As happens each year, the upcoming arrival of this year's film festival has finally prompted me to post my responses to the films I saw at last year's festival. As always, these were my initial responses, many of them written very quickly on my phone while waiting for my next screening, and all of them written within a day or two of seeing the film. So these are very rough and immediate reflections that I have left essentially as they were.
First film of the festival was a short trifle of a film, less than 75 minutes long, but it felt much longer. Kristen Scott Thomas plays a newly appointed Government Minister who holds a celebratory party. But she's constantly distracted by phone calls from her lover, her husband is distracted to the point of being absent, and one guest attends the party with a gun and cocaine, and when the celebration is hijacked by one couple announcing they're having triplets and the husband revealing what's on his mind, the whole party collapses into carefully constructed chaos.
Now, it could just be that I was in the wrong mood for the film; certainly judging from the laughter the audience seemed to really enjoy the film. But I simply never got into the film, which was a shame. For me there was a couple of witty lines and a handful of laughs (with one great joke in particular about a character's academic speciality), but for most of the film I was simply puzzled by what people were laughing at. It had a great cast - in addition to Scott Thomas, we had Timothy Spall, Cillian Murphy, Patricia Clarkson, Cherry Jones, and Emily Mortimer, all actors I enjoy - and they were certainly giving the film their all. Part of the problem was that the film needed a more energetic pace in moving between the situations, and because the film's pacing felt off I had time to think and realise I didn't really believe the actions of half the characters. Add to that an unfortunate decision to open with an in media res shot of the final scene in a way that to me contributed nothing but a distraction (the film could have been more suspenseful, where will this all end?, except the film has already told us where this will all end), and an annoying film-ending revelation that I both saw coming and yet thought made no sense except as a final shock reveal, and the whole thing was a disappointing start to the festival.
An enjoyable, but flawed, satire about artistic pretensions from Swedish director Ruben Östlund. Claes Bang stars as Christian, a museum art gallery curator particularly excited about a new piece they’ve installed (an illuminated square cut into the ground outside) that is supposed to represent a space within which a social contract is created, where if someone in the square needs help another person will help them. One morning Christian is outraged to discover that pickpockets have stolen his wallet, his phone, and somehow even his cufflinks, and after locating the apartment building (in the poorer part of town) where his phone is now located, he decides to plaster the building with notes demanding the return of his stuff. It’s a poorly considered plan and, as with all poorly considered plans, it spins out of control very quickly.
The film is a lot of fun. Bang gives a wonderfully self-satisfied performance, with a charming insincerity to his character that I really enjoyed; witness his carefully practiced “impromptu” informality when introducing an artwork. His life is filled with a lot of very wealthy people looking at art made by very wealthy artists who fill their works with messages about the evils of wealth that everyone agrees with because “it’s terrible how people suffer”, and everyone gets to feel smug and informed and enlightened but no-one actually does anything because they don’t want to challenge the comfort they live in. One of my favourite scenes involves Christian apologising to someone who lives in poverty who he has unambiguously and seriously wronged in several different ways, and yet which very quickly spirals away from acknowledgement of his own guilt and into an indictment of the “251 people who own 50 percent of the world’s wealth”, as though he’s so practiced in talking about art that blames the ills of the world on the ultra-wealthy that he has become oblivious to how he has more in common with those people than the figure of poverty he has harmed.
There are some phenomenal set-pieces throughout the film, and Östlund has a wonderful patience, often filming long scenes in a single take, simply watching the scenes play out until the audience starts to be unsettled simply by the length of the scene. It reminded me of some of the works of Roy Andersson (whose films we’ve been watching at film society recently), or indeed something that David Lynch will employ to make even his more-conventional moments uncomfortable. The high point of this is the incredible dinner scene, where one artist enters to perform his work; it’s a scene that starts funny, but the longer it plays out we find ourselves feeling as uncomfortable as the dinner guests, feeling trapped, trying not to look, eventually even feeling threatened by the dangerous and assaultive nature of the performance. It’s a brilliant and memorable scene that pushes into areas I did not expect.
So it’s a genuinely strong, entertaining film. But at the same time, it could be frustrating. It’s 2½ hours long, and it did not feel like it needed to be; instead it seemed as though some of the subplots were being introduced just to fill the time. The most egregious to me was a storyline involving Elisabeth Moss as an American journalist who Christian hooks up with; I really love Elisabeth Moss, and by themselves her scenes are some of the funniest in the film, but at the same time I don’t know what that plot actually adds to the film, and it feels as though it’s there just because “Hey, we can get Elisabeth Moss; umm, okayyy, we need something for her to do.”
It also has a startling inability to trust the audience to understand its message. The film is named after an artwork that is supposed to indict our reluctance to help those in need, and Christian seems to constantly be encountering people in need of help. In other words, the film is not subtle in constantly reinforcing its message. But by the point where the film starts to use shots of street beggars as transitions between scenes of great wealth, you just want to yell at Östlund “We get it; these characters are hypocrites who will applaud someone who speaks on the importance of society but who are blind to the victims around.”
I was particularly excited to see the film after admiring Östlund’s previous film, Force Majeure. This is not quite as great as that film was; the satirical targets are a little easier, the comedy of the film is somewhat broader, and the film is not quite as disciplined and focused as the earlier film. But it’s still a lot of fun, with more deep belly-laughs than I remember having had in a while. I really did enjoy it.
Probably the biggest event of this year's festival was the screening of the complete second season of Top of the Lake, the thriller TV series written by Jane Campion and a-guy-everyone-forgets-about-because-he's-not-Jane-Campion, and directed by Jane Campion and a-different-guy-everyone-forgets-about-because-he's-not-Jane-Campion.
The second season of the show has Elizabeth Moss, as police detective Robin Griffin, leaving the small rural New Zealand setting of the first season and returning to her old life in Sydney, where she is tasked with investigating the death of an Asian girl whose body is found inside a suitcase that washes up on the beach – a mystery that very quickly leads to an brothel involved in various illegal operations. At the same time, Robin decides to reconnect with Mary, the girl she had given birth to as a teenager, only to discover that Mary is starting to pull away from her adoptive parents because she’s fallen in love with a particularly undesirable boyfriend.
I was really excited for this one. I’d thought the first series was brilliant, and the responses I’d seen to the second season had been equally high, so I was expecting an incredible series. So I found myself somewhat deflated by the show. When it is good it's really good, and for the most part it's really good for the first five episodes. The acting is almost entirely great; obviously Elizabeth Moss and Nicole Kidman were great, and I found Alice Englert as Robin’s daughter Mary utterly appealing. Gwendoline Christie was a particular highlight – she’s often called on to be the comic relief, and it’s an incredibly fun performance, but when the story turns into some darker directions her character flips in a way that felt true to the character. The one point where the acting didn’t work for me was David Dencik as Puss - perhaps it’s that the character was so broadly drawn, but he never felt more than a two-dimensional villain to me. (His performance was probably not helped by the fact that, with his thick East German accent and his long hair, I was weirdly reminded of Tommy Wiseau – and that was before he made a weird video so amateurish it could have been from The Room.)
The mystery at the centre of the film is really gripping and intriguing. There’s not a lot of uncertainty around who is actually involved in the death of China Girl – we see her body being dumped and we know who dumped her – but the film builds a great mystery around why she died. It’s rich and thrilling, and the show goes into some dark and nightmarish places and I fund it genuinely fascinating. But the show’s central riches are in its relationships between the characters, particularly in the way Robin tries to enter into Mary’s life and find the place that she can fill as her birth mother while recognising that she’s not her actual mother. The tentative interactions that builds between Robin, Mary, and the parents who raised Mary were always very precise and careful and wonderful, and when things go wrong with Mary (as we always know they will) the way each party tries to assert their position with her was fascinating. And it’s a good thing that that worked so well for me, because I think the ending shows that that’s what Campion was interested in exploring with the show.
So the first five episodes were very good. But even in those really good five episodes there are definite issues. For a start, there are a number of narrative shortcuts that did bother me. The most egregious of these involved Robin’s daughter Mary, whose undesirable boyfriend happens to be a middle-aged guy very closely connected to the brothel where the victim worked; the absurdity of that coincidence never stopped bothering me, as it was a clear case of the writers writing for thematic resonance rather than narrative sense. It’s the kind of problem you’d expect to see in a movie, where there’s only two hours to tell your story and so shortcuts may be needed, rather than in a TV series where you have (in this case) six hours to explore your points. It would have been a stronger choice to have her boyfriend be involved in a brothel rather than the brothel; it could have achieved the same thematic resonance without making the entire plotline feel like a cheat. Making it even more absurd, several other police figures involved in the investigation are revealed to also have their own deeply personal connection to the case, in a way that I can’t reveal for spoiler reasons, but which took a plotline that had been working for me and from the time this key revelation is made it suddenly stopped making any sense.
The show also seems to feel the need in a couple of episodes to tie things up from the first season in a way that wasn’t necessary, and any time they try to actively do anything to engage with the first season it becomes a distraction from this story, and at times is actively bad. As I remember it the first season was pretty much closed; it didn’t have any dangling narrative threads that needed resolution, and this season takes place four years later, so we can just accept that things change in four years. But they felt the need to have an extended flashback in the second episode to explain why she decided to return to Sydney, and nothing in that scene made sense to me from a character point of view, and which also didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know from the first episode. (Speaking of which, she’s been living with her brother for two weeks before he gets around to saying “Sorry your wedding fell through”?) There’s also a mid-season appearance by David Wenham from the first season which is a complete distraction, provides nothing in terms of this story being told now, and just seems seriously misguided.
And then there are points where I simply didn’t believe what was going on. One mid-season episode ends with an absurd scene where Robin is being attacked, nearly murdered, in a police station in a room that is literally on fire. Because that’s a thing that happens. Or there are characters I don’t believe: in particular there's a group of guys who get together in a cafe to discuss their experiences with prostitutes and review them online, awkwardly closing their laptops every time the waitress comes over so she doesn’t notice the sex sites they’re visiting; I get macho boasting about sexual prowess, but I’d have thought visiting prostitutes was something most people would try to keep private, not something they build their entire real-life social lives around.
And these were all things that were bothering me about the first five episodes, the ones I liked. The sixth episode just changes the show into something completely different. Suddenly there’s a massive manhunt, someone’s taken hostage, and the solution that the person being hunted adopts to try to evade capture is one of the most idiotic ideas I’ve seen this year, and there is zero reason why the person needs to do this. And then there’s stuff about the revelation of the bad guy’s main plan, which, okay, … words fail me. I was also bothered by how quickly they resolved the central mystery. In fact, it was dealt with so quickly that I missed the explanation. The mystery is solved in literally ten seconds, with just one line of dialogue where it was explained why the girl died, and I think I missed it because I was distracted thinking about something else dramatic that had happened just a few seconds before. The only reason I know why the girl in the suitcase was killed was because I asked a friend. When you’re watching a six-hour mystery, your solution shouldn’t be able to be missed because you happened to cough at the wrong time.
People seemed to really respond well to the show. There was extended and genuinely rapturous applause at each intermission. And I can’t help wondering if it’s a case of the Emperor has no clothes. People love Jane Campion, she’s an important filmmaker, and so obviously this is important and great filmmaking. But it’s not that great. It’s good, for the most part. I like it. I would never discourage anyone from watching it, because what’s good about it is really good. But it’s not as incredible as people seem to believe. It has serious flaws running through the entire show, and I simply cannot comprehend how people can not see them.
Finally, after four films, we have a film I could completely enjoy without reservations. I haven’t seen much of the work of Takashi Miike, the notoriously provocative and prolific Japanese director, but I had enjoyed 13 Assassins a few years ago, and the idea of a new swordplay film from the man sounded appealing.
The film tells the story of Manji, a swordsman whose insane sister is brutally murdered by a gang of bounty hunters trying to catch him. He avenges her death, killing every last one of them, but is mortally wounded himself, until an 800 year old witch arrives and fills his body with bloodworms that bestow immortality on him. Fifty years later, he’s hired to serve as a bodyguard for a young girl seeking revenge on the man who had her parents killed as part of a rivalry between swordship houses.
One of the things I had appreciated about 13 Assassins was how it had a slow build-up with barely any action for the first two acts, until it erupts in a spectacular unrestrained 45 minute long finale action scene. Blade of the Immortal is much more traditional. It doesn't have that kind of singular action scene; instead it's filled with an astonishing array of action scenes (you're never more than five minutes away from the next fight), and each action scene is innovative and astonishing. I was particularly surprised by the inventiveness that the film brought with weaponry; I was expecting the film to be largely sword-on-sword fights, but that rarely happens, instead it frequently introduced me to weapons I've never seen before (and in some cases I'm still not entirely certain how they worked) to impress me with how much Miike could achieve within the limitations of the film.
This was the 100th film in Miike's career - the third he's directed this year alone - but what's impressive is that this does not feel like someone's "third film of the year". It doesn't feel rushed; instead there's still a considered craft to the film. There's a clear vision driving the film, with some beautifully constructed images, and a nice clear approach to the shooting and editing that kept these chaotic action sequences clear and coherent. I was genuinely impressed by the film; it may not be particularly rich or deep, but it fully embraced the joy and fun that cinema can offer.
One of those documentaries you need to see on the big screen, The Farthest is an wonderful film experience celebrating the achievements of the Voyager space mission, where two craft were sent to the deepest regions of our solar system to take photographs and readings of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, before heading out of the solar system into interstellar space.
The first half of the film was interesting, but not especially memorable. It’s a typical after-the-fact documentary, with lots of talking heads, and that’s unavoidable. The most notable part of the film in its first half was the half-hearted effort to lessen the talking heads by using oblique impressionistic footage; the sky shot through trees, a close-up of an eye, even a raccoon raiding a rubbish bin. It’s annoying because it feels like the film’s director is trying to find something, anything to put on screen to avoid yet another interview subject speaking to camera. But it’s done in a half-hearted way, so it never really lessens the talking heads, nor does it ever become part of the visual structure of the film, so these cutaways just detract whenever they appear. And the disappointing thing is that it’s an incredible story being told – we’re hearing the mission participants explain how they launched a craft that was able to analyse and send data back to Earth using a computing power equal to the computing power present in a car-key fob – and it’s a shame that the filmmaker seemed to lack confidence in the power of that story to hold us.
The real magic of the film comes in the second half of the film, and that’s point where I was glad to be watching it on the big screen of the Embassy. You’re looking at the images of these planets, of these moons, and you’re hearing these explanations of the wonders you’re looking at, and you’re confronted with the marvels of this universe. Seeing these faint images of distant worlds growing until they fill the screen, offering breathtaking that could not be imagined, hearing the excitement of the scientists as they recount the discoveries that made them exclaim Wow, until the final moment where Voyager 2, at the far end of the solar system, turns its camera around to capture images of the entire solar system, our planet a tiny speck, almost impossible to find. It is literally awesome.
There's a point in the film where some of the scientists express frustration that, with all the incredible things being achieved by the mission, the media seen mostly fascinated by the golden record included with the craft, carrying a sample of our greatest music and greetings in different languages. Frustratingly it was a fascination that extended to the filmmakers. Yes, it's a significant part of the story of the Voyager mission, but it's also something extra: the purpose of Voyager was not to introduce Chuck Berry to aliens. So it's disappointing that the filmmakers keep returning to the record, even after the point where the craft starts sending these incredible images that had never been seen, they decide to go back to talking about the damned record.
But when the film steps away from the record and focuses on the mission's purpose, it becomes utterly magical. I was surprised by how moved I was by the film. In those moments where they just set everything aside and just celebrate the incredible achievement of the mission and the wonders of the universe, it becomes truly a beautiful experience, and one that is worth seeking out.
I’ve never seen any of Luis Buñuel’s films – it’s one of my big blind spots as a film fan – so I was glad to see that the festival was showing a restoration of one of the director’s more celebrated works. I found the film intriguing and fascinating, but I’m really unsure what I’m supposed to take from the film.
The wonderful Catherine Deneuve stars as Séverine, a beautiful young woman who is deeply in love with her wealthy doctor husband of one year. But despite the clear love between the couple, there is some kind of block for Séverine that prevents intimacy; indeed, the film seemed to hint that, despite being married for a year, she might still be a virgin. Meanwhile in her dreams she repeatedly finds herself in situations where she is forcibly stripped, bound, and beaten. One day she hears that a friend of hers has started working as a high-class prostitute; the notion intrigues her, and after talking to a number of male friends (including her husband) about their experiences with ladies of the night, she visits a brothel and secures a job working every afternoon from 2 to 5. Her initial experiences are not particularly successful, but her madam shows remarkable patience with her, and the experiences seem to free something in her. But then she becomes trapped in a violent relationship with a gangster client, and that’s not something you want.
So I really liked the film. As a piece of cinema I found it utterly enthralling. Every image of the film is beautiful, striking, and filled with a cool richness. I also adored Deneuve – her character really makes little or no sense throughout the film, but she imbues the character with a strangely vulnerable strength that carried the film. I was suprised by how weirdly chaste the film is, particularly given the subject matter; after the film I came across a board with the censor’s ratings for the films screening, and was astonished to discover the film is R18, a rating that must surely be a historical artefact because I can’t see anything in the film I saw calling for much more than an M rating. But my big question walking out of the film was, what does it all add up to? What was Buñuel trying to say through the film? I’ve been trying to puzzle over this since seeing the film, and I have no idea.
A likeable, if somewhat, slight, Australian comedy, That’s Not Me focuses on struggling actress Polly who turns down a guest role on a soap, partly to leave herself open for an HBO show with Jared Leto that she has a callback for. The role on the soap instead goes to her identical twin sister Amy, and the buzz around the character sees Amy get the HBO show Polly was hoping for. Suddenly Amy’s a massive star, the gossip magazines are filled with paparazzi photos of Amy with her new boyfriend Jared Leto, and everywhere Polly walks she’s confronted with giant billboards filled with a face that’s identical to her, reminding her of the success that she hasn’t had.
It’s a great idea for a film; as an actor one of the big advantages that you have is that you have your look, and the film plays a lot with the problems that looking so much like someone else would create. Polly’s career is completely destroyed by her sister’s success because she doesn’t have anything about her that can create any distinction between the two. And while the film is understandably very focused on the problems experienced by Polly being constantly mistaken for her sister, at the same time the film plays with the problems that can be created in the other direction, of being in the public eye and having someone else out there who is able to damage your reputation just through her existence.
There’s also a lot of really enjoyable material about family. I found the family relationships appealing and honest; there’s the big stuff, the way parents take pride in any accomplishment, no matter how minor (one great joke features a gossip magazine cover that mistakes Polly for Amy, where the parents can’t decide whose scrapbook of clippings it should go in), down to the petty annoyances parents impose on children and the problems children create for their parents. Disappointingly they seemed to make a deliberate choice to minimise the interaction between the two sisters, possibly to reduce the special effects cost of having the two on-screen at once, because when they do get together the interaction between the sisters is really great, capturing the competitiveness and frustration of having spent your life trying to prove yourself against this other person. The main scene the two sisters spend by themselves was one of the best in the film, and I wish they had been together more.
It’s also a nice commentary on the notion of trying to find your place in the world, of trying to set aside childish fantasies of “I want to be a star” and trying to find who we are as an adult. And I liked how it seemed like that was a process for Polly to come to grips with; there’s a point in the film where Polly seems to come to the revelation that she should move on, but the next scene she’s back to pursuing her dreams. In most films that kind of revelation is the climax of the film, but this film recognises that that kind of overnight change doesn’t happen. I also found it interesting to watch a movie, watch an artistic endeavour, that was about how the arts aren’t the be-all and end-all they’re often held up as. As a society we admire celebrities, we aspire to be them, we look at someone who achieves their goals and becomes a famous actor or musician and think they achieved their dream, and more importantly we might look at an aspiring ballerina who becomes a nurse and think “it’s a shame that she gave up”. There was a refreshing and critical honesty about the place of art in our society that I found refreshing.
One thing I found interesting, but unfortunately unsuccessful, about the film was the way it used actual celebrities to bring a bit of authenticity to the world, most obviously Jared Leto. In some ways it’s effective in communicating the level of success of the twin sister; securing a show on HBO could mean a lot of things, but securing the lead alongside an identifiable Oscar-winning name immediately makes clear just how well she’s doing. At the same time, it sets up a barrier for the film that it has to overcome. As a prominent end credit statement makes clear, Jared Leto was not involved in the production of the film, and so the filmmakers have to constantly work around the actor’s absence, in an awkward “oh, you just missed Jared, what a great guy” way. It starts to be distracting, in a way that creating a new fictional celebrity who can actually appear in the film wouldn’t.
One of the things I enjoy about the festival is how, with some of the titles you choose to see on a whim, by the time you come to sit down to watch the film you’ve completely forgotten what it was about the film that interested you. So you can sit and watch the film with a completely blank slate, and just discover what the film is as it unfolds before you. So when you love one of these films, it feels especially significant because you know it’s a genuine response to the film, untempered by any advance expectations.
This 90s-set thriller focuses on two high school best friends, Zach and Josh, who find themselves hanging out with an annoying kid from school, Dylan, and a younger kid called Charlie. One day they’re in an isolated area of the woods, playing around with a sword when a fight breaks out and Dylan is accidentally stabbed in the throat with the sword. The kids panic, cover the body with leaves, and hide the sword. As time goes by and the body is not discovered, the friends find themselves increasingly burdened by the knowledge of their actions.
It’s a common set-up for a film, the accidental death, the clumsy cover-up, the disintegration brought on by guilt. But I was really impressed by how honestly the film approached that set-up. It seemed significant to me that the central characters were teenagers; they’re still kids, trying to figure out who they are and what their place is in the world, and the idea of taking kids who aren't prepared for the world as it is and adding this incredible burden to them to see how they deal with it was rather appealing. It's essentially a heightened coming-of-age film, and it's pleasingly enjoyable. I thought director Kevin Phillips (working with a strong screenplay by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski) seemed to have a careful grasp of tone; for most of its running time it's simple, allows its characters to dictate what the film is, and really is focused on how these kids are processing their experience. He's aided by some very strong performances by the actors, particularly leads Owen Campbell and Charlie Tahant; I particularly enjoyed Campbell's slow disintegration into paranoia and mistrust as he's trying to hold everyone together. I was also impressed by the wonderfully gloomy cinematography, which gave the film a nicely oppressive tone.
In some ways, I was disappointed by the end, which took this great situation and resorted to the ending of a standard thriller to find some resolution. I'd been so gripped by the strength of these characters and their attempts to keep their lives on track given unimaginable barriers, and had been hoping for it to stay with that focus, that it was a shame to see it take the more conventional route. But I have difficulty holding it against the film, since so much of it was wonderful. Definitely worth keeping an eye out for it.
The Talmud says that, to be happy, you need three things: a nice wife, a nice house, and nice dishes. Menashe, a Hassidic Jew living in a Yiddish-speaking Hassidic neighbourhood in New York, has none of these things: he’s a widower approaching the one year anniversary of his wife’s death; he has a tiny and sparse apartment; and his dishes are plastic. He works a low-paid job at a grocery store (where he constantly fights with his manager over whether the food they sell complies with the legal requirements of their faith), and so he struggles to support himself, let alone his son. The religious authorities in the community have decreed that the law prohibits children from being raised in a house without a mother; for this reason, the son must be raised by his uncle and aunt (who hate Menashe, believing he abandoned their sister in her illness) until Menashe remarries. After all, according to the Torah YHWH said that “It is not good to be alone; I will make a helper for man.”
I found this film utterly charming. The lead character, played by Menashe Lustig, is sweet and affectionate, but not a stereotypical lovable oaf. The film is very honest about who this man is, where his clear failings (of which there are many) lie, and what problems he creates for himself. In a lot of ways it seems daft for him to try to raise a son when he can barely hold his own life together, and it would clearly be best for the boy to be raised by the uncle (who does seem like a genuinely good person and who clearly cares about his nephew). And yet despite all this, despite our clear recognition of Menashe’s failings, despite even the moment where the pressures get too much for him and he physically assaults his son (in a moment so jarring that you could feel the audience’s shock), we are always on Menashe’s side, always willing him to get up and take the next step to improve things. The film culminates in a memorial service and dinner for his wife on the anniversary of her death, which Menashe stubbornly insists on hosting the dinner, despite his inexperience in cooking and despite his brother-in-law’s repeated efforts to take over and make sure it’s done right. In that scene there’s a great moment of ambiguity, where a character makes a comment that may very well be genuine but is just as likely to be an untruth said to help support Menashe at a time where he needs help, and at that moment it just felt genuinely heartwarming and moving. It was sweet and beautiful, yet the film never feels like it’s trying to manipulate the audience into its reaction.
One thing I particularly appreciated was the way the film invited the audience into this culture. It felt like the film was genuine in exploring what it’s like to live in this neighbourhood, which feels as if it exists in a different country from the New York City we usually experience. We observe the culture and the traditions that have developed over thousands of years, and it felt warm and inviting. I was also pleased by the way the film didn’t want to dumb down the culture, made no effort to force unnatural explanations into the film to help the uninformed audience. There were points in the film where the characters were casually throwing around terms that I had never heard before, and the film didn’t really care, because it had trust in the audience to be able to work it out without holding our hands. And that was a satisfying approach to the filmmaking.
I also found the film’s sweet humour appealing; there’s very little in the film where you could point to an actual joke (the only proper joke I can think of comes in the first scene), but there’s a wry resignation infused through the film that elicits quite a few laughs. I really did think Menashe was a wonderful and unique film. It feels like a film that could easily be overlooked and lost over time – frankly it’s probably not a film I would see were it not for the festival – and I love that the film festival offers us the opportunities to introduce us to these experiences we might never have.
In 1987 black author James Baldwin started work on a new book, "Remember This House", which he described as being an exploration of the history of racism in America through his personal remembrances of three murdered civil rights leaders – Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. At the time of his death Baldwin had written just 30 pages of notes setting out the ideas and arguments that he would be advancing through his book. Thirty years later, the Oscar-nominated documentary I Am Not Your Negro takes those notes, as read by Samuel L Jackson, and uses them as the basis for a remarkable film.
Despite the pitch that Baldwin made to his publishers, those three leaders are really not the driving force for the film; they feature, and their deaths are all given particular prominence, but the remembrances of these people that the book would apparently have formed seems to have been material Baldwin would have added as he was writing. Instead those pages of notes that Baldwin wrote appear to be him trying to process what he wants to say with the book, the ideas he’s trying to communicate. And what’s interesting about the film is that it’s clearly drawing on fragmentary ideas; Baldwin feels as though he’s just trying to brainstorm and work out “I want to say this. And I want to say that. And also I should write this. And that would be a great point to make.” Now, I want to be clear: I’m not saying these thoughts are unconsidered or hastily thought out; on the contrary, they’re clearly ideas that Baldwin has been thinking about for years and seems delighted to finally get a chance to make. It’s just that the expression of these ideas is inevitably limited; every statement is a conclusion to an argument that would have been built up in the book. Which admittedly does means there’s no sense of a flow to the movie, but there’s also no sense that his words have been constructed or edited to form the argument. Instead there’s just urgency and passion and rage at the treatment of black people throughout history. And because the structure of the film is contributed by Baldwin’s words, the role of the filmmakers is essentially to compile the imagery that will accompany those words. And the filmmakers do a phenomenal job in constructing the film, mostly using archival documentary footage and movie scenes to illuminate and illustrate his words. At times the editing of the film is simply illustrative or explanatory; other times it’s almost sarcastic or ironic; and at other times it seems determined to assault the audience. The film serves as a condemnation of American culture that stretches back to the treatment of native Americans, and that bring Baldwin’s words and fears up to date with recent deaths of black youths. It’s genuinely confronting, genuinely challenging, genuinely horrifying, and there were points in the film where I would have liked nothing more than to look away.
I feel it’s difficult to really say much about the film at the moment, because I don’t know that I’ve even finished processing it. The film makes a real impact on the viewer, but the nature of the film, the fact that it is constructed from this melange of ideas all thrown together, means that it will take some effort to work through. Barely did I get a chance to even grasp what idea was being communicated and the film had already moved on. This is a tough film to watch, but it’s also tough to process; I feel as though it might require multiple viewings before I could begin to formulate my own thoughts about what he had to say. For the moment, all I can really comment on is the quality of the filmmaking, and on that, all I can say is Wow.
It’s 1989, and Wilhelm, a long-time member of the East German Communist Party, is celebrating his 90th birthday. And so a gathering is held to mark this occasion, with a party made up of a few family members and a lot of local officials looking to pay their respects to this important hero of the working class. But while everyone proudly proclaims the strength of the country, they whisper their belief that East Germany is on the verge of collapse. One family member doesn’t want to wait; Wilhelm’s grandson has already fled to the West, and no-one wants to tell Wilhelm because they’ve already seen him throw one person out because of his connection to someone who has defected.
This is the hardest type of film to write one of these responses about, simply because I didn't respond to the film, and I don't know why. It's not a bad film; there's nothing that I can point to as being something I wish they'd done differently. And I thought it had a great premise and an interesting cast of characters. It even made me smile in some of the comedic moments. But for some reason I just found myself watching the film passively, never engaging with the film. I just don’t feel any excitement about the film. It’s not bad, it’s probably pretty good, but personally I just never connected with it. And that’s a shame.
A Ghost Story took about five seconds to elicit a laugh from the audience. The first thing to appear on-screen is the name of the production company, called "Scared Sheetless". At the sight of that name, a little amused ripple ran through the crowd. It was the last time anyone laughed in the film.
I thought A Ghost Story was fantastic; I need to let the film sit with me for a while, but at the moment I think it might be my favourite film of the year (although I can imagine a lot of people hating it). The film opens with an unnamed couple, played by Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara. They're sweet, clearly in love, which is why it's so devastating when the man dies in a car crash. She comes to the morgue, identifies the body, and after saying goodbye to him covers the body with the sheet. A minute later he sits up, the morgue sheet still covering his body. As he walks out of the morgue, eyeholes form in the sheet. He sees a blinding light, but doesn’t step into it, and it closes up again. And so he returns to his home, a lingering presence, always watching, always listening, all the while looking like a clichéd Halloween ghost costume.
I heard an interview with writer/director David Lowery (whose work I’d previously only experienced in his solid remake of Pete’s Dragon) where he discussed how the final script was just 45 pages long, which is tiny for a feature film, and how Rooney Mara when she read the script was unsure whether it was supposed to be a short film or a feature. And that points to the strengths of the film. The film is in no way driven forward by its narrative; it's soft, contemplative, and beautiful. It plays around with time, giving it a drifting sense of uncertainty. It has a couple of notable dialogue scenes, but most of the movie seems to play essentially without dialogue, adopting a haunting and poetic tone.
The film caught me right from its opening scene; it only has a short amount of time to establish the relationship of the central couple, and if that relationship doesn’t work for the audience the rest of the film has nothing to hang on to. Fortunately this connection is instantly made, with a clear sense that this is a lived-in couple. There's a scene a few minutes into the film where the couple are in bed, holding each other, caressing each other; there's nothing sexual about the moment, it's just a moment of easy casual intimacy. And I found myself uncomfortable watching this moment, in a way I have never experienced before, because it seemed too real and I felt that I shouldn’t be seeing this, as though I was almost intruding on their relationship. For a film to create a relationship that feels so real and rich and intimate in a matter of minutes is remarkable.
And then he becomes the titular ghost, and I thought I understood what the film was doing. Usually when you see a ghost film, the ghost is the central figure, and it’s about them trying to connect with the real world. But here we can’t see the actual person, just this sheeted figure. We never hear the ghost speak. Once or twice he reaches out to almost touch her, there’s even a moment where she almost touches him, completely unaware, but for the most part it seems he’s just a looming figure in the film. And I thought, “Okay, this film isn’t about the ghost; it’s about her working through her grief, and the ghost is just symbolic of this person that she has lost, this presence she’s always reminded of.” And as a symbol it’s incredibly evocative.
There’s an absolutely stunning scene where she comes home to find a pie that has been left for her, and we sit and we literally watch her eat the entire pie. There’s no elision of time; the entire thing plays out in two long takes, apparently totalling about five minutes. The only sound we hear in the scene is the sound of the fork scraping the pie tray. Sometimes we can see the ghost in the shot, sometimes not, but our attention is always on Rooney Mara eating. I was watching this at the Embassy (which is a big cinema), and it seemed fairly full, so there were hundreds and hundreds of people there watching this scene, and it was absolutely silent. There was no restlessness, no feeling of people wondering when this scene would end, everyone seemed completely caught up in the emotional weight of this moment. It doesn’t sound like it should be that captivating, but it honestly was one of the most powerful film-viewing moments I’ve ever experienced.
But then the film stopped telling the story I had thought it was telling; the film’s focus on the woman lessens and the ghost starts to step up and take the lead in his story. And what I found fascinating was how strongly I was able to connect emotionally with this figure, relate to his experience, understand what he was dealing with. It was almost as though the black eyeholes on the blank white sheet become a Rorschach test for the audience, where the emotions I read into the ghost reflect less on the performance and more on how I personally see the character and his experience and how I would feel in that place. And that means that the film I saw and experienced is very likely different to the film the person sitting next to me saw.
That second half of the film is spellbinding, it’s beautiful and enchanting, and quite different to the first half. And yet there are moments where it’s unsettling, where joyous experiences suddenly transform into silent horror before moving on, all in the space of seconds. And that’s the part of the film I really need to reflect on. I understand what the film is doing in its first half, and it’s incredible. But I need to process and reflect on that second half, and grapple with what it’s trying to say. But I’m excited to revisit the film and explore it further.
In case it wasn’t clear, I thought the film is extraordinary. It literally left me speechless after the screening, searching around to find something to say that might communicate the power of the experience I had had. It moved and devastated me, it brought me joy and intense sadness. This, this is why I love movies.
The film festival is showing the French animated film My Life as a Courgette in both subtitled and English dubbed versions. My preference is always for subtitled versions, but scheduling clashes forced me to accept the dubbed version. I was somewhat thrown when the opening credits announced the title of the film, My Life as a Zucchini. Hmm, that's not the title I was expecting, but okay. The film's title reflects the fact that the main character's name is Zucchini - or at least it was when it was spoken. We saw his name written down a surprising number of times through the film, and every time his name was written as Courgette. This bothered me a surprising amount. Is the word Courgette really so foreign to Americans that they needed to change the man character’s name, and if so, how did the American audience cope with the fact that his written name is so different?
[A note: I had assumed that this problem would not have affected me had I seen the subtitled version, but I have since spoken to a friend of mine who saw that version, and she confirmed that the character's name was subtitled as Zucchini even in that version. Sigh. I could almost understand the change in the dubbed version, since that's the version most kids would go and see, but I would have thought the subtitled version would attract a somewhat more intelligent audience that could understand what a courgette is. Apparently not.]
Anyway, to the film: the central character (who I'll call Zucchini since that was the name most associated with the character in the version I saw) is a 9-year-old orphan who goes to live in a children's home. He’s initially bullied but becomes friends with the kids, he develops a crush on a girl who comes to live in the home, and he even acquires a father figure in the cop who helped him after his mother's death. And that’s kind of it.
It's a sweet and understated film. Weirdly understated, in fact; for the most part there's no real dramatic stakes, and the only point where it seems like something dramatic might happen, it happens not to Zucchini but to his crush Camille (the film's climax, for want of a better word, has her fighting an abusive aunt trying to get guardianship). But the film seemed to feel that these kids had been through enough pain in their life, and to inflict more on them for the sake of drama would be unfair. Now, I have no idea whether this portrayal of a group home as some sort of oasis of joy is realistic – certainly such places are usually portrayed in a much more negative way in other films - but in the context of this film it felt tonally right. There are moments of genuine joy throughout, with an extended sequence involving a trip to a cabin in the snow that was utterly heart-warming and wonderful.
What I found surprising was how open the film was about going to some dark places. These are kids who have been through tough experiences that could easily crush someone. Zucchini may possibly be responsible for the death of his mother; other kids may have been the victims of abuse; one girl has lost her mother through deportation. These are kids who are dealing with genuinely traumatic experiences, and the film seems determined to make a point in saying that kids are a lot more resilient than we believe, and that they may not be broken by these experiences.
I always find stop-motion animation to feel particularly magical, and here I particularly enjoyed the character design. The kids have a very simple appealing look to them, but are clearly designed in a way that given a visual expression of the burdens that they carry. Some of that design is obvious (like the visible scarring one character has on his head), but there are a lot of nicely subtle work as well; Zucchini has this nice haunted look in his eyes that’s always present, even when he’s at his most joyful, as a reminder of the pains and the guilt he’s trying to live with. Unfortunately, I do worry that the character design, which is very simple, might make the film appealing to very young audiences (certainly if I’d seen stills of the film I’d have guessed the film was targeted at 4- or 5-year-olds); given some of the subject matter dealt with by the film, viewers really should be a little older, maybe 9 or 10, to be able to work through some of what the film is talking about. But in the context of the film, it all just feels right.
My one qualm about the film was with its ending. For a start, it's a bit of a soft ending. Now that's not necessarily a problem – after all it really isn't a film that's terribly narrative-driven, and once the situation with Camille's aunt is deal with there's not that much tension left to move this whole thing forward, so a level of softness in the film is understandable. But my problem was that, even allowing for the fact that this is in theory a film intended for kids (and so happy endings are compulsory), I couldn't buy the ending. I was willing to meet the film halfway – I was willing to give it the surprisingly joyous and loving child's home – but the film seemed to want to stretch that accommodation into licence to push the story further and further into a resolution that is, even in the most generous interpretation, of dubious credibility. And that was a shame. It wouldn't put me off recommend people watch it (after all, it's definitely worth watching), but it is that small problem that did irk me a bit.
This really was very simple and moving, and I found it quite a delight. I can’t emphasise enough that it’s not a film that I would recommend for very young children, but if you’ve got slightly older kids who can cope with more mature themes, it’s quite wonderful. And while I’ve talked so much about all the dark elements in the film, I want to emphasise that it manages to deal with these issues in the context of a film that remains light and sweet throughout.
Jeremy Renner stars as a skilled hunter and tracker who kills animals preying on the livestock in the region of the Wind River Indian Reservation. One day, while hunting for a pack of mountain lions, he comes across the body of a local girl lying in the snow in the middle of nowhere, fully dressed but barefoot, and with signs of being a victim of rape. The FBI sends its nearest agent, a rookie played by Elisabeth Olsen, to examine the case and determine whether the case falls under the bureau’s jurisdiction; realising that she has no knowledge of the area or how to read the clues left by tracks in the snow, she partners up with Renner.
I was excited to see the film. Taylor Sheridan had previously written Sicario and Hell or High Water, both films that had been highlights of their respective years, largely on the back of a couple of excellent scripts. Now Sheridan was working not only as writer but as director. And I think it’s an interesting case study of the disadvantages of working as a writer/director on a project. It’s not that it’s bad – it’s well above average in comparison to most other thrillers – but it falls short of the other two films. And I find myself wondering: there are a lot of advantages in writing and directing a film (you know exactly what the film was that you were imagining, and you can really target the things you were trying to say), but there are also good things about having someone else direct your script. That response to the script from another person imposes a bit more discipline on the writing. Perhaps there was a key point that you had in mind but didn’t realise you hadn’t really communicated well, or maybe there’s some dialogue that doesn’t hit in the intended way, or could there be some plot element that you fell in love with when writing the script and can’t bring yourself to cut even though it adds nothing; if someone else is directing the film they can find those issues and fix them, but a writer/director could easily be too close to the material and unable to see the problems.
That’s pretty much the concern I have the film. It’s very good, and plays very fast (I was shocked when the climax arrived, because it felt like only an hour had passed and we were halfway through the film, not near the end of a 110 minute movie). I appreciated the way the film sought to use its story to explore the idea of social decline in these reservations, the idea that the American Government basically created these spaces for the Native Americans and then essentially abandoned them. And as a thriller there are some brilliant moments – I loved one moment where paranoia started to build until suddenly there’s a standoff with a dozen people and no-one’s entirely certain why we’re pointing guns at everyone but there’s no way we’re lowering them.
But it often does feel as though Sheridan lacks that extra voice that would force added discipline to the work. Perhaps the dialogue is a bit too on the nose (after Renner explains that his job is to hunt predators, Olsen asks “I want you to help me do that.” Because humans are predators too.) Perhaps there are some extraneous elements, like Renner’s son who the film seems to forget about. And perhaps characters are a little too prone to on-the-nose speechifying in a way to illustrate themes. There are also some awkward structural choices that also didn’t work for me; there’s a flashback inserted in a particular moment, in a film that otherwise doesn’t have flashbacks, that felt like it was motivated less by “this is the point where this flashback falls naturally” and more by “we haven’t done enough setup and the next scene doesn’t really make much sense, so we need the flashback to justify the next scene.” And the ending, once it’s reached, is completely overblown; once the bad guy starts firing a machine gun, I felt that the film had completely changed from the smaller film it had been.
One thing that threw me was an end film card that appeared on screen, announcing that, in all the statistics that are kept of missing persons, no figures are kept on Native American women, and that they are the only category of person for which specific statistics are not kept; to this day, no-one knows how many Native American women are missing. Okay, that’s an absolutely horrific fact and it's terrible, but also, that’s what this film was about? I had no idea. After all, the dead girl wasn’t missing – they found her body just a couple of days after she died, before her family even realised something had happened to her. Perhaps I’m being too literal, but it felt as though the film had initially been inspired by this information, but the film had changed into something different without Sheridan actually noticing. Doing some reading about the film after the film, I found some genuinely horrifying information about life in the Wind River reservation – like the fact that life expectancy there is 49 years and unemployment is 80 percent – and I might have accepted that type of information as a reflection on the broader social themes of the film. But the information about the way missing Native American women are ignored, while horrible, didn’t feel like it had any connection to the film, and so it left me walking out of the film more puzzled than reflective.
Now, to be clear: I liked the film. I was entertained by the film. If you’re thinking about going to see the film, sure, you’ll enjoy it. But I thought the film could be better, and it wouldn’t take much change to dramatically improve the film. It has almost everything it needs to be one of the best films of the year; all it needed was someone to push Sheridan a bit more. Unfortunately, that’s what the film lacked, and that’s why I’m disappointed by the film.
It should be noted, for a start, that Lady Macbeth is not a retelling of Shakespeare's play, but rather an adaptation of a Russian novel, "Lady Macbeth of of the Mtsensk District", relocated to Northern England in the 1800s. Katherine is married into a wealthy family as part of an exchange of land but, while the marriage gives her a comfortable and wealthy lifestyle, she’s also trapped in a loveless marriage with a husband who is unwilling to play his part in producing the heir her father-in-law demands. After her husband is sent away for an extended period, Katherine starts to take advantage of the freedom that comes with being out from under his rule, whether it be to spend her afternoons wandering the country, or starting an affair with someone who works in the stables. (Indeed, for a while, Katherine is reminiscent less of Lady Macbeth than Lady Chatterley.) But as she becomes more brazen in flaunting her relationship with her brutish lover, it attracts attention that could challenge her new-found freedom.
My interest in the film has been sparked by hearing Mark Kermode's review a few months earlier, and at the time I had noted it as a possible festival title to catch. But by the time I came to see it, I'd completely forgotten anything about the film. Which meant I was a little nervous; had I inadvertently had myself caught in a position of having to watch a staid costume drama that wouldn't engage me. (My fears were not alleviated by the fact that the only detail I could remember from the podcast was that they had praised the sound design and had even referenced the sound of wind in the audio clip they played from the film.) Fortunately the film proved to be a highlight of the festival so far. (And admittedly the sound design is pretty great.)
I particularly loved how alive the film feels. It's not the costume drama I'd feared, all static and restrained, bound by the strictures of society. This felt raw, earthy, vital, and it took joy in bringing this messy world to life. I appreciated the tactility of the film, the way it expressed the physical experience of being in place. And running through the film was a nice spark of unrestrained eroticism; I felt the film did a great job in communicating the frustration and desperate compulsion driving these characters, so that we could believe the actions these people decide to take.
I adored Florence Pugh’s lead performance as Katherine. In a lot of ways, Katherine was not a likeable character; while her bristling at the constraints imposed on her might be understandable, there's an insistent petulance in her behaviour that should be unappealing. Yet what made the character was the glee Pugh brought to her performance; this is a character who feels she's seen the worst that can be done to her, so she's going to grab every pleasure she can.
It really is a wonderful film. Well worth seeking out.
Hostages is the true story of an apparently infamous event from Russia in 1983 where a group of friends, frustrated at the restrictions the Soviet government imposes to prevent citizens travelling overseas, hatch a plan to escape from the country. A couple in the group is getting married, and the plan is to use the couple's honeymoon as an excuse to catch a flight to a little-visited destination, then hijack the plane and force them to fly across the border where they can escape. Unfortunately when they come to catch the flight they discover their flight has been combined with another, meaning the tiny plane they had planned to hijack now was a much larger plane with a lot of passengers on board.
The film is very clearly delineated into three parts: the preparation; the hijacking; and the aftermath. And the hijacking really is an exceptional piece of action cinema. It's genuinely suspenseful and intense, and it does a good job in clearly holding all the elements of the scene together, so that even in the middle of utter chaos the audience clearly understands exactly how things have led to the current situation and what needs to happen next.
The problem I found with the film was in the first part of the film. There's a half-dozen people involved in the plan, and I didn't feel that the film did a very good job in introducing us to the various players. Certainly the film did try, giving each person their own introductory scenes in an attempt to establish the parties. Yet for some reason (and I admit this could be due to my own inattentiveness), I found that most of the participants tended to blur together until I couldn't tell who was who. The obvious exception was the newlywed couple, but that was inevitable; they're essentially the main characters in the film, and they have the fact that they are in a couple to provide a point of difference. Beyond those two, I couldn't tell you which person was who. Which in turn affects the way I viewed the hijacking; there's a moment where one character is shot in the head, and it didn't really affect me because even after spending close to an hour with that person I still didn't know exactly who they were. Meanwhile the third act exploring the consequences of the hijacking was interesting, but suffered for being both too short (the story of the aftermath felt very compressed, covering weeks and months in maybe 20 minutes) and too long (the hijacking really is the story's climax, so it's a surprise to realise just how much film remains post-hijack).
I was glad I saw the film, if only for the intense enjoyment that the hijack sequence was able to offer me. I just wish the film around it had been more effective.
A weirdly beautiful and charming film, On Body and Soul opens with mysterious footage of two deer, a stag and a doe, walking through a snow-covered forest; it’s initially unclear why these images are shown to us. The film actually tells the story of the unusual relationship that develops between two employees at an abattoir. The company’s finance manager Endre, a tired and lonely man, is curious about the new quality controller Maria, a young autistic woman who is awkward around people and who isolates herself. One day a theft happens at the abattoir, and to help solve it a psychiatrist comes in to examine the staff; during the profiling interview Endre mentions that he has dreams in which he is a stag walking through a snow-covered forest with a doe, while Maria discusses her dreams of being a doe walking through a snow-covered forest with a stag. The two quickly realise that there is some mysterious connection between them that somehow comes out in their dreams, and they begin to draw closer to each other.
So I enjoyed the film. I found the characters’ puzzlement at their weird connection and their slow, tentative movements towards each other appealing. The characters were engaging, and the film has a clear affection for these people; in particular the film to me seemed to ride a careful line in its portrayal of Maria, never holding her autism up for ridicule but acknowledging the understandable frustration that can come from engaging with someone who sees the world in such a unique manner. It’s also interested in exploring the struggles and pain that can come with allowing yourself to be truly open with another person. At times it adopts a weirdly comedic tone in the middle of incredible blackness; there’s one scene in particular that elicited some uncomfortable but genuine laughter where one person phones another just because they want to talk and has no idea that the other person is literally in a life-or-death situation.
My only frustration was when the relationship between the two of them became romantic. I’m normally fairly oblivious to age differences between characters, but it was inescapable here; Endre simply looks old, and Maria looks young. (The actress is 30 years old; the actor is 64.) And when you consider that the premise of the film is that she has undeveloped social skills and approaches her engagement with people in the way a child would (there is literally a scene where she replays a conversation using Playmobil toys), it starts to feel as though it’s a situation where there is the potential for someone to prey on her. I don’t think that’s what happens, but I was uncomfortable with how close the film came to that possibility. I couldn’t help feeling that the decision to pair them up was based on convention (the lead characters always pair up in these types of films); I think I would have preferred it if this mysterious connection had become the basis for a close friendship, and if through that friendship he could have helped her connect with people other than him.
But on the whole I liked the film. I don’t know that I’ll remember the film all that much a year from now, but it was an enjoyable experience.
Earlier this year I watched a trio of films by famed Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky - Ivan's Childhood, Solaris, and Mirror. Tarkovsky is widely regarded as one of the greatest filmmakers ever, and the films I watched are three of his greatest films. And I couldn’t connect to them at all. His films tend to be dream-like, reflective, and poetic, and I just could not find his wavelength. But I was watching these films at home where distractions abound. Perhaps this is a filmmaker who work really needs to be seen in a pitch-black cinema, where we can just focus solely on the film and allow the world he creates to envelope you. So I approached Stalker with a degree of trepidation, but also a genuine willingness to try to understand what it is that makes Tarkovsky great.
Sometime in the future, a mysterious Zone develops; it may have been created or inhabited by aliens. It’s a dangerous place, filled with traps that will destroy the unwary, so the government decides to make it illegal to enter the Zone and surrounds it with a military blockade. But somewhere in the Zone there is a Room, and anyone who enters the Room will be given their heart’s desire. And so professional guides, known as "stalkers", help people navigate their way past the blockade and through the hazards to reach the Room. The film focuses on one such stalker, who is hired to lead a writer seeking inspiration and a scientist seeking knowledge through the Zone and to the Room.
The film did not work for me. At all. I felt that the film was playing in front of my eyes without ever seeking to engage with me. One frustration I had was that there’s never any real sense of threat in the film; the only reason we have any reason at all to be concerned is because of the panicked performance of (an admittedly excellent) Aleksandr Kaidanovsky, constantly insisting that there’s danger or you can’t go there. But I don’t think we ever see one of these traps, never see any of these aliens, and we’re never given any reason to understand his panic, so we just have to accept that he’s right. And that just turns the entire film into a long slow trek through a wasteland. And I was a bit frustrated with the look of the wasteland – the Zone basically turned out to be a bunch of ruined industrial buildings. Now that makes sense, since it was a functioning industrial area before it became the Zone, but regardless, this is supposed to be an area that aliens live in and have reshaped, and it feels like they just found a shut-down factory and shot the entire film in the facility as it was. There’s one moment where I thought it had changed, that perhaps as they were pushing closer to the room we would see more of the alien influence – the characters enter a mysterious room filled with miniature sand dunes, looking and feeling utterly unlike anything on earth – but the next scene we’re back to the run-down factory location.
Even when there were scenes that I quite liked – and the second half had a lot of scenes that I liked: a walk through the sewers, the sand-dune room, and the wonderfully tense scene that plays out when they reach the Room – those scenes would tend to play out too long, repeating the same beats again and again, until the scene would lose me. Now, it’s not that I’m some impatient viewer who wants his films to get to the fireworks factory already; after all my favourite film of the festival has a five-minute scene of someone eating a pie, while one episode of the Twin Peaks revival had an absolutely enthralling scene of someone sweeping the floor for three minutes. But those works had already connected with me, they’d given me a reason to be intrigued and to care about the world and what was happening, and so I was more than happy to stay and be engaged by them through scenes that might otherwise seem dull and dire, whereas in Stalker I found there was nothing that I could grasp on to.
I’m not saying it’s a bad film; I recognise that it is regarded as a masterpiece, one of the great works of cinema. But for me, there was a genuine struggle to stay involved with the film. I wish I had connected with the film, I almost feel guilty, as though I’m a bad film fan for not engaging with the film. But I didn’t. I tried, I wanted to understand it, wanted to like it, but I couldn’t.
I had been anticipating Berlin Syndrome ever since it screened at Sundance to very strong reviews. It was the first film I checked for when the festival programme was released. In other words, I’ve been waiting for this film for six months, and walking into the screening, I knew exactly what this film was going to be. Having seen the film, I wish this could have been one of those films I’ll see this festival where I’m not exactly sure which film I’m watching. It’s a strong film, but I am really curious what the experience of the film would be like for someone who did approach the film completely free of expectations. The film takes its time revealing exactly what type of story is being told; it casually drops a few hints that the informed viewer would interpret in a different way, but for the most part it seems like one film until it suddenly doesn’t. And I’m really curious about when exactly would you realise what this film is?
Claire is an Australian tourist exploring the architecture of Germany. She meets a schoolteacher named Andi; he’s charming and attractive, and they spend a few days wandering the streets, talking. It’s sweet, charming, and reminiscent of Before Sunrise. Eventually they return to his place and spend the night together. The next morning Andi goes to work and Claire finds she locked in, unable to leave. But when Andi returns he’s surprised to hear this; I’m so sorry, I thought I’d left you a key, you’re welcome to leave now, I’ll just go and take a shower. He’s so casual about the whole situation that she accepts that it was a mistake, she goes out clubbing with him, returns back to his place that night, and the next morning makes sure to have him leave the key. Except the key doesn’t open the door, and she realises she’s allowed herself to become a prisoner of this man she doesn’t know, in a house with no-one for miles around, and in a country where she knows no-one and where no-one will be looking for her.
It's an extremely effective thriller, and one that I greatly enjoyed. Often with these films revolving around a woman in peril, I find that the film either seems to be taking a perverse delight in the suffering of the victim or else find a different focus for the story that ends up treating the victim as an afterthought. What I appreciated was that the film did neither. It's always focused on the emotional experience of the victim, rather than the physical suffering she experiences, and so because we see the story through her eyes it never feels like the film is exploiting her.
The film’s title is clearly referencing the concept of Stockholm Syndrome, and I liked the way the film explored that concept. The film does a great job in putting the audience in the position of Claire, so we understand the hold he has over her and how much she fears him, we understand how much she comes to rely on Andi for her own survival, and how that translates into her attempts to keep him happy to keep herself safe, becoming this perverse relationship where she supports and enables him. While I have no doubt that the drivers of Stockholm Syndrome are much more complex than could be presented in a two hour film, I did feel the film did a good job in providing some insight into how it can occur.
So I really loved almost all of the film. Unfortunately, the big challenge with this type of film is finding a way to end it believably. Assuming the filmmaker wants to end with the victim escaping her captor, you need to establish some inescapable situation and then find some loophole the character can believably exploit to escape. And I initially thought the film had done that. There’s a point where Claire sees an opportunity and distracts Andi so she can do something, and I thought "Ah, that’s smart". I could instantly see a way for her to use this thing to get a message to the outside world. She does not do that. She does something different, something that takes advantage of a particular interest of Andi’s, and I thought "Okay, if this happens and then that happens then it’s a bit convenient but I could see an acceptable solution to the problem". But instead they instead decide to contrive a solution that involved a barely-more-than-incidental character, and required the villain to encounter artificial delays so that these characters who don’t know each other would have time to come together and hatch this complicated plan that would allow her to escape. I don't know that I believed any of it.
So the ending is disappointing. But the rest of the film was fantastic.
A few years ago, director Mike Mills made the film Beginners, a fictional film inspired by his father's life. (I never saw it, but it was very well received.) Now he’s made 20th Century Women, a fictional movie that he’s openly acknowledged is inspired by his mother. The film focuses on Dorothea, a single mother raising her teenage son in California in 1979. Her son, Jamie, is in love with his best friend Julie, who sneaks into his room to complain about her boyfriends and sleep beside him (but not sleep with him). They take in a boarder, Abbie, a feminist punk-loving photographer; and also around the property is William, a guy who’s working to repair the building. Dorothea is worried that Jamie doesn't have any strong male influences so, since Jamie really doesn’t connect to William, she decides to enlist Julie and Abbie, the two people her son is closest to, to prepare him to be a man.
I think the first thing that has to be said is that Annette Bening is absolutely stellar as Dorothea. It’s an impressively raw performance; she’s an incredibly strong character, but there are beautiful moments where she cracks and we see the pain, the disappointment, the loneliness, the vulnerability that she has had to push down in order to be able to raise her son. It is one of the best performances I’ve seen in years, and instantly made me sad that we’ve seen so little of her in years (I think the last time I saw her was in The Kids Are All Right). But everyone in the film is great – Lucas Jade Zumann is a new actor (with just six credits to his name) who holds his own against some very strong performers, Elle Fanning as Julie is the perfect object of unrequited affection, Greta Gerwig is great fun in her efforts to dispense wisdom and teach Jamie how to be the perfect feminist, and I enjoyed Billy Crudup’s understated charm and affection. And you need these performances to be as great as they are, because this is not a film of big drama, this a film constructed of individual character moments, and you need the performers to really lend the necessary weight to those characters.
The film makes a lot of use of voiceover from Dorothea and Jamie, and I found the way the film used voiceover to be fascinating. Unless I missed something, whenever the film has voiceover discussing a character, it’s (almost) always voiceover provided by someone else. So Jamie narrates the information about his mother’s life, Dorothea offers the voiceover discussing her son’s life, and they both share the commentary on the lives of the other characters. There is an exception to this rule – at several points in the story we learn what happened to the characters after the film ends, and those voiceovers are provided by the relevant characters. But other than that the voiceovers are always told from the perspective of a character observing the person being discussed. The idea seems to be that we are the people that we’re perceived as being, but that we have control over the person that we will become. It an essential element in one of the main ideas being discussed by the film – the idea that we don’t really know other people, we just think we do. Dorothea at one time laments the fact that she’s always going to be Jamie’s mother and she’ll never see Jamie being Jamie in the real world. But when she makes that comment to Julie and Abbie, we’re very aware that Julie will also never see the real Jamie since she only ever sees the version that’s in love with her, and Abbie only ever sees the version of Jamie that relies on her as a big-sister figure. And yet the film seems to recognise that we don’t have full understanding over who we are, and that other people do often have a greater understanding of ourselves than we may possess; in one of the best scenes, Jamie tries to connect with his mother by reading her a piece of writing that reminded him of her, but the accurate observations in that passage cut too deep for her and she absolutely rejects it.
I also loved the honesty the film approached to the future of these relationships. It’s clear in the film that these people are absolutely vital to each other and mean the world to each other, and yet it was interesting to hear how many of them aren’t a part of each other’s lives in the years after the film. I feel that in a lot of films there’s a sense that we’re watching people with unbreakable bonds who will remain in this circle forever, but we all know that’s simply not realistic; yes, we all have friends with whom we will remain utterly inseparable, but most of our friends are just for a season, no matter how important they are to us at the time. And the film makes clear that it’s not like these people separated because of some decisive dramatic event; they just drifted away and lost contact. And there’s sadness in those lost connections, but there’s also joy in the new lives that they create.
There are a few irritating choices made. At times it seems as though the director loses faith in the quality of the film, throwing in curious artistic flourishes that seem to contribute little to the film – odd moments where the action slightly sped up for no reason, or a strange rainbow effect he throws into transitional moments. (On the other hand, some of his flourishes do succeed, with some really great work invoking the specific place and time in terms of culture – we see significant photos from the era, characters will read passages of books that mean something to them and the film will highlight when they were published, there’s even a brief piece of footage from Koyaanisqatsi.) I also found some of the comedy to be frustratingly broad – one scene in particular featuring a dinner party being browbeaten into saying the word “menstruation” seemed like it would never end (although that scene did at least feature a laugh-out-loud summary of the ending of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest).
There’s a lot more I could say about the film, but I have no time. For the most part, it’s a wonderful film – funny, sweet, and tender, with some interesting reflections on who we are and how we are shaped by the world around us. I really did enjoy it.
Charlie is a young teenager living in Western Australia in the late 60s. One night he’s woken up by Jasper Jones, a half-Aboriginal kid who’s considered the local troublemaker, asking for his help. Charlie follows Jasper to a forest where he discovers the body of a young woman hanging from a tree, her face visibly damaged by being beaten before death. Jasper insists he didn’t do it, but that this was his girlfriend and he knows he’s going to be blamed. So Charlie helps him hide the body, and then begin to investigate other possible suspects, while the town starts to panic when the news of her disappearance begins to spread.
At the end of the movie, as I was walking out, I heard a woman comment to her friend "It was a much better book." I could believe it. The fundamental problem is that the film has a tone that just didn't work for me. This is a small town, a young woman has gone missing, and the film can't seem to decide if people are bothered by this or not. Even the girl's sister spends several minutes talking about Breakfast at Tiffany's before she casually reveals to the audience that it's her sister everyone is worried about. At times the film is aiming for intense and mysterious, or its trying to raise serious issues like racism (both with Jasper Jones' mixed heritage and with attitudes to Charlie's Vietnamese friend during the height of the Vietnam War) or darker issues I can't discuss (for spoiler reasons), but at other times it's quirky and funny, or there's an extended sequence in which we're supposed to cheer on the town cricket team. I could see a book having the space to soften the tonal shifts between these elements, but within the limited time constraints of a movie, the film had to move from dark to funny to scary to happy so fast that I never managed to find my footing. There are a few other plotting issues that may have been inherent in the source material that bothered me – most notably a key piece of evidence that is given to Charlie for no reason (the person giving it has no idea of Charlie’s involvement) and then is conveniently and improbably never even considered until the most plot-convenient time – but for the most part, this feels very much like a film that is affected by poor adaptation and a reluctance to edit and adjust the source material to meet the available screentime. I was particularly disappointed by what they did with their cast; they collected a really rather strong set of actors (obviously Toni Collette and Hugo Weaving, but also some strong young talents like Angourie Rice), but then gave them a script that often requires the characters to behave either in a very broad manner or an emotionally nonsensical manner. A film that should have been better.
A Korean crime thriller, The Merciless tells the story of Hyun-soo, an impulsive and hot-headed young prisoner who attracts the attention and the friendship of Jae-ho, the Number 2 in a gang that uses a fish-importing business as a drug-smuggling cover. But it seems Hyun-soo is actually an undercover cop trying to build a relationship with Jae-ho to take down the business.
I don’t know that there’s much for me to say about the film. The film is entertaining, to be sure, with some rather gleefully executed actions sequences. But it’s all in favour of a painfully generic storyline; there’s an attempt to mess with the timeline, jumping back and forward across the story to hide crucial information until the most dramatic moment (there must be a half-dozen twist reveals in the film), but in the end the film is doing nothing that Infernal Affairs didn’t do better 15 years ago. And I found that twistiness and determination to hold back vital information kept me at an emotional distance from the film.
What it does have is a surplus of style. It felt as though almost every shot and scene was conceived and designed, not out of the demands of storytelling, but out of a desire to make every shot the coolest sot possible. You can feel the director announcing “It’s pitch black, and then all the car lights come on, and we see the female cop striding down the port, and then she high-fives the guy surrendering with his hands up. It’ll be so cool.” It’s not that I have a problem with movies having moments that have style or look cool – I think movies would be much poorer and weaker without such impulses – but if every few minutes I’m noticing how stylish this moment or that shot is, then the film is not doing its job because the storytelling has become secondary to visual flair, and that doesn’t interest me at all. I’m glad I saw it – some of those action scenes were pretty damned fun – but it really was a hollow experience.
A surprisingly entertaining and suspenseful documentary about the only bank to face trial for alleged crimes connected with the 2008 mortgage crisis. Abacus Federal Savings Bank was a tiny bank, with only six branches, that specifically provided services to the Chinese-American community. When it is discovered that one of their staff was committing various frauds and other illegal actions, they fired him, along with several other employees identified as being involved in similar activities, and reported to the regulators about the beaches. Yet despite Abacus' demonstrable efforts to take action when its staff broke the law, the bank itself found itself on trial for conspiracy to defraud the system.
There is no doubt that the film is absolutely on the side of Abacus and the Sung family that founded and still runs the bank. But the film does well to represent the prosecution's views, at times with some entertaining cuts between the parties as they seemingly comment on each other's soundbite. That said, the film never pretends to not have a point of view. There's a clear anger when the film discusses how the massive banks that were at fault for creating the financial crisis were able to point to the economic impact that would occur if they collapsed (the source of the phrase "too big to fail") to effectively escape the consequences of their crimes, and how the attack on Abacus seems fundamentally unfair in comparison, attacking a small company for much more minor infractions simply because they’re an easier and less dangerous target. There's a fascinating and well-argued idea that the bank was treated this way because of an overtone of racism, an idea that gets extra support when one of the prosecuting parties dismisses the suggestion because the case would have been treated just the same if the bank had been servicing “the South American or Indian communities”. One thing I found fascinating was in the film's discussion about the challenges of working with the Chinese community - a community where many businesses are cash-driven, which can give rise to difficulties establishing the essential information necessary to examine the strength of a loan - and how the solutions to those challenges could be seen as fraudulent, even if the underlying information is more or less accurate and the loans being made are actually much more sound than the fraudulent loans that actually led to the mortgage crisis.
All this probably makes the film seem very dry. But the film has the advantage that Abacus has a very human face: founder Thomas Sung, along with his three daughters. The film could very easily become dry, but there was a lot of genuine good-hearted laughter in the audience recognising their very real family dynamics. Two things in particular leapt out to me as particularly enjoyable: the frequent discussions where everyone is just talking at once or speaking over someone trying to jump in to make a point, and the fact that the entire family seems obsessed with their father's eating (one great scene has all three sisters weighing in on how dry his chicken salad sandwich is).
I was surprised by how suspenseful the film was. As the trial ended and the jury deliberations ran on for weeks, I found myself becoming more and more anxious, desperate to know what the outcome of the trial would be, parsing every comment by the interviewed jurors to try and assess which way the outcome would be. And then suddenly there was a moment where one of the daughters talked about how the wait for the verdict was affecting them, and how they were even examining the handwriting in the juror’s requests to assess the state of their considerations, and I realised I was doing that exact thing; the film had managed to completely put me in the position of the family, waiting anxiously for the verdict. I don’t know that I can immediately think of a documentary that has been quite so effective in creating this type of suspense around its outcome.
It’s an engaging and enjoyable film, and one that genuinely leaves the viewer outraged. It’s a fun legal thriller, but also a fascinating view into an immigrant culture. It’s pretty wonderful.
A nice slow-burning post-apocalyptic thriller with body horror elements, the film takes place in a world that has been destroyed by some kind of sickness. Our main characters – a husband, wife, and teenage son – are surviving in a well-equipped home, protected by the fact that the only entry into the house goes through two locked doors. One night a man tries to break in; he says he’s looking for supplies for his wife and young boy. They decide to trust the man, and go to collect this other family, offering them the chance to move in. But there are a lot of rules to living in this house, the most important being that after dark the doors to the outside stay closed.
There’s a degree to which all post-apocalyptic films, whether it’s The Walking Dead or The Road or Mad Max, tend to keep coming back to the same questions: how can we retain our humanity, how can we trust people, in a world where all the structures that give us safety have gone, and what kind of paranoia can set in when survival is your entire mind-set? I found this to be one of the strongest explorations of this idea I’ve seen in a while. Often what tends to happen is that we have our core characters, and then everyone we meet after that point is basically judged against how much of a threat they are to our people. What I found effective about the film was that it managed, in a way I don’t remember seeing before, to communicate the fact that this isn’t a one-way issue: as much as it’s a risk for our leads to accept this other family into their home, knowing they could be welcoming their enemy within their walls, it’s just as much of a risk for the other family to merge their lives and resources with this family they don’t know. And of course there’s the added threat of this mysterious sickness; even if these new people are completely genuine and good people who aren’t going to try to kill them and take all their stuff, they could be carrying this sickness completely unawares and bring destruction in that way. And the film is effective in exploring how the paranoia can slowly build up.
Given the way the film relies so much on the spiralling fears and suspicions of the characters to carry the horror of the film, there’s a strong pressure placed on the actors. I only recognised Joel Edgerton, playing the lead role as a man fuelled equally by desperation and caution. The only other name I recognised is Riley Keough as the wife in the other family; I’ve apparently seen her before (she’s one of the five wives in Mad Max: Fury Road), but now feel I need to see more of her work – she has a great scene interacting with Travis, the teenaged son of the main family, which is partly wistful remembrance of a lost life and partly a natural unconscious flirtation. Speaking of Travis, I thought Kelvin Harrison Jr was just stellar, carrying much of the burden of the plot as someone who is affected by seeing his grandfather die in a horrible manner and who now fears his own passing in a similar way; he’s a fairly new actor, and I think he has the potential to become known. But the true highlight of the film is the work of writer/director Trey Edward Shults. When I was reflecting on the movie Wind River, I talked about the risks that can come when one person takes on both of those roles. This film demonstrates the other side of that viewpoint: if you have genuinely strong material and a clear vision for what you want the film to achieve, and you know how to achieve it, then it can be a real joy to watch the result. Shults know the tone he wants to achieve, knows the exact purpose of every scene, and so the entire film just feels like you can trust the person behind the camera. But also you clearly feel that the man who is making the movie has a very clear understanding of the threat that is facing the characters, and so even if there are specific details that are never spelled out he’s able to subtly indicate answers to questions in a way that might be much harder, much more heavy-handed, if the project was just handed to a different person to execute.
I do wonder how many people will go to see this film thinking it’s some kind of monster film; certainly the title seems to suggest that there is something specific that they need to protect themselves from. It’s something of a misleading title, since there’s really nothing like that. The titular It that comes at night is something more undefined; it’s not a phrase that I think is ever even used in the film, so we never get a full explanation of what the title is actually referring to. However I think the film is careful to suggest what It refers to; I certainly know how I interpret that title and what significance I think it plays in the film, although equally I could see any number of people arriving to a different understanding of the meaning of that title.
I’ll avoid spoilers on this next point, but I’ve heard a lot of people commenting about the movie having had an unresolved ending. So much so that, as I could feel the film reaching its climax, I found myself think “It’s going to end now. … Oh, okay, well it’ll end now. … Hmm, maybe now?” at every significant scene that seemed as though it would leave the film unfinished. Perhaps it was that I was actively expecting an unsatisfying ending, but I thought the ending of the film was pretty much perfect and resolved everything that there was to resolve. This isn’t an ending where we don’t know if people are alive or dead, or if the plane that’s approaching carries rescuers or killers. I know exactly where every one of the film’s characters are at the end of the story. I may not know what happens to them after the film ends, but with very few films do you actually know what happens to all the characters once the story finishes. To me, everything resolved and I had no questions left hanging.
I can see a lot of people being disappointed by this film. I can imagine people thinking it will be a scary monster film, and feeling let down when they discover its horror is much more psychological. I believe people are being let down by the ending, although I don’t know why. But if you can get in tune with the film’s wavelength, if you can connect with what the film actually is, and not what you might want it to be, there are a lot of riches to be found in the movie. I really liked it.
So this was ... a tough watch. I'd seen a number of very strong reviews for the film, but they'd also talked about what a rough experience it was to watch the film, so I had tried to approach the film in the right mind-set. I don't know how successful I was. It's an effectively made film, but it really is extremely nasty.
Set in Western Australia in the late 80s, the film focuses on Vicki, an attractive teenager who sneaks out of her mother's home to go to a party. While walking to the party she's stopped by a couple in a car, John and Evelyn; they're clearly a family, as they have a baby seat in the back, so she feels safe accepting a ride from the couple. Instead she's drugged, chained to a bed, raped and abused, and at the end of the week the couple plan to kill her.
This isn't the type of film that I would usually be interested in seeing – it’s extremely raw and brutal with little entertainment value; I don't think you could call it torture-porn, but it's certainly torture-porn-adjacent – but I was intrigued when I heard that the film was about a couple that is committing these crimes. Whenever I hear about one of these cases of a couple committing these types of crimes together – apparently the film was partly inspired by an actual couple from the state who committed similar crimes – it always puzzles me, and so I was interested to have a look at a film that discusses the dynamics in a couple that would allow a woman under the influence of her partner to actively participate in these types of crimes. And the film is definitely about the two women, Evelyn and Vicki, and is particularly interested in understanding what might drive Evelyn to participate in these crimes. The film does about as well as could really be expected in a 105 minute film to explore her mind-set: the lifetime of abusive relationships; the heartbreak of children taken from her; the feeling that she needs to hold onto her man and let him do what he wants; the intense jealousy she experiences when she starts to see their victim as her rival for his affections. It's certainly one of the most sympathetic and understanding portraits of a monster I've ever seen, and I found that really interesting.
One thing I particularly appreciated was the care that the film took to avoid enjoying and overly sexualising the victimisation of these girls. The film opens with ultra-slow-motion shots of girls playing netball, with lingering admiring shots lovingly panning up and down their bodies; we're clearly seeing these girls through the leering eyes of the man looking for his next victim. (I will confess, at that point I was wondering if I had made a mistake in seeing the film.) But the film wants us to feel uncomfortable at that scene, we’re not supposed to like seeing the world from his point of view, and that leering tone doesn't persist. When it comes to the moments of abuse, and especially moments of sexual violence, it knows we understand the horror of what is happening, and so it chooses to not show us these in order to avoid the possibility that the audience might find something entertaining in those scenes. There has been a lot of criticism lately of many films and TV shows using sexual violence for prurient reasons (Game of Thrones being a big example), and I'm reminded of stories about movie executives who would suggest rape as a way of getting more sex into a film, and so I was glad to see the film take care to avoid enjoying the suffering of the victims.
There is one thing, a small thing, that did bother me in the film – and here I need to get into detailed spoilers about an important sequence towards the end of the film, so if there's any chance you might want to see the film, stop reading now. ...
So, remember the scene in Silence of the Lambs where they attack Jame Gumb's house but he’s not there, and meanwhile Clarice finds the correct house? Remember how they intercut the scenes of the police ringing the doorbell with Jame Gumb hearing the doorbell, and they're cut together as though they're the same doorbell, but in a sudden reveal we learn that they're not? Hounds of Love does the exact same thing: one person goes to a house and bangs on the door; our villains hear and respond to a knocking on the door; the door is opened; and it's someone different because the first person has the wrong address. Except that the film establishes several times the reason why it’s possible for that person to have that wrong address; indeed I had already assumed the person would have the wrong address from the first time a minor character made a particular comment about something this couple is doing that could result in someone having the wrong address, and when the film reinforced this for us by actually showing them doing this thing I was positive there was a wrong-address issue. Add to that the fact that we've seen enough of the actual house to be able to recognise that the house being approached looks completely different, and suddenly this sequence simply does not work because I'm simply in no suspense about the outcome. It's a great example of how a sequence can be completely effective in one context (I'm always amazed at how perfect that Silence of the Lambs sequence is), and yet a near-identical sequence can fail (even if the scene itself is executed perfectly well) because of a couple of scenes that took place much earlier in the movie. It's a small misstep, but an unfortunate one in an otherwise effective film.
I can't say I liked the film; I appreciated the film for being a good version of the film it was trying to be, but it's not an experience I could ever recommend.
In 1980, six terrorists entered the Iranian Embassy in London and took 26 people hostage, as part of an effort to force the creation of a separate Arabic state in Iran. As the siege progressed and political pressure to find a resolution increased, news media gathered outside to capture the events as they would occur, the SAS trained to find the most efficient way to take the terrorists out, and the police had to negotiate to find a solution that doesn’t end with bodies littering the embassy. I’ll leave you to guess how long the siege lasted.
The new film from New Zealand director Toa Fraser, 6 Days is an efficient and enjoyable factual thriller. Fraser is a strong director with a clear visual sense; the film can be visually striking but such style is never intrusive. It’s clear from early on that Fraser is trying to adopt a strong fact-focused approach to the true events; it feels scrupulously researched and carefully presented in as accurate a manner as possible. I was reminded by comparison with Argo, another film about a hostage-crisis in an embassy; that film featured a host of scenes that felt utterly artificial and as though they existed just for dramatic effect. This film feels as though they’ve taken great care with every detail; there were a couple of moments where things happened and I at the time wondered if those moments actually happened like that or were just minor contrivances for suspense purposes, but I then checked the Wikipedia page for the siege, and every detail I had questioned appears to have happened exactly as described.
While there are a lot of elements running through the film, there are three core storylines the film is focused on: the police, the SAS, and the media. And I found my responses to each of these storylines varied wildly, so I’m going to discuss them separately. The core story of the film is probably the story of the police and their efforts to negotiate a resolution; I’d guess that’s the part of the film that has the most screen-time, and if the film has a main character, it’s probably Mark Strong playing the lead police officer – as always, an excellent performance. Frustratingly, however, it’s the more generic part of the film. We’ve all seen police negotiating with people holed up so many times before, and I didn’t feel that the film was really bringing anything new to those scenes. They’re competently made, but they didn’t have a particular spark.
Whereas I though the scenes with the SAS really were great. The final siege-ending assault was a fine, thrilling action sequence. But what particularly interested me was the material about the SAS’s preparations. The film spends a lot of time examining how they go about preparing for an attack like this. We see the careful plans, the intricate models that are constructed to piece together the building layout. We see the efforts to learn the face of every suspect and every hostage so that they can avoid killing (or not killing) the wrong person. We see the time that’s wasted in preparing for a particular plan that never eventuates. And, in one of the best scenes in the film, we see them put together a quickly-constructed full-sized mock-up of the embassy so that each person in the attack can know every corner in the building and know exactly where they need to go and what they need to look out for. I really did feel that, with some of these preparation scenes, I was seeing things I had never seen before, and it was fascinating.
The least successful element of the film is the examination of the media. The film mainly seems to be amused by how much snooker the BBC used to show; every time they cut to someone watching TV, it always seems to be snooker. For me, one of the problems was with Abbie Cornish playing Kate Adie. For a start, Adie has a very distinctive vocal style, and the performance quickly felt as though it had fallen to mimicry rather than an acting performance. But more than that, it feels much more disconnected from the story than the other two plots. The screening had the real-life Kate Adie for a Q&A, and she commented that the media really had no inside information about what was going on. The problem is that that’s how it feels; you have footage of police and the SAS working hard, and then you have scenes of the BBC sitting around wondering what’s happening. It’s not that compelling a story. Add to that the fact that the film doesn’t do a good job in communicating why the media story is so significant – the news footage of the attack was apparently ground-breaking, and at the time it was highly unusual for the BBC to cut into scheduled programming as they did. At the end of the film, there is an on-screen card that states that the Adie’s coverage from the siege is now considered the gold standard of such coverage. That’s all very good, but the film did very little to explain what it was they did that was so significant. (Most of my understanding comes from Adie’s comments during the Q&A.) And that’s a failing of the film.
In the end, it’s a good film. It’s worth watching. It’s a solid, reliable portrayal about these events that never sacrifices truth for drama. It’s not one of the year’s best, and it definitely had flaws, but it was certainly fun to watch, and I would recommend it.
An entertaining documentary about Richard Turner, one of the greatest card magicians working today, who demonstrates seemingly impossible feats of card manipulation with an easy and practised manner. He also has a black belt in karate, somewhat counter-intuitively since you would expect someone whose livelihood depends on the precision of his hands would avoid punching through blocks of wood. And, although he would almost certainly hate that I’m saying this, he has been blind since the age of nine.
One thing I found fascinating about the film was what it seemed to say about just how much you can achieve if you genuinely set your mind to it and focus on a goal. We learn that he practices 16 hours a day, which when they tell you that fact it seems impossible but after you see the film actually seems believable. No matter what he’s doing, he always seems to be a deck of cards to hand. We see him shuffling one-handed while working out, or while he’s at church; there’s a story about him falling asleep while shuffling two decks simultaneously and how when he woke up he started shuffling before he opened his eyes; we even hear a story about the night his wife realised he was shuffling a deck while the two of them were ..., ahem, being intimate. But that level of determination and practice really has paid off. He seems to almost have an instinctive understanding of the exact location of every card in any deck.
There was a point in the film where they show archival footage of Turner performing his tricks on various talk shows, and every host stops at some point to let the audience in on something they don’t know about Turner. “Hey Richard, why don’t you tell the people at home about your eyesight,” one of them actually says. And every time this happens you can see him getting frustrated at the fact that once again his blindness is being drawn attention to. Turner wants to be appreciated for his skill and the quality of his performance, and he doesn’t want to just be known for his disability. And I can understand that. His skill level is so great that he would be a legend even if he could see. But as one of his loved ones observes, the fact that he can’t see elevates the performance, it makes it even more impressive. But Turner openly admits to being proud and that he hates people knowing he’s blind; he doesn’t want to be seen as disabled or anything lesser. He has to prove that his blindness doesn’t hold him back, whether that be through his insane exploits as a youth when he was losing his eyesight (riding motorbikes or rock-climbing using just his peripheral vision), or more recently his decision to decline an honorary karate black belt and to instead undertake the standard ten-person-fight to earn his black belt the usual way. (And he then decides not to show anyone the newspaper article about him earning the black belt because it discusses his blindness.) So it’s astonishing what Turner can do. But the film also provides an interesting counterpoint in Turner’s sister, who is also blind. Unlike Turner, who deliberately chooses not to use a cane or a seeing-eye dog, his sister has chosen to make use of these resources. They may mark her to the world as a blind person, but they also give her the ability to make her way around the town by herself with confidence. Whereas Turner, in refusing to be seen by the world as blind, has made himself incredibly dependent on his loved ones for help.
So I was watching the film, and when this archival footage of talk shows started, I suddenly started to wonder: if he’s so bothered by people seeing him as blind, why is he participating in this documentary which he knows will have a strong focus on his blindness? We get a bit of an answer from the end of the film, where we learn that he has started to be more willing to accept his blindness and make use of the assistance available. There’s a sweet little scene of Turner and his sister going for a walk together, his sister teaching him how to rely on her seeing-eye-dog to be his eyes. He’s even more open about his blindness in his performance; whereas previously he would try to hide his blindness from the audience, now he’s developing shows that incorporate his life story in amongst the magic. But the shift, from wanting to disguise his challenges to being so open about it, is a significant change in character, and I don’t think we ever really get an explanation of what changed that he’s now had this change of heart. It might possibly be connected with his son’s departure for college, and the loss of him as a consistent and reliable aid, but it’s never really explored. It’s a situation where the film feels like it’s just doing too much, trying to squeeze too much material into a film that is less than 90 minutes long, and it falls short in this particular area.
It’s not a documentary that will revolutionise the form. It’s just a solid documentary profiling an interesting character. But if you’re after a fun film, if you want to spend time in the presence of an engaging and funny performer, or if you just want to see some astonishing card tricks, Dealt is well worth seeking out.
This was my third film by Yorgos Lanthimos. I had really appreciated the subtly disturbing Dogtooth, but really never connected with The Lobster a couple of years ago and have remained a bit bewildered at the praise that film received. But despite that I was hoping for something special from his next film. What I found was a film that was absolutely fantastic, although I don't really understand why or how.
Colin Farrell stars as Steven, a cardiologist who is happily married to Nicole Kidman and who has two teenage children that he loves very much. But for some mysterious reason, he also keep having surreptitious meetings with an unsettling teenage boy named Martin, who he buys expensive gifts for. Steven is rattled when Martin shows up at his work out of the blue and lies about how he knows him, and allows Martin to pressure him into going to dinner with the boy and his mother, yet Steven decides to invite Martin to dinner at his home with his family. An attraction seems to spark between his daughter and Martin, and they begin spending time together. And then Steve's son complains that his legs feel numb...
One of my main problems that I had with The Lobster was the weird, artificial, alienating tone of the performances. The characters in The Killing of a Sacred Deer act in a very similar manner, but for some reason in this film it just worked for me. Its actors are deliberately affectless; characters will say "I love you so much" with the exact same flat tone that they will say "I think we should have mashed potatoes more often." Even when their actions appear emotional (in one scene a character is rampaging through a kitchen smashing glasses and plates on the floor), their tone of voice seems completely disconnected to their behaviour. It's a disorienting approach, and I'm not entirely why Lanthimos adopts it, but it works for me here. The thing that’s particularly odd about this is that this style of performance actually made a lot of sense in The Lobster, as that film took place in a sterile alternate world where emotion seemed to have little relevance, but it just didn’t connect with me. Whereas this film would seem to take place in our world so it should make no sense that everyone in the world would talk like this, and yet here I absolutely connected with it. It achieves a unsettling effect on the audience; we feel as though anyone could say anything and it would seem normal in the context. (Having watched Lanthimos' more recent works, I'm now really curious about going back and revisiting Dogtooth; it has been a number of years since I saw the film, and I don't remember whether this affectless approach to performance is present in that film or whether this is a recent development in Lanthimos' approach.)
One thing I do like about Lanthimos is his skill at balancing the weird tonal shifts that runs through the film. It is a film that is genuinely funny, and frequently had the audience laughing loud and long; if you'd heard just the audience, you would think this was one of the funniest comedies of the year. But it's a thriller, not just a comedy thriller but a genuine pitch-black horrific thriller. The really odd thing is that he seems to use laughter in the complete opposite way it normally works in these types of films. Usually laughter is used as a release valve for the audience; the director lets pressure build and build, and then right at the point where the tension is most unbearable you let the audience laugh, and it lets us breathe and relax back to a neutral position. But Lanthimos seems to know how precisely to use laughter to punctuate and even build the suspense. The film climaxes in a scene that I found utterly unbearable, in a sequence that forcefully reminded me of a moment from a particular Michael Haneke film (which I’ll not name to avoid spoilers), that had me looking away from the screen desperate to escape the horrors that were about to occur, and yet even in that scene I laughed out loud multiple times. And yet somehow the tension is not alleviated by the audience's laughter; if anything the scene becomes more intense, more unbearable.
I don't understand how this film works. I don't know why it works. I don't know that I even have the words to describe how it made me feel or what it made me think. I feel that I will be processing the film for weeks. For now, all I can say is, It's a spectacular film and I loved it.
I love the film festival. I love that it gives a chance to watch some of the best movies being made today in a crowded cinema with an audience that’s open and willing to engage with whatever it is we’re going to see. But as much as I may adore A Ghost Story or The Killing of a Sacred Deer, I’m also aware that these are films that would have very limited appeal outside of the festival. But one of the other things that’s great about the festival is that it can give a chance to have a look at what the mainstream popular cinema in other countries is doing. Much as I may love the Star Wars films or the Planet of the Apes films or really enjoy what Marvel is doing, it’s frustrating to see the cinemas filled for months with one big franchise film after another, with only the occasional spark of something slightly different, something that just wants to be a solid piece of entertainment. Bad Genius is currently the highest-grossing Thai film this year, and it’s a fun crowdpleasing film, the kind of film that used to be a massive hit here just a couple of decades ago. It’s not great and it’s not important, but it is a very good movie of the type that I wish was being made more regularly in mainstream English-speaking cinema.
The film focuses on Lynn, an exceptional student who is offered a scholarship to go to an expensive private school, where she befriends Grace, a sweet likable girl who is unfortunately not particularly strong in her studies. One day, Lynn decides to impulsively help Grace cheat in an exam, writing the multiple-choice answers on an eraser and then passing the eraser back to her. But when Lynn discovers her father is still paying massive amounts of money for the “free” education her scholarship got her, she agrees to accept payment from an ever increasing number of students in the school who are all too happy to cheat. Meanwhile the schemes increase and become ever more elaborate, until by the end they’re travelling to different countries, all in the pursuit of every opportunity to get ahead of the exam.
I was really rather impressed by how much style and energy is in the film. The real challenge of this premise is that, at its core, it’s about people taking exams. It’s about people sitting in a room, with a pencil, silently filling in multiple-choice circles. There are few things that could be less cinematic. But the film approaches these scenes as though they’re a heist; it’s basically Ocean’s 11. Everything in those scenes feels urgent – they even have a literal ticking clock counting down the seconds until the end of the exam – and it creates a remarkably intense experience for the audience. I’m not sure I necessarily buy the success of the schemes – the "piano scheme" in particular seems like it might look decidedly suspicious to any invigilator – but then, it’s a heist film, and the heists are never believable in heist films. What matters is how much enjoyment the film squeezes out of every moment, how much it communicates the thrill of doing something you shouldn’t do and getting away with it. And the movie absolutely succeeds at that.
One thing that I appreciated was how gentle the film was in exploring its themes. The film is definitely making a pointed comment about the haves and have-nots – the film is about a poor but talented student who is exploited by the wealthy who want to party and have fun and still get ahead without doing the work – but it approaches that idea with a light touch. I’ve seen so many films that feel the need to come right and have a character baldly state the theme of the film just in case the audience missed what the film was stating, and it depresses me every time, so it was nice to see a film that trusted that people are smart and are able to pick up on the ideas you’re trying to communicate.
I had an absolute blast with this film. It had me from its opening moment (the rare in media res opening that doesn’t take away from the film) until the blindingly white closing scene and the final line of dialogue. It’s just great fun, and I’m glad to have had a chance to enjoy it.
A sweetly moving film, Summer 1993 is the story of Frida, a six-year-old girl orphaned after the death of her mother, who moves from Barcelona into the country to live with her uncle, aunt, and toddler cousin Anna, spending the summer trying to find her place in her new family before she has to start at her new school.
This is not a film of great dramatic moments. It's essentially entirely observational. Scenes often don't have a concrete ending; we just watch until we've seen enough of a moment and can move on. Even scenes that in other films would give rise to major plot developments (one child goes missing, another runs away) are resolved almost without incident, the way they normally would be outside of a movie. But what I loved about the film is that it's entirely from Frida's point of view; I don't think there's a single scene that she's not present for. So the only information we have is what she knows. There are a few things we may be able to infer from our own understanding of the world in a way that she might not (it's pretty obvious how her mother probably died, even if the only actual explanation we get is a late-film child-friendly explanation), but there are conflicts and problems that seem to arise out of the blue and then vanish because the adults are keeping them from the children.
One thing I loved about the film was how real it was in its portrayal of Frida. There's no sentiment or nostalgia in the film. Sure, at times Frida is nice and sweet and a delight to be around, but at times she is an unthinking uncaring little shit who we're genuinely angry with. (There's a moment where she abandons Anna deep in the nearby forest and then claims that she hasn't seen her that made me so furious.) And on top of her just being a kid, with all the problems that entails, there's also the fact that she's grieving the death of her mother and trying to process emotions that she's absolutely unequipped to deal with, and this infuses into everything that she does. I don't know how they got this performance from young Laia Artigas, but it's utterly natural and non-performative, and quite wonderful.
There's also some very nice understated work by Bruna Cusí and David Verdaguer as the uncle and aunt who invite Frida into their life. There are already issues that they are dealing with themselves - their sister has died, and there's clearly some deeper family conflict with her that's hinted at but never explored. But they have to put all this on hold for this young girl who has gone through this terrible situation and who needs the comfort and safety of being loved no matter how much she might fight against it.
A charming, understated, and honest film. Well worth seeking out.
I really do not want to admit this, but out of a desire to be honest about my reactions to these films, I will admit: I spent the last 15 minutes of this movie crying. I had to wipe my eyes pretty constantly just to see the screen, and judging by the sniffling in the audience during that end sequence, I was not the only one.
In a strange coincidence, this was my second film in a row about a young child dealing with their grief over the death (or, in this case, impending death) of their mother. Conor O'Malley is a 12-year-old boy living with a mother who has terminal cancer. Conor insists that he's able to hold everything together (and the last thing he wants is to live with his grandmother, with whom he has an icy, distant relationship), but at night he repeatedly dreams about his mother falling into a pit and no matter how hard he tries he can't save her. And then a nearby yew tree comes to life and starts visiting him every night. And this monster makes him a promise; the monster will tell him three stories about other times that he was summoned, and then Conor will tell the monster his truth. And there will be healing.
I'm reluctant to say too much about the film, since I would absolutely urge people to seek this one out. It's worth making an effort to find it. What I will say is that A Monster Calls is a powerful exploration about the reality of grief and guilt and the emotions that a person goes through when someone they love dearly is going through this experience. There’s a moment where we realise what the film is saying about Conor’s experience where there was an audible gasp from the audience, as people realised they hadn’t considered the film would go to such a complicated and nuanced place. This is based on a children’s book, and as a result I think we’d expected it to be simplistic, but instead it achieved a level of emotional honesty that took everyone back.
There are some absolutely beautiful sequences in the film. I particularly enjoyed the scenes where we hear the monster's tales; the scenes are created for us to watch in a stylised watercolour form that is beautiful and expressive and evocative. And the stories themselves are not simplistic fairy tales; they're strange little stories about the contradictory nature of human beings, where good people are nasty and evil people help others. And they’re not necessarily stories where this person in the story obviously correlates to that person and this is the lesson that Conor is supposed to learn; the stories have thematic resonance and meaning, but nothing is spelled out and we’re trusted to ponder and discover the significance of those stories for ourselves.
The only thing, the only thing I didn't like about the film came in the closing credits. The film ended, I was incredibly moved, and I just wanted to sit through the credits to gather myself and reflect on the film I'd just watched. But after a few minutes of orchestral scoring the credits started playing some strangely upbeat pop song about learning to fly or some such rubbish, and I just had to get out of the cinema as fast as possible. It was a remarkably misjudged tonal shift that was utterly disconnected from the movie that preceded it. An awful choice, and I was so frustrated that this was the tone I had to leave the movie on.
Other than that, it is a moving and compassionate film, and I adored it. Do find it, do watch it.
At a building construction site, a major collapse leaves the family-owned construction company in significant legal troubles. Meanwhile, when the ex-wife of one of the family members is hospitalised after an overdose, the father takes in his 13-year-old daughter to live with them, where she discovers he is now cheating on his current wife. And the family patriarch is suffering from dementia, and is doing things that put his life in danger.
Here’s the thing: I find Michael Haneke a fascinating filmmaker. Sometimes I absolutely love him – I remember being riveted watching Code Unknown at the film society, and I wish I had seen Cache on the big screen (where every detail in those long lingering shots is massive and can be examined) rather than at home. Other times I hate him with a passion – when I watched the remake of Funny Games, I was so angry and wanted to be out of there so much that as soon as the credits started playing I literally ran out of the cinema and didn’t stop running until I was out of the building and down the street. (And I had previously seen the original, so I knew what I was in for when I saw the remake.) The thing about Haneke is, whether you like a Haneke film or not doesn’t matter. What he wants is to provoke a reaction.
But here’s what’s weird: with Happy End, I had no reaction. I didn’t care. I sat and watched these characters for 110 minutes, and could barely tell you a thing about them. The film just played in front of my eyes. And the thing is, I’m not really entirely certain what Haneke would have been trying to provoke. The opening and closing scenes, with the use of footage cellphone footage with Snapchat-style commentary, along with a couple of Facebook chat sequences would seem to suggest a commentary on social media, but it’s a pretty minor part of the film. There’s probably a bit of condemnation of the response to the current refugee situation in there, but not that much of it. Much of the setup of the film – the wealthy family beset by problems and scandals – would appear to be an ideal place for some commentary about capitalism, but if that’s what it was then it really was extraordinarily half-hearted. It’s muddled and scattershot, and juggles so many different plot-threads that I never felt I could get a grasp on anything. Hell, Toby Jones is in the film for exactly three scenes in total, his scenes are so limited and so spread out through the film that there’s never a chance to understand his character (and frankly, I probably would have even forgotten who he was were he not played by Toby Jones), and yet the final scene revolves around this nothing-character’s engagement to Isabelle Huppert! And the film just feels like it’s Haneke doing what he does: here’s the lengthy still shot where we sit and look at every detail waiting for whatever will happen, or here’s the long shot of a moment of interaction in the distance that suddenly turns violent. I’ve seen all this in much better works from him. In the end, Happy End is something I never would have thought could have existed: a boring Michael Haneke film. And I can’t think of anything more disappointing.
The new film from Sofia Coppola, The Beguiled focuses on a girls’ school in the South, left largely empty during the American Civil War except for the headmistress, one teacher, and five students who had no place else to go. They spend their days in lessons and tending the garden for food, and generally trying to avoid attracting attention from the troops who make their way past the school. Then one day one of the girls walking in the nearby forest finds an injured soldier, an Irish mercenary fighting for the other side, and she brings him back to the school for him to receive the care he requires.
I’m always excited to see a new film from Sofia Coppola; she’s an important talent with a distinct voice and point of view, while at the same time being able to mould her talent in service of her material. (Compare the softly mournful tone of The Virgin Suicides to the youthful energy of The Bling Ring; they unmistakably reflect Coppola’s concerns as a filmmaker, yet feel utterly unlike each other in almost every way.) And I adored the film. Here’s she’s operating with a strongly Southern Gothic atmosphere that really works. Visually it’s enchanting; there’s a glorious murk to the image, lending the entire world a sense of a place that has been abandoned and forgotten. She’s accumulated a great cast – having commented just a month ago to a friend how much I missed Kirsten Dunst, it was particularly exciting to see her work again with Coppola, as the two of them really bring a lot out of each other, but everyone in the film impresses. The cast has been given a phenomenal script to work with – her characters are all precisely drawn; the younger students in particular could easily have become a mass of generic characters, but instead each of them seemed very specific in who they were and in how they related to everyone around them. And there’s a great tone of eroticism running through the film – the Powell and Pressburger film Black Narcissus is an obvious point of influence for Coppola, with its world of women centred around a single man and intense desires barely suppressed. One thing that I was impressed with how the tone modulated and shifted with the characters, the way the deep roiling desire of the adults would shift into youthful naiveté depending on which characters are in play at any one time, while at the same time making that shift in tone feel as if they existed on the same spectrum, that the awkward nervousness of the young girls would mature into the intense passions of the adults.
One little thing did nag at me. I’m always understood Sofia Coppola to be a strongly feminist director, and so I find myself wondering why she decided to make this film. I freely admit, my feminist credentials are not up to date, but it seemed that a large part of this film is about a lot of women getting very googly-eyed over a man while he acts like a man at a smorgasbord overwhelmed by the options being presented to him. And I recognise that the behaviour of the women makes complete sense; when you’re stuck in a house alone with a bunch of women, and then all of a sudden there’s a man there, and he looks like Colin Farrell, it’s just natural that they would behave like this. And yes, this is a movie where the women’s sexuality and desire is absolutely at the foreground, and I recognise that acknowledging female sexuality is an important feminist ideal. But when you have the scene where they sing a song for him and we see Elle Fanning noticeably and awkwardly posing herself for him, or when you get the dinner scene where every woman wears their very best dress in an unambiguous effort to make themselves more appealing to the man, and we are invited to laugh at their transparent efforts (as we are), I find myself wondering what about this story spoke to Coppola as a female filmmaker. The film is a new adaptation of a novel that had previously been adapted by Don Segal in 1971 starring Clint Eastwood (I’d not previously heard of the earlier film), and Coppola has talked about wanting to retell this story from the women’s perspective (which makes me really curious about the earlier version, since I can’t really imagine what this story looks like when told from his point of view). And it’s an interesting idea to take a story that has been told from the male viewpoint and present it from the view of the women involved, but I still don’t understand why, of all the stories she could have told, she decided to tell this story.
But ultimately, I don’t really care why she decided to make the film. All I care about is that we now have this film, and it is wonderful.
(And one final point that I found interesting. Every year I find that there are a couple of actors who appear in multiple films in my festival schedule – for example, this year Elizabeth Moss was in both The Square and Top of the Lake. But as I was sitting in the opening credits for The Beguiled, I was struck by how many of those names I’d already seen in major roles in this festival. Angourie Rice had been the dead girl’s sister in Jasper Jones, Elle Fanning was the object of unrequited affection in 20th Century Women, Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman had played husband and wife together in The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and Kidman had also been the adoptive mother in Top of the Lake. This is a film with just eight core characters, and this was the second or third time in the past two weeks that I had seen literally half of this cast. I just thought that was weird.)
Final day of the festival started with Loveless, the story of a couple whose marriage has come to a toxic end. They’ve both moved on – him with an attractive young woman who’s soon to give birth to his child, and her with a wealthy older man who gives her entry to a life of comfort – and when they do have to meet they can barely stand to be civil to each other. The couple have a son, who is not coping at all well with seeing the harsh and vile way his parents’ relationship has developed, and who the mother plans to send to boarding school and then the army. Then one night he disappears without trace and, when the police assume he’s a runaway who will turn up again, the parents turn to a volunteer group established specifically to find missing children.
I was rather excited about this one. I'd been surprised by Andrey Zvyagintsev's previous film Leviathan, a beautiful and rich portrait of a man fighting to save his home from being effectively stolen from him. Unfortunately while Loveless was always engaging, it felt a bit unfocused. After an introduction to the family, the film spends rather a long time with each of the ex-spouses with their new lovers, so much so that it’s a surprise when they mention the son is missing because I had literally forgotten that they had a son. Once the son goes missing, the exes have a few scenes together but for the most part spend much of the remainder of the film separated, even though if anything this is the core relationship in the film. Part of the problem is that, whatever the film is about, it spends too much time not being about that. If the disappearance of the son is the focus, it's a long time before that's a thing; if it's about the breakdown of the marriage then the spouses spend far too much time apart to really have an impact.
Ultimately, I don't know exactly what the film is trying to say. Is it a condemnation of a government that has effectively abandoned its people, forcing them to come together to do the work of protecting its citizens that the government has chosen not to? Is it a portrait of people who are looking for the new experience that will give meaning to their life without realising that they'll just fall into the same old patterns? And what are we supposed to take from the resolution to the disappearance?
And I also wonder whether part of the problem is that I'm not Russian, so there are aspects of the film that just seem incomprehensible to me. For instance, it makes no sense to me that an employer, even an employer with deeply religious convictions, would apparently fire his employees if they get a divorce, but according to the film that's just accepted over there. I definitely think there's a good chance that the film's central mystery is in some ways supposed to be metaphorical of the political situation in Russia - we spend a lot of time listening or watching radio or TV media coverage of actual news stories - but if so, I'm simply not sufficiently familiar with current events in Russia to be able to pick up on what they're doing. And I freely admit, that's my own failing.
The thing is, I liked the film. I may not know what exactly Zvyagintsev was saying, or think the film was a bit unfocused, but it is a compelling film with characters that I cared about and a central mystery that I was deeply involved in. A flawed but interesting work.
The final film of the festival was a fun, if not especially deep, thriller. Robert Pattinson plays Connie, who pressures his developmentally disabled brother Nick to help him rob a bank. Connie escapes but Nick is caught and sent for holding in prison, where he is injured in a fight and has to be taken to hospital. Meanwhile Connie, feeling guilty for the role he played in getting Nick caught, tries desperately to get the money he needs to pay bail, but when he learns Nick is in the hospital he concludes a better option might be to just break him out.
I really did think this was a very strong piece of pure entertainment, with a wonderful throwback tone to it. In some ways it reminded me of an 80s-era Michael Mann film, but without the sheen of his work. Instead, there’s a grunginess to the film; while it takes place in modern-day New York, it feels as though it’s the type of New York that early-era Scorsese would portray, where you feel as though just existing in this world makes you dirty, and where it feels as though the grime is actively baked onto the very celluloid of the film. The retro sense of the film is particularly aided by the score; the synth-heavy music by Oneohtrix Point Never inescapably calls to mind the work of Tangerine Dream in their scores for films like Thief or Sorcerer, and is an absolute delight that hits the perfect tone.
Robert Pattinson, an actor I’ve not necessarily cared for in the past, is doing some exceptional work here. Connie feels like a character who’s always on the lookout, running on instinct, willing to seize on every weakness of everyone around and take advantage of it to get himself ahead, but whose inherent impulsiveness keeps forcing him deeper and deeper into trouble; it’s a nervous, edgy performance by Pattinson that actively sets us on edge. At the same time it’s a portrayal that should be unsympathetic, but Pattinson lends the role a disarming level of sincerity in his love for his brother and his regret over the impact his choices have had on the one person he actually cares about. It’s particularly disorienting because he’s so amoral and uncaring about everyone else – whether they be new acquaintances (like the granddaughter of the elderly woman or the ex-convict just out of jail) or if they’re people he’s supposed to actually care about (like his girlfriend who he shamelessly exploits) – that it’s weird to see him seemingly care about another human being.
It’s not a perfect film – a mid-film revelation felt particularly obvious although the film played it as a surprise, and some of the characters (the granddaughter in particular) seemed a bit too willing to just go along with Connie no matter what warning signals were on display. And it’s not that thematically rich. But after 17 days and 34 other films that were, for the most part, trying (and sometime succeeding, sometimes not) to be important and to have things to say, it was nice to end the festival with a film that just says that, above everything else, movies are just supposed to be fun. And Good Time is a real blast.
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