As usual, I sought to keep track of my feelings of the films I saw during this year's film festival by posting some comments about each film on Facebook, before collecting those posts here. These were written pretty much within a day, maybe two, of the screenings so they really do record my immediate response, and they were written in a bit of a rush, with all the rough drafting that implies. And my usual disclaimer - these are not "reviews"; they are just reflections, an attempt to record how I felt about each film. They're mainly written for myself - they allow me to process my feelings about each movie, and also ensure that I don't finish the festival having forgotten about half the films I saw. That said, I'm also aware that other people may read these posts, and I would love if my comments would make someone want to see a film that I loved, so I do try to take this external audience into account when I'm writing.
Anyway, here are my initial responses to the films of this year's festival.
[Comments on all 21 films after the jump...]
Navalny
My first film of the festival was a documentary portrait of Alexei Navalny, the popular and charismatic Russian opposition leader running an anti-corruption campaign against Putin. Navalny was famously the subject of a botched assassination attempt using Novichok poison in 2020; after recovering in Germany he returned to Russia where he was arrested in the airport, and he remains in prison today.
So I will be honest: I didn't really know anything about Navalny before seeing this film. I don't follow Russian politics all that much, so while I knew about the Novichok poisoning from media coverage at the time, and knew that he's now in prison on trumped-up charges, I couldn't say that I had a clear knowledge of exactly who Navalny was. And the thing is, having watched the film, I still feel that I don't really know who Alexei Navalny is. Now, I realise that sounds like a criticism, and I don't intend it to be - I really did find the film extremely enjoyable and worth watching - but if you want to understand what makes the man tick, I think you're going to need to look elsewhere. We don't really learn too much about his backstory, where he came from, what motivated him to begin his political career, how he found himself in a position of being this very public rival to Putin. Even this major anti-corruption organisation that he founded is introduced to us with little fanfare. Now to be clear, I'm not complaining about this lack of context - I do think that a a film that did take a more linear story-of-a-life approach would feel more generic and less engaging then this film - but it is really driven home by the fact that I feel I've learnt more about this man by glancing through his Wikipedia entry then I did watching a 100 minute documentary.
The thing is, what the film does is so much more interesting than just present a This Is Your Life for Alexei Navalny. It's essentially an observational portrait of the man. We do get a number of talking-head interviews, most notably Navalny sitting in a bar, but for the most part it is just watching him living his life with his family and his close allies around him. And that approach really bears fruit, allowing the film to be much more dynamic then you might otherwise have expected. This really does feel like it's been constructed to be a work of cinema, not something that simply follows a generic documentary template. This is driven home in two particularly notable sequences in particular. In one, we watch as Navalny and his allies undertake research to identify the people who were responsible for his poisoning, an intriguing and detailed investigation culminating in an incredible scene where Navalny tricks one of the scientists involved in the assassination attempt into confessing his involvement and explaining how the poisoning was actually implemented. It's a remarkable scene, and you're so astonished to hear this person freely admit to this crime that it's not until after the phone is eventually hung up that you realise that this man has just been tricked into signing his own death warrant. (We do indeed learn that the scientist has not been heard from since, which does not bode well for his safety.) The second major sequence in the film is the climax of the film, following Navalny and his wife as they leave Germany and fly into Russia, knowing that he will be arrested on arrival, intercut with footage of police arresting the swarms of people who have gathered the airport to welcome him. It's a fantastic sequence, edited with a cinematic sensibility that feels like a narrative movie rather than a traditional documentary, with a sense of genuine suspense that is maintained despite the fact that you know how this story will end.
But this where I do part ways with the film. It's one thing to feel that you don't get to know the man's backstory, because that's not what the film is trying to do. But I don't know that I get much insight into who the man is today. It's a big thing to decide to go to a place, even if it's your home, where you know you are going to be arrested and held in prison for years. Yet we don't get any insight into the thought process or consideration that he gives to making that choice. Navalny is an experienced politician, and every reply he gives, whether it's in his talking-head interview or just casual comments around the house, feels practised and on message, so he never really opens up to us. And while that maybe something the filmmakers couldn't help, it is a disappointment - the film becomes less a portrait of who the man is, and more illustrative of what he does.
The film touches on a number of other significant issues, most notably with a real focus on data security. It's certainly entertaining as it explores this issue - there's the great story of the senior Russian official who kept being hacked and so every time would change his password from Moscow1 to Moscow2, Moscow3, Moscow4 - but it's also chilling and surprising. I don't think anyone's genuinely surprised that our data and digital footprint is freely accessible to the major states - Russia, China, the US, etc - and that's just something we assume but just try not to think about. But there's a moment where the researcher helping investigate Navalny's poisoning is able to verifiably identify the exact people involved in the assassination attempt because he's able to buy data that tracks their movement over years and match those movements to Navalny's. It's not cheap - in fact it's eye-wateringly expensive - but the knowledge that that type of data is freely available to anyone willing to pay for it is genuinely horrifying.
Ultimately it's an entertaining and engaging film, and one that does allow you understand why this man would become a popular figure in the fight against Putin, but it doesn't give as much insight as I would have liked into who he is or what motivates him, and that's my main disappointment with the film.
Crimes of the Future
My experience with the work of David Cronenberg is unfortunately limited. I've only seen a handful of his big titles - Videodrome, The Fly, A History of Violence - and when I saw eXistenZ at the 1999 festival I liked it so much I saw it again in general release. And that's about it. But when I heard great reports about Crimes of the Future, in which Cronenberg makes his return to the body horror genre that made his name after 20 years of making films that aren't filled with viscera, I had to see it.
Set in a near future in which human beings are beginning to spontaneously generate new non-functional body organs, the film stars Viggo Mortensen as a man particularly prone to having rapid generation of new organs, which he has catalogued before they are tattooed and removed in public surgery by his partner (Lea Seydoux) in a form of performance art. Then there are the unsettling people running an official national registry of new organs, there is the police officer in the newly formed NuVice department investigating crimes relating to these new organs, there are weird technicians responsible for maintaining the devices on which these public surgeries are undertaken. And then there is the father who wants our main characters to undertake a new piece of performance art - a public autopsy on the dead body of his young son.
I realised very early on that I had probably come into the film with overly high expectations. In particular, I heard heard so much buzz around how shocking the first 10 minutes of the movie were that I was fully bracing myself to prepare for whatever horrors I would see. Which is why I felt almost deflated when I saw those opening 10 minutes and was not particularly horrified. Which is not to say that the events of the opening are pleasant; they're not. But when you see what happens - a young boy sits in a bathroom eating a plastic waste basket; later that night his mother murders him by suffocating him with a pillow - there's nothing about those scenes that I haven't seen dozens of times. And while there is certainly uncomfortable material that follows later in the film, with plenty of shots of internal organs or scenes in which the act of slicing into a human body is regarded as the most erotic experience imaginable, it all felt weirdly tame.
My main problem with the film is just that I feel the world of the film seems only half-realised. We hear repeatedly how humanity has progressed beyond pain and discomfort, although it's unclear whether this is due to natural evolution, drugs and anaesthetics, or furniture that adjusts to counter pain sensations, since different scenes will seem to offer different explanations and they don't sit well together. The scenes of public surgery as performance art do feel very half-baked and lacking in any particular comment on the art world. The repeated idea of an inner beauty contest, where people compete by putting their new organs on display, is an amusing play on words, but doesn't feel like it adds to the film. When the film does finally decide to offer some kind of explanation for why these new body organs are appearing, the explanation - the human body is reacting to the pollution and waste in the world by developing body structures that can consume these products - seems to offer a logical explanation that also gives the film a point of view, until you remember the man whose body is completely covered in ears, a scene that now feels as though it exists just for shock without any clear connection to this wider idea. Ultimately I understand where Cronenberg is going with the message of the film - the conflict between traditionalists (who want to keep the status quo and who see that as their source of power) and those who see change as a new opportunity to advance humanity and our understanding. But it felt very surface-level.
There's also a weird and frustrating disconnect in the film's characters. I never really got any sense that any of these people had any depth, had anything to them beyond the surface level. The conversations were bland and matter of fact, not in a way that felt deliberate or stylised (in the way that, say, a Yorgos Lanthimos film might be), but just in a way that felt underdeveloped. I couldn't tell if the film was trying to make a point about the emptiness of these characters and their lives, or if they were just poorly written. And so often these characters are frustrating to be around. I fully admire Viggo Mortensen for the commitment he shows to performing his character in the way he does, but it's exhausting to spend an entire film with this man who's constantly weak and in pain, coughing and hacking. It's not an appealing performance, and I don't want to spend any time with him, which is a problem when he's your main character.
And yet for all that, overall I think I like the film. David Cronenberg knows what he's doing when it comes to body horror, and he's able to construct images of incredible beauty out of elements that should be utterly repulsive. You can understand why someone would find beauty and art in the internal organs of the human body. There's a repeated mantra in the film that "Surgery is the new sex", and you understand what they mean - in one moment, Viggo Mortensen has had a zipper installed in his stomach to allow him to display his new organs, and Lea Seydoux unzips him and starts making out with his opened stomach, and it's a moment that feels tender and romantic. There's a tactility and a sensuousness to his filmmaking and to the world that he constructs that is palpable. The main thing about this film is that it emphasises what a skilled filmmaker David Cronenberg is. And as someone who really does have a limited knowledge of the man's work, it reminds me that I need to start exploring his back catalogue.
This is not a film for everyone. But it is an intriguing and memorable piece of work, with images that do feel like they will linger in the mind, the same way that Jeff Goldblum's decomposing body in The Fly or the fish stew in eXistenZ have remained in my memory. If you know what it means to see a David Cronenberg film, and you are prepared for that, it is worth seeing.
Ali & Ava
A wonderfully sweet romantic drama from Clio Barnard, Ali & Ava focuses on the bond that forms between two middle-aged people. Ali is a British Pakistani, a former DJ in the process of separating from his wife. Ava is struggling as a teacher's aide, widowed with four children and five young grandchildren. Ali gives Ava a lift home from her work one day, and they begin to form a friendship over their shared love of music. But one of Ava's sons, who idolises the memory of his (racist and abusive) late father, isn't keen to see his mother hanging out with another man, especially a Pakistani.
Clio Barnard is not a director of big moments or strong narrative drive; her work is much smaller, intimate, almost documentary-style. Everything about her work feels natural, as though we're just watching these characters live their lives. And it's those small moments that I think are going to linger in the memory - Ava helping a young girl climb down from some playground equipment; Ali dancing on the roof of his car in the middle of the night; Ava softly singing a traditional Irish song to herself. Even when there are moments of drama, they quickly pass and leave us with the intensity of emotional space instead - in one scene, Ava's son angrily threatens Ali with a sword(!), but within a minute the moment has passed and we are left with Ava trying to tenderly help her son deal with the internal conflicts he's experiencing.
Above all, the film is held together by two incredible performances. Adeel Akhtar and Claire Rushbrook bring a nice sense of loneliness to their performances - they're both surrounded by people (it's a great portrait of the way different communities work), while simultaneously dealing with the pain of a lack of connection. Ava is almost wistful at the memory of being in love, while Ali just wants someone who is willing to treat him with a bit of respect. And it's that longing that brings the two to nervously, uncertainly start spending time together, initially not even seeking any type of romantic connection, but just happy to be seen and to have someone else to spend time with - they almost seem surprised when their friendship develops into something more. But they are sweet and charming together and you can really feel the sense of joy they experience as they find this bond with someone they might never have looked twice at.
This is one of those films that just works. It never puts a foot wrong, it never hits a false note, it just set these characters in front of you and ask you to connect with them. It's a delightful little work, it comes by its emotions honestly and earns every moment of joy it presents. I loved it.
My Old School
An intriguing, hilarious, and completely enjoyable documentary. In 1994, a new student called Brandon Lee enrolled as a fifth-year secondary school student at Bearsden Academy in Scotland; the film's director Jono McLeod was a classmate of Brandon. Right from the start, the other students apparently could tell there was something off about him, but eventually they moved past it and he became a well-known figure in the school, even taking the lead in the school musical. But still, there was that thing about him that seemed a little off. The next year, after he leaves school to pursue higher education, the truth about Brandon came out, and the school became the centre of a massive media scandal.
So I don't want to say what Brandon's secret was - although you can pretty much see where this is going from the start (for me, I found the suspense was less about what he was doing and more about why he was doing that). But despite that lack of surprise, it's just a fascinating story, and extremely entertaining as we hear all of his classmates reflecting with 25 years of hindsight on this crazy experience and reacting with amusement to the fact that they were so completely fooled by this person.
There's an unusual but really smart choice made by the film to present most of the talking-head interviews as pairs, where the interviewees are not only responding to the prompting of the interviewer, but also interacting and engaging with their fellow interviewee. It gives this film a real sense of nostalgia, the way that people will just get together with old friends and spend the time reminiscing and telling crazy stories about that time one person did something stupid - except that this time the "something stupid" resulted in massive media attention. The film heightens that sense of nostalgic conversation by having moments where we hear the stories that went around the school, the stories that everyone heard and believed, and it's only once those stories are bedded in that someone who was actually present for the events sticks their head in to correct the record - it's a nice reflection both of the fallibility of memory and the unreliability of gossip. And here it also helps that McLeod himself was a classmate of all these people (indeed, we later discover he's actually one of the talking heads) - he's not someone coming from outside to judge these people; he understands exactly what happened and how it happened. (There's even a moment where one interview subject, when asked why they were fooled, turns it back on McLeod, pointing out to him that he was just as fooled as everyone else.)
One of the most intriguing elements to the film is the way it approaches its interview with Brandon. You can't properly tell this story without getting the perspective of the man at the centre of the story, but for entirely understandable reasons, Brandon refuses to be interviewed on camera, although he does agree to an audio interview. And so, rather than working around the lack of video footage of Brandon's interview, they hire Alan Cumming to play Brandon for the purpose of being a talking head, convincingly lip-syncing his performance to Brandon's actual interview. Initially I wasn't certain whether this worked - Cumming is a very recognisable actor, and so his appearance was a constant reminder that this was not the real person. But when we do eventually see footage of the real Brandon, it turns out that Cumming is pretty good casting for the role - he does look a lot like the real person, and apparently at one point was even attached to play Brandon in a narrative movie that was never made. But there's also something conceptual about this approach that I found increasingly effective as the film went on - the core of this story is that Brendan is playing a role, pretending to be someone he's not, and so having a known actor, someone we can recognise as just playing a role, helps illuminate that fact.
There's also an interesting choice to illustrate the events in the story through the use of animation, rather than reenactment. And for the most part I did enjoy that approach - the stylization of the animation does really drive home that what we are watching is not necessarily how these events went down. It's just a shame that the animation is so noticeably cheap. Now, it's not that I'm expecting Disney-calibre animation on what is presumably a fairly low-budget movie. But it is disappointing when you find yourself watching something that looks about as animated as a basic webtoon from 20 years ago, especially when they keep reusing the same cheap animation over and over again (seriously, surely kids on holiday do other things besides dancing the Macarena all night). Still, the entire film is so likeable that I'll give the animation a pass.
Ultimately, it's just a genuinely entertaining film. It's intriguing, suspensful, hilarious, and a great time in the cinema.
Fire of Love
In the late 1960s, Katia and Maurice Krafft met in university, bonded over their mutual passion for volcanoes, fell in love, and spent over 20 years travelling the world together as married volcanologists to study, observe, and film and photograph as many active volcanoes up-close as possible, enhancing our understanding of the incredible geological processes at work under our feet. And then in June 1991, while observing the eruption of Mt Enzen in Japan, the pair get caught in a sudden cloud of boiling hot gas and ash, and pass away inches away from each other.
So it's a fascinating story, the Kraffts are charismatic and fun people to be around, and their enthusiasm for the marvels of volcanoes is palpable. And you do get a sense from them, particularly from Maurice, that there is a part of them that is thrilled by the danger. But they're never blinded to the destructive power of these processes - late in the film there is a tragic incident in which 25,000 people were avoidably killed in a volcanic mudflow, and the footage from that moment is truly horrific. But there's really only one reason to watch the film - the absolutely extraordinary images of volcanic activity. The Kraffts apparently shot hundreds of hours of footage, and so what we are given here are the best moments, the scenes and shots that just makes you marvel at the wonders of this Earth. There's the hypnotic beauty of watching the Earth split apart and the lava flows just slowly emerge and fold over onto themselves, there's the fireworks of volcanic bombs of red-hot rock flung into the air, there's the lava flow that rushes faster than a fast-moving river, there's the thick dense clouds of ash that plume out and cover everything around. And when I say that these people are close to this activity, I mean it - they're able to cook their food on the new lava flows, and even walk on them, or they pick up and juggle red-hot pieces of lava. And that closeness gives us the ability to witness things you never would have imagined - as we're told, volcanology is all about observation, and the closer you are, the more you observe. Every minute of the documentary brings us some new wonder you never would have imagined.
This is a stunning documentary. It is simply awesome, in the truest sense of the word - it inspires awe at the immense power and beauty of the Earth. You need to see this film, and if you can see this film on the big screen, see it on the biggest screen possible.
Speak No Evil
I couldn't actually remember what Speak No Evil was when I set down to watch the film. But when, less than a minute in, a shot of a beautiful Tuscan villa resort on a bright sunny day is treated with a loud discordant blaring score, you instantly know that this is a horror film.
A Danish family - Bjorn, Louise, and their young daughter Agnes - on holiday in Tuscany meet and befriend a Dutch couple - Patrick, Karin, and their silent son Abel. So when, a few months later, they get an invitation from the Dutch couple to spend a few days at their home, they decide to accept. Sure, they don't really know this other couple, but they're nice, what's the worst that could happen? Right from the start of the visit, they're uncomfortable - Patrick forgets that Louise is a vegetarian, Agnes' bed is a thin mattress on the floor, Patrick and Karin are uncomfortably demonstrative in their affections, they'll use the bathroom while someone is already taking a shower, to say nothing of the growing signs that Patrick is physically abusive to his son. But you can't really say anything about any of this; when you're a guest in someone's home it would be impolite to the host to say that you're not enjoying yourself. And who knows, maybe these are just cultural clashes, maybe they just do things differently in the Netherlands. And so the offences build and grow.
I really had a lot of fun with this one. While the film inevitably does become a horror film, the film really only makes that transition in the final 20 or 25 minutes. Before then, it exists very much as an exploration of manners, in which we are forced into a world of excruciating discomfort, but everyone chooses to suffer through and tolerate it because that's just the done thing, leaving us all discombobulated and unsure of our footing. At the end of the film, once everything has been revealed and the horrors of the situation are understood, Patrick is asked why they have done these things, and his answer is simple: "Because you let us." And that's the fundamental perspective of the film: it can often be easy for us to allow ourselves to be walked all over, to be treated with disrespect, because it's simpler then taking action or expressing anything uncomfortable. In that way, it has a lot in common thematically (if not stylistically) with the work of Ruben Ostlund or Michael Haneke - I found myself thinking a lot about Funny Games as the film progress, and was interested as I left the film to overhear someone else make the exact same comparison, so there's definitely something there.
The film has a fantastic cast all-round, but I found myself particularly admiring the work of Fedja van Huêt as the villainous Patrick. In this role, he manages to ride the line of feeling extremely charming and charismatic without actually being charming or charismatic - we needed to understand how he could be someone so likeable that people would be willing to go and spend time living with someone they hardly know, yet at the same time having an actually likeable villain would undercut the tension of the work by creating a conflict in the audience. Van Huêt is a master of the art of smiling without his eyes, which at times seem soulless, or at other times are often completely consumed with rage and fury. The end result is a performance that is somehow more threatening the more genial he becomes.
One thing I really respected about the film was the decision to leave so much unexplained and unanswered about what exactly was happening. Patrick's "Because you let us" is the only explanation we get for why all of this is occurring, and it's a strong choice. The film is so much in the perspective of Bjorn, Louise, and Agnes as the victims that the question of "why" becomes completely irrelevant. It doesn't really make any difference for the victim what the motivation is of their abuser; all that matters to them is that there is this person who is hurting them. And so the film deliberately leaves us with the same confusion and frustration that our sympathetic heroes are experiencing. We walk out of the film with many, many questions, and while we at least have a hint of an explanation for some of these, for many of those questions we're just left with blanks. And I appreciated the confidence the film had to leave those empty spaces for its audience.
There are really only two things about the film that I didn't appreciate. The first I've already referred to - the score is simply appalling, actively unpleasant, intrusively announcing itself and declaring the film to be a horror film even in moments where there is no horror to elicit that response. It's not supplementing or bringing out the tone of the film; it's aggressively setting the tone of the film in advance of the film itself. The one good thing about the score is that it's relatively sparse, and there are fortunately few moments where it is called on. But you quickly learn to brace yourself whenever you hear the score come in.
The second frustration comes when the characters fall into the common horror film trap of not being smarter then the audience. And sure, I know I'm watching a horror film so I know how important it is to escape, whereas for them it's just an uncomfortable situation until it's really not. But what makes a horror film satisfying is when you think about what you would do to get out of a situation, and then the characters try that very same approach, and it doesn't work - that at least means the characters are as smart as you, and you don't get to be frustrated at how dumb these people are for not trying something so obvious. In this case, there is one thing that I wanted to yell at the characters to try - why didn't they try to think of some excuse (a work situation, an unexpectedly sick family member) that might justify them leaving early. Indeed, there's one point where the family are given a perfect opportunity to take the time to prepare such an excuse, and for some reason choose not to, and as a result effectively choose to let themselves continue to be trapped. Would it have worked if they had said "We've just heard our mum is in the hospital, we have to go"? Perhaps, perhaps not. But it's frustrating that the characters never even give that a try.
But still, it's a very entertaining and suspenseful film that manages to wring a great deal of tension out of just how long it takes the film to reveal its true colours as a horror film, and that is effectively horrifying once it does so. It's an extremely enjoyable film, and I would recommend it.
The Good Boss
Javier Bardem stars as Julio, the wealthy owner of a business manufacturing scales that his family has run for generations. He's excited to announce that the company is in the running for a prestigious award for excellence, and he informs his employees about this award during a speech in which he proclaims that each and every one of his employees is like a family member, they're like his sons or daughters. Of course, he's frustrated at the former "son" who has now set up camp across from the factory in protest at being laid off, which will not look good to the awarding committee when they visit. And he's irritated with his current "son" who keeps making massive and costly mistakes out of distraction because the man's wife is having an affair with another one of Julio's "sons". And then one of his oldest "sons" asks him for help after the "son's" son is arrested for being part of a gang that violently assaulted a man. And he is definitely keeping an eye on one of his newest "daughters", who is young and hot and would be great in bed.
So the film is a perfectly pleasant way to spend a couple of hours - it has some solid laughs, engaging characters, and a story that comes with enough surprising reveals and developments so that it always holds the attention. But as a corporate satire, it's frustratingly toothless and shallow. The film's main message seems to essentially be that your boss is not your family, and that attempts to build any such sense of connection within a company are ultimately born out of a desire to create an emotional bond between the employee and their employer when the employer has no such loyalty to the employee. And that's fine, I think there's a lot of truth in that. But it also doesn't feel like it's saying anything terribly interesting or radical - I suspect every person who watches this film will either have personal experience of being unfairly treated by their employer, or will know someone who was unfairly treated by their employer. At the same time, the boss's job is to run the business, and if an employee cannot contribute to the business or indeed is actively obstructive to its successful operation, it is the boss's job to address that situation as required. There's nothing terribly enlightening about this idea, and so if the film wants to make a point then the film needs to have more to say. And I don't think it does.
I also found the film to be irritatingly overwritten at times, at least as it comes to metaphor. It may seem random that the film revolves around a company that makes scales, until you hear the characters start to talk about the idea of scales - they talked about the importance of treating people fairly, of not tipping the scales; they talked about the blindness of Lady Justice holding the scales of justice aloft to judge the guilt or innocence of all who come to her. The most heavy-handed metaphor would have to be the set of scales that is set on display at the front gate of the factory, which remain constantly askew no matter what efforts are put in to reset them, and that can ultimately only be set back to the appearance of "even" by weighing one down with a bullet, because the involvement of a device for death in this metaphor isn't ominous at all.
If there is a reason to see the film, it is absolutely for Javier Bardem. It's a wonderfully smug, self-satisfied performance by the man, smarmy and with a constant cheerful rictus-like grin on his face that belies the tensions and frustrations that are building up within the man. We were told in a pre-film introduction that this is the third time that Javier Bardem has worked with director Fernando León de Aranoa, and I do think that existing relationship with the director does seem to have given Bardem a confidence to really explore the limits of unlikeability in his character.
It's a fun, enjoyable film - and one I will have forgotten about tomorrow.
Dual
Karen Gillan stars as Sarah, a young woman who one day discovers she has a terminal disease for which there is no hope of recovery. Not wanting to have her boyfriend and mother missing her, she decides to have a duplicate made of her, Sarah's Double. Sarah will spend her last few weeks teaching the Double how to be Sarah, her likes and dislikes, so that the Double can take her place once she dies. But 10 months pass, and Sarah discovers that her terminal illness has gone into remission and she's going to live. Which is a problem because only one of Sarah and Sarah's Double can be allowed to live, and Sarah's Double has been alive long enough to develop her own existence and not want to be terminated. And so this problem must be resolved the way the legal system in this world resolves such issues - they have a year to prepare, and at the end of that year, Sarah and Sarah's Double will meet on a field for a duel to the death to decide who will get to live on as Sarah. And so Sarah meets up with a local personal trainer, played by Aaron Paul, to equip herself with the skills and fortitude required to kill her Double.
I was initially thrown early in the film by several moments where certain lines or performance moments didn't quite ring true, felt a bit artificial. It wasn't until the scene where Sarah goes to her doctor and I was baffled by the doctor's performance that I suddenly clicked and realised that this was deliberate - the entire film had been shot with a consciously blank affect. It's not quite as extreme as you might get in a Yorgos Lanthimos film, but it's definitely there, and it's an intentional choice by the director. The challenge that I have with this is that it's almost not enough. When I watch a Lanthimos film, his characters speak with such an extreme neutrality of cadence that it's impossible to miss, and it almost turns his characters into blank canvases upon which we can apply our own interpretation of their character. But in this film, the way the characters speak and the things they say, while certainly being stylised, are sufficiently close to regular dialogue or conversational cadences that they don't immediately leap out as being part of the artifice of the film. As I said, it probably took me 10 or 15 minutes to register that this was actually part of the film's style, and I don't know how effective that is. I've seen both of Riley Stearns' previous films, Faults and The Art of Self-Defense, and while I could be misremembering, I don't remember there being any such stylisation in either of those films, so I don't think it's a particular quirk of the director. For some reason, Stearns just seems to think that the characters in the world of this film need to talk like this, and I don't understand why. Part of the problem with this approach is that it can be hard to maintain that level of stylised blank dialogue for the length of a film, and I'm not sure how consistently the approach is taken. For instance, there were some parts where it seems to me that they were creating a deliberate distinction between Sarah and her Double, where the Double seemed more natural than Sarah, but just when it seemed as though the film might be making a point about doubles seeming more human, the Double would return to the same blank affect, and it would be clear that these moments of personality were simply minor misalignments in performance or dialogue, rather than being part of any real point.
But I think the other problem with this approach is that it feels as though it pulls the film away from any real weight. Because its characters don't quite feel right, it then becomes difficult to take them seriously. You might wonder what it would be like to live with a double and have that double take over your life, you might wonder what it would be like to have to prepare to kill someone who is in essence yourself - these are natural things to find yourself reflecting on as a result of the film, but because these people never seem to have any real emotional response to the extreme situation they are in, it makes the film feel shallow and as though it's not fully engaging with the emotional realities that would come with existing in this world. Now, to be clear, it's a fun film - I laughed many times, I found the premise of the film intriguing, I admired how much thought and care had clearly gone into developing the world of the film and the rules that would govern the way it operates, and Karen Gillan and Aaron Paul are clearly enjoying themselves. If you see the film, I'm confident you'll have a good time. But I don't think it gets too much beneath its surface.
Resurrection
So I think this might be my first candidate for favourite film of the festival. [NOTE: This was indeed my favourite of the festival.] I walked out of Resurrection stunned, a little shell-shocked, beaten down, yet invigorated at the remarkable experience I've just been through.
Rebecca Hall stars as Margaret, an extremely competent business executive who has her life arranged pretty much exactly how she wants. She's doing well in her career, she has a smart, capable daughter about to turn 18, and she has a regular hook-up with a married colleague whenever she wants to get laid. And then suddenly she starts seeing a man from her past, David (played by Tim Roth), everywhere she goes - at a conference, in a store, at the park. And the sight of this man brings out a sheer panic in Margaret, much to the confusion of her lover and her daughter, who simply cannot understand the way she is behaving.
We don't initially understand either, at least not fully. And then Margaret explains her entire history with David, an appalling story of predatory behaviour and abuse by David against the younger Margaret. It's an incredible, extraordinary scene and performance - Rebecca Hall was my main reason for seeing the film, she's an actress whose work I always admire, but nothing prepared me for the power of her performance in that scene. And the thing that's beautiful about the scene is that it's a pure monologue - Rebecca Hall just starts talking, ostensibly to the other person in the room but in reality to the audience - and suddenly it felt to me as though time just stood still, and I was just caught up in this performance. It's all presented in a single take, there's never the release of a cut, we just sit and watch and listen as Rebecca Hall shows us a woman retraumatising herself as she forces herself to recall in excruciating detail and re-experience the worst moments of her life. But at the same time, the story she tells is so extreme that it's almost hard to believe. She's clearly traumatised and damaged by her experiences with David, there's never any doubt that this was a horrific and abusive relationship, but did he really do THAT? Or is this something she invented to help her process what really happened? Certainly there are things that David says that seem to indicate the truth of her story, but the film feels so completely from the perspective of Margaret that we begin to doubt the reliability of the film we are watching - did he really just say that, or did she imagine him saying that to justify the actions she feels she has to take?
The film is a powerful exploration of the lingering psychological effects that abuse can have on its victims. Margaret is a confident woman in control of her life, she's even able to draw on her own experiences with David to give advice to other women in bad relationships. To all outward appearance, the notion of her as a victim would seem absurd. And yet when he's there, she reverts back to the person she was with him, she has to follow his instructions, because there is such an overwhelming sense of fear in her, she seems to genuinely believe that he has the power to do anything he threatens to do, and all she can do is agree to whatever he demands in order to hopefully win his favour and convince him to leave her alone. And the astonishing thing is that possibly the most powerful threat he has over her is no threat at all, it's an absurdity, it's something that she rationally knows is nothing, and yet that threat has power over her because it is tied to the memory of the worst moment of her life, it's something that she desperately wishes could be undone, and so he can make her do whatever he likes by promising he can help undo this event or threatening to make this event permanent.
I've already praised Rebecca Hall, but I really need to reiterate how marvellous I found her portrayal of a woman slowly unravelling as she becomes increasingly desperate to find a way, any way, to free herself of this lingering presence in her life. But Tim Roth gives an equally exceptional performance as the abusive David. You can see the remnants of his charm sprinkled through his work; you can understand how it would be that an impressionable young woman would become infatuated with this soft-spoken older man. And when he does start exercising his control over her, he does so with an regretful tone - "I wish I didn't have to do this; this hurts me more than it hurts you; it's for your own good" - that is just chilling. But the thing that makes Tim Roth's performance so fantastic is the level of smarmy confidence he has on display. He's almost smug in his knowledge that he has absolute control over this woman, and it seems as though his reason for coming back to see her is just to prove to himself that he still has her hooked.
This is an exceptional thriller. It has moments that are so completely intense that I was literally uncomfortable because there was so much tension in my body. I'm genuinely impressed with writer-director Andrew Semans for making such a confidently crafted piece in only his second film, and am definitely interested to see where his career goes from here. In the meantime, it's a genuinely masterful work, and I find myself invigorated at having experienced it.
The Humans
In a rundown New York City apartment filled with weird noises and water-stained walls, the Blake family gather to celebrate Thanksgiving. Youngest daughter Brigid has only just moved in to this apartment with her partner Richard, their first home together, and while there are a million problems with this apartment, that's why they can (just barely) afford it. She's also frustrated that her dream of being a composer keeps being stymied and that she's losing out on opportunities to build her career. Older daughter Aimee has broken up with her girlfriend, is dealing with a chronic bowel condition, and has just learnt that she has no hope of career progression at her current job. Their father Erik is anxious about his daughter living in this apartment with so many problems, he's still carrying trauma from nearly dying on 9/11 and from the things he saw on that day, and he noticeably has something he needs to tell his daughters but hasn't yet. Deeply Catholic mother Deirdre is not so passive-aggressively trying to deal with both her daughters walking away from the faith, and has her own health issues. And their grandmother Momo has Alzheimer's, just mutters incoherently, and is wheelchair-bound except when she decides to go for a wander.
I was a little bit uncertain approaching this one. I'd heard good things, but at the same time the basic description of the film - a movie adaptation of a recent acclaimed award-winning play about a family that comes together for a significant family event centred around a dinner - gave me strong memories of August: Osage County, which I did not care for. Fortunately this was a much more subtle and reflective film, without the easy histrionics that I found so off-putting in that film. It's the type of film where the tensions are much smaller, much sadder, and although there is one big blow-up in the film it comes surprisingly late in the piece, and you get the sense that this is just an immediate reaction out of surprise to a revelation, rather than some big relationship-ending conflict. Above all, the film seems to be about disappointment, with everyone having to grapple with some form of guilt or frustration at life not working out how you expect.
One thing that is always a risk with a movie that is based on a play is that the adaptation could feel too stage-bound - it's common to have a play where the events all take place in one location, but if you make a movie constrained to one location, it can feel restricted. And this film does takes place in a very limited location - with a handful of brief exceptions, the characters never leave the apartment, and they certainly never leave the building and go outside. And yet the film never feels restricted in that way. For a start, I assume they must have increased the size of the apartment from the play, since I assume on stage they would not have had a two-storey apartment set. While I'm not sure that increase in apartment size quite makes sense (how does the sound of the heavy-footed upstairs neighbour penetrate that loudly through two floors?), having that type of location for the film gives the director a lot more choice; there are so many nooks and crannies with their own distinctive details and feel that the director can use to locate a particular scene, so it never feels like we're stuck in one location. And first-time director Stephen Karam (who wrote the original play, as well as the screenplay adaptation) seems to really enjoy finding unusual or unexpected angles or images offered by the location to use as transitions between moments, as well as interesting little vignettes (particular highlights include Richard trying to create an artificial fireplace with a projector, or Aimee being uncomfortable about her grandmother seeing some graffiti in the elevator) that lighten the tone and give some variation to the texture of the film. All of which means that the movie feel genuinely cinematic, with a sense of scope that is quite unexpected given its limitations.
It's a wonderful little film, and I would strongly recommend it.
Sick of Myself
Signe is a twentysomething cafe worker who one day saves the life of a woman attacked by a dog, and then dines out on the admiration that comes with her heroism. But after a few weeks, people tire of her story, while her artist boyfriend achieves some success with an installation made up of stolen chairs. Wanting to find some way to one-up him, she tries faking a nut allergy, or taunting a dog into biting her, until she finds the perfect way to get attention for herself - an obscure Russian pharmaceutical has just been banned for a side-effect that creates a a severe skin condition, so she buys every pill she can find and starts overdosing on them. And it works - it gives her a very visible problem that people can't help but notice, she even gets media attention when doctors can't identify the cause of her mysterious condition, leading to her being taken on as a model by an agency that specifically represents models with disabilities and unusual conditions.
So this is a perfectly fine film. It's an entertaining black comedy, with some solid laughs and an amusing central performance. But ultimately, the film just feels slight. The basic message of the film - young people today will do anything to attract attention in the modern media landscape - feels like a painfully obvious argument, lacking any truly significant insight at all. Of course the millennial, after handing her phone over to her boyfriend to take a photo of her, immediately knows the exact right pose to adopt for the "I was deep in thought and didn't even realise I was being photographed" photo. Then there's just the frustration that a lot of the jokes, while funny, often feel overly telegraphed and obvious, or simply underdeveloped. Consider the moment where Signe is at the modelling agency and suddenly vomits up a pool of blood, before the blind assistant walks into the room. As soon as they cut to the next scene, you know that the assistant is going to walk in completely unaware of the bloody footprints she is leaving. And sure enough, that happens. But also, there's no real pay-off to the scene that I noticed - she got blood on the sole of her shoe, that's the joke, and it does nothing further with that joke.
The film also has this device running through the movie where Signe constantly goes off on flights of fantasy, rehearsing different moments and imagining how they will always work out to her absolute advantage - of course if she writes a book about her experiences then it will be a massive best seller and hugely inspirational text; what other option could there be? And in theory, I don't mind this as a device. It's funny, it's true and reflects something I think we all do, and it does offer an illuminating insight into Signe as a character. But also I think that if you're going to have this kind of device, you do need to be clear about when your movie is presenting one of these flights of fantasy and when it's portraying real life. After all, the notion of a modelling agency for women with severely disfigured hands or massive unsightly skin conditions seems so unusual and so completely tied to her desire for major attention that for the first couple of minutes, I was fully prepared for this to be another fantasy moment, and it actually took me a little while to be fully certain that this was a genuine plot development in the film.
Ultimately, the film is the film - it's perfectly enjoyable and entertaining, and I enjoyed my time watching it. But it does feel like it lacks any real insight or substance. And that is the key disappointment around this film.
Flux Gourmet
Gwendoline Christie stars as the director of an organisation offering month-long residencies to culinary collectives in sonic catering, artists who construct their art from the aural landscape of food. The current collective in residency is led by an extremely indecisive yet overly stubborn woman who refuses to accept any suggestions, however helpful, from the woman responsible for paying for their art. Meanwhile, one of the institute's employees is suffering from extreme gastric distress, inspiring the idea of a public endoscopy as art. And in the meantime, the director also comes under attack from another culinary collective that was rejected because she "didn't like what they did to terrapins".
You could walk into this film knowing nothing about it, and immediately recognise that this is a Peter Strickland film. For a start, the degree of fetishisation in these films is palpable - at this point, it really does feel as though Strickland is just making films about his fetishes, and then just inviting us to feel how he feels when he looks at these images. One of the very first shots in the film is an image of fingers with perfectly manicured fingernails, painted in a deep green, dipping into salt, and then sprinkling the salt into a boiling broth. It's bizarrely erotic - you can feel Strickland being strangely turned on by the salt crystals that remain on those fingernails even as the rest fall into the hot liquid. Another thing that quite clearly entrances Peter Strickland is evidently millinery - Gwendoline Christie is constantly shown wearing these extraordinary pieces of fashion, always paired off with a stunning hat or fascinator (even in bed, she still wears some great headwear suitable for sleeping in), and there's something about the way he shoots her that gives a particularly uncomfortable and arousing focus to that headwear.
As always, Strickland is a fascinatingly tactile film-maker. As you watch his film, you experience what it feels like to hold regurgitated avocado in your hand, or have tomato soup poured all over you, or indeed to have salt crystals stuck to your fingers. The film has a lot in common with Strickland's excellent Berberian Sound Studio, between the tactility of slicing into vegetables, or the different sounds that can be generated from different foods, but where that film was much more of a nightmare about a man losing his mind, here it's much more sensual and enjoyable. In fact, Strickland seems much more playful here than I think he has ever been before - just look at Gwendoline Christie, who is absolutely a Strickland-type - tall and statuesque, clad in stunning fashion and impossibly powerful - but whereas, say, the comparable lesbian shop-assistant witches of In Fabric were severe and daunting, here Christie gets to be bright and cheery and funny. Indeed, the entire film is a genuinely hilarious experience that the audience seemed to fully delight in - whether it's the wonderfully overblown dialogue ("You can keep the epicurean toxicity, but indulge me on the flanger, please?"), the absurd cast of characters (the cadaverous doctor constantly mocking everyone for not having read Euripides was a particular highlight), or the genuinely affectionate skewering of the art world (which I found much more convincing and effective then in Crimes of the Future).
My only real issue with the film is the frustrating choice to have the film be narrated by a character suffering from severe gastric distress. Being me with my sensibilities, I dreaded every time the narrator came in with yet more discussion about his bowel movements or his constant need to fart.
After I saw In Fabric a few years ago, I referenced the David Fincher quote, "If you think that you can hide what your interests are, what your prurient interests are, ... if you think you can hide that in your work as a film director, you're nuts." The quote continues to be true of Strickland - he's definitely not trying to hide his prurient interests, he's positively revelling in them, and he wants us to join him in this world. The marvel of his work is that we managed to walk away without being made to feel dirty; in fact, I suspect most people would walk away from the film thinking "Hmm, hats..., yeah I get that." I really enjoyed this one.
The Stranger
Henry is something of a drifter, looking for work. So when a new acquaintance suggests that he can get Henry a position working for the same major criminal enterprise he works for, Henry is definitely interested. Henry is introduced to Mark, his point of contact in the organisation, and the two work together and become friends. But what Henry doesn't know is that Mark is an undercover cop, there is no criminal organisation, and this entire months-long operation is entirely focused on him as the lead suspect in a high profile murder case.
So I didn't remember anything about the premise of this film when I sat down to watch it - so much so that I was genuinely shocked, 15 minutes into the film, when Mark pulled out an audio recorder to record a message revealing that he's an undercover cop - which really let me focus on the way the film sets out its key information and tells its story. I did really appreciate how slowly and carefully the film doled out its information - we only gradually learn what crime is being investigated, how the investigation came to zero in on Henry as their main suspect, and even how the elaborate creation of this entire criminal organisation could even lead to the arrest of this man for a completely unrelated historic crime. I did think the film perhaps was not as clear as it could have been that it is taking place in multiple timelines - the film intercuts constantly between the undercover operation and the initial investigation that leads to the identification of Henry as a suspect, and admittedly I might have missed something, but it took a while for me to realise that the film is moving back and forward through time as it cuts between these storylines.
And that, I think, points to one of the big risks presented by this film. The openings studio logos revealed this is a film eventually to be released by Netflix, and I'm not sure how well the film will work at home. We're all aware of the reality of watching a film at home, of being easily distracted by how many devices to hand, of having things pull us out of the film. The Stranger is an extremely effective film that does cast a spell over you when you are able to be completely absorbed into it, but I do fear that watching at home, with all of the risk of distractions taking its audience away of the film, the film's measured pace and careful revealing of information might not quite hold the attention and unfairly damage the film's reception. I also worry because sound was such a big part of the reason I was so engaged with the film - one of my favourite tricks in the film was the often subtle use of a very high frequency tone to represent Mark's awareness of being recorded, and fear that at any moment their operation could be discovered. Again, we had the advantage of a cinema sound system to really draw out the nuances and intricacies of the sound design, and I'd be really curious how well that is communicated at home where most people will not have such precision sound setups.
The film also did some interesting work in portraying the experience and mindset of this man who is trying to be a parent to his son, while at the same time having to maintain a separate identity. And while it is only a minor part of the film, it's effectively explored, thanks to the dream sequences that portray the mental damage this investigation is doing to Mark, or the hide-and-seek scene, in which we clearly see just how fearful Mark is about protecting his son having spent so long with a man accused of a truly heinous crime. At the same time, I'd actually like a bit more development of this point. I couldn't help wondering how this all worked, how someone could return home and fulfil their parental responsibilities when they're trying to maintain an entire separate identity - doesn't that create a real risk of exposure if the target ever discovers where you live? How do they guard against that?
I found the film challenging and thoughtful, and I was excited to have the chance to see it on the big screen. Realistically most people will watch it on Netflix, and so all I can suggest is to turn off the lights, put away your devices, and just let the film envelop you.
The Forgiven
Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain star as David and Jo, a married couple who seem to have nothing but contempt for each other. The couple are on holiday in Morocco, travelling to the palatial compound of a friend for a many-days-long party. But as they drive in the middle of the desert at night, David having spent the day drinking, they accidentally hit and kill a local teenager. So they pile his body into the car and carry on to the party. But then the father of the young boy turns up to claim the body and seeking the person who killed his son, and while David hopes that he can find a way to make this problem go away at minimal cost and inconvenience to him, it becomes clear that David is going to have to travel with the father back to his home to make true reparations (which he doesn't want to do, since what if they're ISIS?). Meanwhile Jo stays behind at the party, enjoying a lifestyle of debauchery, and flirting (or more) with a cute and funny American.
So the film's messaging is extremely obvious, a portrait of the indulgence and excess of the wealthy who build themselves up at the expense of the impoverished around them. It's in David's apparent attitude that he can kill this boy and just move on because the kid is just a local, and not important. It's in the way the host partner proudly announces that he designed all of the servant's uniforms, which are apparently all "authentic". Whenever there's a question of how they did something - whether it's how they got enough water into the middle of the desert to fill the massive swimming pool, or how they got fresh papaya for breakfast - the answer is always the same. Their host, played by Matt Smith, has decided to build his life in Morocco but has also chosen to essentially wall himself off from the country in this massive home, and while he smugly announces the depths of his appreciation of Islamic art he is particularly uninterested in engaging with the culture around him, being dismissive of his servants, and seeming to show little knowledge about how things work in this country past dealing with the authorities. The attitudes of these people feel almost predatory to the country, as though they have come there just to devour the local resources for their own amusement. Unfortunately I think the film is too obvious in making the point, and in deriding the shallowness of its characters it makes the mistake of embracing that shallowness itself - there is precious little nuance to the film, and too many of its characters have no defining characteristics beyond enjoying diving into the pool and taking drugs, or being the stoic servants observing the events.
But then you have the evolution of David, and that is where I think the film is particularly strong. Ralph Fiennes gives his character an extremely subtle journey as he goes on this trip to the dead boy's home - he starts out intensely self-centred, even trying to put the incident aside in order to enjoy the party, and when it becomes clear that he has to go on this trip with the boy's father, his focus is very much solely on his own fears and his desire to minimise any cost to himself as a consequence (he even declares that he won't pay any more than €1000 for the boy's life). There's no big moment where his attitude changes; instead Fiennes brings a real understanding to the character, with each scene taking him one step closer to his conclusion, where his heart is genuinely broken for this boy and where you feel that he would willingly give his life if it would bring the boy back. It's a powerful performance, and is certainly the reason to watch the film.
Beyond that, I don't know there's too much to the film. The satire of the wealthy feels genuinely shallow, beyond the handful of major characters everyone feels unformed, and at times the way the film cuts between the indulgence of the party and the tragedy of David and the grieving father gives the film a whiplash sensation. I also find myself very aware that this is a film made by a white British man that is, in the part of the film that makes most impact, presenting a portrait of the lives and cultures of the people living in North Africa, and I can't help wondering how people who live in Morocco would feel about the way their world has been portrayed. At the same time, there is that Ralph Fiennes performance, which is great, and I'm glad to have seen the film just for that.
The Stars at Noon
Trish is a freelance journalist trying to report from Nicaragua; however, the upscale travel magazine she has written articles for in the past isn't interested in her stories of kidnapping and murder so, with no money coming in, she turns to sex work in order to survive and get enough money to leave the country. One day she meets Daniel, a white-suited Englishman who may be more than the oil company consultant he claims to be, and the two start a troubled relationship. But when pressures in the country starts to get too much, and Trish's other contacts can no longer offer her any assistance or favours, the two decide to try to escape over the border.
The first part of the film, with Trish navigating her way around the city of Managua, really is involving. Admittedly it is baggy, but appealingly so - it's not especially plot-driven, and is much more about simply observing this woman and how she survives. Trish has been in this city long enough that she does have a comfort and a certainty as she navigates the different places of the city, and it's genuinely fascinating just watching her, getting to understand the way she lives. And while there are plot developments in that first part of the film, for the most part they feel less like a story is being told, and more as though we are just watching the character and understanding her through the way she reacts to these new developments and complications.
Playing Trish is Margaret Qualley, who I've been following ever since The Leftovers, and who was my main reason for seeing the film. Her work here really is excellent - she's confident, in control, because she knows she can show no weakness to survive in this world, she just has to take the punches and carry on. But we understand that it is all surface - we see her exhaustion in private as she prepares herself to encounter someone she wants to avoid, or we hear her desperation as she pleads for her weary editor to help her. At times the mask slips and she reveals her anxieties to others around her - her panic when an authority figure betrays her or fails to come through with assistance she was relying on, or her shamefacedness with the guy she's flirting with where she has to come out and say that if he wants to sleep with her he'll have to pay $50 - and you can feel her horror as she understands how weakened her position is as a result of those interactions.
Unfortunately the second half of the film, when our two leads try to escape through the jungle to find some way to leave the country, really did not work for me. The bagginess of the film worked when it was just a static portrait of life in the city, but once it started having an actual direction of travel, started needing to move the story towards its climax, the lack of tension really countered against what the film needed to be trying to achieve. Frankly, I disengaged from the film. The second half would almost have been a complete write-off were it not for the presence of Benny Safdie, who between this and Licorice Pizza is very quickly becoming someone whose role is to wander into a film late in its third act and be brilliant. Here he plays an American who finds himself in the middle of nowhere and who barely even attempts to deny that he's CIA. He's pretending to be a fish out of water, but he knows no-one believes him, he's not really trying to convince anyone, and the entire exercise seems almost to be for his own amusement. He does give the film a nice spark of fun at a time where there is otherwise precious little.
I find myself bothered by one of the key choices made in telling this story. The film essentially takes place today, mid-Covid pandemic - everyone wears masks, they need their temperature checked before checking into high-end hotels, there's even a significant confrontation that takes place in a Covid testing station, and the film definitely tries to suggest that some of the tensions in the story are driven by the pandemic and the response to it. But it's also clear that there is more going on - there's a genuine undercurrent of political unrest running through the film. And that puzzled me - I know I'm not the most up-to-date on international affairs, but I felt that I hadn't heard anything about Nicaragua being a political hotspot lately. Indeed, checking the official travel advisories I find that, while the country is certainly not the safest place to be, it doesn't seem to be in the type of political upheaval that the film suggests. This confused me, until I discovered the film is based on a novel that takes place in 1984 during the Nicaraguan Revolution. I can see that the story would work in that context, that you would need that type of chaotic environment for this story to make sense. I get the impression that they probably tried to write a script that did remove the Revolution from the story and use Covid to replace it, but the problem was that the Revolution was so ingrained into the fibre of the story that even someone like me, who knows nothing about Nicaraguan history or the original novel, could recognise this key plot element even if they've tried to remove it.
So ultimately the film didn't work for me. That said, Margaret Qualley is a star you can't help watching, and I remain interested in seeing where she goes next.
Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon
Mona is a young woman who has spent years being held in a mental institution being treated cruelly by the guards and service providers employed there. But Mona has powers of mind control, and one day she decides to use these to escape and flee into New Orleans. Once there, she befriends a stripper who sees in Mona's powers someone who can help her get the strip club clients to be extremely generous in their tipping, or persuade passers-by to go to the nearest ATM and offload their bank balances onto her. This draws the attention of a cop who has already experienced Mona's mind control powers, and so he determines to hunt her down before anyone else gets hurt.
I can confidently say that this was my most hated film of the festival - and since I was rather looking forward to it, that makes it also my most disappointing film. I really loved Ana Lily Amirpour's first film, the Iranian vampire drama A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night. Inevitably I find myself comparing this film to that earlier film, and there is not a single measure by which this film compares well. In Girl, the entire film is infused with its Iranian setting, the very point of the film is about Iranian oppression of women; here the New Orleans setting feels generic; other than a single scene where the cop gets a token from a voodoo priestess to (ineffectively) protect himself from Mona's powers, nothing about the film seems to connect with the setting at all. In fact, I struggle to find any thematic substance here at all; the closest it came was a moment where we see news footage of Donald Trump signing an agreement with North Korea, followed very shortly by the revelation that Mona is herself North Korean, but while it's clearly trying to make a point, what it adds up to was unclear to me. Girl had interesting, nuanced characters with unexpected shading to them; here the characters can be summed up as according with every clichéd stereotype imaginable for their character category - stripper, deadbeats, neighbourhood bully, precocious boy, determined cop - whatever you've imagine from those barebones descriptions is what these characters are. The only character who can't be summed up in a couple of words is Mona, and that's just because she's pretty much a blank slate responding to whatever else anyone else does or says. Girl had beautiful stark black-and-white cinematography that felt rich and distinctive and created indelible images I still remember seven years after seeing the film; here the cinematography is bright and garish and ugly and feels like it's assaulting the viewer with images I can't wait to forget. It had a promising-looking cast, with people like Kate Hudson and Craig Robinson, but Kate Hudson is wasted in a generic uninteresting stripper role, while Craig Robinson is likeable as the cop trying to catch Mona, but he's also playing the character as Craig Robinson, just like every other role he plays. It's also a film that is trying to be funny, but that never once amused me - although much of the audience did laugh in the intended moments, and walking out I even heard one couple discussing how funny they found it, so maybe I'm wrong about that.
Look, your mileage may vary, you might see this and think it's hilarious, a great film, extremely entertaining. The other people in the cinema seemed to enjoy it. All I know is that, within about 5 minutes of the film starting, I realised that I was hating the film, and sadly it never got better.
Corsage
Vicky Krieps plays Empress Elisabeth of Austria, who was married to Emperor Fritz Joseph I for 44 years. When the film begins, Elizabeth is in her 40s, is sensitive about rumours that she is putting on weight, and so responds by having her servants bind her bodice (the titular "corsage") ever tighter. She's unhappy in her marriage, and feels stifled by court life and the burdens of being consort to the ruler. And so she travels, always finding attractive men to flirt with, but always returning to the life she hates.
The film is perfectly fine. The reason to see the film is Vicky Krieps' performance, another reminder of just how great this actress is. In many ways the performance should be rather unlikeable - she's tetchy with the servants, uninterested in her husband, snaps at those around - but Krieps manages to position this behaviour as a reaction to the frustrations of feeling trapped in this world. Indeed in an early moment she slyly invites us into this world with a glance straight to camera and a knowing smirk, as if telling the audience "you think you'd be fine in this environment, but you get to leave and escape; imagine how trapped this world would make you feel if this was your life". Part of her frustration clearly comes from being someone always strives to challenge herself - her very first scene involves trying to push the limit for how long she can keep herself underwater - so having to live a life filled with endless banquets and little challenge would understandably begin to feel like a prison to the Empress.
I did like the way the film deliberately tried to avoid a narrative structure - the film is not driven by story beats or by the historic record per se, instead presenting a collection of individual moments that together add up to an image of the Empress. Rather then racing from storybeat to storybeat, we get something much more contemplative and reflective of the time passing. Now to be honest, I do think a more narrative-driven approach would have been interesting - Wikipedia would suggest there is a lot of drama in her story that was largely elided in the film - but for the most part it's a rather enjoyable experience.
One thing I was puzzled by was the decision to include a number of anachronisms into the film. There are a couple of moments where characters listen to someone performing modern songs, including a harpist singing the Rolling Stones' song "As Tears Go By". There are multiple scenes where Elisabeth is filmed on a movie camera about 15 or 20 years too early for the technology. And while I missed it, my friend eT informs me that there was a modern tractor in a scene at the railway station. Now there is a long history of deliberately including anachronism in period movies as a way of making a specific point - Sofia Coppola famously gave Marie Antoinette a pair of Converse sneakers is a way of highlighting the fact that the woman was just a teenager - but I am having trouble identifying what the purpose of these anachronisms are, and what message we are intended to take away from these moments. If anything, the anachronisms are insufficiently anachronistic - when she is filmed on the movie camera, my initial reaction was to think that it seemed too early for the technology, but my knowledge about the very early history of the moving picture is weak enough that it seems plausible that the technology was a few years older then I had realised. (Indeed it seems that there had been limited versions of the moving picture camera invented at the time, but not as advanced as the one we are shown, which would not be invented for another 15 years.) What that meant was that whenever one of these movie camera moments arises, it pulled me out of the film - I was more focused on trying to work out whether this was an anachronism rather than thinking about the scene itself.
The movie ends with Elisabeth's death. But the interesting thing is, the way she is shown dying in the movie is not how she died in reality. In truth, Elisabeth was travelling under a assumed identity, but news of this came out, and an Italian anarchist wanting to kill someone - anyone - from royalty stabbed her. That is not what happens in this film - although there is a moment that I think is intended to explain why that is the story that history has recorded. The film instead gives her a death in a striking, stunning moment that has left an indelible final image embedded in my mind. It should be a tragic moment - it's the death of a character we've come to care a great deal about - but instead it's surprisingly freeing, as Elisabeth finds in her death an opportunity to free herself from the constraints of duty that have so tightly restricted her. It's a magical moment.
Alcarràs
Back in the 1930s, the wealthy Pinyol family were protected by the neighbouring Solé family during the Spanish Civil War; as an expression of gratitude, the patriarch of the Pinyols gave a portion of his family's land to the Solés, to build their family home and develop a small peach orchard. Unfortunately, they never signed a contract (because you just didn't do those things in those days - your word was your bond), the man who gave them the land has passed away, and now the younger Pinyol now wants the land back so he can clear the trees and build a solar panel farm. And so the Solés have one last summer to enjoy before their entire way of life ends.
The second feature film from director Carla Simón, whose debut film Summer 1993 was a genuine festival highlight a few years ago, Alcarrás shows that that film's success was no accident. She makes an interesting choice here to set up this tension - they are losing their property - but then it's not really the focus of the film; it's just one of many subplots. This is not a film about the family making one last effort to save the property; the film starts at a point where they've essentially already accepted that they've lost, and so they just put that to one side and enjoy what time they have. Indeed, it seems as though at times they even forget what is happening - instead they continue to worry about the effect rabbits will have on the peach trees, or whether some flooding will kill the trees, despite the fact that everyone knows those trees will be uprooted in a matter of weeks. The Pinyol family are barely a presence in the film - although the constant increase in the size of the solar panel farm means their impact is always present - and they're not villains, despite how the Solés clearly feel (the teens even leave dead rabbits on their front porch). There's a scene where we learn that some of the Solé family members have even been offered a job maintaining the solar panels, which does go to show that, while the Pinyols are doing what is best for their own interests, there is at least some understanding of the impact their actions are having and a desire to find some way to address that. At the same time, the decision to reject that offer is entirely understandable, and reflects the pain of losing the only life you've ever known and being forced to adopt a new life to which you may feel entirely unsuited.
The main delight of Summer 1993 was how the film really focused in on the world of the young children at the centre of the story. Here, the story is much larger with a wider range of characters, but again the highlight of the film does rest in the relationship between the three young children that make up the youngest generation, and it's clear that Simón has a particular talent for portraying the world of children. They're largely oblivious to everything that the grownups are dealing with, and only notice when something happens that affects them - like when the rusted car they enjoy playing in is taken away to clear the area for the solar panels. And it's a real joy to just watch these kids being kids - they play spaceships, and imagine pouring the petrol into the spaceship mid-flight so they can escape from the aliens; they sneak into the neighbour's garden to eat his watermelons and have a lettuce-fight; they build a fort out of pallets and then are annoyed when the grown-ups want to use the pallets for work stuff. But that's not to say that these young kids are the focus of the story - there are several generations represented here across multiple branches of the extended family and they all get involving stories, from the teenage girl practising a dance routine with her friends for a local show, or the guy trying to secretly hide a few marijuana plants in with the other crops, or the fight to improve the payments given to farmers for their fruit.
One thing I was surprised to be reminded of post-film-screening was the fact that the cast is pretty much entirely made up of non-professional actors. I've seen many films that rely on non-professionals - it seems to be one of those things that really appeals to directors looking to introduce some extra authenticity into their work - and it very seldom works, because you can always see a degree of discomfort and self-consciousness by the performers. But here, I completely forgot that these were not experienced actors, because there's such a natural ease to their performances that they became invisible. To do that with such a large cast without a single off-performance speaks to Simón's strength as a director guiding her performers, and it's particularly impressive with a director who is still so new.
The film is just an utter delight, and one of the genuine highlights of the festival.
Watcher
Julia is a young woman who moves with her husband from America to Bucharest for his job. While he's at work, she spends the days putting their apartment in order, shopping, befriending her neighbour, and learning the language. But she also can't help noticing that there's one weird guy in the building facing them who seems to spend all night looking into their apartment, and who also seems to be following her. And it's also possible that person might be the serial killer who has murdered and decapitated a number of young woman in their apartments.
There are few things that I love more than a good thriller, and while Watcher certainly has some flaws, it is absolutely a very good thriller, turning what could be a fairly common stalker story into an intense and suspenseful work. The feature film debut for director Chloe Okuno, Watcher shows that she is a talented maker of thrillers. She has a real understanding for the art of the paranoid thriller, where each step, each moment of the film sets one more block until we reach an impossible conclusion. Plus she has a real feel for the timing of the film, which is so essential in a thriller, knowing for instance how long to let a shot play out in order to build maximum suspense in the audience without wearying them. Okuno is aided by some wonderfully gloomy cinematography by Benjamin Kirk Nielsen, giving the film an oppressive look even in the middle of the day. There's also some fantastic sound design work, that is extremely effective in getting you into Julia's entire mindset. She's not comfortable in this world, and so we are never allowed to feel comfortable - if there's silence, it's a thick kind of silence that feels like it has its own presence; if there's noise, it's a loud, disorienting noise; and the entire aural landscape of the city just seems off, filled with sounds that seem entirely natural and realistic yet unfamiliar.
Maika Monroe made an immediate impression back in 2014, with lead roles as a scream queen in both The Guest and It Follows, but while she has certainly been working in the years since, she hasn't been in anything I've seen (or, in most cases, even heard of), so it was a pleasing surprise to see her name in the credits. She does some really nice work communicating the disorientation and frustration that can come with being in a foreign city where you don't speak the language, don't have a support network, and the isolation that comes with feeling in effect an outcast in the place you find yourself calling home.
I also loved Burn Gorman's work here as the titular watcher. For much of the film, he's this nicely ambiguous presence - he could be sad, glowering, ominous, weak, depending on the moment and depending on the audience's reaction to him. But above all, he's a silent ever-present figure. And then, in one of my favourite scenes in the film, he gets a chance to actually speak, as he talks about his life, about caring for his father, about why it is that he does watch his neighbours, and it's a surprisingly sympathetic moment, as we get an insight into who this person is. Gorman is able to elicit unexpected amount of pathos for a character who the film wants us to believe may be a killer.
The only real issue I have with the film is with the ending, which is sadly predictable. Now, look, I know the way these films work; I'm fully aware that if you make a film where the main character is paranoid that she is being stalked by a serial killer, she's always going to wind up being attacked by the serial killer (even if she's wrong about the person she suspects) - so I'm not complaining about that. But I was disappointed that the film wound up going in a direction that was so predictable. I think that there are several places it could have gone that might have been more surprising, but as it was it instead took the more obvious route, paired with an annoyingly improbable version of the "that person's dead; no they're not" cliche. Add to that the fact that it raises a number of questions - how did that person clean up that crime scene so quickly - that the film tries to move past quickly to avoid you noticing, and it is an unfortunate ending for a film that is otherwise really rather engaging.
In short, be prepared for a minor let-down of an ending, but it's worth it for just how much fun the rest of the film is.
Decision to Leave
Hae-joon is a police officer prone to obsession over his unsolved cases, and sort-of happy in his long-distance marriage, although something is bothering him judging by his constant insomnia. One day he's called in to investigate a mysterious death, a mountain climber who fell to his death, and attention falls on the dead man's wife, Seo-rae. She has a firm alibi, although there's circumstantial evidence that does point to her involvement, and she is oddly unbothered by her husband's death. But, as Hae-joon tries to deal with his insomnia by staking out her place at night, he starts to fall in love with her - and she with him. And then further attention is focused on her after there's a second death of someone close to her.
When you hear the name of Park Chan-wook, you think of someone operating on the extreme end of the scale. Now, to clear, I'm very aware that there are much more extreme filmmakers working today. But Park is a filmmaker whose work always feels like it's pushing the limits of popular filmmaking - I mean, seriously, if you've seen Oldboy, you know how bizarre it is that a film about that became almost a mainstream success. He made his name as probably the most prominent figure in the ultraviolent Korean revenge film, while with his last film he pushed himself into the extremely-erotic thriller genre, and now he's giving us ... a film with an M rating. A film that literally any person in the country can legally see. More than anything else, that just feels wrong. So while the name of Park Chan-wook was always going to interest me, I was especially intrigued to see what he would give us here.
And what I felt it does is prove that Park truly is a master filmmaker. The excessive violence and perverse sexuality of his earlier works may have grabbed the attention - seriously, to hear the online film community talk about it, you'd think there was nothing of interest in Oldboy beyond the hammer scene and that revelation - but if you look past that, he's always been a skilled technician. And here he has nothing to hide behind. I love how patient he is as a filmmaker, taking his time to construct the film's story piece by piece. You're also reminded what a fantastic visual sensibility he's developed; even in the most rundown places, he finds a beauty and a sense of elegance that is quite captivating. And while the film does have an unusual structure to its story, you can't help wondering if this is taking inspiration from the definitive romantic thriller, Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, which famously follows a very similar storytelling structure. But at the same time, you can tell that Park is having fun playing with these characters, and never loses his sense of humour - there's a scene of Hae-joon mountain climbing that is the hardest I've laughed all festival.
Which is not to say that he's completely lost his edge, or has made a "safe" film. On the contrary, this is a film that manages to stay with you and disturb you without ever pushing boundaries. In particular, the climax of the film involves a scene at the beach in which every awful thing you've ever imagined could happen to you at the beach occurs; I literally had a nightmare about it that night, the scene so completely wormed its way into my mind. And yet he manages to have that effect without ever even showing you the event. Instead he just gives you enough to understand the setup, to register what's about to happen, and then he steps away and leaves it for his audience to imagine the horrific scene to follow. It's masterfully done, giving us something I've never seen and could never even have thought of. And he did that within the boundaries of a seemingly safe film.
The romantic thriller is a rather unusual sub-genre. There are plenty of thrillers that include some kind of love story as a side plot line, but the challenge of the romantic thriller is that the tension for the audience needs to be driven, not from whatever plot machinations are occurring around the murder or whatever is driving the story, but from the emotional consequences that those events will have on the relationship - and that's a tricky thing to pull off. Park manages to achieve that with an admirable skill. The relationship is involving from the start, with the first sharing of the "expensive" sushi box, and while the film never loses track of its plotting, it still focuses its investment in the small moments between the characters - him making an "authentic" Chinese meal for her, or the tenderness that she shows as she cares for him. I really appreciated the nice slow build that is taken to developing the relationship - you almost get the sense that the characters aren't conscious of how deeply the relationship has developed. At the same time, in any romantic thriller there needs to be some point of conflict that is so fundamental to the relationship that it dooms the relationship to its ultimate end - otherwise there's no genuine tension to the thriller - and Park seems to really enjoy playing with the notion of the police officer and (possible) criminal being drawn to each other, regardless of the consequences.
Decision to Leave is a fantastically involving piece of entertainment. Strongly recommended.
Triangle of Sadness
A new satire of privilege, wealth, and the use of beauty as currency in three parts from Ruben Östlund. In the film's opening scenes, we watch a group of male models auditioning for a job, where a documentarian filming the auditions tests their ability to adjust their expression depending on whether they are advertising a high-end exclusive brand (glowering, showing contempt for the customer) or a low-end shopping mall brand (happy, smiling, inviting). In the first part of the film, we go with one of those models, Carl, to a very expensive dinner with his model girlfriend Yaya; Carl is upset that Yaya always expects him to pay even though she earns more than him, and an argument between the two breaks out. In the second part, the two receive a free trip on a cruise for the super-rich; while they are by far the poorest on this astonishing luxurious ship, otherwise populated by sweet English weapons manufacturers or a coarse Russian oligarch travelling with both his wife and mistress, they certainly enjoy the privileges and power that comes with being passengers - the ability to demand anything and have it be done. And in the final part, a group of passengers and crew from the boat travel to a nearby island, where they have an experience that challenges their perception about wealth and power and how these can shift as priorities change.
Back in 2014, Östlund's fourth film, Force Majeure, caused the film world to really pay attention to this maker of biting social satires; his next film, The Square, won the Palme d'Or, a feat he repeated again when Triangle of Sadness went to Cannes. The thing about Östlund is that his films are not subtle; you'd have to be pretty obtuse to miss the message of the film when it literally features a scene of an American socialist and a Russian capitalist arguing the merits of their viewpoints over a loudspeaker. Pretty much every scene of the film in some way winds up being an illustration of the film's core themes. Carl exercises his power as a guest (able to demand whatever he wants) to have a worker on the yacht fired because his girlfriend found the worker hot. One passenger feels guilty about enjoying herself on the boat while the crew have to work to help her, and so she insists that the entire crew just drop whatever work they are doing, no matter how pressing it is, to half-heartedly go swimming. The service crew of the yacht go crazy yelling "Money! Money! Money!" as an end-of-meeting chant in excitement at the tips they'll be getting, while one passenger just tries to buy the entire yacht from the captain.
All of which makes the film seem like a very dogmatic, anti-capitalist, eat-the-rich diatribe - that would be funny, but rather shallow. Often with such satires, you get the sense the film has adopted a position that the problem is with the wealthy and that's it. But here, the nice thing is that in its third part the film seeks to introduce some shading to the issue. The message of the film seems ultimately to be that the problem lies in human nature. Yes, the wealthy in this film are obscenely wealthy, but you're fooling yourself if you think you'd be any different if you were in their position. At our core, everyone just wants to get ahead and most people would stomp over anyone else to get in the position of power and to maintain it. And value, power, wealth are all relative, and can shift wildly in different circumstances. One of the first things we learn in the very first scene is that female models on average earn 3 times as much as male models, which sounds quite believable, and so it seems like a pointed comment that by the end of the film Carl finds he has infinitely more economic value than his girlfriend.
One of the things I appreciate about Ruben Östund's work is his willingness to take his time and let his scenes play out to maximum discomfort, where other filmmakers might have have tried to cut away sooner. Take for instance the argument that is the focus of the first part of the film. I honestly have no idea how long that argument even was - I wouldn't be surprised if it was 10 minutes, or even longer - but it reaches the point where it feels like the argument has finished, like they've run out of steam, and then it just keeps going, with Carl outside the elevator with repeatedly sticking his hand in to hold it so that he can make one more point, and another point, and another, and.... Every moment the hand slammed in between the closing elevator doors was another laugh out loud joke. Now, occasionally that instinct does genuinely lead to unfortunate decisions - there is entirely too much vomiting in the storm sequence, which just started to feel cruel, even for Östlund - but for the most part he shows a real skill in exploiting the comedic potential of every uncomfortable moment simply by being patient and letting the moment play out however long it takes.
[EDIT - It's worth noting that, a couple of weeks after the festival screening of Triangle of Sadness, Charlbi Dean (who played Yaya, the woman in the film's central couple) passed away. It was an appealing and enjoyable performance, and I would have been interested to see where she would have gone as her career progressed - a career that has sadly ended. Rest in peace.]
Triangle of Sadness is a great deal of fun. It is not a subtle film, you're never in any doubt about what it is saying, but it operates at such a consistently high comedic level, and finds such variation and subtlety in its messaging, that you simply don't mind being preached to because it's just making you laugh so much. It was a fantastic way to bring to the end of what was overall a very enjoyable, albeit short, festival. Hopefully next year the film festival will return in its full strength.
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