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Films Watched in January 2019
Films Watched in December 2018
Ten Star Movies
Reviews
Mandy (2018)
Parodying the Unparodyable
I am not sure why I had such high hopes for Panos Cosmatos stylish husk of a horror film. The word-of-mouth buzz around it was perhaps one contributor, as was the promise of that rather gorgeous promotional poster. The fact that the late Johann Johansson had worked on the soundtrack, which sounded like a free interpretation of the great electro themes of early 1980s cinema also had grabbed my attention. While the presence of Andrea Riseborough in the titular role balanced off the frustrations of any film where Nicolas Cage is encouraged to implode. Yet all of these possible sparks of excitement count for nought having now surveyed what I can only describe as the first Netflix aggregated film.
Cosmatos is clearly a film nerd in the Tarantino tradition, having gorged himself on the kind of high-wattage 80s trash of the TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2 and MOTEL HELL, he has chugged up for the audience a film that feels custom calibrated to appeal to a nostalgia for the idea of the 'midnight movie' and 'the video nasty'.
It is a film that is consciously riding the retro-zeitgeist for all things neon, electro 80s. In casting Nicolas Cage as the avenging husband Cosmatos seems inspired less by what to do with Cage in this role and more by the Youtube infamy that Cage's school of overacting has achieved. One scene in particular, involving a pair of Y-fronts and a bottle of vodka, is nothing more than the cynical addition to Cage's YouTube 'wig-out' reel. The inclusion of King Crimson over the title credits gives the film the further gloss of artful pretension. While the bum-achingly slow pace of the film rings of Cosmatos ridiculing the indulgent stylings of 'arthouse' slow cinema.
What makes the film even more unfathomable is the restraint that the whole thing actually evidences, certainly when placed in the context of the type of horror movie it is liberally riffing from. The violence here is brutal, but completely undercut by the dual attack of daft humour and a aversion to lingering upon the gorier aspects of what the film offers. Eyes pop, heads roll, women are cremated alive, but none of this violence is really felt, nor is it particularly repellent. Compare what Cosmatos is doing to the more audacious Giallo-infused self-reflexiveness of Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani's work. THE STRANGE COLOUR OF YOUR BODY'S TEARS (2013) has a similarly trippy aesthetic, in which the violence is more shocking and brutally rendered.
There is clearly craft at work in the visual aesthetic and the score. Cage will always have his fans and defenders. And there really is nothing quite like a good revenge tale. Yet that is the limit of my positive feelings toward this film. Its real crime is in parodying the unparodyable, making it impossible to appreciate some of the great work from Linus Roache as the drugged-out Mansonesque figure, who has the flavour of Todd Rundgren about him. Rather than doing something as groundbreaking as certain critics have suggested, I find the whole affair a kind of conservative regression, a film that attempts to bring the outre into the mainstream by coyly viewing its violence through a glass darkly. Disappointing - and what on earth did Andrea Riseborough sign up for?
The Go-Betweens: Right Here (2017)
As a Fan It Worked for Me - And Then Some
The Go-Betweens were a band I cam to in the late nineties, unaware that they were, at that stage, disbanded. There return in the early 2000s was one of the more remarkable pop-rock stories of the period, especially as the quality of Forster and McLennan's songwriting had, if anything, got better. Kriv Stenders' documentary on the trials and tribulations of this genuinely unique Australian band, manages to be both a great primer for someone who knows nothing about The Go-Betweens, and also a nicely gossipy behind the scenes look at one of the messier and incestuous group dynamics.
'Cattle and Cane' is the song that really propelled the band to a different critical space in the canon of Australian popular music. It also marked the point where Grant McLennan became his friend Robert Forster's song-writing equal. There is a great moment in the doc where Forster talks about his late friend as going from the rear-view mirror to driving alongside him and then speeding off into the distance. It is a neat analogy that hints at so much of the creative tension that inspired and destroyed the band.
By far and away the best interview subject is drummer Lindy Morrison, who spent some time as Forster's girlfriend/muse, and comes across as a genuinely complex and intensely creative force of nature, who felt increasingly maligned and marginalised within the group. The straight-forward chronological structure of the film actually works well to show how the band's sound develops over time and Stenders' knows exactly what tracks to place on the soundtrack for maximum effect. All in all, this is an enjoyable and detailed account of a band that never quite managed to be as big as they perhaps could have been, but left behind them a significant body of work.
Ears, Nose and Throat (2016)
An Underwhelming First Encounter with Kevin Jerome Everson
This tiny slither of a film is all about trauma and its after-effects. It's a brief documentary about a brutal incident that Shadeena Brooks witnessed on the streets of Mansfield, Ohio. Her retelling of the incident is overlaid onto footage of her having a medical examination. The idea that Everson seems to have at core is that the body retains as much of a memory of trauma as the mind does. The dislocation between the retelling and the examination, leads to a sense of how traumatic events are displaced or pushed in to unusual shapes by our subconscious. The disruptive opening sequences of white noise and quasi-surveillance footage did little for me, but the film as a whole had a curious appeal that has at least made me want to explore more work by this busy US auteur.
Bad Times at the El Royale (2018)
A Brokeback Beast of a Neo-Noir
Drew Goddard follows up the over-hyped collaboration with Joss Whedon in THE CABIN IN THE WOODS, with this atmospheric and moody Neo-Noir, that somehow manages to blow a fantastic opening hour of mystery and tension.
Set in 1969, just as America's 'Summer of Love' is turning in to the worst hangover in history, the film brings together a disparate group of characters, all of whom appear to be up to something nasty at the titular hotel that straddles the border of California and Nevada. John Hamm, Jeff Bridges, the superb Cynthia Erivo and Dakota Johnson are among the folks looking to check in to the establishment that has clearly seen better days. Over the next hour Goddard whisks the audience through a beautifully edited series of vignettes that add back story and context to the characters, whilst somehow managing to expand the all-pervasive air of mystery.
Yet this cannot last and the film careers away into the desert of great failed film ideas the moment that Chris Hemsworth's Manson-light cult leader pops up on the scene. What had seemed like a delicately balanced series of potential conflicts, where nobody is quite who they appear to be, and no one is sure of coming out of their predicament intact, becomes a ponderously plodding slog through action movie cliches. Ultimately, the whole affair has a whiff of Tarantino hubris about it, slick and smartly executed, but this masks a rather soulless and mechanistic narrative motor. A real shame, as with Erivo's Darlene, their was a beautifully melancholic mood movie crying out to be made.
Grand Prix (1966)
An Excercise in Style and Technique - no more, no less
I think John Frankenheimer has made at least one stone-cold classic film, the deliriously disturbing SECONDS (1966). It is odd to think then that at roughly the same time as he was making that unique foray into monochromatic horror, he was also putting together this day-glo ode to sixties excess for the gimmicky Cinerama ultra-wide projection format.
GRAND PRIX is thoroughly hampered by the centrality of this unique format to its production. Much like THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF THE BROTHERS GRIMM (1962), it is a pretty ropy script, cobbled together to showcase the Cinerama format. Thus, the technical ingenuity of the races is pretty much everything in a film that otherwise documents the brash playboy lifestyle of Formula One race drivers in soap opera like silliness. A cast that features James Garner, Eve Marie Saint, Yves Montand and Francoise Hardy ("I don't drink. I don't smoke"), is generally wasted on an overlong melodrama, punctuated by intense moments of simulated F1 action. At least Antonio Sabato seems to enjoy himself as the feckless up-and-coming driver Nino Barlini.
The Age of Innocence (1993)
Scorsese's Finest Film
Edith Wharton has been very well served in terms of cinematic adaptations of her work. Terence Davies' delivered a delightfully dark vision of Wharton's THE HOUSE OF MIRTH, and in a similar vein Martin Scorsese reaches the very pinnacle of his much-lauded filmmaking career with this lavish period adaptation, that captures all of the caustic irony and brittle insularity of Wharton's late 19th century New York.
Featuring music by Elmer Bernstein and sumptuous Technicolor photography from Michael Ballhaus, this is as detailed and intricate a work as Scorsese has ever made. It is also a very clear passion piece, with three intensely crafted performances at its core. Daniel Day-Lewis is beautifully sincere and agonised as the aristo caught inside the tenderest of traps - it now looks like a dry-run for his similarly masochistic Reynolds Woodcock, in THE PHANTOM THREAD. Michelle Pfeiffer is as close to perfection as an actress could get as Ellen Olenska, the cultured European who no longer belongs in New York society, but utterly depends on it for succour. Then there is Winona Ryder's delicate work as May Welland, which could easily disappear from view when considering the quality of the two leads, but Ryder complements things beautifully with a cunning innocence that is the very image of power and privilege.
Probably the most stunning aspect of the film is the rich production design from Dante Ferretti, which manages to bring together Scorsese's cinephilic reference points, with meticulous period detail, making for a subtle and devastatingly beautiful period costume drama.
It's Always Fair Weather (1955)
A Mature Musical in Cinemascope
I am not entirely sure why IT'S ALWAYS FAIR WEATHER is given such short shrift in the history of Hollywood's golden-era of musicals. Donen and Kelly re-team with SINGIN' IN THE RAIN writers Comden & Green for what is a bittersweet ode to the passing of time, and just maybe the passing of cinema.
There are great individual sequences here, such as the Stomp-inspiring trash can tap number, or Cyd Charisse's wowing of a boxing gym with her rendition of 'Baby, You Knock Me Out'. There is also an underlying air of melancholy which sits rather neatly with the central tale of three war buddies who have long since gone their separate ways. Time is the great destroyer and there is a beautiful sense of how it irrevocably pulls a person's life this way and that, which makes IT'S ALWAYS FAIR WEATHER perhaps one of the most obviously fated of musicals.
Shot in beautiful, wide cinemascope, the film has its flawed moments, in which Donen and Kelly's aesthetic experimentations outrun the practicalities of the technology - the long, continuous lens pull back as the buddies leave the bar and go their separate ways being one such clear example. That said their is still a lot to love about this musical, especially the knockabout humour of the final TV moment - which is one of Dolores Gray's very best screen moments.
Shukria (2018)
An Oblique, Beautifully Shot and Somewhat Cliched Take on Conflict
This played before THE LAST FIGHT at the 2018 Raindance Festival and was a short film that shifted from striking, near-tableaux imagery, to a far more conventional dully allegorical close. A young woman in a war zone becomes pregnant, labours in some strife and finally gives birth, all the while surrounded by the women of her family. There is a sense that the opening imagery obliquely deals with conflict devoid of violence, while the close shows the violent resolution of birth. One thing is for certain, Hajat Tocilla (who plays the eponymous young woman) is a striking screen presence that deserves bigger and better things in the future.
Halloween (1978)
A Classic of the Horror Genre That May Finally be Dating
John Carpenter has enjoyed a remarkable return to cult prominence in the last few years, with TV series like STRANGER THINGS and great recent horrors like IT FOLLOWS and DON'T BREATHE, very clearly paying their dues. HALLOWEEN was the breakthrough film that redefined US horror film and set Carpenter on his genre-heavy career as a cult horror helmer.
I have watched the film countless times since my early teens and it has long since ceased to terrify me. However, repeat viewings have only served to enhance the notion that Carpenter is a master of economy and framing. Look at shots like those where Donald Pleasance's Dr. Loomis looks one way, then the other as Michael Myers wheels by in the car he stole from the Dr, or the unsettling shot of Myers resurrected for the second time, as he sits bolt upright in the background of a shot that foregrounds Jamie Lee Curtis' Laurie and her distraught anguish.
I finally saw the film on the big screen in its 4k reissue tonight, and, as ever, I loved going through the paces with Carpenter and his team, yet on the big screen, with a largely silent audience, I could understand why the likes of Kael originally panned the film. It is a ropy affair in terms of narrative, with Loomis seeming to quite literally just stand around waiting for the the bulk of the film's running time. There is also the infuriating trope of people turning lights off rather than on when walking in to palpably dangerous situations. Finally, there is a real sense of form forcing narrative at the film's end, with Laurie adopting tighter and tighter spaces of the house, as Myers corners her like a frightened rabbit. This latter point I have always thought of as a strength of the film, hinting at how the monstrous masculinity of Myers seeks to dominate and tyrannise the domestic spaces that he is exiled from (those car mechanic overalls are a neat little bit of production design). Yet watching upon the big screen I wonder if the ending isn't actually Carpenter choosing to showcase those incongruously claustrophobic Panavision shots over any reasonable narrative logic. A constant criticism of the film has been the lack of character development that Hill and Carpenter work in to their slender plotting. At least four of the five people who die on screen in the film, have literally no sense of character. Haddonfield also seems remarkably devoid of much activity on Halloween night, with the police presence being restricted to Charles Cyphers occasional doubting returns to doomy Dr Loomis. All in all there are major issues with this 'classic', yet it still gives you at least one good scare, and it is an undeniably succinct piece of low-budget genre filmmaking. I would suggest that STARMAN, THE THING and ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 are all better films in Carpenter's filmography.
The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016)
A Neat and Gory Horror Film That Doesn't Quite Know How to End
Andre Ovredal, director of breakout international hit TROLLHUNTER, transitions neatly to US indie cinema, with this lithe and viscerally executed supernatural horror. Like all the best film's in this sub-genre, it is a battle between faith and rationality, in a very Blackwoodian mode. Brian Cox and Emile Hirsch are a father and son coroner team. Cox is patiently teaching Hirsch the intricacies of their business in a way that suggests he hopes his son will take over when he is no more. However, Hirsch has other hopes and other dreams... all of which are put on hold when a mysterious cadaver is dropped off late one stormy night.
The set-up to the film is simply superb, and when Cox and Hirsch begin to conduct the autopsy on their Jane Doe, their is a great balance between horror and humour which I can only think of being bested by GET OUT from recent releases. The goriness of the autopsy is put in to relief by the matter-of-fact manner in which father and son go about their business. Things start to go awry when the duo are pulled outside of the autopsy room to attend to the free-roaming corpses of the recently deceased who have escaped captivity in the morgue's deep-freeze. At this stage the film slides into rather lazy jump scare terrain, a great shame as the final reveal is still a powerful one, and the set-up hints at a much richer film bubbling under the generic structure.
Hell or High Water (2016)
A Sharply Observed Outsider Heist Western
Taylor Sheridan is one of the most fascinating screenwriters working in contemporary Hollywood, and until SICARIO 2: SOLDADO he had pretty much scripted a trio of very good thrillers that touched on the sharp end of the US political embrace of neo-liberalism. David Mackenzie followed Denis Villeneuve in working closely with Sheridan (who has a small cameo in the film as a disconsolate cowboy), crafting the kind of film that supposedly doesn't getting made in Hollywood any longer: mature, gritty, character-driven and political.
Built around three performances that all have deliberate differences in pacing, Mackenzie's considerable technical ability gives Bridges, Foster and Pine the perfect platform to deliver superb character work. What really stands out though, is the way in which the film gives over running time to perfect little portraits of disenfranchised America, from the waitresses who will not give up their tips, nor tolerate dissent from the menu, through to the bank clerk who just wants to get on with their day, this is a film saturated in local knowledge and a strong sense of place. All the more commendable when it is considered that Mackenzie and Sheridan aren't Texans.
This is probably Chris Pine's transitional performance, as he shifts from more mainstream pretty boy roles to grittier character work. It is also Bridges best performance in at least a decade, as he gets caught up in just one last chase before retirement. Ben Foster continues to deliver incredible work on the periphery of Hollywood and must now be considered one of the most underrated actors of his generation. This is a film that baldly directs an attack at the greedy neo-liberal capitalism that propels the US relentlessly onwards, and it must go down as the most sustained and strident critique of the banking crisis and its fall-out. It is also a fine heist western, in the mould of BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID, or THUNDERBOLT AND LIGHTFOOT.
Wij (2018)
A Wonderful Young Ensemble Cast are Cut Adrift in This Messy Vice-produced Drama
Rene Eller's adaptation of a shocking novel by Elvis Peeters has all the hallmarks of its Vice co-producers sub-Mondo, faux docudrama approach. This makes for a queasy mix of wrong-headed moralising and vapid sensationalism that seems cribbed from REQUIEM FOR A DREAM.
The film has a slightly Rashomon-structure, as four of the film's gang of privileged delinquents tell their differing versions of events. The latter version is from the ringleader Thomas (played with real sleazy noxiousness by Aime Claeys), and pulls in the film's most difficult narrative strand, namely that of the perverted mayor's sex scandal. This whole section is problematically rendered, as the film seems to hint at the idea that child-sex scandals may not be about the exploitation of innocents. There is a damaging disconnect in the film between what is being shown, the way it is being shown and the wider context within which these things could be said to operate. None of this would have really been so much of an issue if Eller didn't so devotedly follow the Vice handbook and attempt to blur boundaries between factual and fictional forms of narrative address.
What is undeniable is that Eller has been able to extract strong performances from his young cast, made up mainly of non-professionals. It is a shame then, that the material to which their great efforts have been put to the service of, is so trivially worked out. A little less fake meta-textuality and this may have been something more like Stephen Frears' BLOODY KIDS (1980).
Tre Maison Dasan (2018)
An Effective and Affecting Documentary About Absent Parents and the Children Left Behind
This rightly won the documentary award at this year's Raindance Film Festival. Denali Tiller is going to be a documentarian to watch out for, as with her first feature she has crafted a beautiful account of three young lives that have been irrevocably moulded by the incarceration of one, or both, of their parents. Taking a look at three very different boys, the Tre, Maison, Dassan of the title, this film documents the damage done to a child's development when their parental role models transgress the law.
Tiller is canny enough as a filmmaker to leave key information out of the film, as it would potentially prejudice our view of these children's lives, so we never find out what there parents have been jailed for. Structurally, Tiller also approaches these disparate lives in an intriguing way, checking in on the kids at important points in their growth and development. Tiller must have spent years putting together these accounts and she judiciously mixes the empathetic with the sentimental, so that when these kids do begin to demand a bit more of an insight into the flaws of their parents, it has maximum emotional effect. The gut-punch of an ending further demonstrates how alert to narrative possibilities Tiller is, as she refuses to milk this shocking turn of events for cheap sentiment.
Wieza. Jasny dzien (2017)
A Graduation Film That Makes for One of the Best Polish Debut Features
Jagoda Szelc was still a film student in Lodz when she began working on this entirely original Polish horror-drama, that makes exceptional use of location and theme. What is most impressive though, is the way in which Szelc directs the acting talent on display. This is a director who seems naturally gifted at extracting stunning performances from adults and children alike.
Tower. A Bright Day is that rarest of beasts, a Polish horror film. It is infused with the iconography and symbolism that is playing out a battle between conflicting belief systems and conceptions of good and evil. This is a film that subtly adopts the long view, gauging the paganism that underpins so much of Polish Catholicism to be something fixed in nature and specific locales. As a result we have the most unsettling and anxiety-inducing use of forest and lake that I have seen since THE WITCH.
Szelc overlays this horror core of her film with the very human drama of two warring siblings fighting over the soul of a young child. Mula (Anna Krotoska) is a believer, whose Christian virtues have made her fill the void in the life of her niece, Nina, when her birth mother Kaja (a terrifying performance from Malgorzata Szczerbowska), checks out of her life for a significant period of time. To complicate matters Kaja and Mula are sisters. When their brother Andrzej brings Kaja to visit Nina on the weekend of her First Communion, all the myriad divisions between these two fraternal siblings comes to the fore, as they struggle for maternal dominance.
This is a film that simply has to be experienced on the big screen, as from its opening omnipotent drone footage, through to the haunting closing shot it is a mysterious, sinister and unnerving examination of what we obscure, repress and elide.
Prisoners (2013)
Better Than I Had Originally Thought, But Still Problematic
My first viewing of this film close to its original release made me pretty angry. I felt that the film had cheated me a little, by presenting itself as one thing and delivering something very different. My initial sense of the film was that it would drift into something horrific and exploitative, but Villeneuve muddied things by bringing what I thought was a rather crass morality to bear on the second half of the film. By the time we are confronted with the true sadist of the film, we have been suitably chastised for our vengeful impulses. My overarching sense was that Villeneuve had worked out the ideas behind this film, the politics, at the detriment of either thrills or plausible characterisation.
On this reviewing I was more open to the ebbs and flows of the drama. What really shifted on this second viewing was my attention. Whereas in the first film I found myself pinballing between Hugh Jackman's Keller and Paul Dano's Alex Jones. On this viewing I began to see the procedural aspects of the film, as Gyllenhaal's mannered Detective Loki came more sharply into view. As a representative of the law Loki is far from infallible, frequently prone to rash errors of judgement and is nonetheless dedicated enough to a code and ethics that he manages to ultimately rescue all those who can be saved. His is an obsessive pragmatism and close attention to deducible facts, as opposed to Jackman's rash torture-as-solution/vengeance approach.
What gives PRISONERS ending a bit more intrigue on this second viewing is the way in which it is Detective Loki who fully registers the horror of the belief system that has been grafted on and around the sadism of the film's villainous character. Without the Detective's more balanced approach to the justice, then Melissa Leo's Holly Jones' has won, as her aim seems to be that of the purest evil, to corrupt any potential or capacity for good within a person.
This is powerful, sombre, desperately depressing stuff, but I still wish it wasn't such awkward medicine to swallow. Villeneuve would go on to finesse his approach with his next film, the masterful exploitation thriller SICARIO - which balanced off the weighty portentousness of this film's moral posturing, with the full-depth experience of moral dislocation that PRISONERS still lacks.
La belle et la belle (2018)
A Time Travel Rom-com That is Smart, Funny and Inventive
Sophie Fillieres was partly responsible for one of my favourite horror films, I serial killer romance called SOMBRE (1998). Her output since then has tended more toward comedy, which might explain why I hadn't seen much else by her - comedy being the one genre that really doesn't travel well. So it was a pleasant surprise to come across this deceptively rich rom-com that initially gives the impression it is a bit of high-concept forth, but it is so much more than that.
Fillieres' directs her own daughter Agathe Bonitzer, in the role of the younger Margaux, who comes across forty-something Margaux (Sandrine Kiberlain, who is near-perfect in her understated comic delivery) at a friend's part, and swiftly realises that they may in fact be one and the same person. What really elevates this film from the hum-drum or the hokey is the quality of Fillieres attention to the passing years between her two Margauxs.
This is almost an elegiac film, as it holds the mirror up to youthful ardour and the wisdom of experience. I've not come across another film that so precisely measures the distance from our youth to our middle years, when regrets creep in and resentments stack up. What is most beautifully rendered here is the two distinct approaches to memory. What is important and felt to the younger Margaux is shown to be so inconsequential as to have been forgotten by the older one. It is a heartbreaking way to depict the losses that time exacts on us, and all the more powerful for its understatement.
The Last Fight (2018)
Defiantly Downbeat MMA Doc Looking at the Point When A Fighter Knows the Game Is Up
THE LAST FIGHT is a fly-on-the-wall doc that accesses the training camp and publicity tours of veteran MMA fighter Marloes Coenen's as she gradually comes to terms with the fact that her highly successful, trailblazing career is coming to an end.
Director Victor Vroegindeweij has a conservative approach to doc form that is replicated in another Raindance Festival release, TEAM KHAN. It's the classic sporting doc shape, taking the audience through the highs and lows of a particular period of a sportstar's career. However, within this conservative approach, the film pulls a few narrative surprises. Late in the film it reveals itself to be less a study of the highs and lows of this well-respected Dutch MMA champion, but rather an examination of the crippling doubts and clouded judgement that creeps into a sports professional at the end of their career, when they can no longer trust their body to respond to the demands being placed on it.
Central to the film is the relationship between Coenen and her long-time training Martijn de Jong. On first encounter these two people clearly have an affectionate professional bond with one another, built up over years of successful work together. Yet over the course of the doc this relationship erodes as Coenen begins to feel her age and de Jong stubbornly persists in pushing her the way he always has. When the two part company and Coenen puts her faith in a 'mental coach' he apparently has read her final glory in the stars, you know that things aren't going to end well.
I had to admire the sheer bloody-minded stubbornness of this doc, which refused to let up on its narrative arc of failure being snatched from the jaws of unparalleled success. Even if you are not a fan of the sport, it is a compelling story and one that deserves a larger audience.
Cicha noc (2017)
Very Much Within a Sub-genre of Polish Celebration Films
Polish cinema has a history of films based around the family shenanigans that occur during Christmas, or weddings, or other major anniversaries and celebrations. Pitor Domalewski's feature sits comfortably within this tradition, neither breaking and blurring the boundaries of the form, nor sinking like a stone. It is first and foremost a drama, but like so many of these films, a little knowledge of Polish culture and traditions would key the viewer in to an undercurrent of rather aggressively dark comedy (a film like Smarzowski's WESELE, does this most explicitly).
Dawid Ogrodnik and Tomasz Zietek star as siblings in a rural Polish family, that has made a habit of burying as many secrets as they have stolen Christmas trees from the neighbouring forest. Ogrodnik's character has returned from Holland where he has been trying to start a new life with his pregnant partner. To do this he needs to sell their grandfather's property, so that he can put this capital into a new business venture, or at least this is what he tells his mother, father, sister and brother - nothing is quite as it seems.
There is a brilliant ensemble cast at work here, with the always watchable Arkadiusz Jakubik as their broken father, a man who is weighed down with the guilt of having been an absent and failed father figure. Agnieszka Suchora is the put-upon matriarch, who for better or worse, has kept her family together, even if it seems to have done very little for the health and happiness of any of its members.
Domalewski keeps things murkily mysterious at first, keeping the audience guessing as to just how far the rot has gone in this family. Yet as the vodka begins to flow a little more freely the film lurches into full-on melodrama, with some surprising revelations and some clunkily executed metaphors and motifs (especially surrounding Poland's relationship to the rest of Europe). Everything is well made, but for keen watchers of Polish cinema it will feel a little uninspiring, especially considering the talent that is on display. I am pretty certain that Ogrodnik's passages in English are going to be a calling card for more international roles for this exciting young actor.
The Bling Ring (2013)
Sofia Coppola Really is the Film Poet of Entropy and Inertia
Probably Coppola's weakest film THE BLING RING nonetheless affirms Coppola as an auteur of entropy and inertia, as well as a filmmaker who finds profundity in the the meaning with which we invest pop cultural artifacts and objects. If in SOMEWHERE she found away to make the listlessness of living in the gilded cage seem somehow transgressive and bewitching, here Coppola gives a flat aimlessness to the everyday affluence of entitlement of a bunch of high-school dropouts. This visual mundanity is juxtaposed against the way in which the film's music score is so blisteringly vital - hinting at the disconnect between the actions of this group of teen trespasser and the ephemeral pleasures these actions afford them. Also, Coppola has one keen eye on the way in which the social media that surrounds these kids lends a self-conscious performativity to their actions, which ultimately sows the seeds of their downfall, while all the time stoking there notoriety.
There may be something distasteful about a privileged scion of Hollywood royalty, making a film about the brattish behaviour of a bunch of middle-class kids clearly and flagrantly breaking the law, yet I feel this is perhaps the true subversiveness that Coppola's oeuvre, as a whole, possesses. Her films are chronicles of privilege as the most soft and sinister of prisons - once again the gilded cage.
The ensemble cast have a lot of fun with the narrow neediness and value judgements of their characters, with Emma Watson feeling like she is particularly engaged with the sly, self-mocking irony of her own articulate and worthy public face. Knowing that Coppola has gone on to create a masterful work of reinterpretation with THE BEGUILED (2017), only makes the relative failures of THE BLING RING all the more intriguing. And while I doubt that this film will receive the full and thorough revaluations that MARIE ANTOINETTE and SOMEWHERE have, there may still be far more to it than initially meets the eye.
Obey (2018)
A London Riots Movie That Resists the Usual Gang Cliches
Jamie Jones ambitious debut feature throbs with a fearsome energy and a strong undercurrent of class critique. Despite ostensibly taking place against the backdrop of the London riots of 2011, the film is very much of the contemporary moment, looking at the clash of class, identity and an increasingly paranoid State apparatus. This is class conflict writ large across the London cityscape.
Jones' has discovered an exciting new British acting talent in Marcus Rutherford, who plays Leon, a young mixed heritage estate kid, disciplined through boxing, but with little else to give his life any real structure or purpose. The director does well to make Leon the central character that we follow through the oppressive rioting violence of an inner city in the throes of rampant gentrification and social displacement. By following Leon around the clearly defined limits of his world, all constriction and constraint, it enables Jones and his production team to look at the riots from the perspective of both an active participant and an utterly disinterested passerby. It gives the film the absurdity of a scene in which Leon has a conversation with his case worker in the street as some overzealous police officers manhandle a 'suspect' to the ground, while also having the spectacle of the extras-heavy riot sequences toward the film's close. Frustration and disillusionment pours forth from the screen, but this is ably balanced by the humour of the bantering friends, as in the film's expertly shot opening street sequence.
Amidst the escalating chaos and carnage, which would feel almost sci-fi if we weren't currently under this Tory government, there are moments of searing beauty and integrity. I particularly loved Leon's sheer wonder at a peaceful space within the city when the privileged class tourist Twiggy (Sophie Kennedy Clark) takes him for a ride along the canal in her barge boat. Likewise, sitting with Twiggy and her boyfriend on top of one of London's many elevated heath's and commons, Leon feels a momentary respite from the sirens of the city below. What makes OBEY a smarter film than one might initially imagine, is the way in which it focuses upon the inability for almost any of the character's to truly escape their backgrounds and find their own space in the city. Class is the lock that we all must obey.
M (2017)
A Romantic Film Full of Wild Impulses That Don't Necessarily Cohere
Sara Forestier's directorial debut is a meet cute that occasionally becomes as ugly and oppressive as the glum countenance of Jean-Pierre Leaud. There is a little of the flavour of Leos Carax about the way in which Forestier constantly needles the romantic impulses of her central pairing. Although I felt the film didn't do enough to bring all of its conflicts together effectively, it will still be of interest to see where Forestier goes next.
Lila (played by Forestier herself) is a young woman preparing for her baccalaureate exams, who has a gift for the poetic use of language, but is socially paralysed by a chronic stutter. Mo (Redouanne Harjane) is an older man who is struggling to mask the fact that he cannot read and write. They meet cute at a bus stop and soon Mo is helping Lila overcome her crippling self-consciousness when it comes to her speaking voice. However, Mo's own issues with language cannot be broached or solved so easily.
I admired the way in which Forestier would frequently choose to wrong-foot her audience by escalating a dramatic sequence in to the realm of horror or melodrama (the way Mo brutalises Lila's younger sister to keep her quiet, or the way in which Mo asserts his 'ownership' of Lila when made to feel awkward at a poetry meeting). However, there were many other elements in the film that felt a little to much like pretty and benign affectation (Mo's family tradition of macaroon making, Lila's father's (played drably by Jean-Pierre Leaud) OTT approach to the policing of hair lice. I think it is worth comparing Forestier's approach to that of the Safdie brothers' approach in their US indie work up to, and including, GOOD TIME (2017). There is a similar sense of intoxicating freedom and spontaneity about there work, but whereas the Safdie's link character development to the very form of their films, things feel far more programmatic and forced in M. An intriguing work, that promises much but doesn't quite live up to that promise.
Dykes, Camera, Action! (2018)
A Strong, if heavily Anglo-centric, History of Lesbian Cinema
Caroline Berler has managed to put together a snappy survey history of Lesbian Cinema, which is skewed largely toward the US indie and activist scene. You have all of the significant players interviewed here, from Barbara Hammer to Desiree Akhavan.
I particularly enjoyed Cheryl Dunye's account of how with a little help from, connected figures like Michael Stipe, she was able to put together a 2-3 million dollar budget for her African-American dykes in prison TV drama STRANGER INSIDE (2001). This would be HBO's first foray into indie cinema, which places Dunye at the very beginning of an unlikely zeitgeist. You also can't really get enough of B. Ruby Rich's slant on cinema, particularly her riff on lesbian vampirism in the late sixties and early seventies.
This is a little bit of a canon-builder of a doc and will probably serve the purpose of a lesbian cinema primer in many film courses. It's upbeat positivism is slightly put in relief by Rose Troche's final wary proclamation that things aren't fully there yet, although the film's being produced now are interesting. With the exception of a brief foray into the world of Chantal Akerman there wasn't really much in the way of a global outlook in the doc. Perhaps, an intersectionist survey would seek to examine how lesbian cinema evolves different paradigm structure, where it is present, within other national / regional cinemas. All in all, this is a thoroughly engaging opening gambit in what will hopefully be a more concentrated exploration of 'other' cinemas.
The Rider (2017)
A Cowboy Film That Mesmerises with Process
At a point about thirty minutes in to Chloe Zhao's immensely moving and powerful study of a broken young rodeo riding champion I found myself utterly immersed in the processes and rituals of horse training and breaking in - I simply did not want this beautiful passage of cinema to end. It says much of Zhao's abilities that she manages to find a form with which to tell the tale of such an unassuming figure as Brady Blackburn (Brady Jandreu), in a way that manages to remain true to the quiet stubbornness of this protagonist.
At the start of the film Brady, a rodeo riding champion, has suffered a near-fatal fall, that has left him unable to return to the saddle without potentially fatal consequences. Brady has monetary commitments to his dad and his sister, that his injury has now prevented him from being able to meet. What is more his intuitive understanding of horses and the simpatico he felt for them has been undermined by the accident.
Zhao plots an arc for Brady, that is full of potentially tragic material, but is ultimately about a broken rider feeling his way back into the saddle and working out what he can now do with the life he is lucky to have. The nuanced way in which Zhao chronicles the rodeo culture of South Dakota, as well as the way of life of those people that inhabit the peripheral reservations of the Badlands, has an insiders empathy, feeling and understanding for these communities. Zhao chose to work with a cast of people who aren't professional actors and who actually inhabit the rodeo circuit, Brady's father and sister are played by Jandreau's real-life father and sister. Moreover, one of Jandreau's close friends on the rodeo circuit, Lane Scott is featured as himself, a man invalided by a car accident, that has robbed him of his unparalleled abilities as a rodeo rider.
Rarely, have I come across a drama that feels so unforced and at ease with its protagonists low-key personal drama. This is perhaps what makes those central sequences where Brady gets back in to the saddle and shows he still has the connection with the animal that he loves, so powerful and potent. These are simply moments of a man doing what he was meant to do, doing what he loves and there is something incredibly compelling about watching them.
The Wife (2017)
An Elegant and Classical Literary Adaptation With Three Powerful Central Performances
Glenn Close has always had an uncanny facility with the expressivity of her face. As much as she can be guilty of hammy melodramatics, her strongest performances have always been anchored in the inscrutability and fascination that her countenance is capable of. Swedish director Bjorn Runge, in his English-language debut, elicits one of the greatest performances of her career from Close, which with a canny distribution and marketing strategy may yet land her a deserved Oscar nom at the very least.
The film is a quality adaptation of the Meg Wolitzer novel of the same name, ably adapted by veteran screenwriter Jane Anderson (OLIVE KITTERIDGE, HOW TO MAKE AN AMERICAN QUILT). Joseph Castleman (Jonathan Pryce) is a Brooklyn-born Jewish novelist, who at the opening of the film finds out that he has just received the 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature. Castleman is immediately keen for his wife Joan (Glenn Close) to be brought into the telephone conversation with Stockholm, and it becomes swiftly apparent that this is a couple who are bound together by a shared history of indiscretions and secrets. Through very precise and sparing use of flashback we see how the young Joe and Joan (played with subtle conviction by Harry Lloyd and Close's real-life daughter Annie Starke), have built a life together around an unusual, but seemingly necessary literary pact, which has wide-ranging consequences at the moment the Nobel committee make their call.
Jonathan Pryce gives a great supporting turn, which is all bluster and wheedle and narcissism. It is built around Close's insular performance, taking up the space she has deliberately chosen to vacate. Joe is the diva and Joan makes sure to rein in his more compulsive moments. Yet what is beautiful about Pryce's work is that it is a neurotic display, the necessary braggadocio of a man who knows himself to be an impostor. What Runge does well here is to show the history of a marriage through the present actions of people who have been life-long partners, with all of the confusion of deep-rooted resentments and undeniable affection that is rarely seen on screen.
The third startling turn in the film is Christian Slater's performance as the unctuous biographer Nathaniel Bone (who is very much like a dog with one). I had actually forgotten that Slater was once a promising young actor, so invisible has he been in the last two decades, outside of maybe a brief performance in NYMPHOMANIAC. On the strength of his work here, there may yet be a high-quality character actor to be made out of Slater. His smarm and reporter's persistence is backed up by a mean facility for listening to what his subjects are not saying. The scene of the entire film involves Nathaniel's flagrant flirtation with Joan, which is astutely deployed to get at 'the truth', mixing flattery with disarming candour, even whilst 'mansplaining' the injustice of Joan's predicament.
In a film that is as straightforward a piece of classical Hollywood drama as you are likely to see this year, I was truly impressed with the mood and tone, so finely crafted and modulated, of the first hour. There are some minor blips into melodrama toward the film's final third, but this is still an impressive showcase for the acting talents of its cast, and a caustic indictment of the smothering hauteur of the Swedish Academy and its pomp and ceremony.
Automatic at Sea (2016)
A Beguiling Atmosphere With Little Pay-Off
I had never come across Matthew Lessner prior to this popping up on MUBI. Initially, I was put off by the intro he wrote for that service and the all-too-obvious 1970s cult cinema feel to the film's opening 10 minutes. Was this about to be a trawl through hipster affectation and rip-off as homage? I was therefore presently surprised to see just how oddly AUTOMATIC AT SEA developed.
Ostensibly the account of a young Swedish ingenue called Eve (Livia Hiselius) who falls in with a wealthy young American called Peter (producer, David Henry Gerson), who whisks her away to his private New England holiday home for a small gathering of friends, the film morphs into a psychological thriller, then a creepy supernatural horror and finally a trippy revenge movie. Perhaps, Lessner's most impressive trick is to shoot the whole thing in the sun-kissed summer months around Martha's Vineyard. This mutes the darker elements of the film and makes the most mundane of moments queasily threatening and filled with portent. The curious triangular relationship that emerges between Grace (Breeda Wool), Peter and Eve, mixed with the arcane references to high art and classical European culture, feel cribbed straight from a literary work like John Fowles' THE MAGUS. In essence the film is about confronting totemic fears and neuroses, breaking down the id and freeing yourself from that which has bound and constricted your life thus far. It is Eve's closeted character that is ultimately teased out and liberated by the often sinister interactions of Peter and Grace. Another touchstone work would be something like Bergman's masterpiece THE HOUR OF THE WOLF, and although Lessner's film is not in that league, it is still an arresting and atmospheric work, even if it drifts off into complacent circularity at the end.
Definitely worth 90 minutes of your time and absolutely undeserving of the rather ridiculous review from the 15th October.