As usual, here is a post collecting my responses to the films of this year's film festival. They were written rather quickly, and posted to my Facebook within a day or two of each film, so I certainly wouldn't call them "reviews". They're just a reflection of my response to the film - how did I feel about them, what did I find myself thinking about when I reflected on the film.
[My thoughts on all 38 of my festival films, after the jump.]
It was an inauspicious start to the festival, with a film that was, fine, I guess. The film followed a corrupt cop who comes to an island to learn their local whistling language as part of a broader scheme to help free a businessman from jail and secure a significant amount of money acquired through criminal dealings.
The fundamental problem that I had with The Whistlers was that it felt like the film was trying to keep me at a distance. After the film, I heard the woman in the seat behind me saying that she felt lost and had no idea who anyone was; I don't think I was quite as bad, but at no point did I feel like I really had a firm grasp on any of the characters or what was motivating them beyond money. By the time of the climactic shootout, it didn't really matter to me because I didn't care about any of the characters, and because I felt like I didn't have a connection to any of the characters I wasn't invested in the outcome. The main character in particular seemed stoic to the point of emotionlessness. I have no idea who this person is, what his story is, what led him to his current position; I know nothing or about him beyond his direct actions in the film.
I also questioned the reality of the whistling language. I don't know - it may be that this language was a real thing, in which case that's fine and I apologise - but the way the language was explained to us as working, it seemed almost seemed to strip so much out of the language as to effectively render all communication utterly impossible. It's like - I can quite easily believe you could strip the vowels out of a language and effectively communicate just using consonants (we already do that often), but you couldn't strip out the consonants and communicate only with vowels, and that's is similar to what the whistling language seemed like it was doing. And so when you have scenes with characters communicating quite complicated messages, I found myself questioning how it would be possible to say these things through simply whistling. The most frustrating thing was that the whistling seemed largely pointless as a device, as there was nothing in the film that particularly relied on the whistling in a way that couldn't have been achieved through more conventional means.
The film had an annoying tendency to pick up potentially interesting ideas, but just as quickly abandon them never to be mentioned again. Early on, it seems that's though the film is taking place in an extreme surveillance state, with characters being spied on out on the street, or from hidden cameras in hotel rooms, all bugs in people's offices, and we see the way people have learned to work around those surveilling them. But I never felt that it clearly explained what was going on with the surveillance, and after a while it just stopped being a thing in the film. Connected to this, we learn that the police chief's office is bugged after she has to go into the corridor away from prying ears to ask someone to plant some evidence. This seems to set up a conflict where the "good guys" are just as bad as the bad guys, but after that scene ends, it's something that's never mentioned again, and I felt that we were supposed to see the police chief as a genuinely good character. And that just doesn't work.
I was also puzzled by the way the film ends. In the second to last scene, one character tells another character to meet them at the Gardens by the Bay in Singapore. Unless I missed something, I don't believe Singapore was ever mentioned at any other point in the film, so it comes out of nowhere. The final scene then plays out with one person walking around these gardens in the middle of an admittedly spectacular light show, looking for the other person. It doesn't feel like this is part of the film, especially since the film feels more interested in showing us the light show then in showing us the characters being reunited. Not that it matters too much, since I felt so little connection between the characters that I didn't really care about their reunion, but I also don't care about the light show we were being shown since those things are always more spectacular in person. Still, to have the final scene of your film be the reunion of two major characters, and have that take second place to a light show just shows how absent the characters felt from the story being told. It frankly felt as though the director had seen the light show on his holiday and decided to force it into a film he'd already made - it feels that disconnected.
It has some nice sequences, and I was certainly entertained by what was going on, but I simply felt that it ultimately didn't create the connection with the audience that it needed.
An utterly delightful romantic comedy, La Belle Époque focuses on Victor, a 60-something cartoonist in a largely loveless marriage with a woman who is thrilled by all the technology of the modern world and who is frustrated at her husband's stubborn preference for a world of pen and paper. After his wife throws him out of home, he decides to use a gift he received - a complimentary experience with a company that recreates historical periods for people who want to know what it was like to live during, say, World War 2. But rather than trying to experience being one of Hemingway's drinking buddies, or life as a French aristocrat, he chooses to return to a small cafe in 1974 and relive the day where he met and fell in love with his wife. And as he experiences the start of this relationship again, with a young actress playing the role of his wife, he starts to reconnect with the person he was and the woman he fell in love with.
It's an enjoyable reflection on the power of nostalgia, and the dangers that it can pose. Victor talks about the world of 1974 with great affection for the smoke-filled cafes and the hedonistic drug-fuelled parties, and lovingly recreates those moments in delicately detailed drawings, but he's blind to the faults of that era. He doesn't seem to understand that what he loved about that time was not that 1974 was an ideal time, but just that he was young and excited and eager to understand the world, in a way that the man he's turned into, irritable and resistant to change, has lost.
This nostalgic experience also seems to presented itself as an easy trap for him to fall into. We see him becoming increasingly desperate to remain in that world, regardless of the expense, because it feels so comfortable and exciting to him. But it's also clear that he's been driven by the challenges of his relationship with his wife; he doesn't understand her as she is now, and though it's clear that he wants to try to restore the marriage, he seems almost unable to conceive of how to do that. And that's why his return to this world has such an allure, because at least there he knows what to do, what to say, in order to get his wife to fall in love with him, because he's already done that once before. What's hard is trying to find the way to connect with her now.
I found myself somewhat uncertain about the romantic relationship between Margot, the actress playing the role of the wife, and Antoine, the director steering the experience. There's a weird toxic codependence between the two, that is played for laughs in an uncomfortable way. I'm not entirely certain about that element of the film. I think it might be that the relationship is intended as a contrast against the idealised romanticised version of Victor's version of him falling in love. Despite Victor's constant insistence on correcting every detail, we never actually see what 1974 was actually like and how their relationship actually started - there's never any flashback to show us all the early little problems and fights that Victor has erased from his memory; we only ever see the version where rose petals fall from the ceiling as he watches her dancing. But I think in Margot and Antoine, we're supposed to see the turbulent emotions that come with being young and in love, and we're supposed to then apply those observations over to Victor and Marianne. The problem is that the relationship between Margot and Antoine is so rough, is so constantly on the verge of breaking up, that if that's what we're supposed to take from it then it feels much too much. And if it's something else, then I'm not entirely sure what we're supposed to take from that part of the story.
Still, it really is a wonderful movie, and a fantastic end to the first day of the festival.
One of the surprising things about film, given the fact that it is a visual medium, is that sound is arguably more important to the medium than picture. There have been experiments that have shown that people are more willing to accept a film that has a bad picture but good sound, than a film that has good picture but poor sound. It's almost like the reality of the medium is established by what we hear, rather than what we see. It's something I can confirm is true from personal experience. Last year I was at a screening of a film that I knew had been shot on an iPhone. The picture was surprisingly good, but the audio was incredibly muddy, something that I assumed reflected the films low-budget origins, and I just wasn't getting into the film. After about 10 minutes, someone in the projection booth clearly realised there was an incorrect sound setting, fixed it, and suddenly the sound was crystal-clear. And from that point, this film I had found impossible to get into suddenly was transformed into something I really enjoyed.
Making Waves was a solidly made documentary giving an engaging and accessible introduction to the place of sound in cinema. The thing about sound is that it's supposed to be invisible, you're not supposed to be aware of it, it's just supposed to be a natural part of the world that you're watching. So the documentary opens with a fascinating sequence establishing the significance of sound to cinema by looking at the opening of Saving Private Ryan, how the film visually has a very narrow focus on just the immediate world of Tom Hanks' character, and how it's in the sound that we get a sense of the wider chaos of the battle that is taking place out of view of the camera.
From there the documentary expands out into a history of sound in film. One thing I never knew was that the movie camera was initially developed by Edison with an idea that it would be paired with his phonograph - sound was always part of his vision for cinema, even if ultimately they didn't have the technical ability to achieve it. It then takes you through the major landmarks and advances to sound technology - The Jazz Singer being the first film to have fully synchronised dialogue, or King Kong with its revolutionary use of animal effects reconstructed to create new sounds for Kong and the dinosaurs. It talks about the ability of radio to construct fully immersive soundscapes, and how Orson Welles brought his experience from radio when he was constructing the soundscape for Citizen Kane. There's brief discussion about people like Kubrick and Hitchcock, who had an innate understanding of how to make the sound work for effect, rather than just accompanying the image. There's the way the Beatles innovations with stereo took a good decade to feed through into cinema, and how it was Barbra Streisand's work on her version of A Star is Born that really established stereo sound. And then there's a fantastic extended sequence dedicated to Walter Murch's work on Apocalypse Now, creating probably the first significant six-speaker sound and effectively creating modern movie sound. Then there's the movement away from cutting sound on magnetic tape towards the flexibility of editing audio digitally. And all the way through the film it takes detours to give miniature biographies of the modern legends in cinema sound - people like Walter Murch, Ben Burtt, and Gary Rydstrom.
And then the film starts to explain exactly how sound for a movie is created, taking you through the individual elements of dialogue, sound effects, and score. We learn what's involved in using the original on-set dialogue versus recreating the dialogue in ADR. We learn about sound design, about finding sounds in the real world that can be repurposed and reconstructed to create something new or to punch up something that already exists - like the jets in Top Gun, which had animal growls added to the sound to give them more impact. There's the section on foley artists, showing them painstakingly create crunching footprints or the sloshing of wet clothes. And finally there's a brief discussion about the place of music in aiding the impact of the film.
It's a well made and engaging film, that I think most people would find unexpectedly fascinating. It offers a convincing demonstration of the significance of sound design in affecting the way we watch movies. But it is definitely a film that is very introductory. It has much too much to cover in only 90 minutes, and so it does feel like everything is a little bit disjointed, and the film is constantly jumping from topic to topic to try to squeeze everything it can in. But for what it is, it's a thoroughly entertaining and fascinating piece that I enjoyed.
An incredible tribute to the single greatest human achievement, Apollo 11 is a fantastic cinematic experience and should be sought out, on the big screen if at all possible. With the exception of a handful of brief simple diagrams explaining the different stages of the mission, the film is constructed entirely from audio and visuals shot at the time, including some incredible footage shot on large format film documenting aspects of the mission that I've never seen before. There are no talking heads, there's no retrospective commentary, there are no recreations. It's all what happened at the time.
What's fantastic about the choice to only use historical material is that it manages to put you in the mindset of those who were there at that time; you can see and feel the tension and the suspense and the excitement as the mission reaches each new stage, each new opportunity for something to go wrong. And so it takes this event that is so well-known, so completely documented, and presents it in a way that makes you feel like you've never seen it before. I've never been more fully aware of the colossal power of the engines taking off. I genuinely found myself sitting in genuine suspense as the lunar module came down to land on the moon. I wanted to applaud as the astronauts returned to Earth. These are images and moments that I've seen countless times, but the way the film presents them makes me feel as though I'm experiencing them for the first time. Part of that is a conscious choice by the director to rely on lesser-known footage. Even the moment of Neil Armstrong stepping on the moon is presented in a way I have never seen, with the film using high angle footage from a camera mounted on top of the lunar module looking down at Armstrong. It's not the best angle to see the moment, but we've all seen the broadcast footage, we don't need to see it again, and this gives us something new, something fresh, a different perspective on one of the most-watched moments in human history. And I realised that, while that first step is so well known, the rest of the mission was basically a blank for me. I don't know that I've ever seen that the footage of Buzz Aldrin coming down to join Armstrong on the moon. I don't know that I had a clear knowledge of what they did once they got there. But the film corrects that, because it's not focused solely on that one moment, but on the mission as a whole.
And there's a surprising humanity to the experience. Moments where we get to see all these people not as legends completing this momentous achievement, but just normal people working together and acting as though this was any other workplace. They discuss the news (given the importance of JFK in inspiring the mission, it was interesting to hear them discussing the events in Chappaquiddick). They make jokes (there's a fantastic moment where Buzz Aldrin is coming down on to the moon and he makes a joke about taking care not to accidentally lock the door). They chat. They listen to music. And then they go and do something incredible.
My only disappointment was that it wasn't possible for me to see it on an IMAX screen; the Embassy is a fantastic screen and I love it deeply, but it must have been an overpowering experience to watch on the IMAX. Still, whether on the big screen or the small, Apollo 11 is an absolutely incredible experience. If the mission is the greatest achievement in human history, the film does a great job in focusing on the human element, rather than just the achievement. It's worth seeking out however you can see it.
This was the first Agnès Varda film that I've ever seen, and I don't know if it was the best place to start, or the worst possible place to start. The film is constructed essentially from several talks given by Varda in which she reflects on her life, her career, and her art. I found it genuinely entertaining, and Varda is an engaging and thoughtful speaker, and it's increased my excitement at the prospect of experiencing her work. And having seen this film, I do think that it will give me a useful starting point for thinking about her films as I watch them. But for the moment, as I'm watching this specific film, when she talks about the two halves of Cleo From 5 To 7, it didn't mean a lot to me because at the moment Cleo From 5 To 7 is just the title of a famous film that I've heard of but have no relationship with.
It's for that reason that I think the part I most engaged with was the section where she was discussing some of her video art installations, because there was less of an expectation that people would be familiar with what she was talking about, and we therefore were given greater context for whatever point she was making. At the start of the film she talks about three words that underpin the work of an artist - inspiration, creation, and sharing. And it's in the section on her art that we are able to best observe the importance of sharing art, the impact that her work has on people watching it. At one point, the film takes a couple of minutes to talk about an art piece she did inside a small shed set around the grave of a much-loved cat. We watch several children having the experience, they talk about what they're feeling after watching the video, and then there's a nice moment where one young girl runs back into the shed to watch the video because it's better to watch when there aren't other people around. The girl's excitement at experiencing this artwork is genuinely a delight.
I enjoyed the film; I enjoyed the playfulness of it, and it made me excited to start to engage with Varda's work during the rest of the festival. But this was a difficult film for me to reflect on, because of my lack of context for her work and because it was so focused on her work piece-by-piece, without necessarily providing an overarching perspective of her work as a whole. Still, I had fun.
Francis Ford Coppola marked the 40th anniversary of his legendary film about a soldier sent up-river to kill a rogue colonel during the Vietnam War by restoring and re editing the film into what he's called the Final Cut. I don't know that I need to say too much about the film itself - it's a truly incredible experience, bizarre and nightmarish and funny and terrifying, and any attempt to try to express a response to the film will inevitably feel inadequate and superfluous. You should have seen it, and if you haven't then you've been living life wrong and need to address that failing as soon as possible.
It's never been a short film - the original theatrical version was 153 minutes long, and in 2001 he released his Redux version that added an extra 50 minutes to the film. This Final Cut falls somewhere between the two, running almost exactly for 3 hours. And I think length-wise this is about ideal for the film. At 2 1/2 hours, the original film is just too short, without the time to really linger in the world. The film is supposed to be bizarre and hallucinatory, and we're supposed to feel like we're going mad with the characters, but in the original version there just wasn't the time to achieve that effect. The Redux certainly had the necessary time, but it was much too long, testing the patience of the viewer. But with the Final Cut, it achieves the necessary balance, allowing the audience to walk out of the film exhausted and drained, but still engaged with the film.
Having just watched the documentary about cinematic sound, with its discussion about how Apocalypse Now created the sound of modern movies, I found myself very consciously engaging with the way Walter Murch used every sound at his disposal to create this world. The slow throbbing of helicopter blades, the eerie stillness of the jungle, the power of the boat engine, the wild climax of the music, all feed into the impact of the movie. My favourite moment of sound comes in the Ride of the Valkyries attack. We've heard Lt Kilgore talk about how they play Ride of the Valkyries loud because it scares the villagers, and then we sit and listen to the music for a minute. And then there's a sudden silence, as we go to a small school in this village, where all is peace and calm, and then ever so quietly we hear the music in the background, building, and slowly people hear the music, and they recognise what it means, and there's a panic that builds, even as the music is only faint. Eventually the helicopters arrived, and the music is loud, and the explosions are deafening and chaotic, but for that one moment, there's a genuine terror that is communicated in the quiet. And it's a fantastic moment.
If there's one thing I think the Final Cut has proven, it's that Coppola's big disappointment with the film was his inability to include the French Plantation in the original film - it feels as though both the Redux and the Final Cut exist primarily to restore that scene to its rightful place. And it's a shame, because I think most people who saw the Redux agreed that the worst part of it was the French Plantation sequence, which was just too long and tiresome; it doesn't feel quite that bad here, although I don't know if that's because he's edited the sequence further, or if it just feels better because the film preceding it is tighter. But the problem with the sequence is that it doesn't feel relevant to the film. The film is about the insanity of war - there's a scene where Colonel Kurtz bemoans the idea of the US military providing aircraft to rain death and destruction on a populace, but not letting its soldiers write the word "Fuck" on their aircraft because it's obscene, and it's that kind of bizarre insanity and hypocrisy in war that the film is exploring. But that's not what the French Plantation sequence is about - instead it's a long engagement with the history of colonisation in Vietnam, which is a significant issue, but it stops the film's momentum dead. It feels like an idea that Coppola had and just couldn't let go off. There's a famous idea in art that you need to be prepared to kill your darlings, you need to be prepared to remove that thing that you love if it will make the work better as a whole. When the original cut of Apocalypse Now came out, technical problems with the French Plantation sequence meant that it couldn't be included; this meant that the choice to kill that darling was made for him at that time, and it's a shame he wasn't ever able to let that go.
I'm no expert on Apocalypse Now and the various versions, so I can't be definitive about what was and was not trimmed or added for the Final Cut. The only thing I know is in the Redux and not in the new cut is the second appearance of the Playmates. I think I would have rather they had dropped the French Plantation sequence and kept the reappearance of the Playmates. That's not a great scene either - it feels too coincidental to run into them again, and it's always felt a bit distasteful in the way the men trade their fuel for a couple of hours of intimacy with the girls - but that at least feels a part of what the film is exploring, in the way that the men take advantage of the danger and threat of the war and the desperation of these girls to get out to get what they want. They could have kept the Playmates scene, dropped the French Plantation sequence, have kept the film pretty close to that 3 hour run time, and then I think we would have had a version of Apocalypse Now that was pretty damned perfect. Instead, Apocalypse Now remains what it always was, a flawed masterpiece. But what a masterpiece.
At the start of the film, a card on screen informs us of an astonishing fact. In Mexico City, with a population of 9 million people, there are only 45 ambulances funded by the Government. This massive shortfall has led to the rise of private ambulances, competing with each other to respond to callouts in the hope that whoever is injured is insured or has the ability to pay for the services they deliver. The film focuses on a private ambulance operated by the Ochoa family - in particular concentrating on the charismatic 17-year-old Juan, who operates the ambulance with his father Fern, while his younger brother Josue skips school in the day and spends the night hanging out in the back of the ambulance.
The experience of the film is frequently exhilarating - when the call comes out for medical service, and the family spring into action, racing to be the first to get there to help. We ride with the ambulance as they tear down the streets, sirens blaring, Fern on the loudspeaker yelling at people to move out of the way. And when they do get there, and they are able to help the person, you get this sense of the great pride that these people taken their job. But at the same time, they are a business, and so there are nights where they walk away having lost money, because they provided a service, they used medical supplies and petrol, for a person who doesn't have the means to pay them for what they did. And that leaves the family barely above the poverty line, with one moment where the family even needs to borrow money to put petrol in the ambulance.
And yet, the film never quite goes the way of portraying the Ochoa family as great heroes. After all, there are multiple moments in the film where we ride with them as they race at high speed down narrow streets alongside a competing ambulance both trying to be the first to get there to take the work; there are even times where you wonder whether they are going to cause a crash themselves trying to beat another operator. And then there are the moments where they seem too eager to encourage their patients to go for care in a private hospital; it's never said, but you get the sense they get paid by the hospital for the patients they bring to them. (In one deeply upsetting moment, a mother whose daughter has just died accuses them of letting her die because they brought her to a private hospital rather than taking her to a much closer public hospital.) But that's the nature of the system. Above all, the film is an indictment of a severely broken medical system, which has out of necessity forced the creation of these private ambulances and these insane practices. But then the police service doesn't seem to be much better, with police constantly insisting on bribes before they will allow these ambulances to operate (and even at one moment seeming to be about to arrest Juan on some spurious basis).
Throughout its runtime, the film remains strictly observational, just letting the events play out in front of the camera. But the presentation of the events leaves us in no doubt that the film is fuelled by an anger at how dysfunctional the medical system is in city. Above all it's a gripping insight into a world I never would have imagined existed.
A fantastic little drama, The Farewell stars Awkwafina as Billi, a woman whose family emigrated from China to the United States when she was a child. She's remained close to her grandmother in China over the years, and so is distressed when she learns that the grandmother has terminal cancer but doesn't know, as the family has decided to keep it a secret from her. (Apparently this is common in China.) Instead, Billi's cousin is being press-ganged into marrying his girlfriend of three months, so that the entire family can have an excuse to come together in China and have one last family gathering with the grandmother.
Based apparently on the actual experiences of writer-director Lulu Wang, the film is an intriguing exploration of the conflict inherent in life as an immigrant. At this point, Billi has spent about half her life living in China and half living in the States; she's reached a point where she feels comfortable in America, and certainly would identify herself as an American, but at the same time her family moved to the United States when she was old enough to clearly remember the experience, to know what it was like coming to a new country where you're alone without your support systems, not knowing the language, and trying to find a new identity and a new life in this new country. And she is also old enough to very clearly remember her life in China, enough to recognise and be astonished by the amount of change that has occurred in China over the past decade or two. And so she finds herself very much caught between these two worlds and these two cultures. When it comes to the issue of the lie that is at the centre of the film, it seems almost impossible to her that people would go along with this, see this as something acceptable, because she exists in a world that emphasises the importance of the individual, and so she struggles to understand a culture where a person's life is not just theirs but their families'. It's in that cultural context that it is acceptable to not tell someone that they're dying, it's reasonable to create false medical results declaring that the matters of concern proved to simply be benign shadows, it's okay to secretly give someone medication telling them that it's just vitamins. The way the film explores the challenge of this cultural conflict is subtle and nuanced and always sympathetic to everyone involved.
Up to now I haven't really cared for what I've seen of Awkwafina, whose comedic work in films like Ocean's 8 or Crazy Rich Asians always felt very big and broad. Here, however, she is fantastic, giving a performance that is gentle and restrained. Much of the character is defined by this fundamental conflict that is warring within - she's already grieving for the grandmother she knows she's going to lose, and she's someone who struggles to hides her emotions, but she needs to make it seem as though she is excitedly celebrating the joyous event that is this impromptu wedding, all the time feeling severe discomfort at this cultural difference that says that it's OK to keep something like this secret. And I was genuinely surprised by just how clearly and carefully Awkwafina manages to communicate that struggle. At the same time, having someone in the role whose background is comedic gives her the ability to bring out the natural laughs inherent in the absurdity of the situation. It's impressive work, and I'm now much more interested in seeing what she does in future.
And it's not just Awkwafina that manages to bring the comedy to the film. For such a serious and emotional drama, it's impressive just how constantly funny the film is. One of my favourite running jokes in the film revolved around the constant bewilderment of the Japanese soon-to-be bride, who at times seems completely overwhelmed by the experience, extremely uncomfortable at being pressed into marriage so soon into the relationship, and just utterly bewildered at being in this environment where she doesn't know the language or understand what's going on, and just has to smile and get through it. I also adored the performance of Zhao Shuzhen as Nai Nai, the grandmother at the centre of the film. There's a hilarious strength and determination to the character that feels very real, and when at the end of the film Lulu Wang includes footage of the real Nai Nai, it becomes clear just how genuine and loving the portrayal is.
An absolute delight, and well worth seeking out.
I was a bit surprised when I saw that the new film by Werner Herzog was an interview with the final president of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev. But I was intrigued - while I'm not much of a fan of Herzog's narrative films, I do really enjoy his documentaries, which allow his distinctive personality free rein. And some of my favourite moments of Herzog being Herzog come in his one-on-one interactions with other people, and so I was curious what the film would be like.
The film was certainly fascinating, but Gorbachev does feel rather closed off, although admittedly it's possible that may be a consequence of the way the interview was conducted. Herzog asked his questions in English, while Gorbachev answers in Russian, but with no obvious sign of a translator telling Herzog what Gorbachev just said. So when Gorbachev pauses for a moment midway through his reply, it's unclear whether he's taking this time to reflect on what exactly he wants to say, or whether he's just pausing to allow the translator time to translate and the audio of the translator has just been stripped from the film. But for whatever reason, those extended delays in his answers mean it does feel as though he is being very guarded in what he says. Couple that with the fact that Herzog is very clearly an admirer of Gorbachev, which forces him into a position where he's much more respectful then he often is. (As a friend of mine observed, it almost seemed as though the film existed as an excuse for Herzog to meet Gorbachev.) All of which means that it really doesn't feel like a Herzog film - if it weren't for the fact that Herzog appears on screen, I don't think you could have guessed that he was behind it. There's really only one moment where Herzog's personality as a film-maker comes out, when a string of three identical funerals are presented in quick succession to chart Gorbachev's rise to the leadership of the Soviet Union.
Which brings me to the other thing that surprised me about the film. With the understanding that the film was primarily an interview with the man, I was not expecting quite as much archival footage - not that I'm complaining, since I suspect without the context provided by this material I would have been lost. I was more bothered by the prominent use of talking heads from people that had interacted with Gorbachev during his time as leader - some of these commentators seemed to have almost as much screen time as the Gorbachev interviews, and that balance did feel wildly off.
And that's especially true given how good the actual interview with Gorbachev was. It was fantastic whenever the film just let Gorbachev reflect on his experience. When you hear him talk about the thinking that led him to identify the need for perestroika (economic reform) and the way he identified the necessary changes to achieve that reform, it's fascinating. When you hear about his passion for ridding the world of nuclear weapons, and his frustration at modern brinkmanship that may be restoring the nuclear arsenal, it's great. There's a moment where he talks about some peace talks held between him and Ronald Reagan, where coming out of the talks the US felt that nothing had really been achieved, and said so publicly; Gorbachev discusses how he simply decided not to buy in to the negativity and despondency coming out of the discussions, instead declaring the talks to be a great success, thus making space for the other parties to the negotiation to also alter the perception of the talks. And there's an incredible sadness to the interview when he talks about how much it pained him to see the breakup of the Soviet Union, or how his dream of truly democratic rule in the country was stymied by those in power whose self-interests would have been affected by democracy.
As a documentary, as an insight into one of the most significant people of the 20th century, it's very good. It just lacks the personality of its filmmaker, and that's a slight disappointment.
The film opens with a middle-aged woman, newly separated from her husband, going to a department store during "the sales", to buy a dress that she can wear on dates. She buys a striking ambassadorial dress in an arterial red colour, at the urging of the somewhat creepy verbose saleswoman. The dress is striking on her, although she does notice a rash forming on her body after wearing it. And the dress seems to have a life of its own, moving from room to room, at times apparently floating in mid air. And then, after she learns that a woman was run over at a zebra crossing shortly after modelling that exact dress for the store catalogue, she becomes convinced that the dress is possessed, almost demonic.
So where does one start with In Fabric? How do you talk about the disarming bloody horror of a washing machine gone mad? How do you describe a film that in one scene has a dress crawling along the ceiling and then dropping down to suffocate the person below? What is there to even say about a film that has a scene of the elderly store owner pleasuring himself while watching his saleswoman give an erotic sponge bath to a mannequin with anatomically accurate bleeding genitalia? I mean, objectively this is a very silly film, and those of us in the cinema all knew that, but we all came into the film knowing we were seeing a film about an evil dress - the rounds of laughter echoing around the cinema could easily have been derisive and mocking from those who weren't on the film's wavelength, but I thought they were laughs of delight and joy from those who got the film and were excited to see where it would go.
I loved the choice to never put a name to what was going on in the store; I assume it was witches, but that may simply be because I was reminded of the original Suspiria. And the way Strickland shoots these woman, all tall and severe and amusedly strict comes across as strangely perverse and erotic. I was reminded of something that David Fincher once said, "If you think that you can hide what your interests are, what your prurient interests are, what your noble interests are, what your fascinations are, if you think you can hide that in your work as a film director, you're nuts." Strickland clearly isn't worried about the film revealing his fetishes, he positively revels in them. Indeed, in all of his films, I've found Peter Strickland to be a very tactile director, very in touch with cinema as a way of connecting with your senses. Here I loved the subtle sensuality of the film, and the way that the fabric was shot with such clear in such detail that it seemed as though you could since the way the fabric feels under your fingers.
So what does the film add up to? At the moment, I'm honestly not sure. There's certainly a degree of commentary on consumerist society, on the compulsion we have to rush into the shop in response to never-ending sales pitches, but beyond that I'm currently not entirely sure what deeper message I'm supposed to take from the film. But I'm excited to read the wider commentary on the film and see what other people see in the film.
This is almost the definition of a film that is not for everybody - if you hear that this is a film about an evil dress and the erotic allure of shop saleswoman, and you think that sounds silly, then you're not going to care for the film. But if you hear that description and you don't immediately start laughing, then you might be at the right wavelength to connect with and sincerely enjoy the film.
I really didn't have much familiarity with the old Punch and Judy puppet shows; what little knowledge I had comes from references in other pop culture. I knew about the existence of some of the characters - obviously the titular husband and wife, but also their baby, the policeman, and the dog that steals the sausages. And obviously I knew that a lot of the humour came from the character of Punch violently assaulting his wife Judy and others. So I was a little bit curious about the notion of a feminist retelling of, and an ostensible origin for, the Punch and Judy story.
Set in 17th century Britain, in a small town optimisticly called Seaside (although it's nowhere near the sea), we meet the entertainer "Professor Punch", who works with his talented wife Judy to put on elaborate and complicated marionette performances, that always ultimately conclude with one character giving a good walloping to another. Punch is a respected member of society, and is even invited to throw the first stone whenever they have to stone a woman for witchcraft because she looked at the moon too long. But one day while caring for the baby, the dog steals Punch's breakfast sausages, he drunkenly gives chase but trips, and accidentally flings the baby out the window to its death. When Judy returns home and asks Punch where the baby is, Punch beats her to death because he's sick of her nagging, and then blames the deaths on his senile servant Scaramouche and wife. But there are real witches living in the nearby forest, and when they decide to resurrect Judy, she decides to seek revenge on the man who murdered her.
It's a pretty impressive film, especially for a first-time-feature director. Mirrah Foulkes gives the film an unexpected sense of scope and scale, especially for a film that does take place in such a limited locale. There's an ambition, with a fully realised world that exists with its own cultures and traditions, its own in jokes, and characters who we glimpse only briefly but who feel very real and lived in. And I think she generally does a great job in dancing around the context of the society as it would have existed at the time. Often when you see films that seek to retell an older story through a modern context we wind up with a story in which characters behave the way a person might behave today, regardless of how much that may or may not make sense in that time period. But here there's a sense that the characters, especially the woman, are all very aware that they "know their place", and when people do act outside the boundaries of accepted behaviour, they do so explicitly and with full understanding of what their actions mean. And I think it's a film that doesn't rely on any knowledge of the traditions around Punch and Judy in order to grasp or enjoy the film - if the film relied too much on an audience knowing all the references and all the characters, then I think the appeal of the film would be restricted, especially given the outdated nature of the show, but I do think anyone could watch the film and not even know that there was a puppet show to reference and enjoy it.
The performances in the film are a great deal of fun. I realise we've reached a point where the fact that Mia Wasikowska gives a great performance can just be taken as given, but I loved her soft, steely work as a woman who is used to fading into the background and letting her husband take the prominent role, but who is strong willed and not willing to just take whatever is given to her. Damon Herriman as Punch is someone I'm not familiar with, but I'm instantly interested in him. He gives a performance that is filled with charm and charisma, but he's someone who craves the limelight and who is willing to do or say anything, sacrifice whatever he needs to, in order to it the fame he deserves. (I'm particularly intrigued because I know Herriman is playing Charles Manson in the new Quentin Tarantino film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and there is such overlapping between the two characters that I'm now even more excited to see what Tarantino does.)
I will confess to being bothered by a couple of small creative choices in the film. Firstly, there's a lot of music that stands out as period-inappropriate, whether it be music by Bach played on a Moog synthesizer, or Leonard Cohen's song "Who by Fire". Secondly, there is an unusual moment during the climax in which one character recites one of the best-known speeches from the movie Gladiator. Both of these matters came up during the Q&A after the film. Mirrah Foulkes explained the music by talking about how she felt that the tone of the movie was very unusual, and how they had to look very hard to find an artist with ideas that would work well with the film. But I'm not sure that this did work; I did find myself constantly distracted by the music, especially when it seemed as though some of the synthesizer music was supposed to be diegetic, as in the scenes where it scores the puppet show. I was more bothered by the Gladiator quote, which does come at the climax of the film and which distracted me, as for a moment I had to pause and try to remember which film that particular quote came from. Foulkes defends the reference, saying that it's intended to highlight that Punch and Judy didn't invent violence as entertainment, and that throughout human history we've always looked to be entertained by violence. And that is a solid justification, but the problem is that the moment itself distracts right at the point where we are supposed to be most in suspense at what will happen next, and I'm not sure that the justification she gives for the quote is necessarily communicated in the film itself. Not every screening gets to have the director there to explain what she was trying to achieve in the moment, and so it does feel like a misstep on her part. Still, this is her first film, and for the most part it is an impressively confident and assured piece of work.
A beautiful, contemplative, almost hypnotic piece of science fiction cinema, High Life opens with Robert Pattinson travelling on a spaceship with only a young baby for company. Every day he has to give a report on his actions, in order to receive another 24 hours of life support, although he observes that people won't receive these reports for hundreds of years - if there even are people alive to receive these reports. And then, in an effort to preserve was little resources he has, he decides to abandon the cryogenically frozen bodies of his former shipmates. It seems that everyone on this ship, Pattinson included, were death row prisoners offered a reprieve in return for agreeing to be human guinea pigs in a ship undertaking a one way trip towards a black hole. While en route, the ship's doctor, played by Juliette Binoche, conducts experiments into reproduction on the shipmates. But it all ends disastrously, until the only people left alive are Pattinson and a young baby.
Science fiction is a genre that has traditionally been used to explore the question of what it is that makes us human. The answer, according to High Life, seems to be our physical form. It's a very fleshy film; I don't know that there's a single bodily fluid that doesn't appear on screen at some point in some way during the film. The film also argues that the human experience is defined by the ultimate fate of our physical form, with death constantly pulling at us like the slow pull of a black hole that takes us away from the familiarity of all existence. And then there's the strong focus on our base instincts running through the film, whether it be our violent impulses or more significantly our sexual desires; there's even a room, called "the box", filled with devices that exist solely for the purpose of allowing people to relieve these desires. But it's clinical and routine, and for some people the desire for what is unattainable is stronger than permissible relief - the fact that Robert Pattinson has decided voluntarily to be celibate makes him almost the focus of constant attention from the doctor, and there are other people who also seek to impose their will and their desires over the choice of others.
All of which is making the film sound as though it's some kind of outer space exploitation film. It's really not. Despite the film's focus on the base instincts of its characters, the film keeps itself away from indulging the impulses of the audience; there's nothing titillating about the film, nothing that feels gratuitous, if anything it's more likely to repulse rather than arouse. It is slow, it is contemplative; I've seen comparisons to 2001, and that's not a bad point of comparison, except there is more of a sense of human experience in High Life than in Kubrick's work. But even in moments that would in other films seem erotic, here the film stands separated and disconnected from the moment.
And besides, all that seems to focus only on one half of the film. As terrible as the interactions of the convict shipmates are, there's also this other half of the film where Robert Pattinson has to raise this young girl. And as much as the film is aware of how impossible it would be to raise a child in these circumstances, quite literally alone without any support, there's still a genuine delight and innocence in those scenes that is simply joyous. There's one scene in particular, where Pattinson helps the girl walk for the first time, which is just beautifully and lovingly shot.
But the presence of the girl in the story also creates some interesting shading. As I said, the film establishes this idea the bizarre death row convicts seeking to redeem themselves for their sins. But that makes it sound rougher than it perhaps is. There's a scene where the doctor mocks the other shipmates for not being real criminals, observing that she's the only one that did any kind of real crime; for the most part these are not hardened criminals or evil people, but simply people who got caught up in a situation that went out of their control. (That's certainly true for Pattinson's character.) And in that context, the experience of finding yourself stranded in deep space seems like cruel and unusual punishment for the crimes these people committed. But it seems especially tragic for this young girl who will grow up never knowing a world that isn't the spaceship. She claims to be okay with it, that there's nothing she needs that she doesn't have, but there's still something about the human experience that pulls in her - her entire knowledge of the world comes from videos, when she sees footage of people praying, she decides to try it, just to see what people are feeling when they do it.
I don't believe I've ever seen any films by Claire Denis before, and I feel that is an oversight on my part. Right from the start, with the images of bodies floating slowly down past the screen, Denis constructs unique and stunning visuals that presenter moments that should feel completely familiar and routine, but that instead seems strange and alien. You need look no further than the scene in which Juliette Binoche makes use of the box, where her writhing and orgasmic gasps seemed bizarrely mechanised and lacking in humanity.
It has been two days since I saw the film, and ever since then it has been running through my mind as I've been trying to grapple with it, trying to find the words to describe it. There are a million things I want to say about the film, and I simply don't know how to begin to express them, or how to even approach understanding what the film is saying. I just know that I love it.
During the mid 70s, director Agnès Varda was living on a street in Paris, Rue Daguerre. One day, she was looking at the window of one shop on that street, a seller of perfumes and hosiery, thinking about how the items on display in the window hadn't changed in 20 years. And this gave her the idea of making a documentary about the various shopkeepers that work in the shops on her street. There's a baker, a tailor, a hairdresser, a butcher, a driving instructor, a musical instrument shop, a general store, and they all allow her in to observe them and their customers as they work.
The film is just utterly adorable and charming. I was enchanted by how much affection and love was on display in the film. It's really vital to the film that this is not just a film about shopkeepers, it's a film about these shopkeepers. Because these are the people who work on the street that she lives, these are people who Varda sees every day, who she knows well, and who know her well. And because of that, even when you can tell that certain people aren't especially happy about being filmed in this way, they're still willing to go with it and put up with the experience because it's Agnès that asked them, and they like Agnès.
For the most part, the film is often very observational. The film will just sit and pause, and watch the baker as he goes through the process of preparing and baking baguettes, or the butcher as he goes about cutting individual cuts of meat, carefully trimming all the fat away for his customers. Or perhaps it becomes less interested in the shopkeepers for a moment, and instead starts watching the customers. Or perhaps it goes outside to listen to a busker, only slowly turning across to reveal the disapproving looks of the nearby shopkeepers.
And there's never any attempt to try to hide the process of filming. Right at the very start, there's a moment where they're filming a couple of shopkeepers, but then the camera gets distracted by a passerby who's staring at the camera, and so the camera just starts following him as he walks down the street, until finally the film decides to return to the shopkeepers. Placing this moment right the start of the film establishes a fairly fundamental ground rule, that they're not going to pretend as though the cameras are invisible. All through the film, there are certain people who never seem to entirely feel at ease on camera, who feel awkward and stilted, and Varda just decides that that's okay, that she won't create an artifice around the filming.
There's also some wonderful playfulness in the film's editing, particularily around the second half when she introduces a magic show. She enjoys cutting between moments of the magic performance and the work of the shopkeepers. So a scene of the magician stabbing a knife into his own arm is intercut with the butcher trimming a cut of meat, or a magic trick in which the assistant's head seems to vanish cuts to the driving instructor telling his pupils not to lose their heads, or the folding up of a magic box interplays with money being stowed away inside a small cardboard box.
And then there are some wonderful little moments where the film just pauses to celebrate our common experiences. So she'll include a montage of people discussing how long they've been working on the street, with some people being there for 40 years, others only a couple. Or she'll have each of them discussing what they dream of, with one person's dreams of the IRS proving particularily amusing. Or, in the best of these sequences, she has each of them telling the story of how they fell in love with their spouse. (One of my favourite laughs in the film comes when the baker's wife tells the story of how she fell in love with him, and it's so sweet and romantic and loving, and then they cut to the baker telling the exact same story as a recitation of dates and facts without an ounce of romance.)
Above all, it's a film that, when seen 40 years later, is particularly nostalgic. There's a degree to which a lot of these quaint little shops had stood unchanged for so long, so much so that it was believable that a store might not change its window display for 20 years. But these are shops that really do feel like these days time will have passed them by. For me, I think the moments that made me most nostalgic were the scenes in the butcher's shop. I remember as a kid going to the butcher with my mum, it was just a regular occurrence; these days, I couldn't even tell you where a butcher's shop is, and what we gain from the convenience of buying meat from a supermarket we definitely lose in personal connection and service.
A simple, yet brilliant piece of work. Every minute of the film had me completely sold.
Far up at the top of a remote mountain, a group of teenage soldiers train. Members of a rebel militia called "the Organisation", these children have been tasked with guarding an American doctor who has been taken hostage. But they're kids, so they don't really take their work to seriously, especially after the team leader partners up with one of the girls in the group. But then disaster strikes when one of the kids, while goofing off and firing his machine gun erratically, accidentally kills the cow that they were quite specifically instructed to take good care of. This leads directly to the death of a different person, and the opportunity for them to place the blame for the cow's death on this dead person and protect the actual guilty party from execution by firing squad. But this turn of events causes the group to slowly pull apart.
Here's my essential problem with the film: I didn't feel that there was a clear story being told. As the film progresses, the story increasingly becomes fractured, as at several points in the story the film would decide to focus on one particular character or another, concentrating on their story alone to the complete exclusion of all other characters. There were several times during the course of the film that I actually thought that the film was finally revealing that this character was the central character of the film, until the film would suddenly remember that there were other people in the story. In one instance, there is a character who is tied up to a tree, and the film leaves that person there, and waits so long to reconnect to that person that I had completely forgotten that they existed, and when they appeared on screen I found myself wondering how many days they had been tied up. It may be that this fracturing narrative is by design, that the intention was that the way the group was fracturing would be reflected in these little mini-narratives, but in that case it almost seems as though the filmmakers simply struggled to find the right balance to tie these narratives together. It gets so bad that the storyline of one major character is seemingly hand-waved away in the audio of a television news report, as though they realised they simply don't have enough time to resolve that person's story. The end result was a film where I walked out after the screening uncertain about what the actual story being told was.
I also have to mention the music, which did not work for me at all. I found it frequently intrusive and jarring, and worked against any connection that the film was establishing. I was a bit surprised when I noticed Mica Levi's name in the end credits. I wouldn't say that I liked her work in films like Jackie or Under the Skin - she has a very atonal style that doesn't appeal to me - but I did find that work memorable and generally find she does a good job in making her style fit tonally in the context of the rest of the film. But here the music was constantly distracting me and drawing me away from the film. There was something about it that simply felt very out of place in comparison to the rest of the film.
But whatever you might think of the film, it has to be said that the film is extraordinarily beautiful. The first part of the film was more stunning then I have the words to describe, with the location being the top of a mountain so high that it seems to sit above the cloud cover, so that in every direction you look all you see is an expanse of clouds, and the film makes great use of the almost mystical air that the location offers. It's the kind of location that I don't remember ever having seen before, and I honestly never would have imagined that such a place existed. Eventually they do have to leave that location, and the story is transplanted into the middle of a jungle, a location much more familiar cinematically but no less beautiful, and with a much greater air of danger.
The thing is, this is not a bad film. This was not a dull film. I enjoyed watching the film, I was engaged by the characters, I was always interested in what was going on. This is a solid piece of filmmaking that felt like it was held back from being as good as it could be by a lack of clarity of vision. And that was my main disappointment with the film.
In 1972, a 29 year old Aretha Franklin was already well established as one of the great soul singers, when she decided to go to New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in LA and record a live album of gospel music, which would become the best selling gospel album ever. Director Sydney Pollack was hired to film the recording, but a lack of experience shooting documentaries led to technical difficulties that meant it was impossible to sync the audio with the visuals. And so for over 45 years, the film went unseen. Now, with the aid of modern technology, the movie is finally completed.
The film does have flaws. I don't know what planning went into preparing for the process of shooting this film, but it certainly does feel as though Pollack turned up expecting to be able to just shoot on the fly without planning which shots to get when, and so there are points where certain shots look awkward, where people are obscured, or where shots come in and out of focus. But that can't be helped today, we can't go back in time and reshoot this performance. What we can change today are the editing choices being made when compiling the footage. In particular, there are two songs, a total of four moments, where it seems almost as though the editor couldn't decide which of two shots they want to use, and so they shrunk the images down and showed them both on screen simultaneously as a split screen. It's a jarring approach, largely because such split screens are used for maybe 30 seconds in total of the film, and otherwise they're simply not part of the vocabulary of the film, and so they really do stand out as though the editor was simply too afraid to make a choice.
That's what bothered me about the film. One of the things I loved about the film was how open it was about the process. I've seen concert films in the past where the performance has been shot over multiple nights, but edited together as though it were a single seamless performance. Nothing like that happens here. Now, admittedly, part of that might be the fact that Aretha wears different clothing on the two nights, meaning that it's impossible to seamlessly cut the two together, but at the same time it also feels as an inherent part of what this film is. It's a record, not of what we would imagine this celebrated recording to be like, but what it actually was like to be in that church on those nights. And so it's not a seamless experience. Instead we hear the church reverend giving the people instructions to make themselves heard on the audio recording or how to behave when on film. There are technical difficulties, there is a moment where Aretha starts singing and two lines in stops and asks to start again. There's no attempt to hide the cameras; instead we can see Sydney Pollack in the background frantically waving at cameras to grab that shot. While we are watching Aretha pouring her heart out, you can see the various technicians working away in the background.
And yet, in all that chaos, the film emerges as a celebration of this incredible voice. Aretha can really sing, and it's just a delight to get to sit and for 90 minutes enjoy that voice. It's a fantastic experience, and well worth seeking out, and I would urge anyone with the slightest interest to seek it out in a cinema with the best sound system you can find.
Sergio is a young man in Italy with political aspirations. One day, while having sex with a prostitute, he notices the tattoo she has of Silvio Berlusconi's face. This inspires him with a plan to try to work his way into Berlusconi's trusted circle, a plan that involves lots of prostitutes, lots of drugs, and a rented villa next door to the Italian Prime Minister's house, in the hope that the man will observe all the partying going on. But Berlusconi is busy with his own affairs, trying to keep himself in power and secure his numbers in Parliament, trying to keep his reputation in the face of media scandals, and trying to keep his marriage together despite his many infidelities.
So the film for me just did not work. At all. If you're going to make a film about Silvio Berlusconi, that's fine, but make a film about Silvio Berlusconi. The film opened with a card on screen telling us that some of the characters in the film were fictional and were not based on anyone, that the story was primarily fictional and the actions of the fictional characters were imagined, but some of the characters were real people, that the events in the film in relation to those characters were truthful to the best of the filmmakers' knowledge and were based on news reports. This set up this expectation that the film is primarily about characters like Sergio, and that Berlusconi was just going to be a character a supporting character in their story. And indeed, Berlusconi isn't in the film at all for the first 20 or so minutes, but then all of a sudden he's in the film, and from that point this is absolutely his film, to the point that the film seems to largely forget Sergio (at one point it probably goes a good hour without him even appearing on-screen) and you wonder what the reason of starting the film with him even was.
And then there's this weird tonal inconsistency that goes through the film. The first 20 minutes seem like they're setting up a film that is aiming to be The Wolf of Wall Street (but that isn't quite as good). It's over the top, it's wild and anarchic, there are pills and boobs everywhere, and it's all hedonism all the time. And then Berlusconi comes in, and that tone just stops. Outright. And instead it's much more sedate, much more of a character story, and it is completely at odds with the film that it had been up to now. And that wild hedonistic tone never returns, not even during one of Berlusconi's famous bunga-bunga parties, which as portrayed here just feel sad and pathetic. And so it becomes unclear why the film decided to open in that way. This is a film that starts seeming like it will be the Wolf of Wall Street, and ends with a long scene of a statue of Jesus slowly being pulled from the rubble of an earthquake-destroyed church. And if you're wondering how a film can possibly move between those tones, it can't. Neither of these sequences feel like they're part of the film that this actually is.
Part of the other problem is that many of the characters, most particular Berlusconi, feel less like human beings and more like caricature. They're so covered in obvious makeup to help them look like the real person that they look ghoulish and distracting and inhuman. The film makes a real mistake by having the self-indulgence to ask Toni Servillo, who plays Berlusconi, to also play a former business partner of Berlusconi in one scene. For a start, it's incredibly obvious that these are both the same actor, especially as the scenes are very clearly being shot in a way that use the most basic techniques - a simple split screen! - to put the two on screen at the same time. But it's also a mistake because it reminds us what Toni Servillo looks like, and he looks so normal compared to the garish figure he's playing in the rest of the film that any hope of us not seeing the makeup is completely destroyed.
And then there's the decision to just portray Berlusconi in the way he's shown here, as a comical gurning clown who never seems to have any depth or humanity. Now, I hear you say, perhaps that's just a reflection of the way the film wants to portray Berlusconi, that Berlusconi was a corrupting and terrible influence on Italian politics, and deserves to be held up for mockery, and perhaps he just didn't have the depth to explore. And I could respect the film if that's what was trying to do. The problem is, in the last 20 minutes of the film, that stops being the Berlusconi that is portrayed. As his marriage is coming to an end, the absurd smiling stops, and the film seems to try to get us to sympathise with Berlusconi, actually feel sorry for them. But if that's what you're planning to do, then you can't spend the rest of the film presenting him as a one-dimensional clown. It just doesn't work.
The film is beautiful - you can always rely on Paolo Sorrentino film for beautifully constructed images - but it's all in service of a film that is just an utter mess from beginning to end. The annoying thing is that I had an instinct that's what this film would be like. The grinning image in the festival programme of Servillo as Berlusconi did not look good to me at all, but I decided to give it a go because I have enjoyed Sorrentino films in the past. And I regretted that choice.
Now, to be fair, I am aware that this was originally a two-part film, and this was the cut-down version that removed a full hour out of the running time. It's possible that's some of my problems with this film may be resolved in the complete cut. But if so, all that does is call into question the editing decisions when cutting the film down; after all, this version of the film is intended to stand on its own, and should be judged on that basis. And many of my problems are so inherent to the film itself that I don't think any number of additional scenes could resolve. The film is quite simply a mess.
I was familiar with the name and artistic reputation of Maria Callas, the soprano who was one of the greatest opera singers of the 20th century, but I was completely unfamiliar with her story, and don't think I had ever actually heard her sing, so I was very interested to see this documentary. The documentary charts Maria Callas' story, from her rise as an artist in the 1950s, through the various controversies and challenges as she earned a reputation for being a diva, the end of her marriage, her relationship with Aristotle Onassis both before and during the marriage to Jackie, and through to her death by heart attack in 1977 at the age of 53.
The catch with the film is that it's told entirely in her words: her interviews, her diaries, her letters, her unpublished memoir. And so, throughout the film, we're getting to know her as she saw herself and her experience, and that offers some valuable insight and understanding. The problem with that approach is that we are all the heroes of our own story, and we are all blind to our own failings, or prone to self-deception to justify our flaws. It very quickly becomes evident that she was a difficult person to have to work with, very much the stereotype of the prima donna. You get the sense that she may very well have been one of those people who threw her reputation around to demand what she wanted. But because we only ever hear her viewpoint, we only ever hear her excuses for her actions. And while there is probably truth in what she says, you always feel that there is more to the story that we're not getting. This was particularly driven home in a moment when we see a 10-second clip of the head of the Metropolitan Opera, one of the great opera companies, explaining that they had decided to end their contract with Callas. We then watch an interview with her, and which she explains that she was dissatisfied with the way the company was treating her, with the way the cast around her was constantly changing, or with the quality of the productions she was being offered. And perhaps that's true. But you do feel that there is more to the story. If you are one of the leading opera companies, and you have one of the greatest singers under contract, surely you do what you can to keep that person and do not choose to end their contract, unless that person creates such problems that it's not worth the hassle of having them around. But we never get an opportunity for any opposing view, or any other perspective. This is a film in which you very much need to read between the lines to interpret the way other people saw her.
That said, the film is a delight to watch as an opera fan, just to finally hear this voice that I've heard referenced so often, and to realise it is every bit as extraordinary as people say. It's just a shame that she was working at a time when sound recording was relatively primitive. There are moments when she is singing, and you can hear the recording struggling to capture it, the sound of her voice and the orchestra just turning into mush and you wish for the audio precision of modern technology. It's just barely good enough that you can appreciate her greatness, and to realise what a magical experience it must have been like to hear her perform live.
It's also fascinating to watch the film and realise just how recently opera was still a major art form, and key figures had name recognition. I can't imagine any of the major opera singers today being mobbed in the way Callas was, or being the centre of such media attention, or having people queue for days to get tickets to hear them perform, but only 50 years ago that was what the world was still like.
Ultimately, I enjoyed the film, qualms about its perspective aside. She had an interesting story that took some left turns that I did not see coming, and the music is fantastic. And to be honest, that was the reason I wanted to see the film in the first place.
I've never read Pauline Kael, although as a film fan it's impossible not to know the woman's reputation. She was one of the great voices in film criticism, and someone who really shaped the way that people think about cinema. This documentary follows her career from her first review, commissioned after someone overheard her arguing forcefully against Chaplin's film Limelight, through her time as a reviewer on the radio, her movement into print criticism, until she established herself as the leading film critic for the New Yorker, complete with devoted fans who would hang onto her every word as though it were gospel.
The film discusses her place as a passionate advocate for cinema. It discusses her review of Bonnie and Clyde, which at the time was being trashed critically, so much so that the magazine she was writing for refused to publish her positive review simply because it was so against the accepted opinion. That review was eventually published by The New Yorker, which started her time writing for that publication, but it also completely changed the conversation around that film, and started the American new-wave movement of the late 60s and 70s, about which the film argues Kael wasn't just a chronicler but an actual creator of the movement. The film discusses her passionate championing of films, with the studio actually running her entire two-page review of Last Tango in Paris as an advertisement for the film. But it also discusses how caustic and poisonous she could be when she didn't like a film (her review of The Sound Of Music is brilliant and brutal and laugh-out-loud funny, and the film shows you some of the hate mail the review provoked). But even when people disagreed with what she had to say, they still wanted to read her because she had such a careful skill in constructing her arguments and she was very focused on finding the exact turn of phrase to precisely articulate what she was trying to say.
But at times, you do get the sense that she perhaps just took delight in being able to tear people down. There's a famous story about the great David Lean, director of Lawrence of Arabia, being invited to a lunchtime gathering of New York film critics, only to discover that it would be two hours of these critics, led by Kael, condemning him for his (admittedly not great) film Ryan's Daughter. I had heard the story before, but this was the first time I'd actually seen David Lean telling the story, and as he's remembering the experience you can see the emotional devastation that it had on him, so much so that it was nearly 15 years before he could bring himself to make his next film. Towards the end of that meeting, David Lean apparently commented that he didn't think these critics would be satisfied until he shot a film on 16mm in black & white, and Kael apparently responded, "No, we'll let you use colour." There is such cruelty in this story that you feel bad laughing at that line, but it is such a funny line that you can't help but laugh at it. And that's the reputation that Pauline Kael had - as someone who was passionate and intelligent, caustic and poisonous, and incredibly sharp and funny.
Every time I hear the name of Pauline Kael, I always think how I need to seek out some of her books and dig into some of her writing. And now, having seen this film and having enjoyed what brief excerpts from her reviews they had time to include, I really need to seek out some of her books and dig into some of her writing. There's such a sharp wit and pithy precision in her expression, and there was clearly such insight and careful thought in the ideas she was expressing, even if I disagreed with her view. I also loved this film as a passionate defence of the role of criticism as a way of sparking conversation about cinema. The value of good criticism isn't just in a film's Rotten Tomatoes score as a binary Good/Not, it's in the way that it causes people to think about a work in a new way, or to open themselves up to experiences they might not otherwise be willing to have. And the film is a fascinating celebration of this.
So this is probably my favourite film of the festival so far, certainly the most entertaining and the film I've laughed hardest at.
In 2014, comedy magician The Amazing Johnathan, was diagnosed with a terminal heart condition and given one year to live, forcing him to retire from his headline act in Vegas. Three years later, director Ben Berman has been shooting a documentary about Johnathan for six months. It's clear that Johnathan is stifling with frustration at spending the days with nothing to do except for swimming in the pool, throwing sandwich meat at the walls, and taking the odd hit of meth. And so, against doctors' orders, Johnathan decides to go out again for his farewell tour, his wife by his side worried about him dying on stage. And then one day, in the lead up to the performance, Johnathan casually mentions how excited he is that there will be two documentary film crews filming the tour. It seems that Johnathan was approached by the makers of Oscar-winning documentaries Man on Wire and Searching for Sugar Man, also wanting to make a documentary about the tour, and he also granted them permission. But the unexpected arrival of the second documentary crew is not the last of Johnathan's revelations, and as Berman is constantly surprised by new information being dropped by Johnathan, he starts to question the reality of anything he's been told.
One of the frustrating things about this film is that the story is so filled with absurd twists and turns that I feel like I'm limited in being able to talk about it, because I want people to see this film, and I want them to be surprised and shocked in the same way that I was surprised and shocked.
I do need to be really clear about one thing. When I say that this was the funniest film I've seen this festival, that is not because the film is about a comedian and he says things that made me laugh; I'm honestly not sure that I laughed once at any of the The Amazing Johnathan's jokes. Instead, there's a genuine comedy that has brought out by the quality of the filmmaking. Right from the very start, the film opens with a moment where Berman asks Alexa what the best documentary about The Amazing Johnathan is; Alexa's reply was that "the jury is out on that question". That plays as a very funny and silly scene in the moment, but it's before we know about the existence of the second film crew, and so the scene becomes funnier in retrospect as the story develops. Berman is able to punch up each new surprise piece of information for maximum comedy value, and his exasperation at every new development is fantastic. He includes talking head interviews with people like Weird Al Yankovic and Penn Jillette, seemingly less because of their insight into The Amazing Johnathan, and more so that he can include their astonished and hilarious reactions as he's telling them the story of everything that's going on. He manages to take restrictions and turn them into reliable running jokes through the film. He decides to incorporate the presence of the second film crew into the story, but when they refuse permission to appear in the film, he blurs their face, obscures their voice, even hides their names, and then uses the footage in a way that makes every appearance by a blurred face hilarious. There's one moment where he plays footage with a key element censored by a large black box for legal reasons, and then he stops the film to play legal advice telling him that not even the box would be sufficient. This is a film in which even the on-screen credit for the film's executive producer got a genuine laugh from the audience. If there is any way to make anything in this film funny, you feel that Berman did it.
One of the big challenges that Berman finds himself dealing with is how he can make a documentary film that distinguishes itself from another documentary about the same subject, with pretty much the exact same footage shot of the same events, because he knows that he has no chance against Oscar-winning filmmakers unless he can find something different about his film. The solution he lands on is to move the film away from being about The Amazing Johnathan and turn it into a much more meta film about that conflict. He includes footage of him discussing the project with his friends and family, asking them for advice. There's a moment where he starts comparing interview footage that he shot with other footage that he didn't shoot, just to show the challenge of making something different while working with a man who seizes a good line and reuses it over and over again. At one point he plays the entirety of the film that we've just watched to his parents seeking their advice for where to go from here. There's even one part of the film where he's offered the chance to do something absolutely insane, something that will certainly allow him to distinguish his film from the other, but that may very well risk damaging his life forever, and he seems to genuinely grapple with how far he's willing to go to make this film work.
It's a fantastically entertaining film, and I highly recommend it.
A delightful, unusual comedy from Japan, We Are Little Zombies tells the story of four young teenage orphans (three boys, one girl) who meet at the crematorium and become friends, bonding over their lack of response to the deaths of their parents, which causes them to compare themselves to zombies. They decide to run away together and have an adventure, going on various quests until, inspired by an encounter with a group of homeless men playing as a band, they have the idea of forming a pop band called Little Zombies, wearing colourful costumes constructed out of trash. While their singing is not the best, their appealing personalities and tragic backstory leads them to become a viral sensation, overwhelmed by the world of pop stardom.
The film navigates some really delicate tones. It's hard to manage to be a film that is so bright and cheerful while also being a film where, say, a 13-year-old girl is orphaned after her parents are murdered by an adult who is obsessed with her, but somehow this film manages it. It's a film about the way that we deal with grief and our willingness to show or to hide it, and perhaps the film works so well in navigating these tones because it outwardly treats the experiences of the orphans with as much distance and lack of emotion as they do. The kids were all subject to some kind of parental neglect, in one form or another, and you do feel that this is one reason why they have so little emotional connection to their experience, and so the film becomes very much about these children coming to terms with their emotions - We are zombies, but alive.
The other reason why these characters are so disconnected from the world around is the vast array of distractions that are open to all of us. The first child we meet, Hikari, is never without his favourite portable gaming device, and this becomes a major element throughout the film. Think of Scott Pilgrim and how that film interpreted the world through video games, and then amplify that approach, and you'll get something of an idea of what is going on in the film. The musical score sounds like a midi score played on a video game chip, the film is divided up into individual stages like video game levels, each stage has its own unique visual style or approach, the characters often have particular challenges or tasks to complete in order for the stage to be completed, and there is significant discussion about the concept of the end-of-level-boss and who that boss will be.
The characters in the film are all very well-drawn and distinctly defined, and I really loved spending time with them. But the most interesting character of the four was the girl, Ikuko. With any type of film like this, where you have a group of young kids made up mostly of boys with one girl, maybe two, there's often a tendency to turn the girl into a prize to be won by one of the boys at the end of the film. Here, Ikuko is someone who is specifically seen for her sexuality despite her young age - her parents specifically described her as a femme fatale, and that was before they were murdered by someone obsessed with her - and as a result, she has no patience for it, frequently rolling her eyes in irritation as the boys start fighting over her. It's a wonderfully funny subversion of a rote trope, and I really enjoyed it.
One thing I really liked about the film was the way it pointed to the negatives of modern-day fan culture. It's not an original observation to say that the internet has empowered a lot of vile and destructive behaviour by fans, but while it's only a small part of this film I don't remember ever seeing it portrayed quite as effectively as it is here. Outside of internet culture, it would be absurd that this group of trash-wearing children would become stars, but in an age where there are no cultural arbiters it seems weirdly plausible. More worrying is the portrayal of fans whose identity become too closely connected to their favourite artists. There's a genuinely chilling part of the film where, through excerpts from internet discussions, we observe as Little Zombies fans try to hunt down the bus driver whose mistake led to the deaths of Hikari's parents, and torment him for his actions.
The film take some fantastically weird turns as the story progresses, including a segment that felt almost like it might have come out of David Lynch's Eraserhead, but the film is so wild and out there that it allows you to just follow the right, completely confident that the filmmakers know exactly where they're going.
The songs are catchy and fun, the characters are rich and drawn with warmth, the film cuts its sentimentality with an honest cynicism, and there's an indeniable confidence in its over-the-top construction. I loved We Are Little Zombies.
Part of the Classic section of the festival program, Andrei Rublev is one of the best-regarded films by the great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. Inspired by the celebrated painter of religious icons, the film charts about 20 years in the early 15th century, and follows the artistic monk Rublev as he accepts an invitation to travel to the town of Vladimir to paint a fresco in that town's church. After a long journey, he arrives in Vladimir, only to struggle with the commissioned work, a painting of The Last Judgement, as he feels uncomfortable with the idea of using terror to push people into faith. Eventually the town is attacked by Tatar invaders, and much of the town is destroyed; during the attack Rublev kills a man to save a woman from being attacked, and the regret over that action causes him to take a vow of silence and to withdraw from his artistic efforts. Over the next ten years, the town is slowly rebuilt, even as famine and plague afflict the region.
This was the fifth film by Tarkovsky that I've seen, and he's a filmmaker I never really connect to. His works are undeniably slow - here, we have a three-hour black and white film set in medieval Russia about a painter, in which a good hour is spent following him on a journey from one town to another, and the film is filled with extremely long discussions about art and religion and sin and forgiveness and regret and pain and revenge and envy. And at those points, I did find myself slowly drifting off, losing focus, losing connection to the film, to the point that I did need to go to Wikipedia just to clarify one or two points about which I was uncertain.
But there was also a lot that I really liked in the film, that managed to get me to connect to the film in a way that no other Tarkovsky film ever has. There's a fantastic opening sequence, in which a man has constructed a hot air balloon; despite the attack of a horde of people trying to keep him on the ground, he takes off in the hot air balloon and, for a few brief moments, has the joyous experience of flying. It's a remarkable sequence that I found exhilarating and thrilling. Later on, there's a fascinating sequence where Rublev encounters a group of naked pagans celebrating a ritual, who condemn Rublev for his Christianity that has sought to oppress their beliefs. There's an absolutely awe-inspiring battle sequence in which the town of Vladimir is destroyed; it's a sequence that has a breathtaking sense of scope and size, and it absolutely gripped me throughout. And finally, there was an extended sequence involving the making of a massive bell and placing inside its tower; I was fascinated by the way the film portrayed the methodical process involved in casting a bell, was astonished to realise just what an engineering feat it was to construct these massive towers and raise these bells to sit within them, and was absolutely gripped with suspense as I waited to see whether the bell would indeed ring.
So while, on the whole, I didn't really care for the film and largely found it as disengaging as most of Tarkovsky's films have been for me, there were significant parts of the film that did grab me, and managed to achieve a connection that his work usually does not. And it must be admitted that the film is genuinely beautiful, with Tarkovsky constructing some stunning imagery that looked incredible on the big screen. And because of that, I was glad to see the film.
A few days ago, I saw Daguerréotypes, a documentary that was my first proper experience with the work of Agnès Varda. And it was fantastic. Now, with Vagabond, I had a chance to see what her work as a director of fictional narrative was like. And it was fantastic.
The film opens with the discovery of the body of a young homeless women, frozen to death, lying in the middle of a drainage ditch in a vineyard during the French winter. The film then cuts back several weeks earlier, purporting to be the memories of those who encountered the young woman, Mona, in the last weeks of her life. So we watch as she hitchhikes across the country, crashes in empty or derelict houses, finds the odd guy to sleep with for a night or two, picks up the odd job that never lasts, steals things and tries to sell them for a bit of money, and generally just tries to survive. Which we know she won't.
As presented here, Mona seems like someone who should be really hard for the audience to care for. She's actively abrasive and unpleasant, almost deliberately defying you to dislike her. One of the first interactions we see of her has her hitchhiking and being picked up by a truck driver, who drops her off again very soon after she criticises the truck for being rubbish because it didn't have a radio - the driver realising this girl will be too much hassle. People will help her, will buy her food or offer her shelter, and she'll express no gratitude at all - I don't think the phrase "thank you" is spoken once by her in the film - almost as though to thank someone is to admit that they did something to help her, which would mean admitting that she needed help, which she can't do because she's so determined to be self-reliant. People will help her, but the second they stop helping her, she'll pull an obscene gesture to make sure they know that she didn't need the help. At one point, someone offers her a bed and a job trimming grapevines, but tells her that he shares his flat with some other guys who are currently on holiday, and when they return he may not be able to offer a bed anymore; when the other guys return and do say that she can't stay with them, she loses her temper, angrily returns the scarf that he gifted her, and accepts his offer of a ride to the station, but loudly claims he only wants to get her away faster. And yet it seems that she doesn't need to live like this, as she claims to be smart, even able to speak English, at least to a high school level, and apparently has secretarial training, although she decided to quit her job because she didn't like having a boss tell her what to do, instead choosing this life as a way to turn away from society and its expectations.
All this should make Mona a completely frustrating person to have to spend close to two hours in the company of. That she's not is, to a large degree, due to the incredible performance by Sandrine Bonnaire. She gives a fantastic charisma to the character, giving her a spark of fire and determination, but revealing the inherent vulnerability and fear that underpins the character. She never feels genuinely angry, and her rages only ever feel like acting out by someone who wants to hold people at her distance so that she can never be let down by them. It's a beautiful, compelling performance. And it's absolutely vital that she give such an appealing performance because it's inherent in the film that she is someone that people, for the most part, look back on with fondness despite her behaviour. She's not someone that people pick up, drop off, and never think about again; instead she's someone that those who encountered her continue to think about and worry about weeks later.
And those other supporting performances are so vital to the success of the film. Most of them are tiny, only a scene or two, and there's only a handful of characters that would have more than 5 minutes on screen. And yet, each of the characters seems fully realised and richly constructed. Each of them has a different relationship, a different way of connecting with Mona, and those differences feel very natural given who these different people are and how they would naturally interact. The film doesn't work if these characters feel false, but they always hold up and feel honest and genuine.
And it's clear that Agnès Varda genuinely loves Mona. I loved the choice to end the film before Mona's death. We've known since the start of the film that she was going to die, we've known how it was going to happen, and now we reach the end of the film and we've seen her wind up in that place, and we see her desperation and sadness as she's lying there, and it's devastating. I didn't want to watch Mona die, it was going to hurt too much, and so I was glad to discover that Varda felt the same way. Not that I was surprised, as Varda had already made the decision not to show Mona's previous lowpoint, looking away when the character is raped. It's like Varda knows that she's causing this character to suffer tremendously, and the least you can do is not lingering on her pain when the character is suffering the most. Especially since this character in particular would hate to be seen at that moment of weakness.
There's a moment that is essentially an expression of the thesis of the film. Mona has been offered accommodation in a caravan, a small plot of land that she can work, and a few goats. But Mona is incredibly resentful at being asked to do anything in return for the gifts that she was given. The goat farmer sits down with her and explains how you can't live a life alone, that you need other people, that you need society to live. A stubborn self-reliance, a refusal to accept help, will just kill you - he's seen it. It's only when you can accept that you can't do everything and ask for help that you can survive. The tragedy of Vagabond is that Mona hears these words, and chooses to reject them, and thus seals her ultimate fate.
I love this film, and was devastated by it. It is a beautiful piece of work.
About these festival film responses - I actually do the initial drafting of them by turning on voice recognition and then just letting it run as I express all of my initial thoughts. Later, I do a lot of tidying up, pruning, expanding, rewriting, but the initial effort to make sure I've captured exactly what I think is all done by voice recognition.
What's great about that is that, if you see a film that you absolutely hated, and there's no-one at the movie that you can talk to about how much you hate it, you can just turn on voice recognition and yell and rant about how much you hated that film for 15 minutes. And it is so satisfying.
Case in point:
Juliette Binoche stars as Claire, a university literature professor, trying to rebuild her life as her ex-husband is starting his new life with his much younger girlfriend. She's also hooking up with a younger man, although he seems less invested in the relationship, and seems to be trying to distance himself from her. One day, she impulsively decides to create a Facebook profile for an imaginary twentysomething called Clara, and sends a friend request to the best friend of her occasional lover, hoping to follow the lover through the friend. And this starts a slow friendship that turns romantic, although he's obviously oblivious to the fact that he's being catfished. They chat online, and she agonizes over every word choice that might reveal her age; they talk on the phone, and she adopts a high-pitched, breathy, youthful tone of voice. And then he starts to press to meet her, which is obviously impossible, and so the relationship starts to go wrong.
Full warning: this film made me actively angry, but to explain why, I do need to talk about the final part of the film. I'll try to avoid specific details, but there will be spoilers. Not that you should care, because you really shouldn't see the film.
I struggle to remember the last time I saw a film that so completely manages to destroy itself in its third act. The first two acts of the film are enjoyable, with an engaging performance by Binoche, and I was really curious about a development that occurred as the central relationship broke down, and where that might take the story. But instead, what the film does is decides to pretend that development didn't take place. The entire film is presented as Claire telling her story to her new psychologist, and after this development, Claire is so upset by what happened that she presents the psychologist with a written story that imagines how things might have turned out differently if she had chosen a different course of action. And so the entire third act, the supposed climax of the story, is explicitly presented to us as a fictional imagining by the main character.
I was reminded of an Oscar-nominated film from 10 or 15 years ago (and I won't name the film because I don't want to spoil it, but if you know the film you'll recognise it). In that film, the climax involved a revelation that the second half was a fictional story written by the main character, who felt so guilty about something they did and the consequences of that action on other people that they felt the need to write a happy ending for these people that they never had in reality. It's the exact same ending! The difference is that the earlier film works because we don't know that it's fictional, and so we remain invested in that story up until the moment of the twist ending, and then the revelation of what really happened hits the audience like a real gut punch. But in this film, we learn about the reality with half an hour to go, and then we have to sit and watch something that the film actively tells you isn't real even within the world of the film. And meanwhile, there are genuine consequences that Claire should be trying to deal with following those climactic developments, but the film doesn't even attempt to deal with those because it's so busy telling this imagined story.
Also, you know the phrase "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach". It turns out there's a very good reason why Claire is teaching literature rather than writing it. In particular, she gives her story the most cliched ending imaginable, an ending I have seen literally dozens of times. The frustrating thing about this particular ending is that there is only one way this ending can be filmed, as any other perspective or angle on the events would completely destroy the ending, and so it winds up being a situation where as soon as you see this character doing one thing and you notice the framing of the shot, you know definitively what's about to happen, because you've seen that exact moment countless times. Claire tries to defend her ending by arguing that it would make a good movie, but it wouldn't, and I know this because I'm literally watching a movie with that ending and it's not good.
But just because the film tells you that this ending is a fictional story doesn't mean the film is devoid of twists. On the contrary, by my count, there are at least three twist revelations that take place in the last 5 minutes of the film. That's a lot to put into a film - too much, as there's not enough time for the film to actually explore the dramatic consequences or thematic meaning of these twists, which instead seem to exist just for the hell of it. And because of these twists, the film needs to adopt some incredibly awkward storytelling to preserve the surprises. There's one twist in particular that is just dire, especially as in order for it to work, it relies on one character being actively evasive about an issue they have no reason to be evasive about, and other character conversations have to be written in a stilted and unnatural manner to obscure a key piece of information. But they have to behave in this way, because otherwise the twist won't be a twist, and that's the most important thing about the story.
The frustrating thing is that the first two acts really did set up an intriguing story. These days it's not particularly unexpected to examine social media, and explore its potential for causing serious damage to people from a distance without us ever needing to deal with the consequences. That may be an unoriginal idea, but a competently made film could do really well in exploring that idea, especially given how the end of the second act sets up the story to proceed. But instead the film seems actively uninterested in these ideas, or indeed in having anything to say. A film that just sets up the situation, then pretends that something else might hypothetically have happened in another universe, and then throws a bunch of end-of-film reveals, does nothing to engage with the actual consequences of what the character may or may not have done. And that leaves the film feeling absolutely pointless.
I was so angry at this film; to be honest, I was surprised by how angry it made me. But I think the reason why I was so enraged was because I was genuinely engaged by the first hour or more of the film, and genuinely wanted to know what would happen next. And so, when I discovered the film had no interest in exploring that question, it felt like a genuine betrayal. I felt that the film had wasted my time.
A film that is brutal and brilliant, unpleasant and enthralling, The Nightingale tells the story of Claire a young Irish woman convicted of some petty crime and sent to Tasmania during the early-19th century. She's served her time, but the local lieutenant, Hawkins, refuses to sign her release papers to allow her to build her life with her husband and young baby. One day, Hawkins and his lackeys rape Claire and murder her husband and baby, before heading off on a 5 day expedition. Claire is determined to pursue the men alone, no matter the risk to herself, but she is persuaded to take an angry Aboriginal tracker Billy as a guide.
I was interested in seeing The Nightingale because I had greatly admired Jennifer Kent's previous film, The Babadook. But having seen reporting about how rough the film was to sit through, about the three separate rape scenes in the film, I certainly wasn't looking forward to the experience. There's a long history, particularly in exploitation or shock cinema, of the rape-revenge film, and they often have a reputation for using the inciting crime as an opportunity for a bit of titillation for the audience, as well as providing the justification for the excessive violence to follow. And it's here that it matters that the film was written and directed by a woman, because it feels like it approaches those moments with great care, being respectful to the victims of the crime, staying bedded in the experience of the victim, and being very clear that the crimes are more about an exertion of power over others, rather than just about sex.
And that's a key part of the film as a whole - everything that Hawkins does seems to be governed in some way as an assertion of power and authority over others, because his position allows him the authority to do whatever he likes without challenge. His refusal to sign Claire's release papers allows him to assert power over her, that she is his property. When she says that she will complain about what he does to her, he mocks the idea, because he automatically has reliability and standing through his position as an officer in the British Army. Throughout the film, he commits murder with a casual impunity. He'll sit with his lackeys and loudly discuss the crimes they've committed while the rest of their party sit a couple of feet away listening. Or they'll tie up and rape a woman that they come across, while fully within earshot of everyone else, who know exactly what's happening but who seem unable to do anything out of fear. He will happily commit these crimes, because his position gives him power and authority to override any consequences. And it's not just Hawkins and those who support him who feel free to commit whatever crimes he commits without penalty; there's a sense of lawlessness and a lack of restriction for anyone who is a white male in this country - witness the men who casually murder a whole group of Aboriginal men in chains for no reason. Because that is what the film is about. The film is about how modern-day Australia is built on a history of violence and destruction and exploitation. As terrible as the crimes are that we witness, and they are terrible, they're nothing compared to the moment where we hear about multiple tribes being completely wiped out, or the mournful way Billy constantly bemoans the loss of his ancestral land to "England".
I really appreciated the portrayal of Claire as a woman dealing with intense trauma and survivor's guilt. It's there in her determination and stubbornness to try to seek revenge, less for herself and what was done to her, and more because she feels she's the only person who can ensure that these men will pay for the murder of her family. It's in the way she almost loses control when lashing out at one of the men, and then her horrified response when she realises what she's done. It's there in the moment that she finally sees Hawkins for the first time, having spent the entire film chasing him, and she is suddenly paralyzed at the sight of the man who has committed these atrocities. And there are some fantastic dream sequences that are incredibly effective in communicating how the trauma continues to affect her without any hope for respite; while this isn't a horror film, in those moments Jennifer Kent demonstrates that she retains the skill as a horror director that was on display in The Babadook, with moments of pure terror that were no less effective because we know they were a dream.
And it has to be said that the film would be nowhere near as effective were it not for the performance of Aisling Franciosi as Claire, who is great in communicating the traumatised state of the character, but also convincing as someone who was taken away from her home at a young age and who has had to learn to build her life alone in a new country, and who therefore feels like she has the strength to conceivably hunt down these men. Similarly, Baykali Ganambarr brings a mournful resentfulness to the role of the guide Billy, constantly aware that this was his home but that now around every corner is someone who could kill him for existing. And I found the growing relationship between the two compelling and convincing; she's initially actively and realistically awful to him to him, and it never feels like they actually become friends, instead simply becoming bonded out of a mutual hatred of the English and a growing understanding of the horrors that each has experienced.
I feel like I'm reluctant to say that I liked the film. It's not a film that you like. But it was a brilliantly made film, and one I deeply appreciated.
The film opens with a quote by M.C. Escher in which he declares that he believes the only person who could ever successfully make a film about his art is himself. It's a bold gamble to open your film like that, because you really are setting yourself up for failure, which they did here. A frustratingly middling documentary about a genuinely fascinating subject, the film seeks to cover the life and work of M.C. Escher in about 80 minutes, which really is not enough time to do justice to what it's trying to achieve. It feels very much like one of those documentaries that plays on a channel that you usually skip over but have to pay for because it's part of the pay TV package. It's a documentary, it's fine, you're engaged while you're watching it, it's interesting and you'll learn something, but there's nothing particularly special about the film.
Told largely through his own words, as written in letters and diaries and read by Stephen Fry, Escher was the Dutch artist whose work illustrating impossible objects and tessellation was ubiquitous in every mathematics classroom I was ever in. The film basically gives a general overview of his life, as well as examining his own thoughts on his work.
The problem is, the film winds up feeling very surface-level. The material about his life is fine enough as it is, but it does feel like there's really not a lot to his life of any particular interest. They spend enough time on his life that it feels like it's using up quite a bit of time in the film, but not enough time to actually get much insight into who he was - there are a couple of points where they make elliptical references to problems in Escher's marriage or to his wife's mental illness, but there are no details and so I find myself asking why they felt the need to mention it. It's also frustrating because Escher is not a particularly personal artist and so, other than learning about his encounters with particular ideas or designs that actively inspired him, it feels like the film is just killing time when they discuss his personal life.
Especially as the film is so much stronger when it's not about Escher's life, and is zeroed in on his artwork, which is the only reason we're watching the film in the first place. It is fascinating to hear Escher's own words as he expresses his frustration at his difficulty trying to get the physical form of his artwork to replicate the ideas he has in his head, at the little imperfections that make their way into his work. There are some fantastic moments where we learn about his process, where we see his initial sketches and ideas as he tries to construct his pieces, and then see how these are reflected in the final artwork. And we hear him talk in detail about particular pieces, describing and deconstructing every element of some of his most famous works to analyse the ideas that he's trying to communicate through these designs - how this piece is an attempt to communicate the concept of infinity, or how in that piece he's playing with the way that 2-dimensional shapes can appear as 3-dimensional objects. And that is genuinely fascinating, hearing a person as thoughtful and detailed as Escher analysing his own work is quite remarkable. At one point towards the end of the film, he again dismisses the idea of being an artist, observing that an artist's primary focus is always on creating a thing of beauty, where his focus is on trying to create a sense of wonder - and that does feel like a very simple but articulate summary of Escher's work.
The film really does feel very slapdash. Here's an example: in the first minute or two of the film, the film talks about how Escher in the late 60s heard that hippies were buying pirated prints of his artwork that had been coloured to transform the stubbornly black-and-white work of Escher's originals into bright multi-coloured fluorescent art artworks, and how baffled he was trying to understand what about his very cerebral artwork would appeal to drugged-up hippies. Later, as we start to arrive at the end of Escher's life, we reach a point where the exact same story is told to us with little or no variation. I'm not entirely certain what the purpose of telling that story twice was, but as I was watching the film, I did find myself thinking "We know this, you've already told us." It does feel remarkably sloppy to tell the story twice without there ever even being a sense that the retelling brings out something new.
There's also some incredibly annoying, cheap-looking CGI effects that are implemented to try to visualise some of the images described in Escher's writing, or to try to bring elements of his artwork to life, at one point even having birds fly out of the artwork and out into the real world. It almost never works, and just makes the film feel tacky and immature, and even feels a little disrespectful to an artist who put such great care and consideration into his work.
There's one other thing that bothered me about the film. I believe that there are only three people that provide talking head interviews in the film. Two of these are Escher's sons, and that makes sense. The third is Graham Nash, from Crosby Stills and Nash. He doesn't really have that much to contribute - he was essentially an admirer of Escher's work who one day phoned Escher as a fan and who was told by Escher that he didn't consider himself an artist, rather a mathematician. You don't need Graham Nash to tell us that, as it's very clear from the rest of the film that's how he felt. Then the film actually ends with Nash talking about how he feels the art world undervalues Escher, and how he feels one day his work will become much better appreciated. Thank you for that insight, Mr folk-rock musician. It feels very much like the documentary filmmakers wanted someone famous in the film, couldn't get Mick Jagger (who once asked Escher to design an album cover), and so decided that Nash will do, without any consideration to what his purpose for being in the film should be and whether he adds anything.
Still, it was fine. While I would have preferred the film spend much more time examining the artwork, to the exclusion of almost everything else, I walked out feeling like I heard a greater appreciation for the man and his work, and that's really all I wanted from the film.
Fly By Night
An entertaining if undistinguished crime thriller from Malaysia, Fly by Night tells the story of four taxi drivers, including two brothers, that have teamed up to identify potential people they could extort money from. As they take their wealthy passengers home, the drivers assess their value for extortion and look for potential problems or openings to take advantage of. But after they extort money from a senior official, their actions come to the attention of a cop who's determined to take them down. Meanwhile the younger brother and his best friend are becoming impatient with the small amounts of money being brought in, and look to separate out and undertake their own efforts. But when they find themselves in debt to a local gangster, and desperate to get a large amount of money very quickly, they decide to take advantage of an opportunity offered by a jilted mistress looking for revenge on her former lover.
This is very much the type of film that Hollywood used to make a lot of, but that seen to have fallen out of fashion. These days you often get the massive-budget special effect blockbuster films, or the low-budget films that cost nothing to make. But you don't often gets these mid-budget movies, films that aren't big special effects extravaganzas, that do have a strong focus on characters and their interactions, but also have a budget that allows them to do some solid action work. And this is a good example of that type of film; I do miss these films, and I'm glad to see that they are still being produced elsewhere. But as I was watching the film, I did find myself wondering if this film would be playing in the film festival if it were in English. Does the fact that it's from Malaysia give it an impression of significance that it wouldn't otherwise have?
The film holds very much to the standard cliches. There's the gunfight that takes place in a quarry in the middle of nowhere. There's the thrilling chase between a motorbike rider and a seemingly infinite number of police cars, all swerving to avoid people carrying things out into the middle of the road or crashing into piles of boxes. There's the wild card that messes up the plan, here the jilted mistress who jumps in just because she doesn't trust them to get her the ring that she's after. There's the deranged gangster who will gleefully torture people, in this case pouring boiling hot tea over people's faces, and who takes delight in his power over others. There's the brutal interrogation of a person suspected to be lying, in this case a genuinely horrifying moment where a person is questioned while having a screwdriver slowly driven in through their ear. It's all done with a great deal of style and skill, and it's impressively polished, especially for a first-time director who shows genuine talent and noticeable confidence and control over the film. I was greatly entertained, but I don't know that there was much in the way of substance to the film, or that I'll think about it too often. It just does what it wants to do really well. If this is the type of film that appeals to you, and you can find it, it's certainly worth watching.
The Day Shall Come
Moses is a man living in Miami who has formed a small religious organisation with a belief system based around a "star of six" key black figures, including Jesus, Mohammed, General Toussaint, and Black Santa. He got his beliefs from a duck; normally Satan speaks to him through the duck, but one day Satan was distracted and God spoke through the duck when Satan wasn't looking. He preaches about a black jihad that will wash away the white man from his position of accidental privilege, but he will not allow his followers to take up guns or other weapons to bring about this change; the strongest weapon he will allow is a toy crossbow. Mostly, he seems to just focus on keeping his followers away from drugs and gangs by having them grow food and raise animals at his house in the middle of the city that he's turned into a church/farm. He's picked up a handful of followers, by which I mean a literal handful - he has five followers, including his wife and daughter. All in all, he's harmless, a mild schizophrenic whose only real interest is in helping his followers improve their lives. Which is why it's unfortunate that he's just come to the attention of the FBI, which is really keen to catch him committing acts of terrorism, and doesn't really care if they have to encourage him down the path a bit.
It has been nine years since writer-director Chris Morris made the incompetent-terrorists comedy Four Lions, and so it was exciting to see what he would give us in his new film. If anything, I think his target here is better honed. I loved Four Lions, I thought it was absolutely hilarious, but that was a film about terrorism in which it was easy to laugh at the terrorists because they were goofy and silly, they were idiots, and it's fun to laugh at idiots doing supremely dumb stuff.
Which makes Morris' target in The Day Shall Come much harder. Here, he's focused all of his attention on the FBI, which has the weight of the Government behind it, so that there are real consequences to their idiocy. And what's horrific here is how the FBI is portrayed as actively manufacturing threats. Moses and his followers are nothing, they're harmless, and pose no threat to anyone. They just want to be left to take care of their little urban farm, but they can't afford the rent, and so when someone turns up offering to give them $50,000 and an entire cache of guns, of course they're interested because they need the money; it doesn't matter to the FBI that Moses plans to make the guns inoperable by putting them in concrete and using them as fence posts, because if he receives the guns that's proof of terrorist intent. The entire motivation seems to be that the agency has been tasked with catching terrorist threats, but it's hard to find actual terrorists, and it's much simpler to create your own and then have them arrested - and they're deliberately targeting the stupid or naive or mentally unwell in doing so. (I've read interviews with Morris where he talked about some of the actual cases that inspired the film; the satire here doesn't seem that far from reality.) And then there's the usual competitiveness that builds up between different law enforcement agencies that serves simply to escalate situations because they have to show that they are responsive to threats that they've created and that they know are non-existent - at one point, as they're discussing declaring an actual threat in order to deal with a non-existent threat, it's actually commented that the sentence makes no sense if you say it fast, and so you have to express these sentiments slowly in order to keep the contradictory elements as distant from each other is possible. That is a very funny joke, and it's absolutely horrifying to think about.
But while Morris may be aiming his satire at a much more significant target, it's all so much harder to be funny. Moses is a genuinely funny character, but the humour is made more uncomfortable by the fact that his delusions do come from a place of mental illness. And there's a very funny but bitter running joke around the FBI covering over the activities of a pedophile in return for his assistance helping to run these sting operations. And then there's just the fact that Morris knows how to write stupid and self-serving and venal people like few others. But when the joke is that these people are trying to actively manipulate a fundamentally good and nice guy into destroying his life just so that they can get a promotion, and it all seems shockingly realistic and convincing, the laughs don't come quite as freely. There's also something weird going on in the pacing of the film, which feels like it's going along quite gently, slowly building up, and then all of a sudden BANG and I was shocked to realise that we're at the climax because five minutes earlier it didn't feel like we were anywhere near the end of story.
But these are minor issues about a movie that is really very strong. The Day Shall Come is a reliably funny film that has genuine bite in its satire. I just hope we don't have to wait another nine years for Chris Morris' next film.
Under the Silver Lake
This was probably the film I was most curious to see how I responded to it. I'd really enjoyed David Robert Mitchell's earlier film It Follows, and had therefore been following the development of Under the Silver Lake for several years. But I knew that, while some people really liked the film, the majority seemed to strongly dislike it (indeed, as I was driving to the cinema I was listening to Mark Kermode list it as the second-worst film of 2019 so far) and it had a famously disastrous cinema release in the US. Having seen the film, I love the film, even as I understand people hating it.
Andrew Garfield stars as Sam, an unemployed wastrel on the verge of being evicted, largely because he doesn't care about finding a job, and instead spends all his time trying to crack the codes that point to the vast conspiracy under which we all live. One evening his attractive neighbour invites him to spend the night, but when her roommates turn up, she decides to postpone until the next day. So the next day, he turns up expecting to get laid, only to discover the flat is empty, and they moved out in the middle of the night. This makes no sense to Sam, because she was going to have sex with him, and so something must be wrong. And so he applies all of his focus to finding the girl to understand why she left him, a quest that seemingly grows more urgent after she turns up dead with a millionaire in a car crash.
The film is insane. Absolutely bonkers. And I really admire Mitchell's ambition with the film. There's a lot of Hitchcock running through the film, most obviously Rear Window and Vertigo. But it's also very clearly inspired by LA neo-noir - I've seen a lot of comparison to Chinatown, to me it reminded me a lot of The Long Goodbye, while Inherent Vice seemed like a more recent touchstone. Then there are the echoes of dark-side-of-Hollywood films like Sunset Boulevard, or Mulholland Drive which felt like a major influence. But it's all wrapped up in this film that is so insanely paranoid that it borders on incoherent. There's a line of logic that means that you understand at every point how you got there, but it relies on absurd leaps that wouldn't make sense anywhere else then in this film. This isn't a film where a hero follows actual clues to reach the solution, instead, he cracks codes hidden in cereal boxes and historic magazines and pop songs, and it's in cracking these codes that Sam is seemingly led to the answer he seeks. And it's apparently the correct answer, which means that all of these insane and incoherent ravings are apparently true.
And then there at the weird touches that Mitchell seems to throw in, almost more for colour then for coherence. Why is there a naked female assassin wearing an owl mask? Why is there a scene where a cardboard box containing a used vibrator is grabbed by a person wearing a pirate costume who then runs away like he's holding a treasure chest? Why is there a scene where a character is beaten to death with a guitar that was literally owned by Kurt Cobain? I don't know, but I was completely sold by the film.
One thing I found fascinating was Andrew Garfield's absolute willingness to make Sam into an utterly repulsive character. He's completely unsympathetic, and almost certainly a sociopath. The film was in development many years before Me Too, but the character feels like an exploration of sense of entitlement that has allowed those behaviours to flourish. He's physically repellent as well, dishevelled and wearing a stream of t-shirts that look unwashed - he looks like he's smells, and that's before he gets sprayed by a skunk, after which he definitely smells because everyone tells him so. And yet he's bizarrely able to just walk into any exclusive party he chooses, almost as though he only needs to carry himself as though he assumes he will get in and he will - the staff presumably assuming that he must be pretty important to have reached a point where he doesn't need to hear about how he looks or smells.
I get why people hate the film, I really do - but I found it completely enthralling.
Vivarium
Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg are a young couple looking to buy their first home together. One day, they wander into a storefront promoting a new suburban development called Yonder. The two aren't all that interested in the development, and they are put off by the seriously unsettling salesman giving them the hard sell, but they agree to go out and look at properties. Yonder is a bizarre location, with streets upon streets of literally identical buildings, looking like something that shouldn't exist. And then the salesman disappears halfway through showing them house #9, and they can't find their way out of the neighbourhood, driving for hours and hours until they run out of petrol, yet always returning to #9. And so they're stuck. Every day there's a delivery of food and essentials, although they never actually see anyone deliver the package to them. And then one day, they are delivered a baby in a box with a note, "Raise me and you will be released". But the child is weird and off-putting, and they very quickly come to resent this creature forced on them.
It's an effective little science-fiction horror film, albeit one that eschews gore and excess in favour of a lingering sense of dread and fear. And so much of that effect is entirely reliant on the performances of Poots and Eisenberg. I was so impressed with the way they communicated the slow loss of hope and the growing resignation at their new reality; you really can see the light fading from their eyes, until they almost feel as though the life they previously lived was an imagined experience. Look at their sad nostalgia as remembering the experience of feeling the wind on their face, or the way they sneak into their car, just because it's the only thing in Yonder that didn't come from that place, and so it actually has a smell, which reminds them of outside. And there's a nice little scene in which they discover a brief opportunity to experience music again, and for a few moments they can let themselves go and experience joy and dancing to the music.
There's a sad and bitter pessimism to the film, which very much wears its themes on its sleeve. It's not difficult to see the film as being about the burdens and pains of marriage and parenthood stifling experience and forcing people into traditional gender roles. Everyday, Eisenberg goes off to work, which means spending the day digging a hole to try to find some way to escape, because that's the only thing he can think to do, and he refuses to let Poots help him. And so Poots finds herself fulfilling the role of mother for this unsettling child, even as she stubbornly fights it, even loudly and repeatedly telling him "I'm not your mother". The child is truly nightmarish, with a screech that penetrates and an uncanny ability to imitate and reproduce every conversation the couple have, because every child learns how to act from their parents.
The boy was probably my favourite part of the film, especially the performance of Senan Jennings who played the growing child. Jennings certainly gives a uncanny performance, never quite threatening but very far from safe. The couple feel as though they constantly being watched by him, and he has this penetrative stare that I found simply bone-chilling. They also apply some very nice trickery to the boy's voice - I think it's digital manipulation, but it could easily be as simple as another actor voicing the character - that ensured that he never sounded the way he felt like he should, so every time he spoke, the audience was held at a distance and never allowed to feel comfortable with him. It's a very smart idea that really reaps dividends in audience response.
The Yonder neighborhood is certainly fascinating and memorable, but it's probably the film's only real disappointing element. The suburbs have long been an easy thing for movies to poke fun at, and it's never really been that successful a target. But here the typical jokes about identical cookie-cutter houses are taken to an extreme, with identical two-storey houses all painted the exact same shade of green, all looming and imposing and spreading as far as the eye can see. As a visual for a horror film, it's fantastic, easily communicating the sense of feeling trapped and isolated in a world without personality, but as a piece of satirical comment, it feels very easy and dismissive. And there's no doubt that this is actively intended as a comment on the suburbs, as even before we arrived at the neighborhood, the salesman defensively tells the couple, "I know it's in the suburbs, but...". Still, I did love the Yonder neighborhood for its design as something created by someone who doesn't understand people. I laughed out loud at the artwork inside the house, paintings of the exact room the painting is in. I loved the way the clouds looked exactly like clouds and therefore nothing like clouds. If you were to imagine a housing development created by beings that don't understand people, this is exactly what that would look like.
All in all, I really enjoyed the film. It's an entertaining piece of dread-filled horror, and I was pretty impressed by it.
The Gangster, the Cop, the Devil
A hot-headed, single-minded cop notices similarities between a brutal stabbing and other recent incidents, and starts to suspect that this is the work of a serial killer. His bosses dismiss his theory and take him off the case, so when a local crime boss is attacked in a similar incident, the cop decides to team up with the gangster, sharing information in order to try to hunt down the killer and bring him to justice (although the type of justice he faces depends on whether he's caught by the gangster or the cop). But when the gangster acquires the killer's knife and uses that to have a rival crime boss murdered, DNA on the blade leads the police to accept the presence of the serial killer, which means the two must carry out their investigation while avoiding both the cops and the minions of the dead rival.
This was just terrific fun. Ma Dong-seok's work as the gangster is a real highlight, with a calm confidence to his character; he feels like someone who has faced down every threat imaginable and who knows nothing can defeat him. He's a brute with charm and wit, and he's weirdly likeable, even when he's literally ripping a person's tooth out. Meanwhile, as the cop, Kim Mu-yeol is a figure of pure stubbornness and determination, and while the idea of a cop working with a criminal who he had previously targeted and sought to take down seems improbable, his portrayal as someone who is so single-minded and focused makes his actions entirely believable, as he does feel like someone who would work with whoever he needed to in order to achieve his goal.
The action in the film is skillfully executed and extremely involving, and with careful variation in the scenes. There's an excellent brawl with an attacking horde that is very fun and put me in mind of Oldboy (even if it's not quite as great as that). The car chases are gripping and exhilarating. There's some wonderfully suspenseful moments, particularly a foot chase around narrow streets where the threat of attack lies around every blind corner. And I was pleased by the visceral brutality of the film - these were not nice, safe people or an easy comfortable world, and the film was determined to never compromise on this.
I did have a few qualms about the film, particularly its believability. The film opens with a declaration that the film is based on a true story, although it acknowledged it had been fictionalised, and more and more I do find myself wondering whether making that kind of statement actually harms a film. If you tell me that a film is largely true, then it can take you out of the film, as you suddenly find yourself thinking "That seems improbable; is that really what happened, or is that the invention of the filmmaker?", and ironically it can almost break the sense of reality of the film. So when the gangster and the cop meet a person minutes before they become the killer's next victim, or when an investigation on a seemingly unrelated kidnapping leads to the identification of the killer, these are moments which I probably would have accepted as simply a convenient coincidence in a normal film, but the second you introduce the idea of it being a true story, those coincidences feel fake.
But in the end, it's just wonderful entertainment from writer-director Lee Won-tae. I had fun, and I'm definitely interested in seeing what he does next.
Koyaanisqatsi
If I'm being honest, the 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi is a movie that I probably never would have seen were it not for the festival. It's a film I've heard many people rave about how great it is, it's a film I was definitely interested in seeing because of its reputation, but it's not a film that I think would ever have moved up to the top of my viewing list without the prompting of a festival screening at the Embassy.
At the end of the film, we learn that Koyaanisqatsi in the Hopi language means life in turmoil, life out-of-balance, and that the Hopi prophesies sung as part of the soundtrack have meanings like "If we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster." And that is a pretty solid summary of what the film is trying to express. It's a reflection on the natural world, on humanity's place in that world, on our power to create, our power to destroy, and the impact that we have on our world. The film contains no narrative or story, instead being constructed entirely from documentary footage without context cut together so that the meaning and significance of the work comes from the juxtaposition. And it's difficult to really express what is going on in the film. It starts with some of the most astonishing imagery of the natural world I've ever seen, moments of mountain tops with clouds swirling over valleys and ridges, or water mist throwing up at the bottom of waterfalls. And then it moves to look at humanity, all that we've created, all that we've destroyed. Perhaps we watch speed-up footage of swarms of people, or perhaps we slow down and look at a single face, perhaps alone, perhaps standing beside something important to them. Or we see a massive truck, slowly being covered by a thick black smoke until the truck is completely hidden. Shots of nuclear clouds followed by footage of people sunbathing next to a nuclear power plant. We watch the ingenuity of humans creating vehicles on a production line. We go on a ride in a car, at times the lights of the world turn almost into electric static. A rocket into space explodes and slowly tumbles for an impossibly long time. Or perhaps we watch giant buildings and bridges, great engineering feats, being destroyed and collapsing in an instant. And it's beautiful, and extraordinary. All of it. I was genuinely shocked to when the film ended to realise that we've been watching this film for 80 minutes, as I would have thought it was half that.
The film is perfectly paired with an incredible score by Philip Glass, and while I knew this was his best-known work, I had no idea just how much of this score I would know note for note; his minimalist tendencies and repetitive patterns building like an urgent cry from the world - it's stunning work.
I don't have the words to express my response to the film. It's a film that is entirely working in an emotional sphere, and the experience is all about the way it makes you respond. It's just incredible. I loved it.
Ruben Brandt, Collector
A celebrated psychiatrist, tormented by nightmares in which he is constantly attacked by people from famous paintings, decides to team up with an expert art thief and three of his patients to steal the artworks that are tormenting him. The string of major art heists become the focus of massive attention, even earning the nickname "the Collector" for the person behind the crimes. But hot on the heels is a police detective still smarting from his previous encounter with the art thief in which he came out second-best.
The animation picks in this year's festival seemed a little thin, but Ruben Brandt, Collector looks like it might be fun. Sadly it fell far short. My first, and most fundamental problem with the film, is that it was just ugly to look at. Part of the joy of animation is just sitting and admiring the beauty of the work in creating the image on screen. All the best animated films feature moments that I would love to frame and keep them as an example of great art. But here, the character design is actively ugly and unpleasant. When the film first introduces us to Ruben Brandt, I had an immediate dislike of his design, with his overly long face and eyes so wide apart that they literally sit on the side of his head. But through the course of the film, I came to the largely accept his design, mainly because it was one of the least unpleasantly designed characters. At least he doesn't have 3, 4, 6, or more eyes, or multiple faces, some with two faces sharing the same side of the head, others with a second face on the back of the head.
And the problem with this character design is that it means I'm held at a distance because I can't work out the reality that the film exist in. Think about, say, the original Lion King - those characters don't actually look like real versions of the animals, but we can accept them as representations of what those animals are like, and then we can move on from there. Here, the film exists in a world where there are these famous and instantly recognisable works of art, so my first instinct is to assume that these are characters that are representations of people that are supposed to exist in our reality, and that the character design is much like a more modern artwork that completely distorts the body of the subject but still remains a representation of that figure. But then we learn that one character who is presented as a two-dimensional figure with two faces, one on the left and one of the right side of his head, really is literally two-dimensional, able to slide under locked doors or slide behind a painting without anyone noticing. Well obviously that can't happen in our reality, and so I found myself struggling to understand what the reality of the world was in this film, and why it was so filled with grotesqueries. And as a result, I couldn't get into it.
And this brings me to my next issue with film. It's only a small issue, but this is a film about art, it's a celebration of art, and yet when we see representations of celebrated artworks, the works are interpreted and distorted through this design style. So if you ever wondered what Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus" would look like if it were incredibly ugly, this is the film for you. If you've ever wondered what Van Gogh's "Portrait of the Postman" would look like without his detailed brushstrokes, here you are. There's a significant focus in the film on Andy Warhol's "Double Elvis", but if they hadn't told me that's what this was, I never would have guessed because it was so distorted through the design as to be unrecognisable, such that I never would have guessed it was a representation of one of the most famous figures of the 20th century. If this is a celebration of art, why distort real artworks to such a degree that they lose what makes them great?
Another thing that greatly irritated me was the film's constant tendency to pause in order to throw some reference to a celebrated work of art. I'm not a great art aficionado, and so while I recognised enough to know that this was happening in the film, most of the references went over my head. The problem is that, when you have a film that is trying to do something like a major action sequence between a criminal trying to escape and a cop trying to catch them, when you pause the film, even just for a second or two, in order to throw out an irrelevant reference for those who recognise it, that affects the pacing of the action sequence, and also alienates those in the audience that may not recognise the reference. And when you're doing that constantly through the entire film, it just becomes irritating. (Although that's nothing compared to how the film made me made me hate it when it introduced a bar where the singer sang the most annoying lounge covers of Radiohead's "Creep" or Britney Spears' "Oops I Did It Again", and then kept playing them. Those were some references I did recognise, and hated.)
The writing isn't even very good, with characters that I simply felt the film seemed uninterested in exploring in any depth. Take for example the cop trying to chase them. This is a man who doesn't know who his father is; we know this because on Father's Day he calls his mother to ask "What's my father's name?", and his mother refuses to answer. And then, having established in that 10-second exchange that he doesn't know his father, the film largely forgets that, has no interest in exploring how having no father has changed him. It seems to be something the film inserts just for a later scene where he discovers who his father is, and when he calls his mother, she can deliver a monologue that turns out to explain the entire plot of the film. There are a million ways in the film could have explained the plot, but this film just chose the laziest and most awkward and unconvincing way to do so, and then had no interest in actually exploring the consequences of that.
I will give the film credit - there is one scene where the characters perform a robbery in the middle of the day, in a crowded gallery, and they do so by pretending to be performance artists where the theft of the artwork was part of the performance. That was a funny joke. But for the most part, I think this might be my least favourite film of the festival.
The Wild Goose Lake
After a meeting of gangsters to allocate sectors for motorcycle theft turns into a brawl between people wanting to secure the most lucrative streets, a decision is made to hold the Olympic Games of motorcycle theft, to see who can steal the most bikes in two hours. But one of the gangs plays dirty, setting a trap that leaves one person decapitated and another, Zhou, on the run after accidentally killing a cop. After a reward is offered for Zhou's capture, one of the local "bathing beauties", prostitutes that work at the nearby Wild Goose Lake, is sent to help bring him in by using his estranged wife as leverage over him. But while Zhou is happy to come in, he will only do so if he knows that the reward is going to his wife and son. And so he hides out near the lake with the help of bathing beauty Liu, all while being the subject of a massive manhunt.
This was sadly a bit of a disappointment. I had been a great fan of the director's previous film, Black Coal, White Ice, a wonderful crime thriller that really captivated me, and I was hoping for more of the same. This had a lot to commend it, but it did fall short. It's beautifully shot, fully embracing its neo-noir genre with a love for gloomy city streets at night, the colours of the neon lights reflected on the rain-drenched streets, or the harsh unnatural glare of fluorescent lights. And there's some very fun work being done in creating the contrast between the harshness of the city and the simplicity and beauty of the natural world - there is a moment of Liu standing in front of the lake that is just breathtaking.
And it has some wonderful sequences. I was thoroughly entertained by an early demonstration of motorbike theft techniques, and the Olympic games of motorcycle theft really was a thrilling sequence that completely drew me in and then took me by surprise when it all went wrong in an instant. There's a great gunfight that takes place in a zoo at night, with the bursts of light illuminating the impassive face of a watching tiger. There's a fantastic brawl in a tiny apartment, with one death by umbrella in particular being particularly memorable, and the ensuing foot chase really is thrilling.
But the problem is that these are small interludes, and in between the film adopts the languorous pace of someone in hiding just trying to wait the threat out. And I can understand the decision to do that, because it does reflect the experience of the character, but the problem is that I don't feel the film fills the time with anything. I don't think I really came to know the characters to any great depth, came to understand who they are or what motivated them beyond the surface level - Zhou was too stoic to connect to, and because we were supposed to not know whether Liu could be trusted they therefore couldn't explore her character too much for fear of answering that question. Instead, the film just was sedate and patient, without offering too much to hold the audience. There were some great moments in those quieter stretches that have stayed with me, like the scene where Zhou contrives to bandage his own wounds, but for the most part I simply don't feel the film justified its two hour run time. I'm still interested to see what Diao Yinan does next, but I'm hoping for something that's a bit more focused next time.
Les Misérables
In the best scene of the new film Les Misérables, a young boy runs through the streets of Paris until he arrives at a giant gathering of people in the middle of the streets, the French tricolor flag waved proudly. Except this isn't 1832, and it isn't isn't a group of students gathering in revolution and protest; rather, this is today, and the people are gathered in celebration at the victory of the French soccer team. It's a rare moment where all of France is joined together, and it's not something that happens often in this film.
The film explains its title very early on in the film, when we learn that it takes place in the neighbourhood where Victor Hugo was living when he was inspired by the things and people he saw around him to write his masterwork. These days, the neighbourhood has a largely Muslim population, and had been a prominent location for drugs until a new police unit, the SCU, cleaned it up. These days, the main problem is prostitution, with rundown apartments being rented for cheap for the girls. Stephane is a cop who transferred into the SCU, and who is experiencing his first day in the neighborhood. He meets the unofficial "mayor" of the neighbourhood, who acts as a go-between between the authorities and the people in the community. He meets the local kebab store owner, a former jihadi now trying to provide a place of peace. And he meets a variety of wayward youths. But when an altercation leads to one of the youths being seriously injured, the cops are more concerned about hunting down the drone that filmed the incident rather than getting help for the youth, which leads to a violent outcome.
It's a pretty bold decision to name your film after one of the great works of literature, because all you are doing is inviting a comparison that you are inevitably going to fall short on. But it's a decision that I think the film that's a good job in defending. This doesn't feel like a film that is exploiting a recognisable title for its own purposes, but rather a film that is in conversation with the Hugo novel. It doesn't have the grand sweeping scope of the novel, essentially taking place over two days rather than many decades, and it doesn't seem to have the same thematic focus on legalism, forgiveness, and redemption, but it shares Hugo's concern for the plight of the underprivileged and their oppression at the hands of law enforcement with little interest in justice. And as you might expect, the story does culminate in a massive protest complete with barricades, albeit in a very different environment.
When writing a novel, Hugo had 1300 pages to build his sprawling community of characters; here they managed to do a similar job in under two hours, building a fully realised world in which the characters were convincing and well-developed without ever feeling 2-dimensional. When certain characters choose to take particular actions, the choice always felt natural and logical in response to the situation, and you quickly understand how the intervention of this character or that character intervenes will escalate or ease the tensions. What's particularily impressive is that they make their job harder on themselves by introducing an excess of characters - there's this idea that, particularly in filmmaking, you should only ever introduce a character if they have a role to fulfill in the story, because time in a movie is so limited that you don't want to waste time on irrelevancies. But here, there are several characters who don't particularly serve any plot purpose, but because they exist in the world and in this community, it's important that they be acknowledged. And their presence makes the film feel much more genuine and lived in.
One big problem that I had was with the actual incident that led to everything occurring in the story. The events that sets everything off is the theft of a lion cub from a traveling circus. It's a genuinely baffling choice, because every time they started talking about the lion cub, or they go inside the circus, it feels like a completely different film, utterly unlike the urban drama this otherwise is. And the problem is, the film tries to present the ending as the inevitable outcome of the tensions in the community, but the use of the lion cub is so separate from that community that it breaks that impression. It's impossible to watch this film, and not be reminded of Do the Right Thing - they're both films that take place on sweltering days, in which various racial and other tensions build up until they explode, an excessive use of police violence takes place, and it all culminates effectively in a riot. But in Do the Right Thing, the inciting incident is Radio Raheem being an arsehole, but because Radio Raheem is part of the community and is always an arsehole, it genuinely feels like something was inevitably going to happen, and it's just that on this day this was the outcome. But in Les Misérables, the lion cub is a completely external problem, and so when they try to say that the pressures that are building in this community are inevitably going to explode, I have difficulty accepting that because they had to go so far outside the community to find a spark that would cause the explosion. And more than anything, that's why the lion cub doesn't work - because it completely undercuts what the film is trying to say.
In many ways, there's nothing about Les Misérables that is especially new. I've already discussed its debt to Do the Right Thing, but films like Training Day are also an obvious point of comparison. And there's also nothing new about a film that rages to such a degree at the injustices of society and how it allows its authorities the freedom to exploit its people in this way. But it is on the whole well executed and suspenseful, and I did like the film a great deal.
Jacquot de Nantes
My last Agnès Varda film of the festival, but definitely not the last Agnès Varda film I will ever see. I really have been delighted by having the chance to discover her work in the festival, and this was no exception.
Especially as the film is so much stronger when it's not about Escher's life, and is zeroed in on his artwork, which is the only reason we're watching the film in the first place. It is fascinating to hear Escher's own words as he expresses his frustration at his difficulty trying to get the physical form of his artwork to replicate the ideas he has in his head, at the little imperfections that make their way into his work. There are some fantastic moments where we learn about his process, where we see his initial sketches and ideas as he tries to construct his pieces, and then see how these are reflected in the final artwork. And we hear him talk in detail about particular pieces, describing and deconstructing every element of some of his most famous works to analyse the ideas that he's trying to communicate through these designs - how this piece is an attempt to communicate the concept of infinity, or how in that piece he's playing with the way that 2-dimensional shapes can appear as 3-dimensional objects. And that is genuinely fascinating, hearing a person as thoughtful and detailed as Escher analysing his own work is quite remarkable. At one point towards the end of the film, he again dismisses the idea of being an artist, observing that an artist's primary focus is always on creating a thing of beauty, where his focus is on trying to create a sense of wonder - and that does feel like a very simple but articulate summary of Escher's work.
The film really does feel very slapdash. Here's an example: in the first minute or two of the film, the film talks about how Escher in the late 60s heard that hippies were buying pirated prints of his artwork that had been coloured to transform the stubbornly black-and-white work of Escher's originals into bright multi-coloured fluorescent art artworks, and how baffled he was trying to understand what about his very cerebral artwork would appeal to drugged-up hippies. Later, as we start to arrive at the end of Escher's life, we reach a point where the exact same story is told to us with little or no variation. I'm not entirely certain what the purpose of telling that story twice was, but as I was watching the film, I did find myself thinking "We know this, you've already told us." It does feel remarkably sloppy to tell the story twice without there ever even being a sense that the retelling brings out something new.
There's also some incredibly annoying, cheap-looking CGI effects that are implemented to try to visualise some of the images described in Escher's writing, or to try to bring elements of his artwork to life, at one point even having birds fly out of the artwork and out into the real world. It almost never works, and just makes the film feel tacky and immature, and even feels a little disrespectful to an artist who put such great care and consideration into his work.
There's one other thing that bothered me about the film. I believe that there are only three people that provide talking head interviews in the film. Two of these are Escher's sons, and that makes sense. The third is Graham Nash, from Crosby Stills and Nash. He doesn't really have that much to contribute - he was essentially an admirer of Escher's work who one day phoned Escher as a fan and who was told by Escher that he didn't consider himself an artist, rather a mathematician. You don't need Graham Nash to tell us that, as it's very clear from the rest of the film that's how he felt. Then the film actually ends with Nash talking about how he feels the art world undervalues Escher, and how he feels one day his work will become much better appreciated. Thank you for that insight, Mr folk-rock musician. It feels very much like the documentary filmmakers wanted someone famous in the film, couldn't get Mick Jagger (who once asked Escher to design an album cover), and so decided that Nash will do, without any consideration to what his purpose for being in the film should be and whether he adds anything.
Still, it was fine. While I would have preferred the film spend much more time examining the artwork, to the exclusion of almost everything else, I walked out feeling like I heard a greater appreciation for the man and his work, and that's really all I wanted from the film.
An entertaining if undistinguished crime thriller from Malaysia, Fly by Night tells the story of four taxi drivers, including two brothers, that have teamed up to identify potential people they could extort money from. As they take their wealthy passengers home, the drivers assess their value for extortion and look for potential problems or openings to take advantage of. But after they extort money from a senior official, their actions come to the attention of a cop who's determined to take them down. Meanwhile the younger brother and his best friend are becoming impatient with the small amounts of money being brought in, and look to separate out and undertake their own efforts. But when they find themselves in debt to a local gangster, and desperate to get a large amount of money very quickly, they decide to take advantage of an opportunity offered by a jilted mistress looking for revenge on her former lover.
This is very much the type of film that Hollywood used to make a lot of, but that seen to have fallen out of fashion. These days you often get the massive-budget special effect blockbuster films, or the low-budget films that cost nothing to make. But you don't often gets these mid-budget movies, films that aren't big special effects extravaganzas, that do have a strong focus on characters and their interactions, but also have a budget that allows them to do some solid action work. And this is a good example of that type of film; I do miss these films, and I'm glad to see that they are still being produced elsewhere. But as I was watching the film, I did find myself wondering if this film would be playing in the film festival if it were in English. Does the fact that it's from Malaysia give it an impression of significance that it wouldn't otherwise have?
The film holds very much to the standard cliches. There's the gunfight that takes place in a quarry in the middle of nowhere. There's the thrilling chase between a motorbike rider and a seemingly infinite number of police cars, all swerving to avoid people carrying things out into the middle of the road or crashing into piles of boxes. There's the wild card that messes up the plan, here the jilted mistress who jumps in just because she doesn't trust them to get her the ring that she's after. There's the deranged gangster who will gleefully torture people, in this case pouring boiling hot tea over people's faces, and who takes delight in his power over others. There's the brutal interrogation of a person suspected to be lying, in this case a genuinely horrifying moment where a person is questioned while having a screwdriver slowly driven in through their ear. It's all done with a great deal of style and skill, and it's impressively polished, especially for a first-time director who shows genuine talent and noticeable confidence and control over the film. I was greatly entertained, but I don't know that there was much in the way of substance to the film, or that I'll think about it too often. It just does what it wants to do really well. If this is the type of film that appeals to you, and you can find it, it's certainly worth watching.
Moses is a man living in Miami who has formed a small religious organisation with a belief system based around a "star of six" key black figures, including Jesus, Mohammed, General Toussaint, and Black Santa. He got his beliefs from a duck; normally Satan speaks to him through the duck, but one day Satan was distracted and God spoke through the duck when Satan wasn't looking. He preaches about a black jihad that will wash away the white man from his position of accidental privilege, but he will not allow his followers to take up guns or other weapons to bring about this change; the strongest weapon he will allow is a toy crossbow. Mostly, he seems to just focus on keeping his followers away from drugs and gangs by having them grow food and raise animals at his house in the middle of the city that he's turned into a church/farm. He's picked up a handful of followers, by which I mean a literal handful - he has five followers, including his wife and daughter. All in all, he's harmless, a mild schizophrenic whose only real interest is in helping his followers improve their lives. Which is why it's unfortunate that he's just come to the attention of the FBI, which is really keen to catch him committing acts of terrorism, and doesn't really care if they have to encourage him down the path a bit.
It has been nine years since writer-director Chris Morris made the incompetent-terrorists comedy Four Lions, and so it was exciting to see what he would give us in his new film. If anything, I think his target here is better honed. I loved Four Lions, I thought it was absolutely hilarious, but that was a film about terrorism in which it was easy to laugh at the terrorists because they were goofy and silly, they were idiots, and it's fun to laugh at idiots doing supremely dumb stuff.
Which makes Morris' target in The Day Shall Come much harder. Here, he's focused all of his attention on the FBI, which has the weight of the Government behind it, so that there are real consequences to their idiocy. And what's horrific here is how the FBI is portrayed as actively manufacturing threats. Moses and his followers are nothing, they're harmless, and pose no threat to anyone. They just want to be left to take care of their little urban farm, but they can't afford the rent, and so when someone turns up offering to give them $50,000 and an entire cache of guns, of course they're interested because they need the money; it doesn't matter to the FBI that Moses plans to make the guns inoperable by putting them in concrete and using them as fence posts, because if he receives the guns that's proof of terrorist intent. The entire motivation seems to be that the agency has been tasked with catching terrorist threats, but it's hard to find actual terrorists, and it's much simpler to create your own and then have them arrested - and they're deliberately targeting the stupid or naive or mentally unwell in doing so. (I've read interviews with Morris where he talked about some of the actual cases that inspired the film; the satire here doesn't seem that far from reality.) And then there's the usual competitiveness that builds up between different law enforcement agencies that serves simply to escalate situations because they have to show that they are responsive to threats that they've created and that they know are non-existent - at one point, as they're discussing declaring an actual threat in order to deal with a non-existent threat, it's actually commented that the sentence makes no sense if you say it fast, and so you have to express these sentiments slowly in order to keep the contradictory elements as distant from each other is possible. That is a very funny joke, and it's absolutely horrifying to think about.
But while Morris may be aiming his satire at a much more significant target, it's all so much harder to be funny. Moses is a genuinely funny character, but the humour is made more uncomfortable by the fact that his delusions do come from a place of mental illness. And there's a very funny but bitter running joke around the FBI covering over the activities of a pedophile in return for his assistance helping to run these sting operations. And then there's just the fact that Morris knows how to write stupid and self-serving and venal people like few others. But when the joke is that these people are trying to actively manipulate a fundamentally good and nice guy into destroying his life just so that they can get a promotion, and it all seems shockingly realistic and convincing, the laughs don't come quite as freely. There's also something weird going on in the pacing of the film, which feels like it's going along quite gently, slowly building up, and then all of a sudden BANG and I was shocked to realise that we're at the climax because five minutes earlier it didn't feel like we were anywhere near the end of story.
But these are minor issues about a movie that is really very strong. The Day Shall Come is a reliably funny film that has genuine bite in its satire. I just hope we don't have to wait another nine years for Chris Morris' next film.
This was probably the film I was most curious to see how I responded to it. I'd really enjoyed David Robert Mitchell's earlier film It Follows, and had therefore been following the development of Under the Silver Lake for several years. But I knew that, while some people really liked the film, the majority seemed to strongly dislike it (indeed, as I was driving to the cinema I was listening to Mark Kermode list it as the second-worst film of 2019 so far) and it had a famously disastrous cinema release in the US. Having seen the film, I love the film, even as I understand people hating it.
Andrew Garfield stars as Sam, an unemployed wastrel on the verge of being evicted, largely because he doesn't care about finding a job, and instead spends all his time trying to crack the codes that point to the vast conspiracy under which we all live. One evening his attractive neighbour invites him to spend the night, but when her roommates turn up, she decides to postpone until the next day. So the next day, he turns up expecting to get laid, only to discover the flat is empty, and they moved out in the middle of the night. This makes no sense to Sam, because she was going to have sex with him, and so something must be wrong. And so he applies all of his focus to finding the girl to understand why she left him, a quest that seemingly grows more urgent after she turns up dead with a millionaire in a car crash.
The film is insane. Absolutely bonkers. And I really admire Mitchell's ambition with the film. There's a lot of Hitchcock running through the film, most obviously Rear Window and Vertigo. But it's also very clearly inspired by LA neo-noir - I've seen a lot of comparison to Chinatown, to me it reminded me a lot of The Long Goodbye, while Inherent Vice seemed like a more recent touchstone. Then there are the echoes of dark-side-of-Hollywood films like Sunset Boulevard, or Mulholland Drive which felt like a major influence. But it's all wrapped up in this film that is so insanely paranoid that it borders on incoherent. There's a line of logic that means that you understand at every point how you got there, but it relies on absurd leaps that wouldn't make sense anywhere else then in this film. This isn't a film where a hero follows actual clues to reach the solution, instead, he cracks codes hidden in cereal boxes and historic magazines and pop songs, and it's in cracking these codes that Sam is seemingly led to the answer he seeks. And it's apparently the correct answer, which means that all of these insane and incoherent ravings are apparently true.
And then there at the weird touches that Mitchell seems to throw in, almost more for colour then for coherence. Why is there a naked female assassin wearing an owl mask? Why is there a scene where a cardboard box containing a used vibrator is grabbed by a person wearing a pirate costume who then runs away like he's holding a treasure chest? Why is there a scene where a character is beaten to death with a guitar that was literally owned by Kurt Cobain? I don't know, but I was completely sold by the film.
One thing I found fascinating was Andrew Garfield's absolute willingness to make Sam into an utterly repulsive character. He's completely unsympathetic, and almost certainly a sociopath. The film was in development many years before Me Too, but the character feels like an exploration of sense of entitlement that has allowed those behaviours to flourish. He's physically repellent as well, dishevelled and wearing a stream of t-shirts that look unwashed - he looks like he's smells, and that's before he gets sprayed by a skunk, after which he definitely smells because everyone tells him so. And yet he's bizarrely able to just walk into any exclusive party he chooses, almost as though he only needs to carry himself as though he assumes he will get in and he will - the staff presumably assuming that he must be pretty important to have reached a point where he doesn't need to hear about how he looks or smells.
I get why people hate the film, I really do - but I found it completely enthralling.
Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg are a young couple looking to buy their first home together. One day, they wander into a storefront promoting a new suburban development called Yonder. The two aren't all that interested in the development, and they are put off by the seriously unsettling salesman giving them the hard sell, but they agree to go out and look at properties. Yonder is a bizarre location, with streets upon streets of literally identical buildings, looking like something that shouldn't exist. And then the salesman disappears halfway through showing them house #9, and they can't find their way out of the neighbourhood, driving for hours and hours until they run out of petrol, yet always returning to #9. And so they're stuck. Every day there's a delivery of food and essentials, although they never actually see anyone deliver the package to them. And then one day, they are delivered a baby in a box with a note, "Raise me and you will be released". But the child is weird and off-putting, and they very quickly come to resent this creature forced on them.
It's an effective little science-fiction horror film, albeit one that eschews gore and excess in favour of a lingering sense of dread and fear. And so much of that effect is entirely reliant on the performances of Poots and Eisenberg. I was so impressed with the way they communicated the slow loss of hope and the growing resignation at their new reality; you really can see the light fading from their eyes, until they almost feel as though the life they previously lived was an imagined experience. Look at their sad nostalgia as remembering the experience of feeling the wind on their face, or the way they sneak into their car, just because it's the only thing in Yonder that didn't come from that place, and so it actually has a smell, which reminds them of outside. And there's a nice little scene in which they discover a brief opportunity to experience music again, and for a few moments they can let themselves go and experience joy and dancing to the music.
There's a sad and bitter pessimism to the film, which very much wears its themes on its sleeve. It's not difficult to see the film as being about the burdens and pains of marriage and parenthood stifling experience and forcing people into traditional gender roles. Everyday, Eisenberg goes off to work, which means spending the day digging a hole to try to find some way to escape, because that's the only thing he can think to do, and he refuses to let Poots help him. And so Poots finds herself fulfilling the role of mother for this unsettling child, even as she stubbornly fights it, even loudly and repeatedly telling him "I'm not your mother". The child is truly nightmarish, with a screech that penetrates and an uncanny ability to imitate and reproduce every conversation the couple have, because every child learns how to act from their parents.
The boy was probably my favourite part of the film, especially the performance of Senan Jennings who played the growing child. Jennings certainly gives a uncanny performance, never quite threatening but very far from safe. The couple feel as though they constantly being watched by him, and he has this penetrative stare that I found simply bone-chilling. They also apply some very nice trickery to the boy's voice - I think it's digital manipulation, but it could easily be as simple as another actor voicing the character - that ensured that he never sounded the way he felt like he should, so every time he spoke, the audience was held at a distance and never allowed to feel comfortable with him. It's a very smart idea that really reaps dividends in audience response.
The Yonder neighborhood is certainly fascinating and memorable, but it's probably the film's only real disappointing element. The suburbs have long been an easy thing for movies to poke fun at, and it's never really been that successful a target. But here the typical jokes about identical cookie-cutter houses are taken to an extreme, with identical two-storey houses all painted the exact same shade of green, all looming and imposing and spreading as far as the eye can see. As a visual for a horror film, it's fantastic, easily communicating the sense of feeling trapped and isolated in a world without personality, but as a piece of satirical comment, it feels very easy and dismissive. And there's no doubt that this is actively intended as a comment on the suburbs, as even before we arrived at the neighborhood, the salesman defensively tells the couple, "I know it's in the suburbs, but...". Still, I did love the Yonder neighborhood for its design as something created by someone who doesn't understand people. I laughed out loud at the artwork inside the house, paintings of the exact room the painting is in. I loved the way the clouds looked exactly like clouds and therefore nothing like clouds. If you were to imagine a housing development created by beings that don't understand people, this is exactly what that would look like.
All in all, I really enjoyed the film. It's an entertaining piece of dread-filled horror, and I was pretty impressed by it.
A hot-headed, single-minded cop notices similarities between a brutal stabbing and other recent incidents, and starts to suspect that this is the work of a serial killer. His bosses dismiss his theory and take him off the case, so when a local crime boss is attacked in a similar incident, the cop decides to team up with the gangster, sharing information in order to try to hunt down the killer and bring him to justice (although the type of justice he faces depends on whether he's caught by the gangster or the cop). But when the gangster acquires the killer's knife and uses that to have a rival crime boss murdered, DNA on the blade leads the police to accept the presence of the serial killer, which means the two must carry out their investigation while avoiding both the cops and the minions of the dead rival.
This was just terrific fun. Ma Dong-seok's work as the gangster is a real highlight, with a calm confidence to his character; he feels like someone who has faced down every threat imaginable and who knows nothing can defeat him. He's a brute with charm and wit, and he's weirdly likeable, even when he's literally ripping a person's tooth out. Meanwhile, as the cop, Kim Mu-yeol is a figure of pure stubbornness and determination, and while the idea of a cop working with a criminal who he had previously targeted and sought to take down seems improbable, his portrayal as someone who is so single-minded and focused makes his actions entirely believable, as he does feel like someone who would work with whoever he needed to in order to achieve his goal.
The action in the film is skillfully executed and extremely involving, and with careful variation in the scenes. There's an excellent brawl with an attacking horde that is very fun and put me in mind of Oldboy (even if it's not quite as great as that). The car chases are gripping and exhilarating. There's some wonderfully suspenseful moments, particularly a foot chase around narrow streets where the threat of attack lies around every blind corner. And I was pleased by the visceral brutality of the film - these were not nice, safe people or an easy comfortable world, and the film was determined to never compromise on this.
I did have a few qualms about the film, particularly its believability. The film opens with a declaration that the film is based on a true story, although it acknowledged it had been fictionalised, and more and more I do find myself wondering whether making that kind of statement actually harms a film. If you tell me that a film is largely true, then it can take you out of the film, as you suddenly find yourself thinking "That seems improbable; is that really what happened, or is that the invention of the filmmaker?", and ironically it can almost break the sense of reality of the film. So when the gangster and the cop meet a person minutes before they become the killer's next victim, or when an investigation on a seemingly unrelated kidnapping leads to the identification of the killer, these are moments which I probably would have accepted as simply a convenient coincidence in a normal film, but the second you introduce the idea of it being a true story, those coincidences feel fake.
But in the end, it's just wonderful entertainment from writer-director Lee Won-tae. I had fun, and I'm definitely interested in seeing what he does next.
If I'm being honest, the 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi is a movie that I probably never would have seen were it not for the festival. It's a film I've heard many people rave about how great it is, it's a film I was definitely interested in seeing because of its reputation, but it's not a film that I think would ever have moved up to the top of my viewing list without the prompting of a festival screening at the Embassy.
At the end of the film, we learn that Koyaanisqatsi in the Hopi language means life in turmoil, life out-of-balance, and that the Hopi prophesies sung as part of the soundtrack have meanings like "If we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster." And that is a pretty solid summary of what the film is trying to express. It's a reflection on the natural world, on humanity's place in that world, on our power to create, our power to destroy, and the impact that we have on our world. The film contains no narrative or story, instead being constructed entirely from documentary footage without context cut together so that the meaning and significance of the work comes from the juxtaposition. And it's difficult to really express what is going on in the film. It starts with some of the most astonishing imagery of the natural world I've ever seen, moments of mountain tops with clouds swirling over valleys and ridges, or water mist throwing up at the bottom of waterfalls. And then it moves to look at humanity, all that we've created, all that we've destroyed. Perhaps we watch speed-up footage of swarms of people, or perhaps we slow down and look at a single face, perhaps alone, perhaps standing beside something important to them. Or we see a massive truck, slowly being covered by a thick black smoke until the truck is completely hidden. Shots of nuclear clouds followed by footage of people sunbathing next to a nuclear power plant. We watch the ingenuity of humans creating vehicles on a production line. We go on a ride in a car, at times the lights of the world turn almost into electric static. A rocket into space explodes and slowly tumbles for an impossibly long time. Or perhaps we watch giant buildings and bridges, great engineering feats, being destroyed and collapsing in an instant. And it's beautiful, and extraordinary. All of it. I was genuinely shocked to when the film ended to realise that we've been watching this film for 80 minutes, as I would have thought it was half that.
The film is perfectly paired with an incredible score by Philip Glass, and while I knew this was his best-known work, I had no idea just how much of this score I would know note for note; his minimalist tendencies and repetitive patterns building like an urgent cry from the world - it's stunning work.
I don't have the words to express my response to the film. It's a film that is entirely working in an emotional sphere, and the experience is all about the way it makes you respond. It's just incredible. I loved it.
A celebrated psychiatrist, tormented by nightmares in which he is constantly attacked by people from famous paintings, decides to team up with an expert art thief and three of his patients to steal the artworks that are tormenting him. The string of major art heists become the focus of massive attention, even earning the nickname "the Collector" for the person behind the crimes. But hot on the heels is a police detective still smarting from his previous encounter with the art thief in which he came out second-best.
The animation picks in this year's festival seemed a little thin, but Ruben Brandt, Collector looks like it might be fun. Sadly it fell far short. My first, and most fundamental problem with the film, is that it was just ugly to look at. Part of the joy of animation is just sitting and admiring the beauty of the work in creating the image on screen. All the best animated films feature moments that I would love to frame and keep them as an example of great art. But here, the character design is actively ugly and unpleasant. When the film first introduces us to Ruben Brandt, I had an immediate dislike of his design, with his overly long face and eyes so wide apart that they literally sit on the side of his head. But through the course of the film, I came to the largely accept his design, mainly because it was one of the least unpleasantly designed characters. At least he doesn't have 3, 4, 6, or more eyes, or multiple faces, some with two faces sharing the same side of the head, others with a second face on the back of the head.
And the problem with this character design is that it means I'm held at a distance because I can't work out the reality that the film exist in. Think about, say, the original Lion King - those characters don't actually look like real versions of the animals, but we can accept them as representations of what those animals are like, and then we can move on from there. Here, the film exists in a world where there are these famous and instantly recognisable works of art, so my first instinct is to assume that these are characters that are representations of people that are supposed to exist in our reality, and that the character design is much like a more modern artwork that completely distorts the body of the subject but still remains a representation of that figure. But then we learn that one character who is presented as a two-dimensional figure with two faces, one on the left and one of the right side of his head, really is literally two-dimensional, able to slide under locked doors or slide behind a painting without anyone noticing. Well obviously that can't happen in our reality, and so I found myself struggling to understand what the reality of the world was in this film, and why it was so filled with grotesqueries. And as a result, I couldn't get into it.
And this brings me to my next issue with film. It's only a small issue, but this is a film about art, it's a celebration of art, and yet when we see representations of celebrated artworks, the works are interpreted and distorted through this design style. So if you ever wondered what Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus" would look like if it were incredibly ugly, this is the film for you. If you've ever wondered what Van Gogh's "Portrait of the Postman" would look like without his detailed brushstrokes, here you are. There's a significant focus in the film on Andy Warhol's "Double Elvis", but if they hadn't told me that's what this was, I never would have guessed because it was so distorted through the design as to be unrecognisable, such that I never would have guessed it was a representation of one of the most famous figures of the 20th century. If this is a celebration of art, why distort real artworks to such a degree that they lose what makes them great?
Another thing that greatly irritated me was the film's constant tendency to pause in order to throw some reference to a celebrated work of art. I'm not a great art aficionado, and so while I recognised enough to know that this was happening in the film, most of the references went over my head. The problem is that, when you have a film that is trying to do something like a major action sequence between a criminal trying to escape and a cop trying to catch them, when you pause the film, even just for a second or two, in order to throw out an irrelevant reference for those who recognise it, that affects the pacing of the action sequence, and also alienates those in the audience that may not recognise the reference. And when you're doing that constantly through the entire film, it just becomes irritating. (Although that's nothing compared to how the film made me made me hate it when it introduced a bar where the singer sang the most annoying lounge covers of Radiohead's "Creep" or Britney Spears' "Oops I Did It Again", and then kept playing them. Those were some references I did recognise, and hated.)
The writing isn't even very good, with characters that I simply felt the film seemed uninterested in exploring in any depth. Take for example the cop trying to chase them. This is a man who doesn't know who his father is; we know this because on Father's Day he calls his mother to ask "What's my father's name?", and his mother refuses to answer. And then, having established in that 10-second exchange that he doesn't know his father, the film largely forgets that, has no interest in exploring how having no father has changed him. It seems to be something the film inserts just for a later scene where he discovers who his father is, and when he calls his mother, she can deliver a monologue that turns out to explain the entire plot of the film. There are a million ways in the film could have explained the plot, but this film just chose the laziest and most awkward and unconvincing way to do so, and then had no interest in actually exploring the consequences of that.
I will give the film credit - there is one scene where the characters perform a robbery in the middle of the day, in a crowded gallery, and they do so by pretending to be performance artists where the theft of the artwork was part of the performance. That was a funny joke. But for the most part, I think this might be my least favourite film of the festival.
After a meeting of gangsters to allocate sectors for motorcycle theft turns into a brawl between people wanting to secure the most lucrative streets, a decision is made to hold the Olympic Games of motorcycle theft, to see who can steal the most bikes in two hours. But one of the gangs plays dirty, setting a trap that leaves one person decapitated and another, Zhou, on the run after accidentally killing a cop. After a reward is offered for Zhou's capture, one of the local "bathing beauties", prostitutes that work at the nearby Wild Goose Lake, is sent to help bring him in by using his estranged wife as leverage over him. But while Zhou is happy to come in, he will only do so if he knows that the reward is going to his wife and son. And so he hides out near the lake with the help of bathing beauty Liu, all while being the subject of a massive manhunt.
This was sadly a bit of a disappointment. I had been a great fan of the director's previous film, Black Coal, White Ice, a wonderful crime thriller that really captivated me, and I was hoping for more of the same. This had a lot to commend it, but it did fall short. It's beautifully shot, fully embracing its neo-noir genre with a love for gloomy city streets at night, the colours of the neon lights reflected on the rain-drenched streets, or the harsh unnatural glare of fluorescent lights. And there's some very fun work being done in creating the contrast between the harshness of the city and the simplicity and beauty of the natural world - there is a moment of Liu standing in front of the lake that is just breathtaking.
And it has some wonderful sequences. I was thoroughly entertained by an early demonstration of motorbike theft techniques, and the Olympic games of motorcycle theft really was a thrilling sequence that completely drew me in and then took me by surprise when it all went wrong in an instant. There's a great gunfight that takes place in a zoo at night, with the bursts of light illuminating the impassive face of a watching tiger. There's a fantastic brawl in a tiny apartment, with one death by umbrella in particular being particularly memorable, and the ensuing foot chase really is thrilling.
But the problem is that these are small interludes, and in between the film adopts the languorous pace of someone in hiding just trying to wait the threat out. And I can understand the decision to do that, because it does reflect the experience of the character, but the problem is that I don't feel the film fills the time with anything. I don't think I really came to know the characters to any great depth, came to understand who they are or what motivated them beyond the surface level - Zhou was too stoic to connect to, and because we were supposed to not know whether Liu could be trusted they therefore couldn't explore her character too much for fear of answering that question. Instead, the film just was sedate and patient, without offering too much to hold the audience. There were some great moments in those quieter stretches that have stayed with me, like the scene where Zhou contrives to bandage his own wounds, but for the most part I simply don't feel the film justified its two hour run time. I'm still interested to see what Diao Yinan does next, but I'm hoping for something that's a bit more focused next time.
In the best scene of the new film Les Misérables, a young boy runs through the streets of Paris until he arrives at a giant gathering of people in the middle of the streets, the French tricolor flag waved proudly. Except this isn't 1832, and it isn't isn't a group of students gathering in revolution and protest; rather, this is today, and the people are gathered in celebration at the victory of the French soccer team. It's a rare moment where all of France is joined together, and it's not something that happens often in this film.
The film explains its title very early on in the film, when we learn that it takes place in the neighbourhood where Victor Hugo was living when he was inspired by the things and people he saw around him to write his masterwork. These days, the neighbourhood has a largely Muslim population, and had been a prominent location for drugs until a new police unit, the SCU, cleaned it up. These days, the main problem is prostitution, with rundown apartments being rented for cheap for the girls. Stephane is a cop who transferred into the SCU, and who is experiencing his first day in the neighborhood. He meets the unofficial "mayor" of the neighbourhood, who acts as a go-between between the authorities and the people in the community. He meets the local kebab store owner, a former jihadi now trying to provide a place of peace. And he meets a variety of wayward youths. But when an altercation leads to one of the youths being seriously injured, the cops are more concerned about hunting down the drone that filmed the incident rather than getting help for the youth, which leads to a violent outcome.
It's a pretty bold decision to name your film after one of the great works of literature, because all you are doing is inviting a comparison that you are inevitably going to fall short on. But it's a decision that I think the film that's a good job in defending. This doesn't feel like a film that is exploiting a recognisable title for its own purposes, but rather a film that is in conversation with the Hugo novel. It doesn't have the grand sweeping scope of the novel, essentially taking place over two days rather than many decades, and it doesn't seem to have the same thematic focus on legalism, forgiveness, and redemption, but it shares Hugo's concern for the plight of the underprivileged and their oppression at the hands of law enforcement with little interest in justice. And as you might expect, the story does culminate in a massive protest complete with barricades, albeit in a very different environment.
When writing a novel, Hugo had 1300 pages to build his sprawling community of characters; here they managed to do a similar job in under two hours, building a fully realised world in which the characters were convincing and well-developed without ever feeling 2-dimensional. When certain characters choose to take particular actions, the choice always felt natural and logical in response to the situation, and you quickly understand how the intervention of this character or that character intervenes will escalate or ease the tensions. What's particularily impressive is that they make their job harder on themselves by introducing an excess of characters - there's this idea that, particularly in filmmaking, you should only ever introduce a character if they have a role to fulfill in the story, because time in a movie is so limited that you don't want to waste time on irrelevancies. But here, there are several characters who don't particularly serve any plot purpose, but because they exist in the world and in this community, it's important that they be acknowledged. And their presence makes the film feel much more genuine and lived in.
One big problem that I had was with the actual incident that led to everything occurring in the story. The events that sets everything off is the theft of a lion cub from a traveling circus. It's a genuinely baffling choice, because every time they started talking about the lion cub, or they go inside the circus, it feels like a completely different film, utterly unlike the urban drama this otherwise is. And the problem is, the film tries to present the ending as the inevitable outcome of the tensions in the community, but the use of the lion cub is so separate from that community that it breaks that impression. It's impossible to watch this film, and not be reminded of Do the Right Thing - they're both films that take place on sweltering days, in which various racial and other tensions build up until they explode, an excessive use of police violence takes place, and it all culminates effectively in a riot. But in Do the Right Thing, the inciting incident is Radio Raheem being an arsehole, but because Radio Raheem is part of the community and is always an arsehole, it genuinely feels like something was inevitably going to happen, and it's just that on this day this was the outcome. But in Les Misérables, the lion cub is a completely external problem, and so when they try to say that the pressures that are building in this community are inevitably going to explode, I have difficulty accepting that because they had to go so far outside the community to find a spark that would cause the explosion. And more than anything, that's why the lion cub doesn't work - because it completely undercuts what the film is trying to say.
In many ways, there's nothing about Les Misérables that is especially new. I've already discussed its debt to Do the Right Thing, but films like Training Day are also an obvious point of comparison. And there's also nothing new about a film that rages to such a degree at the injustices of society and how it allows its authorities the freedom to exploit its people in this way. But it is on the whole well executed and suspenseful, and I did like the film a great deal.
My last Agnès Varda film of the festival, but definitely not the last Agnès Varda film I will ever see. I really have been delighted by having the chance to discover her work in the festival, and this was no exception.
Agnès Varda was married to the celebrated director Jacques Demy for 28 years, until his death in 1990. The next year, she released Jacquot de Nantes, a film that plays very much as a love letter to her late husband. The film essentially tells the story of him growing up in the city of Nantes, from his time as a youngster watching puppet shows, ending with him as a young adult moving to Paris to begin his career as a filmmaker. In between, we watch the family leave the town during the German occupation, moving into the country to live with a a clog-maker. We observe his growing passion for the cinema, starting from a simple enjoyment of the movies and an excitement at getting access to a very basic home projector, through to a desire to actually create his own films. We watch him make his first experiments with filmmaking, scraping the image from old filmstrips so that he can reuse them, roughly hand-drawing animation onto these tiny pieces of film. We watch him construct an entire city out of cardboard in the attic, so that he could create elaborate stop-motion stories with clever innovations to replicate complicated camera movements. And we watch his constant fights with his parents, as they try to get him to adopt a reliable trade while he desperately wants to be a filmmaker.
And all the way through, the film pauses to show us how these early experiences shaped Demy's films. So the garage that his father owned becomes the garage where Guy works in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. The aunt who comes to visit with gifts after success at the roulette wheel inspired a gambling sequence. The fairy tales told by the puppet theatre inspired various fairy tale projects. The unmarried pregnant girl next door inspired Genevieve in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Unfortunately my knowledge of Demy's filmography is limited to just the big two films, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort, and so when they would show clips from his other films, I found it frustrating because I had no context for those scenes or knowledge of what the films even were. But that's a failing on my part, and in any case it's in no way necessary for you to know anything about his work to appreciate this film. And that's the thing that I probably found most compelling about the film. You often hear people talk about how their art was influenced by their own experiences, but this was the first time saw a film that sought to communicate this element of creating art, and it was fascinating to watch.
The film is mostly narrative, but every now and then, they will intersperse a brief moment of the real Jacques Demy, shot apparently not long before his death. In those moments, perhaps we get a sentence or two of reflection on what we've just seen. At one point, the film cuts from the narrative of young Demy filming something with his camera to the elderly Demy displaying the actual camera that he used; at another point, Varda shows Demy about to show one of the films he made as a youth to a young boy (presumably his grandson), before cutting to the young Demy about to show his film to his parents. And sometimes the film just sits and looks at his face, or examines his wrinkles in detail. And in those moments, the film really does feel like an expression of love for the man that Varda spent 30 years with.
One thing about the film that I was baffled by: the film is mostly a black and white film, but there are moments where we get brief flashes of colour, usually just a single shot but occasionally two or three shots together. Try as I might, I failed to find a logical explanation for why certain shots were in colour. I initially wondered whether they were moments where the young Demy was sitting outside the frame observing, but then I realised there were some colour moments where Demy was in the shot. Perhaps they were moments of artistry, but then why was the celebration of the end of World War II in colour? Perhaps it's a moment that inspired his art, but then there were plenty of moments where the film told us that something that inspired his work, but those moments remained in black and white. Why is this shot of a movie poster in colour, while this next shot of a movie poster in black and white? Most bafflingly, why is there a colour shot of a sign in the trade school workshop that he hated so much? I finished the film completely confounded in my efforts to understand the logic behind this decision.
But really, who cares? The movie is fantastic, and not only does it make me want to watch more Agnès Varda films, but also reminded me that I really need to dig into the films of Jacques Demy. I loved it.
(Also, there was one moment where the young Demy lost his temper and threw a bowl through a window. Cue shocked sounds from the audience, except for one woman in front of me who laughed four precise staccato "Heh"s.
"Heh. Heh. Heh. Heh.")
Kind Hearts and Coronets
I've watched Kind Hearts and Coronets, one of the greatest of the Ealing studio comedies, a number of times, most recently during my Christmas holidays this last year, so the film was still very fresh in my memory. But I never going to complain about rewatching such a glorious film. Presented as the memoirs of the 10th Duke of Chalfant, and written on the eve of his execution for murder, it tells the story of Louis, a young man whose mother came from a noble family, but who was disowned after she married for love. Louis' bitterness at the way his mother was treated by her family grows, as does his resentment at being denied a high-born life. And so, when he realises that there are only eight people ahead of him in the line of succession to the dukedom, he decides to murder everyone that stands in the way of him gaining his rightful title.
The high point of the film is obviously the performance of Alec Guinness, playing nine different roles as the various members of the d'Ascoyne family. When you're playing nine different characters, you'll never going to get a chance to bring too much depth to any one figure, and so his performances are admittedly rather broad. But there's also a glee to the work that he's doing, and a delight in trying to find ways to distinguish the character - so much so that it seems hard to remember that the doddering old fool of a priest is the same actor playing the wide-eyed naive enthusiast, or the angry window-smashing suffragette, or the proud and determined sea captain, or the smarmy and dismissive presumed heir to the title. These are not nuanced characters, but they do feel very distinct and convincing, and very, very funny.
I also enjoy how the film completely embraces the darkness of its premise. There's never any mystery about whether all these people will be murdered, since we know from the start that Louis gets all the way up to the dukedom, and so the film feels free to enjoy how terrible it's being. There are not many films that could turn the tragic deaths of twin babies into a genuine laugh-out-loud moment, but this manages that trick. And you can feel the filmmakers enjoying themselves trying to think of all the outlandish ways they can have the character commit murder. My favourite is the death by explosion, partly because the way the film deals with the moment cinematically is so fun - it might have been tempting to show the explosion, but instead it plays out off-screen while we listen to a conversation that continues even after the explosion, the sight of the initial wisps of smoke getting a genuine laugh from the audience.
Another thing I do really enjoy about the film is Joan Greenwood's performance as Sibella. It would have been easy to turn the figure of unrequited love into a blandly meek character, but as presented here, Sibella is as unsympathetic and grasping as Louis is; she rejects Louis solely because she views Lionel as having better opportunity to improve her social standing, and there's a wonderful scene where Louis seduces Sibella by accurately telling her that she's vain, selfish, cruel, and deceitful. Indeed, the only difference between the two is the fact that she's not in a position where she needs to commit murder to advance herself.
I do enjoy the little touches in the film that make fun of English obsession with status. The opening scene with the hangman in particular is an utter delight, from his decision to retire after hanging the duke because he can't go back to hemp after using a silken rope, to his concern about the correct way to address a duke ("Your Grace") who he is about to hang. The entire film is prompted by the decision of Louis' mother to marry someone of lower social standing, which offends against the way you're supposed to act, and there is the climactic trial sequence, which due to his social standing takes place before the House of Lords. Ealing films were always very socially aware, and in its denunciation of a system that accords greater status to people based only by an accident of birth, this film was certainly one of the finest examples of this.
That trial before the Lords, however, is probably the one real flaw in the film. Once Louis finishes his work in killing all of the d'Ascoyne family, much of the comedic interest goes from the film as Alec Guinness isn't in it anymore, and because of the framing device, we know he'll be found guilty, so there's no suspense to the sequence. And so I do find that I lose a bit of patience with the film during that trial, and it seems to me that you could very easily trim a few minutes from that scene and wind up with a film that is pretty much perfect, instead of one that's simply close-to-perfect.
And it is otherwise pretty close to perfect. It's wonderfully cynical, with the blackest of humour, and a sharp eye for telling a joke cinematically. It is glorious.
The Third Wife
In Vietnam in the late 19th century, a 14-year-old girl, May, is married to become the third wife of the son of a wealthy landowner. She finds herself in an unusual position with the other wives, at some times receiving great support from the other women, but also always in constant competition with them - especially as the second wife has not produced any sons and so, if the child May is pregnant with proves to be a boy, she has the chance of taking a position of seniority from the second wife. Then one day, she happens to spy a couple involved in an illicit liaison, and the tensions that secret relationship creates prove destructive.
This is just a beautiful piece of cinema, with some exquisite and elegant filmmaking. There's real care and consideration in every moment of the film. I can't think of a wasted line of dialogue, or a single pointless shot. Instead, the film quite noticeably chooses not to say something if there's any other way to express that idea, and every time there's a cut between shots it feels motivated by some new piece of information being communicated. And the film is wonderfully observational, at times just letting the events pause so that we can sit and patiently watch a wedding, or a funeral, or a punishment, or a moment of connection. And in those moments, you feel as though you've genuinely learned something about how that culture operated at that time, mostly without any need for commentary or explanation for the audience. I was astonished to discover that this was Ash Mayfair's first film, because there was such confidence and control over her medium that it seemed extraordinary.
In all the rave responses I heard about the film, it had somehow evaded my notice that the film was about a 14-year-old girl and this did make me initially uncomfortable, in that I was watching a film about a child who gets married, with all that entails. (Indeed, the actress itself was even younger - only 13 at the time.) But I thought the film did an excellent job in approaching the subject matter with care and sensitivity. While the film is unavoidably in part about her sexual experiences, the film is very respectful of the youth, both of the character and of the actress, taking care never to eroticise those moments. Instead, it adopts a very sensual tone, focused very much on the sensations and the emotions of the character, both positive and negative. And this isn't a story where you can work around the character's age; I've read Ash Mayfair talk about how this story is inspired by the experiences of some of her ancestors, who were given in an arranged marriage at this young an age, and it feels important to address the fact that this really is a thing that happened.
I thought the characters and the relationships between them all were wonderful. It's very much a female-driven film - the males are barely present in the story - and I enjoyed the complex mix of kindness and competition that emerged between the women. The women could be extremely supportive of May, understanding the experiences that she's going through, and helping her to find ways where she can protect and help herself. At the same time, these women are ultimately defined by their relationship with the husband, and so there is a constant jockeying for position and a constant fear that any change could threaten your status and advantage someone else. I also loved the relationship that develops between May and the young girl, about the same age, who has been pledged to be married as the first wife to the grandson; it's a very sweet relationship, and the only time that May feels like she has a genuine friend, but it's a friendship that is tinged with pain because both May and we are aware of an inevitability of pain in that relationship.
The Third Wife was my final screening of the festival period proper, and it was a wonderful way to end 17 days of intensive movie watching.
Midsommar
For the second time in two years, I find my film festival being extended into the following days due to a post-festival screening of a film that was only confirmed long after everyone's festival schedule was finalised. This year, the film is Midsommar, the 2 1/2 hour folk-horror film from Ari Aster, his follow-up to last year's Hereditary.
The film follows a young couple in a toxic relationship - indeed, the guy is planning to break up with her, until she suffers the tragic loss of her parents and sister, which prevents him from ending the relationship. An anthropology student, he's planning a trip with some fellow students to observe a nine-day ritual midsummer celebration at an obscure commune in Sweden, and feels compelled to invite his girlfriend. The group are a little disoriented by the perpetual daylight, by the bizarre artwork portraying unusual practices, and by the hallucinogenics that seem a vital part of the celebration, but they're mostly fine with it. But then the celebration takes a dark turn that causes some of the visitors to want to leave, while others get in trouble for offending against the local traditions and beliefs.
I was a bit apprehensive approaching the film, because I had heard a lot of people talking about how extreme some of the moments and images in the film were - and this had been from people who had seen Hereditary, knew about the extreme images in that film, and said that this was harder. Given that expectation, I was relieved to find the film wasn't as hard as I feared - certainly there are a couple of moments that are shocking and horrific, but one of them was almost identical to something I'd seen less than a week earlier in Under the Silver Lake, while another moment, while shocking, was so artful and elaborate that it looked like something that would have been in the TV series Hannibal. It's certainly rough, and there were moments where I did want to look away, not wanting to see what was on screen, but it's not as bad as I expected.
I really am excited by how Florence Pugh is developing as an actress. I'd never seen her before Lady Macbeth a couple of years ago, but since then she's also been great in films like Fighting With My Family or this, all fascinating films that really push her range as an actress. Here she's called on to be unrestrained emotionally, and she gives a performance that is vulnerable in a way I've never seen from her before. I think I've pretty much reached a point where any film is more interesting to me if Florence Pugh is in it. The other main actors are also very enjoyable. Jack Reynor is surprisingly sympathetic as the boyfriend, unexpectedly so since the film is so firmly on her side; there are a lot of problems in their relationship, mostly his fault, but at the same time he is someone who was trapped in this relationship because he doesn't want to cause pain to someone already grieving, and he never feels irredeemable. William Jackson Harper, who plays Chidi on The Good Place, plays a very similar role here as the academic who is simply fascinated by the culture, but here he lets that fascination override his understanding that these are real people with sincere beliefs to be respected. Will Poulter is developing a very fun career playing another in a long line of entertaining assholes - here, his resentment at Florence Pugh for coming on the trip is very funny, as is his refusal to accept his mistakes when he offends the locals. And I found Vilhelm Blomgren, playing the local who invites everyone on the trip, quite fascinating as he rides the line between sweetly charming and vaguely menacing.
I really was very impressed with how much control Ari Aster had over the film and its tone. He shows himself to be an extremely patient storyteller, a filmmaker of intent, sitting back and observing as the events play out. He's not constantly trying to shock you or surprised you, instead trusting you as an audience to engage with what's going on and react naturally to events. He even makes the bold choice to keep most of the deaths off-screen, an unconventional decision for a horror film, but one that I found extremely effective because it heightened the impact of the eventual revelation. I was also surprised and impressed by his restraint in the scenes involving hallucinogenics; it must have been tempting to present those moments as nightmarish sequences, but instead he holds back, downplaying it and giving what seemed like a more realistic portrait of the experience. (There's a moment in the film where I suddenly noticed that some flowers were breathing, and I realised I had forgotten that she was still on the hallucinogen she took 10 minutes earlier; it's a very small detail, so small there's people watching the film at home on a smaller screen might not even notice it, but it's a great affirmation of his determination to tell a story subtly and visually.) It's an impressively mature piece of filmmaking for such a young director. I will also thrown by just how funny the film was - I don't remember there being any humour in his previous film, and so it never occurred to me that he had the ability to get the entire audience to genuinely laugh while also shocking them. But he understands the goofy and silly elements in his film, and he wants you to laugh at these, largely because that laughter allows you to lower your defences and makes you more susceptible to the horror when it comes.
My main problem with Hereditary had been that the over-the-top ending felt like it came from a very different film to the more dread-filled film it had previously been. I did feel that with Midsommar he achieves a much better consistency of tone, without any sharp turns or improbable revelations to completely derail the film, and at every point there's a chain of logic that leads to the ending as the inevitable outcome. Now admittedly, if you're making a film in the folk-horror genre, you're always going to come back to The Wicker Man as a key influence, and carrying that understanding into the film could mean that certain turns feel more predictable than for someone watching this film fresh. But still, I think it works. (I was also surprised to realise that the film seems to be referencing, not only the original Wicker Man, but also the infamous remake with Nicolas Cage - that was an unexpected choice, but it amused me.)
I did find myself uncertain about the deaths of the parents and sister at the start of the film. It's an extremely effective sequence, and makes a real statement at the start of the film. But I don't know that the film really does much with it. It becomes the excuse for why the boyfriend can't break up with her when he wants to, later on she thinks she has glimpses of her parents, and it does sever any family ties back to the US, which makes her more susceptible to the influence of the commune, but it is a marginal element of the film and could easily be dropped without being noticed. Its main purpose seems more to be about literalising the major theme of the film - the film is about an end of a relationship, and about how emotionally that can feel like a death that you need to grieve - but that is an idea the film would have been able to make very clear without having a character who's already literally grieving. Because I do think the film was very effective in portraying and exploring the relationship breakdown, the frustrations and resentments that accumulate, the reluctance to leave for fear of not having someone to support you when you need it, and the appeal of someone new and exciting over the person you've been with for years. There's a moment where she finds herself weeping over the state of her relationship, and it's in the middle of a ritual, and she's surrounded by woman who are weeping with her as part of the ritual; it's a fantastic portrait of the emotional turmoil that she's going through in her relationship, and how much she just needs the support of other people who are willing to be there for her as she goes through it.
I think it says a lot for the film that, after watching it for 2 1/2 hours, I was honestly surprised to realise that it was ending because it did not feel like much time had passed at all. I wanted more to the film, and it looks like I may be able to get it. I know that Ari Aster has said he's working on an extended cut with an additional 30 minutes, and I'm really excited to see it.
And all the way through, the film pauses to show us how these early experiences shaped Demy's films. So the garage that his father owned becomes the garage where Guy works in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. The aunt who comes to visit with gifts after success at the roulette wheel inspired a gambling sequence. The fairy tales told by the puppet theatre inspired various fairy tale projects. The unmarried pregnant girl next door inspired Genevieve in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Unfortunately my knowledge of Demy's filmography is limited to just the big two films, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort, and so when they would show clips from his other films, I found it frustrating because I had no context for those scenes or knowledge of what the films even were. But that's a failing on my part, and in any case it's in no way necessary for you to know anything about his work to appreciate this film. And that's the thing that I probably found most compelling about the film. You often hear people talk about how their art was influenced by their own experiences, but this was the first time saw a film that sought to communicate this element of creating art, and it was fascinating to watch.
The film is mostly narrative, but every now and then, they will intersperse a brief moment of the real Jacques Demy, shot apparently not long before his death. In those moments, perhaps we get a sentence or two of reflection on what we've just seen. At one point, the film cuts from the narrative of young Demy filming something with his camera to the elderly Demy displaying the actual camera that he used; at another point, Varda shows Demy about to show one of the films he made as a youth to a young boy (presumably his grandson), before cutting to the young Demy about to show his film to his parents. And sometimes the film just sits and looks at his face, or examines his wrinkles in detail. And in those moments, the film really does feel like an expression of love for the man that Varda spent 30 years with.
One thing about the film that I was baffled by: the film is mostly a black and white film, but there are moments where we get brief flashes of colour, usually just a single shot but occasionally two or three shots together. Try as I might, I failed to find a logical explanation for why certain shots were in colour. I initially wondered whether they were moments where the young Demy was sitting outside the frame observing, but then I realised there were some colour moments where Demy was in the shot. Perhaps they were moments of artistry, but then why was the celebration of the end of World War II in colour? Perhaps it's a moment that inspired his art, but then there were plenty of moments where the film told us that something that inspired his work, but those moments remained in black and white. Why is this shot of a movie poster in colour, while this next shot of a movie poster in black and white? Most bafflingly, why is there a colour shot of a sign in the trade school workshop that he hated so much? I finished the film completely confounded in my efforts to understand the logic behind this decision.
But really, who cares? The movie is fantastic, and not only does it make me want to watch more Agnès Varda films, but also reminded me that I really need to dig into the films of Jacques Demy. I loved it.
(Also, there was one moment where the young Demy lost his temper and threw a bowl through a window. Cue shocked sounds from the audience, except for one woman in front of me who laughed four precise staccato "Heh"s.
"Heh. Heh. Heh. Heh.")
I've watched Kind Hearts and Coronets, one of the greatest of the Ealing studio comedies, a number of times, most recently during my Christmas holidays this last year, so the film was still very fresh in my memory. But I never going to complain about rewatching such a glorious film. Presented as the memoirs of the 10th Duke of Chalfant, and written on the eve of his execution for murder, it tells the story of Louis, a young man whose mother came from a noble family, but who was disowned after she married for love. Louis' bitterness at the way his mother was treated by her family grows, as does his resentment at being denied a high-born life. And so, when he realises that there are only eight people ahead of him in the line of succession to the dukedom, he decides to murder everyone that stands in the way of him gaining his rightful title.
The high point of the film is obviously the performance of Alec Guinness, playing nine different roles as the various members of the d'Ascoyne family. When you're playing nine different characters, you'll never going to get a chance to bring too much depth to any one figure, and so his performances are admittedly rather broad. But there's also a glee to the work that he's doing, and a delight in trying to find ways to distinguish the character - so much so that it seems hard to remember that the doddering old fool of a priest is the same actor playing the wide-eyed naive enthusiast, or the angry window-smashing suffragette, or the proud and determined sea captain, or the smarmy and dismissive presumed heir to the title. These are not nuanced characters, but they do feel very distinct and convincing, and very, very funny.
I also enjoy how the film completely embraces the darkness of its premise. There's never any mystery about whether all these people will be murdered, since we know from the start that Louis gets all the way up to the dukedom, and so the film feels free to enjoy how terrible it's being. There are not many films that could turn the tragic deaths of twin babies into a genuine laugh-out-loud moment, but this manages that trick. And you can feel the filmmakers enjoying themselves trying to think of all the outlandish ways they can have the character commit murder. My favourite is the death by explosion, partly because the way the film deals with the moment cinematically is so fun - it might have been tempting to show the explosion, but instead it plays out off-screen while we listen to a conversation that continues even after the explosion, the sight of the initial wisps of smoke getting a genuine laugh from the audience.
Another thing I do really enjoy about the film is Joan Greenwood's performance as Sibella. It would have been easy to turn the figure of unrequited love into a blandly meek character, but as presented here, Sibella is as unsympathetic and grasping as Louis is; she rejects Louis solely because she views Lionel as having better opportunity to improve her social standing, and there's a wonderful scene where Louis seduces Sibella by accurately telling her that she's vain, selfish, cruel, and deceitful. Indeed, the only difference between the two is the fact that she's not in a position where she needs to commit murder to advance herself.
I do enjoy the little touches in the film that make fun of English obsession with status. The opening scene with the hangman in particular is an utter delight, from his decision to retire after hanging the duke because he can't go back to hemp after using a silken rope, to his concern about the correct way to address a duke ("Your Grace") who he is about to hang. The entire film is prompted by the decision of Louis' mother to marry someone of lower social standing, which offends against the way you're supposed to act, and there is the climactic trial sequence, which due to his social standing takes place before the House of Lords. Ealing films were always very socially aware, and in its denunciation of a system that accords greater status to people based only by an accident of birth, this film was certainly one of the finest examples of this.
That trial before the Lords, however, is probably the one real flaw in the film. Once Louis finishes his work in killing all of the d'Ascoyne family, much of the comedic interest goes from the film as Alec Guinness isn't in it anymore, and because of the framing device, we know he'll be found guilty, so there's no suspense to the sequence. And so I do find that I lose a bit of patience with the film during that trial, and it seems to me that you could very easily trim a few minutes from that scene and wind up with a film that is pretty much perfect, instead of one that's simply close-to-perfect.
And it is otherwise pretty close to perfect. It's wonderfully cynical, with the blackest of humour, and a sharp eye for telling a joke cinematically. It is glorious.
In Vietnam in the late 19th century, a 14-year-old girl, May, is married to become the third wife of the son of a wealthy landowner. She finds herself in an unusual position with the other wives, at some times receiving great support from the other women, but also always in constant competition with them - especially as the second wife has not produced any sons and so, if the child May is pregnant with proves to be a boy, she has the chance of taking a position of seniority from the second wife. Then one day, she happens to spy a couple involved in an illicit liaison, and the tensions that secret relationship creates prove destructive.
This is just a beautiful piece of cinema, with some exquisite and elegant filmmaking. There's real care and consideration in every moment of the film. I can't think of a wasted line of dialogue, or a single pointless shot. Instead, the film quite noticeably chooses not to say something if there's any other way to express that idea, and every time there's a cut between shots it feels motivated by some new piece of information being communicated. And the film is wonderfully observational, at times just letting the events pause so that we can sit and patiently watch a wedding, or a funeral, or a punishment, or a moment of connection. And in those moments, you feel as though you've genuinely learned something about how that culture operated at that time, mostly without any need for commentary or explanation for the audience. I was astonished to discover that this was Ash Mayfair's first film, because there was such confidence and control over her medium that it seemed extraordinary.
In all the rave responses I heard about the film, it had somehow evaded my notice that the film was about a 14-year-old girl and this did make me initially uncomfortable, in that I was watching a film about a child who gets married, with all that entails. (Indeed, the actress itself was even younger - only 13 at the time.) But I thought the film did an excellent job in approaching the subject matter with care and sensitivity. While the film is unavoidably in part about her sexual experiences, the film is very respectful of the youth, both of the character and of the actress, taking care never to eroticise those moments. Instead, it adopts a very sensual tone, focused very much on the sensations and the emotions of the character, both positive and negative. And this isn't a story where you can work around the character's age; I've read Ash Mayfair talk about how this story is inspired by the experiences of some of her ancestors, who were given in an arranged marriage at this young an age, and it feels important to address the fact that this really is a thing that happened.
I thought the characters and the relationships between them all were wonderful. It's very much a female-driven film - the males are barely present in the story - and I enjoyed the complex mix of kindness and competition that emerged between the women. The women could be extremely supportive of May, understanding the experiences that she's going through, and helping her to find ways where she can protect and help herself. At the same time, these women are ultimately defined by their relationship with the husband, and so there is a constant jockeying for position and a constant fear that any change could threaten your status and advantage someone else. I also loved the relationship that develops between May and the young girl, about the same age, who has been pledged to be married as the first wife to the grandson; it's a very sweet relationship, and the only time that May feels like she has a genuine friend, but it's a friendship that is tinged with pain because both May and we are aware of an inevitability of pain in that relationship.
The Third Wife was my final screening of the festival period proper, and it was a wonderful way to end 17 days of intensive movie watching.
For the second time in two years, I find my film festival being extended into the following days due to a post-festival screening of a film that was only confirmed long after everyone's festival schedule was finalised. This year, the film is Midsommar, the 2 1/2 hour folk-horror film from Ari Aster, his follow-up to last year's Hereditary.
The film follows a young couple in a toxic relationship - indeed, the guy is planning to break up with her, until she suffers the tragic loss of her parents and sister, which prevents him from ending the relationship. An anthropology student, he's planning a trip with some fellow students to observe a nine-day ritual midsummer celebration at an obscure commune in Sweden, and feels compelled to invite his girlfriend. The group are a little disoriented by the perpetual daylight, by the bizarre artwork portraying unusual practices, and by the hallucinogenics that seem a vital part of the celebration, but they're mostly fine with it. But then the celebration takes a dark turn that causes some of the visitors to want to leave, while others get in trouble for offending against the local traditions and beliefs.
I was a bit apprehensive approaching the film, because I had heard a lot of people talking about how extreme some of the moments and images in the film were - and this had been from people who had seen Hereditary, knew about the extreme images in that film, and said that this was harder. Given that expectation, I was relieved to find the film wasn't as hard as I feared - certainly there are a couple of moments that are shocking and horrific, but one of them was almost identical to something I'd seen less than a week earlier in Under the Silver Lake, while another moment, while shocking, was so artful and elaborate that it looked like something that would have been in the TV series Hannibal. It's certainly rough, and there were moments where I did want to look away, not wanting to see what was on screen, but it's not as bad as I expected.
I really am excited by how Florence Pugh is developing as an actress. I'd never seen her before Lady Macbeth a couple of years ago, but since then she's also been great in films like Fighting With My Family or this, all fascinating films that really push her range as an actress. Here she's called on to be unrestrained emotionally, and she gives a performance that is vulnerable in a way I've never seen from her before. I think I've pretty much reached a point where any film is more interesting to me if Florence Pugh is in it. The other main actors are also very enjoyable. Jack Reynor is surprisingly sympathetic as the boyfriend, unexpectedly so since the film is so firmly on her side; there are a lot of problems in their relationship, mostly his fault, but at the same time he is someone who was trapped in this relationship because he doesn't want to cause pain to someone already grieving, and he never feels irredeemable. William Jackson Harper, who plays Chidi on The Good Place, plays a very similar role here as the academic who is simply fascinated by the culture, but here he lets that fascination override his understanding that these are real people with sincere beliefs to be respected. Will Poulter is developing a very fun career playing another in a long line of entertaining assholes - here, his resentment at Florence Pugh for coming on the trip is very funny, as is his refusal to accept his mistakes when he offends the locals. And I found Vilhelm Blomgren, playing the local who invites everyone on the trip, quite fascinating as he rides the line between sweetly charming and vaguely menacing.
I really was very impressed with how much control Ari Aster had over the film and its tone. He shows himself to be an extremely patient storyteller, a filmmaker of intent, sitting back and observing as the events play out. He's not constantly trying to shock you or surprised you, instead trusting you as an audience to engage with what's going on and react naturally to events. He even makes the bold choice to keep most of the deaths off-screen, an unconventional decision for a horror film, but one that I found extremely effective because it heightened the impact of the eventual revelation. I was also surprised and impressed by his restraint in the scenes involving hallucinogenics; it must have been tempting to present those moments as nightmarish sequences, but instead he holds back, downplaying it and giving what seemed like a more realistic portrait of the experience. (There's a moment in the film where I suddenly noticed that some flowers were breathing, and I realised I had forgotten that she was still on the hallucinogen she took 10 minutes earlier; it's a very small detail, so small there's people watching the film at home on a smaller screen might not even notice it, but it's a great affirmation of his determination to tell a story subtly and visually.) It's an impressively mature piece of filmmaking for such a young director. I will also thrown by just how funny the film was - I don't remember there being any humour in his previous film, and so it never occurred to me that he had the ability to get the entire audience to genuinely laugh while also shocking them. But he understands the goofy and silly elements in his film, and he wants you to laugh at these, largely because that laughter allows you to lower your defences and makes you more susceptible to the horror when it comes.
My main problem with Hereditary had been that the over-the-top ending felt like it came from a very different film to the more dread-filled film it had previously been. I did feel that with Midsommar he achieves a much better consistency of tone, without any sharp turns or improbable revelations to completely derail the film, and at every point there's a chain of logic that leads to the ending as the inevitable outcome. Now admittedly, if you're making a film in the folk-horror genre, you're always going to come back to The Wicker Man as a key influence, and carrying that understanding into the film could mean that certain turns feel more predictable than for someone watching this film fresh. But still, I think it works. (I was also surprised to realise that the film seems to be referencing, not only the original Wicker Man, but also the infamous remake with Nicolas Cage - that was an unexpected choice, but it amused me.)
I did find myself uncertain about the deaths of the parents and sister at the start of the film. It's an extremely effective sequence, and makes a real statement at the start of the film. But I don't know that the film really does much with it. It becomes the excuse for why the boyfriend can't break up with her when he wants to, later on she thinks she has glimpses of her parents, and it does sever any family ties back to the US, which makes her more susceptible to the influence of the commune, but it is a marginal element of the film and could easily be dropped without being noticed. Its main purpose seems more to be about literalising the major theme of the film - the film is about an end of a relationship, and about how emotionally that can feel like a death that you need to grieve - but that is an idea the film would have been able to make very clear without having a character who's already literally grieving. Because I do think the film was very effective in portraying and exploring the relationship breakdown, the frustrations and resentments that accumulate, the reluctance to leave for fear of not having someone to support you when you need it, and the appeal of someone new and exciting over the person you've been with for years. There's a moment where she finds herself weeping over the state of her relationship, and it's in the middle of a ritual, and she's surrounded by woman who are weeping with her as part of the ritual; it's a fantastic portrait of the emotional turmoil that she's going through in her relationship, and how much she just needs the support of other people who are willing to be there for her as she goes through it.
I think it says a lot for the film that, after watching it for 2 1/2 hours, I was honestly surprised to realise that it was ending because it did not feel like much time had passed at all. I wanted more to the film, and it looks like I may be able to get it. I know that Ari Aster has said he's working on an extended cut with an additional 30 minutes, and I'm really excited to see it.
[And now I'll just throw in a note to say that I have since seen the extended cut of Midsommar, and indeed, I think it's pretty much a perfect version of this film. There's not a minute wasted in that version, and I simply adore it.]
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