (Penpak Sirikul) in more glamorous circumstances in the same country house, with the same film project.

The only character who connects these disparate scenes is Atchara Suwan’s unnamed worker, who variously plays a chambermaid, waitress, cleaner and monastery employee completing this surreal and enigmatic rumination. Suwichakornpong handles the ever-shifting form with consummate deftness while Ming Kai Leung’s camerawork moves seemlessly through the diverse sequences to capture the ethereal beauty of the verdant settings and swirling citiscapes. MT

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 16 JUNE 2017

 

 

 

Gifted (2017)

Dir.: Marc Webb; Cast: Chris Evans, McKenna Grace, Jenny Slate, Lindsay Duncan, Octavia Spencer; USA 2017, 101 min.

Spiderman director Marc Webb and Captain America hero Chris Evans team up for a well-meaning but utterly predictable custody fight story, which is saved from mediocrity by McKenna Grace, as seven-year old Mary, breathing some life into the soppy and sometimes downright embarrassing project.

Boston philosophy lecturer Frank Adler (Evans) is guilt-ridden after the death of his sister, a mathematical genius who committed suicide due to pressure from their over-bearing mother Evelyn (Duncan). Frank feels partly for her death and decides to takes her six-month-old daughter Mary to Florida to raise her away from his mother’s influence. Seven years on, whilst Mary is impressing her school with her math prowess, the condescending Evelyn turns up and starts a custody battle, claiming that Frank is neglects his niece’s talents and, as a mere boat repairman, cannot give Mary the resources she deserves. Despite support from Mary’s teacher Bonnie (Slater) and a helpful neighbour Roberta (Spencer) Frank has to give in, and his fears come true: Mary is taken in by downright evil foster parents, who together with Evelyn, give Mary home schooling centred around developing her mathematical genius. When Frank learns that Fred, Mary’s eyed-cat, has been abandoned by the foster-parents to a home for stray animals and is in danger of being put down he dreams up a far-fetched plot to save Mary.

Everyone on board this project gives their professional best – with the exception of scriptwriter Tom Flynn, who comes up with some really cringeworthy moments, like Mary finding her teacher Bonnie half-naked in Frank’s apartment, after a drunken one-night stand. DoP Stuart Dryburgh (The Great Wall) doesn’t have a great deal to work with as the characters are one-dimensional in this rather torpid affair that aims to pull at our heart-strings but only succeeds in numbing our brain cells. Luckily, McKenna Grace is unperturbed by the adult mediocrity around her, proving that she is the only one deserving the film’s title. AS

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 16 June 2017

Wilson (2017)

Berlin Syndrome (2017) Netflix

Dir.: Cate Shortland; Cast: Teresa Palmer. Max Riemelt, Matthias Habich, Emma Bading; Australia 2017,116 min.

Even if you don’t always agree with Cate Shortland’s point of view – Lore was a case in point – she has a special style –as in this variation on John Fowles’ The Collector, filmed in 1965 by William Wyler.

Australian tourist Clare (Palmer) is somehow lost in Berlin, and when she meets handsome Andi (Riemelt), an English teacher, she abandons her journey to Dresden, and stays with him. The sex is satisfying, but Clare soon finds out that Andi wants to keep her for good, as his prisoner: her Sim-Card disappears, the windows of the flat in an otherwise empty apartment block don’t open, and the door is double-bolted.

Andi is a lonely person, his only real contact is his father Erich (Habich), a university lecturer, who, contrary to his son, has some positive feelings about living in the old GDR. Andi’s mother ‘defected’ to the West when he was a child, something he will never forget or forgive.

Clare oscillates between fighting (both are seriously injured) and trying to coax Andi to release her. After  Erich dies, the two even spend a rather harmonious Christmas together in the dead man’s house. Andi adopts his father’s dog, and Clare is happy to have some company, when Andi is at work. But Andi’s true nature is soon revealed. A chance encounter with Franka (Bading) – one of Andi’s female students – who turns up on the doorstep, leads to a surprising, but well constructed, original conclusion.

The title refers to the claustrophobic atmosphere, which to this day, hangs over a united Berlin. Neither the neon-glitz of the western part of the city, nor the much less kempt part of the old east, lets us forget what happened here between 1933 and 1945. The fate of over 300 000 Berlin Jews, who were first excluded from public life and had to hide in their flats, before being deported from Grunewald Station to the extermination camps, still hangs over the city. And an involuntary wall the GDR rulers then erected, showed that Germans, whatever the ideology, are very good at creating a Huis-clos state of affairs.

When it becomes clear that Clare is not the first of Andi’s victims, she even allows him to use her more and more as a sexual object: he is more interested in taking photos of the helpless woman than having sex with her. He can only function if there is a woman substitute for the mother who abandoned him.

Palmer and Riemelt are convincing, both Erich and Franka seem to be only there to drive the plot forward. This is a shame, because we would have liked to learn more about Andi. The length of nearly two hours is also problematic: the tighter structure adopted by writer Shuan Grant in Melenie Joosten’s novel, would have kept the audience more engaged. DoP Germain McMicking’s images are most imaginative in the indoor scenes, the Berlin panorama is a little too idyllic. This is a provocative, but authentic production.

NOW ON NETFLIX

Norman (2017)

Dir.: Joseph Cedar; Cast: Richard Gere, Michael Sheen, Lior Ashkenazi, Charlotte Gainsborough, Steve Buscemi, Josh Charles; USA 2016, 118 min.

Director/writer Joseph Cedar (Footnote) works hard to avoid the usual clichés in this fresh and amusing portrait of the eternal loser Norman Oppenheimer – full title Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer. But his latest feature suffers from too many narrative strands to keep the audience entertained for two hours.

Norman is played by Gere, in fine form, and sees himself as a financial fixer in the Jewish world of New York – unfortunately, he is just a man with a dodgy past and a string of failures in his current trials and tribulations. Nephew Philip Cohen (Sheen) tries his best to keep Norman’s feet on the ground, but he’s a man with his eye to the main chance – which is always just around the corner. Norman invents a dead wife and a daughter to gain the community’s sympathy, but on the up-side, he’s never mean-spirited. When he meets the Israeli politician Micha Eshel (Ashkenazi), he tries to impress him with his connections, and Eshel, who does not know how insignificant these business contacts are, gives Norman the lions-share of his time. In return, Norman blows his budget on a gift of designer shoes for Eshel, who is a man without scruples, becoming Prime Minister of Israel and going all-out for a peace mission with the Arab world. But he still remembers Norman’s kindness when visiting New York, and for once, Oppenheimer is the toast of the town. But soon Eshel gets into a bribery scandal, and to save his career, he has to sacrifice Norman.

There are fine character performances here: Steve Buscemi does Rabbi Blumenthal, who uses Norman’s new found popularity to involve him in a donation scheme to save the synagogue – but quickly drops him, when his connections with Eshel become a liability; Charlotte Gainsborough’s Alex Green, an Israeli agent, who tries to bring Eshel down with notes about connections drawn up by Norman – total fabrications, just to impress her. Arthur Taub is a coldblooded host, who literally throws Norman out after he gate-crashes his party.
Norman struggles against the tide of life, and he has our sympathy. DoP Yaron Scharf (who worked with Cedar on Footnote) crafts a harsh world with his brilliant camerawork. Gere is terrific, a big fish in his small world of sharks waiting to pounce. With some cuts and a little structuring this could have been a great film, but it is still worthwhile. AS

NORMAN IS ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 9 JUNE 2017

From the Land of the Moon | Mal de Pierres (2016)

Director: Nicole Garcia   Writers: Nicole Garcia, Jacques Fieschi, based on a novel by Milena Agus

Cast: Marion Cotillard, Louis Garrel, Alex Brendemuhl, Brigitte Rouan, Victoire Du Bois, Aloise Sauvage, Daniel Para, Jihwan Kim, Victor Quilichini

Marion Cotillard is back with another intense character study that haunts this otrtured love story. In actor turned filmmaker Nicole Garcia’s eighth film FROM THE LAND OF THE MOON  she plays Gabrielle a woman from a bourgeois background who is desperate to find fulfilment in romantic love. Based on a best seller by Italian writer Milena Agus, the story opens in 1950s France where Gabrielle is driving her family to distraction with her violent and quixotic temperament. Fortunately beauty and money are on her side in an era where arranged marriages were still commonplace, so her mother organises a match with a penniless but decent Spanish builder, Jose (Alex Brendemuhl from Wakolda), who knuckles down to taking Gabrielle respectably off their hands and making an honest Catholic woman of her. From the outset, Gabrielle makes it clear that she will not be having sex with Jose and he takes this calmly knowing full well that his bedroom skills could potentially change her mind on the subject.

And Jose’s straightforward, kind and stable nature soon calms Gabrielle’s flighty temperament and emerges as one of the more  sympathetic characters in the film and a counterpoint to Gabrielle’s selfish and wayward character. Garcia and Jacques Fieschi’s script also emphasises Gabrielle’s desperate need of sexual fulfilment as we seen her standing in the cool river on a hot day trying to achieve the same sexual relief as men did during the war with the use of bromide. Obviously this is a sotry that will draw comparisons with Madame Bovary, although Gabrielle is not constrained by her social, moral or religious scruples and her husband is kind and supportive. After a miscarriage, Jose sends her off to an expensive Swiss clinic for treatment and once again her febrile sexual imagination gets the better of her. Here she meet Louis Garrel as the dashing lieutenant Andre Sauvage and is immediately smitten, especially as his keyboard skills playing Tchaikovsky are to become a leitmotif for the piece in the whimsical closing scenes.

Cotillard’s is the driving force behind this visually ravishing drama. She illuminates every scene with her serene beauty and elegance instilling calm and grace despite her brooding unhappiness which morphs into euphoria when she meets Sauvage. As  Gabrielle, she struggles to find contentment upsetting everyone else into the bargain with her toxic personality and meanness. This is a fabulously crafted classic drama that is both absorbing and intensely enjoyable. MT

IN CINEMAS FROM 8 JUNE 2017

Crown Heights (2017) | Sundance London 2017

Dir.: Matt Ruskin; Cast: Lakeith Stanfield, Nnamdi Asomugha, Natalie Paul; USA 2017, 94 min.

Writer/director Matt Ruskin’S conventional portrait of Colin Warner is emotionally convincing. The Black teenager was wrongly convicted of murder as an eighteen-year-old, and had to spent 21 years in prison, before being released due to the efforts of his his best friend.

In 1980, Colin Warner (Stanfield), a Trinidadian emigrant, worked as a car mechanic in New York, and stole cars in his spare time. He had a stable home life and no record of violence. When two detectives arrested him, he thought it was down to his car heists – but to his surprise, he was accused of murdering a young man in Flatbush. Without motive, murder weapon or any physical evidence, Warner was convicted of Murder in the Second Degree, and was incarcerated in a High Secirity prison, to serve 15 years to life. The only “proof” in the trial was an “eye-witness”, a 15 year old boy, who cut a deal with the police for a crime he committed, in exchange for him naming Warner as the shooter. In prison Warner soon lost his temper, beating a warden which resulted in him spending two years in solitary confinement. Whilst he later calmed down, this incident cost him his parole in 1995. Due to the efforts of his friend Carl King (Asomughan, a co-producer), who risked his job and marriage, the truth finally emerged, and Warner was finally freed in 2001, to live in freedom with his wife Anoinette (Paul), whom he had married in prison.

CROWN HEIGHTS reminds us that miscarriages of justice in cases of black men are a regular affair. Ruskin enriches his drama with clips of speeches by Reagan, Bush sen. and Bill Clinton, all of them proudly announcing new and tougher laws aimed at the presumed violence carried out by minorities. It is only logical that King, asked by Warner, why he is working so hard for the truth, answers: “This isn’t just about you, it’s bigger than that. It could have been me”. DoP Tim Gills sticks with reliable images of social realism, and Lakeith, who was in contact with Warner, succeeds in giving us an absorbing emotional rollercoaster of twentyone years. AS

SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL LONDON | 1-4 JUNE 2017

Wonder Woman (2017)

​Dir: Patty Jenkins | Cast: Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Robin Wright, Connie Nielsen, David Thewlis | US | Adventure Drama

IMG_3790That sound you can hear right now is hundreds, if not thousands, of film writers and critics breathing a huge sigh of relief that they won’t need to think too hard about the positives in DC’s newest reboot of Wonder Woman. With a cast straight out any fanboy and girl’s dreams and more roles for women over 40 than you can shake a stick at, WONDER WOMAN is not only a welcome break from the usual male-centric superhero movies, but it also presents its audience with a truly engaging and thoroughly enjoyable storyline. Staring Israeli actress Gal Gadot and directed by the excellent Patty Jenkins (Monster, 2003), the film manages to cleverly avoid the usual pitfalls of big summer blockbusters by offering up a plethora of very likeable characters and a wonderfully engaging plot. Fans and foes alike will have to admit that DC has finally got a big hit on its hands, and the fact that this was a female lead superhero movie is even sweeter for some.

​Diana (Gadot) lives on a mythical island inhabited by beautiful Amazonian warrior women, which has for centuries been hidden away from the prying eyes of the modern world. When American pilot Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) crash-lands on the island with tens of German soldier in his pursuit, Diana goes to his rescue and helps free him from the wreckage of his war plane. Together, they hatch a plan to leave the island, him to go back to his top secret mission and her in search of Ares God of war, whom she believes is responsible for the current World War. Staring Robin Wright as the Amazonian warrior Antiope and Connie Nielsen as Diana’s mother Hippolyta, the film spends a rather unnecessary amount of time setting up the mythical story behind our heroine, but once it gets going, there’s no stopping it. Chris Pine manages to be both charming and insufferably smug, his performance is beautifully nuanced and commendably comedic at his own character’s expense.
​                                                                                                                                                                             Whether WONDER WOMAN is, as some have said, a feminist treatment of a classic story, remains to be seen, but one thing is for sure, Gal Gadot not only puts in a brilliant performance, but also presents a whole new generation of little girls and boys with a badass alternative to the usual male counterparts. On the whole, the film is very silly in parts, but this does nothing to put a dampener on the proceedings. I would dare anyone not to be entertained, at least by its witty dialogue and touching storyline. A sure hit for DC and Warner Brothers. LINDA MARRIC.

WONDER WOMAN IS ON GENERAL RELEASE 1 JUNE


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Lily Lane (2016) |

Director | Bence Fliegauf | Cast Angéla Stefanovics, Bálint Sótonyi, Miklós Székely, Mária Gindert,, Maja Balogh

90mins  Fantasy Drama  Hungary

Hungarian filmmaker Bence Fliegauf creates a world of fantasy based in the reality of a divorcing couple and their small son. With a few simple devices: a ghostly original score, technical effects such as slo-mo and extreme close-ups as the camera glides over his toys and giving them a otherworldly appeal, while a young woman slowly spins a fairy story. Bence Fliegauf’s mesmerising debut drama slowly emerges like an enigmatic crystalis from its cocoon. By associating simple objects and images – a broken toy, a stuffed animal, a mask, a stormy skyline: a suggestive narrative emerges connecting with our own childhood experiences of fear. Rebeka and Dani face these fears head on – embracing them to create their own fantasy world that drives the narrative forward.

In flashback, Rebeka (Angéla Stefanovics) casts back to happy times when her son was born. Clearly she was loved but now wants a separation from his father, but not a divorce on paper. LILY LANE shifts backwards and forwards; a stream of consciousness that sparks subconscious fears and memories of childhood, life and love.

The story unravels in black-and-white photos, snapshots of the physical intimacy and unique bond between mother and child. Often the camera creeps around at strange angles, giving a voyeurish feel of impending and oppressive doom and building palpable suspense. Angela Stefanovics is well cast: her dark looks are bewitching and she gives the impression of a being a soul from a bygone era. Her sudden emotional outbursts evoke impending tragedy or mental instability brought on by post traumatic stress. Her son asks simple questions: “what happens when we die” yet in the film’s context they often appear ghoulish. Fliegauf’s cognitive dissonance technique is similarly used by Veronika Franz in her debut Goodnight Mommy. Based on montage made with cleverly edited mixed technology LILY LANE is a simple yet highly effective fantasy drama that plays on the senses and remains in the memory. MT

NOW ON RELEASE AT THE BARBICAN | 31 MAY 2017

 

Based on a True Story (2017)

Dir Roman Polanski | Writer: Roman Polanski, Olivier Assayas | Cast: Emmanuelle Seigner, Eva Green

Unusually, there’s a happy ending to this traditionally styled film from Roman Polanski.

Emmanuelle Seigner and Eva Green go tete a tete in a tongue in cheek psychological drama adapted by Polanski and Olivier Assayas from Delphine de Vigan’s story about an author and her envious admirer (D’Apres un Histoire Vrai).

There are shades here of the director’s award-winning 2010 thriller The Ghost Writer, not least because Green’s feisty character pens books for well-known people. That said AFTER A TRUE STORY wears its heart more playfully in a formidly-crafted thriller that inhabits a chic quarter of Paris and a Normandy farmhouse where Seigner’s divorced Delfine spends weekends with her part time lover Francois (played insipidly by Vincent Perez/La Reine Margot) and host of  book programme.

We first meet Delphine at a signing for her latest bestseller as adoring fans extoll the virtues of her literary genius. But Delphine is now struck by writers-block in a period of anxious navel-gazing, and this is where Elle comes into the story.

At first we get the impression that the two are going to be romantically involved as they kiss warmly but this is all part of Polanski’s teasing style. Delphine exuding an air of confidence that Delphine seems to be lacking in her current state of flux but Alexandre Desplat’s unsettling score signals a warning of danger.

Alarmingly Elle soon takes over the writer’s life advising Delphine’s contacts to give her space and strangely she acquiesces. Meanwhile, Francois has dropped out of the story on a name-dropping tour to the US  (Bret Easton Ellis and Cormac McCarthy, don’t you know!) and soon the women are living together in Delphine’s flat – apparently sharing their life together, with Elle even impersonating her at a student lecture.

Green and Seigner are convincing in their roles, as the sassy Elle and more laid-back – almost submissive – Delphine,  but there’s no mistaking a steely side to the author who looks like she’s just rolled out of bed. DP Pawel Edelman’s confident lensing and Jean Rabasse’s sophisticated set design ensure a enjoable watch in this sophisticated game of wits that, unlike Polanski’s usual fare, has a happy outcome leaving us pondering whether the Polish born filmmaker was softening in his dotage. Luckily, as we now know, this was just a blip in the 90 year old director’s landscape. MT

AN OLIVIER ASSAYAS RETRO IS NOW ON MUBI

 

The Desert Bride (2017) | Cannes Film Festival | Un Certain Regard

Dir:

Paulina Garcia (Gloria) as a fiftysomething housekeeper whose life changes dramatically turn when she travels across Argentina to take up a new post.

The Meyerowitz Stories (2017) | Cannes Film Festival | In Competition

Baumbach’s latest serio-comedy THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES asks the question: how do you manage a creative father who constantly puts you down?

Ben Stiller and Adam Sandler deal with their own neuroses while managing a creative father who puts them all down. Stiller is well-off LA lawyer Matthew Meyerowitz, a half- brother to failed musician Danny (Sandler) and non-entity Jean (Elizabeth Marvel) who live close by to their sculptor father (Hoffman) whose party piece is bringing the conversation back to himself.
Harold’s retrospective show brings the family back together in the Brooklyn home he shares with his fourth wife Maureen, a scatty alcoholic played amusingly by Emma Thompson. But the show is put in jeopardy when Dad suffers a brain trauma that makes his narcissism worse.
The siblings find a certain love-hate solidarity as they struggle with the inevitable fallout, all operating from a position of shame; Danny feels a failure as an artist, although he’s a good father. Matthew fails by not being an artist, despite being a financial success; Jean has emerged from Harold’s negligent parenting never achieving anything, in act of self-sabotage; and they’re all latently angry with each other. Baumbach’s clever script ensures there’s plenty of dry humour, and even open wrestling, to lighten things up. With entertaining turns from Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson and a soulful Adam Sandler as the underdog, this is a film that will feel poignantly personal for many.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | 17 – 27 MAY 2017 | IN COMPETITION

The Shepherd | El Pastor (2016)

Dir.: Jonathan Cenzual Burley; Cast: Miguel Martin, Alfonso Mendiguchia, Juan Luis Sara, Maribel Iglesias; Spain 2016, 98 min.

The harsh rural landscape of Central Spain is the backdrop to this story about what money (the lack of it and the lack of need for it) can do to rather ordinary men. This is not so much about greed, but about what happens when the pressure to be materially successful in life collides with the traditional values of a life outside modern society.

Anselmo (Martin) is a shepherd, who lives in harmony with nature and his dog Pillo in a rundown cottage in the middle of nowhere. He, and his very modest lifestyle, are introduced in the first ten minutes; apart from a few words to Pillo, the sequence is just an introduction to the landscape, which will dominate proceedings: As in his debut The Soul of Flies, Burley is his own DoP, his pristine camerawork captures the beauty a natural workd that is never sentimentalised. Anselmo has no television, his leisure time is spent having a glass of wine in the local bodega and visits to the library in the nearby city of Salamanca (?) where he meets the librarian Concha (Iglesias), who treats him with gentle respect: most people believe he is a simpleton for eschewing a material existence. The tranquillity is undisturbed, until a developer offers Anselmo a handsome amount for his land. Anselmo refuses, he sees no need to change his modest, but meaningful life. Enter Julian (Mendiguchia), the owner of the local slaughterhouse, and Paco (Sara), another businessman, who need to sell their land to the developer – but won’t be able to make the much-needed profit, if Anselmo does not join them in the endeavour. Both men depend on the deal, because the middle class Julian, as well as the petit-bourgeois Paco, are living above their means. The pace kicks up in the last fifteen minutes, with an action-packed finale that is much in contrast to what went on before, very much action packed: a boy falls into a well, after Anselmo foresees the accident – shades of the magic realism of The Soul of Flies. But the bloody confrontation between the male trio, whilst telegraphed, somehow seems a rather simplistic solution.

Great on atmosphere, THE SHEPHERD is a brilliant explores the collision of very different lives, but the characters – apart from Anselmo – are somehow unwritten. To resolve this rather delicate story with an explosion of violence, is somehow negating everything what went before. Beautiful to look at, and directed with great panache, it is Burley the writer whose narrative fails him in the end. AS

ON RELEASE IN ARTHOUSE VENUES FROM  2 JUNE 2017

 

The Other Side of Hope (2017)

Dir: Aki Kaurismäki | Finland / Germany | Finnish, English, Arabic | Drama | 98 min · Colour · 35 mm, 2K DCP

The grass is always greener on the other side especially when your business is failing or you live in a war zone. Aki Kurismaki’s latest film is an unapologetically upbeat story of dystopia in modern day Helsinski where two lives converge – that of Khaled, a Syrian refugee and stowaway on a coal freighter and Wikström, a Finnish travelling salesman peddling ties and men’s shirts. Treating his characters with even-handed sympathy and understanding Kurismaki evokes a realistic picture of the local refugee crisis as well as the economic malaise affecting contemporary Finland.

When Khaled claims asylum at the government offices, he is bathetically told: “you are not the first”. This is the start of many telling observations that give THE OTHER SIDE OF HOPE its spry and ironic humour. Meanwhile Witstrom leaves his wife and his business and, after a win at the poker tables, buys a local restaurant business. When the authorities turn down Khaled’s application, he decides to remain, going underground in the Finnish capital where he gets duffed up by the ‘Finnish Freedom League’ before some friendly street musicians offer support. And soon Wikstrom offers him a job in his new concern where the classic Kaurismaki community muddle along with the waitress, the chef and his friendly Jack Russell.

Starring regular collaborators Sakari Kuosmanen, Kati Outinnen and Ilkka Koivula, THE OTHER SIDE OF HOPE is witty and watchable and never takes itself too seriously in showing how the kindness of strangers goes along way to making the world a better place. MT

ON GENERAL RELEASE 26 MAY | SILVER BEAR WINNER BERLINALE  2017| BEST DIRECTOR

Loveless (2017) | Cannes Film Festival 2017

IMG_3612Dir: Andrei Zvyagintsev | 127min |Drama | Russia

Zvyagintsev’s long-awaited followup to Leviathan is the story of a divorcing couple forced back together again to search for their missing son. LOVELESS is scripted by Oleg Negin who also wrote The Banishment, Leviathan and Elena but the only similarities lie in the alienation of the characters: here Zvyagintsev would have us believe that the Grim Reaper has finally visited Russia and stolen its human soul and spirit. What remains is a collection of spiteful, self-seeking, sociopathic types whose only pleasure is shopping, selfies and social media due to a culture that breeds indifference by forcing them into loveless marriages to procreate and conform.

In Moscow a young couple have already been through a bitter divorce but are still sharing a home. Their young son Alexsei sobs silently in his bedroom in one of the most moving scenes in this otherwise emotionally barren affair, while his parents, who never wanted him, bicker about how best to sell the family flat. Boris (Alexei Rozin) is a tubby, pasty-faced office worker whose new girlfriend, an aquisitive blond, is needy and close to her conniving mother. His soon-to-be-ex-wife Zhenya (Maryana Spivak) is hostile towards her son and husband. A beautician, she is now dating a rich and cold-eyed man twice her age with a pristine appartment in an upmarket part of town.  There is nothing to recommend any of them: physically and spiritually they represent the worse form of life, alive and kicking – not just in Moscow – but in much of the civilised world.

When Alexsei disappears during his parents’ separate date nights, the film becomes a police procedural of utter desperation. Moscow feels like a frozen forest filled with creatures from another planet: these s0-called parents are merely psychopaths and narcissists going through their vacuous routine, their only despair is for themselves rather than the loss of their son. This is a bitterly depressing film but visually impressive and inventively framed.

If you’re looking for two hours of utter desperation and frightening emptiness. LOVELESS is the film to watch and it’s coming to a cinema near you. Be warned. MT

NOW ON GENERA RELEASE | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW | IN COMPETITION 2017

 

 

I Am Not Madame Bovary (2016)

Dir.: Feng Xiaogang; Cast: Fan Bingbing, Guo Tao, Da Peng Zhang Jiayi; China 2016, 138 min.

Director Feng Xiaogang (Back to 1942) and writer Zhenyun mock the Party bureaucrats but fail to give justice to the main character Li Xuelian, a woman fighting the law of an entire country, when she is wronged by her ex-husband.

Ten years ago Li Xuelian (Bingbing) and her husband Qin Yuhe got a fake divorce, the plan was to obtain another property. But after the divorce, Qin fell in love with another woman, and Li took him to court, to have the divorce annulled. But Judge Wang Gongdao (Peng) rules that the divorce stands; later Qin Yuhe calls Li a whore in front of his friends. A decade later, Wang is Chief Justice of the country, whilst Li is still protesting the court ruling at the Party Congress in Beijing. Wang asks the chef Zhao Datou (Tao), who had a crush on the young Li at school, to keep the woman away from the Congress. After raping Li, who tells him, “in spite of the rape this was the best sex I ever had”, she nevertheless leaves him when it emerges that he is spying on her on Wangs’s behalf. Much too late we learn at the end that the first divorce caused Li to have a miscarriage, and that she is fighting the courts on behalf of her unborn child.

Overlong and openly misogynist, the only saving grace is the innovative camerawork of DoP Pan Luo (Old Fish), whose circular images are a joyful reminder of silent films. But this does not compensate for the many issues director and writer have with women and their representation. AS

I AM NOT MADAME BOVARY (WO BU SHI PAN JIN LIAN) RELEASE ON 26 MAY 2017

Whisky Galore! (2016)

Dir: Gilles MacKinnon | Cast: Eddie Izzard, James Cosmo | Drama | UK

Alexander McKendrick’s 1949 screen adaptation of Compton McKenzie’s true story is an Ealing classic fondly remembered for its feisty depiction of the fearless folks of Todday Island in the Scottish Outer Hebrides and their attempts to recover the whisky cargo from a shipwrecked boat.

Quite why Gilles MacKinnon has decided on a remake of this popular arthouse gem is questionable given the high status it holds in the collective memory and the lacklustre cast he has selected to replace the originals: Basil Radford, Joan Greenwood, Gordon Jackson and James Robertson Justice.

The film is set during the Second World War when the Scottish Islands were a reasonably tranquil outpost in the war effort but impacted nevertheless by a serious dearth of whisky brought on by a breakdown of supplies. When a ship runs aground on a rocky outcrop, the residents club together to relieve the vessel of its precious liquid cargo. Hampered by a slowdown due to the Sabbath Sunday, the islanders are forced into ingenious ways of overcoming strict religious observances enforced by the local minister Macalister (James Cosmo). The only other spanner in the works is – naturally an Englishman – Captain Wagget (Eddie Izzard), who is tasked with maintaining order as Head of the Home Guard.

MacKinnon’s film beautifully evokes this period in history with painterly set design and some magnificent local scenery of the glorious location. Nigel Willoughby captures  summer on the island which glows with lush landscapes and wonderfully vibrant seascapes, clouds scudding by. Patrick Doyle’s original score compliments the narrative but the witty script falls flat on mediocre performances that lack the star quality needed to lift the film in Mackendrick’s brilliant 1949 league. The Home Guard appears to be modelled on the characters from Dad’s Army and are a pale imitation, borrowed again from another inimitable national treasure and cannot compete with Arthur Lowe, John Le Mesurier or Arnold Ridley. Some viewers may also be offended by the indelicate racial subtext that creeps into some of the dialogue and feels out of place for modern audiences.

That said, this is a decent if rather tame period piece, totally lacking drama but hopefully instrumental in reviving the treasured forties classic original. MT

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 19 MAY 2017

 

The Secret Scripture (2016)

Dir.: Jim Sheridan | Cast: Rooney Mara, Vanessa Redgrave, Theo James, Aidan Turner, Eric Bana, Susan Lynch | ROI 2016, 108 min | Drama

After some Hollywood mediocrities such as Brothers, director|co-writer Jim Sheridan has tried to recapture his breakout success with My Left Foot by adapting Sebastian Barry’s artful novel The Secret Scriptures. The result is an uneven and often bewildering melodrama, but a moving one that is certainly worth seeing.

Set in the early 1940s and at the end of the 1990s, the drama tells the story of Roseanne McNulty who spent nearly all her adult life in a prisonlike psychiatric ward in Ireland where the film opens showing Vanessa Redgrave as an emotionally distraught elderly Roseanne whose future in the home is threatened due to plans for an upmarket Spa. In flashback the story retraces her young days in Sligo where Rooney Mara is captivating as the young Roseanne who clearly “has power over men”, as the town’s priest Father Gaunt (James), puts it. The Second World War has just started, with Southern Ireland staying neutral but actually supporting Nazi Germany in a clandestine way. Roseanne is marked by the priest as a ‘dangerous’ influence, and soon moved to a dilapidated cottage by her aunt, having worked in her shop and turned too many heads. After rescuing RAF pilot Jack McNulty (Reynor) on the beach one day, she hides him from the paramilitary forces acting on behalf of the Government. The two have a whirlwind affair and marry in haste, but McNulty is captured by his pursuers and executed. Roseanne, pregnant, is send to a horrific church institution for “fallen Women” and gives birth to a son. Learning that the nuns will take her child away and sell it to rich US-citizens, she flees with her baby into the sea.

The narrative is interlaced with Roseanne (Redgrave) telling her story to psychiatrist Dr. Grene (a thoughtfully appealing Eric Bana) and a sympathetic nurse (Lynch). Veering wildly between flash backs and Roseanne’s more contemporary narrative (including her diary, written into a bible), does not help the creation of a dramatic arc: it creates an episodic structure, which not only reduces the emotional impact but also skips over vital clues that muddle and fail to serve what could have been a spectacular denouement.

Whilst Mara, Redgrave and Bana are brilliantly believable, overcoming the shortcoming of Sheridan (both as director and co-writer), the rest of the ensemble is reduced to clichéd cardboard figures despite best efforts from Aidan Turner, Jack Reynor and a mesmerising Theo James as Father Gaunt. But ultimately it is the clumsily-handled finale that robs the film of the glory of its early scenes. Leviathan DoP Mikhail Krichman’s sumptuous camerawork and set pieces of the Irish countryside and interiors are really stunning in conjuring up the romantic past, and the miserably grim atmosphere in the hospital. But Jim Sheridan wastes all this for a sentimental TV melodrama retelling a story which has been told in a much better ways since the original true events. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 19 MAY 2017 NATIONWIDE

Manhattan (1979)

Dir: Woody Allen | Writer: Woody Allen, Marshall Brickman | Cast: Diane Keaton, Woody Allen, Mariel Hemingway, Meryl Streep, Anne Byrne Hoffman, Michael Murphy | 96min | US | comedy romance

Woody Allen’s witty and insightful New York satire is a seamless pleasure. Scenes in the life of a divorced writer are accompanied by George Gershwin’s music and Gordon Willis legendary camerawork. MANHATTAN captures the essence of 1970s cinema serving as a tribute to an era where friends talked in person on a regular basis and people met face to face and fell in and out of love in before the advent of social media and mobile phones.

Allen plays Isaac the neurotic central character attempting to find the perfect start to his novel about New York, a city that unfolds in black and white splendour against the iconic score (Rhapsody in Blue) and snapshots of Times Square, Broadway and Central Park. What follows is a sinuous story of Isaac’s studious teenage girlfriend (Mariel Hemingway), his second ex-wife (Meryl Streep) and her lesbian lover, his close friend and confident Yale (Michael Murphy), and wife and spiky journalist lover Mary  (Diane Keaton).

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The performances are peerlessly natural yet preternaturally witty. Beautifully framed and edited, Gordon Willis will forever be remembered for his shots of the Manhattan skyline that bookcase each scene. Mariel Hemingway gives an open and honest portrayal of first love and captures with poignancy what every girl should say when her lover comes back to acknowledge he can’t live without her.

Another classic New York comedy Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale followed 16 years later. This heavier and more tortured film showed us that the world was already a much darker place. MT

MANHATTAN RETURNS TO CINEMAS NATIONWIDE FROM 12 MAY 2017 COURTESY OF PARK CIRCUS 

Tomcat (2016)

Dir: Handl Klaus | Cast: Kater Moses, Lukas Turtur, Philipp Hochmair, Sebastian Loschberger | Drama | Austria | 123min

Klaus Handl is an Austrian filmmaker known for his Locarno prize-winning debut March. His second feature – Berlinale Teddy winner TOMCAT – is a finely crafted piece that pictures the soigné existence of two loved up classical musicians and their handsome tomcat Moses. The trio enjoy a peaceful existence in a leafy upmarket suburb of Vienna and they are not wafting around naked petting each others’ penises and plucking their home grown plums, the couple a enjoy a varied social life and regularly have great sex that sometimes includes their timid clarinetist friend Andreas (Philipp Hochmair).

But Moses isn’t so sociable and their domestic harmony is ruptured one night when the cat gets involved in a territorial scrap and comes off the worse for wear. Stroking him the following morning, Moses snaps back at Stefan, who breaks the poor cat’s neck in retaliation. Life will never be the same again. But this tragedy comes as a distinct relief after over thirty minutes of rather twee domestic bliss now ruptured by a welcome undercurrent of conjugal conflict. While Stefan sobs emotionally in the bedroom, Andreas descends into a deep sulk as the pair engage tight-lipped – and now fully clothed – in a peevish passive aggressive bout of soul-searching. Also gone is the mincing classical music score and we’re left with brooding silence. Then the violence starts with a short sharp cat fight initiated by aggrieved and angry Andreas. Enter screechy violins and more tight-lipped bottom clenching silence and an angst ridden outbreak of tears from Stephan after a football match, where he is soothed and pacified by another male player.

Clearly nothing in this Garden of Eden will ever be as it was and the narrative unravels in a prolonged bout of Andreas sulking petulantly and Stefan trying to appease him until an accident in the plum tree, once again shifts the status quo. What starts out as an enticing Austrian arthouse drama ultimately offers little more than narrative torpor for the remaining hour, as TOMCAT pussyfoots around some resonant relationship issues, instead of  bringing something real and resonant to the party. Although pristinely crafted and earnestly performed by Hochmair and Turner, ultimately TOMCAT is just another mediocre domestic drama. MT

OUT ON RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS FROM 12 MAY 2017

The Last Face (2016)

Director: Sean Penn

Cast: Charlize Theron, Olivier Bardem, Jean Reno

117min | Action Drama | US

Actor turned director Sean Penn brought his well-crafted but empty action film to the competition line-up in Cannes Film Festival. Many booed and there was slow clapping. Charlize Theron leads and partly narrates this wartorn saga which has not yet been picked up leaving us in no doubt at to its popularity in the harsh world of the film market where the best films are either pre-sold or snapped up within minutes of their press screening in a voraciously competitive marketplace, where the Hollywood eye is on the money. And this is a Hollywood-style movie.

Unspooling in just under two hours THE LAST FACE throw us into the harsh realities of civil war in Africa where Theron plays well-respected Doctor Wren Petersen who divides her time between her office at the UN Human Rights Department and the killing fields of Liberia where the love of her life Dr Love (Javier Bardem) slaves overtime to patch up and save broken bodies in his work for a NGO relief agency. With its melodramatic score and bleeding heart overtones THE LAST FACE is the last word in worthiness with a capital W. That these high-minded and privileged white people should be seen falling in love while they dedicate their lives to ‘poor black people’ is a premise that is both condescending and hackneyed and explicit references to female injuries, rape and pillage (“she was ripped from her vagina to her anus and yet she’s still dancing) feel both crass and strangely misogynistic, reducing women to the level of animal specimens and robbing them of the little dignity they undoubtedly deserve in this humiliating scenario where refugees merely exist to serve the narrative as the inevitable casualities of war, rather than real people with backstories.

Javier Bardem and Jean Reno give their utmost along with a quality ensemble cast, but there is nevertheless an undertow of male superiority in the film’s blatant denegration of Dr Petersens’s character which comes in the opening scenes where, in voiceover, she admits to being the daughter of a man who desperately wanted a male heir, and never felt she existed until endorsed by the love of a ‘good’ man. Whatever happens next brings nothing original to the party and the patent lack of interest in this overblown gorefest – that poses as entertainment – should send Penn sculttling back to the drawing board for some new ideas. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM FRIDAY 12 MAY 2017

Frantz (2016)

Director: François Ozon

Cast: Paula Beer, Pierre Niney, Ernst Stoetzner, Marie Gruber, Johann von Buelow, Anton von Lucke, Cyrielle Clair, Alice de Lenquesaing

Drama | France | 112min

With the theme of guilt firmly at the forefront, François Ozon takes his inspiration from Ernst Lubitsch’s ‘Broken Lullaby,’ in his first black and white film – a gloriously imagined postwar drama that flips fluidly from French to German.

The First World War changed everything – not only from a political point of view but also from a societal one. European countries were left reeling from the devastation but Ozon focuses here on the bitterness and remorse ordinary people felt at losing their dear ones to the war effort and the enemy, both from the German and French perspective.

After a lightweight dramady The New Girlfriend, Ozon is back on form with this lusciously filmed magnificently mounted masterpiece that takes place in the immediate aftermath to the Great War in a small village in rural Saxony (with echoes of Haneke’s The White Ribbon) and slowly builds to a powerful bodyblow in its emotive final scenes set in Paris and provincial France before returned to Germany. Basing his premise on a series of blatant lies, albeit white ones, the inventive French filmmaker tells a story of guilt and loss – where a young man (Pierre Niney plays Adrien) is driven to protect an old couple (the Hoffmeisters) and their daughter-in-law Anna (Paula Beer), in order to assuage his own actions in the trenches of Verdun, where Anna lost her lover in the slaughter that wiped out thousands and divided Europe in a way that many of our own relatives can still remember (beware Brexit!).

Paula Beer radiates a tragic sadness here as the complex heroine who gradually falls for Pierre Ninney’s fragile yet hopelessly handsome French soldier who manages to conceal his secret for most of the film, spinning her tortuously into a spiral of mixed emotions ranging from longing to anger, hatred and gradually, love and acceptance.

Ozon’s cinematographer Pascal Marti crafts velvety images 35mm in black-and-white. His regular composer Philippe Rombi crafts a atmospheric soundtrack of orchestral splendour that seems to continually presage doom in judiciously chosen moments, and there is an enchanting scene in Adrien’s family chateau where an impromptu piano and violin recital takes place between Anna, Adrien and Fanny (du Lenquesaing). Ozon’s theme of art as a potential healer and inspirer once again appears with Manet’s painting Le Suicide representing a potent motif. This is an accomplished and immersive period drama that will resonate with arthouse audiences and is certainly Ozon’s most mature and accomplished film so far. MT

NOW OUT ON RELEASE FROM 12 MAY 2017 at selected arthouse cinemas including CURZON | BEST EMERGING ACTOR SOPHIE BEER | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2016

 

The Levelling (2016) Bfi player

Dir: Hope Dixon Leach | Ellie Kendrick, David Troughton, Jack Holden, Joe Blakemore | 83min | UK | Drama

English filmmaker Hope Dixon Leach explores some thorny contemporary themes in her assured directorial debut. The Levelling deals with intergenerational conflicts, suicide and the plight of UK dairy farming in a moving family drama that sees a girl forced to return home from college to face her troubled past and the unexpected death of her younger brother

Creating just the right mood of sadness and brooding tension, Ellie Kendrick plays Clover, a recently qualified vet who is now back home on the dairy farm in Somerset after leaving her family in a mood of unresolved tension after the sudden death of her mother. Her father Aubrey (David Troughton) is an old school army type who believes in duty though somehow resents his daughter’s reappearance, not least because of her disappearance at a difficult time during the devastating floods of 2014. As is often the case, father and daughter are driven apart by a tragedy that should have united them in their grief.

The storyline is fraught with enigma and unanswered questions as to why Clover (Ellie Kendrick) was not invited to her mother’s funeral; why she calls her father by his Christian name, and whether her brother Charlie committed suicide or died in an accident. None of this is revealed adding to the sense of mounting introspection in this often gruelling story. But daily life must go on where the farm is concerned, and despite her professional credentials, Clover finds it difficult to kill a recently born male calf, adding to her own sense of misery and anguish.

Somerset is a sorry sight as a backdrop: waterlogged fields awash with mud; her father has been forced to leave the flooded farmhouse and retreat to a sordid caravan. The motif of a hare swimming along the riverbed is redolent of the gloomy state of affairs where even animals seem dejected as they fight for survival in the uncertain climate. Clover bickers with her father as they wallow in sadness, her dog Milo offering the only affection and respite from the unremitting sense of doom.

Kendrick’s thoughtful performance carries the film supported by an otherwise all male cast of Jack Holden as Charlie’s friend James, as David Troughton as her father Aubrey, a man unused to sharing his feelings of emotional despair yet desperately needing to do so. The Levelling is a grim but promising debut from a fresh British talent. MT

NOW ON BFI PLAYER

Jawbone (2017)

Dir.: Thomas Q. Napper | Cast: Johnny Harris, Ray Winstone, Michael Smiley, Ian McShane | UK | Drama | 91 min.

First time director Thomas Q. Napper conjures up a bleak and shadowy portrait of a homeless, alcoholic boxer who has seen better days and retreats to the glory days of his old boxing club in Union Street near Waterloo Station. But the journey into the past confronts him with his lost opportunities and few alternatives for the future.

Jimmy McCabe (Harris, also writer and co-producer), has been evicted from the council flat where he grew up; the whole estate is being raised to the ground. Losing this final connection with his mother, who died a year ago, he runs berserk in a council office, protesting violently, attacking police officers and spending the night in jail. He turns for help to William Carney (Winstone) and Eddie (Smiley), who now run the club where McCabe’s career started so successfully. Carney, who is on his last legs, does not want to hear any hard-luck-stories from Jimmy: “I have heard them all”, but reminds him that alcohol is a taboo in the club, where young boys and teenagers try to channel their isolation and violence into something constructive in the ring. Eddie, who is very close to Carney, has no patience with McCabe, who is sluggish in training and full of self-pity. When McCabe meets the shady promoter Joe Padgett (McShane), he agrees to a non-licensed fight ”up north”, where he will meet a stronger and much younger opponent. Padgett is open about McCabe roles in the fight: for two and a half thousand GBP (plus 500 extra if he unexpectedly wins), Jimmy is the scapegoat. “People love seeing this guy hurting his opponents, and they pay good money for it” is Padgett’s take on the forthcoming fight.

This is a grim and hapless British Noir that calls to mind John Huston’s classic Fat City (1972). Napper holds out little hope for the future but creates a blistering portrait of alienation in a desolate journey through this corner of South-East London, which has not changed much since the ’60s. The timeless settings and authentic characters enhance the quality of JAWBONE, overcoming the limits of the boxing genre, and establishing a noirish scenario, in which the anti-hero is trapped. Like John Huston’s Fat City, the ageing ex-champ is very much the victim of greedy promoters as well as his own inability to come to terms with life without alcohol abuse. But there is more: After Padgett had warned Jimmy about the odds against him in the ring, we see the crowd response: there is an alliance between the sadistic prize-fighter and his supporting audience – as long as he is winning against Jimmy. But this support turns into hatred against McCabe. When he leaves the ring as a winner, he has spoiled their evening, they had came for his blood. Napper taps into the rather shameful audience that watches endless hours of Reality-TV, to see others humiliated. This morose world is hauntingly evoked by DoP Tat Radcliffe (Pride), creating a world of half-shadows, in which the sun never shines. Artificial lights of all kinds, just give Jimmy a moment’s respite, but he can only hide for so long. Worse still, the two protagonists socially inclined to help others, are the dying Carney, and Eddie, who is the same age. One does not want to imagine a world without them – as Jimmy put it to Eddie: “I am not like the two of you, helping others, I can’t even help myself”. JAWBONE is a ballad of doom, atmospherically brilliant, a dark poetic realism for a time of utter disenchantment. AS

OUT ON 12 MAY 2017 NATIONWIDE

Requiem for Mrs J (2017) | Berlinale 2017

Dir: Bojan Vuletić | Drama | Serbia / Bulg/Mac/ Russ Fed/France | 94 min · Colour

Living in a state of flux is complicated, but dying is even harder, as Mrs J finds out when she tries to commit suicide, in this dark but beautifully captured comedy from Serbian New Wave filmmaker Bojan Vuletić (Practical Guide to Belgrade)

Jelena has reached her early fifties with nothing to look forward to. The loneliness of her newly widowed state is amplified by her selfish daughter’s active sex life with her fiancé Milan, who shares their comfortable suburban flat along with Jelena’s elderly mother-in-law. We first meet Mrs J nonchalantly assembling a gun and silencer at the dining room table in a scene that is not only shockingly deadpan but also mildly hilarious. The whole film is embued with ironic moments like this, where gentle humour comes from the Kafkaesque task of simply sorting out her affairs, before she pulls the trigger and ends the abject pointlessness of it all.

Many will empathise with this universal portrait of a woman who is resigned to die, simply because the rest of her life seems to stretch before her as an emotionally arid desert, where her own modest but worthwhile life experience is regarded and reflected back on her as superfluous and even downright irritating by the younger generation, compounding even further the dejection she already feels. This is an incredibly difficult role played with nuanced subtlety by Mirjana Karanovic (When Father Was Away on Business) who captures without rancour or bitterness the utter despondency of a woman’s middle-age cast adrift in a country that offers no certainty, swinging back and forth between torment and transition. The authorities are unable to cope, Jelena’s former employers are now bankrupt and the remaining staff are just killing time.

Expertly framed and filmed by Jelena Stankovic; this is a quiet gem of a film that carries a small but delightful message of hope in the final scenes proving that nothing is ever quite as bad as it seems when family and friends rally in support. MT

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL 9 -19 FEBRUARY 2017 | PANORAMA SECTION

 

The Journey (2016) | Venice 2016

Dir: Nick Hamm | Drama | 94min | UK | Timothy Spall | John Hurt |Colm Meaney | Toby Stevens |

A rather crass comedy that reduces the Northern Ireland peace process to a glib foray into the forest. THE JOURNEY is a missed opportunity to make a really resonant and worthwhile meeting of minds between the influential figureheads of the era known as The Troubles..

The cast is superb and well chosen: Timothy Spall plays Ian Paisley, the gritty Protestant leader and head of the Democratic Unionist Party as a toothy gruffalo – almost a parody, while Colm Meaney is perfect as Martin McGuinness – he looks and sounds just like the fearful IRA member and chief negotiator for the dreaded Sinn Féin. Colin Bateman’s script places the two in a Scottish hotel near Edinburgh during the St Andrews meeting that took place in 2006, Paisley was to return to Northern Ireland to celebrate his 50th wedding anniversary and McGuinness decides to accompany him during the car journey to the airport – although in reality Paisley’s celebration fell on the final day of the talks.

John Hurt makes an utterly believable MI5 agent (Harry Paterson) who has engineered their journey to the airport, arranging to bug the taxi driven by an undercover policeman (Freddy Highmore/Finding Netherland), unbeknownst to the two passengers. Meanwhile Toby Stevens plays a snarling and facetious Tony Blair who is listening in to the conversation, back at the hotel. But the car is involved in a planned collision leaving the two plenty of time to themselves while they ebulliantly thrash out their differences in a disused church in the heart of the glen.

Sadly this is a rather contrived piece of cinema that cherrypicks and tussles with the truth, jumbling historical facts. And for what? Hollowly humorous at times, and rather poignant as Hurt and McGuinness are now no longer alive, THE JOURNEY comes across as a rather trite final word from the main characters at the coalface of decades of murdering, mayhem and strife that was The Troubles – namely Eniskillen, Bloody Sunday and the 1979 murders of Airey Neave (who escaped from the Nazi’s Colditz) and Lord Louis Mountbatten . MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL UNTIL 10 SEPTEMBER 2016

 

 

Mulholland Drive (2001) | Bfi Player

DIRECTOR 001Writer| Dir: David Lynch | Cast: Justin Theroux, Naomi Watts, Laura Harring, Ann Miller | US  Mystery Thriller |

“One night, I sat down, the ideas came in, and it was a most beautiful experience. Everything was seen from a different angle…Now, looking back, I see that (the film) always wanted to be this way. It just took this strange beginning to cause it to be what it was.” David Lynch.

David Lynch’s neo-noir existential thriller is dreamily weird and strangely intoxicating to watch. Themes of denial, aspiration and unrequited love coalesce in a cryptic psychological thriller whose apparent normality mingles with a surreal and darkly comic  speculative storyline unfolding when a wannabe actress arrives in Los Angeles and befriends a semi-amnesiac woman she finds hiding in her family apartment.

Now regarded as one of of Lynch’s best films it launched the career of Welsh actress Naomi Watts who has gone from strength to strength as the vulnerable figure of hope who finds rejection and disillusionment in the city of dreams. David Lynch reinvented postmodernism making it edgy and fashionable again. Mulholland Drive was original devised as a TV series after Twin Peaks was rejected for TV, so here Lynch gave it an ending.

It also starts with a car crash the beguiling sole survivor Laura (Elena Harring) staggering disorientated from a stretch limo onto LA’s Mulholland Drive. She fetches up in a nearby apartment where wannabe actress Betty (Watts) later arrives after a long flight from Canada. So vulnerable and lost is Laura that Betty develops a strange and sympathetic attraction to her that eventually morphs into attraction and love in scenes of a graphic sexual nature.

Betty is an entirely straightforward and fresh-faced ingenue at the start of film – much in the same vein as Kyle MacLaclan’s Jeffrey in Blue Velvet (where Isabella Rossellini plays Dorothy, the equivalent of Laura). It seems that this dazed and confused female image could come from Lynch’s recurring teenage memory of a neighbour who appeared semi-naked and bleeding on the driveway of his family home, as discussed in David Lynch – The Art Life (2017).  All this feels plausible and yet imbued with a hypnotic sense of disorientation where ‘Rita’ (from a poster of Rita Hayworth) and Betty’s dark persona’s appear as Diane and Camilla. Diane is also a struggling actress and Camilla’s lesbian lover. Successful star Camilla is swept away by Justin Theroux’s film director Adam, and the jealous Diane has her killed in the ‘car crash’.

Confused? The reality depends on which side of the looking glass we are standing. Looking forward, “Betty” is vouchsafed a vision of where infatuation and professional failure could lead. Looking backward, the drama’s first part is the final anguished, transfiguring dream of “Diane”. All this is open to interpretation but in such a way as the reverie is pleasurable as well as intoxicating – like tripping on medazolam. There is a weirdly authentic cameo from Maya Bond as Aunt Ruth, and Monty Montgomery as a cowboy cum Diddy man.

Angelo Badalamenti’s languorous score washes over the feature that glows in Peter Deming’s sumptuous visuals (Peter provided the vibrant images on Oz the Great and the Powerful and Twin Peaks). MULHOLLAND DRIVE is a sensual experience, unforgettable and alluring. MT

Latest digital restoration of a 4k transfer now on BFI Player | DVD, Blu-ray & EST 

Lady MacBeth (2016)

Dir: William Oldroyd | Cast: Florence Pugh, Christopher Fairbank, cosmos Jarvis, Bill Fellows, Naomi Ackie | drama | 89min | UK

British director William Oldroyd transports Nikolai Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk to the wilds of 19th century Northumberland in his standout Gothic horror debut, served with a dash of noirish melodrama.

How male authors love to punish their female heroines, particularly the attractive ones. The main character in Leskov’s 1865 novella follows a long line of leading ladies such as Madame Bovary, Therese Raquin and Therese Desqueyroux. And Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned particularly when she is a young wife married to an impotent middle-aged psycho who comes (not) and goes of his own accord, leaving her locked in a stone mansion. Oldroyd adds modern flavour to the brew with a feminist, racial and gender subtext but the narrative retains a distinct whiff of Victorian starchiness from the tight bodices to the gracefully austere set design. We first meet Katherine (played by Florence Pugh) as a nervous teenage bride joining the household of Alexander (Paul Hilton) a wealthy but dysfunctional mining boss with brutish manners and a bedside manner to startle Jack the Ripper.

His lack of bedroom skills and frequent absences leave her craving companionship, sharing the house with her timid housemaid Anna (Naomi Ackie) and tight-lipped father-in-law Boris (Christopher Fairbank). But cocky stable groom Sebastian (Cosmo Jarvis) soon steps in to warm her wintery solitude and eventually the two find themselves locked in lust unable to keep their love a secret from the household staff and Alexander himself. Murder and mayhem ensue in the devilish denouement.

Performances here are astonishing particularly from Pugh in her first major role, mastering a decent Northumberland accent and a minxy sparkle in her eye to boot. While Oldroyd and screenwriter Alice Birch stay true to the pages of the original, the finale is more in line with Polanski than Leskov intended.

Shot on a tight budget but none the worse for it, Lady Macbeth was made for under £500,000 as part of a regional film-funding programme supported by BBC Films and the British Film Institute. Sometimes the film feels claustrophobic trapped in its country house setting and Lady Macbeth makes a pretty swift descent into Hell given the scant running time of 89 minutes. That said, this is an enjoyably gruesome romp that remains top drawer (particularly in the dress and lingerie department) and true to its literary pretensions never sinking into tawdriness as it unleashes a gripping tale of male oppression and female fury in a remarkable debut. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 25 APRIL 2017

 

 

Réparer les Vivants (2016) | Heal the Living

Dir: Katell Quillevéré

103min | Drama | France

Best known for her feature debut Love Like Poison, Abidjan born Katell Quillevere’s third feature is an ambitious but tonally uneven drama that brings together the lives of two French families through an extraordinary gift.

Featuring an eclectic cast from Canada, Belgium and France, and based on Maylis de Kerangal’s novel Mend the Living, the narrative is told in two parts, the second half linked to a tragedy that unfolds in the first. The film opens with a thrilling Dardennesque escapade of surfing and skateboarding for a young French boy (a spirited debut for Gabin Verdet), and develops into a nerve-shredding struggle for survival after a spectacular accident  leaves him with life-limiting injuries. Without revealing the entire story suffice to say that the final segment is a sluggish study of a ciggie puffing bisexual middle-aged woman (a thoughtful Anne Duval) who suffers degenerative heart failure culminating in a plodding medical procedural.

Although the plot is an inspiring one, the characters involved are singularly less so apart from Simon, who has the winning charisma and ebullient energy to carry the first act forward giving it considerable dramatic heft and one of the best surfing scenes ever – followed by his subsequent tragic death. There is a delightful scene, told in flashback, where we see him flirting with his girlfriend Juliette who then takes the funicular to the top of the hill, and Simon follows her on his bike, appearing at the summit to give her a romantic surprise and a really passionate kiss. His parents – played by Emmanuelle Seigner and Kool Shen – are understandably devastated by the accident but act with tremendous courage in the aftermath. After that we never see them again. Tahar Rahim plays an amiable hospital assistant who is responsible for organising the aftercare, he is also a bird fancier (or the feathered variety) who is prepared to pay over 1000 euros for a goldfinch, adding his tousled-haired charm to the otherwise bland medical staff. After the hero of the piece is killed off, the second segment feels comes as a crashing disappointment. Anne Duval fails to generate any sympathy for her character who is a one a dimensional mother who lives for her two teenage kids (Oldfield and Cholbi) and – in a bizarre twist – is  also attempting to have an affair with a concert pianist (Alice Taglioni) but is perpetually too out of breath. Apart from being less dynamic or resonant, this second part is also more pedestrian with its needlessly graphic scenes of prolonged surgery feeling a little ‘de trop’ in what is essentially a drama. If you’re squeamish or anti-smoking, it’s prabablu time to call it a day at this point . MT

ON RELEASE FROM 29 APRIL | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 10 SEPTEMBER 2016

 

The Zookeeper’s Wife (2017)

Dir: Niki Caro | Screenwriter: Angela Workman (based on the book by Diane Ackerman | Cast: Jessica Chastain, Johan Heldenbergh, Daniel Bruhl, Timothy Radford, Efrat Dor, Iddo Goldberg, Shira Haas, Michael McElhatton, Vad Maloku | 127min | Drama

The most poignant aspect of THE ZOOKEEPER’S WIFE is the non-human story. But sadly the animals concerned are not the main focus in this Holocaust tale about a woman who sheltered Jews in her Zoo in Warsaw. Niki Caro’s drama is a variation on the The Diary of Anne Frank with exotic beasts thrown in – and this time getting the short straw – most of them being slaughtered by the Germans during bomb raids over the Polish city. The commendable but controlled drama film is also a showcase for Jessica Chastain’s talents as Antonina a gentle Polish woman whose guile and courage helped save a group of Jews who were banished to the Warsaw ghetto towards the end of the Second World War and escaped with their lives.

THE ZOOKEEPER’S WIFE faces stiff competition with Polanski’s Warsaw epic The Pianist and Agnieszka Holland’s In Darkness, where a Polish World War Hero, Leopold Socha, hid a group of Jews. But the human element here is far less memorable than the story of the Zoo. Antonina Zabinska and her husband Jan , sheltered 300 Polish Jews at the Warsaw Zoo during World War II. The story opens cosily in the balmy summer of 1939 with Chastain waking her son and two lion cubs that share the family home. Her husband is a Prof and together they’ve nurtured the Zoo and its impressive menagerie of animals and are now basking in the afterglow of their hard work, blessed with a young son Ryszard (Timothy Radford) and an active sex life. The characterisation is all rather predictable. Prof is a masculine protector (The Broken Circle Breakdown‘s Johan Heldenbergh, Chastain as Antonina exudes feminine wholesomeness from her bouncy curls to her curvaceous figure and rocks a rather good Polish accent. Then it all goes pear-shaped when Germany invades Poland. The Nazis are nasty and shouty and their commandant Lutz Heck (Daniel Bruhl)- who we first meet as a German zoologist from Berlin Zoo – rapidly turns callous at the outbreak of hostilities informing the couple that their Zoo is to be ‘liquidated’. The animals are then mostly shot or slaughtered – one of the worst scenes involves the shooting of an elephant and a prize golden eagle who Bruhl orders to be ‘stuffed and mounted’. It later appears in his private office as he announces his plans for a selective breeding programme. At this point Antonina uses her feminine wiles to persuade Heck to run their Zoo as a pig farm providing fodder for German soldiers. The pigs will be fed vegetable waste that Jan will collect daily from the Ghetto. But the two plan to secrete Jews onto his truck, hiding them under the litter.

Although awful things happen to the Jewish hostages here we remain mostly unaffected by their plight largely due to a lack of complexity. The underwritten characters are like cyphers so we fail to feel their pain – or their joy and Antonina and Jan Zabinski – despite their bravery – emerge as martyred victims rather than shining heroes. Adapting Diane Ackerman’s best-selling book, Caro and screenwriter Angela Workman portray their protagonists as endlessly virtuous saviours and the enemy as vicious and venal. The only flicker of naughtiness comes when Antonina willingly submits herself to Heck’s blandishments- to save her husband, Jewish friends and cherished Zoo.

As Holocaust film go this is a safe bet, yet also a unexpected tear-jerker. It has cuddly bunny scenes (where the CGI is barely distinguishable) and cuddly conjugal scenes showing how men very much had the traditional upper hand in wartime. DoP Andrij Parekh camerawork is skilful and Daniel Bruhl breaks out of his usual buttoned-up roles in a scene of surprising passion which adds to his repertoire and his allure. The most disappointing aspect here is tragically the human story. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 21 APRIL 2017

 

The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki (2016)

The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki is Finnish filmmaker’s Juho Kuosmanen’s dynamite debut, a black and white retro-flic based on the true story of the Finnish boxer Olli Mäki and his 1962 championship match against the American featherweight champion Davey Moore (who died shortly afterwards). As much a poignant love story as a raw and visceral sketch of pre-match preparation involving gruelling training sessions, this impressive debut also reflects the quiet pensive moments in the run-up to Maki’s happiest day in August 17th, 1962, as he determines what he really wants out of life.

With hand held camera in high contrast 16mm and cinema verite style the film captures the febrile intensity and gruelling pain of day to day match preparation for the legendary episode in Finnish sporting history and the euphoric national pride and excitement of a country on the crest of international sporting fame.

As the unassuming amateur boxer, known as the “Baker of Kokkola”, trains for his first world class fight he is also falling in love with Raija, a local country girl (Oona Airola), and their romance blossoms distracting him but also grounding him as to his true ambitions while he competes in the world of professional boxing amid the glamour, bright lights, sponsors and press.

Kuosmanen also captures the contrast between the sophistication of Helsinki’s elite and the wholesome country folk, the art nouveau splendour of the maritime capital and the open skies of the countryside where vast pine forests and lakes provide a lush setting for the romantic scenes and spartan training hours, in and out of wooden saunas and snowy woods.The film’s grainy black and white freshness and glowing fervour capture our imagination and conveys the heart-pumping joy of first love and thr the simplicity of the sixties when sport was simply about talent. Peter von Bagh would be proud. MT

OUT ON 21 APRIL 2017.| Winner Prix Un Certain Regard

 

Frank and Lola (2016) | DVD | Digital Download

F&L PackshotDir|Writer: Matthew Ross | Cast: Michael Shannon, Imogen Poots, Emmanuelle Devos, Michael Nyqvist, Rosanna Arquette, 88min | US | Romantic thriller

Michael Shannon is the one to watch in an electrifying neo-noir that explores desire, domination and redemption. His star quality and sizzling sensuality oozes all over this stylish curio where he plays the strong and sincere Frank alongside Imogen Poots’ dreamy airhead Lola.

It all kicks off with a torrid night of lust in the playground of Las Vegas. The two have just met. Divorced, forty-something Frank is a talented chef in a city where restaurants are legendary and Lola is a newly-arrived fashion graduate whose enigmatic past drives the narrative backwards and forwards to France threatening to destroy their convincing stab at coupledom.

In the tight working community of Las Vegas, Frank becomes surprisingly jealous when he overhears Lola being offered a job over a drink in a local bar. Her new employer (Justin Long) is a young, glib and confident and appears rather too keen on Lola. And when she turns up the following evening distressed and tearful Frank decides to probe Lola’s past. An interview in Paris gives Frank the opportunity to track down a suave Frenchman (Michael Nyqvist) who was once involved with her sophisticated mother (Rosanna Arquette in a coquettish cameo) and has now married a wealthy Frenchwoman (Emmanuelle Devos) who has recently been in Las Vegas.

What starts out as a seductive love story develops into a peripatetic psychological thriller well served by a witty script and infused with an intriguing menu of subplots that lead us into the often bizarre world of the superrich with lashings of food and property porn and an over-cooked side dish of real porn. Shannon’s Frank is the kind of man who women desire: strong and masculine yet sensuous and vulnerable as his love and protective obsession for Lola permeates every scene. Frank bears his soul for Lola without ego or rancour from his romantic past, channeling masculine jealousy into a passion that ultimately makes him a great lover and a better man. Poots’ Lola is a flighty and fluffy female who remains an elusive dark horse right until the final denouement, and even then we’re unsure of her motives. Michael Nyqvist nails a new kind of macho male: one whose ego sits uncomfortably with his role as a kept man hanging around nightclubs and playing the field. As Frank puts it plainly: “you’re a bit long in the tooth to be playing these kind of games. You’re not 35 anymore, come on Pops move on with your life”. Matthew Ross is a talented directer who is crafted a set of authentic characters with convincing and complex agendas in this provocative and exciting feature debut. MT

FRANK AND LOLA IS OUT NOW ON DVD AND DIGITAL DOWNLOAD |  10 APRIL 2017

ON

 

The Transfiguration (2016)

Director/Writer: Michael O’Shea

Cast: Eric Ruffin, Chloe Levine, Aaron Clifton Moten

97min | Drama | US

Eric Ruffin (Nature Calls) plays a dark horse called Milo in Michael O’Shea’s pseudo vampire flick that premiered at Un Certain Regard Cannes side-bar last year. This low-budget indie follows the teenage African-American orphan in his freewheeling daily grind in a story that generates a palpable tension but never seems to know where it’s going.

Although O’Shea splatters his downbeat narrative with numerous vampire tropes in this impressive first feature that takes place in the backwaters and beaches of New York’s Rockaway Boulevard, the horror element is lowkey and is most distinguished by the atmosphere of alienation and loneliness generating in a desolate urban milieu.

Grieving Milo lives a solitary existence with his brother Lewis (Aaron Clifton Moten) in a flat they once shared with their mother who appears, in flashbacks, to have commited suicide. Plagued by a crew of gangland heavies, who call him ‘the freak’ on account of his tiny stature, Milo strikes up a tentative friendship with a white girl called Sophie (Chloe Levine) who moves into his housing block but who we later see being abused by the gang in nearby grassy wasteland.

With his vacant stare, Milo strikes a melancholy figure tramping silently through the streets, clearly still traumatised by his mother’s death and withdrawing into himself while attempting to build an impenetrable poker-faced facade to the outside world. In his bedroom he watches youtube footage of animals being slaughtered and has also experimented with drinking the blood of solitary warefarers who approach him in the subway, although there is no rhyme or reason to these desultory and unprovoked attacks.

Although it feels as if Milo’s budding romantic relationship with Sophie is heading the same way as that of Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One, with roles reversed: the slightly older girl’s affection for him appears to act as a calmative influence on Milo and he soon backs off emotionally, freezing Sophie out of his life for her own salvation and ultimately his own tragic demise. THE TRANSFIGURATION eschews schlockiness to focus on building a potent sense of malevolent stillness ably assisted by a droning occasional electronic score composed by Margaret Chardiet. This is a promising debut from Michael O’Shea and his young cast but the dread of the enigmatic early scenes never really transmutes into anything meaningful. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE | Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard) 12-22 MAY 2016 

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Re-release

Dir: Miloš Forman | Writer: Lawrence Hauben | Cast: Jack Nicholson, Louise Fletcher, Scatman Crothers, Danny De Vito | Drama | US 1975, 128 mins

Randle Patrick McMurphy is a catalyst for change. Arriving at the Salem State Sanatorium (Oregon) he brings a spark of life to twelve random inmates. Surfacing as the ringleader of this group of lost souls he is a free spirit, a force for good – while also being a convicted rapist. In Milos Forman’s film version of Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel, Jack Nicholson, armed with his Oscar for Chinatown, gives a joyfully subversive performance in the leading role. A quick-witted, sly-eyed anti-hero whose life before never really amounted to much, is transformed into a saviour who brings light to the befuddled darkness of the loony bin.

But is Randle really mad, or just faking it to avoid serving his time in jail? This whole question is one that has been debated again and again and recently in Jon Ronson’s book The Psychopath Test, where the central character explores the spectrum of mental health by checking himself into a home where he purports to be unhinging and ends up being a victim of the system. And this is partly what happens to Randle. When we first meet him, he has been transferred from prison to the state institution, on the grounds of diminished responsibility. Here he undergoes psychiatric observation while making a spectacular rise to glory and then a tragic fall. In some ways Randle is a Christ-like figure, bringing redemption and salvation to his disciples at the expense of his own life on Earth. He battles a system that attempts to rob the patients of their souls by dumbing them down with medication and reducing them to simpering idiots. The bête noire of the story is Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher in an Oscar winning turn as a cruel and cold-eyed control freak who imposes her will on her patients, only being sympathetic when operating from the moral high ground.

Randle kicks against the system, represented by Ratched, determined to get his own way and corralling his co-inmates (some of whom are socially dysfunctional or lonely elective patients) by championing their human rights. These are people who have lost their way in life circumstance or upbringing, none of them is nefarious or ill-intentioned making this tragedy of the institutionalised even more poignant. With Randle they go to the match and even a spot of deep sea fishing, but it all eventually ends in tears.

Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman’s script leads to a schematic and anticlimactic ending when Randle suddenly loses his impetus after a night’s drinking and revelling with the boys (including Scatman Crothers’ sympathetic nightwatchman), making a mockery of all that has gone before. Fletcher’s Nurse Ratched is an intriguing and almost underwritten character whose backstory can only be imagined.

Although this scathing satire of the American mental health system fails to be as moving as it could have been, the performance are worth their weight in gold. Jack Nicholson’s jubilant  Randle with his subtle expressions and facial dynamics, will pave the way for his villainous turn as Jack Torrance in The Shining (1980). The tremendous support cast headed by William Redfield (who spouts blithering nonsense); Danny De Vito (as an engaging simpleton); Will Sampson (a strong and silent Native Indian) and finally Brad Dourif (as a young man with a mother complex). MT

Opening at BFI Southbank, IFI Dublin, Light House Dublin, Electric Cinema Birmingham and selected cinemas UK-wide on | 14 April 2017 in celebration of Jack Nicholson’s 80th birthday

Cézanne et Moi (2016)

Dir/Writer: Danièle Thompson | Cast: Guillaume Canet, Guillaume Gallienne, Alice Pol, Deborah Francois, Sabinz Azema | Drama

Emile Zola might have written some desolate novels but his private life appears to be rather pleasant according to CÉZANNE AND I exploring the close friendship between two of France’s most famous 19th century cultural geniuses: the titular novelist and the impressionist painter Cézanne. Unlike Gilles Bourdos’ tepid Rénoir (2012), there is plenty of drama here, as befits the subject-matter.

Writer and director Danièle Thompson’s painterly period piece imagines the two enjoying a beautiful bromance that lasted from childhood until their deaths, although it wasn’t without its tiffs and rivalries as the strong creative personalities often clashed giving rise to some moments of drama and even tears, and the racy often lyrical dialogue doesn’t hold back in expressing the deep intimacy of their conversations about the pleasure and pain of creativity (“do you still get a hard on from your writing?” asks Cézanne of his mate).

Starring Guillaume Gallienne (Yves Saint Laurent) as Cézanne and Guillaume Canet (Tell No One) as Zola this is a spirited and enjoyable – if occasionally soapy – affair with its sumptuous settings making great use of the gloriously lush and sun-drenched scenery of Provence and elegant boulevards of Paris and the Louvre, where the Salon de Réfusés episode descends into a brawl .

Eric Neveux’s intrusive score primps up moments of sauciness by a lakeside as Cézanne executes his’ plein air’ canvasses, and Jean-Marie Dreujou cleverly evokes some of the artist’s outdoor compositions with limpid camerawork and a fabulous choice of settings. While the painter comes across as the more louche of the pair, with his wealthy background and family funding; Zola is a more sober character and Canet plays him as a rather buttoned up and inaccessible, growing up a penniless orphan until he joins the successful bourgeoisie, as captured in the final scenes. The narrative unfolds from 1888, when Cézanne accuses Zola of writing a novel whose central character – a striving but unsuccessul painter – feels too near the bone for his liking. But Zola assures him that the novel in question ‘L’Oeuvre’ is not about his close friend. Most of the scenes  involves tête à tête set-toos between the pair highlighting their creative differences and expressing their feelings about sex and women. According to Thompson, they both fell in love with the same person, Alexandrine (Alice Pol), who would eventually become Zola’s wife. While Cézanne is restlessly married to his muse Hortense (Deborah François) there appear to be issues with his sexual performance, and she complains that “I fuck her too quickly and paint her too slowly.” The two debate Zola’s theatrical naturalist style that today feels stuffy and dated as opposed to Cézanne’s impressionism which proved the more universally evocative form of expression due to its avant-garde appeal that gave birth to modernism. Zola resents Cézanne’s monthly income that allows him freedom to explore, while the writer is hampered by his lack of funds. Meanwhile, Cezanne calls him a “a violeur et un voyeur”, somehow implying that his ideas were not original.

Artistic context of the era is further provided in the shape of fellow impressionists Edouard Manet (Nicolas Gob), Auguste Renoir (Alexandre Kouchner) and Camille Pissaro (Romain Cottard). This is a watchable and vivacious drama that paints an absorbing picture of two driven men but despite Thompson’s learned research CÉZANNE AND I  comes across as a lightweight drama rather than a resonant biopic of the creative duo. MT

Cézanne et Moi will be released on Friday 14th April at Ciné Lumière, find out more here: http://www.institut-francais.org.uk/cine-lumiere/whats-on/new-releases/cezanne-et-moi/

 

The Handmaiden (2016) | Agassi

Director: Park Chan-wook

Cast: Kim Min-hee, Kim Tae-ri, Ha Jung-woo, Cho Jin-woong, Kim Hae-sook

Writers: Chung Seo-kyung, Park Chan-wook, Novel by Sarah Waters

The Handmaiden (Agassi) is a sumptuously mounted and kinky erotic love story set in the 1930s Orient. Neatly sidestepping tawdriness the writer take the original text and flip it over into a tale of three parts, told from differing viewpoints that gradually morph into the realms of fantasy in a challenging re-telling.

Sarah Waters’ original novel Fingersmith tells the story of a girl who leaves poverty in Victorian England using her skills as an expert pickpocket to gain fame and fortune, eventually getting her comeuppance at the hands of a wealthy swindler after serving in the household of a Japanese heiress. We first get a glimpse of young Sookee (played by newcomer Kim Tae-ri) in the slums where she grew up surrounded by unwanted babies. Korea is under Japanese rule and she is sent to the mansion of Kouzuki (Cho Jin-woong), a black-tongued old man who specialises in book dealing. It soon becomes clear that she is to be the maid of his niece, Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee – Right Now, Wrong Then). In truth, Sookee is a crafty petty thief sent by a pimp-style gangster called The Count (Ha Jung-woo) to help him marry the young heiress and gain control of her fortune. This is all revealed in a series of fast-moving scenes while we’re still reading the subtitles. Hideko seems to be a naive, virginal orphan who knows nothing of the real world outside her sheltered kingdom. But it soon emerges that her nonce of an uncle has groomed her from childhood to be his companion after driving her aunt (Moon So-ri) insane and later hanging herself from a cherry tree and haunting the mansion. But the Count suddenly appears presenting himself as a putative suitor from a noble family who is to add value to Kouzuki’s book collection with illustrations.

There is great deal of languorous heavy petting here between both men and women in scenes reminiscent of the Marquis de Sade’s “Crimes of Love” and this is all cleverly achieved by filming the sequences from different angles. The denouement is a complex affair in this lavish epic which is mostly filmed in the dark interiors of the mansion, although it occasionally breaks out in to some glorious surroundings of a nearby lake and shimmering landscapes. A real arthouse treat that needs to be seen again to fully appreciate the intricate plotting. MT

NOW ON RELEASE FROM 14 APRIL 2017

 

 

Masaan | BFI INDIA Celebration

DIrector: Neeraj Ghaywan

Writer: Varun Grover| Neeraj Ghaywan

MASAAN enchants Un Certain Regard audiences with a painterly modern love story set in the holy city of Benares (Varanasi).

With his co-writer Varun Grover, Ghaywan creates a sure-footed character-driven debut that has all the intensity of a Bollywood drama but is told with a delicacy of touch similar to recent Indian dramas The Lunchbox and Udaan.

The three-stranded lyrical drama is essentially a coming of age affair where we first meet Devi (Richa Chadda) and her student friend Piyush checking into a hotel for an afternoon of sexual discovery. Both virgins, they are piqued to explore forbidden pleasures but Police break into the room before they have a chance to consummate matters. Piyush tries to kills himself during the onslaught and is rushed to hospital and the scandal brings shame on Devi and her father Pathak (Sanjay Mishra).

Meanwhile, in another part of the riverbank, Deepak (Vicky Kaushal) works at the funeral pyres of the ghats but his dream is to become to become an engineer. Shy yet stunningly attractive, he has set his heart on a Shaalu (Sheta Tripathi), who he meets on Facebook, but her higher caste means that their love affair is doomed before it begins.

This is a sweetly romantic and endearingly old-fashioned film that avoids sentimentality but finds a satisfying conclusion with some moving moments along the way. Although some of the musical choices feel slightly out of place – more locally-rooted music would have better captured the mood –  Avinash Arun Dhaware’s visuals of the exotic landscapes and rose-tinted sun-sets are amongst the most gorgeous of this year’s Un Certain Regard section, creating a real sense of place and transforming this beguiling drama into a memorial tribute to the people of Varanasi. MT

NIW SHOWING AT BFI AS PART OF THE INDIA SERIES

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 13 – 24 May 2015 | UN CERTAIN REGARD

Effi Briest (1974) Dvd release | Rainer Werner Fassbinder

220px-Effi_briest_movie_posterFONTANE EFFI BRIEST

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Cast: Hanna Schygulla, Wolfgang Schenck, Ulli Lommel

West Germany 1972/3, 141 min.

When Rainer Werner Fassbinder embarked on his screen adaptation of Theodor Fontane’s novel Effi Briest (1884/5) in the autumn of 1972, he wanted the script to stay as close as possible to the original text, hence the title. Theodor Fontane (1819-1898) developed the style of German poetic realism during the 19th century. And whilst critical of certain aspects of society, he was anything but a Dickens: he represented the “Biedermeier” attitude of the cultured German middle class citizen of his time, which Fassbinder recreated lovingly in the sets of the film.

Fassbinder and his contemporary directors of the “New German Film” school had set out to make films with a programmatic approach, often explaining their intentions in longwinded title texts; in this case: Fontane Effie Briest or many like her, who are well aware of their potential but still accept the ideology of the ruling system in their heads, and therefore in their deeds, and so cement and affirm the ruling ideology.

Seventeen year old Effie (Schygulla) is living a very sheltered life with her parents in the small German town of Brandenburg. Her mother arranges a marriage to Baron Von Instetten (Schenck), a highly ranked civil servant who is twenty years older than his bride. The couple move to Kessin, a seaside resort at the Baltic Sea but Effie is bored, her husband often absent, making a career for himself. When Effie meets Major Crampas (Lommel), a superficial seducer, their relationship is not so much passionate, but rather indolent. Six years later, Effi and von Instetten now live in Berlin, and he discovers some old letters which disclose his wife’s affair. He challenges Crampas to a duel and kills him. Then he divorces Effi, keeping their daughter with him. Effi ‘retires’ to her parent’s home and dies soonafter – not so much of a physical ailment, but a broken heart.

Aesthetically Effi is the exception in Fassbinder’s work. His cinematic style usually veers towards highly emotional settings with the cinematography reflecting the passion and action with abandon. But Effie is austere, clinging closely to the tone of the book and the performances echo this stiff quality. Shooting in black and white and using inserts (black on white background) and circular fade-outs, Jurgen Jurgers (Christiane F) evokes an 19th century atmosphere of elegant discretion that only comes to life during the outside carriage scenes, making the drama feel like a silent movie with dialogue. Mirrors in the rooms reduce the usual shot-counter shots and cuts, this way, the close-ups are very intense. The performances are buttoned down emotionally frustrated by the claustrophobic, soulless atmosphere.

Fassbinder (who narrates the voice-over) explains his concept of a ‘film to be read’: “I wanted to make sure that the audience does not experiences this film like others, which reach heart and soul, but this is only a film for the head; a film, where the audience does not stop reflecting, and like reading a book, where the letters and sentences become the narrative, the images here would tell the story.”AS

SCREENING AS PART OF A MAJOR BFI RETROSPECTIVE | MAY 2017 | NOW AVAILABLE ON DVD

 

The Last Stage | Ostatni etap (1948) Mubi

Director: Wanda Jakubowska | Scr: Wanda Jakubowska, Gerda Schneider | Cast: Tatjana Gorecka, Antonina Górecka, Barbara Drapinska, Aleksandra Śląska | Drama / Poland / 110 minutes

Wanda Jakubowska (1907-1998) and her scriptwriter Gerda Schneider were themselves both inmates of Auschwitz; and Jakubowska’s determination to remember what she was witnessing in order to make a film about it helped keep her alive. In the summer of 1947 she duly returned to Auschwitz to film the exteriors of ‘The Last Stage’, with former inmates among the supporting cast. (The fact that it was shot in summer already sets it apart from most other films set in the camps, which usually find winter more atmospheric). Much of the imagery of later reenactments like ‘Schindler’s List’ – including the famous orchestra – can be found here; while the fact that the events it reenacts were only a couple of years previously gives it an immediacy and visual authenticity no later reenactments could hope to match. (One tends to think of Auschwitz as just a collection of huts, but seeing the real thing in this film you realise how enormous it was).

‘The Last Stage’ is not strictly speaking about The Holocaust, but is more an anti-fascist document of the rape of Poland by its occupiers; and we actually see Polish women protesting at their incarceration and rough treatment on the grounds that they’re not Jewish. Jakubowksa herself was there because of her activity in the resistance, while the onscreen introduction lists the many different nationalities held in Auschwitz. We see Frenchwoman singing the Marseilleise and Russian women dancing to celebrate Stalingrad (although it is sobering to reflect that at this stage liberation will still be two very long years away); and one prominent character is a gypsy.

Jakubowska’s film is organised as an ensemble piece which flits from group to group, the most prominent character being Barbara Drapinska as Martha Weiss, a young Jewish woman whose ability to speak German result in her life being spared (for the time being) to function as an interpreter. The actress who actually heads the cast list is Tatjana Gorecka as Eugenia, a Russian doctor ultimately tortured to death for attempting to tell the truth to members of an international commission who visit the camp to observe the conditions. (The fact that outside observers were allowed into some of the camps, where they were successfully lied to about what was actually going on, remains little known).

The chimneys perpetually belching smoke are frequently remarked upon throughout the film; and although the actual mass extermination programme is not depicted there are harrowing scenes involving the murder of a baby and the withholding of medicine. The cruelty of the guards and the kapos is depicted as a routine matter and the camp administration as unimaginative jobsworths. But Jakubowska is more concerned with making an uplifting socialist tribute to comradeship in adversity than a recitation of Nazi atrocities. Everyone in ‘The Last Stage’ is an individual, even the administrators (who get a surprising amount of screen time). Despite the characters all speaking in their native languages, the cast are all Polish (some of those playing Germans obviously dubbed), and with their handsome Polish faces look far too healthy and well nourished to dispel memories of the damning newsreel footage of starved and broken human beings that shocked the world in 1945. Even Aleksandra Śląska as the camp overseer is ironically much prettier than any of the actual women guards we see in contemporary newsreels.

‘The Last Stage’ could only have been made with Russian approval (Stalin, apparently actually approved the script personally), the excellent photography is by a veteran Russian cameraman, Bentsion Monastyrsky, and the Red Army are portrayed as saviours. Although stills from ‘The Last Stage’ regularly appear in film histories, the film itself (along with the rest of postwar Polish cinema) is little seen today. That Jakubowska remained an ardant communist until the very end of her long life, as well as enthusiastically wedded to socialist realist aesthetics, led to her own work ironically being sidelined as “politically incorrect” in post-communist Poland. RICHARD CHATTEN

ON MUBI

Neruda (2016) ****

Dir.: Pablo Larrain; Cast: Luis Gnecco, Mercedes Moran, Gael Gabriel Bernal, Alfredo Castro; Chile/Argentina/France/Spain/USA, 107 min.

Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain has immersed himself in two iconic figures of the 20th Century to bring us films about Jacqueline Onassis and his fellow countryman Pablo Neruda, premiering at Venice and Cannes this year, respectively. NERUDA is not so much a biopic of the Nobel Prize winning poet, more a noirish character study of the man himself, in the format of a deconstructed detective novel.

In Chile 1948, President Videla (Castro) has joined the Cold War hysteria by arresting communists and putting them into concentration camps – one run by a certain Augusto Pinochet. Fleeing the police forces with his Argentine wife Delia del Carril, poet and Senator of the Republic, Pablo Neruda (Gnecco), is being hotly pursued by a part-factual and part-fictional detective Oscar Peluchonneau (Bernal), the putative son of a late police chief and a prostitute.

Aided and abetted by national sympathisers, Neruda enjoys a lifestyle which is anything but spartan: he and his wealthy wife are fond of the good life: but it does not detract him from writing his radical poems. Oscar belittles Neruda in his off-screen commentary, but at the same time he is in awe of him. The longer Neruda continues to evade him, the more Oscar becomes a pure invention of the writer who increasingly sees himself in a central role, everything revolving around him. In the third act, when Neruda escapes via the snowy Andes to Argentina, the duel between the poet and his creation becomes almost satirical.

Neruda was – like his Chilean compatriot Robert Bolano – an admirer of the detective novel, and Larrain plays the genre to perfection. The name Peluchonneau is a dead give-a-way: ‘peluche’ or a ‘stuffed toy animal’. The director weaves Guillermo Caldron’s script into a new form of magical realism: a form of noir, in which Neruda directs his own world, sometimes making fun of himself to deflect from the deadly game of reality. Oscar is somehow his alter-ego, very much an outsider, like himself: but the difference between them is that Neruda has never forgotten his impoverished childhood, he walked barefoot until the age of 12. Meanwhile Oscar is desperate to be the son of his father, who never really acknowledged him. Both men are pompous at times – pretenders; but Oscar lacks Neruda’s genius, and perhaps, more importantly, his courage to rebel.

Gnecco, a real look-alike, plays Neruda in the style of Cervantes, larger-than-life and always careful with his words in recording the most banal events for posterity. DoP Sergio Armstrong (The Maid) creates sumptuous, flowing images, the camera rolling over wild landscapes, starry skies and dark streets full of hidden danger, blacker than black. Chile is the 1940s is shown as a treacherous and exotic badland. The scenes in the brothel, where Neruda holds court, are reminiscent of early Renoir paintings. Larrain directs not so much with anger, as he did in The Club, but with a mischievous playfulness, never letting the audience forget the dangerous path the fearless poet is treading. Neruda’s works of art live on, giving voice to the fight against Fascism that engulfed his sub-continent for so long.

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 6 APRIL 2017

Man Down (2015)

Dir.: Dito Montiel | Cast: Shia LaBeouf, Kate Mara, Gary Oldman, Jai Courtney, Charlie Shotwell | US | 91 min.

There have been many films about post traumatic stress disorder, but the plight of American veterans returning from far-away battlefields since the days of the Vietnam War in the early ’60s has been more or less neglected by successive governments. On the big screen, the efforts have also been mixed to say the least, and Dito Montiel (A Guide to Recognizing your Saints) has tried to come up with an original approach, which proved in the end – again – not wholly satisfying.

The four-stranded narrative is centred around two GIs returning from a tour of Afghanistan: Gabriel Drummer (LaBeouf) and Devin Roberts (Courtnay), and flips between the pre-war memories of Gabriel, featuring his wife Natalie (Mara) and his son Jonathan (Shotwell); the traumatic war experience; a lengthy interview with councillor Peyton (Oldman), who tries to help the suicidal Gabriel; and finally, the return of the two buddies to a (seemingly) apocalyptic America, where Gabriel tries to find his wife and son.

There is certainly a soft streak in the original Gabriel before “the fall”: Learning that his cute was bullied by his school peers, after they overhead him saying to his mother “I love you”, Gabriel arranges a secret code with Jonathan: They will say “Man down” instead of “I love you”. Devin is much more uncompromising, he basically drags Gabriel into joining the Marines; the scenes in the Lejeune base camp of are conventional, featuring the nominal OTT drill sergeant. But nothing prepares the soldiers for the real war in Afghanistan, where combatants and families often live under one roof and leads to a gruesome incident, from which Gabriel does not recover, in spite of a lengthy session with Peyton. When the two return to their hometown, they find a country devastated by war.

Only in the final part do we learn about the true nature of the denouement, even though, in hindsight, the clues have been there all along. In attempting to tell the story in four different strands, Montiel often loses coherence. DoP Shelly Johnson’s visuals (Wild Card, Hidalgo), particularly of a ravaged America, go a long way, to keeping our interest going, but plot-wise MAN DOWN is often opaque, particularly with regard to the true nature of the relationship between Natalie and Devin during the weeks before Devin joined Gabriel in Afghanistan, due to a broken arm. LaBeouf is tries his best to impress, but is really the weak link – not given helped by the script enigmatic script. MAN DOWN simply lacks the direction to do the topic justice: trying to be avant-garde does not lead to an immersive experience in a story hampered by too many contradictions and unsolved equations. AS

ON RELEASE FROM FRIDAY 31 MARCH 2017

The Age of Shadows (2016) | Miljeong

Dir.: Kim Jee Woon

Cast: Song Kang-ho, Gong Yoo, Um tae-goo, Han Ji-min

South Korea 2016, 139 min.

The original Korean title in translation means Secret Agent, and writer/director Kim Jee Woon (The last Stand) offers us a dazzling spy story, set in Seoul as well as Shanghai during the 1920s when large parts of South East Asia were occupied by the Japanese. Kim gets very near to the spirit of Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent: double crossing, based on ambivalent interests, dominates this sumptuous ballet of shadow fights played out against the alluring background of twenties architecture, lovingly recreated.

The first ten minutes set the tone: Kim Jan-ok, a leading personality of the Korean resistance movement in Seoul is chased by Japanese soldiers, led by Captain Lee Jung-Chool (Song), who once was himself a resistance fighter, before changing sides in Seoul. Cornered, Kim Jan kills himself. The whole sequence is filmed like a ballet: the soldiers jumping from rooftop to rooftop, whilst Kim tries to loose them in the narrow alleyways. Lee is truly sad about Kim’s death, and when he is ordered by his Japanese superior Chief Higashi to catch the leader of the resistance Kim Woo-jin (Gong), he remembers the time spent with Kim Woo and the beautiful Yeon Gye-soon (Han) in the underground movement.

In Shanghai, Lee meets up again with Kim-Woo, who is buying TNT from Hungarian anarchists, to use it against the Japanese in Seoul. On the train journey to the Korean capital, Lee has to kill his nemesis, Hashimoto (Um), to save Kim Woo’s life and that of the other resistance leaders. When they arrive in Seoul station, the police have surrounded the concourse, and one of the most memorable fighting sequence is set in motion – whilst Lee is still able to hide his true conviction to his Japanese superiors.

The true star of the film is DoP Kim Ji-jong, who effortlessly conjures up images of a bygone era: everything glitters in fragmented lights, cars roaming the streets, casting frightening shadows at night where the protagonists look very much like marionettes, pulled along in their own dangerous ways. The vibrant colour schemes are permanently changing, melting into each other, creating prisms and a dreamlike atmosphere. Even the violence takes place in an elegant way – apart from the torture scene with Yeon, which seems out of place. The sequences in the train feel seemless – an endless chase in a labyrinth. Song brilliantly evokes his character: a tormented man whose past eradicates his present. Kim Jee Woon directs with great sensibility, avoiding cliches as much as possible. The Age of Shadows is a real masterpiece: a paean to a people lost in the chaos of events well beyond their control, with images of true magic. AS

NOW SHOWING AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL UNTIL 10 SEPTEMBER 2016

The Lost City of Z (2016)

Dir: James Gray | Cast: Charlie Hunnam, Sienna Miller, Robert Pattinson, Angus Macfadyen, Tom Holland | US | 140 min.

Director James Gray, who based this biopic of Army officer/explorer Percival Fawcett on the non-fiction book by David Grann, delivers an un-ashamedly old-fashioned and linear boys-own-adventure, shot on grainy 35 mm, making The Lost City a stunning visual adventure spoilt by its overlong running time and regurgitation of the well documented stifling ideology of the Edwardian era which detracts substantially from the film’s enjoyment.

We first meet Major Percival Fawcett (Hunnam) in his late thirties, during a hunt staged for foreign dignitaries, where Fawcett distinguishes himself by killing a deer. But praise, in the form of an invitation for a formal dinner, will not come his way: his commanding officer explains, that “he choose the wrong ancestry” – meaning, that Percival’s father disgraced himself by alcoholism and gambling. But soon afterwards, there is a chance of redemption: The Royal Geological Society (RGS), of whom Percival’s father had been a member, offers Percival a tricky job in the Brazilian jungle where he has the thankless task of establishing a border between Brazil and Bolivia, rendered indistinct by newly installed profitable rubber plantations. Between 1906 and 1924 Fawcett would undertake seven more expeditions into the Brazilian jungle where he became obsessed by the idea of the lost city of Z, located somewhere in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil. Often clashing with James Murray (Macfadyen) an obese and unsuitable head of the rather reactionary RSG, who could not stomach the fact that the indigenous population had established a culture long before Great Britain, Fawcett is accompanied on all but his last trip by Henry Costin (Pattinson), who served him faithfully, backing him up in the dispute with Murray.

Fawcett joined the Army at the outbreak of WW1 in spite of his advanced age and he was injured and temporarily blinded at the battle of the Somme. His relationship with his wife Nina (Miller) was marked by his permanent absences: she had the burden of bringing up the children, whilst he followed his obsession. When Nina rebelled, wanting to accompany her husband on one of the expeditions (she was certainly fitter than Murray), Fawcett denied her vehemently, claiming “the different roles of males and females are the cornerstone of our culture”. In 1925 Fawcett made a final trip to the Brazilian jungle with his oldest son Jack (Holland): they were presumably killed by Indians along with around a hundred would-be-rescuers.

Percival Fawcett was a certainly a colourful character: he was befriended by Rider Haggard and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who used Fawcett’s exploits as material for his books: ‘The Lost World’. Fawcett was very much a one-dimensional man of his time: unable to settle down to family life, he searched for a holy grail, always preferring physical exhortations to reflective patience. He had an anti-authoritarian streak, in reaction to his father’s reputation, but was a male-chauvinist when it came to his relationship with Nina. James Gray (The Immigrant), reiterates the clichés of the era and Fawcett’s part in it over and over again, in a linear narrative that is as conventional and bloated as the characters themselves. A more contemporary approach, such as Pablo Lorrain’s deconstructed approach for Neruda, could have offered a tighter and more engaging watch, The overriding entertainment comes from DoP Darious Khondji (Amour, Seven) sumptuous jungle scenes, the opera house in the middle of the wilderness, the serenity of the natives and the attacking animals which are captured in magnificent lighting. Contrapuntal to the lush jungle landscapes, England is pictured as cold, artificial light dominates in the scenes shot at the RGS. The Lost City of Z is a visual masterpiece, if you can forgive the rather stolid narrative. AS

IN CINEMAS FROM FRIDAY 24 MARCH 2017

Quand on a 17 ans (Being 17) | BFI Flare Film Festival

Director: André Téchiné (Les Témoins) Writers: André Téchiné, Céline Sciamma

With Sandrine Kiberlain, Kacey Mottet Klein, Corentin Fila, Alexis Loret

Drama | World premiere | France

Revered writer|director André Téchiné portrays adolescent sexual awakening, loss and love in the snowy landscapes of the French Pyrenees. Wild Reeds will spring to mind here, as will his co-writer Celine Sciamma’s rites of passage films Tomboy and Girlhood. But this is a work of multi-layered subtlety that pictures two rival teenagers at loggerheads in a close-knit community where change comes slowly and in unexpected ways

Poignant upbeat but always real BEING 17 has a searing sense of place and of the local traditions in this farming community as it moves through three seasons winter, spring and summer. Stunningly captured by cinematographer Julien Hirsch’s spectacularly scenic shots of vermillion sunsets and icy mountain vistas, the story opens at the cattle farm where teenage Thomas (Corentin Fila), the bi-racially adopted son of Christine (Mama Prassinos) and Jacques (Jean Fornerod) helps out with the animals while studying at the main lycée several hours ride away in the valley. A loner, he resents the more intelligent Damien (Kacey Mottet Klein), a gawky but sensitive kid who doesn’t hide his talent in the classroom. That prompts Tom to beat him up after school, but Damien is too tough let it worry him. Living in the lcoal town with his doctor mother Marianne (Sandrine Kiberlain) he also enjoys boxing, training locally with old family friend Paulo (Jean Corso).

Damien’s father, Nathan (Alexis Loret), is in the French airforce stationed oversees. Marianne treats Thomas’ mother Christine one day and discovers she’s pregnant. Marianne invites Thomas to stay while his mother is resting, unaware that the two boys are sworn enemies and she secretly quite fancies Thomas. The boys’ animosity is pictured in frequent punch ups that somehow start to spark feelings of another nature between them. Klein was pictured in the equally snowy Sister (2012) and has since blossomed developing an raw and piercing sensitivity in his acting which he brings to his role as Damien. As Thomas, Corentin Fila has his own fawn-like sensuously tempered with impetuousness.  The genesis of their relationship is so subtle as to be imperceptable but gradually manifests itself from close contact during their tussles. Drawn together from lonliness and, to a degree, isolation it is bred from a mutual longing for emotional and physical closeness  but is conveyed in bewildered feelings of insecurity and is tenderly moving to watch. There are so many strands here interacting and evolving, yet Téchiné blends them seemlessly together to create a dynamic that feels natural and inevitable as life in village moves on. For her part, Kiberlain lights every scene as a warm and loving mother who is also intuitive, kind and completely natural.

The occasional score is judiciously sparing at just a few points and the tone natural throughout, this is an immersive and satisfying French drama which, along with Things to Come, is sure to go down well with the arthouse crowd.

BFI FLARE FILM FESTIVAL 16-26 MARCH 2017

It’s only the End of the World | BFI FLARE Film Festival

Director: Xavier Dolan Writer: Xavier Dolan based on a play by Jean-Luc Lagarce

97min | Drama | Canada

At 27, Canadian maverick Xavier Dolan has made six good features in eight years. So eventually there had to be an exception and it premiered here at Cannes Film Festival in the main competition.

Innovative and always inventive Dolan’s films all driven by a passionate energy and incredible insight as he strives for unusual angles and plot twists in his ambitious narratives and impressive visual style. But here’s the kicker, IT’S ONLY THE END OF THE WORLD is not his original source material and that is possible why it’s his least enjoyable feature to date.

Beautifully shot with some outstanding climaxes and lows, the drama is adapted for the screen by Jean-Luc Lagarce with some intense turns from its French cast: Gaspard Ulliel (making his second appearance at the festival this year) plays  Louis, a gay man returning home to his family after over a decade, to reveal his terminal illness and to deal with another thorny issue: “the illusion that I am the master of my life,” which he explains in an opening voiceover.

His dominating mother Martine (Nathalie Baye); his mixed up sister Suzanne (Léa Seydoux); and older brother Antoine (Vincent Cassel), who brings his delightful wife (Marion Cotillard, in an underutilized role), to meet Louis for the first time in his return home after 12 years absence. Antoine is the antagonistic link is the otherwise delighted family circle, and he reacts with Cassel’s trademark belligerence which is intolerable in the car scene where is driving Louis to see his childhood home.

Intimate in setting yet far-reaching in its scope and resonance, those familiar with family disarray will find the film disturbing and disruptive but it never feels claustrophobic despite its domestic confines thanks to Dolan’s visual inventiveness, clever lighting techniques and use of occasional flashbacks to a golden past that fills Louis with nostalgia. Along with Marion Cotillard’s character, Louis emerges the most sympathetic character: softly-spoken and placcid, his eyes well up frequently at the heart-breaking scenario which all feels so familiar to his past strife and his quiet disappointment and hurt is palpably expressed in a subtle facial expressions. Realising he is better off on his own he abruptly leaves. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 11-22 MAY 2016 | COMPETITION ENTRY

 

Afterimage | Powidoki (2016) | Kinoteka Polish Film Festival

IMG_3487Dir.: Andrzej Wajda | Cast: Boguslaw Linda, Zofia Wichlacz, Bronislawa Zamachowska, Aleksandra Justa | Poland | 98 min.

Andrzej Wajda’s final film, an unsentimental bio-pic covering the last years of the avant-garde painter Wladyslaw Strzeminski (1893-1952), is the opposite of a melancholic swansong: AFTERIMAGE is a vicious attack on Stalinist repression and censorship, filmed by a man still young at heart, who never gave up the fight against an inhuman dictatorship regime which perverted the idea of equality.

Despite losing a leg and an arm in active service during WWI, Strzemisnki (a magnificent turn by Linda) led a vibrant life, shown in the opening sequence, when he rolls down a grassy hill with his students of the State Higher School of Arts in Lodz, which he had founded in 1945. A popular lecturer, all his students stood by him when he was dismissed from his post in 1950 for refusing to submit to the doctrine of Socialist Realism. One of his students, Hania (Wichlacz), eventually fell in love with him, but was rebuffed by the artist, because he knew he was dying of tuberculosis. But there was still time for a family drama: Strzeminski had left his wife, the famous sculptor Katarzyna Kobro (Justa), whom he had married in 1920, and who lived with their young daughter Nika (Zamachowska – in a case of life copying art, Justa’s Kobra is Zamachowska’s real life mother). Despite the family’s creative talents, resources were tight. Zamachowska has an other-worldly screen presence: she stands out as a fearless and self-possessed child. particularly in the scene where she walks alone behind the coffin in her broken down shoes and only coat (which she turns inside out after chastisement from a passer-by for its bright colour). After Kobra’s death, Nika moves in with her father and tenderly cares for his needs while lecturing him to eat more and smoke less. But when Hania appears on the scene, on the crafty pretext of recording “The Theory of Vision” on a typewriter stolen from the Art School, Nika makes no bones about moving into the local childrens’ home, where at least she gets a free uniform and new footwear.

The bureaucratic authorities gave Strzeminski a final warning after he damaged a street banner bearing a picture of Stalin, because it cut out the natural from his studio window. It counted for nothing that the painter was the co-founder of the world-famous BLOK group in 1924, a loose association of Cubists, Constructivists and Suprematists, including Malevich (whose students Kobra and Strzeminski had been), as well as El Lissitzky. After Strzemisnki’s dismissal from the Higher Art School, two events followed: firstly, his students’ exhibition was destroyed by hooligans hired by the State Authorities; then came the enforced closure of the Neoplastic Room in the Museum in Lodz, which Strzemisnki had opened in 1948 (and included five Spatial Compositions by Kobro, who nevertheless was not invite to the opening). Further humiliation followed: he was thrown out of the Artists Union, barring him from buying any more painting materials. Since food was only obtainable on ration cards for the employed, his status as unemployed meant that he was reduced to starving. Although his students tried to find odd jobs for him, Hania even getting arrested,  Strzeminski’s body eventually gave up just after Christmas 1952. Whilst Wajda concentrates on the last years of Strzeminski’s life, there is certainly another story to be told: daughter Nika has published a memoir of her parents “Love, Art and Hatred” in 1991.

César-winning (The Pianist) DoP Pawel Edelman’s resplendent visual style records the hardship of the post-war years, and the bitter hounding of a great artist by a posse of petit-bourgeois functionaries, who hide behind their orders from above. The Stalinist regime robs everything from Strzemisnki: even his love for the cinema, which he leaves with his daughter, after having to watch an infuriating propaganda newsreel. An Afterimage is the visual impression that remains on the retina after viewing an image: what will be remembered from Andrzej Wajda’s work is not the narratives that cleverly navigate through Stalinist restrictions and bans, but the memory of his fight to record the truth behind the events in over fifty films that he made from the 1950s onwards. In AFTERIMAGE Wajda drives his last spear into the heart of the Stalinist monster. AS

SCREENING DURING KINOTEKA POLISH FILM FESTIVAL | 17 MARCH TO 5 APRIL 2017

Another Mother’s Son (2017)

Dir: Christopher Menaul | Writer: Jenny Lecoat | Cast: Jenny Seagrove, John Hannah, Julian Kostov, Amanda Abbington, Ronan Keating, Susan Hampshire and Brenock O’Connor | UK | Biopic | 90min

Best known for her TV work and the dire docudrama Diana: Last Days of a Princess, writer Jenny Lecoat unearthes another wartime story and this time one close to her own heart. Set on the island of Jersey in 1940 it explores the life of her great aunt and war widow Louisa Gould (Jenny Seagrove) who took in a young Russian prisoner of war in the final days of the Second World War.

Directed for the big screen by Christopher Menaul (Summer in February) with a decent British cast this painterly period piece conveys the community spirit of the islanders who were forced to live in reduced circumstances in the only part of the British Isles occupied by the Nazis. The wartime storyline lends itself to some rich moments of drama and gentle comedy but tension soon mounts in the third act when reality bites in a shocking denouement where the tone suddenly shifts to melodrama as Jenny Seagrove rather hams it up as she is overtaken by unexpected events.

ANOTHER MOTHER’S SON would work really well as a TV drama so it’s unclear why the producers have decided to give it a theatrical release but the significance of the true story, set to Mario Grigorov’s rousing original score; the lushly verdant landscapes of Jersey and some quietly moving performances from Seagrove (as the resourceful but cavalier Gould ), Julian Kostov (the impetuous Russian POV known as Bill), and Ronan Keating (rather appealing as Louisa’s brother Harold) give this tale of love, loyalty and betrayal a resonance that many may find deeply affecting. MT

ANOTHER MOTHER’S SON IS ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 24 MARCH 2017.

 

In the Mood for Love (2000) |Faa yeung nin wa | Fashion in Film Festival

Dir: Wong Kar-Wai | Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung | Romantic Drama | 98min

Wong Kar-Wai’s subtle (and only) masterpiece is a paean to disillusioned romantics everywhere. The mournfully reflective mood piece riffs movingly on what should have been or what could have been for two loves in 1960s Hong Kong. Tony Leung’s quietly seductive Chow Mo-wan is a journalist who moves into the same cramped apartment building as Maggie Cheung’s elegantly graceful personal assistant, Su Li-zhen. Attraction is mutual but tentatively discrete allowing us to reflect and muse on our own romantic encounters: deception, loneliness, loss and heartache. And as the two tease out the barest details of each other’s existence it emerges that their respective spouses are possibly having an affair. But the overarching theme of the film lies in the suggestive longing of love rather than its lustful consummation.

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Maggie Cheung sashays seductively in beautifully cut cheongsams, her coal black hairdo caressing her high-cut collars. Tony Leung is a dreamy matinee idol with soulfully suggestive eyes and hand tailored suits. Sensuality smoulders as Christopher Doyles’ voyeuristic camera lingers on them longingly in chiaroscuro shadows and hues of crimson, lime and turquoise. Their sylph-like bodies caress the dimly lit corridors yet they glide past each other – oceans apart, their longing palpable. So much is left unsaid in a film that speaks volumes with its cinematic language and its elegaic cello score. And Nat King Cole croons cruelly with his Spanish words “Quizas, quizas, quizas”. Only perhaps.

The support characters are sketched out in deliberate crudeness leaving the central couple cocooned in their unfulfilled desire: the landlady Mrs Suen plays mahjong-mad all afternoon oblivious to Su’s predicament, her boss is occupied with his own affair. Chow’s crass colleague at work Ah Ping is lost in his own troubles. Are they too polite; bound up in old school etiquette – or simply too unsure of each other’s feelings to take things further?.

The Fado-esque finale is both heart-rending and, in part, revealing, as Chow whispers his unexpressed desires and regrets into a stone oracle at Cambodia’s Angkor Wat temple. Sadly, the film’s sequel 2046 fails to develop the narrative in any satisfactory form. MT

CURZON SOHO | FRIDAY 17 MARCH 2017 | FASHION IN FILM FESTIVAL

 

 

Beyond Words (2017)

Dir.: Urszula Antoniak; Cast: Jacub Gierszal, Stanislaw Chyra, Christian Löber, Justyna, Wasilewska; Netherlands/Poland 2017, 97 min.

Urszula Antoniak’s (Code Blue) fourth feature is a melancholic and moody portrait of Michael, a young, Polish born lawyer in contemporary Berlin who, in spite of his German citizenship, feels alienated in the superficially glamorous German capital. Luminously captured in ice-cold black-and-white by Dutch DoP Lennert Hillege, this is a modern version of Musil’s Man without Attributes.

Michael (Gierszal), blond and blue-eyed like a Napola graduate, is asked by his boss Franz (Löber) to take the pro-bono case of an African poet claiming asylum in Germany. But it turns out that the pair have met before and Franz has turned into a proud philosopher questioning the right of nationality with Michael who rejects the case when Franz reminds him of his own origins, commenting “You are very different when you talk Polish. Like a little boy”.

Out of the blue, Michael’s father Stanislaw (Chyra) appears at his doorstep. Stanislaw has been in hiding after some trouble with the authorities in Poland (it is not clear if these were pre-or past 1989), he doesn’t stay for long but his visit leaves his son more insecure than beforehand. Franz emerges an isolated and avoidant figure with few friends apart from a Polish waitress, Alina (Wasilewska from Ida) who, in vain, wants some commitment from him. His dilemma is perfectly illustrated in a short exchange with his father who asks if he feels accepted: “They can’t ignore me”, comes Michael’s reply. “But is that enough?” says the father. “For a start, yes”.

Antoniak emigrated from Poland to the Netherlands, and her own background obviously comes into play with her character Michael – who takes  a while getting used to his father calling him by his given name of Michal. Clearly he is trying to bury his past, and apart from a yearly visit to his mother’s grave, he obliterates his Polish identity. But in spite of being a qualified lawyer, he remains an outsider, his friendship with Franz is very one-sided: Michael tries to copy him like a chameleon, without really liking what he sees. Franz, ironically, treats Michael like an exotic animal but never as an equal. Apart from a sequence towards the end, Michael controls himself rigidly, he treats himself like a work in process. In spite of a weak ending, Beyond Words is a fascinating study of estrangement in a place where the past is barely concealed under a forced modernity. Michael lives an a-historical life in Berlin, ignoring his roots, not wanting to be reminded that he too was once an immigrant. His brittle personality allows him to function in his job; but he is indifference personified.

KINOTEKA FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | LONDON

The Salesman (2016) | Cannes Winner: Best script and Actor

Director/Script: Asghar Farhadi | Drama | Iran | 127min

Asghar Farhadi is best known for his enigmatic drama A Separation (2011). This was a film that impressed the arthouse crowd with its slowburn intensity gradually building to a shocking final. About Elly (2009) followed with slightly less acclaim and The Salesman fits comfortably into the Farhadi groove. It’s a good film but not a great one. Starring the same lead as his Fireworks Wednesday (2006) the superb Taraneh Alidoosti, it explores a similar premise and now universal theme: that something familiar and safe is now fraught with uncertainty and the resulting chaos provides the testing ground for the protagonist’s integrity, or lack of it.

There’s an artificial and rather forced quality to The Salesman, a tale of Tehrani bourgeoisie: Rana (Alidoosti) is a housewife and Emad (Shahab Hosseini who won Best Actor) teaches at the University. They both enjoy the theatre and have joined an acting group staging Arthur Miller’s ‘American Dream’ play Death of a Salesman when the film opens. Emad gets the lead part of failed salesman Willy Loman and Rana – his wife -Linda. But events are waylaid by an horrific structural collapse at the couple’s apartment block and they are forced to move out into alternative accommodation, provided by another member of their group. The previous occupier has been involved with some unsavoury characters who swing by regularly at all hours of the day and night. And one day Rana accidently opens the door to one such individual. This paves the way for some startling unpleasantness as Farhardi mixes scenes from the American play with the couple’s sombre reality. The normally restrained Emad starts to take on a rather self-congratulatory grandiosity as his masculinity is challenged, much as Willy Loman’s salesmanship is when he fails in his sales efforts- the similarities emerge between the two man, albeit in a rather fatuous way in the final twist.

Although The Salesman has possibly more mainstream appeal it lacks the subtle quality of A Separation. That said, this is an intelligent and watchable drama that provides a great deal to reflect on, winning the Best Script award at Cannes Film Festival 2016. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 11-22 MAY 2016 | Winner Best Script and Best Actor

 

Personal Shopper (2016) | Cannes 2016 | Best Director 2016

Director: Olivier Assayas

Cast: Kristen Stewart, Nora vonWaltstätten, Anders Danielsen Lie

101mins | Fantasy drama | France

Paris has always had a sinister side inspiring Poe’s Murders in The Rue Morgue and Balzac’s Pere Goriot, a story of social realism set near the Pierre Lachaise Cemetery: French literature is redolent with macabre stories conjured up by the dark side of the capital. So it seems somehow feels fitting that Olivier Assayas should add other chilling chapter to this spectrally charged city with his ghost-themed story PERSONAL SHOPPER.

The film is creepy, charismatic and as quirkily inventive as Olivier Assayas who has explored differnet genres in his consummate career but never a ghost story. And Kristen Stewart its star shimmers here in a sombrely subtle turns that is as dark as its subject matter. She plays the unlikely named Maureen Cartwright, a 27 year old American girl who is bored with life and living out a meaningingless few months as a personal shopper to bitchy German media figure Kyra (Nora vonWaltstätten), while she mourns the death of her twin brother Lewis.

Paris is the capital of the fashion world and Assayas works this elegantly into the plot as Maureen glides through a series of glitzy ateliers garnering hand-styled garments for her boss and jewelled accoutrements from Chanel and Cartier. This is work that fills Maureen with ennui as she considers herself worthy of better things and idly sketches and researches her yen for the supernatural and the psychic experiments of Victor Hugo and the avant garde Swedish artist Hilma af Klint. On the sly, she guiltily slips into Kyra’s couturier gowns and fetishistic footwear before pleasuring herself on Kyra’s bed during her trips abroad. Kristen Stewart brings a gamine insouciant sensuality to her role that feels both menacing and intriguing in its sexual ambivalence.

Maureen is also developing her psychic skills in trying to contact her brother Lewis who died of a congenital heart condition in a dreary nearby fin de siecle mansion where they both grew up. Spending several spooky nights there a ghostly presence is felt as Maureen whispers inaudibly in scenes that are genuinely scary and entirely plausible given the undercurrent of glowering spitefulness that vibes through the increasingly dark narrative. This leads us to believe that Maureen is herself conjuring up the devil’s work. Olivier Assayas’s wickedly inventive vision is the most exciting thing so far at Cannes 2016. MT

ON GENERAL RELEASE 17 March | CANNES FIL FESTIVAL 11-22 MAY 2016 | Best Director for Olivier Assayas

The Love Witch (2016)

imagesDir/Writer: Anna Biller | Cast: Samantha Robinson, Jeffrey Vincent Parise, Laura Waddell, Jared Sanford, Robert Seeley | US | Fantasy Drama | 118min

Anyone who enjoyed TVs Bewitched will appreciate this hyperrealist technicolour drama where the harmless Elizabeth Montgomery is replaced by a mysterious modern day minx who mixes potions and plots to make men fall in love with her, forever. Elaine (Samantha Robinson) is gorgeously winsome and perfectly poised until she retreats behind closed doors to a boudoir bursting with lurid love games and sexy underwear and where she shamelessly seduces her prey leaving a trail of dying and distraught menfolk wondering what on earth happened. Anna Biller’s clever script has nailed men’s egos to a cross and brazenly exposed their deepest anxieties of losing control, falling in love and ‘drowning in the oestrogen’ of their new found perfect playmate. Set in an imagined kitsch community in 1960s California, there’s also a whiff of Chaucer’s Friar’s Tale and Polanski’s Fearless Vampire Killers to Biller’s dark and mocking humour which also has a pop at women folk and their machiavellian ways when it comes to romance. Weird and possibly the most watchable satire you’ll see this week. A cameo from the wonderful Agnes Moorehead would have been the icing on the cake. MT

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NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM FRIDAY, 10 MARCH 2017.

 

 

 

Elle (2016) |

Dir: Paul Verhoeven | Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Anne Consigny, Laurent Lafitte | Drama | 130min |

Dutch auteur Paul Verhoeven’s first French-language feature came to the Cannes Competition with magnificent Isabelle Huppert in a star turn that has just won her a Golden Globe for Best Actress. Slick and seductive, when it isn’t being violent in its glossy arthouse depiction of rape and twisted mysogyny, this is an upbeat, almost chipper tale of contemporary life, piqued with mordant humour. But what else would you expect from a director who brought us Basic Instinct and Showgirls?

ELLE features several strong female characters who are well-equipped to deal with their lives with sophistication and a certain élan. Wittily adapted from Betty Blue writer Philippe Djian’s novelIa, Isabelle Huppert plays Michele Blanc, a sexy and savvy businesswoman who is stylish and perfectly in control of her faculties. A leader in her field of video games, she deals with a masked intruder, who rapes her viciously in her sumptuous Parisian house, by bouncing back with disdain and aplomb – despite some serious injuries – not least to her self esteem. Brushing herself down and disposing of her elegant black decolté she gets back to work immediately with a mission to uncover her assailant. But the incident has sparked a surprising change in the way she responds sexually to the men around her. In the Cannes Film Festival press conference, the cast and directors refused to be drawn into a discussions concerning the controversial implications of the rape scenes. Ms Huppert said her character responded in a way that served the film’s narrative, and the work was purely fiction.

Verhoeven keeps the tension taut throughout the film’s running time – just proud of two hours. And the suspects are diverse but don’t intrude into the other themes of this intelligent comedy thriller. There is her suave neighbour Patrick (Laurent Lafitte) a banker whose marriage to his devout Catholic wife (Virginie Efira) provides some grounds for humour; ex husband Richard (Charles Berling), a wannabe novelist; Robert (Christian Berkel), the husband of her best friend and business partner, Anna (Anne Consigny) who both have sexual dalliances with her during the course of this entertaining drama – even her petulant son Vincent (Jonas Bloquet), who is dating Josie (Alice Isaac) a minx with whom he is expecting another man’s child, falls under the spotlight.

Perversely, the film’s comedy surfaces from incidents that could be perceived as troubling or negative in misogynist terms, yet the female leads respond with such self-possession and insight that the rape brings out greater weaknesses in the male characters rather than the female ones and Michele choses to pluck success and inner strength from the jaws of possible failure. This is very much a French film with its exuberant family crises, sexual complexity in the way the sparky characters treat each other with an attitude that many many consider rude or offensive.

Visually the film is a delight with Isabelle Huppert sporting a sumptuous couture wardrobe ranging from classy elegance to  raunchy vamp. Academy award winner Anne Dudley’s original score pumps up the suspense adds gravitas but never detracting from the provocative atmosphere. MT

ON RELEASE AT PICTURESHOUSE FROM 10 MARCH 2017 | PREMIERED CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 11-22 MAY 2016

Afterimage (2016) | Kinoteka 2017 | 17 March -5 April 2017

Dir: Andrzej Wajda | Script: Andrzej Mularczyk | Cast: Boguslaw Linda, Aleksandra Justa, Bronislawa Zamachowska, Zofia Wichlacz, Zofia Wichlacz, Krzysztof Pieczynski | Biopic | Polish | 98min

The last work of Poland’s most revered postwar filmmaker, Andrzej Wajda (Promised Lands, Pan Tadeusz), is a fiercely committed obituary of Wladyslaw Strzeminski, one of his country’s most strikingly visionary contemporary artists, victimised by the communist regime all the way to his death in 1952. As played by Boguslaw Linda, whose features bear more than a passing resemblance to both Wajda and Strzeminski, this is a fitting end note to Wajda’s career; the filmmaker recently passed away at the age of 90, leaving a filmography largely dedicated to crucial moments and leading characters in the history of his country.

The film stands as an imposing monument to the memory of a great artist although it’s clearly a festival item per excellence – after all, no film event would want to miss the last work of a grand master. This is an essential addition to the tragic cultural history of the communist era in Eastern Europe and the disasters wrecked by this totalitarian rule. Since Wajda’s career was launched at about the same time this story takes place, his intimate knowledge of the background is not necessarily the result of thorough research but also an expression of personal frustrations and pain he experienced himself through long patches of his own artistic life.

Strzeminski, born in 1893 in Minsk, now the capital of Belarus, and educated in St. Petersburg, lost an arm and a leg in WW1, despite which he attended the First Free State Workshops in Moscow and was close to such ground- breaking avant-garde artists of that period as Malevich and Chagall. In 1923 he moved to Warsaw to become one of founders of the constructivist group Blok.

A scholar, theoretician and art historian, Strzeminski formulated the Unism theory, an artistic conception based on the integrity of the universe which considers the levels of artistic, scientific and cultural achievements as an indication of social development. Most of his ideas about art in general and visual arts in particular are to be found in his posthumous Theory of Vision, published by his students after his death.

Wajda’s film, written by Andrzej Mularczyk, picks Strzeminski up in 1949, when he is about to be fired from his teaching job at the Higher School of Visual Arts in Lodz over preaching a modernity strictly opposed to the populist demands of the Communist Party.

The film’s plot follows the regime’s systematic efforts to break down this headstrong, unbending artist who refused to compromise on any artistic grounds whatsoever. A chain smoker and man of great personal charm, exclusively dedicated to his art who, notwithstanding his disabilities, was living on his own at the time – apart from irregular visits from his teenage daughter – he carried on teaching his devoted students in as much as was tenable.

With his work systematically destroyed and obliterated, Strzeminski was gradually deprived of any income, fired from the Artists Union and even denied the right to buy paints. Pushed into utter misery and forced to accept degrading jobs, only to be kicked out of them as well, he collapsed one day on the street, was taken to a hospital where he died of tuberculosis in 1952.

Wajda, whose early films (Generation, Kanal, Ashes and Diamonds) are considered definitive portraits of Poland of that period and who clashed often throughout his long career with the Polish communist regime (on films such as Man of Marble), evidently felt strongly for Strzemynski and his fate, seeing in him a symbol of the creative artist crushed down by a narrow-minded, ferociously dictatorial regime which allows no digression.

Lynda, one of his country’s leading actors, who was associated with most of the great films coming out of Poland in the 80’s and 90’s – including Wajda’s own Man of Iron – is probably the perfect fit for the role, not only because of his obvious thespian gifts but also his physiognomy.

A remarkably neat, correct, and historically faithful picture, Wajda’s passionate veneration for Strzeminski clearly led to a rather didactic approach. Characters are not too deeply probed, there are heroes we admire, villains we detest and nothing much in between, but some scenes, such as the funeral of Strzeminski’s estranged wife, the sculptor Katarzyna Kobro, and the moment when he finds out about her death, a few days later, are truly moving.

DoP Pawel Edelman are, as always, exquisite, but the art direction fills the screen with freshly made, antiseptically clean sets, seemingly never lived-in before. This may be rather out of tune, but despite it, the film still stands as an imposing monument to the memory of a great artist. AS

Certain Women (2016) | Best Film | LFF 2016

Director: Kelly Riechardt

Cast: Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart, Jared Harris, James Le Gros

107mins | Drama | US

Auteur Kelly Reichardt’s latest film is a humane and poignant story capturing the isolation and quiet devastation of loneliness. Following her noirish eco-thriller Night Moves, CERTAIN WOMEN feels even more prescient, yet low key and leisurely as it reveals with startling vulnerability the lives of three women in contemporary America.

Adapted from short stories by Maile Meloy and set around the trendy mountain outpost of Livingston, Montana (Michael Keaton, Dennis Quaid and David Lettleman have places nearby), this female-themed drama initially feels understated but eventually resonates as its gently calibrated rhythm echoes through the wide open landscapes of the northwest Pacific and the close reliance between people, animals and nature.

Casting stars alongside newcomers, regular collaborator Michelle Williams (Meek’s Cutoff) joins Laura Dern, Kristen Stewart and a welcome discovery in the shape of Lily Gladstone. These women play characters who could be you or me. And their daily lives strike a knowing chord as they trip lightly through our own experiences, in the capable hands of Reichardt and Meloy.

The opening scene is one that springs to mind as local lawyer Laura Wells (Dern) lies pensively in bed after a brief encounter with her lover Ryan (James Le Gros), who we later discover is married to another member of the trio. Pulling on his thermal underwear he goes back to his roost with wife Gina, Michelle Williams’ spiky mother of sulky teenager Guthrie (Sara Rodier). Turns out he also shares a close bond with Guthrie as the family camps on a piece of land where they plan to build themselves a house. Gina and Ryan hope to get elderly Albert (Rene Auberjonois) to sell them some local sandstone so that their house will have a touch of the vernacular. This is the only scene where Gina cracks a disingenuous smile as her assertive qualities comes across as machiavellian manipulativeness.

Laura Wells, meanwhile, is tasked with defending local chippie Fuller (Jared Harris), who is proving to be an irritating client fighting an un-winnable compensation claim over an accident at work. Taking liberties and turning up in unexpected places, Fuller seems to think he has the upper hand because Laura is a woman, and a sympathetic one at that.

The third strand is an enigmatic encounter with a twinge of l’esprit d’escalier where Kristen Stewart’s legal graduate Elizabeth travels thousands of miles each day to teach teachers education law. Attending the classes is Jamie (Lily Gladstone) a groom from a nearby ranch who seems drawn to Elizabeth, but whether this is a schoolgirl crush or nascent lesbian longing is wisely never examined, giving the story delicious depth and mystery. Jamie’s days are spent in the company of horses and her trusty mutt (Reichardt’s own corgi cross), but she seems ready to spread her wings although her direction never quite unravels. The two grow strangely close – emotionally and physically – as they share evenings together in the diner and a horseback ride back to Elizabeth’s car.

CERTAIN WOMEN is both pleasurable to watch and enjoyable to contemplate, It probes the lives of intelligent women whose longings never quite materialise, remaining inchoate and undefined but instilled with the growing melancholy of possibilities untrammelled and romantic disillusionment. DoP Christopher Blauvelt adds a grainy, indie feel to his glistening 16mm camerawork, and the tone that is subdued and introspective, enhanced by Jeff Grace’s atmospheric score. These are women who seem to know themselves but are somehow back-footed by their circumstances, being too empathetic with their fellow humans to boldly make a stand in raw emotional scenes that communicate more in visuals than they ever could in words. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 3 MARCH 2017 | BEST FILM BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2016 

The Student (2016) (M)Uchenik

Dir.: Kirill Serebrennikov

Cast: Pyotr Skvortsov, Victoria Isakova, Julia Aug, Nikolai Roschin, Svetlana Bragarnik; Russia 2016, 118 min.

Kirill Serebrennikov’s adaptation of the stage play by German playwright Marius von Mayenburg is set in contemporary Russia, creating a vicious intellectual discourse of clashing ideologies and religious fanaticism.

Whilst Muchenik means ‘martyr’ in Russia, ‘uchenik’ translates into student – since this wordplay would not be understood outside Russia, the English title Student was chosen. But Serebrennikov’s anti-hero Venya Yuzhin (Skvortsov) is exactly the amalgamation of the two: a martyr in his own and in the eyes of the worldwide anti-enlightenment movement; a student for teachers, who educate in believing in a rational world and the importance of tolerance.

Attending secondary school in Kaliningrad Oblast, Venya is an angry pupil: his first hate object is his divorced mother Inga (Aug), who is holding down three jobs to survive. Venya attacks her with his rabid bible quotes (one of hundreds, annotated on screen), calling her a whore for leaving the father, who abused her. Inga wails: “I wish he collected stamps or jerked off all the time”. At school, Venya, afraid of his sexual orientation, rages against the girls, wearing bikinis in the swimming pool. The reactionary head teacher Stukalina (Bragarnik) even tries to accommodate Venya: she asks the PE teacher to have the girls wear one-piece bathing suits. But Venya is far from finished: he wears a gorilla outfit (shades of Karel Reisz’ 1966 British New Wave film Morgan!) in an Economy lesson, arguing against the need for industrialisation, because it does not confirm with the demands of St. John in the bible.

On a personal level, Venya is only to keen to kiss an attractive female student, and he also tries to heal a limping co-student, putting his hand on his deformed leg. Confronted by the orthodox priest (Roschin), Venya accuses him of lacking fighting spirit “unlike the martyrs of the Jihad, who want to die for their cause”. But Venya’s main enemy is the biology teacher Elena (Isakova), whose views on contraception and evolution he challenges. Again, Stukalina gives in, asking Elena to “find a tolerable mixture of scientific and religious ideology”. Venya has, in vain, asked his handicapped friend to manipulate the brakes of Elena’s motor Scooter, and clobbers him with a rock when the boy tries to kiss him. In a final confrontation, Stukalina takes sides, when Venya accuses Elena “to have fondled him”: she agrees with the priest, that Elena’s worldview is governed by her being Jewish.

The real monster of Student is not Venya, but Stukalina, whose far right-wing views on feminism, Judaism and homosexuality were the norm in Stalinist Russia. She is very much at home in Putin’s Russia, as intrinsic a nationalist state like the old USSR.

DOP Vladislav Opelyant’s visuals are breath-taking: his looping long shots set the antagonists on their confrontations. The images of Venya’s and Inga’s flat are symbolically divided: her living room is full of ungainly figurines, the walls covered with gruesome wallpaper; his ‘prison’ room is dark and spartan: the wallpaper ripped off, the windows closed with planks. Laibach’s pounding “God is God” is adequate good choice for an anthem: Serebrennikov shows a Russia of oppressive puritanism where hate is becoming institutionalised – again. AS/MT

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 3RD MARCH 2017 | REVIEWED AT CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 11-22 MAY 2016 |

7 Minutes (2016) | Cinema Made in Italy

Dir: Michele Placido | Writer: Stefano Massini| Michele Placido | 88min | Drama | Italian

Veteran Italian director Michele Placido’s grainy slice of social realism is a timely and engrossing character drama that succeeds despite its low budget credentials and grainy feel. Based on real events, 7 MINUTES is told in intimate close-up from the POV of its female characters who all work in a textile factory in the outskirts of Rome.

Very much along the lines of the Dardennes Brothers’ Two Days, One Night (2014) this is a much more intense and angry affair but its feisty authenticity conveys the feeling of betrayal and bitterness that the women feel when they are given two hours to decide the fate of 300 of their colleagues facing redundancy in an increasingly hostile and stressful urban environment where they are all struggling to make ends meet.

Impassioned performances by Clémence Poésy and Karen Di Porto (in debut) the standouts. Anne Consigny plays the factory boss with sensitive grace in this intelligent and believable story based on a play by Stefano Massini . MT

CINEMA MADE IN ITALY | 1-5 MARCH 2017

 

Bitter Harvest (2016)

Dir.: George Mendeluk; Cast: Max Irons, Samantha Barks, Terence Stamp, Gary Oliver, Tamar Hassan; Canada 2016, 103 min.

Veteran auteur George Mendeluk was born of Ukrainian descent in Germany and emigrated to Canada where he worked in television and the US (Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Miami Vice). BITTER HARVEST recreates one of the most dramatic episodes of the 20th century where in early 1930s Ukraine, Joseph Stalin caused mass starvation with an economic policy of collectivisation which led to his man-made famine of ‘Holodomor’.

After the idyllic opening scenes in a Ukrainian village where schoolboy Yuri (Irons) battles to save his childhood love Natalka, comes the Russian October revolution and the death of Tsar and his family, an event that is celebrated by the Ukrainians. For a few years Lenin has his hands full with the Civil War, and the country enjoys freedom and prosperity. But this would change dramatically when Stalin came to power forcing collectivization on all the farmers in the Soviet Union. Ukraine was then the “bread basket of Europe”, and suffered horrendously from the results of this policy. By the mid 1920s, before Stalin had killed or exiled his political enemies and established his dictatorship, Yuri (Irons) has grown up into a handsome young man, but contrary to his father and grandfather Ivan (Stamp), who were warmongers, Yuri is only interested in painting and Natalka (Barks). His friends leave for Kiev, to take part in the a new revolutionary art movement. When Yuri later joins them at the art academy – Natalka stays in the village to look after his sick mother. But the wind is changing: Stalin policies not only mean the end of any independence for the Ukraine, but also the death of a true revolutionary, modern art: in painting this is replaced by a drab soviet-style-realism. At the beginning of 1932 Stalin (Oliver), has decided to destroy the “Kulak class” – in reality independent farmers, not rich feudal lords, as Stalin called them. With Yuri in prison in Kiev, and one of his friends, a leader of the Ukrainian Communist Party, commits suicide and his family and Natalka are brutally repressed: they are led by the sadistic Sergei (Hassan), who fancies Natalka, and humiliates her. Yuri has escaped from prison, joining his family in the bloody uprising against the Russian troops. Whilst his father and grandfather are killed, Yuri and Natalka, who has lost her baby, escape with a young boy, they have adopted, trying to escape, they flee to the Polish border.

BITTER HARVEST tells it like it is without pulling any punches in recounting the harsh realities. DoP Douglas Milsome are very much in line with his work on Full Metal Jacket, but the narrative is full of plotholes. Although a more measured approach occasionally would be preferable, the rawness of the unflinching confrontation between good and evil, is perhaps the only way to tackle this genocide. After all, when Stalin was warned by Bukharin that his policy would cost millions of lives, Stalin answered “And who will know?”In spite of all its shortcomings, BITTER HARVEST is perhaps the only way to bring these atrocities to a wider contemporary public, not only just an arthouse-audience. Considering the recent invasion of large parts of  Ukraine by Russia, we need to learn more about the history of Russia’s ongoing subjugation of an independent country: there is a clear line from the feudal imperialistic empire of the Romanovs, the genocide of the Stalinists and Putin’s unpunished invasion of today. MT

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM FEBRUARY 27

The Confessions | Le Confessioni (2016) | Cinema Made in Italy 1-5 March 2017

Dir: Roberto Ando | Cast: Toni Servillo, Daniel Auteuil, Pierfrancesco Favino, Moritz Bleibtreu, Connie Nielsen, Mari-Josee Croze, Lambert Wilson, Richard Sammel, Johan Heldenbergh, Togo Igawa | 103min | Thriller | Italy

Toni Servillo and Daniel Auteuil star in Roberto Ando’s slick and timely political thriller that follows the exploits of a savvy monk who attempts to outmanoeuvre the European delegates at a fictional G8 summit.

Sadly lacking the delicious dark humour of Ando’s breakthrough Viva la Liberta that screened during last year’s festival, this is an intelligent and self-assured affair occasionally spiced with irony and graced with a starry international arthouse cast including Connie Nielsen, Lambert Wilson and Moritz Bleibtreu.

Invited to the IMF summit by one of the other delegates – from countries that represent 50% of the World’s wealth – Roberto Salus, a monk and writer, adds a touch of calm integrity but also a twist of tension to the top secret Monetary Fund get together in his chaste alabaster garb and sincere gaze that contrasts amusingly with the less than trustworthy-looking official attendees (particularly Bleibtrau’s Mark Klein) gathered together in the secluded spendour of a luxury German resort. Two other ousiders are also there to monitor the talks: a musician, and Connie Nielsen’s glamorous author of children’s books, complete the trio.

Auteuil plays the strung out, suicidal master of ceremonies, Daniel Roche, who has summoned the Monk to hear his confession before he pops his clogs, to the annoyance and suspicion of the assembled crew and  who wonder what was said by Roche to Salus in his final hour, and whether he alluded to their secret scheme to bankrupt the world’s poorer economies. His tête à têtes with the monk unfold in flashback adding a frisson of insight as the political narrative progresses.

Although there are overtones that something greater and more powerful may be at work here, Ando and co-scripter Angelo Pasquini fail to develop this supernatrual strand to the film’s slight detriment making the political story less resonant than it could have been. That said, LE CONFESSIONI remains an intriguing and enjoyable watch, largely due to the strength of its performances – particularly from Toni Servillo – Maurizio Calvesi’s arresting cinematography and Nicola Piovani’s atmospheric and stately occasional score. MT

CINEMA MADE IN ITALY 1-5 MARCH 2017

 

Newton (2017) | Berlinale Forum | CICAE Award

Dir.: Amit V Masurkar; Cast: Rajkummar Rao, Pankaj Tripathy, Anjali Patil; India 2017, 106 min.

Director/co-writer Amit V Masurkar’s second feature is a light-hearted critical analysis of the limits of personal endurance and the validity of elections in an India divided by class and plagued by civil war.

In central India, civil servant Newton (Rao), sees himself as the advocate of a modern country. Unfortunately for him, not many agree with him least of all his parents, who want him married to an under-age bride, who left school at the age of thirteen. Newton (who constructed his name from two Indian names he was given at birth) is understandably angry, clearly his parents just want to benefit from the bride’s generous dowry, at the expense of his future happiness and satisfaction. A strong – but equally naïve – believer in democracy, Newton is sent out as the Returning Officer in a jungle voting polling station where Maoist guerrillas are putting the local inhabitants under pressure not to vote. Newton soon collides with the commander of the military unit, Aatma Singh (Tripathy), who is in charge of security, and does not want to risk the lives of his men in a battle for 76 votes, which he sees as a charade – which is more or less true. But Newton is supported in his zealous efforts to get the village population to vote by the local schoolteacher Maiko (Patil). She is much more realistic than Newton and is able to speak the Ghondi dialect of the region, since the local villagers do not understand Hindi. Whilst Singh charms the clueless UN observers, Newton and Maiko bring the majority of the voters to the ramshackle polling station. There, the ultra modern voting machines – clashing very much with the dilapidated environment, are a challenge too great for the voters – but Singh, eager to please the observers, tells them to “use the machines like toys”, which they do. Newton is still not happy; he wants to wait for the remainder of the local electorate. Losing patience, Singh pretends that Newton and his polling station helpers are under fire from guerrilla forces, and evacuates everyone. Newton, who is not fooled, challenges the commander and the unit with extreme measures.

Newton is a stubborn anti-hero. His achilles heel is a disregard for his better informed friends (Maiko) and foes (Singh). A foreigner in this part of his own country, he is totally unaware of the power positions. The villagers are as much under threat from the guerrillas as the local militia, it does not matter to them which side burns down their houses and steals their food. Their understanding of democracy has nothing to do with the countless names presented on the voting machines – the village elder simply tells Newton that he is “selected to speak for them in the parliament in Delhi”. Newton’s one-man stand may be honourable, but he helps nobody, his pride bordering on arrogance. Still, he is preferable to the opportunists of all colours he encounters, and is rewarded in the end with a personal happy-ending.

Masurkar very clearly shows the limits of parliamentary democracy in a country like India where feudalism and religious bigotry are still the most potent pillars of the state. Newton fails not because of his lack of courage, but because he too believes in a democratic process, which is unachievable under the circumstances. He fails to acknowledge that the poor villagers are the victims of both factions fighting on their behalf. DoP Swapnil S Sonawane creates a real war zone in the jungle, contrasting very much with the city atmosphere Newton is accumstomed too. Rao is convincing as the prickly anti-hero, and Patil’s Maiko is calm and collected – qualities none of the men achieve. AS

BERLINALE 9-19 FEBRUARY 2017 | FORUM 

John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017)

Dir.: Chad Stahelski; Cast: Keanu Reeves, Riccardo Scarmarcio, Claudia Gerini, Ian McShane, Ruby Rose, Common; USA 2017, 122 min.

Doubtless creating a new action franchise, director Chad Stahelski and writer Derek Kolstad return Keanu Reeves as a super-hero killing machine – with a new dog and an even larger kill quota.

After a sort of overture, in which Wick fights a gang of Russian mobsters who have stolen his beloved Mustang, he settles in his new home with his canine friend. His retirement does not last long: Santino (Scarmarcio), an Italian member of the Camorra, asks Wick to kill his sister Gianna (Gerini), producing a blood token for help, signed by Wick for assistance rendered in the past.

In Rome, Gianna takes her own life in the bath, Wick watching, making small talk. But Santino is double-crossing Wick, sending his killers after our hero, amongst them is the mute Ares (Ruby Rose), a martial arts fighter who communicates in sign language. Returning to New York, every beggar and street tramp seems to be on Santino’s pay roll, not to mention Cassian (Common), Gianna’s body guard, who is out for revenge. After killing Santino in the New York Continental, a sort of violent free exclave for gangsters, Wick is given an hour’s grace by its proprietor Winston (McShane), before the Camorra and “The High Table” will up the seven million bounty on Wick’s head, ready to chase him in Chapter 3.

JOHN WICK is A perfectly choreographed dance of the dead; the body count is so astronomical viewers might expects the combo meter to appear any time in the right hand corner of the screen – this is a video game indeed. There are jarring moments, when Wick remembers his dead wife, but overall Wick is left do what he is best at: killing with ease, death seems to be painless. Coming nearest to a pure, classic Hong Kong product of the past, the irony of a 52-yer old hero causing mayhem will be lost on testosterone-driven audience. AS

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 17 FEBRUARY 2017

Return to Montauk (2017) Bergamo Film Meeting 2021

Dir: Volker Schlöndorff | Cast: Nina Hoss, Stellen Skarsgard, Niels Arestrup | Ger/France/Ire | English | 106 min · Drama

Nina Hoss and Stellan Skarsgard grace Volker Schlöndorff’s elegantly chilled cocktail of literary lives and romantic recidivism that premiered in at Berlinale several years ago, then disappeared before coming to Amazon Prime

Stellan Skarsgard is Max Korn, a seasoned writer who knows how to project romantic illusions of love in his relationships, but whose fame has taken him to a place of unreality, and who’s totally unaware of it. During his life, he has moved through a series of female conquests without really engaging with anyone. In New York to promote a book with his latest – much younger – partner (Susanne’s Woolf fawning ‘creative’ groupie), he reconnects, via a business associate (a sinister and alluring Niels Arestrup) with Nina Hoss’ glamorous Rebecca.

Rebecca is another brief fling from the past who appears aloof at Max’s reappearance, scarcely concealing a troubled secret behind her own sophisticated persona. These central characters make a fascinating couple – much in the style of After Midnight: Max is accessible yet empty inside; Rebecca’s outward frostiness conceals a romantic but disillusioned idealist . An impromptu trip to the tip of Long Island to view Rebecca’s putative holiday home is the catalyst for a tender eruption of feelings that flood back when she confesses her troubles to the now enraptured Max.

Shot on a handheld camera in the slick Manhattan venues and limpid platinum beaches of Montauk, on the tip of Long Island, this an engrossing and emotionally moving story of lost opportunities and dreams that asks the question: do we settle for the ordinary or the life less ordinary? MT

SCREENING DURING BERGAMO FILM FESTIVAL’S Volker Schlöndorff. RETROSPECTIVE | ALSO ON AMAZON PRIME

Tanna (2015)

Director: Bentley Dean | Martin Butler

99min l Drama  l Australia

Dean and Butler are experienced TV documentarians whose first foray into narrative features is this stunningly cinematic tribal tale from Vanuatu in the South Pacific.

TANNA is a tragic love story whose implications ripple out into the wider world and connect us to the narrative of disappearing communities and survival of remote tribes. There is a disarming innocence and fierceness that marks the traditional tribal villagers out as philosophical and emotionally highly evolved, despite their frugal and backwood existence in the magical island set in its Pacific splendour. The Australian helmers make no attempt to trivialise these honest and gentle people, or diminish the very real threats they face from rival tribes who pose a very real danger if their customs and beliefs are not upheld. By incorporating elements of ethnography and spirituality in their storyline TANNA comes across as a serious study while cleverly also appealing to mainstream and arthouse audiences, children and adults setting the story from the young protogonist’s perspective.

The island of Vanuatu has around 30,000 inhabitants who form part of distinct tribes who embrace the Kastom system of beliefs, rejecting Colonial invasion, Christianity and the lure of 21st century economic advancement. Dean and Bentley lived amongst the islanders in a village called Yakel where they gradually put together a narrative based on tribal customs, rituals and traditional stories basing their drama on an incident that occurred during 1987.

Women play an important role in this patriarchal community and the story is seen through the eyes of a little girl called Selin who quietly observes a budding romance between her sister, Wawa and a the village chief’s orphaned grandson Dain, But Wawa is coming of age and been committed by her grandfather to an arranged marriage with a man from another tribe which will serve to heal a rift between the rival villagers. Both the sisters share a rebellious streak and Wawa has no intention of fallong in with the arranged marriage haven fallen in love with Dain. Selin’s grandfather is the village shaman, and he takes her to visit the island’s active volcano, Yahul. The vermillion sparks and fiery energy provides the focus for a spritual force that offers both comfort but commands supreme respect.

TANNA is a poetic and magical drama that also highlights the songs and music of the tribal traditions focusing on the virtues of conflict resolution, forgiveness and wisdom gained through experience. The film shows how the rival tribes are proud but deeply philosophical and always willing to ‘see another way’ in resolving their differences, and although they appear backward are highly evolved, bringing compassion and intelligent to their way they conducting inter-tribal relations.

With its tantalising score and natural performances from the villagers, Bentley and Dean have created a tense and tender drama that is instructive and dazzlingly cinematic harnessing the rain forests, colourful tribal costumes, volcanic landscapes and palm-fringed beaches of Vanuatu. MT

ON RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS FROM 17 FEBRUARY 2017

 

Fences (2017)

Dir. Denzel Washington, USA/Canada 2016, Dur. 138 mins.
Cast: Denzel Washington, Viola Davis, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Jovan Adepo, Russell Hornsby, Mykelti Williamson

August Wilson wrote his play FENCES some 33 years ago. It has been on stage in England, most recently the 2013 version with Lenny Henry, who was very good as the father. Now Denzel Washington, who played the part on Broadway in 2010, along with others in the film, takes the role of Troy and also directs the movie FENCES.

Taking place in Pittsburgh in the 1950s, we gradually learn Troy’s story. Once he had aspirations to be a baseball star but was thwarted as, at that time, only white sportsmen succeeded. Now he is bitter and talks about the past as he works on a garbage truck alongside his best friend, Bono (a most sympathetic performance by Stephen Henderson). The two, in fact, met when Troy had a spell in prison. Troy is supported by his wife, Rose (Viola Davis), who attempts to get her husband to promote the ambitions of their son, Cory who wants to become a professional footballer. Troy refuses to allow him to play in the college team and wants him to get a job. Troy also argues with Lyons (Russell Hornsby), his 34 year-old son from a previous marriage. Lyons is a musician, but regularly appears at his father’s door on paydays to ask for money.

IMG_3357Denzel Washington plays Troy convincingly. He puts over the playwright’s tremendous dialogue with a real feeling for the words he speaks. Sometimes he sounds like a musical instrument as he gives colour to the words. He is backed by a most sympathetic performance by Stephen McKinley Henderson as his white work mate who is mostly content to sit and listen as Troy tells stories about his past.

The two sons come across well, too. Older son, Lyons – a tough role to put across well but Russell Hornsby manages it – a struggling musician who feels forced to ask his father for cash and the youngster Cory, a breakout performance by young Jovan Adepo. Mykelti Williamson is moving in the small part of Gabriel, the mentally damaged brother of Troy.

The outstanding role is played by Viola Davis as Rose – she is terrific and you can see why she is up for a Supporting Actress Oscar. In her speech telling her husband that while he regrets not having achieved much in his life, she has stood next to him all the way, she is not afraid to let mucous from her nose run down her face she confronts her husband with a few home truths.

Washington directs the movie in a workmanlike fashion. Even if there is not a lot of flair here, it is always truthful and one can believe that the characters portrayed really exist. It mostly takes place in the front yard of Troy’s home and doesn’t show much of the area around. Yes, it is stagey but it is actually very well-staged. It’s good to see that August Wilson, who wrote the screenplay of his play, got his wish for the film to be directed by a black director. It is a long film but always absorbing and one not to be missed. CARLIE NEWMAN

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Vazante (2017) | Berlinale Panorama Special

Dir: Daniela Thomas | Adventure Drama | Brazil / Portugal 2017 | 116 min · Black/White

This languorously seductive lush-mounted arthouse piece is the feature debut of Walter Salles’ regular collaborator Brazilian director Daniela Thomas. It explores transitional race and gender relations sixty years before the end of slavery, in 1820s Brazil, with a tantalising drama that focuses on a group of charismatic performances rather than adopting the more traditional approach of highlighting colonial myths.

composed on the widescreen and in intimate close-up in glowing black and white, her gorgeously teasing linear narrative slowly unfolds relying on atmosphere and a series of sparsely dialogued episodes which unspool against the backdrop of the glorious meadows and mountains of the Chapada Diamantina, that runs north and south through Bahia.

Mine owner Antonio has been forced to turn his back on diamond mining and switch to cattle and crops, in a remote estate where he lives with his black slaves and a group of indigenous retainers. Returning home from a trip he discovers his wife has died in childbirth, he decides to marry her pubescent niece Beatriz, who is a feisty tomboy who is unemotionally unprepared for a relationship with a man, and is still playing barefoot in the fields. Preoccupied with survival Antonio makes frequent forays to re-build his fortune and while he’s away, Beatriz is bored and lonely in their large home with only her taciturn grandmother for company with tragic results for all concerned.

Exuding a heady atmosphere of palpable racial tension intensified by its steamy steamy exotic setting VAZANTE is an impressive debut that will entrance cineastes with its gripping plotline, visual allure, feminine perception and captivating acting from a largely unknown cast. In pacing and ambience VAZANTE echoes Embrace of the Serpent. MT

BERLINALE 9-19 FEBRUARY 2017 | SPECIAL SCREENING

Barrage (2017) | Berlinale Forum

Dir: Laura Schroeder | Cast: Lolita Chammah, Thémis Pauwels, Isabelle Huppert, Charles Müller, Elsa Houben, Marja-Leena Juncker, Luc Schiltz (Pol) | Luxembourg / Belgium Franc |112 min

Three women are united in Laura Schroeder’s second feature, which is very much a family affair with Isabelle Huppert and her daughter Lolita Chammah starring in their real life roles, as Elisabeth and Catherine.

Catherine returns home to Luxembourg after a decade in Switzerland during which her daughter Alba been looked after by her own mother Elisabeth. From the side of the tennis court, she watches Elisabeth coach Alba, her face clearly showing how well she remembers this mixture of stimulus and humiliation from her own childhood but Catherine needs to reassert her motherly authority and rightful place in the heirarchy – not easy when Huppert is in charge. The dynamic between the trio constantly changes with Catherine sometimes feeling like a sister to Alba but Schroeder’s skillful narrative is underpinned by some serious undertones which the three manage deftly in their subtle and entertaining performances.

The action takes place over a few days and little is known of Catherine’s past although she has clearly got some serious issues to deal with that have left her unstable and during a day in the country with Alba events come to a head explaining the film’s rather omenous title. And although Huppert is not always present her presence is strongly felt as a dominating force to be reckoned with – perfectly suiting her profile as a powerful actor in often tricky roles.

Laura Schroeder keeps emotional distance from her characters by using the Academy ratio, used after the Silent era when synchronised sound was first introduced in 1929, and this gives this potent character study rather a formal detached feel rather than an intimate ambiance. Despite this BARRAGE offers insight into women’s minds that will resonate with audiences familiar with the territory. MT

BERLINALE 9-19 FEBRUARY 2017 | Forum Section

 

 

Taxi Driver (1976)

Dir: Martin Scorsese; Script: Paul Schrader; DoP: Michael Chapman; Score: Bernard Herrmann | 112 minutes | Cast: Robert De Niro, Cybill Shepherd, Jodie Foster, Harvey Keitel, Peter Boyle, Leonard Harris, Albert Brooks, and Martin Scorsese.

Scorsese’s searing portrait of alienation is every bit as raw and relevant now as it was in 1976. But it carries with it a message of hope; a happy ending that so often is different from today’s reality. Robert De Niro plays a young Vietman war veteran who fetches up post-combat in a Manhattan bedsit, aimless and unable to sleep and : “Loneliness has followed me all my life”.

TAXI DRIVER captures New York in the seventies, a neon trashcan stuffed with the American Dream where hopes slowly seep away into the steaming sewers while politicians slogans still promise: “A Return to Greatness” forty years ago.

Meanwhile, in the city “all the animals come out at night: hustlers, pimps, pushers, frauds, and freaks—they’re all at large”.  So hero/loner Travis Bickle (De Niro) takes a job where he can work long hours driving out to Brooklyn, The Bronx and Harlem and popping pills and watching blue movies to relax. He’s a complex and strangely charismatic character driven to the edge by his seclusion. But when he sees Sybill Shepherd’s political campaigner Betsy working in a Columbus Circle office, he becomes obsessed with her grace and beauty and boldly asks her for a date. A mutual attraction but blossoms then deteriorates when he takes her to an explicit film. Travis Bickle’s latent pyschosis then floats to the surface of a landscape that is increasingly hostile and depraved, but distinctly New York in the ’70s,  as we are instantly wafted back there by Bernard Herrmann’s highly charged and woozily romantic score.

TAXI DRIVER is in many ways naive in its belief that its central protagonist can find salvation in such a sordid set of circumstances. When Travis is rejected by the fresh-faced college grad Betsy it feels like his world will implode and destruct but scripter Paul Schrader endows him with a backbone and integrity that fights back to vanquish evil, redeeming him as a hero of almost Christ-like proportions. He suffers, reaches out enters Hell and comes back again with glory. And De Niro plays him with a subtlety and strength of feeling and expression rarely seen on the bigscreen today. The spectrum of psychosis is so broad that it’s entirely plausible that this man eventually pulls through. He is not hard bitten criminal but a decent type who temporarily loses his way, like Dante’s hero.

More slick and than Scorsese’s other Manhattan movie Mean Streets, TAXI DRIVER is a deceptively nuanced narrative: drama, sex, politics, romance, violence coalesce in a richly textured character study. Scorsese himself appears in a vignette as a cuckolded husband watching his wife’s silhouette in her lover’s window; the scene in the gun parlour over-looking Manhattan island is full of authentic details, in another scene, a professional-looking street musician runs through Chuck Webb titles but nobody stops to listen.Travis Bickle is in some ways similar to Polanski’s tragic Parisian loner Trelkovsky in The Tenant which interestingly came out the same year. But he lacks the emotional ballast to underpin his psychosis, and get him back on the straight and narrow, like Travis. Clearly, Travis is a bundle of self-destructing neuroses but his redeeming feature is his respect and love for women. . He makes friends with the angelic and intelligent campaign worker, played by Cybill Shepherd. His unfortunate choice of movie shocks her, and their palpable sexual chemistry is unable to overcome this grave error on his part, committed not intentionally but due to his mind swimming with a complex brew of emotions and ideas. Jodie Foster plays a sympathetic teenage hustler, whose inner vulnerability captures Travis’ imagination and is his saving grace. Harvey Keitel plays a sleazy pimp. None of Scorsese’s main characters are inherently evil; they are just ordinary people driven to the wrong side of the tracks through of force of circumstance. And that’s probably why, with its positive, message of hope, TAXI DRIVER won the Palme d’Or that year, while The Tenant went away empty-handed despite its similar narrative vigour and acclaimed performances. MT

TAXI DRIVER IS BACK IN CINEMAS NATIONWIDE FROM 10 FEBRUARY AND AS PART OF THE BFI MARTIN SCORSESE RETROSPECTIVE UNTIL THE END OF FEBRUARY 2017 

 

 

Gold (2017)

Dir: Stephen Gagham | Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Edgar Ramirez, Bryce Dallas Howard, Corey Stoll, Toby Kebbell, Bill Camp | US | Adventure Drama | 121min

“Inspired by true events”, is the old chestnut that warns us to be deeply sceptical about Stephen Gaghan’s ambitious attempt at boys own adventure with a financial thriller in his latest drama GOLD.

The perfect vehicle for Matthew McConaughey to play a traditional Southern oilman armed irrepressibly pioneering for the American Dream, it sees him break out from the confines of his father’s mining company to forge a booze-soaked path to hell and high-finance when he bets his bottom dollar and joins forces with the legendary geologist and copper striker Michael Acosta (Edgar Ramirez) to forge a precious metal venture in the wilds of Indonesia.

As Kenny Wells, McConaughey cuts a comical figure, half Hottentot, half orangutang, striving with a genial gusto that impels him forward to keep panning for gold, despite numerous setbacks, and a narcissistic self-belief that sees him continually coming up smelling of roses, despite smoking a cartload of Marlboros on his indefaticable journey to the dream. But despite this ebullient tour de force and a gilt-edged ending, the film falls flat around him, largely due to an overly episodic and scatty script by Patrick Massett and John Zinman.

GOLD is a story rich in dramatic elements: an amiable opening in early ’80s Albuquerque, where Kenny courts his sweetheart Kay (Bryce Dallas Howard) while working for the family business,Washoe Mining, father Craig T Nelson), an economic down-turn where Kenny scrapes the barrel and loses his home and is reduced to living in Kay’s flat-pack villa; an exciting interlude in the steamy jungles of Jakarta where the prospecting story deepens; and the lustrous lure of Wall Street where their discovery hits the dealing rooms. What transpires is a muddled mess, where even the score with its inappropriate hits has us confused and uninspired. (what has Iggy Pop got to do with gold mining or Wall Street for that matter). Bewildering too, is a series of flash-forwards to an interview with Kenny and an mystery interrogator (Toby Kebbell), which intends to elucidate but actually leaves us in the dark. Despite all this, GOLD is strangely enjoyable and entertaining –  rather like a piss-up in a brewery; you’re not quite sure what’s happening next, but it seemed fun in the afterglow, largely due to McConaughey and his antics. And although his character lacks impact, emotional integrity or intelligence there’s an authenticity to his relationship with Kay. And, in this end, his self-centredness is what really saves him. Kenny is not a selfish man, but his narcissistic self-regard prevents him from actually seeing the truth of the situation. Acosta is a man of few words who remains a cypher and a dark horse until the final denouement.

Corey Stoll’s New York investment banker is well played and Kenny’s flirt with Rachael Taylor’s City femme fatale provides relief but this is very much a one note film with few dramatic peaks and troughs despite the dramatic possibilities. Gaghan direction is uninspiring with the use of split screens feeling rather ineffective. The jungle scenes, filmed in Thailand are the most visually entrancing part of a drama that somehow fails to in impact despite its energy and potential. MT

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