Meredith Taylor, Author at Filmuforia

Sundance Film Festival 2022 | 20-30 January 2022

SUNDANCE is the first major film festival of the year; a true indie festival coming to you from snowy Utah courtesy of its founder Robert Redford. Setting the benchmark for independent titles in 2022, SUNDANCE focuses on excellence in screenplays and innovativeness in cinematography: each filmmaker is put their paces before their film can be considered in competition. Unlike the Academy Awards, SUNDANCE is purely about talent. We have highlighted some buzzworthy titles – watch out for them in the coming year!

Elizabeth Banks photo credit Wilson Web

CALL JANE (2022) DIR: PHYLLIS NAGY

Chicago, 1968. As a city and the nation are poised on the brink of violent political upheaval, suburban housewife Joy leads an ordinary life with her husband and daughter. When Joy’s pregnancy leads to a life-threatening condition, she must navigate a medical establishment unwilling to help. Her journey to find a solution to an impossible situation leads her to the “Janes,” a clandestine organization of women who provide Joy with a safer alternative — and in the process, change her life.
Carol screenwriter Phyllis Nagy takes the reins as director and executes a riveting narrative, partially based on true events surrounding the Jane Collective, who provided thousands of abortions during a four-year period through their covert and precise mobilisation. Supported by a remarkable cast, Elizabeth Banks delivers an impressive lead performance as Joy, whose determination and strength of character holds relevance more than a half-century later. Call Jane poses urgent questions about systemic barriers, the ever-shifting nature of politics, and the struggle for women to maintain control of their bodies.

Image Courtesy of Sundance Institute

2ND CHANCE (2022) DIR: RAMON BAHRANI

In 1969, bankrupt pizzeria owner Richard Davis invented the modern-day bulletproof vest. To prove that it worked, he shot himself — point-blank — 192 times. Davis then launched Second Chance, which became one of the largest body armour companies in the world. Charming and brash, he directed sensational marketing films, earning him celebrity status among police and gun owners across the country. But the death of a police officer wearing a Second Chance vest catalyzes Davis’s fall, revealing a man full of contradictions cultivated over decades of reckless lies. Equally as questionable as he was captivating, Davis saved thousands of lives while endangering exponentially more.

Acclaimed filmmaker Ramin Bahrani’s feature-length documentary debut continues his fascination with the perilous pursuit of the American dream as seen through a uniquely individual lens. The film shrewdly juxtaposes Richard Davis’s actions with those of his righteous right-hand man, Aaron Westrick. Unwilling to passively present questionable truths, Bahrani instead lays bare the complexities of one man’s supposed virtue while speaking to the nature of power and impunity in America.

Bill Nighy in Living by Oliver Hermanus, photo credit Ross Ferguson.

LIVING (2022) DIR: OLIVER HERMANUS

A veteran civil servant and bureaucratic cog in the rebuilding of Britain post-WWII, Williams (Bill Nighy) expertly pushes paperwork around a government office only to reckon with his existence when he’s diagnosed with a fatal illness. A widower, he conceals the condition from his grown son, spends an evening of debauchery with a bohemian writer in Brighton, and uncharacteristically avoids his office. But after a vivacious former co-worker, Margaret, inspires him to find meaning in his remaining days, Williams attempts to salvage a modest building project from bureaucratic purgatory.

South African filmmaker Oliver Hermanus (Beauty) offers a poignant reimagining of Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece, Ikiru (To Live). Nobel and Booker Prize–winning author Kazuo Ishiguro’s adaptation elegantly transposes the story’s profound humanism to postwar London. Free of false sentimentality and tragic intonations, Living finds its soul in the wistful dignity Nighy brings to Williams. Transcending its period setting, Living is a timely reflection on the compulsions and distractions that obscure what it means to live.

Lucy and Desi by Amy Poehler – Image Courtesy of Sundance Institute.

LUCY AND DESI (2022) DIR: AMY POEHLER

One day in 1940, two budding stars met for the first time in the RKO Pictures commissary, unaware that together they would change the face of pop culture. After surviving a tumultuous upbringing, a teenage Lucille Ball left her family for New York City, where she first found success as a model before moving to Hollywood to begin working in movies. Hailing from Santiago de Cuba, Desi Arnaz was a paid musician by 16 and quickly broke out as a multitalented entertainer. The two would go on to consistently challenge the status quo in entertainment both in front of and behind the camera.

For her documentary debut, director Amy Poehler respects these two iconic trailblazers as driven individuals and a loving couple until the end. Clearly influenced by Poehler’s own history in entertainment, Lucy and Desi not only chronicles the pair’s personal and professional lives, it also smartly breaks down concepts like the rehearsed choreography of comedy, their innovations in studio production, the sisterhood of comedy, and much more. It’s a thoughtful telling made for those who loved Lucy (and Desi).

image courtesy of Sundance Institute

THE PRINCESS (2022) DIR: ED PERKINS

Decades after her tragic death, Princess Diana continues to evoke mystery, glamour, and the quintessential modern fairy tale gone wrong. As a symbol of both the widening fissures weakening the British monarchy and the destructive machinery of the press, the Princess of Wales navigated an unparalleled rise to fame and the corrosive challenges that came alongside it. Crafted entirely from immersive archival footage and free from the distraction of retrospective voices, this hypnotic and audaciously revealing documentary takes a distinctive formal approach, allowing the story of the People’s Princess to unfold before us like never before.

Director Ed Perkins distills thousands of hours of riveting material to present Diana’s story in a fresh and imaginative way, depicting not only one of the most alluring public figures of the 20th century but also the sociopolitical upheaval afflicting the United Kingdom at the time. The Princess exquisitely captures the echoes of a monarchy whose far-reaching impact on the public continues to this day, turning the camera back on ourselves to explore our own complicity in this enigmatic narrative.

Image of Karen Gillan courtesy of Sundance Institute

DUAL (2022) DIR: RILEY STEARNS

Recently diagnosed with a rare and incurable disease, Sarah is unsure how to process the news. To help ease her friends’ and family’s impending loss, she is encouraged to participate in a simple futuristic cloning procedure called “Replacement,” after which Sarah’s last days will be spent teaching the clone how to live on as Sarah once she’s gone. But while it takes only an hour for a clone to be made, things become significantly more challenging when that double is no longer wanted.

This darkly off-kilter comedy marks a welcome return to the Festival from writer-director Riley Stearns (The Cub, Sundance 2013). He straddles a inventive line between deadpan satire and high-concept storytelling to take us on a sci-fi journey into the ways a catastrophic life change can force reconsideration of one’s entire existence. In the lead dual role, an oddly charming Karen Gillan proves the perfect match for Stearns’s strange, strange cinematic world.

ALL THAT BREATHES (2022) DIR: SHAUNAK SEN

Brothers Saud and Nadeem were raised looking at a sky speckled with black kites, watching as relatives tossed meat up to these birds of prey. Muslim belief held that feeding the kites would expel troubles. Now, birds are falling from the polluted, opaque skies of New Delhi and the two brothers have made it their life’s work to care for the injured black kites.

Shaunak Sen’s intricately layered portrait reveals an evolving city and a fraternal relationship bonded by purpose. The film’s patient, roaming camera skillfully uses scale and perspective to draw attention to the interconnectedness of an ecosystem — one that humans are a part of, not apart from. The social unrest that begins to materialize in the streets is seen through the perspectives of the brothers and their family, as well as the insects and animals that share the urban landscape. There is both cruelty and tenderness in nature, and Sen elegantly captures how they coexist, while emphasizing the ways in which all living beings must evolve to survive.

A still from The Territory by Alex Pritz, courtesy of Sundance Institute

THE TERRITORY (2022) DIR: ALEX PRITZ

The Indigenous Uru-eu-wau-wau people have seen their population dwindle and their culture threatened since coming into contact with non-Native Brazilians. Though promised dominion over their own rainforest territory, they have faced illegal incursions from environmentally destructive logging and mining, and, most recently, land-grabbing invasions spurred on by right-wing politicians like President Jair Bolsonaro. With deforestation escalating as a result, the stakes have become global.

With unprecedented access, and co-produced by the Uru-eu-wau-wau community, The Territory drops the audience into the center of this conflict. Young Indigenous leaders like Bitate and Ari, along with their mentor, environmental activist Neidinha, risk their very lives to defend the rainforest. On the other side, Sergio leads an association of indigent farmers eager to establish a settlement, while others like Martin, impatient and entitled, strike out on their own, clear-cutting the forest to establish a homestead. With the government unwilling to stop this brazen encroachment, the Uru-eu-wau-wau set up their own media team, using technology to expose the truth and fight back.

courtesy of Sundance Institute

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT COSBY (2022) DIR: W KAMAU BELL

During his nearly 50 years in show business, Bill Cosby became one of the most recognizable Black celebrities in America. With a career that included an astronomical rise on television in the mid-1960s; work in children’s programming and education; legendary stand-up performances and albums; and an epoch-defining hit sitcom, The Cosby Show, Cosby was a model of Black excellence for millions of Americans. But now, thanks to the brave and painful testimonies of dozens of women, we know there was a sinister reality to the man once extolled as “America’s Dad.”

Over the course of four gripping episodes that feature the voices of people closely connected to Cosby’s life on screen and off, including several survivors, director W. Kamau Bell digs into who Cosby was and what his work and actions say about America, then and now. We Need To Talk About Cosby is a powerful and timely reckoning destined to be widely discussed for how it urges audiences to reconsider not only what they know about Cosby but also about the culture that produced and celebrated him.

WHEN YOU FINISH SAVING THE WORLD (2022) JESSE EISENBERG

From his bedroom home studio, high school student Ziggy performs original folk-rock songs for an adoring online fan base. This concept mystifies his formal and uptight mother, Evelyn, who runs a shelter for survivors of domestic abuse. While Ziggy is busy trying to impress his socially engaged classmate Lila by making his music less bubblegum and more political, Evelyn meets Angie and her teen son, Kyle, when they seek refuge at her facility. She observes a bond between the two that she’s missing with her own son, and decides to take Kyle under her wing against her better instincts.

In his carefully observed, aesthetically pleasing directorial debut, Jesse Eisenberg adapts his audio project of the same name to tell the story of a mother and son who fail to understand each other’s values. With gentle humor and pitch-perfect dialogue, When You Finish Saving the World reflects a moment of internet fame and youth activism, but it also recounts the timeless tale of parents and children struggling to connect across the generational chasm that separates them.

SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL | 20-30 JANUARY 2022 | Words courtesy of Sundance Inst.

The Last War (1961)

Dir: Shue Matsubayashi | Japan Sci-fi, 110’

Made the year before the Cuban Missile Crisis; even in the dubbed and abbreviated version I’ve just watched on YouTube (the original was half an hour longer, and has been reedited so that the story is now told in flashback) this remains a mighty powerful piece of filmmaking. With America and North Korea currently rattling sabres at each other it has still, alas, not yet lost its relevance to a 21st Century audience. An elaborate production by Toho in Eastmancolor and TohoScope with special effects by ‘Godzilla’ regular Eiji Tsuburaya, it was Toho’s second highest grossing film of its year, but never released theatrically in America.

Much of this film (whose Japanese title ‘Sekai Daisensō’ translates literally as ‘Great World War’) is taken up with domestic scenes which would not have been out of place in the contemporaneous domestic dramas of Yasujirō Ozu, from which a number of cast members like Chishū Ryū and Yumi Shirakawa would have been familiar to Japanese audiences at the time; while Nobuko Otowa – who plays the mother – had nine years earlier featured in her husband Kaneto Shindo’s anti-nuke drama ‘Children of Hiroshima’.

As these people continue to plan for the future, back at the silos we twice see catastrophe narrowly averted until eventually the Sword of Damocles falls for real and Tokyo is shown convincingly raised to the ground, followed in short order by shots of the Kremlin, New York, Tower Bridge and the Arc de Triomphe going up in smithereens which more than atone for the unconvincing model work elsewhere in the film. Almost as an aside we are at one point informed that in one of the earlier engagements one side has resorted to “a low level napalm and strafing attack”; a disturbing harbinger of the tactics used by the United States in the proxy war that actually took place in Asia during the coming years. @RichardChatten

Kosciuszko pod Raclawicami (1938)

Dir: Joseph Lejtes | Cast: Tadeusz Bialoszczyn, Witold Zacharewicz, Jerzy Pichelski | Poland, Drama 92’

The victory of the Polish military leader Tadeusz Kościuszko (1746-1817) over Poland’s Russian occupiers at the Battle of Racławice on 4 April 1794 had already been the subject of a film in 1913. In the context of European geopolitics a quarter of a century later, such truculent sabre-rattling at their old adversary in the East seems an extraordinary exercise in wishful thinking, considering the imminent threat posed in the West by their other neighbour Germany.

Much of the film consists of actors in wigs beating their chests (sometimes literally) and loudly declaiming their intentions to stick it to the enemy; with comparisons drawn between Kościuszko’s uprising against the Russians in 1791 and that by George Washington in America fifteen years earlier. Although top-billed as Kościuszko, Tadeusz Białoszczyński actually gets far less screen time than Witold Zacharewicz (who died in Auschwitz in 1943) as a dashing young lieutenant whose interest in a comely young local lass played by Elżbieta Barszczewska results in them forming two corners of an extremely uninteresting romantic triangle that eats up footage throughout much of the first two thirds of the film, until finally the last twenty minutes of the film make way for a galumphing bargain basement recreation of Racławice. The rest – as they say – is history. @RichardChatten

NOW ON YOUTUBE

The Velvet Queen (2021)

Dir: Marie Amiguet, Vincent Munier | France, Doc, 89′

If you’re thinking this is going to be another children’s Christmas animation – think again. The Velvet Queen – or its more informative French title La panthere des neiges – sees two explorer/photographers heading to the snowy wastelands of Tibet in search of the elusive Snow Leopard.

A soulful love letter to nature The Velvet Queen focuses on ambience rather than facts in exploring an unexplored part of the world where animals still reign supreme in the echoing silence of the Tibetan plateau, one of the last sanctuaries of the wild where the rare and endangered leopard still roams despite poaching and environmental dangers.

Vincent Munier and Sylvain Tesson are clearly at one with each other pondering engagingly on the plight of the animals that venture past their long distance lenses in respectful coexistence, all camouflaged by magnificent furry winter coats that make them almost invisible to the naked eye against the sparse landscape known as ‘the roof of the World’.

Even when the feline eminence does make an appearance, towards the end of the film, a sinuous fluffy tail curling gingerly round a rocky outcrop, it cuts an unobtrusive figure prowling stealthily towards the body of a dead yak, then catching sight of the camera and warily withdrawing again into the hinterland. Bushy coated bears, mountain goats and a perky little bird with a black head and rust coloured body all wander by but are never identified, such is the impressionist style of this arthouse eco-doc: Oh David Attenborough where are you when we need a few names to faces? We do meet a local family with three young kids who are fiercely keen to learn and teach Tibetan to the French filmmakers who gladly join them later in their yurt for some welcome sustenance.

Director Marie Amiguet is best known for her documentary debut La Vallee des loups (2016) which goes on the trail of wolves in the French Alps, and she is also joined behind the camera by first time filmmaker Munier in this subtle but luminous look at a world fast disappearing. The film originally premiered in Cannes’ eco-conscious Cinema for the Climate strand and is now on general release at selected arthouse cinemas. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM FRIDAY

Berlinale – Isabelle Huppert Tribute 2022

Homage and Honorary Golden Bear for Isabelle Huppert at the 2022 Berlinale

The Homage section of the 72nd Berlin International Film Festival will be dedicated to French film and stage actor Isabelle Huppert, who will be awarded an Honorary Golden Bear for lifetime achievement. In conjunction with the Award Ceremony on February 15, 2022 at the Berlinale Palast, the festival will screen as Berlinale Special Gala À propos de Joan (About Joan, dir: Laurent Larivière). Huppert is one of the most versatile actors in the world, and has played an impressive range of characters in almost 150 cinema and television productions.

Isabelle Huppert has been closely linked with the film festival for many years and starred in seven Competition films to date. She was first a guest in Berlin with La vengeance d’une femme (A Woman’s Revenge, dir: Jacques Doillon). Director François Ozon cast her in his dark musical comedy 8 Femmes (8 Women) as an unprepossessing woman who emerges in the end as a confident beauty. The ensemble cast was awarded a Silver Bear for outstanding artistic accomplishment. In L’Avenir (Things to Come), she also plays a woman re-discovering her freedom as a philosophy teacher in a failing marriage. Director Mia Hansen-Løve won the Silver Bear as Best Director for the film.

“We are proud to welcome Isabelle Huppert back to the festival,” say Berlinale directors Mariette Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian, “the Honorary Golden Bear may seem like a natural progression in a career without equal, since Isabelle Huppert is one of the few artists recognised with acting awards at all major film festivals. But Isabelle Huppert is more than a celebrated actor — she is an uncompromising artist who doesn’t hesitate to take risks and flout mainstream trends. Awarding her our most prestigious prize is to accentuate cinema as an art form, independent and unconditional. We often see actors as tools in the hands of filmmakers, but Isabelle Huppert is a clear example that the dynamic can be a true exchange. Actors can be the true engine of creating not only emotions, but also concepts of cinema.”

Isabelle Huppert began studying acting at the age of 14, and later attended the Conservatoire nationale supérieur d’art dramatique in Paris. She began her career on stage and made her screen debut with Faustine et le bel été (Faustine and the Beautiful Summer, dir: Nina Companeez).Huppert’s first appearance in an international production was in the film Rosebud (dir: Otto Preminger). Two years later, her starring performance as the shy young woman Béatrice in Claude Goretta’s La Dentellière (The Lacemaker) won her the BAFTA as Most Promising Newcomer.

Huppert early on came to the attention of a host of top filmmakers, such as Jean-Luc Godard and Bertrand Tavernier. Her first turn for Godard was as the star of his Sauve qui peut (la vie) (Every Man for Himself). Other world-renowned directors soon seized on Huppert’s diverse acting talents, including Olivier Assayas, Catherine Breillat, Patrice Chéreau, Claire Denis, Andrzej Wajda, and Joachim Trier, as well as American filmmakers such as Curtis Hanson, Hal Hartley, Ira Sachs, and David O. Russell. Italian filmmakers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani gave her the lead in their film Le affinità elettive (Elective Affinities) and she was part of the ensemble in Marco Bellocchio’s Bella Addormentata (Dormant Beauty).

French acclaimed director Claude Chabrol cast Isabelle Huppert in a total of seven films, with each character as mutable and complex as the next, beginning with the title role in Violette Nozière. That garnered her her first Palme D’Or for Best Actress at the Cannes film festival. Huppert and Sandrine Bonnaire played a pair of homicidal friends in the director’s La Cérémonie, a role that won her a César. Huppert’s final collaboration with Chabrol was her complex portrayal of a powerful judge in L’ivresse du pouvoir (Comedy of Power), which premiered in Competition at the Berlinale.

The actors film career has also been shaped by her work with Austrian director Michael Haneke, with whom she has made four movies. Her outstanding lead performance in his controversial 2001 drama La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher) brought her accolades as Best Actress in Cannes and at the European Film Awards, among others. Beginning with her appearance in Brillante Mendoza’s Captive, shown in Competition in Berlin, Huppert has increasingly worked with Asian directors. That same year, she was in Hong Sang-soo’s Da-reun na-ra-e-seo (In Another Country), playing three different women who all have the same name.

Huppert has also made successful films with other German-language directors and actors. She appeared alongside Hanna Schygulla in Storia di Piera (The Story of Piera) directed by Marco Ferreri. And she took on the lead as the nameless writer who increasingly loses touch with reality in the film adaptation of Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina (dir: Werner Schroeter), winning the German Film Prize. She was top-billed in Swiss director Ursula Meier’s Home.

Isabelle Huppert has been nominated for the French film prize César more than any other actress in France, and has twice won one. Her virtuoso acting style has also brought her two Palmes D’Or at Cannes. She has appeared in more than 20 films shown in competition there — yet another record. She won a Golden Globe as Best Actress for her work in the thriller Elle (dir: Paul Verhoeven). That role as a successful businesswoman who takes revenge on her rapist also resulted in her first Academy Award nomination.

In addition to her successful onscreen career, Isabelle Huppert also continues working on stage and has been awarded the Europe Theater Prize, among others. After premiering the French version of Orlando, she took to the stage under Robert Wilson’s direction once again as the glacial marchioness Merteuil in Heiner Müller’s Quartett. She was equally brilliant in Sarah Kane’s play 4.48 Psychosis staged by Claude Régy. A guest performance of that play in Berlin marked the first time that Huppert appeared on a German stage, entrancing audiences with her intense portrayal.

The French-German-Irish co-production À propos de Joan (About Joan) directed by Laurent Larivière, which stars Huppert alongside Lars Eidinger, will be released in Germany in 2022.

The Homage films:

La Dentellière (The Lacemaker), France / FRG / Switzerland, 1977, Claude Goretta

Sauve qui peut (la vie) (Every Man for Himself), France / Switzerland / FRG / Austria, 1980, Jean-Luc Godard

La Cérémonie, France / Germany, 1995, Claude Chabrol

La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher), France / Austria / Germany, 2001, Michael Haneke

8 Femmes (8 Women), France / Italy, 2002, François Ozon

L’Avenir (Things to Come), France / Germany, 2016, Mia Hansen-Løve

Elle, France / Germany / Belgium, 2016, Paul Verhoeven

The Homage is mounted under the aegis of the Deutsche Kinemathek.

Absolution (1978)

Dir: Anthony Page | Cast: Richard Burton, Dominic Guard, David Bradley, Billy Connelly | UK Drama 95′

You never knew during his later years whether Richard Burton was going to just walk through his part with a faraway look in his eyes and simply collect his cheque, or pull his finger out and actually give a performance worthy of his reputation; and this is one of those occasions when he’s actually rather good as a flint-hearted Catholic priest who has plainly spent his entire life studying the scriptures without ever absorbing one iota of their meaning.

A sort of cross between Hitchcock’s I Confess and Sidney Lumet’s Child’s Play, in which the unlovely central character is mischievously manipulated as in scriptwriter Anthony Shaffer’s earlier classics Sleuth and The Wicker Man (Burton’s face when he first takes young Benjie Stanfield’s confession is truly a picture!), it’s basically a two-hander between Burton and Dominic Guard for much of its duration, with fine actors like Andrew Keir and John Nettleton given remarkably little to do in brief supporting roles, indicating quite a bit of paring back in the cutting room.

The presence, however, of Dai Bradley and Brian Glover further evokes the harrowing picture of school life painted a decade earlier in Kes @RichardChatten

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO | PLEX TV

Minyan (2021)

Dir.: Eric Steel; Cast: Samuel H. Levine, Ron Rifkin, Christopher McCann, Mark Margolis, Brooke Blom, Alex Hurt, Carson Meyer; USA 2020, 119 min.

Eric Steel’s documentary The Bridge was a shockingly realistic study of suicide attempts from the Golden Gate Bridge. Here he turns his camera on a more sentimental subject, a gay coming of age drama set during the winters of 1986 and 1987 the rapidly changing milieu of Brighton Beach, NYC. Based on David Bezmozgis’ tale about Holocaust survivors from Europe, the title refers to a Jewish prayer meeting, requiring the quorum of ten men to go ahead.

David (Levine) is a seventeen-year-old yeshiva student at an ultra-orthodox institution, and wants nothing more than to leave his parents, an abusive father and over-protective mother (Blum) to start a new life at a state school. Close to his grandfather Josef (Rifkin), whose wife has died.

Josef wants to leave the flat he shared with his wife understandably because there are too many memories there. He and David try to get an apartment in a block of flats subsidised by a Jewish charity. David gets on much better with his grandfather’s generation, is drawn to Itzik (Margolis) and his partner Herschel (McCann), who share a flat, their relationship sanctioned by the other tenants.

With David discovering his sexual orientation, despite attention from the attractive Alicia (Meyer), he feels more and more out-of-synch with his family background. His first lover, super macho Bruno (Hurt), is a revelation for David, but also introduces him to the raging death count in the gay community as the AIDS epidemic claims many victims. More and more liberated, David joins a school in Greenwich village and is properly introduced to the writing of James Baldwin (who died in December 1987) having found out that Bruno used Baldwins’s “Giovanni’s Room” simply as a calling card for pick-ups. After Itzik’s death, his son selling all his furniture, Herschel is left homeless with David drawn into the complex undertaking to find flats for the two homeless old men.

There are too many flaws in what could have been a stunning feature: to start with the running time of two hours is indulgent, since there is no proper story, just a series of episodes. Steel wanted DoP Ole Bratt Birkeland to use images which could have been at home in any up-market Hollywood feature. Dull brown and grey colours give the proceedings an artificial background. And Steel, like many before him, does not do justice to the survivors of the Holocaust, whose lives are blighted by traumata and survivors’ guilt. Like many features set in the death camps, the post-life of the survivors cannot be caught in any way realistically – there is always too much of a chasm between reality and film set staging.

IN UK CINEMAS FROM 7 JANUARY 2022

The Matrix Resurrections (2021)

Wri/Dir: Lana Wachowski | Cast: Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Jessica Henwick, Neil Patrick Harris | US action Thriller 138’

At two and a half hours all the hushed talk, bone-crushing violence and showy special effects gets very tiring. But there are occasional flashes of wit and grace; and Jessica Henwick and Neil Patrick Harris are welcome additions to the franchise. Richard Chatten

IN CINEMAS NATIONWIDE

I Passed for White (1960)

Dir: Fred M Wilcox | Cast: Sonya Wilde, James Franciscus, Patricia Mahon, Elizabeth Council | Drama 63’

Far from being the trashy exploitation movie signalled by the title, the rather bland groupings by veteran director Fred Wilcox actually heighten the drama that grows and grows and grows, with the final resolution only coming right at the very end.

Based on Mary Hastings Bradley’s novel, James Franciscus’ aryan good looks are perfect for the leading man who you never know which way he’ll jump. But but as usual it’s the women who are the most interesting characters: Sonya Wilde in her screen debut after making her mark on Broadway taking over the role of Maria in ‘West Side Story. Pat Michan as the friend who’s the only one in on the heroine’s (literally) dark secret, Elizabeth Council as the menacing mother-in-law who you are never sure how much and what exactly she suspects; and especially Isabelle Cooley as the ever-present but quiet and inscrutable maid who is yet another element in the film that keeps you guessing. @RichardChatten

NOWN ON YOUTUBE

Cicada (2021)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Communion (2021)

Dir.: Nejib Belkadhi; Cast: Nejib Belkadhi, Souhir Ben Amara; Tunisia 2021, 95 min.

A man in emotional meltdown during the early months of the pandemic is the focus of this surreal and intensely intimate indie feature from Tunisian writer/director Nejib Belkadhi (Bastardo).

The brilliant black-and-white of DoP Hazem Berrabah, framed in the old-fashioned 4:3, portray a slow-burning but intricate story of a couple’s very different reaction to Covid-19 that lead to the shifting dynamic in their relationship.

In Tunis Kais (Belkadhi) and Sara (Ben Amara) live in a stylish modern flat. Sara is busy organising the local lockdown after restrictions begin to bite: she is permanently on the move whereas Kais is stuck at home suspended from work without pay, and afraid of losing his job. With a history of mental problems he needs to take anti-psychotic drugs – well he should be taking them – but prefers to smoke marihuana, against his psychiatrist’s advice. While slowly adapting to the new modus vivendi he turns his attentions to environmental issues, convincing himself that mankind needs to be punished for its destruction of the planet. Soon Kais starts getting ‘messages’ from his mobile, telling him to get ready to start his ‘mission’ and he intends to embrace the cause.

Meanwhile, the family intrudes on his covert plans: his mother is finding the restrictions tough, and his sister wants Kais to take care of her at his flat. And then Sara reveals she is pregnant, despite their agreement not to have kids so she pretends to have an abortion to keep the peace.

But Kais’ state of mind is gradually deteriorating, with disastrous results that seem to accentuate his submissive personality in emotional scenes that see him drawn to the sea, magnetically obsessed by an octopus-like plant, which hovers in the sky.

Making the best use of a limited budget and to accentuate the sense of intimacy, the feature was filmed in the claustrophobic confines of the director’s own apartment, his pet cat Faouzi, stealing the limelight from the human protagonists. Souhir Ben Amara literally lived round the corner, to complete a realistic environment. Belkadhi shows Kais’ relationship with Sara changing from an adult rapport to something entirely different. Maudlin and highly intriguing, COMMUNION is a perfect example of a success feature made on a financial shoestring.

SCREENING DURING THE RED SEA FILM FESTIVAL 2021

A Hero (2021)

Dir/Wri: Asghar Farhadi | Cast: Amir Jadidi, Mohsen Tanabandeh, Fereshteh Sadre Orafaiy, Sahar Goldust | Iran Drama 127′

Another moral satire from Asghar Farhadi that mulls over truth, honesty and family life in modern Iran.

Lowkey in its sober setting but brimming with a growing complexity the story takes place in and around a modern prison in Shiraz where the likeable working class hero Rahim (Amir Jadidi) is a regular visitor for his various petty crimes involving debt.

The Royal Tombs of Persepolis provide a striking showcase early on when Rahim meets up with his brother-in-law (Alireza Jahandideh) to discuss ways of refinancing his life and paying back the money he owes a former brother-in-law, Bahram (Mohsen Tanabandeh), who won’t let him get away with a penny, determined to make him suffer over the divorce. Meanwhile Ramin is hoping to marry career-minded Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldust) once things are back to normal.

But the crux of the story revolves around a lost handbag containing a number of gold coins that turns up on a bus. Farkhondeh naively takes the bag home and Rahim tries to sell the coins through a dealer, but the amount offered doesn’t begin to cover the money he owes so he decides instead to put an announcement in the small ads, a relieved woman eventually coming forward to reclaim it.

This simple act makes Rahim a hero in the small local community boosting his self esteem with his family, and particularly his young son who has learning difficulties. But when the national press and TV get hold of the news his popularity leads to family jealousy, particularly for Bahram who now digs his feet in over the money. And so Rahim’s naive act of honesty sets him back even further, the envious family picking holes in the story, and his motivations – they can’t quite believe him to be capable of such a selfless act. Rahim’s lack of confidence causes him to change his take on events, and soon he’s up the proverbial creek without a paddle. Farhadi deftly weaves a social media strand involving false news into his thorny narrative, just for good measure, once again triumphing with this immersive, elegantly paced modern parable that shows how a little fame can boost your profile but too much soon garners envy and resentment from friends and family. More imaginative cinematography and set design would have taken this to another level. MT

IN CURZON CINEMAS NATIONWIDE FROM 7 JANUARY 2022

La Revue des Revues (1927)

Dir/Wri: Joe Francis | Cast: Josephine Baker, Andre Luguet, Helene Hallier, Pepa Bonafe | France, Silent 103′

St Louis-born and Harlem-raised Paris music hall star Josephine Baker was the highest paid entertainer of her day and has now made history as the first Black woman to enter France’s hallowed Pantheon, courtesy of President Macron. In Cannes she also has a special marine walkway dedicated to her memory.

The grotesquely inappropriate musical accompaniment by Taranta-Bubu, the emphasis of the plot on foot fetishism and Baker’s contributions to this silent drama have been discussed at length by many critics, but here are a few brief words on the other production numbers which comprise about three quarters of the film.

They nearly all suffer from being extremely unimaginatively photographed from the point of view of a theatre audience, the choreography generally seems to consist of the performers simply marching laterally back and forth across a rather crowded stage displaying a variety of almost comically elaborate (and generally disappointingly unscanty) costumes and even more comically elaborate hats – the rather Edwardian nature of the costumes emphasised by the number of production numbers staged in period costume (usually 18th Century).

Aside from the two Josephine Baker numbers, the three other routines with a contemporary ambiance appropriate to the 1920s were: ‘Les Poissons d’Avril’ with Erna Carise briefly displaying herself slinkily attired as a snake; ‘Le Temple Egyptien’, its Ancient Egyptian setting ironically inspiring a faintly avant garde sequence that would have gone well with Stravinsky rather than the caterwauling by Taranta-Bubu that all the other reviewers have complained about; and finally Lila Nikolska, performing in an understated little tassled tutu flanked by a much smaller chorus in less fussy costumes and on a far less fussily decorated stage than anything that has preceded it, and all the more effective for it. @Richard Chatten

AVAILABLE ON THE CRITERION CHANNEL |

Crisis (1946) Bfi player

Dir/Wri: Ingmar Bergman | Cast: Inga Landgre, Stig Olin, Marianne Lofgren, Dagny Lind | Drama, 63′

Ingmar Bergman’s directorial debut was according to him “a bona fide fiasco” on which everything that could go wrong did, but none of this is apparent in the finished product. It just seems rather average.

Since few English-speaking viewers have ever seen a forties Swedish potboiler, it’s difficult to know how Crisis compare with its contemporaries, but it looks good (as I imagine most of the rest do), aided by Arne Åkermark’s art direction and Gösta Roosling’s photography. The over-emphatic music by Erland von Koch ironically demonstrates how discreet Bergman’s use of music would be in his heyday.

Considering that it was purely an assignment, its interesting how woman-centred it is, like some of Bergman’s more auspicious later projects. The most involving of various plot strands is that concerning Dagny Lind as the young heroine’s adoptive mother. @RichardChatten

NOW ON BFI PLAYER

Vortex (2021)

Dir; Gaspar Noe | 142′

Gaspar Noe’s latest is a tougher, spikier and less affecting version of Michael Haneke’s Oscar-winning Amour (2012) that pictured the final months of a couple in their eighties.

Vortex opens with a man and woman enjoying an evening aperitif on the balcony of their book-filled penthouse. It’s a contented, easy-going domestic vignette with improvised dialogue, but dark clouds soon gather as a split screen then follows their day to day existence, after waking up in the next morning.

Dementia is the focus and Françoise Lebrun will succumb to the illness in a fairly nuanced performance – there are no confrontations or outbursts of aggression – simply a slow downward spiral into mental disintegration. Dario Argento plays the more troubled character, a heavy smoker suffering from heart failure and desperate to complete a book about dreams in cinema – he is fractious and destabilised by his wife’s increasingly erratic behaviour and worried for her safety: “you can’t just go swanning about the place, Paris is full of really dangerous people”. Although his wicked sense of humour comes out in the scenes with their mentally unstable son (Alex Lutz) who gently tries to coax his parents into the idea of a care home – we’ve all been there before, and it doesn’t get better.

The father will protest, the son will desperately try to find another solution – but we all know the writing is on the wall. The tone here is more about resentment and desperate resignation than Amour’s tempered sadness that celebrated the glowing embers a long life full of tenderness and devotion between a couple. Vortex presents a starker more predictable scenario, and very much a Dylan Thomas style ‘rage against the dying of the light’ for Argento’s husband. There are none of the thrills and spills normally associated with the Argentinian maverick’s work. Certainly this is Noe’s most grown-up film to date. An sobering engagement with reality, maybe acknowledging his own mortality. MT

VORTEX COMES TO UK CINEMAS IN MAY 2022.

Belfast (2021) BAFTA Outstanding British Film 2022

Dir: Kenneth Branagh | Cast: Judy Dench, Ciaran Hinds, Jamie Dornan, Caitriona Balfe, Drama, UK

Kenneth Branagh’s happy little film glosses over the turbulence of The Troubles to give us a candy-coated memoire of his Protestant childhood in backstreet Belfast of the Sixties.

Most of us remember the endless reports on the telly and radio recounting the horrors of Catholic and Protestant confrontations in the ‘bogside’ area of the capital. And there’s no attempt to brush these under the carpet, but staged in lustrous monochrome set pieces the hostilities seem almost thrilling from his character Buddy’s cheeky 9 year-old perspective (Jude Hill is perfect for the part). Dressed in grey flannel shorts, a shirt and tie he watches it all from the bedroom window of his family’s two-up two down terrace where he grows up with his parents (Dornan and Balfe) and grandparents (Hinds and Dench) and older brother Will (McAskie). It’s a picture of domestic bliss.

The upbeat freewheeling storyline drifts from home to pub to schoolroom with a focus on his father’s constant trips to England to chase lucrative work as a carpenter, before the family eventually moved there. This leaves Buddy time alone to fathom out the religious conflict in his own mind, and dream and scheme about girls with his grandfather Pa, a jovial Ciaran Hinds, Judy Dench bringing them both down to earth with a cutting comment or two. There are trips on the bus and family outings to the ‘pictures’ to see Raquel Welch in One Million Years BC and A Christmas Carol. A redolent score by Van Morrison seems apt for this perfectly pitched family drama telling it just how it was back then. MT

OUTSTANDING BRITISH FILM | EE BAFTAS 2022 I RED SEA FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Canyon Passage (1946) Venice Classics 2022

Dir: Jacques Tourneur | US Western

Jacques Tourneur’s first film in Technicolor won praise from Martin Scorsese for its use of colour. Set in Oregon in 1856, the obvious studio sets contrast badly with the majestic location work; but are mitigated by Tourneur’s Germanic lighting, mise en scene and elegantly mobile camera.

In the lead Dana Andrews is (constantly) addressed as and referred to just as ‘Logan’ (his full name is actually ‘Logan Stuart’). Most of the interesting supporting cast are given little to do, with the notable exception of Ward Bond as a particularly brutish heavy, and Hoagy Carmichael dressed as Mr Macawber, who gets to drawl ‘Ole’ Buttermilk Sky’. Richard Chatten

PLAYING IN THE VENICE FILM FESTIVAL CLASSICS RETROSPECTIVE 2022

Les Enfants Terribles (1949/50) Blu-ray

Dir.: Jean Pierre Melville; Cast: Nicole Stéphane, Edouard Dermithe, Jacques Bernard, Renée Cosima, Maurice Revel, narrated by Jean Cocteau; France 1949/1950, 107 min.

It is difficult to imagine two different directors (and personalities) more different than Jean Cocteau and Jean-Pierre Melville. Yes, both were French – Cocteau, the poet of a decadent underworld; and the intellectually aloof Melville, whose policiers were disguised Westerns. But it happened, when Cocteau asked Melville to adapt his 1929 novel “Les Enfants Terribles” for the big screen, having watched his 1947 debut feature Le silence de la Mer. Detachment met passion, but the result was closer to a duel than a collaboration, fought out between two ex-students of the famous Lycée Condocet. Against the odds, a cult classic was born.

Paul (Dermithe), is severely injured in a snow ball fight at the Lycée Condocet; Dargelos (Cosima) who threw the fatal ice bomb, is expelled from the school. Paul lives with his dominant, possessive sister Elisabeth (Stéphane) and their dying mother, looked after by the maid, and supported by a kind doctor (Revel). Paul’s friend Gérard (Bernard), is the only person Elisabeth will give houseroom to but after her mother’s death Elisabeth’s fortunes improve: she becomes a model and meets Agathe, also played by Cosima, although her short marriage to a wealthy business man ends with his death in a car crash before they can consummate the marriage.

Elisabeth moves into his vast mansion inviting Paul, Agathe and Gérard to join her but Agathe and Paul soon fall for each other concealing their feelings, so as not to upset Elisabeth. But their love is exposed when Elisabeth intercepts Paul’s secret billet doux to his paramour, and she forces Gérard and Agatha to marry and leave the house, so she can be alone again with Paul.

On the first day of filming, Cocteau’s lover Dermitte was on set when the writer shouted “Oh no. Cut”, immediately apologising for upstaging the director Melville, and claiming: “Forgive me, I don’t know what came over me. I thought I was still on the Orphée set”. Later Cocteau went on “to advise” Melville, leading to a contretemps between the two, putting their relationship under strain until Melville, feeling ill one day, asked Cocteau to take over the helm and was surprising that he followed his instructions, “like a real Assistant Director”. Melville then explained, “The one thing Cocteau wanted was for me to die, so that he could make the film himself.”

Jean-Pierre Melville, who became the “grandfather” of the Nouvelle Vague (for a time), reported, that Truffaut had seen the film 25 (!) times, and Chabrol, during the shooting of Les Cousins, asked DoP Henri Decaë “to do exactly what you did in Les Enfant Terribles”. Decaë’s poetic black-and-white images are perfect for this decadent incestuous rapport between two siblings who did not want to grow up, playing games until the disastrous denouement. Melville chose Bach and Vivaldi in preference to the Jazz score, Cocteau had favoured – and it perfectly accompanies this morbid and maudlin death dance. AS

Released on Blu-ray, iTunes and Amazon Prime on 13 December 2021

The 400 Blows | Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959)

Dir.: Francois Truffaut; Cast: Jean-Pierre Léaud, Claire Maurier, Albert Rémy, Guy Decomble, Patrick Auffay, Georges Flamant; France 1959, 100 min.

Francois Truffaut was banned from attending the Cannes Film Festival in 1959 but that didn’t prevent him from winning Best Director for Les Quatre Cents Coup, paving the way for other “Cahiers du Cinema” critics like Godard, Rivette and Chabrol to follow in his wake – et voilá La Nouvelle Vague was born.

Dedicated to the eminent French critic André Bazin, who had “adopted” Truffaut and died just before shooting began, the over-literary translation ‘Raising Hell’ would have certainly been appropriate given the startling nature of this bitter coming-of-age story fraught with poverty, institutional repression and parental neglect and centring on Jean-Pierre Léaud’s pre-teen Antoine Doinel.

Victimised at school, Antoine’s home life is no better, his mother Gilberte (Maurier) and stepfather Julien (Rémy) neglect him emotionally in their cramped Parisian apartment where he is forced to sleep in the hallway. Escaping this nightmare environment is the only answer: Antoine will play truant at school with his friend René (Auffay), sneaking into cinemas and a fairground, and hiding in René’s flat where his parents make it nearly impossible for the two to meet. A huge, stuffed horse dominates the bedroom, a metaphor for the absurdity of their marital life.

At school Antoine is the scapegoat of an obnoxious French teacher (Decomble) who regularly picks on him. When a photo of a pin-up girl is passed round under the boys’ desks naturally Antoine is caught in the act, painting a moustache on the woman’s face. Later, Antoine paraphrases a Balzac text for an essay and is accused of plagiarism – the writer is his hero, he even has an altar with a candle for him, almost burning down his parent’s flat.

Worse is to come: Antoine gets caught out lying about his mother’s ‘death’ until both parents turn up at the school, alarmed by the boy’s behaviour. Antoine sleeps rough, steals a typewriter from his step-father’s office, and ends up behind bars with robbers and sex-workers. Later Antoine is transferred to a juvenile detention centre, where he absconds during a football match – eventually ending up on the beach – his dream of freedom comes true.

The humour is always harsh, even Antoine’s close friendship with Rene is turbulent – but at least he has a decent home. Truffaut explores the emotional affects of Antoine’s homelife through a psychologist at the detention centre, who asks him: “how do you feel, not knowing who your biological father is”. Antoine’s answer is cutting: “I always thought my mother was not my real mother”.

Truffaut and Jean-Pierre Leaud’s collaboration on the film led to a close friendship that would continue until Truffaut’s early death. DoP Henri Decaë sums up the cultural wasteland of the 1950s with this dispiriting picture of a Paris of grey facades. Black-and-white images are for once not poetic nor illuminating, just simply bland – ugly even. There is no compromise possible: family and institutions are the enemy of liberty and creativity in Truffaut’s mind. His debut would be his masterpiece. AS

Opening at BFI Southbank, HOME Manchester, Ciné Lumière, Broadway Nottingham and selected cinemas UK-wide on 7 January 2022

Ennio (2021)

Dir/Wri: Giuseppe Tornatore | Doc 157′

Ennio Morricone was one of cinema’s best loved and most prolific composers. Giuseppe Tornatore captures his complex romantic spirit in this warmly nostalgic tribute that also celebrates their own working relationship that started with Cinema Paradiso (1988) and continued for many years. In his lifetime Morricone scored over 500 movies, one year alone completing 18 films.

The biopic straddles film and musicology enriched by a treasure trove of excerpts and the stars that brought them to life praising Morricone’s charisma and single mindedness and describing their own experiences with a man whose modesty contrasted with his prodigious talent to amuse. The final half hour does feel repetitive with its endless clips of concert performances which add nothing to the party, and almost fly in the face of the composer’s lowkey sense of style.

‘The Maestro’ is pictured in his palatial home relaxing in a armchair as he talks expansively about a career that started with his training to be a doctor before his father, a professional trumpeter, persuaded him to become a musician.

Times were hard and the family struggled during the Second World war years when Morricone played for a pittance writing dance tunes before a classical path at the Rome’s Santa Cecilia Conservatory would see him training under the respected teacher and composer Goffredo Petrassi who would strongly influence for the rest of his career.

Working with an avant-garde collective inspired by John Cage allowed Morricone to develop his creative inventiveness using a variety of sound effects using tin cans to the famous whistles and even typewriters to produce his unique sounds during the Sixties in scores often inspired by Bach toccatas, but the bread and butter came from TV work where he was often uncredited.

Morricone often felt he was letting his classical training down preferring to remain in the background with his iconic scores for Westerns, but they allowed him to expand his contacts, and it was here that he would forge a long lasting working relationship with Sergio Leone, one of his old schoolfriends, he would go on to score all Leone’s films after A Fistful of Dollars.

A Fistful of Dollars (1963/4) provided a springboard for other Western projects where he insisted on having control of the score, even when Leone proposed additions from another movie. He even replaced his mentor Petrassi on John Huston’s The Bible (1966), a moment he still considers regretful, and where he is uncredited. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) followed and Sergio Corbucci’s The Great Silence (1968). He turned down an offer from Roland Joffe saying he couldn’t score The Mission (1986) without ruining the aesthetic appeal of the images, but then went on to enhance the epic. It was nominated for that year’s Oscar but missed out to Herbie Hancock’s Round Midnight, which was not an original score, and therefore not really eligible for the category.

This is a film that somehow benefits from its plethora of talking head stars: Clint Eastwood, Quentin Tarantino, Oliver Stone, Dario Argento all make valuable contributions along with Bernardo Bertolucci and Bruce Springsteen. Even the elusive Terrence Malick gives his two pennyworth on working with the maestro in Days of Heaven, who received his first Academy Award nomination for the score. The only regret during his prodigious output is that he was unable to score A Clockwork Orange for Kubrick after a misunderstanding with Sergio Leone deep-sixed the collaboration, Leone claiming Morricone was too busy with his score for A Fistful of Dynamite, which was apparently untrue).

Tornatore really gets to the heart of a genuine and deeply sensual man who clearly lived for his music at a profound level and found happiness in his marriage to Maria who provided an invaluable sounding board throughout his career and got him his first job at RAI.

Ennio provides a rich vein of lesser known Italian films from the Sixties – Giuseppe Patroni Griffi’s Love Circle, Alberto Lattuada’s Fraulein Doctor and Liliana Calvani’s I Cannibali (1970) as well as classics such as Elio Petri’s A Quiet Place in the Country, Bertolucci’s Partner; Pasolini’s Hawks and Sparrows, and Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers and Leone’s 1984 epic Once Upon a Time in America (still considered his best) whetting our appetite to re-discover these and fully appreciate how his compositions add another dimensions to cinema, Sidelined at the Academy Awards for many years he finally struck gold with Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, at 90. MT

IN CINEMAS AND ON DEMAND | 22 APRIL 2022 | PREMIERE – THE RED SEA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Take Me to The Cinema (2021) Rea Sea Film Festival 2021

Dir: Albaqer Jafeer | Doc, Iraq 74′

“You have dreams, but it’s important to fulfil them too”

The cinema has long provided an escape route, a journey into a dreamworld when reality is too much to bear, or freedom impossible. But does cinema have a future in the modern world ponders Iraqi filmmaker Albaqer Jafeer.

Four years in the making his documentary Take Me to The Cinema was inspired by Nassif Falak’s and serves both as a personal odyssey into the world of film and a potted history of a troubled era told through his protagonist, an Iraqi soldier who avoided active service in the 1980s Iran/Iraq disappearing into the world of film where his obsession with the film Papillon began.

The soldier reflects on a time only 50 years ago when travel was impossible, so the only way of escape was to flee into the darkness of a cinema. Papillon remained seared to his memory conjuring up images of conflict and confinement far worse than those experienced by Steve McQueen. Iraq went into lockdown when war was declared in 1981, so the soldier decided to forge a passport as a means of escape – he also forged passports for his friends.

Captured in magical images of the ancient riverside city and its splendid surrounds, the lyrical journey begins with the two traipsing round Baghdad in the purple gloaming during the evening prayer time. Intercut with reminiscences of the conflict, the 65-year-old former soldier and Jafeer browse through old combat gear, which now has a valuable market value of its own. A walk through a disused cinema is revealing – and it was where here the soldier last saw Papillon on the big screen. Italian movie posters of matinee idols still adorn the crumbling walls, old reels of film are strewn about the sandy aisles in a sight for sore eyes. But there’s also treasure amongst the wreckage. “Cinema is like an Iraqi person – he opines – it went through the sanctions and survived”.

The final act comes full circle as the soldier acts out his ‘dream’ in the reality of the nearby countryside, striding symbolically through the wasteland, tossing away his combats triumphantly and embracing the future and all it holds declaring “I am here you bastards” a quote from McQueen’s Papillon in the film. Take me to the Cinema is another slim but enchanting film from the Arab world playing at this year’s Red Sea Film Festival. MT

RED SEA FILM FESTIVAL 2021

The Sea Ahead (2021) Red Sea Film Festival

Dir/Ely Dagher | 119’ Drama Lebanon

The Sea Ahead is a rather languid feature debut for Lebanese writer/director Ely Dagher opts for moody enigma at the expense of a tangible plot in an enigmatic narrative that somehow suits its theme of directionless youth.

Jana (Manal Issa) is back in a wintery Beirut to find life has changed in the Mediterranean capital – her father has even started doing the washing up in support of female emancipation. But Jana seems sullen at the prospect of being home again and somehow resentful of her middle-class parents. Trying to maintain a low profile while she finds her feet again is impossible with her mother alerting the whole neighbourhood of her return from studying in Paris.

Beirut positively glows with the promise of new life, the city’s regeneration well on the way, with burgeoning construction stretching along the coastline – despite the ravages of the pandemic- but Jana is not convinced. Her years in Paris have broadened her horizons but not just culturally, leaving her disenchanted, coasting through her days not keen to work despite a potential job offer from family friend Hassan.

Another friend is getting married – word has it she’s already pregnant – and Jana’s father tuts away in dismay at the aimlessness of today’s younger generation: “we fought and suffered” he claims, presumably referring to the 1982 war with Israel.

Seeing her old boyfriend Adam (Roger Azar) is the only thing that puts a smile on Jana’s face and they spend lazy days in the lowly mechanic’s apartment eating falafel, staring at their phones and dancing to Middle Eastern disco music until things turn sour.

A fadoesque portrait that explores a well to do generation with too much freedom and too many choices that leaves the uninspiring central character aimlessly drifting and dissatisfied. The feature works along similar lines to The Worst Person in the World although it lacks the energy, dramatic heft and fully fleshed out central character of the Cannes-winning Norwegian title showing that aimlessness can also have a winning appeal of its own. MT

RED SEA FILM FESTIVAL | Jeddah Old Town 6-15 December 2021

Europa (2021) Red Sea Film Festival 2022

Dir/Wri: Haider Rashid | Adam Ali, Svetlana Yancheva, Mohomed Zouaoui, Michael Segal | Italy, Thriller 75′

This gritty migration movie clearly takes its cue from the 1964 black and white Czechoslovak classic Diamonds of the Night that followed two Jewish teenagers escaping from a train taking them to Dachau concentration camp.

Haider Rashid’s debut may slimmer of script and less engaging but the sombre subject remains the same. A breathless Zac handheld camera follows a young Iraqi Muslim who reaches the coast of Bulgaria on a boat, trafficked from North Africa. Hoping for a better life, rather than escaping certain death like the teens in Jan Nemec’s Czech New Wave debut that ends in tragedy, Europa is more enigmatic.

DoP Jacopo Caramella keeps his camera right up close to Kamal (Ali) as he rushes on through the bosky undergrowth. Occasionally the focus broadens to the near distance where his pursuers are hot on his trail. Europa is about the pain, fear and the gruelling tiredness suffered by this modern refugee who may be young and fit but is also injured and exhausted by his dangerous odyssey, and ill-equipped to endure the perilous journey that lies ahead when night falls.

Writing with Sonia Giannetto, Haider keeps the tension taut in this fact- based drama driven forward by Kamal’s terrorised POV. We feel his sheer exhaustion, his fear-fuelled energy sapping away. Eventually he reaches a safe haven in the woods but not for long. Adam Ali grew up in the safety of Manchester but his performance as Kamal is fraught with palpable terror in this tightly-wound unhurried tragedy that ponders the unkindness of strangers. MT

RED SEA FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Intregalde (2021) Red Sea Film Festival

Dir: Radu Muntean | Romania, 104′

“No good dead goes unpunished” is the idea behind this latest film from Romania’s Radu Muntean (One Floor Below). Întregalde ponders how modern Romania has gone backwards and forwards at the same time through a richly thematic psychodrama playing in this year’s Red Sea International Film Festival.

Written by Răzvan Rădulescu, Alex Baciu and Radu Muntean it centres on three friends Maria, Ilinca and Dan (played by Maria Popistașu, Ilona Brezoianu and Alex Bogdan) who embark on a humanitarian mission to deliver food parcels to a remote part of Transylvania.

But on their way home the upbeat charity jaunt soon turns into a stress-fuelled nightmare when they pick up a mysterious old man in the forest. Kente (played by non-pro actor Luca Sabin) takes them wildly off track, before leaving them on a muddy track in the autumnal gloom of the Apuseni mountains.

Early scenes strike a familiar note for most of us used to charity efforts, food banks and child poverty, now at 21st century reality. In the back of their land-rover the two stranded women talk about relationships and fertility problems while they wait for Dan (Bogdan) to get help to repair their stricken vehicle. Arguments follow as they all fall out over their decision to leave the main road in the bitterly cold falling snow. By the morning the woods are transformed into a winter wonderland where time seems to have shifted back hundreds of years in the village of Întregalde.

Muntean gives us a sardonic vision of a country where two worlds collide: one is the complex modern existence, the other is caught in a fairytale past of painted wooden houses and rural traditions. Both exist in the 21st century: Kente still believes in his imaginative stories and folklore and lives sustainably off the land and his livestock. The three helpers have been catapulted into an economic reality where food and money are now scarce for many ordinary people, caught in the poverty trap of modern Romania. MT

RED SEA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | JEDDAH OLD TOWN 6 -15 December 2021

The Story of Film: A New Generation (2021)

Dir/Wri: Mark Cousins | Doc, UK 160′

A decade after The Story of Film: An Odyssey, comes Mark Cousins’ latest deep dive inquiry into the state of filmmaking in the 21st century. The Story of Film: A New Generation, sees Cousins focus on the past decade in a fascinating reflection on world cinema from 2010 to 2021. The film opens with Joker and Frozen showing the transformative power of the medium and its ability to bring stories from the desperate and disenfranchised on the world stage. Cemetery of Splendour (2015) features heavily in this exploration of recurring themes and emerging motifs, from the evolution of film language, to technology’s role in moviemaking today, to shifting identities in 21st-century world cinema.

Cousins’ research is encyclopaedic as he confidently talks us through a staggering array of films – not just from the last ten years but reconnecting to examples that demonstrate connections with the past that have influenced filmmakers of the present and future. Rather like fashion and architecture, cinema is an eternal reimagining of what has gone before marking out trends and themes only to reinvent them to appeal to a new generation, weaving in historical touchstones such as Covid-19 and Black Lives Matter as the world responds to its environment.

Plundering the archives for those iconic features there is everything from Jonathan Glazer’s visually and thematically groundbreaking Under the Skin to reworked upstairs/downstairs satires such as Parasite and Us which explores the dark and light sides of the human psyche through the an invasion thriller. In With films like Lover’s Rock and Moonlight Cousins identifies films, filmmakers and communities under-represented in traditional film histories, with a particular emphasis on Asian and Middle Eastern works, as well as boundary-pushing documentaries and films that see gender in new ways.

The streaming age has taken us from ‘cinema on show’ to ‘cinema on demand’. Cousins tracks the latest trends of the digital age with viewers calling the shots, a trend accelerated in the light of the recent pandemic. He looks forward to the future but what remains is a recurring motif that drives cinema forward: our profound desire to escape and travel beyond the ordinary, or see ourselves reflected through the medium of the silver screen as we are transported to a place of wonder and euphoria. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 17 DECEMBER NATIONWIDE

Opium (1919)

Dir: Robert Reinert | Silent film

Siegfried Kracauer – who hit thirty the year this feature came out – was able personally to recall the film’s first release which ran in an expensive Berlin movie theater with the house sold out for three weeks. Of course, one avoided being seen on such occasions”!

With prescription of addictive opiates currently causing a panic in Britain it’s timely to see again this dire warning against the perils of opium a hundred years on; restored to its former glory with magnificent tinting, handsome exteriors and an involved plot starting in China and concluding in Europe.

With so much going on the plot thread involving opium is easy to lose track of, and director Robert Reinert is for the most part content to let his cast mug to the camera (Werner Krauss both looks and acts like Moore Marriott as the leering Chinese villain Nung-Tschang, who keeps magically popping up whenever the action relocates) and let the plushness of the production take care of itself. There are a couple of interesting camera tricks that anticipate Vertigo but Reinert more often favours scenes of Satan cavorting with nymphs to create the atmosphere he’s after!

Although he (eventually) makes an impressive entrance, Conrad Veidt isn’t actually in the film for very long, and the cast member who makes the most sympathetic impression is probably doe-eyed Sybill Morel in a double role as mother and daughter. Richard Chatten

Kayan (2021) Red Sea Film Festival 2021

Dir: Hakeem Jomah | Horror, Saudi Arabia 75’

A young Saudi couple’s past regrets and neuroses play out in this startlingly effective genre piece, a sophomore feature for Hakeem Jomah, who has made a name for himself as the man behind Madayen, Saudi Arabia’s first psychological horror ghost story.

A blood moon, poltergeists and a Dracula like receptionist are some of the sinister experiences the two encounter when they decide to check into a hotel after a boozy night with friends.

Kayan unfolds in modern day Jeddah where Salman and Thuraya are having a tough time relationship wise, and a house move and new baby doesn’t help. The tone darkens on their way home, deciding to spend the night in a rather mysterious old hotel with more that a few ghastly secrets behind its exotic portals.

The weird hotel manager gives them a chilly reception and not surprisingly nobody gets any sleep haunted by hallucinations and strange things that go bump in the night. Thuraya is menaced by a strange little boy – a reminder of an early abortion. She then appears hovering above the bed in a ghoulish transformation – or it is a figment of his Salman’s imagination?. Meanwhile in his dreams he floats between feverish fantasy and reality menaced by a baleful ex-girlfriend and a security guard with kinetic powers.

Kayan makes effective use of red tints and an eerie electronic soundscape to ramp up the tension in a tightly scripted and stunningly realised psychological horror outing that certainly puts the Saudi Arabian filmmaker firmly on the map horror-wise. MT

RED SEA FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Jules et Jim (1961) Truffaut Season at the BFI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

River of Blood (2021) Red Sea International Film Festival 2021

Dir: Nitin Lukose | India, Drama 101′

In his beautifully realised revenge drama Indian director Nitin Lokose dives into the troubled waters of a divided Catholic community in the southern island of Kerala to show how an age-old vendetta can perpetuate ill-feeling despite religious cohesion. Each year at Christmas time the two factions at the heart of the story agree to bury their differences but Christmas is rarely a good time for families, and sparks from the fire soon ignite another round of violence.

A body is brought out on to the sandy river banks deep in the lush Keralan countryside – was it a murder or an accident? The death seems to be connected to a decades long rivalry between two Catholic families unable to live by the values they espouse. Anna (Kosher) and Joey (George) had hoped to get married, but their nuptials are put on ice due to the inter-family feud, Romeo and Juliet style.

Years later Joey’s uncle Kochappan (Kizhakkan) returns home from jail, having served 15 years for the murder, much to the consternation of his nasty little blind father, a devout Catholic and pillar of the local community who had urged Kochappan to take revenge, even providing the weapon of choice and encouraging Joey and the rest of male to perpetuate the cycle of violence.

Kochappan’s crime hasn’t been forgotten, and as history repeats itself the police are brought in to investigate uncle’s sudden disappearance- no prizes for guessing what’s happened as the killing spirals out of control.

A great premise but rather a simplistic script fails to flesh out characters or backstory instead plunging us immediately into a series of violent episodes between the menfolk – the women remaining cyphers on a sidelines, leaving us caring little for those involved. A curious comedy undertone feels tonally out of kilter with the otherwise baleful mood of constant conflict. Lukose gets into his stride as his narrative unfolds in the second act, full of Srikanth Kabothu’s wonderful images and a tense dramatic undertow that makes River of Blood entertaining arthouse thriller, despite the repetitive violence and rather predicable finale. MT

RED SEA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2021

The Stranger (2021) Red Sea Film Festival 2021

Dir: Amir Fakher Eldin | Drama 112′

“How can we fear death when we have not lived”

Amir Fakher Eldin’s feature debut a melancholy parable, a tribute to all those oppressed or forced to live elsewhere. As Palestine’s Oscar 2022 hopeful the film also reflects the disenchantment of the older generation with the next one, as it in turn considers an uncertain future in the internecine conflict. Laced with metaphors and sage quotes from ‘the prophets’, this quietly engrossing slow-burner establishes character and place before moving on to a tense but satisfying conclusion.

On an opening vignette a father (Mohammed Bakri) is writing his will, disinheriting his only son Adnan (Ashraf Barhom, an borderline alcoholic failed doctor who has always disappointed him, leaving all his worldly possessions to the temple, apart from the treasured family orchard which produces a decent crop of apples and cherries on the slopes of the occupied Golan Heights.

Amid the sound of distant shelling we meet Adnan, tending the orchards in the glowing shades of late Autumn, a dusting of snow glistens on the distance mountains, a chilly reminder of another winter of discontent. Rather than turn in a profit the orchard is the his refuge to get away from the everyday realities of a cow with an infection, a wife who wants to emigrate, and a daughter who desperately needs his guidance. Meanwhile his brother in law demands he shape up or ship out. At least he still has his faithful dog Kosba.

On his way home Adnan is stopped by Israeli soldiers who smell drink on his breath, he winds them up a provocative way, claiming to be heading to Damascus and challenging them over the Israeli occupation. Not a clever idea in the circumstances, but Adnan is not a particularly sensible man whose poor decisions have left him and his family financially broken.

But Adnan is a decent soul, and his next decision is a good one. Driving with his friends Akram and Hani, later that night, they pick up a wounded man who is gravely ill, and needs a doctor. Hani insists on knowing the man’s identity before they get a doctor. But Adnan objects to Hani’s lack of care: whoever the man is he deserves saving. Using his medical knowledge he treats the man’s leg wound himself.

When he wakes up the man claims to be a Syrian war photographer searching the Golan Heights for his grandparent’s house before they were exiled to Syria in the 1967 war. A Syrian exile himself, Hani insists on seeking the advice from the elders, still believing the photographer to be an imposter. Should the traditional values of neighbourliness transcend political differences? Eldin’s absorbing drama raises all sorts of questions, but in a poetically appealing, unoffensive way. MT

RED SEA FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Ailey (2021)

Dir.: Jamila Wignot; Documentary with Alvin Ailey, Judith Jameson, Carmen de Lavallade , Robert Battle; USA 2021, 90 min.

Alvin Ailey (1931-1989), founder of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre (AAADT), remains pretty much a mystery in this lyrical portrait of the dancer and choreographer – a black, closeted gay man. Cicely Tyson called him the “Pied Piper of modern dance”, and when Ailey received his award during the Kennedy Honours ceremony in 1988, ironically presented by Ronald whose policies had punished the gay community.

In her first outing as solo writer/director, Jamila Wignot works with Ailey archive interviews often as a commentator, escaping the ‘talking heads’ malaise which blights many documentaries. Alvin Ailey was born in 1931 in rural Texas, he never met his father, but his mother worked on the cotton fields and as a cleaning lady for white homeowners. In 1941 they moved to Los Angeles where their relationship became the corner stone of Alvin’s psychological world for the rest of his life. Later, when he suffered from Bi-Polar disorder and was institutionalised in a psychiatric ward, it was his mother who took him home and looked after him. Alvin was very protective of his mother, right to the end, when he made his doctor sign the cause of his death as a result of a blood disorder, so that she would not be stigmatised by him being a victim of AIDS.

Ballet was for Ailey a form of escape, he was captivated by the Ballets Russes Monte Carlo and Catherine Dunham even though his football coach at High school tried in vain to interest him in the sport. Alvin was taught by Martha Graham, among others, and founded the AAADT in 1958 at the age of only twenty-seven, after having moved to NYC, where he replaced Lester Horton as choreographer at his last engagement.

Perhaps Ailey’s most famous ballet, “Revelations” (1960) was called a “re-enactment’ of life, a mixture of passion and sorrows” by members of the ensemble. In 1970, AAADT was nearly bankrupt, and the Foreign Office sent the ensemble on a tour of Asia and Europe. They were extremely popular, particularly in Stuttgart (Germany) “where the sell-out crowd hollered and stomped, like they had an orgasm”. The audience called the troupe for 80 curtain raisers. But Alvin remained an enigma even for his closest collaborators, he was just another person when he left the building after performing. His work was sometimes criticised for not being political enough in the wake of the rising Civil Rights movement, but he answered “that his protest was on the stage, not the streets”.

Further successes were “The River” (1970) and a year later, “Cry”, a birthday present for his mother, and a solo performance for Judith Jameson. There is interesting footage from an interview of Alvin with Harry Belafonte, where they discuss race integration, which for Alvin did progress too slowly. After the death of close collaborator Joyce Trisher, he was shocked and honoured her with “Memoria” (1979). But the experience in Texas stayed with him forever: after successful performances in Paris, he claimed that he could not adjust to such different experiences, and left. He soon returned with “Fever Swamp” (1983). Alvin Ailey spent the last days of his life on a sofa, watching his troupe rehearse.

Apart from archive footage and Newsreel snippets, Wignot uses rehearsals by the new artistic director, Robert Battle, of “Lazarus” by Rennie Harris, to celebrate 60 years of the AAADT, with Masazumi Chaya, another co-director of the company, also commenting on the continuation of Alvin Ailey’s work.

AILEY flows like a dream, languid and indulgent. Perhaps Alvin Ailey was too much of a contradictory personality to have everything revealed in one feature. But Wignot has achieved enough, to make us curious to get to know him better. AS

IN CINEMAS AND ON DEMAND from 7 JANUARY 2022

Hell’s Gate (2021) Red Sea Film Festival 2021

Dir: Amin Dora | Cast: Cynthia Samuel, Adam Bakri, Fadi Abi Samra, Hassan Farhat | TV Series | 8 Episodes

When it comes to the niche genre of Arab Sci-fi this new TV series is one to watch out for with its surprisingly captivating characters and inventive production design, make-up and costumes.

Blending horror and sci-fi with an edgy love story, it takes place in a post apocalyptic Beirut in the year 2052, where an authoritarian regime has taken hold of the population. A struggle for power breaks out between a group of shrewd investors who have assumed control of the Lebanon and a bunch of revolutionary young men and women eager to overthrow them. The story centres on Adam (Adam Bakri) whose path crosses with a mysterious young woman Alia (Samuel) who claims to “tick all the boxes”, and she certainly seems to with her intelligence, mesmerising beauty and emotional strength.

Emmy Award winning director Amin Dora has us hooked from the opening scenes with his cast of really impressive Middle Eastern actors made more intriguing for Western audiences by their exotic looks and strong characterisations – the women are certainly no wallflowers here, often calling the shots.

Hell’s Gate is on Shahid VIP, Shahid’s subscription-based service, now available worldwide

Rotterdam Film Festival | Retrospectives 2022

A retrospective in this year’s Rotterdam Film Festival is dedicated to China’s Qiu Jiongjiong, one of the world’ most innovative artists and filmmakers, with a series of films and an exhibition. Intimate memory and national history resonate in Qiu’s baroque rhapsodies of music and design.

Six of his films are presented, including his latest masterwork A New Old Play. Its overview of China from the 1930s to the 1980s, filtered through the semi-fictionalised life of a Sichuan opera star, won the Special Jury Prize at the 74th Locarno Film Festival; the film was supported in development by IFFR’s Hubert Bals Fund. The accompanying exhibition Qiu Jiongjiong: A Play with Paintings, Drawings and Manuscriptsdisplays different stages of Qiu’s creative process.

Madame, Qiu Jiongjiong, 2010, China, European premiere

The Moon Palace, Qiu Jiongjiong, 2007, China, international premiere

My Mother’s Rhapsody, Qiu Jiongjiong, 2011, China

A New Old Play, Qiu Jiongjiong, 2021, China

Ode to Joy, Qiu Jiongjiong, 2008, China

Portrait of Mr. Huang, Qiu Jiongjiong, 2009, China

ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | 27 JANUARY – 5 FEBRUARY 2022

Hit the Road (2021)

Dir: Panar Panahi | Iran, Drama 98′

A promising debut for Panar Panahi (son of Jafar) proving that Iranian cinema need not have a political subtext but can just be relaxed and reflective, as Hit the Road certainly is, in spades. Clearly well-trained under his father, Panahi hits the spot with a bittersweet but un-involving story steeped in melancholy, a road movie that successfully blends light-hearted and more sensitive moments encompassing the nuances of human behaviour and the complexities of life.

Very much a critics’ film with its arthouse style and artful framing (it premiered at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight) the pace may be too slow-burning for mainstream audiences with a lack of real dramatic tension, and unexplained plotlines – in the old Iranian style the film meanders along at its own pace bolstered by enigma, but never really reaching a conclusion, other than the predictable, sad event that brings it to a melancholy close.

A car is travelling through the Iranian countryside and 6-year-old Rayan (Sarlak) is playing along to the classical music on the radio tapping imaginary notes on a hand-painted keyboard on his father’s plaster cast – clearly his much older father (Hassan Madjooni from The Pig) has broken his leg. Rayan’s mother (Pantea Panahiha) sits in the front and his older brother (Amin Similar) is in the driving seat, a sullen young man who doesn’t quite gel with the rest of the family unit, and is permanently on the verge of tears although we never really understand why.

Panahi shifts from dark comedy to Greek tragedy, the mother frequently breaking into tearful or cheerful song as they travel along. Rayan has a tiny tantrum when his mother decides to bury his mobile phone with her bare hands by the roadside, a bizarre action that is left open for our own conclusions.

The father is a moody, avuncular man who dotes on his precocious little boy, clearly an afterthought in the couple’s long marriage. Rayan plays to the audience, sometimes disingenuously, you get the impression he is being heavily guided off camera.

As they head into the mountains, the tone grows more sombre and we discover their adorable pet dog Jessy is a stray with not long to live. It then emerges in an elegantly framed father/son tete a tete, set by a backdrop of astounding natural beauty, that all is not well with the elder brother who reflects on his future, or lack of it.

The mother clearly absorbs all the sadness of her family as well as the ebullience of little Rayan, it’s a wonderful performance from Panahiha and balances Madjooni’s laidback nonchalance. There are shades of Kiarostami in the widescreen set pieces, and inventive use of CGI in a mesmerising scene shot from above, but some may find the final act too long and drawn out.

Hit the Road is an expressive four-hander with a strong aesthetic, plenty of new ideas and solid performances. But somehow you leave feeling disappointed – and the ending doesn’t help. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE | REVIEWED AT THE RED SEA FILM FESTIVAL 2021 | 6 -15 DECEMBER 2021

Val (2021)

Dirs: Leo Scott and Ting Poo | US Doc 104′

The thing about Val Kilmer is his silly humour. It shines out in this warm biopic of an actor who struck gold commercially but still wants to make it in the arthouse world. Now in his early 60s, a glittering past is behind him, a cancer survivor clinging on cheerfully despite a robotic voice like Stephen Hawking, he still smiles radiantly. A shadow of his former self but his spirit is strong and full of positive energy for the future. And once you get used to the voice you realise he’s much the same as he ever was: just older and wiser – and more philosophical.

In Val, directors Leo Scott and Ting Poo use a hotchpotch of videos and snapshots mostly taken by Kilmer himself: an actor and writer but most of all a big human whose love for life and his family radiates through the 40 years of archive footage in a documentary that takes us from his childhood years in California to the Batman years for which he is most famous, and beyond. His latest project – a tribute to Mark Twain – is still ongoing and clearly fascinates him.

The film starts with him playing around in his trailer with Rick Rossovich during the making of Top Gun, his complex character comes out in another scene where he’s filming John Frankenheimer on the set of The Island of Dr. Moreau. Ordered to stop filming Kilmer carries on regardless. The director had threatened to walk out and so Kilmer bargains with him to stay and the camera continues rolling.

A training at New York’s Juilliard school has clearly instilled a strong sense of quality in his work. And this is probably the root cause of his reputation for being ‘difficult’. He was billed for the main role in the 1983 production of “The Slab Boys,” a Broadway hit play, Sean Penn and Kevin Bacon later pulling rank for the main parts. His creativity went on to be stymied by the commercial system that ultimately offered little by way of freedom to express himself, and this theme sets the tone for an entertaining portrait of a real man, rather than just a jobbing player of parts. This is why his story remains one of success rather than failure, despite the decrepit guy in the picture. Loss is a big theme: his marriage and divorce from Joanne Whalley affected him badly, and obviously the cancer diagnosed in 2015. But he soldiers on making us laugh with an infectious humour in this feelgood movie.

Batman was a personal disaster for him weighed down by a heavy costume and hardly able to breathe, let alone speak. It crushed his performance and he signed out after one go at the Caped Crusader: “every boy wants to be Batman, but not play him”.

The Top Gun episode was a blast with much fooling around off set, sealing his reputation:“For the rest of my life I will be called Iceman by every pilot at every airport I ever go to.” he comments from his Malibu beach hideaway. But he wanted more than fame. Inspiration was really his watchword. In a bid to work with Kubrick and Scorsese he sent them audition tapes but nothing came of it. His force of personality projected him forward for choice roles but he didn’t always get them. Willow was another disaster but the The Doors would be special and he honed his performance again and again, even wearing the leather trousers in an obsession that ultimately cost him his marriage.

Family intervenes throughout the film: particularly his sadness over his brother Wesley who died in a jacuzzi accident in his teens. And his mother was a big influence and he reminisces over her in some tearful sequences. Although his father was a big business man Val ultimately had to bail him out. His faith Christian Science also figures strongly and clearly gives him the strength to pursue his artistic projects. He may have fallen from the pantheon of stardom but seems to have found peace with his kids and a boundless enthusiasm drives him forward to the future. MT

NOW ON RELEASE

Sisters (2020) Red Sea Film Festival 2021

Dir: Yamina Benguigui | France, Drama 99′

Isabelle Adjani is the star of this turbulent sophomore feature from French filmmaker Benguigui that sees three sisters ride an emotional rollercoaster en route to discovering what became of their brother after their father took him back to their homeland.

Part road movie, richly complex character study and melodrama, Benguigui touches on socially relevant themes of immigration and female empowerment in her largely autobiographical film that is powered forward by genuine enthusiasm – and it succeeds, despite structural flaws, in relating a genuine story of sisterhood set against a turbulent past.

The film open as the youngest sister Norah (Maiwenn) finds herself back home with her mother Leila (a fierce Fattouma Ousliha Bouamari) causing ructions in the domestic status quo. Past resentments resurface, Norah blaming her mother’s divorce from their abusive Algerian father as the root of her problems. But Leila claims she bringing her daughters to freedom they now enjoy in France. And although only the middle sister, Djamila (Rachida Brakni), seems settled with a high profile career in the Law her feathers are ruffled when the eldest sister Zorah (Isabelle Adjani) decides to write a play about the family story, the others reacting with varying degrees of horror, not wanting to relive the trauma through a play. Sudden news of their father’s stroke back in Algeria then forces the girls to pull together and visit him in the hope of a family reunion, and to find out what happened to Redah.

Much soul-searching follows as they all make the fraught homeward journey that leads to tears and violent recriminations, and some really powerful acting from the trio. Benguigui’s fractured narrative swings flips backwards and forwards to fill us in on the past, but the doubling up in casting is often confusing with Zorah’s daughter Farah, (played by Hafsia Herzi) also playing her mother in the play’s flashbacks. And the father’s sudden stroke feels rather too convenient as an opportunity to return to Algeria although the scenes around the capital are some of the film’s most enjoyable moments. And it’s interesting to see some nuanced subtlety for Adjani after her more fraught roles in Possession and Camille Claudel.

RED SEA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Cyrano de Bergerac (2021) Red Sea International Film Festival 2021

Dir: Joe Wright | Writer; Eric Schmidt | Cast: Peter Dinklage, Haley Bennett, Ben Mendelsohn, Kelvin Harrison | UK Musical drama, 124′

Joe Wright gives Cyrano De Bergerac a musical makeover with this soft-centred lyrical approach to the time-honoured French classic, transposing the action to early 18th century Italy and dressing the love story up in macaroon pastels and tender gazes as delicate as the Capodimonte porcelain of the region that clearly inspired Sarah Greenwood’s production designs.

Peter Dinklage plays the sweet-natured romantic soldier unlucky in love due to his unfeasibly large nose and lack of stature, but whose way with words woes Haley Bennett’s wistful but unwitting maiden Roxanne (Bennett) through poetic billets doux penned on behalf of the real object of her affections, Christian (Harrison) a recruit in the service of her caustic suitor Duke De Guiche (an ebullient Ben Mendelsohn).

The everlasting appeal of the story lies in the cherished belief that inner beauty and noble intentions can override physical imperfections in our quest for love. And Wright certainly moves us with this woozy concoction and its touching performances particularly from Dinklage in the leading role as a captivating Cyrano crooning original tunes from Aaron & Bryce Dessner.

There have been several adaptations of the 19th century novel, the most famous, from 1990, stars Gerard Depardieu as the disillusioned dreamer, and this one is based on Erica Schmidt’s 2018 stage show, which also starred Dinklage in the title role. A little bit lightweight but intoxicating nevertheless. MT

CYRANO OPENS THE RED SEA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2021

The Case of the Vanishing Gods (2021)

Dir: Ross Lipman | US Doc 71

Ventriloquism is explored in this novel and darkly amusing experimental doc hybrid from US documentarian Ross Lipman who traces the phenomenon of ‘throwing voices’ from the oracles of ancient Greece to the spectacle of the modern horror film.

It all starts with a strange one-eyed man who welcomes us into his abode referred to as the ‘psycho ward’ to experience the deepest corners of human mind. The story of puppetry and ventriloquism then unfolds through a consultation between two puppets: psychiatrist Dr Labyrinth and his patient Hugo, interleaved and enlivened by a comprehensive cache of film excerpts and archive footage from the famous ventriloquist stage double acts such as Anthony Hopkins, Karru Mari, Chucky providing a terrifying and comprehensive collage of creepiness that dates back to the 17th century and possibly even earlier.

‘Ventriloquism’ comes from Latin ‘to speak from the belly’ (the Greeks called it nacromancy). Noises from the stomach were thought to be the voices of God that were interpreted by the ventriloquist – forecasting future events

Essentially a two-hander (or a four-stringer) starring Hugo and Dr Labyrinth, the ‘case of the vanishing gods’ is what the puppet psychiatrist refers to as ‘Hugo’s case’. Hugo – a Bronx-accented classical marionette – is suffering from a fear of scissors and frequent memory loss. Dr Labyrinth puts Hugo under a trance where he experiences the most fantastic dream with sybilles or immortal nymphs becoming oracles and connecting us with the spirit world. Hugo then returns the following week for another session and once again is put into a trance, this time the Gods and Sybilles have disappeared and we learn how the 17th saw ventriloquism take shape as a more earthbound mode of communication. But it wasn’t until 1886 when Costa Joe introduced the first ventriloquist dummy to the theatre – Prof Echo brought his dummy Tommy who sang on stage with tunes like Sweet Rose O’Grady and soon the puppets were appearing in silent cinema: Lon Chaney provided the dummy’s voices himself. Then came Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy.

All this unfolds through the medium of the patient and doctor consultations. Hugo’s memories then become darker and feature clips from the film Dead of Night (1945), Hugo somehow becoming a character friend of Michael Redgrave. Another memory has Hugo reflecting over the comedy duo where a dummy called Caesar actually takes over his ventriloquist, the dynamic dramatically switching and putting servant in control of master.

The third segment develops this sinister strand – the focus is now on puppets taking control of their owners – a worrying trend that has actually come full circle, hinting at the AI robots that are now with us in the 21st century. Meanwhile the Doc takes Hugo into his fourth session which encounters yet another memory featuring a Roubinska puppet who could see things the puppet ventriloquist could not express (“It’s schitzo Doc “).

The film touches on ‘Prophetic transition’ where the puppets become an alter ego helping us to bounce off our ideas and seek guidance for a higher unconscious and possibly unlocking the deep and potent inner resources of the human mind. The imagined puppet sequences in the first act are absolutely enchanting, delicately superimposed on Hugo’s first therapy session with the Doc. What follows is a compact yet immersive odyssey through the history of ventriloquism packing a richly thematic punch in just over a hour. And while the experimental style may not have wide appeal, content-wise Lipman offers an enjoyable dive into the history of this arcane form of entertainment. MT

ON FESTIVALSCOPE PRO

Petrov’s Flu (2021)

Dir: Kiril Serebrennikov | Cast: Semyon Serzin, Chulpan Khamatova, Yulia Boris and Yuri Kolokolnikov | USSR, Drama

Petrov’s Flu unites Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov with Semyon Serzin, the star of his 2018 drama Leto. His standout thought-provoking religious drama The Student (2016) screened at Un Certain Regard. It won that year’s Francois Chalais Award.

Based on the novel “The Petrovs In and Around the Flu” by Alexey Salnikov this film version is a deadpan, hallucinatory romp through post-Soviet Russia. With the city in the throes of a flu epidemic, the Petrov family struggles through yet another day in a country where the past is never past, the present is a booze-fueled, icy fever dream of violence and tenderness, and where – beneath layers of the ordinary – things turn out to be quite extraordinary. Set somewhere between reality and imagination, Petrov’s Flu is a visually captivating: rough, funny, violent and psychedelic, and yet at the same time tender and poetic. It’s not quite a good as The Student .but its ideas and striking visual aesthetic make it well worth watching. MT

ON RELEASE FROM FRIDAY 11 February 2022

The Love of Jeanne Ney (1927) Blu-ray

Dir.: G.W. Pabst; Cast: Edith Jéhanne, Udo Henning, Fritz Rasp, Brigitte Helm, Adolph Edgar Licho, Eugen Jensen; Germany 1927, 100 min.

Austrian director G.W. Pabst (1885-1967) was the leading proponent of interwar German cinema, along with his countrymen Lang and Murnau. But Pabst did not settle abroad, returning to Germany in 1939 where he became a pawn in Dr Goebbels’ empire. The move discredited his oeuvre, even though he tried to make amends after the war.

The Love of Jeanne Ney is based on the novel by Ilya Ehrenburg (1891-1967), a Soviet journalist and author who spent time in Paris before leaving for the USSR. Written by Vadislav Vadja and Rudolf Leonhardt, Pabst’ UFA feature is a lighter version of Ehrenburg’s tonally rather grim novel; Pabst having been told by the UFA to make a feature in the ‘American style’. He certainly obliged.

In the Crimea, the Civil War is about to be decided in favour of the Red Army. We watch the libertine Khalibiev (Rasp) getting drunk while the White Russians stage a debauched party. Pabst having encouraged his cast of real soldiers from the White Army, to imbibe freely for the endeavour.

The film centres on Jeanne Ney (Jéhanne), daughter of French diplomat Andre Ney (Jensen) and in love with Red Army soldier Andreas Labov (Hennig), a spy for the Bolsheviks. In the novel, he shoots Jeanne’s father – she forgives him immediately – but in the film, the murderer is a friend of Andreas’. Jeanne then flees to Paris where she works for her uncle Raymond (Licho) in his shady detective agency. When the two lovers meet Andreas is in the midst of organising a strike on behalf of the communists. But Khalibiev is also in Paris, and has his eye on Jeanne while making do with Gabrielle (Helm). But he is persistent in pursuing Jeanne, one scene sees him caressing Gabrielle, while at the same time trying forcefully to kiss Jeanne. He steals a valuable diamond, making Andreas look like the thief. Jeanne lets him have his evil way in the novel, but in Pabst’s feature she resists and we get a happy-ending in a train scuppering the torrid ending of Ehrenburg’s novel.

DoPs Frit Arno Wagner and Robert Lach work with natural light, the camera roving around freely and catching the protagonists in perpetual motion, along with an editing style that described “their very order re-enforcing the realistic illusion”. Film critic Iris Barry remarked: “In the scene where Khalibiev sells the list of Bolshevik agents to Jeanne’s father, it lasts about three minute, though one is scarcely aware of a single shot, there are forty in this short scene – needless to say, the director cut and edited the film himself.”

As Kracauer put it: “Pabst permanently discredits his daring attitude as in Joyless Street. The imaginative way he satisfies UFA’s craving for melodrama, confirms the strength of his own tendencies in this direction”. In the final three films that Kracauer called the “Stabilised Period”, Pabst retreated from reality and the social scene to indulge in “the secrets of the soul”. But he would return to the social whirly again with West Front 1918, Comradeship and The 3 Penny Opera, three of the most important features of the period before Hitler came to power in 1933. This makes the director’s later alignment with the Third Reich even more surprising. AS

NOW ON BLURAY COURTESY OF MASTERS OF CINEMA | DECEMBER 2021

Tomorrow is Forever (1946)

Dir: Irving Pitchel | Cast: Orson Welles, Claudette Colbert, George Brent, Lucile Watson | US Drama 104″

A fascinating memento of Orson Welles’ extremely brief mid-forties spell as a bankable star in ‘A’ features, with Max Steiner crashing about on the soundtrack, a glamorous, expensively suited Claudette Colbert as his ‘widow’ and a cute little Natalie Wood as his adopted daughter. (Welles presumably hit it off with Richard Long, who plays his grown-up son, since he cast him in his next film, The Stranger).

Playing yet another role greatly in a advance of his real years, Welles wears the first of many false beards he would adopt in the years to come, along with a rather theatrical limp. Director Irving Pichel like all the other Hollywood hacks Welles worked with during this period produced work suspiciously far in advance of his usual accustomed mediocrity; such as a couple of nice uses of a mirror and a finale depicting a burning letter that recalls a certain sledge. The film competed at Venice in 1947 but went home empty-handed. @Richard Chatten

Lamb (2021) Mubi

Dir: Valdimar Johannsson | IFantasy Sci-fi | Iceland, 103′

This surreal sci-fi for animal lovers is one of a new breed of arthouse films that blends folklore and fantasy horror with a surprising touch of dark humour.

A first feature for Icelandic director Valdimar Johannsson, its intriguing premise invites us to suspend our disbelief when a childless couple in a remote farmstead in Iceland unexpectedly become parents during the lambing season. Ingvar (Hilmir Snaer Guonason) and Maria (Noomi Rapace) realise this is no ordinary newborn. But the sense of joy they feel at finally being a family of sorts fills the couple with a warm contentment. The docile baby takes pride of place in their bedroom, and life goes on as normal.

But there’s an unsettling undertone to this much wanted birth that leaves a nagging doubt in our minds and fuels this sober arthouse curio with eerie dread. The reason for their muted joy soon becomes apparent in a way that is both amusing and bizarre, with its distinct references to Cannes 2021 title Annette and even the recent Border.

Johannsson’s spare soundscape echoes around the bleak lunar-landscapes of Iceland’s craggy peaks and windswept terrain. But the tone lightens with a visit from Ingvar’s musician brother Petur (Bjorn Hynur Haraldsson) whose reaction to young Ada is hilarious but also worrying until he gets used to the unorthodox new household. This amusing interlude provides the story with an upbeat vibe and some rather touching family scenes as the two bond both outsiders in their own special way. But the nagging suspicions remain. And it’s the film’s cruel finale that provides a tragic twist that reminds us that Ada may have been nurtured by loving parents but is still a wild child at heart. MT

NOW ON MUBI

Silent Night (2021)

Dir.: Camille Griffin; Cast: Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode, Roman Griffin Davies, Hardy Griffin Davies, Gilby Griffin Davis, Annabelle Wallis, Rufus Jones, Davida McKenzie, Lucy Punch, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Sopé Dirisu, Lily-Rose Depp; UK 2020, 90 min.

Silent Night is one of those plucky B-Pictures, with lots of ideas – not always fully realised – and a surreal plot. In this case the setting is in an English country mansion where friends from school and university are celebrating a time of “love and forgiveness”. But they will have to make the most of their get together because – according to News reports, a poisonous gas will soon engulf the planet exterminating everything alive. The government is giving out ‘Exit-pills’, to relieve the suffering – sounds familiar, eh?

The hosts, Nell (Knightley) and Simon (Goode) are in charge of catering, their son Art (Roman Griffin Davis) cuts himself slicing the carrots. As it turns out, he’ll be in the minority, not wanting to accept the need for the government prescribed pill. Art’s twin brothers Hardy and Thomas (Hardy and Gilby Griffin Davies) are nowhere to be seen, but go with the flow making life for their parents easier. Then the guest roll in two by two, creating a reverse Noah’s Ark effect. Sandra (Wallis) self-centred and attention seeking with hubby Tony (Jones), candidate for ‘Mediocre Man’ of the universe and daughter Kitty (McKenzie), as unbearable as her mother.

Lesbian couple Bella (Punch) and Alex (Howell-Baptiste) are here to enjoy themselves, laid-back medic James (Dirisu) has issues with much his younger partner Sophie (Depp), an American, who is pregnant and joins Art in defiance.
Nell and Simon are proper hosts, trying to cater to everyone’s whim – whilst fighting a losing battle with Art, who will run off deep into the night where he will come across a car packed with the bodies of neighbours who have taken the pills, something Art wants to avoid at all cost.

As the hour of ‘no return’ creeps nearer, James wins the battle of wills with Sophie, whilst Sandra and Tony also make peace just in time, giving their daughter a peaceful exit. But Bella has big problems with Alex who gets so drunk she passes out. Bella administers the pill to her sleeping lover who wakes up and vomits the pill out. Alone in the kitchen with Alex Bella has to come up with a radical solution.- everyone else has retreated to their bedrooms, including Art who is asleep in his mother’s arms, the twins keeping up their personal rivalry to the bitter end.

There are simply too many characters here to given them a convincing backstory and make us feel for their desperate plight, although the leads – especially Knightley and Goode are impressive, and Art, the director’s son and his real life brothers Thomas and Hardy – give the cowardly grown-ups a run for their money.

Simon’s sermon to his children “It’s not our fault, nor is it yours”, rings very hollow but DoP Sam Renton makes the best out of the glittering claustrophobia of the domestic settings and the group interactions are entertaining particularly the hilarious scene where the adults discuss who slept with whom and why at university. A major twist at the end makes us forget some of the shortcomings – it may not totally win you over, but lovers of the bizarre are well served. AS

IN CINEMAS from 3 December 2021

Taming the Garden (2021)

Dir.: Salomé Jashi; Documentary; Germany/Netherlands/Switzerland/Georgia 2021, 91 min.

Georgian writer/director/co-DoP Salomé Jashi (The dazzling sight of Sunset) has portrayed her fellow Georgians justified but remorseless: whilst ex-premier Bidzina Ivanishvili, a Dollar billionaire, robs the country of its natural beauty, the ones directly concerned take the money and moan. Ivanishvili, who also has a private zoo with with kangaroos, penguins and zebras in one of his many villas near the Black Sea, has decided to re-plant old trees near his country mansion, overlooking the capital Tbilisi, were flamingos mingle near lakes. Jashi follows the re-planting on a 135-year old tulip tree, weighing 650 tonnes, on its journey to its new home.

The beginning is surreal, Fellini and Herzog could not have done it better: two men fish at the banks of the Black Sea, when suddenly a tree a tree floats along the waves, only when it comes closer, we make out the barge, which carries it. Cut to to the village of Tsikhisdziri in western Georgia, were the tree, “legally bought” by Ivanishvili, “because giant trees are my hobby, I am developing a park, I think tis is all appropriate”, is dug out from the ground, to go on a journey of forty km along the Black sea coast. Workers use diggers of all sorts and seizes, drills and pipes to extricate tree and roots, and load it on two coupled up HGVs, to drive to the coast.

The job will take about three months, and the crew of workmen compare the current enterprise with other jobs of the same kind, which they have done for Ivanishvili in the past. Planks are laid out, a new road is being constructed, leading to the coast of the Black Sea, where the tree will be loaded on to a barge. It goes without saying, that there will be collateral damage: trees in the neighbourhood of the prize object will be cut down or severely trimmed. The same goes for the trees of the neighbours, next to dirt street, where the tree will be transported. Five hundred Lai is the price per tree. The recipients of the compensation are muted about their response: “Never mind, what sort of villain Ivanishvili is, he is doing something. People never gave a shit about the trees.” One man, slightly drunk swears “I’ll never give way to the transportation workers, I am going for death”. When the deed is done, their is some regret, but also optimism: “The trimmed trees will bloom again in two years”, to which an elderly lady answers “But will I be alive then?”

Celia Stroom’s choral score ends the feature with close-ups of barge and tree, before we cut to Ivanishvili’s new park, were a bamboo forest is next to the newly up-rooted trees’, leaving the audience with the question if this is home or prison.

In foregoing the usual commentary, which tells the audience the obvious, Jashi concentrates on the images and Vox populi: the harsh realism of the work environment clashes with the poetic lyricism of he Black Sea travel. Taming the Garden is harbinger of a world to come, where not only the souls of trees will be up for sale. AS

In UK & Irish cinemas 28th January 2022

My Wonderful Wanda (2021) Prime Video

Dir: Bettina Oberli | Cast: Agnieszka Grochowska, Marthe Keller, Andre Jung, Birgit Minichmayr | Switzerland, drama 111′

Winner of awards at Tribeca and Vancouver, My Wonderful Wanda is a deliciously amusing satire that sees a wealthy Swiss family get more than they bargained for when a Polish au pair joins the family.

Reworking similar themes as Parasite this European ‘upstairs downstairs’ affair is nearer to home and much closer to the bone than its South Korean counterpart, set in a gorgeous lakeside villa in Switzerland where the head of the Wegmeister-Gloor family, successful industrialist Josef (an affable André Jung) is now wheelchair bound and needing 24-hour care after suffering a stroke.

Wanda (Agnieszka Grochowska), in her mid thirties, comes to the rescue leaving her own small children at home in Poland, managing the tricky dynamics of this privileged set-up while also being at the beck and call of Josef who seems to want more than just medical care. All families are complicated and this one is no different, even the adults are spoilt kids. Oberli and her writer Cooky Ziesche contrive a plot that is convoluted yet bang on the nail and extremely well-conceived – without putting too fine a point on it.

A brilliant Marthe Keller is the graceful matriarch who brings much needed perspective with her worldly experience and love for all the family – including Wanda (an appealing Grochowska) who is very much valued and far more influential than she at first imagined. Oberli brings warmth and humanity to this perceptive dark comedy that always looks on the bright side of modern life. MT

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

Maytime in Mayfair (1949)

Dir: Herbert Wilcox | Anna Neagle, Michael Wilding, Peter Graves, Nicholas Phipps, Thora Hird, Desmond Walter-Ellis | UK Drama 94′

The reference to Sir Stafford Cripps in the opening foreword passes for satire in so light a confection; but also reminds us why there was a need for this sort of escapist fantasy seventy two years ago, with ‘Mr. Austerity’ in No.11 Downing Street.

Ravishingly shot in Technicolor and with clothes (designed by Hardy Amies, Norman Hartnell, Creed and Worth) probably consuming much of the film’s budget ; it’s otherwise played out in sets by William C.Andrews that look as if they’d fall over if you blew on them (it relocates to Paris for a few minutes courtesy of one hotel room and an incredibly phony-looking ‘outdoor’ restaurant), and the wind never disturbs the branches of any of any of the trees that adorn the very occasional studio exteriors.

Never mind, material this slight doesn’t offend the way that Wilcox’s flat-footed direction of more ‘serious’ subject matter does. Michael Wilding is fun overacting like crazy as a conceited jerk, Thora Hird is permitted to look incredibly glamorous as Neagle’s secretary; and it provides a unique opportunity to see “our old friend” Tom Walls in Technicolor playing an Irish police inspector presiding over a station so minimal it could have been designed for ‘Dr Mabuse’. @Richard Chatten

House of Secrets (1956)

Dir: Guy Green | Cast: Michael Craig, Julia Arnall, Brenda de Banzie, David Kosoff, Barbara Bates | UK Drama 97′

The words “A British Film” ironically appear at the start over a shot of the Arc de Triomphe; and it’s Harry Waxman’s atmospheric fifties Technicolor photography and the Parisian locations that keeps you watching through the rather garrulous film that follows, based on Sterling Noel’s novel Storm over Paris, and enlivened by some violent deaths for the period and with a memorable finale on board an airplane.

The other perk is the novelty of seeing British ‘B’ movie stalwarts like Anton Diffring and Eric Pohlmann (all immaculately dressed, of course) in colour along with Gallic thespians Jacques Brunius and Gerard Oury. And Brenda de Banzie – who was then enjoying plum roles following her success in Hobson’s Choice and turns out to be the most glamorous of the three females that share star billing in the credits with the young Michael Craig. Richard Chatten

Circle of Danger (1951)

Dir: Jacques Tourneur | Cast: Ray Milland, Patricia Roc, Marius Goring, Hugh Sinclair | UK Drama, 86′

A drama rather than a thriller, with a plot anticipating Bad Day at Black Rock and Get Carter. The action encompasses both Wales and Scotland, but only the second unit under Gilbert Taylor seem actually to have gone to those outposts without Milland; the conclusion itself being an interior moment of revelation worthy of Chabrol.

Unusually produced by a woman, Joan Harrison, who later produced Hitchcock’s TV series, as much drama is generated by the two principal male characters’ relationship with Patricia Roc than with the search for the truth about the death of Milland’s bother. Red herrings abound and characters flit in and out of the narrative (including Hitchcock veteran Edward Rigby in his final fleeting film appearance as a Welsh miner. There’s also a charismatic appearance from Marius Goring) with the result you never know until the conclusion who the prime movers are going to turn out to be.

The biggest mystery of all is probably the story’s original provenance. Printed sources (but not the film itself) claim it was adapted by Phillip McDonald from his own novel, ‘White Heather’, yet he never published a book with that title. If it WAS adapted from his own book, it was an unpublished one. @Richard Chatten

NEW 4K RESTORATION: blu-ray,DVD and Digital 5 February 2024

Boxing Day (2021)

Dir.: Aml Ameen; Cast: Aml Ameen, Naomi King, Leigh-Anne Pinnock, Fraser James, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Tim Aherne, Shyi Cole; UK 2021, 109 min.

Best known for his acting roles in Inside Man: Most Wanted and Parallel, Aml Ameen directs and stars in this Christmas cracker based on his own experiences in the Caribbean community in London. where black people are for once neither victims or perpetrators, just full of issues and contradictions just like everyone else.

Melvin (Ameen) is a successful author in the US and wants to take highflying girl friend Lisa (King) to London for Christmas, and introduce her to his Caribbean clan. Things will go disastrously wrong: to start with, Lisa is pregnant, but has not yet told Melvin, who has already told her he’s not ready to be a father. Melvin’s Mum Shirley (Jean-Baptiste), rules the roost and soon finds out Lisa’s secret, but has enough problems with her own new partner Dave (Aherne) who will meet the family for the first time over the holidays which would be no big deal, apart from the fact that he is white.

Melvin’s father Billy (James) is not much of a role model having left Shirley and the kids, like many men of his generation, and now runs a night club. He has ‘forgotten’ to tell Lisa that he has left London years’ ago without keeping up contact with the family, apart from a few postcards. And while the teenage generation of the clan is as wild and violent as Melvin’s own age group at the time, countless aunts and uncles are waiting with baited breath to meet Lisa, who is, needless to say, is just another outsider, due to her Afro-American background, charms everyone with her put-on Jamaican accent. But Melvin still seems to have feelings for his ex Georgia (Pinnock, from “Little Mix”), who is now a super star and planning to take up a job in New Zealand, Lisa spying the couple sharing a cheeky covert kiss in the garden.

Ameen skates over the identity politics with panache, never losing the light-hearted sense of humour. The cast is ready to rumble, particularly Jean-Batiste as Shirley, trying to align all the contradictory bits of family life into a Hollywood style happy-ending in a referential bow to Hollywood musicals of the mid 20th century. A cocktail of festive fun and games laced with a few home truths . AS

ON RELEASE FROM 3 DECEMBER 2021

Hive (2021)

Dir.: Blerta Basholli; Cast: Yllka Gashi, Cun Lazci, Kaona Sylejmani, Mal Noah Safqui, Kumrije Hoxha, Adriana Matoshi; Kosovo/Switzerland/Albania/Macedonia 2021, 84 min.

Feminist solidarity, male chauvinism and the effects of the Kosovo war (1998-99) and its aftermath coalesce in this impressive first feature for Albanian writer/director Blerta Basholli who triumph against considerable odds with this true crime story. The conflict came to be viewed as a Serbian act of genocide and her film went on to win all three main awards at Sundance, Yllka Gashi is brilliant in the main role.

In the village of Krusha e Madhe in Kosovo 260 men have been killed in the hostilities, with a further 64 still missing. One of them is Agim, husband of Fahrije (Gashi), who lives in a dilapidated house with Haxhi (Lazci), her father-in-law and her two children Zana (Sylejmani) and Edon (Safqui). The family makes ends meet selling the honey Fahrije produces – she has been stung all over her body to prove it. But she also has to look after the invalid Haxhi who is totally dependent on her. Haxhi does not want to undergo a DNA test, which would make it possible to identify the remains of his son; many remains are still being discovered. Fahrije gathers together he women of the village and starts a business producing a spicy preserve made from red peppers, intending to sell the product in supermarkets in the nearby town, passing her driving licence so she can transport the goods with the help of her most supportive helpers Zamira (Agushi), Lume (Matoshi) and Nazmije (Hoxha).

But the men in the village make a bid to sabotage the women’s collective: calling Fahrije a whore, sexually assaulting her, breaking her car window with a stone, and even trying to turn her son and daughter against her. But Fahrije is determined to prevail against the odds in this gritty portrait of a war-torn society where male chauvinism still holds sway. AS

CELEBRATING INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY RECLAIM THE FRAME presents HIVE plus recorded Q&A with writer and director Blerta Basholli on Tuesday 8 March 2022

The Shop Around the Corner (1940)

Dir.: Ernst Lubitsch; Cast: Margaret Sullavan, James Stewart, Frank Morgan, Joseph Schildkraut, Felix Bressart, William Tray; USA 1940, 99 min.

“The American movie-going public has the mind of a 12-year old child; it must have life as it isn’t. (Ernst Lubitsch)”

Of all Hollywood’s immigrant filmmakers, German born Ernst Lubitsch (1892-1947) was the most successful in serving his new audience, adapting well to the change-over from silent to sound. The “Lubitsch touch” became a trademark, success was guaranteed, he reeled off classic Hollywood comedies like Trouble in Paradise, Ninotchka or To Be or Not To Be. He would have churned out even more, but for a heart condition which slowed him down in final years of his life, succumbing to it whilst shooting That Lady in Ermine.

The Shop Around the Corner is based on the play ‘Parfumerie’ by Miklos Laszlo, adapted for the screen by Lubitsch regular Samson Raphaelson (Heaven Can Wait), with some uncredited work by Ben Hecht. Whereas most of his comedies played out in world of the idle rich, The Shop is set in a working environment, taking him back to his father’s tailoring business where he did the accounts as he took his first steps as a stage actor.

The setting is a leather-goods and novelty shop in Budapest (via Hollywood), run by the imperious Hugo Matuschek (Morgan), whose bark is worse than his bite. His deputy is Alfred Kralik (Stewart), a likeable but air-headed man and the day unfolds amid bickering with new shop assistant Klara Novak (Sullavan). Little do they know that after office hours they are falling in love through the post as each other’s anonymous pen pal.

When the great day arrives for the ‘lovers’ first meeting in a local cafe, Mr. Matuschek orders his staff to stay late for an inventory, and then later fires Kralik suspecting him of having an affair with his wife. The real culprit will be soon be revealed. Off to his meeting Kralik looks through the window and, to his horror, sees Klara reading Tolstoi at the cafe table. He enters, talks to her, but does not reveal his true identity. Meanwhile, Mr. Matuschek is saved from suicide by the apprentice Pepi (Tray) who is promoted, as is Kralik who then becomes the manager.

The film positively glows in fluffy fairy-tale black-and white by William Daniels (Cat On A Hot Tin Roof), Lubitsch again ducks the censors by talking sex, but only showing a perfunctionary final kiss. The director might have been inspired by the relationship of Maurice Chevalier and Jeannette McDonald who played love birds in numerous features, despite oathing each other off screen. Lubitsch directed McDonald’s debut (and also his first sound feature) alongside Chevalier in The Love Parade (1929). Often remade with disappointing results – with Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail (1998) the latest offering, Lubitsch’s The Shop is from another universe: A true classic.AS

IN CINEMAS FROM 3 DECEMBER 2021

Tailor | Raftis (2020)

Dir.: Sonia Liza Kenterman; Cast: Dimitris Imellos, Tamilla Koulieva, Stathis Stamoulaktos, Daphne Michopoulou, Thanasis Papagrogiou; Greece/Belgium/Germany 2020, 100 min.

The first feature film of Greek director/co-writer Sonia Liza Kenterman, a graduate of the London Film School, is a fine character study of a man in his early 50s who suffers from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, might be on the autism spectrum and is still a virgin. Unfortunately, Kenterman sticks to enigma, resulting in a rather sentimental meandering.

Despite his challenges Nikos Karalis (a brilliant Imellos), is under the cosh of his tyrannical father Thanasis (Papageorgiou), who has been in the tailoring business since the age of sixteen. But the demand for tailor-made suits is near zero in the recession plagued Greek capital of Athens and his clientele is now dwindling in the recession and the bank foreclosing on the shop and all other assets,.

The only joy in Nikos life is his relationship with Victoria (Michopoulou), the spoilt daughter of his neighbour Olga (Koulieva), a Russian emigrant, whom Nikos fancies, without being aware of it. Transformation is needed, after Thanasis is taken to hospital, suffering from cancer. Nikos becomes, overnight, a specialist in creating the most wonderful bridal robes and other feminine outfits. And he even finds the courage to go to bed with Olga – and event which naturally angers her jealous partner Kostas (Stamoulakatos) who destroys Nikos’ work place, sending him and his life possessions on a journey into the unknown. Will Nikos find the courage to fight for his first love?

There are subtle social comments, like the nurse, providing medicines for Nicos’ father in exchange for fashionable outfits. But overall, Tailor lacks a much needed bite, opting instead for an over saccharine approach resulting in a mundane feel-good movie, which panders to audiences’ expectations. A shame, since the impressive images of DoP Dimitris Mihelis and the wonderful ensemble acting deserve more than just another hard-luck story. AS

TAILOR WON THE FIPRESCI PRIZE AT THESSALONIKI FILM FESTIVAL 2020

Masquerade (1965) Prime video

Dir: Basil Dearden | Cast: Cliff Robertson, Jack Hawkins, Marisa Mell, Michel Piccoli, Charles Grey, Bill Fraser, Felix Aylmer, John Le Mesurier | UK Drama 102′

Like Graham Greene, the writing-producing team of Michael Relph and Basil Dearden interspersed ‘novels’ like Sapphire and Victim with ‘entertainments’ like The League of Gentlemen; and they never made an entertainment more entertaining than this, attractively shot in Technicolor on picturesque Spanish locations with a once-a-lifetime cast (the witty animated titles sequence contains the extraordinary credit ‘Also Starring Michel Piccoli, Bill Fraser’; while Jack Hawkins ironically shares scenes with Charles Gray, soon to become his regular screen voice when Hawkins tragically had his voice box removed).

Dearden and Relph had for ten years planned to film Victor Canning’s 1954 novel ‘Castle Minerva’, originally with Rex Harrison in the lead; but fortunately Cliff Robertson starred when the film finally got made.

William Goldman earned his first screen credit making the hero more American, and it abounds in cynical one-liners like “In my country torture is still legal” and “I’ve – got – scruples?” and a priceless breach of the fourth wall when a sequence both suspenseful and hilarious ends with Robertson staring into the camera and saying “Somebody up there hates me!”

It’s full of surprises – some scenes resemble North by Northwest directed by Fellini – and in a scene worthy of Hitchcock an abduction is carried out in full view of a circus audience laughing uproariously. @Richard Chatten

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

The History of the Civil War (1921) IDFA

Dir.: Dziga Vertov; Documentary; USSR 1921, 94 min.

Exactly hundred years after The History of the Civil War was shown in a Komintern meeting in Moscow, Dziga Vertov’s historical document of the Russian Civil War (1918-1921), – believed to have been lost, apart from a twelve-minute footage – screened at IDFA, having been fully restored by Russian film historian Nikolai Izvolov, who also plans to bring back Vertov’s masterpiece Man with a Movie Camera to its original glory.

Dziga Vertov (1896-1954) is the father of modern documentary filmmaking. Using the camera as an observer, and structuring the film in the editing room, he revolutionised the genre, paying as much attention to small details as well as constructing an overview. The History starts with a sequence of devastation: decimated bridges, destroyed railway stations, burning oilfields and exploding munition factories. ‘The White Terror’, enemies of the 1918 Revolution are responsible, they range from anarchists to feudal landowners. Trotsky ends the sequence with the promise that the newly founded Red Army “Will answer the White Terror with the Red Terror of the Revolution.”

The fight back starts with the disarming of the Anarchists in 1918 Moscow. The captured opponents are (mistakenly) not afraid of their fate. In a garage, machine guns are readied, a cat strolling nonchalantly among the deadly hardware. The HQ of the counter revolutionary forces is to be found in the Spasski monastery. Comrade Nicolai Kazadanov is in charge: he poses narcissistically in front of the camera. Other Soviet military leaders liked to be seen as ‘intellectuals’, their writing desks piled high with books.

Meanwhile, the Soviet Navy deals with their own Kronstadt uprising, among the sailors we see a well dressed woman, looking into the horizon. Comrade Innocenti Kozhevnikov is in charge of a partisan unit crossing the border into Czechoslovakia. Kozhevnikov would be one of the first victims of Stalin’s purges, murdered in 1931. The defeat of Cossack general Miranov is celebrated, and the general is pardoned after the original death sentence. The ‘Makhno’ movement assists the “the young and inexperienced soldiers of the Red Army” to win the battle for Kazan. Political commissar Timofei Mikhailov is pictured in earnest discussions, he would be another of Stalin’s victim in 1928.

We watch a revolutionary Muslim unit and Trotsky greeting a revolutionary Czech unit. The leader of the Soviet Perm front is Grigori Zinovev, shot after a show trial in 1936. The Denikin front is commanded by Yakov Swerdlov, who died “suddenly of TB” in 1919, but had a city named after him by Stalin, the mastermind of this deadly irony. In between the many meetings of military officials at the different fronts, British ‘monster’ tanks are captured by the Red Army, who “would learn soon to operate them”. Meanwhile, at the Baku front Ivar Smilga (executed by Stalin in 1937), and Sergei Ordzhonikidze (driven to suicide by Stalin in same year – but getting a State Funeral), are being honoured for their bravery.

At the Caucasus Front, Sergei Kirov and Konstantin Mekhonoshin are unaware of their fates. The former will be shot by a jealous husband in 1934, the latter executed 1938. At the front fighting the reactionary Baron Vrangel, Kliment Vorishilov and Red Cavalry founder Semyon Budyonni, are the lucky ones, both will survive Stalin’s massacre of the Old Bolshevik guard. At the very end, Trotsky, general Tukhachevski and Grigory Petrovski, who would sign the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, take the parade of the victorious army. Petrovski, who helped his master with disastrous collectivation experiments, is the the only one who would survive Stalin, with Tukhachevski murdered after a show trial together with seven other old Bolshevik military leaders.

The filmmaker Vertov would never have believed his masterpiece would one day indict Stalin for the murder of these military leaders who fought for the national base, from where he murdered millions. Ironically, Stalin manages to keep a low profile throughout, only appearing briefly in an uncovered scene. Vertov turns out to be one of the lucky survivors – had the documentary survived, Stalin would have taken his revenge on the filmmaker for not hailing him as a war hero.. AS

INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL AMSTERDAM 2021

Songs for a Fox (2021) Tallinn 2021

Dir: Kristijonas Vildžiūnas | Lithuania, Drama 125′

There’s a magical lyrical quality to Songs for a Fox which seems to echo the director’s previous life as a rock musician before becoming a filmmaker with a string of features, winning the special jury prize at Tallinn for You Am I (2006).

Set in the glorious summery meadows and swampy woods of Lithuania Songs follows emotionally vulnerable rock singer Danius who escapes to the bucolic paradise to get over the death of his girlfriend. He may run but can’t hide from the haunting memories of their time together and she appears in woozy dream sequences as he slips in and out of reality, in a script loosely based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and also inspired by Lithuanian folklore.

The story gradually unravels inside his subconscious while reality is firmly tethered to the wild landscapes of this post soviet nation lucidly captured by Jurgis Kmins’ camera blending 3D animation, VFX and evocative wildlife images to echo Greek mythology, medieval folklore, paintings by Pieter Bruegel and Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s’ Dream.

This imaginative visual backcloth is accompanied by a surreal soundscape of newly recorded songs by cult Lithuanian band ‘Šiaurės kryptis’ in a fable about love, longing and the circle of life. MT

TALLINN BLACK NIGHTS FILM FESTIVAL | 12 -28 NOVEMBER 2021

House of Gucci (2021)

Dir: Ridley Scott | Cast: Adam Driver, Lady Gaga, Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons, Jared Leto, Camille Cottin, Jack Huston, Salma Hayek | Drama, 157′

Ridley Scott’s tragicomedy about the downfall of the Gucci family is a real epic: flawed, flamboyant but highly entertaining. A perfect clash between style and bravado. Adam Driver is the driving force behind it all. And he’s brilliant as the starchy patrician lawyer Maurizio Gucci seduced and ultimately murdered by Lady Gaga’s buxom firecracker, Patrizia Reggiani, the daughter of a haulage contractor, whose elbows are as sharp as her husband to be’s tailoring.

Maurizio is the son of suave Gucci scion Rodolfo played by Jeremy Irons whose well-tuned antenna has already spotted Gaga as a gold-digger. And predictably it all ends in tears when Rodolfo dies leaving Maurizio as the majority shareholder whose ideas for the family business conflict with those of his cousin Paolo Gucci – Al Pacino knows all the ropes here as the New York cousin who kept the brand exclusive offering his celebrity clientele loafers lined with gold leaf.

So the social side and the business story go hand in hand in a patchy drama that careers all over the place tone-wise – the bits with Jared Leto as Paolo’s idiotic son are awkwardly painful – but it speeds along like a Ferrari when Driver and Gaga are in the frame, their chemistry and glitzy lifestyle providing most of the fun, Pacino giving one of his best performances in recent years as the savvy businessman who finally loses out when Maurizio, and ultimately the Arab investors gain control. And Rodolfo’s predictions come true, and Maurizio eventually tires of his little wife’s unbridled ambition, and he moves onto the elegant charms of Paola, a woman from his own background in the shape of Camille Cottin (there’s a lovely scene where she shimmies, fireside).

House of Gucci is largely about a clash of cultures, and House of Gucci (based on a book by Sara Gay Forden) is spot on in its retelling of how the once chic emblem of the 1970s – anything by Gucci back then was considered highly desirable – is soon tarnished by family disagreements and over-exposure, so eroding the core values it represented as a brand. But never mind all that, House of Gucci is flamboyant fun. MT

IN CINEMAS FROM FRIDAY 26 NOVEMBER 2021

Hour of the Wolf (1968)

Dir: Ingmar Bergman | Cast: Max Von Sidow, Liv Ullmann, Ingrid Thulin, Gertrud Fridh, Georg Rydeberg | Sweden, Horror 90′

Ingmar Bergman had had a penchant for short injections of fantasy into his films as far back as the chiaroscuro dream sequences of his forties ‘neo-realist’ dramas, although by the time of Vargtimmen the hero (Max von Sydow) has moved up market and is now an artist in retreat from the world on a remote island who happens to have a neighbour – played by Erland Josephson – who lives in a castle occupied by a court of dinner-jacketed idlers.

Based – like The Blair Witch Project – on the diary of an individual who then disappeared without trace, relaxed 60’s censorship permitted more explicit images than the vaguely Freudian nature of Bergman’s earlier fantasies; like Ingrid Thulin baring herself for the camera while cackling fiendishly, and one of Bergman’s sun-bleached nightmares in which Sydow bashes in the head of a young lad in speedos. Elsewhere there are creepy moments as when Josephson is depicted walking up a wall and Naima Wifstrand peels off her face and drops her eyeball into a wine glass; while Sydow prowls about at night like Vincent Price in one of Roger Corman’s Poe adaptations – only shot by Sven Nykvist in glacial black & white rather than the hot Pathecolor hues of Floyd Crosby. @Richard Chatten

NOW ON AMAZON

Flee (2021)

Dir: Jonas Poher Rasmussen | With: Daniel Karimyar, Fardin Mijdzadeh, Milad Eskanderi, Belal Faiz | Denmark, Animated drama, 90′

Based on real events, this noirish gay awakening story blends new beginnings and past trauma in an involving and surprisingly poetic way, the delicately drawn animations notching down the rawness of a harrowing escape for the central character whose real identity is kept confidential.

Director Jonas Poher Rasmussen calls his friend Amin but only discovered the true horror of his backstory years after they met. Amin is a refugee from Afghanistan who escaped Kabul during the the 1980s and is now safely settled in Denmark in a relationship he never dreamed possible.

Rasmussen recounts his friend’s adventures through a series of animated events and interviews in a way that draws us into his world as we experience the horrors from Amin’s own perspective. The conflict that caused his family to leave their home and suffer at the hands of the authorities on their way to Europe is not news to any of us but it is brought to life here in an alarming way that brings a sobering perspective to the refugee crisis that’s still unfolding every today. Being gay was a further hurdle that Amin had to overcome in this bracingly tense adventure. MT

IN CINEMAS and EXCLUSIVELY ON CURZON HOME FROM FRIDAY 11 FEBRUARY 2022 | NOMINATED FOR THREE OSCARS

Feature Film About Life (2021) Black Night Festival Tallinn

Dir.: Dovile Sarutyte; Cast: Agne Misiunatie, Nele Savicenko, Kestutis Jakstas, Romuald Lavrinovic, Inga Maskarina, Aldona Bronislava Dausienie; Lithuania 2021, 100 min.

Don’t be put off by the rather banal title, this first film from Lithuanian director/co-writer Dovile Sarutyte is a small gem: genre wise, a trauma fuelled road movie that finds dark humour in the banal and the tragic when a young woman is suddenly confronted by the double blow of death and complex funeral arrangements. A time of mourning when we are forced to face the world at the most importune time.

In a Paris hotel we meet Dovile (Misiunatie), a young recording artist in her twenties, celebrating being young and independent with her two girlfriends Egle and Rasa. A day later, at work in her Vilnius studio recording studio in Vilnius, the world implodes with the sudden death of her father. The story continues as past happiness mingles with current anguish – home videos of Dovile’s childhood in the 1990s, and now the aftermath of family tragedy – a clapped-out Mercedes and a neurotic mother (Savicenko).

The two women meet Vladislavas (Lavrinovic) a greedy undertaker capitalising on their grief to sell them the most expensive funeral package. Afterwards, Dovile grapples with the Death Certificate from the hospital morgue, the cause of death was heart failure. Desperate for more detail to help her process her anguish Dovile learns that her father’s liver was severely damaged. The arrangements for the wake are also costly: 500 Euro for a one-day rental. “I could rent a concert hall for that” snaps Dovile and goes to meet Tadas (Jakstas), an old friend of her father, but not before the car breaks down.

Tadas has not seen Dovile’s father for more than six months but proves to be a ‘friend in need’. Father had stopped driving due to an alcohol problem, piling bewilderment onto her shaky state of emotional fragility. Gradually things come together, the Mercedes is repaired and Tadas finds a much cheaper venue for the wake: the boss of the funeral parlour, Zita (Maskarina), is a former flame. Dovile also makes a collage of photos from the family album telling her father’s life story in the wake room, where the urn looks solemn, a life reduced to a pot.

After the funeral, Dovile and her Mum make fun of Zita trying to re kindle her relationship with Tadas. But the laughter turns hollow, when it emerges Dovile’s grandmother somehow missed her lift to the funeral, and she explodes in anger: “You burned my little son”, insisting on a photo of the deceased in an open coffin.

The home videos show a joyful Dovile. But reading between the lines, the truth is quite different. Funny how we often remember the past with rose-tinted spectacles, bringing another strand of false memory to the narrative. At least Dovile and her father bought Christmas presents for each other, and this makes for a mellow ending to the traumatic and frustrating two-day adventure. DoP Eitvydas Doskus has kept up with the pace of the story, the images flying by, but his close-ups of Dovile, who is suffering from a worrying eye infection, are a testament to his skill of creating intimate moments. Dovile Saratyte is certainly a name to be reckoned with – you read it here first! AS

SCREENING DURING BLACK NIGHT INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL TALLINN

The Power of the Dog (2021) Best Film & Director BAFTAs 2022

Wri/Dir: Jane Campion | Benedict Cumberpatch, Jesse Plemons, Kirsten Dunst, Kodi Smit-McPhee | Western drama, 125’

Jane Campion’s Oscar-winning drama The Piano defines arthouse film and remains seared to the collective cineaste unconscious as a classic for all time.

The Power of the Dog, which premiered at the 78th Venice film festival, has the same potent stillness, captivating characters and visual allure, a traditionally told Western it unfolds in a buttoned-down ranching community in 1925 Montana where outward appearances belie dastardly intentions and family dysfunction, inspired by the novel written in 1967 by Thomas Savage.

Benedict Cumberbatch holds sway as Phil Burbank, the swaggeringly macho, latently homosexual son of a cattle rearing family, an ability to castrate a head of cattle before breakfast is the touchstone to his sadistic prowess. His gentlemanly brother George (Plemons) is quite the reverse soon landing himself a wife in the shape of thoughtful alcoholic widow Rose (Dunst) and her academic but weakly son Peter (a star turn from Kodi Smit-McPhee) whose wounded pride and keen interest in medicine and dissecting animals provides the key to this beguiling slow-burner.

Ostensibly this is a straightforward family drama about the dynamics of power that create a pecking order locked in stasis until one member cracks the code. At first it seems Phil is on track to destroy Rose and her son, but Peter is not to be underestimated, proving that canny inquisitiveness is far more potent than mere intelligence even in a toxic masculine environment where Phil lords it over the locals resting on his laurels as the sneering ‘intellectual’ cowboy whose crass manners and cruelty to animals and his fellow men makes him secretly unpopular.

Campion loads her film with subtle textural references, Ari Wenger’s widescreen set pieces glower and glow in the hostile terrain. The clever adaptation allows plenty of scope for three intensely unusual protagonists: macho Phil is ultimately trounced by his pride; Rose is weak but utterly sympathetic as a deeply affectionate woman starved of physical love and in thrall to her impossible situation. But Peter is far the most intriguing, his physical weakness hiding a steely resolve to succeed and protect his mother at all costs. MT

OSCAR FOR BEST DIRECTOR | AWARD FOR DIRECTOR, JANE CAMPION | EE BAFTAS 2022 | NOW ON NETFLIX

Forces Occultes (1943)

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOW ON YOUTUBE

Rebel Dykes (2021)

Dir.: Harri Shanahan, Siân A. Williams; Documentary with DEBBIE, ROZ, FISCH, SIOBHAN, SEIJA, BAYA, DEL, LULU; UK 2021, 82 min.

The collective of Harri Shanahan, Siân A. Williams and producer Siobhan Fahey serve up a slice of subversiveness from the 1980s centred round a group of women activists who got together at Greenham Common, then decided to spice up the not-so-exciting London scene, taking over Women’s Centres and Gay Bars. In Brixton where squatting was not entirely legal, the DYKES started a vibrant underground culture with an SM club.

It was a time of revolt against Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s administration: to create a Lesbian Fetish Club was in itself an open protest against the government’s ‘mishandling’ of the Aids Crisis and the introduction of Section 28, which basically forbade any mention in school curriculums about the existence of non hetero-sexual activities. The animated title sequence leads the audience into wild discussions and graphic descriptions of sexual scenes. The group was constantly under homophobic attack in the streets, so they just lived by night. But the danger came also from another front: mainstream feminists picketed the club and forced entrance with crowbars and axes. They accused the Rebel Dykes of anti-feminism and violence. The Rebel Dykes counter with action: invading the BBC News and chaining themselves to the furniture; they also founded sex-toy businesses and erotic Magazines – often having to fight the incriminating laws.

1981-1991 was a pivotal time in the history of alternative culture: kink, fetish, hedonism, music, drugs and political activism developed, leading to the formulation of trans rights and black queer life. It should be mentioned, that The Rebel Dykes were an international set-up: Seija came from Finland, Baya fled repressive East Germany, and Lulu was a San Francisco based photographer. Music plays a central role in the feature: Britpop artist guitarist Debbie Smith, the “most celebrated Black female guitarist”, is the film’s leading narrator. The archive music used is of precious cultural importance since women musicians rarely signed contracts in a male dominated business. The film’s composer, Ellyott, who works with ‘Sister George’ and ‘Night Nurse’, is the founder of Rebel Dyke and Queercore. The archive, consisting of mini-discs, digitised cassettes and VHS tapes, will be house permanently in the Bishopsgate Archive, London. Overall, the story-telling has multiple viewpoints, not a singular perspective.

Co-director/co-editor/animator Harri Shanahan, who studied filmmaking at university and produced post punk/experimental music videos, wanted “to tell the story of the Rebel Dykes because they “felt a kinship with their punk rebelliousness and their DIY approach to art and culture. It has been an amazing experience to meet these trailblazing, kickass people and to have the opportunity to be part of telling their story”.

The Rebel Dykes’s have virtually been written out of the history of the Queer movement, but it is a true revolutionary movement of female, non-binary and trans voices, celebrating direct action. So far unseen archive footage shows the Lesbian Strength March (1988) and the “Lesbian Avengers” who ab-sailed into the House of Lords, the night when ‘Section 28’ was passed into law, not to be revoked until 2003. AS

In cinemas and on BFI Player and Bohemia Euphoria from 26 November

Red Sea International Film Festival 2021 | International Spectacular strand

Every festival has to attract and entertain the public and The Red Sea International Film Festival (RedSeaIFF) is no different. Taking place from 6-15 December, it will be a chance for audiences in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to catch up on some of the year’s most powerful stories from iconic, award-winning international filmmaking voices. All eight films in the INTERNATIONAL SPECTACULAR section will be Arab premieres, showcasing the very best of international cinema.

Much will be made of the ground-breaking contribution of women to cinema, including tributes and masterclasses from some of the most inspiring female names in cinema. The Festival will honour the first female Saudi filmmaker, Haifaa Al Mansour, who is not only one of the most significant names in the Saudi film industry, but has lead the way in championing female empowerment across the region. Academy Award and BAFTA nominated French actress Catherine Deneuve will also be honoured by the Festival.

Academy-Award, BAFTA, and multiple award-winning writer, director, and actor Giuseppe Tornatore’s latest, Ennio, is a documentary focusing on the late Ennio Morricone, who was among the most influential and prolific musicians of the twentieth century, the winner of two Academy Awards and composer of over 500 unforgettable movie soundtracks. Tornatore interviews the Maestro himself, who had a long-established association with the director, having composed the music for 13 Tornatore feature films, including for Tornatore’s Academy-Award winning Cinema Paradiso.

Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon, written and directed by acclaimed filmmaker Ana Lily Amirpour is a fantasy thriller that had its world premiere this year at Venice, telling the story of a girl with unusual powers, who escapes from a mental asylum and tries to make it on her own in New Orleans. Starring Jeon Jong-seo, Kate Hudson, Craig Robinson and Ed Skrein.

French-Algerian director Yamina Benguigui’s latest film Sisters (French: Soeurs), starring Isabelle Adjani, tells the story of three French-Algerian sisters: Zorah, Nohra and Djamila. For thirty years, they have been living in the hope of finding their brother, Rheda, abducted by their father, and hidden in newly decolonized Algeria. When they learn that their father is dying, the three sisters decide to go to Algeria to seize their last opportunity to have him reveal where their brother is.

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut The Lost Daughter also world premiered at Venice 2021 where the director won Best Screeplay for her adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s novel of the same name. It stars Olivia Colman, Dakota Johnson, and Jessie Buckley in the film adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s novel of the same name. The psychological drama tells the story of a woman on holiday, who meets another woman and her young family, prompting surprising memories of her own early motherhood. Expect something completely different.

Written and directed by Academy Award® nominee Kenneth Branagh, Belfast is an autobiographical poignant story of love, laughter and loss in one boy’s childhood, amid the music and social tumult of the late 1960s in Northern Ireland. The highly anticipated cinematic tribute to Branagh’s native city is beautifully shot in black-and-white and stars Judi Dench, Jamie Dornan, Jude Hill, and Ciarán Hinds. The film scooped the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Spanish comedy The Good Boss (Spanish: El Buen Patrón) is written and directed by Fernando León de Aranoa. Standing on the industrial outskirts of a small provincial town, for decades Básculas Blanco, played by Javier Bardem, has been making industrial scales for major retail outlets, to weigh vehicles and livestock. The good boss likes to tell his workers that Lady Justice holds Blanco’s scales in her hand. The film premiered at this year’s San Sebastián International Film Festival and has been chosen as the Spanish entry for Best International Feature Film at the upcoming 94th Academy Awards.

You Resemble Me (French: Tu Me Ressembles/main image) is the directorial debut of Egyptian-American filmmaker and award-winning journalist, Dina Amer. The film, co-written by Amer and Omar Mullick, tells a story of cultural and intergenerational trauma, takin-g on one of the darkest issues of our time and deconstructing it in an intimate story about family, love, sisterhood, and belonging. After two sisters on the outskirts of Paris are torn apart, the eldest, Hasna, struggles to find her identity, leading to a choice that shocks the world. The film had its world premiere in the Venice Days section of this year’s Venice International Film Festival.

Based on a true story, Bridgerton star Phoebe Dynevor plays Clarice Cliff, a remarkable figure who revolutionized the British pottery industry in the 1920s. Sky Original Film The Colour Room directed by Claire McCarthy is a fabulous period drama showing how Cliff battled against the odds in a world run by men to establish herself as a pioneering ceramic artist, impressing an eccentric factory owner (Matthew Goode) with her ingenuity. Director Claire McCarthy makes a brilliant mark by highlighting the battles women had to win to be heard in the workplace in a feel-good tale of talent, determination, and perseverance.

RED SEA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Zero Fucks Given (2021)

Dir.: Emmanuel Mare, Julie Lecoustre; Cast: Adèle Exarchopoulos, Mara Tarquin, Alexander Perrier, Jonathan Sawdon; Belgium 2021, 115 min.

This bizarre but brilliant first feature for French duo Emmanuel Marre and Julie Lecoustre follows a shameless young air-stewardess on a flight to nowhere, emotionally speaking. We soon understand why.

Cassandra (Exarchopoulos from Blue is the Warmest Colour) works for a budget airline mostly around Europe. She dreams of being hired by Emirates Airlines or even a high-paying company called Private Jets, but speaks only a little English apart from French.

From her base in Lanzarote relationships are tricky so she signs out of reality, keeps her family at a distance and opts for an online life on Tinder under the pseudonym ‘Carpe Diem’, a bare-breasted selfie setting the tone for some casual sexual encounters. In some ways she is typical of the resigned young millennial who literally doesn’t care what happens as long as she’s having fun.

Not only is the job repetitive and unfulfilling, Cassandra spends most of her time in airline terminals, a hostile and alien environment made worse since Covid. Drugs and disco are her favourite release on breaks from the inflight tedium. When her contract runs out, she is re-assigned to a course that includes saving passengers with CPR – an exercise Cassandra fails dismally, unable to interact even with a dummy: “You are breaking all his ribs” the course leader tells her, after Cassandra pummels the model doll mercilessly. Job follows job largely down to Cassandra’s ability to sell her persona on Zoom interviews – ‘Seize the day’ very much captures the economic and social climate of this disposal world.

Exarchopoulos gives a stunning performance as the women “with no attributes”, an empty vessel not even trying to find an engagement with the outside world. She is vague to the point of disowning herself, constantly on the move in transit positions. She is the modern young woman honed for the instant turnaround of her professional life, opting for a quick fix while treading water in the hope of a better opportunity, always with her eye on the main chance. Cassandra is the opposite of her sister and father: rootless and uninterested in her past, leaving them to deal with the emotional consequences of the mother’s death. DoP Olivier Boonjing excels with the cold airport images which contrast with the warmer colours of Cassandra’s hometown. Zero Fucks Given is certainly original: an almost sinister study of a modern milliennial. Hugely recommended. AS

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE NATIONWIDE | The Rainer Werner Fassbinder Award for Best Screenplay, presented this year to Zero Fucks Given‹ by Julie Lecoustre and Emmanuel Marre |MANNHEIM HEIDELBERG FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Exodus – Pitbull (2021)

Dir: Patryk Vega | Cast: Przemyslaw Bluszcz, Tomasz Dedek, Andrzej Grabowski | Crime thriller, 115’

This nasty little English language crime thriller from Poland’s Patryk Vega’s sees his central character Nos (Przemyslaw Bluszcz) descend to the depths of depravity in the organised crime world in Poland and Eastern Europe. In an attempt to give credibility to the storyline the film uses the book of Exodus for its title but this doesn’t elevate what is already a choppy, unconvincing storyline. Nos is a self-confessed psycho and seasoned killer who speaks like an automaton and takes us rapidly through the backstory, growing up in a dysfunctional home where his pimp mother ran a brothel later blows that Nos destroys after honing his self-taught skills in explosives and bomb-making. The narrative drones on, Nos making a career out of his explosives, with a sideline in corporate bribery and extortion as part of a criminal gang. Eventually Nos gets arrested after proposing to a woman he’s only just met in the vain hope that having a family will put him on the straight and narrow. At the same time he makes an enemy of crime officer Jacek (Andrej Grabowski), after killing his colleague, and this feud fuels the rest of the film. Vega throws every crime into the mix from drug running to kidnapping and more murder for our tawdry antihero. An attempt to weave in biblical references make Exodus faintly ludicrous. A tragic case of less would have been more. MT

NOW ON RELEASE IN CINEMAS NATIONWIDE

Dying to Divorce (2021)

Dir: Chloe Fairweather | UK Doc, 84′

This grim but worthwhile documentary – the UK’s Oscar Academy hopeful – greets us with the news that one in three Turkish women experience domestic abuse.

Yes. And we meet two of them now living with life-changing injuries, merely for wanting a divorce on entirely reasonable grounds. One husband had openly taken a lover, and reduced his wife Arzu to a wheelchair-bound invalid leaving her unable to care for their five kids. Another, caused catastrophic head injuries during a petty argument, leaving his wife Kubra – a former presenter for Bloomberg – virtually ‘gaga’, quite literally. And nothing to do with that famous celebrity.

English filmmaker Chloe Fairweather follows a typical day in the life of Istanbul lawyer Ipek Bozkurt who supports these courageous women in court standing up to their husbands in a male-dominated authoritarian regime that is modern day Turkey. At one point we actually see the Turkish president Recep Tayep Erdogan extolling the virtues of child-rearing as women’s only purpose in life in his increasingly authoritarian regime that continues to crack down on all forms of opposition since the attempted coup in July 2016. There is also ample archive footage showing how protestors demonstrated in the streets of the capital on International Women’s Day in March 2019, Police dispersing what looks like teargas into the crown.

We genuinely feel devastated by these women’s horrific injuries and humbled at their perseverance in seeking justice in a climate where men have the upper hand. Without the support of their families these women simply could not carry on.

Dying to Divorce is not a pleasant film but a vital document in the battle to raise awareness that femicide, toxic masculinity and domestic abuse is still an ongoing occurrence in all societies where women are treated as second class citizens. MT

DYING TO DIVORCE – In UK cinemas from 24th November | Official UK Entry for the Academy Awards for: Best International Feature Film

King Richard (2021)

Dir.: Reinaldo Marcus Green; Cast: Will smith, Aunjanue Ellis, Saniyya Sidney, Demi Singleton, John Bernthal, Tony Goldwyn; USA 2021, 138min.

The success story of mammoth tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams was already mapped out well before they hit a single ball, according to this extensive biopic whose focus is their father and tennis coach Richard Williams (a game by Will Smith).

Green and his writer Zach Baylin are keen to play on the sunny side of the former security guard’s character avoiding the more troubled aspects of a man who suffered from delusions of grandeur and narcissism.

We meet the Williams family in the seedy side of Compton, LA, were Richard and Oracene Williams (Ellis) are raising their five daughters, among them Venus (Sidney) and Serena (Singleton) who are coached by their father on the run-down tennis courts of the disadvantaged neighbourhood where a gang of youths give Richard a good kicking until he loses his temper and nearly shoots one of his attackers who is mowed down in front of him by bullets from a passing car.

At home Richard is a domestic tyrant with a work ethic high on his agenda. But he sometimes overdoes it, making the kids watch Cinderalla twice on TV to drill them on the virtues of humbleness. Richard is not a good advert for this particular style of parenting as he always knows best, even arguing with coach Cohen (Goldwyn), who teaches Venus for free.

Finally, Richard takes the whole family to the Florida training centre of coach Rick Macci (Bernthal), where there is a disagreement over how soon his daughters should play competitive matches before their mid-teens. Richard argues that the girls should have a ‘normal’ childhood, and just train hard. In the end, he gives in after Oracene takes Venus’ side. She will make her pro debut at the age of fourteen, falling to the World Number One player Sanchez-Vicario in three sets, after leading for a long time.

Richard struts around in tennis gear most of the time even though he has never played himself. Much time is spent on negotiations between the various companies wanting to sign Venus up for multi-million deals, with her father holding out for a better offer, infuriating Macci and well as his wife. Oracene finally reads Richard the riot act and it becomes clear how much the family relied on her contribution, even though Richard goes on hugging the limelight, turning the girls’ success story into his own triumph even when proved wrong.

DoP Robert Elswit’s images are on the conventional side, as befits a traditional bio-pic. King Richard is a star vehicle for Smith, who turns on the charm and totally convinces as the prophet who makes things up as he goes along. The serious side of the story is hardly touched upon: William’s dealings with the Klu-Klux Klan is the elephant in the room. Overall, King Richard is overdone with a botched ending that leaves the characters of Oracene as well as Venus and Serena on the touchline, and worst of all, seem to believe in its message, that Father knows best. AS

NOW IN CINEMAS NATIONWIDE FROM 19 NOVEMBER 2021

Drive My Car (2021) BAFTAs 2022

Dir/Wri: Ryusuke Hamaguchi | Cast Hidetoshi Nishijima, Toko Miura, Masaki Okada, Reika Kirishima, Park Yurim, Jin Daeyeon | Drama, Japan

Ryusuke Hamaguchi follows Wheel of Fortune and Fame with another thoughtful love story this time Hidetishi Nishijimia is Yusuke Kafuku, a stage actor and director preparing to direct Uncle Vanja at a theatre festival in Hiroshima.

Daily rides to and from work in a stylish red Saab with his shy young driver Misaki (Miura) provide a safe space to share his feelings, and as a tentative relationship develops between the two lonely hearts, secrets from the past and heartfelt confessions gradually surface.

Based on the short story Drive My Car in ‘Men Without Women’ by Haruki Murakami, the Japanese director is still riding high on his feature Wheel of Fortune and Fame that won a Silver Bear earlier in Berlinale 2021. Once again this explores loneliness and the intense human need to share and be understood. Kafuku is a passionate and highly relatable character whose professional skills and strong sense of self belie his deep longing for a kindred soul to complete his happiness.

Modest in terms of his material needs, Kafuku has a complex psyche with a rich emotional inner world, and his soul is often laid bare during intimate chats with female chauffeur Misaki. She is a woman whose harsh and extreme life has afforded her a maturity beyond her years. And although the two companions are from different generations Hamaguchi’s textured script and layered characterisations show them both to be highly intuitive and emotionally intelligent.

The film’s ample running time allows for an indepth understanding of what it is to be lonely while also being complete from an intellectual and professional point of view. It’s a subtle, engrossing and enjoyable piece of cinema showing Hamaguchi at the top of his game as one of the world’s leading auteurs. MT

OSCAR BEST INTERNATIONAL FEATURE | BEST FILM NOT IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE | BAFTAS 2022

Masha (2020)

Dir.: Anastasiya Palchikova; Cast: Polina Gukhman, Anna Chipovskaya; Maksim Sukhanov, Alexander Mizev, Iris Lebedeva; Russia 2020, 86 min.

This first feature from Russian writer/director Anastasiya Palchikova is a thinly veiled critique of the nation post Stalinism, wrapped up as a crime/revenge story. The director takes the forces to task in creating a society riddled with violence where Putin and his oligarchy cronies rule with impunity given the lack of a legitimate opposition.

We meet Masha (Gukhman) just before her thirteenth birthday; she lives in a small Russian town and is the darling of her uncle (Sukhanov), who is a crime lord, involving his sons and other relatives in all his schemes from robbery to murder. Masha, a gifted singer, has the family in thrall – and when school friend Sergey ignores her approaches, she asks Uncle’s sons to beat him up until he relents and offers her the attention she craves. But Sergey has also got mixed up in the family business and will later pay with his life for getting out of his depth.

Uncle is very critical of Masha’s mother Nadya (Lebedeva), who has married outside the clan, and has left her husband while remaining a close friend. Nadya wants to take Masha to a relative in far away Samara, but Uncle does not want to give up control, and asks his son Andrei (Mizev) to burn Nadya’s flat down, killing Nadya’s husband in the process. And he’s not the only one sleeping there.

The end is set in Moscow where a grown-up Masha (Chipovskaya) gets ready for a performance with Uncle, Andrei and other family members are in attendance, getting rich on the spoils of the now legitimate music business. But Masha has not forgotten.

Polina Gukhman carries the feature as Masha the 13 year old whose uncle and sons fulfil her every wish, the big family cushioning her from the big wide world. Violence is the norm for her – but the victims are always the ones fighting Uncle and his clan. Only once is the order disturbed, when one of Uncle’s relatives is killed by a rival gang, having raped an under aged girl. Told from the POV of Masha, for whom Uncle is a sort of God granting her every wish, this is a study of a regressive dog eat dog world, where violence holds sway. In Masha’s infantile understanding of the situation, brutality is just part of getting what you want – just ask Uncle whose soft spot for her (rather like the Kray twins for their mother) contrasts with his harsh treatment of all others, including his wider family. DoP Gleb Filatov’s harsh realism is sometimes hard to bear, but never gratuitous in showing how casually normal this hostile environment is for an adolescent like Masha. But Uncle’s little Princess would grow up one day. AS

MASHA is showing as part of the London Russian Film Festival, currently being held for the first time in the UK – from November 12 to December 10, 2021. New customers can enjoy the festival films as part of an extended Subscription free trial on BFI player using the voucher code RFF21.

May God Be With You (2021) IDFA 2021

Dir: Cleo Cohen | Israel Doc

Cléo Cohen’s directorial debut is a highly personal exploration of her own identity as the granddaughter of Jewish Arabs who emigrated from Tunisia and Algeria to France during the 20th century.

In the intimate confines of the family homes Cohen plays devil’s advocate, questioning the time honoured subject of Jewish identity and the relationship between Arabs and Jews in the Maghreb. What emerges is a generational conflict, as well as a very subjective view of the past from the older generation’s perspective.

Cohen starts with a provocative bon mot in the opening titles which manages to ruffle a few feathers back home: What is the shortest joke in history?: “A Jew met another Arab.” When defending the Arabs’ view of history she is told: “Defend the Arabs and you’ll see what happens to you”. When she answers back: “the worst massacre of Jews took place in Western, Christian Europe” a swift reply comes: “If the Arabs were organised, they would have done the same to us. Cleo does not feel Jewish at all when her grandma Denise tells her “the Arabs got what they deserved.”

In an attempt to gain context she then speaks to Richard Cohen (to whose memory the film is dedicated) former lawyer for the FLN in Algeria. He nods, too weak to answer in full. And Daniel Shebabo is equally frank: “The French got the Jews on their side during the wars of Independence in the Maghreb – separating them from the Arabs via the Cremieux Decree, which made Jews French overnight in 1960. I still remember the pride my mother felt. It caused some confusion with other Pied-Noirs, but my mother said we are Pied-Noirs. My family never mingled with Arabs.”

Denise Houri, is firmly in the Jews’ camp and considers herself ‘in exile’ from her native Tunisia. “It was hard finding ourselves in another country. But we can’t go back, the old country won’t be the same any more. Memories stay still in time. You are often disappointed if you go back. Alain went, he sent photos”. Nevertheless, Cleó is planning to visit Oran in Algeria. Denise is hard-line when it comes to Cleó’s duty regarding her own (as yet unborn) children: “You will be the guide for the people of Israel, on their behalf. You must pass that on to your children. Transient Jewish identity is a value. They should never marry an Arab. I practice my religion at home. Cultural blending is not a good idea.”

Daniel Shebabo talks about the thorny issue of identity: “Identity is never a foregone conclusion. It can always be undermined by yourself or others. I am re-assured by being Jewish, but I do not distance myself from others. The more you are re-assured, the better you can accept others with different identities. In Tunisia I mainly lived with Muslims.”

The director wanders around Denise’ flat, resting in the huge bath tub, and reading Albert Memmi’s classic of 1957 ‘The Colonizer and the Colonized” from his perspective as a French-Tunisian writer of Jewish origins. She reflects that “Arabs are not just Tunisians, there are Christian Arabs, Muslim Arabs and Jewish Arabs too. We are not Muslims, but we are Jews with an Arab culture and identity. Our mother tongue is Arabic, but we are Jews. I am an Arab by culture, but not a Jewish Arab.”

A highly personal feature which nevertheless touches on ideological conflicts, not only between Jews and Arabs, but also within the Jewish communities themselves. An important film that attempts to shed light on the complex the issues surrounding cultural and religious identity, antisemitism, racism and colonialism. AS

SCREENING DURING IDFA 2021 | INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL AMSTERDAM 2021

In the Billowing Night (2021) IDFA 2021

Dir: Erika Etangsale | France, Doc 50′

In her delicately atmospheric meditation on identity and colonial origins Erika Etangsale uses silence, a soft ambient soundscape and an impressive editing technique as an affective distancing mechanism in expressing the ongoing feelings of disconnection felt by her Creole father, offering insight into French social history enriched by evocative personal photos and original footage.

Originally from Reunion, he still feels a strong connection with his island birthplace in the Antilles, and a deep pain in the his soul, flushed with anger, that only softens when he eventually returns to the place of his birth as a much older man. As a teenager he was only too happy to come to Metropolitan France (during in the 1960s-1980s Bumidom2 initiative), where he worked for thirty years, never thinking of going back despite finding himself uprooted from his friends and family, at a time where France was experiencing the same social and economic turbulence as his native Reunion. Marrying Erika’s mother, from Macon, brought a certainly stability. But now in retirement he is affected by strange dreams that Erika herself shares with her father, whom she describes as “a man of few words”.

Shot between Reunion Island and Mâcon, In the Billowing Night, is an attempt to understand and connect with her cultural background through the story of her father who has buried the trauma of his uprooting. And perhaps the dark, unsettling dreams are his way keeping the past alive but also working through the trauma. The past is certainly reanimated in a melancholic cinematic rumination that fuses black and white archive footage of the volcanic islands with vibrant images of exotic flora and fauna, contrasting with scenes of violence in the streets of both locations. A valuable, living memory of slavery, turmoil and unrest that still resonates throughout Europe in the post-colonial present.

INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL AMSTERDAM 2021 | 17 – 28 NOVEMBER 2021

The Vampire (1957) Prime Video

Dir: Paul Landres | Cast: John Beal, Coleen Gray, Kenneth Tobey, Lydia Reed | US Vampire Horror 75′

The biggest spoiler connected with this horror outing is its title. Shot under the working title ‘It’s Always Darkest Before the Dawn’, Pat Fielder’s story feels as if it started life as a drama about drug addiction revamped (if you’ll pardon the expression) as a horror film: The line “aspirin never hurt anyone” is ironic, since aspirin is used far more cautiously these days.

The plot, with its drug that causes “regression to a primitive state”, sounds more like Jekyll & Hyde. The few perfunctory vampiric details, such as the very inoffensive fang marks left on one victim’s neck, and the fact that the pills are extracted from vampire bats, feel like token late additions to the script. The climax takes place out of doors in broad daylight and detective Ken Tobey defends himself with a big hefty stick, which, if the film’s makers had been on the ball, he could have driven into his attacker’s chest rather than just used to protect himself. Veteran cameraman Jack MacKenzie’s photography of the small town setting and interiors is clean and attractive, but also fails to deliver in the more shadowy and horrific moments.

What makes this film so harrowing to experience is the quality of the acting and the human dimension. John Beal is so sympathetic you genuinely care about him (as you do for the other characters), and for the sake of him and his cute young daughter Lydia Reed, you badly want to see some sort of happy resolution; even though you know full well that that becomes more and more out of the question with every passing minute. The monster make-up comes as a double disappointment because its crudeness (he looks more like the Neanderthal Man than any vampire) is wholly unworthy of the build up by Beal’s performance @Richard Chatten

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

Eve of Destruction (1991)

Dir: Duncan Gibbins | Cast: Gregory Hines, Renée Soutendijk, Michael Greene, Kurt Fuller | US Thriller 91′

The Dutch actress Renée Soutendijk – who had made her name ten years earlier as The Girl with the Red Hair – is magnificent here in her only American film as Dr. Eve Simmons and her robot double Eve VIII in this fascinating cross between The Colossus of New York and Marnie. It sounded like fun when it briefly hit cinemas 30 years ago; and after waiting a quarter of a century for it to turn up on TV or on the DVD rack, YouTube once again has finally come to the rescue…

An exercise in which robot Eve is allowed out in San Francisco dressed (like Dr.Simmons herself) in the style of Hillary Clinton, inevitably goes wrong; and after being accidentally reprogrammed in Battlefield Mode she’s transformed into a seriously hot Ms Hyde who rather than heading for an army surplus store and purchasing a set of combat fatigues, instead opts for the hooker look: spending the rest of the film in blood red lipstick, a black mini skirt, high heels and red leather bomber jacket accessorised with a red Mustang (which she later swaps for a red jeep). Thus equipped, she starts making life hard for sleazeballs on the pull, a yuppie roadhog and her abusive father (played in a brief cameo by an unbilled Kevin McCarthy). Then her maternal instinct kicks in…

Obviously the people who designed Eve VIII never go to the movies, otherwise they wouldn’t have been careless enough to make their latest secret weapon a foxy blonde who can already kill a man with her bare hands even when not carrying an Uzi. She also happens to be a tactical nuclear weapon with a 24-hour trigger (I’m sure we’ve all met women like that; and the mind boggles at what the Taliban would have made of her had she ever been deployed against them). But scariest of all she’s also carrying a lot of emotional baggage inherited from Dr. Simmons, whose memories and fantasies have been programmed into her. She reacts to the word ‘bitch’ the way Marnie Edgar used to react to thunderstorms and the colour red. The film’s writers plainly felt this made the movie ‘deeper’; but personally I would have been happier with her just sticking to being an unstoppable killing machine…@Richard Chatten

Out of the Blue (1980) Blu-ray

Dir: Dennis Hopper | Cast: Linda Manz, Dennis Hopper, Sharon Farell, Doń Gordon | US Drama 94′

Initially signed on as an actor, Dennis Hopper took over the direction of this, his third feature film, from writer Leonard Yakir (whose script Hopper re-wrote eight days into the six-week shoot in Vancouver). The result is Hopper’s most professional looking film (not necessarily something he would have taken as a compliment), well-acted, good looking and engrossing, particularly when the unique Linda Manz (billed over Hopper) is onscreen; confirming here that her unforgettable performance in Days of Heaven was no flash in the pan.

Obviously intended not to be an easy ride, towards the end a spectacularly ugly skeleton comes crashing out of the family closet, and it all ends very badly for all. Does Cebe’s poor junkie mother Kathy (a characteristically attractive performance from Sharon Farell; an actress like Miss Manz grievously underused in films) really deserve what her daughter does to her? Richard Chatten

AVAILABLE from 29 NOVEMBER ON DIGITAL and BFI BLU-RAY

The Conscience (2021)

Dir.: Aleksey Kozlov; Cast: Vladislav Komarov, Alexandre Kononets, Vasily Shcipitsyn, Natalya Sveshinova; Russia 2021, 93 min.

Already winning awards for screenplay and artistic achievement this compulsive crime drama from Russian director/co-writer Aleksey Kozlov takes place in the early 1920s Petrograd where Boris Letush, a law professor at the university, becomes embroiled in a dark underworld of politics and secret police while investigating the death of his brother and sister in law, – his nieceMargo survived, but was struck dumb by the traumatic experience.

Letush (Komarov) is a busy man. Teaching his university students, and actively working for the Police, his boss Matveer (Shcipitsyn) is an unscrupulous and greedy little man, who steals food and sleeps with women who are in thrall to, fully aware he has syphilis. So far the chief murder suspect is a well known felon and gang leader Lyonka Panteleev (Komonets). The police boss is convinced he has his man but Letush suspects Matveer himself of the crime, and his lover, a cabaret singer, is ready to denounce him. But the fly in the ointment is that Panteleev was also working for the police as undercover agent. But the do decide to go ahead with Matveer’s plan to have Panteleev ‘escape’ from prison, being shot “whilst escaping”.

Of course it all goes wrong on the night and Panteleev escapes for real, leaving Letush and Msatveer in the lurch, and attracting the attention of the Cheka (Secret Police) after Letush’s lover Vera (Sveshinova) falls foul of the law trying to escape to Paris.

Paranoia seethes throughout a city where everyone seems to be untrustworthy, not least the Cheka on the regular Police. Letush, for all his scruples, is caught up in these over-lapping spider-webs of deceit. He may be a goodie with the best of intentions but somehow the climate conspires against him, leaving him no alternative but to participate if he wants to save Vera and Margo.

Throwing shadows all over the place, DoP Viacheslav Tyurin creates a German expressionist underworld of subterfuge and sculduggery where it never seems to get light as the characters struggle to survive the atmosphere of menace. There is no quarter given for mitigation or self doubt, the only way forward is to hunt with the wolves, as Letush will find eventually find out to his chagrin. AS

THE CONSCIENCE is showing as part of the London Russian Film Festival, currently being held for the first time in the UK – from November 12 to December 10, 2021. New customers can enjoy the festival films on BFI PLAYER as part of an extended Subscription free trial using the voucher code RFF21.

ALSO SCREENING AT THIS YEAR’S TALLINN FILM FESTIVAL

Mothering Sunday (2021)

Dir: Eva Husson | Cast: Odessa Young, Josh O’Connor, Sope Dirisu, Colin Firth, Olivia Colman, Glenda Jackson | UK Drama 110′

A nostalgic reflection on English family life ravaged by loss in the Great War is the subject of Eva Husson’s languorous female empowerment melodrama.

Slim of plot but indulgently languid in its evocative sensuality Mothering Sunday is seen through the eyes of a young girl in service reflecting back on a fateful summer day in 1924 when tragedy changed her life forever: and she decided to become a writer. The timeline sashays backwards and forwards, Glenda Jackson adding grist as the older novelist Jane shrugging off the success of her prize-winning in the modern day.

Based on Graham Swift’s novella Mothering Sunday – a day when staff in service were given the day off to visit their mothers – evokes the sultry atmosphere of a doomed affair between a maid Jane Fairchild (Odessa Young) and Paul Sheringham (Josh O’Connor) the only surviving son of a well to do family in the verdant English countryside. Released from duties Jane spends the day in bed with her lover at his stately mansion in his parents’ absence. Paul is going to be marrying Emma in a fortnight’s time, so both he and Jane know their affair is limited by time and social conventions.

In the background Colin Firth and Olivia Colman play the Nivens, an older generation broken by loss, and still mourning their sons killed in the Great War. But the focus here is on sensuality rather than storyline, and the camera lingers on their love scenes as Jane prances around naked. Meanwhile on the grassy lawns of Henley the Nivens keep calm and carry on over a tearful lunch with their coterie of bereaved friends, Colin fronting up well, Colman morose.

But there’s only so much loving-making and visuals of fusty libraries and flowers in a china vase a film can take. And rather than focus on Jane’s literary aspirations and how they eventually take shape and blossom professional – we see her occasionally penciling a word on a page, or in brief vignettes during a marriage in the 1940s, Husson is more concerned with the atmosphere permeating this soulful story with a pent up feeling of loss and longing, that eventually erupts in the tragic denouement. In this sense the film is a missed opportunity to make better use of its strong cast of Colin Firth, Olivia Colman and Glenda Jackson. MT

NOW IN CINEMAS NATIONWIDE | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2021 PREMIERE

Prisoners of Ghostland (2021) Blu-ray

Dir.: Sion Sono; Cast: Nicholas Cage, Sofia Boutella, Nick Cassavates, Bill Moseley, Tak Sakaguchi, Charles Glover, Yazuka Nukaya; USA 2021, 103 min.

In his first English language feature Japanese director Sion Sono (Love Exposure) is still very much the enfant-terrible of today’s Japanese cinema with this wild visual extravaganza that sometimes loses the plot (by Aaron Henry and Sôhei Tanikawa). There are good bits and very bad bits. Nicholas Cage is – true to form- an OTT hero without a name – Ghostlands is a ride-and-a-half on the wild side.

Cage is first seen robbing a bank with Psycho (Cassavates), an enterprise that goes wrong and leaves Cage in prison and at the mercy of shady Governor (Moseley) of Samurai Town. letting Cage out of jail to liberate niece Bernice (Boutella) from Ghostland, wearing a suit which threatens to explode if he oversteps his time limit, and will blow up his testicles, if he makes a move with Bernice.

Ghostland is headed up by Enoch (Glover). Time has stood still since a convoy of dangerous prisoners collided with a transport of nuclear waste; Psycho being one of the victims. But Cage also recognises Bernice, whose mother he shot dead in the debacle following the bank robbery, injuring the child. Somehow the two escape and, with the help of Yasijiro (Sakaguchi), a samurai and young Susie (Nukaya), get rid of the Governor and his clique in a wild shootout with sword fights.

The Western meets the Samurai actioner and together they spawn a post-nuclear disaster movie with humans running around as Semi-Zombies clad in card-board. Cage lets fly, Boutella is underused, and in the end one no one gives a damn that nothing makes much sense. Sôkei Tanikawa’s excoriating images are wasted, as are the attempts of the audience to remember anything of the slightest importance after leaving the cinema. A void. AS

NOW ON BLURAY AND DVD FROM NOVEMBER 15th

Petite Maman (2021)

Dir: Celine Sciamma | Cast: Nina Meurisse, Margot Abascal, Josephine Sanz, Gabrielle Sanz, Stephane Varupenne | Drama France, 72′

Petite Maman ia a haunting drama contemplating loss and longing through the eyes of two young girls.

Seeing things entirely from a child’s perspective French auteuse Celine Sciamma once again explores the subtle sensibilities of human dynamics with a cast of young performers (Gabrielle and Josephine Sanz) who are remarkably calm and detached in a wake of a family bereavement.

The director showed a keen appreciation of young minds in her 2011 film Tomboy. Here the focus is little Nelly and how she copes in the days after her grandma’s death as the rest of the family clears out the home that has become so familiar and comforting during the first years of her life.

Avoiding sentimentality Sciamma creates an atmosphere of placid ambiguity for most of this almost spellbound drama that sees solemn 8-year-old Nelly (Josephine Sanz) wondering into the nearby woods where she meets Marion (played by identical twin sister Gabrielle), the two striking up a tentative friendship as they build a tree house. There’s a touch of the twins in Kubrick’s The Shining about these children, with their chilly demeanour and distant, ambivalent gaze. But we are far removed from any horror story here in a style that is best described at fantastical realism.

Mature beyond her years Nelly views her bereft mother with emotional detachment, although she is very supportive and practical in other ways, doing chores around the house with her father (Varupenne) whom she regards with scepticism, ticking him off about his chain-smoking smoking. Sciamma gradually abandons enigma in the second half but also keeps us guessing as the story gradually unfolds in an eerie and suspended moment in time.

Building a gentle but restrained camaraderie throughout, the Sanz sisters give captivating debut performances as the confident but controlled friends. Meurisse is full of sensitivity as Nelly’s mother carrying her grief with a doleful dignity. MT

NOW ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE | BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL 2021 |

Dettori (2021)

Dir: Anthony Wonke | UK Doc | 114′

This biopic about the Italian-born jockey Frankie Dettori is a film for everyone to enjoy, not just the racing fraternity. It gallops forward on the back of Dettori’s infectious charisma and sunny optimism, a role model who proves that perseverance and commitment is just as important as talent, often more so. With over 3000 wins under his belt, Dettori is as popular as he’s successful on the turf. An admiring portrait of a man who’s still raring to go at 50, but the admiration is justified, and, as a bonus, the camera just loves him, as much as the horses do.

Like the jockey himself, Anthony Wonke’s film darts backwards and forwards, while Frankie, spotlit, just talks into the camera. It all starts with a spurt of adrenaline in October 2019 at the famous Arc de Triomphe in Longchamp (near Paris) where we first meet Dettori and his ‘soulmate’ Enable, the champion British Thoroughbred racehorse. The pair are a legend. And rightly so. Frankie describes his bond with the horse as a ‘living/breathing experience’. Riders can be “emotionally touched” by certain horses, and the champion Enable was certainly one of them for him. Dettori rode Enable in everyone of her 14 races, winning 11 of them. And although they didn’t win on this third unprecedented attempt to take the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, there is tremendous support from the 40,000 strong crowd who are more nervous than he is. The deflation of being pipped to the post is so emotional, and you feel for him – and the horse. Then comes the usual pep-talk from his father on the journey back home.

The story then flashes back to Italy and Dettori’s modest upbringing in Milan. His father Gianfranco had tried his luck as a stable boy and soon developed a talent for riding, becoming a champion jockey and one of the best riders of his generation. His constant presence as a taskmaster and mentor has shaped Frankie’s career. Frankie describes how his father (who still calls him Lanfranco) eventually gave him a palomino pony. But he had “all the gear and no idea” until he was shipped off to Luton, England – which was the making of him. Padre Dettori still spurs him on mercilessly, even today, where the story comes full circle with his own daughter Ella, now competing as a rider.

Frankie remembers a fraught childhood. And although his mother was an affectionate figure, the young Frankie was a ‘volcano inside’ according to his sister Alessandra who spent lockdown in the family home near Newmarket with his English wife Catherine and their five children, and still makes him his favourite “polpette”.

There’s so much to pack in, but Bafta-awarded Anthony Wonke somehow manages it in just under two hours: that day at Ascot in 1996 when Dettori won 7 races on the trot; the tragic plane crash at Goodwood that saw him escaping with Ray Cochrane (the pilot was killed); his international achievements in Dubai, and the pinnacle of the racing diary The Epsom Derby. He covers the years with the training aristocracy: Luca Cumani, Peter Burrell and John Gosden who describes him as a “one-man marketing operation”. But Gianfranco really seems to have made him what he is today, pumping him full of confidence but also verbally horse-whipping his son into shape. Horses run for him. He seems to fly with the horse and the strong work ethic is there too. And his joie de vivre is extraordinary.

There are the lows too, where Frankie has a brush with drugs, spending time in a Hong Kong jail. But the film also describes his love of the limelight: he wanted to be famous too much to let that life get the better of him. Covid was the worst time, his wife Catherine describing how he very much needs the buzz of the track and the international competitions to keep his mojo up. She comes across as a powerful, stabilising force along with their united, loving family; a rift with his father is now healed. At its heart, Dettori is a feelgood film that captures the essence of an extremely likeable man who simply rides horses better than anyone else does. MT

ON RELEASE ON 15 NOVEMBER IN SELECTED CINEMAS, BLU-RAY, DVD & DOWNLOAD TO OWN.

Stanislavski. Lust for Life (2020)

Dir.: Julia Bobkova; Documentary with Declan Donnellan, Renata Litvinova, Katie Mitchell, Nikita Mikhalkov, Marina Brusnikina, Yuriy Butosov, Oskaras Korsunovas, Lev Dodin; Russia 2020, 82 min.

A new film explores the pioneering work of Russian actor and director Konstantin Stanislavski (1863-1938) who became synonymous with a performance style based on his ‘Actor’s Manual’ in three parts, published during the 1930s.

The ‘Stanislavski Method’ is the bible of all progressive theatre artists, and still hotly discussed in all the best dressing rooms, even though Stanislavski himself is quoted saying “Create your own method, don’t rely on mine. Keep on breaking traditions”. Stanislavski himself managed to maintain his inner freedom and true artistry within the harsh boundaries of the Soviet system, all thanks to the power of his prodigious talent.

The MHAT (Moscow Arts Theatre, which Stanislavski founded with Vladimir Nemerovich in 1898), seems an appropriate setting for a series of interviews with leading proponents on this method immersive feature documentary directed by Julia Bobkova. We meet Lithuanian director Oskaras Korsunovas who claims sitting in Stanislavski’s chair, rehearsing ‘The Seagul l’, gave him the inspiration for his performance. Marina Brusnikina, also a stage director, talks about the master’s polemic writing “Theatre is Dying”, which was published when he was still alive in the late 1930s. She sees the modern actor as a journalist and explorer, crossing the borderline of regular theatre. She laments the fact that Shakespeare is no longer on the curriculum in London acting schools. The general consensus nowadays is that studying the bard is unlikely to help you a get slot on HBO as a filmmaker.

Katie Mitchell, Artistic Director of the ‘Globe Theatre’ (and stage director of a Virginia Wolfe novel based purely on the reflections of the main character) goes a step further: “Cinema deprives the audience of imagination. It replaces imagination with itself. Theatre happens not so much on the stage, but in the imagination of the audience”. Russian film and stage director Nikita Mikalkov (Burnt by the Sun) talks about his adaption of Stanislavski’s approach to rehearsals: “During rehearsals, with five or more cameras active, I ask one of the actors to do something which is not in the script, like putting a cup of tea forcefully on the table where the rest of the cast is sitting. Their reaction is priceless and gives me ideas.”

An exhibition at the MHAT shows stills and other memorabilia of all “Seagull” productions the theatre has ever staged, from Stanislavski’s (it did not open the theatre as commonly reported) to the most recent, directed by Oskaras Korsunovas.

Stanislavski’s tour of the USA from 1922-24 was a great success, and “was the best thing that could have happened to Hollywood. Many Russian directors and actors left the hunger they faced in Stalinist Russia, and emigrated to the New World”. Meryl Streep and Helen Mirren are seen heaping praise on the Russian innovator. Renata Litvinova, who teaches at the ‘Actor’s Studio’ is adamant, that “Genius is 95% work. You have to throw yourself away every day.” And Ivana Chubbuck, who has taught countless Oscar and Emmy winners, underlines Litvinova’s sentiments: “It is not just one day, where you have to give everything, it is your life”. There are some pessimistic thoughts raised at the MHAT events: “Now the office dictates to actors and directors. But it should be the other way round. People become more and more irrelevant, as we head to a virtual life. It’s a kind of de-personalisation, with a lack of direct, intimate connections. Today everything is becoming a sort of a product measured in currency.”

At the end of the film, the actors and directors are given some writing by Stanislavski to read out in front of the camera. Declan Donellan, Artistic Director of ‘Cheek by Jowl’, is annoyed when he reads the Master’s advice not to copy him, and goes spontaneously on strike.

Bobkova keeps talking heads to a minimum, thus avoiding hagiography, instead her more radical approach focuses on the lively camera crew of six and entertaining archive clips of the master, bringing the past and the present together, and keeping Stanislavski’s independent spirit alive. AS

If you’re in the UK you can discover the best in contemporary Russian cinema as part of an extended free trial to BFI Player Subscription – simply sign up here using voucher code RFF21 to claim an additional free month.

RUSSIAN FILM AT TALLINN BLACK NIGHTS FILM FESTIVAL 2021 are also screening CONSCIENCE, STANISLAVSKI, A SIEGE DIARY, LAST ‘DEAR BULGARY’

Red Sea Film Festival (2021) Feature Competition 2021

The inaugural edition of the Red Sea International Film Festival is set to bring the best in Arab and World Cinema to the UNESCO world heritage site of Jeddah Old Town.

The Festival will open with Joe Wright’s musical dramady CYRANO (2021) based on Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play and starring Peter Dinklage in the lead alongside Ben Medelsohn and Haley Bennett (as Roxanne). The world premiere of Egyptian director Amir Salama’s BARA EL MANHAG closes the festival in a light-hearted mode after ten days showcasing a compelling slate of new and diverse films, alongside a retrospective programme celebrating the masters of cinema as well as introducing audiences to exciting new voices from the region and beyond. The Festival will provide a platform for Arab filmmakers and industry professionals from around the world to connect, host feature and short film competitions, and present a series of events, masterclasses, and workshops to support emerging talent.

COMMUNION is the latest film from Tunisian actor, director and writer Nejib Belkadhi. In life under lockdown, Sarra works from home, helping people distressed by Covid-19. The film questions whether they can survive this confinement without sinking into depression and whether their marriage can return to normal. The film is one of 14 to receive a grant from the Red Sea Fund, and will have its world premiere at the Red Sea International Film Festival.

PAKA – RIVER OF BLOOD (above) s the feature debut from Indian writer and director Nithin Lukose. The Malayalam-language drama introduces us to two families in North Kerala that that for generations have been locked in a blood feud, separated by the river running between them that has become a makeshift graveyard for the feud’s many casualties. When Anna and Johnny, scions of these opposing clans, fall in love, it signals hope to ending the violence – until another body is pulled from the river.

HUDA’S SALON (above) is the latest film from Academy Award nominated Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad. The film, written and directed by Abu-Assad, follows Reem, a young mother married to a jealous man, who goes to Huda’s salon in Bethlehem for a haircut and an attentive ear. The feminist thriller portrays two women fighting for their freedom, filled with contradictions and battles between betrayal and loyalty.

In its world premiere at RSIFF, SOULA (above) is the directorial debut feature from Salah Issaad, co-written with Soula Bahri. Bahri plays herself in this road movie about a young single mother rejected by her family. Trying to make it through the night with her baby, she sets out along the roads of Algeria, only to find herself caught up, through a series of unfortunate encounters, in a spiral of violence.

EUROPA (above)is the latest feature from writer and director Haider Rashid. Intent on leaving Iraq for Europe, Kamal faces a long, difficult and dangerous journey on foot. Crossing the border between Turkey and Bulgaria, where local mercenaries are hunting down migrants, he must negotiate a seemingly endless forest that is also host to a lawless underworld. The film premiered during this year’s Cannes Directors’ Fortnight.

courtesy of Tribeca

BRIGHTON 4TH is the third fiction feature from Georgian New Wave director Levan Koguashvili. Kakhi, a former Olympic wrestler, travels to New York to clean up a mess made by his gambling addict son, Soso, who was trying to marry Lena for a green card. Khaki discovers that life in America is not that different from Georgia. The film presents a touching exploration of masculinity in a stunning central performance by real-life former Olympic wrestling champion Levan Tediashvili. Selected as the Georgian entry for the upcoming 94thAcademy Awards, it had its world premiere at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, where it won Best International Narrative Feature Film.

YUNI above) the latest feature from award-winning Indonesian writer and director Kamila Andini. At 16, Indonesian schoolgirl Yuni will qualify for a highly-prized college scholarship if she maintains good grades and avoids marriage. She has already rejected two suitors, but her community’s belief is beginning to close in on her: if a woman rejects three proposals, they say, she will never marry at all. The film had its world premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the Platform Prize, and has been selected as the Indonesian entry for the upcoming 94th Academy Awards.

SALOUM (above) is the latest feature from Congolese writer and director Jean Luc Herbulot. Set against the backdrop of the 2003 Guinea-Bissau military-backed coup d’etat, an elite trio of mercenaries extract a drug dealer and his wares from the chaos to take him to Dakar, Senegal. The escape goes awry, leaving them stranded in the Sine-Saloum Delta, an area rife with myth and mystery, where the mercenaries face an unexpected foe from local legend.

RUPTURE directed by Saudi filmmaker and writer Hamzah Jamjoom is a suspenseful drama that follows a Saudi pregnant woman who must decipher reality from dreams, drug-induced delusions, and perceptions of death before a killer gets to her and her family. Her fractured life and memory are not the only thing that stands in her way.

REHANA MARYAM NOOR is the second feature from Bangladeshi writer and director Abdullah Mohammad Saad. A tense tale of abuse, accusation, and resistance, the film depicts the opposition and negligence at a university when Rehana, an assistant professor, reports a professor abusing students. The film was selected in the Un Certain Regard section at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, becoming the first Bangladeshi film to be featured in this category. It has also been selected as the Bangladeshi entry for Best International Feature Film at the upcoming 94th Academy Awards.

HIT THE ROAD (above) has been one the highlights of the summer festival circuit in Europe and the feature debut from Iranian writer and director Panah Panahi. This road movie is a rollercoaster ride of emotions – from belly-aching laughter to a sea of tears – as a family of four take a borrowed car on a road trip to the sounds of 1970s Iranian pop. The film premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where it competed for the Caméra d’Or for best first feature. At the BFI: London Film Festival, it won the top prize for Best Film.

Written and directed by Al Hadi Ulad-Mohand, LIFE SUITS ME WELL is set in the mid-1990s, in a small town in the north of Morocco, where Fouad is the only employee of the local post office. When he is diagnosed with a neurological disease, his whole family enters a new chapter of their lives during which they rediscover what life means to them. The film is one of 14 to receive a grant from the Red Sea Fund, and will have its world premiere at the Red Sea International Film Festival.

NEIGHBOURS (above) is the latest film from Kurdish writer and director Mano Khalil. Arabs, Kurds and Jews live amicably together in a small Syrian village on the Turkish border. The arrival of a fanatical new teacher at the primary school divides the community, where 6-year-old Sero finds his own small world turned upside down. Drawing on his own experience, Khalilpays tribute to the good neighbours of his childhood.

FARHA (above) is the feature writing and directorial debut from Jordanian filmmaker Darin J. Sallam. In 1948 Palestine, 14-year-old Farha has almost convinced her father to let her go to school in the city. Her village comes under a bombing attack and her father leaves, locking her for safety in the family’s cellar and promising to return. Through a small hole in the wall, Farha watches the village she was excited to leave turned to rubble, bearing witness to the collapse of her country and the forced displacement of its people.

Written and directed by Samir Nasr, SHARAF is adapted from the novel of the same name by acclaimed Egyptian writer, Sonallah Ibrahim. Sharaf may dream of being fabulously rich, but when he ends up in prison after killing a man in defence of his honour, he has to wake up fast. Prison mirrors the outside world, with all its systemic inequality, injustice and corruption– although, even here, Sharaf believes he can make his fortune. The film will have its world premiere at the Red Sea International Film Festival.

THE ALLEYS (above) is the feature directorial debut from Jordanian filmmaker Bassel Ghandour, who also wrote the film. East Amman’s labyrinthine neighbourhood Jabal Al Natheef runs on a toxic brew of gossip and violence. Just one thing is certain: that the shadowy corners of the alleyways are crawling with secrets. Ghandour is most well-known for writing and co-producing the 2016 BAFTA winning and Academy Award–nominated Theeb.

The inaugural edition of the Red Sea International Film Festival will run in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia from December 6-15, 2021.

107 Mothers (2021)

Wri/Dir: Peter Kerekes | Drama: Ukraine, 92’

This candid look at motherhood in a Ukrainian prison makes for grim viewing but it is fascinating nevertheless, and there’s stark honesty in the faces of these women who have brought babies into the world in harsh circumstances. All are criminals, but none are odious as they talk direct to the camera about their lives and misdemeanours. Most are murderers. One woman killed her husband’s lover with a piece of piping. A crime of passion, but one that comes with a certain sense of satisfaction. At least he’s alone now too.

Czech filmmaker Peter Kerekes melds reality and fiction in a documentary that features professional actress Maryna Klimova (as Lesya). A convicted felon cuddling a cherubic-faced newborn baby is the ultimate is contradiction, but maybe the experience of motherhood will offer redemption of sorts as they stare at stone walls and prison bars. Tenderness and torture in a cold climate. A woman punished emotionally and viscerally, unable to love and care for the child who’s been her most intimate companion for the past nine months.

There’s a grudging camaraderie amongst these females of all ages as they shuffle from one vast room to the next, exchanging words and glances, facing uncomfortable facts and surroundings, rather than the love and gentleness that normally surrounds motherhood, a woman’s ultimate goal; her raison d’être, reduced to nothing. Expressing milk from the breast to the bottle – and then pouring it down the plughole feels like a terrible travesty. Surely better to drink the precious elixir of life, than pour it down the sink? And the babies are the ultimate victims, torn from their mother’s warmth, they languish in metal cots crying pitifully until the orphanage or a family member claims them.

But prison is also a reductive experience. And these women are in no doubt as to what they really wanted out of life. And the sad circumstances that led them down the wrong road, their emotions taking over in the heat of the moment. Regret and endurance are now their only bed fellows Even the prison guard Iryna (Iryna Kiryazeva) has missed her chance at happiness, and it’s her own mother who tells her as much, once the gruelling work day is over and the two sit in solemn silence, the mother lamenting her lack of a grandchild. In the morning, Iryna reads through the inmates’ personal letters, to her chagrin, before posting them in their respective mail boxes. One man writes to his girlfriend: “I’ll bring you tights and red lipstick, we’ll fuck for three days when you’re free”. Some have already managed a covert conjugal visit. There are ways and means, even in prison.

Motherhood behind bars is an unusual subject for a male filmmaker but one that Kerekes delivers with sensitivity in a delicate colour palette. There’s a rhythmic quality to his framing and mise-en-scene that makes this ‘docudrama’ appealing despite the subject matter. Social realism would have been too grim. 107 Mothers is compulsive and memorable despite its flaws. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL HORIZONS WINNER | BEST SCREENPLAY | MANNHEIM HEIDELBERG FILM FESTIVAL 2021

A Place Called Dignity (2021) Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival 2021

Dir.: Matias Rojas Valencia; Cast: Salvador Insunza, Hanns Zischler, Amalia Kassai, Noa Westermeyer, Tato Dubó, David Gaete, Leonie Wesselow; Chile/France/Germany/ Argentina/Columbia; 2021, 95 min.

The final years of the ‘Colonia Dignidad’ in Parral, Southern Chile are the subject of this spirited drama with its pervasive political undercurrents from Chilean writer/director Matias Rojas Valencia.

The former German Nazi soldier Paul Schäfer (1921-2010) founded a cult colony in 1961. Later, Schäfer supported General Pinochet, the latter’s opponents were tortured and killed in the colony. Schäfer was later accused of sexual abuse by 25 children, sentenced for several decades and fined 1.5 m$. He escaped to Argentina, but was extradited to Chile in 2006 and died in jail four years later. Colonia Dignidad – The True Story, a 2015 semi-documentary has covered some of the same ground as this feature film.

Pablo (Insunza), a twelve-year old local boy – whose father has deserted the family – is given a place in the school by ‘Uncle’ Paul (Zischler), the leader of the colony ‘Dignidad’. Pablo is very insecure, he urinates in public and is permanently taunted by the white boys, mostly Germans. Pablo shares a room with Rudolph (Westermeyer), who is Uncle Paul’s favourite, and can spend the night with him watching TV. Paul and his minions terrorising the teenagers, with regular sessions in the assembly hall, where the misfits are publicly punished. Paul is devious in his approach to the sexual assault victims.

Meanwhile Rudolph has never left the colony, and Pablo has to explain to him what traffic lights are, such is his naivety. Gisela (Kassai), who wants a child, tries her luck with Johannes (Gaete), copying the positions from a book about rhino procreation. Gisela is punished by being forced to wear a white jumper, the sign of a ‘wrong-doer’. White is the theme that runs through house: the huge piano is gleaming white, with a German shepherd languidly stretched out on top.

Inmates disappear regularly from the tightly guarded compound. And soon Pablo will replace Rudolph as Uncle Paul’s sex object. Paul making sure that Pablo wins a race against other boys, declaring him the new ‘sprinter’, an honourable position, even though the other boys, protest, that Pablo is ‘only’ an indigenous boy.

Christmas is still celebrated despite the evil goings-on – but instead of Father Christmas, a ghostly, devil like creature with two horns appears (Johannes in disguise, to make up for transgression). Pablo has enough of being molested, in a dream sequence, his mother visits him, lying in an open coffin. Pablo takes this as a sign and talks Rudolph into joining him in a escape bid, but Paul’s henchmen are alert.

DoP Benjamin Echazarreta creates a startling visual environment that really brings to life the pervading atmosphere of deceit and repression. The dream sequences are fantastic but the the director never neglects politics: in 1989 Paul and a visiting army officer openly discuss the possible implication of Pinochet losing the approaching referendum. Paul is full of angst, but the officer tells him to be hopeful: The dictator will watch out for them even if defeated. Crucially, the film reminds us how Nazi torturers became active after WWII and continue to influence the South American continent to this day – Barby and Mengele being only the tip of the iceberg. AS

TALLINN BLACK NIGHTS FILM FESTIVAL | 12-28 NOVEMBER 2021

Vera Dreams of the Sea (2021)

Dir: Katrina Krasniqi | Drama, Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia. 87 mins.

The evocative title of this confident feature debut from Kosovo’s Katrina Krasniqi belies the toughness of the heroine in a family drama focusing on inheritance and male dominance. Vera (played with restraint by Teuta Ajdini Jegeni) is a calm but resolute woman who is not to be messed with, particularly when it comes to losing her home.

Vera is swift to point out that the only thing she has ever inherited is her bread-winning ability as a sign language translator, a talent that no one can steal, and gives her economic and personal freedom. She works for a TV news channel and lives in old-fashioned but comfortable surroundings in Prishtina with her husband, retired judge Fatmiri (Xhevat Qorraj).

But when he suddenly commits suicide, Vera faces the threat of homelessness due to Albania’s patriarchal society dictating that males automatically inherit. This taut character drama is a stinging indictment on a culture that places men at the head of the queue before women and children. After the funeral, Vera’s husband’s cousin, Ahmeti (Astrit Kabashi), shamelessly asserts how close he was to Fatmiri, so much so the judge had left him the family house. His side of the story is then endorsed by a disdainful crew of ‘village elders’ who refuse to countenance Vera’s righteous claim on the property. A series of sinister threats then ensue.

Vera’s daughter, Sara (Alketa Sylaj), is a single mother struggling for financial security of her own, which puts her at a disadvantage, confidence-wise, when auditioning for a part which she fails to land in the feature’s ‘play within a film’ structure.

Vera is of the old school of Kosovo women; keeping her own counsel, quietly firm and pragmatic, unlike the strung-out and emotional Sara. But in private she does shed a tear at the injustice of her predicament, while driving back on the brand new Prishtina-Skopje highway (a nod to the nation’s economic future that has clearly come at a price).

And she will work things to her advantage in the satisfying conclusion, proving her a force to be reckoned with in Doruntina’ Basha’s refined screenplay where a great deal happens behind closed doors. Vera’s emotional outlet comes in her dreams where she sees herself drowning in the titular sea, a potent motif with its clear implications. Another powerful scene pictures Vera and Ahmeti in a cafe for the deaf, where she states her argument loud and clear, and in no uncertain terms. MT

NOW IN COMPETITION AT MANNHEIM HEIDELBERG FILM FESTIVAL 2021 | Grand Prix WINNER TOKYO FILM FESTIVAL 2021

New Saudi Cinema | Red Sea Film Festival 6-15 December 2021

The Red Sea Film Festival will celebrate its inaugural edition from 6 -15 December 2021 in the world heritage site of Jeddah Old Town, flying the flag for a flourishing filmmaking scene in Saudi Arabia.

The New Saudi/New Cinema selection showcases the latest features from Saudi directors.

Junoon is the feature directorial debut of directors Maan B. and Yaser B. Khalid, played by Maan B., is a wannabe vlogger, who travels with his wife and best friend from Saudi Arabia all the way to Southern California, hoping to catch some great footage of paranormal happenings. When his wish comes true, the question becomes whether the three of them will have the presence of mind to turn the cameras off and flee.

Route 10 is the latest feature from director Omar Naim, co-written with Khalid Fahad. Jamal and Maryam are set to travel from Riyadh to attend their father’s wedding in Abu Dhabi, until the flight is cancelled, and they plan to make the journey by car instead. They underestimate the many hazards of the desert road, including an angry stranger whose terrifying pursuit has the brother and sister driving for their lives. Naim’s 2004 film The Final Cut, starring Robin Williams, was nominated for the Golden Bear for Best Film at the 2004 Berlinale.

Quareer – Red Sea Film Festival 2021

The omnibus film Quareer is a collection of five Saudi women’s stories. The five female filmmakers, Ragheed Al Nahdi, Norah Almowald, Ruba Khafagy, Fatma Alhazmi, and Noor Alameer explore themes of abandonment, neglect, control, abuse and shame in a conservative society. In a captivating portrayal of a harsh reality, these women don’t hesitate to carve out their own spaces.

Fay’s Palette is the feature directorial debut from writer and director Anas Ba-Tahaf and produced by the leading actor Hisham Fageeh. Fay lives in a cloistered apartment, which she can’t leave because her only obstacle to the outside world is her brother. She expresses all of her obsessions through painting, but when she orders a new paint palette, matters get complicated.

Becoming – Red Sea Film Festival 2021

Directors Sara Mesfer, Jawaher Alamri, Noor Alameer, Hind Alfahhad and Fatima Al-Banawi tell five women’s stories in Becoming which was produced by the Red Sea Film Festival Foundation. Stories of a female infertility healer, an 11-year-old girl raised in a conservative household, a disappearing bride, a forty-year-old hairdresser contemplating an abortion, and a divorced mother are beautifully illustrated in this omnibus film from the five female filmmakers.

Kayan directed by Hakeem Jomaah takes us to an almost deserted hotel where a couple is stranded with their baby, here they are confronted with their obsessions. This only strengthens the circle in which they find themselves.

Cinema Al-Hara directed by Faizah Ambah follows the lives of three teenagers whose lives are changed forever when cinema come to the old neighborhoods of Jeddah. Shot during the Festivals community outreach program Saudi filmmakers and talents hosted workshops that contributed to the performance of the teenagers in addition to film screenings in the heart of the city.

The inaugural edition of the Red Sea International Film Festival will run in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia from December 6-15, 2021

There is No Evil (2021)

Dir.: Mohammad Rasoulof; Cast: Ehsam Mirrhosseini, Shaghayegh Shourian, Kaveh Ahangar, Mohammad Valizadegan, Maytab Servati, Mohammad Sedighi, Jila Shahi, Baran Rosoulof; Germany/Iran/Czech Republic 2020, 152 min.

Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof (Manuscripts Don’t Burn) is under house arrest in his own country waiting for a prison sentence to be enforced. And to make matters worse, is forbidden to direct feature films.

Nevertheless, Rasoulof managed to escape all restrictions and shot There Is No Evil secretly, and had the copies smuggled out of the country where his film won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Festival in 2020. Anyone expecting a hurried guerrilla style film will be surprised: DoP Ashkan Ashkani’s measured wide screen images are intricately composed, and the tempo is either lyrical or unhurried in the four episodes which deal with the death penalty, part of the instrument of terror in Iran’s repressive regime.

The first episode (that takes the main title) shows an ordinary day in the life of an ordinary couple. We watch Heshmat (Mirrhosseini) leave his work place, fetch his wife Razieh (Shourian) from work, collect their spoilt daughter from school, visit the ailing grandmother, prepare for a wedding the next day, pay bills at the bank – with Heshmat having time to rescue a little cat trapped in the garage of his apartment block. It therefore comes as a surprise that Heshmat’s work is to carry out some of the many executions demanded by the Iran’s clerical fanatics aimed at punishing all forms of resistance. Needless to say, Heshmat’s ‘work’ room is as unremarkable as his life outside.

Episode two “She said, you can do it” is a thriller. Private Ponya (Ahangar) is in a room with five other soldiers. As dawn breaks Ponya will undertake his first hanging of the day, by kicking away the stool from the standing victim. Ponya does not want to blacken his soul, but there’s no other way of doing his job. His pleasant girl friend collects him in a car, and Ponya is overwhelmed by his own ‘courage’: triumphant music celebrates his escape from the deadly duty.

“Birthday”, the third segment, returns to the topic of hanging, this time again featuring a soldier whose duty is to kick the stool from under the execution victim: Javad (Valizadegan) agrees to perform the gruelling task in order to get three days off to propose to his girlfriend Nana (Servati). He arrives in the countryside, and washes himself in a stream. Chairs are set out in the garden of the country mansion where Nana is waiting for him, but the chairs are not for her birthday celebrations, as her father tells Javad, but for a memorial service for Keshurvaz, a local teacher and opponent of the Regime, who had been executed the day before. Javad is crushed, and later confesses to Nana. She is gentle but firm: saying good-bye to Javad for the last time.

The last episode, by far the longest, enigmatically called “Kiss Me”, features Baran Rosoulof (the director’s daughter) who plays Darya, a young medical student, living in the USA, and home to visit her uncle Mehr (Sedighi) and his wife Zaman (Shahi), who live in the remote Iranian countryside. Mehr suffers from TB, and is not practicing medicine any more, instead the couple lives from the proceeds of their bee-keeping. Darya is in permanent contact via mobile with her father Mansoor and her boy friend, but neither seems to be able to satisfy her many questions. Finally, Mehr admits the shocking truth about her origins which came about due to a lack of trust and disillusion with the brutal regime in another tragic family story.

Rasoulof avoids sentimentality directing with crisp emotionless precision and never dwelling on the overwhelming negativity. A near fatalistic air hangs above all four segments. “Kiss Me’, teeters on the brink of an emotional outburst but Rasoulof in the end opts for restraint, dwelling on a long shot in the beautiful mountain landscape. The feature was originally called by its direct translation “Satan doesn’t exist”, a more fitting title for this understated masterpiece. AS

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM 3 DECEMBER 2021

Playground (2021)

Die: Laura Wandel | Drama, Belgium, 62′

Bullying and the casual cruelty of children is the focus of this schoolground psychological thriller – Belgian’s Oscar hopeful in next year’s academy award.

Everyone remembers a school bully or being at the receiving end of acts of nastiness that caused emotional if not physical pain. The old adage “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me” was regularly trotted out by parents attempting to rationalise the situation but offered scant comfort as the next day at school loomed with trepidation.

Playground launches us straight into the tearful time seven year old Nora is having when her father (Karim Leklou) drops her off at the school gates. And we feel for her, and it’s a touching and impassioned and astonishingly subtle performance from Maya Vanderbegue. She will gradually toughen up during the course of Laura Wandel’s debut feature but you get the impression there is a steely, not altogether, healthy resolve behind her wilful behaviour in the finale stretch, the camera lingering at the kids’ eye level, as the adult world seems far away, irrelevant, any grown up authority unable to intervene or limit the taunts and vicious outbursts of a playground transformed into a gladiatorial arena from the scared children’s’ perspective .

Nora clings to her elder brother Abel (Günter Duret) who soon becomes an unreliable ally: he’s got his own adversaries to deal with in the schoolyard pecking order, and resents Nora’s babyish demands for sibling allegiance when he has to protect his own interests and not appear weak, or involve her by association. Seen through the naturalistic gaze of Frederic Noirhomme’s camera kids are just as complex as fully grown adults but not yet capable of guile and disingenuousness in their facial expressions, making them fascinating subjects to watch.

Eventually Abel will turn the tables on his child tormentors in this impressive first feature which explores how kids separate from the parental comfort zone and learn to fight their own battles – quite literally. MT

PLAYGROUND wins the Grand Prix in Tallinn’s Just Film | FIPRESCI prize for Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival and the Sutherland Prize for Best First Feature at the London Film Festival.

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Dir: George A Romero | Cast: Duane Jones, Judith O’Dea, Karl Hardman, Marilyn Eastman | US Horror, 96′

A cult film (actually similar in mood to Daphne du Maurier’s original short story ‘The Birds’) that still packs a punch over half a century later and richly deserves its cult reputation; despite having a lot to answer for, since it spawned so many gorier, inferior sequels. Needless to say, Night is one of the most successful independent movies ever made, grossing USD 30 million – over 263 times its budget, although none of the money – as usual – went to the people who actually made the film, due to a poor distribution deal and a copyright technicality waiving their rights to the proceeds.

It starts quietly, with the dialogue between two bickering siblings establishing from the outset the grimly black humour (like the rednecks who find an opportunity for sport in hunting ‘ghouls’; the word ‘zombie’ is never used).

Night of the Living Dead is actually extremely realistic for a horror film as every attempt made by the cast to escape fails. The handsome, level-headed hero is black (a fact never mentioned); a mixed blessing as every decision he makes is the wrong one and they’d actually have been better advised to have taken the advice of unattractive loudmouth Mr Cooper (played by co.producer Karl Hardman).

If one wanted to be really pretentious the film also contains it’s own Shakespearean ‘double time’ scheme, as it’s supposed to be charting the events of just one night yet the news bulletin from Washington – in which director Romero appears as a reporter – takes place in broad daylight.@Richard Chatten

A Thousand Fires (2021) IDFA

Dir.: Saeed Taji Farouky; Documentary with Thein Shwe, Hwte Tin, Zin Ko Aung; France/Switzerland/Netherlands/Palestine; 90 min.

The day to day life of a family in the Magway region of Myanmar, home to the largest number of unregulated oil fields, vividly contrasts the past and the present. Myanmar – the former Burma – was once best known for its paddy fields but nowadays farming provides only a minimal income in this shift from agrarian to industrial lifestyle.

Thein Shwe and Hitwe Tin are a married couple who, like thousands of others, followed the oil-rush. now eking out a meagre living from their ‘home-based’ production of less than a barrel day. Even though this is still more profitable than working the fields, the work is just as gruelling and unpredictable. And although rigs are machine-powered: ropes and wheels drive the piston – the operation is controlled manually, like in the 19th century, before drilling became industrialised. And the oil reserves are rapidly running out.

The opening sequence is a flaming blaze of fire setting alight a landscape full of derricks and make-shift huts. Clanging, humming and banging fills the air, mud and oil are everywhere, and humidity makes the work even more arduous with Thein Shwe constantly covered in grime. But the future doesn’t exactly look promising with the parents still doing the manual work, while their three teenage children were supposed to bring financial relief through their education. But they’re not much help on that front. One of the sons Zin Ko Aung still lives at home but is unreliable, having left High School without a degree he’s now drifting between the pass and the future although one of his qualified college friends earns good money as manager of a textile company.

Thein Shwe is highly critical of Zin but realises that the teenager should make the best of his talent for football. The local Soccer Academy coach offers him a place and his parents drive him there. But the Coach then tells Zin “to cut all ties with his family”.

Meanwhile the couple resort to their Buddhist faith and Fortune Tellers who offer a comfort of sorts: Thein Shwe being told not to be greedy. A somewhat scary ritual ‘Feed the Dragon’ is connected to their work environment.

Farouky keeps his distance and even avoids social commentary. What we see is the parents’ abiding love for their offspring – a universal theme that never changes. The old-fashioned 4:3 format creates an intimacy connecting us all with it common threads. Shot by the director with a vibrant colour palette and wonderful night sequences, when absolute peace replaces the clamour of the day, A Thousand Fires is unremarkable but moving just the same. AS

INTERNATIONAL DOC FESTIVAL AMSTERDAM | 17-28 NOVEMBER 2021| Locarno Critics’ Week Winner – Marco Zucchi Award 2021

The Boy with Green Hair (1948)

Dir: Joseph Losey | Wri: Baz Barzman | Cast: Pat O’Brian, Robert Ryan, Barbara Hale, Dean Stockwell | US Fantasy Drama 82’

This unique film begins with a scene set in a police station at night worthy of Edward Hopper, immediately followed by the surprise of seeing a smiling young Robert Ryan in Technicolor in a brown suit in the prologue and epilogue.

Wedded to a very specific moment both in the history of the world and of Hollywood, the film that emerged represents the competing input of several specific individuals; of whom one of the most decisive is probably the least mentioned: Betsy Beaton (1914-1977), author of the original short story published in the 29 December 1946 edition of ‘This Week’ magazine; who got $10,000 less for the film rights than Eden Ahbez for his twee hit song ‘Nature Boy’. (What the film is really about is summed up in a throwaway remark made by one of the kids, “How’d you like to have your sister marry somebody with green hair?”.)

Director Joseph Losey had made only one more feature film in colour before he and fellow blacklistee Ben Barzman worked again on another pacifist fantasy (this time in very stark black & white) about child victims of war, ‘The Damned’ (1961) – Barzman’s draft of which Losey discarded – which remains one of Losey’s most underrated films.

The fate of both films at the hands of the studios that originally produced them provide a fascinating footnote to the Cold War they eloquently bookend. @Richard Chatten

Naked (1993) Blu-ray and digital release

Dir.: Mike Leigh; Cast: David Thewlis, Lesley Sharp, Katrin Cartlidge, Greg Cruttwell, Claire Skinner, Peter Wight, Gina McKee; UK 1993, 131 min.

Winning Best Director Award at Cannes Film Festival in 1993, catapulted British writer/director Mike Leigh from progressive, but marginal filmmaker, into worldwide recognition with Naked. The dark portrait of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain also garnered the Best Actor Award for its main protagonist David Thewlis, and British cinema had its first internationally recognised director since the New British Wave of the 1960s.

When Leopold Blum, the main protagonist of James Joyce’ 1922 novel “Ulysses” roams the streets of Dublin, both he and the city had an identity. Seventy years on, Johnny (Thewlis) flees his hometown of Manchester for London, stealing a car, as much of a wreck as he is, and fearing retribution after a bout of violent sex with a woman in some dark corner, Johnny, in his late twenties, has long lost any sense of himself or his surroundings. Disenfranchised, he heads towards the capital, the citadel of Thatcherism: a home for nobody, not even yuppies, as we will learn.

And just as there was for Odysseus, there is a Penelope waiting for Johnny – not that he will recognise her. Heading for the home of his ex-lover, Louise (Sharp), a Mancunian just like Johnny, she made a move to London for a job that somehow never materialised. When Johnny arrives he meets Louise’s flat mate Sophie (a brilliant Katrin Cartlidge, who died only forty-one years old in 2002), spaced out on drugs. Johnny enjoys brutal sex, and is soon replaced by the landlord in Katrin’s bed, the suave Jeremy (Cruttwell), who also gets high on violent rape. Katrin, now nearly out of her mind, is saved by the arrival of Louise: the two women locking themselves in a room. Johnny has meanwhile wandered off into the night as nobody wants to listen to his verbal diarrhoea: endless provocations and put downs. On his nocturnal wanderings, Johnny meets the middle-aged security guard Brian (Wight), who guards an empty office block. Just to show he can, Johnny enters the flat of a middle-aged woman, who is the target of Brian’s ‘peeping tom’ longings.

For no reason at all, Johnny decides he rather would continue to put Brian down, but then along comes ‘cafe girl’ (a melancholy McKee). She is so miserable that Johnny leaves her flat willingly when she chucks him out. He returns to Louise’s, where Sandra (Skinner), the main tenant fetches up, having finished a nursing stint in Zimbabwe. Sandra gets rid of the obnoxious landlord (who turns out to be not so tough, when confronted by a determined woman), and bandages Johnny’s injured ankle, the result of a fight. Whilst Sandra recovers in the bath, Louise and Johnny sing together about ‘Rainy Manchester’, and we get a glimpse of what could have been, when Louise leaves to give in her notice, and return to Manchester.

To say that Naked is bleak is an understatement. DoP Dick Pope, who went on to collaborate with Leigh on seven more features, shows grim nights, invaded homes and a general wasteland in colours fit for a funeral. The acting is just perfect and Leigh always gives Johnny a redeeming way out, before piling on more self-inflicted misery. Johnny’s Alter ego Jeremy is just ahead in the male rat race, but driven by the same need to hurt women. A pitiless ending closes a journey into the underbelly of humanity. AS

CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF FILMMAKING, BFI RELEASES 4K BLURAY and DIGITALLY, INCLUDING BFI PLAYER on 29 November 2021

UK Jewish Film Festival 2021

Explore the latest crop of Jewish films screening in venues all over London many with talent interviews, panel discussions and other special in-person events.

Online screenings start from Friday 5 November. Films and pre-recorded events will be released at 6pm Monday – Saturday and 12pm noon on Sundays, and available for 72hrs from release date. Viewing permitted from the UK only.

For an overview of festival screening times download and print the film schedule here.

Eiffel (2021)

Dir: Martin Bourboulon | Cast: Romain Duris, Emma Mackey, Pierre Deladonchamps | France, Drama 108′

Martin Bourboulon’s elegant and ravishingly realised historical drama also goes by the amusing title of Eiffel in Love and sees the pioneering engineer who designed the iconic symbol of the city of Paris as a disillusioned romantic and national hero played dashingly here by Romain Duris.

In March 1889 Gustave Eiffel is sketching away at his drawing board way in the rooftops of Paris proud in the knowledge that his completed edifice, built for the ‘Exhibition Universelle’, had impressed everyone with its stature and daring design representing France’s return to power and industry after an era of ‘blood and tears’. A cutaway shows him receiving an American award for his framework design for the Statue of Liberty, three years previously, in 1886.

Now a household name, Eiffel feels a sense of professional achievement; the brief was to build a democratic monument that everyone could see: worker, child and aristocrat. It had been an ambitious and controversial undertaking based on Eiffel’s ingenious sand-based system, but dogged by setbacks, worker disputes and anger from local residents due to the disruption and enormity of the perilous building process, pictured in Matias Boucard’s majestic widescreen images.

The sumptuous social settings of his upper bourgeois circle of friends are overshadowed by a tumultuous and bittersweet private life revealing the engineer as a deeply sensual man, a proud father and widower – but destined to be unhappy in love. An early coup de foudre with the young seductrice and socialite Adrienne Bourges (the darkly attractive Emma Mackey) who he calls “spoilt” but soon impregnates, comes to an end when her father declares Eiffel ‘socially unsuitable’. So she goes on to marry his friend, the wealthy and influential Antoine de Restac (Deladonchamps) who supports Eiffel’s controversial tower scheme. His torrid love affair with Adrienne is then rekindled and runs throughout the film as a bittersweet motif in the rather choppy five-handed screenplay.

Some may see this slickly realised social drama as a unique tribute to France’s 19th century industrial power, trivialised by the doomed love story at its heart. Others may find the romantic interludes flesh out the maverick engineer’s backstory and add emotional freight and tension to the awe-inspiring construction procedural that gradually gains momentum through the sheer human endeavour that built a ‘staircase to infinity’ soaring 300 metres high over the rooftops of Paris, the tallest man-made edifice at the time. Despite its structural flaws – and whichever way you see it – Eiffel is an enjoyable and fitting homage to a man who was creative, romantic and cerebral. Certainly a hero to be celebrated. MT

ON RELEASE IN UK and IRISH CINEMAS from 12 August 2022

Every Single Minute (2021) Made in Prague Film Festival 2021

Dir.: Erika Hanikova; Cast: Documentary with Misco, Lenka and Michal Hanuliak; Czech Republic/Slovakia 2021, 80 min.

A new documentary looks at the merits and drawbacks of a controversial Czech educational system through one couple’s experience with their own son.

Czech writer/director Erika Hanikova (Nesvatbov) takes a year in the life of Misco Hanuliak and his parents Lenka and Michal. The couple opts for the rather dogmatic approach of the Kameveda (Comprehensive Multi-Developmental Education of Children) based on the success of founder Pavel Zacha, who managed to get his when son into the famous American National Hockey League (NHL) – a rare exception for a non-US player.

We meet Misco, who is still barely out of nappies when his parents fill every minute of his day with sport: ice-hockey, tennis, basket ball, BMX cycling, all forms of athletics and fitness training The Hanuliak home is a paradise for the sport obsessed, with plaques bearing the platitudes “Home, Sweet Home” and “Family, were life begins, and love never ends”. hanging over doorways. Bilingual Lenka, is a full time mother and coach, running around with a stop watch, checking her son’s progress in the various activities. Michal runs a business but still finds time to ‘coach’ Misco who has no friends, and only has time for the Kamevada obsessed members of his family

Whilst Lenka shows her son affection, this is usually coupled with him breaking just another record. The couple is strangely reserved with each, all conversation targeting Misco’s progress: more a work relationship than a love affair. Misco is certainly indoctrinated by his parents: at a visit to his grandparents he says “yack” to chocolate and “Yummy” to a carrot offered, whilst his grandfather congratulates him on his stance, telling him, that he won’t end up with a big belly like he himself.

Every obstacle can be overcome, with Lenka giving a good example, driving – to just another sport’s venue – in spite of a very high temperature. Even a visit to a beach is used for Misco to break another record. When the latter tells is mother, that he has seen a tramp fishing around in the bins of their apartment block, Lenka uses this as a didactic opportunity: The man has certainly not trained and worked enough, so he has nothing to eat. But if Misco trains and works hard, he will be able to buy himself everything he wants.

DoPs Simon Dvoracek and Lukas Milota adopt a “fly on the wall” approach with Erika Hanika staying a non-judgemental observer. A sad fate awaits Misco – and the many other children of this cult-like organisation which robs them of creativity and a identity thanks to a misguided group of parents, trying to give their children the success they never had, by making them into little “Stepford” acolytes. AS

MADE IN PRAGUE FILM FESTIVAL | LONDON 2021

Gaza Mon Amour (2021) VOD

Dir.: Tarzan Nasser, Arab Nasser; Cast: Salim Dau, Hiam Abbass, Maisa Abd Elhadi, George Iskandar, Manal Awad; France/Palestine/Germany/Portugal/Qatar 2020, 86 min.

Love and war on the West Bank where the refugee camp has become home for two generations of Palestinians. But politics plays second fiddle to this pithy personal story about the people who live here.

Fisherman Issa (Dau) is a grumpy, old man – and there are many reasons for single status. His best friend, Samir (Iskandar) has given all his savings to people smugglers, and will soon leave his family behind. Then there is Issa’s sister Manal (Awad), who wants to marry him off to a wealthy woman, dragging five suitable candidates into Issa’s small flat. But the fisherman has already fallen for Siham (Abbass), a seamstress, who lives with her divorced daughter Leila (Elhadi), who prefers university life to helping her mother. For Manal, this match would ruin her brother’s reputation: a divorced daughter and a bride who meddles in business – clearly a male prerogative.

Then things take a comic turn when Issa catches an old Greek statue in his net, instead of fish. He drags the man-sized object home, but drops it, and the rather large penis breaks off in the process. Issa takes the appendage to the jeweller, who offers him a good price, but Issa declines. Next day, the police search his home, uncover the statue (minus the missing piece) and Issa ends up in jail. The authorities ask an expert to value the piece of art, but when the academic claims it represents the God Apollo, he is ticked off: the use of the word ‘ God’ it not permitted. Religious scruples aside, a foreign museum offers a competitive price and would go higher if the missing piece is found. Issa gives it to the police, but only after having been promised a reward. Meanwhile his sister collects more ‘dirt’ on Manal, and there is nothing but offence left for Issa, he is simply an awkward bugger getting old, and lonely, so marriage seems his only option. Meanwhile Amir has had enough of it and leaves his wife and children behind. The other character with big dreams is Leila: she wants success on her own terms, and while she doesn’t want to be stuck at home with her mother, she loathes the thought of another repressive husband, despite her mother’s advice to settle down.

DoP Christophe Graillot shows Gaza as it is: a planner’s housing nightmare, put together decades ago as a transitional solution but now falling apart. And the inhabitants, are under just as much under the IDF cosh with their daily bombing raids as the business owners – Siham’s boss cuts her wages, telling her to be glad she’s not laid off – like others. And the electricity company charges exorbitant prices, even though regular black-outs disrupt everyday life. But then there is Issa, dreaming of love in midst of the chaos of this run-down but obdurate community.

With great performances by Dau and Abbass, Gaza Mon Amour is a slow-burning humanist tale of bizarre and absurd contradictions. AS

GAZA MON AMOUR IS PALESTINE’S OSCAR ENTRY IN THE 93rd ACADEMY AWARDS | NOW ON VOD AND in US theatres.

The Brain that Wouldn’t Die (1962)

Dir: Joseph Green || Cast: Jason Evers, Virginia Leith, Anthony La Penna, Adele Lamont | US Horror, 82

This is one of those films that makes me wish you could rate it with an exclamation mark rather than just a numerical score. That truth often surpasses fiction in strangeness is attested to by the fact that clients for cryogenic freezing who haven’t the funds to have their entire bodies frozen can have just their heads placed in storage; so after sixty years this film (like plenty of cheap sci-fi movies) isn’t as far-fetched as it might have seemed at the time.

I have no intention of ploughing through all the 168 reviews so far posted on the IMDb, but no one seems to have noticed that our latter day Frankenstein spends most of this film engaged in the same activity in earnest that Steve Martin later did (with the aid of cleaning fluid; where did I come across that recently?) for laughs in ‘The Man with Two Brains’.

With obviously post-synced dialogue (the scene in a dressing room culminating in a cat-fight sounds as if recorded in an aircraft hanger), but enhanced by location work in Manhattan and Tarrytown in upstate New York and an eerie jazz score arranged by Ed Craig, it was shot in 1959 (and bears a 1960 copyright date) under the title ‘The Black Door’, after which it took a couple of years to briefly hit screens.

It’s attitude to women may seem antediluvian now, but most of the men are a creepy bunch too (especially the photography club and burlesque audiences we see). You expect the heroine to be just a victim; but Virginia Leath shows a remarkable capacity for vindictiveness as the film proceeds to it’s gruesome finale. @Richard Chatten

NOW ON PLEX

The Beatles and India (2021) Evolution Mallorca International Film Festival

Dir: Ajoy Bose, Peter Compton | Doc, 95

Regaling the time when The Beatles went mad in India – where Beatlemania was already a thing – this new musical documentary digs up some archive treasures from from an era that launched flower power and all things surreal and psychedelic.

The title sequence kicks off with Rammi Kapoor doing his stuff accompanied by India’s equivalent band the Savages and a motley crew of exotic dancers in Bhappi Sonie’s 1965 film Janwar. We then cut back to archive footage of a bomb-struck Liverpool where the boys recall their how grim it was back then in England – has anything changed – and confirming that the grass is always greener when you venture to pastures new. As they did.

The Beatle story has already been rung dry of new juice but somehow Ajoy Bose and his co-director Peter Compton switch stuff around to make this fun and entertaining, and a tribute to how four young guys electrified the youth of their day, who up to then looked and acted pretty much as their parents had done until this zippy injection of counterculture ushered in the Swinging Sixties.

And the band’s massive success certainly did its bit in turning the spotlight on India which until then had never registered in the collective consciousness of the west (could they now please do something for climate change?).

Of course, George Harrison will always go down in history as being the most adventurous Beatle beating a path to India to take sitar lessons from Ravi Shankar in 1966. The others followed in 1968 captivated by the idiosyncratic sitar music and its history and transformational powers, and this is the thrust of this new film with its fascinating talking heads recalling their own memories of the band’s visit from the Indian perspective. MT

MALLORCA EVOLUTION INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | 27 Oct 27 – 2 Nov 2021

Cow (2021)

Director: Andrea Arnold | UK Doc 94′

Andrea Arnold returns to her native Kent for a first documentary feature that follows the daily life of a best-loved farmyard animal, the Cow. An intrusive almost wordless look that starts with the birth of a female calf to Luma, a long-lashed beauty with a glossy black and white splodged coat. Hooves first, the baby emerges and all we see is an enquiring eye looking round at the world in amazement, Luma wiping a lustrous tongue round her baby’s fluffy ear. But mother and calf are soon parted, the calf is taken away to the plastic teat of the farmer’s bottle. Dairy cow Luma will then be milked mechanically for our own consumption til the end of her life.

Cow has echoes of the 2012 shocker Leviathan where Lucien Castaing Taylor and Vanessa Paravel took an intense arthouse gaze at commercial fishing through the eyes of the fish themselves. Gunda took a similar wide-eyed approach: A human attempt to see things from the animals’ perspective. Here the cow becomes our friend and the human a cruel, opportunistic and exploitative interloper. When the black bull arrives to do his business, Luma carries on unimpressed. The only moment of bliss in her life is grazing in the bucolic peace of the summery Kentish meadows, chewing buttercups and lush grass in the moonlight. Overhead a plane comes into landing its lights flashing like an alien spaceship in her natural world.

The mass production of milk is big business but Arnold doesn’t bore us with the facts or figures, or even talking heads. The only heads here are furry bovine ones, and muddy bottoms caressed by swishing tails. Bemused, bewildered and beguiling the cows look out in wonder at a world of exploitation. And when Luma’s calf disappears into a plastic pen with a plastic teat, Luma moos loudly in protest as the two are parted. And as each of her calves is born Luma becomes more and more protective, or at least that’s what we hear from a disembodied human voice. Clearly cows have feelings too. But here she merely exists to produce milk – gallons of it – and that repetitive diurnal task is what leads us to the film’s shockingly blunt finale. MT

Andrea Arnold’s first feature documentary COW in cinemas on demand from 8 April 2022.

The Laureate (2021)

Dir.: William Nunez; Cast: Tom Hughes, Dianna Agron, Laura Haddock, Indica Watson, Fra Fee, Julian Glover, Patricia Hodge, Timothy Renouf, Christian Anholt; UK 2021, 108 min.

William Nunez chronicles three years in the life of British wartime poet Robert von Ranke Graves as a voyeuristic sex trip, the creative context being largely sidelined.

The focus is the late 1920s ménage-a-trois with his wife Nancy Nicholson and the American poet Laura Riding that gradually became a quartet when the Irish poet Geoffrey Phibbs joined the party. Graves was once of the most influential poets and writers of his generation, his WWI Memorial ‘Good-Bye to all That’ being a seminal text, yet with all that dramatic potential to mine, it does seem surprising that bedroom affairs and orgies take centre stage in The Laureate, Nunez portraying Graves as a straight man, rather neglecting his relationship with fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon who only has a cameo role.

Graves had several near-death experiences: as a boy he suffered from pneumonia and later, in the trenches, was left for dead returning shell-shocked from the front. His 1918 marriage to Nancy Nicholson, an early feminist resulted in four children but Graves was often plagued by writing-block due to his PTSD.

American poet Laura Riding visits the couple and their daughter Catherine (Watson) in a cottage in Oxfordshire where Riding at first seems more interested in Nancy than Graves. But soon, with Nancy’s open approval, Laura takes Robert to London’s Hammersmith where they indulge in some clumsily staged sex parties.

Laura, the archetypal destructive femme fatale, soon claims another male scalp: Irish poet Geoffrey Phibbs, a rather wooden performance by Fra Fee. But Phibbs is very taken with Nancy who has been left alone, renting a house boat on the Thames. Laura jumps out of a window when Phibbs fails to return her affections. Robert jumps after her. Both will survive and live together before separating in 1940. Phipps will divorce his artist wife and live with Nancy until 1934 in Oxfordshire, Nancy becoming a famous textile designer.

There is a great deal of name-dropping, with TS Elliot (Anholt) making a pass at Laura, promising to publish her writing if she goes to bed with him. Sassoon (Renouf) offers to help Graves with his writing block possibly for ulterior motives but then becomes miffed when Graves marries Nancy. Sassoon felt betrayed by Graves, believing their relationship should have meant more than the heterosexual relationship with Nancy.

In this sumptuously staged arthouse drama Nunez concentrates on salaciousness at the expense of the complex intellectual relationships between the writers: Riding continued to support Graves while he was writing “The White Goddess” (1948), even though their sexual relationship was over. Nunez also shamelessly re-constructs history: particularly where Graves’ daughter Catherine in concerned. And she only appears briefly to serve the narrative in showing Laura as an unfeeling mother who tries to trick the child into jumping out of the window, just to show her power.

NOW IN ARTHOUSE CNEMAS

Night Tide (1961) Mubi

Dir: Curtis Harrington | Cast: Dennis Hopper, Gavin Muir, Luana Anders, Linda Lawson | US drama 82’

Starring a fresh-faced young Dennis Hopper during his blacklisting following a row with the director Henry Hathaway; director Curtis Harrington was a film historian of some distinction who wrote glowingly of Val Lewton and this fanciful little Freudian psychodrama obviously draws upon Cat People.

Enhanced by glacial photography by newcomer Vilis Lapenieks and haunting music by veteran David Rakin; in addition to Hopper the unique cast includes Gavin Muir (an urbane English-accented presence at Universal during the forties), Marjorie Cameron (who had appeared with Harrington in Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome), and Luana Anders, later reunited with Hopper on Easy Rider

NOW ON MUBI

The Novice (2021)

Wri/Dir: Lauren Hadaway | Cast: Isabelle Fuhrman, Dilone, Amy Forsyth, Jonathan Cherry, Kate Drummond, Jeni Ross, Eve Kanyo, Nikki Duval, Charlotte Ubben, Sage Irvine, Chantelle Bishop | US Thriller 94′

The ‘sports or performance thriller ‘ is fast becoming a sub-genre in its own right: The Novice follows on from the recent skiing drama Slalom (2020) and The Coldest Game (2019), Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash and even the recent Israeli drama God of the Piano where the central protagonist is obsessed by chosen field, often to their own detriment.

In Lauren Hadaway’s rowing-related film, Alex Dall (Isabelle Fuhrman) skulls along in the dark waters of a river, desperate to beat all records, hellbent on her own performance despite being part of a team. Later, on the rowing machine, Dall is enters the ‘zone’ again high on adrenaline and challenging herself to the limit – ignoring an innate lack of talent but turning instead to strategy, hell bent on being better and better. Eventually her desire becomes a unhealthy obsession that somehow feeds on her soul, an all-consuming need to push the body further and further, until she feels physical pain in order to achieve her goal: the Varsity rowing team.

The Novice in actually a film about obsession rather than enjoyment – and Dall has to excel in everything she turns her hand to: be it a sport or a subject at college where she is a ‘Fresher’. Meeting teacher’s assistant Dani (Dilone) is the turning point – she is naturally gifted, relaxed and secure. Their chemistry sizzles for a time despite Dall’s lack of social skills – prickly and awkward – she is not popular, but her obsession soon takes over again and everything suffers in the wake of her drive to succeed. Dall is in flight from herself, restless, constantly on the move. Rowing gives her a ‘raison d’être’.

She does have one other ally in the shape of Jamie (Amy Forsyth), but soon even he is alienated, along with the others, in her desire to be the best. Her sporting prowess defines her, all the pain is worth suffering, or is it? Here – unlike the other films in the genre – there is no prize for Dani’s excellence – only the loneliness of extreme endeavour, and the misery of isolation. There’s a comfort in this mental anguish, it feels familiar – and that reinforcement is the reward for Dall, confirming her habitual unhappiness. This is the status quo that she’s grown used to since childhood. A welcome home from home.

Based on the director’s own experience The Novice is a convincing depiction of character implosion. And Fuhrman gives it her best efforts as Dall in an award-winning turn (Best Actress US Narrative at Tribeca 2021). Todd Martin keeps things suitably dank and murky with his watery visual aesthetic along with Hadaway’s confident direction in an unsettling study of an unbalanced mind. MT

NOW ON FIRETV, APPLETV, ROKU.

Jane by Charlotte (2021) Tribute to Jane Birkin

Dir/Wri: Charlotte Gainsbourg | Doc, 86′

In his rather tricksy biopic singer, photographer, actor and now director Charlotte Gainsbourg (1971-) attempts to unveil her legendary mother Jane Birkin (1946-2023), model, actor and enigmatic star of that kinky song “Je t’aime, moi non plus” by her rakish father Serge

Keen to retain her mystique, Birkin – who has died aged 76 – smirks winsomely behind a tousled mop of hair, murmuring breathy soundbites to retain her allure, her daughter tentatively teasing out episodes past and present to avoid embarassing or disrupting the fragile facade that created her mother’s original elusiveness. The two speak French, Birkin sometimes breaking into ‘Franglais’. Meanwhile we desperately clutch at straws hoping for a meaty backstory, something more tangible to feed on; not so much of that flirty love affair between Birkin and Gainsbourg but of the essence of Birkin herself, and how she came to be celebrity muse to maverick star Serge Gainsbourg.

Many of her fellow female celebrities of the sixties: Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton, Marianne Faithful, and the like, have retained that place in history, seared to our collective consciousness as legendary icons. But was their legendary status justified; did it have ballast – or where they just lucky to be around to capture the essence of a time when this cloud of creative counterculture known as the ‘swinging sixties’ burst onto the scene?.

The legendary Agnes Varda had a go at revealing Birkin in her upbeat film essay Jane B. by Agnès V. but managed to keep her friend under wraps. Will Charlotte do the same, or will her piece a ‘peek behind the scenes’ that manages to find something more intriguing. Sadly no.

Loose and louche, this turns out to be rather sketchy, to say the least. Mother and daughter potter around in the garden of Birkin’s picturesque seaside home accompanied by various small kids, the veteran star, now 74, attempting to be edgy by admitting to hacking off her hair in a flattering mirror, catching sight of the finished result in a less attractive reflection, and is horrified. But the stunt gave her singing career another lease of life when she performed onstage at the Paris Bataclan, proving she did have a real voice. Previously she had lip-synced to a playback tape.

From her various interviews over the years, and searching on Wikipedia, we know that Birkin was married to prolific film composer John Barry and had Kate who later committed suicide in 2013. She then gave birth to Charlotte with Gainsbourg and Lou Doillon with Jacques Doillon. The Hermes ‘Birkin’ bag was named after her and she wrote the “Munkey Diaries”, but what new gems are uncovered here? Not a lot in an arcane outing that feels like an intensely personal vanity project with its family footage and hushed mother/daughter chats, but nothing else. There are no archive clips or film excerpts to enrich the film for the entertainment and enlightenment of audiences young and older. Just a rather ‘off the cuff’ sortie that plays out as a series of snapshots of the two spending time together. They are clearly close, touchingly so, but also respective of one another’s talents and Charlotte never pushes the boundaries into real intimacy.

The most fascinating scene sees Jane and Charlotte swinging by Serge’s flat in the rue de Verneuil (Paris) which has remained untouched with his white shoes – even Gitane cigarettes and old cans of food (many having exploded!) – there for all to see. But that’s as interesting as it gets for the outsider. Another missed opportunity. MT

JANE BIRKIN 1946-2023

The Electrical Life of Louis Wain (2021)

Dir.: Will Sharpe; Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Claire Foy, Andrea Riseborough, Toby Jones, Amy Lou Wood, Haley Squires, Stacy Martin, narrated by Olivia Coleman; UK 2021, 111 min.

Louis Wain’s paintings of anthropomorphic cats changed the human perception of our feline friends forever. In his whimsical if uneven imagined biopic drama Sharpe raises the profile of the lesser known English artist in a conventional hyper-emotional approach that borders on a TV soap, but its solid cast and the wacky subject will certainly appeal to cat lovers, and Olivia Colman’s narration is exquisite.

The Electrical Life stays clear of any sensational rumours about the artist’s mental decline which seems to go hand in paw with Wain’s prolific output in In the early 1880s the shy and introverted Wain (Cumberbatch) is heading up the London home of a family of six women after the death of his father. Of his five sisters Caroline (Riseborough) would have been better suited suited to the task of pater familias but Louis does his best with his meagre artist’s income, leaving his secure teaching job, and counting the editor of the London Gazette, Sir William Ingram (Jones), as a client, along with the New York Hearst Newpapers where Louis visits in 1907. Marriage to the family governess Emily Richardson (Foy), who is ten years his senior – was a scandal in those days, but a move to Hampstead, where they adopt a stray cat, calling it Peter, changes Wain’s artistic outlook forever. Louis’ work is very popular, but as a businessman he is less successful and the tragic death of his wife puts a dint in his morale and ultimately leads to his downfall.

In fact mental health issues dog the entire family – his sister Mary (Squires) has to be committed to an asylum – and Louis himself suffers the same fate in 1924, entering the pauper’s ward of Springfield Hospital, Tooting. A year later, a campaign was launched to have the artist relocated to the Royal Hospital Southwark ((where H.G. Wells was a patron) and then the Napsbury Hospital near St. Albans, which had large gardens and a huge colony of cats. In the years before his death, Wain paintings entered a new stage: full of bright colours, flowers and intricate abstract patterns, the cats still the centre of his artistic universe. This repudiates views that Wain had suffered from schizophrenia, which would have resulted in a deterioration of his work. It is highly likely that he suffered from Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

DoP Erik Alexander Wilson choses a surreal approach, picturing Victorian England as a fanciful fantasy idyll echoed in Suzie Davies’s plush production design in the style of BBC Sunday afternoon classics. AS

IN CINEMAS ON New Year’s Day 2022

You Will Die at Twenty (2020)

Dir.: Amjad Abu Alala; Cast; Mustafa Shehata, Islam Mubarak, Mahound Maysara Elsaraj, Bonna Khalid, Talal Afifi, Amal Mustafa | Drama 103 min.

This first feature film from Sudanese director/co-writer Amjad Abu Alala is a melancholic rites of passage fable that has won awards across the board since Venice Film Festival 2019. Based on the short story “Sleeping at the foot of the mountain” by Hammour Ziada, it tells the story of Muzamil, who was destined at birth to live no more than the titular twenty years (according to a religious prophecy). With gorgeous images by DoP Sébastien Goepfert, the feature won the Luigi de Laurentis Award for Best First Film at the 76th Mostra 2019 in Venice.

In a village near the river Nile, Sakina (Mubarak) has given birth to a son, Muzamil. The Sheik and Village Eldest oversees the ceremony, but just when he wants to wish the baby a long and prosperous life, the dancer – reciting the incantatory verses – loses consciousness, his last word being ‘Twenty’.

From that time Muzamil will be known forever as the man who will die at twenty. His overprotective mother Sakina goes into mourning and wears black from the day of that fateful ceremony. The children tease him, calling him “Son of Death”. His father Alnoor (Afifi) reacts differently to the potential loss of his son.) leaves the family and becomes a nomad on the African continent.

When Muzamil (Shehata) reaches his teens, his childhood sweetheart, Naima (Khalid), tries in vain to make him marry her. Muzamil has a brilliant memory, and can recite the whole Quran in two versions. But he also has an admirer in the shape of local Imam. But Muzamil’s life changes when he meets Sulaiman (Elsaraj), a cinematographer who has travelled the world and has filmed his foreign adventures, as well the nightlife in Khartoum. He enthuses Muzamil with his zest for life and cinema and soon an internal conflict grows in Muzamil’s heart challenging his modern aspirations with his traditional values.

Alala choses a slow tempo to recount his tale making it clear where he stands in the fight between religious repression and human desire. With its naturalistic performances and sparse dialogue, this is pure visual storytelling and despite the rather maudlin subject matter You Will Die At Twenty is delightful to watch. AS

NOW ON MUBI

Red Sea Film Festival 2021 | Treasures

The Treasures selection celebrates seminal and innovative classics from the Arab world and beyond, many of which will be seen for the first time in Saudi Arabia on the big screen at The Red Sea International Film Festival (RedSeaIFF), which will host the first edition from 6-15 December.

The Treasures section celebrates award-winning and ground-breaking classics from both the Arab and international world with a renewed vigour and in an exciting new context.

The 1994 classic Strawberry War, directed by legendary Egyptian director Khairy Beshara, tells the story of Thabet, played by the renowned Sami El Adl. Thabet is a wealthy businessman who owns multiple factories, and lives alone in his huge mansion. After losing his only son, Thabet doesn’t know the meaning of happiness anymore. He meets the peddler Hamama, played by Mahmoud Hemeida, and Farawla, played by iconic actress Yousra, and they decide to go to the mansion, where they embark on a journey to discover the true meaning of happiness. A special film for its unique story, fantastical setting, and its sense of humour, the film has been restored with the support of the Red Sea Film Festival Foundation.

Raafat El-Mihi’s 1995 classic A Little Love Much Violence is considered one of the most daring in the history of Egyptian cinema. Personally selected by the iconic Laila Eloui, one of most versatile actresses of her generation, who delivers a powerhouse performance in the film. Based on the novel by Fathi Ghanem, the narrative is a two-stranded affair, one of which is light-hearted, the other more realist with its focus on well-being. A son decides evade his father’s control and divorce his wife from their arranged marriage. He then starts a relationship with another girl, in pursuit of influence and power. The film breaks several cinematic and dramatic traditions through various elements, making it a truly iconic piece of work.

The 1979 Bengali-language mystery The Elephant God (Bengali: Joi Baba Felunath) is one of the most popular films from Indian director Satyajit Ray, who is widely considered to be one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. The story introduces a private investigator, Felu, who arrives in the holy city of Benares for a holiday. On a visit to a strange holy man, Felu is told that a rare, valuable gold statuette of Ganesh, the Elephant God, has been stolen. Felu is engaged to unravel the mystery of the missing Ganesh and, thus, the adventures begin.

Directed by notable director Henry Barakat, the 1959 Egyptian drama The Nightingale’s Prayer is based on the novel by modernist writer Taha Hussein. The film tells the story of two young women and their mother who are banished from their idyllic, isolated village by an uncle who is shamed by his brother’s adulterous behaviour. The film competed at the 10th Berlin International Film Festival, and was selected as the Egyptian entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the 32nd Academy Awards. The film was personally selected by filmmaker Haifaa Al Mansour who cites Henry Barakat as an inspiration

Wadjda is the 2012 feature directorial debut of Saudi Arabian writer and director Haifaa Al-Mansour. It is through the escapades of Wadjda, a young teenager of twelve, that the audience discovers daily life in the suburbs of Riyadh. Through the fate of several female characters, the film approaches the different aspects of the female condition, such as forced marriage or polygamy. The multi award winning film was selected as the first ever Saudi Arabian entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the 86th Academy Awards, and was nominated for Best Foreign Film at the 2014 BAFTA Awards.

1970 rare classic The Choice is among the most essential films of legendary Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine. The masterpiece was restored by the Red Sea Foundation with the support of Egypt’s Ministry of Culture in 2020. Written and directed by Chahine, the film tells the story of Sayed, a famous writer and social climber, who, when he learns of his twin brother’s death, delays his life plans in order to find his brother’s killer. The film is an immersion into a human soul that appears calm on the surface, but has constant turmoil lurking beneath.

French writer and director Thierry Frémaux’s 2016 documentary Lumière! takes audiences back to witness the birth of cinema. Frémaux, director of the Institut Lumière and of the Cannes Film Festival, sheds light on all the dimensions that cinema has occupied and continues to occupy in everyone’s daily lives, by inviting the audience to witness the birth of Cinema and the genius of the Lumière brothers.

The Red Sea International Film Festival will also pay tribute to one of the most popular French actors, Jean-Paul Belmondo. Unforgettable in A bout de souffle, The man from Rio or Itinéraire d’un enfant gâté, Jean-Paul Belmondo has played under the direction of the greatest European cineastes. Beginning with Jean-Luc Godard and the New Wave, it did not take long for him to take the turn of comedy and action film, with more than 80 films to his name. The Festival pays homage to this exceptional actor by presenting a montage of his main roles, prepared by the Lumière Institute, and by programming Pierrot le Fou in a restored version.

Pierrot le Fou, the 1965 classic from French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, is based on the 1962 novel Obsession by Lionel White. Selected as the French entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 38th Academy Awards, the film tells of the adventure of Ferdinand, played by Belmondo, cynically married to a rich woman, who decides one evening to flee his dreary existence with Marianne, a girl once loved and found by chance. This joyous and desperate run through sunny France gives the film the appearance of a road movie, tinged with musical comedy, film noir and flamboyant melodrama.

The inaugural edition of the Red Sea International Film Festival will run in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia from December 6-15, 2021.

Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival 2021

Hungary is to be the focus of this year’s Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) announces Hungary as the Focus Country for this year’s 25th edition of the festival. The 25th celebration will open with Ildikó Enyedi’s ninth feature The Story of My Wife, which premiered in competition at Cannes this year, with 18 more Hungarian films screening as part of the In Focus: Hungary programme, including 10 films in a special archive section and 8 new films representing the best of current Hungarian cinema.

Eight current feature films will be shown at PÖFF25, including Gábor Fabricius’ Erasing Frank, which premiered in Venice this summer, Kornél Mundruczó’s Evolution, which premiered in Cannes, and Péter Bergendy’s Post Mortem, Hungary’s entry for the Academy Awards. The archive programme includes cinematic gems from acclaimed directors including Ildikó Enyedi, Miklós Jancsó, Márta Mészáros and István Szabó.

The Story of My Wife is set in the 1920s and sees a middle-aged Dutch seaman betting his cynical business partner that he will marry the next woman who comes into the café they’re sitting in, and unfolds from there in an adaptation of the Hungarian poet Milán Füst’s novel of the same title – oosely based on the legend of the cursed Flying Dutchman.

The Hungarian theme continues with György Pálfi’s Perpetuity. And another, Wild Roots, will screen as part of the Just Film sub festival.

Opening Film / In Focus: Hungary

The Story Of My Wife / A feleségem története (2021, Hungary/Germany/Italy/France, Director: Ildikó Enyedi)

Official Selection – In Competition / In Focus: Hungary
Perpetuity (2021, Hungary, Director: György Pálfi)

In Focus: Hungary Programme

Erasing Frank (2021, Hungary, Director: Gabor Fabricius)
Evolution (2021, Germany/Hungary, Director: Kornél Mundruczó)
Post Mortem (2021, Hungary, Director: Péter Bergendy)
Things Worth Weeping for (2020, Hungary, Director: Cristina Grosan)
Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time (2020, Hungary, Dir: Lili Horvát)
Cream (2019, Hungary, Director: Nóra Lakos)

In Focus: Hungary / Just Film Programme

Wild Roots (2021, Hungary, Director: Hajni Kis)

In Focus: Hungary Archive Programme

Merry-Go-Round / Körhinta (1955, Director: Zoltán Fábri)
Current / Sodrásban (1963, Director: István Gaál)
The Round-Up / Szegénylegények (1965, Director: Miklós Jancsó)
Love / Szerelem (1970, Director: Károly Makk)
Sindbad / Szindbád (1971, Director: Huszárik Zoltán)
Nine Months / Kilenc Hólnap (1976, Director: Márta Mészáros)
Mephisto / Mephisto I-II. (1981, Director: István Szabó)
Son of the White Mare / Fehérlófia (1981, Director: Marcell Jankovics)
The Midas Touch / Eldorádó (1988, Director: Géza Bereményi)
My 20th Century / Az én XX. századom (1988, Director: Ildikó Enyedi)

Tallinn Black Nights | 12-28 November 2021

No Time to Die (2021)

Dir: Cary Joji Fukunaga | Wri: Neil Purvis Cast: Daniel Craig, Ana de Armas, Rami Malex, lea Seydoux, Lashana Lynch, Ralph Fiennes | Action Drama 163’

It seems rather ironic that the latest James Bond was thrice postponed because of Covid, since one of many plot elements is a weaponised virus. No Time to Die is being declared the best Bond movie ever; although I still feel that accolade belongs to From Russia with Love, and Goldfinger easily the most fun).

A nightmare rather than the usual 007 daydream, Daniel Craig’s James Bond is what ‘The Iron Mask’ was to Douglas Fairbanks’ D’Artagnan, with Craig’s Bond looking much older than before, and continuing to bear the scars from the pre-credits sequence throughout the film that follows.

There are three eye-popping action scenes (and the film is thankfully free of the unrelenting use of steadicam that is such a trial in modern films), but Ana de Armas is grievously underused as the nearest thing it has to a traditional Bond girl. Much more of the massive 163 minute running time is devoted to hushed talk in which little of Phoebe Waller-Bridges’ much-vaunted wit is in evidence; while the villains’ lair owed more to the German silent cinema than the swinging sixties, housing poisonous plants straight out of the final scenes of You Only Live Twice (the book not the film); likewise the chilling confrontation with a returning Christoph Waltz as Blofeld briefly wheeled on like Haghi in Spione. @Richard Chatten

The Exam | A Vizsga (2011)

Dir.: Peter Bergendy; Cast: János Kulka, Zsolt Nagy, Péter Scherer, Gabriella Hámori; Hungary 2011, 89min.

Hungarian director Peter Bergendy has made a taut B-picture of Norbert Köbli’s script about the mechanics of the Hungarian Secret Service under Stalinism.

Bergendry previous feature, Post Mortem, screened at the 2021 London FrightFest, and will have another viewing at Tallinn Black Nights this November – so we’re not surprised to discover this is much more of a horror film than a thriller: the director actually majored in psychology with a thesis entitled ‘Psychology of the Horror Film’.

Set over twenty hours on December 24th, 1957 in Budapest, Andras Jung (Nagy) is a teacher of German and also a low level informer for the Hungarian Secret Service. A year after the failed uprising, the Secret Police is busy cleaning up their ranks, hunting down remaining sympathisers of Miklos Rakosi in particular. Senior officer Pal Marko (Kulka) is in charge of a unit testing Jung, Marko’s protégé. Marko had been exchanged during the war for a French spy and was greeted personally by NKDW chief Lavrenti Beria on his return.

The young Andras is in a relationship with Eva Gati (Hámori), who has fought the Secret Police during the uprising in the ‘battle’ of Corvin Lane. Or has she? We doubt her more and more, because Jung’s flat is full of surveillance microphones, his conversations are listened to by Marko and his fellow spies, one of them the sinister Emil Kulscar (Scherer) – and Jung himself tapes a conversation he has with Marko. All will be revealed at the end, when a grand inquisitor in the underground HQ of the Secret Police will listen to the testimonies of the trio, with Jung’s tape of his conversation with Marko playing a central role to determine who will be the victim of the charade.

Jung’s flat and the one rented by Marko and the Secret Service members are the main locations, and DoP Zsolt Tóth’s grim images of black and brown are symbolic for a feature, where even the snow in Budapest’s streets is made to look grey. There are beautifully dark images of the banks of the Danube, and the huge cars are looking more like tanks than automobiles. All of the protagonists are ambivalent, or hiding their true motives: to survive, one has to denounce friends or lovers, just to stay on the right side of the permanent shifting Party line. A desperate portrait of a society where lies are the common currency for staying alive, told sparsely and without any glimmer of hope or redemption. AS

COURTESY OF HUNGARIAN FILM CENTRE LONDON

The Deep Blue Sea (2011) Viennale

Wri/Dir: Terence Davies | Cast: Rachel Weisz, Tom Huddleston, Simon Russell Beale | UK Drama 108′

Terence Davies (now in his mid seventies) is not a prolific director, his ‘uncommercial’ style of filmmaking often lacks support on the financing front. But rather like John Schlesinger, he knows how to connect with his audience in a deeply affecting way largely due to clever casting and a feel for dramatic timing and editing, and his judicious choice of music.

Of Time and the City (2008) was a melancholy documentary about the sad decline of his hometown, Liverpool. There followed two literary adaptations of American novels set in different eras: John Kennedy Toole’s The Neon Bible and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth.

The Deep Blue Sea, is a rather good version of a play by Terence Rattigan, made after Davies went through a fallow period of nearly a decade during which he retreated into Shakespeare and his favourite composer Bruckner. The Browning Version and Separate Tables had already been done, so Davies approached The Deep Blue Sea with some trepidation after so long behind the camera. But luck was on his side on the casting front – Rachel Weisz accepted the project almost immediately and Tom Hiddleston knew just how to create the voice of the 1950s Battle of Britain hero in audition and became a perfect choice to play a rather bumptious young officer feeling at a loose end, like many soldiers after the end of the war. London had suffered devastation and a shortage of housing stock led to many people finding themselves in reduced circumstances in miserable rooms let by unsympathetic landladies. And this is where Lady Collyer (Rachel Weisz) fetches up having left her judge husband Sir William (Simon Russell Beale) for a torrid but doomed affair with the dashing young Freddi Page (Huddleston) .

Rather like Gillian Anderson’s fated young socialite in House of Mirth, Lady Hester Collyer is determined to shoot herself in the foot, claiming love as the reason. And we very soon appreciate her feelings of lust as a hungry woman in her forties falling for the charms of her blue-eyed toyboy but, very soon also realise it ain’t gonna work due to his callousness and puerile state of mind (which partly leads to her suicide attempt by the gas fire). In contrast her judge husband’s sense of decency almost feels appealing, although he readily admits to a lack of emotional intelligence despite his field of work being all about the assessing the human mind. He also has an acerbic and overbearing mother who has somehow emasculated him. Never good for a marriage.

The film is bookended by two minor love affairs: that of the stolid high court judge for his much younger wife, and the landlady’s love for her war-crippled husband (“you we’re always a dish”) she assures him lovingly in a back room. One of the best scenes involves her having a quiet chat with Hester in the hallway after this romantic sadness of her own emerges, and she quickly points out that love isn’t a question of heart-stopping lust but of “wiping their arse and moving on together with dignity” when the time comes.

Once again silence combined with stealthy camera movements creates a perfect meditative balance that opens in the dingy bedsit in a dilapidated stucco-fronted terrace and proceeds almost entirely in domestic surroundings. And although the loving scenes with Weisz and Huddleston are electric, somehow their tantrums feel tiresome. The real emotion lies in the other two scenarios which are spare and dignified. The films ends in the same way as the play, beside the fireplace. But this time the gas is lit – marking Hester’s resignation and acceptance of her future..MT

SCREENING AS PART OF A Terence Davies RETROSPECTIVE | VIENNALE 2021

The Great Freedom (2021) MUBI

Fir: Sebastian Meise | Drama 104’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ON MUBI FROM 11 MARCH 2022

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

Dune (2021)

Dir.: Denis Villeneuve; Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Zendaya, Stellan Skarsgard, Javier Bardem, Charlotte Rampling, Josh Brolin, Jason Momoa; USA/ Canada 2021, 155 min.

The forth realised adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 cult novel Dune, directed by Québécoise filmaker Denis Villeneuve (2049) is big news – with a budget of 165 million dollars Warner Brothers have taken a gamble in the hope that streaming on their platform HBO Max and good receipts at the cinema box office will guarantee a sequel covering the second half of Herbert’s book.

After the David Lynch version of 1984 was butchered by the producers (from 180 to 137 minutes), and two TV mini-series, Villeneuve’s almost two hour version could be seen as a mere set-up for the all-revealing two-and-half hour denouement – or even part of a new franchise. But Part Two is not a certainty at all, if you cast your mind back to the troubles Alejandro Jodorowsky had in the early 1970s, when even Salvatore Dali failed to get the Chilean helmer’s project off the ground, spawning only Frank Pavich’s 2013 doc exploring its contingent failure.

To their credit, Villeneuve and co-writers Eric Roth and Jon Spaiths, have played down only the background of the saga, so that non-aficionados of the Herbert novel can enjoy the more entertaining intrigues and endless battles: in the far, far future humankind has conquered the universe due to a super, life-enhancing spice that super-charges the brain endowing humans with preternatural powers of rapid mobility in space travel, that today would take millions of years. The downside is that this super-dust, called Spice, is only found on the planet Arrakis, aka Dune, where giant sandworms contribute to a very inhospitable environment.

The indigenous population known as Fremen (read Free Men) are engaged in an ongoing battle to combat the colonisation of the Emperor’s armies. Enter the House of Atreides, a noble family who is ordered by the Emperor to take charge of Dune and its rebellious population. They take over from the House of Harkonnen, but it is not clear if the Atreides are getting a promotion, or are just a toy in the hands of the Imperial ruler. Duke Leto (Isaac) of Atreides, his concubine Jessica (Ferguson) and their son Paul (Chalamet) arrive on Dune, only to be ambushed by evil Baron Harkonnen (Skarsgard). Paul’s mother belongs to a tribe of women known as the ‘Bene Gesserit’,who have been engaged for centuries in creating “The One” – but it’s still uncertain if Paul is really this long-awaited saviour.

Jessica trains her son in the art of “Voice”, which allows its user total mind control. Paul is being prepared for battle by Gurney (Brolin) and Idaho (Momoa), so he can lead the stranded family on their way to salvation on Dune, whilst taking the Spice and dreaming of Chani (Zendaya), a Fremen woman, whom we only see in Paul’s dreams. Will the enigmatic Paul and Jessica become allies of the Fremen, or is this just the start of hostilities with the black-clad Harkonnen?

The two-part script structure is clearly flawed but Villeneuve, DoP Greig Fraser and PD Patrice Vermette have created a totally unique universe where sandstorms (aka climate change?) pose an even greater threat than the mayhem caused by human armies. This is brutalist futurism where helicopters fly like birds with insect wings, and the Harkonnen army, with their hairless, pale faces bring to mind the SS ‘Angels of Death’. But the graphic descriptions of the battle scenes often feel repetitive and gradually lose their power to shock, becoming ineffectual. DUNE is certainly a visual masterpiece, so let’s hope the producers’ pay-as-you-go strategy pays off with Part II. Shame though the the whole thing couldn’t have been down in one go. AS

NOW In CINEMAS

The Shadow Player | Henrik Galeen – A Film Author of Weimar Cinema – Viennale 2021

This year’s Viennale celebrates the work of Henrik Galeen (1981-1949) with a retrospective entitled The Shadow Player | Henrik Galeen – A Film Author of Weimar Cinema

The writer, director and actor’s name often appeared in accounts of the ‘heroic’ era of the German silent cinema between the wars: it was Galeen, for example, who actually came up with the title for ‘Nosferatu’ in 1921. He still seemed enigmatic enough nearly fifty years ago when David Thompson wrote that if still alive he was then 93 years old (he actually spent the war years in New York, was one of Siegfried Kracauer’s sources when the latter was writing ‘From Caligari to Hitler’ and died in Randolph, Vermont on 30 July 1949). In 2014 German critic Rudiger Suskind made a documentary From Caligari to Hitler

Born Heinrich Weisenberg to a Jewish family in Lemberg, Galicia on 7 January 1881, formerly an assistant to Max Reinhardt and a stage actor, Galeen first entered films as an actor and then as a scriptwriter from 1913. The following year he co-directed with Paul Wegener the first screen version of The Golem (1915) in which he also appeared as an actor.

After the Great War, Galeen scripted the macabre classics Nosferatu (1922) and Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (1924). Although he played no part in Wegener’s ‘prequel’ to The Golem in 1920, Galeen in 1926 directed an acclaimed remake of Wegener’s film debut Der Student von Prag with Conrad Veidt and Werner Krauss, and was reunited with Wegener himself the following year to make Alraune, from Hans Heinz Ewers’ notorious novel, and made a series of thrillers starring Harry Piel.

The Final Verdict – Image courtesy of Viennale Film Festival

After spending the years 1928-31 in Britain where he filmed After the Verdict (1929), a crime drama adapted by Hitchcock’s wife Alma Reville from a novel by Robert Hichens (the first film to be shot in Wimbledon), he returned to Germany to make his only talkie, a spy thriller called Salon Dora Greene (1933). The rise of Nazism forced Galeen to flee Germany for good, finally settling in the United States. @Richard Chatten

HENRIK GALEEN – A FILM AUTHOR OF WEIMAR CINEMA | VIENNALE 2021

Paris Frills | Falbalas (1945) Bluray

Dir.: Jacques Becker; Cast: Raymond Rouleau, Micheline Presle, Jean Chevier, Gabrielle Dorziat, Françoise Lugagne; France 1944/5, 111 min.

Jacques Becker only completed thirteen feature films but still enjoys a near mythical reputation. Nouvelle Vague directors like Godard and Truffaut wrote enthusiastically about his dramas Goupi Mains Rouges and Le Trou in ‘Cahiers’, vaunting his work as far superior to the traditional French cinema offerings they often lambasted.

Becker started his film career as assistant to Jean Renoir, (Toni, Partie de Campagne), before finding his own style mainly in dark crime features mining his experiences in the Resistance in the South of France. He began shooting FALBALAS (‘Furbelow’ or trimming for a woman’s petticoat) in 1944 after the Liberation, but the release had to be postponed well into 1945.

Nineteen-year old Micheline Lafourie (Presle) has come from Reims to Paris to marry the much older business man Daniel Rousseau (Chevier). Whilst living with her ten (!) cousins in a Paris mansion, she meets couturier Philippe Clarence (Rouleau), a good friend of Daniel. Philippe is a womaniser, but worse, treats his nearly all female staff abominably. The mature fashion house manager Solange (Dorziat) is the only one who stands up to her boss, treating him like a little boy – a nasty one, at that. Not so lucky is Clarence’s ex, Anne-Marie (Lugagne), who is still in love with Philippe, even though he treats her like a doormat. Philippe is captivated by Micheline and seduces her – promising to elope with her. A few days later, he has changed his mind, encouraging Micheline to marry Daniel as planned. Micheline, scorned but determined not to let it show, decides to return to Reims alone. And her nonchalance towards Philippe makes him think again: he is once again infatuated and claiming to be in love for the first time. Daniel finds out about the affair, but it is too late. Micheline has made up her mind to teach Philippe a lesson on the launch of his new collection. The dramatic ending is one of the finest piece of noir cinema – the fashion world overall pictured as glamorous but shallow and empty. Falbalas plays out in the style of the sub-genre, so appealing with its ravishing sets and elegance it later convinced Jean Paul Gautier to become a couturier.

Rouleau is in his element as the suave and soulless perfectionist: a misogynist par excellence. DoP Nicolas Hayer (Orphee) conjures up immaculate black and white images of Philippe’s domaine: the physical and psychological exploitation in stark contrast to the beauty of the garments and the soigné clientele. Editor Marguerite Renoir (who took Renoir’s name even though they were not married) keeps up a breath-taking tempo, much more suited to a thriller than a graceful fashion feature. But the ending is one of the greatest achievements of post-war French cinema. AS

NOW ON BLURAY

In Front of Your Face (2021)

Dir: Hong Sang-soo | South Korean, Drama

The subtle South Korean director teases us once again with this elegant arthouse gem that follows a day in the life of middle-aged actress Sangok, back from America to visit her sister Jeongok (Cho Yunhee) in their hometown of Seoul. A first walk in the park together reveals their very different personalities. But there’s an enigmatic quality at play and a feeling that Sangok (Lee Hyeyoung, a leading light from the 1980s) is leaving a lot our imagination, until an unexpected tragicomic twist occurs in the final denouement.

After the walk Sangok agrees to meet for lunch with a lightweight film director called Jaewon (Kwon Haehyo). All this is plays out with Sangok’s voice-over monologues giving us small clues as to her state of mind. Clearly Jaewon is a big fan of the Sangok’s work and he surprises the actress with intense recollections of a particular film she finds it harder to remember, but feigns flattery nevertheless. After she declines an offer to star in his next film, Jaewon quietly dissolves into tears during a cigarette break outside the cafe, clearly deeply affected by her rejection. The two then leave during a sudden thundery downpour, as the camera watches them tentatively sharing another cigarette.

The final reveal comes the following morning when Sangok wakes up to find a mobile message from Jaewon, It makes her laugh out loud. Her upbeat approach is gently philosophical. Clearly the benefits of experience have once again trumped youth: reality is there for all to see. MT

ON RELEASE from 23 September 2022 | Reviewed at VIENNALE 2021

Brazil Indigenous Film Festival 22 – 24 October 2021

Inspired by the UN Climate Summit this first edition of the Brazil Indigenous Film Festival takes place in London’s ICA cinema on the Mall from October 22 -24, featuring a dozen or so features and shorts from indigenous filmmakers sharing their stories – both fact and fiction – from all over Brazil.

Twelve films, in six languages, from seven different groups will be showing in the three-day festivalbetween 22 – 24 October 2021. The programme is split into three strands: The Right toEarth combines work on different forms of Indigenous struggle – symbolic, practical, political, mythological – for the right to land; The Ritual Dimension documents and celebrates the Maxakali andKisedjê in rural Brazil, exploring their political rituals, and Orality, Film and History brings historical, social and philosophical perspectives from the Parakanã, Guarani–Nhandewa and Guarani–Kaiowácommunities.

A few highlights from the programme: Equilibrium, an ethno-media video art by Tupinamba journalist and educator Olinda Muniz Wenderley. The female filmmaker explores through an experimental narrative the connection of the Indigenous People with the Earth and their spirituality. Two animations explore colours of nature and traditions. The Celebration of the Spirits tells the saga of a Guajajara man, who, during a search for his lost brother, ends up on a voyage of self-discovery.

Other films to look out for are Tatakox, a hypnotic ritual film that documents celebrations evoking the spirits of dead children, and Nũhũ yãgmũ yõg hãm: This land is our land!, winner of the Best International Film prize at this year’s SheffieldDoc/Fest.

The festival also presents two productions from Alberto Alvares: Dream of Fire, an interpretation of a dream – an omen of disease, according to Guarani Nhandewa traditions, and Tekowenhepyrun: The Origin of the Soul, is based on the belief that the soul is the connection between the body and the spirit. Alberto has had works exhibited in Arts Biennales and international film festivals.

FreeLandCamp a documentary by photographer and anthropologist Edgar Kanaykõ, portraying the massive 2017 demonstration organised by APIB, when diverse ethnic groups got together in the country’s capital, Brasília to demand their rights. Ava Yvy Vera: The Land of the People of Lightning, is a depiction of the Guarani–Kaiowá peoples’ struggle for land rights that gained international recognition after the release of a joint letter in 2012, protesting against the assaults and advances of Brazilian agribusiness.

The thought-provoking Zawxiperkwer Ka’a explores the activities of the Guardians of the Forest, a group that has been fighting against illegal logging and working to protect the Awá-Guajá, one of the most threatened isolated Indigenous groups on the eastern coast of the Amazon.

This festival has the support of APIB, a national reference of the Indigenous movement in Brazil. Raising international awareness about Indigenous peoples as protagonists in the fight against climatechange and resisting the destruction of their traditional ways of living is urgently needed.

Festival Schedule:

Friday, 22 Oct @18h30 (Opening Night followed by a Q&A with festival curators and special guests)

Saturday, 23 Oct @16:20

Sunday, 24 Oct @16:20

Full programme can be seen here.

The Gravedigger’s Wife (2021)

Dir.: Khadar Ayderus Ahmed; Cast: Omar Abdi, Yasmin Warsame, Kadar Abdout Aziz Ibrahim.Somalia/Finland/Qatar/Germany/France 2021, 82 min.

The Gravedigger’s Wife was the first Somali film ever to be nominated for the Oscars in the Foreign Features category. It takes place in Djibouti City, the capital of the smallest country on the African continent, where employment – or the lack of it – is a major issue for nearly a million who live in and around the capital.

Guled (Abdi) and his wife Nasra (Warsame) are true romantics: they eloped as teenagers, Nasra’s family wanting her to marry an older, wealthy man. Even now, they only have eyes for each other, their teenage son Mahad (Aziz Ibrahim) has the freedom to roam the streets with his mates, but his truanting only comes to light after he has missed months of school.

Guled competes with his friends for the ‘bounty’: they are all lined up at the gate of the local hospital, ready to chase the arriving ambulances. Guled and Nasra never had much money, he left his herd of goats to his brother in their home village, after he and Nasra were expelled for disobeying the wishes of the elders.

The couple light-heartedly “borrows” a goat, presenting it as a wedding gift at a wedding they gate-crash. But their playful attitude has to stop, when Nasra develops a kidney infection requiring surgery at a specialist hospital in Ethiopia at the cost of $500 000

When Nasra’s condition worsens, the doctor has good and bad news: On a positive note the surgery can be managed locally by a visiting anaesthetist, but the price tag remains the same. So Mahad and his friends take on all kind of jobs to contribute to the staggering costs, Guled swallowing his pride, as he sets off for his home village to reclaim his goat herd.

You could call Khadar Ayderus Ahmed’s first film a road movie, as most of the action plays out in the streets of suburban Djibouti and the long desert road between the city and his home village. But the most intimate scenes are set in the modest family home where hope fades with day that passes, Nasra’s presence a pale comparison with her former strength in the local community, she now stays at home, her pain all too visible.

DoP Arttn Peltomaa contrasts the sun-dappled colours of the desert surroundings with sombre earthy colours of the intimate domestic interiors where the family fears for the worst.

In his passionate feature debut Ahmed adopts a less is more approach to the narrative, but the way he deals with conflicting emotions augurs well for the future. AS

NOW ON RELEASE FROM 21 OCTOBER 2022

The Last Duel (2021)

Dir: Ridley Scott | US Action Drama 153′

This medieval parable based on a true story feels utterly up to date with its modern rape-revenge theme told from three perspectives: a savvy noblewoman, her pompous husband and the silver-tongued ‘Squire’ who rapes her. Ridley’s Scott’s latest is a magnificently mounted and gory epic, crowned by a string of charismatic performances: Jodie Comer is Marquerite de Carrouges, Matt Damon her husband Sir Jean, and Adam Driver. the squire, Jacques Le Gris. Ben Alffleck is dynamite as his close friend and ally Count Pierre d’Alencon, rocking a saucy blond wig; Alex Lawther plays a mincing King Charles VI. Strange accents are the order of the day – Laurence Olivier would turn in his grave.

Back in the 14th century chivalry was a big thing. And men took their gallantry seriously, and were even prepared to stake their lives on it. Women were merely impotent bystanders in this honour-bound society, and that’s – to an extent – the only flaw in the rape-centred story. Co-writer Nicole Holofcener (Gladiator) serves up revenge from a female point of view primped with contemporary credentials, showing that a woman’s mental resolve can be just as strong as the sword when her own honour is called into question.

Freighted by the gravity of its subject matter, The Last Duel bristles with intrigue from start to finish, a gripping crowd-pleaser that wears its ethical and moral emblems proudly on its 14th-century sleeve. Ridley Scott jostles us through the early part of his film establishing the milieu of brutal battlefield set-pieces finally getting down to business with the crux of the narrative: land-ownership and property in 1386. Norman knight Carrouges is locked in a bitter dispute with his nemesis Le Gris over parcels of land and military preferment. But when his wife Marguerite accuses Le Gris of rape, the feud turns murderous, Carrouges asking King Charles VI for the right to challenge his enemy to a duel.

Based on Eric Jager’s bestseller: The Last Duel: A True Story of Trial By Combat in Medieval France, the macho premise morphs into a female-centric tale reflecting on the putative assault from the three different angles, growing more persuasive as they pass from assailant to victim.

Once again Jodie Comer is the star of the show even through she only grabs part of the screen time from the macho male contingent in a lavish and entertaining Hollywood style arthouse action drama. MT

NOW IN CINEMAS

Les Mots de la Fin (2021) Warsaw Film Festival 2021

Dir: Gaelle Hardy, Agnes LeJeune | Belgium Doc 74′

Real people share their innermost thoughts in confronting death in this humanistic and affecting film about euthanasia from Belgian co-directors Gaelle Hardy and Agnes Lejeune,

In a wise and compassionate move, the Belgian government Wisely has legalised euthanasia. And the results are truly enlightening. No longer fearing physical pain and emotional anguish, a weight is lifted being those suffering endless trauma allowing them to end their lives with peace and dignity. The mentally fragile or seriously ill often feel a burden on their relatives, and are no longer valued in society. Now they can quietly take control and slip away in security and comfort.

In a consulting room in a public hospital in Belgium. Dr Francois Damas reflects on the wider concerns of his patients: both men and women, often accompanied by a relative. Most of them are seriously ill, but not all. Madame Vinciane Bonsignore just feels tired of living and is sick of being told to ‘get on with it’, describing her life like ‘a house with poor foundations’. Now she just wants to end it all. And we feel for her and so does Dr Damas, although he advises her to talk to her son. The trauma of assisted death has a major impact of those left behind, but most of the friends and relatives seen here seem acquiescent. In the case of terminal illness, they only want the best for those concerned. There is a perception that society no longer values the aged and infirm and this impacts on their ability to bear their suffering, often making it worse.

But one patient, Ziegfried Pohl attending with his favourite nephew, Michel Purage, has actually changed his mind about dying, having gradually come to terms with the shock of his wife’s death after 60 years of marriage. But for Michel Lombard the gruelling nature of his terminal illness means death will come as a welcome relief, and his wife Agnes Ries is fully supportive of his decision. Off camera we share the tranquility of his final moments looking out on the pleasant countryside from his hospital room as the family say their final farewells.

A round table discussion amongst the specialised medical team allows us privileged access to professional debate and discussion. The overriding message here is of compassion and understanding. As far as circumstances and the law allow, these patients want to choose their death, and are able to go ahead after frank and intensely authentic consultations.

Hardy and Lejeune direct with extreme sensitivity avoiding sensationalism. One of the most affecting scenes sees Dr Damas dissolve in tears when visiting the home of Sylvie Guerin whose young daughter Clara Dupont decided to end her own life after suffering from cancer, gently describing the reasoning behind the decision. How comforting to know the date of your own death, particularly for those who have no one left to share their lives with. This must be the ultimate in self-determination. MT

WARSAW FILM FESTIVAL | 2021

Benediction (2021)

Dir.: Terence Davies; Cast: Jack Lowden, Kate Phillips, Peter Capaldi, Gemma Jones, Richard Goulding, Simon Russel Beale, Ben Daniel, Geraldine James, Matthew Tennison, Jeremy Irvine, Tom Blyth, Calam Lynch, Lia Williams, Suzanne Bertish UK/US 2021, 137 min.

Terence Davies’ portrait of poet and soldier Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) is an ambitious if rather theatrical undertaking, with sumptuous scenes playing out in a two act drama rather than a flowing feature, and with a fine cast of British actors. Jack Lowden plays the gentle yet acerbic young poet, Peter Capaldi his bitter, disillusioned older self, more a ghost of his younger incarnation. There stilted aesthetic approach that has crept into Davies work of late is in tune the Emily Dickinson bio-pic A Quiet Passion there are also moments of poignancy, particularly in the finale, and the archive footage of the war adds depth and context

The story is elegantly fleshed out: Sassoon’s bravery in the trenches, underlined by the archive material; his protest against the political forces’ prolonging the war unnecessarily, manifesting itself in his “Soldiers’ declaration” of 1917, which could have ended in court martial. Influential friend Robbie Ross (a mellow Russell Beale) saves him from the bitter consequences and Sassoon is sent to a psychiatric unit in Scotland, where understanding Dr. Rivers (Ben Daniel) helps the poet to recover. Sassoon also meets poet Wilfrid Owen (Tennison), the two of them bonding in many ways, in a first coup de gourde.

Back at the front, Sassoon is wounded again, and decorated for bravery. London after the Great War is shown in all its decadence, with cameo appearances by Suzanne Bertish as Lady Ottoline Morell, and Lia Williams’ Edith Sitwell (hilarious and one of the highlights). But the main scenes belong to the men in Sassoon’s life: the cruel and sneering Ivor Novello (Irvine), and other overly narcissistic friends, Stephen Tenant (Lynch) and Glen Byam Shaw (Blyth). And there is Sassoon’s wife Hester Gatty (Phillips), who “has to redeem his life for him” – which is a bit much to ask.

The break into the late 1940s is radical and supported by a lighting change: instead of colourful glitter there is melancholy gloom and the introduction of grown-up son George (Goulding) and the end of the marriage with a mature Hester (Jones), their relationship having broken down years earlier due to age and sexuality incompatibility. Benediction ends on a sombre note with Sassoon converting to Catholicism and a beautiful reading of Wilfred Owen’s “Disabled”.

Bon mots rule – particularly in the 1920s. But somehow the later scenes needed a less glib approach, with a remark about Sassoon’s conversion feeling tasteless: “You can get permanence from dressage, without the guilt”. Geraldine James’ long suffering mother is underused, her relationship with Siegfried never explained, even though she was one of the keys to his troubled existence

DoP Nicola Daley’s camerawork offers a lively first half, when her images re-creating the bohemian atmosphere of the British version of the roaring Twenties. The gloom and doom which follows gives her little room to express herself. Jack Lowden is very convincing – whilst Capaldi is lost with a mono-script which sometimes degenerates into parody. The overly didactic elements of part two will never coalesce with what has gone before. Sassoon, like many of his generation, suffered a sad and thwarted life and Benediction serves as a tribute to the millions that literally lost their lives and their potential, the dead and the living alike. AS

NOW ON RELEASE IN UK AND IRISH CINEMAS FROM 20 MAY 2022 |REVIEWED AT VIENNALE | 21 OCTOBER to 30 0CT0BER 2021 | a retrospective tribute to Terence Davies entitled CAPTURING TIME IN IMAGES AND WORDS

Unpublished Story (1942

Dir: Harold French | Cast: Richard Greene, Valerie Hobson, Basil Radford, Roland Culver | UK Drama 82′

The British wartime authorities’ perennial obsession with fifth columnists (‘enemy agents’ were serving as baddies as early as the 1940 George Formby vehicle Let George Do It!) here finds elaborate expression in an ambitious production set in London during the Blitz. It took five credited writers to concoct this frequently hard to follow propaganda piece in which actual footage from the Blitz is adroitly combined with recreated studio footage. Censorship is benignly depicted as an essential part of the war effort (hence the title), while a pacifist organisation called ‘People for Peace’ is revealed to be not simply a Nazi front organisation run by British reactionaries but headed by authentic German ‘sleepers’ who privately converse among themselves in German. (With acts of terrorism in Europe by refugees from the Middle East now becoming almost everyday occurrences, the sequence depicting the arrival of a German agent masquerading as a Belgian refugee has disturbing contemporary resonances.)

Richard Greene and Valerie Hobson are colourless leads, and dependable supporting actors like Basil Radford, Roland Culver and André Morell are generally given remarkably little to do; with the notable exception of Brefni O’Rorke as the editor of ‘The Gazette’, the newspaper the plot revolves around, who gets to deliver the film’s stirring final speech at the fadeout. @Richard Chatten

Munich: Edge of War (2021) Netflix

Dir.: Christian Schwochow; Cast: George MacKay, Jeremy Irons, Jessica Brown Finlay, Jannis Niewöhner, Anjil Mohindra, Liv Lisa Fries, Sandra Hüller, Martin Wuttke; UK 2021, 203 min.

German director Christian Schwochow – perhaps a surprising choice – directs British playwright Ben Power’s adaption of Richard Harris’ 2017 bestseller as a lively mixture of personal and political conflicts. Schwochow takes on board the strengths and weaknesses of the novel: the need to suspend reality is better suited to the cinema than the written page: but it’s an entertaining romp, even hair-raising at times with with a brilliantly sensitive George MacKay and Jeremy Irons the gallant stars.

German Paul von Hartmann (Niewöhner) and Englishman Hugh Legat (MacKay) meet in the early 1930s at Balliol, Oxford, later falling out over Hitler’s’ racial policies. But they are forced to bury their differences and pull together when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (Irons) heads to Munich to sell out Czechoslovakia in the Autumn of 1938. He soon finds himself in a race against time to prevent war. His personal secretary Legat and German underground agent Hartmann are hellbent on stopping Chamberlain’s appeasement politics, well aware that the German Army would putsch against Hitler, if Great Britain and France were to take up arms in the event of a German invasion.

Chamberlain and the French Premier Daladier are determined to accommodate Hitler’s demands, not even bothering to invite a Czechoslovak delegation to Munich, instead it is Benito Mussolini who has a staring role at the conference. Meanwhile Legat has marriage trouble, his wife Pamela (Brown Findlay), resents Hugh’s workaholic life, Von Hartmann on the other hand is putting his life on the line by having a torrid affair with co-conspirator Helen.

Although Chamberlain is briefed on a secret document outlining the imperialist goals of the Third Reich, he is adamant that avoiding war is the only way forward with Hitler, he even goes so far as to have the infamous “Peace in our Time'” note signed by Hitler himself, ignoring advice that the piece of paper is just that. Nobody was prepared for Hitler to take a shine to his stand-in translator Von Hartmann. In a pivotal moment, which could change the course of history, Paul finds himself alone in a room with Hitler (Wuttke), a loaded revolver hidden behind his papers.

Jeremy Irons steals the show as Chamberlain, an ageing supremo more suited to the gentlemanly decency of Victorian England, he now sees his friends being killed in the trenches while dealing a psychotic upstart who shares none of his gallant concepts of honour and gentlemen’s decency. Ironically Chamberlain would go down in history as the man who helped Hitler turn against Europe.

DoP Frank Lamm uses the wide screen to brilliant effect (shame that the feature is destined for the small screen of Netflix). So despite underlying flaws Schwochow delivers an exhilarating political thriller of the first order vaunting triumph over adversity. AS

NETFLIX

Slovo House An Unfinished Novel (2021) Warsaw Film Festival 2021

Dir.: Taras Tomenko | Ukraine 2021, 120 min.

Taras Tomenko revisits his 2017 feature with a stylish re-creation of the early years of Slovo House, an artist’s colony in the Ukrainian capital Kharkiv, built in the late 1920s. Originally intended as a showcase for Soviet art, the Stalinist security forces and their compliant censors soon turned the creative idyll from a paradise to a prison where dozens were executed. But in the early years, before the Soviet-induced famine known as the Holodomor (1932-3) wiped out seven million people, Slovo was a creative haven for the literati.

In a blissful sunny afternoon in Slovo House, the artists, among them Mike Yohannsen, Tychyna, Pavlo Tychyna, Rayisa Troyan and Epik, are seen playing volleyball in the courtyard . Enter Volodymyr Akimov, a budding poet. The artists welcome him into their well-appointed wing which houses a solarium, a rarity in the Soviet Union. Somehow Akimov feels an outsider, his archaic poetry clashing with the others’ avant-garde efforts. A beady-eyed security officer senses his apprehension, offering Akimov the chance to become a spy from the privacy of his room, complete with a surveillance suite that takes in every other apartment in the block. Crucially he also offers Akimov the chance for literary success, duping an established author, Mykola Khuylioviy (Yakimchuk), into believing his play is on the censors’ list, and republishing it under Akimov’s name. Akimov then joins the pantheon of literary stars: when Bertholt Brecht, Theodore Dreiser and Bruno Yasensky meet for the Conference of Revolutionary writers in Kharkiv, the German playwright congratulates Akimov for a play he has not written.

But the noose is closing around the artists: Raya Troyanker (Levchenko), a self-styled ‘femme fatale’ is the first to be expelled from the colony. Meanwhile, Khuylioviy and another brave writer, travel to the Ukrainian countryside to confirm ‘rumours’ about the famine but have no chance to publish their horrific discovery, with tragic consequences for all concerned. But the Stalinist Security apparatus still grinds on: Akimov’s overseer is mortified by Khuylioviy’s fate, having has lost the source material for his ‘protege’s’ putative success.

Tomenko fashions his sophomore feature in the black-and-white style of contemporary Soviet films of the era, and although this works well from an aesthetic point of view, not so successful is his use of a ploy adopted by the propagandist filmmakers of the Stalinist era: he paints the villain, Akimov, blacker than black, making him into a serial rapist, highlighting his impotence. These voyeuristic, graphic descriptions sensationalise the core material detracting from the overall impact of this otherwise enlightening slice of Soviet history. AS

WARSAW FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Ganja & Hess (1973)

Dir: Bill Gunn/Lawrence Jordan | Cast: Duane Jones, Marlene Clark, Bill Gunn, Sam L Waymon | US Horror 112′

The confused and contradictory comments and descriptions among reviewers of both the quality and the content of this film was probably the desired effect of this laconic semi-underground conversation piece which vaguely appropriated aspects of vampire film iconography to satisfy the film’s financiers without actually making one. It doesn’t have the noisy razzmatazz of the blaxploitation film the druggy-sounding title suggests, or the visual fussiness of a continental seventies vampire movie; while the scenes depicting wrapped up bodies being carrying across a field for disposal rather recall comedies like The Old Dark House and Arsenic and Old Lace. Quite a bit of blood gets drunk, but in circumstances that suggest psychosis rather than authentic vampirism; although only a genuine vampire would be able to drain the glass of red fluid Hess offers to Ganja at one point (blood in that quantity is actually an emetic).

The liberal amounts of both sex and violence are handled in a generally deadpan fashion (the spectacular stabbing of Dr. Green with an infected knife referred to in several reviews, for example, is merely described in an opening caption, not shown), and the characters rarely seemed fazed by much that happens. Duane Jones of ‘Night of the Living Dead’ as Dr. Hess Green has acquired a beard in the intervening five years and like any self-respecting screen vampire lives in an enormous country house with servants. As Ganja Meda, Marlene Clark is enjoyably venal and grasping, her steely beauty (no afro!) contributing the seductive female component without which no seventies vampire film could possibly have possibly been complete. Richard Chatten

NOW ON AMAZON

A.rtificial I.mmortality | Warsaw Film Festival 2021

Dir: Ann Shin | Doc Canada, 74’

If you could create an immortal version of yourself, would you?

Don’t be put off by its tricksy title, this new documentary from award-winning Toronto-based Korean filmmaker Ann Shin is fascinating from start to finish.

A.rtifical I.mmortality opens with a welter of technical experts fast-talking their way through their ground-breaking research. But the focus soon narrows on Shin, best known for her HBO title The Defector: Escape from North Korea, who is now working on how to capture the essence of her dying father who is rapidly sliding down the slippery slope of dementia. Is there a way to keep part of him alive, and leave something of herself for her own kids to reflect on? – she ponders while chopping away at those ubiquitous veg in her kitchen?.

Apparently there is. And Shin showcases each new discovery in a film that uncovers the cutting-edge world of AI: “what is it that makes us uniquely human, and cannot be recreated by a robot, however sophisticated?. The film’s first episode is possibly the least plausible and most confusing: we meet Lincoln Cannon, a leading proponent of the ‘Trans humanist Movement’ which believes in the ‘ethical use of technology to transcend human limits, even making death “optional”.’ Is this a load tosh, you may wonder? Well, watch on, it does get better.

What follows is a deep dive into the realms of artificial intelligence, machine learning and biotechnology. Shin interviews specialists from the world of religion, robotic science, technology, philosophy and neuroscience.

She 52 year old mother of two then explores ‘mind-files’. Facebook and Twitter all possess these intensely personal impressions of us from the social posts that we share with them. So what if these could be downloaded onto a personal file and then uploaded and stored privately for our benefit on an avatar?. She talks to Dr Deepak Chopra has already created his own “digital Deepak” from his mind-file. The idea is to pass on the essence of himself and his accumulated knowledge for his grandkids.

Mind files can also be used for Chopra’s own commercial benefit, as a virtual mentor and guru. He explains the difference between this unique personal version and, say, Siri. With your digital avatar you have a direct relationship with that tailored made ‘person’. It can interpret your own feelings based on a personal knowledge bank, created by you in an AI version of yourself that you compile well before you die.

Meanwhile in California, Profesor Alysson Muotri has found a way to replicate actual human brain cells in a petri dish using stem cellls known as organoids. These can produce a more complex and nuanced artificial brain material. So sometime in the future brains may be able to grow this material for positive uses, including the treatment of traumatic injury, and even to tackle mental illnesses such as depression or motor neurone disease.

Over in Japan where robots are very much part of everyday life, Hiroshi Ishiguro has pioneered ‘intelligent’ robotics. So lifelike is his own android that it actually fooled audiences into believing it was Ishiguro himself – but that’s possibly because he looks and acts more like an Android than a human, in the nicest possible way.

One of the sceptics of the AI world is neuroscientist Dr Taufik Valiante who has been finding out exactly how memories are made in the brain. Very little is actually known about the brain and how it processes memory. But the significant issue here is how malleable memory is, and how much it is subject to individual and personal reflections. Memories are a ‘loved experience’ with a richness that AI does not have the capability of recording. Human cognition is an “embodied cognition’ far more complex that any AI can replicate. Robots, no matter how sophisticated, can’t smell, feel or touch. How could those elements be replicated by a computer? Taufik heads up a think-tank at the neurological department of Toronto’s Krembil Research Institute and reminds us, reassuringly, that humans are capable of feeling exquisitely subtle qualities including ‘body memory’ that avatars are just not able to sense. This all very encouraging for those fearing a takeover by robots. The Japanese have coined an expression “sonzaikan” that refers to the unique presence of another being. So there’s hope for us real humans yet in the scary world of future intelligence. MT

WARSAW FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Marx Can Wait (2021)

Dir: Marco Bellocchio | Italy, Doc, 96′ | With Marco, Piergiorgio, Alberto, Francesco, Letizia, Maria Luisa Bellocchio, Pia Bareggi |

Veteran Italian director Marco Bellocchio’s latest nonfiction film (his last was in 2002) has nothing to do with Carl Marx, nor is it an auto-biography, but a love letter to his twin brother Camillo who committed suicide in 1968 and whose life – and death – marked the director’s filmmaking.

Although there are noteworthy clips and excerpts from Bellocchio’s filmography, those hoping for an immersive look back at his film career – and this year marks an Honorary Palme d’Or Tribute to his lifetime achievement – will be disappointed. Instead Bellocchio puts his siblings at the focus of the narrative giving them an opportunity to share and ruminate on their brother’s death at the tender age of 29, exploring how the tragedy could have been avoided.

Now considerably advanced in years, the four remaining brothers and sisters are left with poignant memories and regrets, some sixty years after a loss that has clearly affected them deeply in ways that are now physically and emotionally difficult to express (one has a serious speech impediment but still manages to contribute with emotional clarity).

Much time (almost too much time) is spent in the ringing of hands, the reflecting on the past and how the remaining siblings could been more supportive. Suicide feels like a punishment for those left behind, an admonishment, a stinging valedictory that will forever haunt friends and loved ones, shaking them to the core of their being. Camillo’s recently deceased widow is represented by his sister-in-law, and her sister, who adds valuable outside context to the family’s grieving.

Bellocchio opts for a straightforward chronicle narrative where he remains the calm and lucid interlocutor, the camera frequently panning away from the tortured confessions to the domestic interiors, archive clips adding relief to the constant emoting. This remains an intensely personal film, deeply resonant for those directly affected by the issues. But processing grief is always a personal affair, and to his credit, Bellocchio retains distance from his project, on this occasion allowing the others to do the mourning for him. MT

CANNES PREMIERE | NOW SCREENING AT LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2021

The History of Ha | Historya Ni Ha (2021) Bfi London Film Festival

Dir.: Lav Diaz; Cast: John Lloyd Cruz, Mae Paner, Dolly De Leon, Jonathan Francisco, Teroy Guzman, Hazel Orencio, Earl Ignacio, Ceian Hazel Gabuco; Philippines 2020, 450 min.

Philippine director Lav Diaz once again returns to the world of his homeland politics with an allegorical fable that takes place in the post-war period, which saw the socialist HUK movement crushed by the CIA and the army, and General Ramon Magsaysay, who later died in a plane crash in 1957, ascend to the Presidency. Diaz uses a mostly linear structure, his protagonists often verbally referring to the past in a fable that is in length compared to his previous films, the longest of which is 660 minutes

We meet the central protagonist, ‘bodapil’ (vaudeville) performer Hernando Alamada (Cruz) and his puppet Ha, on board the luxury cruiser ‘Mayflower’, just as Magsaysay’s death is being announced over the radio. Alamada has had a successful run, but is looking forward to joining his family in the village of his birth where he wants to marry his sweetheart Rosetta. He has brought many books for his sister and her two children, making it clear how important reading is. Alas, the gift for Rosetta will never reach her since she has been placed under house arrest destined to marry a local bigwig who will pay off her family’s debts which too numerous even for Hernando to finance. There is no chance even for the two lovers to meet so tight is the security patrol where she lives. Heartbroken, Alamada leaves family and village for good setting off on an eventful journey where his path will cross with several travellers whose stories will inform the historical contact of the narrative.

On the road to Diwata he first meets Joselito (Francisco) who is heading for the mythical island lured by the famous gold rush, even though he cannot even afford a ticket for the boat. Then there’s a sex worker called Dahlia (De Leon), and Sister Lorenza (Paner), a Catholic who are also heading for Diwata, the latter to build a mission to save the souls of the gold diggers. And the travellers arrive at the harbour only to discover Kuyang (Guzman) and his psychotic sister Matilde (Orenico) are now in control of the boats to Diwata, with the help of a vicious militia, and the fares have gone up astronomically, Hernando is now the only one who can afford to cross.

Joselito then falls in love with blind flower seller Ina (Gabuco) – a nod to Chaplin – Kuyang, who has seen Hernando perform on the Mayflower, arranges a ‘bodapil’ evening for Hernando and his puppet, which is violently interrupted by guerrillas, who kill Joselito and Ina – the two most innocent characters. Hernando decides that only Ha should speak from now on, setting in motion a long, poetic journey of redemption.

Aesthetically as well as contents wise, History of Ha is closest to Melancholia (2008), in which Diaz reflected on the guerrilla movement of the 1960s when the middle class Philippines took up arms against the tyrannical Marcos regime. The tropical rain forest features extensively in both features, even though the outcome could not be more different. Again, Diaz entranced his audience with his languorous characterisations, the camera often not leaving the field of vision until well after the protagonists have left the frame.

Life in the rainforest is never romanticised, violence is kept to a minimum, even though the threat of it hangs over nearly every scene. Even though dialogue does play an important role, particularly in the discussions between Hernando and his three companions, whom he tries to dissuade from their journey to Diwata, long sections of the feature do without words – again creating a particular intimacy with the audience. The History of Ha is set in an around the village of Once again Dias casts professionals actors alongside indigenous non-pros creating an authenticity which few other filmmakers achieve. Shot mainly in the village of Sibaltan (Plawan), Diaz, as often in his features, uses the indigenous population, integrating them with professional actors and creating an authenticity few film makers achieve. It is an enigma, how Diaz again is able to commit his audience to be part of his characters’ struggle. This is not a question of ideology, but the result of projection and transference, where the feature’s images bind the audience emotionally to the characters.

The History of Ha was scheduled to premiere at the 2020 Locarno Festival, which was postponed. Diaz, known for his prolific work ethos, is now in post-production for two more features: Servando Magdamag and Henrico’s Farm, the latter with Charo Santos Concio, the titular heroine of Diaz’ Venice winner The Woman Who Left (2016). AS

PREMIERING AT BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2021

White Building (2021) Bfi London Film Festival

Dir.: Kavich Neang; Cast: Piseth Chhun, Sithan Hout, Uk Sokha, Chinnaro Soem, Sovann Tho, Jany Min; Cambodia/France/China/Qatar 2021,

Cambodian filmmaker Kavich Neang once again returns to the timely topic of gentrification in his second film – this time a drama – following his 2019 documentary Last Night I Saw You Smiling.

Housing has become big business in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh. The titular White Building, built in 1963, was once a haunt for artists, but now the developers have arrived, investors from Japan and China. Boyhood friendships and family ties are going to be tested.

The story follows three men in their early twenties Samnang (Chhun), Ahco (Soem) and Tol (Tho) who spend their time chasing women – unsuccessfully – and trying to make it with a dancing routine. Their performances in restaurants and pubs are not a big hit, and they go on dreaming. But soon Tol leaves for the ‘bright lights’ of France where you can buy all sorts of cool trainers. This leaves Samnang living with his mother (Soha) and father (Hout), a former sculptor in the white building, his home since birth.

Stories about people moving from the rural areas to the newly built but morally corrupt cities have been a popular theme for Far Eastern filmmakers with some award-winner features: Stray Dogs (2013) being the most memorable. White Building sees the other side of the story. Samnang’s father is chasing the dollar on home ground, heading up the white building’s tenants’ association, and hoping to strike a good deal with the developers. But even the best outcome, based on a deal in square meters, would only secure the families with the largest flats a decent place in central Phnom Penh, with more chance of a job. Most residents would have to leave for the countryside, where employment is thin on the ground.

Samnang’s sister Kanha (Min) has already left the family, and her parents are afraid her brother will also fly the nest, conditions in the estate are rapidly going downhill and the landlord has cut off the water supply to the block. As as result of these upheavals Samnang’s father is not only relieved from his duties as chief negotiator, but also has to have part of his leg amputated as a result of untreated diabetes, In their new country home, Samnang must make a decision.

DoP Douglas Seok has an eccentric way of shooting: cameras are on drones, the angels of the buildings taking on an German expressionist look as the tenants flee the building in droves. Phnom Penh’s three-seater scooters loom large in Seok’s rowing camerawork. Everything seems out of kilter in this ‘end of days’. At the centre of the tornado, Piseth Chhun deserved to win Best Actor in Venice Horizons sidebar at the 78th Mostra last month. AS

SCREENING AT BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL | WHITE BUILDING HAS BEEN SELECTED AS CAMBODIA’S OSCAR HOPEFUL IN NEXT YEAR’S ACADEMY AWARDS 2022

Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon (2021)

Dir.: Ana Lily Amirpour; Cast: Jeon Jong-seo, Kate Hudson, Evan Whitten, Ed Skrein, Craig Robinson; USA 2021, 106 min.

A Korean teenager’s hypnotic powers create havoc in a suburb of New Orleans in this second feature from from Ana Lily Amirpour whose stylish debut A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) felt radical and edgy back in the comparatively tame world of 2014.

One again wrapping her story round a lone woman, Jeon Jong-seo makes for a feisty Mona Lisa, the teenager in question. A diet of junk food and soft drinks has nudged her into the autistic spectrum, but her kinetic powers soon come in handy in the confines of her high security psychiatric ward, enabling her to overpower the abusive warden and she escapes into the night. Embarking on a frenzied foray powered forward by a seething soundscape, and aided and abetted by friends Fuzz (Skrein), stripper drug dealer cum DJ Bonnie (Hudson) and son Charlie (Whitten), she is hotly pursued on her odyssey of destruction, by a police officer undeterred by his plaster cast.

Very much a bedtime story for adults this is a less appealing rif on Jonathan’s Glazer’s Under The Skin: underdog Mona Lisa morphing into the exotic heroine from far away, mastering, while not comprehending, the rules of the planet she has landed on. Mona Lisa just stays her spontaneous self, surrounded by machiavellian schemers (apart from Charlie). Her motivation is not power or money, but freedom – the desire to avoid capture and imprisonment becomes paramount in her dystopian crusade.

This is an unashamed B-picture where rules are suspended, and emotion became the primary focus: reality is submerged by the heroine’s sheer willpower and self-determination. DoP Pawel Pogorzelski’s neon-drenched aesthetic underlines the narrative’s artificial world, that hangs somewhere between Twilight Zone and a non-realised David Lynch project. Mona Lisa is just pure excitement, the supporting half of a double feature which turns out to be much stronger stuff than the main attraction. AS

NOW AT LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2021 | VENICE PREMIERE

Money Has Four Legs (2021) Bfi London Film Festivali

Dir.: Maung Sun; Cast: Okkar, Khin Khin Hsu, Hein Thiori San, Kio Thu; Myanmar 2021, 98 min.

Mynamar’s Maung Sun opts for a light comedy style to get this debut feature past the censors. Set in the capital Naypyidaw Money Has Four Legs is a semi-autobiographical portrait of a contemporary filmmaker and his trials and tribulations trying to get a movie in a country seemingly down on its knees.

We first meet Sun’s alter ego, Wai Bhone, arguing over his script in the censor’s office. All this unwelcome interference radically alters the finished product, proposing a scenario where the police force is the guiding force and sex scenes are symbolic rather than graphic. And Bhone could do without it. Back home in his living room, decorated with his awards and photos of his father, a famous director, Bhone contemplates an uncertain future, his wife Seazir (Khin Khin Su) is about to lose her job ay the bank, and there’s their daughter Meemi (Thiori San) to think about too. Seazir’s brother Zaw Mynth (Ko Thu), a film extra, is prone to violent episodes when drunk – which is nearly always. The film’s producer is at the end of his tether, considering replacing Bhone with another helmer. Luckily, he manages to keep the show on the road after digging up some some dirt on his producer, and when Seazir’s bank goes into liquidation, as anticipated, Bhone and his brother turn the situation to their advantage in a denouement that feels like a tribute to Jules Dassin.

DoP Thaiddhi conjures up fairytale images that certainly sum up the chaotic upbeat style Sun had in mind: the colours are bright, the scenes in the hustling streets are well-observed. But behind all the bungling – in real life and film-making – this is a cry for help: if the banks are going under, what hope is there for an out-of-work population? Sun’s debut is a subversive attack, a welcome celebration of 100 Years of Burmese cinema. AS

SCREENING DURING BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 6-17 OCTOBER 2021

The Outlaws (2021) Bfi London Film Festival

Dir.; Henrik Martin Dahlsbakken; Cast: Asmund Hoeg, Filip Berg, Benjamin Helstood; Norway 2021, 79 min.

This Norwegian take on Bonnie and Clyde, also based on real life, is remarkable for its visual allure and picturesque beauty in startling contrast the carnage that erupts when a young drifter loses his way in a ‘follie a deux’ set in 1920s Sweden.

Johannes (Hoeg) really needs a role model in life, and he finds it in fellow lumberjack Peder (Helstod), an older man who offers some sort of security. But when Peder is killed in a tree-felling accident, Johannes takes up with another, older man, in the shape of Mikhael (Berg), who impresses the young labourer with his stories of America but soon turns out to be a dangerous psychotic, who has stolen the car he is driving.

The two men derail a train. But Johannes is shocked to discover that Mikhael is also a murderer, killing two policemen who give chase, and quite obviously enjoying the experience. And it doesn’t stop there. The two of them hide out in a house belonging to a man and his daughter and then take off in another stolen car in a finale that is quite remarkable for the stark contrast in the two men’s reactions.

Dahlsbakken does not enlarge on the sexual angle of the relationship, but it is clear that Johannes, who has slept with women before, is really just looking for love and protection, which Mikhael, who is certainly gay, takes advantage of. Johannes is prepared to go along with Mikhael’s psychotic outbursts just to avoid being alone. Outwardly masquerading as a softly spoken educated man, Mikhael, emerges a psychotic monster, with no feelings for Johannes or anybody else, for that matter.

Berg is impressive as ‘Lucifer’, Hoeg playing the perfect ‘lap dog’ who just wants to be loved. The Swedish countryside is a wonderful background for the exploding mayhem, the director continuously probing the dissonance between the two elements highlighted in DoP Oskar Dahlsbakken’s stunning camerawork. AS

SCREENING DURING BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Who Dares Wins (1982) Prime

Dir: Ian Sharp | UK Drama

Interviewed on the set, Lewis Collins said the situation depicted was ambivalent since although his character deplored the terrorists’ methods he sympathised with their aims. The film itself naturally displays no such nuance; and the late Philip French described it at the time as the most ludicrous political picture he’d seen since the Boultings’ ‘High Treason’ over thirty years earlier. (An apt comparison, although the earlier production was plainly a much better film.)

After the Iranian Embassy Siege, Collins – always the less introspective half of ‘The Professionals’ – was quickly snapped up by producer Euan Lloyd for the lead for this fascinating document of the mood that prevailed in Britain during the bleak winter of 1982 between the Toxteth riots and the war in the Falkland Islands that reunites the writer and one of the stars of ’12 Angry Men’.

No such film would of course be complete without a voluptuous female psycho from Europe with an itchy trigger finger (played by Ingrid Pitt in fatigues), and despite being idyllically married to a wife in Laura Ashley (played by Lloyd’s daughter Rosalind) big-haired Judy Davis says Collins makes love like he “just got out of prison” while her glowering entourage of lefty malcontents look on enviously. (Since they have to to get their hair cut and be smartened up to impersonate a military band a fascinating scene that didn’t make the final cut must have been Ms Davis impatiently showing her confederates the correct way to do up their bow ties.) @RichardChatten

NOW ON ANAZON PRIME

Italian Films at the BFI London Film Festival 2021 | 6-17 October

Italian cinema has had a good summer so far. So expect to see a good selection at this autumn’s BFI London Film Festival, courtesy of Cinecittaluce.

SMALL BODY is a delicate fantasy drama from Laura Samani and had its premiere at Cannes Critics’ Week. MARX CAN WAIT is Marco Bellocchio’s documentary tribute to a much loved twin brother, and also screened at Cannes, where the veteran director was awarded the 2021 Honorary Palme D’Or for his body of work.

Paolo Sorrentino was on the Lido with his latest lush drama THE HAND OF GOD which took the Grand Jury Prize, its lead, Filippo Scotti, was awarded the Marcello Mastroianni Award for best young actor. Meanwhile, Michelangelo Frammartino’s Special Jury Prize winner IL BUCO captured the hearts and minds of Italian and international critics at Venice: Il Buco is his long-awaited follow-up to Le Quattro Volte.

ITALIAN FILMS | BFI FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Eugenie Grandet (2021)

Dir: Marc Dugain | Cast: Josephine Japy, Olivier Gourmet, Valerie Bonneton, Cesar Domboy | Drama, France/Belgium 103′

Another Balzac novel hits the big screen: this time his early 19th tale about the evils of capitalism and family inheritance, sombrely adapted by Senegal born director Marc Dugain.

Eugenie Grandet is a dour and joyless story and Dugain does little to lift it above the confines of the page despite thoughtful performances from Josephine Japy in the lead role, and Olivier Gourmet as her vehement property-dealer father Felix whose stinginess and greed makes her life a misery at a time when self-realisation was impossible for ordinary women.

Saumur 1819 during the Bourbon Restoration is the setting, and endless views of dripping rain and dank mornings establish the grim milieu where Eugenie Grandet and her mother (Bonneton) endure a monotonous bourgeois existence, her father poncing around the countryside doing deals and pretending to be down on his luck. Although the reality is quite different.

Felix Grandet is not a good father. Frugal, possessive and emotionally remote, he keeps his wife and daughter on a tight budget, making a big deal out of giving Eugenie a single gold coin for her dowry. Eugénie spends her days sewing and dreaming of love and when her cousin Charles (Domboy) arrives to stay she is completely taken with his dashing good looks and suave Parisian manners. So much so she falls in love with him – rather too quickly – offering her only worldly possession when it emerges that his father has killed himself due to mounting debts. And when the mean-spirited Felix finds out what has happened he further castigates Eugenie, imprisoning her in her bedroom.

Gilles Porte creates a morose atmosphere in the darkened interiors of the Grandet household, often softly highlighting the characters’ faces in the style of Caravaggio, and in Eugenie’s case this accentuates her qualities of gentleness and devotion. And although Dugrain’s script successfully condenses the novel into a reasonable running time, it doesn’t quite give enough weight to Charles and Eugenie’s love affair which after all carries the novel’s uplifting emotional freight, much needed to counterbalance all the endless misery. Joséphine Japy is brilliant as the innocent, long-suffering heroine in a world where women’s happiness and wellbeing depended entirely on the integrity of their menfolk. MT

Antalya Film Festival 2021

Antalya Film Festival opens on the 2nd October celebrating its 58th edition in the Southern Turkish Riviera setting with a slew of award-winning titles taking part in the International Feature Film Competition.

Fred Baillif’s sharp-sighted study of protective measures for the youth turning out to be the very source of danger, The Fam received Generation 14Plus Grand Prix at Berlinale. Winner of Best Film and Best Scenario awards at Tribeca Film Festival, Brighton 4th also brought its director and lead Levan Koguashvili Best Actor award. Reminding some classical titles about the lives and dreams of migrants left outside of both worlds, the film narrates the story of a former wrestler Kakhi, travelling from Tiflis to Brooklyn to save his son from a gang.

The winners of the International Feature Film Competition will be announced at the Closing and Awards Ceremony on the evening of Saturday, October 9, 2021.

ANTALYA FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Shepherd (2021)

Dir/Wri: Russell Owen | UK Horror 103’

A little bit style over substance, Shepherd is an effective but rather overwrought third feature from Welsh writer/director Russell Owen, with Greta Scachi as the star turn and Tom Hughes as angst-ridden widow Eric Black.

Devastated after the mysterious death of his wife, who is pictured teasing him in menacing early flashbacks, Eric takes a job as a shepherd heading for the solitude of ramshackle house on a remote island with only his faithful Collie Baxter for company.

Front-loading the narrative with foreboding tropes and jump scares before really establishing Eric’s grievances with his wife makes it difficult for us to really feel for him or appreciate his troubled state of mind. So Owen keeps things ambiguous with a recurring motif of gloomy mountains and a roaring soundscape, an ominous tolling bell driving the narrative forward in this wind-beaten setting. The island is purportedly uninhabited but soon after arriving on a lighter steered by a gaunt boatsman, Eric spies a sinister hooded figure darting around a disused lighthouse, and discovers human remains in a stream.

Trauma from the past resurfaces in a scary vignette from Greta Scacchi as his widowed mother who has somehow tracked him down and was clearly not a fan of Rachel. But is she alive or dead, a nightmare or reality? Then Baxter goes missing and Eric’s state of mind down-spirals into a glowering night of the soul as the truth comes back to haunt him. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 26 November 2021

Boiling Point (2021)

Dir.: Philip Barantini; Cast: Stephen Graham, Vinette Robinson, Alice Feetham, Ray Panthaki, Jason Flemyng, Lourdes Faberes; UK 2021, 92 min.

Stephen Graham is a budding star chef in this adrenaline fuelled single-take drama that powers non-stop through the hectic kitchens of a top restaurant where staff and owner could lose their livelihoods at any minute.

Graham’s Andy is a committed workaholic, a ‘business before family’ kind of guy. But his dedication to the job is clearly not paying off. Boiling Point gets off to a simmering start with a visit from the food hygiene inspector who downgrades his restaurant’s kitchen from a five to a three, point-wise. Andy takes it all out on the staff, particularly his sous-chef Carly (Robinson) and commis chef Freeman (Panthaki). To be fair, Andy is not the only person responsible for restaurant’s shaky reputation: front-of-house maître Beth (Feetham) overplays the role of social media, particularly Instagram, and this has a detrimental affect on proceedings.

Everyone has a story to tell about Andy’s classy eaterie; there are reports of self-harm and drug misuse. And that bottle Andy carries with him seems to contain more than just water. The fractious evening comes to a climax when TV chef Alastair Skye (Flemying) arrives with capricious food critic Sara Southworth (Faberes): A female guest is apparently feeling the affects of her nut allergy, even though the staff had been informed of her condition at the start of the evening. The ambulance arrives, and Skye puts the blame unjustly on Beth for the incident. But Andy refuses to “throw” Beth “under the bus”, leaving Skye in deep water over his £200K investment. But that’s not the end of it, new developments will test Andy to breaking point, again.

Everyone plays their part in keeping the tension going, and credit to DoP Matthew Lewis for making the best in a limited environment with his use of crane shots to break up the intensity of person-to-person conflicts. Often in these kind of films staff are either demonised for being jealous, or pushed into the eternal victim role by well meaning middle-class script writers. But in Boiling Point the focus is on competent professionals doing their jobs while falling victims to a boss on the downward spiral. AS

IN UK CINEMAS from 7 JANUARY 2022

Raphael Revealed (2020)

Dir: Phil Grabsky | Doc

Marking the 500th anniversary of Raphael’s death, director Phil Grabsky was in Rome with his camera to document the greatest exhibition that has ever taken place of the Italian master’s work. Raphael Revealed celebrates the life of Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino on the big screen allowing viewers all over the world access to several hundred masterpieces, including paintings and drawings – over a hundred of which have been brought together for the first time.

Director and cinematographer Phil Grabsky has made a name for himself recording a series of major art exhibitions and adding value with informative commentary from experts – in this case Nicholas Penny, Tom Henry and Dr Angelamaria Aceto, of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford – who bring the artists’ creativity to life for those unable to be there in person.

Raphael 1483-1520) is widely regarded as one of the three great masters of Renaissance Italy, along with Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. Mixing in eclectic circles from Popes to paupers his work reflects the diversity of 15th century society, not just through paintings but also in his skilful draughtsmanship of building design and architecture. Raphael also wrote poetry in his brief life of just 37 years.

Grabsky takes us on a tour of the exhibition itself interweaving vibrant shots of the paintings with outdoor vistas picturing Raphael’s forays to Florence and Rome as well as his his daily life in Urbino. The exhibition unfolds in reverse chronological order, starting in Rome, where he dies at the age of 37 – with a life-size facsimile of his tomb “built with cutting edge technologies” (which will later rest in his hometown of Urbino) – and then tracing his story back to Florence and Umbria.

Raphael honed his craft by drawing in pencil, a skill that enabled him to understand the intricacies of the human form and learn about spacial perspectives. His father was the official painter and poet of the Duke Montefeltro, and Raphael took over this role when he was still only a teenager on his father’s death.

At the age of 25 Raphael was commissioned to decorate the rooms in the Vatican where he spent the rest of life perfecting his skills not only as a painter but also as architect to the serving Popes, a role that allowed him to develop his artistic expression in sculpture, tapestry design and drawing in ink, charcoal, metal point and chalk.

During his lifetime Raphael also crafted two self-portraits and these bookend the exhibition – one from the Louvre, known as Self-Portrait with his Fencing Master (1518) and the other portraying the maestro as a young man.

Raphael Revealed also includes significant paintings from the Uffizi, Pinacoteca di Bologna and the National Gallery of Washington along with sculptures, tapestries and other works. The highlight for many devotees of the Italian artist are the portraits of the two popes hung together for the first time: Julius II from the National Gallery in London and Leo X with the cardinals Giulio de’ Medici and Luigi de’ Rossi from the Uffizi.

Along with Chopin, Mozart and the poet Shelley who also died in their thirties, Raphael’s incredible body of work puts him in the league of the world’s most revered creative geniuses. At his death he was still working on a graphic reconstruction of Ancient Rome MT

IN CINEMAS FROM 12 OCTOBER 2021

Le Frisson des Vampires (1971)

Dir: Jean Rollin | French, Horror

Disinterred from its crypt in the small hours recently by London Live, not a lot really happens in this fanciful little trifle by Jean Rollin – who David Pirie wrote “it is tempting to see as the Claude Lellouch of the vampire cinema” – but it contains some beautiful colour effects, and an attractively lit chateau housing a coven of female vampires who glide about in big hair and little else.

Vampiress-in-chief, Isolde, is given to making dramatic entrances from hiding places as varied as a grandfather clock (whose door swings open in an image worthy of Nosferatu, from behind a curtain and up a chimney; while her handmaidens dance off into the night together before the film’s conclusion on the director’s favourite location, the beach at Normandy. Richard Chatten

ORCHESTRATOR OF STORMS: THE FANTASTIQUE WORLD OF JEAN ROLLIN | and other SELECTED TITLES is on ARROW.COM in FEBRUARY 2023

Getting Away with Murder(s) (2021)

Dir.: David Wilkinson; Wri: David Wilkinson, Emlyn Price | Documentary with Philip Rubenstein, Benjamin B. Ferencz, Fritz Bauer, Donald M. Ferencz, Jens Rommel; UK 2021, 175 min.

Yorkshire born director David Wilkinson (Postcards from the 48%) has co-written and produced a unique, sober and frightening report on Holocaust murderers that have somehow avoided prosecution. How did it happen? How did the executioners of six million Jews get away it? Only one percent of the million or so perpetrators were actually brought to justice.

On his mission to uncover the truth Wilkinson has travelled the globe interviewing Nazi-hunters and survivors, horrifying clips from the camps underline an utter contempt for retribution that begs the question: what would the US government have done had the Nazis decimated the entire State of Maryland? And how would the British government have reacted had the entire population of Yorkshire lost their lives in the same way? Surely, the rate of successful prosecutions in both cases would have run into double-figures.

The (West) German government and the Allies played their part by turning a blind eye to the atrocities The victors all fell out, starting a Cold War which saw the USA, Great Britain and France freeing already convicted war criminals who would then see active service against the USSR.

From the late 1949 to the mid 1960s the West German government was led by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who in 1934 had begged the Nazi Interior Minister Frick to have his state pension restored: “I have always treated the NSDAP properly, against ministerial instructions. I allowed the NSDA to meet in the city sports ground, moreover I allowed the Party to hoist up the Swastika”. His plea was successful. As Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), Adenauer surrounded himself with a cabinet that included Hans Globke, author or the Nuremberg laws of 1938 for the Nazis. Theodor Oberländer was Minister for Refugees and had been a member of the SA, having participated in the Hitler putsch of 1923, and had been directly involved in the plans to exploit the occupied countries in Eastern Europe. In 1965, Adenauer was replaced by Ludwig Erhard who had the dubious honour of being a member of the Nazi “Arbeitskreis für Aussenwirtschaftsfragen (AAF)” along with Ludger Westrick, Karl Blessing and Hermann Josef Abs. All played a major role both in Nazi Germany and the FRG,

But the government of the time merely reflected the view of the German population: war criminals lived on at liberty, often without having to change their names. Some even returned from exile in South America to bury their dead: Dr. Joseph Mengele, the “Angel of Death” was a prime example, having ‘selected’ Jews on the ramps of Auschwitz for his infamous experiments. Reunited with his family in Switzerland in 1956, he returned to his birthplace in Günzburg/Bavaria in 1959, for his father’s funeral. Everyone in the small town knew that he was present – apart from the police. Mengele died of a stroke swimming in Sao Paulo in 1979, aged sixty-seven.

German justice actually made it extremely difficult for Nazi war criminals to be prosecuted, as Benjamin B. Ferenc, Chief prosecutor of the 1948 trial against the members of the Einsatzgruppen explained: German law did not allow retrospective interpretations of any criminal action, which meant that since it was lawful to kill Jews, Communists, gays and Roma in Nazi Germany, one had to prove the accused acted “in a way beyond the legal (!) requirement” – for example showing more than average brutality or indulging in extra-curricular actions. It was a reasonable defence to clam the Jews were the enemies of Germany. In many trials in Germany and Austria, witnesses were asked for the exact time when the atrocities took place – as if any camp inmate had a watch. Defence lawyers hunted down the witnesses, and the population in many towns joined in.

Thus the trials became more a second punishment for the Jews and other victims, than for the perpetrators themselves. Even though, the names of Fritz Bauer and Jens Rommel, both having been in charge of the Central Agency for the Prosecution of Nazi Criminals in Ludwigsburg, should be mentioned – Bauer gave Mossad a tip-off about Eichmann’s whereabouts in Argentina, because Bauer believed his trial in Germany would not serve justice.

The number of major war criminals who got away it is long: Walter Rauff, who designed the specialised carriages where 100 000 victims met their deaths, fled to Chile, where he died in 1984 aged seventy-seven. Karl Jaeger, Nazi Colonel, carried out the murder of Lithuanian Jews, his diary showed that he killed over 100,000 men and women, of which 4273 were children. In the 1965 Sobibor trail in Germany, the main defendant Alfred Ittner was convicted of the murder of 68 000 Jews – his punishment was seven years in prison. Johanna Altvater, a mere secretary, killed Jewish babies by throwing them out of the window. She was never prosecuted and died aged at the ripe old age on 84, in 2003.

Dr Herta Oberweiler was responsible for the deaths of thousands of children who lost their lives as a result of her sepsis “research’. She was sentenced to twenty years prison, later reduced to five. After her release, she actually got her licence back, and it took years for her to struck off the register. Alois Brunner, Eichmann’s deputy, responsible for the murder of over 100,000 Jews, got the death penalty in absentia in France, but fled to Syria, where he advised the government on torture methods, dying in his late 90s. Herberts Cukurs, the “Butcher of Riga”, was not so lucky. He was responsible for killing 30 000 Latvian Jews. In a macabre incident, Cukurs asked an old Jewish man to rape a young Jewish woman, and then shot all Jews who looked away. He fled to Brazil, where he was killed by Mossad agents in 1965, aged sixty-four. But in 2014, a musical was produced in his home town, showing him as a hero.

The British government’s role in all this is rather shameful. Foreign Secretary Sir Anthony Eden was asked by the Bulgarian government in the early 1940s, to allow over ten thousand Jews, threatened by the Germans, to emigrate to the British Protectorate of Palestine. Eden refused, and all Bulgarian Jews were murdered subsequently in Treblinka. Later, the UK Government clamed to be too broke, to contribute to the 1948 trial against members of the murderous Einsatzgruppen. Even though the trial went ahead, few of Einsatzgruppen were prosecuted. After the war, the UK became a safe heaven for Nazi war criminals; and Wilkinson visits places in Oldham and Selby, were many had hidden, a map showing that the perpetrators managed to settle throughout the UK. Philip Rubenstein, former director of the All Party Parliamentary War Crime Group was instrumental in changing the law to allow for Nazi prosecution in the UK. He reports, that since 1943 Civil Servants were actively employed in avoiding Nazi prosecution, claiming that it “smelled of laws made by the victors.” Needless to say, the Holocaust is not on the main curriculum in UK schools.

GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER(S) is an epochal work, much more than a feature documentary, it is disturbing testament to widespread genocide and asks grave questions of our judicial system AS

Critically-acclaimed Holocaust documentary Getting Away with Murder(s) to be made available to view for free as a two-parter to mark Holocaust Memorial Day

27 January 2023 | 9pm CHANNEL4

Pordenone Silent Film Festival 2021

The PORDENONE SILENT FILM FESTIVAL is back for its 40th celebration from 2 to 9 October 2021 at the Teatro Comunale Giuseppe Verdi, in the Northern Italian town.

In 1982, when the Cineteca del Friuli and Cinemazero first joined forces to collaborate on a three-day retrospective dedicated to the French comic Max Linder, no one could have imagined this would become the first edition of a festival whose pioneering work has literally rewritten the history of the first three decades of cinema, or that the city of Pordenone would become an indispensable destination for scholars and all those passionate about silent film from the world over.

This year’s programme will consist of four screenings per day. Last year’s online edition managed to double its viewing public of silent film lovers garnering a whole new audience from all over the world. This year’s 40th edition will also be streaming a selection of films during the festival dates for the benefit of those unable to attend.

Pordenone Festival Director Jay Weissberg

Expect to see classics such Gustav Machaty’s EROTIKON and Guido Brognone’s festival pre-opener MACISTE ALL’INFERNO (1926) along with favourites such as Ernst Lubitsch’s LADY WINDERMERE’S FAN and Willi Wolff’s LOLA MONTEZ, THE KING’S DANCER from 1922.

A rediscovery in the shape of Georg Jacoby’s JOKEREN from 1928 will be showing with an accompaniment by Stephen Horne and Frank Bockius. Cecille B. DeMille’s FOOL’S PARADISE (1921) is another showstopper and the festival closes with Alexandre Volkoff’s CASANOVA (1927).

Highlighting a strong female influence to this year’s edition there will be a a screening of Grace Cunard’s short THE PURPLE MASK (1916/17) along with an amusing array of short films entitled Nasty Women. It’s worth remembering that more women worked in film during the early silent years of the 20th century that at any time since. And these women made films for a female audience. MT

PORDENONE SILENT FILM FESTIVAL 2021

The Astonished Heart (1950)

Dir: Anthony Darnborough Terence Fisher | Cast: Celia Johnson, Noel Coward, Margaret Leighton, Joyce Carey UK Drama 85′

Like Brief Encounter based on one of the theatrical pieces that comprised ‘Tonight at 8.30’, this reunion of that classic’s writer and star is an equally garrulous but far more grandiose affair that failed as spectacularly as their previous collaboration had succeeded (although the scenes depicting the neuroses exhibited by Noel Coward’s patients are still haunting after the film is over; particularly the scene where John Salew is challenged to read a certain word Coward claims to have written down for him to look at.

All involved were as genuinely unhappy making this epic folly as they looked acting in it; Coward having taken on the lead only after Michael Redgrave took one look at the rushes and walked.

After lumbering through the wreckage like Frankenstein’s monster (Alan Strachan later observed that “Coward’s performance of ravaged heterosexual ardour is riotous”) the star subsequently found himself a far more congenial niche making guest appearances in other people’s films. @Richard Chatten

Tlamess (2019) Zurich Film Festival 2021

Dir: Ala Eddine Slim |Cast: Abdullah Miniawy, Souhir Ben Amara, Khaled Ben Aissa Tunisia/France |121′.

Tunisian director Ala Eddine Slim follows his striking cult debut The Last of Us with another visually alluring reverie that is rather too opaque for its own good. Verging on the biblical, it once again contemplates themes of isolation and our relationship with nature. The evocative storyline focuses on a loner caught up in the wanderlust of his desert surroundings in a atmospheric soundscape created by Oiseaux Tempete with mesmerising art direction from Malek Gnaoui and imaginative camerawork by Amine Messadi.

S (Miniawy) is a lieutenant in the army. State terrorism is the order of the day and we witness a brutal suicide. After hearing about the death of his mother S is overcome by grief and absconds from his army service to go home, becoming Tunisia’s most wanted man. S soon meets the newly pregnant F (Amara), a bored and unhappy housewife left alone in luxury surroundings while her rich husband gads off around the world. The relationship develops into something more, F enjoying the wilderness much more than her pampered home.

The pair communicate only with their eyes, these extreme close-ups inscribed with Arabic are an expression of intimacy, the motives being fear, desperation and a new found equilibrium on F’s part. The monolith in the forest is a nod to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Full Metal Jacket is also referenced in the military scenes. Slim uses extreme contrasts: light and dark, sound and silence, open spaces versus claustrophobia, tradition collides with modernity Many of the protagonists are mute, Slim drawing much from silent cinema, the characters whirl through time and space in this hostile terrain. Tlamess is a visual triumph, leaving the audience much room for interpretation. MT

ZURICH FILM FESTIVAL | 25 SEPTEMBER – 3 OCTOBER 2021 Marrakech Film Festival 2019 | WINNER BEST DIRECTOR

Pleasure (2021)

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://youtu.be/1hl4D0sE5TA

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

Seven Samurai | Shichinin Samurai (1953) | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | Classics 2024

Dir.: Akira Kurosawa; Cast: Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Keiko Tsushima, Kamatari Fujiwara, Isao Kimura; Japan 1953/4, 207 min.

Japanese director Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998) is really the father of action films, his 1954 feature SEVEN SAMURAI not only spawned countless remakes such as John Sturges’ Magnificent Seven (1960), but was also ‘midwife’ to the Italo-Western, the Star Wars franchise and a signature school of French crime films, best represented by Jean-Pierre Melville, with his melancholic 1967 police produral Le Samourai (1967).

Kurosawa himself is indebted to John Ford, whose Westerns were really existentialism in disguise. Seven Samurai’s primary photography took over a year to complete, with a budget of $500 000, the biggest for any Japanese feature at the time.

Set during the last knockings of the 16th Century this Jidai-geki (historical film) takes place in 1587 when feudal landlords were still engaging in protracted battles, further depleting the already impoverished rural population of Japan. The various factions here are in thrall to warring aristocrats: the villagers regularly fall prey to marauding bandits, who are often ex-samurai, and the unemployed samurai or Ronins who have come to the help of the farmers. The Robins are led by Kambei (Shimura), a master strategist.

The three-stranded narrative centres on the seventh samurai Kikuchiyo (Mifune) – who is actually not a samurai at all, but a farmer aspiring to become one. Samurai are honour bound to work for just lodgings and subsistance, repelling the local bandits in preparation for the battle itself. The villagers have a hard time protecting their womenfolk not only from the outlaws, but the Samurai warriors themselves: one of the locals Manzo (Fujiwara), is so worried about losing his daughter (Shino (Tsushima) he cuts off her hair so she looks like a boy, but still falls for the masculine charms of Katsushiro (Kimura), and gets a good hidings from her father into the bargain.

Eventually the farmers do triumph over the bandits, but it’s a Pyrrhic victory that sees them returning to their gruelling daily grind. The once very powerful Robins are meanwhile slowly written out of history.

DoP Asakazu Nakai shot twelve of Kurosawa’s features. His dazzling set pieces keep up with action as the camera glides from one sensational rush of images to the next. Even the so-called quiet moments are full of visual mastery in a compilation of single shots: Kurosawa used multiple cameras to cope with the avalanche of live combat scenes. The bandits are a force to be reckoned with: on their small horses they like look ants swarming down from the mountains to torment the villagers. Seven Samurai is a continuous succession of confrontations and skirmishes even before the final battle, masterfully orchestrated by the villagers’ ally Kambei. But their defence barriers are no match for the outlaws sheer relentless aggression, although they do have a few nasty tricks up their sleeves, mercilessly killing injured bandits and looting their weapons in acts of appalling brutality.

Seven Samurai won the Silver Lion at Venice in 1954. Kurosawa developed into the most ‘western’ director in his country, and his name became synonymous with innovation, setting himself up as an idol for avant-garde filmmakers all over the world. AS

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | CLASSICS 2024

From the Wild Sea (2021) Zurich Film Festival 2021

Dir: Robin Petré | Doc, 77′

Weather conditions are becoming much more extreme. Marine animals are needing emergency care due to injuries caused by the effects of climate change on tides and changing oceanography.

The caring efforts of marine conservationists are at the heart of this cinematic nature doc From the Wild Sea from Danish documentarian Robin Petré known for her unconventional short nature films (Pulse, Stream and Distant Water) that push the borders beyond the norm. Along similar lines to Leviathan and Bird Island (2019) this deeply sensory film shows how vets in coastal regions are building up a strong support system of rescue centres to rehabilitate mammals and sea birds.

The sheer power of an image is all that’s needed to convey the tragedy of our changing climate which has given rise to powerful storms raging into Europe from the Atlantic, bringing with them injured and confused animals such as seals, dolphins, whales and seabirds. The film is swift to point out that untrained human interference in nature – however well-intentioned – is not helpful. Moving injured animals that have been washed up on the shore should be avoided at all costs. The changing tides have had a deleterious effect on seal mammals who rely on echolocation to get their bearings and forage of food: One such seal recently lost its sense of direction and headed to Morocco, wildly off course. After rehabilitation in Cornwall it made its way back north, then took a wrong turn at the Continental Shelf and headed South again only to be re-homed in the Cornish sanctuary. The release of these healthy seals back into the wild is the film’s highpoint.

Although the work being done in animal rehabilitation is an admirable labour of love, this is a really upsetting film to watch: we see seals in great distress – some of them uttering almost human cries as they struggle to breathe, their airways caught up with plastic or infection as the trained staff work to help them recover. We watch another seal gradually losing its fight for life, flippers twitching as it cries out in pain, its mottled fur coat is a thing of exquisite beauty, its soulful eyes speak volumes of the tragic marine odyssey that has led to its death.

Whales fare particularly badly: we watch as a 19-metre-long whale lies beached like a massive, punctured tyre, off the coast of Cornwall. The team rushes to help but it’s already too late. The animal will not just die from its bleeding injuries but because its sheer weight will crush the organs, unless the tide favours transport back into the sea. Many whales die due to head-butting from a boat, or multiple injuries from propellers. An autopsy takes place on the beach itself, it must be one of the few times the pathologist actually gets inside a body to do his work. We also witness a fascinating autopsy of a small 4-5 year-old dolphin who has been terribly badly scarred by marine craft and survived and healed, before finally dying of other injuries.

Birds are particularly difficult to handle, and a white swan hisses savagely when it is given a bubble bath to wash off black marine diesel in the clinic, and here the camera offers intense close-ups of the meticulous cleaning process, including a blow-dry to return the bird to its snow white beauty before release. Frequently the camera pulls out to pan the coast in widescreen images of waves crashing down on the raging ocean. Nicholas (de) Montsarrat was not wrong when he called his 1951 war novel: “The Cruel Sea”.

Robin Petre maintains a respectful distance from her subject matter avoiding anthropomorphism at all times while filming with a deeply humane perspective. A really immersive film for those interested in animal welfare and suitable for all the family (except for the very young). MT

ZURICH FILM FESTIVAL 25 SEPTEMBER – 3 OCTOBER 2021

Ascension (2021) Zurich Film Festival 2021

Dir.: Jessica Kingdon | Documentary; China 2021, 97′

Mesmerising in its imagery, Ascension is a frightening impressionistic portrait of China’s growing class divide through staggering observations of labour, consumerism and wealth.

In her documentary debut Chinese-American Jessica Kingdon explores this study of Chinese superiority by those whose crafted the system. But there is also the hankering after western values and traditions, coupled with a search for perfection in every aspect of working life. Through sheer determination this stealthy dragon will soon be the number economic power on the globe – a nightmarish vision.

The film is structured in three parts, ascending through the hierarchical levels: workers running factory production, the middle class selling to aspirational consumers, and the elites revelling in a new level of hedonistic enjoyment. In traveling up the rungs of China’s social ladder, we see how each level supports and makes possible the next while recognizing the contemporary “Chinese Dream” remains an elusive fantasy for most.

Job-seekers gather in front of buses which will ferry the chosen ones to their factories and dorms. The pay is a couple of dollars an hour, but there are restrictions: Only applicants between 18 and 38 are welcome, men are not allowed to have tattoos or ear-studs – and no illegals will be accepted let alone those with a criminal record. Then there is the roll call for the HUWAI bus, under a big sign of “Work hard, and all wishes come true” the workers put their luggage away before entering the bus. Other poster slogans tell the workers “Be civilised, set good examples” before we set off for the factories.

In a plant producing water bottles from plastic, the female workers discuss the role of the manager: “It does not matter how many days you work, the manager will decide how many days you get paid for. I buy the boss lunch, right after having been paid. We all plead to buy lunch for him so he can pull some strings for us.” In a factory producing jeans, the workers are told “to work harder”, because these jeans are for export: the stitching reads “Keep America great”. In front of a factory producing sex dolls, the chorus shouts slogans like “I love my company, I love my colleagues, I love my career even more. My fate is tied to the company’s, my glory bound to the company”.

Books are given out to workers and they are exhorted to study them with diligence, since the boss spend much time on writing the advice for his workers. During work hours, role play about how to be a perfect workmate is transmitted via loud speakers. We see workers marching like soldiers in front of factories. Meanwhile in the sex doll factory, the workers earnestly discuss the colour of the nipples and the trimming of the pubic hair.

A little more up the food chain, the middle-managers are equally enthusiastic about paying good money to listen to champion managers, who have a large fan base. “Monetise your personal brand. Knowledge must be monetised”. Others have participated in a two-day course and promise “to make millions and millions” in the coming months and years. There are other expensive courses that tell you how to smile (show eight teeth), nod and hug, the latter not being very popular in China.

At a lecture by the Senior International trainer we learn “either you influence me, or I influence you”. There is a training school for butlers too: The new Chinese ruling classes want to copy their European counterparts. “You may not have much time for your personal life, or your family. The rich people do what they want to do, and you have to accept it. They are the people who pay you, no matter how much they humiliate you”.

We watch a group of young men being trained as body guards for the big bosses – unfortunately the applicants fail: the boss has been killed. A group of rich Chinese business people complain about the West calling them out for their Human Rights violations. “They don’t understand the poor have to learn to survive, there is no place for human rights, just survival.” One of the directors tells the audience of employees that “If your intelligence does not match your wealth, Chinese society has hundreds of ways to take your wealth away”.

Before a rather melancholic ending, we are reminded again “that dreams are”. Kingdon keeps the tone understated, letting images and the slogans talk. The result is a mixture of false naivety – on behalf of the upper classes – and a kind of religious fervour of obedience from the workers. But whatever the future holds, the mixture of state capitalism (after all the Party rules supreme) and expanding consumerism, which will see China overtake the USA’s GDP by five times, is a reason for trepidation – to say the least. A brilliant study of a communist nation on the march. AS

ZURICH FILM FESTIVAL 2021 | 25 SEPTEMBER – 3 OCTOBER 2021 | THE 2021 ALBERT MAYSLES AWARD BEST NEW DOCUMENTARY DIRECTOR to JESSICA KINGDON AT Tribeca Film Festival | JUNE 2021

Next Door | Nebenan (2021)

Dir.: Daniel Brühl; Cast: Daniel Brühl, Vicki Krieps, Peter Kurth, Rike Eckermann, Aenne Schwarz, Gode Bendix; Germany 2021, 92 min.

Spanish-German actor Daniel Brühl, who shot to fame in 2003 with Wolfgang Becker’s GDR satire Goodbye Lenin, also stars in his autobiographical themed feature debut, a political satire that riffs on Berlin’s modern day gentrification.

Essentially a two-hander It all takes place in a bar in Berlin’s now upmarket Mitte district where Brühl is self-important film and TV thespian Daniel preparing for a screen test in London. After the obligatory early morning work-out he swings by his favourite cafe (where owner Hilde jokes about the ‘new’ craze for espresso), and shoots the breeze with his East Berliner night-worker neighbour Bruno (Kurth), who regrets voting for re-unification ultimately handing over the power to the capitalist West.

Daniel has a private lift to his lush penthouse but relationships wise the two are on the same page:. Bruno listens to Daniel’s marital up and downs with Clara (Schwarz), who is now having him followed, Bruno knows the territory having had to put up with his wife’s unfaithfulness. But the men also share a chequered past with each other: Daniel’s father also cheated Bruno’s over the ownership of the flat Daniel now lives in. And the security agent has also found out that Clara herself has been playing the field and that Daniel himself is hardly pure as the driven snow as we will discover in the film’s end titles.

Daniel Kehlmann’s script is laced with satirical subtexts but these are only relayed verbally making the whole things feel rather claustrophobic: Next Door could have worked better on the stage or even as a radio play. We only see Clara for a few minutes groaning at being woken up early, and Hilde holds court as a sort of a verbal umpire who eventually falls out with Daniel.

DoP Jens Harant does his best to liven things up with overhead shots of the bar, the few street scenes make a welcome change from the interior bound verbal duel between Daniel and Bruno. The dialogue is sharp, and Bruno’s grievances are certainly plausible. but there are too many characters serving as bland window-dressing: Daniel’s two children and a particularly aggressive drunkard, and Vicki Krieps is under-used in the support. Next Door makes a good point regarding gentrification and social inequality in Germany today, but cinematographically it misses the mark. AS

AT CURZON CINEMAS AND HOME FROM 1 OCTOBER 2021

Wild Indian (2021)

Dir: Lyle Mirchell Corbine Jr. | Cast: Michael Greyeyes, Chaske Spencer, Jesse Eisenberg, Kate Bosworth | US Drama 90’

Native Americans justifiably have an axe to grind in these post colonial retribution times. Coming from this background himself, Lyle Mitchell Corbine certainly knows the territory. His feature debut, “Wild Indian,” captures the zeitgeist in a sober debut that opens with scenes of past glory where a proud warrior is seen brandishing a bow and arrow, but is sadly unable to deal with his traumatic past and male prowess in modern day America.

But let’s forget all the stuff about tomahawk spirit guides and dusky squaws bedecked in chamois leather. This is actually a classic female abuse drama couched in a Native American heritage drama. It sees a disenfranchised man called Michael taking his traumatic past out on women, then asking Jesus for mercy in a phoney act of confession .

We first meet Michael as Ojibwe teenager Makwa (Phoenix Wilson) with his best friend and cousin, Ted-O (Julian Gopal), living on a Midwest reservation. Makwa is clearly a troubled individual whether as a result of his upbringing or his heritage is never really explored in-depth. Messing about in the woods one day with Ted-O, Makwa comes across a former classmate who he shoots and kills, unable to reconcile a long held grievance from the past.. Ted-O is so shocked he actually helps his friend bury the body – something he will live to regret as the crime comes back to haunt him in later years.

Fast forward to 2019 and the pigtailed Mawka, now Michael (Greyeyes), is living in another part of the US and married to an ex dancer Greta (Kate Bosworth) with whom he has a son. Enjoying the uplift his heritage proffers him in the context of workplace diversity Michael enjoys all the perks of his job in a successful marketing company alongside colleague Jesse Eisenberg (who is also the film’s producer). Ted-do (Gopal), on the other hand, has just served time for a drugs-related offence and looks the epitome of a hard bitten criminal covered in tattoos. Despite attempts to ingratiate himself with his sister Cammy (Lisa Cromarty) and her five-year-old boy, he bizarrely decides to sleep outside in a tent, rather than in her house. His manual job in a restaurant is not something he is not proud of, but he clearly feels remorse for the woods incident and tries to make it up to the family of the boy Makwa killed, an episode that ends in tears.

Greyeyes gives a convincing performance as the hard-eyed Michael emerging a vicious bully where women are concerned, and they are forced to deal with the full brunt of his particularly toxic brand of machismo throughout this feature, Michael continuing to cause havoc, many years after killing his school friend in cold blood.

Corbine manages the two-stranded narrative well enough although there is not enough about Michael’s American heritage – details of which could have been fleshed out in flashbacks rather than a ‘before and after scenario’ that leaves us wondering whether his abusive childhood was not the only factor contributing towards his becoming a psychopath.

Instead, the thrust of this fraught psychological drama focuses on his everyday casual violence in the present day as he struggles with the perceived injustices of his background while outwardly presenting as a high-performing almost seductive psychopath prone to visiting lap dancing venues where he asks one ‘hostess’ to indulge him in his predilection for choking.

Well performed by the ensemble cast – Greyeyes is really chilling in the central role – Wild Indian is a brave attempt to highlight the issues facing Native Americans in the present day, but sadly rather a lost opportunity because of its confusing narrative. MT

On digital platforms (iTunes/ Apple TV, Amazon, Sky, Virgin, Google/ YouTube, Rakuten, Microsoft) this Friday 29th Oc

Vengeance is Mine (1949)

Dir: Alan Cullimore | Cast : Valentine Dyall, Anne Firth, Sam Kydd | ,UK Drama 59’

The unmistakable voice of Valentine Dyall as the Man in Black sent shivers down the spines of radio listeners in postwar Britain and led to a few leading roles in horror thrillers during the late forties, of which this comes nearest to a ‘straight’ lead.

Packing a remarkable number of twists and turns into less than an hour’s running time, the central premise of this film has seen service several times, usually played for laughs, and dates back at least as far as Robert Siodmak’s ‘Der Mann, der seinen Mörder sucht’ in 1931. Unusually it here serves as the basic for a luridly enjoyable thriller that as photographed by the reliable Jimmy Wilson vividly evokes a sleazy postwar London of spivs and a still-flourishing black market; suitably embellished by a noisy jazz score by Ken Thorne that sounds more 50’s than 40’s.

Veteran character actor Richard Goolden makes a rare but memorable film appearance in the pivotal role of Sammy Parsons, Anne Firth provides Dyall with a handsome Girl Friday and Sam Kydd has a much more substantial role than we’re used to seeing him in. The atmosphere is further enhanced by the casting of the smaller parts, such as Russell Westwood as an oily-haired henchman in a zoot suit and Betty Taylor as the silent but unnervingly watchful “The Little Girl”. Great fun. @Richard Chatten

Five Films for London Film Festival 2021

The BFI Film Festival is the highlight of the Autumn calendar for London cinema lovers. This year has seen a bumper crop of new films at major festivals all over Europe and America, as the post-pandemic backlog finally clears. So expect to see the best of them – with a few premieres thrown in for good measure – along with virtual reality and shorts. Blockbusters Dune, The Last Duel and The Green Knight may have captured the limelight. But this is what we recommend off the beaten track:

HINTERLAND (2021)

This stylish noir thriller from Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitzky sees Germany and Austria brought to their knees after gruelling defeat in the Great War. While soldiers limp home to a decadent poverty-ridden Vienna a serial killer on the loose sets the scene for a desperate homecoming where their surviving comrades are being preyed upon by the grisly murderer. Wonky German expressionist framing and a sombre mood creates a jagged-edged, rather quaint feeling, echoing M by Fritz Lang or even Grimms’ Fairy tales. All this is suffused with Klimt’s Secessionist jewel-like paintings transporting us rather evocatively back to early 1920s Vienna where a mood of mistrust prevails. The background photograph technique works wonders in conjuring up the contrast between doom and the squalid splendour of the Austrian capital. But our war hero Peter Perg (Murathan Muslu) is still haunted by the nightmarish terror of the trenches looming up in dream sequences on the vast wall behind his bed. LOCARNO 2021

BROTHER’S KEEPER (2021)

Ferit Karahan’s stunningly captured second feature takes place in a draconian boarding school deep in the snowbound mountains of Anatolia. Bringing back memories of many British public schools where caning and freezing cold showers were commonplace, this study of cold-hearted repression serves as an artful metaphor for the ongoing conflict between Turks and their Kurdish underclass whose cultural identity has been repressed since the 1980 coup. In this chilly hellhole – and the cold here is palpable – Turkish teachers subject the poor but gifted Kurdish pupils to regular beatings in spartan conditions where internet connection is random. Once a week, the boys are allowed to shower, and on one such occasion twelve year-old Memo catches a chill in the freezing dorm and by the morning is very ill indeed. His friend Yusuf tries to alert the masters to the boy’s plight but they carry on their collective neglect of Memo – so desperate are they to keep up the macho facade – until the boy becomes unresponsive, along with the mobile connection to the emergency services. BERLINALE 2021

LAMB (2021)

This surreal sci-fi for animals lovers is one of a new breed of arthouse films that blends folklore and fantasy horror with a surprising touch of dark humour. A first feature for Icelandic director Valdimar Johannsson, its intriguing premise invites us to suspend disbelief when a childless couple in a remote farmstead in Iceland unexpectedly become parents during the lambing season. Ingvar (Hilmir Snaer Guonason) and Maria (Noomi Rapace) realise this is no ordinary newborn. But the sense of joy they feel at finally being a family of sorts fills the couple with a warm contentment. The docile baby takes pride of place in their bedroom, and life goes on as normal. But there’s an unsettling undertone to this birth that leaves a nagging doubt in our minds and fuels this sober arthouse curio with eerie dread. The reason for their muted joy soon becomes apparent in a way that is both amusing and bizarre, with its distinct references to Cannes 2021 title Annette and even the recent Swedish fantasy flic Border. CANNES 2021

NITRAM (2021)

Justin Kurzel blows us away with this scorching arthouse psychodrama commemorating the Port Arthur tragedy, exploring the milieu that created a murderer (Martin Bryant) who would kill 35 people on that fateful day in 1996. Not since Snowtown has a film engendered such utter terror through its central character – the titular Nitram – played by a coruscating Caleb Landry Jones – a fully formed enfant terrible who lives with his long-suffering parents (Judy Davis and Anthony LaPaglia) in the sleepy seaside town. Snowtown writer Shaun Grant again shows how long-term parental abuse and a casually toxic environment turns Nitram ((Martin backwards his hated school nickname) into a vulnerable, isolated loner who wreaks havoc wherever he goes. A display of his anti-social behaviour kicks off a story driven forward by his unpredictable behaviour, even more frightening than his brutal strength: like a firecracker he goes off without warning, but is also capable of loving affection for his mother who diminishes him with constant putdowns, unleashing a monster which roars through this splintering psychodrama. CANNES 2021 – Winner Best Actor Caleb Landry-Jones.

EUROPA (1931) Photo credit: Themerson Estate

Stefan and Franciszka Themersons’ long lost 1931 anti-fascist masterpiece Europa will be screening at this year’s festival, 80 years after it was seized in Paris during the Second World War. Originally believed to have been destroyed by the Nazis, Stefan and Franciszka Themersons’ incendiary film was rediscovered by chance in the Bundesarchiv, Berlin, in 2019. On behalf of the Themerson Estate, the Commission for Looted Art in Europe negotiated the restitution of the film from the Bundesarchiv, which had preserved the original nitrate film since the reunification of Germany in the 1990s. LONDON FILM FESTIVAL (photo credit: Themerson Estate).

BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL | 6 – 17 OCTOBER 2021

Earwig (2021)

Dir: | Wri: Lucile Hadžhalilović, Geoff Cox | Cast: Paul Hilton, Romola Garai, Alex Lawther, Romane Hemelaers | 114′

French auteuse Lucile Hadžhalilović offers another bizarre but compulsive arthouse psychodrama, this time in the surgical horror sub genre, upping her game with a star cast of Romola Garai and Alex Lawther.

Arcane and edgy Earwig is immaculately crafted with its surreal Lynchian credentials that subtly inveigle us into the horror bound story of little Mia (Romane Hemelaers) who is forced to undergo the painful daily procedure of having her teeth surgically replaced by ice-cubes due to some unexplained medical condition. Yes, this is not for everyone but fans of her quirky style will thrill to Earwig’s macabre charm.

The Lyonnaise filmmaker’s previous film Evolution (2015) saw a young boy hospitalised and subjected to strange interventions performed by a series of female cyphers dressed as nurses. Once again writing with her Evolution collaborator Geoff Cox, Hadžhalilović keeps the storyline enigmatic in a dialogue-starved scenario: no explanation is offered for the procedure as we peer at the screen desperately looking for clues, our own teeth almost twinging with the agony of expectation. Ken Yasumoto’s scraping soundscape recalls the abject terror of the dentist’s chair, brought to cinematic life in Marathon Man, but there are also echoes of Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’ Goodnight Mommy (2014).

Closely based on a book by sculptor and performance artist Brian Catling, the film actually takes its title from the male central character Albert (Paul Hilton), a singularly morose carer who tends to Mia in the confines of a squalid flat in mid century Liege, Belgium, redolently captured in Jonathan Ricquebourg’s dingy visuals where the weather is as grim as the storyline.

Part of Albert’s misery is being under the cosh of a telephone taskmaster, a mysterious man who hounds him unpredictably, demanding updates on Mia’s condition. Meanwhile he continues the meticulous molar replacement mission until forced into the outside world with Mia on a hospital visit which ends in more pain, this time in a local bar where Romula Garai is another hapless victim. MT

NOW AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS FROM FRIDAY | SAN SEBASTIAN PREMIERE

Falling for Figaro (2021) Netflix

Dir: Ben Lewin | Cast: Joanna Lumley, Hugh Skinner, Danielle Macdonald, Shazad Latif | UK Comedy 104′

Hugh Skinner is the reason to see this instantly forgettable bit of fun. Just one look at him brings a smile, along with Joanna Lumley who has the finest English voice and diction in living memory. Bringing to mind the true story of Florence Foster Jenkins, although the chanteuse in Ben Lewin’s comedy is American, and sees a jaded city whizz kid leaving her dead end romance and heading for the Scottish highlands to chase her dream of becoming an opera singer.

Unfortunately, Millie, a brilliant Danielle Macdonald, doesn’t realise that Rome wasn’t built in a day, and also has a voice strangely similar to Susan Boyle, despite the efforts of her talented but overbearing coach Megan Geoffrey-Bishop (Lumley). Amusing and light-hearted with Lumley carrying the film to its predicable conclusion. Worth a watch if you’re in the mood for unchallenging comedy. MT

ON RELEASE FROM October 1st | On demand on most platforms

Prayers for the Stolen (2021)

Dir/Wri: Tatiana Huezo | Cast: Ana Cristina Ordonez Gonzalez, Marya Membreno, Norma Pablo, Mayra Batalla, Eileen Yanez, Emeo Villegas Olivia Lagunas | Drama 100′

A lush and haunting tale of friendship and survival draws us into the vortex of oppression and fear felt by three girls growing up during wartime in rural Mexico. Recent figures from Amnesty suggest that around ten women and girls are killed in Mexico alone, every day.

Based on the 2014 novel by Jennifer Clement this is the latest human drama from Tatiana Huezo who has been quietly raising the profile of social and personal abuse for woman all over Latin America – from Civil War in El Salvador (in El Lugar mas pequeno in 2011) to human trafficking in Mexico (Tempestad (2016)). This is her third and most accomplished feature to date.

In a tight-knit community nestled in the Mexican mountains, we first meet eight year old Ana (Ordonez Gonzalez), digging a hole in the ground with her mother Rita (Batalla). Ana will ‘bury’ herself here when the guerrilla soldiers come to kidnap the local girls who will be turned into captives and slaves. In the bosky remote hillside violence is an everyday part of growing up for young Mexican girls. So Ana and her two friends create their own impenetrable parallel universe where they play at being women, comforting each other with an affectionate bond of friendship, singing and painting their lips with beetroot. Soon Ana’s long hair will be cut into a boyish crop to avoid detection. On lonely days she hides out in the empty houses of villagers who have long disappeared or fled, such as Juana and Don Pancho, whose abandoned flock of cows now roams free in the village.

Strong on atmosphere the film is cinematic study of what it means to grow up as a girl in a hostile environment where men are almost constantly the enemy. Ana’s father is supposedly working on the other side of the valley, but he has not sent money back for several years, and so Ana and her mother are forced to fend for themselves on the brink of poverty. One surreal scene pictures Rita desperately trying to get a mobile signal on the top of a mountain, along the other abandoned women whose ‘phones light up the darkness like mini torches glowing in the gloom.

Five years later, at thirteen, the girls become teenagers as they face the harsh reality of what being a woman really entails in this toxic climate of war and macho culture. Abstract danger becomes an inescapable threat, as a Russian roulette plays out one day when soldiers arrive to take Ana, forcing her into the dugout as her mother is threatened with death.

Some films are moving but this rich character drama is actually harrowing too, as we become emotionally invested in the girls’ story fleshed out in Huezo’s richly textured script, joining them in their descent into traumatised hell as a daily experience. The casual involuntary abuse from Ana’s mother is echoed by the disorientating fear she feels from the outside male threat. Ana – both as a child and a teenager – is impressively performed by two newcomers (Ordonez Gonzalez and Membreno), and is matched by Huezo’s assured direction and luminous camerawork by Dariela Ludlow.

IN CINEMAS FROM 8 April 2022, and exclusively on MUBI from 29 April 2022 | San Sebastian FILM FESTIVAL | Latin American Prix HORIZONTES WINNER

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2021 | UN CERTAIN REGARD SPECIAL MENTION AWARD

The Severed Arm (1973) Plex TV

Wri/Dir: Tom Alderman | Cast: Deborah Walley, Paul Carr, Marvin Kaplan, John Crawford | US Horror, 89′

Thomas S Alderman’s exploitation movie sees five trapped miners on the bring of starvation resort to butchering one of their mates, before rescue brings retribution for all concerned. The Severed Arm follows that old chestnut about a group of men haunted by a guilty shared secret, who receive a nasty surprise in the mail followed by scary nightly visits.

Dated by the seventies haircuts and moustaches, constant zooms and a synthesised score, and seemingly edited with the same axe their nemesis employs; it’s all played straight (including by veteran comedy actor Marvin Kaplan as nighttime D. J. ‘Wild Man Herman’) and reasonably effective on what was plainly half a shoestring.

Although top billed, early sixties teenage actress Deborah Walley is largely absent for most of the duration; although she certainly makes up for lost time at the conclusion. Richard Chatten

NOW ON PLEX TV AND YOUTUBE

The Alpinist (2021)

Dirs: Peter Mortimer, Nick Rosen | US Doc 93’

Almost everyone is entranced by the thrill of mountains. And so another documentary about man pitting his wits and physical stamina against the elements is always welcome.

Just the sheer elation of being overwhelmed by stratospheric heights and snowcapped peaks only adds to the nail-biting suspense of the ascent: will the mountaineer make it to the top, or will nature hold sway. And then there’s the descent – the most critical part of any top-tier climber’s mission. More people die going back to base camp then scaling the summit in this perilous pastime

Mortimer and Rosen’s taut documentary offers much of the intensity Mountain and Free Solo and is probably more realistic about the pitfalls and realities of mountaineering. Not for the vertigo prone, the directors occasionally going off piste themselves in their storytelling, occasionally there’s a sense that the film teeters on the brink of a mockumentary in style.

The Alpinist does not refer to its namesake, the European Alps, but to the practice of tackling complex and perilous peaks, and here the focus is a complex climb in Patagonia where Canadian climber Marc-André Leclerc challenges perilous conditions. Best known for his derring-do in tackling mountain paths less travelled with the added challenge of racing against time to compete with established records, Leclerc is a courageous climber who pits himself against the elements. No mean feat considering he suffered ADHD as a child. A case in point is an ascent in Canada where he beat the record-holding alpinist Honnold in a complex endeavour given the challenging circumstances: like every sport nowadays enhanced gadgetry and equipment is increasingly de rigueur. Solo climbs are a speciality for Leclerc who gets his buzz from the spiritual experience that alpinism offers. Although he is occasionally accompanied by his girlfriend Brette Harrington, who is an accomplished climber herself.

Mortimer is not over-awed by Leclerc’s courage or the stratospheric scenery conjured up in The Alpinist’s dizzying visuals, keeping his distance – literally and metaphorically, although he doesn’t quite get under the Canadian’s skin. Leclerc is an unintentionally evasive character, and the shoot was not without its own ups and downs given the peripatetic and often haphazard nature of his life, when the spirit moves him he’s up and at it like a true pro. Talking heads help to break up the tonal intensity of Leclerc’s experience as fellow alpinists share their stories — some amusing, some intriguing in this heady foray into this extreme sport. MT

IN CINEMAS FROM 24 SEPTEMBER 2021

IL Buco (2021)

Dir.: Michelangelo Frammartino; Documentary with Paolo Cossi, Jacobo Elia, Denise Trombin, Nicola Lanza; Italy/France/Germany 2021, 93 min.

Milan born director/co-writer Michelangelo Frammartino is not in a hurry: more than a decade after Le Quattro Volte his languorous essay on nature and the limited influence of humans, is a re-staging of the 1961 speleogical expedition, the doco-fiction hybrid paints a rather sober picture of the Abisso del Bifurto at the Pollino plateau in Calabria, where the then – third largest cave of nearly 700 m was discovered and meticulously measured.

Once underground, there is only artificial light: the team’s helmet lamps illuminate the usual detritus: old newspapers with recognisable idols such as JFK and Sophia Loren their images going up in flames to provide firelight for those men and women toiling meticulously in the abyss. It being Italy, a football match takes place underground, the two players overground unable to keep the ball away from the cave entrance. Other team members snooze, with a horse poking his nose into their tent.

In the nearby village, locals gather round a TV screen as if it was a cinema: the fuzzy black-and-white picture shows the 24-story high Pirelli building in Milan, and some crackly old dancing numbers. Strangely enough one of the old villagers, a man in his eighties, steals the show. He is a bystander collecting wood borne by his donkey to the hut where he lives with other farm workers. Somehow we expect him to be there forever (like the old boy in Quattro Volte), even when the film crew is long gone – but nature intervenes. The men transport him to his home where a doctor arrives later on another donkey. We’re prepared for the grim outcome reminding us of our own mortality and the fragility of life.

Meanwhile in the cave, the speleologists tool their way down, encumbered by ropes and other instruments. Afterwards they sit in the sunshine copying their measurements on old-fashioned writing paper with a quill. It all ends in a puddle in a cul-de-sac, without fanfares and celebrations.

DoP Renato Berta lets his camera glide lovingly about the landscape and the animals, showing the descent like in a glowing string of beads. Somehow we cannot take it all seriously, the animals and farmers overground seem much more real than the heroes with their determination to discover and measure. If there is any message, it is that so-called progress is very limited – as is fame. The age-old railway which brought the climbers to their destination, and the their motley collection of tents remain in the memory, along with the old man who has ‘sneaked’ in grabbing the limelight as a major attraction. Progress is measured by human patience and observance of nature, records of all kinds are fleeting.

AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS FROM FRIDAY | SPECIAL JURY PRIZE VENICE 2021

Eagles of the Fleet (1952)

Dir: Lesley Selander | Cast: Sterling Hayden, Richard Carlson, William Phipps, Keith Larsen, Phyllis Coates | US Doc 83′

The opening credits and martial music seem rather grand to be bearing the infamous name of poverty row purveyors Monogram Pictures – now moving (for them) upmarket and soon to rebrand themselves Allied Artists – by whose standards this production by Walter Mirisch (who later gave us The Great Escape) obviously represented a prestige project.

Those with a knowledge of US military aircraft will as usual have a great time pointing out all the mismatched aircraft footage (just as trainspotters never tire of pointing out that the rolling stock is all wrong in any film with a railway setting); but the 16mm Kodachrome film shot by enterprising wartime cameramen was already proving a gift that keeps on giving, of which this early production was an early beneficiary, aided by Cinecolor photography by Harry Neumann and art direction and editing by David Milton and William Austin that reasonably unobtrusively blends the original footage with studio work and scenes actually shot on the USS Princeton.

The names of Sterling Hayden and Richard Carlson gave a strong hint as to what to expect, and sure enough we get the usual conflict between granite-faced by-the-book disciplinarian Hayden and nice guy Carlson who comes to appreciate the wisdom of Hayden’s anti-charm offensive on the new boys (who include a youthful-looking William Schallart in a surprisingly substantial early role as ‘Longfellow’).

The film holds your attention for the most part, although Marlin Skiles’ music increasingly emphasises exhilaration rather than grim determination on the part of the flyers; and I did find my attention starting to wander during the final twenty minutes when the excitement was supposed to be at its height.@Richard Chatten

Azor (2021) San Sebastián 2021

Dir: Andreas Fontana | Cast: Fabrizio Rongione, Stephanie Cleau, Gilles Privat, Elli Medeiros, Carmen Iriondo, Pablo Torre Nilson, Ignazio Vila, Juan Trench, Juan Pablo Geretto| Argentina, Switzerland, 99′

Another sophisticated Argentine thriller along the lines of Rojo set during the ‘Dirty Wars’ and this time seen through the eyes of a Swiss banker who arrives in Buenos Aires to investigate the mysterious disappearance of his partner only to discovers intrigue and subterfuge amongst the elite.

In 1976 a military junta seized power from Eva Peron’s government resulting in the deaths of over 30,000 people. Swiss born filmmaker Andreas Fontana transports us back to these uncertain times with high society characters who feel real in their glamorous settings, manicured poolsides, lush estancias, exclusive polo parties where Fabrizio Rongione strikes just the right tone of cool circumspection and biddability in his role as the trustworthy banker with a listening ear (a million miles away from the shoddy service we’ve come to expect from our own banks).

Cleau adds allure as Ines, his chain-smoking wife and confidente, oiling the wheels of their social encounters – where smoking is ‘de rigueur’ -with her unthreatening, savvy charm. Other characters who stand out here are Carmen Iriondo, a society hostess, and the Monsignor, who strikes fear into the proceedings with his chilly glare. These are people you may not trust to post a letter but as the gatekeepers of Argentina’s shady upper echelons of power, they must be respected.

In their car from the airport Yvan and Ines witness two men being held up at gunpoint, Yvan suavely fails to bat an eyelid, and once in their comfort of their exclusive hotel, Buenos Aires stretches before them just like any other international capital city, although the tinkling harpsichord score warns of trouble ahead, in the style of those Claude Chabrol thrillers. The couple get a rude awakening from the rather glib thickly-accented lawyer Dekerman (Geretto), who welcomes them to BA on behalf of ‘the client’, before rudely ordering his own whiskey before offering Ines a drink (and failing to light her cigarette), preparing her for the macho set up that will follow.

Business here is not just about talent but also moving in the right circles and keeping quiet at the right time (the code word ‘Azor’ means to ‘keep shtum’, rather like the Sicilian ‘omertà’). As a private banker from a monied background Yvan De Wiel settles graciously into the hushed scenes of high society in this enjoyably taught first feature from Swiss director Fontana who writes and directs with considerable flair, capturing the zeitgeist of these dangerous times with a florid eye for local detail.

A De Wiel sashays discretely in soigné villas, lush lounges and amongst the polo ponies, he swiftly gains the trust of the movers and shakers repositioning his bank’s interests with the junta when it dawns on him that his partner Rene Keys had possibly pulled the wool over his eyes bringing his firm into question. But he has another string to his bow, that of deal-making (aka laundering blood money) using his utmost caution. it’s a restrained performance and one of subtlety.

From the outset Fontana creates a real sense of danger here, a feeling that anything could go wrong as De Wiel’s investigation leads him deeper and deeper into the exotic hinterland of Argentina’s pampas where the Junta’s sinister types hang out in the film’s seething finale.

There is more that a whiff of colonialism to Azor. Silence and an evocative ambient soundscape prove to be Fontana’s best weapon in ramping up tension in the final stages of his restrained thriller, a slick seventies score of musak playing out during discrete cocktail parties where these smooth operators mingle under swaying palms, waiters plying them with drinks as they plot and plan how to deal with the trappings of colonialism. MT

San Sebastian Film Festival 2021

The Employer and the Employee (2021) San Sebastian 2021

Dir.: Manolo Nieto; Cast: Nahuel Perez Biscayart, Christian Borges, Justina Bustos, Fatima Quintanilla, Carlos Lacuesta, Virgine Mendez, Manuel Guedes; Uruguay 2021, 105 min.

Another big screen treat from South America in this year’s Quinzaine selection, this time from Uruguay stars trailblazing Argentine actor Nahuel Perez Biscayart who has been the toast of the international festival circuit for Persian Lessons, Beats Per Minute, and See You Up There.

Elegantly paced and thoughtful despite its rather cumbersome title this ‘upstairs downstairs’ parable unfolds in a rural community in the north Eastern part of Uruguay near the Brazilian border where the magnificent widescreen landscape is very much the star of the show.

Uruguayan writer/director Manolo Nieto’s family affair has strong magic realist undertones: his titular boss and employee are not conventional by any means – and neither are their other halves. DoP Arauco Hernandez Holz conjures up lush, languid images in a richly textured slow burn tragedy in the style of Bunuel and Nuri Bilge Ceylan Greek where servant and master are forever bound together in a paternalistic system.

The way we meet Rodrigo (Biscayart), the titular boss, is symptomatic of all the main characters: caught at the border with some weed, he looks like your typical university dropout, and not a clever one at that. A family doctor swings by to get his baby boy Bautista to sleep in the most unorthodox way possible. Wife Federica (Bustos), a blue eyed blonde, is concerned about Bautista’s health, and later they will take him to hospital for tests, in a nice little tense undercurrent that burbles on til the film’s finale.

Uruguay’s agricultural production had to change from traditional animal farming to soya planting, and only a few labourers can manage the sophisticated machinery for the harvest. Rodrigo sets out to meet the old retainer and farm hand Lacuesta (Lacuesta) who puts forward his teenage son Carlos (Borgoes) for the job. The young man also has a baby daughter with Estafania (Quintanilla) but lacks experience or any real commitment, preferring the more glamorous job of looking after the horses, and one in particular is Hidalgo, a race horse destined to be sold to the Arabs, if it does well in a 115 km marathon race. Carlos hopes to be selected as his jockey. But clearly he’s not up to the job of driving a tractor and a serious accident reveals his shortcomings as an employee.

Surprisingly, Rodrigo gives him another chance, even taking him to a brothel, where Carlos blacks out. The situation becomes even more bizarre when Rodrigo invites Estafanie to work on the hacienda as a maid. Federica and the young woman nearly come to blows over baby Bautista’s care. But Rodrigo is in a bind: the Farmworkers’ Union has filed a lawsuit against him as the boss with overall responsibility for the tractor accident, and so he promises Carlos can ride on Hidalgo at the famous race in Santa Fe where loyalties explode in a racy finale. Manolo Nieto delivers a calmly-paced and contemplative modern thriller that ponders on the past and the present in his native Uruguay. AS

San Sebastian FILM FESTIVAL 2021 |

Buñuel: A Surrealist Filmmaker (2021) San Sebastian

Dir; Javier Espada | Spain, Doc 90′

Spanish filmmaker Javier Espada shares his birthplace of Calanda (Aragon) with the legendary Spanish surrealist and Palme d’Or winner Luis Buñuel Portolés (1900-83) whose story forms the subject of his engaging new documentary that premiered in the Cannes Film Festival Classics section.

As a teen during the Easter Semana Santa processions Espada escaped the loud drums of the ceremony for the relative calm of his local fleapit and was instantly bewitched by Luis Buñuel’s The Milky Way (1969), the image of Christ fusing with the character of the Marquis de Sade in his subconscious, creating subversive undertones.

Although far from a full-bloodied biopic of Buñuel’s films, this plays out as nostalgic tribute to the legendary director from one of his most ardent admirers. Espada’s obsession would also provide the springboard to a lifelong friendship with Buñuel’s regular screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière whose script for Diary Of A Chambermaid would continue with cult classics such as Belle De Jour and The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie, and would also pave the way for Buñuel’s memoirs ‘My Last Breath.’

A recently restored archive from stereoscopic glass plates, clips and personal photos – provided by his sons Juan Luis and Rafael – and the Luis Bunuel Film Institute is enlivened by Espada’s own thoughts and those of the director providing insight into a charismatic career that started with his traditional upbringing in a well to do influential family in Calanda. But a tragic incident involving a donkey would put a subversive spin on the director’s output and much of his work would be banned banned by Franco’s regime due to its controversial subject matter. DoP Ignacio Ferrando Margeli provides a pristine black and white aesthetic in this dive into cinema history. MT

SAN SEBASTIAN FILM FESTIVAL 2021 | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2021 | CANNES CLASSICS

I Want to Talk About Duras (2021) San Sebastián Film Festival 2021

Dir.: Claire Simon; Cast: Emmanuelle Devos, Swann Arlaud; France 2021, Drama 95 min.

US born, French director Claire Simon explores one of the most obsessive love affairs in literary history: between Marguerite Duras (1914-96) and her much young partner Yann Andréa (1952-2014) that continued for sixteen years despite the age difference and his being gay.

Simon draws her material from the 1982 interviews made by Duras’ close friend, the writer Michèle Manceaux, who became Yann’s confidante in Neauphie-le-Chateau. The intimate two-handed drama sees a chain-smoking Yann (Arlaud) talking to Marie Claire columnist Manceaux (Devos) while the tape recorder is running. All this is intercut with archive footage and wordless dramatised sequences where the two lovers are pictured in romantic rendezvous. After Manceaux’ death, Yann entrusted the tapes to a friend who later handed them over to Andréa’s sister Pascale Lemée in 2015.

Marguerite Duras is possibly best remembered for her script of Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour. But it was in Caen during a 1975 screening of her film India Song, starring Delphine Seyrig, that she met postgraduate student Yann Andréa. He was an avid fan of her novels and initiated a – mostly one-sided – correspondence with Duras for the remainder of that decade. Then, in 1980, Duras invited Yann, who was gay, to live with her in a hotel in Trouville. Thus began an extraordinary relationship which lasted until Duras’ death sixteen years later.

Covering more or less the same ground as Josee Dayan’s Cet Amour Là, starring Jeanne Moreau as Duras and Aymeric Demarigny as Andréa, based on Andréa’s memoire, the interview is a sharp reminder of the closeness of love and death. Manceaux insistently but gently probes him with personal questions, Yann confessing “total love for Duras and her work. It was eternity that completely belonged to me. Passion yes, but passion struck by death”. He would leave his job, apartment and friends to be with Duras and was soon eclipsed and dominated by her. He tried to pull back, ending the relationship several times and even attempting suicide. Duras challenged his sexual orientation: “I am not just a writer, I am also a woman. You are not gay, I am all your desire”. Yann was soon convinced that his homosexuality was a form of solidarity that allowed him to escape his true feelings. But it went much deeper than that: “She was the master. She re-created me. And un-created my old self, to create me.” Passion and fiction overlapped. “I existed but at the same time I felt projected into her imagination.”

Duras emerges a bit of a control freak, reformulating her lover, changing the way he dressed and even his perfume, discouraging his personal friendships and forbidding him to read any novels but her own. Even his rapport with Manceaux “felt like a betrayal of her”. His entire existence was subsumed by Duras, who opined “You only exist through me”. Yann felt like the main character in her book ‘The Malady of Death’. Andréa also played a part in Duras’ film L’Homme Atlantique (1981), “but I realised later, that she made me die by filming me; always in a chair, never moving. And finally, Yann actually felt inadequate and unable to satisfy his lover: “Maybe I love her less than she loves me, I am always a step behind, she wants to raise me to her intensity. She sees that I can not do it. That hurts her a lot.” But whatever went on between them Duras set him a monument in words: ‘Yann Andrea Steiner’, her final book.

DoP Céline Bozon uses a gap in the interview (which went on for two days) to focus on the countryside settings where Yann is pursued by alluring men. Enlivened by paintings of the couple’s sexual relationship and excerpts from India Song and L’Homme Atlantique this is a captivating piece of filmmaking that avoids sensationalism in portraying a remarkable, real-life relationship between a man and a woman. AS

SAN SEBASTIAN FILM FESTIVAL 2021 | COMPETITION

The World Ten Times Over (1964)

Dir: Wolf Rilla | Cast: Sylvia Syms, June Ritchie, William Hartnell | UK Drama 93’

After over fifty years this film has been rescued from near oblivion because the lesbian subtext has led to it being dusted off by the BFI in celebration of sexual diversity. Shot towards the end of the famous winter of ’63 (the snow was gone by then but the Serpentine and The Long Water in Kensington Gardens are visibly still both frozen over), the record it provides of London in those far-off pre-Profumo days gives the film the usual lustre possessed by films from that era.

Despite much emphasis on the sex-crazed mood of its time, the film is really about money rather than passion. Billa (Sylvia Sims) and Ginnie (June Ritchie) are a pair of nightclub ‘hostesses’ wholly dependent for their livelihood on men; and the men in this film are a pretty unlovely bunch. The nearest thing to a conventional romantic relationship depicted is that between Ginnie and Bob Shelbourne (Edward Judd); but he’s portrayed as a weakling whose most attractive quality in Ginnie’s eyes is the enormous fortune owned by his controlling tycoon father.

It becomes pretty clear as the film progresses which side Billa actually bats for from her butch leather overcoat and boots and the high necked pullover she wears when not uniformed for work in cocktail dresses. Her infatuation with Ginnie becomes more and more evident as the film progresses, but ironically she’s the one who gets pregnant. The future doesn’t really seem to hold much chance of Billa settling down for good with a self-absorbed drama queen like Ginnie, whose rejection of men may owe more to her only being interested in those with the money to shower her with gifts than authentic sapphist inclinations. The final scene resolves nothing, although it would be interesting to speculate where they would have been ten years later, or (for that matter, Sims and Ritchie both still being alive and well as I write this) now. @RichardChatten

The Middle Man (2021) Toronto Film Festival 2021

Dir: Bent Hamer | Cast: Don McKellar, Kenneth Welsh, Nina Andresen, Nicolas Bro | Drama 95′

A middle man is a concept that many will be unfamiliar with but it provides the backbone to Ben Hamer’s dead-pan drama about small-town America, inspired by Lars Saabye Christensen’s novel Sluk. The strange thing about this absurd Hal Hartley style feature, directed by a Norwegian, is the cast of lowkey European and Canadian actors that only adds to its impassive charm.

Frank Farelli (Pål Sverre Hagen) is just the sort of person you might run into in this moribund backwater where days go by uneventfully for its small-minded inhabitants. Yet there’s a dark humour about a place that used to attract visitors by the score to a hotel that’s now been closed for many years, along with the local cinema.

The place in now run by a motley crew of po-faced citizens laughably called the “Commission”: a sheriff in the shape of Paul Gross’, a man of God (Nicolas Bro) and the local doctor (Don McKellar), supported by their able secretary (Tuva Novotny). They are the self-appointed Civic guardians who keep the civic wheels running smoothly despite a dwindling council budget. Strangely the taxpayers that still live here seem beset by a string of tragic events requiring the appointment of a ‘middleman’ – in this case Frank – to be the bearer of bad news, a job that requires him to take an oath of secrecy, seemingly ludicrous in a place where everyone is either related or ‘in the know.’

Mild-mannered to the point of obsequiousness, Frank ironically lost in father some time ago in one of these tragic episode and now lives with his mother, played by the attractive, long-suffering Nina Andresen who despairs at her son’s naivity. The lowkey narrative meanders on spiked by moments of of dry humour. One scene sees Frank ‘celebrating’ his new job as the town’s middleman, with half a tee-bone steak (he couldn’t afford the other half). But once installed in his new office office, Frank’s workload grinds to a halt, the previous spike of accidents levelling out to a virtually nothing, leaving the now sharp-suited middleman twiddling his thumbs with the bored Brenda. This all changes when catastrophe suddenly rears its head, and Frank is not only in the thick of it, but implicated in the crime that shakes up the feature’s weirdly ambiguous finale. MT

TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL 2021 | 10-18 SEPTEMBER

Small World (2021)

Dir.: Patryk Vega; Cast: Piotr Adamczyk, Enrique Arce, Julia Wieniawa-Narkiewicz, Montserrat Roig de Puig, Andris Keiss, Sally Day; Poland 2021, 117 min.

Poland’s Patryk Vega is well known for his unpretentious action thrillers like The Plagues of Breslau, usually mitigating the hyper violence with a certain glossy style, making it all worthwhile. But SMALL WORLD is a singularly unpalatable and relentlessly uncomfortable watch, the narrative – about victims of under-age sex trafficking – is ham-fisted and full of gratuitous violence, with its anti-hero policeman looking for vengeance, while morphing into a vile super-hero of the worst kind.

It all looks terrific: Norbert Modrzejewski’s brutal images leave nothing to the imagination, the camera gleefully recording unmitigated violence, making it all look like a titillating videogame for adults. Vega sinks to his nadir when his antihero Police officer Robert Goc (Adamczyk) is seen groping a young girl in the flume of a public bath. Ultimately the detective is just as depraved as the felon he’s chasing.

In the opening scenes Got is seen pursuing the abductors of four-year old Ola and her mother, but they narrowly miss a truck of under-aged kids being waived through the Russian border by a corrupt police officer. In Russia, years later, a gas explosion rips through the apartment belonging to Oleg (Keiss). In the wreckage are photos of under-age girls, including one of Ola. Goc re-opens the investigation, and the obsessive hunt for Ola. But once again he is too late, with Oleg’s brother whisking the girls away.

Later Goc meets Jasmina (de Puig), the evil leader of a satanic paedophile ring, celebrating a masked ball with her follows, But the police officer manages to slip through her clutches, finally tracking down the (now) 16-year old Ola (Wieniawa-Narkiewicz) in Bangkok, where she lives with her wealthy abuser John (Arce), and his coterie of prostitutes. In reality, Goc is a bit of a nonce himself, and gets off on underage girls. But he manages to save Ola sending her back to her mother in Poland, before tackling the nefarious Jasmina and her masked followers. AS

NOW ON RELEASE IN CINEMAS NATIONWIDE

The Djinn (2021)

Dir.: David Charbonier, Justin Powell; Cast: Ezra Dewey, Tevy Poe, Donald Pitts, John Erickson, Rob Brownstein; USA 2021, 82 min.

After their successful collaboration in Behind the Door, US writers/directors David Charbonier (also the PD) and Justin Powell (editor) get together to torture 12 year-old Dylan, whose new home is the battleground for a fight with an intrusive evil spirit, the titular Djinn. The mute boy is driven to the end of his tether for not heeding the warning, “be aware of the Djinn’s toll, for the gift you seek might cost your soul”. In other words that trusty old chestnut “be careful what you wish for”.

Set in 1989, and aesthetically beholden to this period, Dylan (Dewey) is left to his own devices when his father (Brownstein) goes off to work the night shift, after reading his son a bedtime story from ‘Pinochhio’, with the warning “What’s done, can’t be undone” ringing in our ears. Dylan finds ‘The Book of Shadows’, and asks the Djinn to grant him a voice. The nefarious entity is apt at switching into multiple personalities: Dylan’s mother Michelle (Poe), or an old man who recently died, are amongst its repertoire. The Djinn (Erickson) then chases the boy round the house, leaving him gasping for breath, his Asthma inhaler running out. Come the morning, Dylan is only grateful to be alive, welcoming his father with open arms.

Lacking tempo, and resorting to corny dialogue: “Would Mum have stayed if I was not …. different”, The Djinn is often tedious and predictable plot-wise, right up to the anticlimactic finale. Inventive production values mask a tiny budget, and save this from sinking without trace. AS

OUT ON FRIDAY 17 September

Smokescreen (1964)

Dir: Jim O’Connolly | UK thriller 70’

One of the many perks of the British ‘B’ movie of the early 60s was occasionally seeing a proper actor rather than merely a bankable star getting a lead role; and it only needs to happen once for posterity to be able to sit back and enjoy the result.

Just five years after an uncredited bit as a detective in ‘Sapphire’ – but long before his memorable TV turns in the likes of ‘Porridge’ and ‘Citizen Smith’ – the late Peter Vaughan effortlessly demonstrates his ability to carry a film lead on his broad shoulders, backed by a terrific supporting cast (mainly drawn from TV) including Sam Kydd and the town of Brighton.

The character Vaughan plays is given individuality by making him pathologically tight with money. I think it was a failure of nerve on the part of the film’s makers to add what looks like a last minute addition to make him more sympathetic in the form of the scene of him throwing money about with complete abandon visiting his sick wife in hospital; although even that provides an even rarer big screen appearance by another friendly face from TV in the form of Damaris Hayman as the nurse. (Sadly she died on 3 June, 2021, aged 91. That she was unbilled lends further weight to my supposition that her scene was a last-minute addition after the rest of the film was complete.) @Richard Chatten

Balloon (2019)

Dir: Pema Tseden | Drama, Tibet 100”

Tibetan director Pema Tseden brings a tender sense of beauty and tragedy to this inspirational family drama, his seventh feature, exploring ordinary life in the early 1980s for a Tibetan farming community.

Vibrantly captured and delicately observed The Balloon initially appears to be a straightforward modern fable, but there’s much to it than that. Tseden’s clever script is underpinned by a subtle socio-political commentary and a contemporary female empowerment theme (in the style of Tulpan) highlighting women’s pivotal place in the East Asian pecking pecking order, running contrary to outward appearances.

In this much fought over territory an extended family of grandfather (Konchok), mother Drolkar (Sonam Wangmo), father Dargye (Jinpa) and two cheeky young sons (Druklha Dorje and Palden Nyima) eke out an existence from their cramped living conditions where privacy is impossible, so one of the boys soon finds a condom tucked under his mother’s pillow. Mistaking it for a balloon, the boys have great fun the following day, blowing it up in broad daylight, much to the amusement of the older menfolk.

Despite demure outward appearances their demure mother Drolkar is not just a pretty face, nor is she under her husband’s thumb. But China has just adopted a strict population-control policy with crippling fines extending to Tibet. Drolkar is anxious not to have any more children, but needs to satisfy her husband’s rampant sex drive into the bargain.

Ironically the Chinese birth policy does not apply to the family’s flock of sheep which are actively being encouraged to breed and the couple’s teenage son is tasked with engaging the services of a young ram to do the job. All this is further complicated when Dargye’s Buddhist father suddenly dies, leaving the grieving farmer with the obligation of having to provide another soul to allow for his father’s reincarnation, this religious touchstone adding further complexity to The Balloon‘s seemingly straightforward storyline.

Meanwhile, Drolkar has secretly consulted a savvy female doctor (Kangchen Tsering) providing her with the wherewithal to call the shots family-planning wise. The couple already have a teenage son who is running their ram breeding programme. But somehow Drolkar falls pregnant again and knows she must have an abortion but how she proceeds is both intriguing and amusing.

Peyman Yazdanian’s atmospheric score and Lu Songye’s stunning handheld photography capture the sheer beauty of Tibet’s magnificent scenery boosting the wide-ranging appeal of this charming ethnological drama. MT

ON RELEASE IN CINEMAS FROM FRIDAY 24 SEPTEMBER 2021

Whether the Weather Is Fine (2021) Toronto Film Festival

Dir: Carlo Francisco Manatad | Cast: Charo Santos-Concio, Daniel Padilla, Rans Rifol | Thriller, 105′

For his debut feature, a post apocalyptic fantasy thriller, Filippino director Carlo Francisco Manatad explores how the aftermath of catastrophe changes life for three individuals in his native city of Tacloban.

Hayan is not the first typhoon to devastate his hometown in the coastal region of Eastern Visayas and it won’t be the last. A young man wakes up one morning to discover that two close friends have disappeared in the utter chaos – his mother Norma (Santos), and Andrea (Rifol) the woman with whom he was a planning a new life.

But worst of all, the authorities impose strict regulations on the region leaving Miguel (Padilla) in a state of emotional turmoil that swings between cynicism and obdurance in a bid to survive food shortages and lack of shelter. In their hour of need many of the religious villagers seeks recourse to their faith, even folklore. Others desperately clamber onto ships offering to take them to the nearby capital of Manila.

Spiked with flashes of dark humour, and the occasional foray into fantasy as a way of evoking the climate of loss, fear and confusion, Manatad directs with confidence in this follow-up to his short film The Imminent Immanent (2018). Whether the Weather is Fine serves as a rousing tribute to the people of Tacloban whose stoicism and resourcefulness is another example of the human will to survive in times of adversity. MT

TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Terrorizers (2021) Toronto Film Festival 2021

Dir.: Wi Ding Ho; Cast: JC Lin, Moon Lee, Po Hung Lin, Jie-Fei Huang, Pipi Jao, Cheng Ko, Annie Chen; Taiwan 2021, 127 min.

Taiwanese director/co-writer Wi Ding Ho is clearly disturbed by the youth of modern day Taipei judging by his nihilistic thriller Terrorizers playing at this year’s Toronto Film Festival.

Not to be confused with Edward Yang’s Taiwanese masterpiece The Terrorizers from 1986, there are clearly parallels to be drawn in the melancholy bleakness of the settings. But Wi Ding’s version deals with the VR world, now infringing what is called reality.

After six gruelling years in the kitchens washing dishes Xiao Zhang (Lin) returns to Taipeh, now a qualified chef on an ocean cruiser, hopes to open his own luxury restaurant with an uncle. Then up pops his old flame Yu Fang (Lee), now an actress in rehearsal for The Seagull, and soon they’re talking about moving in together. Yu has some doubts, she’s had a trail of doomed relationships that started when her mother left when she was a little girl, and an affair with a porn star called Monica (Chen), leaving her in the lurch. Family-wise her political father has just married his pregnant secretary and is on the verge of moving to another city, so Yu, once again, is alone.

In downtown Taipei Yu shares her apartment with Ming Liang (Hung Lin), the son of a politician, and her father’s financial backer. Liang and Yu are not on speaking terms but the psychotic Ming is somehow convinced that they’re an item. But worse is to follow: Ming has filmed Monica making love to her, and now wants to kill Yu for “deserting” him.

In spiteful act of revenge, Ming attacks Yu with a machete, Xiao narrowly saving her life. And Ming’s nasty side surfaces again when he gives the police the video showing the two women in bed together, claiming his attack was motivated by Yu’s betrayal of him.

All this dystopian darkness reveals Taipei to be a toxic male environment that seems to be particularly down on women: Yu’s father now forcing her to leave town, afraid that her staying in Taipei will harm his career. It’s ironic that a monster like Ming can sway public opinion to be on his side, denouncing the two women as perpetrators, and getting away with it, when we are all made aware of his monstrous nature, possibly inculcated by his abusive alcoholic mother, a ‘masseuse’ who regularly gives her son a ‘full service’ – fortunately off screen. But Ming is not the only villain of the piece: teenagers Kiki and Billy also prey upon randomly chosen strangers to get their kicks.

DoP Jean Louis Vialand shows the VR world for what it is: a fake construct where humans create substitutes of themselves and, in the process, become dependent on the media circus generated. Ming is the ultimate voyeur and ‘director’ of his sick universe. Chopin’s mournful Nocturne in e-flat accompanies this soulless descent into Hell.AS

TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Haruhara-San’s Recorder (2021) San Sebastian Film Festival 2021

Dir.: Kyoshi Sugita; Cast: Chica Araki, Takenori Kaneko, Saha Ito; Japan 2021, 120 min.

HARUHARA-SAN’S RECORDER won this year’s main award in the International Competition at FIDMarseille. Jury president Lav Diaz certainly related well to the leisurely tempo. The Japanese director describes his style as “probably different from the general method. I think most people start their different preparations after having originally completed the script, but in my case, I write the script in the end, after having settled the casting, location scouting and shooting schedule”. The result is an uncompromising cinematographic poem where windows, doors, balconies, staircases and thresholds have the same significance as protagonists’ emotions.

Based on a tanka (31-syllable one-line poem) by Naoko Higashi, Sugita creates a narrative-free universe fraught with feelings. Lockdown brought the production to a halt after the first day of filming, and the subsequent loss of a close friend had a significant impact on Sugita, and is reflected in his melancholy central character Sachi (Araki) who has now works in a cafe, dreaming of a partner who will never be at her side.

Essentially a series of graceful reflective vignettes that never fully play out, loss and recuperation are central themes throughout this subtle drama. In the opening scene Sachi (Araki) is saying goodbye to her flatmate who leaves no forwarding address. Family and friends arrive to share tea and sympathy. We see Sachi leaving on a friend’s scooter on the way to an amusement park dwarfed by a huge rollercoaster, but a cut propels us hours forward, with Sachi and her friend drenched by the rain.

Sachi then plays muse to a young filmmaker, her performance projected onto a high window, for an audience full of friends. The plot-free structure allows ordinary life to take centre stage, giving full rein to Sachi’s artistic endeavours: she creates a banner with calligraphic symbols of Wind, Forest, Fire and Mountain, which floats off in the breeze from her balcony. There is one amusing vaudeville scene when her uncle Takeshi comes to visit, and Sachi’s friend Taeko hides in an overhead cupboard, freaking the old man out.

DoP Yukiko Iioka creates delicate images, mostly tracking shots, giving this a very intimate, chilled out atmosphere. Chica Araki, in her acting debut, is a contemporary dancer and calligrapher whose ‘unbearable lightness’ is a captivating presence in this meditative oasis of calm. AS

San Sebastian FILM FESTIVAL | 17 – 25 SEPTEMBER 2021

Anatolian Leopard (2021) Toronto Film Festival

Dir.: Emre Kayis; Cast: Ugur Polat, Ipek Türktan, Tansu Bicer, Ege Aydan, Nuri Gökasan, Osman Alkas, Seyithan Ozdemir, Hatice Aslan, Ezgi Gör; Germany/Turkey/Poland/Denmark 2021, 117 min.

The sombre city of Ankara is the setting for this melancholic portrait of a middle-aged man, still struggling with himself and his past. In his first feature Emre Kayis pulls off a wistful character study steeped in irony and crowned by a charismatic Ugur Polat, that may bring to mind Musil’s Man Without Attributes,

Of course we never see the leopard that sets the cat among the pigeons when it disappears from the zoo while the manager Fikret (Polat) is fighting a losing battle to preserve the national treasure from privatisation. The city Mayor (Alkas) is negotiating with an Arab consortium hellbent on replacing the animals’ home with an amusement park full of thrilling rides, and just a few plastic animals – already in place in the entrance – as a solemn valedictory. The only obstacle is the titular Anatolian leopard, an endangered species, and unless a new home can be found the Arabs will pull out of the deal.

Of course other zoos are keen to take the leopard, but Fikret keeps this quietly under his belt. In an amusing montage we see him trudging from the muddy carpark to a side entrance, a reserved parking space now occupied by a fleet of flash cars belonging to the minister and his staff. His assistant Gamze (Türktan) arrives on the bus, starring enviously at some flight attendants boarding a coach on their way to the airport. Gamze and Fikret will play a secret game, unknown to each other, after the leopard’s fate is revealed.

Suspect number one in the case of the missing leopard is his faithful warden Ibrahim (Ozdemir), who is vehemently against being relegated to look after the hippos. But then the police chief (Gökasan) is shot dead in the countryside where the leopard is supposedly lurking. At a fateful high-school reunion, Fikret’s old bête noire Tezer (Aslan) falls for Gamze. And while the prosecutor tells Fikret that his confession is now redundant, the zoo manager must act to change the course of his moribund life.

This is a feature of nuances: the subtle slings and arrows Fikret and Gamze endure in their loneliness slowly accumulate forcing them to make some radical decisions. It gradually emerges that Fikret’s state of misery is a kind of happiness. And it will need a big step forward to make him climb the mountain ahead of him.

DoP Nick Cooke’s strengths are the sophisticated interiors, and the panoramic widescreen shots of Turkey’s sprawling capital city. Ugur Polat is very much at home as the man observing the unfolding drama with a wry sense of ‘deja vu’ while Tansu Bicer’s prosecutor tells him absurd allegorical stories, toying with his victim Fikret. AS

TORONTO 2021 | BEST FIRST FILM AWARD ANTALYA FILM FESTIVAL 2021 |

BEST ART DIRECTOR, BİLLUR TURAN| ANTALYA FILM FESTIVAL

La Cha Cha (2021)

Dir: Kevin Allen | Cast: Liam Hourican, Ruby Ashbourne Serkis, Sonny Ashbourne Serkis, Rhys Ifans, Llyr Evans, Dougray Scott, Keith Allen, Alfie Allen | UK Comedy

Rhys Ifans and Dougray Scott are the stars of this light-hearted bit of fun that follows the residents of a campsite in the North Wales who are hiding a dark secret.

Solti Buttering (Liam Hourican) is on a road trip to scatter his grandfathers ashes. Finding everywhere closed, he stumbles across La Cha Cha, a holiday park where a motley crew of pensioners are having time of their lives. Meanwhile spirited owner Libby Rees (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis) and her brother Damien (Sonny Ashbourne Serkis) are struggling to keep the place alive and kicking with a very unusual plan.

LA CHA CHA is essentially a romantic comedy that riffs on that famous Under Milk Wood quote: “do not going gentle into that good night”. Set on the Gower Peninsula with a sterling cast of British talent, it’s aimed at an audience sick an tired of doom and gloom and look for some genuine comedy relief.

Kevin Allen (Twin Town, Under Milk Wood), wrote and shot the feature in a mobile film studio in Wales during lockdown, uniting the entire cast of the cult classic Twin Town for his ‘companion piece’, and adding a few young rising stars into the bargain. Essentially it’s a series of amusing cameos featuring real musical performances combined with the original soundtrack by Mark Thomas and, of course, a few Cha Cha Chas.

ON RELEASE IN CINEMAS FROM 17 SEPTEMBER 2021

London Spanish Film Festival 2021

A chance to see a selection of recent Spanish films which may not get a general release in the UK. Most are UK premieres from new talent and established filmmakers

LA ISLA DE LAS MENTIRAS | The Island of Lies

In dense fog of a Christmas morning in 1921, a boat with 260 emigrants bound to Buenos Aires sinks off the coast of Sálvora, Galicia. Three courageous women row out in a bid to save as many people as they can. The tragedy captures the imagination of an Argentine journalist who investigate the many fatal coincidences that happened on the night of the shipwreck. | Fri 24 Sep | 6.30pm

UN EFECTO ÓPTICO | An Optical Illusion

Alfredo and Teresa, a married couple from Burgos, decide to take a deserved trip to New York. Shortly after their arrival Teresa starts to feel strangely uncomfortable. Then Alfredo’s pictures of monuments don’t match what they remember they saw. Cavestany’s film is a distinctive and daring take on tourism, globalised provincialism, the banality of a steady couple’s daily life… and much more. | Sat 25 Sep | 6.30pm

EL SUSTITUTO | The Replacement

In 1982 a young father and hardened police officer moves his family from Madrid to a small Mediterranean sea town where he is to replace an inspector, murdered in mysterious circumstances. During his investigation, strange links between the inspector’s assassination, drugs and property speculation come to light. Based on real events, Oscar Aibar’s beautifully made thriller takes us to a happy retirement spot on the Mediterranean coast that Nazi’s gained possession of due to Franco’s regime and kept through the Transition | Sat 25 Sep | 8.30pm, Mon 27 Sep | 6.05pm

EL PLANETA | Planet

dir. Amalia Ulman, with Ale Ulman, Amalia Ulman, Nacho Vigalondo, Zhou Chen | USA | 2021 | 79 min | cert. 15 |London premiere | In English and Spanish with English subtitles

A jobless young woman is forced to leave London and return home to live with her eccentric mother, after the death of her father. The wolf is at the door but they continue to live beyond their means in Gijon. El Planeta explores contemporary poverty, class awareness and female desires as well as mother-daughter relationships in post-crisis Spain all throughout with a charming and subtle sense of humour. | Sun 26 Sep |6.20pm

NIEVA EN BENIDORM | It Snows in Benidorm

After a long career at his bank Peter is “awarded” early retirement and sets off to visit his brother in Benidorm on a trip that doesn’t quite turn out as expected. A poetic take by veteran Isabel Coixet on Benidorm’s particular beauty, its gloomy side and its “unpoetic” real estate mafias as well as on love at an older age. | Fri 24 Sep | 8.35pm

CATALAN Strand

SENTIMENTAL | The People Upstairs

Ana and Julio are a couple who seem to spend most of their time together arguing. Salva and Laura, on the other hand, never stop having sex. Julio is extremely annoyed when Ana invites them for dinner for an eventful evening where secrets, fears and insecurities soon surface, spiced up by witty dialogue written by Catalan Cesc Gay. The result is a highly enjoyable and intimate comedy exploring the complexities of modern relationships. | Thu 23 Sep | 8.30p,

UN BLUES PARA TEHERÁN | Tehran Blues

dir. Javier Tolentino, with Golmehr Alami, Sina Derakhshan, Pezhman Dishad | 2020 | 80 min | cert. PG |doc | UK premiere | In Spanish, Persian and Kurdish with English subtitles

Javier Tolentino’s documentary debut transports us to some of Iran’s most remote corners, discovering a truly sophisticated culture seen through the eyes of Erfan, a young Kurdish man who sings, writes poetry and dreams of being a film director. Tolentino is one of Spain’s most established journalists and film critics, now turned director.| Sun 26 Sep | 4.10pm

CHAVALAS | Girlfriends

After an initial stint as a professional photographer, jobless Marta finds herself having to go back to live with her parents in a suburban flat in Barcelona, where she grew up. There she reconnects with her childhood girlfriends Desi, Soraya and Bea, sharing the bond of their teenage years. Carol Rodríguez Colás’s first feature film is a sincere and tragicomic take on friendship. | Tue 28 Sep | 8.45pm

BASQUE strand

ANE | Ane is Missing

When Lide discovers her teenage daugher, Ane, is missing, she teams up with ex-husband, Fernando, to track her down. As the troubled Lide’s determination grows Fernando’s fear of Ane becomes more evident. Throughout most of the film Ane feels like a ghost and an oppressing and spectral unseen presence. A first feature for awarded shorts director David Pérez Sañudo, moves seemlessly from from mystery to family drama and then to political thriller.

Preceded by the short:

QUEBRANTOS | Breaches

dir. Koldo Almandoz, Maria Elorza | Spain | 2021 | 7 min | doc | cert. PG | In Basque with English subtitles

Living with fear… Based o an interview on Euskadi Irratia Radio. | Tue 28 Sep | 6.30pm

NORA

Lara Izaguirre’s sophomore feature is a fresh and optimistic reflection on the road less travelled for a young Spanish woman prepared to put her self out there, and take a few risks. As the saying goes, “bad weather, good face” (in Spanish, “al mal tiempo, buena cara”). | Wed 29 Sep | 8.30pm

London Spanish FILM FESTIVAL 23-29 SEPTEMBER 2021

Courageous Mr Penn (1942)

Dir: Lance Comfort | Cast: Clifford Evans, Deborah Kerr, Dennis Arundell, Aubrey Mallalieu | UK Drama 78′

A straightforward history lesson plainly aimed at drumming up support from the isolationist United States of 1941, Penn of Pennsylvania wasn’t ready for cinemas until Pearl Harbor had already forced America’s hand and thus rendered this film obsolete by the time it finally opened in Britain at the end of January 1942. It received only a perfunctory New York airing at the end of 1943 retitled Courageous Mr. Penn to suggest action rather than history and was then quietly forgotten. (The print on YouTube is of the US version, with hasty-looking credits containing errors and omissions – Edmund Willard is billed as ‘Edward’ and the name of director of photography Ernest Palmer is missing altogether.)

Precisely because it’s moment was so brief makes Penn of Pennsylvania extremely interesting viewing today. In many respects it ironically resembles a German ‘genius’ film of the same period such as Friedrich Schiller (1940), in which a fiery young hero back in the Bad Old Days defies convention and outrages the reactionary old establishment. Both a jury of Penn’s peers and Charles II himself (played by Dennis Arundell) are shown taking the side of the dashing young Mr. Penn against the dead weight of the establishment.

The Merry Monarch thoughtfully opines for the benefit of any future waverers across the Pond that “We could take America and turn it into a vast continent whose freedom of thought and liberty of conscience will be the birthright of every man”. Penn goes one better by declaring “We would treat the Indians as brothers and gain their friendship”; although he’s later required to show himself handy with his fists to prevent the lynching of one of his new brethren. Penn also makes a point of obliging his colleagues to leave their weapons at home when he comes to negotiate with the local chief.

(A strange moment occurs when the King himself solicits the opinion of a gentlemen that he addresses as “My Lord Halifax”, who we then cut to in close-up – the actor himself is like many others in the film unidentified in the credits – so that he can respond “I think that Mr. Penn is an extremely brave gentlemen, and I should like to wish him luck.”)

The cast includes many familiar faces in wigs – including Henry Oscar as Samuel Pepys and Gibb McLaughlin as the Indian Chief (fortunately the latter isn’t playing a speaking part) – embellished with handsome sets and photography and William Alwyn’s first score for a feature film. A radiant young Deborah Kerr plays his wife Guli, whose memory a title informs us “was always with him” after her death in 1696. The film omits to mention that he remarried two years later and fathered nine more children. @RichardChatten

NOW ON YOUTUBE

A Brixton Tale (2021)

Dir: Darragh Carey, Bertrand Desrochers | Cast: Barney Harris, Lily Newmark, Ola Orebiyi, Michael Mahoney, Jaime Winstone | UK Drama 76′

Worlds collide in downtown Brixton where confident, coke-snorting Leah (Newmark) is making a film about thoughtful black guy Benji (Orebiyi) who she falls for in a big way.

Her producer friend Tilda (Winstone) is impressed enough with Leah’s first rushes to offer her a potential screening, although Benji doesn’t always welcome the intrusion of Leah’s probing lens as their romance gets heavier, somehow softening the tone of Leah’s narrative, much to Tilda’s irritation. But the love affair is soon over.

When Leah finds out that a video of her making out with her ex (Charles/Harris) has gone viral, Benji is determined to defend her honour with tragic consequences for all concerned.

There’s a suitably experimental feel to this upbeat urban fable with its convincing performances, driven forward by a sensory soundscape and strong visual storytelling. Derek Holland’s lively editing offers a snapshot of the South London ‘hood, rainy streets and sweary locals epitomising this edgy part of town. MT

ON RELEASE FROM FRIDAY 17 SEPTEMBER

The Soul of Youth (1920)

Dir: William Desmond Taylor | Silent

William Desmond Taylor (1872-1922) unfortunately remains one of the best-remembered directors of the silent era for entirely the wrong reason that on 1 February 1922 he was the victim of Hollywood’s most notorious unsolved murder. Kenneth Anger in 1959 devoted a lip-smacking chapter of ‘Hollywood Babylon’ to the case; while Sidney D. Kirkpatrick’s ‘A Cast of Killers’ (1986) is an excellent review of the evidence. But no one ever showed any curiosity about his films. (I first came across Taylor’s name in David Robinson’s ‘World Cinema’ (1973), in which Robinson simply dismisses him as “an indifferent director”.)

However, the excellent tinted print of ‘The Soul of Youth’ presently available on DVD reveals Taylor the director to be just as interesting as Taylor the murder victim; and that he is worthy of attention as an imaginative creative figure in his own right. His professional standing during the early twenties is attested to by the opening credits for this film, which read ‘William D. Taylor’s Production of “The Soul of Youth”‘.

16-year-old Lewis Sargent, who had just played the title role in Taylor’s version of ‘Huckleberry Finn’, stars as an orphan and juvenile delinquent gently guided towards the straight and narrow by the humanitarian regime of the Denver-based jurist and social reformer Benjamin Barr Lindsey (1869-1943). Assisted by atmospheric and realistic production design by an uncredited George James Hopkins and superb photography by Taylor’s regular cameraman James Van Trees (who a quarter of a century later shot the Marx Brothers classic ‘A Night in Casablanca’), Taylor skilfully marshals his large cast, keeping up the pace as he adroitly juggles various concurrent narrative threads with warmth and good humour. @Richard Chatten

https://youtu.be/tkT7SiJsU8Y

Michelin Stars II – Nordic by Nature (2021) San Sebastian Film Festival

Dir.: Rasmus Dinesen; Documentary with Poul Andrias Ziska, Karin Visth, Rebecca Mead, Johannes Jensen, Sverri Steinhólm; Denmark/Spain 2021, 62 min.

In this foodie documentary Rasmus Dinesen (Michelin Stars – Tales from the Kitchen) travels to the Faro Islands to find out how the top starring Michelin restaurant KOKS thrives on its predominantly international clientele.

The pandemic brought out the best in Johannes Jensen’s entrepreneurial skills: despite enforced close his restaurant is back doing a roaring trade attracting diners from far and wide to sample the Nordic delights of chef in charge Poul Andrias Ziska who has to rely on local produce sourced exclusively from 500 square miles of rugged terrain under sub-polar weather conditions. KOKS is housed in a grass-roofed low ceiling farm homestead surrounded by fields and hills in one of the isolated Faroe archipelagos in the North Sea. It may look right out of ‘Hobbit’ country, but the Faroe Islands are made of mythological stuff: Nordic fairy tales, 37 different words for fog, sheep outnumbering humans, waterfalls, deadly cliffs and the native language spoken by just 50 000 locals.

And then there is KOKS. Poul Andrias Ziska, the spiritual leader of the establishment, has a young daughter and his partner is pregnant again. Karin Visth is one of the few women featuring in this male dominated set-up. The guests sit only a few inches away from the predominant kitchen staff. Journalist Rebecca Mead fetches up from the ‘New Yorker’ to sample the culinary delights and we also meet Marco Invernizi, a soi-disant ‘International Diner’.

But the food is the star here, a veritable work of art: Steamed Horse Mussel, Smoked Whale’s Heart, Breast of Fulmar and fresh Sea Urchins, to name but a few. Ziska is also an active hunter: we watch him on a boat going after whales, and killing a sheep, before dismembering them. The mass slaughter of whales is another gruesome addition, but the film makers have employed Pastor Sverri Steinhólm to parry any accusations: “We are using animals as food, but we are no Big Game hunters like in Canada and North Norway.” And Ziska also defends the killing of animals in the name of survival. He collects Fulmar eggs on a precipitous rockface, and exchanges some of them later with fishermen who have just come back with their catch; demonstrating an ancient custom of collaboration.

Nobody can deny the KOKS team’s achievements. But there are contradictions, and Pastor Steinhólm’s praise of the strength of the Faroe people and their ‘Nordic superiority’ are wishful-thinking in the light of the recent pandemic. AS

SAN SEBASTIAN FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Nobody Has to Know (2021)

Dir: Bouli Lanners | Cast: Bouli Lanners, Michelle Fairley | Drama, 99′

Memories define us and connected the present with the past. In his latest drama – a first in English – Belgian writer and director Bouli Lanners plays a man whose romantic history is rewritten when he suffers a stroke.

Atmospherically shot on the windswept Isle of Lewis in Scotland, this is a sober and reflective psychological drama made all the more dour by its subject matter and the morose-looking locals, although its hard to imagine that the thoughtful Phil (Lanners) is a Belgian farmhand – he behaves more like a sophisticated film director (!) with his raffish good looks, swept back hair and well-trimmed beard. And when his carer Millie arrives (Fairley), after a stroke leaves him with amnesia, she takes an instant liking to her vulnerable patient persuading him they were lovers before his illness.

Despite his memory loss there is nothing wrong with Phil’s sex drive: he makes romantic overtures which Millie instantly rejects causing Phil to be even more confused. It soon dawn on Millie that she’s crossing professional boundaries and must draw a line, not only for lying to her charge, but also for abusing a mentally ill patient – particularly as Phil is now completely disarmed – but the two end up in bed.

Millie continues to tease him with ‘memories’ of their past relationship and how it came about, and can now be rekindled. She is clearly having a field day after a fallow patch in her love life on the barren island.

Despite its flawed premise Nobody Has to Know looks gorgeous, Lanners and Fairley making for convincing lovers as they wander along vast castor sugar beaches, storm clouds scudding by and melting into the distance. A religious subplot that sees the local vicar vehemently preaching the Christian gospel from a pulpit doesn’t quite work, although clearly it represents the wagging finger of God. A dog called Nigel is the focus of another rather unsubstantial narrative strand in this watchable feature that explores identity, false memory and the nature of romantic desire. MT

NOW ON RELEASE

Inexorable (2021) Toronto Film Festival 2021

Dir: Fabrice du Welz | Cast: Benoit Poelvoorde, Jackie Berroyer Alba Gaia Bellugi, Melanie Doutey | Thriller, 98′

Looking for inspiration a writer takes up residence in an echoing chateau deep in the countryside, his past triumphs retuning to haunt him with self doubt: will he ever be creatively successful again.

Inexorable is another erotic psychodrama from the Belgian cult director, and although similar in tone and location to his previous outings Calvaire and Adoration this latest is not quite on a par with Alleluia

A voyeuristic camera lingers on dislocated characters in the foreboding stillness of the bosky backwater setting the scene for an intriguing horror story, made all the more sinister by its brooding soundscape. Inexorable is possibly the most personal film Fabrice du Welz has made to date. It ponders the ephemeral nature of creativity, particularly when early success paves the way to future doubts and insecurities – not something du Welz has had to worry about with his filmic string of hits.

Known for his comedy roles Benoît Poelvoorde plays Bellmer with a sense of vulnerability despite his proven talent and fierce determination. The old mansion becomes home to his wife and publisher Jeanne (Mélanie Doutey), whose family no longer lives there. The hope is that this new setting will somehow stimulate Bellmer’s creative juices after months of writer’s block.

But he soon becomes fascinated with one of his daughter’s teenage friends, a troubled orphan named Gloria (Alba Gaïa Bellugi), with the welcome affect of spicing up his sex life with wife. But the febrile Gloria soon makes a pass at Benoit and although the violent, illicit sex that follows seem to re-awaken his imagination, the inevitable fallout threatens to consume the entire family.

Written by Joséphine Darcy Hopkins, Aurélien Molas, and Du Welz, Inexorable explores nepotism, sexual chemistry, and the nature of creativity in a thriller fraught with shocking psychological insights and devastating revelations. MT

TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Miracle (2021) Venice Film Festival

Dir: Bogdan George Petri | Cast: Ioana Bugarin, Emanuel Parvu, Cezar Antal, Valentin Popescu | Drama, 118′

Bogdan George Petri follows his sweaty murder story Unindentified, with another discursive crime drama wrapped round the case of a young novice who goes missing from her convent in the Northern Romanian countryside.

19-year old Cristina (Bugarin) is fiercely committed to becoming a nun, but judging from her tears in the opening scene the trial period is not going to plan and early one morning she secretly leaves her cloistered confines heading for the local hospital.

The taxi ride with another passenger, a doctor, offers a taste of Romanian humour allowing Petri to share his pithy views on spirituality, the music of folk singer Gica Petrescu, the state of the nation in general, a theme that will crop up again and again throughout this thorny tale that soon becomes a seething crime investigation. On the way back to the convent after her tests Cristina takes another taxi, but she will never reach her destination

Apetri’s skilful direction includes a quietly devastating scene where the camera swings full circle around a vicious crime unfolding deep in the woods. The victim’s awful cries compete with a howling wind gusting through the trees, a pair of cattle ranchers riding by emphasising the remoteness of the location, and leaving us desperate to know the outcome from their sole witness perspective.

The police procedural is headed by inspector Marius Preda (Parvu) who brusquely cuts to the chase in his hunt for the perpetrator who will soon be have to be eleased from custody. Investigations at the convent prove inconclusive, the nuns are unwilling to cooperate in their desire for privacy, echoing Cristian Mungiu’s convent drama Beyond the Hills.

Ioana Bugarin is vulnerable yet determined as the novice at the heart of this tightly coiled mystery that sees the desperate detective committing a series of serious misjudgements. And as he races against time to convict the suspect a strange modern miracle occurs before his eyes. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Old Henry (2021) Venice Film Festival 2021

Dir/scr: Potsy Ponciroli. US. 2021. 99 mins.

There are nods to Peckinpah in this spare but rather lacklustre western that eventually catches fire in a coruscating showdown after a series of posturing gun-slinging episodes.

Writer-director Potsy Ponciroli shoots the wild west of the early 20th century as a merciless desiccated wilderness where Stephen Dorff’s Ketchum leads a posse of villains posing as law-keepers. In a grassy ditch in deepest Oklahoma cadaverous farmer Henry (Tim Blake Nelson) finds a satchel of dollars near a listless body transporting both to his homestead determined, for some unknown reason, to nurse the stranger back to health.

Living with his sweet-natured teenage son Wyatt (Gavin Lewis) the taciturn Henry is still mourning the loss of his wife to tuberculosis a decade earlier — but her ghost is the only female to grace the cast of this macho fuelled narrative. Hot on the trail of the injured man Ketchum claims to be a sherif from another county. Henry senses something suspicious and strengthens his resolve to protect the injured man (Scott Haze), but his own identity is soon called into question, providing the reveal which comes as an anticlimax so late in a mystery that never gets under the skin.

Made up of gritty action sequences and terse standoffs this is a western in the traditional style from video and TV director Ponciroli. Old Henry is decent but pedestrian fare reliably carried by Dorff and a ghoulishly taciturn Blake Wilson who holds out stoically until the final frame.

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Last Night in Soho (2021)

Dir|Wri : Edgar Wright | Cast: Thomasin McKenzie, Anya Taylor-Wood, Diana Rigg, Terence Stamp, Rita Tushingham, Synnøve Karlsen, Michael Ajao | Fantasy thriller, 116;

Only residents know the misery of living in the toilet that is today’s Soho with its sordid street eateries all night disco taxis. To the outside world louche glamour has always been the watchword for this niche quartier and this edginess is revisited in Edgar Wright’s first horror pic, a warped psychological thriller inspired by the psychotronic cinema of the 1960s and ’70s.

Last Night in Soho has vintage star power in the shape of British screen veteran Rita Tushingham, playing the protagonist’s doting grandmother, Peggy, who fondly remembers her own glory days in around Carnaby Street. Joining her is Terence Stamp and Diana Rigg, in her swansong, in a party that is refreshed for a new generation with a time travel twist and a vampire subplot that rather outstays its welcome.

Wright, best known for his zombie cult classic Shaun of the Dead, brings the dizzying dynamism and style of Baby Driver to a feature that carries us forward like a perilous ride at a fun-fare with its neon shot aesthetic and retro score of classic hits from Dusty Springfield, Cilla Black, Sandie Shaw and Petula Clark but the music is drowned out by the extended horror element that overwhelms character and storyline in the final stretch.

It all starts in Cornwall where Thomasin McKenzie is ambitious dancer Eloise Cooper. Raised as an orphan by her grandmother Peggy – her mother committed suicide – Eloise dreams of Twiggy and Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Awarded a much coveted place at the London College of Fashion, Eloise then heads to the capital as Peggy’s warnings about the seamier side of London fall on deaf ears.

Bitchy flatmate Jocasta (Synnøve Karlsen) proves too much for the delicate Cornish rose to handle so she moves on with down-to-earth Ms. Collins (Rigg) who keeps her on the straight and narrow, for a time. But the young girl’s dreams turn to nightmares in a tonal shift that grows sinister in the garish strobe of the lighted signage outside her bedroom. Now in a nocturnal time warp Eloise meets Anya Taylor-Wood’s blonde, back-combed singer Sandie dancing to an electro disco vibes from Steven Prince. Dreams of fame and success taunt the young Cornish creative, blind-siding her to the lascivious intentions of her seedy agent Jack (Smith) who’s all over her like a cheap suit – and wearing one too.

There is a distinct feel of Peter Strickland’s In Fabric to the tone and styling here as Eloise’s life swings form the past to the present, her fashion career gliding sinuously through a series of twists and turns as she descends into the dark demimonde where Eloise’s forays intensify in a vivid vibe of danger.

She meets Terrence Stamp’s suave silver fox and Michael Ajao’s sweet romantic dreamer to the retro vibes of Petula Clark who trills: “forget all your troubles, forget all your cares, so go downtown.” Wright presents Soho as synonymous with glamour and vice in a musical fantasy exploring the darker face of fame and fortune. Shame there wasn’t more of the music and less of the gore. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2021 IN UK CINEMAS FROM 29 OCTOBER

Sundown (2021) Venice Film Festival

Dir/Wri: Michel Franco | Cast: Tim Roth, Charlotte Gainsbourg | Thriller 83’

Neil Bennett is just starting to relax in a plush Mexican resort with his sister Alice and her two teenagers, when a phone call shatters their idyll. Their mother has been taken to hospital and soon after dies.

Hurriedly getting their stuff together they dash to the airport. But Neil has forgotten his passport, leaving his neurotic sister to pick up the pieces back home. So begins Michel Franco’s latest thriller with his signature plot twists and nasty surprises: a blueprint for lean storytelling unravelling in just over an hour, Sundown just might change your life.

Louche, snarky and yet utterly devastating Sundown is all about serendipity – how life suddenly falls into place and then out again. You can’t help rooting for Neil, a suitably laid back Tim Roth, he does what everyone wants to do, walking away from responsibility, following his heart. Charlotte Gainsbourg is a strung-out, stressful bundle of nerves as Alice, and you just want to run away from her and that’s what Neil does. Running a successful slaughterhouse business the family is loaded. Money has never been a problem, and it shows in their flip attitude in a tight little thriller with its clipped dialogue: nothing is spare.

Leaving the airport Neil heads back to a squalid hotel in downtown Acapulco and it’s here that he finds contentment in a love affair with a local Mexican brunette. Pretending to be organising a new passport with the consulate he drinks beer and shoots the breeze, ignoring his sister’s endless phone calls. When Alice finds him, a week later, he’s already loving the dream. And all the stress of London suddenly floods back. You may well empathise with Neil when Alice forces a ‘business divorce’ on him offering a generous retirement package while he willingly gives up his share, content to be left to his own devices.

But his laid back attitude hides a more sinister but pivotal plot twist telegraphed in the opening scene, blink and you’ll miss it. Michel Franco certainly does no favours to his native Mexico portraying it as a venally corrupt and dangerous place to visit. And we’re not prepared for the showcase showdown that brings Sundown to a grisly climax

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Copilot (2021)

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

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

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

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

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

RELEASED IN UK & IRELAND IN CINEMAS 10 SEPTEMBER 2021

Scenes from a Marriage (2021) Venice Film Festival 2021

Dir/Wri: Hagai Levi, Amy Herzog | 5 episode mini series

Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac are the stars of this elliptical potboiler that offers plenty of talky têtes a têtes and raunchy sex. Inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s 1974 screen classic it may make the average couple wonder why parents of one, Mira and Jonathan, are filing for divorce. Communication lines are open and flowing with candid confessions and compromises, and that’s not the only thing that flows between these lustful Jewish forty somethings who lose no opportunity in sharing their bodily juices between the sheets or on a plastic wrapped sofa waiting for the removal man.

Set in New York, Scenes is a surprisingly mature and engrossing five parter from acclaimed Israeli born director Hagai Levi best known for his standout mini series Be’Tipul that also ran on HBO (from 2005-9). Hagai and his co-writer Amy Herzog promise “love, hatred, desire, monogamy, marriage and divorce” and certainly deliver it in spades providing immersive bitesize viewing, each of the eps running for a well-judged 60 minutes. Just enough time for you to question your own relationship and fall out with your partner before bedtime. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | COMING TO HBO

The Hole in the Fence (2021) Venice Film Festival

Dir.: Joaquin Del Paso; Cast: Eric David Walker, Yubah Ortega Tellez, Raul Vasconcelos, Valria Lamm Willams, Luciano Kurti Bustamente,, DiegoLazona Caeto, Enirque Lascurain Peralta, Takahiro Murokawa, Marek Tokaocik, Jacek Poniedzialek; Mexico/Poland 2021, 100 min.

In a village in Mexico a rigid Catholic institution has long been churning out leading figures for the establishment. But its future is suddenly threatened when the titular ‘hole in the fence’ surrounding the camp is discovered by a group of rowdy teenagers in the nearby Centro Escolar de Los Pinos.

With The Hole in the Fence Mexican directorJoaquin Del Paso (Maquinaria Panamerica) and co-writer Lucy Pawlak have created a summer camp from hell. When the boys arrive in a bus they are immediately warned by staff, under the leadership of ‘Minister’ Professor Monteros (Peralta), that they should stay away from the nearby village. But boys will be boys. A brutal attack on indigenous ‘scholarship’ student Edoardo, by his mostly white roommates, sets the tone for something much more serious as the violence escalates despite ‘meditation classes’.

Another teenager, Diego (Walker), is forced to wear a neck brace and a cast on his arm but the cause of his injuries remains mysterious. The other boys continue to torment Eduardo and when they see him swimming naked with Joaquin (Bustamente) a scuffle breaks out and Josue’s (Cueto) nose is broken. His wealthy parents arrive in a helicopter to collect their son; his father, a former alumnus of the “Centro Escolar” himself, is prevemted from taking action by Monteros. But things get out of hand when the existence of the hole becomes common knowledge, and eventually all hell breaks loose as Monteros’ authority is increasingly challenged. Alarmingly his retribution is as cruel as the boys’ treatment of each other.

Cinematographer Alfonso Herrera Salcedo contrasts azure blue skies with the hell hole unfolding on the ground. He shows evil not as something abstract, but as a combination of psychological predisposition and a generalised cult atmosphere which feeds off the mayhem and the victims themselves. The ensemble acting is brilliant, with Peralta’s Professor Monteros giving a really convincing performance channelling Joseph Goebbels and a Spanish inquisitor. AS

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2021

The Lost Daughter (2021) Netflix

Dir: Maggie Gyllenhaal | Cast: Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, Dakota Fanning, Jack Farthing | UK Drama 124′

Olivia Colman reconnects with her past on a trip to the Greek Islands in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s first film as director.

Based on Elena Farrante’s novel, The Lost Daughter makes for a fraught psychological drama graced by another gripping performance from Colman as Leda Caruso, a professor of Italian literature looking for seclusion on a working holiday.

Not quite as brittle as Charlotte Rampling in The Swimming Pool but just as redoubtable and mesmerising, Colman’s warm smile melts to reveal a passionate determination as an academic and mother of two grown-up daughters, openly confessing that her maternal instincts were secondary to her desire for self realisation

The peace of her the secluded beach near her holiday home (rented from Ed Harris) is soon shattered by the arrival of a raucous bunch of New Yorkers from Queens whose apparent parental dysfunction mirrors Leda’s own, the reflection on the past gradually destabilising her tranquility as anxiety drifts into this newfound idyll.

Olivia Colman brings all the subtleties of age and experience to her richly complex role. Voluble when the occasion arises, she mostly keeps to herself but is increasingly drawn in by the antics of her American neighbours: the young mother Nina (Johnson) soon becoming the focus of her fascination. And Nina copes with a clingy toddler, memories of Leda’s own experiences flood back as the film plays out in a series of flashbacks fleshing out her past, Jessie Buckley playing her younger self.

Stifled by the heat and buzzing insects and hemmed in by her American interlopers Leda’s working holiday soon descends into anguish heightened by the sudden disappearance of Nina’s daughter, and her much loved doll. Leda joins the search party eventually finding the girl but keeping her doll to satisfy some unexplained maternal urge which fuels the final prt of the film as some visceral recollections of the past creep back: an early marriage, kids arriving too soon and disrupting her glittering career, precipitating her into romantic indiscretion and divorce.

Gyllenhaal’s assured direction and well-modulated narrative explores some dark nights of the soul but it’s Colman who brings it all together in an incendiary performance full of mercurial moments as well as measured maturity that keeps the hatches battened down in this stormy story about love, attraction and personal satisfaction. MT

ON NETFLIX FROM December 31st 2021 | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | BEST SCREENPLAY 2021

Amira (2021) Oscar hopeful withdrawn by Jordan

Wri/Dir: Mohamed Diab | 98’

Amira is a passionate but conflicted melodrama that turns on a case of mistaken identity involving one of the thousands of babies conceived through artificial insemination between men in Palestinian prisons and their wives in the outside world.

17 year old Amira (Tara Abboud) is the result of one such miracle: her father Nawar (Mohamed Ghassan) smuggling out a frozen packet of sperm from his cell in the Megiddo Prison to her mother (Saba Mubarak). But there’s an unexpected twist to the tale when it soon becomes apparent that Nawar is shooting blanks and unable to provide his wife Warda with a much wanted second child as Amira prepares to leave home to study photography.

Amira is close to both her parents, but particularly her father in his hour of need. Keen to keep him included in her life on the outside, she has skilfully photoshopped him into family snaps proudly presenting them as gifts on her frequent visits to Megiddo Prison where he has been on hunger strike.

Now her past and future descend into emotional turmoil when it emerges that Nawar is not her biological father, raising all sorts of questions not least about her real paternity, but also Warda’s fidelity.

The film gets off to a strong start with its thorny premise and fiery conflicting characters but these elements are handled with a surprising lack of finesse compared to Diab’s usual deftness so much in evidence in his previous features Clash and Cairo 678. An ill-considered final section that descends in raucous melodrama and an overbearing sound design only make matters worse.

In scenes that are quite shocking considering the 21st century advances in female emancipation, Warda’s inlaws put her under house arrest in a locked room, confining her until she reveals the identity of Amira’s father, even before she has been proved guilty of dishonouring the family, or indeed, any crime. Diab paints the Israel faction as inhumane yet fails to see how his own countrymen are still subjugating their own women as second class citizens, and the only character objecting to Warda’s treatment is a male colleague who then falls under the spotlight as Amira’s potential father simply because of his protective stance. Despite all this Abboud gives a dignified and restrained performance in the title role as a woman whose world is blown apart bringing about the final tragic denouement. MT

Jordan’s Royal Film Commission has withdrawn Egyptian director Mohamed Diab’s drama Amira as its submission to the 2022 international feature Oscar race following a local backlash against the film.

Lost Illusions | Illusions Perdues (2021) Venice Film Festival

Dir. Xavier Giannoli. France. 2021. 144′.

Inspired by Honoré de Balzac’s rags to riches hero Eugene de Rastignac who works his way through the Comédie Humaine, this lavish period drama charts a personal and literary advancement in post revolutionary France in a way that resonates with the media world of today, the clear voice of Balzac providing a guiding narration.

In the flowing tradionally styled screen adaptation Xavier Giannoli calls his main character Lucien de Rubempre and casts a dashing and tousled haired Benjamin Voisin (fresh from Ozon’s Summer of ‘85) to play the ambitious young social climber charting his impetuous progress through the ranks from the backstreets of Paris to the corridors of power where he comes up against the ruthless establishment of the salons.

Lucien de Rubempré is an aspiring poet from Angoulême who soon captures the heart of cultured baroness Louise de Bargeton (Cécile de France). But his lowly social class causes a scandal, and Louise is cautioned by her beady eyed cousin, Marquise d’Espard (a beady-eyed Jeanne Balibar) forcing Lucien back onto the rocky road of Parisian grafting where he soon meets his rival Nathan (Xavier Delon) and the hard-nosed cynical journo Etienne Lousteau (Vincent Lacoste in fine form) who has found a way of financing his literary career through theatre criticism in the newly burgeoning tabloid press.

Lucien’s arriviste vanity and lust for life will eventually derail his dreams of lasting success, although for a while he is the toast of the town. Until then Lucien discovers the high life, champagne flows and the beau monde of Paris appears to be his oyster, Gérard Depardieu’s wealthy publisher soon signing the cheques. Meanwhile Louise has gone full circle in her spiritual evolution as a world weary aristocrat and beaten a hasty retreat to the country where she pines for her beau.

Meanwhile new love for Lucien arrives in the shape of homely showgirl Coralie (Salomé Dewaels) who becomes his mistress and confidante, her strengh and moral probity a much needed guiding light for the impetuous ingenu. And for a while the couple enjoy a meteoric rise as the ‘dernier cri’ of Paris through their hard work and genuine endeavour. But storm clouds soon gather on their moment of fame and Coralie’s desire to keep Lucien in the dandy manner he’s not been accustomed to see the debts mounting up until all they have left is their love.

With Christophe Beaucarne’s fluid camerawork this is an opulent if rather overblown drama that could do with a trim here and there to make it a slightly more palatable watch instead of an indulgent two and a half hours. That said, Giannoli is worthy of praise for his skilful adaptation of what is an enjoyable and magnificent French classic. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Marceline. A Woman. A Century. (2021)

Dir.: Cordelia Dvoràk; Documentary with Marceline Loridan-Ivens, Simone Veil, Judith Perignin, Jean-Pierre Sergent; France/Netherlands 2018, 76 min.

Cordelia Dvoràk’s biopic about the life of filmmaker and author Marceline Loridan-Ivens (1928- 2018) is an example of the triumph of opposition: Fourteen year-old Marceline Rozenberg was imprisoned in Bollène (Vaucluse) then deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau on 13.4,1944, having worked with her father Szlama for the resistance. She did not only survive Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Terezin (Theresienstadt), but became a filmmaker, working with her husband Joris Ivens (1898-1989) in Vietnam and China.

Loridan-Ivens was one of only 2500 French Jews who survived deportation, just under three percent of the total of 76 000 victims. After watching Loridan-Ivens signing copies of her auto-biography ‘Et tu n’es pas Revenu’, she meets co-author Judith Perignon in her Parisian flat, a cheerful place with flowers everywhere. This sets the tone of an upbeat documentary: the old Marceline talking to her young self. “Hunger, beatings, thirst. People die, and you instantly forget them. No soul is left. I can see her clearly, that little girl that is still inside me to this day. She is fairly shy”. Marceline met Simone Veil in Block 9, and the once Minister of Culture makes a (too) short visit.

After her liberation by the Red Army in May 1945, she returned to Paris where her mother “wanted her daughter to marry into Jewish families, have children and erase the past”. But “sexuality was a form of disobedience”, and Marceline, who never wanted children on her own, preferred to visit the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris and sit in bistros to discuss the past and present. This is how she met documentary filmmakers Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, whose star she became in Cronique d’un Ete (Chronicle of a Summer) in 1961. It also led to a liaison with 18 year-old journalist Jean-Pierre Sergent, who was supposed to teach Marceline all about Philosophy so that she could prepare to study at the university. But the two became lovers and later filmmakers in their own right, having discovered that filmmaking was not that difficult. The duo was very much a supporter of the FNL, Marceline even carrying suitcases for the FNL. The result was the documentary Algeria Année Zero. Today, Loridan-Ivens is very critical of herself: “We thought the FLN was led by progressive militants, little did we know the majority had their roots in Islamic fundamentalism.”

She met Joris Ivens whilst watching his feature A Valparaiso. He was impressed by Marceline, sending her flowers, but then disappearing for months. When they met again, they stayed together until Ivens’ death. The couple lived like vagabonds, Ivens being “very macho” at the beginning, but Marceline “imposed her will on him.” The past suddenly becomes the present, when Mrs. Phuong arrives from Vietnam to invite Marceline for the 50th Anniversary screening of The 17. Parallel, the couple’s iconic Vietnam documentary, with Mrs. Phuong not only doing the translating, but was also offering technical support. Next for the filmmakers was China, then ostracised by the whole world, after their split with the Soviet-Union.

Joris and Marceline documented the last two years of the cultural Revolution in the 763-minute epic How Yu Kong moved the Mountains (1976), which was to be shown in twelve parts. With “The Band of Four” making a power-grab, Premier Zhou Enlai told the filmmakers to leave the country immediately. Jean Bigiaoui, who worked with the crew, gives a lively commentary on the (film)adventure. We watch clips from Franck Leplat’s 2015 documentary Marceline Loridan-Ivens racontant sou passage a la prison de Sainte-Anneavant (2015). Loridan-Ivens is, for once, very bitter on the commentary. She remembers singing for her father, whose cell was near to her own. But this sets her off into an angry monologue about “never forgiving” the perpetrators.

Marceline is the only Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor who returned to the camp and made her own feature film about her incarceration there: La Petite Prairie aux Bouleaux (The Birch Tree Meadow) 2003. Anouk Aimée plays Marceline’s Alter Ego, who meets a German photographer and questions him about his motives for taking photos in the ruins of the camp. Marceline was not quiet satisfied with her effort: “The concept of a documentary was not enough, because I wanted a representation. I should have played myself.”

Marceline Loridan-Ivens died on 18.9.2018, six weeks after this documentary was finished. She wanted to be buried, even though it frightened her. “But everything is better than being burned”. AS

NOW ON TRUE STORY at all leading platforms | From September 17

The Hand of God (2021)

Wri/Dir: Paolo Sorrentino Cast: Filippo Scotti, Toni Servillo, Teresa Saponangelo, Marlon Joubert, Luisa Ranieri, Renato Carpentieri, Massimiliano Gallo, Betti Pedrazzi, Biagio Manna, Ciro Capano, Enzo Decaro, Lino Musella, Sofya Gershevich, Lino Musella, Dora Romano, Alessandro Bressanello, Birte Berg, Roberto Oliveri, Alfonso Perugini | Italy Drama 129’

Oscar-winner Paolo Sorrentino returns to Naples in the 1980s with this melodramatic coming of age drama fuelled by football, family and Fellini.

The Hand of God has all the hallmarks of Sorrentino’s signature style: the violent men, corrupt officials and voluptuous women who inhabit a larger than life landscape vibrantly brought to life by Daria D’Antonio’s lush camerawork. But this is a tragedy in the Greek style, complete with folkloric undertones and a soulful often strident chorus-line scoring the mosaic of magnificent vignettes that make up a poignant feature tainted by tragedy, and possibly Sorrentino’s most personal yet.

Naples is the star of the show, the majestic Campania coastline and the mauve mountains of Capri shimmering in the Tyrrhenian sea providing an amazing backdrop to the flamboyant storyline. In the traffic strewn Spaccanoli a big-breasted woman (Ranieri) waits wearily for her bus home. A limousine pulls up and a blue-eyed man (Decaro) claiming to be San Genaro, patron saint of Napoli, offers her a welcome life home and hints at the possibility of a much-wanted child to heal her marriage to Franco (Gallo), who the driver appears to know by name. Astonished, the woman climbs on board, but her arrival home is greeted with a brutal beating from her husband, forcing her to call her happily married sister Maria (Saponangelo) and husband Saverio (Servillo) who soon arrive with their teenage son Fabietto (Scotti) from whose perspective the story continues.

At this point it becomes clear that Fabietto is Sorrentino’s younger self: a gentle, thoughtful, football-mad teenager, desperate to lose his virginity: “just get the first time out of the way” urges his conspiratorial father Severio, a warm and loving pater familias with a fine line in tailoring and a solid job.

But Fabietto’s first love is football, hence the film’s Diego Maradona linked title – referring to a divisive goal he scored in the 1986 World Cup quarterfinal. Welcome news for the lustful but lowkey Fabietto arrives when the Argentine player is signed for Naples and will turn out to be his saving grace in the final denouement.

But until then the film swelters with Neopolitan summer indulgences: robust encounters, raucous al fresco lunches and volatile viragos busting out of bikinis or stripping naked to bask in the sun. There’s a cheeky scene where Fabietto eventually scores, not in the football sense but with his much older neighbour (Pedrazzi). His creativity is stimulated by the charismatic film director Antonio Capuano (Capano) – whose 1998 feature The Dust of Naples, was co-written by Sorrentino.

Sorrentino recalls all this with nostalgia and a tender affection that steers clear of sentimentality in bearing its heart on an elegantly crafted sleeve. Scotti’s Fabietto makes for an appealing, introspective alter ego capable of extreme emotion and utter devotion in fervently pursuing his future career. MT

ON NETFLIX | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2021 | SILVER LION – GRAND JURY PRIZE 2021 | BEST YOUNG ACTOR – FILIPPO SCOTTI

The Power of the Dog (2021)

Wri/Dir: Jane Campion | Benedict Cumberpatch, Jesse Plemons, Kirsten Dunst, Kodi Smit-McPhee | Western drama, 125’

Jane Campion’s Oscar-winning drama The Piano defines arthouse film and remains seared to the collective cineaste unconscious as a classic for all time.

The Power of the Dog, premiering at the 78th Venice film festival, has the same potent stillness, captivating characters and visual allure, a traditionally told Western it unfolds in a buttoned-down ranching community in 1925 Montana where outward appearances belie dastardly intentions and family dysfunction, inspired by the novel written in 1967 by Thomas Savage.

LFF 2021 | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2021 premier

The Card Counter (2021) Venice Film Festival

Dir: Paul Schrader | Cast: Oscar Isaacs, Willem Dafoe, Tye Sheridan, Tiffany Haddish | US Thriller 120’

Paul Schrder’s latest thriller turns on a ‘one more trick before retiring’ premise. Oscar Isaacs is in his element as William Tullich, an ex convict from Guantanamo bay whose decade in prison has made him an introverted, compulsive routine-junkie now earning his living as a card counter travelling around from casino to casino ‘just to pass the time’ attracted by his skill at gambling rather than his desire for filthy lucre.

A bitier more full-blooded take on Croupier (1998), this is essentially a revenge road movie with a difference that contemplates a stale and soulless America fuelled by rancid day-old filter coffee, and reflecting on the bitter vestiges of Abu Ghraib prison where William served as a US officer complicit in the torture of inmates.

With his poker face and detached demeanour Will is driven by a subtle desire for redemption that gradually becomes more obsessive as the narrative strands mesh together revealing the true horror of how ordinary people can become monsters in a controlling environment where they are forced to create an alter ego to survive.

On the road William meets Tye Sheridan’s broken young man Cirk, a metaphor for a millennial caught up in debt and dysfunctional family relationships, whose father was also involved at Guantanamo. Will’s desire to help “the kid” will lead to a coruscating showdown in the film’s elliptical finale where Will comes face to face with his former army superior Gordon Gaddo (Dafoe). A subplot involving Will’s gambling sidekick La Linda (Haddish) is only the weak link here and doesn’t quite convince as the love story at the film’s core: neither Haddish nor Isaacs really connecting with the deep humanity of their characters as fully rounded individuals capable of expressing deep emotion. That aside this is a visually alluring and at times gripping thriller that imagines 21st century America as a lost and shallow shadow of its past. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Stateless (2020) Latinx cinema at Casa Festival 2021

Dir.: Michèle Stephenson; Documentary with Rosa Iris Diendomi Alvarez, Gladys Feliz-Pimental, Teofilo Murat; USA/Canada/Dominican Republic 2020, 97 min.

Stateless, a documentary debut for Canadian writer/producer Michèle Stephenson, follows the turbulent lives of two feisty women at the opposite end of the political spectrum in the Dominican Republic (DR), a country undergoing a long history of conflict, not least the massacre of 30 000 citizens under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo in 1937.

In Trujillo’s drive to “whiten” the population of the DR he ordered the slaughter not only of Haitians, but also the darker skinned DR population. To cap it all, in 2013, a decree by the nation’s Supreme Court stripped about a few hundred citizens of their rights (dating back to 1929) despite their heritage, making them effectively stateless in their own country.

Human rights lawyer Rosa Iris Diendomi Alvarez sums up the status quo: “They are here, but they don’t exist”. We watch her touring the country, and helping the disenfranchised to claim their rights, keeping up with the often conflicting stance of the authorities, who try to keep as many people as possible disenfranchised. Alvarez is also actively campaigning against electoral corruption and is an advocate of social justice. Later, she will run for congress, but the game is rigged, her opponent is able to triumph with the help of many 100 pesos notes.

Meanwhile, her cousin Juan Teofilo Murat, who has spent all his life in the DR, now lives in Belladere, Haiti, close to the border. He is one of the many “dispossessed”, even though his documents, according to Alvarez, are proof of his DR citizenship. Their trip together into the DR, the pair are wearing hidden body cameras, is an ordeal. They are countless times stopped for no reason, always being asked “Are you Dominican?” On TV, we listen to DR president Danilo Medina, responding to claims that his government is currently expelling Haitian Dominicans, although he claims the opposite, introducing an identification document under a “national regularisation plan”.

His ‘benevolence’ is in stark contrast to the behaviour of his political allies, such as Gladys Feliz-Pimentel, a member of the Dominican Nationalist Party, who is a direct descendant of one of the nation’s founding fathers. She was once married to a black Dominican man, whom she divorced. Both her children are black. We meet her at a bridge crossing between the to countries, where she pontificates that “the Haitians coming into the country only want to murder DR citizens, chopping them up”. She recalls, the Israeli government telling the then President Hipolito Mejia to ‘build a wall’. But he, unfortunately, did not listen. Pimentel and her party are making up for it, we see many posters advocating the building of a wall, which, so Pimentel “is the basis for nation building”. Later we see her on the podium during a party congress, quoting Philippine president Duarte as a positive example of how things should be done, before starting to sing the country’s National Anthem.

Alvarez also recounts the story of Moraime, a young, black girl, who had to flee the country during the genocide of 1937. Her spirit now lives in the rivers of the country, where she takes care no harm comes to children. The wonderful images of magic realism are in stark contrast to the grim political reality of white supremacy – in a country were 80%of the population is black or of mixed race.

Stateless is a sober document. More evidence of Trump’s ideology has poisoned other countries. Six DoPs share the work, avoiding “Talking Heads” as much as possible. But there is no happy-ending: Rosa Iris Alvarez, harassed and threatened, has asked for political Asylum in the USA. It was eventually granted. AS

LATINX CINEMA AT LONDON’S CASA FESTIVAL

Django and Django (2021)

Dir.: Luca Rea; Documentary about Sergio Corbucci with Quentin Tarantino, Franco Nero, Ruggero Deodato; USA/Italy 2021, 80 min.

Italian director/co-writer Luca Rea (Cacao) pays tribute to compatriot director Sergio Corbucci (1926-1990), who, with Sergio Leone, dominated the short era of the Italo-Western in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Corbucci, who made 63 feature films, is usually shunned by mainstream critics, even though he directed huge box office successes with Adriano Celantano and Toto, as well as the later Terence Hill and Bud Spencer Western comedies. Quentin Tarantino is the main source, leading us through Corbucci’s career in seven chapters.

Sergio Corbucci, like Leone, started out as a film critic, and via screen writing became an assistant director. In 1959 Leone and Corbucci worked for Mario Bonnard in The Last Days of Pompei and their valuable contribution set them both up for a great future, even though both Sergios’ insisted the glory belonged to Bonnard alone. Tarantino maintained that Corbucci’s ‘Spaghetti Westerns’ were a settlement of his scores with Fascism, since the young Sergio grew up under the Mussolini dictatorship and WWII. He even had the ‘honour’ – as a member of the Fascist Youth Choir – to be five feet away from Mussolini and Hitler he visited Rome. Corbucci’s villains rode roughshod through all his features as sadistic, misogynist and racist monsters, in love with spilling blood – particularly the one of innocents.

Romulo and Remo (Duel of the Titans) 1961 was Corbucci’s first attempt to show a prototype of the violent men which would later dominate his Westerns. His first, Minnesota Clan (1964) was shot in the same year as Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, starring Clint Eastwood. The shooting of Django (1966) didn’t go to plan: all the horses bolted, and nobody was sure which of the film lots they were shooing on. Nevertheless, the Kurosawa-inspired revenge story (nearly all Corbucci Westerns fall into this category), “was the most violent film, before Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch came along in 1969″.

Corbucci’s Mexican Revolution trilogy of The Mercenary (1968), Companeros (1970) and What Am I Doing in the Middle of a Revolution (1972) is perhaps his most popular, but the most violent by far is The great Silence (1968). The role of Gordon, the mute avenger, was meant for Franco Nero but he decided to go to Hollywood, making an angry Corbucci cast Jean-Louis Trintignant. Klaus Kinski acted the sadistic killer Tigero, who survives, whilst Gordon is killed. Shot in an eerie, snowy landscape, The great Silence also featured another re-occurring theme of the Corbucci’s Western: the cowardly citizens of the hamlets, who would rather obey the repressor than take the side of the avenger. “It feels like Corbucci is taking a swing at John Ford. The latter’s films show the town building and solidarity of the citizens, whilst Corbucci’s folks are rather meek and cowardly”. One of Corbucci’s last Western was Sid & Jed (1972), a Bonnie and Clyde story set in a Western milieu.

Tarantino offers a clever solution to an unsolved riddle in Django. When the titular hero arrives, we see him laying flowers on the grave of a certain Mercedes. Tarantino conjures up an explanation, in which Django is a soldier who has fought the Confederates, and now returns to give a keepsake to Mercedes, the wife of his black friend who was killed in the war. He then encounters the hooded KKK, who have done away with the black population, and are targeting the Mexicans. All set in Missouri, where slavery was not abolished.

Filmmaker Ruggero Deodato, once Rossellini’s assistant, who worked with Corbucci on 13 films, gives insight into the director’s work, as do many private videos sharing some hilariously funny and candid incidents during shooting. They also show a director who certainly enjoyed his work, and who was always ready for a good laugh – even at himself. AS

NOW ON NETFLIX | Premiered at VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2021

The Peacock’s Paradise (2021) Venice Film Festival 2021

Dir: Laura Bispuri | Cast: Alba Rohrwacher, Dominique Sanda, Maya Sansa, Carlo Cerciello, Leonardo Lidi, Maddalena Crippa | Italy Drama 87;

Laura Bispuri’s first film Sworn Virgin took Berlinale by storm in 2015 with its edgy story about a woman opting to live as a man deep in the mountains of Albania. The Peacock’s Paradise appears to be a more straightforward domestic drama, Bispuri’s long time collaborator Alba Rohrwacher this time playing a mother (Adelina ) planning a church wedding to her fiancé Vito (Lidi). But Bispuri’s other family members are an offbeat bunch, outwards appearances proving to be deceptive.

Dominique Sanda stars is the hostess Nena celebrating her birthday with her husband Umberto, their children Vito and Caterina, cousin Isabella, their daughter-in-law Adelina, her daughter Alma, Caterina’s ex Manfredi – who still lusts after her – although he’s at the party with his new girlfriend Joana. But the star of the show is Paco, Alma’s peacock, whose delicate presence and sudden fall from grace causes everyone to reflects on their own sadness and missed opportunities, as well as each other.

With its muted colours, gentle pacing and thoughtful performances this is a nuanced, introspective film that avoids sentimentality or melodrama in exploring close close relationships, perceptively written by Bispuri and Silvana Tamma. MT

Venice Film Festival 2021 | Orizzonti 2021

Private Desert (2021) Venice Film Festival (2021)

Dir.: Aly Muritiba; Cast: Antonio Saboia, Pedro Fasanaro, Thomas Aquino, Leo Miranda, Mauro Zanata, Laila Garin; Portugal/Brazil 2021, 118 min.

A tortured amour-fou between a violent policeman and a transgender man is at the heart of this anger-fuelled Western melodrama from Brazil’s Aly Muritiba who sensitively explores how traditional family roles are replayed in gay/transgender relationships in a strongly macho culture.

Forced to live as a straight man, Daniel (Saboia), has turned into a disgruntled forty-year old, recently been suspended from duties after causing life threatening injuries to a young recruit. His relationships with women have, unsurprisingly, been fraught. Online he has just met Sara (Fasanaro), who lives in Sobradinho, in the south of Brazil, thousands of miles away from Daniel’s hometown of Curitiba. But when Sara stops answering his calls, Daniel leaves his sister (Garin) in charge of his dementia stricken father (Zanata), and heads to Sobradinho where he produces flyers with Sara’s photo, and plasters them all over the small town. There he meets Fernando (Aquino), who knows Sara (Fasanaro) who actually goes by the name of Robson. As it soon emerges, the two are an item, but the local priest has asked Robson to undertake a “re-orientation” course with his college Oswaldo (Miranda), who himself had been “cured” from being gay. Robson’s true identity made public, thanks to Daniel’s flyers, he decides to leave for Rio, but the past is far from over.

DoP Luis Armando Arteaga conjurers up stunning widescreen images of the vast sub-continent, Daniel’s drive across the country serving as the centre piece. Pedro Fasanaro triumphs in his role as Sara/Robson, Saboia finding a certain humanity in the unlikeable character of Daniel. Aly Muritaba directs with analytical insight, avoiding sentimentality in a mature and thoughtful epic.

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | GIORNATE DEGLI AUTORI

Calling All Stars (1937)

Dir: Herbert Smith | With: Larry Adler, Arthur Askey, Bert Ambrose, Caroll Gibbons, Evelyn Dall | UK Musical 75′

Shown in the small hours by Talking Pictures, this tinny Joe Rock potboiler is of archival interest for the visual record it provides of the likes of The Mills Brothers, Mantovani and Nat Gonella, loosely held together by a farcical plot involving Clapham & Dwyer in the doghouse for saying a naughty word on the air and getting involved with Claude Dampier as a gormless rat poison salesman rejoicing in the name of Pomphrey Featherstone-Chew.

Purportedly the film debut of Arthur Askey, a sassy young Evelyn Dall supplies the glamour; and the finale is broadcast using television technology far in advance of that actually then available. @Richard Chatten.

TALKING PICTURES TV

Once Upon a Time in Calcutta (2021) Venice Film Festival

Dir: Aditya Vikram Sengupta | Cast Sreelekha Mitra, Shayak Roy, Bratya Basu, Arindam Ghosh, Satrajit Sarkar, Anirban Chakrabarti | India, France, Norway – 129’ – 2021 – Bengali

Aditya Vikram Sengupta’s third feature is the only Indian film in this year’s Venice lineup. Set against the ancient city of Kolkata adapting to a rapidly changing world, this delicately observed but ultimately tragic story centres on a divorced mother who also experiencing an identity crisis after the loss of her daughter and her marriage.

When she is refused a home loan by the bank, having spend all her money of funding her daughter’s treatment, her boss, the owner of a massive Ponzi scheme, makes her a questionable offer to finance her future. But Ela feels more comfortable looking to her family for support, reconnecting with her estranged stepbrother who also lets down her down, blaming Ela for his own dark fate.

Then Ela’s childhood sweetheart resurfaces and gives her the warmth and hope for a new beginning. Just as Ela starts living the life she had dreamed for herself, she realises that she isn’t the only desperate soul clinging to a raft in a sea of scavengers.

Bengalis have strong ties to the world of cinema and communism and Sengupta chips away at the various layers of tradition to reveal a human condition that is often soulful and yet full of hope and joy. The film highlights the aspirations and struggles of cultured people gasping for breath in an ever-expanding metropolis, once home to Satyajit Ray and Rabindranath Tagore Once Upon A Time is a love letter to a city struggling in murky waters where colourful characters are constantly trying to invent new identities without being submerged in the tide of change. MT

Venice Film Festival 2021 | ORIZZONTI .

The Blind Man Who Didn’t Want to See Titanic (2021) Venice Film Festival (2021)

Dir.: Teemu Niki; Cast: Petri Poikolainen, Marjaana Maijala, Samuli Jaskio, Rami Rusinen; Finland 2021, 81 min.

The Finns are well known for their deadpan humour and this latest from Teemu Niki is also full of passion and soulfulness in the style of recent dark comedies Come As You Are and Berlinale Golden Bear winner The Other Side of Hope.

It follows two film buffs coping with debilitating illnesses – but the last thing they need is pity. Crucially, Niki is pains to point out that his physically challenged characters by no means see themselves as second class citizens, although they are often considered as such by those around them. The story unfolds through the out of focus perspective of wheelchair-user and John Carpenter fan Jaakko (Poikolainen) who doesn’t let his condition stand in his way, despite the negative views of his friends. Not to be outdone, his online friend Sirpa (Maijala) – the two haven’t yet met – is affected by some kind of blood virus and forced to travel “only three hours away in a train and taxi” for chemotherapy with its ghastly side effects. Jaakko takes this opportunity for a face to face meeting, paying her a supportive visit, despite to his mobility issues, a welcome lottery win providing much needed funds for the journey. As an ice-breaker, Jaakko brings with him a brand new copy of her favourite romcom the titular Titanic, a film he personally detests.

But as luck would have it, his backpack is stolen at the train station, the identity of the thief later being revealed as a young man wearing a tee-shirt emblazoned ‘Scorpions’. Here Niki introduces another humorous twist to the narrative involving the drug dealing pair Samuli and Rami (Jaskio and Rusinen). But will Jaako survive to deliver his gift?

DoP Sari Altonen has great fun imagining Jaakko’s outlook on daily life, giving the audience a full taste of the horrors which go hand in hand with his condition. But the biggest surprise of all is that Petri Poikolainen suffers MS in real life. A performance of great endurance and utter brilliance.

Venice Film Festival 2021 | IN COMPETITION

Silent Land (2021)

Dir: Aga Woszczyńska | Poland, Drama 112′

In Aga Woszczyńska’s impressive first feature, a Polish couple’s relationship exposes serious fault-lines during a stressful Italian vacation where everything goes wrong.

Polish filmmakers certainly know how to be provocative and push the boundaries where love and sex are concerned and Silent Land excels in ramping up the tension in this subversive and acutely piquant two hander.

A cleverly written script and choice visuals keep us engaged with an all too familiar holiday scenario primped with surprising twists and turns enough to derail the most loved-up up romantic break. And what initially feels like an ideal marriage soon shows cracks that run deeper than those in the dirty and disused swimming pool that awaits this couple in their dream villa.

Confronted by builders who can’t speak English – or Polish for that matter – Adam and Anna head for the idyllic beach for some rest and relaxation. On their return the pool has been repainted but still lacks the requisite water, and a serious accident poolside involving the immigrant builder then deep-sixes any chance of a late afternoon swim. Soon the owner and the paramedics arrive and as the two holidaymakers give evidence in the ensuing police investigation, a dark vein of humour creeps into the narrative ‘lost in translation style’ when the carabinieri also turn up, and clearly don’t speak much English either. But why should they?.

The compliant Poles are only too delighted to accompany the police to the station to help with inquiries, their holiday clearly heading into a disaster zone for no fault of their own. A Kafkaesque scenario develops when the detective leading the inquiry picks apart their statement and asks them to return for further questioning. The tables are gradually turned as the justifiably disgruntled clients soon become unwitting suspects in an accidental death inquiry.

There are certainly touches of Michael Haneke’s observational storytelling in the precise framing as the voyeuristic camerawork tracks the couple in silent contemplation or sharing a private joke. The Colombo style police procedural has a understandably unsettling and de-stabilising affect on the couples’ sense of integrity and tranquility as they start to question their own response to the tragedy as foreigners in a unfamiliar environment increasingly coming under the xenophobic spotlight of a tightly knit community far away from home. Tense and highly intelligent filmmaking. MT

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM 23 SEPTEMBER 2022 | TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL

Annette (2021)

Dir/Wri: Leos Carax | Marion Cotillard, Adam Driver, Simon Helberg | Drama France, 139′

French auteur Leos Carax last graced the Croisette with Holy Motors a weird and mysterious odyssey into the mind of one man. Annette his latest creation sees him back in Cannes nine years later with another cinematic sensation: another journey into the complexities of male psyche that explores the nature of fame and the fragility of love through his first English language film.

Adam Driver haunts this moody modern opera with a muscular expressiveness that lurches from rage to almost religious fervour as offbeat comedian Henry, although his comedy act sequences are overlong and not particularly amusing and detract from the central narrative which already has more than enough references to his anger issues. Marion Cotillard shimmers exquisitely as the diva he falls for but the baby they make together is simply out of the world.

Visually stunning in the style of Holy Motors, is Caroline Champetier once again beguiles with her luscious cinematography in a highly original film that blends its bizarre ideas and tonal switches with elegance, always surprising the audience: particularly with erotic sex scenes laced with obsidian black humour: this is a richly thematic modern classic with a focus firmly in the future.

The cult rock band Sparks performs and composes a score that is daringly racy and poignant in the style of a Greek tragedy (complete with a black female chorus) where its central character Henry (Driver) is a meglamaniac narcissist whose lust for new experiences and extreme carnal compulsion will be his devastating downfall, destroying everything challenging his dominance.

Opera singer Ann (Marion Cotillard) melts his heart with her dulcet tones – for a while at least – and the two wander deliriously in a verdant garden of Eden crooning the film’s catchy musical leit-motif “We Love Each Other So Much”. and soon their baby Annette is born and their joy now complete.

But storm clouds soon gather over on the loved-up paradise in a melodramatic tone shift. Carax goes into overdrive in a full-blown expose of macho toxicity where passions are given full throttle during Henry’s hysterical nighttime motorbike rides home to his tropical hideaway, the dizzying camerawork recalling Holy Motors’ nocturnal taxi forays. There is a third narrative strand in shape of Simon Helberg’s compelling turn as Ann’s spurned lover now reduced to her accompanying pianist at her elegantly-staged opera gigs. Once again Cotillard get the chance to play Lady Macbeth and this will be teased out suggestively in the film’s third act.

Baby Annette is like a benign female version of ‘Chucky’, her blue eyes and auburn locks adding an endearing appeal and vulnerability to the subtle scariness she engenders but also hinting at A.I. She will grow up to be a thoughtful and intuitive little girl, whose presence pivotal to the storyline. At this point Carax uses the female chorus to clever effect as a #MeToo theme kicks in and this feeds into Henry’s violent anger management issues which are now the central focus of the story and pivotal to the final reveal.

Annette is a compelling visual masterpiece that utterly captivates and confuses for nearly two and half hours. An atmospheric soundscape, dreamlike images and extraordinary performances coalesce in a contemporary rock melodrama the like of which has never been seen before, and it world premieres here at Cannes. MT

NOW ON RELEASE AT CURZON

Leave No Traces (2021)

Dir.: Jan P. Matuszynski; Cast: Sandra Korzeniak, Mateus Gorski, Tomasz Zietek, Alexandra Konieczna, Sebastian Pawlak; Poland/Czech Republic/France, 160 min.

Jan P. Matuszynski’s passionate if rather sprawling political thriller is testament to how ordinary people as well as the police forces were complicit in Poland’s tyrannical Stalinist regime that led to the murder of 18 year old Grgzegorz Przemyk, son of the poet and Solidarnosc supporter Barbara Sadowska (Sandra Korzeniak).

In Warsaw on the 12th of May 1983, Przemyk (Gorski) was celebrating the end of term with his friend Lezary Filozof (Zietek). But the evening was to end in tragedy after the teenager was arrested for drunken behaviour and beaten up by local police in a way that outward signs were hardly visible, according to the para-medics, Michal Wisocky (Pawlak) and Jacek Szyzdek.

The authorities, Party, Military and Police, immediately started a cover-up operation which included raids on Filozosf’s home, while the witness was in hiding. The secret police found love letters from Filozof to Barbara Sadowska, and used them to subdue Filozof’s statement. His parents, afraid that the regime would damage their livelihoods by inventing ‘irregularities’, denounced their son to the Secret Police.

But Lezary did not give in to pressure. Meanwhile, the authorities made one of the paramedics, Wisocky, admit, that he trampled on Grgzegorz. Again, they used threats against his family to elicit the false confession. Wisocky later tried to commit suicide in prison. Franziske Rusek, the independent prosecutor, was then replaced with the more pliable Jozef Zyta, who was under the influence of hardliner Wieslawa Bardonowa (Konieczna), a fierce State Prosecutor.

When the trial opened in December 1983, nearly all the defendants were cleared, apart from the guiltless paramedics, who were sentenced to two years in prison, but released earlier. Even though in 1993, after the fall of Stalinism, an independent commission tried to uncover the truth, the statute of limitation ran out in 2010, and everyone involved got off scott free. Several years later Barbara Sadowska died of lung cancer.

DoP Kacper Fertacz’ hyper realist images show how squallid the living conditions were in the 1980s, even for the supposedly middle class Lezary family. Performance wise, Alexandra Konieczna (Wieslawa Bardonowa) makes for a steely General Prosecutor masquerading as a middle-aged ‘Hausfrau’, who visits her friends for an afternoon of coffee and cakes after using her considerable brain power to destroy the witness Filozof in a frightening turn as a petit-bourgeois avenger let loose. The rather self indulgent running time of over two hours dilutes the thrust of the powerful storyline- the endless meetings of the Apparatchiks could have been scaled down. AS

NOW ON RELEASE FROM FRIDAY AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS

Giulia (2021) Venice Film Festival

Dir.: Ciro de Caro; Cast: Rosa Palasciano; Valerio Di Benedetto, Fabrizio Ciavoni, Cristian Di Santis, Mattheo Quinzi, Annalisa Lori; Italy 2021, 109 min.

This slow-burning and sensitive drama explores the overwhelming sense of loss and confusion brought on by a pandemic, a state of affairs that will be familiar to all of us. Ciro de Caro’s loose direction oscillates between impressive scenes and fuzzy vagueness held together by Rosa Palasciano’s luminous presence as Giulia, her lack of certainty leading to an identity crisis as relationships come under pressure.

In Rome, we meet first Giulia with her boyfriend Alessandro (Quinzi), he wants to split up but she insists on having ‘another baby’. She embarrasses him in front of his family then rushes off, looking in waste bins for discarded children’s toys, a habit she indulges in for the rest of the feature. Giulia’s employment track record is not looking good: working part-time looking after an old lady she ends up stealing from her. At the same time, another job in a care home comes to an end, Giulia holding Sergio (Di Benedetto) responsible. Sergio and his two friends Ciavoni (Ciavoni) and Fausto (Di Sante) are nevertheless obsessed with Giulia, the four of them driving to the seaside where they meet up with Giulia’s friend Sandra. After a stressful afternoon ends with arguments and accusations, Giulia wanders off on her own through the countryside, where she releases a horse from its tether, a metaphor for her own desire for freedom. There are elements of Neo-Realism at play, but De Caro’s narrative mostly lacks focus drifting off into banalities, feeling more like a ‘first draft’ than a polished final feature, although some may interpret his enigmatic approach as representative of Giulia’s loss of self. DoP Manuele Mandolesi limpid visuals capture the essence of the fragmenting Giulia in this languorous portrait of a woman in distress. AS

Venice Film Festival 2021

Corridor of Mirrors (1948)

Dir: Terence Young | Cast: Eric Portman, Edana Romney | UK drama 108’

A unique Gothic version of Fifty Shades of Gray, with the extravagance but not quite the sex (debuting director Terence Young would later supply plenty of that in his James Bond pictures).

Set in 1938 and shot in France with a British cast (including future Miss Moneypenny Lois Maxwell, with later Bond villain Christopher Lee making his film debut), a French cameraman and music by the great French composer Georges Auric. Scripted by producer Rudolph Cartier and leading lady Edana Romney (‘inspired’ by a novel by Chris Massie), it provides a temporary escape from the mundane day to day realities of life in postwar austerity Britain to which she returns rather as Celia Johnson does at the end of ‘Brief Encounter’. It’s amazing that this extraordinary film isn’t better known. @Ricard Chatten

BLURAY NOW AMAZON

The King of Laughter | Qui Rido Io (2021) Venice Film Festival 2021

Dir: Marco Martone | Cast: Toni Servillo

Toni Servillo is the star turn in theatre director Mario Martone’s resplendent portrait of Neopolitan comic theatre legend Eduardo Scarpetta, making its bow here in Competition at the 78th Venice Film Festival.

Scarpetta (1853-1925) who first took to the stage as a four year old, was best known for his role as the light-hearted slightly air-headed Felice Siociammocca, a typical Neopolitano who, in a break from tradition, was more good-natured than the darker stereotype of Pulcinella whose origins lay in 17th century ‘commedia dell’arte’ as a stock character from puppetry. Scarpetta was also celebrated for his plays – of which he wrote more that fifty – one in particular: ‘Poverty and Nobility'(1888), was later made into a film starring starring Sophia Loren and comedy star Totò. Scarpetta’s main achievement off stage was to translate into Neapolitan the standard Parisian farce of the era: Hennequin, Meilhac, Labiche and Feydeau. He also fathered actor and playwright Eduardo De Filippo along with two other children.

Martone’s begins his story at the beginning of 1900s, when Eduardo Scarpetta has already made his name as the most successful Italian comedian of the era, his plays are all box office hits, and the stage is his exclusive kingdom. But behind the scenes his unconventional family life is proving challenging, the drama tracing his eventually descent into darker times, including the his trial with the magniloquent poet Gabriele D’Annunzio.

Servillo lends his ebullient joie de vivre to the role in this lavish production which follows the star on stage and in real life in an around Naples and Rome in the mid 18th century. Martone and his writer Ippolita Di Majo keeping us entertained for over two hours with the gracefully-paced storyline, partly in Italian, and partly in Neapolitan dialect, and classically captured by Swiss Italian DoP Renato Berta (Au Revoir Les Enfants). MT

Venice Film Festival | COMPETITION 2021

Atlantide (2021) Venice Film Festival 2021

DirWri: Yuri Ancarani | Cast: Daniele Barison, Bianka Berényi, Maila Dabala, Alberto Tedesco | Italian Fantasy Drama, 100′

Unfolding serenely in a suave jazzy vibe this splashy narrative-slim hyperrealist Venetian love letter thrums to the soft summery ambient sounds of the lagoon where it pays homage to la Serenissima.

Artful framing and a contemporary soundtrack are all that’s needed to tell the story of the venal side of Venice that unfolds fantasy docudrama-style through a series of suggestive long takes tracking the main character – Daniele, a young man from Sant’Erasmo – who takes a scuzzy psychedelic road less travelled away from the typical barchino (motorboat) way of life, aiming for something more subversive and even surreal involving ever more speedy and powerful craft.

Captured in the vibrantly inventive camerawork of DoP Lorenzo Pezzano, Atlantide is the latest from video artist and filmmaker Yuri Ancarani (a junior Jonathan Glazer) and perfectly captures the lowlife in this highlife location in a pop promo way. Lowkey yet thrilling Atlantide is a colourful subtle crime story that gradually turns more sinister driven forward by Mirco Mencacci’s majestic score in the closing stages, keeping us guessing until the final frame. MT

Venice Film Festival 2021 | Orizzonti Competition

Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, Journey, A Song (2021)

Dir.: Dan Geller, Dayna Goldfine; Documentary with Leonard Cohen, Larry ‘Ratso’ Sloman, Sharon Robinson, Judy Collins, Regina Spector, Clive Davis, Amanda Palmer, Rufus Wainwright; USA 2021, 118 min.

Canadian singer, poet and novelist Leonard Cohen (1934-2016) once again comes under the spotlight in this passionate but objective new documentary from Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller (who also serves as DoP).

The focus here is Cohen’s quest for spiritual meaning, culminating in the 1984 song, Hallelujah. Inspired by “The Holy and the Broken” by author Alan Light, the directors have cleverly put together a piece of musical history, backed by prodigious researc.

Cohen was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Montreal and stayed faithful to his religion even though for a time, in the late 1990s, he was drawn to Zen Buddhism and lived for a few years at the retreat of Zen master Kyozan Joshu Sasalli Roshi on Mount Baldy. Cohen was a renowned womaniser unable to commit to family life. He bought the Greek island of Hydra in the 1960s where he enjoyed a long relationship with Marianne Ihlen, for whom he wrote “So long Marianne”. They both died only a few months apart (of leukaemia). Cohen’s last love letter formed the eulogy at Ihlen’s funeral. In the 1970s Cohen lived with Suzanne Elrod, the couple had two children, but “Suzanne” was actually written for Suzanne Verdal. Cohen shared most of the 1980s with the fashion photographer Dominique Isserman with whom he also collaborated on work projects. Actress Rebecca de Mornay also shared professional achievements with Cohen.

Even before Hallelujah was made globally famous by the animation feature Shrek (2001), Cohen wrote songs for Robert Altman’s noir Western McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971). The original reaction to Hallelujah on the 1984 album ‘Various Positions’ was anything but promising: Columbia Music CEO Walter Yetnikov was less than enamoured, and the album was not released in the USA. The original version was produced by the small record label ‘Passport Records’ a year later. Cohen was not the only one to record the song, the most famous versions are by Jeff Buckley (who died shortly afterwards in a swimming accident), John Cale, KD lang and Brandi Carlisle. Rufus Wainwright was supposed to perform Shrek for the feature but the producers decided at the last minute to go with John Cale’s version “because it fitted better with the character of the titular protagonist of the feature”. But Wainwright did not lose out completely, his version was used for the sound track version.

Many ‘famous’ moments from music history are touched upon: the meeting between Dylan and Cohen in Paris, comparing the time the composers spent on their songs, with Dylan (15 minutes in the back of a taxi) the clear winner, since Cohen honed Hallelujah to perfection in over seven years using about 200 verses. Rolling Stone music critic Larry ‘Ratso’ Sloman, friend of Dylan and Cohen, is the most animated witness, trying to come to terms with Cohen’ ‘split’ personality, best described by the man himself: You either raise your fist, or sing Hallelujah. I did both”.

In spite of the long running time, for once justified, Hallelujah is chockfull of juicy titbits, keeping us enthralled for nearly two hours. The legendary star found himself making a successful comeback, touring the globe after his business manager absconded with all his money, including his pension fund. He leaves behind him an oeuvre suffused with languid longing, words and music full of sentimental low level depression.AS

IN CINEMAS FROM 16 SEPTEMBER 2022

Spencer (2021)

Dir: Pablo Larain | Wri Steven Knight Cast: Kristen Stewart, Timothy Spall, Sally Hawkins, Sean Harris | Drama 113’

An imagined Christmas at Sandringham is the latest showcase showdown in the tortured saga of Princess Diana’s fated marriage to Prince Charles.

Pablo Larraín’s Venice competition hopeful Spencer makes for extremely painful viewing as an atmospheric arthouse portrait of isolation and emotional disintegration. But the fact that it portrays two well known figures representing the British royal family makes it all the more poignant. A story of two of unhappy people struggling within the confines of tight security and rigorous protocol was never going to be joyful especially when each one is a mannered caricature of their putative selves.

Chilean auteur Pablo Larain has become somewhat of a dab hand at painting marginalised characters: from Jackie Onassis to a group of distressed priests in his 2015 feature The Club. And those who hate the monarchy will have a field day with how dreadful a royal weekend is made to look.

Diana – who died 24 years ago – is victimised to within an inch of her life by the regal system, eventually falling victim to her psychosis in Sandringham’s splendour during a visit that would send anyone screaming for a taxi to Norwich, if they didn’t have their own Porsche parked outside. The film’s timing is even more significant in a year where Her Majesty the Queen has had enough to contend with, not least the death of her husband.

Kristen Stewart couldn’t be more suited to her role as Diana, her wan pallor and delicately chiselled features mirror those of the tragic Princess who doted on her boys and wanted a normal life despite her wealth and privilege. That said, she lacks the vivacious charisma of the princess – who I once met. It’s a performance that plays to the crowd rather than the cognoscenti. Spencer will prove divisive: Some will find it brittle, glib and shallow; others will delight in its sullen melodrama.

The film starts with Diana literally losing her way in the depths of the Norfolk countryside, the film was actually shot in Germany, on a bleak winter’s day. Pitching up at a roadside cafe to ask directions, she eventually finds herself in the safe hands of Sean Harris’ Sandringham chef Darren who guides her back to face the music over her late arrival.

Larrain draws clever but rather chilling comparisons with Diana’s situation and that of Anne Boleyn (Manson). Dream sequences picture the hapless wife of Henry VIII drifting through Sandringham’s gilded corridors. In fact, there’s a great deal of drifting and floating in this often haunting tragedy, as Diana frequently goes awol in frosty nights and foggy mornings, in a bid to avoid the strictures of this regimented family ‘holiday’.

Playing out as a series of grim episodes during the festive break, Diana gradually implodes:.And if she’s not hounded by equerries (Timothy Spall makes for a ghastly bully) and dressers (her only trusted aide is Maggie played by Sally Hawkins), then the press are on her tail with their long distance lenses. Forced into wearing a series of specially selected twee outfits (Christmas lunch, boxing day tea etc) Diana erupts in anguish, biting into a rope of pearls that clatters into her pea soup – a scene that leads to a bulimia attack. The pearls were a gift from Charles (played by Poldark’s Jack Farthing) who offered the same jewels (known as a symbol of tears) to his lover Camilla Parker-Bowles. Only Diana, Maggie and Spall’s equerry are fully fleshed out, the other characters are cyphers only there to serve the narrative.

Diana is seen making the most of joy-filled moments with her boys (played gamely by Jack Nielen and Freddie) and eventually there is a happy ending to this particular episode which culminates with a liberating car ride to Mike and the Mechanics. A dismally depressing, washed out watch, fraught with sorrow. A terrible tribute to the real people it depicts. MT

NOW ON RELEASE IN UK CINEMAS | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Gaia (2021)

Dir: Jaco Bouwer | Cast: Monique Rockman, Carel Nel, Alex van Dyk, Anthony Oseyemi | US Eco-thriller, 97′

South African director Jaco Bouwer delivers a stunning eco thriller that’s less impressive on the narrative front despite a beguiling premise that unfolds in the mysterious depths of the country’s atavistic Tsitsikamma rain forest, home to some terrifying species.

South Africa’s rangers are well known for their intricate knowledge of the animals that inhabit the wild untamed landscapes of the Cape and beyond. But during a routine mission with her colleague Winston (Oseyemi), nothing prepares Bouwer’s heroine Gabi (Rockman) for the terrifying alien predators that lurk in the undergrowth. And when she is injured by a poisoned spear, help arrives in the shape of two mysterious human beings who initially save her life. These ‘post-apocalyptic survivalists’, father and son Barend and Stefan, are clearly versed in all sorts of natural medicine, but lying in a state of semi-sedation, Gabi starts to wonder whether they are as benign as they appear, while trying to contact Winston who has disappeared into the forest. Communicating exclusively in Africaans with the surreal cavemen-like couple Gabi is nevertheless none the wiser as to their motives. Things take a sinister turn when Winston is invaded by flesh-eating lichen like funghi and Gabi’s hopes of escape start to diminish. Bouwer comes up with some stunningly imaginative special effects captured by Jorrie van Der Walt’s immaculate lensing. But Tertius Kapp’s storyline is just too slow-burning and enigmatic to keep us engaged despite the film’s modest running time. Although highly entertaining for body horror fans, Gaia is perhaps best described as style over substance. MT

IN CINEMAS FROM 27 SEPTEMBER 2021

As far As I Can Walk (2021) Karlovy Vary Film Festival 2021

Dir.: Stefan Arsenijevic; Cast: Ibrahim Koma, Nancy Mensah-Offei, Maxim Khali; Serbia/ France/Luxembourg/Bulgaria, Lithuania 2021, 92 min.

Serbian director/co-writer Stefan Arsenijevic transforms an epic medieval Serbian poem, ‘Banovich Stralinya’, into a modern migrant love story involving two Africans, once again illustrating the naivety of refugees hoping for streets of gold in Europe. Imaginatively shot by DoP Jelena Stankovic, this is a convincing drama with a refreshing take on the migration sub-genre. But the grating voice-over of the classic poem disturbs the natural rhythm. and feels at best pretentious.

Ghanian couple Samita ‘Stralinya’ (Koma) and his actress wife Ababuo (Mensah-Offei), both in their late twenties, have been deported from Germany to a transit camp in Serbia where their new existence exposes faultlines in their relationship. Stralinya, named after the epic hero, is a talented footballer who deserves to get a contract as a professional with the local team. Ababuo entertains the refugee kids with her spirited acting talents.

Returning to the camp after a night’s drinking Stralinka is told that Ababuo has left for London with some Syrian refugees. Bullldozing his way into a vehicle loaded with people being smuggled across the border, he learns that the driver charged with transporting his fellow refugees is delivering them straight to the police. Stralinya is furious, mostly at himself, because he feels a moral responsibility having led most of his friends to their ultimate fate. Evading the border police, Stralinya crosses into Hungary, where Ababuo has taken up refuge with a Syrian politician, Ali (Khali) in just another transit camp. Stralinya confronts his wife, who claims she needs “at least the illusion of something big”. After a massive argument the two approach the head of the transit camp in a bid to be re-deported. But while Stralinya is sitting in the bus, waiting to leave, he sees Ababuo being dragged by soldiers towards the bus. He must make a decision, and fast. AS

WINNER | THE ECUMENICAL JURY AWARD | KARLOVY VARY FILM FESTIVAL 2021

The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939)

Dir: Michael Curtiz | Cast: Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Vincent Price, Harry Stephenson | US Drama 106′

This depiction of the love/hate relationship between Queen Elizabeth I and Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex is obviously based on a play (the Irish debacle is plainly staged on a single Germanic-looking set, and Cadiz – although frequently referred to – is only talked about).

The film is sumptuously produced with an incredible supporting cast; some of them practically just glimpsed (with Olivia de Havilland – in reality one the few woman who resisted Flynn’s advances – as usual while she was under contract to Warners wasted but radiant as Davis’s most serious rival in love).

At the centre of course are two star performances, although Daves’ makeup is grotesquely aged but completely unlined with those famous eyes darting hither and thither as the elderly Queen, and – the vaguely ‘naughty’ title notwithstanding – they are shown doing little more in private than playing cards together. Richard Chatten

BETTE DAVIS: HOLLYWOOD REBEL SEASON IS NOW PLAYING AT THE BFI Southbank FOR THE REMAINDER OF AUGUST 2021

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

Dir.: John Huston; Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, Lee Patrick, Gladys George, Jerome Cowan, Elisha Cook Jr; USA 1941, 101 min.

The second film adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s novel ‘The Maltese Falcon’, which was serialised in the ‘Black Mask’ before being published by Knopf in 1930, became a corner-stone of a new sub-genre: the Film Noir. Directed by debutant John Huston, who makes good use of Hammett’s dialogue in his analytical script, the star of the show is Humphrey Bogart who plays Private Eye, Sam Spade. With Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet – the latter another newcomer at the rip of age of 61 – it made film history. John Huston would direct his most famous film The Asphalt Jungle nearly a decade later.

Partners Sam Spade (Bogart) and Miles Archer (Cowan) run a sleazy detective agency. One of their clients, the enigmatic Bridget O’Shaughness (Astor), using a false name, wants to track down a relative. The same night Archer is shot dead. The finger points at Spade due to his affair with Archer’s wife Iva (George). Spade and the widow are seen in a passionate embrace by ‘Girl Friday’ Effie Parine (Patrick). But it soon turns out that Bridget is one of four of crooks on the hunt for the titular Maltese Falcon, a bird emblazoned with priceless jewels. Bridget had shot Archer to get rid of a fifth bounty hunter, Thursby, who is the number one suspect in the Archer murder case. Kaspar Gutman (Greenstreet) leads the hunt for the bird, aided and abetted by his minions Joel Cairo (Lorre) and Wilmer Cook (Elisha Cook Jr) who are subjected to Spade’s robustness on more than one occasion. In the end, the Falcon turns out to be a fake, and the three men land in prison. But the worst fate awaits Bridget, Spade following head before heart in giving her up to the police: “You might get away with twenty years, I’ll wait for you. If they hang you, I will never forget you”.

Warner Brothers had first asked George Raft to play Spade, but the big star was not keen to put his reputation on the line with a newcomer like Huston. Greenstreet and Lorre would act together in nine more features, Bogart occasionally joining them. The highlight for DoP Arthur Edeson, who shot Casablanca, is a seven-minute take in a hotel room the highlight, shot over two days. But the feature belongs to Bogart: a violent detective, cynical womaniser, and crass opportunist in a nest of vipers. AS

ON RELEASE from Friday 17th September | IN UK CINEMAS NATIONWIDE

Captain Volkonogov Escaped (2021) Venice Film Festival 2021

Dir: Aleksey Chupov, Natasha Merkulova | Cast: Yuriy Borisov, Timofey Tribuntsev, Aleksandr Yatsenko | USSR Drama 120′

A muscular yet strangely poetic drama suffused with human emotion by Russian directing duo Aleksey Chupov and Natasha Merkalova whose feature The Man Who Surprised Everyone, did just that.

Classically styled and set against the backdrop of the 1938 political persecutions – the colour red serving as a thematic touchstone for Soviet ideals of valour, sportsmanship and nationalistic allegiance – it stars man of the moment Yuriy Borisov fresh from his triumphs in Cannes with Compartment Number 6.

He plays Fyodor a hard-boiled, weightlifting law-enforcer in a Russia pulsating with subversive wartime undercurrents where cowing-towing to the Soviet system is the only way to go. But when Fyodor sees his peers being interrogated by the authorities he decides to abscond. Once on the run (to rousing sounds of ‘The Russian Red Army’ and a propulsive electronic score) Fodor is hotly pursued by his wiry, tuberculosis ridden superior Golovnya (Tribuntsev), haunted by the past as it plays out in a series of haunting hallucinatory sequences featuring his old comrades. So he decides to return as surreptitiously as possible while surrounded by a seething climate of savage mistrust.

Immaculate lensing by ace Estonian cinematographer Mart Taniel makes this a visually captivating as well as thrilling with its storyline that tracks Fodor’s evasion from his steely band of brothers with a pervasive feeling of danger and gritty authentic characters who feel real in their struggle to survive against the odds in a climate of fear and suspicion that forces them to root for themselves while keeping their backs against wall in their putative allegiance to the state. That said, the few female characters are seen as weak and febrile, the men physically and emotionally rigorous.

Powered forward but some really shocking violence: an execution scene is one of the most starling: a state employee priding himself by dispatching his firing squad victims with just one shot; in another a little girl recounts how her father was tortured by Spanish Fascists and then Russian Communists, the latter the more affective in sending him to him to his grisly death. Unorthodox weapons come in all shapes and sizes – an old fashioned telephone proving an effective stunning device. But the harsh brutality is tempered by some potently transcendent moments that Andrey Konchalovskiy or Tarkovskiy would be proud of: an enormous red zeppelin glides by silently framed between two buildings; a wild dog scampers along joyfully in the morning mist, and an emaciated man breathes his last moments of life cradled in Volkonogov’s tender embrace. MT

Venice Film Festival | 1 – 11 September 2021 | COMPETITION

Better Davis season | August at the BFI, Southbank

Throughout August BFI Southbank will celebrate the legendary BETTE DAVIS, one of the most powerful and confident women in the Hollywood studio system. Rather like Olivia de Havilland, Davis was a contract player for Warner Brothers, where she fought long and hard for actors’ rights at the studio. Although she lost the court case against her employers, better roles soon started to come her way in the shape of Julie Marsden in JEZEBEL (William Wyler, 1938) which won her an Oscar (she would go on to become the first person to secure 10 Academy Award nominations for acting) and Wyler’s THE LITTLE FOXES in which she played the malevolent Southern aristocrat Regina Giddens.

Bette Davis once said: In this business, until you’re known as a monster your’e not star” and she certainly proved it re-inventing herself in her fifties with unlikeable roles in films like HUSH… HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE (Robert Aldrich, 1964) and WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? (Robert Aldrich, 1962), that focused on the legendary feud between Davis and her co-star Joan Crawford. The BFI season will include a BFI re-release of NOW, VOYAGER (Irving Rapper, 1942), back in selected cinemas UK-wide from 6 August. There will also be the chance to see lesser known titles such as DARK VICTORY, THE WHALES OF AUGUST, DEAD RINGER, THE MAN WHO CAME TO DINNER. OLD ACQUAINTANCE, THE NANNY, THE STAR and Mr SKEFFINGTON

BETTE DAVIS SEASON | BFI Southbank LONDON

Ilsa She Wolf of the SS (1975) Amazon

Dir: Don Edmonds | US Drama

The commonly made observation that a particular old film today looks tame by modern standards always depresses me, representing as it does, a reflection on how debased modern tastes have become: and becoming more debased by the minute. For that reason it comes as something of a relief that ‘Ilsa’ still looks pretty revolting today, even if it doesn’t begin to compare with the sheer relentless nastiness of nihilistic shockers like Kōji Wakamatsu’s Violated Angels (1967) and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo (1975), and is partially rescued by the childish sense of glee that makes the films of the late Herschell Gordon Lewis bearable.

Two distinguished Polish feature films have depicted the experience of women held in Nazi concentration camps, Wanda Jakubowska’s The Last Stage (1948) and ‘Andrzej Munk’s Passenger (1963). Over the years there has been occasional trash with pretensions set against the backdrop of The Holocaust, such as Roger Vadim’s soporific Le Vice et la Vertu (1963) and Liliana Cavani’s sleazy The Night Porter (1974). And then there is simple trash like ‘Ilsa She Wolf of the SS’.

Less cheesy looking than anticipated, and with professional-looking photography, generally good acting and unpleasantly convincing special effects by Joe Blaso, the film is shot on the sets left over from the production of the TV series ‘Hogan’s Heroes’. ‘Camp Nine’ only seems to be holding about a dozen prisoners, and George ‘Buck’ Flower as Dr.Binz could easily have wandered in from an episode of the original series.

The character of Ilsa herself is loosely based upon the genuine antics of Ilse Koch (1906-1967), the wife of the commandant of Buchenwald best remembered for her taste in lampshades. She makes love to male inmates like a praying mantis until the unprecedented staying power of – guess what! – an American, sends her to hitherto undreamt of heights of ecstasy and exposes her Achilles heel. Ilsa has a theory that women are capable of enduring more pain than men; a theory that if proved will result in better use of the so far underused resource of German womanhood on behalf of the war effort. Nobody who has read the relevant section in William Shirer’s ‘The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich’ will, alas, be surprised at anything they come across in this film (such as the decompression chamber, immersion in water and deliberate infection of prisoners in order to test medical treatments). The sequence when Ilsa is alone with The General (as she refers to him throughout) also indicates that someone involved in the film was aware of the gossip concerning the Führer’s own personal sexual predilections.

Set in the very last days the Third Reich in 1945, it goes without saying that no serious attempt has been made to get the period right, but even so Ilse’s rather ugly seventies hairstyle is distractingly anachronistic, especially worn loose as it is when she’s in uniform (all her other female staff have their hair more plausibly tied back in buns) and if she’d just let it down occasionally during her more – er – unrestrained moments the contrast could have had more visual impact. The late Anne Ridler looked more authentic to the period – and was far hotter – in her brief role as an SS torturer in 633 Squadron (1964).

Many will find simply discussing such a disreputable trivialisation of Nazi atrocities so nonchalantly grossly offensive. But as an earlier user has pointed out, Nazi-porn pulp novels known as ‘Stalags’ were popular in 60s Israel; and this movie’s portrayal of the Nazis as sadistic perverts would probably offend most Holocaust deniers too. (Although an American-German production, the film was of course banned in Germany.)

NOW AVAILABLE ON AMAZON

Dusk Stone (2021) Venice | Giornate degli Autori

Dir/Wri: Ivan Fund | Cast: Alfredo Castro, Mara Bestelli, Marcelo Subiotto, Marcel Alvarez | Drama Argentina, Chile, Spain 87’

Alfredo Castro stars in this enigmatic and rather wistful ecologically themed drama that sees a couple coping with the mysterious disappearance of their son in the windswept coastal resort of Aldea Mar (Buenos Aires) during the end of year holidays.

It’s a wild place haunted by myths and legends, and during a long leisurely lunch with their close friends Sina and Genaro the conversation touches on a giant sea monster that haunts the area, the couple’s plans to sell their beach house and their preparations to move out. During the meal the camera’s focus in on Sina and Genaro as they work their way through the local delicacies, and listen to Greta and Bruno’s off-camera account of what happened on the fateful day.

Although the film is more cutely endearing than suspenseful, Francisco Cerda’s evocative occasional score sets a sinister tone for the soulful storyline that dwells on the couple’s muted feelings of loss, but also on the hope that the four of them might discover what happened as they relax together on their drives along the misty coastline with the family dog in tow. But nearly an hour into the film and we’re none the wiser, as gradually the mythical stories take hold of their collective subconscious and become inextricably linked to positive memories of the son as sea and sand eventually reveals an unexpected but inconclusive connection with the dreaded monster and the truth. MT

GIORNATE DEGLI AUTORI | VENICE September 2021

Prophecy (1979) Blu-ray

Dir.: John Frankenheimer; Cast: Talia Shire, Robert Foxworth, Richard Dysart; USA 1979, 102 min.

US filmmaker John Frankenheimer (1930-2002), director of the original Manchurian Candidate, started out, like Sidney Lumet, directing TV fare including numerous reputable ‘Playhouse’ episodes. He never lost feel for a good newsworthy story, and Prophecy is a good example with its focus on environmental issues.

Written by David Seltzer (The Omen), Prophecy takes place near Maine, where strange findings are reported in the river Ossipee. Considering, the Flint Water Crisis in Michigan went on from 2014 to 2019, Seltzer’s script is very much ahead of its time.

Doctor Robert Verne (Foxworth) and wife Maggie (Shire) are working in Washington DC, and hope that a holiday in Maine might take their minds off the polluted capital. But soon they are witnessing strange incidents in the river Ossippee, near the paper mill run by Bethel Isley (Dysart). Babies are being born with physical defects, people are walking around in a drunken stupor even though they have not consumed a drop of alcohol, and in the local river salmon and tadpoles are growing to monstrous proportions, while on dry land racoon are running riot.

When a group of lumberjacks go missing, Isley blames the indigenous population, who in turn claim that the Katahdin, a Sasquatch monster, is responsible for the mysterious happenings. Maggie, who is pregnant, but has not told Robert, grows increasingly nervous – she has eaten fish caught in the vicinity. But worse is to come in the shape of an enormous bear with diseased skin that causes total mayhem for all concerned.

Bad timing saw Prophecy premiering only a few weeks before Alien, and Ridley’s Scott’s monsters were very far superior to the giant bear. DoP Harry Stradling jun. (Convoy, Little Big Man) is on fine form, and the mixture of conspiracy and horror is a potent brew. When the survivors leave the scene, a bear cub is left behind – but unlike Alien, a sequel to Frankenheimer’s outing never saw the light of day. AS

OUT ON BLURAY courtesy of Eureka Classics

Erasing Frank (2021) Venice – Settimana della Critica

Dir.: Gabor Fabricius; Cast: Benjamin Fuchs, Kinscö Blénesi, Ildicó Bánsági, Andrea Ládanyi; Hungary 2021, 98 min.

In Stalinist Hungary during the early 1980s a troubled punk musician is sent to a psychiatric ward where he struggles against the regime’s authoritarianism alongside patients with more serious mental health problems. Stunningly captured in black and white by Tamás Dobos, first time director Gabor Fabricius goes for an Orwellian atmosphere showing Frank’s descent into a nightmarish vision of a system hellbent on destroying any kind of creativity, seen entirely from Frank’s POV. This is a fuzzy journey into darkness where we meet a series of periphery characters whose place in Frank’s universe never becomes entirely clear: his unnamed partner and another inmate he befriends. The aesthetics certainly carry the film, but the lack of narrative structure reduces the impact on our ability to engage with Frank and his tortured world. Erasing Frank is nonetheless a visceral visual poem portraying the misuse of psychiatry in all Stalinist countries from WWII until 1989 in one of the darkest chapters in history.

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Promises (2021) Venice – Orizzonti 2021

Dir.: Thomas Kruithof; Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Reda Kateb, Naidra Ayadi, Jean-Paul Bordres, Vincent Garayer; France 2021, 98 min.

Isabelle Huppert is the guiding light of this socio-political drama that centres on a deprived Parisian housing estate where she is Clemence Collombet the ambitious mayor with her eye on the main chance.

Modelled on local authorities like St. Denis or Bobigny, Thomas Kruithof’s sophomore feature accurately portrays the sort of self-seeking politician we have grown used to of late: Clemence has a wilful, authoritarian streak and limitless ambition. From her upmarket home she hopes the struggle on the decaying housing estate Les Bernardins will define her future, and has promised to resign after two terms, her deputy Naidra (Ayadi) – whose parents have immigrated from North Africa – is her chosen successor.

Clemence is keen to further her career and only to happy take on a ministerial post in central government when it is offered. Her chief of staff Yazid – Reda Kateb on top form – is kept busy by her many machiavellian moves. Les Bernardins is run by the shady developer Chaumette (Garayer) and Clemence wants to replace him. The real victims are the tenants of the estate, who have seen promises constantly broken while the building falls into a parlous state of disrepair.

But the real villain is Jean-Marc Forgeat, the local Mafia boss. On the opposite side is Michel Kupka (Bordres), chair of the tenants’ association, trying to keep up a deal for renovation with the mayor and Yazid, even though Kupka does not trust the politicians. Then everything changes when Clemence’s ministerial appointment fails to materialise, and all she gets is a place in the Senate. In a furious volte face she reneges on her promise not to run again – offering the disappointed Naidra the job of mayor in three year’s time. Meanwhile Yadiz is involved in a race against time to get the renovation project off the ground, and into the hands of the local MP at an Elysee meeting.

Kruithof shows two different levels of the playing field, the mayor using the tenants merely to advance her own career. Yazid is shown as the beavering ‘nuts and bolts’ man who has still a little bit of engagement left, but is dependent on people on the ground, like Kupka, who is fighting a battle on two fronts, trying to unite the tenants in the hope that Yadiz keeps his promise.

DoP Alexandre Lamarque offers up a sophisticated looking feature reflecting the changing milieu, from council house to corridors of power, but there is simply two many plot lines going on for the audience to see things clearly. Isabelle Huppert once again running the show like a seasoned professional with composite ease. AS

The Noise of Engines | Le Bruit des Moteurs (2021) San Sebastian Film Festival

Dir.: Philippe Grégoire; Cast: Robert Naylor, Tanja Björk, Marie-Therese Forline, Naila Robel, Alexandrine Agostini; Canada 2021, 90 min.

The bizarre debut feature of Canadian writer/director Philippe Grégoire is too clever by half, hurtling into cul-de-sacs, before petering out with a limp. There are some interesting moments, but overall The Noise is simply too pretentious and immature.

Gregoire kicks off in semi-documentary style with a group of Canadian customs officers being introduced by Alexandre Mastrogiuseppe (Naylor) to the use of firearms. Later Alex has sex with Laura (Rabel), one of the the trainees – all rather awkward as her efforts to wear a mask bring on an asthma attack, Alexandre coming to the rescue. He is nevertheless suspended from work by the strange unit chief (Agostini) who admits she is in an open marriage while she claws the underside her desk in frustration, enviously alluding to his multiple sexual escapades. Alexandre is then sent home to his mother (Forline), who owns a race course in a small town.

On the race course Alexandre is accosted by two police officers who accuse him of sticking an obscene drawing on the church door. Next he embarks on a treasure hunt instigated by Icelandic racing driver Adalbjörg (Björg) a big fan of filmmaker Andre Forcier, the two eventually fetching up in a deserted backwater. The two policemen appear again, burning Alexandre’s hands on the hot plates of an oven, and other unspeakable parts of his body. Needless to say, things go from bad to worse for Alexandre who embarks on a journey to discover the holy grail of drag racing

Essentially The Noise is a series of disconnected episodes where everything feels unnatural, performed by an unexceptional cast, Shawn Pavlin’s images are as anaemic as the whole undertaking. So not a strong debut for Gregoire despite some interesting ideas. AS

San Sebastian FILM FESTIVAL 2021 | 17 – 27 SEPTEMBER 2021

The Pawnbroker (1964)

Dir: Sidney Lumet | Wri: Morton S Fine | Cast: Rod Steiger, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Brock Peters, Jaime Sanchez | US Thriller 116′

Director Sidney Lumet’s gritty New-York set Nazi survivalist movie made Rod Steiger a star with his unforgettable portrayal of a Holocaust survivor. Jewish refugee Sol Nazerman is a broken holocaust victim eking out an existence as a pawnbroker in Harlem’s squalid mean streets. His world-weary cynical approach to his customers is a study of indifference occasionally erupting in irritation – he’s too exhausted by misery and the memories of the wife he lost in the Death Camps to be angry or even sad any more, although at one point he’s reduced to tears of sheer emotional exhaustion by his tyrannical business partner, the gangsterish Rodriquez (Brock Peters).

Haunted by the lost and the misunderstood, The Pawnbroker is given a certain poignance with its louche jazz score from debut film composer Quincy Jones. Based on Edward Lewis Wallant’s cult novel – the film evocatively recreates a not so swinging Sixties America where life limps on in the shadows of the past. MT

THE PAWNBROKER IS OUT ON BFI BLURAY/DVD 16 August 2021

Wendy (2020)

Dir.: Benh Zeitlin; Cast: Devin France, Yashua Mack, Gage Naquin, Gavin Naquin, Kevin Pugh, Shay Walker; USA 2020, 111 min.

Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild was a breakout hit with its endearing little heroine. This take on the J.M. Barrie classic Peter Pan doesn’t quite have the same magic although is still a much worthier drama than Steven Spielberg’s Hook. WENDY’s long journey into being – principal photography started in 2017 – has left its imprint on the finished feature.

Siblings Wendy (France) and twins Douglas (Gr. Naquin) and James Ga. Naquin) live with their mother (Walker), who runs a diner in Louisiana where the adventurous trio hop on a freight train, following a black boy called Peter ((Mack). They eventually land on an island, vowing never to grow old in their partly submerged world ruled by an octopus-like creature the children call ‘Mother’. But the inevitable ageing process arrives leading to a rather unconvincing ending

The whole undertaking is somehow spoiled by Wendy’s twee voice-over, which takes away from the magic of the settings – WENDY was partly shot on Montserrat – the stunning island captured by Sturla Brandth Grovlen. Devin France’s Wendy carries the film through some questionable plot twists: One somehow has the feeling that Zeitlin’s siblings never got far enough away from the Barrie original. Their re-imagining is also hampered by having to pull off some brutal shock-effects, which oversteps the suitability for younger viewers. WENDY is not a failure, but proves the curse of the sophomore feature is still alive and kicking. AS

NOW IN CINEMAS

The Last Bus (2020)

Dir.: Gillies MacKinnon; Cast: Timothy Spall, Phyllis Logan, Natalie Mitson, Ben Ewing; UK 2021, 86 min.

The Last Bus is something between a feel-good-movie and an elegy on death in modern Britain seen through rose-tinted specs. Carried by the great Timothy Spall, it somehow lacks enough information on the character he plays, eighty-something Tom Harper, who is taking his wife Mary’s ashes all the way from John O’Groats to Lands End, making the 838-mile journey on public transport thanks to his bus pass.

After Mary’s death Tom’s reverse journey is a nod to the past, with flashbacks of their married life together as a young couple (Natalie Mitson/Ben Ewing) when they first made the trip, through to the present day. Undeterred by terminal cancer, Tom still firing on most of his cylinders: helping when the bus breaks down and rooting for a racially abused fellow passenger. As the bus travels southwards we’ll get to know more about Tom’s trails and tribulations finishing on a high note on his arrival in Lands End

The contrast between the early 1950s and today Britain seems more positive than realistic: the good old days reflect the happiness of Tom’s married bliss with Mary, nothing seemingly dimming their nirvana, even 70 years later. The goodwill shown by nearly everyone towards the pensioner seems idealist given what most older people have to put up with. Nostalgia rules visual and tonally, the characters reflecting this bland idealism in their conventional rather make-believe lives. A touch of irony would have been welcome to take the edge off the sweetness, Spall breathing life into a chocolate box existence. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 20 August 2021

Mandragore (1952)

Dir: Arthur Maria Rabenalt | Cast: Hildegard Knef, Erich von Stroheim, Trude Hesterberg, Denise Vernac, Harry Holm | Fantasy Drama 92′

The fifth and – to date – last film version of Hanns Heinz Ewers’ 1911 bestseller is handsomely mounted, interestingly cast but far too talky. It worked far better as a silent film, with Brigitte Helm much more convincing than dear Hildegard Knef as the soulless product of artificial insemination.

By bestowing such inauspicious parenthood upon his creation Professor Jacob ten Brinken (Erich von Stroheim!) explicitly states that his desire is to inject a bit of depravity in the female genes in order to create a more exotic bloom by unnatural means than two upstanding citizens could ever hope to produce; although real life is constantly demonstrating that Mother Nature can always be depended on to bring into the world plenty of young women with more conventional antecedents that would be capable of wreaking just as much havoc among the male sex.

Although Ewers was initially an enthusiastic supporter of the New Order and joined the NSDAP in 1931 – and Alraune clearly reflected the eugenics debate that Hitler brought into disrepute – it wasn’t filmed during the Nazi era. The director of this postwar version, Arthur Maria Rabenalt, had been an enthusiastic propagandist for the Nazi regime, which makes him an ironic choice for such potentially touchy subject matter. @Richard Chatten

Otar’s Death | Karlovy Vary Film Festival 2021

Dir.: Iosep ‘Soso’ Bliadze; Cast: Nutsa Kukhianidze, Iva Kemeridze, Eka Chavleishvili, Archil Makalatia, Taki Mumladze, Vakho Chachanidze, Marlen Egutia; Georgia/Germany/Lithuania 2021, 107 min.

Georgian Iosep ‘Soso’ Bliadze comes to Karlovy Vary for the first time with this complex and well-written debut. Otar’s Death is a mature psychological drama set in Tbilisi and the surrounding countryside contrasting two very different life styles with irony and sensitivitiy .

Sixteen-year old Nika (Kemeridze) lives with his mother Keti (Kukhianidze), who is really too young to be taking proper care of her fatherless son in a rented flat in Tbilisi, while also holding down a freelance job selling cosmetic products to friends and neighbours. Nika has a girlfriend, Ana (Mumladze) who is the same age as Keti but far more confident. Keti rather neglects her son, and even when she drives him to a lake in the countryside, she takes her girlfriend along too so Nika is left to his own devices while the two women are preoccupied with their own interests.

Nika soon get bored and drives home in his mother’s car, even though he has no driving licence. But she insists he collects her on the way home although it’s already nearly dark. in the dimly streets, the ensuing tragedy is pivotal to the plot development, Nika causing an accident that involves the titular Otar Egutia) in front of his house.

The doctor declares Otar dead, and when Keti arrives, she makes a bargain with Otar’s daughter Tamara (Chavleishvili) to keep her son out of jail. But raising the money proves almost impossible: the bank will not give her credit without collateral and her family cannot help

Finally, she visits old flame Zaza (Mumladze), a former lover, who has served time in prison, but is now married with a child. Meanwhile, Nika’s mental health suffers and he goes on the rampage causing more problems.

Meanwhile back at the mortuary, the mortician makes a surprising discovery, Tamara insisting on going ahead with her agreement with Keti.

Tamara’s son Oto (Makalatia) who has watched his mom play the cello in the barn, is against her taking the money, and sets fire to the barn. Next morning, Otar goes hunting near a lake with his dog, after having had a good breakfast. Which leaves a distraught Nika, who takes a bus to the lake he visited days ago.

The importance of a well worked out script cannot be over-estimated: here, everything flows, and the protagonists find always new ways of relating to each other. In spite of the gruelling topic and violence, Bliadze always has time for some dark humour. The two women leads, Kukhianidze and Chavleishvili, are brilliant, and DoP Dimitri Dito Dekanosidze comes up with great establishing shots, and wonderful panoramic shots of Tiblisi, with the cable cars acting as special extras. A true discovery.

EAST OF WEST | Karlovy Vary FILM FESTIVAL 2021

San Sebastian Film Festival – Tribute to Johnny Depp

Johnny Depp, one of contemporary cinema’s most talented and versatile actors, will receive a Donostia Award on Wednesday, September 22 during San Sebastian Festival’s 69th edition.

Depp is a 3-time Academy Award nominee, a Golden Globe winner and 10- time nominee, a Screen Actors Guild Award Winner for Best Actor and 6- time nominee, and the winner of 14 People’s Choice Awards. With more than 90 audiovisual productions to his name, Depp has also produced some ten films, including the most recent, Minamata, by Andrew Levitas (2020), Hugo (2011), directed by Martin Scorsese, and Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan (2020), helmed by Julien Temple, winner of the Special Jury Prize at the last San Sebastian Festival. He has also directed shorts and the feature film The Brave(1997), which he also wrote, featuring Marlon Brando on the cast.

He made his movie debut at the age of 21 as one of Freddy Krueger’s victims in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), and over the years, a relationship with the audience crystallised in the early 90s with his lead roles in the cult movie Cry Baby (Zabaltegi 1990), written and directed by John Waters, and his first collaboration with Tim Burton, Edward Scissorhands (1990).

Over the following years he starred in films directed by prestigious filmmakers including Emir Kusturica (Arizona Dream, 1992), Lasse Hallström (What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?, 1993, and Chocolat, 2000), Tim Burton (Ed Wood, 1994, and Sleepy Hollow, 1999), Jim Jarmusch (Dead Man, 1995), Mike Newell (Donnie Brasco, 1997) and Terry Gilliam (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 1998) –screened at the Festival as part of the retrospective Terry Gilliam–.

In the 21st century, his part as Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean saga (2003, 2006, 2007, 2011 and 2017) also earned him the admiration of the new generations. During this period, he received three Oscar nominations for Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), Finding Neverland (2004) and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007). The latter earned him a Golden Globe, the awards for which he has amassed another nine nominations. His long inventory of acknowledgements also includes the Honorary Cesar (1999), a list now joined by the Donostia Award.

In recent years he has worked with Gore Verbinski (The Lone Ranger, 2013), Rob Marshall (Into the Woods, 2014), Scott Cooper (Black Mass, Perlak 2015), Kenneth Branagh (Murder on the Orient Express, 2017) and Andrew Levitas (Minamata, 2020).

Depp has played writers, undercover cops or outlaws, almost always misfits, in casts placing him alongside Marlon Brando, Faye Dunaway, Jerry Lewis, Penélope Cruz, Helena Bonham Carter, Javier Bardem, Kate Winslet, Mark Rylance, Dustin Hoffman, Judi Dench, Antonio Banderas, John Malkovich, Marion Cotillard, Forrest Whitaker, Al Pacino, Benedict Cumberbatch, Morgan Freeman, Benicio del Toro, Michelle Pfeiffer, Leonardo Di Caprio and Christopher Plummer, among many others.

This will be Johnny Depp’s third visit to the Festival following his fleeting appearance in 1998 with Terry Gilliam, and his visit in 2020 for the participation of Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan.

SAN SEBASTIAN FILM FESTIVAL 2021 |

Venice Film Festival 2021

Venice has upped its game programme wise in recent years and now looks to challenge Cannes with its glittering line-up. The 78th edition opens on September 1st with mainstream film as well as arthouse fare including the hotly anticipated Princess Diana drama Spencer starring Kristen Stewart and Denis Villeneuve’s Dune. Star power is boosted by Adam Driver, Matt Damon, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Olivia Colman and Jamie Leigh Curtis

This year’s jury is headed by Oscar-winner Bong Joon Ho (Parasite) presiding over Oscar winner Chloé Zhao (Nomadland), French actress Virginie Efira (Benedetta), Italian director Saverio Costanzo (Hungry Hearts), Canadian actress and producer Sarah Gadon (Enemy), Romanian documentary maker Alexander Nanau (Collective), and British actress and singer-songwriter Cynthia Erivo (Widows).

Other major movies picking Venice for their world debut include David Gordon Green’s latest horror outing Halloween Kills starring Jamie Lee Curtis; Ridley Scott’s period drama The Last Duel starring Adam Driver, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and Jodie Comer; and Edgar Wright’s hotly anticipated Last Night in Soho with Anya Taylor-Joy. All three will screen out of competition.

In the running for the 2021 Golden Lion for best film are Jane Campion’s star-studded literary adaptation The Power of the Dog featuring Kirsten Dunst and Benedict Cumberbatch, Ana Lily Amirpour’s latest Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon, and actor Maggie Gyllenhaal, whose directorial debut, The Lost Daughter, starring Oscar winner Olivia Colman, will also premiere in competition at the 78th Venice Festival.

Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco is back in the main competition after his New Order won the Silver Lion Grand Jury prize in Venice last year, Sundown, an English-language features sees him working again with Tim Roth, and Charlotte Gainsbourg. Paul Schrader will be there with The Card Counter, starring Oscar Isaac, Tiffany Haddish and Willem Dafoe.

Venice 2021 has proved of late to be somewhat of a springboard for the Academy Awards. But Italian cinema has also garnered kudos from the ‘La Mostra’ which features this year no less that five Italian titles in competition, including America Latina from brothers Damiano and Fabio d’Innocenzo, Il Buco from director Michelangelo Frammartino, Freaks Out from Gabriele Mainetti, and Mario Martone’s Qui Rido Io.

Oscar winner Paolo Sorrentino will also be on the lido with his latest The Hand of God,a rites of passage football themed drama set in Naples during the 1980s where Diego Maradona joined the city’s team.

The closing film on September 11th will also be Italian — Roberto Ando’s Il Bambino Nascoto

Other buzz worthy titles include Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song from director Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine. TV wise there’s Scenes From a Marriage starring Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac reunited after A Most Violent Year (2014) an adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s celebrated classic 1973 feature.

The Horizons section this year features a lot of new directors. Most notable here is British director Harry Wootliff whose premiere True Things, has a glittering cast of Ruth Wilson and Tom Burke, and Matt Dillon starring Land of Dreams from Iranian director Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari, starring Matt Dillon. The sidebar closes with Rhino from the contraversal Ukrainian director Oleg Sentsov. As if there wasn’t enough films the Horizons now includes an ‘Extra Section’ that explore new avenues in world cinema, ie ‘experimental’ fare.

Last year Venice successfully managed to be the first major international festival to hold an in-person edition since the pandemic broke in the February. The 2021 festival acknowledges that coronavirus is still rampant in Europe with the variants taking hold.

The full lineup of the 2021 Venice Film Festival is below.

VENEZIA 78 – COMPETITION

Madres Paralelas, dir: Pedro Almodóvar
Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon, dir: Ana Lily Amirpour
Un Autre Monde, dir: Stéphane Brizé
The Power of the Dog, dir: Jane Campion
America Latina, dirs: Damiano D’Innocenzo, Fabio D’Innocenzo
L’Evénement, dir: Audrey Diwan
Competencia Oficial, dirs: Gaston Duprat, Mariano Cohn
Il Buco, dir: Michelangelo Frammartino
Sundown, dir: Michel Franco
Illusions Perdues, dir: Xavier Giannoli
The Lost Daughter, dir: Maggie Gyllenhaal
Spencer, dir: Pablo Larraín
Freaks Out, dir: Gabriele Mainetti
Qui Rido Io, dir: Mario Martone
On the Job: The Missing 8, dir: Erik Matti
Leave No Traces, dir: Jan P Matuszynski
Captain Volkonogov Escaped, dirs: Natasha Merkulova, Aleksey Chupov
The Card Counter, dir: Paul Schrader
The Hand Of God, dir: Paolo Sorrentino
La Caja, dir: Lorenzo Vigas
Reflection, dir: Valentyn Vasyanovych

OUT OF COMPETITION – FICTION

Il Bambino Nascosto, dir: Roberto Ando
Les Choses Humaines, dir: Yvan Attal
Ariaferma, dir: Leonardo Di Costanzo
Halloween Kills, dir: David Gordon Green
La Scuola Cattolica, dir: Stefano Mordini
Old Henry, dir: Potsy Ponciroli
The Last Duel, dir: Ridley Scott
Dune, dir: Denis Villeneuve
Last Night In Soho, dir: Edgar Wright

OUT OF COMPETITION – NON-FICTION

Life of Crime 1984-2020, dir: Jon Alpert
Tranchées, dir: Loup Bureau
Viaggio Nel Crepuscolo, dir: Augusto Contento
Republic of Silence, dir: Diana El Jeiroudi
Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song, dirs: Daniel Geller, Dayna Goldfine
Deandré#Deandré Storio Di Un Impiegato, dir: Roberta Lena
Django & Django, dir: Luca Rea
Ezio Bosso. Le Cose Che Restano, dir: Giorgio Verdelli

SPECIAL SCREENINGS

Le 7 Giornate Di Bergamo, dir: Simona Ventura
La Biennale Di Venezia: Il Cinema Al Tempo Del Covid, dir: Andrea Segre

OUT OF COMPETITION – SERIES

Scenes From a Marriage (Episodes 1-5), dir: Hagai Levi

HORIZONS EXTRA

Land of Dreams, dirs: Shirin Neshat, Shoja Azari
Costa Brava, dir: Mounia Akl
Mama I’m Home, dir: Vladimir Bitokov
Ma Nuit, dir: Antoinette Boulat
La Ragazza Ha Volato, dir: Wilma Labate
7 Prisoners, dir: Alexandre Moratto
The Blind Man Who Did Not Want to See Titanic, dir: Teemu Nikki
La Macchina Delle Immagini Di Alfredo C, dir: Roland Sejk

ORIZZONTI

Les Promesses, dir: Thomas Kruithof
Atlantide, dir: Yuri Ancarani
Miracle, dir: Bogdan George Apetri
Pilgrims, dir: Laurynas Bareisa
Il Paradiso Del Pavone, dir: Laura Bispuri
The Falls, dir: Chung Mong-Hong
El Hoyo En La Cerca, dir: Joaquin Del Paso
Amira, dir: Mohamed Diab
A Plein Temps, dir: Eric Gravel
107 Mothers, dir: Peter Kerekes
Vera Dreams of the Sea, dir: Kaltrina Krasniqi
White Building, dir: Kavich Neang
Anatomy of Time, dir: Jakrawal Nilthamrong
El Otro Tom, dirs: Rodrigo Pla, Laura Santullo
El Gran Movimento, dir: Kiro Russo
Once Upon a Time in Calcutta, dir: Aditya Vikram Sengupta
Rhino, dir: Oleg Sentsov
True Things, dir: Harry Wootliff
Inu-Oh, dir: Yuasa Masaaki

VENICE LA BIENNALE FILM FESTIVAL | 1 – 11 SEPTEMBER 2021

Karlovy Vary Film Festival – Tribute to Michael Caine

This year’s special guest of the 55th Karlovy Vary IFF will be British actor and winner of two Oscars, the European Film Awards, and more than forty other commendations Sir Michael Caine. At the festival’s opening ceremony, Caine will be presented with a Crystal Globe for Outstanding Artistic Contribution to World Cinema.

During a career spanning six decades, Caine has played more than a hundred roles in a variety of film and television genres. The great diversity of his filmography is proof of his exceptional range and his ability to become one with the characters he portrays, regardless whether he is appearing in dramas such as The Man Who Would Be King (1975, dir. John Huston) or Little Voice (1998, dir. Mark Herman), comedies (Miss Congeniality, 2000, dir. Donald Petrie), or action films such as Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy – Batman Begins (2005) The Dark Knight (2008), The Dark Knight Rises(2012) – or the spy parody Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014, dir. Matthew Vaughn).

Caine’s mastery of acting has earned him a number of awards. When he received his first Oscar for best supporting actor for Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters, it was his fourth nomination for the Academy Awards (having been previously nominated for Alfie, Sleuth, and Educating Rita). In 2000, he received his second Oscar for his performance in the film adaption of the bestselling book The Cider House Rules (dir. Lasse Hallström), and in 2003 he was again nominated for his appearance in an adaptation of Graham Greene´s The Quiet American (dir. Phillip Noyce).

His appearance in the film version of the mystery drama Sleuth brought him an interesting opportunity. For Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s original 1972 adaptation of the well-known play, he portrayed the lover of the wife of a famous author, a performance that earned him his first Oscar nomination, and in Kenneth Branagh’s 2007 remake he portrayed the cynical author himself.

Michel Caine also holds three Golden Globes and eight Golden Globe nominations. To all his roles, he brings the right dose of empathy, objectivity, and the basic acting requirement that the actor serve the role and not the other way around.

One outstanding example of his finely honed acting abilities was his performance in Paolo Sorrentino’s bitter comedy Youth (2015). Here, his portrayal of a composer who, faced with old age, looks back on his failures in life, earned Caine a European Film Award for best actor. At the same time, he was presented an honorary lifetime achievement award. The film was also well received in Karlovy Vary, where it earned the Právo Audience Award. In the fall of 2015, it was the first film to be brought to Czech cinemas by KVIFF Distribution. Last year, he created one of the roles in Medieval (Jan Žižka)by director Petr Jákl.

In 1992, Michael Caine was inducted into the Order of the British Empire, and in 2000 he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.

At this year’s Karlovy Vary IFF, Michael Caine will personally present the comedy drama Best Sellers (2021), director Lina Roessler’s feature film debut in which he portrays a cranky old author who sets out on one final book tour.

KARLOVY VARY FILM FESTIVAL 2021 | 17 – 27 AUGUST 2021

Black Diamonds (1932)

Wri/Dir: Charles Hammer Cast: Beckett Bould, Jennie Stevens, Norman Astridge, Jenny Morgan | UK 53′

Black Diamonds was made by working miner and amateur filmmaker Charles Hanmer “without the usual Studio facilities, or professional resources” as a follow up to his earlier documentary Tour of a British Coal Mine (1928), from which he reused footage to create a public relations film to promote awareness of the hazardous conditions worked in and to drum up public support for Britain’s miners. Starting with a recreation of the Cadeby mine disaster of 1912, it depicts the efforts of miner John Morgan to convince an initially unsympathetic MP to finance a film about pit life. Hanmer plainly didn’t know the first thing about filmmaking, but as a document of working life it still resonates. Nearly thirty years later, Beckett Bould, who plays Morgan, ironically played a small part in the union-bashing The Angry Silence (1960). Richard Chatten

NOW ON BFI PLAYER

Escher: Journey Into Infinity (2020)

Dir.: Robin Lutz; Documentary with George and Jan Escher, Liesbeth Escher-Hogenhout; Netherlands 2018, 80 min.

Like many before him Dutch graphic artist M(aurits) C(ornells) Escher (1898-1972) came late to fame. But his influence, particularly in pop-culture, is still growing. This might seem to be a contradiction, since Escher was a modest creative who told his admirers he was not clever enough to be an academic and had to wait until 1970 for his first exhibition. But he doubted his artistic talents because he believed a ‘real’ artist should not enjoy his work but be tortured in creating it

Escher met his wife, 24-year old Russian émigré Yetta Umica, in Ravello in 1923. The couple married in Viareggio a year later and settled in Italy where Escher marvelled at the blue skies “colour was needed, but I did not want colour”. He often sketched at nigh-time although he maintained: “the reality of the day is like a dream”.

Escher and his wife travelled on a cargo ship to Valencia, paying their way with ten drawings, which the company used for advertising. They then travelled through southern Spain to Granada where he worked every day in the Alhambra. Escher was particularly struck by the geometric figures used by the Moors. Back home in the Netherlands he worked from dawn to dusk “so that the inner images came out”. One of his most famous drawings was of people living in the ‘second and third dimension’ but never meeting on imaged of stairs, one person going up as the other went down. Mathematics became increasingly important to his work leading him to pose the question: “Is it still art?”. But as son Jan comments, “work was opium for him.”

By now, the Germans had occupied the country, and Jewish artists could not exhibit any more. Escher cancelled his membership of the Artists’ Society and the Graphic Association. He rescued over two hundred drawings from his art teacher, one of the many deported to the death camps. When the wartime food supply dwindled Yetta sacrificed her own well-being, saving what little was available for the three sons.

After the end of WWII, she became more and more fragile and her mental health deteriorated. She would later travel to Switzerland and live with her son and his wife Liesbeth, but they eventually had to put her into a nursing home. She survived her husband who died after numerous operations for cancer.

MC Escher had been supported by his wealthy parents for most of his life, but an interview with ‘Time-Life’ in the 1960s raised the profile of his work and he became famous virtually overnight. One of his most famous concepts pictured people as wheels, rolling forward. When he listened to Bach’s St. Matthew oratorio, he imaged the cathedral floating over the ocean to New York and San Francisco. And this drawing with its psychedelic beauty found many admirers in the growing counter-culture, even though Escher had little in common with the flower-power generation.

Stephen Fry reads Escher’s letters as a v.o. Music by Bach dominates the feature, hardly a co-incidence since the composer himself admired mathematics. Escher was a certainly a person of substance and wild imagination, and deserves all the plaudits he gets after a life of self-doubt. AS

NOW AVAILABLE ON DIGITAL RELEASE

Monte Verita (2021) Locarno Film Festival

Dir.: Stefan Jäger; Cast: Maresi Riegner, Max Hubacher, Julia Jentsch, Hannah Herzsprung, Philipp Hauß, Tina Distefano, Aline Distefano, Michael Finger; Germany/Switzerland/Italy 2021, 116 min.

A detailed and rather worthy biography of Austrian avantgarde photographer Hanna Leitner who left her husband and children in 1906 to join the artist colony in Monte Verità, Switzerland before pioneering a counter-cultural movement in Brazil with Henri Oedenkoven (Finger).

Swiss director Stefan Jäger directs Kornelija Narak’s two-handed narrative centring on Hanna’s time at the artist’s colony with flashbacks to her unhappy time in Viennese society at the end of the 19th century.

Marriage to a brutish and rather mediocre photographer Anton was thwarted by his competitiveness and poor bedroom skills, so leaving him for the free-spirited artist colony near Ascona offered release and a creative outlet for the highly-strung and straight-laced Hanna who found much of the behaviour there morally questionable, members often cavorting around in the nude.

Here she meets psychoanalyst and sexual predator Otto Gross, a mentor of Freud, who preys on his female patients (rather like Carl Jung whom he influenced) and falls into a sexual relationship with him while developing her photographic talents.

Life in the Monte Verita is by no means without incident: an exhibition of Leitner’s work is destroyed by fire, and her husband arrives in Ascona with their daughters Helene (T. Distefano) and Marie (A. Distefano) threatening to have her admitted to an asylum when she refuses to go home.

Isadora Duncan, Herman Hesse and the anarchist writer Erich Mühsam (who believed women should be confined to the kitchen) also make an appearance amid the frolicking band of artists who are clearly forerunners of the hippy culture of the 1960s.

Performances lack verve, the actors more suited to theatre than film. DoP Daniela Knapp’s images add flair but are rather on the idealistic side aptly reflecting Narak’s script which is all earnest and learned, but lacks dramatic heft. The whole undertaking is not so much inspired by rebellion, but by academic endeavour. AS

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Medea (2021) Locarno Film Festival

Dir.: Alexander Zelkovich; Cast: Tinatin Dalakisvili, Evgeniy Tsyganov, Evgwnii Kharitonov, Yotam Kushnir, Gay Kelly; Russia 2021, 139 min.

Georgian supermodel Tinatin Dalakisvili – who is constantly taking her clothes off – is the star of this Russian take on Medea a big screen bonkbuster brought down by a clumsy script: Zelkovich uses a confessional to drive the spare narrative forward, laced with some unintentionally awkward home-spun philosophies

Life for the chemistry graduate revolves around her family, kids Misha and Yulia, and their Jewish father Alexei (Tsyganov), a business man who spends most of the time with his lover Nadya and their child.

Keen to escape the strictures of this dual existence, Alexei decides to settle in Israel, and wants to take his lover and the two children with him. But his plans are put on hold by Nadya’s security service agent brother Valera (Kushnir), who has some dirt on Alexei, and wants a big pay-off before he lets his sister and Alexei go.

Valera makes a big mistake when he reveals his plan, and it will cost him his life. Meanwhile in Israel, Alexei soon tires of the mother of his children, falling for his blonde neighbour. But his lust for women doesn’t stop there. An affair with a graffiti artist (Kelly) is next, then a soldier (Kushnir) in the Israeli secret service, who wants to die for the country, will follow. The end is brilliantly executed (like many of the scenes), but the running time is far too generous for what little Zelkovich has to say.

This Medea is a wild opportunist: she endangers her children in a concrete silo, saves their lives when the police give chase to a terrorist, and sets fire to a model on a roof terrace Overwhelming images drown out the threadbare narrative leaving us with eye candy. In trying to be mainstream, Zelkovich has squandered some good ideas. AS

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Secret Name | La Place d’une Autre (2021) Locarno Film Festival

Dir: Aurelia Georges | Cast: Sabine Azema, Lyna Khoudri, Maud Wyler, Laurent Poitrenaux | France, Drama 110′

Inspired by a Wilkie Collins 19th century novel The New Magdalen this female centric drama starring Sabine Azema is transposed to the verdant Vosges region of France, under German occupation during the First World War, where it turns on a case of stolen identity.

The Red Cross are busy recruiting nurses to tend to the war-wounded and Nelie – a poor but educated orphan – decides to join up. There she meets Rose a Swiss Protestant who has lost her family but soon dies in a blast, Nelie quickly assuming her identity in a bid to return to neutral Switzerland

But a letter in Rose’s pocket gives Nelie an idea. So she changes her mind soon finding herself in the illustrious household of vicar Julien and his wealthy aunt Madame de Lengwil, a cultured but staunchly Catholic intellectual with strong opinions who ‘Rose’ finds challenging company, particularly when Madame starts to probe deeper into her provenance while also seeing her as the daughter she never had. And when the real Rose reappears during a musical soirée in Madame’s luxurious country house it appears that Nelie’s cover is blown in the tense third act of this gripping social drama

Like his fellow writer and countryman Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins’ ‘Victorian sensation’ novels often focused on complex and secretive domestic relationships, and Aurelia George and her co-writer Maud Ameline capture the fraught female sensibilities that sensitively reflect the mood of anxiety and enigma, elegantly performed by Azema and Khoudri in this classically styled and gracefully-paced drama which bristles with intrigue in showing women at their best – and their most devious. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2021

A Walk with Angels (2020) Locarno Film Festival

Dir.: Tomasz Wysokinski; Documentary with Jeremaiah Marobyane, Thandi Mbatha, Louisa Mbatha, Ma Mbatha; Poland 2021, 84 min.

Polish director Tomasz Wysokinski spent four years in the shanti Town of Kliptown, Soweto for this labour of love that follows ex-child soldier and civil war commander Jeremaiah Marobyaneon on his search for missing children. “Every sixty minutes a child is lost in South Africa” is the cruel premise of the raw and resonant documentary.

The focus is his search for Angie, kidnapped six months previously from her mother Thandi Mbatha and her family. Jeremaiah sets out on gruelling mission during which he’ll come across, always coming across children exposed to violence on an everyday basis. Soweto is a hotbed of superstition and Satanists are actively kidnapping kids for ritual execution. The members of the local show clear signs of mental disorder: “by day I am a boy, but at night a girl ‘they’ want to use”.

The perpetrators practising exorcism, “taking the genital parts from the babies, like penis and testicles from boys and breasts from girls”. The cult members are convinced that “demon power will give them power to kill”. Meanwhile, Jeremaiah has arrived in the small town of Witbank where he is told that Angie is no longer alive is told, and that the witch doctors have got hold of her. Unperturbed, he pushes on further to Johannesburg, a city “which looks good in the glittering lights from a distance”, but when he arrives we see colonies of children sleeping in the streets. In the borough of Hillbrow, Jeremaiah puts up the poster of Angie, who has a distinct birthmark near her eye. The children, sleeping in boxes on the pavement, go through the rubbish in the day time, often finding the corpses of babies. One shot is particularly disturbing. “The witch doctors crush the babies, mix their blood with herbal medicine and throw them into pots while they are still alive.

Finally, Jeremaiah finds a young woman who has interviewed Angie’s father Mbengeni, who apparently confessed to having abducted his daughter. Undeterred, and walking with the titular angels, Jeremaiah makes his way to meet Mbengeni.

This no-frills documentary is highly disturbing and makes for a grim watch. It shows a South Africa still suffering from abject poverty and dangerous superstition. Jeremiah is well aware that “Apartheid has destroyed South Africa’s people”, causing bitter conflict between the various factions, but the total absence of state intervention points to some serious underlying reason for this discord.

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2021

The Nest (2020)

Dir.: Sean Dirkin; Cast: Jude Law, Carrie Coon, Oona Roche, Charlie Shotwell, Anne Reid, Michael Culkin; USA 2020, 107 min.

After the breakout success of his debut Martha, Mary, May Marlene Sean Dirkin’s follow up is a dark story of greed, lies and – aptly set in the early 1980s during the high tide of Reagan and Thatcher. An alternative title could have been “Lie with me”, a crime story by British author Sabine Durrant.

In both book and feature film the two main protagonists are fully aware their other half is lying, but go along with it, as long as it suits them. Commodity broker Rory O’Hara (Law), born in London, returns to the city of his birth from the USA with wife Allison (Coom) with their ten-year old son Ben (Shotwell), teenager Sam(antha) and Allison’s daughter from an earlier relationship. This is not the first upheaval for the family, Allison has experienced four moves in the last decade alone. At one point Rory was a high roller, thinking he would be a big swinging dick forever, and this move to London is motivated by those good old working for tycoon Arthur (Culkin), running the show in his posh London office.

A bit of a flash git, Rory is keen to make a big impression: rentimg a huge mansion in Surrey, dishing out hefty school fees for the children, even transporting Allison’s horse from the USA (which will have dramatic consequences). He brags about ‘a Central Park apartment’ when looking for a Mayfair pad. But the reality is quite the reverse: the couple can’t even afford an expensive meal, using the issue to score points. And whilst Rory plans to trouser big bucks from the merger of Arthur’s company with a US outfit, he hasn’t checked the fine print and his boss has already written the move off.

As things go from bad to worse his relationship with Alison deteriorates Rory emerging a snarky bully, Jude Law is perfect for the part. Dirkin shows us a glittering balloon of material wealth, waiting to pop and deflate at any minute. Particularly harrowing is a meeting between Rory and his mother (Reed), whom he has not seen for more than a decade. Hungarian DoP Mátyás Ederly, who shot Saul and Sunset, really does his stuff here creating a visual masterpiece of riches beyond the dreams of avarice splicing horror and thriller elements with startling effect at home in the world of business his images convincingly conveying the business world as if it were an entertainment industry Rory soon finding out that they belong to neither. AS

SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 2021 | ON RELEASE from 27 August 2021

Zahori (2021) Locarno Film Festival

Dir: Mari Alessandrini | Chile, France, Swiss | Drama, 105′

In the rugged windswept remoteness of the Patagonian Pampas a lonely girl vows to avenge the macho menfolk by becoming a gaucho in this deeply sorrowful Western, a feature debut for Mari Alessandrini.

Life is tough for 13 year old Mora (a gentle Lara Tortosa) in the remote community where she lives with her unsupportive Swiss Italian parents, who are ecologists, and younger brother. There don’t seem to be many girls her age so she helps her father grow vegetables and makes friends with some of the animals on long walks across the desiccated landscape full of beetles and armadillos (that she plans to roast) and the occasional condor swirling overhead. Here she meets a Mapuche who gives her a brace of river trout as a gift, her disgruntled vegetarian parents refusing to touch them.

But deep-seated resentment and hostility dogs this outwardly peaceful existence, and it soon emerges that everyone harbours a savage mistrust of their neighbour, a product of the harsh terrain: Mora’s parents seem miserable; brigands plague the locals at night stealing livestock and a beautiful white horse belonging to Mora’s Mapuche pal – the half-blind Nazareno (Curapil) who offers a vain reward for the recapture of his lifelong ‘friend’. But the horse seems to represent a freedom that the Mora can only dream of. Meanwhile two ludicrous American missionaries fetch up to proselytise and annoy everyone, but are given short shrift by the locals.

Chloe Zhao’s Oscar-winning feature The Rider, clearly inspired Alessandrini although this is a more mournful, enigmatic feature that captures the remoteness of the wild locations, and the essence of the Mapuche, an endangered native of Patagonia and Southern Argentina.

Handling her material with confidence, Alessandrini knowns how to create tension with a lightness of touch in this alienated place at the edge of the world. With a simple score of guitar folk music and some old Italian hits from the Sixties this is a thoughtful and visually evocative portrait of a troubled community struggling to survive against the odds amid hardship and spiritual discontent. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Victory of the Faith | Der Sieg des Glaubens (1933)

Dir: Leni Riefenstahl | Germany, Doc 64’

One gets a sense of déjà vu all the way through this trial run for Triumph des Willens, as so many of its images were deliberately recreated by Leni Riefenstahl a year later for the more famous film, which also reuses Herbert Windt’s music; although sadly there is no zeppelin in Triumph des Willens.

In addition to being almost exactly half the running time of the interminable ‘Triumph’, it’s the mismatches and the occasional moments of spontaneity that makes Der Sieg des Glaubens the more endurable of the two films. The presence throughout of Ernst Röhm is naturally the most remarkable feature; usually at Hitler’s side but otherwise not unduly prominent (the film overall contains mercifully far less speeches – and marching – although there do seem to be rather more shots of Goebbels this time round).

After years of being accustomed to seeing the aerial view of the threesome of Hitler, Himmler and Lutze (Röhm’s tame replacement as head of the SA) approaching the Ehrenhalle in ‘Triumph’, the sight of just Hitler and Röhm giving the salute comes as a jolt. The presence of Vice-Chancellor Papen (soon to be sidelined by the Führer until collared by the Allies in 1945 and brought back to Nuremberg as one of the defendants) reminds us that this is still very early days for the New Order, and Riefenstahl occasionally cuts to a suitably overwhelmed looking Italian delegation.

image coutesy of @wikiwand.

Two amusing moments depicting the Führer caught slightly off-guard are early on when he immediately thrusts a bouquet of flowers two little girls have just presented him with in Rudolf Hess’s direction; and the unaccustomed slouching posture he adopts while the leader of the Hitler Youth, Baldur von Schirach, attempts to quieten them down so that he can begin his address.@Richard Chatten

A New Old Play | Jiao Ma Tang Hui (2021) Locarno Film Festival

Dir.: Qiu Jionqjiong; Cast: Yi Sicheng, Qiu Zhmin, Song Xuchun, Zhang Zivi; Hong Kong/France 2021, 179 min.

A New Old Play is the debut feature for Chinese writer/director Qui Jionqjiong, best known for his documentaries. A poetic journey through Chinese history in the turbulent years between 1920 to the mid Sixties, this in depth biopic mirrors the tumultuous career of legendary Hong Kong actor and clown Qui Fu (Yi Sicheng).

Shot in exquisite, washed out colours, resembling paintings of the era by DoP Feng Yuchao ‘Robbin’, A New Old Play echoes – aesthetically and contents wise – Theo Angelopoulos’ 1975 feature The Travelling Players. It’s a complex, self-indulgent but gratifying piece of filmmaking that requires a grasp of modern Chinese history (and the language) to be fully appreciated: Reading subtitles for three hours while taking on board the film’s aesthetic delicacy and rich detail is quite a challenge.

Qui Fu (Yi Sicheng) is called to perform for the King of Hell (a poetic way of describing death), who has sent two guards to accompany him on his journey where Qui recalls his life. It’s 1920, during the last knockings of the Sichuan Dynasty, and army generals will seize political office in a bid to survive.

One of these generals is saved by barber Pocky (Qui Zhmin), who is freed up to found the Sichuan Opera School. The Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek are fighting the Communist forces under Mao Tso-Tung and Qui Fu, an orphaned victim of war and political unrest, is taken on by Pocky as a sort of court jester cum stooge.

After the Communist victory Qui joins a theatre group, the “Army of Culture” serving – as Mao dictates – workers, peasants and soldiers. The ‘Peoples’ Sichuan Theatre’ also agitates to keep citizens out of the Opium dens. But after Mao declares “The great Leap” forward with a rapid programme of industrialisation, the economy collapses, and people are literally left dying in the streets.

By this time Qui has already been married and his second wife (Zhang Zivi) is his own boss in the Propaganda Administration. After losing a baby daughter the couple adopt another child who they discover abandoned on the steps outside their home. Later the birth mother will reclaim the child, giving the pair a pumpkin as a reward. Joy comes with the birth of a son, Ah Hei (Xuchun), who will grows up to join Beijing’s Red Guards after Mao’s “Cultural Revolution” puts students in charge.

But Qui’s career then takes a downturn when is captured and imprisoned in a cowshed by the authorities who consider him an enemy of the people. Seizing the opportunity to her own advantage, his wife goes on stage to condemn her husband, but refuses to endorse the accusations against him, even though she is warned by the government: “Do not let marital relations obscure class contradictions.”

Pocky too, has fallen on hard times, hailed “a reactionary Warlord.” And while Ah Hei tries to make his way back to the capital on a flying broomstick, his father is released and will, when fully rehabilitated, play villains on the stage. Meanwhile Qui’s eventful career sees him once again on his way to Hell where he is brainwashed with a poisoned tea in a tragic denouement. A comprehensive look at the not so glamorous world of the Chinese theatre in the mid 20th century but not for the feint-hearted.

SPECIAL JURY PRIZE OF THE CITIES OF ASCONA AND LOSONE | LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2021

She Will (2021)

Dir. Charlotte Colbert | UK, Thriller | 95 minutes.

Charlotte Colbert’s feature debut imagines the horror of surgical mutilation in ways that are strikingly beautiful as well as painfully visceral. Post double mastectomy, a well-known actress seeks healing solitude in the wilderness of the Scottish Highlands only to discover that a fashionable artist (Rupert Everett) and famous film director Eric Hathbourne (Malcolm McDowell) – an echo from the past – are also in residential retreat at the remote forest mansion.

Body horror thrillers are increasingly the domain of women filmmakers: Julia Ducournau’s Palme d’Or winning Titane is an example, but Rose Glass’s Saint Maud more readily springs to mind with its distinctly British brand of dourness: both films are set in grim locations and deal with creative cancer-stricken heroines.

Veronica Ghent (Alice Krige) is an understandably prickly patient whose artistic ego is struggling with her grisly affliction making it difficult for her to accept the sympathetic ministerings of her likeable nurse Desi (Kota Eberhardt). Travelling up in the Tartan-padded splendour of the night train (The Highland Express?) she clearly wants to be cosseted but prefers the seclusion of a quaint but isolated bothie and makes a rapid retreat there with Lois in tow, in the hope of some much-needed healing. Eschewing her medication (“tramadol is the breakfast of Stars”) through sheer exhaustion she is falls asleep and is transported into a fantasy dreamworld imagining a raging fire in the depths of the night. But the heart of her trauma seems to rest with an incident in her past involving a powerful media mogul (Malcolm MacDowell). Her solitude unearths powerful memories and sets in motion the hope of retribution in the bosky backwater.

A witty sardonic script co-written by Kitty Percy makes this darkly drole as well as mysterious and endlessly beguiling with its imaginative camerawork, Gothic undertones and recurring motifs of bloody sutures and tingling nerves are interwoven as dream sequences in a thriller also steeped in Highland folklore – not to mention the dreaded Scottish play by Shakespeare.

Rather like Jennifer Ehle’s diva in Saint Maud, Veronica is stylish and forthright; red-lipped, be-turbaned in velvet, and bedecked with a fine line in vintage furs. The peace and seclusion of the bothie gradually work wonders on her emotional state as she garners strength in weird and wonderful ways, and her rapport with Desi morphs into something fluid and fascinating in this imaginative first feature. MT

ON RELEASE IN UK CINEMAS FROM 22 JULY 2022 | LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Swatch First Feature Award
SHE WILL by Charlotte Colbert, United Kingdom

Soul of a Beast (2021) Locarno Film Festival

Writ/Dir: Lorenz Merz | Switzerland, Fantasy Drama 110

Impressionistic, overlong but strangely captivating Soul of a Beast is an inventive piece of visual storytelling. playing out as a stream of consciousness collage of feelings and sensations and set in and around an upbeat and summery Swiss setting that becomes increasingly apocalyptic.

With its retro Hollywood soundtrack, fashion-conscious freewheeling style and dreamy tonal wooziness this artfully involving close-up experience works well for a while in following the days of its loved-up characters: Corey (Ella Rumpf) and her lovers Joel (Tonatiuh Radzi) and Gabriel (Pablo Caprez) who is looking after his cute kid son and brother from the ditzy drunkard Zoe (Luna Wedler) who seems to have drowned in a sea of booze and fags. Her own mother (Lolita Chammah) is keeping an eye on proceedings from a distance. The slow-burning narrative succumbs to aimless longueurs in the second act as the feature dwindles into an imaginatively edited art installation finally building to a tense and violent denouement.

The focus here is the escape from the zoo of two Colombian pumas and a giraffe who are roaming the city wreaking havoc and sustaining and causing injury. As usual the authorities mishandle the crisis, and nature strikes back casting a spell over the central characters as they become vaguely feral and violently inhibited in response to the climate of hostility brought about by the ecological tragedy. Escape to the countryside with Jamie seems the only way out of the mayhem for the vulnerable Gabriel who becomes increasingly confused and is savagely beaten up by the previously blissed out Joel, jealous of his relationship with Corey.

Soul of a Beast is a striking creative compositional fantasy with a perplexing Japanese occasional narration that ultimately outstays its welcome. While brilliantly cinematic and daringly executed this kind of choppy editing is extremely tiring to watch for longer than an hour and a half. Please kill your darlings – less is always more. MT

Pardo for Best Actor
Mohamed Mellali and Valero Escolar for SIS DIES CORRENTS (The Odd-Job Men) by Neus Ballús, Spain

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Hinterland (2021)

Dir: Stefan Ruzowitzky | Austria/Luxembourg, Noir Thriller 99′

Germany and Austria have been brought to their knees after gruelling defeat in the Great War and limp home broken to a decadent Vienna amidst poverty, despair – and a serial killer on the loose – in this stylish noir thriller that sees Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitzky return after his The Counterfeiters won the international Oscar. For once the tight running time could have been extended to fully flesh out the story which also could work well in as a Netflix series.

In the opening scenes a ship glides by laden with dead and mutilated soldiers, the living barely alive against the atmospheric green-screen technology that pictures utter devastation an a desperate homecoming. The men soon discover their surviving comrades are being preyed upon by a grisly murderer as the story unfolds around Marathon Muslu’s dynamite performance as an injured veteran embroiled in the murder mystery.

Wonky German expressionistic framing and a sombre atmosphere creates a jagged-edged feel echoing M by Fritz Lang or even something out of Grimms’ Fairy tales, suffused with Klimt’s jewel-like Secessionist paintings transporting us back to early 1920s Vienna where a savage mood of mistrust prevails at every turn in the decadent splendour of the Austrian capital. But our war hero Peter Perg (Muslu), once a respected police officer and criminologist, is still haunted by the past. After dark, the nightmarish terror of his Russian internment camp looms up in dream sequences on the vast wall behind his bed in the apartment he once shared with his wife who has fled to the sanctuary of the countryside with their daughter. Meanwhile the fatherland has lost its indomitable Emperor emperor (Franz Joseph, in 1916), and Austria is raging against a climate of anarchy and political unrest brewing throughout Vienna’s tea rooms.

Perg teams up with the Poirot-like Detective Renner (Marc Limpach) and pathologist Theresa Korner (Liv Liese Fries) to fathom out a motive for the horrific murders perpetrated by the “Beast of Vienna” – one particularly gruesome corpse has been decapitated and flayed with a cat o’nine tails, another left to be eaten alive by sewer rats. But the team’s interest focuses on the iniquitous murder of Perg’s war-wounded comrades, who are being picked off, one by one, his close friend Captain Krainer appears to have been garrotted by the roaming psychopath. And as their investigations go underground to the murky depth’s of the city sewers Peter becomes meets the killer face to face in this seedy and stylishly evocative serial killer thriller. MT

NOW ON RELEASE IN FRANCE | LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL PREMIERE 2021

Rose (2021) Locarno Film Festival 2021

Dir/Wri: Aurelie Saada | Cast: Francoise Fabian, Aure Atika, Gregory Montel, Damien Chapelle, Pascal Elbe, Mehdi Nebbou | France Romantic Drama, 102′

Aurelie Saada brings her musical training as a composer to this brilliantly executed and vivacious film about love, family life and second chances.

A crowd-pleasing winner which will particularly resonate with Jewish audiences who will appreciate its finer details, Rose is a riff on Sebastian Lielo’s Berlinale winner Gloria, Francoise Fabian is absolutely magnificent as the grieving widow Rose. Elegant and graceful in her seventy-eighth year the opening scenes see her celebrating a joyous family occasion with her debonair husband (Bernard Murat in cameo) whose subsequent death sends her spiralling into overwhelming grief and confining her to the safety of her comfortable Parisian apartment.

Family and friends offer support but bring their own issues to the party, and this familiar outpouring of collective misery is not always welcome to the person most closely affected, Rose retreating into a world of her own, understanding yet unable to offer guidance or even deal with her three middle-aged children who are all experiencing emotional trauma unconnected to their father’s death. Her daughter Sarah (Aure Atika) is in the final throes of a separation for her straying husband (Mehdi Nebbou); Pierre (Gregory Montel), a doctor with his own marital issues, and Leon (Damien Chapelle) is a prickly man-child in trouble with the law.

In her feature debut Saada brings a maturity and wisdom to this hopeful story with its convincing characterisations and perfectly pitched mise en scene. Francoise Fabian understand her role and strikes just the right balance between vulnerability and self-possession as a woman who has dedicated her life to husband and children but now realises she needs an outside stimulus, and she finds one – quite unexpectedly – in the shape of a local restaurateur (Pascal Elbe) who restores her raison d’être and offers a sympathetic ear at a time when Rose needs it most.

A powerfully emotive score of well known classics and Saada’s own compositions give this soigne romantic drama a potent kick along with Martin De Chabaneix’ lush and sophisticated cinematography. Gracefully paced, smart and highly enjoyable Rose is an upbeat flight of fantasy and a tonic for those looking for a silver lining when family is actually the last thing we need. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2021 | PIAZZA GRANDE

Heavens Above | Nebesa (2021) Locarno Film Festival 2021

Dir: Srdjan Dragojevic | Serbia/Croatia/Germany, Fantasy Drama 122′

Miracles colour the lives of Serbians in a post-communist society readapting to Christianity in writer-director Srdjan Dragojevic’s exuberant ‘Wild Eastern’ fantasy melodrama.

Inspired by three short stories from French novelist Marcel Ayme (1902-67), the director brings this visually resplendent, thematically provocative comedy to Locarno’s main competition lineup.

Communism and Christianity are still fighting it out in the post war God-fearing impoverished rural enclave in Serbia where people are bloody but indomitably unbowed, in the first segment of the trilogy. Gun-toting Strojan (Goran Navojec) and his wife Nada (Ksenija Marinkovic) are the combative main characters bolstered by their ebullient village neighbourhood where Strojan is cheating with his next-door neighbour, stray dogs riffle through the rubbish and false teeth are still kept overnight in glasses like something out of the Sixties. Meanwhile inside the immaculately clean 1940s style town hall with its pristine marble tiling, civil rectitude still reigns supreme But whatever he does Strojan can’t get rid of his halo or the vestiges of the past. Meanwhile, in the second narrative strand Gojko is an arch villain seething in prison, awaiting the death penalty when mysterious events may somehow offer him a surprising reprieve. The third story transports us to 2026 where an art gallery curator shows a painting portraying a poignant image of a stray dog which somehow reunites the locals in a collective sense of the healing power of animals.

Heavens Above is a lively and imaginative snapshot of the Balkans in the post communist transition period between 1993 and the near future. Classically styled and vibrantly theatrical, it’s also a gut -punching reflection on the pros and cons of organised religion and political coercion with its ethical and moral strictures, and how they impinge on real life in all its decadent glory reminding us of where we should be heading in this brave new post Covid era. The characters are all convincingly bonkers, but you can’t help but like them. Susan Joksimovic does wonders with his special effects seamlessly dovetailing the surreal into the mundane. Dragojevic certainly has a talent to amuse giving us plenty of bang for our bucks in this incendiary feature. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Around Rocha’s Table (2021) Locarno Film Festival

Dir.: Samuel Barbosa; Documentary with Paulo Rocha, Manoel de Oliveira, Isabel Ruth, Marcia Briea; Portugal 2021, 94 min.

Samuel Barbarossa makes his feature debut here as director with this enlightening biopic raising the profile of Portuguese “Cine Nova” director Paulo Rocha (1935-2012) who blazed a trail with his brand of neo-realism in the Sixties and was later known for his rigorously classical films, although sadly neither found much of an audience outside his native Portugal (unlike the more illustrious Manoel de Oliveira – who also gets a look in here with a short interview).

Rocha grew up in Oporto where his close bond with his mother appears to have affected his emotional relationships with other women. After studying Law at the behest of his father, he soon turned to filmmaking enrolling at the famous famous IDHEC (Institute des Hautes Etudes Cinematographique) in Paris, where like many directors before and since he claims to have learnt more from “watching the films of Jean Renoir and Kenzo Mizoguchi than from his academic studies”.

Rocha idealised other male artists such as Manoel de Oliveira, setting him a monument in film with “Cinema de Notre Temps: “Oliveira – L”Architecte” (1993). Another obsession was his fascination with Japan, where he lived for a while. Again, his love of the country is crystalised in a male “Super Ego”: Wenceslau Moraes (1854-1929) to whom Rocha dedicated his 1982 feature A IIha dos Amores. It took him fourteen years to finish the feature set in Japan, not filming anything for over ten years. Rocha abandoned neo-realism and melodrama for a formal, classicist aesthetic. O Desejado(1988), adapted from “Tale of Genji” by the classical author Shikibu, is set in contemporary Portugal, but very much faithful to the original text.

Like Godard (Barbosa has named the production company for his documentary Bando à Parte) Rocha taking his inspiration from newspaper articles. Isabel Ruth and Marcia Briea, who starred in many of Rocha’s features, reports that Rocha went first on location hunting, before he thought about the narrative. “The story grows whilst I visit the locations.”

DoP Jorge Quintela deftly interweaves ‘Talking Heads’ enlivened by informative clips from Rocha’s oeuvre, Barbosa offering a balanced view of the director’s contribution and whetting our appetite to discover more about Rocha’s role in Portuguese Cinema, which has been overly dominated by Manoel De Oliveira. AS

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL

Zola (2020)

Dir.: Janicza Bravo; Cast: Taylour Paige, Riley Keough, Nicholas Brown, Colman Domingo; USA 2020, 96 min.

Sex has never been so ugly in this rollercoaster ride on the sleazy side that makes Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers look like a film for kids. Sexploitation, kidnapping and a suicide attempt are just some of the highlights of this unsavoury tale, teetering self-parody and something much nastier. It’s the work of Janicza Brava who directs a script by Jeremy O. Harris, and the author of the original 148 tweets, A’Ziah King.

Still, it’s worth bearing in mind that Jim Thompson got the same treatment of disbelief from the established literati, back in the day (never mind during his lifetime) and his books are now sought after cult classics, analysed by academics.

Trailer trash white stripper/hooker Stefani (Keough) picks up titular waitress Zola (Paige) and they set off for Florida where they will be well paid well for working the poles, although they have to contend with Stefani’s nerdy boyfriend Derrek (Brown) who whinges non-stop. But when Zola sees X (Domingo), Stefani’s pimp, she gets cold feet: this is prostitution of the most sordid kind. Taking pity on Stefani, she organises more lucrative tricks which pay $500 instead of150, X is impressed and makes Zola his deputy.

Whenever Zola has to watch any bodily contact, she spits out “Gross” and turns her back on all kinds of graphic degradation – including Derrek’s suicide attempt: half desperation, half cry for help, which defines very much the whole enterprise.

DoP Ari Wegner just lets the camera roam around the sleaziness of it all, the scenes in the dystopian luxury hotels are a treat, and his night images on the road are some of the best recently commited to celluloid. Meanwhile Paige clearly enjoys every second, and so does Keough, who just gets the balance right between vulnerability and arrant naughtiness. When it comes to women’s sexual depravity it appears they are worse than men – there are simply no limits for bad taste. No one can pretend its in any way a critique of anything: This is X-rated stuff with a mental health warning, but just enjoy the spectacle and have fun AS

In cinemas from 6 AUGUST 2021

The River (2021) Locarno Film Festival 2021

Dir: Ghassan Salhab | Fantasy Drama, 101’

This distinctive existential feature from veteran arthouse filmmaker Ghassan Salhab has a stillness and a slow-burn sense of beauty that relies on sound and atmosphere to convey an enigmatic storyline that holds our attention for a while but is ultimately unsatisfying in the long run.

Essentially a two-hander, beguilingly captured in a series of elegantly framed cinematic long takes the film unfolds in the bosky autumnal settings in the Lebanese mountains where two characters appear trapped in an offscreen war zone that echoes around them as they share an enigmatic almost monosyllabic rapport punctuated by the threat of impending danger. Sudden raucous sound bites puncture the peaceful emptiness of the landscape and the river that runs through it – helicopters buzz overhead, along with occasional bomb blasts.

Clearly Hassan (Ali Suliman) and his girlfriend (Yumna Marwan) feel unsettled as they explore the rocky terrain and a palpable sense of tension gradually builds driven forward by the film’s glowering electronic soundscape, danger seems to emanate from deep underground, where some kind of atavistic force connected to the earth’s core signifies that nature is rebelling against man’s onslaught on its domain.

Yumna Marwan is a hypnotic presence and her feral magnetism captives Hassan. But rather than being put off by their impending danger, it actually fires up their ardour for each other in a physically satisfying encounter that dissipates the tension, for a while at least, as the two explore how their relationship seemed to exist long before they even met. But this encouraging idea is never really develops and the film drifts self-indulgently towards an aimless final half hour. Could The River be a metaphor for the garden of Eden corrupted by man’s onslaught on nature? Salhab leaves his story open to interpretation, but while the film all looks beguiling it doesn’t really reach a conclusion.

In his Cannes Jury Prize winning film Memoria, Apichatpong Weerasethakul takes his time to create an almost parallel universe using sound and atmosphere to convey a potent earthly force reacting to man’s hostile intervention on the earth. But his film language is far richer conveying a deep yet serenely meditative resonance with its far-reaching themes about man’s connection with nature and the spiritual world.

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL | In competition | 14.00 on 5 Aug

The Odd-Job Men | Sis dies corrents (2021) Locarno Film Festival 2021

Dir: Neus Ballus | Cast: Mohamed Mellali, Oriol Cervera, Valero Escolar, Pep Sarra | Catalan, Comedy Drama, 82’

Exposing deep seated xenophobia with wry humour this comedy drama set in and around the leafy environs of Barcelona takes a fresh and light=hearted look at the world of handymen in Spain’s Cataluna.

Pep and his colleague Valero (Escolar) are put out when a new member joins their team in the shape of Moroccan electrician Mohamed (Mellali). In barely disguised irritation Valero grudgingly complains to his boss but she insists so the three get down to work amid much moaning, Valero determined not to like Moh from day one, as the story follows them through an average week. Not that Moh fares any better with his Moroccan flat mates who are equally racist, mocking the Catalan languages and resenting Moh’s keenness make a better life for himself

Being a handyman to the general public often brings with it an ancillary duty of care which is part of the job and Moh – who has an intelligent grasp of things and is doing well in his Catalan classes – is particularly understanding in this regard accepting that older people are often lonely and need to express themselves – the 100 year old health fanatic is a point in question with his savage mistrust of today’s dietary additives.

Then there’s the naughty little girls who lock the workers out of the house where they trying to upgrade the lightening system, or the Catalan speaking photographer who needs her air–conditioner fixing, Valero using the opportunity to gauchely chat up her models while giving poor Mohamed impromptu dating tips in the process. Moh actually lucks out with the prospect of a lucrative opportunity to pose in adverts with his soulful looks and bristling pecs looking rather like Blazing Saddles’ Cleavon Little). Needless to say the portly Valero is not impressed – realising – clearly he needs to lose weight.

With its naturalistic performances this sharply observational comedy mines a rich vein of humour in consumer bleats and rants about the good old days, shoddy modern workmanship and the downsides of retirement, Pep and Valero by no means always seeing eye to eye but getting with it all the same until they fall out big time.

As the week progresses Dramatic heft comes during a job for a psychiatrist who manages to get Valero into a full scale argument when asking about the ‘quality’ of his working relationship’ with Moh. Neus provides and entertaining and often ludicrous snapshot of multiculturalism in full swing in modern day Spain. MT

Pardo for Best Actor
Mohamed Mellali and Valero Escolar for SIS DIES CORRENTS (The Odd-Job Men) by Neus Ballús, Spain

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2021

The Sadness (2021) Locarno Film Festival

Dir.: Rob Jabbaz; Cast: Berant Zhu, Regina Lei, Tzu-Chiang Wang, Apple Chen; Taiwan, Horror, 99 min.

In his blood-strewn, scare-mongering first feature Rob Jabbaz imagines a hyper-violent-pandemic re-surging through an exhausted Taiwan as a couple try in vain to find other.

In Taipei, Kat (Lei) and Jim (Zhu) have fallen out over holiday plans to escape the first wave of viral mayhem. They desperately need time out when the Alvin virus is finally under control after a year when the effects on humans were relatively benign. But it’s election year, and the president has relaxed all precautions. The result is total chaos and the male population inexplicably lose their self control in a rampage of murder and rape.

In the tube on her way to work, Kat is accosted by a smart but infected business man (Wang) who morphs into a maniac, poking passenger Molly in the eye, Kat conveying her briskly to the NTU hospital, where the Casualty is predictably closed. Hot on their heels the business man manages to get hold of Molly while a doctor explains to Kat about a weird imbalance of the limbic system responsible for the outbreak of violence. Jim has also been assaulted by a neighbour and wonders whether he will survive the encounter without being infected.

Certainly one for horror fans, The Sadness delivers handsomely on the gore front with graphic images that leave nothing to the imagination. But cleverly Jabbaz always has a rationale at hand, suggesting that this brutality amongst the male population has just been dormant, waiting for the opportunity to erupt. A startling finale brings matters to a satisfying conclusion. Unbridled violence, then, but not of the mindless gratuitous kind. AS

LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Brotherhood (2021) Locarno Film Festival

Dir: Francesco Montagner | Italy drama 97’

Brotherhood is a male-centric cinema verite portrait that sees religious and paternal dominance colliding with the present in a close-knit Bosnian rural community. Screening in the Filmmakers of the Present competition at thus year’s Locarno Film Festival, this is an impressive feature debut for documentarian Francesco Montagner .

Montagner and his DoP create a real sense of remoteness in the lush bucolic landscapes of deepest Bosnia where the family raise sheep, discuss Islam and still bitterly remember the Serbian conflict. Were it not for their mobile phones it would be difficult to believe that shepherd brothers Jabir, Usama, Useir lived in the modern day. Their traditional farmstead seems cut off from civilisation and their strict Muslim father keeps a draconian control over their lives with a regime of daily prayers. But when he is convicted of a religious crime that will take him away from the family for several years, the three brothers must take over and the family dynamic shifts dramatically with unexpected consequences.

Life carries on as normal for a while as the boys tend to their livestock, the youngest becoming increasingly difficult to handle. The world of Islam is never far away on the internet, and during the long winter evenings by the fire they discuss their faith and download live footage encouraging them to rise up against ‘the infidel’, Islam encroaching on their collective consciousness. Naturally school work and studying runs contrary to everyday life as shepherds, particularly when seeing off wolves seems more important than passing exams. But without their strict father figure to keep them under the cosh, their existence is increasingly threatened. Beautifully captured by Prokop Soucek’s sensitive camera, this is a revealing look at traditional rural life in an Islamic household, even if the ending is rather simplistic. MT

PARDO D’ORO – Cineasti del Presente LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Giants | I Giganti (2021) Locarno Film Festival

Dir.: Bonifacio Angius; Cast: Stefano Deffenu, Bonifacio Angius, Michele Manca, Ricardo Bombagi, Stefano Manca, Valeria Demartis, Francesca Niedda; Italy 2021, 80 min.

The Giants is an Italian-Western Noir set in the famous Casa Flores in Thiesi where men come together to share their grimly nostalgic stories of violence fuelling a party for the doomed.

Stefano (Deffenu) is maudlin: his girl friend has left him with their daughter, and all he gets is a beating by her relatives. Stefano dreams up a great revenge story: he will visit the two women, who live in house near the railway tracks, the mother will not let him into the house, and, left alone with his daughter, he will throw himself under the approaching train. This way, he hopes, the daughter will hate her mother for ever, because she did not let her father into the house. It shows, that Stefano has been an actor once, he even remembers Mayakovski. After Stefano dies overnight, the trio of seven – for a short while two sex workers had joined hem, but fled the violence – becomes even more violent, fuelled by meth and alcohol. Dreams of a great drug deal are certainly wishful thinking. Ricardo (Bombagi), the youngest listens to vinyl records, and seems to be the most adjusted – before he lays into abstruse stories about Stefano’s burial. A foreboding funeral procession passes the house, and enigmatic, repeated shots in a bowling alley, featuring one of the sex workers, are the only times, the outside world intrudes into the Huis clos of self-pity and stories from a violent past. The re-enactment in the house is as bizarre as sadistic.

This is certainly a labour of love by Angius, who revels in a free-for-all re-union, sparing none of his protagonists. They are a motley crew from the outset, only held together by a guilty past. There are not so much twists and turns, but a deterioration of personalities, their desultory behaviour oscillating between drug induced tiredness and ultra-violence. Lacking a certain structure, might be even helpful in this case. Angius shows his protagonists as a lot of regressed children, who should be packed to bed by their mothers. An idiosyncratic original. AS

Petite Solange (2021) Locarno Film Festival

Dir: Axelle Robert | France, Drama

Petite Solange is a heart-breaking coming-of-age story that desperately wants to be liked. It’s the feature debut of writer and director Axelle Robert Set in Nantes, the feature is slow to develop, and any dramatic developments are far and few between – in spite of a heart breaking story.

Guitar shop owner Antoine (Katerine) and his wife Aurelia (Drucker), an actress, have set their sights set on new horizons after a marriage of twenty years: Antoine has fallen for his attractive assistant Gina (Astor), and Aurelia is seeing another man carefully watched over by her thirteen-year old daughter Solange (Springer), and her brooding twenty-year old brother Romain (Montana-Haroche), who gets all the parental attention.

The divorce means the kids will lose the home they grew up in, and little Solange is not even part of the decision as to where she will live. A loner by nature, does not get much help from her girlfriend Lili (Léon), or distant love-interest Arthur (Ferreira), who is more interested in getting a bargain instrument from Antoine, than in his daughter. Solange is so upset about losing her home she actually tries to commit suicide but her life is saved by cool, intellectually overbearing psychiatrist in the hospital, and she eventually goes home.

Jade Springer gives a memorable performance as Solange in whose unforgettable face and soulful eyes the cruelties of the adult world are reflected. Whilst Axelle Robert quotes Verlaine, she fails to capture the spirit of her compatriots rather maudlin poetry. Instead she ends up with a film that lacks analytical depths or emotional empathy. AS

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2021

The Bamboo Saucer (1968)

Dir: Frank Telford | Cast: Dan Duryea, Lois Nettleton | US Fantasy Sci-fi 100’

The Bamboo Saucer attempts far more than its obviously tiny budget can manage, and at 100 minutes takes much too long to deliver too little. Writer-director Frank Telford’s garrulous script feels like one written in the fifties that took ten years to get made – so was then brought up to date by making Red China rather than the Russkies the heavies. A competent cast led by the late Dan Duryea does their best, and Lois Nettleton as a hot Russian scientist with lovely blue eyes gamely spouts some particularly atrocious dialogue. (There’s a lot of Russian dialogue in the script; and it would be interesting to learn what a native Russian speaker makes of her accent and how convincing the dialogue spoken by her and the other actors playing Russians actually sounds.)

Competently lit in an overlit TV movie sort of way by twice Oscar-winning Hollywood veteran Hal Mohr, the ‘Chinese’ locations resemble an episode of Star Trek and the Chinese church where much of the action is played out is presumably a standing set from something made earlier. But where the corner-cutting really shows is in the dreadful music score and the perfunctory special effects. The score is obviously carelessly selected odds and sods taken from a library when a halfway decent score would have generated a bit of much-needed atmosphere to make up for the slack pacing. And the special effects are spectacularly inadequate.

The budget evidently didn’t exist for the design and construction of a full-sized flying saucer exterior for the studio scenes, so we instead get a flatly lit superimposition that looks even worse than Edward D. Wood Jr’s notorious hub-caps of ten years earlier. When the thing finally takes off, the flight to Saturn and back (aided by shots of outer space, the Moon, Mars and so on presumably lifted from other films) certainly makes for a final ten minutes that is fascinating for what it attempts with so little. @Richard Chatten

The Legionnaire | Il Legionario (2021) Locarno Film Festival 2021

Dir.: Hleb Papou; Cast: Germano Gentile, Maurizio Bousso, Marco Falaguasta, Sabina Guzzanti; Italy/France 2021, 82 min.

Il Legionario is a first feature for Belorussian born director/co-writer Hleb Papou who fleshes out a simplistic narrative from his award-winning Cannes short film of the same name centring on brothers Daniel and Patrick, of African parentage. Daniel is a policeman with Rome’s Riot Police, Patrick the gang-leader of a group of squatters in a building due for ‘clearance’ by Daniel’s unit.

The director’s sympathy clearly lies with Patrick (Bousso) and his cause, Daniel (Gentile) appears to be on the wrong side of the conflict. Daniel’s wife Tricia is pregnant; the fact that she is white makes Daniel’s position even more complex. The squad leader of his unit is a man called ‘Aquila’ (Falaguasta), who meets with right-wing extremists and expects Daniel to obey his orders when it comes to repossessing the block of flat from the 150 occupiers, who have been offered accommodation in Milano, which they refused. Patrick and Daniel’s mother tries in vain to reconcile the brothers, but in the end, she sides with Patrick, not wanting to leaver her own flat in the block. The fight is bloody, and Patrick threatens to throw himself from the roof. For Daniel, with ‘Aquila’ watching, there will be no more comprises.

Impressive flight scenes between the police and protestors make this a gritty action drama: Gentile’s Daniel is convincing as a man who hesitates, until it is too late. Patrick is a head banger, but still tells his son, that Daniel is one of them, acting as a spy. Passionate and visually spectacular, Papou weaves a violent tapestry, where everyone is caught up in a battle nobody can win. AS

Best Emerging Director Award of the City and Region of Locarno | LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Pleasure (2021) Sundance Film Festival 2021

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

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

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

SUNDANCE LONDON 2021

Coda (2021) BAFTAs 2022

Wri/Dir.: Sian Heder; Cast: Emilia Jones, Marlee Matlin, Troy Kotsur, Daniel Dureant, Amy Forsyth, Eugenio Derbuz, Ferdia Walsh-Peelo; USA 2021, 111 min.

Teenage Ruby Rossi (Jones) is the only person in her family not afflicted by deafness in this fluidly amusing coming of age drama from American writer/director Sian Heder (Tallulah) winning Best Adapted Screenplay at this year’s Baftas 2022.

Ruby Rossi is not much of an academic in her last year at High School, so she’s decided to stick with the family business joining her father Frank (Kotsur) and brother Leo (Durant) who are independent fishermen, and mother Jackie (Matlin) who does the books. But the new music teacher Bernardo Villalobos (Derbez) discovers Ruby’s fine voice and coaches her for the entrance examines at a respected conservatoire in Boston. Love interest Miles (Walsh-Peelo) supports her, but Ruby is torn between a musical career and staying put – particularly since the Rossi’s and other fishermen are planning to break away form the corrupt wholesale agency.

Refreshingly Heder avoids a didactic approach in CODA aka Child of Deaf Adults in a narrative that flows easily with its conflicting emotions, Ruby is not a victim, having to ‘translate’ for her family in sign language – she has a certain agency which she sometimes ruthlessly exploits. She disapproves of her parents’ loud lovemaking and brother Leo’s girlfriend Gertie (Forsyth) who is also over-sexed. When Gertie asks Ruby to tell her the sign language for “I love you”, Ruby shows her a completely different meaning: “I have herpes”. Leo is blown away by the “discovery”.

Set in a blue-collar community, CODA has a ring of true realism without being an agit-prop. DoP Paula Huidobro does a great job in the ‘action’ scenes on the fishing boat, as well as the close-ups. Inspite of the indulgent running time there’s never a spare moment, Heder lets her cast roam around in a feature of setbacks wild emotions; with the overly long drawn out happy-ending perhaps the only point of critique. CODA scooped three Oscars for its worthy topic more than anything else.AS

SIAN HEDER won Best Adapted Script BAFTA | TROY KOTSAR won Best Supporting Actor | EE BAFTAS 2022 | SIÂN HEDER’S CODA WINS 2021 SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL: LONDON AWARD PRESENTED BY BIFA |

House of Gucci (2021)

Directed by Ridley Scott from a script by Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna based on Sara Gay Forden’s bestseller The House of Gucci brings to the big screen the shocking true story of the family empire behind the Italian fashion house of Gucci. Spanning three decades of love, betrayal, decadence, revenge, and ultimately murder, we see what a name means, what it’s worth, and how far a family will go for control.

COMING TO CINEMAS THIS NOVEMBER

In the Same Breath (2021) Sundance London

Dir.: Nafu Wang; Documentary; USA 2021, 95 min.

A scathing documentary about the handling of the COVID-19 crisis in the one-party state of the People’s Republic of China – and the not so different approach of the Trump administration in the USA – is quite an eye-opener. Chinese born writer/director Nafu Wang (One Child Nation) bases her her findings of her own experiences having lived and worked in the USA for the last nine years,

Wang, born and raised in China, was visiting her mother in a city 200 miles away from Wuhan when she came across news reports stating how eight doctors had been arrested for spreading rumours about a respiratory sickness. When Wang left for the USA on January 23rd, Wuhan was in lockdown. Wang’s husband managed to get their son, who was with his grandmother, home to the USA. Wang was by now alerted and aware of the discrepancy between the censured media reports, and the real situation in China. Back home, she commissioned camera operators, often using covert mobiles ‘phones to report on what was going on in China. She also offered the story to an American newspaper, which declined.

The results were astonishing – the censored reporting of state media was completely skewed away from people dying in the streets, or posting their x-rays on You Tube in the vain hope that they would receive treatment. The lavish New Year’s Eve celebration in Wuhan became a super spreader – ignoring the doctors alarm cost countless lives. But the Chinese government celebrated the success of their medical campaign, even when people were still dying outside hospital doors.

Wang was equally angry with the reaction of the Trump government: the president and his supporters in the White House and the CDC playing down the impact of pandemic, even Dr. Anthony Fauci can be heard aping the president stating “nobody in the USA is at risk from the pandemic”. “Just like the flu” was a common statement. And so the US went unprepared into the fight with the pandemic, even the most basic equipment was lacking.

In China the government agencies hailed the “victory over the virus” only weeks after the doctors’ arrests, the authoritarian Trump administration let loose millions of pandemic deniers and conspiracy theorists. For Wang, the idealist, who never had any illusions about the nature of the ruling Chinese Communist Party, the failure of the US government, is a failure of Democracy itself. AS

SUNDANCE LONDON 2021

Girl in the Headlines (1963)

Dir: Michael Truman | Cast: Ian Hendry, Ronald Fraser, Margaret Johnston, Natasha Parry | UK Drama 93’

Based on a 1961 novel by the actor Laurence Payne called The Nose on My Face. This enjoyable little murder mystery with an interesting cast – most of them still relatively young – and shot on familiar London locations seems on the surface charmingly old-fashioned (everybody is so immaculately dressed, and ball-point pens were still sufficiently novel for one to be an important plot point).

Yet the the victim is described as “a little nympho…without morals or scruples of any kind” who came to London to have “an operation” after getting pregnant by her mother’s fiancée. “Reefers” and “cocaine” are also mentioned by name and a character (described as “a rich and successful TV thing”) is stabbed to death in what is obviously a gay club. Incredibly this only carried an ‘A’ certificate in 1963, which shows how rapidly times were then changing.

Like Inspector Morse, Ian Hendry (who was still young and dashing then before his drinking got the better of him) as the detective drives a Bentley and knows his opera. Coincidence? @Richard Chatten

TALKING PICTURES

Human Factors (2021)

Dir.: Ronny Trocker; Cast: Max Waschke, Sabine Timoteo, Jude Hermann, Wanja Valentin Kube, Daniel Séjourné; Italy/Germany/Denmark 2021, 102 min.

Italian-born Ronny Trocker’s intelligent but underpowered invasion thriller has the same fault line that runs through many German features of the past few decades: a premise that looks promising on paper but fails to come alive cinematically because everything has to serve the central construct. This may work for Michael Haneke but Trocker’s film lacks the narrative heft that makes Haneke’s features so absorbing. DoP Klemens Hufnagl tries for a ‘Huis clos’ atmosphere but he’s further hemmed in by the narrative confines, and the actors can’t inject much verve either with their underwritten characters.

Human Factors centres on a repressed and deeply conflicted upper-middle class family. For some light relief they take a break in a holiday home in Belgium near the German border but this is a sticking plaster rather than a solution to their woes. Husband Jan (Waschke) and wife Nina (Timoteo) run a PR agency in Germany, but politically they are poles apart and this tension bleeds into their ongoing campaign in the run up the country’s elections. Their kids are suffering too: Teenage daughter Emma (Hermann) is having problems at school and hanging out with the wrong crowd, her young brother Max (Kube) has lost the plot completely and is only interested in his pet rat Zorrow.

The holiday gets off to a bad start with a bungled burglary, the repercussions having a knock on affect for all concerned in this Rashomon like set-up. Nina’s gay brother Flo (Séjourné) and his partner then fetch up on the scene, and this doesn’t go down well with the rather homophobic Jan, opening up further avenues of discontent. Back in Germany on the Monday, things just go from bad to worse. AS

IN SELECTED CINEMAS FROM 15 February 2022 | SUNDANCE LONDON premiere |

Misha and the Wolves (2021)

Dir.: Sam Hobkinson; Documentary with Misha Defonseca, Jane Daniel, Evelyn Haendel, Sharon Seargant; Belgium/UK 2021, 89 min.

Sam Hobkinson (Fear City) tells one of the most bizarre stories of modern times. Misha and the Wolves could be a fairy tale, but it turns into a nightmare – and then into something completely beyond the wildest imagination.

In the remote town of Millis, Massachusetts. Belgian immigrant Misha Defonseca regaled friends and neighbours with her experiences during the Holocaust. She told the members of Temple Bel Torah how, as a little girl in during wartime 1941, she left her loveless foster home and began to search for her biological parents who had been deported to a death camp. Taking up with a pack of wolves she walked on foot from Belgium to Germany, it what would be an eventful and violent journey.

One of her neighbours of Defonseca Jane Daniel, ran a small publishing company, the Mt. Ivy Press and offered to publish the memoir as ‘Misha: A memoire of the Holocaust Years’. It came out in 1997 and was a great success, as was the French version. In 2007, the French filmmaker Vera Belmont shot the story as Survivre avec les Loups. But the cracks started to show: Defonseca took Daniel to court, over her refusal to be interviewed by Oprah Winfrey. Next came a major discovery: Defonseca had used two different versions of her birth name: one for the America edition, one for the French one. Than everything unravelled quickly, thanks to forensic genealogist Sharon Sergeant, and Evelyne Haendel, a Belgian researcher and Holocaust survivor. What emerged was a completely different version of events. Misha was born in 1937 as Monique de Wael to catholic parents in Etterbeek, Belgium. She never left home as a child.

Hobkinson then uses the Errol Morris technique, turning the narrative into a Patricia Highsmith style story where the focus is no longer Defonseca – but a gullible public on both sides of the Atlantic intrigued to have discered just another plucky Jewish survivor. The guilt surrounding lack of social responsibility during the Shoah still haunts communities who react with denial (as in Poland) or half-truths as they do in France. Misha’s real story is also chained to this process of uncovering the kindness of strangers who courageously risked their own safety to help Jews. Opportunism is still rife in the publishing world, Jane Daniel being only one example. DoP Will Pugh documents this torrid tale of a deception that provides a welcome version of the truth, an antidote to bestseller spin. Misha Forenseca still lives in Millis. AS

NOW ON RELEASE

Writing With Fire (2021) Movies that Matter Festival 2022

Dir.: Sushmit Ghosh, Rintu Thomas; Documentary with Meere Devi, Shyonkali Devi, Suneeta Prajapate; India 2021, 92 min.

This Oscar nominated documentary by first time feature directors Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh (also co-DoP) once again exposes an endemic culture of police corruption, bribery and misogyny in Indian culture seen through the ‘Khabar Lahariya’ (‘News Wave’) newspaper. The publication was founded just after the turn of the century by women of India’s lowest cast – the Dalit, and operates out of Uttar Pradesh, a region which usually votes for the winning Party in the General election – and this will play a big part later.

We begin with chief reporter Meere interviewing the victim of a brutal rape, and her shocked husband. Meere then walks straight into the police station to demand why nobody has been charged with the assault. Alarmingly the police are not interested in helping the victim. Clearly they are not there to serve the people or enforce law and order, but to trouser lavish bribes from their venal local overlords who continue to operate with impunity.

Although the “Khabar Lahariya’ is now digital, at the end, with 125 million followers on You Tube, the journalists are not really taken not seriously – even by their own husbands – one proclaiming the whole operation will fail.

During the 2019 election, the sitting candidate of the region left his own party, and joined Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP. When interviewed by the women he gives the usual lip service to fighting corruption, if re-elected, since the BJP will allow him to be active on this front, unlike his old Party. Modi and the BJP won in a landslide, not only in Uttar Pradesh. But already a week later, the journalists are repressed by members of the BJP, wearing orange outfits, and pretending to represent religious groups. The danger of absolute Hindu nationalism is obvious.

The fate of the individual members of the newspaper is also told, centring around Suneeta, Meere’s best ‘student’. Disappointingly she then decides to give up her profession and marry. Lost in that immediacy is a deeper historical look at the paper itself; while we understand its creation was unique, Writing with Fire is so invested in the present that the filmmakers fail to offer key information about its founding.

Still, now is as good a time as any to follow the paper and its evolving reporters as we watch Khabar Lahariya grow in size and influence. It’s a double-sided coin: Increased visibility means increased impact, for the journalists and their subjects, but it also places the women in the crossfire of anyone opposed to them (and that’s plenty of people, especially as the country enters a key election period).

The personal toll is never far from the frame, and while some of the documentary drags as its filmmakers cycle through repetitive scenes (a husband rolling his eyes at his wife’s work, a family railing against the impossibility of marrying off their daughter, a puffed-up subject refusing to talk to female journalists), they also put the audience very much inside the world of Meera, Suneeta, and Shyamkali.

A startling finale makes Writing with Fire one of the finest features ever made about journalism, a real eye opener. AS

GRAND JURY DOCUMENTARY AWARD WINNER | MOVIES THAT MATTER 2022

The Sparks Brothers (2021) Sundance London 2021

Dir.: Edgar Wright; Documentary with Ron Mael, Russell Mael, Mike Myers, Giorgio Moroder, Tony Visconti, Christl Haydon, Steve Jones, Alex Kapranos; UK 2021, 135 min.

At first glance, The Sparks Brothers is an odd choice as a first documentary for director/writer Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Baby Driver). They were the operatic star turn with their score for Annette at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and their music has endured half a century. Hits like ‘This town is not not big enough for Both of Us’, was a great success in the UK, but ignored in the US, leaving many fans with the impression they were British – but they were born and bred LA. The Sparks have produced twenty-five albums, and Wright (a self-confessed fan) has given everyone enough space here – which accounts for a self-indulgent running time of two hour fifteen minutes.

Ron and Russell Mael had a proper cinema upbringing with their parents, who, idiosyncratically, took their kids to the cinema whenever they saw fit. No surprise then that Ron and Russell wanted to compose for the big screen. But early efforts with Jacques Tati and Tim Burton came to nothing. Luckily, they ‘escaped’ the dud Rollercoaster from 1977, which fell instead to poor Lalo Schifrin while we get an uncredited glimpse of the brothers. Finally Ron and Russell got their just reward: this year’s opening feature at Cannes directed by Leos Carax, scored by the Maels. Not bad for a duo who inspired New Order, Duran Duran and The Human League.

The brothers Mael are great entertainers, even performing with a dummy. And Wright mocks the genre roles of the documentary, with animation and CGI inlets. Wright hits the spirit of the Maels: the 1979 album produced by Giorgio Moroder, featured classics like ‘Try outs for the Human Race’, just the sort of anarchy Wright reproduced in his feature films. The Sparks Brothers is a proper head banger, celebrating the feeling of anarchic creativity. AS

SUNDANCE LONDON | July 29 – August 1st 2021

The Blazing World (2021) Sundance London 2021

Dir.: Carlson Young; Cast: Carlson Young, Udo Kier, Vanessa Shaw, Dermot Mulroney, Liz Mikel; USA 2021, 101 min.

Carlson Young writes directs and also stars in her first film, an extended version of her 2018 Sundance short and essentially a fantasy sci-fi. Young takes full credit for the outcome, a glittering, elaborate eye-catcher build on an anaemic narrative, held together by DoP Shane F. Kelly and PD Rodney F. Becker. But it is the evocative orchestral score of composer Isom Innis that sets the tone.

Margaret (perhaps a nod to Margaret Cavendish, who authored a 1666 sci-fi-themed tome ‘The Description of a New World Called the Blazing World’) never recovered from the profound shock of losing her twin sister Elizabeth who drowned in the swimming pool of the family mansion while her parents (Vanessa Shaw and Dermot Mulroney) were otherwise engaged in one of their spectacular showdowns. But the traumatic day didn’t end there: a haunting figure (played by Udo Kier) tries to lure her into going with him into a dark hole. She grows up to become a gloomy college student (Young) desperately trying to be re-united with her sister, who she believes is caught in another dimension, waiting to be rescued. But even respected TV astrologer (Mikel) is unimpressed by her efforts: “You should watch Dr. Who, it’s on the BBC” she advises Margaret. In Pan’s Labyrinth-style sequences she follows Kier in a bid to be re-united with her sister, swallowed up in Cagliari-like corridors. But somehow we are never quite sure which rabbit hole Margaret is aiming for. Meanwhile Kier waxes lyrical: “What the darkness eats, the darkness keeps.” Young was clearly aiming for a baroque aesthetic for her earnest protagonist on a mission – what we get is a digital makeover. AS

SUNDANCE LONDON 2021 | July 29-1 August

Jungle Cruise (2021)

Dir.: Jaume Collet-Serra; Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Jack Whitehall, Jesse Plemons, Edgar Ramirez; USA 2021, 127 min.

Fizzing with feelgood vibes Jungle Cruise is a blockbuster extravaganza that takes its name from the famous Disney Land theme park ride and brought alive here by Catalonian born director Jaume Collet-Serra and his writers Glenn Ficarra and John Requa.

After the overwhelming success of Pirates of the Caribbean it comes as no surprise that Disney would chose another fairground theme for a feature film, Taking place1916 during WWI, the action-packed prologue is set in London, where Dr. Lily Houghton (Blunt) and her gay brother MacGregor (Whitehall) hope that some dusty old relics will lead them to a magical tree in the Amazon jungle so they can harness its much needed healing powers amid the slaughter of the trenches.

Arriving at the Amazons, Lily takes her wuss of a brother in hand and hires Captain Frank Wolff (Johnson) to lead them to the mystical tree. But despite a massive ego the debit-ridden Frank is not really up to it and neither is his shambolic boat. His real name is Francisco and he fetched up here 400 years ago with the conquistadores. Over the centuries his quest for the legendary tree has been in vain in a desperate search to help his soldier friend Aguirre (Ramirez), who needs the petals for his sick daughter Anna. Aguirre still haunts Frank in his nightmares. Meanwhile Prince Joachim, a relative of the German Kaiser, is also after the tree’s petals, hot on the heels of Frank’s motley crew in their U-boat. Luckily, Frank’s pet leopard is there to defend them – despite getting drunk and throwing up. The foursome face a fearful battle before a happy-end delivers them back to London.

Basque DoP Flavio Martinez Labiano can take all the credit for this spectacle. His roving camera almost makes you throw up – never mind the leopard – and his rapid change of lighting angles creates a hostile, supernatural atmosphere of dread. Johnson is, as always ‘The Rock’, but Blunt is no shrinking violet either in the petal quest. Whitehall’s understated MacGregor is just shy of a caricature. Fabulous production values more than make up for the narrative torpor. Just enjoy the fun. AS

IN CINEMAS FROM 30 July 2021

The Collini Case | Der Fall Collini (2019)

Dir.: Marco Kreuzpaintner; Cast: Elyas M’Barek, Alexandria Maria Lara, Franco Nero, Heiner Lauterbach, Manfred Zapatka, Jannis Niewöhner, Catrin Striebeck, Peter Prager; Germany 2019, 123 min.

A gripping courtroom drama based on a real events sees a modest man tried for a motiveless murder.

Even today war crimes are still being committed all over the world. German director Marco Kreuzpaintner‘s feature serves as a timely reminder of the Dreher Law that allowed many war criminals to get off by a technicality.

Inspired by Ferdinand con Schirach’s bestseller of the same name and adapted by Christian Zübot, Robert Gold and Jens-Friedrich Otto, The Collini Case brought the scandal to the international stage. It’s an impressive undertaking that rather overstays its welcome despite Franco Nero’s engaging performance as defendant Franco Collini.

It maintains that the German justice system and the majority of politicians wilfully obstructed the persecution of war criminals, in the majority members of the Waffen SS.

Lawyer Caspar Leinen (M’ Barek) is appointed by the court to defend Fabrizio Collini (Nero), who has killed the German industrialist Hans Meyer (Zapatka) with three shots to the head. Collini is not willing to defend himself, and refuses to talk to Leinen, whose mother was Turkish, and was abandoned by his father (Prager) when Caspar was two.

Leinen is inexperienced in court dealings and his position is not helped by his close ties to the Meyer family: Meyer senior has financed his studies and treated him like a son and he has been enjoying an affair with Meyer’s grand daughter Johanna (Lara). Flashbacks flesh out how Leinen’s relationship with the influential Meyer family ended after several members of were killed in gruesome car accident, and bring to light Meyer’s senior’s controversial past: he was a member of the Waffen SS and responsible for a massacre in Montecatino when he saved little Fabrizio from being shot as a hostage. instead the child had to watch his father being killed, with Meyer ending his life in a coupe de grace.

In 1969 Fabrizio and his family filed a law suit against Meyer, but were then told that the German parliament had adopted the so-called Dreher law, which meant that all German war criminals were guilty of Murder Two – in other words the statue of limitation run out after twenty years, whilst Murder One had no time limit for prosecution.

In tense but protracted court scenes Lenien is locked in a battle of wits with his mentor the Public Prosecutor Prof. Mattinger (Lauterbach) part of a committee which formulated the Dreher law.

Although some may consider the flashbacks self indulgent, distracting from the central narrative. DoP Jacub Bejnarowicz does a brilliant job of enlivening the court proceedings with his visualisation of a contemporary Berlin still full of reminders of a murderous past. But his flashback images are rather on the kitsch side. Franco shines in a central tour de force but the support cast is not always convincing. Somehow there is too much pathos, partly due to the script.

The Collini Case needed a touch of irony to lighten its ever-relevant themes: But despite its worthwhile and ever-relevant themes of corruption, judiciary ethics, and toxic masculinity. Nero adds allure in a film marred by a rather stuffy support cast, the whole ensemble resembling a fighting unit, ready to attack rather than engage. AS

IN CINEMAS 10 September 2021

The Plough and the Stars (1936)

Dir: John Ford | Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Preston Foster, Barry Fitzgerald, Denis O’Dea | US Drama 72’

Made during John Ford’s ten-year 1930s sabbatical from making westerns; he’d just won an Oscar for The Informer, so he could insist upon yet another Irish subject. The opening caption “Dublin — Ireland”, however, straight away betrays its Hollywood provenance, and despite photography by the great Joseph August, lurches throughout between beautifully designed and lit interiors and obvious studio exteriors.

RKO imposed upon him Barbara Stanwyck, who Ford treated very badly on the set before eventually withdrawing to his yacht in a huff when shooting wrapped. Of the Abbey Players themselves, F.J.McCormick is visibly younger and healthier here than in the role of Shell ten years later in Odd Man Out for which he is known today and Arthur Shields looks very dashing as Padraic Pearse. But considering how notoriously truncated a version of the play this is, far too much time is devoted to depicting Barry Fitzgerald’s ‘hilarious’ fondness for a tipple. @RichardChatten

TALKING PICTURES TV

European Arthouse Film | ARTEKino Selection Summer 2021

The ARTEKino Festival is an innovative online film festival presented by ARTE.tv and Festival Scope aimed at movie goers from all over Europe. The festival strives to celebrate and promote European films from new filmmakers to larger audiences in less accessible countries.

This year the ARTEKino Selection is also available free at ARTE.tv. Each month a new film is featured representing the richness and diversity of European cinema.

In July, the ARTEKino Selection features Claire Denis’s 2008 film 35 Shots of Rum, currently streaming onARTE.tv. For August, Tereza Nvotová’s powerful debut feature Filthy, explores hard-hitting issues of rape, trauma and secondary victimisation. In September ARTEKino presents the potent real-world feminist fable Sibel featuring a mesmerising performance by Damla Sönmez.

The ARTEKino Selection – August

FILTHY

Slovakia, 2017

Director: Tereza Nvotová
Available at ARTE.tv from 1 August to 31 August

Seventeen-year-old Lena’s carefree world comes crashing down when she is raped at home by her maths teacher. The attacker calmly walks away, but Lena ends up in a psychiatric hospital. But even there she can’t bring herself to tell anyone what happened to her, since it doesn’t appear the staff are prepared to combat secondary victimisation. Tereza Nvotová offers up a drama which clearly demonstrates that rape only marks the beginning of a series of distressing experiences and brings to light an often-marginalised problem exacerbated by inadequate professional help. The oppressive subject matter acquires form as an assured study of the main character and of those around her, their contours nuanced by Marek Dvořák’s camerawork and by Dominika Morávková, whose Lena comes to realise that only she can find the strength that lies within her.

The ARTEKino Selection – September

SIBEL

Turkey, 2018

Directors: Çagla Zencirci & Guillaume Giovanetti
Available at ARTE.tv from 1 September to 30 September

25-year-old Sibel lives with her father and sister in a secluded village in the mountains of Turkey’s Black Sea region. Sibel is a mute, but she communicates by using the ancestral whistled language of the area. Rejected by her fellow villagers, she relentlessly hunts down a wolf that is said to be prowling in the neighbouring forest, sparking off fears and fantasies among the village women. There she crosses path with a fugitive. Injured, threatening and vulnerable, he is the first one to take a fresh look at her.

Watch free of charge, on ARTE.tv, via the ARTE mobile app and the Smart TV app @ARTEen

Old (2021)

Dir.: M. Night Shyamalan; Cast: Gael Garcia Bernal, Vicky Krisp, Rufus Sewell, Abbey Lee, Elizabeth Scanlen, Kathleen Chalfant, Ken Leung Nikki Amuka-Bird, Aaron Bird, Alex Wolf, Thomasin McKenzie, Embeth Davidtz, Emun Elliot; USA 2021, 108 min.

Somebody once said that M. Night Shyamalan more or less recreates an episode of ‘Twilight Zone’ in all his features. We wish! In reality this is filmmaking by numbers, aiming for mystery yet putting his cards on the table one by one the writer director is caught in his own universe with a tried and tested formula – OLD is just that.

Based on the graphic novel ‘Sandcastle’ by Frederick Peters and Pierre-Oscar Levy, it sees a group of hotel guests unable to escape their a nightmare tropical holiday when they find themselves trapped on their beautiful beach ageing rapidly at an alarming rate in fanciful camerawork provided by DoP Mike Gureckis.

Married couple Guy (Bernal) and Prisca (Krieps) are giving their relationship a final try on the island idyll, with their two young children Trent and Maddox. Prisca develops a tumour in the blink of an eye – shock-horror-gasp. Another couple, Charles (Sewell) and wife Chrystal (Abbey Lee) and their young daughter Kara (Scanlen) are also victims of the ageing process; whilst a third couple, Jarin (Lesung) and Patricia (Amuka-Bird) are written out of the narrative early on. Prisca and Guy eventually make peace in the evening but by now the adult Trent (Elliot) and Maddox (Davidtz) are desperate to get away. A famous rapper (Pierre), going by the name of Mid-Sized Sedan, is not even spared, despite his fame.

Meanwhile Charles, who may or may not be a schizophrenic, is trying to remove Prisca’s tumour hampered by his inability to the film that starred Brando and Nicholson together. You guessed it: Missouri Break.

A solid premise – age gets to us all in the end – could have led to a twist in the tale, instead Old goes out with a whimper. Rod Serling of ‘Twilight Zone’ fame would have winced. AS

IN CINEMAS

Good Time Girl (1948)

Dir: David MacDonald | Writer: Muriel & Sydney Box | Cast: Jean Kent, Dennis Price, Flora Robson, Diana Dors, Herbert Lom, Orlando Martins | UK Noir

The id to the ego of Herbert Wilcox’s ‘London’ films of the late forties. Based on the 1947 novel ‘Night Darkens the Streets’ by Arthur La Bern, who later provided equally sordid subject matter for Hitchcock’s ‘Frenzy’. The use of a continental poster to head this page on the IMDb is aptly appropriate since it’s unsparing depiction of the perils that lay in wait for a penniless girl attempting to scrape a living in postwar London could have happened at any time and any place. It’s depiction of the travails of sweet sixteen (yeah, right) Jean Kent trying to scratch a living in a postwar London rife with criminality and violence and her travails in approved school not surprisingly resulted in it being banned by some local councils and to official disapproval (Home Secretary James Chuter Ede actually wrote to J. Arthur Rank protesting that “The girl got no effective assistance from the institutions provided in this country to help young people who have gone astray”), which resulted in the addition of an edifying framing story with a plump young Diana Dors and nice Flora Robson; but not before all the bad publicity saw to it that it was a box office hit.

Most of the men inevitably are predatory creeps with ulterior motives, and disagreements are resolved with razors, knives or guns. (One of the few sympathetic male characters, interestingly enough, is Kolly, the doorman at Herbert Lom’s nightclub, played by veteran Nigerian actor Orlando Martins.) It’s fun to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there. @Richard Chatten

The Most Beautiful Boy in the World (2020)

Dir.: Kristina Lindstrom, Kristian Petri; Documentary with Björn Andrésen, Robine Roman, Annike Andrésen, Jessica Vennberg, Miriam Sambol, Margareta Krantz, Ryoko Ikeda; Sweden 2021, 93 min.

Swedish directors/writers Kristina Lindstrom (Palme) and Kristian Petri (Sommaren) explore the blighted life of actor/musician Björn Andrésen (*1955) who shot to international fame in 1971 as the blond youth Tadzio in Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice.

The remainder of the young man’s life resembles a Greek tragedy after a world-wide advertising campaign based on Andrésen’s androgynous image inspired, among others, Japanese Manga writers Ryoko Ikeda, sealing his fate. But What’s crucial here is that Visconti ‘owned’ the image of the under-aged actor via a copyright agreement for three years.

Björn was the fifth of six actors Visconti tested in 1970 in Stockholm for role of Tadzio, the nemesis of gay composer Von Aschenbach, in the novel of the same name by Thomas Mann. Visconti intended to direct the movie for the big screen, having been obsessed by it for a long time. Paradoxically Visconti somehow got away with being a prominent member of the Italian Communist Party and a very wealthy aristocrat. He was openly gay (exceptional in Catholic Italy after WWII) and his film crew consisted mostly of members of the the same sexual orientation.
At the screening test, Visconti made Björn strip to his pants, making the teenager highly uneasy.

Visconti emerges a stern and authoritarian figure, issuing an edict: nobody could even so much as look at Björn. Meanwhile the director touted the teenager around at gay nightclubs during the film’s shoot in Venice, where – acceding to teenager “the waiters looked at me as if I was a particular rare food which they would devour at any time”.

Miriam Samboli was engaged by the production company to look after Björn as a governess, helping him with his homework, and Casting Agent Margareta Krantz. Word had it that Visconti was completely smitten by Björn:”Whenever he was with Björn, his whole body came alive.” The media circus gathered speed in 1971 after Death in Venice had its premiere in London with The Queen and Princess Anne in attendance. The festival in Cannes, a few few months later, made the young man into a worldwide star. He was particularly famous in Japan as the first ‘Western Idol’, and made some music records. Next came Paris, where a certain Mr. Durant paid Björn 500 francs a month as pocket money, and rented a flat for him. “I had never any of my own money during my travels round the world”.

But Björn still had his education to think about and at school the boys sneered at him for his ‘femininity’: “I only had to snap my fingers and ten girls would come running – I never learned the social skills to communicate with the other gender”.

Björn Andrésen amassed credits for 16 TV films and series (40 TV episodes), as well as eleven feature films. He had asked not to be cast in the “Tadzio” mould, because he wanted to escape the gay image. It goes without saying he never gained the same attention as he did in 1971.

But it would be wrong simply to blame the Visconti episode for Bjorn’s post 1971 career, there were clearly aspects in his childhood that contributed to his lack of ongoing success: Björn never knew his biological father and his mother Barbro, a writer and painter, committed suicide. We watch him in a heart-breaking scene with an archivist who shows him the police report of Barbro’s suicide. His sister Annike Andrésen, the siblings were born in the same year, and daughter Robine Roman, paint a picture of a haunted man who never came to terms with fame. But the worst was still to come: Björn’s son Elvin died, nine months old, of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. He is convinced he died “because I loved him not enough, I was not up to it”.

The present sees him with supportive girlfriend Jessica Vennberg, who helps Björn clean his flat and fight off an eviction order from a Housing Association. A an adult he cuts a shy figure, hiding behind masses of hair: clearly not wanting to be seen.

DoP Erik Vallsten follows Björn Andrésen’s journey with a respectful distance: Here is a man so much hurt by the past he is a whisper away from disaster, totally lacking agency or self determination. Lindstrom’s biopic echoes an uneasy silence, captured with empathy in this diligent and dignified portrait. AS

NOW ON BBC IPLAYER

The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960) Prime

Dir: Budd Boetticher | Cast: Ray Danton, Karen Steele, Elaine Stewart, Jesse Whir | US Neo-Noir 107’

After a run of intelligent and highly-regarded colour westerns, director Budd Boetticher made a remarkable about turn with this classic recreation of the roaring twenties. The Production Code was by 1960 losing its iron grip on Hollywood, and The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond came at just the right moment to recapture both the breezy amorality of the pre-Code crime films of thirty years earlier, while Lucien Ballard’s crisp black & white photography vividly evokes the look of the era.

The absurdly good-looking Ray Danton is unforgettable in the lead, and the amused charm he brings to the part rather subverts the film’s message that he owed his fall to his lack of basic humanity, since you’ve spent most the film enthusiastically rooting for him @Richard Chatten

ON AMAZON PRIME

Sabaya (2021)

Dir.: Hogir Hirori; Documentary with Mahmud, Siham, Shadi, Sheik Zyad; Sweden 2021, 91 min.

Kurdish director/writer/DoP/editor Hogir Hirori (The Deminer) has certainly ventured where few other filmmakers dare to go: he follows Kurdish resistance fighters, both men and women, in their efforts to liberate young Kurdish women who have been abducted, raped and sold by members of Daesh, during their reign of terror which lasted from 2014 to 2019. The Yazidi, a Kurdish minority religion, was one of their fiercest opponents, and Daesh took it out on them: By 2016 over two thousand six hundred women and girls – some still babies – were abducted, 3793 remain as sex slaves until now, given the titular name of Sabaya by their captors.

Mahmud, a Syrian, seems to live where he works, the ‘Yazidi Home Centre’ in north-east Syria. Mahmud and Sheik Zyad, the director of the Centre, lead a group sending female “infiltrators” into the nearby ‘Al-Hol’ refuge camp to locate Yazidi women. Daesh is trying to reconstitute itself by selling Yazidi women to sex trafficking groups. Bereft of any political aim, they are simply a Mafia organisation. Some of the Yazidi women are sold up to 15 times to different sex-slave operators. The fighter’s most important allies are older Arabic women who “look after” the captured Kurdish women evading Mahmud and his female spies by changing tents when the liberators arrive. The search is hampered by their inability to identify the women, post capture, and this is their main setback. Even when a positive identification is made, the real trouble begins: the liberators – including Hirori – are shot at in their cars, and near the end there is an armed attack on the Centre itself. Eylol, the commander of the female troops, also has to use rifles. The number of nationalities in the Camp makes is even more difficult and dangerous to spring the Yazidi women: 58 nationalities are involved, among them citizens of Morocco, Tunisia, Russia, Chechnya, France and Somalia.

Mahmund, whose wife Siham and young son Shadi suffer from his regular absence; but when he visits the nearby Hassaker Prison, where Daesh prisoners are kept, he can confirm the identity of Leila and Dilsoz, who were abducted from the city of Sinjar. Leila has a baby from her Daesh rapist/husband, but when even if her family are alive it’s doubtful they will welcome her with open arms. Finally, young Mitra, who is unable to speak or understand anything but Arabic, will be re-united with her parents – if they can be found. To date, 206 Yazidi women and girls have been rescued, 52 had children born after a rape. When Mahmud takes five of the liberated women to Sinjar, he brings back the same number of female infiltrators.

Like his ‘hosts’, Hirori certainly put his life at stake during the nightly raids. Sabaya is a chronicle of courage, it is filmed like a diary, avoiding dramatic arcs – the continuous action speaks for itself. It could be considered a thriller – but that would sensationalise its sad subject matter. The reality can be found in the faces of the ‘liberated’ women – to call hem the lucky ones would be a sad euphemism. Brutal and unforgiving, Sabaya is a unique tale, told under the most hazardous circumstances. AS

IN CINEMAS FROM 20 AUGUST 2021

The Fan (1949)

Dir: Otto Preminger | US Drama

Towards the end of his journeyman years at Fox, having recently completed Ernst Lubitsch’s final film, ‘That Lady in Ermine’ (1948); Otto Preminger next remade one his illustrious predecessor’s silent hits with strange results.

Although fluidly photographed by his collaborator on ‘Laura’, Joseph LaShelle, he later admitted that it was “one of the few pictures I already disliked while making it” and rather than a droll comedy of manners it bizarrely resembles a Victorian film noir in which characters occasionally come out with familiar Wildean epigrams (a sense compounded by the postwar framing story, from which it flashes back in the style of the forties).

Martita Hunt is menacing rather than comical during her fleeting appearances as the Duchess of Berwick; while Madeleine Carroll in what proved her final screen appearance as Mrs Erlynne is far from the glacial blonde we remember from her thirties films. @RichardChatten

The Worst Person in the World (2021)

Dir: Joachim Trier | Wris Eskil Vogt, Joachim Trier | Norway, Romantic comedy 121′

Renate Reinsve won the Best Actress award at Cannes for being ‘the worst person in the world’ in Joachim Trier’s latest film. But her only crime is indecision in this morally complex character drama about freedom of choice for beautiful young things in the 21st century.

Julie is 30. A perfect age to be alive in Oslo where she lives with her boyfriend Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie, who also stars in Bergman’s Island), a successful cartoonist who adds a thoughtful stability to Julie’s spirited self-focus. The choppily edited early scenes see Julie reinventing herself in various career choices: medicine then psychoanalysis, then photography. Her mother is supportive then exasperated in an upbeat narrative that regularly spins off in various directions but never loses its central focus in a script co-written by Eskil Vogt.

Aksel’s career is going from strength to strength and he wants to start a family. But Julie is conflicted and even more so after the two spend a fraught weekend with his family where other smug couples make her feel uncomfortable with her lack of decision. What follows is series of episodes where Julie toys with her career choices and the men in her life, Aksel becoming more and more disenchanted with her constant forays into pastures new.

Divided into twelve chapters, a prologue and epilogue, the film fizzes with light-hearted fun never making Julie out to be callous – she is sensitive and likeable – but feels a genuine uncertainty about her emotional status in a society that seems to funnel us into a lemming like direction of commitment. There is melancholy too, especially in the final chapter where Julie is made aware of the impact of her choices, or lack of them. Sometimes splashy but always entertaining this is a watchable chronicle of modern millennial life. MT

The Single Standard (1929)

Dir: John S Robertson | Cast: Greta Garbo, Nils Asther, Johnny Mack Brown, Dorothy Sebastian | US Drama 89′ Silent

The second of three silent features featuring Garbo released in 1929 while MGM scratched its head pondering how they were to promote her as an attraction in talkies; The Single Standard was also her second feature in a row pairing her with fellow Swede Nils Asther.

Garbo is improbably introduced as All-American party girl Arden Stuart, presumably loaded, but of whose life and means prior to the wild party in an enormous Art Deco mansion with which the film begins we learn nothing. Despite the provocative title – vaguely advanced at one point as some sort of feminist statement about the social constraints placed upon women – The Single Standard swiftly turns into a standard Garbo vehicle in which after flirting with modernity in the form of motor rides at seventy m.p.h. and a dalliance with pugilist turned artist Asther she ultimately embraces respectability and parenthood with John Mack Brown for the sake of her cute little curly-haired moppet of a son.

The name of director John S. Robertson isn’t much recalled today, even by connoisseurs of silent cinema (unless they’re also connoisseurs of horror cinema, since he directed the John Barrymore version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1920), but he does a good job here with the assistance of high-priced Metro talent like cameraman Oliver Marsh, art director Cedric Gibbons, costume designer Adrian and whoever was responsible for Garbo’s various hairstyles which subtly changed as the film ran its course to reflect her developing emotional state. @Richard Chatten

All Things Bakelite (2018)

Dir.: John E. Maher; Documentary about Leo Hendrik Baekeland, narrated by Adam Behr; USA 2018, 59 min.

Everything you needed to know about the origins of plastic is here in John E Maher’s watchable docu-drama that sheds a light Leo Hendrik Baekeland (1863-1944), the Belgian born inventor of Bakelite, which under its common name, Plastic, has dominated our lives since 1907.

Plastic is a dirty word nowadays, but it was hailed as a miracle back in the day when Baekeland first invented the substance. His biographer, Carl Kaufmann, and even a flamenco dancer sing his praises, Mark Ferreira, re-creating dramatised insight into the genius who was not keen on other people.

Born in Ghent, Baekeland married Celine Swarts, the daughter of his professor at the town’s university. But instead of following in the footsteps of his father-in-law, he emigrated with his wife to the USA in 1889. The couple would have three children, two of which survived their childhood. An inventor at heart, Baekeland struck gold first by coming up with a new photographic paper in 1893, the rights of which were bought up by the Eastman company making Baekeland independent and ready for the big step forward in 1907.

Bakelite was a mixture of phenol and formaldehyde, but Baekeland “hit a wall, like his competitors, but he found a door”. The original mixture was too sticky to be formatted, and it took Baekeland 680 attempts to find a solution for its adaption in all forms possible. Radio, telephone, cars – all mass-produced articles soon relied on the new invention. Others copied Baekeland, and only in 1923 did a judge gave him he sole right for the production of the new formulary.

Baekeland was in love with cars, he even got a speeding ticket for driving at 30 in a 20 mph zone. But behind the scenes, he was an anxious, lonely and nervous man, just the opposite his wife, a socialite who loved to give parties. Her husband felt safest on his yacht, where he spent hours on his own: “He was not a people person”.

But Bakelite would soon find its way into Hollywood: art-deco design dominated the features of Busby Berkeley, and, on the other end of the spectrum, the invention of the first Baby Monitor in 1937. In 1940 Bakelite was the foundation for the first Hawaiian guitar, which was played later on SNL. But crucially the film points to the inevitable downside: plastic is not bio-degradable and will be with us forever – even if, in the future new components make it more eco friendly.

That hydrogen bombs also have a use for Bakelite, is another irony and makes a quote by Kaufmann particularly poignant: “Plastic is the finest and worst expression of mankind”. Baekeland, who was nocturnal in his habits, often feeling like a ‘wandering ghost’, leaves us with pithy food for thought, a Professor of the History of Design at Pratt Institute exclaiming “the heart of Bakelite is the American soul”.

Short and to the point, Maher uses archive material to make his points, his re-staging of Baekeland life is not always successful, and his admiration for chemistry as a whole is obviously questionable. Still, we get to know the man who left us with a major long-term problem, by solving all our daily needs. AS

ON DIGITAL PLATFORMS WORLDWIDE

Joy Womack: The White Swan (2020)

Dir.: Dina Burlis, Sergey Gawrilov; Documentary with Joy Annabelle Womack, Nikita Ivanov-Goncharov, Masha Beck, Elizabeth Shockman; USA 2021, 91 min.

A culture of bribery and corruption in Russia’s Bolshoi Ballet provides the cut and thrust of this new documentary, seen through eyes of Prima ballerina Joy Womack.

Born in 1994, Womack grew up in California and Texas, even though she is ethnically Russian. At the age of 15 she left her family and went to train at the Bolshoi Ballet Academy in 2009, later becomeing a member of the Bolshoi Ballet proper – quite an achievement and a ‘first’ for an American. But she would resign in 2013 when the scandal became public, later joining the Kremlin Ballet Theatre Moscow where she performed the leading role in ‘Swan Lake’ and other iconic parts in the repertoire.

Told in a series of flashbacks that culminate in her performance in ‘Swan Lake’ at the Kremlin Ballet Theatre – the film is a hotchpotch of episodes in Womack’s life: there are highlights of her training and rehearsals, and her close relationship with ex-partner Nikita Ivanov-Goncharov. Two biographers, Masha Beck and Elizabeth Shockman are the main commentators, often rather too gushing in style giving the undertaking a hagiographic flavour. Training to be a dancer is gruelling and psychologically stressful: at one point Womack needed complex and expensive surgery after dancing with a fractured foot, just because no understudy was available. Fortunately her church provided the financing for her operation, because her family had gone bankrupt.

Most dancers suffer from weight problems, and Joy is no different. Weighing at one point only 38 kg, she developed an eating disorder, along with many of her colleagues. One point of contention between Joy and Nikita, also a dancer, was her total commitment to work. Womack is clear about her goals in life: “More work is good, no compromises. I train at the gym, practice my yoga, run a bible group and attend church. I could not do all this if I was still with Nikita. Many things make me into a better dancer and a better person. For me, works comes first, and I consider it impossible to combine work and personal life”.

Sadly, Nikita, now a choreographer, has to accept she’s married to her work with almost religious devotion. But it wasn’t a happy decision and she misses him: “He does not understand it, he is heartbroken. My heart aches for him.” When she left the Kremlin Ballet Theatre for a position in Seoul, she was adamant to burn no bridges: “Moscow will be always my home, I think of it as a base”.

Structurally flawed due to its confusing non-linear timeline – makes this a confusing to watch, but Womack herself is very much a documentary filmmaker’s dream: outspoken and always willing to take centre stage, she is a force of nature to be reckoned with, even if her underlying need for entitlement is sometimes grating.

Lively and action-packed throughout its running time, this portrait of a woman bulldozing herself through life, taking no prisoners is impressive. AS

OUT ON 19 JULY 2021

Handsome (2021)

Dir.: Luke White; Documentary with Nick and Alex Bourne, Molly and Charles Somers, Amber and Armand Maillard, Krich and Sachit Matrega, Thanh Nam and Tranh Viet; UK 2021, 98 min.

This adventurous new documentary from writer/filmmaker Luke White (Blood Money) who embarks on a international search for care-givers for those suffering from Down’s Syndrome. The idea was inspired by his friend Nick Bourne who also looks after an affected sibling, and has come to the stage where he wants to develop his own life. So he takes his brother Alex on a journey round the world, to explore others are coping in his position.

First stop is Cornwall, where Molly Somers looks after her brother Charles (Charlie). Their home is in an idyllic country setting, and Molly is fiercely protective of her brother who clearly brings out her motherly instincts. Compared with Alex, Charlie’s Down’s is quite mild, and he gets on well with his sister, Nick feeling rather envious of their closeness. Obviously it helps if you can through money at the situation, but despite family wealth Molly is determined not to hide reality from Charlie: “He knows he is different.”

Next stop is New York, where Nick and Alex visit City worker Amber who in naturally concerned that caring for her brother Armand will have a negative impact of her own career. Again, it looks like Nick is over-estimating his brother’s mental capacity and lack of verbal dexterity – which he blames on his parents for sending the boy for speech therapy. Alex can also be overbearing and this is another area Nick must confront as his brother matures into a manhood. There is a tendency for both Amber and Nick to refer to their siblings in the third party, even when they’re actually in the same room, they also need to keep them in the loop, so this in part understandable.

Government help is non-existent, but funding would their lives so much easier. At its the same in Mumbai, where Nick and Alex meet Krich and Sachit Matrega. To start with, Sachit is not badly affected by his Down’s: an accomplished cook, he can also organise his domestic life. Krich shows Nick some self-help organisations in the slums.

On their final stop, in Hanoi, Vietnam, Nick and Alex meet brothers Than Nam and Tranh Viet. The situation here is dire, religious fortune-tellers spin their lies for profit, and even worse, unqualified doctors perform brain-surgery offering false hope to all involved. The two also come across victims of “Agent Orange”, the toxic nerve gas sprayed from planes by American troops from their planes during the war. At the end of the fact-finding mission Nick has reached a decision.

Handsome is often hard to watch, the emotions are so raw. Somehow it feels like we’re intruding into the intimate lives of those affected, and that often feels wrong. Handsome is simply overloaded with human suffering. There are complex issues at stake but White does his best in the cannot be worked out in a mere 98 minutes. AS

ON DEMAND FROM 30 AUGUST

Titane (2021) Palme d’Or | Cannes Film Festival

Dir: Julia Ducournau | Cast: Agathe Rousselle, Vincent Lindon, Garance Marillier, Laïs Salameh, Bertrand Bonello, Dominique Frot | France Thriller 108′

Julia Ducournau’s Palme d’Or winning female revenge thriller is a strange dark comedy: for a lot of the time you’re bored between outbursts of unspeakable violence, its tortured heroine taking self-harm to a different level after a dysfunctional upbringing forces her into a life of crime.

As a little kid we see her kicking the back of her stepfather’s carseat, a habit that drives him mad and sends the vehicle careering into a top spin leaving Alexia in need of brain surgery – she’ll bear the scars forever, physically and mentally. Performing a lap dance style routine on the boot of a car is the way she earns her living in a louche local nightclub. Her hairpins come in handy for fending off unwanted advances: one incident sees her piercing a fan through the ear spurting his brains everywhere, in another Monty Pythonesque moment she forces a barstool leg into another man’s mouth – calmly sitting on it.

French filmmaker Decournu’s film life started with Raw – a seedy vampire story about a student who develops a penchant for blood. Here stabbing is the method of dispatching victims, although one night Alexia gets rather more than she bargained for in a raunchy one night stand. All this is conveyed in a colour-popping neon visual style, awkward camera angles delivering a stylish avant-garde allure to what is basically arthouse body horror.

Tortured and troubled after her murder fest, Alexia retreats to a public lavatory where she breaks her nose on the ceramic sink and crops her hair into a boyish bob to escape the authorities. Now as man, she seeks refuge with her musclebound firefighter father (Vincent Lindon). But then there’s her bulging stomach – has she been impregnated? Again the hairpin comes in handy for firking about in her vagina in an effort to bring on a miscarriage.

Fluid in its sexuality, this is a Palme d’Or winner that ticks all the boxes virtue-signalling wis: Ducournau is only the second woman ever to win the top prize, the first was Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993). To complete the zany picture this year at Cannes, Jury President Spike Lee announced the winning title right at the beginning of the ceremony – a gaffe that transformed the show into Mel Brooks’ style comedy mayhem – pure Hollywood, but that’s entertainment. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL – WINNER PALME D’OR

The Restless | Les Intrinquilles (2021) Cannes Film Festival

Dir: Joachim Lafosse | Belgium Drama 105′

If Damien Bonnard wasn’t a manic depressive in his latest film you’d punch him in the face. He plays the lead like a spoilt manchild. but that’s the sad side affect of his mental disturbance in this summery drama from Belgian’s Joachim Lafosse.

Success as abstract artist has provided Damien with one of those gorgeous 19th century Cote d’Azur villas where he lives with his likeable wife Leila (Leila Bekhti) and young son Amine (Merz Chammah). But their seaside idyll becomes increasingly fraught when his illness gets out of control, powering him forward in a sleepless manic mission to achieve everything while Leila and Amin are left exhausted by his insatiable often violent moods that eventually requirement hospitalisation. .

With its elliptical narrative, this three-hander is a brave attempt to tackle mental illness but The Restless is predictably an irritating film to watch until almost the end. Enthusiastically crafted and acted it will transport you to lush Mediterranean locations, but relaxing or particularly enjoyable it ain’t. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Nitram (2021)

Dir: Justin Kurzel | Cast: Caleb Landry Jones, Judy Davis, Essie Davis, Anthony LaPaglia, Sean Keenan, Conrad Brandt | Australia: Drama 118′

Not since Snowtown has a film engendered such utter terror through its central character – the titular Nitram – played by a coruscating Caleb Landry Jones – as a fully formed enfant terrible who lives with his long-suffering parents (Judy Davis and Anthony LaPaglia) in the sleepy seaside town.

Snowtown writer Shaun Grant again shows how long-term parental abuse and a casually toxic environment turns Nitram ((Martin backwards his hated school nickname) into a vulnerable, isolated loner who wreaks havoc wherever he goes. A display of his anti-social behaviour opens a story driven forward by an unpredictable behaviour even more frightening than his brutal strength: like a firecracker he goes off without warning, but is also capable of loving affection for his mother who diminishes him with constant putdowns.

But his unpredictability is nerve-shredder here. And the film open with a typical episode of antisocial behaviour when Nitram sets off firecrackers from the rooftop of his parent’s house in a bid to dispel his sense of ennui and hopelessness – there’s nothing else to do here but surf, and we watch him floundering in the waves, driven to tears by another failed attempt to stay onboard.

Port Arthur feels more like an English seaside town in the 1960s, charmingly down-at-heel and raffling. Redolent of its faded but questionable glory as a colonial outpost, basking in the lush green landscapes leading down to the sea. But when Nitram meets ditzy local heiress and Gilbert & Sullivan fan Helen (Essie Davis) things are set to change. An offer to mow the extensive lawns of her rambling mansion with its menagerie of dogs leads to a touching friendship, Nitram finding acceptance and a contentment of sorts as the misunderstood misfits rub along together in a ‘folie a deux’ before thunder clouds once again gather and his fate is finally sealed.

Kurzel and Grant show how Nitram is unable to empathise as a result of his dysfunctional family dynamic. Davis and LaPaglia are charismatic as his callous mother and depressive father, Nitram’s flawed emotional touchstones as the story seethes towards a devastating finale. All this contrasts with the serene shambolic beauty of the painterly settings – particularly of Helen’s home. This is a mesmerising look at mental illness made all the more pitiful by the tragedy that could have been avoided. As a master of quirky psychological dramas Kurzel is back at the top of his game. MT

IN CINEMAS FROM 1 JULY 2022

Bunuel: A Surrealist Filmmaker (2021) Cannes Classics

Dir; Javier Espada | Spain, Doc 90′

Spanish filmmaker Javier Espada shares his birthplace of Calanda (Aragon) with the legendary Spanish surrealist Luis Bunuel whose story forms the subject of this engaging new documentary playing in the Cannes Film Festival Classics section.

As a teen during the Easter Semana Santa processions Espada escaped the loud drums of the ceremony for relative calm of his local fleapit and was instantly bewitched by Bunuel, the image of Christ fusing with the character of the Marquis de Sade in his subconscious, creating subversive undertones.

His obsession would later lead to a lifelong friendship with Bunuel’s regular screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière whose script for Diary Of A Chambermaid would continue with cult classics such as Belle De Jour and The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie. It and would also lead to Bunuel’s memoirs ‘My Last Breath.’

A recently restored archive from stereoscopic glass plates, clips and personal photos – provided by his sons Juan Luis and Rafael – and the Luis Bunuel Film Institute is enlivened by Espada’s own thoughts and those of Bunuel providing insight into a charismatic career that started with his traditional upbringing in a well to do influential family in Calanda. But a tragic incident involving a donkey would put a subversive spin on the director’s output and much of his work would be banned banned by Franco’s regime due to its controversial subject matter. DoP Ignacio Ferrando Margeli provides a pristine black and white aesthetic in this deep dive into cinema history. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2021 | CANNES CLASSICS

Memoria (2021) Cannes Film Festival 2021

Dir: Apichatpong Weerasethakul | Thailand, Fantasy Drama 139′

Memoria is the delicately mesmerising and meditative first English language film from Thai artist and film-maker Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Well known for his awarded experimental filmmaking and avant-garde art installations, he won the Palme d’Or back in 2004 for his bewitching fantasy drama Uncle Boonmee but Memoria is his most thematically rich and accessible film so far.

Tilda Swinton is the quietly haunting main character Jessica, an English expat who seems ethereal yet down to earth gliding gently through a story touching on folklore, sci-fi and mysterious happenings linked to unusual sonic events in the Colombian capital of Bogota. Unfolding in a series of hypnotic long takes Memoria ponders the meaning of life and the negative impact of man’s imprint on the natural world in a way that is exquisitely subtle rather than forced on the audience.

Jessica is a horticulturalist based in Medellin and visiting Bogota where her sister Karen (Agnes Brekke) is recovering from an unexplained respiratory affliction in hospital. That same morning Jessica woke to a strange sonic boom, and this sound, unheard by Karen and her husband Juan (Daniel Giménez Cacho, leads Jessica to sound engineer Hernan (Juan Pablo Urrego) to try and uncover its origins. That same night the sound once again resonates at a dinner with Karen and Juan but they are unaware of it. Further investigations seem to point to construction work in the nearby countryside where ancient bones belonging to a little girl have recently been unearthed in the disruption. There may be a connection with Karen’s illness – pointing to a covid-style virus that been released in building work but this theory remains unproved and part of the film’s enduring allure.

Hernan manages to replicate the sound – a deep metallic thud – and the two seem to be on the verge of a breakthrough. But when Jessica goes back to his studio later on Hernan appears not to have been a figment of her imagination, and he never appears again. Walking in the lush tropical surroundings of Bogota Jessica then meets another man called Hernán (Elkin Diaz) who belongs to a community who sleep dreamlessly and with their eyes open. In his ramshackle home mysterious memories start to flood Jessica’s subconscious, but whether they are hers or transmitted by the spirits unearthed in the building works is the mystery at the heart of her zen-like odyssey.

Echoing the work of Lav Dias Memoria is a film experience that places us under its spell in a parallel universe enveloping all the senses. Enigmatic, beguiling and astonishingly captivating throughout Memoria explores fundamental aspects of our existence in a natural world that is is very much a force to be reckoned with, slowing taking its revenge in subtle and unfathomable ways. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2021

House Arrest (2021) Un Certain Regard

Dir: Aleksey German Jr. | Wrs: Aleksey German Jr., Maria Ogneva

Cast: Merab Ninidze, Anna Mikhalkova, Roza Khairullina, Anastasia Melnikova, Svetlana Khodchenkova, Alexander Pal, Anastasia Talyzina, Alexandra Bortich, Von Duanugiz | Drama USSR 106′

A middle-aged academic accused of embezzlement is the focus of this discursive arthouse feature from Russian director Aleksey German Jr. David (Ninidze) may be confined to house arrest by the authorities but his mind is free to expose a rich minefield of social issues affecting modern Russia.

There’s nothing particularly to this story that treads old ground for the most part. David’s critique touches on corruption, state-sponsored violence and anyone who dares to speak out against the system. But filtered through David’s own troubled state of mind, his bruised ego and indignation at being cooped up by the system that drew sharp criticism after his sketch of the Mayor having sex with an Ostrich, the story becomes more interesting. As such this is a rich character drama as much as a social satire. House Arrest is the most accessible film German Jr has made so far following in the footsteps of his recent features Dovlatov (2018) and Under Electric Clouds (2015), and premiering in this year’s Cannes Un Certain Regard sidebar.

People seem more concerned with the sex act itself rather than what it represented, and herein lies the dark irony of the situation further enriching the film’s plotlines. As an eminent professor specialising in Russian literature and particularly a late 19th century period referred to as the ‘Silver Age’ – fellow writer German clearly feels the professor’s anger acutely, and provides David’s mother (Roza Khairullina) as a wise stooge allowing him to expound on his ideas. Ex-wife (Anastasia Melnikova) is reluctant to become involved as her husband is part of the system but she supports him with food parcels in his increasingly untidy prison. The only person entirely onside is his lawyer Anna (Anna Mikhalkova) and she has her work cut out when strange men arrive at the flat in the middle of the night to beat him up. This is a timely if claustrophobic drama that will resonate with everyone who has been trapped in their lives and forced to ruminate and navel gaze in these Covid times. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2021 | UN CERTAIN REGARD

Shorta (2020)

Dir.: Frederik Louis Hviid, Anders Olholm; Cast: Jacob Lohmann. Simon Sears, Tarek Zayat, Al Jabouri, Issa Khattab; Denmark 2020, 108 min.

Shorta is an intelligent a police thriller tucking a range of weighty social issues firmly under its belt for an adrenaline-powered ride.

Danish first time directors/writers Frederik Hviid and Anders Olholm unpack the role of the today’s police in a crime caper that never lets up in dealing with racism, immigration and misogyny. The violence is hard-hitting but never gratuitous.

We start with the familiar good cop/bad cop routine: a day after a teenage immigrant is gravely injured by police, the squad boss asks officer Jens Hoyer (Sears) to keep an eye on fellow officer Jacob Lohmann (Andersen) who has a track records of open racism and misogyny, and enjoys provoking immigrants – something to be avoided on a day of high tension, even so when their patrol covers the infamous Svalegarden estate where the young victim lived.

At first the cops’ behaviour is true to form: Hoyer the voice of reason, Lohmann a brutal bully. Their relationship is made even more fraught by Jens having been a witness when the teenager was put in an arm lock by the police. Lohmann more or less threatens Hoyer to lie to the internal investigators maintaining that no excess force was used during the incident – appealing to his esprit de corps. Enter Amos (Zayat), a teenager from the same estate, deliberately throwing a milkshake at the two officers in the squad car. Amos is arrested and it soon emerges that the victim of police brutality has died in hospital and more violence follows for all concerned.

Although the director keeps his distance, his message is clear as day: the police cannot be expected to deal with issues caused by politics and parents who are no longer responsible or even interested in their kids. There are two scenes which really are heart-breaking: Lohmann fighting a German Shepherd in a lift: no prizes for guessing who survives. When are filmmakers going to stop kill off their dog characters? Still, Shorta makes its point and is entertaining – if you disconnect from reality. AS

ON RELEASE IN CINEMAS FROM 30 AUGUST 2021

A Hero (2021) Cannes Film Festival

Dir/Wri: Asghar Farhadi | Cast: Amir Jadidi, Mohsen Tanabandeh, Fereshteh Sadre Orafaiy, Sahar Goldust | Iran Drama 127′

Another moral satire from Asghar Farhadi that mulls over truth, honesty and family life in modern Iran.

The Royal Tombs of Persepolis provide a striking showcase early on when Rahim meets up with his brother brother-in-law (Alireza Jahandideh) to discuss ways of refinancing his life and paying back the money he owes a former other brother-in-law, Bahram (Mohsen Tanabandeh), who won’t let him get away with a penny, determined him suffer over the divorce. Meanwhile Ramin is hoping to marry career-minded Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldust) once things are back to normal.

This simple act makes Rahim a hero in the small local community boosting his self esteem with his family, and particularly his young son who has learning difficulties. But when the national press and TV get hold of the news his popularity leads to family jealousy, particularly for Bahram who digs his feet in over the money. And so Rahim’s naive act of honesty sets him back even further the envious family start picking, holes in story, and his motivations – they can’t quite believe him to be capable of such a selfless act. Rahim’s lack of confidence causes him to change his take on events and soon he’s the proverbial creek without a paddle, Farhadi deftly weaving a social media strand involving false news into his thorny narrative, just for good measure, once again triumphing with this immersive, elegantly paced modern parable in screening in competition at Cannes 2021

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Lamb (2021) Un Certain Regard 2021 | Un Certain Regard

Dir: Valdimar Johannsson | IFantasy Sci-fi | Iceland, 103′

This surreal sci-fi for animals lovers is one of a new breed of arthouse films that blends folklore and fantasy horror with a surprising touch of dark humour.

But there’s an unsettling undertone to this birth that leaves a nagging doubt in our minds and fuels this sober arthouse curio with eerie dread. The reason for their muted joy soon becomes apparent in a way that is both amusing and bizarre, with its distinct references to Cannes 2021 title Annette and even the recent Border.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2021 | UN CERTAIN REGARD

Bergman Island (2021)

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

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

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

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

NOW ON RELEASE FROM 3 JUNE 2022

The Innocents (2021)

Dir/Wri” Eskil Vogt | Cast: Rakel Lenora Flottum, Alva Brynsmo Ramstad, Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim, Sam Ashraf, Ellen Dorrit Pedersen, Morten Svartveit, Kadra Yusuf, Lise Tonne | Norway, 117′

The Omen meets Jack Clayton’s 1961 titular original in this haunting arthouse horror trip from Eskil Vogt who explores the parallel world of children in his chilling second feature.

The Innocents follows his eerie experimental drama Blind with this textured thematic look at casual violence and subversive behaviour in a group of young friends growing up in small-town rural Norway.

Seen entirely from the children’s point of view this is a deeply sinister and often violent film, at times frighteningly so, but subtle as a whisper. A sense of terrible dread seethes as the plot unfolds, Vogt spending rather too much time establishing the milieu of a modest domestic set-up before hitting the jugular in full blown psychological horror that dives deep below the surface of ordinary young lives.

Freed from the mundanity of running their lives kids are free to let their imaginations wander. And wander they certainly do in a serene suburban idyll surrounded by pine forests and sparkling blue skies that create an oppressive sense of isolation for the blonde-haired angel-faced Ida, played by Rakel Lenora Flottum, her autistic and mute older sister Anna (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad) and their kindly but ineffectual parents (Ellen Dorrit Pedersen and Morten Svartveit).

The kids are free to roam far and wide and soon become firm friends with tousled-haired Aisha (Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim) and the levantine Ben (Sam Ashraf impressive in debut) whose background is more troubled, in one violent scene he throws Ida’s pet kitten from the top of the stairs and crushes the crippled animal’s skull – without any remorse. Ben also develops telekinetic powers not unlike Danny in The Shining but Ben’s are put to nefarious use in sending a boiling pan of water over his single mother (Lise Tonne) while he carries on oblivious.

An eerie soundscape from Gustaf Berger and Gisle Tveito ramps up the tension as Ben’s powers come into conflict with Anna’s benign psychic sense as a turbulent battle of wills plays out completely beyond the radar of the adult world.

As the film edges towards its startling finale Vogt creates a distinctive and highly-tuned alter universe in a lushly cinematic supernatural horror that remains tethered in reality while sending out shockwaves of terror with lowkey but chilling affect. MT

Now ON RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS

Tre Piani | Three Stories (2021)

Dir: Nanni Moretti | Wri: Nanni Moretti, Federica Pontremoli, Valia Santella | Cast: Margherita Buy, Riccardo Scamarcio, Alba Rohrwacher, Nanni Moretti | Italy 119′

Nanni Moretti’s latest will certainly appeal to fans of his classically filmed dramas featuring Italy’s best acting talent. Since winning the Palme d’Or in 2001 for The Son’s Room he has been turning out spirited stories about life for middle class people, and this circuitous story involving neighbouring families is darkly witty and enjoyable, although more muted than his earlier fare. The women are peacemakers, the men the troublemakers, apart from Moretti himself who plays a powerful man of integrity, naturally – he’s the director.

Based on a novel by Tel Aviv writer Eshkol Nevo, Moretti transports the intricately plotted action to Rome where a car accident sets the cat amongst the pigeons for those living nearby. Local resident Monica (Alba Rohrwacher) is waiting for a taxi to take her to hospital where she will give birth to her first child when a speeding car collides with a nearby pedestrian, hurtling into the ground floor flat where Sara (Elena Lietti) and Lucio (Riccardo Scamarcio) live with their 7-year-old daughter.

At the wheel of the car is a drunkun Andrea (Alessandro Sperduti), the problem son of two judges, Dora (Margherita Buy) and Vittorio (Moretti) who will refuse to pull any strings for their son, causing a long-lasting rift in the family when his prison term is finally up.

Meanwhile Monica gives birth to baby Beatrice with her usual elfin delicatesse, her alluring husband Giorgio (Adriano Giannini) is working abroad offering no emotional support to deal with the baby or her ageing mother, but female empowerment saves the day. A mini mafia subplot with Giorgio’s estranged brother gives the story another showcase for its signature male rivalry and violence, Monica batting off his sexual advances with grace.

Meanwhile Sara (Elena Lietti) and Lucio (Riccardo Scamarcio) become suspicious of the old man next door Renato (Paolo Graziosi), who regularly babysits their daughter and who provides the film’s child abuse theme that will see Lucio himself in a flirtation with young neighbour Sara (Elena Lietti) later accusing him of sexual misconduct.

Elegantly paced and thoughtful with some inspiring music choices and delightful performances, Moretti delivers another class act. MT

ON BFI PLAYER

Mothering Sunday (2021) Cannes Film Festival

Dir: Eva Husson | Cast: Odessa Young, Josh O’Connor, Sope Dirisu, Colin Firth, Olivia Colman, Glenda Jackson | UK Drama 110′

A nostalgic reflection on English family life ravaged by loss in the Great War is the subject of Eva Husson’s languorous female empowerment melodrama.

Slim of plot but indulgently languid in its evocative sensuality Mothering Sunday is seen through the eyes of a young girl in service reflecting back on a fateful summer day in 1924 when tragedy changed her life forever: and decided to become a writer. The timeline sashays backwards and forwards, Glenda Jackson adding grist as the older novelist Jane shrugging off the success of her prize-winning in the modern day.

In the background Colin Firth and Olivia Colman play the Nivens, an older generation broken by loss and still mourning their sons killed in the war. But the focus here is on sensuality rather than storyline, and the camera lingers on their love scenes as Jane prances around naked. Meanwhile on the grassy lawns of Henley the Nivens keep calm and carry on over a tearful lunch with their coterie of bereaved friends, Colin fronting up well, Colman morose.

But there’s only so much loving-making and visuals of fusty libraries and flowers in a china vase a film can take. And rather than focus on Jane’s literary aspirations and how they eventually take shape and blossom professional – we see her occasionally penciling a word on a page, or in brief vignettes during a marriage in the 1940s, Husson is more concerned with the atmosphere, permeating this soulful story with a pent up feeling of loss and longing, that eventually erupts in the tragic denouement. In this sense the film is a missed opportunity to make better use of its strong cast of Colin Firth, Olivia Colman and Glenda Jackson. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Benedetta (2021)

Dir: Paul Verhoeven | Cast: Virginie Efira, Charlotte Rampling, Daphné Patakia, Lambert Wilson, Olivier Rabourdin, Louise Chevillotte

Dutch director Paul Verhoeven is still best known for his scandalous sex saga Basic Instinct. It set the 1990s on fire with Sharon Stone’s memorable naked crutch shot and a brilliant script by Joe Eszterhas that felt racy and groundbreaking. Next came Showgirls and Elle, notable for their leading ladies Gina Gershon (who won a Razzie award) and the incandescent Isabelle Huppert.

Benedetta attempts to recreate the world of Ken Russell’s The Devils and Walerian Borowcyck’s Blanche without their narrative ballast despite an opening credit that proudly announces “based on a true story”: of a naughty nun in Renaissance Italy entitled’ Immodest Acts’ by one Judith C Brown.

Benedetta Carlini claimed to have seen a vision of Jesus and subsequently devoted her life to her saviour. But the only devotion here is to the misogynist male gaze in a shagged-out shaggy dog story that drew sniggers of derision from an audience of critics at its Cannes premiere in 2021.

Benedetta (Virginie Efira), works her way shamelessly through the ecclesiastical hierarchy in a convent in Northern Italy city of Pescia after hoodwinking the Abbess Felicita – Rampling adding a touch of class in a difficult role as the Convent head. Efira doesn’t hold a candle (let alone a wimple0 to Sharon Stone in the erotic scenes, her approach too raunchy and too coarse.

Benedetta is warned early on that “your worst enemy is your body,”. But this is a caveat that soon falls by the wayside when dark-eyed novice Bartolomea (Patakia) is admitted to convent escaping her father’s cruel abuse. The story soon takes a more sinister turn when the two are bonded by their fatal attraction – far less alluring or convincing that that of the Stone and Douglas affair.

What starts out a lushly-mounted period drama soon descends into a dark-edged Carry on at the Convent-style caper that is more corny than provocative. Verhoeven has a field day as his absurdist melodrama burns through a bloated budget in extraordinary set pieces, its lush Tuscan locations evocatively lensed by Jeanne Lapoirie. Under the influence of Bartolomea, Benedetta turns into a bodice-ripping virago with a deep baritone voice. Worse is to come involving CGI snakes, blood-letting and stigmata in scenes featuring a sexually ambivalent Christ on the Cross.

A series of torrid encounters between the two young nuns drives the pacy plot forward, Felicita soon ‘smelling a rat’ through a peephole in the convent wall. Verhoeven and his Elle writer David Birke attempt to add moral complexity to the story by suggesting that Felicita is jealous of ‘their thing’ and this catapults the film towards its ludicrous finale playing out in Florence and featuring a glowering Lambert Wilson as the Catholic church’s top dog, the Nuncio.

This was a time where women were regularly burnt at the stake and had minimal social and sexual agency. In the confines of a convent cloistered exploits clearly allowed them a mode of sexual expression. But Verhoeven trivialises rather than champions the women’s cause by making these encounters porny than horny, at least for his female audience.

Overstaying its initial welcome at two hours (plus) this clunky bonkbuster feels both tedious and exploitative. What could have been seductively subversive is just silly and salaciously over the top. We are left smirking in our seats by the showcase showdown – but not in a good way – not caring what happens, as long as it ends. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 15 APRIL

Great Freedom (2021) Cannes Film Festival

Fir: Sebastian Meise | Drama 104’

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

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

Souad (2021)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ON RELEASE IN AUGUST 2021

After Yang (2021) Cannes Film Festival 2021

Dir: Kogonada | Famtasy sci-fi drama | 107’

Kogonada’s serenely seductive cinematic style was always going to be a winner for a Sci-fi meets Artificial intelligence thriller, especially when it stars Colin Farrell in the leading role.

He is the touchstone for the old-fashioned metrosexual male whose angsty performance keeps this feature real when far into the future robots can be hired to complete your nuclear family – if all else fails.

A sassy dance routine sets an upbeat tempo for a hypnotic drama where Kafkaesque scenarios still exist. If a robot breaks down the computer usually says ‘no’ to any simple repair job, that’s if you can get through to the call centre. Such is the case with ‘Second Siblings’ the company that provided Jake (Farell) and his partner Kyra (Turner-Smith) with an older Chinese brother in the shape of Yang for their strong-willed Chinese daughter Mika (Tjandrawidjaja).

Yang seems like a ‘normal’ teenager until he de-programmes and threatens to decompose just as we’ve met this happy multicultural family unit who live in a modernist bungalow in leafy LA. While Kyra is an ambivalent workaholic mother, Jake is left with the tech issues and that’s where the consumer nightmare starts, but the tone is ultra mellow and Jake’s mood can best be described as uncomfortably bemused.

South Korean-born Kogonada transports us to a dreamlike place in the future where technology has taken over but feelings still prevail for humans, their robo-sapiens sidekicks are just not “programmed that way”. But when Jake gets deeper into repairing Yang’s complex core he discovers a memory bank that is thrilling and out of this world.

Jake tracks down a blonde teenager who seemed to feature in Yang’s past, Ada (Haley Lu Ricardson) reveals how Yang was keen to explore his Chinese identity. Meanwhile Mika is suffering from the loss of her sibling particularly missing his sensitivity and understanding of her adoption likening it to the ancient Chinese practice of tree grafting, playing out in an idyllic scene in an apple orchard.

Kogonada directs with alluring sensitivity in a feature that engenders a warm feeling of calm through its delicately vibrant aesthetic and quietly convincing performances. After Yang contemplates a future that’s still far from perfect despite surreal technical advances. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Rehana Maryam Noor (2021) Cannes Film Festival Un Certain Regard

Dir/Wri: Abdullah Mohammad Saad Cast: Azmeri Haque Badhon, Afia Jahin Jaima | Drama 107

Bangladesh makes its first appearance ever in this year’s competition selection at Cannes 2021.

The claustrophobic, seething, slice of social realism is a second feature for writer-director Abdullah Mohammad Saad. It follows moralistic widow Dr. Rehana Maryam Noor in her daily round at a teaching hospital in Dhaka where she works as an assistant professor and mother of a recalcitrant teenage daughter, Emu (Afia Jahin Jaima).

Invigilating in the exam room in the opening scene of this tense psychological drama, Dr Noor unceremoniously expels a medical student for scribbling notes on her yellow ruler. This draconian approach sets the tone for a vehement tirade that plays out in grim close-up as she then comes across a professor abusing a student: there will be hell to play!.

Maryam – a smouldering Azmeri Haque Badhon – has a difficult backstory which slowly unfolds in parallel with the main narrative. Unbalanced by her fraught home life she is a woman who is unflinching in her approach to anyone who breaks the rules. A tough, spiky feminist she also makes for an unlikeable heroine clearly shaped by her tough life in this male-dominated sexist society.

In sharp contrast her boss Prof. Arefin (Kazi Sami Hassan) is almost lackadaisical towards the young students in his care, giving them a cautionary ticking off when they err. Especially in the case of Annie, a student who fetches up as Arefin’s office in tears. But when it transpires that the young girl has been sexually abused it’s impossible for Rehana not to get involved, determined to make those involved come forward and take the rap to safeguard the safety of future female students. But Rehana’s severe attitude soon points to her own repressed sexual nature, gradually complicating an already complex state of affairs that plays out in the second half of the film.

There so many themes going on in Saad’s richly textured script making this an engrossing but not particularly enjoyable film to watch which its intransigent characters and baleful tone. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | COMPETITION 2021

Cow (2021) Cannes Film Festival

Director: Andrea Arnold | UK Doc 94′

Andrea Arnold returns to her native Kent for a first documentary feature that follows the daily life of a most-loved farmyard animal, the Cow. An intrusive almost wordless look that starts with the birth of a female calf to Luma, a long-lashed beauty with a glossy black and white splodged coat. Hooves first, the baby emerges and all we see is an enquiring eye looking round at the world in amazement, Luma wiping a lustrous tongue round her fluffy ear. But mother and baby are soon parted, the calf is taken away to the plastic teat of the farmer’s bottle. Dairy cow Luma will then be milked mechanically for our own consumption til the end of her life.

Cow has echoes of the 2012 shocker Leviathan where Lucien Castaing Taylor and Vanessa Paravel took an intense arthouse gaze at commercial fishing through the eyes of the fish. Gunda took a similar wide-eyed approach: A human attempt to see things from the animals’ perspective, where the animal becomes our friend and the human a cruel, opportunistic interloper. When the black bull arrives to do his business, Luma carries on unimpressed. The only moment of bliss in her life is grazing in the bucolic peace of the summery Kentish meadows, chewing buttercups and lush grass in the moonlight. Overhead a plane comes into landing its lights flashing like an alien spaceship in her natural world.

The mass production of milk is big business but Arnold doesn’t bore us with the facts or figures, or even talking heads. The only heads here are furry bovine ones, and muddy bottoms caressed by swishing tails. Bemused, bewildered and beguiling the cows look out in wonder at a world of exploitation. And when Luma’s calf disappears into a plastic pen with a plastic teat, Luma moos loudly in protest as the two are parted. And as each of her calves is born Luma comes become protective, or at least that’s what we hear from a disembodied human voice. Clearly cows have feelings too. But here she exists to produce milk – gallons of it – and that repetitive diurnal task it what seems to lead to her tragic demise in the film’s shockingly blunt finale. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | CANNES PREMIERES

Everything Went Fine | Tout est bien passe (2021)

Dir: François Ozon | Cast: Sophie Marceau, André Dussollier, Géraldine Pailhas, Charlotte Rampling, Éric Caravaca, Hanna Schygulla, Grégory Gadebois, Jacques Nolot, Judith Magre, Daniel Mesguich, Nathalie Richard | France 98′

Francois Ozon always has a cheeky grin in his films. And Everything Went Fine is no exception. This candid end of life drama is a delightful follow-up to the darkly drole Summer of 85, a funny version of The Father with the same piquancy and sharp attention to detail. It could be anyone’s family story once parents get to ‘un certain age’. It could even be yours.

Charlotte Rampling is back, along with his regular collaborator the late novelist Emmanuèle Bernheim who wrote Under The Sand, Swimming Pool and 5X2 and on whose book this new story is based. Refreshingly honest and laced with Ozon’s classic subversiveness, André Dussollier plays the classic stroke-ridden 84 year old with an arch naughtiness and poignancy. The relationship with his long-suffering middle-aged daughters Emmanuelle and Pascale is spiky, to say the least. There’s even a cameo role for veteran Hanna Schygulla who advises on euthanasia.

What elevates this from trite comedy territory is the cast who really capture the essence of fraught family life with an honesty that tonally transcends sentimentality. Some may call it a ‘love hate relationship’ but this is exactly what happens with life and death, and Ozon craftily navigates these prickly relationships making us believe that he’s really been there himself.

Emmanuèle’s father André Bernheim is a cultured man with an ego not unlike Dustin Hoffman’s character in The Meyerowitz Stories that premiered at the festival in 2017. A rather selfish gay art collector who rediscovered his sexuality after marrying the girls’ sculptress mother – a cool-handed Charlotte Rampling – he keeps on the ball despite his stroke leaving him physically challenged.

Many may baulk at the humour Ozon playfully uses to convey a desperate family tragedy but this is really how it is – as those affected can frankly testify. And it’s this complete authenticity that keeps you glued to the screen and nodding in agreement, rather than the cardboard worthy scenario many may envisage.

Euthanasia is also thoughtfully handled, offering the film a morally meaty maze with plenty to chew on. This is a satisfyling mouthful that will make you laugh to self rather than out loud. A light-hearted comedy that unflinchingly faces reality with heart and humanity. MT

ON RELEASE from 17 June COURTESY OF CURZON | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Goodbye Morons | Adieu les cons (2021)

Dir.: Albert Dupontel; Cast: Virginie Efira, Albert Dupontel, Nicholas Marie, Jackie Berroyer, Bsstian Ughetto, Marilou Aussilloux, Josephine Helin; France 2020, 87 min.

Winning no fewer than six César’s at this March’s ceremony, Goodbye Morons is populist and playfully anarchic hitting just the right tone despite the odd cliché.

Comedy meets tragedy in the lives of three people: a dying woman and a suicidal software programmer in charge of national security who team up with a blind archivist to locate the woman’s long lost child.

Forty-three year-old hairdresser Suze Trappet (Efira) has fallen victim to the longterm hazard of aerosol hairsprays used in her saloon. But making contact with her son, given up for adoption, is her main priority before she goes. What follows is a fraught and hilarious struggle to see the teenage Alter Ego (Helin), assisted by soft-ware developer Jean-Baptiste Cuchas (Dupontel) whose attempts to end it all, after being sacked, only end up injuring a colleague in the next room.

Blind archivist Monsieur Blin, already a victim of police brutality, comes to Suze and JB’s rescue and their research leads them to Dr. Lint (Berroyer), the obstetrician who delivered young Suze’s baby boy. But Dr. Lint is suffering from Alzheimer’s and lives in a care home. To make matters worse his handwritten diaries are illegible, only his wife can decipher them. Eventually the trio finds success of sorts but this happy-end is overshadowed by a showcase showdown in true ‘Thelma and Louise’ fashion.

DoP Alexis Kavyrchine uses all the tricks in the book with his avant-garde electronic surveillance methods. Nobody is safe from the government, thanks to JB, but turning the tables on them proves counterproductive. Once again the comedy lies in the ridiculous red-tape. Dupontel melding machines with the mindless men in charge. A comedy enforcing a barbed message: our technicians are even less humane than the systems themselves. AS

NOW ON RELEASE AT CURZON CINEMAS NATIONWIDE

Val (2021) Cannes Film Festival

Dirs: Leo Scott and Ting Poo | US Doc 104′

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | SPECIAL SCREENINGS

Annette (2021) Cannes Film Festival

Dir/Wri: Leos Carax | Marion Cotillard, Adam Driver, Simon Helberg | Drama France, 139′

French auteur Leos Carax last graced the Croisette with Holy Motors a weird and mysterious odyssey into the mind of one man. Annette his latest creation sees him back in Cannes nine years later with another cinematic sensation: another journey into the complexities of male psyche that explores the nature of fame and the fragility of love through his first English language film.

Visually stunning in the style of Holy Motors, is Caroline Champetier once again beguiles with her luscious cinematography in a highly original film that blends its bizarre ideas and tonal switches with elegance, always surprising the audience: particularly with erotic sex scenes laced with obsidian black humour: this is a richly thematic modern classic with a focus firmly in the future.

But storm clouds soon gather over on the loved-up paradise in a melodramatic tone shift. Carax goes into overdrive in a full-blown expose of macho toxicity where passions are given full throttle during Henry’s hysterical nighttime motorbike rides home to his tropical hideaway, the dizzying camerawork recalling Holy Motors‘ nocturnal taxi forays. There is a third narrative strand in shape of Simon Helberg’s compelling turn as Ann’s spurned lover now reduced to her accompanying pianist at her elegantly-staged opera gigs. Once again Cotillard get the chance to play Lady Macbeth and this will be teased out suggestively in the film’s third act.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Zero Fucks Given | Rien a Foutre (2021) Semaine de la Critique

Dir.: Emmanuel Mare, Julie Lecoustre; Cast: Adèle Exarchopoulos, Mara Tarquin, Alexander Perrier, Jonathan Sawdon; Belgium 2021, 115 min.

Cassandra (Exarchopoulos from Blue is the warmest Colour) works for a budget airline mostly around Europe. She dreams of being hired by Emirates Airlines or even a high-paying company called Private Jets, but speaks only a little English apart from French.

Not only is the job repetitive and unfulfilling, Cassandra spends most of her time in airline terminals, a hostile and alien environment made worse since Covid. Drugs and disco are her favourite release on breaks from the inflight tedium. When her contract runs out, she is re-assigned to a course that includes saving passengers with CPR – an exercise Cassandra fails dismally, unable to interact even with a dummy: “You are breaking all his ribs” the course leader tells her, after Cassandra pummels the model doll mercilessly. Job follows job largely down to Cassandra’s ability to sell her persona on Zoom interviews ‘Seize the day’ very much captures the economic and social climate of this disposal world.

Exarchopoulos gives a stunning performance as the women “with no attributes”, an empty vessel not even trying to find an engagement with the outside world. She is vague to the point of disowning herself, constantly on the move in transit positions. She is the modern young woman honed for the quick-turnaround of her professional life, opting for a quick fix while treading water in the hope of a better opportunity, always with her eye to the main chance. Cassandra is the opposite of her sister and father: rootless and uninterested in her past, leaving them to fight with the emotional consequences of the mother’s death. DoP Olivier Boonjing excels with the cold airport images where contrast, the warmer colours of Cassandra’s hometown. Zero Fucks Given is certainly original: an almost sinister study of a modern milliennial. Hugely recommended. AS

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | 2021

Intregalde (2021) Quinzaine – Cannes Film Festival 2021

Dir: Radu Muntean | Romania, 104′

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2021 | QUINZAINE DES REALISATEURS.

Europa (2021) Quinzaine – Cannes Film Festival 2021

Dir/Wri: Haider Rashid | Adam Ali, Svetlana Yancheva, Mohomed Zouaoui, Michael Segal | Italy, Thriller 75′

This gritty immigration clearly takes it cue from the 1964 Czechlovak classic Diamonds of the Night that followed two Jewish teenagers escaping from a train taking them to Dachau concentration camp. Haider Rashid’s debut may be more colourful but the sombre subject remains the same. A breathless handheld camera follows a young Iraqi Muslim who reaches the coast of Bulgarian on a boat, trafficked from North Africa. Hoping for a better life, rather than escaping certain death like the teens in Jan Namec’s New Wave debut that ends in tragedy, Europa is more enigmatic.

DoP Jacopo Caramella keeps his camera right up close to Kamal (Ali) as he rushes on through the bosky undergrowth. Occasionally the focus broadens to the near distance where his pursuers are hot on his trail. Europa is about the pain, fear and gruelling tiredness suffered by this modern refugee who may be young and fit but is also injured and exhausted by his dangerous odyssey, and ill-equipped for to endure the perilous journey that lies ahead when night falls.

Writing with Sonia Giannetto, Haider keeps the tension taut in this fact- based drama driven forward by Kamal’s terrorised POV. We feel his sheer exhaustion, his fear-fuelled energy sapping away. Eventually he reaches a safe haven in the woods but not for long. Adam Ali grew up in the safety of Manchester but his performance as Kamal is fraught with palpable terror in this tightly- wound unhurried tragedy that ponders the unkindness of strangers. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Don’t Take it to Heart (1944)

Dir: Jeffrey Dell | Cast: Richard Bird, Edward Rigby, Esma Cannon, Ivor Barnard | UK Drama 90′

Jeffrey Dell’s best remembered credit as a director is probably Carlton-Browne of the F. O., which he co-directed fifteen years later with Roy Boulting; and which looks like Ken Loach compared to this frenzied exercise in garrulous lunacy set in Chaunduyt (pronounced ‘Condit’), a fictitious rural community with an inbred population whose surnames tend to be either ‘Bucket’ or ‘Pail’.

Richard Greene is just a hole in the screen as the supposed ‘hero’ (compensated for by a very young Patricia Medina as a button-eyed socialist in jodhpurs). However, it looks good and has a typically wondrous supporting cast of the period. But it’s never actually as funny as it should be (despite the exclamation mark in the title and the soundtrack’s strenuous efforts to convince us how hilarious this all is), and the interminable courtroom section that takes up much of the second half of the film is a pale (or should that be ‘Pail’?) echo of the equivalent sequence in Passport to Pimlico.@Richard Chatten

The Surrogate (2020)

Dir.: Jeremy Hersh; Cast: Jasmine Batchelor, Chris Perfetti, Sullivan Jones, Brook Bloom, Tonya Pinkins; USA 2020, 93 min.

Made on a (crowd funded) mini-budget, The Surrogate is one of those worthy films you really want to like: Take a pregnancy, a Down’s Syndrome baby, a surrogate mother and two gay ‘fathers’ and you have the recipe for a success. But no, Hersh’s script lets him down, and the actors can’t help.

The titular surrogate mother is Jess Harris (Batchelor), who, in spite of an MA, is having difficulties as a web designer for a Non-Profit outfit which does nothing to value to her efforts. Jess throws all her energies into becoming a surrogate mother for best friends Josh (Perfetti) and Aaron Jones (a lawyer for a prestigious law firm, who has drawn up a contract between Jess and the gay couple).

Since surrogacy is illegal in the State of New York, money cannot change hands. But after the first euphoria, it turns out the baby’s genetic make-up points to Down’s Syndrome. At first, Jess intends to leave the abortion option to the men, but after they voice support for a termination, Jess becomes a saint-like fighter for the unborn baby, taking the couple to a Help Centre for those affected and a visit to family with a Special Needs child. Eventually she literally rail-roads a mother of an afflicted child into answering all her questions about why she, Jess, should not terminate the pregnancy. The bemused mother just can’t give an affirmative answer. From selfless helper, Jess becomes increasingly judgemental when the men decide, once and for all, to opt for a termination.

Hersh’s characters are rather one dimensional, the gay couple only defined by their sexuality. Jess’ family members come and go, so does a sudden love interest. We are left with a hectoring main character who pushes forward ideological points of view, rather that a real person full of contradictions and doubts.

DoP Mia Cioffi Henry tries her best with the mundane environment, but the narrative only really offers her talking-head shots, All the performances suffer from Jess’s central position – the feature being determined by a morality-play insincerity. Many valid questions are raised, but are left hanging in the air. AS

IN CINEMAS FROM 9 JULY

The Heroics | Les Heroiques (2021) Cannes Film Festival 2021

Dir.: Maxime Roy; Cast: Richard Bohringer, Francois Creton, Romeo Creton, Ariane Ascaride, Patrick D’Assumçao, Clothilde Couran, Clara Ponsot, Mai and Cosmo Gernay-Fouquin; France 2021, 99 min.

This ‘Men behaving badly in Paris’ buddy movie reunites Maxime Roy with the cast of his short film Beautiful Losers. It’s a world where drugs and alcohol fuel physical and psychological abuse for the punk generation Francois Creton – who co-wrote the script – plays 53-year old bruiser Michel, who has fathered a baby called Arno despite his longterm addiction to Meths, Although he’s spend the last six months on the waggon.

Michel’s meets up with a close coterie of friends at the classic AA meeting, where he breaks down cursing himself and the world in general. But a visit to the hospital doctor confirms the damage wreaked on his body. Although his friends exhort him to ‘grow up’ on a regular basis: he does not want and therein lies the problem. ,

He sees himself as the perpetual Peter Pan character freewheeling through life in an alcoholic daze of music, drugs and his motorcycle. Reality – he feels – has conspired against him. And he’s fallen with nearly everyone, not least Arno’s mother Hélène (Couran) whose advice is: “Do your son a favour, get out of our lives”. Michel’s mother committed suicide and his relationship with his father Claude (Bohringer) – who has anger management issues and is dying of cancer – is even is more fraught, the two men have a big blow up, accusing each other for her death. Despite the bust up, Claude tries to get his son a job as a welder with a friend, but Michel is too proud to go on the training course.

Claude lives with Josiane (Ascaride), who is trying to broker a truce between son and father but even she give up in the end, along with Michel’s oldest son eighteen year-old Leo (R. Creton) who finds out that the fatherly role model is a cul-de-sac, and soon moves out. Michel has a softer side, supporting his AA pal Lily (Ponsot) who can’t face the first hour of alcohol free existence

This this richly textured character piece is no hyper-realist film in the Ken Loach tradition. Nothing could be further from the truth: Roy shows Michel’s depravity in all its glory but opts for a European form of Magic Realism, connected to the South American tradition of Glauber Rocha or Alejandro Jodorowsky.

DoP Balthazar Lab’s fluid camera captures moments of pure poetry: the baby sleeping serenely while a water leak causes mayhem in Michel’s flat. The motorcycle sequences, shot often at night, are also particularly impressive, when the baby, again, is oblivious to the danger, while his mother is doing her nut. Bohringer and Ascaride triumph along with a talented ensemble cast steered by finely tuned Roy’s finely-tuned direction in this darkly comic French tragedy that’s competing in this year’s Camera D’Or in the Cannes Special Screening sidebar. AS

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2021 | CAMERA D’OR.

Anaïs in Love (2021)

Dir: Charlene Bourgeois-Tacquet | Cast: Valerie Bruni-Tedeschi, Anais Demoustier, Denis Podalydes, Jean-Charles Clichet,

Anaïs in Love is light, fluffy but real in its depiction of a young girl enjoying her Parisian life, flirting and indulging in a varied sex life while trying to pay the rent – and who better to play her than a gorgeously flip and froufrou Anais Demoustier who strikes just the right chord between frivolousness and concern for her mother, recently diagnosed with cancer, as the titular Anaïs, who can shed a tear although a smile is never far from her pouting red lips.

This is French filmmaker Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s feature debut and she writes and directs with confidence and a lightness of touch in a freewheeling narrative that sashays gaily around Paris in the summer. Of course, it always helps to have Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi in this sort of upbeat sweet-hearted drama, and she adds a touch of class in her usual slightly ‘distraite’ style as Emilie, a vaguely blue-stocking woman who lectures on creative writing at a summer school that piques Anais’ attention. The two bond immediately, drawn together by the stylish allure they both exude, and a strong sexual attraction.

Of course, Anaïs is short of cash and has to blag herself onto the class where upfront payment is de rigueur. Here she meets Yoann whose father has just died of cancer, reminding Anaïs to write to her mother (cue John Ireland’s mournful score of “When I am dead”). But it’s Emilie who holds the strongest interest for the young Anaïs, until it turns out that they also share the same man, in the shape of much older Daniel (Denis Podalydes) who turns up unexpectedly to join the fun in this enjoyable literary-themed romantic drama with its scarlet aesthetic and vibrant lesbian twist. MT

COMING TO CINEMAS ON 19 August 2022

La Traviata – Mes Frères et Moi (2021) Un Certain Regard Cannes 2021

Dir/Wri: Yohan Manca | Cast: Jael Mouin Berrandou, Judith Chemla, Dali Benssalah, Sofian Khammes | Drama France 108′

A 14-year-old boy broadens his cultural horizons caring for his bedridden mother in this fresh and lively family drama from France’s Yohan Manca.

Nour – a fresh-faced Jael Mouin Berrandou – has just finished school for the summer, but going on holiday is not on the cards. Sharing a council house with his four brothers brings tensions the usual tensions as the four of them struggle to look after their mother whose love of opera music – particularly La Traviata – fills their cramped home in the South of France.

When Nour crosses paths with Sarah (Manca’s real life partner Judith Chemla), who is teaching an Opera summer school, he finally finds the opportunity to come out of his shell and explore new horizons. Manca directs with real joie de vivre in this charming cinema verite crowdpleaser, his characters coming alive despite the challenges of the setting. There’s a raw energy connecting the men to their mother who while desperately sick still acts as a stabilising loving influence for her argumentative family. Chanelling a message of hope with its positive depiction of life’s challenges this is an upbeat feelgood contender for this year’s Un Certain Regard and Camera D’Or. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2021 | UN CERTAIN REGARD

The Employer and the Employee (2021) Quinzaine – Cannes Film Festival 2021

Dir.: Manolo Nieto; Cast: Nahuel Perez Biscayart, Christian Borges, Justina Bustos, Fatima Quintanilla, Carlos Lacuesta, Virgine Mendez, Manuel Guedes; Uruguay 2021, 105 min.

Another big screen treat from South America in this year’s Quinzaine selection, this time from Uruguay stars trailblazing Argentine actor Nahuel Perez Biscayart who has been the toast of the international festival circuit for Persian Lessons, Beats Per Minute, and See You Up There.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2021 | QUINZAINE DES REALISATEURS

Locarno International Film Festival 2021 – selection complete

New artistic director Giona A Nazzaro unveils his first mix of films for the 74th Locarno Film Festival which runs from 4 until 14 August in its luxurious Swiss lakeside location. Locarno is known for its edgy profile and this year will be no different: Films by established auteurs: Abel Ferrara, and Bertrand Mandico will screen alongside an inventive array of undiscovered newcomers in a selection that embraces traditional stories and more experimental avantgarde fare. 17 films from 12 countries having their world premiere in the international competition which promises, as ever, to be eclectic and daring.

Late additions to the party are world premieres: SHE WILL a Scottish-set psychological drama from Franco-British director Charlotte Colbert that centres on a mastectomy and stars Alice Krige, Rupert Everett and Malcolm McDowell, and 100 MINUTES the latest from veteran Russian director Gleb Paniflov who won the Golden Leopard in 1969 and the Golden Bear in 1987. The film’s focus is Alexandr Solzhenitzyn’s literary hero Ivan Denisov Shukhov, in a book that would win him the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The international competition jury comprises US filmmakers Eliza Hittmann and Kevin Jerome Everson, Italian actress Isabella Ferrari, director Philippe Lacote from Ivory Coast, and Portuguese actress Leonor Silveira.

Abel Ferrara’s espionage thriller Zeros And Ones stars Ethan Hawke as an American soldier caught up in an explosion at the Vatican. Srdjan Dragojević’s dark comedy Heavens Above explores the impact of miracles on the lives of three Serbians. Cop Secret is a sexually charged crime caper from Icelandic director Hannes Tor Halldórsson (who also plays in goal for his national football team and saved Lionel Messi’s penalty at the World Cup in 2018). Award-winning Indonesian director Edwin joins the main competition line-up with a comedy satire that sets nature against our macho world: Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash.

The festival’s Filmmakers of the Present strand welcomes a variety of international filmmakers with premieres from Philippines, Chile, Mexico, Tunisia as well as Western Europe.

The star of the show is the massive outdoor venue that is Piazza Grande – seating up to 7500 – the fun will start with Ferdinando Cito Filomarino’s Beckett, Oscar winner Stefan Ruzowitzky’s Hinterland, and US director John Swab’s crime Ida Red, starring Melissa Leo, Frank Grillo and Josh Hartnett.

Concorso internazionale 2021

After Blue (Fr)
Dir Bertrand Mandico

Al Naher (Leb/Fr/Ger/Qat)
Dir Ghassan Salhab

Espiritu Sagrado (Sp/Fr/Tur)
Dir Chema Garcia ibarra

Gerda (Rus)
Dir Natalya Kudryashova

I Giganti (It)
Dir Bonifacio Angius

A New Old Play (HK/Fr)
Dir QIU Jiongjiong

Juju Stories (Nig/Fr)
Dirs C.J. “Fiery” Obasi, Abba T. Makama, Michael Omonua

La Place d’une Autre (Fr)
Dir Aurelia Georges

Cop Secret (Ice)
Dir Hannes Tor Halldórsson

Luzifer (Aust)
Dir Peter Brunner

Medea (Rus)
Dir Alexander Zeldovich

Heavens Above (Serb/Ger/North Mac/Slo/Cro/Mont/Bos)
Dir Srdjan Dragojević

Petite Solange (Fr)
Dir Axelle Ropert

Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash (Indonesia/Sing/Ger)
Dir Edwin

The Odd-Job Men (Sp)
Dir Neus Ballus

Soul Of A Beast (Switz)
Dir Lorenz Merz

Zeros And Ones (It/Ger/USA)
Dir Abel Ferrara

Concorso Cineasti del presente 2021

Actual People (USA)
Dir Kit Zauhar

Holy Emy (Gr/Fr/USA)
Dir Araceli Lemos

Public Toilet Africa (Ghana)
Dir Kofi Ofosu-Yeboah

Brotherhood (Czech/It)
Dir Francesco Montagner

Virgin Blue (China)
Dir NIU Xiaoyu

Il Legionario (It/Fr)
Dir Hleb Papou

Whether The Weather Is Fine
Dir Carlo Francisco Manatad

L’Ete L’Eternite (Fr)
Dir Emilie Aussel

Mis Hermanos Suenan Despiertos (Chile)
Dir Claudia Huaiquimilla

Mostro (Mex)
Dir Jose Pablo Escamilla

Niemand ist bei den Kälbern (Ger)
Dir Sabrina Sarabi

Shankar’s Fairies (Ind)
Dir Irfana Majumdar

Streams (Tun/Lux/Fr)
Dir Mehdi Hmili

Wet Sand (Switz/Geo)
Dir Elene Naveriani

Zahori (Switz/Arg/Chile/Fr)
Dir Mari Alessandrini

Piazza Grande 2021

Beckett (It)
Dir Ferdinando Cito Filomarino

Free Guy (USA)
Dir Shawn Levy

Heat (USA)
Dir Michael Mann

Hinterland (Aust/Lux)
Dir Stefan Ruzowitzky

Ida Red (USA)
Dir John Swab

Monte Verita (Switz/Aust/Ger)
Dir Stefan Jager

National Lampoon’s Animal House (USA)
Dir John Landis

Respect (Canada/USA)
Dir Liesl Tommy

Rose (Fr)
Dir Aurelie Saada

Sing-Keu-Hol (Sinkhole) (South Korea)
Dir KIM Ji-hoon

The Alleys (Jor/Egy/Saudi Arabia/Qat)
Dir Bassel Ghandour

The Terminator (USA/UK)
Dir James Cameron

Vortex (Fr/Bel/Mon)
Dir Gaspar Noe

The Walking Liberty (It)
Dir Alessandro Rak

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2021 | 4 -14 AUGUST 2021

Lingui (2021) Cannes Film Festival 2021

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

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

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

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

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

Born in Chad, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun first won critical acclaim for his short films before directing his first feature, Bye-bye Africa (Best First Film, Venice Film Festival 1999). He then went on to direct Abouna (Our Father) (Director’s Fortnight, Cannes 2002), Daratt, Dry Season (Special Jury Award, Venice Film Festival 2006), A Screaming Man (Jury Prize, Cannes Film Festival 2010), Grigris (Vulcain Prize for Best Cinematography, Official Competition, Cannes Film Festival 2013). Hissein Habr , A Chadian Tragedy, his first documentary film, was selected at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, Official Selection – Special screening. A Season in France, is his first feature film shot in France, starring Eriq Ebouaney and Sandrine Bonnaire. Selected at the Toronto International Film Festival 2017 – Special Presentation. New York paid tribute to Mahamat-Saleh Haroun by hosting two retrospectives of his films: in 2006 at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and in 2018 at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). In 2010, he received at the Venice Mostra the Robert Bresson Award for his complete works and in 2013, the Fellini Medal awarded by UNESCO.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2021 | IN COMPETITION | WORLD PREMIERE

Cinema de la Plage | Cannes outdoor cinema 2021

This year’s Cannes Film Festival certainly promises better weather with its July slot taking over the usual rainy May programme when nvariably grey skies threaten to scupper the Cinema de la Plage – this year it’s going to be hot, hot, hot, with temperatures already in the 30s. So prepare for some balmy evenings watching films.

In the Mood for Love by Wong Kar-wai (2000, 1h38,

Hong Kong/China)
Awarded at the Festival de Cannes in 2000, Wong Kar-wai’s major work is one of the greatest romantic films of all time, set in a hypnotic and colourful universe with an enchanting original cast. A restored copy will be screened before its re-release in France on July 21, 2021 and worldwide starting in the summer of 2021.

Wednesday, July 7, 9:30 p.m.

Scarecrow by Jerry Schatzberg (1973, 1h52, USA)

Ten years ago, the photo of Faye Dunaway taken by Jerry Schatzberg was featured in the Cannes Festival poster. At the age of 94, as senior member of filmmakers still in service, Jerry will be in attendance on the Croisette to present the film that won the Palme d’or in 1973. One of the gems of great American cinema of the 1970s, with Al Pacino and Gene Hackman in a picaresque American road movie, it is an ode to freedom and to film.
Presented by Jerry Schatzberg

Thursday, July 8, 9:30 p.m.

Tom Medina by Tony Gatlif (2021, 1h40, France/Switzerland)
World premiere – Official Selection Cannes 2020
Ciné-Concert !

A “Camargue Western”, the new film from the great Tony Gatlif, winner of the Best Director Award at Cannes in 2004, will also bring us, prior to the screening, his trademark kind of surprise: the “Tom Medina Concert”, rock, flamenco, gypsy music performed by thirteen musicians, including Karoline Rose Sun, Nicolas Reyes, Manero, Norig, Cécile Évrot and flamenco dancer Karine Gonzales.
The evening is presented and moderated by Tony Gatlif

Friday, July 9, 9:30 p.m.

Black Cat, White Cat by Emir Kusturica (1998, 2h10, Germany/France)

A family adventure, funny and fantastical, with eccentric – one could say “kusturician” – characters, for a plunge into the depths of the colourful, musical and poetic world of Emir Kusturica, a two-time Palme d’or winner at Cannes.

Saturday, July 10, 9:30 p.m.

The Summit of the Gods (Le Sommet des Dieux) by Patrick Imbert (2021, 1h34, France/Luxembourg) World premiere – Official Selection Cannes 2020

Adapted from the famous manga by Jirô Taniguchi, himself inspired by the novel by Baku Yumemakura, The Summit of the Gods is an extraordinary animation film, a great adventure and an investigation into the thrilling realm of conquering the world’s most challenging peaks.
Presented by Patrick Imbert

Sunday, July 11, 9:30 p.m.

JFK (Director’s Cut) by Oliver Stone (1991, 3h25, USA/France)

The most famous film about the event that traumatized America in 1963. The investigation carried out on a drum roll on the assassination of President Kennedy: suspense, politics and history. Oliver Stone presents his personal thesis, with conviction and often convincing, that there were several killers and that it was a plot against America. Screened in its full version, as Oliver Stone wished, it will also raise the curtain on the next day’s screening in Official Selection of the world avant-premiere of another fascinating documentary: JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass.
Presented by Oliver Stone

Monday, July 12, 9:30 p.m.

Fast and Furious 9 by Justin Lin (2021, 2h23, USA)
European avant-première

For the return of the Festival in Cannes and of film in our hearts, Universal Studios is offering the Cannes audience a magnificent gift and one of the highlights of the summer: opus 9 of the motorized saga, screened in avant-première in France prior to its release on July 14. Vin Diesel and his band, the family, harrowing stunts and crazy car chases. The blockbuster of the summer.

Tuesday, July 13, 9:30 p.m.

Fast and Furious 9 by Justin Lin (2021, 2h23, USA)

Rain check date in the event of bad weather the previous evening. If the July 12 screening is held normally, then another film will be screened on July 13.

Wednesday July 14, 10 p.m.

Bastille Day – Fireworks put on by the City Hall of Cannes.

Thursday, July 15 9:30 p.m.

Lovers Rock by Steve McQueen (2020, 1h08, UK)
Official Selection Cannes 2020

In the 2020 Official Selection, and at long last on the big screen in France, the Small Axe anthology is like a long trance, a slow combustion of desire on a backdrop of reggae in London of the 1960s, that represents almost everything you weren’t allowed to do under physical distancing. In this summer of 2021, this is the perfect film by which we can come out of confinement (cautiously)!
Presented by Steve McQueen

Friday July 16, 9:30 p.m.

Amélie by Jean-Pierre Jeunet (2001, 2h01, France/Germany)
Thrust into the limelight two decades ago, Amélie depicted Paris and Parisians, Montmartre and garden gnomes, extraordinary actors (Audrey Tautou, Mathieu Kassovitz, Jamel Debbouze) and a splendid tribute to French cinema of the 1940s. Jeunet at his best.
Presented by Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Saturday, July 17, 9:30 p.m.

David Byrne’s American Utopia by Spike Lee (2020, 1h45, USA)Spike

Lee’s latest film, never released in France. A percussive concert of extraordinary beauty by New York singer David Byrne, directed by the 2021 President of the Jury. The best way to close the Festival: with music!

ALL SCREENINGS TAKE PLACE ON THE BEACH | ALL WELCOME

Where is Anne Frank? (2021)

Dir: Ari Folman | With voices of Emily Carey, Ruby Stokes, Neil Barlow, Skye Bennett, Sebastian Croft, Stewart Scudamore | US Animation 109′

On a dark stormy night in Amsterdam a red-haired beauty breaks into the city’s Holocaust Museum and steals a diary from a crystal showcase. The woman is Kitty and the daybook belonged to the famous woman who created it, Annelies Marie Frank (1929-45).

Ari Folman’s latest animation is a playfully evocative take on the tragedy of Anne Frank (Emily Carey) whose final months are reflected through the eyes of her gadabout muse and confidante Kitty, vividly brought to life here by Ruby Stokes. Bristling with ideas that buzz around like fireflies in the vibrantly rendered animations, this clever imagined drama offers a slice of European social and political history pulsing to an upbeat syncopated score, but doom is never far away.

Ink spots on the diary implode to expose episodes of Anne’s daily life before and after her Jewish family’s confinement in the Amsterdam attic, Folman reveals a tense and introspective young daddy’s girl (her father Otto was the sole survivor) escaping into her imagination, pushed away by an unloving mother, an envious elder sister (Margot) and a collection of unsuitable boyfriends in the shape of Herman Kupman and Rob Cohen, growing up in wartime Amsterdam. Finally she settles for the gentle unassuming hypochondriac Peter van Daan, thoughtfully voiced by Sebastian Croft.

In the present day, Kitty comes alive as an inquiring young ‘girl about town’ desperate to find out what happened to her creator, who disappeared nearly eighty years ago. Gradually the past and present collide through a kaleidoscope of comic and tragic touchstones: flashbacks to Anne’s final birthday with a cake and bottle of ‘4711’ cologne; Nazi troops marching into the city as supersized Darth Vader monsters shrouded in black; the ‘Occupy Europe’ era. The current immigration crisis shoehorned in as a pivotal plot twist is inspired, but somehow a step too far.

More convincing is the film’s ‘cancel culture’ theme that sees the wan and prickly teenage Anne confessing to missing the cinema as she huddles with her family in their attic hideout while the Nazis set fire to the city, banning Jews from everywhere in the ensuing mayhem. Her dream that Clark Gable will scoop her up on a white charger and save her from the macabre encroaching enemy feels real and poignant with its nod to the pandemic.

In their hideout the Frank family are joined by the genteel Van Daans. This allows Folman to make some amusing observations about living in close quarters with strangers: how do you cope with flatulence when your diet consists largely of cabbage? Then there’s the well-worn hypochondria theme seen through Peter’s penchant for staying in bed all day feigning illness.

After Anne’s ‘disappearance’ Kitty files a ‘missing person’s report’ and meets little Ava who has managed to enter Europe by boat courtesy of her sailor father. The police are ever vigilant, one officer has an Israeli accent, but the shadow of the death camps darkens the film’s final segment in haunting widescreen animations picturing trains travelling East to Westerbork transit camp where Anne and her mother are briefly united before she goes with Margot to Bergen Belsen and beyond.

There is a romantic scene towards the end that captures Anne and Peter kissing under a frosty star-strewn sky, set to Chopin’s Piano Etude #3 In E. this is the loveliest memory of a film that occasionally dazzles with its trove of thoughts and memories of a terrible time in history when Europe was divided as it is, once again, today. MT

IN CINEMAS FROM 12 AUGUST 2022

Freaky (2020)

Dir: Christopher Landon | US Comedy Horror 98′

A fun and freaky body-swap film that sees a bullied beauty become the target of a serial killer on the run whose mystical dagger sets in motion an unlikely switcheroo. Worse still the young schoolgirl has only twenty four hours to return to her original form before she is stuck as the hideous “Blissfield butcher” forever.

Vince Vaughn is astonishingly complex in his teenage girl guise carrying this film through a largely predictable storyline with some inspired gore-filled set pieces echoing Freaky Friday in a comedy slasher that’s more weird than scary, but certainly entertaining and confidently put together by Landon who is best known for his 2017 outing Happy Death Day.

Meanwhile Millie (Kathryn Newton) recruits her friends (Misha Osherovich and Celeste O’Connor) to help her get back to normal and garners considerable emotional and physical power as a 6.5 foot man – offering some food for thought with the boot on the other foot. There’s also a flirty frisson going on in the background between Vaughn’s teen transformation and Millie’s high school crush (Uriah Shelton). And you don’t often see that kind of subplot is this kind of movie. MT

OUT IN CINEMAS FROM 1 July 2021

Evolution (2021) Cannes Film Festival 2021

Dir: Kornél Mundruczó, Kata Weber | Hungary Drama 97’

In a blistering follow-up to Pieces of a Woman, Kornél Mundruczó and Katia Weber return with this powerful drama tracing three generations of a family, from a surreal memory of World War II to modern day Berlin, unable to process their past in a society still coping with the wounds of its history.

False memories, real memories, recollections and reminiscences still haunt those affected as they surface, bob along or drown in a tide of feelings haunted by the past and connected by the Hungarian filmmaker’s evocatively visual imagery and Weber’s thoughtful storytelling.

Drawing on her Hungarian Jewish roots Weber crafts a three stranded story, the first, entitled Lena, is one of the most unusual opening scenarios of recent years set on a second world wartime battlefield, the second is about Lena, a discursive two handler that sees a mother recounting her Holocaust early months as a baby born in Auschwitz, and the third is set in modern Berlin where her own daughter is now living with a son Jonas who is having a difficult time at school. While generational traumas find new expression in the present, the family in EVOLUTION looks towards a more hopeful future despite its troubled past. MT

Retour a Reims (Fragments) (2021) Cannes Film Festival, Quinzaine 2021

Dir.: Jean-Gabriel Périot; Documentary with a narration by Adèle Haenel; France 2021, 83 min.

Adèle Haenel is the force behind this sober big screen essay film from French writer/director Jean-Gabriel Périot, based on the autobiography of philosopher and author Didier Eribon (*1953) Retour a Reims (2009) it works as a social and political commentary of the past 100 years.

Eribon is a controversial figure in French literary circles winning the prestigious Brudner Prize, which he later returned. Retour has also been adapted for the stage by Laurent Hatal in 2014.

Périot successfully avoids talking heads and instead overlays Adèle Haenel’s narration of the text with a 83-minute collection of French newsreel, documentary and feature film clips from the 20th century. As the camera slowly pans over a working class district of the city, Retour a Reims opens with a discourse on the family’s history, recounting how his grandfather, who died aged 54, kept it all going with to two jobs during the 1940s when the average live expectancy of manual workers was around 59. There then follows a long diatribe about a reconciliation with his mother, visiting her for the first time in 30 years, after the death of his homophobic father. “My hatred for him has been forged by the violence of the social world. His fate was determined by his upbringing. leaving school at fourteen like all working class kids of his generation. The powers that be knew that Culture was a corrupting force, controlled by the middle and upper classes, they were kept apart from the workers”.

An interview during the 1950s documents the power of this ruling ideology: “At work I can be free, in school we had to be quiet, but at work, we sing, talk and so on.” As in much of Europe, only the privileged entered higher education. Working class parents could not help their children with home work, they could not even, as one of the mother recalls tearfully, give the children fruit.

Eribon’s parents started their marriage in a single room without a bath. Their family was completed with two sons. In the 1950s illegal abortions were common, so some couples put their sex life on hold. After his mother’s insistence paid off, the family was given a two-bedroom apartment in one of the new estate on the city’s border. Later, his father was made redundant, and his wife was forced to work in the factory. Traumatised by losing control of the earning power, he joined other men in the local bars near the factory gates to see if their wives were being faithful.

Most working class men had a privileged position in the family set-up: their wives managing the domestic routine often holding down part-time jobs as well as child and home care. Meanwhile the men were away for long hours of social life in the bars and fishing “to get peace from the noisy family life”. Eribon’s parents voted Communist during the 1950s and 60s. This was not so much a political project, but a reaction to the hardship of every-day life. “We don’t know what happy ness is, because we do not have it”.

The advance of the National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen in the early 1970s, was fuelled by the deep-seated racism of the white working class. “A million unemployed means a million immigrants too many”. The replacement of the Communist Party of France by the NF as the main party of the French proletariat is mirrored in a scene from a feature film: in a bar full of French workers, a mixed race couple as accosted, the white woman called a “whore”. One of the workers has a grim message: “I would simply drop an A-bomb on Algiers”. Another one has a better solution:” No bombs. What we should do is put all immigrants onto planes, and then open the doors over the sea”.

Eribon “adopted the racism against the workers from North Africa”. After his mother ‘confessed’ to having voted NF, Didier told her “that Le Pen’s Party was against abortion rights”, but she went on complaining about the hordes of immigrant children.” They have to learn that these places here are not like the hovels they have back home”. After his parents moved away from the estates, her son comes to the conclusion that “the NF is the last bastion of the working class to preserve the identity against those politicians from the right and left, who have trampled on it.” And “My mother’s racism was a compensation for her own repression, so that she could feel superior to those even worse off than herself.” But isn’t the stance of the disenfranchised? The outlook, according to Eribon, is not rosy; somebone painting a slogan on a shop window after the 2017 election “Macron 2017, Le Pen 2022”.

What makes Retour so fascinating is the mixture of personal memory and historical research. Somehow, the author’s guilt at becoming a “class traitor”, seeps below the surface of his studied distance. But most intriguing is the parallel rail of film and commentary: the seventh art as a witness of history. Brilliant. AS

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | QUINZAINE 2021 | SUNDAY JULY 11, 2021

Small Body (2021)

Dir: Laura Samani Wri: Marco Borromei, Elisa Dondi, Laura Samani | Cast Celeste Cescutti, Ondina Quadri | Italy / France / Slovenia – 2021 – 89′ – Friulan and Venetian dialect

A spiritual journey into the unknown is at the heart of this haunting debut feature from Laura Samani whose work explores the mystical connection between faith and womanhood in her native Italy.

Celeste Cescutti is the determined female driving force of this eventful odyssey that starts in a fishing community on the shores of the Adriatic at the turn of the 20th century and culminates in the lofty Dolomite mountains. She is Agata a young woman celebrating the imminent arrival of her first child with special ceremony that takes place on the seashore.

The small body of the title refers to her stillborn child – a baby girl – who is buried by her husband before Agata even has a chance to see or hold her. In the Catholic faith, baptism is only for the living, and the local priest denies the child a Christening, leaving its soul languishing in Limbo. When Agata hears about a holy sanctuary in the mountains where infants can be baptised, she courageously sets off with the recovered body of her daughter to ensure she has a place in Heaven, against the odds.

Essentially a two-hander, Small Body (Piccolo Corpo) is an assured feature debut for Samani whose sensitive style echoes the lightness of touch in Corpo Celeste and The Wonders by fellow Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher. The film explores the mystique of religious devotion and its links to folklore and ancient tradition, making use of magic realism in a way that feels tonally convincing transporting the story into the realms of spirituality despite the harsh realities of Agata’s mission in difficult conditions and a hostile terrain.

Rather like Jesus Christ’s journey into the wilderness, Agata’s ‘pilgrimage’ north is hampered by highwaymen, unsavoury characters and adverse weather. She also has to convince her mysterious guide (Quadri) not to abandon her, luring them on with a secret package, and promising to share its precious contents if the mission in successful.

Quadri, who has already won awards for a role in Ariana, joins a cast of non-pros as the rather enigmatic wayfarer Agata meets on her journey north. The two rebels bond without altogether trusting one another as they pursue their individual goals. An original score by Frederika Stahl adds a sinister undercurrent to proceedings in this mystical drama lensed by Slovenian DoP Mitja Ličen whose magnificent landscapes of Venezia Friuli Giulia and the Italian Dolomites create a surreal sense of place. @MeredithTaylor

NOW ON BFI PLAYER | SEMAINE DE LA CRITIQUE | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Tom Medina (2021) Cannes Film Festival 2021

Dir.: Tony Gatlif; Cast: David Murgia, Slimane Dazi, Karoline Rose Sun, Suzanne Aubert, Lyes Ouzeri; France 2020/21, 95 min.

The latest from French, Algerian born director/writer Tony Gatlif is a passionate portrait of a young drifter, the titular Tom Medina, who fails to adjust to life in the romantic surroundings of the Camargue.

Drawing on his ethnic heritage as a Romani, Gatlif shows Tom in permanent transit transported by magical landscapes, DoP Patrick Gheringhell conjures up a parallel universe where Tom is much more comfortable than in reality.

Tom is a petty criminal on the run from his family heading for Spain where he hopes to become a matador. But his identity papers are in disarray and his gothic rock star daughter Stella (Rose Sun) and father are still bemused by his sudden disappearance. Now on probation along with his sidekick Bob, (Ouzeri), a marionettist who entertains everybody with his witty performances, the two are entrusted to the care of Ulysse (Dazi), a horse trainer cum probation officer, with a penchant for Provençale literature. The journey south kicks off at a bullring where Tom watches the matador leaving the stage, having crossed paths with a black cat. Tom tries gamely to replace him, but the animal gets the better of him.

In a small town not far away, Tom meets up with Suzanne (Aubert), his female alter ego. She sells bunches of rosemary in the town square, but really longs to be united with her baby-daughter who now lives with foster parents in Montpelier. On this spiritual journey of sorts the motley crew find themselves in all sorts of scrapes but luckily Ulysses always manages to save the day, Tom eventually finding satisfaction, redeemed by the power of love.

Transcended by the wild beauty of the Calmargue, the feature centres on a core collective of loveable idiosyncratic oddballs. The episodic nature of the narrative is possibly not really about to sustain the running time, but the performances are entertaining enough to capture our imagination for a while, and Gatlif directs with great sensibility and paternal care for his assorted oddballs. A Misfits for our time. AS

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Are You Lonesome Tonight (2021) Cannes Film Festival 2021

Dir.: Wen Shipei; Cast: Eddie Peng, Sylvia Chang, Wang Yanhui, Zhang Yu; China 2021, 95 min.

Memory and obsession dominate the debut of Chinese director/co-writer Wen Shipei in a contemporary version of Dostoyevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’.

Taking its title from the iconic Elvis tune which is rendered by numerous artists on various media outlets, Are You Lonesome Tonight smoulders with hallucinatory visuals from Andreas Thalhammer, most of the action taking place night in an old fashioned trippy experience.

Xue Ming (Peng) tries to get by as an air-con engineer, but hardly makes ends meet. His much younger girl friend (Peiyao), is dismayed when he misses another date in the local cinema, without even apologising. Driving along in a clapped out mini-van Ming runs over a man, and decides to dispose of the corpse rather than alert the authorities. His victim is Mr. Liang; his widow Liang Ma (a brilliant Sylvia Chang) puts up ‘Missing Person’ posters all over town. But it soon turns out Liang was also a smalltime gangster, and the lucrative spoils from life of crime are hidden in a locker at the railway station. Ming finds a key but is unaware of the fortune.

As it happens, Liang Ma’s air conditioning breaks down, and Ming is only too willing to repair it for free, in an effort to assuage his burgeoning guilt for her husband’s death. Liang Ma reveals that the police have found her husband’s body and identified his killer. Meanwhile Peng becomes obsessed with his crime and the surviving victim, following Liang Ma everywhere, desperate to make a clean breast of it, and finally finding the courage to confess.

Enter Detective Inspector Chen (Yanhui), who gets obsessed with the case. The chase and shootings that follow are the weakest part of the feature, which redeems itself with the last part, after Peng’s release from the prison after an eight-year sentence in 2005.

A non-linear structure underpins this episodic feature, so whenever Shipei shifts into action mode, the narrative loses its integrity: the key to the treasure in the railway station is merely a McGuffin, and Shipei would have done better to treat it exactly as such. Ma Liang’s guilt at wishing her husband dead, before he left on that fateful evening, is as lingering as Ming’s guilt for killing the unsavoury husband.

Detective Chen is the third member of this rimorse-ridden trio, trying to avenge the death of his partner. Their struggle to liberate themselves is a long one, but there is hope for all of them.

Are you Lonesome is a brilliant exercise in aesthetics. Fewer conventional action scenes would have made more impact in this impressive-looking modern drama. AS

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2021

West 11 (1963) Blu-ray

Dir: Michael Winner | Cast: Diana Dors, Eric Portman, Alfred Lynch, Kathleen Breck | UK Crime Drama 93′

Michael Winner’s social realist crime caper is not his best by long chalk, lacking the heft to transport into the realms of a gritty thriller or an involving drama. Captured by Otto Heller’s inventive camera it certainly evokes the seedy squalor of 1960s Kensington well before gentrification made it trendy ‘Notting Hill’. The cast was intended to include Oliver Reed for the lead role of Joe Beckett. Instead Alfred Lynch stepped in as an aimless office worker recruited into crime by Eric Portman’s lowlife gangster. Beckett’s two complementary love interests are a smouldering Diana Dors and coquettish Kathleen Breck but the feature the lacks the verve of so many other outings of the era despite a decent script from Keith Waterhouse, based on Laura del Rivo’s ‘The Furnished Room’. MT

NOW ON STUDIO CANAL DVD, BLURAY and DIGITAL DOWNLOAD FROM 5 JULY 2021

Softie – Petite Nature (2021) Semaine de la Critique

Dir.: Samuel Theis; Cast: Aliocha Reinert, Antoine Reinartz, Melissa Olexa, Izoa Higelin, Jade Schwartz, Mario Gallo, Romane Esch, Abdel Bensehendikh; France 2021, 93 min.

Class and gender politics are delicately explored in this sophomore feature from writer/director Samuel Theis, graduate of the famous La FEMIS film school and co-director of Party Girl (2014) which won the Camera d’Or at Cannes.

The film explores how boys process and absorb ideas of self and masculinity through ten year old Johnny (Reinert) who lives on a council estate in Forbach near the German border. Highly intelligent and mature for his age, he’s already a star pupil at the local primary school and very much the prodigal son of his broken family, taking care of little sister Melissa (Schwartz) and tearaway teenage brother Dylan (Gallo). His mother Sonia (Olexa) has just shacked up with a new boyfriend (Bensehendikh) and now works as a shop assistant in a grocery store.

But everything changes when a new teacher arrives at the school, taking Johnny under his wing. Jean Adamski (Reinartz) lives with his partner Nora (Hegelin) in a posh suburb – light years away from Johnny’s estate. Off they all go on visits to the local museum in Metz, where Nora works. Johnny even spends the night at the couple’s home, where Nora teaches him all about body language. This short encounter has serious consequences. Johnny tries out Nora’s ideas on Jean, kissing him on the lips. Jean is horrified, and shuts down all contact with his pupil. Johnny’s life soon spins out of control.

In his debut Aliocha Reinert gives a stunning performance as Johnny. With long blond hair, his androgynous look hints at gender identification issues, even though these are mostly ambivalent. But the social gap is always made transparent, Jacques Girault’s luminous camerawork keeping things light despite the thorniness of the core themes. The rough and tumble of life on the estate, and the modest but artistic household are clearly on different planets. Theis directs with great sensitivity, always giving the actors enough leash to express themselves naturalistically. Who is afraid of the second film, then? AS

CANNES SEMAINE DE LA CRITIQUE | 2021

Bruno Reidal: Confessions of a Killer (2021) Semaine de la Critique, Cannes 2021

Dir: Vincent Le Port | Cast: Roman Villedieu, Jean-Luc Vincent, Dimitri Dore | France, Drama 101′

Some things you never forget. And for young Bruno Reidal it was the traumatic annual pig slaughter at his family farm.

Competing for this years Camera d’Or this classically told period drama is the feature debut of Vincent Le Port who shows with dispassion and meticulous detail how a killer is made from early childhood through his introverted sullen central character evocatively played by Dimitri Dore.

Mulling over themes of guilt, masturbation and Catholicism, there’s actually a touch of the Bruno Dumont’s about this elegant and captivating period chronicle that gracefully explores the grim genesis of murder (Jean Luc Vincent also appeared in Camille Claudel 1915 and Slack Bay).

Based on the real writings of a convicted murderer at the turn of the last century, the film opens in 1905 with a gruesome murder, the camera focusing on the strenuous efforts of young Bruno as he decapitates a child – we later see the headless body lying arms up-stretched in its leafy grave.

Bruno (Dimitry Dore) then gives himself up to the authorities denying to doctors that he a criminal or insane. So despite the serious nature of his crime, the investigating doctor Lacassagne (Vincent) puts the pasty-faced boy into a bare room and orders him to write down his life story. Meanwhile an invasive interrogation by a team of doctors forms the backbone to a lushly dramatised chronicle of Bruno Reidal’s life.

Bruno was born in rural Raulhac, Cantal (Auvergne) on June 12,1888, one of six children of modest but intelligent farming stock, his formal and undemonstrative parents were hard-working, his father would die before Bruno even reached puberty. Taking over farming duties one summer’s day Bruno suffers a coup de soleil. And this along with the traumatic annual pig slaughter at the family farm makes an horrific impression on the boy’s rather sensitive frame of mind, seemingly turning his thoughts to matters macabre. All this is negativity is enforced by an unloving early sexual experience – he is interfered with by an old wayfarer one day in the fields and this becomes the blueprint for his obsessive need to masturbate connecting sexual pleasure with violent intent. His mother then sends him away to a Catholic seminary where the ascetic religious education sees Bruno continually haunted by terrible thoughts of killing and torturing his fellow students, and of course, masturbating. And then he meets fellow student Blondel.

The verdant rolling countryside of the Auvergne provides a glorious pastoral setting for this serene and solemnly paced drama, contrasting wildly with its cruel and murderous narrative and perverted central character of Bruno who we feel a strange pity for despite his cold and calculating personality. MT

SEMAINE DE LA CRITIQUE | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Ultraviolence (2020) Bfi player

Dir.: Ken Fero; Documentary with Vivian Figueiredo, Lucy Chadwill, Brenda Weinberg, Amy Sey, Myrna Simpson; UK 2020, 75 min.

Director Ken Fero has teamed up again with writer Tariq Mehmood, the co-director of their 2001 documentary Injustice, to follow up on the topic of death in police custody in the UK: a thousand people died between 1969 and 2006, most of them people of colour. Fero has framed Ultraviolence as a letter to his son using Godard and Marker, among others, for the non-linear chapter structure dedicated to a victim of police brutality.

Injustice more or less killed off Fero’s career. It won several awards but was never shown on TV after the Police Federation threatened all media platforms with legal action, Fero threatened to sue them for loss of earnings but never received a reply. But it took a personal case for the director to engage again: Brian Douglas, a sports- and music promoter, happened to be a class mate of Fero at secondary school; he was stopped in May 1995 by constables Mark Tuffey and Paul Harrison in Clapham. Brian was struck with an American-style long-handled baton by PC Tuffey. Despite vomiting in his cell in Kennington Police Station, Douglas was only taken to hospital 14 hours later. He had a fractured skull and damage to his brain stem, dying five days later. At the inquest Tulley said his baton slipped accidentally when he hit Douglas on the shoulder. Evidence at the inquest revealed that the force of the blow was the equivalent of being dropped from eleven times his own height onto his head. The jury returned a verdict of misadventure, a verdict later challenged unsuccessfully by the Douglas family at the High Court.

Nuur Saeed, Paul Coker and Christopher Alder suffered equally gruesome deaths. The most clear-cut case of manslaughter (if not worse), is the case of Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes, who was shot after running away from Metropolitan Police hunting the Middle-Eastern perpetrators of a recent London suicide bombing. The policemen shot de Menezes seven time in the head, without even making an effort to talk to him in Stockwell Station. Vivian Figueiredo, Charles’ cousin, is one the many family members to this day is asking for justice. “Unity will give us strength to win” is one of her battle cries. Only, they do not win. An Independent Police Complaints Commission report concludes that the then Commissioner, Ian Blair, “was not served well by his staff, that his private office failed to keep him informed, but does not uphold allegations of a cover-up against him. No police officer is charged.” The family is left bewildered: “A man is shot in the head and yet their conclusion is no one is accountable?”

The most disturbing CCTV footage is from Plumstead Police Station, where Paul Coker died in August 2005. He became slightly paranoid in the flat of his girlfriend Lucy Chadick. She called the police, who arrested him. Chadwick told the police, that she heard Paul crying out to the police “You are hurting me, I can’t breathe, you are killing me”. He was carried by the police down the stairs, his head lolling from site to site. Later in the Police station, the policemen laughed about him “He is an evil fucker”. “He has already assaulted four officers”. “Its amazing the strength of the fucker to try and do that.”

There is at least one moment of redemption for the family of Brian Douglas. In 2006, eleven years after the killing of Brian, Mark Tuffey was in court, facing criminal charges. He had been reported by a fellow officer of kicking a black man and calling him a “dirty black cxxx”. Tuffey was convicted of aggravated behaviour and ordered to pay £400 fine and £400 cost. “It felt good to know he would no longer be a serving officer, as he had continued after Brian’s death. I walked away from court not necessarily victorious but that a little piece of justice had been done”, said Douglas’ sister Brenda Weinberg.

There is a certain overreach by Fero: He tries to connect the topic of his feature with wars like Vietnam and Iraq, trying to find a common strategy to end all violence. But the lively images of DoPs Koutaiba Al Janabi and Souleman Garcia are enough to support the continuous fight of the families of the victims. Their dedication stands for itself. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 16 JULY 2021

Joan of Arc (1948)

Dir: Victor Fleming | Cast: Ingrid Bergman, Jose Ferrer, Selena Royle, Robert Barrat, Jimmy Lydon, Rand Brooks | US Drama 145′

As befits a film based on a play, this independent production is a slow, talky, studio-bound affair, shot in the rather cramped confines of the Hal Roach Studios in Culver City (with most of the exteriors and even the very perfunctory battle scenes obviously shot on sound stages under immobile clouds); rendered slower still by the number of close-ups (ravishing as they are) shot by director Victor Fleming of his beautiful (and expensive) old flame Ingrid Bergman.

Although naturally nominated for several Academy Awards – receiving Oscars for its costume design and Technicolor photography – the latter accolade immediately lost its lustre when Natalie Kalmus of Technicolor went over the heads of the Academy by presenting a special award to The Red Shoes.

Joan’s army is populated by bruisers like Ward Bond and Ray Teal in pudding bowl haircuts; while as the “poor, mad maid from Lorraine”, big, strapping Scandinavian Ingrid Bergman makes (as her own father observes after she has her hair bobbed) “a handsome lad”. She looks fitter still in armour. But the film, alas, isn’t even halfway through before (SPOILER COMING:) she receives a crossbow bolt to the shoulder. @Richard Chatten

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

Medusa (2021) Quinzaine – Cannes Film Festival

Dir: Anita Rocha da Silveira | Cast: Bruna Linzmayer, Thiago Fragoso, Lara Tremouroux, Mariana Oliveira | Brazil horror 127′

Woman are supposed to be the fairer and more gentle sex. But not according to Medusa. This psychedelic female-centric psychodrama makes florid use of magic realism to expose the rank hypocrisy still rife in modern day Brazil through a group of friends who pretend to be morally whiter than white. Of course, quite the opposite is true as we discover in this trenchant take down of hyper-feminism and religious devotion under right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro.

In her follow-up to Mata Me For Favor (2015) Anita Rocha da Silveira’s jagged sociopolitical satire is an eye-popping yet strangely serene selection of episodes that invite us to take a walk on the wild side with its unusual characters – mostly women – who occasionally break loose when they’re not being ultra demure. The reason is to attack other women who they consider out of order on religious or moral grounds.

Medusa kicks off with a mob scene that sees masked women at war with each other, accusing them of debauchery, during a blackout in the north-east of Brazil. The women have a band, ‘The Princesses’, which preaches obedience to men and eternal love for God. The narrative is centred around the lead singer of ‘The Princesses’, Michele (Tremoroux), and newcomer Mariana (Oliveira). The men form a cabal called ‘The Watchmen’, clad all in bright green. The spiritual leader is the narcissistic Pastor Guilherme (Fragoso), who loves the sound of his own voice.

Mari sets out to find Melissa Garcia (Linzmeyer), an actress, who, some time ago, suffered an acid attack at the hands of ‘an angel-like woman’. Both have since disappeared. Bible reading and book-burning go hand in hand, whilst at the same time – in a contradictory twist – the women must be immaculate dressed and coiffured. Disfigured by a tragic accident Mari is then sacked from her job at the beauty clinic, and work in a sinister clinic caring for comatose victims of plastic surgery, where she falls for a male nurse Lucas (Fazao), even though he is one of the ‘wordy’ men because he enjoys sex.

But Guilherme suffers a heart attack whilst exorcising a demon stage, but is saved. Whilst Mari finds clues to what happened to Melissa, Michele becomes embroiled in a fight with members of her band, and falls into a pond. After a passionate kiss with Mari, a grand finale will answer some of the many open questions, after Guilherme asks Michele to marry her and the latter refuses.

Medusa is all about grand theatre: its shock factor fired up by a potent brew of horror and over-the-top performances. DoP João Atala has a field day with his roving camera in a film that overstays its welcome in the final stretch. Da Silva certainly drives home her message, but less would have been more. AS

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Cannes Classics 2021

As every year, the Festival de Cannes presents a selection of the best restored prints and invites us to explore again the history of Cinema.

The curtain rises with Mark Cousins’ pre-opening documentary; the rediscovery of director-actor Kinuyo Tanaka and Spanish director actress, screenwriter and producer Ana Mariscal; a tribute to director and actor Bill Duke; a close-up on the first African-American director Oscar Micheaux; the 1959 Palme d’Or; the 70th anniversary of Les Cahiers du cinéma; the modesty of Jacques Doillon; two wonders from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger; Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation and the World Cinema Project; Tilda Swinton’s first role; cinema from the Ivory Coast, former Yugoslavia, Italy and former Czechoslovakia; Alain Resnais’s film at Cannes in 1966; Irène Jacob by Krzysztof Kieślowski and Jeanne Moreau by Philippe de Broca; some French thriller; “soviet” films welcomed in competition at Cannes; Orson Welles’s magic, the style of Max Ophüls; four outstanding documentaries on the great producer Jeremy Thomas, Satoshi Kon, Luis Buñuel and Yves Montand; a docudrama full of cinephile fury; and twenty years later, the unsolved mystery of Mulholland Drive…

Here is Cannes Classics 2021

A Tribute to Bill Duke

The director, actor (for John McTiernan, Samuel Fuller, John Landis or Steven Soderbergh) and producer, in Competition at Cannes with A Rage in Harlem in 1991, returns to the Croisette with his first film as director, presented at the Semaine de la critique in 1985.

THE KILLING FLOOR by Bill Duke (1985, 1h58, United States)

Presented by Made in U.S.A. Productions, Inc. The UCLA Film & Television Archive facilitated in-house 4K scanning of the film’s 16mm original picture negative, which is vaulted in the Archive’s Sundance Institute Collection. Under the supervision of film’s executive producer/co-writer, Elsa Rassbach, Made in U.S.A. Productions completed the 4K restoration with color grading by Alpha-Omega digital in Munich and Planemo post-production in Berlin. In addition, the soundtrack was digitally restored by Deluxe Entertainment Services Group from the film’s original 35 mm audio mono mix mag track. The film was restored in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the 1919 Chicago Race Riot.

Director Bill Duke and executive producer and co-screenwriter Elsa Rassbach in attendance.

Kinuyo Tanaka, actress and filmmaker

Kinuyo Tanaka, one of the greatest Japanese actresses, made her first film in 1953, entering the Cannes Competition in 1954. She returned in 1961 and 1964 as a performer. She was the only active filmmaker of the golden age of Japanese cinema and her second feature film, presented here, is a reflection of her immense talent. This new version restored in 4k by Nikkatsu inaugurates the Tanaka event, a forthcoming retrospective of her 6 films.

Tsuki wa noborinu – THE MOON HAS RISEN by Kinuyo Tanaka (1955, 1h42, Japan)

Presented by Nikkatsu and distributed in France by Carlotta Films.
Restored from the original 35mm positive preserved by Nikkatsu Corporation. 4K restoration by Nikkatsu Corporation and The Japan Foundation at Imagica Entertainment Media Services, Inc laboratory.

Ana Mariscal, Spain in the feminine form

Pioneer director of Iberian cinema, Spanish actress, screenwriter and producer Ana Mariscal directed ten rich films, as non-conformist as they are visually splendid. As a foretaste of her work, here is a nostalgic chronicle of a modest Spanish village in the 1960s.

EL CAMINO – The Path by Ana Mariscal (1964, 1h31, Spain)

Presented by David García Rodríguez. 4K digitalization and restoration supervised by Ramón Lorenzo Sierra from the original edited negative and vintage dupe. Sound restoration from the original sound negative. Laboratory: Vivavision (Madrid). Theatrical distribution in France: Karmafilms Distribution. Release in France: October 2021. On video in France: UHD collector edition, November 2021.

Oscar Micheaux

The first African-American director in the history of American cinema is honored in a sublime restored copy of one of his greatest films accompanied by a fascinating documentary.

MURDER IN HARLEM by Oscar Micheaux (1935, 1h36, United States)

Presented by Cineteca di Bologna. Restored in 2021 by the George Eastman Museum and Cineteca di Bologna in association with the Film Foundation, Quoiat Films and Sky from a 35mm nitrate print in the SMU/Tyler Film Collection, SMU Libraries, deposited at the George Eastman Museum. Restoration performed at George Eastman Museum Film Preservation Services and L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory. Followed by:

Oscar Micheaux – The Superhero of Black Filmmaking by Francesco Zippel (1h20, Italy) – Director Francesco Zippel in attendance

Orfeu Negro, Palme d’or in 1959

The Cannes Film Festival continues to explore the Palmes d’Or that have marked its history. This year, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice will be revisited by Marcel Camus in Brazil and set to music by Antônio Carlos Jobim to bossa nova, samba and jazz. Dazzling.

ORFEU NEGRO – Black Orpheus by Marcel Camus 1959, 1h45,

Presented by Solaris Distribution. Presented by Impex Films and Tigon Film Distributors. 4K digital restoration by Impex Films and Tigon Film Distributors with the help of the CNC, from the original 35mm negative. Original monophonic sound digitized from a viewing print which was also used as reference for color grading. Laboratory: Hiventy Classics. Theatrical distribution in France: Solaris Distribution, to be released in France by the second semester of 2021.

Rossellini and Les Cahiers du cinema

While the Cineteca di Bologna continues its visit to Rossellini’s work, the Cahiers du cinéma celebrate their history in Cannes. André Bazin, the co-founder of the magazine was even a member of the Jury in 1954 and kept a diary recounting this experience.To celebrate the anniversary of the mythical monthly, what better way than to screen a film by Roberto Rossellini? He was assisted by François Truffaut, Bazin considered him a major figure in the same way as Renoir, Hitchcock or Hawks and this work signed by the Italian director was reviewed in the first issue in April 1951.

FRANCESCO – GIULLARE DI DIO – The Flowers of St. Francis) by Roberto Rossellini (1950, 1h27, Italy)

Presented by Cineteca di Bologna and The Film Foundation. Restored in 2021 by Cineteca di Bologna and The Film Foundation, in association with RTI-Mediaset and Infinity+, at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory. Restoration funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

All the restored films of Cannes Classics 2021

LA DRôLESSE (The Hussy) by Jacques Doillon (1978, 1h30, France)

Presented by Malavida. 2k scan and restoration made from the negative image, by Éclair Cinéma laboratory. Sound restored from the negative by L.E. Diapason. Restoration made by Gaumont with the support of the CNC. In preview of the retrospective « Jacques Doillon, jeune cinéaste » starting on November 3rd 2021.
Director Jacques Doillon in attendance

I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING ! by Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
(1945, 1h32, United Kingdom)

Presented by the Film Foundation. Restored by the BFI National Archive and The Film Foundation in association with ITV and Park Circus. Restoration funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. Additional support provided by Matt Spick.

LUMUMBA: LA MORT DU PROPHETE (Lumumba: Death of a Prophet) by Raoul Peck (1990, 1h09, France / Germany / Switzerland / Belgium / Haiti)

Presented by The Film Foundation within the framework of the World Cinema Project. Restored by the The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata/L’Image Retrouvée in collaboration with Velvet Film and supervised by Raoul Peck. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. This restoration is part of the African Film Heritage Project, an initiative created by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers and UNESCO – in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna – to help locate, restore, and disseminate African cinema.

FRIENDSHIP’S DEATH by Peter Wollen – (1987, 1h18, United Kingdom)

Presented by the British Film Institute (BFI). The 4K remastering by the BFI National Archive was from the original Standard 16mm colour negative. The soundtrack was digitised directly from the original 35mm final mix magnetic master track. The remastering was undertaken in collaboration with the film’s producer, Rebecca O’Brien and cinematographer, Witold Stok.

Actress Tilda Swinton in attendance

BAL POUSSIERE by Henri Duparc – (1989, 1h33, Ivory Coast)

Presented by the CNC and the Henri Duparc Foundation. Restoration of the original 16mm negative image by the CNC laboratory. 2K scan. Color grading: Hiventy. Sound restoration from the original 16mm magnetic: L’Image retrouvée.

THE DOUBLE LIFE OF VERONIQUE by Krzysztof Kieślowski (1991, 1h38, France / Poland)

Presented by MK2. Restoration carried out by Hiventy from the original negative in 4K, supervised by director of photography Sławomir Idziak. Theatrical distribution in France by Potemkine.
Actress Irène Jacob in attendance

F FOR FAKE by Orson Welles (1973, 1h25, France/ Iran / Germany)

Presented by Les Films de L’Astrophore and La Cinémathèque française in collaboration with Documentaire sur grand écran. Restored by Les Films de L’Astrophore and La Cinémathèque française in collaboration with Documentaire sur grand écran, the Cinémathèque suisse and the Audiovisual institute of Monaco, with the support of Hiventy and the company foundation Neuflize OBC. Restoration work, image and sound made by the Hiventy laboratory, from the original negative and at L.E. Diapason Studio from the 35mm magnetic track.

YASHAGAIKE (Demon Pond) by Masahiro Shinoda (1979, 2h04, Japan)

Presented by Shochiku. Digital remaster by Shochiku Co., Ltd. For the 4K remaster, the original 35mm negative was provided by Shochiku, sound remastered by Shochiku MediaWorX Inc. and the image remaster conducted by Imagica Entertainment Media Services, Inc. French distribution in theaters: Carlotta Films.

LA GUERRE EST FINIE (The War is Over) by Alain Resnais. (1966, 2h01, France)

Presented by Gaumont. First digital restoration in 4K presented by
Gaumont with the support of the CNC. Restoration made by Éclair Classics laboratory.

ÉCHEC AU PORTEUR (Not Delivered) by Gilles Grangier, (1957, 1h27, France)

Presented by Pathé. 4K scan and 2K restoration from the original safety negative (negative image, a standard dupe, a negative optical sound). Work made by L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory (Paris-Bologne). Restoration with the support of the Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée (CNC).

CHERE LOUISE (Louise) by Philippe de Broca (1972, 1h45, France / Italy)

Presented by TF1 Studio. New 4K restored version by TF1 Studio and Warner Bros. from the original negative image. Digital work made by Vdm laboratory in 2021. Theatrical release to come: Les Acacias. Blu-ray collector release: Coin de Mire.

Napló gyermekeimnek (Diary for my children) by Márta Mészáros
(1983, 1h49, Hungary)

Presented by National Film Institute Hungary – Film Archive. The 4K digital restoration was carried out as part of ‘The long-term restoration program of Hungarian film heritage” of the National Film Institute – Film Archive. The restoration was made using the original image negatives and magnetic tape sound, it was carried out at the National Film Institute- Filmlab. The Digital grading was supervised by Nyika Jancsó, DOP of the film.
Director Márta Mészáros and DOP Nyika Jancsó in attendance

Až přijde kocour (The Cassandra Cat) by Vojtech Jasný
(1963, 1h45, Czech Republic)

Presented by the Národní filmový archiv, Prague. 4K digital restoration based on the intermediate positive was done by L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in Bologna, 2021. The donors of this project were Mrs. Milada Kučerová and Mr. Eduard Kučera. Restored in partnership with the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. French distribution: Malavida Films.
Actress Emília Vašáryová in attendance

MONANIEBA (Repentance) by Tenguiz Abouladzé
(1984, 2h33, Georgia)

Presented by Georgian National Film Center. Interpositive: goskinofond. 4K scan and color grading: UPP Prague. Digital restoration, sound work and DCP: Studio Phonographe, Tbilissi. Funding: Georgian National Film Center.
Actor Avtandil Makharadze and screenwriter Nana Janelidze in attendance

Dan četrnaesti (The Fourteenth Day) by Zdravko Velimirovic

(1960, 1h41, Montenegro / Serbia)
Presented by Crnogorska kinoteka, Podgorica & Jugoslovenska kinoteka, Belgrade. Digitally restored film from a 2K scan of the original black & white negative.

IL CAMMINO DELLA SPERANZA (The Path of Hope) de Pietro Germi
(1950, 1h45, Italy)

Presented by the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia – Cineteca Nazionale. Restored by Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia – Cineteca Nazionale from the original 35mm negative made available by
CristaldiFilm, completed by a dupe of the Cineteca Nazionale and optical sound of a positive by the Cineteca Nazionale.

LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN (Lettre d’une inconnue) de Max Ophüls (1948, 1h27, United-States)

4k restoration from the original negative image and a 35mm positive. Sound restoration from the original negative. Work done by Technicolor for the image and Chace Audio by Deluxe for the sound, under the supervision of Paramount Pictures Preservation.
Theatrical release by La Rabbia, february 2022.

MULHOLLAND DRIVE by David Lynch – (2001, 2h25, United-States)

Presented by Studiocanal. Restoration made by Criterion and Studiocanal from the original negative, scan in 4K at Fotokem, sound remastering from the original 5.1 sound. Sound and image were validated by David Lynch, in Cinéma and HDR format. French distribution by Studiocanal, with a theatrical release and a collector Blu-Ray UHD box set.

Cannes Classics 2021 : the documentaries

THE STORMS OF JEREMY THOMAS by Mark Cousins (1h29, UK)

A yearly drive with the famous British producer Jeremy Thomas from London to Cannes, on his way to the… Festival de Cannes. A life in the service of cinema, a journey towards the discovery of new films and talents in the company of the cinephile director and author Mark Cousins.
Presented by David P. Kelly Films. Produced by David P. Kelly with Creative Scotland, Tim Macready and Visit Films.
Jeremy Thomas and Mark Cousins in attendance.

SATOSHI CON, l’illusionniste by Pascal-Alex Vincent
(1h21, France/Japan)

A subtle portrait of Japanese director Satoshi Kon by the specialist of Japanese cinema Pascal-Alex Vincent and a dive into a rich work. With interviews of the greatest Japanese, French and American directors inspired by his work.
Presented by Eurospace and Genco (Tokyo) in collaboration with Carlotta Films et Allerton Films (Paris).
Director Pascal-Alex Vincent in attendance

Buñuel, A SURREALIST CINEASTE by Javier Espada
(1h23, Spain)

Luis Buñuel and the Festival de Cannes is a great love story – the theater where the films of Cannes Classics are screened is called Buñuel itself. The documentary is filled with culture and is dedicated to the screenwriter, who was so close to the Spanish filmmaker and wrote many films with him, Jean-Claude Carrière. The documentary brilliantly explores the themes of the genius filmmaker.
Presented by Tolocha producciones.
Director Javier Espada in attendance

ALL ABOUT YVES MONTANT by Yves Jeuland
(1h40, France.)

As an actor in Le Salaire de la peur (Grand Prix in 1953) or in La Guerre est finie presented this year, President of the Jury in 1987 (Maurice Pialat received the Palme d’or), Yves Montand has left a mark on the Festival de Cannes. Yves Montand has left a mark as strong in cinema as in music hall. On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his birth and the 30th anniversary of his death, Montand est à nous is an exceptional documentary.
Written by Yves Jeuland and Vincent Josse.
Presented by Zadig Productions. Film produced by Zadig Productions, in coproduction with Diaphana Films, with the participation of France Télévisions.
Director Yves Jeuland and co-writer Vincent Josse in attendance,

Et J’AIME A LA FUREUR (Flickering Ghosts of Love Gone By) by André Bonzel (1h50, France)

A very personal self-portrait of André Bonzel, co-director of the cult film C’est arrivé près de chez vous, based on images from amateur films that he has always collected, including some shot by his great-great-grandfather, a familiar face of the Lumière brothers. A unique, moving film that tells the story of a family cinephilia over several generations, set to music by Benjamin Biolay.
Produced by Les films du Poisson.
Director André Bonzel in attendance

CANNES CLASSICS | Cannes Film Festival 6- 18 July 2021

Olga (2021) Semaine de la Critique | Cannes Film Festival 2021

Dir: Elie Grappe | Wri: Elie Grappe, Raphaelle Desplechin | Cast: Nastya Budiashkina, Sabrina Rubtsova, Jérôme Martin

It’s 2013 and a 15-year-old gymnast is torn between Switzerland – where she is training for the European Championship in preparation for the Olympics – and Ukraine, where her widowed mother is a controversial anti-government journalist, reporting on the Euromaiden revolt.

As much a sports film as a character drama Grappe and his co-writer Raphaelle Desplechin (sister of Arnaud) keep dialogue lowkey leaving the film’s strong visual aesthetic to drive the story forward, Lucie Baudinaud’s widescreen camerawork making the locations – particularly of the built environment – a star of the show, adding a strong docudrama feel to the feature along with the ample news footage of the ongoing riots that enforce in Olga a strong sense of national pride, despite her new Suisse nationality.

The female centric narrative portrays the tough physical and emotional challenges women face in their careers. It all gets off to a stunning start when Olga and her mother’s car is hit by an unidentified object on the way to dinner one night, spinning out of control in the centre of Kiev. This sets the tone for a feisty confrontation over their respective work priorities. Olga also has a fraught relationship with her French trainer who works her hard, but draws firm boundaries – the training rapport is similar to that in the recent Slalom

When she’s not training tough cookie Olga (a strong-featured Anastasia Budiashkina) must study and speak French with her fellow elite gymnasts and it’s during these online sessions that she sees her mother caught up in the violence back home, pictured in new clips. Although she channels her negative emotions into her training routines the stress clearly has a destabilising affect on the resilient teenager but often erupts into violence in the changing rooms amongst the other girls. A fiercely feminist film that packs a punch with its intense storyline and appealing visual aesthetic. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | SEMAINE DE LA CRITIQUE 2021

The Story of Film: A New Generation Cannes Film Festival (2021)

Dir/Wri: Mark Cousins | Doc, UK 160′

A decade after The Story of Film: An Odyssey, comes Mark Cousins’ latest deep dive inquiry into the state of filmmaking in the 21st century. The Story of Film: A New Generation, sees Cousins focus on the past decade in a fascinating reflection on world cinema from 2010 to 2021. The film opens with Joker and Frozen showing the transformative power and its ability to bring stories from the desperate and disenfranchised on the world stage. Cemetery of Splendor features heavily in this exploration of recurring themes and emerging motifs, from the evolution of film language, to technology’s role in moviemaking today, to shifting identities in 21st-century world cinema.

Plundering the archives for those iconic features there is everything from Jonathan Glazer’s visually and thematically groundbreaking Under the Skin to reworked upstairs/downstairs satires such as Parasite and Us which explores the dark and light sides of the human psyche through the an invasion thriller. In With films like Lover’s Rock and Moonlight Cousins identifies films, filmmakers and communities under-represented in traditional film histories, with a particular emphasis on Asian and Middle Eastern works, as well as boundary-pushing documentaries and films that see gender in new ways.

The Story of Film: a New Generation will be showcased to the press and festival attendees in the afternoon of Tuesday, July 6th in the Debussy Theatre of the Palais des Festivals.

Babi Yar. Context (2021) Ukrainian Conflict

Dir: Sergei Loznitsa | Documentary, 120 min, b/w and colour, 2021 | The Netherlands, Ukraine

History comes back to haunt us in this recent documentary from Ukraine’s Sergei Loznitsa. It reconstructs the events leading up to the massacre of over 30,000 Jews in German-occupied Kyiv in September 1941, and the aftermath of the tragedy and other genocides committed by the German Army, Gestapo and SS soldiers during the occupation of Ukraine between 1941 and 1943. The prolific Ukrainian documentarian also mentions the collaboration of the huge majority of Ukrainian citizens in the crimes. His aim is to “plunge the viewer into the atmosphere of the time”.

After the invasion of Soviet Ukraine by German in June 1941, the vast majority of Ukrainians actually supported the invaders. Banners were put up, proclaiming “Glory for Hitler and Melinek”. In Lviv (formerly Lemberg), Ukrainian Auxiliary Forces helped to round up Jewish citizens of the city on 1st of July. The Jews were accused of collaboration with Soviet Forces and the Secret Police of the NKDW. A month later, the population greeted Hans Frank, the General Governor of Poland, to celebrate the incorporation of Galicia into the German controlled governance with Poland.

Hitler salutes of the Ukrainians, coming across as entirely genuine, and the women dance enthusiastically in their traditional costumes. Ukrainian men parade on horses, and the women offer up their flowery tributes to the Nazi leader. Banners again proclaim “Long Live Adolf Hitler the Leader of the German people”. Flags with the Nazi Party symbol are put on trams, so are photos of Hitler, proclaiming him the Liberator of ‘the Ukraine’.

On Monday, 24th of June 1941, all Jews in Kyiv are ordered to gather at 8 am at the corner of Melnikova and Dokterivska Street, bringing their valuables and warm clothing. The proclamation is stark: “all Jews not obeying will be shot immediately.” “Citizens breaking into Jews’ homes will be shot”. On September 29/30 the ‘Sonderkommando 4a of the ‘Einsatzgruppe C, assisted by two battalions of the Police Regiment South and the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police – without any resistance from the local population – shoot 33, 771 Jews in a ravine in north-west Kyiv. The local press celebrates the massacre, talking to about 150 000 Jews who have left the capital, so that hour by hour, life in the city can revert to normal: “Kyiv is liberated from oriental barbarians, finally a new life begins.” The Jews of Lubny, Poltava, Kharkov, Kremchug, Borispol and Lugotin among others, will follow. Vasily Grosman talks mournfully about the centuries of Ukrainians and Jews living peaceful together.

In November 1943 Soviet troops re-take Kiyv, not many turn out to greet the liberators. Courts hear cases of genocide, one is simply called Nr. 1679. One of the accused is SS man Hans Isenmann, his military rank would be Sergeant. He goes into details of the murders as if describing a sporting event, in which he played a winning part. “I had to round up and shoot Jews. We divided them into groups of seventy to ninety, then later into smaller groups with six men to be shot, and six to be guarded. In the end, 45 to 50 were led to the ravine. We used one machine gun, two sub-machine guns and rifles. I shot with the sub-machine gun of Unterscharführer Rennert and killed 120 Jews. The valuables of the Jews were collected by Special Commandos, but I do not know what happened afterwards.”

Witness Dina Pronicheva, an actress, told of her narrow escape – so many things had to go according to plan for her to be able to serve as a witness. She lied to a Ukrainian policeman, so she would not be shot immediately, but could sit with a group of women near the massacres, hoping to escape in the evening. But a German commando picked up the whole group, and led them to the ravine to be shot. Pronicheva jumped at the right moment and landed on the pile of corpses. Then the Germans scattered soil over the dead, and Pronicheva nearly suffocated. The Germans, wanting to keep the massacre ‘under wraps’, sent a commando unit down into the ravine to kill off the few who were still breathing. One of the SS men stood on Pronicheva’s chest and arm, the nails in his boots piercing her skin. By now it was dark, and she managed to crawl out from under the rotting corpses, the Germans had gone and she fled into the night.

On February 2nd 1946, thirteen men were hanged publicly on Kyiv”s Kalinin Square. Among them was Hans Isenmann. About 1.4. million Jews were murdered in Ukraine; even now new mass graves continue to surface. The ravine of Babi Yar is now a reservoir for liquid industrial waste.

Loznitsa’s impressive ‘Trauerarbeit’ seems even more relevant at a time when some want to re-write history and emerge as the sole victims in today’s new conflict. But like in the case of the Baltic States, mass graves do not lie.

BABI YAR. CONTEXT is Loznitsa’s 7th film presented in the Official Selection of the Festival de Cannes. Loznitsa decribes his feature as “a film about our past, it’s about our present and, possibly, about our future.” Sadly his words have come true. AS

Produced with the support of the BABYN YAR HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL FOUNDATION. The film screened in the Séance Spéciale strand of the 74th edition of Cannes Film Festival.

Drive my Car (2021) Cannes Film Festival 2021

Dir/Wri: Ryusuke Hamaguchi | Cast Hidetoshi Nishijima, Toko Miura, Masaki Okada, Reika Kirishima, Park Yurim, Jin Daeyeon | Drama, Japan

Daily rides to and from work in a stylish red Saab with his shy young driver Misaki (Miura) provide a safe space to share his feelings as a tentative relationship develops between the two lonely hearts as secrets from the past and heartfelt confessions gradually surface.

Based on the short story Drive My Car in Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami, the Japanese director is still riding high on his feature Wheel of Fortune and Fame that won a Silver Bear earlier this year at Berlinale 2021. Once again this explores loneliness and the intense human need to share and be understood. Kafuku is a passionate and highly relatable character whose professional skills and strong sense of self belie his deep longing for a kindred soul to complete his happiness.

Modest in terms of his material needs Kafuku has a complex psyche with a rich emotional inner world and his soul is often laid bare during intimate chats with female chauffeur Misaki. She is a woman whose harsh and extreme life has afforded her a maturity beyond her years. And although the two comes are from different generations Hamaguchi’s textured script and layered characterisations show them to be highly intuitive and emotional intelligent.

The film’s ample running time allow for an indepth understanding of what it is to be lonely while also a complete human being from a intellectual and professional point of view. It’s a subtle, engrossing and enjoyable piece of cinema showing Hamaguchi at the top of his game as one of the world’s leading auteurs

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | WINNER | BEST SCRIPT 2021

A Radiant Girl (2021) Semaine de la Critique

Dir/Wri: Sandrine Kiberlain | Cast: Rebecca Marder, Ben Attal, India Hair, André Marcon, Anthony Bajon and Florence Viala.

Garlanded actress Sadrine Kiberlain makes her debut behind the camera with this wartime drama about a young Jewish woman living in Paris in the early days of the German occupation in 1942.

Comédie-Française actress Rebecca Marder who recently starred in Spring Blossom, the debut feature of Kiberlain’s daughter Suzanne Lindon. She plays 19-year-old Irene whose passion for acting is only dimmed by the shadow of war.

Far too often cinema pictures the plight of Jews under the Nazis, the latter dominating, the production design getting the lion share of the budget, the victims very much stereotypes. Kiberlain offers a refreshingly different approach and appears to have solved the conundrum: her middle class Jewish family in the Parisian summer of 1942 lives under occupation, but the emblem of evil only appears for a few seconds.

Irene (Marder) is nineteen years old and lives with her older brother Igor (Bajon) in a flat with her grandmother Marceline (Widhoff) and Andre (Marcon), a father figure, Irene’s biological father is an unnamed “public accountant”. We learn this when Andre begs Irene’s drama tutor to classify her as “half Jewish” for the forthcoming audition for the Conservatoire of Dramatic Arts. By then we are more than half way through the film, which starts with rehearsals for Marivaux’s ‘La Meprise’ (The Misconception), in which Irene has a part as well as her love-interest Jo (Attal), who is also Jewish.

Irene is playful, the Marivaux rehearsals are much more dominant in her life than Marceline’s struggle: Andre had to go to the police to have a red “J” stamped in all of their identity-cards. The agnostic Marceline finally relents and gives Andre the documents, after hiding them. Andre is relieved: “Nothing will happen to us, we are French. I heard of Madame K. being arrested, but she was Polish”. Irene meanwhile feels dizzy and has fainting spells. Doctor V. prescribes vitamins and an eye test, conducted by Jacques (Metzger). Irene falls for him, since Jo has disappeared. Best friend Viviane (Hair) dresses up as a boy to take Jo’s place in the play.

When the day arrives for the results to be handed out much has changed: The families’ radio and binoculars have been confiscated, Andre finds a note asking him “to please enter the building by the backdoor”. At the bakery the family is not served: “sold out” says the shop assistant, with the racks bulging with baguettes. Igor’s long time girl friend Heloise suddenly cancels her invitation to spend the Shabbat with the family, and the only non-Jewish guest, Josiane (Viala), is no great help either: “I like Jews personally, and find other cultures interesting, like travelling”. Students share their dreams about what they will do if selected. Vivienne and Irene (now wearing the Yellow Star) have the highest hopes, when Vivienne spots something and the screen goes dark.

Kiberlain’s minimalist approach has been shot in contemporary Paris, focusing on the Germans’. psychological tactics of isolating Jews and leaving them in fear what will happen next. In spite of all this, A Radiant Girl is often playful like its titular character. We are reminded of Rivette’s La Bande des Quartre, with four treasure hunting young women also being in a Marivaux play: ‘La double Inconstance’.

Rebecca Marder is pitch-perfect: just hitting the right notes between romantic innocence and provocative wilfulness. DoP Guillaume Schiffman’s images capture the sunset of the family, conjuring up a bourgeois Paris, where the victims are shunned by their own class. A passionate and mature debut. AS

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL

Amparo (2021) Cannes – Semaine de la Critique 2021

Dir/Wri: Simon Mesa Soto | Sandra Melissa Torres, Diego Alejandro Tobon, Luciana Gallego, John Jairo Montoya | Colombia, Drama 97′

In the early 1990s Medellín, in Colombia, was the most violent city in the world. The homicide rate reached unprecedented levels not least because of notorious cocaine baron Pablo Escobar who used Medellin as a base for his cartel. Young men were also being swept off the streets and drafted into an army, particularly in the poorest and most deprived parts of the city. And this is where Simon Mesa Soto’s feature debut Amparo takes place. It’s a cruel-eyed, claustrophobic drama that keeps a tight grip on its eponymous heroine, following her relentlessly through the backwaters of Colombia second largest city where she struggles to bring up two children from men long since gone. Her feisty mother is the backbone of the family with her finger on the pulse. The voice of Colombia’s strong matriarchal tradition she sums up her daughter’s life in a nutshell: two kids from two different fathers, one roaming the streets with no job and no money. She thinks the army may be the making of aimless Elias. But Amparo thinks differently, and Sandra Melissa Torres plays her with a gritty but glum sense of resignation.

Amparo is not a particularly likeable single mother. Worn down by the years of worry she couldn’t care less about her little daughter Karen (Gallego) but is devoted to her spoilt monosyllabic son Elias (Tobon) whose hopeless plight drives the story forward. In the opening scene he is being interrogated off camera by an officer from the army. Soon he will be transferred to a dangerous base in the southern outpost of Caqueta, rumoured to be a point of no return. Amparo will do everything in her power to keep him at home.

Simon de Soto Mesa establishes a sense of slow-burning steely determination in his world weary characters in this atmospheric first feature burnished by Juan Sarmiento’s voyeuristic camerawork that plays along with a secretive society built on transactional relationships, corruption and greed. Every single character is open to persuasion and manipulation in this dog eat dog world, but Amparo keeps her eye on the end game – to secure the release of her much loved son. And it’s a race against time where human nature is laid bare in all its depravity. But one thing stands out – a deal is a deal, even in Godforsaken Medellin. And Amparo must bargain with the men in control to let Elias go. And despite a rather predictable outcome this is an evocative thriller masterfully told. MT

SEMAINE DE LA CRITIQUE | CANNES 2021

Violet Evergarden: The Movie (2020)

Dir.: Taiochi Ishidate; Voices of Yui Ishikawa, Daisuke Namikawa, Haruka Tomatsu, Sumire Morohoshi; Takehito Koyasu; Japan 2020, 140 min.

It all started with a series of novels by Kana Akatsuki, featuring Violet Evergarden, a child soldier from an unspecified conflict in the early 20th century. A TV anime version was created in 2018 and streamed at Netflix.

A spin-off feature, Violet Evergarden: Eternity and the Auto Memory Doll was released in 2019, the first release at Kyoto Animation Studio after the deadly arson fire. But Violet Evergarden; The Movie (written by Reiko Yoshida), the final chapter of the series, had to be postponed twice: first as a result of the studio fire, then because of Covid-19.

The feature is delivered in the typical Kyoto animation (‘KyoAni’) style: a romantic melodrama with phantasy elements. Whilst Violet (Ishikawa) dominates the proceedings, Yuris, a young, terminally ill boy is the narrator. He asks Violet, a ‘memory doll’, to write letters to his parents and a friend he fell out with. Violet’s profession as a letter-writer for people who cannot express their feelings in words is also very much a self-help project.

At the end of war, the dying Major Gilbert (Namikawa) confessed to object of his dreams: “I love you”. Violet never really understood the concept of romantic love so he tries to come to terms with her past by expressing emotions on behalf of others as a sort of ghost writer. Eventually her skills become more and more redundant, with the invention of the telephone, and conflicting memories of Major Gilbert start to surface.

The Movie also takes up strands from the series, with characters Anne and Daisy, whom she had helped with her letters during over the generations featuring in the storyline. The narrative brings to together the interplay between the episodic strands and the overarching history of Violet. It all culminates on a remote island where Gilbert, who lost an eye and an arm during the war, is very much alive. A letter gets Violet to the island, but Gilbert does not want to see her. Spoiler alert: there will be a happy end after the final credits – don’t leave before!

The story plays out against vast and shimmering cityscapes. Computer-generated water sometimes collides with the hand-painted background . Character design is very elegant, conjuring up the many decades of the past the narrative is covering. Equally impressive are the fantastical elements of the mechanical arms. The images focus on small objects in the rooms, the characters are caught in long panning shots, in which the background signifies their emotional state. The very detailed animation of tears – making sobbing really look gorgeous – is certainly a speciality of ‘KyoAni’. But overall, the expressive characters archive a lot with minimal exaggeration.

Violet Evergarden is a feast of visual fireworks, there is so much to admire, feelings and emotions taking centre stage, absorbing us in a storyline that never out stays its welcome despite the prodigious running. A real joy. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 1 JULY 2021

False Positive (2021) TriBeCa 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tribeca Film Festival 2021

The Krays (1990) Blu-ray

Director:Peter Medak Screenwriter: Philip Ridley Cast: Billie Whitelaw Tom Bell Gary Kemp Martin Kemp Susan Fleetwood Charlotte Cornwell, Stephen Berkoff, Alfred Lynch | UK Drama 115′

Peter Medak’s thrilling drama about the Kray twins rattles with wartime angst – there’s an evocative scene in the underground the sound of bombs thundering overhead. The Krays (1933-95/2000) were a product of that stoical generation weaned on rations by a mother as tough as old boots who fought tooth and nail for them – here played by the indomitable Billie Whitelaw in a rather painterly portrayal of the legendary story. That said there’s some brutal violence, and plenty of scarlet bloodshed mostly involving swords.

Although we think of the Ronnie and Reggie Kray as 1960s mobsters it was all over for them by 1968 (they spent the rest of their lives in confinement). Their story really started in in the 1930s where we see them as nasty little boys growing up in the grimy backstreets of Haggerston well before they became the instigators of organised East End crime.

Their’s was not a pleasant household – and the family milieu seems to dominate here, their mother Violet threatening to slit their father’s throat in one of the more feisty scenes, the boys defending their mum against an emasculated father, their consumptive aunt Rose (Fleetwood) hovering in the background with her horror stories of being left at home while the men were being ‘heroes’ on the front.

The twins rise to glory in seen in sedate night clubs and fairground settings where their heyday played out against swing bands, Matt Munro and early Beatles. The deft touchstones of Philip Ridley’s textured script are school life, army service, mob and murder. There’s a sensitive turn from Kate Hardie as Reggie’s put-upon wife Frances. Martin and Gary Kemp are more psychopathic than thuggish as the sleek, twinkly-eyed twins – Medak brushed up against them in the East End while shooting another movie and felt the full force of their power. There’s an iconic turn from Tom Bell as Jack ‘the Hat’ McVitie, and where would we be without the snarling Steven Berkoff as George Cornell. And Jimmy Jewel as the grandad. The action is more glamorous than dark and dastardly but, as I said, this is more of a family drama. A social document of backstreet London in the aftermath to the Second World War. MT

NOW ON RELEASE COURTESY OF SECOND SIGHT | 12 JULY 2021

Vier um der Frau (2021)

Dir: Fritz Lang | Cast: Hermann Bottcher, Carola Toelle, Lilli Lohrer, Ludwig Hartau | Germany, Silent, 52′

Now a hundred years old! Despite resurfacing in Brazil in 1987 and now available on YouTube, this dynamic, good-looking little gem by Fritz Lang remains stubbornly overlooked by most film historians, yet is probably as lively as anything Lang ever made, based on a play by Rolf E, Vanloo, and a script by Thea von Harbou.

Like his earlier serial Die Spinnen, Lang’s template at the time was Louis Feuillade’s melodramatic tales of arch criminals transposed to what is presumably contemporary Berlin (although the time it was made is now far closer to Dickens than us), in which morals were loose, most of the characters wear large overcoats and hats signalling their social status (and one of the employees at the local restaurant is a little black kid). The production company plugs itself by making the local cinema prominently on view the Decla-Bioscop; while Teutonic thespians like Rudolf Klein-Rogge play characters with Anglo-Saxon names like ‘Upton’. @Richard Chatten

NOW ON YOUTUBE

Jazz on a Summer’s Day (1958) Curzon

Dir.: Bert Stern, Aram Avakian; Documentary with Theolonious Monk, Anita O’Day, Louis Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson, Chico Hamilton, Chuck Berry; USA 1959, 85 min.

This documentary of the Newport Jazz Festival that took place at Freebody Park, Newport, Rhode Island in July 1958 is the only directional credit of fashion photographer Bert Stern; also one of three credited cameramen of Jazz. (His co-director Aram Avakian is best known for helming End of the Road (1970), which got a X-rating for showing an abortion).

Jazz is a lively interactive blast from the past, the crowd are major players in an event that captures the heady atmosphere of a free-wheeling and jubilant world on the cusp of the 1960s: the best was yet to come in this brave and promising new era. Of course, behind the scenes Behind Vietnam was raging and the filmmakers make a conscious decision not to include the mayhem caused by an influx of black citizens into the luxury enclave of Rhode Island. But they are big players as musicians and onlookers enjoying the pleasant July seaside resort.

The music is very mainstream, even by standards of the late 1950s. Looking at the list of omissions by the filmmakers – Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington with his band, and Mary Lou Williams – it becomes clear Jazz was meant to appeal to the widest audience possible. Still, it works, mainly because the lack if commentary, just the voice of emcee Willis Connover. The directors drift around the harbour too where yachts were competed in trials for the ‘America Cup’, adding a salty maritime edge to the sultry Southern singers. Their camera catches the Hamilton Quintet rehearsing in a nearby house, after which cellist Nathan Gershman plays Bach’s Cello Suite number one – just for himself.

Having said all this, there is a towering cast of musicians, dominated by female artists – Louis Armstrong (joyful as ever) and his “All Stars”, Anita O’Day (Sweet Georgia Brown), Dinah Washington (All of Me), R&B star Big Maybelle and Mahalia Jackson. At the beginning we get only a short glance of Theolonious Monk, playing “Blue Monk” with his trio, totally immersed in playing the piano, oblivious to what was going on around him. Chuck Berry enjoyed great applause for his version of “Sweet little sixteen”, even though it was originally a rock hit. But the night belonged to Mahalia Jackson, whose “The Lord’s Prayer” ran into Sunday morning.

The audience is shown intimately, not just a decorative backdrop, but a real participant. Some are serious devotees, others have brought their children and even babies to boogie along. A vicar and fan with his own 8mm camera are also on show. The consensus was to give the impression of a united nation, helped along by a decade of affluence. But the undocumented police interference was a sign of things to come. The near future would bring the murders of John F. Kennedy, his brother Bobby and the slaying of Martin Luther King amongst a growing Civil Rights movement. So looking back Newport 1958 appeared like a beacon of hope, in a world now lost for ever. We are left wondering how many of the earnest young citizens went on to the streets in the 1960s, protesting against the Vietnam War.

The film was shown at the Venice Film Festival in 1959 and the restored copy is much more than a Jazz documentary: A snapshot of a nation just before major turmoil would jumble the pieces leaving nothing in its place any more. Only the jazz survived. AS

A 4K RESTORATION ON CURZON | 30 AUGUST 2021

Prayers for the Stolen (2021) Un Certain Regard, Cannes 2021

Dir/Wri: Tatiana Huezo | Cast: Ana Cristina Ordonez Gonzalez, Marya Membreno, Norma Pablo, Mayra Batalla, Eileen Yanez, Emeo Villegas Olivia Lagunas | Drama 100′

Making its premiere at this year’s Un Certain Regard sidebar this lush and haunting tale of friendship and survival draws us into the vortex of oppression and fear felt by three girls growing up during wartime in rural Mexico.

Based on the 2014 novel by Jennifer Clement this is the latest human drama from Tatiana Huezo who has been quietly raising the profile of social and personal abuse for woman all over Latin America – from Civil War in El Salvador (in El Lugar mas pequeno in 2011) to human trafficking in Mexico (Tempestad (2016)). This is her third and most accomplished feature to date.

In a tight-knit community nestled in the Mexican mountains, we first meet eight year old Ana (Ordonez Gonzalez), digging a hole in the ground with her mother Rita (Batalla). Ana will hide here when the guerrilla soldiers come to kidnap the local girls. They will be turned into captives and slaves. In the bosky remote hillside violence is an everyday part of growing up. So Ana and her two friends create their own impenetrable parallel universe where they play at being women, comforting each other with an affectionate bond of friendship, singing and painting their lips with beetroot. Soon Ana’s long hair will be cut into a boyish crop to avoid detection. On lonely days she hides out in the empty houses of villagers who have long disappeared or fled, such as Juana and Don Pancho, whose abandoned flock of cows now roams free in the village.

Strong on atmosphere the film is cinematic study of what it means to grow up as a girl in a hostile environment where men are almost constantly the enemy. Ana’s father is supposedly working on the other side of the valley but he has not sent money back for several years and so Ana and her mother are forced to fend for themselves on the brink of poverty. One surreal scene pictures Rita desperately trying to get a mobile signal on the top of a mountain, along the other abandoned women whose ‘phones light up the darkness like mini torches in the gloom.

Some films are moving but this rich character drama is actually harrowing too, as we become emotionally invested in the girls’ story, joining them in their descent into traumatised hell as a daily experience. The casual involuntary abuse from Ana’s mother is echoed by the disorientating fear she feels from the outside threat. Ana – both as a child and a teenager – is impressively performed by two newcomers (Ordonez Gonzalez and Membreno), and is matched by Huezo’s assured direction and luminous camerawork by Dariela Ludlow. MT

UN CERTAIN REGARD | Cannes Film Festival 2021

Last Man Standing: Suge Knight and the Murders of Biggie and Tupac (2021)

Dir.: Nick Broomfield; Documentary with Suge Knight, Tupac Shakur, Biggie, Pam Brooks, Russell Poole, Faith Evans, Greg Kading, Bernard Parks; USA 2021, 105 min.

Director/writer Nick Broomfield provides the sequel to his own documentary Biggie & Tupac (2002) about the founder and CEO of LA’s Death Row Records Suge Knight. Back in 2018 Knight was sentenced to 28 years in jail for the voluntary manslaughter of fellow music producer Terry Carter, CEO of Heavy Weight Records on 29.1.2015 in Compton, California.

The two had been friends; the same can be said about Knight’s relationship with the murdered Rappers Biggie and Tupac. Knight’s incarceration loosened the tongues of many witnesses, and opened up new avenues, including the involvement of the LAPD.

Suge Knight, born 1965 in Compton, Cal., was raised by his mother, keeping him away from the gang violence of the area: he was not allowed to play with certain groups and later had a college career as a footballer, followed by a short stint with the NFL team LA Raiders in 1987. Two years later, he began his career as music producer, which led to his founding of Death Row Records.

The company was soon involved in the Bloods versus Crypts gang warfare which overshadowed the music business along with the ultra violence and abusive lifestyle of his star performers. Substance abuse also featured heavily. Rapper Tupac Shakur was born in 1971 East Harlem to parents who were members of the Black Panther organisation. When he was jailed in 1995 for sexual offences, Knight paid his bail and added Tupac to his DRR stable a year later. Friends of Tupac (amongst them the producer Pam Brooks) remember how prison had changed Shakur: he was no longer interested in the progressive politics of his parents, but indulged in extreme behaviour: the henchmen of DRR even had women fighting each other, watching the proceedings like dog fights.

After Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg had left DRR, Shakur was the victim of a shooting in September 1996 in the aftermath to watching a Mike Tyson fight in Las Vegas. He died six days later. Biggie’s drive-by murder a year later in LA, again was credited to Knight, even though some members of DRR claim Tupac had a relationship with Faith Evans, Biggie’s wife.

But LAPD officer Russell Poole (1956-2015) was convinced that two of his colleges from the LAPD, Rafael Perez and David Mack, were involved in the shootings of both men. Poole died of a heart attack, after fighting in vain to uncover the guilt of the two officers. Mack was a former middle-distance runner, participating in the World Championship, but later became a bank robber and was sentenced to fourteen years in prison, until his release in 2010.

Even LAPD Police Chief Bernard Parks admitted to the involvement of the two officers. Meanwhile, Biggie’s mother, Voletta Wallace, claimed the LAPD knew the identity of her son’s murderers at the 20th anniversary of his death: A photo of three people, all clad in the red of the Blood gangs, features the daughter of LAPD chief Bernard Parks. It had since disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

Last Man Standing is a like an old fashioned who-done-it, with the background of sex and drugs fuelling an over-the-top atmosphere. DoP Joan Churchill adds a certain sense of realism, but Broomfield’s pursuit of the truth still feels very much like fiction. A roller-coaster ride of a very deadly music business. AS

WORLD PREMIERE SCREENING + EXCLUSIVE Q&A WITH NICK BROOMFIELD | HOSTED BY TREVOR NELSON | IN CINEMAS ONE NIGHT ONLY 30TH JUNE | TICKETS:WWW.LASTMANSTANDING.FILM
| ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 2ND JULY

Ultrasound (2021) TriBeCa 2021

Dir: Rob Schroeder | Wri: Conor Stechschulte | US Sci-fi Drama 103′

Ultrasound is a curio: a visually stunning sci-fi psychodrama that often feels like several films rolled into one, a loose storyline connecting its diverse narrative strands and characters.

It seems the protagonists are as confused as we are, taking part in a bizarre experiment masterminded by one Dr Conners (Adebimpe). There is a dreaminess here suggestive of Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color. But this desire to be inventive doesn’t necessarily make for a satisfying conclusion, although some may be intrigued by the hypnotic weirdness of it all.

Starting off straightforwardly, Glen (Kartheiser) breaks down in a rainy remote backwater after his tires puncture on a bunch of nails. Shaken and disorientated by the collision, Glen finds refuge from the elements in the home of a welcoming couple – the rather too friendly Cyndi (Lopez) and Arthur (Stephenson) who even suggests Glen stays the night in the master bedroom with his wife. Reluctantly Glen agrees to the arrangement, out of politeness rather than any sexual frisson between him and Cyndi. At some point later Arthur appears on Glen’s doorstep with the news that Cyndi is pregnant. Soon Glen and Cyndi are the bewildered central couple but whether Cyndi is actually ‘with child’ is up for grabs.

Elsewhere, and in a seemingly different film, Katie (Rainey Qualley) is in thrall to her older businessman boyfriend who works all hours while she waits for him in needy isolation. Shannon (Wool), meanwhile, is a research assistant running a human experiment while trying to unravel a subversive plot within the medical establishment where she works for the sinister boss Dr Conners.

Schroeder employs an exotic electronic soundscape to drive his mysterious vehicle forward, but at times it seems to spin out of control, not unlike Glen’s car, although ‘the science’ is the reason for the mayhem rather than nails. Certainly Ultrasound has some interesting ideas and a distinct visual flair but that doesn’t mean it makes sense as a cohesive fantasy drama. MT

Tribeca Film Festival 2021

Bernstein’s Wall (2021) TriBeCa 2021

Dir: Douglas Tirola | Wrs: Leonard Bernstein, Douglas Tirola | US Doc, 101′

“the artist can change the world but he can’t necessarily do it through his art”

Leonard Bernstein became a household name for his ground-swelling score of modern Broadway classic Westside Story. In those days to be a twenty-something Jewish immigrant conductor was unheard of. But Bernstein was determined to bring music to the mainstream and it was this democratisation of his craft and the arts in general that made him his place in history.

Bernstein came from a non-musical background in Boston. His father – whom he described as a cold, authoritarian tyrant escaped Italy on an ocean-liner and settled in Brooklyn to ply his trade as a fishmonger.

Directed by Douglas Tirola and narrated by the composer himself in modulated engaging tones, Bernstein’s story unfolds in a didactic but fascinating way, enlivened by a wealth of personal photos and archive films – and of course, audio footage in a rich musical score. In these vivid scenes Bernstein comes across as an inquiring free-thinker, his lustrous dark curls framing an opened-faced sensual masculine beauty that only got better as the years rolled by.

Cultural ambassador, artist, teacher, and philosopher, the musician’s gift to the world was his ability to bring classics to everyday audiences who would mostly see his prodigious passionate outpourings on the television during the 1950s when he was known for his CBS arts series Omnibus in 1954.

Although classically trained Bernstein developed an eclectic interest in all kinds of music, jazz and opera blurring the lines between class and culture sealing his reputation as an iconic figure whose talent would unify, engage and entertain.

Training at Tanglewood, Bernstein would soon gravitate from Boston to New York where he took to the conductor’s podium with ease and aplomb wafting aside his radical background with charismatic determination, thanks to his supportive mentors Serge Koussevitsky and Aaron Copland.

Romantically it was plain-sailing for the affable family-orientated conductor who fell for Chilean American actress Felicia Montealegre, snippets from their early love letters rendered in graceful black and white graphics. Soon he had a son and a daughter and needed to support them all. From modest beginnings in Carnegie Hall, The New York Philharmonic beckoned in 1958.

Bernstein’s way of engaging his audience was to give a rousing introduction to his dynamic stage performances – offering an entente cordiale in Russia, or laced with a political agenda at home – but always brimming with a febrile physicality as his quivering body conveyed his excitement and passion for music via the orchestra to the audience: “music keeps me glued to life even when I’m depressed”.

Tirola adds political and social footnotes. Felicia, a keen pianist and obedient fifties wife, saying all the right things, yet clearly sharing her husband with another muse, music itself. But also a burgeoning yen for men – an episode which is discretely conveyed in those same black and white graphics. And Felicia admits his confused sexuality clouded their marriage of 27 years although it was undoubtedly happy and fulfilling for a time, his homosexuality is never explored.

Politics and leftist activism takes centre stage during the Kennedy years as Bernstein increasingly warms to his role as conductor for social change, using his reputation and art to promote peace, equality and racial harmony. In Alabama he is seen joining fellow jazz musicians in a peace rally, and visiting Jerusalem to give a rousing speech on the Mount of Olives. And there snaps from his well-publicised and misinterpreted soiree in support of the civil liberties for the Black Panther party – leading to Tom Wolfe’s coining the derogatory phrase “radical chic”. This all caused a vicious backlash on the Bernsteins and a storm of critical hailstones in 1970 his subversive stance drawing suspicion from Richard Nixon.

The film coming to a satisfactory close with footage of Bernstein conducting the Ninth Symphony in East Berlin in 1989 as part of the celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall. To mark that reunification, he rewrote part of Friedrich Schiller’s text for the “Ode to Joy” movement, and had the choir substitute the German word for “freedom” in place of “joy.”

Tirola’s warm but not hagiographic approach allows for an enjoyable and immersive look back at the conductor’s fascinating life. Of his own musical choices Bernstein talks glowingly of Beethoven although his West Side Story work is almost entirely absent, apart from a few visuals. We are left with the impression of a genius but never a showman, a true artist absorbed and taken over by his obsession – a true conductor if ever there was one – music was the lightening bolt that set Bernstein’s life on fire. MT

Tribeca Film Festival | JUNE 2021

Compartment Number 6 (2021)

Dir: Juho Kuosmanen | Cast: Yuriy Borisov, Seidi Haarla, Dinara Drukarova, Vladimir Lysenko | Finland, Drama 107′

Compartment Number 6 sees two unlikely strangers thrown together in a train journey from Moscow to the Arctic Circle port of Murmansk.

Inspired by Rosa Liksom’s award-winning novel this two-hander needs charismatic support from his cast to keep us entertained for nearly two hours. And it certainly gets it, in the shape of Russian actor Yuriy Borisov and Finland’s Seidi Haarla, who won Best Actress for her role at Cannes 2021. A feisty chemistry soon develops between the world-weary Laura, and the maverick miner Ljoha as the film flies from the confines of the original page with a Lesbian twist bringing this upbeat and playfully imaginative road movie right up to date.

Finnish director John Kuosmanen was last in Cannes to win the top prize at Un Certain Regard with his black and white debut feature, boxing drama The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki, This is a more contained drama – we don’t get much in the way of scenery as the train chugs its way north, instead the camera is close up and personal as the two become acquainted in the cramped compartment number 6. Vadim’s coarse behaviour and disgusting eating habits sees Laura retreating into the dinner carriage or onto the platform on the train’s frequent stops. And it’s here that we get a flavour of a Russia still reeling from Sovietism where Finnish archeologist Laura has been studying Russian at Moscow University. She now wants to spread her wings and explore the rock formations (petroglyphs) around the Barents Sea, on a break from her lover Irina (Dinara Drukarova). Their affair is finally severed during a telephone chat during a train stop in St Petersburg station.

The journey is eventful with various newcomers breaking the tedium of the shared compartment: a woman with bawling kids is not so welcome, and a guitar playing drifter is not want he seems. Down in the dumps Laura then warms to Ljoha’s invitation to spend the night in his foster mother’s house, at an overnight stop, enabling her to see a different side to the rough and ready vodka drinker with surprising effect.

Ljoha is also going to Murmansk for work reasons and cannot fathom why Laura would want to go there for pleasure during the Russian winter – it’s still early March. And when the train finally grinds into the station the two part company, at least for a while.

The film really takes off in the final part when the unsophisticated couple embark on another journey – this time into unknown and perilous territory. Once again Kuosmanen offers up a rumbustious feelgood film, not quite as visually alluring as his first feature, with the same touching joie de vivre and an atmospheric score of 1980s hits: rousing French tune “Voyage Voyage” by Desireless, topping the bill. MT

NOW ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Piccadilly (1929)

Dir.: Ewald André Dupont; Cast: Jameson Thomas, Gilda Gray, Cyril Ritchart, Anna May Wong, King Hou Chang, Charles Laughton; UK 1929, 109 min.

German director E.A. Dupont (1891-1956) did not make a success of the talkies in the advent of sound cinema, although his features set in the show-biz world: Variety (1925) Salto Mortale and Trapeze (1931) were visually ravishing.

Emigrating to Hollywood in 1933 brought him mostly failure, his twelve US films include the infamous Neanderthal Man from 1953. Piccadilly, based on the script by Arnold Bennett, was later ‘updated’ with scores and sound effects provided by Harry Gordon.

London Nightclub owner Valentine Wilmot (Thomas) is in love with dancer Mabel (Gray), brought in to boost the club’s clientele with her partner Vic (Ritchart). But one night an irate diner (Laughton) complaining about a dirty plate, interrupts Mabel’s performance, sending Wilmot into the kitchen where Shosho (Wong) is entrancing the workers with her table-top dancing routine. Wilmot fires her, and next morning Vic also resigns in a move that will lead to betrayal, lust and murder as he fights to save his club.

Wong captivates with her smouldering charisma DoP Werner Brandes showing the glamorous side of the glittering London nightlife with dreamy images, light and shadow transforming the set into an ethereal fantasy.

Unfortunately, Brandes would stay in Nazi Germany, shooting, among others, Veit Harlan’s propaganda film Der Herrscher (1937). Dupont would follow up with Atlantic, the Titanic story (1929), the major production resulting in a very costly flop despite its star turn Madeleine Caroll.

Anna May Wong soon left Hollywood, disenchanted by the portrayal of Asian characters as evil. Her European career never caught fire, so she returned to Hollywood to co-star in Josef von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express (1932) alongside Marlene Dietrich. AS

PICCADILLY NOW ON BFI BLURAY ON 21 JUNE 2021

Flame in the Streets (1961)

Dir. Roy Ward Baker | Cast: John Mills, Sylvia Syms, Brenda de Banzie, Earl Cameron, Johnny Sekka | UK Drama 93′

Sixty years ago Sylvia Syms bravely accepted two parts as women facing ostracism because of their choice of partner. Most people know about Victim, but far fewer have seen this film, ironically preceded on Talking Pictures by a disclaimer warning audiences that the offensive language belonged to 1961, in those far off days when the opening credits were accompanied by a brief snatch of calypso rather than reggae or rap.

Yet the characters using such language are shown to be in the wrong; while the sentiments expressed – by members of all communities – are still routinely expressed today, but with less candour. And you only have to pick up any newspaper today at random to discover the sores this film reveals are still fresh. @Richard Chatten

Wildmen – Vildmaend (2021)

Dir/Wri: Thomas Dakeskov | Denmark Drama 101′

Another amusing absurdist Danish comedy along the same lines as male midlife crisis films Klown and Another Round.

Written and directed by Thomas Dakeskov it sees married man Martin escape to the wilderness of Norway – aka his ‘man cave’ – in a bid to escape growing up in the modern world and reverting to ‘hunter-gather’ mode, regretting the loss of his bankcard when the going gets tough.

Although somewhat derivative in its narrative pretensions, this is guaranteed to make you laugh – especially the scene where a ‘people carrier’ collides with a moose – and the animal comes out on top. There are some hairy moments, quite literally, when Martin dons an animal skin for a shopping trip to the supermarket – an episode which ends, inevitably in tears – of hilarity.

On the run from life in the Norwegian mountains Martin (Rasmus Bjerg), freely engages in acts of supreme physical prowess which contrast wildly with his normal humdrum existence, but goes on to confront uncomfortable truths about the masculine reality. The film pokes fun at his macho attempts to look butch in the wild, as opposed to mild-mannered and sophisticated in his urban habitat. And while his ludicrous antics are clearly entertaining to the audience, the humour points a rather derogatory finger at Martin, making him into a pathetic figure of fun, rather than a renaissance renegade. That all said this inventive caper doesn’t aim to plumb the depths of the human psyche, merely to entertain and upliFt. And it does so admirably despite its obvious limitations, never taking itself too seriously. A little gem. MT

NOW ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE \ Tribeca Film Festival 2021

The Christine Jorgensen Story (1970)

Dir: Irving Rapper | US Drama 98′

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

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

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

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

No Man of God (2021) TriBeCa 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

TRIBECO FILM FESTIVAL | JUNE 2021

Lady Boss: The Jackie Collins Story (2021) TriBeCa Film Festival 2021

Dir: Laura Fairrie | US Doc 96′

Success came to Jackie Collins beyond her wildest dreams. Despite negative vibes from her father and sister, the actress Joan Collins, she proved that women can make in bed – and in board room – coining the aspiration phase “Girls can do anything” and giving women supreme sexually agency to enjoy their own escapist fantasies not just on the page but on top of the sheets – or anywhere they chose.

This warm and witty portrait of the best-selling author -who books have sold more than 500 million copies worldwide – shows how steely determination and iron resolve eventually made her the toast of Hollywood, sending her rocketing into stardom in the 1990s with a string of raunchy chic-lit page-turners mostly centred on the “dangerously beautiful” sexually liberated Italian-American femme fatale Lucky Santangelo, the character in her most successful paperback ‘Hollywood Wives’. Jackie was also the self-styled author of her own life and chic outward persona. Guarding a secret world behind her well-penned pages, she remained positive in the face of multiple setbacks not least the suicide of her first husband Wallace Austin while her mother was dying of cancer. She would follow in 2015.

Growing up in leafy Hampstead the daughter of a Jewish showbiz agent Jo Collins and his Christian stay at home wife, family played a major part in Jackie’s life, according to director Laura Fairrie. The youngest of three children – her older brother and sister provide informative ballast along with her three voluable daughters and a clutch of close friends and colleagues (amongst them Tita Cahn, wife of Sammy). According to her big sister Joan – who frequently damns her with faint praise – Jackie was always quietly scribbling away in a diary as they enjoyed a glamorous party scene where she joined Joan in late 1950s Hollywood, and these notes would form the basis of her characters, Lucky was the one she aspired to most.

Jackie Collins’ paperbacks were the first to have shiny, gold-embossed covers (now so commonplace in airport booksellers) setting them apart from the usual fare, they looked glamorous and enticing. And while Fairrie’s film is rich in the ruminations of friends and family, what jumps out ahead of the crowd are the startling double-standards at play at the time (and nothing has really changed). Women claim – by the sheer number of books sold – to enjoy the sexually-charged escapes that would later feature in films like The Stud (Joan neatly writing herself into the picture as the main star, as her own career flagged). But on-stage Q&As show the complete opposite, with women castigating her openly with their comments: one opines: “your books are absolute filth”. To her credit Jackie is seen listening thoughtfully, never coming over as strident or outspoken, always perfectly poised and graceful. One amusing sequence sees hackneyed romantic novelist Barbara Cartland having a pop at Jackie, who looks on incredulously. Another less appealing scene shows how Jackie was mercilessly set up on a British chat show with an audience populated by puritanical prudes.

Although Jackie never made it into acting the film shows how she used her experiences observing the Los Angeles celebrity circus and it was Lerman who encouraged her to finish her first book, The World is Full of Married Men, and agreeing to move the family to Los Angeles when Collins set out to crack the American market.In her own coterie of Hollywood jet-setters: Roger Moore is curiously seen making obscene gestures behind Jackie’s back during a drinks soiree but her second marriage to Tramp owner Oscar Lerman proved to be happy, fulfilling and supportive, paving the way to sealing her success in Hollywood.

The success story is only marred by Jackie’s own tragedy that she seems to have kept to herself and suddenly looms up from nowhere, according to her daughter Tara, possibly indicating a lack of self esteem at her innermost core, feeding into those early memories of feeling ‘less than’ and “a big fat lump” next to Joan. But

It was both a tireless work ethic and her survival instinct that kept Collins writing through her grief when Lerman died of prostate cancer in 1992. An extended engagement followed, to L.A. businessman Frank Calcagnini, described by her daughters and other intimates as like a gigolo character from one of her novels. “A gambler, a drugger, an alcoholic and an abuser,” is what Tita Cahn calls him. His death from a brain tumor nonetheless was another blow. When Collins herself was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer, she took a leaf out of the book of her father, who decades earlier had responded to her beloved mother’s cancer diagnosis by declaring: “We don’t use that word.”

The film’s account of Jackie’s final weeks, when she kept her illness almost entirely to herself, is quite affecting. There’s poignancy in Joan’s recollections, as well as those of business manager Laura Lizer, of a lunch at the Ritz Carlton where Jackie informed her sister of her condition. During that farewell trip home to London, she also appeared on an ITV chat show, looking gaunt but still full of spirit, just days before her death. She went out promoting her work and keeping her sorrows private.

Fairrie doesn’t attempt to rewrite history and make a case for Collins as an underappreciated literary genius. But she paints a stirring picture of a gifted storyteller and a brilliant female entrepreneur, who shrugged off the cultural snobbery and the misogynistic backlash sparked by her “scandalous” work and laughed all the way to the bank.

hanging out with Michael Caine and Sean Connery and making her friends with the powerful wives of studio bosses such as Barbara Davis and Tita Cahn who refer to her as “their best friend”. MT

Tribeca Film Festival | New York | JUNE 2021

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEOija16ns4

Cannes Selection…now complete

There are always a few last minute additions to the official film line-up at Cannes Film Festival, and today Thierry Fremaux completed the Official Selection for the 74th ‘all live edition’ running from 5 -18 July 2021with FROM AFRICA WITH LOVE. Nicolas Bedos, Jean Dujardin and Pierre Niney star in the Final Screening of the 74th Festival de Cannes!

By renaming the closing film as the “Final Screening”, the Festival de Cannes aims to rekindle the tradition of the last screening, drawing inspiration from huge evening galas gone by like the screening of Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (in the old Palais in 1982) or Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise (in the new Palais in 1991).

This year, the 74th Festival will round off with the premier of the latest chapter in the adventures of Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath, code name OSS 117, played by Jean Dujardin who will appear onscreen alongside Fatou N’Diaye, Pierre Niney, Natacha Lindinger and the late Wladimir Yordanoff.

Gaspar Noe is back with a docu-drama Vortex, starring Dario Argento, and focusing on the final days of an elderly couple. Press queued all evening at the Marriott Hotel for his previous film Climax in 2018, but this – by its very nature – promises to be a more sober affaire, although with Argento at the helm one never knows.

Once again the films are distinctly Gallic in flavour with three music-themed outings joining the party: TraLaLa is a musical comedy from Arnaud and Jean-Marie Larrieu, and Supremes looks at the French band NTM, directed by Audrey Estrougo. Of the Special screenings New Worlds, The Cradle of a Civilisation is Andrew Muscato’s musical documentary, set in Athens, Greece. It captures the final performance of Bill Murray and Jan Vogler’s European “New Worlds” tour.

Mi iubta Mon amour is the directorial debut of actor-turned-filmmaker Noemie Merlant whose smouldering performance in Portrait of a Young Lady on Fire was one of the highlights of Cannes 2019.

For his latest film Where is Anne Frank? the Oscar-nominated Israeli animator Ari Folman has gained special access to the diaries of the tragic young Jewish girl who went into hiding in wartime Holland. Seen through the eyes of her imaginary friend Kitty, to whom Anne dedicated her diary, she wakes up in contemporary Amsterdam and tries to find Anne in modern day Europe. The film plays out of competition.

Mes Freres Et Moi by Yohan Manca completes the line-up at the Un Certain Regard sidebar.

Jodie Foster will receive an honorary Palme d’Or. Spike Lee will preside over the Jury, and the world premiere of Annette with Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard will open proceedings.

OUT OF COMPETITION

Where is Anne Frank ? by Ari Folman (Israel)

Animated film

CANNES PREMIERE

Vortex by Gaspar Noé (Argentina – Italy)

starring Dario Argento, Françoise Lebrun and Alex Lutz

UN CERTAIN REGARD

Mes frères et moi by Yohan Manca (France)

starring Sofian Khammes, Dali Benssalah, Judith Chemla, Maël Rouin Berrandou

First feature

MIDNIGHT SCREENINGS

Tralala by Arnaud and Jean-Marie Larrieu (France)

starring Mathieu Amalric, Mélanie Thierry, Bertrand Belin, Maïwenn, Josiane Balasko, Denis Lavant

Suprêmes by Audrey Estrougo (France)

starring Théo Christine, Sandor Funtek

SPECIAL SCREENINGS

Bill Murray’s party: New Worlds, the cradle of a civilization by Andrew Muscato (Greece-USA)

starring Bill Murray and the musicians from New Worlds: Jan Vogler, Mira Wang and Vanessa Perez

Mi iubita, Mon amour by Noémie Merlant (France)

starring Gimi-Nicolae Covaci and Noémie Merlant

First feature

Les Héroïques by Maxime Roy (France)

starring François Creton, Richard Bohringer, Ariane Ascaride, Clotilde Courau, Patrick D’Assumçao

First feature

Are you lonesome tonight ? by Wen Shipei (China)

starring Sylvia Chang, Eddie Peng

First feature

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2021 | 6 – 18 JULY 2021

Men Who Sing (2021) Sheffield Doc Festival 2021

Dir/Wri: Daryl Williams | UK Doc 77′

The Welsh are well known for their singing. And this charming story about an elderly Welshman’s choir in the town of Rhyl on the Denbighshire coast, makes it World Premiere at this year’s Sheffield doc festival.

Director Dylan Williams is best known for his award-winning documentary debut Men Who Swim (2010), and this thematic sequel turns out to be another poignant love letter – this time to his father. Not the closest pair, the two are reunited when the widowed 90 year old announces he’s selling the family home “while he’s still able”. Naturally this is a wake up call to ‘only child’ Dylan, who promptly makes his way back from his home in Sweden where he has lived for the past twenty years.

Almost entirely in the Welsh language this is, unsurprisingly, a tuneful and light-heated biopic, making great use of its green and pleasant coastal settings in the former industrial town in North Wales, known for building the airbus, and this is where most of the choir men have been gainfully employed. Now retired they have found cosy camaraderie in this local choir, and inspiration from their feisty choir-mistress Ann)

But most of the men are now mostly in their eighties, and a much needed recruitment drive to find new singers to boost their dwindling numbers makes up the other main strand to the narrative, along with the important need to keep practising, improving and entering competitions, adding an element of drama to the storyline. Men Who Sing is not just a another tribute to a filmmaker’s father, this is a well-structured and watchable portrait of a choir, and a generation of men soon to be lost forever in the industrial heartlands of North Wales. MT

SHEFFIELD DOC FESTIVAL 2021

The Savior For Sale: The Story of Salvator Mundi (2020) Sheffield Doc Festival 2021

Dir: Antoine Vitkine | France Doc 95′

Controversy has long surrounded this emotive work of art purportedly by Leonardo da Vinci. Like a beautiful woman, many men have struggled to win her and have succeeded, but then been deceived or outwitted. But the ‘Salvator Mundi’ represents more than just a depiction of Christ, it has a deeper resonance thanks to its title: ‘Saviour of the World’ capturing the zeitgeist of our fragile planet, that resonates beyond Christendom.

Best known in France for his TV outings: ‘Magda Goebels, First Lady of the Third Reich’ (2017) and ‘The President and the Dictator: Sarkozy-Kadafi’ (2015), journalist, writer and director Antoine Vitkine explores the painting’s eventful journey from discovery to oblivion so exposing the vagaries of the international art market. This is a lushly mounted sinuously-scored thriller, its twists and turns revealing some of the most powerful players in the art world, and those making money out of them. It’s a tale of backbiting, greed and hype that shows how leverage from a handful of key players can transform a virtually valueless piece to a painting commanding millions the following day in the hurly burly of market credibility.

From the opening scenes The Savior For Sale bristles with intrigue and skulduggery transporting us into the hushed homes and yachts of the super-rich from Paris to New York, London to Monaco. A masterpiece in investigative journalism the film’s cut and thrust only adds to its allure, showing how the ‘Salvator’s’ attribution to the legendary old Italian master would see its value rise to stellar heights, becoming “the most expensive – and coveted – painting in the world”.

Modest yet deeply resonant its depiction of a serene Christ – not unlike that of the Mona Lisa – the painting’s route to success comes courtesy of a fascinating group of protagonists whose roll-call plays out like a game of Cluedo. There is “The Expert” Martin Kemp; “The Dealer” Warren Adelson; “The Journalist” Scott Reyburn; “The Oligarch” Dmitri Rybolovlev and his Swiss right-hand man Yves Bouvier. Belgian art specialist Chris Deacon also makes his case, and soon the Saudis wade in with their billions. The aim is to prove that Leornardo was the painter, not simply his studio, and there’s a great deal to be gained – and lost – financially in the process. MT

SCREENING DURING SHEFFIELD DOC FESTIVAL 2021

Almost Liverpool 8 (2021)

Dir: Daniel Draper | UK Doc, 89′

Daniel Draper makes the Toxteth area of Liverpool cinematic in his summery trip through the streets of the neighbourhood known 50 years ago for its race riots.

Billed as Don McCullin: Almost Liverpool 8 in the Sheffield Doc Festival programme, we were hoping for another look at the renowned photographer’s life. But he only bookends the film chipping in occasionally with memories of a time when he worked on the railways in the 1950s as a teenager, wending his way back and forth between London and the deprived place he recalls as “dark and Satanic” back in the day. As a war photojournalist decades later he would capture the Toxteth community during an era of transition and decline.

McCullin is joined by a motley crew of friendly, laid-back locals who shoot the breeze on camera with Draper, their chats interweaved with Allan Melia’s artfully framed long takes. What emerges is a calm and reflective love letter to a working class district now home to a multicultural bunch who now get along like a house on fire – or so they would have us believe: Victorian churches and mosques standing cheek by jowl.

Liverpool was once a major industrial seaport the maritime trade providing the lucrative backbone of a place whose well built low rise red-brick housing now offers ample opportunity for a chat over the fence or a neighbourly meeting on the doorstep. Roads are named after composers (Brahms, Beethoven etc) and Dickens characters, but there is little evidence of the high-rise housing blocks, crime or the rank social deprivation we had come to associate with the place.

Local Poet Roger McGough is joined by salt of the earth beekeeper Barry Chang; a hairdresser tells of her regular Somalian clientele. Then there’s community organiser Joe Farrag who laments the loss of local shops that once energised the area when sailors regularly passed through on their way from the docks. An lyrical look at a proud and welcoming Toxteth in 2021.MT

NOW ON RELEASE

SHEFFIELD DOCFEST 2021 UK COMPETITION

Nashville (1975) Robert Altman Retrospective

Dir.: Rosbert Altman; Cast: Karen Black, Keith Carradine, Henry Gibson. Geraldine Chaplin, Lily Tomlin, Keenan Wynn, Ronee Blakley, Barbara Harris, Scott Glennon, Shelley Duvall, David Hayword, Gwen Welles, Barbara Baxley, David Peel; USA 1975; 160′.

Nashville, undoubtedly director Robert Altman’s greatest feature, was scripted by Joan Tewkesbury and shot by Paul Lohmann: it is still, 26 years later, a magnificent portrait of the American South.

Set in Nashville, Tennessee, is tells the stories of stars, drifters and wanna-bee singers, all fascinated by country music and unaware of anything political going on: the most important agitator is never seen during the Presidential primaries for 1976 election: Hal Philip Walker, an early Donald Trump version, candidate and founder of the radical right ‘Replacement Party’, sends his PR man on a mission to win over musicians for his campaign.

Twenty-four central characters pass the baton around, the playing field gradually growing until violent fragments destroy nearly everyone’s life. Barbara Jean (Blakley) is the archetypal Loretta Young type, mismanaged by her punitive husband, living in her own world, even if on stage – but still remaining the ‘Queen Bee’.

Rival Connie White (Black) makes a good enough stand-in after Barbara, just recovered from treatment on the East-Coast for a burn treatment, has lost it completely in front of a bewildered audience. Singer and promoter Haven Hamilton (Gibson) had opened proceedings with his recording of “We must have done something right to last 200 Years” hymn on the United States. Hamilton is upset with his son Bud (Peel), who has hired the “wrong” pianist. Haven breaks off the session and tells the pianist: “Get a haircut, you do not belong in Nashville”. His companion Lady Pearl (Baxley) is certainly living in the past: she had had worked for the Kennedy brothers in the 1960s and 1968 elections, and can’t get over her frustration about Nixon winning Tennessee by a small margin over JFK in 1960.

Then there is Tom Frank (Carradine) a narcissistic womaniser and singer – Carradine would win the only Oscar for Nashville, for his original song. Tom spends all day and night in bed, inviting women to join him. One of them is Linnea Reese (Tomlin, in her debut), a mother of two deaf children and member of a Gospel Choir. Also to be found between his sheets is BBC reporter Opal (G. Chaplin), who makes the most inappropriate racial comments when interviewing members of the music scene. When she visits a disused car lot, her take on this hyperbole is more suited for the millennium.

Two women try their luck as newcomers: Albuquerque (Harris) is running away from a husband, and trying to get a debut as a singer. She has no idea how her wish will eventually become reality. Sueleen Gay (Welles) is a waitress, who in spite being tone-deaf, tries her luck as a singer: The rowdy audience cajoles her into stripping. There is a quartet of more lowkey participants, led by Mr. Green (Wynn), who is looking after his dying wife in hospital. His niece Joan (Duvall) is an incompetent groupie who never gets to see her aunt or meets the musicians. A uniformed soldier (Glennon) is lurking around Barbara Jean during most of the film, we fear the worst, but the shots at the ending are fired by smart and pleasant Kenny (Hayward).

Nashville is a kaleidoscope of celebrity fandom showcasing the early stages of political manipulating through culture. Haven Hamilton has been given the nod to become the next Governor of the State if he supports Walker. But the drifters and onlookers are given equal screen time for their shattered dreams. A marvellous script which is acted out by a stellar ensemble cast. Nashville remains the benchmark for everything following in its wake. AS

ROBERT ALTMANN RETROSPECTIVE AT BFI Southbank 2021

Rendezvous in July (1949)

Dir/Wri: Jacques Becker | Cast: Daniel Gelin, Brigitte Auber, Nicole Courcel, Pierre Trabaud, Maurice Ronet | France, Drama 102′

One of Jacques Becker’s most financially successful films, this exhilarating slice of postwar Parisian life isn’t quite the first ‘slacker’ film (that distinction probably belongs to Val Guest’s Give Us the Moon five years earlier) – but its freewheeling portrait of the young at play around Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the Latin Quarter, aided by tremendous photography by Claude Renoir, vibrantly captures the look and feel of a Paris only recently freed from the dead weight of the Occupation and discovering jazz (and amphicars!).

Strongly anticipating later ‘youth’ subjects like Fellini’s I Vitelloni (1953) and Marcel Carné’s ‘beat’ film Les Tricheurs (1958), a full ten years before the Nouvelle Vague Becker’s film also discreetly employs the whimsical archaism of irises in and out that later became one of the hallmarks of the new kids on the arrondissement during the early sixties. Among the attractive cast of newcomers, watch out for veteran Gaston Modot playing a professor. @Richard Chatten

NOW ON AMAZON

Directors’ Fortnight | Quinzaine des Réalisateurs (2021)

Cannes Film Festival is only weeks away and the Directors’ Fortnight selection has just been announced screening from 7 to 17 July 202. It’s surprising how many new filmmakers feature in this year’s slate with Britain’s Clio Barnard and Joanna Hogg joining the party with her sequel to her personal feature Souvenir (2019).

Other noteworthy directors are Romania’s Radu Muntean (One Floor Below), Italy’s Alice Rohrwacher (Happy as Lazzaro), who joins fellow directors Pietro Marcello (Martin Eden) and Francesco Munzi (Anime Neri) in a documentary portrait of Italy’s up and coming generation. Also to look forward to is the latest from Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes (Arabian Nights).

A Chiara – Jonas Carpignano 98′

A Night of Knowing Nothing Payal Kapadia (debut) 90′

Ali & Ava – Clio Barnard 93′

Clara Sola – Nathalie Álvarez Mesen (debut) 108′

De bas étage (A Brighter Tomorrow) – Yassine Qnia (debut) 86′

Diários de Otsoga (The Tsugua Diaries) – Miguel Gomes, Maureen Fazendeiro 108′

El empleado y el patron (The Employer and the Employee) de Manuel Nieto Zas 108′

Entre les Vagues (The Braves) d’Anaïs Volpé | 99’1h39

Europa de Haider Rashid – 1h15

Futura de Pietro Marcello, Francesco Munzi, Alice Rohrwacher 105′

Întregalde – Radu Muntean – 1h44

Jadde khaki (Hit the Road) – Panah Panahi (Debut) 93′

Les Magnétiques (Magnetic Beats) de Vincent Maël Cardona (debut) 98′

Luaneshat e kodrës (The Hill where Lionesses Roar) de Luàna Bajrami
(debut) 82′

Medusa d’Anita Rocha da Silveira 127′ 2h07

Mon légionnaire (Our Men) de Rachel Lang 106′ Closing Film

Murina d’Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović (debut) 92′

Neptune Frost de Saul Williams, Anisia Uzeyman 105′

Ouistreham (Between Two Worlds) – Emmanuel Carrère 107′ Opening
1h47 – Film d’ouverture

Re Granchio (The Tale of King Crab) d’Alessio Rigo de Righi, Matteo Zoppis 90′

Retour à Reims (Fragments) – (Returning to Reims (Fragments) – Jean-Gabriel Périot 83′

The Souvenir Part II de Joanna Hogg – 106′
1h46

Yong an zhen gu shi ji (Ripples of Life) de Shujun Wei – 120′

The Sea Ahead d’Ely Dagher (debut) – 116′

SÉANCE SPECIALE
The Souvenir de Joanna Hogg – 120′

QUINZAINE DES REALISATEURS | 7 -17 JULY 2021

Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021)

Dir: Kier-La Janisse | US, Doc 193’

Everything you wanted to know about horror films: this immersive three hour documentary is an expansive study of the macabre genre of “folk horror” from the lurid to the surreal and downright ghastly. A gruesome and immersive trip to Hell signposted by the trilogy of cult classics: Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General (1968) Piers Haggard’s Blood of Satan’s Claw and Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man.

Canadian filmmaker and scholar Kier-La Janisse embellishes her film with insightful talking heads and over a 100 clips from the archives, to explore how “Folk horror” came into being relatively recently, casting a spell over a growing audience with enigmatic qualities often escaping definition yet firmly rooted in the countryside with local mores and primitive superstitions providing its down to earth life blood, sustained by a fear of the unknown. This “juxtaposition of prosaic and uncanny”, coined by author and actor Jonathan Rigby, lies at its heart.

A must for genre fans Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched also provides a valuable potted history for newcomers, divided into six chapters, for ease of reference. Commentatory from occult experts, historians and cult filmmakers enriches the informative brew.

The only two surviving directors from the unholy trilogy also give their pennyworth on their rural cult outings: Robin Hardy’s terrifying ‘pagan meets pious’ tale The Wicker Man (1973) and Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) a tale of villagers fearing possession by the Devil in 17th century Christian England.

Britain has always harked back to past socially and architecturally, and so UK folklore provides a particularly rich trove to draw with its rural traditions and literary heritage of ghost stories and the supernatural. American directors can mine the puritan sensibilities of the pilgrim fathers onwards for their source of folk horror. Here Robert Eggers talks about his breakout revivalist features The Witch and The Lighthouse. Janisse then skates more broadly over the international scene showing how folk horror in countries such as Australia and South America is largely influenced by Colonialism and its literary traditions of magic realism. Canadian cult filmmaker Guy Maddin also makes an appearance talking about his surreal, award-winning work.

Janisse has crafted a worthwhile and entertaining compendium film that can be enjoyed in an afternoon, or dipped into from time to time. MT

NOW ON AMAZON PRIME | ROTTERAM FILM FESTIVAL | SUMMER SEASON June 4-6 2021

Sheffield Doc Festival 2021 | TV highlights

Among an exciting array of the latest big screen documentaries, this year’s SHEFFIELD DOC FESTIVAL highlights two new digital and TV productions heading to our screens with a series of quintessentially British stories

All at Sea: Fishing for Britain (w/t)

So disappointing that the British Fishing industry has been suffering of late with the new Brexit regulations. My own great grandfather was a sea captain with his own fleet of trawlers on the Lincolnshire coast so it seems only fitting that the BBC should explore our fishing heritage in this new six part series showcasing the British fishing fleet on a scale not seen before.

It follows boats from all around the nations’ shores plying their trade across a vast expanse of UK waters. Focusing on deep-sea fishing fleets, a key industry in communities from Shetland to Newlyn, this series will dramatically intercut the stories of fishermen who put to sea for a week at a time, work round the clock in all weathers, and do one of the most dangerous, high stakes jobs in Britain.

Each episode will be set over a week at sea, with multiple crews filming simultaneously, capturing the contrasting fortunes of different vessels. With access to boats in every kind of fishery, from multi-million-pound pelagics and supercrabbers to wreck-netters and trawlers, we’ll see characters facing unique challenges and shifting odds as they battle to bring home their catch – hundreds of miles apart, but all sailing the same fine line between risk and reward.

The series will use satellite tracking technology to drive graphics that link these stories and set them in the epic big picture of fishing activity around our coast. While latest-generation camera technology on board the boats captures this most dramatic of precincts.

All at Sea: Fishing for Britain (w/t) (6×60) for BBC One and iPlayer is made by Frank Films

The Nilsen Files: A Very British Crime Stories

In the wake of the BAFTA-winning Yorkshire Ripper Files and the extraordinary revelations of The Shipman Files, filmmaker Michael Ogden will re-examine the case of Dennis Nilsen, convicted in 1983 for the murders of six young men. Focusing on the lives of the victims, he’ll ask why 40 years on they remain just a footnote in this terrible case. Michael will explore not just who these boys and young men were, but also how attitudes at the time allowed their disappearance and murders to be overlooked.

Meeting with former police officers, he’ll discover their regrets about the premature closure of the case, leaving seven murder victims unidentified and families without answers about the fate of their missing children.

This series will upend everything we think we know about this case; exploring the homophobic attitudes that allowed Nilsen’s crimes to go un-investigated for many years. And how attitudes suggested that there was little interest in missing young men, often dismissed simply as ‘drifters’. Understanding the case anew, Michael will seek to show how these attitudes are as dangerous to young men’s lives today as they were almost forty years ago.

The Nilsen Files: A Very British Crime Story (3×60) for BBC Two and iPlayer

SHEFFIELD DOC FESTIVAL 2021 | JUNE 3 – 14 2021

The Father (2020) Blu-ray

Dir: Florian Zeller | Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Olivia Colman, Mark Gatiss, Olivia Williams, Imogen Poots, Rufus Sewell | Drama 97′

If ever there was a film for now it’s The Father. Dementia has become today’s most dread disease – along with cancer – not least because of its emotive and devastating effects on sufferers and loved ones alike as the personality disintegrates in a frightening and often hurtful way casting a dark shadow on entire families as they struggle to make sense of it all as everything changes.

Based on the acclaimed, award-winning play, The Father starts out with a simple idea based on the situation familiar to many of us. Anne (Olivia Colman) realises her 80-year-old father, Anthony (Anthony Hopkins) is losing his mind but can do nothing to help him. Anthony refuses a carer determined to control his own destiny while exerting an invidious grip on his frustrated and desperate daughter, who is moving to Paris and needs to ensure his wellbeing.

The Father is rather a triumph for director and playwright Florian Zeller who has already won an Oscar for his clever script nailing the anxiety, frustration and sadness surrounding dementia, and the confusion it causes for the sufferer and those affected who increasingly find themselves at odds with each other.

Anthony thinks a conspiracy is playing out as he continues his life ‘as normal’ believing his daughter (Colman) to be overplaying the situation as she becomes increasingly neurotic and overbearing, according to him. One of the features of the disease it that sufferers confuse members of their family, and Olivia Williams steps in to play the ‘other’ person. Meanwhile Anthony suspects (wrongfully) that things are being done behind his back and this all too familiar aspect of dementia often gives rise to a dark humour that Zeller thoughtfully interweaves into the fractured narrative through a series of surprise events and changes adding a bizarre twist to proceedings.

Hopkins pulls this off brilliantly in a totally convincing performance that sways from outrage to pitiful vulnerability building on his reputation as one of the world’s finest actors. Colman too is impressive as she struggles convincingly between anger and deep sadness. A sibling set-to would have added grist to the storyline, so often family members fall out as they are pitted against one another amid stress and confusion in a battle to comply with the sufferer’s need to divide and rule in the descent in mental mayhem.

The Father is a difficult film to watch – and it will touch a nerve with so many of us – but Hopkins and Colman deliver their best and that’s all that can be hoped for in the circumstances. MT

The Father is on Digital Download 27 August and Blu-ray & DVD 30 August from Lionsgate UK

The Brothers (1947)

Dir: David MacDonald | Cast: Patricia Roc, Will Fyffe, Maxwell Reed, Finely Currie | UK Drama 98′

It’s hard to tell if this barnstorming adaptation of L. A. G. Strong’s novel is ‘serious’ melodrama or a spoof until John Laurie (already rolling his eyes like he was on something) turns up in another even more eccentric additional role in whiskers and pebble lens glasses looking like Corporal Jones’ elderly father as ‘Alistair McDonald’, when you realise the humour must be intentional (although the late Will Fyfe, who compares the heroine to “a daffodil growing on a dung heap” seems the only cast member actually in on the joke).

Maybe the authorities thought it would reconcile audiences mired in drab postwar austerity by showing the Isle of Skye nearly fifty years earlier more visually majestic but less fun to actually experience. (Stephen Dade’s camera – noisily pursued by Cedric Thorpe Davie’s’ music – creates majestic exteriors and interiors worthy of a German silent film).

Arriving at this sty of “crossbred pigs” (where the ratio of males to females already seems unhealthily high) young Patricia Roc finds Scotland even more of a trial than Nova Pilbeam did Wales a year later in The Three Weird Sisters. @ Richard Chatten

Petrov’s Flu (2021) | Cannes 2021

Dir: Kiril Serebrennikov | Cast: Semyon Serzin, Chulpan Khamatova, Yulia Boris and Yuri Kolokolnikov | USSR, Drama

Petrov’s Flu, the new film by Kirill Serebrennikov marks the third time in a row for the Russian director at the Cannes Film Festival, uniting him once again with Semyon Serzin, the star of his 2018 drama Leto. His standout thought-provoking religious drama The Student (2016) screened at Un Certain Regard and won that year’s Francois Chalais Award.

Based on the novel “The Petrovs In and Around the Flu” by Alexey Salnikov, PETROV’S FLU is a deadpan, hallucinatory romp through post-Soviet Russia. With the city in the throes of a flu epidemic, the Petrov family struggles through yet another day in a country where the past is never past, the present is a booze-fueled, icy fever dream of violence and tenderness, and where – beneath layers of the ordinary – things turn out to be quite extraordinary.

Set somewhere between reality and imagination, PETROV’S FLU is a visually arresting experience: rough, funny, violent and psychedelic, and yet tender and poetic. A tale that is going to stick in the viewer’s mind for a long time after the credits roll. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2021 | COMPETITION

The Last Film Show (2021) TriBeCa 2021

Dir/Wri: Pan Nalin | Cast: Bhavin Rabari, Richa Meena, Dipen Raval, Rahul Koli | India, Drama 110′

The Last Film Show is one of the most buzz worthy titles at this year’s TriBeCa film festival. Essentially India’s answer to Giuseppe Tournatore’s 1988 cult classic Cinema Paradiso it’s a lush nostalgic crowdpleaser beautifully written and directed by Pan Nalin whose Angry Indian Goddesses garnered acclaim as India’s first female buddy movie back in 2015.

A mischievous nine-year-old boy called Samay is the film’s pre-teen hero, a cross between between Toto’s child and teenager – as he never gets any older in this version – he’s altogether more sullen too without the endearing charm of Toto, but cheekily played by the tousled-haired Richa Meena who is savagely beaten by his father when he plays truant after discovering his secret new hobby.

In early scenes we see Samay (Rabari) and his mates hitching a ride on a train trundling through the remote Gujarat village where he lives with his parents and younger sister, finding their way to a rundown cinema where the boy bribes the hungry projectionist (Dipen Raval channelling a much leaner Philippe Noiret) with the lunchbox prepared for him by his mother.

Samay slips into a daily routine captivated by his newfound love for cinema, offering Bapuji his lunch box in exchange for the best seat in the house – the projection booth. And when the cinema goes digital from 35mm, the rites of passage narrative sees Samay and his mates setting up their own projection suite, as their parental ties finally loosen.

Pan Nalin pays tribute to the cinema of yesterday with this vibrantly cinematic homage to the magic of film, its ability to unite and uplift seen through the eyes of a naughty young boy. MT

Tribeca Film Festival 2021 | 10 JUNE, 2021 WORLD PREMIERE

The Committee (1968)

Dir: Peter Sykes, Wri: Max Steuer | Musical Drama | Cast: Paul Jones, Tom Kempinski, Robert Langdon, Pauline Munro | UK 58′

To grasp where this film is coming from I guess you’d have to read the short story by Max Steuer (originally a dream) on which it is based. It plays as a bargain basement melange of Robbe-Grillet and Kafka, with the attention immediately grabbed by the arresting title sequence juggling mug-shots of the three main protagonists to a sinister blurping accompaniment on the soundtrack; but which is soon allowed to dissipate by what follows. For a film that begins with the central figure decapitating a total stranger on a whim, The Committee is an incongruously well-mannered, very British affair – albeit with hip sixties trimmings in the form of a soundtrack by Pink Floyd and a personal appearance by Arthur Brown.

Ian Wilson’s cool black & white photography is presumably intended to evoke L’Année Dernière à Marienbad, and as in Marienbad there’s a lot of talk but very little actually said. The plush backdrop is here provided by the London School of Economics, where Steuer – author of ‘The Scientific Study of Society’ (2003) has been ensconced in the philosophy department since 1959, and was at the time of the making of ‘The Committee’ a lecturer in economics and social sciences. The endless gnomic prattle may be a joke at the expense of his colleagues there. @Richard Chatten

THE COMMITTEE is available on Amazon

La Civil (2021) Cannes – Un Certain Regard 2021

Dir: Teodora Ana Mihai | Cast: Arcelia Ramirez, Alvaro Guerrero, Jorge A Jimenez, Ayelen Muzo | Belgium. Drama 140′

La Civil is only the third Belgian Flemish feature of recent years to be included in the prestigious official Un Certain Regard sidebar at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Another startling episode in the history of Latin America was the inspiration for this feature debut from Belgian-Romanian director, Teodora Ana Mihai. This time we’re in Mexico channelling the tragic real life experience of Miriam Rodríguez through the character of a young mother Cielo who is desperately looking for her daughter abducted by members of a drug cartel. Once again, the authorities are not much use so Cielo (a feisty Arcelia Ramirez ) takes things into her own hands gradually turning from ordinary housewife into avenging activist, all for the love of her daughter.

Visually striking and packed with gritty authenticity thanks to a script from Texan born Mexican author Habacuc Antonio de Rosario the film comes alive in relating the ongoing horror of families blown apart by drug cartels, not unlike the British equivalent in the recent County Lines. At its heart La Civil is about unconditional parental love, a mother refusing to back down in the face of a venal enemy, prepared to do anything to save her child, rather like this year’s other Mexican survival drama Amparo playing in the Semaine de la Critique section.

Here the camera sees things from the victim’s point of view with strong atmospheric echoes of the US TV crime series Narcos. MT

UN CERTAIN REGARD CANNES | JULY 12TH PREMIERE

Brighton 4th (2021) Red Sea: Competition Best Film: BRIGHTON 4th

Dir.: Levan Koguashvili; Cast: Levan Tediashvili, Giorgi Tabidze, Nadezhada Mikalkova, Kakhi Kausadze, Tolepbergen Baisakalov, Yuriy Zur, Irakli Kavsadze, Irma Gachechiladze; Bulgaria/Georgia/Monaco/Russia/USA 2021, 90 min.

Georgian director Levan Koguashvili (Street Days) captures the essence of Boris Frumin’s idiosyncratic script – a fraught concoction of shattered dreams and fatherly love in exile, laced with dark humour and set in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, once a cultural melting pot for Jewish emigrants and artists and now home to Russian-speaking Georgian emigres not afraid to resort to gangster tactics to get what they want.

Soso (Tabidze) set off from Tbilisi with the best of intentions, his family lending him $15,000 to study medicine and pay Lena (Mikalkova) for a fake marriage and a Green Card. Once in New York the hot-tempered Soso develops a gambling habit, the money slipping through his fingers.

So it’s up to his father Kakhi (Tediashvli) to put things right. Arriving tired and stressed the former Olympic wrestler finds his son in a shabby boarding house, and soon devises a way of earning the money to get him back on his feet.

Amongst the motley crew of local Georgians – played by mostly non-pros – is fellow ex-wrestler Amir who has partly contributed to the problem, lending Soso the money, and now wants it back, threatening the young man and his father with a death squad. On a misty beach, with the now defunct fairground in the background, a bitter feud develops where they will eventually fight it out.

Shot by Oscar-nominated DP Phedon Papamichael (Nebraska) whose images of the decaying district fit in well with the dry absurdist narrative: the film shows how these hapless immigrants were aiming to capture the elusive American Dream. Instead, desperation sets in like the permanent fog that haunts the beach front, twinkling fairy lights the only beacon of hope they mistook for the promised land. Brilliantly acted, Brighton 4th is a homage to early Jarmush features: the greener grass of Brooklyn looking distinctly grey on the horizon. AS

Best International Narrative Feature Film: Brighton 4th, directed by Levan Koguashvili,

Best Actor in an International Narrative Feature Film: Levan Tediashvili

Best Screenplay in an International Narrative Feature Film: Boris Frumin,

TRIBECA 2021 | 14 JUNE 2021

Red Sea: Competition Best Film: BRIGHTON 4TH by Levan Koguashvili – Georgia, Russia, Bulgaria, USA, Monaco.

Basic Instinct (1992) Blu-ray release

Dir: Paul Verhoeven, Wri: Joe Eszterhas | Cast: Sharon Stone, Michael Douglas, George Dzundza, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Leilani Sarelle | US Thriller, 127′

A lush and stylish Neo noir thriller capturing an era of permissiveness and danger its sultry assured heroine remaining mysteriously foxy until the final reveal, the taut and twisty narrative overpowered by the cinematic allure. Basic Instinct has a potent whiff of sex and seduction about it, and that’s what sealed in the public imagination.

San Francisco seemed the right setting, more alluring that LA and laid back than New York, Jerry Goldsmith languorous score striking just the right mood for love, and murder. Sharon Stone at the height of her powers, the perfect choice to play Joe Eszterhas’ liberated woman (the script garnering him a $3 million pay check), attractive, sexually voracious, Mustang driving and smart, with just a hint of vulnerability setting the detectives against each other in their bid to prove her guilty of a crime. But one of them falls prey to her charms. And the thrill of the chase is his undoing. To be fair, he’s ripe for exploitation by this femme fatale.

Michael Douglas was also at the top of his game having won an Oscar and a Golden Globe for Oliver’s Stones’ Wall Street. As detective Nick “Shooter” Curran, Stone’s Tramell whips him up into a frenzy, his addictive personality unleashed into a toxic brew of indignation and lust. So his ditches his on off girlfriend/mentor (Tripplehorn): “We went to bed ten maybe fifteen times – it wasn’t memorable enough to call a relationship”.

The film walks a fine line between revelation and enigma, giving us just enough to draw us further into the murder mystery, never revealing the truth in a finale that will remain ambiguous. MT

ON 4K UHD COLLECTOR’S EDITION STEELBOOK, BLU-RAY DVD and DIGITAL JUNE 14, 2021

The Skull (1965) TPTV

Dir; Freddie Francis | Peter Cushing, Patrick Wymark, Jill Bennett, Nigerl Green, Patrick McGee, Christopher Lee | UK Horror

Shrewdly packaged from a 1945 short story by Robert Bloch for his recently formed company Amicus by Milton Subotsky, vividly designed in Technicolor and directed by Freddie Francis when he still cared. The film also follows Hammer precedent by employing a classy British composer, Elizabeth Lutyens, whose music carries the long sections without dialogue.

Although headlining Hammer alumni like Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and Michael Gough, the cast includes many others of Britain’s finest, including Patrick Wymark and Nigel Green (both of whom died not long afterwards) and Patrick Magee fresh from Corman’s Masque of the Red Death. The fanciful use of colour, weird visuals and general mood suggest familiarity both with Corman’s Poe pictures and the Italian horrors of directors like Bava & Freda. @Richard Chatten

NOW ON TALKING PICTURES TV | PRIME VIDEO

The Lost Leonardo (2020) TriBeCa (2020)

Dir: Andreas Koefoed | Cast: Dianne Modestini, Yves Bouvier, Robert Simon, Alexander Parish, Warren Adelson, Luke Syson, Martin Kemp, Frank Zöllner, Maria Teresa Fiorio, Jacques Franck, Evan Beard, Kenny Schachter, Jerry Saltz, Robert K Wittman, Alexandra Bregman, Georgina Adam, Alison Cole

This year’s Tribeca Film Festival offers a treat for art lovers, especially those following the fortunes of “The Salvator Mundi”. Not just one but two documentaries explore the buzz surrounding the most expensive painting ever sold (at $450 million), claimed to be the work of the legendary artist Leonardo Da Vinci.

The Lost `Leonardo goes behind closed doors to dish the dirt on this ‘civilisational masterpiece’. Whereas Antoine Vitkine’s The Savior for Sale (2021) took a jaunty thriller approach to the picture’s authenticity and provenance, and its journey to acquiring that stratospheric price tag, the Danish director Andreas Koefoed takes a deep dive into the artful world world of art marketing and explores possible outcomes for the work which disappeared after being brought by a Saudi prince (surely a sacrilegious acquisition as Islam forbids any depiction of a prophet) and is now purportedly languishing in a secret location, or possibly back in the care of Yves Bouvier the world’s richest freeport owner.

Dividing into a series of Parts (I,II & III), the story is steeped in greed, one-upmanship and secrecy. The Lost Leonardo reveals how vested interests became all-important, and the painting itself almost secondary. Once again with almost the same players as Vitkine’s film, the story relies on a high profile array of compelling interviews illustrating how the work of art went from the discreet world of old masters to take on celebrity status as a ‘trophy piece’ thanks to Christie’s cunning marketing strategy. Bidders were required to transfer a percentage of the funds into a ‘goodwill’ sealed account to show their good intentions. And the bids came in thick and fast – possibly from entire countries rather than individuals, finally closing at $450 million.

But the fake tag still lingered. Art Critic Jerry Saltz was one of the painting’s main detractors, as was a stream of – mostly ignorant – twitter followers to the viral stream the Christie auction attracted. But the painting’s careful restorer Dianne Modestini stands by its authenticity, and Jean-Luc Martinez (president of the Louvre Museum) has confirmed it as a work by da Vinci in the museum’s catalogue.

As the documentary moves further away from the painting and its provenance, and more into the world of billionaires, it is revealed how vested interests are more relevant than the truth, in a film that studies each aspect of the art world and increasingly contemplates the religious, moral and ethical issues implicated by such a resonant painting.

A sinuous score by Sveinung Nygaard drives the story forward to the final – surprising – denouement in a film that is really more about social politics and one-up-manship than art history. MT

Tribeca Film Festival 2021

Scarecrow | Pugalo (2021) IFFR 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Day Today | Au jour d’aujourd’hui (2021) IFFR June 2021

Dir/scr: Maxence Stamatiadis | Doc with Suzanne Mouradian, Edouard Mouradian. Sci-fi mokumentary, France. 67′

Artificial intelligence can unite us with a loved one, as we saw in the recent British sci-fi flick Archive. In his documentary debut Franco-Greek director Maxence Stamatiadis goes a step further showing what could happen in real life.

The mockumentary mishmash of art installation, archive footage, sci-fi, and droll satire is very much redolent of recent Greek ‘weird wave’ fare. Close-up camerawork projects us forward to the near future in Paris where an elderly couple are going through the motions of everyday life. Still very much in love with her husband Edouard, 88 year old Suzanne Mouradian is addicted to sharing kitten videos and her innermost thoughts on losing her soulmate on social media through her various devices, Edouard (1929-2013) meanwhile puts up with her tender overtures, secretly yearning for a second chance as he struggles on resentfully with his pills, and his glasses, their obnoxious grand-daughter laying down the law on impromptu visits.

My own father once said to me: just because you’re old you don’t change, ‘you still have the same ideals, and romantic desires’. And Stamatiadis captures this couple’s romantic affection and closeness drenching his story in documentary-like authenticity, using his grandparents as the lead characters clearly intensifies the experience; the knowledge that life is coming to and end lacing the film with a melancholic tristesse heightened barely disguising his subversive humour with a sultry Claude Chabrol style occasional score.

The narrative slides back and forward beginning in Les Pavillons-sous-Bois in 2013 where the couple live out a claustrophobic domestic existence darkened to assist their addiction to technology. Moving on to 2024, Suzanne is now a nostalgic widow and has found an internet site (The Day Today) that bizarrely enables her to recreate Edouard, right down to that burgundy jacket he wore the time that love was in the air (“il etait si chouette”) courtesy of a volunteer ‘swapper’.

So along comes the new version of Edouard his latent dark side this time ramped up: he tools with a flick-knife and sports gaudy knucke-dusters along with his pink halo. Monosyllabic, churlish and generally unbiddable to Suzanne’s constant need to control, he even darts demonic looks in her direction while she slaves over his ‘petites tartines’ and lovely prepared dinners. While Edouard is own on his mysterious evening strolls, Suzanne resorts to her devices, describing him as “tragic”, the whole endeavour as “mal foutu” but carries on all the same with a “better the devil you know” acceptance of her new hubby.

The Day Today is a darkly delicious satire of modern life, highlighting the perils of internet dating, artificial intelligence and even our human tendency to go with the flow even when the going gets rough. MT

IFFR CONTINUES ITS SUMMER FESTIVAL | 2 – 6 June 2021

In the Heights (2020)

Dir.: Jon M. Chu; Cast: Anthony Ramos, Melissa Barrera, Leslie Grace, Corey Hawkins, Jimmy Smits, Gregory Diaz IV, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Stephanie Beatriz, Olga Merediz; USA 2021, 143 min.

Director Jon M. Chu (Filthy Rich Asians) is behind this dizzying adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In The Heights (written before Hamilton, when Miranda was still a student), based on the script of the original writer Quiara Alegria Hudes.

Released a year late due to the Pandemic, Heights is a musical extravaganza, combining Hollywood, hip hop and pop, with the narrative serving primarily as a bridge between the dance numbers, brilliantly choreographed by Christopher Scott.

The titular Heights are in Washington Heights, a 40-block ‘hood in New York City, that starts at 155th Street. Originally home to Jewish and Irish immigrants, and is now dominated by Latinos; with Miranda writing very much about his own experience. There is a permanent carnival atmosphere, spiced by social commentary – the fight for the much coveted “Green Cards”, while avoiding the clutches of the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), commonly known as ‘Dreamers’.

The action is centred around two couples: bodega-owner Usnavi de la Vega (Ramos) is supported by his sidekick Sonny (Diaz IV), and madly in love with Vanessa (Barrera), who works for fierce real-life couple Daniela (Rubin-Vega) and Carla (Beatriz). Vanessa dreams of moving downtown and becoming a designer, but can’t get the finance.

Then there is Benny (Hawkins), a black guy who is dating Nina (Grace), the daughter of the cab company owner Kevin Rosario (Smits), Benny’s boss. Kevin is helping his daughters through law school at Stanford University, But Nina is unhappy at the ‘posh’ place of learning when she is mistaken for a waitress at faculty meetings. Nina decided to quit to the chagrin of her father. Benny wants Nina to stay for his own sake, and the knowledge, that she help the fight against the authorities. Finally, there is Abuela Claudia (Merediz), the community ‘matriarch’, who, like many of her generation, wonder whether the sacrifices made for their kids have really helped in realising the American Dream.

Powerful songs”Carnival del Barrio” and the jubilant “96,000 Dollars” really set the night on fire along with a dancing couple in the sizzling set piece outside a tower building, the tenants looking down in disbelief. But the visual highlight captures the spirit of Busby Berkeley and Esther Williams, with 500 extras celebrating summer in the local lido.

In the Heights is intoxicated by its permanent carnival atmosphere, a barely disguised feeling of melancholia permeates this need for make-believe, best symbolised by Usnavi, an unreliable narrator, who relates the story to a small group of children at a more than perfect beach in the Dominican Republic. But overall this is a big party, the plot a side-show with its sleek social commentary, vibrant visuals provided by DoP Alice Brooks. The film strikes just the note for the re-opening of cinemas. It might be overlong, overdue, and still threatened, but relentless in spirit, nevertheless. AS

The Silent Enemy (1930)

Dir: H P Carver, Wri: W Douglas Burden | US Doc 84′

The makers of this dramatised documentary, following in the footsteps of Nanook of the North (1922) about the Ojibway Indians, returned after spending a year in Northern Ontario. They brought with them 25,000 feet of silent footage shot by the veteran Hollywood cameraman Marcel Le Picard. By the time the footage had been made into a feature, silent film had long since become a thing of the past.

Before Paramount could release it, The Silent Enemy had to be transformed into a part-talkie through the addition of a short opening speech to camera by Chief Yellow Robe – who had played Chetoga in the film – along with a synchronised organ score.

As usual the villain of the piece is the witch doctor, and as previous reviewers have commented some of the scenes must have been staged for the makers to have been able to have had their cameras in precisely the right place at the right time; and some of the wildlife is extremely roughly treated (including a couple of extremely cute bear cubs that the hero has just orphaned) in a way that would draw screams today from the American Humane Association, amongst others. The title by the way refers to hunger. @Richard Chatten

Cannes Film Festival | Programme 2021 announced

Thierry Fremaux looked proud and relaxed to confirm that the 74th Cannes Film Festival programme will go ahead from 6 – 17 July, two months later than its normal May edition.

Only one journalist looked on at the Paris Press conference as Thierry announced this year’s programme during a cosy chat with Festival president Pierre Lescure. The two Frenchmen laughed and bantered voluably – it seems that all is well on the Cote d’Azur, so far. It remains to be seen whether the British press corps and distributors will be able to make it due to government restrictions.

The twenty four films selected from almost 20,000 will include festival regulars Hong Sang-soo, Arnaud Desplechin, Mathieu Amalric, Asghar Farhadi and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Sean Penn will also be there with Flag Day – his previous feature The Last Face screened to mass walkouts back in 2016.

Appropriately, female directors are there in force, and Spike Lee will finally get a chance to head up the main jury after last year’s fiasco was cancelled due to the pandemic.

French director Leos Carax is also back with the festival opener Annette – also in competition – his last Cannes feature was the astonishing Denis Lavant starring Holy Motors (2013, now a firm cult classic. And Finnish director Juho Kuosmenan whose breakout Un Certain Regard winner The Happiest Day in the Life of Olii Maki enters the main competition with Compartment Number 6. Justin Kurzel is also back with Nitram after his stunning version of Macbeth, in comp five years ago.

Britain will also feature with Andrea Arnold’s latest Cow, and Mothering Sunday, based on a novel by Graham Swift (who also wrote Last Orders and Waterland), forming part of the new Cannes Premiere strand, dedicated to first features.

From the US, Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, will also finally get a premiere, after missing its chance last year. And Todd Haynes will be there with a new documentary The Velvet Underground.

The Un Certain Regard sidebar, the home for edgier competition fare features Kagonada’s latest After Yang, Alexei German Jr’s follow up to Dovlatov, Delo (House Arrest) and Tatiana Huezo’s Noche de Fuego.

Competition

Annette – Leos Carax (also opening night film)
Benedetta – Paul Verhoeven
Bergman Island – Mia Hansen-Love
Drive My Car – Ryusuke Hamaguchi
A feleségem története (The Story of My Wife) – Ildikó Enyedi
Flag Day – Sean Penn
La Fracture – Catherine Corsini
The French Dispatch – Wes Anderson
Ha’berech (Ahed’s Knee) – Nadav Lapid
Haut et Fort (Casablanca Beats) – Nabil Ayouch
Un héros (A Hero) – Asghar Farhadi
Hytti Nro 6 (Compartment No.6) – Juho Kuosmanen
Les Intranquilles (The Restless) – Joachim Lafosse
Julie (The Worst Person in the World) – Joachim Trier
Lingui – Mahamat-Saleh Haroun
Memoria – Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Nitram – Justin Kurzel
Les Olympiades (Paris 13th District) – Jacques Audiard
Par un demi clair matin – Bruno Dumont
Petrov’s Flu – Kirill Serebrennikov
Red Rocket – Sean Baker
Titane by Julia Ducournau
Tout s’est bien passé – François Ozon
Tre piani by Nanni Moretti

Un Certain Regard

After Yang – Kogonada
Blue Bayou – Justin Chon
Bonne Mère – Hafsia Herzi
Commitment Hasan – Hasan Semih Kaplanoglu
Delo (House Arrest) – Alexey German Jr.
Freda – Gessica Geneus
The Innocents – Eskil Vogt
Lamb – Valdimar Jóhansson
Moneyboys – C.b Yi
Noche de fuego – Tatiana Huezo
Un monde – Laura Wandel

Cannes Premiere

Cette musique ne joue pour personne (Love Songs for Tough Guys) – Samuel Benchetrit
Cow – Andrea Arnold
Evolution – Kornél Mundruczo
In Front of Your Face – Hong Sang-Soo
Mothering Sunday – Eva Husson
Serre-moi fort (Hold Me Tight) – Mathieu Amalric
Tromperie (Deception) – Arnaud Desplechin
Val – Ting Poo and Leo Scott

Out of Competition

Aline – Valérie Lemercier
Bac Nord – Cédric Jimenez
De son vivant – Emmanuelle Bercot
Emergency Declaration – Han Jae-Rim
Stillwater – Tom McCarthy
The Velvet Underground – Todd Haynes

Special screenings

Cahiers noirs (Black Notebooks) – Shlomi Elkabetz H6 – Yé Yé
JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass – Oliver Stone
Jane par Charlotte – Charlotte Gainsbourg
O marinheiro das montanhas (Mariner of the Mountains) – Karim Ainouz

Midnight screenings

Oranges sanguines (Bloody Oranges) – Jean-Christophe Meurisse

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 6 – 17 JULY 2021

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

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

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

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

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

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

Ascension (2021)

Dir.: Jessica Kingdon | Documentary; China 2021, 97′

Mesmerising in its imagery, Ascension is a frightening impressionistic portrait of China’s growing class divide through staggering observations of labour, consumerism and wealth.

Before a rather melancholic ending, we are reminded again “that dreams are “. Kingdon keeps the tone understated, letting images and the slogans talk. The result is a mixture of false naivety – on behalf of the upper classes – and a kind of religious fervour of obedience from the workers. But whatever the future holds, the mixture of state capitalism (after all the Party rules supreme) and expanding consumerism, which will see China overtake the USA’s GDP by five times, is a reason for trepidation – to say the least. A brilliant study of a communist nation on the march. AS

Documentary Films will release ASCENSION, one of the most acclaimed documentaries of 2021, on 14 January 2022 in UK cinemas.

THE 2021 ALBERT MAYSLES AWARD BEST NEW DOCUMENTARY DIRECTOR to JESSICA KINGDON AT Tribeca Film Festival | JUNE 2021

Running Against the Wind (2021)

Dir: Jan Philipp Weyl | Cast: Ashenafi Nigusu, Mikayas Wolde | Drama, 119′

A feel good film about sport, friendship and ambition Running Against the Wind, sees two friends growing up in a remote village drawn together by their love of running, a sport that has long been associated with this now beleaguered nation which has produced two-time Olympic gold medal winner Haile Gebrselassie – who has a cameo in the film – and long-distance runner Muktar Edris.

But the boys’ lives diverge when Solomon (Wolde) leaves for Addis Ababa to become a professional photographer and Abdi (Nigusu) pursues his running career. They will meet again under darker skies.

German filmmaker Weyl has put a great deal of thought into his feature debut – clearly a ‘method director’ he has immersed himself in the country’s history and culture, even learning Amharic, one of Ethiopia’s eight major languages, to make a story that feels gritty and authentic with the bond of friendship at its core. Mateusz Smolka’s widescreen visuals capture the magnificent scenery and the intimacy of the human story with its universal appeal. MT

NOW ON BLURAY and QUALITY DIGITAL PLATFORMS from 11 JUNE 2021

Mandabi (1968)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perfume of Gardenias (2021) TriBeCa 2021

Dir.: Macha Colon aka Gisela Rosario Ramos; Cast: Luz Maria Rondon, Katia Maria, Blanca Rosa Rovira Burset, Carmen Milagros Ortiz Cruz, Abner Riviera; Puerto Rico/Columbia 2021, 97 min.

This dark but colourful comedy reflects the identity of a nation inured to adversity and where humour and drama always go side by side. Perfume of Gardenias is the feature debut of Puerto Rican director/writer Macha Colon, a queer multi-disciplinarian artist who studied in New York.

Vibrantly reflecting the director’s idiosyncratic personality, Perfume often indulges in shock-treatment and plays havoc with an audience used to mainstream aesthetics.

When theatre and television star Isabel (Luz Maria Rondon in her first starring role) loses her high-ranking officer husband Mario after a long illness, she has to rethink her life in the religious middle-class community. Daughter Melanie (Maria) comes to stay, but is not much of a help, treating her mother like a child. For example, she asks Isabel to look for a “plug-into-the wall piece” – to which her mother answers “it would have been easier if you asked me to look for your mobile charger.”

Melanie is soon off, promising – not very sincerely – to be back at Christmas leaving Isabel to restructure her life. She has made a great impression of organising her husband’s funeral paying respect to him in a very individual way. Her friend Toña (Riley), self-appointed leader of the small community, decides that Isabel should be the one to interview the moribund members of their circle, so they have an individual input in their own funeral arrangements.

Unfortunately, Toña has the tendency to speed up the process, before many potential clients are ready to leave this world. While Toña is already directing their funeral. Isabel has to learn to find a new approach to death and religion.

Perfume is highly entertaining – DoP Pedro Juan Lopez capturing the customs and characters, always making fun of the sacred religious undertones which dominate the middle classes: despite their reduced status they must still be seen to be the ruling spiritual light. Rondon carries the often rowdy proceedings with much dignity and elegance, farce never overtaking the narrative. Colon, playing the enfant-terrible of her cultural scene, is often too self-indulgent, going for full blown radical shock-effects rather than a more sensible approach. Her attitude of wanting the cake and eating it somehow diminishes the underlying problems of the society she caricatures. But Colon and the brilliant ensemble certainly have their fun. AS

https://youtu.be/JzX-bJ_AwCg

SCREENING DURING Tribeca Film Festival | JUNE 13th 2021

Treasure City | Bekeido (2020)

Director: Hajdu Szabolcs; Cast: Abel Krocovay, Orsolya Töth, Arpad Schilling, Fanni Wrochna; Hungary/Romania 2020, 92 min.

Hungary has lost the will to live according to Hajdu Szabolcs (The Gambler) who looks at the lives of a handful of disorientated Hungarians struggling to make sense of it all.

Demonstrators are seen clashing with police, while opposition activists accuse Victor Orban’s semi-fascist government of rising violence and mass immigration. Weirder still, Treasure City is actually set in the Romanian city city of Cluj-Napoca.

A subtle mix of nocturnal urban tales Treasure City pictures the dark side of sexual, political and romantic relationships. Dorottya (Wrochna) is accused by her female boss of lying and incompetence and begs for another chance. A row breaks out in a florists where Alma (Töth) and her daughter Johanna (Palfi) insults the female shop assistant with an unprovoked, racist attack, apologising profusely when the worker phones the police

In Treasure City one event connects to another in a post-covid metaphor exposing anger, frustration and inertia. Life is no worse than it was, in the 21st century there are just many more ways to complain about it all. And the pandemic has pushed everyone to the brink emotionally and physically, the gulf widening between native and foreigner, rich and poor, teen and parent. Even friendships have suffered as we are pushed into banal backwaters stifled of creativity, the window of freedom turned into a mirror focussing on our own inadequacies and shortcomings.

Essentially a series of twenty two interconnecting storylines Treasure City is really a metaphor for our post-covid world, exposing the anger, frustration and inertia.

DoP Banto Csaba uses magic realism to create a nightly universe of turmoil, misunderstandings and emotional frustration. Treasure City is very much a case of Bunuel meets Michael Haneke: not for everyone, but the committed will certainly enjoy themselves. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 18 JUNE 2021

Inferno (1953) Bluray

Dir: Roy Ward Baker | Cast: Rhonda Fleming, Robert Ryan | US Western 73′

Although largely forgotten today, this ‘desert noir’ probably marked the early fifties apex both of the 3D film and the sojourn in Hollywood of director Roy Baker, who glowingly recalled it as “a very good story indeed”.

Robert Ryan, however, plainly had this movie in mind when he lamented that Cary Grant got the glamorous parts while he had to make do with “deserts with a dirty shirt and two day growth of beard” (although he forgot to mention also having a broken leg). Rhonda Fleming as his faithless wife, on the other hand, is dressed to kill in expensive finery throughout.

Shot in gleaming Technicolor by ace cameraman Lucien Ballard in Apple Valley on the edge of the Mojave desert, Baker said the idea appealed to him of making an interior film without dialogue. There’s actually a lot of talk in the finished film (including about what a jerk Ryan’s character was prior to the film opening not really bourne out by Ryan’s engaging performance; although those inclined to get sentimental about cuddly wildlife like rabbits and deer are likely to take umbrage at the way Ryan looks upon them purely as food), and in context such comments as “That’s my Rabbit!” and “Want a ride?” really hit the spot. Ditto the closing line. @Richard Chatten

NOW ON BLURAY

Catch the Fair One (2021)

Dir.: Joseph Kubota Wladyka; Cast: Kali Reis, Daniel Henshall, Tiffany Chu, Kimberly Guerrero, Kevin Dunne; USA 2021, 86 min.

US director/writer Joseph Kubota Wladyka has a bold confession – as a kid he tried to sneak out of the local Arthouse where his parents had taken the family to watch Terminator.

It is no surprise then that Catch The Fair One – exec-produced by Darren Aronofsky (and co-producer by Molley Asher of Nomadland fame) is a straightforward action thriller. But nothing to be sneezed at – this is genre cinema at its best.

Feisty Native American Ex-champion boxer Kaylee (Reis) is having a tough time making a comeback as a boxer, well aware that competition is fierce from younger players. And with her unsupportive mother Jaya (Guerrero), a group therapist bereavement sufferers, and concerns that her sister has been abducted by sex traffickers, the outlook is grim.

Sleeping with a razor blade for protection means Kaylee often wakes up with blood on the pillow. And this make-ship weapon comes in handy when she is drugged and ‘sold’ to sex trafficker by boss Bobby (Henshall). But Kaylee surprises her guard, kills him, and then sets off for Bobby’s place where she overpowers him and immobilises his son. But Bobby won’t reveal her sister’s whereabouts, so Kaylee must set off on a ‘no holds barred’ mission to track down her sibling.

DoP Ross Giardina’s images of the sleazy underbelly of the boxing gangland are spectacular, so are his flashbacks of Kaylee’s violent times in the ring. A real-life middle-weight champion, Reis is impressive in her hunt for vengeance, her hostile expression striking fear into opponents – both in and out of the ring. Wladyka has certainly watched enough classic movies of the genre: this is a masterclass in tempo and timing. But most awe-inspiring of all is his tight script in a narrative full of twists and turns that never relies on atmosphere alone to keep the audience in thrall for 86 minutes – even the running time is a salient reminder of former B-pictures, who are today ageless wonders. AS

ON RELEAE FROM 4 APRIL NATIONWISE | TRIBECA PREMIERE 2021

Two Way Stretch (1960)

Dir: Robert Day | Cast; Peter Sellers, David Lodge, Bernard Cribbins, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Irene Handly | UK Comedy 78′

In 1973 the Allans opined of this little gem that “looking back, Sellers may feel was the peak of his career. After this, he became a major international star and the fun seemed to go out of his films.” An ego like Sellers is unlikely to have agreed with such a verdict and in 1960 his career was in fact ascending fast until his traumatic near-death experience in 1964.

However, his obsession shortly after making this film with the very married Sophia Loren marked a further decline in his mental state and his increasingly self-centred behaviour on set culminated in various psychotic episodes during the making of Dr. Strangelove, (for which he was nominated for a Oscar and which definitely DID constitute the peak of his career), and he had made himself absolutely detested on the set of Kiss Me Stupid before being forced to drop out by a near-fatal series of heart attacks; after which his films became almost consistently unwatchable.

To return to happier days, however, among a wonderful supporting cast particular credit is due to Lionel Jeffries as the first of two extremely stupid upholders of the law (the second being Parker of the Yard in The Wrong Arm of the Law). The latter was stupid but harmless, but Sidney Crout (“Shut up, I’m talking!!”) is almost as terrifying as his Queensbury in the same year’s The Trials of Oscar Wilde and makes Mackay in ‘Porridge’ look as soft-hearted as Mr.Barrowclough. It’s hard to believe Jeffries was only 33 when he made this. @Richard Chatten

Blind Ambition (2021)

Dir/Writers Warwick Ross & Rob Coe | Australia, Doc 96′

Driven by relentless optimism and a passion for their craft, four Zimbabwean refugees become South Africa’s unlikely top sommeliers, competing for the coveted title of ‘World Wine Tasting Champions’ as Zimbabwe’s first ever wine-tasting team.

Blind Ambition is a colourful and lively documentary cutting a dash through the stuffy, privileged world of the wine-tasting with its refreshing spin on South Africa’s storied winelands. Upbeat in tempo in its early scenes, the fractured narrative style gradually sobers up as it reflects on the sommeliers’ backstories of poverty and disadvantage back in their beleaguered homeland. Luminaries Jancis Robinson add insight and credibility to the film boosting its potential for a mainstream audience. MT

NOW ON RELEASE FROM 12 AUGUST 2022 | World Premiere TriBeCa Film Festival 2021.

The Killing of Two Lovers (2020)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ON BFI PLAYER FROM 9 DECEMBER 2021

The Death of My Two Fathers (2021) Tribeca 2021

Dir.: Sol Guy; Documentary with William Richard Guy, Sol Guy, Donna Guy, Freye Parkhouse, Soshana Guy; USA 2021, 96 min.

Finding the courage to look at photos and videos of a lost loved one is tough, even years after their death. It took Sol Guy decades to watch a batch of 20 VHS tapes his father William Richard Guy (1944-1998) had made, just after being diagnosed with terminal kidney cancer, when Sol was twenty. This labour of love and remembrance forms the subject of this mature feature debut that enabled the writer director to reach out and meet the extended family his father had founded.

William Richard was quiet a philanderer: he had five children with three women, compensating with his good looks for the bad cards fate dealt him by having to grow up in a segregated America. The KKK was still rampant in his youth, its members capturing Blacks and selling them to plantation owners in the South. Signs like “Waiting room for Coloured only, by order of the police.” were common; and demonstrators waved signs in favour of segregation: “We want a white School.” Housing was so poor, that rats simply came as standard with the accommodation.

Via Kansas City and Iowa, and a two-year stint in the army in Thailand, William ended up in Canada, working as DJ ‘Gigging Guy’. William’s partner Bobbie tells their son, “your father had girl-friends”. Eventually she had enough and moved in with Freye Parkhouse, an Englishman, would become Sol’s second father.

After Bobbie left, William went to Mexico where he met Lee Lee, another adoring white woman, before fathering his 5th child with “auntie” Jayda. William turned to social work which became his redemption, drink and drugs were out, caring for others made him a better person. For Sol, his father’s suffering was too much, he ran away not wanting to watch his deterioration. At William’s funeral, all his children met for the first time. Sol, like his father had a penchant for running away when the going got tough he left his own family in Germany, and travelled the world, before it occurred him that he was just repeated the same pattern as his dad. At the end of the feature, we see him and Bobbie caring for the dying man who by now had lost his ability to speak. On the 20th anniversary of William’s death, the family met again in Kansas City: for Sol a time to reconcile himself with his past, and re-connect with the family he once spurned

The feature was completed in the editing suite shown in the lively, handheld camera of DoP Rafe Scobey-Thal. Sometimes confusing it its timelines and points of view – both Sol and his father address their children, the difference being that the protagonists are one generation removed from each other. But Sol’s utter honesty is the redeeming feature here. Never resorting to the ‘race card’, Sol freely admits that Black men often repeat the lives of their fathers’, leaving their women to bring up the kids. This way, Sol Guy creates a history of race and fatherhood in the USA, and a personal account of gender roles in the Black community. AS

SCREENING AT Tribeca Film Festival 2021 | 10 June 2020.

The Red Pony (1949) Prime

Dir: Lewis Milestone | Cast: Robert Mitchum, Myrna Loy, Shepperd Strudwick, Louis Calhern | US Drama 89′

Ten years after his classic version of Of Mice and Men for Hal Roach, Lewis Milestone this time went to Republic (the title design is the same as on their John Ford westerns) to again film John Steinbeck (this time adapted by Steinbeck himself), who professed himself satisfied with the results.

In addition to Steinbeck & Milestone this stagy but affecting little fable recalling The Yearling and The Boy with Green Hair marshals various disparate talents including composer Aaron Copland (who had also scored Of Mice and Men) and veteran cameraman Tony Gaudio doing a lovely job behind the camera on his final film; while Bob Mitchum is in his only Technicolor film of the 1940s and Myrna Loy of course looks ravishing in her first since the two-colour days and coming as close as she ever came to her long-cherished desire to play a frontierswoman.

The brash little blond kid with blue eyes is a seven year-old Beau Bridges, Louis Calhern as Loy’s garrulous pappy looks and sounds almost exactly as he did the following year as Buffalo Bill in Annie Get Your Gun; while Margaret Hamilton as the local schoolmarm appropriately looks as if she just stepped out of a painting by Grant Wood. @Richard Chatten

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

The Babadook (2014) Bluray release

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

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

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

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

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

Death on the Streets (2021) IFFR 2021

Dir.: Johan Carlsen; Cast: Zack Mulligan, Katie Folger, Chris Abel, Tammy Hansard Hernandez; Germany/Denmark/Greece 2020, 93 min.

Homelessness has reached a critical level in these pandemic times where businesses have simply disappeared overnight leaving those previously gainfully employed on the scrap heap.

Danish born director/co-writer Johan Carlsen looks at the plight of Kurt a casual worker in rural northern Illinois. Death of the Streets shows how Kurt simply falls out of a society that doesn’t need him any more. Playing out like a research project the film is done with great dignity and understatement.

Kurt (Mulligan) is a tractor driver helping with the maize harvest. He loses his job at the end of the season in a “don’t ring us, we’ll ring you” fashion. There is an offer of a loan. But Kurt is perplexed, he never bargained for this to happen. His caring wife, Sarah (Folger) looks after the couple’s two boys, but Kurt is deeply affected by his new unemployed status and changing dynamic in his role as former head of the family. Old wounds also open with his father-in-law (Abel) who has never respected him, believing that his attractive and intelligent daughter deserved better.

The family has a whip round but Kurt rejects their offer of help. His mother (Hernandez) turns to God asking Kurt to join her in church. But Kurt is adamant. He refuses to take any “hand-outs”. A job interview comes up in the insurance business. But Kurt is clearly not a salesman and has difficultly presenting himself well at interview.

Shamed by his loss of face, Kurt packs his bags and makes his way to Atlanta City where he sleeps under the piers, his mental health gradually going down hill as a chasm opens up between him and his family. Somehow Kurt seems pre-destined to end up a drifter. Like a puppy-dog, he’s willing and keen but unable to understand the basic structures of society, raising questions about his own childhood upbringing. Even at the end of the film his face looks totally unmarked – as if nothing has happened.

DoPs Eric Ferranti and Jide Tom Akileminu creates a great sense of place in the hostile environment seen from Kurt’s POV as he drifts into nothingness, echoed in a bleached out aesthetic eventually morphing into black and white. Death on the Streets is not a political movie, more an intense study chronicling a soul who falls through the cracks of a society he struggled to join. AS

IFFR 2021 CONTINUES ITS LIVE SUMMER SHOW | JUNE 2021

Agony (2020)

Dir: Michele Civetta | Cast: Asia Argento, Jonathan Caouette, Claudia Salerno, Nick Daly, Ninetto Davoli, Franco Nero, Monica Guerritore |

In this fantasy melodrama, New Yorker Isidora (Argento) gets hit by a bombshell in the opening scene – the mother she thought had died in the 1970s has only just departed this world leaving her troubled daughter Isadora the marchese of an extensive Tuscan estate.

Once in Tuscany (actually Viterbo slightly further south) strange things start to happen and Isadora is plagued by hallucinations of a grey-haired wailing woman who haunts the medieval castle in psychedelic magic realist sequences that dovetail seamlessly into Nicola Pecorini’s lushly rendered visuals that create a great sense place in the rural Italian settings. A pig-trailed Franco Nero (Carlo) is the only person she feels she can trust and the two instantly bond when he confesses to a close friendship with her mother (“she saved me from a haze booze and baccarat”) claiming she fell victim to a religious curse in the village back in the time of the Spanish Inquisition.

Driven forward by Bardi Johannson’s sinister soundscape Michele Civetta’s feature debut has echoes of Jane Eyre and an impressive Italian cast (Franco Nero joins fellow Pasolini veteran Ninetto Davoli) – but there’s also something spooky going on with his script (co-written by the film’s producer Joseph Schulman) that seems tonally out of kilter with the histrionic New Yorkers who are crass and cartoonish in the context of the otherwise rather enjoyably lowkey poetic narrative that grows increasingly outlandish in their wake. MT

OUT ON 14 JUNE 2021

The Singer Not the Song (1961)

Dir: Roy Baker | Cast: Dirk Bogarde, John Mills, Mylene Demongeot | UK Drama

Anybody who thought Dirk Bogarde’s performance as a homosexual in Victim blazed a trail should acquaint themself with this camp classic in which kitted out in leather trousers (his wardrobe “a fetishist’s dream”, as Peter John Dyer observed at the time) he strokes kittens, his left eyebrow permanently arched as the third corner of a very unlikely triangle of which the other two members comprise Mylene Demongeot (referred to as “the child” and with whom Bogarde commiserates “It must be heartbreaking to fall in love with a man you can never have”) and John Mills.

John Mills?! Director Roy Baker understandably would have rather had Richard Burton (who preferred the role of the bandit) or Paul Schofield (who Baker knew better than to ask), but considering how awful towards him Bogarde was throughout shooting his final film under contract with Rank, he clearly just wanted to pack his bags and get out.

In small town Mexico (actually Alhaurin de la Torre on the Costa del Sol) Mills does his best as a Catholic priest who ultimately wins respect from the outlaw, despite his feeble attempt at an Irish accent. It would have been fun to see Burton rise to the occasion after trying to be a gangster in Villain.@Richard Chatten

Miracle in Soho (1957)

Dir: Julian Amyes | Cast: John Gregson, Belinda Lee, Cyril Cusack, Rosalie Crutchley, Ian Bannen | UK Drama 93′

Miracle in Soho begins with the proud declaration “An Emeric Pressburger Production”. The elevation of Michael Powell to the Pantheon of great directors has not been without muted grumbles; and has even lead some to claim Pressburger was the one with the talent.

But such talk tends to ignore the two 1950s films Pressburger made without Powell, starting with the only one he actually directed, Twice Upon a Time (1953). Always conspicuous by its absence from Powell & Pressburger seasons, the experience evidently cured him of the desire ever to direct again, this time hiring Julian Aymes to take on that onerous task. Based on a script called ‘St Anthony’s Lane’, which he had written in 1934 and was in his suitcase when he arrived in Britain the following year, the film follows Michael Morgan (Grigson) an ordinary bloke whose life is turned around by the ‘miracle’ of love. Neither Pressburger nor Aymes ever made another film; and Miracle in Soho proves that whereas Pressburger gave the Archers’ their heart, Powell definitely supplied the muscle.

Ten years earlier Powell had done an amazing job of recreating the Himalayas without leaving Britain in Black Narcissus; and three years later he too would set a fanciful Eastman Colour production in Soho. But Peeping Tom was a vision of Hell compared to the studio-bound whimsy of Miracle in Soho. Like Black Narcussus before it Miracle in Soho was also shot at Pinewood, but although set in a location far closer to home it’s far less convincingly evoked than Black Narcissus. A previous writer on the IMDb has speculated that the final cut had a hefty edit, which would account for the brevity of Billie Whitelaw’s role and the haunting but fleeting presence of an un-billed Wilfred Lawson as John Gregson’s father (ironically seen sipping tea from a saucer in the second of his two very brief appearances; since he’s obviously been tippling on something a lot stronger). @Richard Chatten

TALKING PICTURES TV

No Sudden Move (2021) Tribeca Film Festival 2021

Sex Lies and Videotape director Steven Soderbergh will present his latest highly anticipated crime drama NO SUDDEN MOVE as the centrepiece gala at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. The outdoor premiere will take place at The Battery in New York City on Friday, June 18 as part of Tribeca’s 12-day celebration to re-open New York and bring live entertainment back. Members of the cast will make an appearance at the live event.

Set in 1954 Detroit, No Sudden Move stars Don Cheadle, Benicio del Toro, David Harbour, with Ray Liotta, Jon Hamm, Amy Seimetz, Brendan Fraser, Kieran Culkin, Noah Jupe, Craig muMs Grant, Julia Fox, Frankie Shaw and Bill Duke. The story centers on a group of small-time criminals who are hired to steal what they think is a simple document. When their plan goes horribly wrong, their search for who hired them – and for what ultimate purpose – weaves them through all echelons of the race-torn, rapidly changing city.

TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL 2021 | 9 – 20 JUNE 2021

Shiva Baby (2020)

Dir.: Emma Seligman; Cast: Rachel Sennott, Polly Draper, Fred Melamed, Molly Gordon, Danny Deferrari, Dianna Agron; USA 2020, 77min.

Rachel Sennott is the star turn in Emma Seligman’s inspired featured debut Shiva Baby. She is Danielle, a Jewish woman caught up in her parents’ plans to get her a husband – or at least a job – in this hilarious comedy.

During happier times we see Danielle in bed with her sugar daddy, Max (Deferrari), who will save her from the woes the world has in stall for her. But that was then. A Jewish funeral get-together (Shiva) provides an ideal networking opportunity for the family’s machinations, never mind that one of their loved ones has actually died.

So parents Debbie (Draper) and Joel (Melamed) head off to the Shiva, Danielle making a last unsuccessful attempt to learn the name of the deceased. Still not having made her way in the right circles, her parents are well aware of the seriousness of the task that lies ahead: Danielle is earning a pittance as a ‘babysitter’ but the fruits of her labours seem to stem from another, more dubious source. Professional ambitions are still unclear university-wise, and her parents are covering all the bills.

Friendships are fraught – she had a stormy relationship with Maya (Gordon) who is also at the Shiva. Debbie warns her daughter “not to experiment today”. But before Danielle has time to internalise this parental guidance and critique (“You look like Gwyneth Paltrow on food stamps, and not in a good way”), enter Max, followed by his wife Kim (Agron) and baby daughter Rose. The lovers can’t agree on their opening gambit, “where did the two of you meet”, finally settling for ‘schul’ (the synagogue). It soon turns out Kim is the major breadwinner in the family, and she carps half-jokingly about her husband’s penchant for expensive restaurants.

Meanwhile, Daneille’s parents have cornered Max in the hope of an internship for their daughter. Kim joins the conversation, expressing the need for a babysitter – Debbie praising her daughter’s (non-existent) experience. Danielle mislays her ‘phone number in the bathroom, having sent Max a rather daring selfie. Maya finds the phone but promises to keep schtum: “I don’t want your parents to know their daughter is a whore.” After much bickering and desert-guzzling, nervous exhaustion finally takes over as furtive hands find each other in the back of a crammed car.

Seligman gets away with her not very likeable heroine in a mishmash of sharp-elbowed characters trying to get into pole position on the back of each other. Danielle hasn’t the slightest idea what she wants from life – apart from not ending up like the rest of the Shiva crowd. Her only virtue is a foggy idea about feminism – something that doesn’t follow through in her relationship with Maya.

DoP Maria Rusche takes her lead from Robert Altman in crowd scenes that zero in on the individual players, a bleached-out aesthetic echoing Danielle’s efforts to stay sane. Editor Hannah A. Park keeps the encounters lined up, the interplay amusing and insightful. Shiva Baby is funny, but the humour is as sharp as the lemons the characters chew on, Seligman bringing the curtain down while the going’s still good. AS

IN SELECT UK CINEMAS FOR ONE NIGHT ONLY
WITH SPECIAL Q&A 9 JUNE 2021 ON MUBI FROM 11 JUNE 2021

Zebra Girl (2021)

Dir.: Stephanie Zari; Cast: Sarah Roy, Jade Anouka, Tom Cullen, Daisy Mayer, Isabelle Connolly; UK 2021, 79 min.

In leafy suburbia Catherine (Roy) lives a seemingly blissful life with husband Dan (Cullen) when suddenly she stabs though the eye with an eight-inch knife in the opening scenes. Not altogether surprising when we later learn the same thing happened to her father who abused her as a teenager. All this is all delivered in ‘comic mode’.

Based on the one-woman-play “Catherine and Anita” performed by Roy to apparently rave reviews at Edinburgh Festival Fringe and King’s Head Theatre in London, Zari’s film debut is not so successful, mixing ultra-realism, horror elements and psychological traumata into an awkward narrative,

Catherine Derry’s stirring camerawork keeps things interesting from a visual point of view: dicing with inventive changes of perspective and frightening dolly-zooms. Derry also makes affective use of rush cuts, signalling that Catherine is clearly schizophrenic. Meanwhile Caspar Leonard’s score keeps the unsettling atmosphere alive.

But horror and real trauma do not make good bedfellows – apart from in gothic masterpieces – and Zebra Girl is set very much in a realist present where Catherine’s suffering is equally real. There is also an uneasy humour at play, particularly between Catherine and her friend Anita, which is far too flippant in the context of narrative. And these contradictory elements reduce Zebra Girl to a superficial, good-looking horror flic undermining the heroine’s tragic history. AS

The Woman in his House (1932) Amazon

Dir: Edward H Griffith | Wri: Horace Jackson | Cast: Myrna Loy, Les Howard, Ann Harding, William Gargan, Ilka Chase | US Comedy Drama 85′

Four years after this film was made, Myrna Loy – then Queen to Clark Gable’s King of Hollywood – played his wife in a glossy ‘A’ list trifle suggestively called Wife vs. Secretary (1936). The wife of the title is a whiny gold-digging shrew whose charm resides solely in the enormous charisma of the actress playing her; while the racy title is belied by making the newly ‘brownette’ Harlow brisk, efficient and wholly honorable in her intentions toward husband Clark Gable.

When I saw it I thought it would have been a much more interesting film if it had been made Pre-Code with Loy playing the secretary and Harlow at her sluttiest and most peroxided as the wife (as in Dinner at Eight). The same thought occurred to me watching The Animal Kingdom. Being pre-Code, it’s able to be frank about the role that sex plays in the various characters’ interrelations without being too flippant about it either, since it’s really about relationships rather than sex (rather as Douglas Sirk’s glossy melodramas of the fifties tended to be) and views a husband leaving his lawful wedded for his on again-off again mistress with active approval.

@wikipedia

Loy’s name isn’t even included on the title card but she actually gets far more screen time than Ann Harding as the mistress and is obviously offering husband Leslie Howard passion (when she feels he’s earned it) of an order he plainly hasn’t known with Harding for some time. As in real life the characters have made exasperating life choices (Loy herself in reality notoriously made four wholly unsuitable choices of husband).

Loy is here charming but mercenary and manipulative, while Harding seems very prim for a supposedly “promiscuous” (yes!, that’s the word that Loy – no less – uses to describe her) bohemian who has allowed her physical relationship with Howard to wither on the vine, yet is still affronted that Howard should have the temerity to seek more… stimulating companionship elsewhere. The fact that he nonchalantly leaves her apartment while she just carries on talking in the next room speaks volumes about the state of the relationship.

Within minutes of primly branding Harding “a promiscuous little…!” Loy reveals herself to be not above finally stopping teasing poor Neil Hamilton and giving him a little of the “excitement” he’s plainly been gagging for since the film began if he’ll perform a professional service on her behalf. Having until now shown himself to be weak and easily manipulated, Howard at the film’s conclusion draws upon hitherto unsuspected reserves of iron self-control – that would certainly have been well beyond me – to turn his back on a bedroom door on the other side of which the delectable Loy is undressed and waiting for him.

All the acting is good – particularly William Gargan recreating his stage role – and Loy was always effusive in her praise for the guidance she received from the film’s largely forgotten director Edward H. Griffith. Also fascinating is the diorama of the Brooklyn Bridge visible through the window of the New York apartment occupied by the supposedly penniless Harding. @Richard Chatten

NOW ON AMAZON

Joan the Woman (1916)

Dir: Cecil B DeMille | Wri: Jeannie Macpherson, William C de Mille | Cast: Geraldine Farrar, Raymond Hatton, Hobart Bosworth, Theodore Roberts | US Drama, Silent 138′

Premiering over a hundred years ago on Christmas Day 1916, this marked the first of the historical epics with which Cecil B. DeMille’s name became synonymous. Joan the Woman far excels his later sound spectacles, by which time he’d lost his enthusiasm for location shooting, his films becoming painfully studio bound, with just a few token exterior sequences left in the hands of second-unit directors. Handsomely designed by Wilfred Buckland and photographed by Alvin Wyckoff, at 138 minutes, it is almost as long as Victor Fleming’s Technicolor folly of 1948 with Ingrid Bergman, but far surpasses it as spectacle.

Imposing a contemporary WWI framing story was probably prompted by Griffith’s Intolerance and pushes the feature over the two hour mark, making it a long even by today’s standards; and the first third of the film drags a bit. The other weak link in the chainmail is Farrar herself. The title ‘Joan the Woman’ (compared to later versions with titles like ‘Das Mädchen Johanna’ and ‘Jeanne la Pucelle’) already seems to acknowledge that DeMille is aware that the 34 year-old soprano Geraldine Farrar looks extremely matronly as Joan (much more so than the 32 year-old Ingrid Bergman in 1948). In the rare close-ups where DeMille has her lit for effect from below, Farrar actually looks strikingly like the 43 year-old Hedy Lamarr in The Story of Mankind (1957). Sadly she also gives possibly the worst performance in the film, constantly playing to the camera rather than the other actors.

However when Joan finally gets into her armour and lays siege to Orléans the film really gets going. The screen positively swarms with extras, some of whom look as if they’re genuinely getting hurt (you can actually see some of them flinching). Joan’s imprisonment and trial also captures DeMille’s imagination and provides him with the opportunity to indulge in one of the torture sequences he developed a penchant for, to the accompaniment of appropriately dramatic ‘Rembrandt’ lighting. Now in the clutches of tombstone-faced Theodore Roberts as Cauchon, the faces of the menacing-looking extras DeMille amassed to fill the courtroom during Joan’s trial are really something; as is her execution, when a flaming orange firebrand is applied to her pyre. Courtesy of the Handschiegl colour process she expires in an eye-boggling blaze of orange flames. @Richard Chatten

NOW AVAILABLE ON AMAZON

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1916)

Dir: Stuart Paton | Allen Holubar, Dan Hanlon, Edna Pendleton, Curtis Benton | UK, Action Drama 105′

A remarkably lavish production that seems not content with merely filming Jules Verne’s 1870 novel but for good measure also throws in his later novel ‘L’Île Mystérieuse’ and a concluding flashback that – as the subtitles themselves admit – owes nothing to Verne but must have made an already expensive production needlessly extravagant (Universal’s Carl Laemmle took a bath – if you’ll pardon the expression – on the reported $500,000 he spent on it).

The most remarkable aspect of the film is the pioneering underwater photography supervised by the brothers Ernest & George Williamson (some of it shot in the Bahamas) depicting the view from Captain Nemo’s famous picture window, the camera lingering lovingly on strikingly modern-looking actuality footage of coral reefs and shoals of fish. When Nemo’s crew get into their diving suits there is then remarkable footage of them interacting with actual sharks; although the realism abruptly evaporates in a later scene involving an extremely phony looking octopus.

The film’s makers quickly lose interest in a straight adaptation of Verne’s novel at this point, and the action transfers to a mysterious desert island whose one human inhabitant is initially a boisterous ‘child of nature’ played by Jane Gail in dusky body makeup, who jauntily trades in her cheetah skin sarong for a fetching combination of blouse and trousers provided by one of the visitors. (Quite a few adventure films from this period that I’ve seen have put the leading lady in trousers.) Nemo, alias Daaker, turns out to have been an Indian prince in a previous life, and Miss Gail turns out to be his daughter, as is explained in a flashback thrown in climaxing in a native uprising. The film had at this point seemed to be drawing to its conclusion; which makes the insertion of this very expensive looking sequence reportedly featuring almost 2,000 extras all the more bewildering.

The extraordinary underwater footage aside, the handsome and atmospheric look of the rest of the film probably owes more to the photography of Eugene Gaudio (whose elder brother Tony’s long career at Warner Bros. included The Adventures of Robin Hood) than to the rather perfunctory direction of Stuart Paton, who should have told Allen Holubar as Nemo and the unidentified actress playing his late wife not to wave their arms around so much. Other reviewers have commented on the resemblance of the uniform worn by Captain Nemo and his crew to the one traditionally worn by Santa Claus. @Richard Chatten

NOW AVAILABLE ON AMAZON

The Toth Family | Isten Hozta Örnagy (1969)

Dir.: Zoltan Fabri (1917-1994); Cast: Zoltan Latinovits, Imre Sinkovits, Marta Fonay, Vera Venczel; Hungary 1969, 95 min.

Zoltan Fabri’s amusing dramatic farce serves as a well-veiled metaphor for Stalinism. Adapting from Istvan Orkeny’s novel ‘Totek’, the Hungarian director was first and foremost a humanist whose films successfully smuggled their subversive subtexts through the censors as here in this lively social satire that couldn’t really offend anyone.

It all takes place during 1942 in a village in Northern Hungary where the peaceful existence of the Toth family comes to an abrupt end with the arrival of their son’s regimental superior, on sick leave. Father Lajos (Sinkovits) the naive head of the fire brigade, his plump wife Mariska (Fonay) and their doting daughter Agika (Venczel) find themselves lodging and entertaining the paranoid war-weary Major Ornagy (Latinovits), catering to his every whim in a bid to promote their son’s army career.

The major really is in a state: the slightest noise makes him jump as he imagines enemy soldiers at every corner and mistakes nighttime shadows for trenches, desperate to avoid them. In an effort to exert control over the locals he puts in place a laborious new system the villages must adhere to involving a series of boxes. Agika develops a crush as chaos reigns and the mentally impaired village postman Gyuri mislays the family’s post, including a letter of vital importance leading to the film’s dramatic finale.

The Toth Family has aged well: its Brechtian narrative serves the farcical content well – the family forced into a futile labour of love while the major is blissfully unaware of the havoc his demanding behaviour is causing. The output of useless boxes is the only direct connection to every-day live under Stalinism, where production of everything but consumer goods was the mantra of the system.

DoP Györgi Illes painterly images and saturated prime colours give the film a traditional, almost fairytale feel. Fabri’s classical approach helped him package his messages discretely – never attracting the same negative attention from the authorities as Miklòs Janscò with his eye-catching modernist style. But the death of Communism also marked the end of Fabri’s output. His final feature Housewarming was made in 1983. AS

COURTESY OF THE HUNGARIAN CULTURAL INSTITUTE

After Love (2021) BAFTAs 2022

Dir/scr: Aleem Khan | Joanna Scanlan, Natalie Richard, Talid Arris | UK, Drama 89 mins

A spare but transcendent feature debut that takes place between Calais and Dover in the aftermath of a cross-channel menage-a-trois. Happily married Muslim convert Mary/Fatima (Scanlan) discovers her husband’s secret on his mobile ‘phone, shortly after his sudden death. Curiosity sees her travelling to France where she tracks down Genevieve the middle-aged mother of his love child Solomon, now an unruly teenager much loved by both his parents. Through a understandable mix-up the women’s lives come together, but only Mary is aware of Genevieve’s identity. Both women are forced to deal with loss and longing in different ways.

Writer director Aleem Khan delivers an accomplished and insightful drama that speaks volumes about race, identity and the nature of love and faithfulness through a storyline that goes to unexpected places. Joanna Scanlan is quietly tremendous as a woman exploring grief and bereavement in a graceful and philosophical way that never descends into melodrama or histrionics, so commonplace in this kind of story. And it’s also down to Khan’s economic style of writing that follows the saying: ‘speech is silver, but silence is golden’.

Instead the two women discretely and gradually explore the past and the present in a way that is both surprising and satisfying. Khan leaves a great deal to the imagination – we are left to make up our own minds about Mary and Genevieve’s life, the focus here is the dynamic between them as they feel their way forward, largely in the dark, as the truth gradually emerges questioning their core beliefs and feelings.

One scene in particularly mirrors the women’s crushing loss of faith seen through a section of Dover’s white cliffs literally crumbling into the sea. It’s a stunning metaphor for this graceful two-hander that portrays women at their best, coping calmly with disappointment and bewilderment, reflecting on their lot with dignity and philosophy. A stunning and mature drama in the classic tradition of storytelling. MT

BAFTA AWARD FOR LEADING ACTRESS Joanna Scanlan | Released on Blu-ray and digitally as a BFI Player Subscription Exclusive on 23 August 202

The Best of Men (2012)

Dir.: Tim Whitby; Cast: Eddie Marsan, George Mackay, Leigh Quinn, Niamh Cusack, Rob Brydon, Richard McCabe, Tracy-Ann Oberman; UK 2012, 87 min.

This upbeat crowd-pleaser takes place in leafy Buckinghamshire where the Paraplegic Games first kicked off courtesy of one Ludwig Guttmann (1899-1980), a Jewish neurologist who revolutionised life for injured veterans, after fleeing Nazi Germany at the beginning of the Second World War.

TV Director Tim Whitby and his writer Lucy Gannon are best known for their popular TV series Bramwell and their star-strewn big screen production shows how the pioneering Jewish doctor’s groundbreaking work at Stoke Mandeville Hospital eventually led to him founding the centre’s Para-Olympics, held parallel with the London Olympic Games of 1948. Guttmann also founded the International Medical Society of Paraplegia and was later knighted.

Eddie Marsan plays the good doctor who arrives at Stoke Mandeville where paraplegic soldiers injured in the war effort are more or less being left to die, plagued by bed sores and suicidal with chronic pain. At first the medical staff are totally opposed to Guttmann’s methods with a great deal of tutting from Nurse Carr (Quinn) and Sister Edwards (Cusack) and pompous resident Doctor Cowan (McCabe) who tries to obstruct the newcomer, there’s even talk of a transfer.

The storyline follows twenty year old William Heat (Mackay) – who we see in happier days with his fiancée – he now wants to die after a prognosis of being confined to a wheelchair. Then there is Wynne ((Brydon), a Welshman who wants a divorce from his wife on the grounds of him not being man enough anymore. With the help of a PE instructor, Guttmann gets the men out of bed – and the rest is history.

The good old British stiff up lip makes light of the sombre topic, Rob Brydon and George McKay are lively and amusing. Guttmann’s fight against the stolid traditions of British bureaucracy has an upbeat feel – but Guttmann doesn’t get an easy ride of it – he too can be difficult at times. The men rise to the occasion with banter and witty repartee. An outing to the local pub underlines the film’s firmly British credentials. DoP Matt Gray captures the English countryside with roving panorama shots, his interiors are full of inventive angels. Marsan is convincing as the knowledgeable intruder whose solemn bedside manner fails on the empathy front with his British hosts. A tad didactic at times, The Best of Men is a wonderfully entertaining insight into a sporting triumph. AS

DVD & DIGITAL RELEASE ON 14 JUNE 2021

Topkapi (1964)

Dir: Jules Dessin | Cast: Melina Mercouri, Peter Ustinov, Maximillian Schell, Robert Morley, Akim Tamiroff | 120′

The second of two glossy international adventures Istanbul played host to in 1963 (the first was From Russia with Love), this much-copied (especially the scene with the cat burglar suspended from the skylight) adaptation of Eric Ambler’s 1962 novel The Light of Day’ is the sort of slick entertainment Losey thought he was making – but wasn’t – when he made Modesty Blaise two years later.

Effectively a sumptuous, less clinical Technicolor remake by Jules Dassin of his own classic fifties heist movie Riffifi. Henry Alekan’s photography is as fluidly mobile as it is ravishing to the eye (notably in the scene clambering across the roof of Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace Museum in brilliant sunshine).

With the cast including Peter Ustinov playing a schmoo “who aims low and misses”, Robert Morley and Akim Tamiroff you know you’re not going to get method acting; even without queen bee Melina Mercouri. (Ustinov later opined that director Dassin “could have had a more remarkable career if he had not dedicated himself so devotedly to her service”.) Yet despite the gleaming presence of Ms Mercouri as a voracious nymphomaniac there are occasional scenes with a strong homoerotic character; and not just the one with the oiled-up wrestlers. @Richard Chatten

In a Quiet Place: Part II (2021)

Dir: John Krasinski | Cast: Emily Blunt, Noel Jupe, Millicent Simmonds, Cillian Murphy | US thriller 97′

It’s a novel idea: an anthropod alien attracted to earthbound prey merely by sound. In a Quiet Place (2018), essentially a survivalist Sci-Fi thriller, was the brainwave of John Krasinski who wrote and stars alongside his wife Emily Blunt. As Evelyn and Lee Abbott they spend the entire film cowering in silence in the family farm in New York State while the predator – who arrives from the heavens – rages outside. Part II sees Evelyn and the kids escaping across the Appalachian mountains where other dangers lurk.

Thriller-wise there are some clever beats here: the exquisitely sound-sensitive predator is an animal – not a robot – and can be destroyed by gunfire – keeping the story grounded, relatively speaking. This spider-like critter can also be repelled (for a time) by a loud transistor radio, held up like a cross to a vampire. Meahwile its horrified potential victims tiptoe around – in the serene splendour of the bucolic Buffalo countryside where they hide out in a disused factory. The well-honed family members feel real and relatable, Evelyn and her clever kids Marcus (Jupe) and hearing-impaired Regan (Simmonds) love each other, and it shows. There’s also a newborn in tow.

Krasinski successfully develops the storyline with a sequel that combines likeable heroes with stunning Sci-fi set pieces moving on from the ground-breaking reveal of ‘part one’. Pitting man against monster in a post-apocalyptic world feels entirely ‘now’. Horror lovers will enjoy plenty of jump scares and skeletons popping out of nowwhere to a pounding soundscape that jostles thunderous vibes with suspenseful interludes of silvan silence. Somehow this could be happening to you. MT

NOW ON RELEASE IN CINEMAS NATIONWIDE

The Last Days (1998) Netflix

Dir.: James Moll; Documentary with Bill Basch, Irene Zisblatt, Renee Firestone, Alice Lok Cahana, Tom Lantos, Dario Gabbai, Randolph Braham,Hans Munch; USA 1998, 87 min.

Five Hungarian Holocaust survivors, now settled in the USA, share their memories of Dachau, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen in this astonishing Oscar-winning documentary that sees James Moll (Inheritance) taking them back to their tragic past. The Last Days, was only the American director’s second feature yet it manages to stun with its trenchant insight and archive footage showing the human spirit at its darkest. But there are glimmers of hope.

In March 1944 Germany occupied Hungary with the help of the Hungarian Fascists, the Arrow Cross Party. Nearly half a million Jews were ferried in cattle trucks between 15th of May 1944 and 9th of July 1944 to Concentrations camps in Poland and Germany, where they were murdered. The Jews of Budapest were saved by the arrival of the Red Army. But elsewhere in the country the occupying Germans (and their allies) focussed on annihilating Jewish Hungarians at the expense of the war effort, which was admittedly by this time a busted flush.

Irene Zisblatt, now a grandmother, remembers the day, when her mother sewed diamonds into hem of her skirt – the girl would swallow these and wash them again and and again in Auschwitz, they would provide bread when the going got tough. These diamonds have been fashioned into pendants, given to the first girl in each new generation in the USA.

Alice Lok-Cahana, a painter, is joined by her children, husband and grandchildren for a prayer in KZ Bergen Belsen. Art is her way of re-emerging from the ashes of the Second World War. But there is also survivor’s guilt: business man Billy Basch recalls how he swore everlasting friendship with two fellow inmates. But when the Germans ordered the Auschwitz prisoners on a death march in the winter of 1945, a foot injury prevented one of them from continuing, the SS guard putting paid to their solidarity threatening to shoot all three, leaving their friend to a certain death.

Renee Firestone, a teacher, literally interrogates Hans Munch, a German doctor who experimented with women prisoners: sterilisation and changing the eye colour of prisoners were his speciality. Her sister Klara, who died in June 1945, was one of his victims, Renee is seen putting flowers on her grave. Munch managed to escape indictment at numerous court cases claiming his parents would have been executed had he not obeyed. His mitigating ‘decency’ acted in his favour, compared to the sadism of the other doctors. But when he talks cold-bloodedly about the smell of human fat, the facade slips.

And there is Tom Lantos, the only Holocaust survivor elected to the US Senate, singing the praises of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg who hid him and others in houses belonging to Swedish diplomats. Lantos is now the proud grandfather of seventeen grandchildren.

DoP Harris Done has a delicate hand, always knowing when to cut if the witnesses are too overcome by grief. With a memorable score by Hans Zimmer, The Last Days leaves us in no doubt. Over 75 years later the psychological wounds still run deep. AS

NOW ON NETFLIX

Suspect (1960)

Dir: John & Roy Boulting | Cast: Tony Britton, Virginia Maskell, Ian Bannen, Peter Cushing, Donald Pleasence, Spike Milligan, Raymond Huntley | UK Thriller, 81′

Sadly forgotten today. This sober adaptation of his own 1949 novel ‘A Sort of Traitors’ by Nigel Balchin is one of the very few films by the Boulting twins signed by both as co-directors, and the third of an unofficial trilogy of Cold War dramas that recalls the earnestness of the brothers’ films of the thirties and forties (the monstrously unfunny comedy relief by Spike Milligan being ironically by far the weakest component).

Instead of the atom bomb ten years earlier in Seven Days to Noon the threat to humanity here is the unfortunately only too topical menace of virulent contagions like Bubonic Plague or Typhus. Sixty years later it remains one of the very few British films to mention Korea (where Ian Bannen lost both his arms), and the presence of such a singular character as Bannen plays could only happen in a film based upon a novel. Rather than the saintly figure the disabled are usually portrayed as (“People are usually reliably sentimental about the maimed”) Bannen has obviously been destroyed mentally as well as physically by his ordeal.

Pragmatism is favoured over idealism (“The slippery ones are easy, but these honest chaps turn you grey” laments deceptively vague spymaster Thorley Walters). Although supposedly the hero, Tony Britton incredibly dismisses the disabled as “of no social value”; while Raymond Huntley’s obstructive minister (despite his distractingly obvious toupee) demonstrates to be sharper than he seems throughout the rest of the film in an incisive speech cogently stating that political realities trump heady idealism (“Matters of judgment are our business”).

Despite its ultra-low budget, the efficient production design and use of locations – cleanly lit by veteran Boulting’s cameraman Max Greene – makes the film looks austere rather than cheap; while the economical use of excerpts from Scriabin and Chopin also adds to the melancholy of the piece, and is possibly a discreet reminder that Bannen’s dashed dream had been of becoming a concert pianist.@Richard Chatten

NOW ON TALKING PICTURES

David Hockney: the Arrival of Spring in Normandy 2020

David Hockney ‘Britain’s most expensive living artist’ (1937-) made a snap decision at the outbreak of Covid. Travelling to Normandy from his home in California his express intention was to capture the arrival of Spring – nature couldn’t be cancelled by the pandemic.

Staying in a small wattle and daub house surrounded by four acres of countryside, he observed the blossoming of a new year frame by frame as spring emerged and took hold with all its drama and glory.

Hockney had first depicted this ‘most classical of subjects’ in his native Yorkshire in 2011 in a fifty two part work. This was the first time he took to his iPad and a show was later organised at the RA. Two years later he was back again working this time in charcoal on paper.

The Arrival of Spring in Normandy sees him taking to his iPad again but this time with a new app, adapted and developed to his specific requirements, allowing a freedom of expression and mobility to capture the fresh zinging elements in a ‘naif’ style that perfectly compliments foliage and flower, from March until July 2020. Working very much like the French Impressionists two hundred years ago, his pictures are captured ‘en plain air’, just like Monet in nearby Giverny. There is also an animated work featuring gentle rain falling a meadow. At 86 the much loved painter is still inspired and inspiring. MT

The Arrival of Spring in Normandy – is now showing at London’s Royal Academy of Arts

The Rise of the Krays (2015)

Dir: Zackary Adler | Cast: Matt Vael, Simon Cotton, Kevin Leslie, Olivia Moyles

With a new series ‘Secrets of the Krays’ now on TV the endless fascination with the terrible twins continues, here played by Simon Cotton (Ronnie) and Kevin Leslie (Reggie) who appropriately won Best Actor at that year’s Marbella Film Festival.

Although it supposedly begins in Hackney in 1951, this movie takes its sartorial and visual lead from David Bailey’s 1965 portrait of the Kray Twins and its technique from A Clockwork Orange rather than The Blue Lamp; while the saturated Edward Hopper colours evoke the swinging sixties rather than the drab Britain of the fifties where the action mostly takes place. Likewise the saturnine young blades depicted here bear little resemblance to the beefy, cold-eyed bruisers of Bailey’s double portrait (while naturally no attempt has been made to cast actors who resemble Alec Douglas-Home or Henry Brooke in the brief scene with the Prime Minister and Home Secretary at Number 10).

Amidst all this testosterone a couple of ladies from Albert Square make all too fleeting appearances in the form of Anita Dobson as a barmaid and Nicola Stapleton as the twins’ mother, Violet. @Richard Chatten

NOW ON PRIME

Those That Wish Me Dead (2020)

Dir: Taylor Sheridan | Cast: Angeline Jolie, Medina Senghore, Aiden Gillen, Nicholas Hoult, Finn Little, John Bernthal, Jake Webber | US Action Thriller, 100′

A flash and burn action thriller that really doesn’t set the night on fire despite a solid cast and a smouldering Angelina Jolie who plays a Montana firefighter recovering from one too many forest tragedies. And in the midst of this she rescues and befriends a traumatised orphan (Little) whose father (Webber) has been blown to bits in escaping an incendiary couple of cypher-like assassins (Gillen and Hoult) who kill people for reasons that never really makes sense – destroying swathes of bosky Montana countryside in some spectacular set pieces that will make nature-lovers and environmentalists weep.

Taylor Sheridan was heralded a promising new talent on the indie circuit with his spunky scripts for the lauded Hell or High Water and Sicario. Here he gets behind the camera sharing the virtue-signalling narrative in a group effort – and it shows – a big budget fails to paper over the cracks in the muddled, multi-stranded storyline takes a while to shape up, based on a book by Michael Koryta – who joins Charles Leavitt and Taylor in the writing department.

One thing it does have is two feisty female characters in the shape of Jolie (the more convincing of the two, taking over from Emily Blunt’s FBI agent in Sicario) and Medina Senghore who gets the cheesy option as a simpering pregnant sheriff’s wife whose gloves go on in the fraught finale. Between them they save the day amid endless mayhem – and that’s something to welcome in this otherwise rather forgettable pulpy production. MT

NOW IN CINEMAS NATIONWIDE

The Monster Maker (1944) Plex TV

Dir: Sam Newfield | Cast: J Carrol Naish, Ralph Morgan, Talia Birell, Wanda McKay | US Horror fantasy, 62′

1944 was the year in which a hitherto obscure glandular disorder called acromegaly hit the Hollywood mainstream. In the Sherlock Holmes adventure ‘The Pearl of Death’ a crowd player named Rondo Hatton (1894-1946) who suffered the affliction was promoted to featured billing as the backbreaking Hoxton Creeper and achieved transitory stardom as the only movie monster who didn’t require makeup. And it was also a central plot element in The Monster Maker; stored in a bottle in the drugs cabinet of a certain Dr.Markoff bearing a professionally printed label reading “Acromegaly A.5.B2”, as if he’d bought it at his local branch of Boots.

It was probably tasteless for a mere horror movie to use the authentic condition which in reality afflicted poor Hatton (a picture of whom will show you what a genuine sufferer actually looks like); but the film is nowhere near as sleazy as authorities like Leonard Maltin and the late Denis Gifford made it sound (and that it’s provenance as a production of ‘Z’ budget studio PRC might lead one to expect). J.Carroll Naish and Ralph Morgan are both urbanely professional as the oily Dr Markoff and the concert pianist whose daughter he covets. The acromegalic makeup by Maurice Seiderman (who worked on Citizen Kane) is actually not bad (although is wisely not lingered on for too long by director Sam Newfield); and is more convincing than that later worn by Leo G. Carroll when afflicted with the same condition in Tarantula. Oddly enough, cinematographer Robert Cline’s name isn’t in the credits (at least in the prints posted on YouTube), but he does a fluid and elegant job; as does editor Holbrook N. Todd.

Previous IMDb reviewers have pointed up similarities to The Raven (1935); and schlockmeister Herman Cohen in turn probably drew upon youthful memories of this when he produced the laugh-out-loud funny Konga (1961), with which it shares in common a very mad scientist (hilariously overacted in Konga by Michael Gough) with a fondness for injecting serums, a besotted female assistant frustrated by her boss’s infatuation with a younger, cuter and blonder girl on whom he forces his creepy attentions to a predictably unenthusiastic response, and a pet gorilla in a cage (who looks as if he’s even wearing the same gorilla suit) who he occasionally lets out at night to deal with people who are making a nuisance of themselves.

One of the most improbable elements in the film is also one of its strengths. As played by Tala Birell, Markoff’s assistant Maxine is a smart, handsome woman who knows her way around a laboratory. But, knowing what he did to the real Markoff and his wife, why is she so besotted with this jerk in the first place? Happily she avoids the fate suffered by lab assistants in most horror movies and survives until the end, seems to take Markoff’s death in her stride and hopefully went on to settle down with someone more worthy of her. @Richard Chatten

NOW ON PLEX TV

Cairo Station | Bab el Hadid (1958)

Dir.: Youssef Chahine; Cast: Youssef Chahine, Hind Rostom, Farid Sawqi, Hasan al-Barudi; Egypt 1958, 75 min.

Cairo Station was the eleventh of over thirty feature films by prolific Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine (1926-2008) providing a snapshot of Egyptian society that appears, on the face of it, more permissive than today.

Chahine was born into a multi-lingual family of Coptic Christians in British-occupied Alexandria where his lawyer father was a supporter of the Wafd nationalist party; his Greek mother sent him to the Christian English-speaking Victoria College. His desire for a theatrical career was first prompted in childhood by seeing shadow plays, then 9.5mm films.

Chahine rose to the international stage with his autobiographical trilogy set in the bustling Mediterranean port of Alexandria, the place of his birth and a creative melting pot where the Egyptian film industry was born in the 1920s: Iskindiria … Leh? (Alexandria … Why?, 1978); Haddouta Misriyya (An Egyptian Story, 1982); and Eskandarai Kaman We Kaman (Alexandria Again and Forever, 1989). But although he was highly regarded by European directors his films were rarely shown beyond the festival circuit in the West, apart from in France where he won a Palme d’Or for his oeuvre in 1997. Cairo Station was Chahine first auteur feature: far ahead of his time aesthetically and contents wise and now getting a international showing on Netflix.

Radical and very much ahead of its time – when you consider the step back that the Arab world has since taken – Cairo Station was later banned and Chahine forced to leave Egypt.

The station is seen as a microcosm of Egyptian society in the late 1950s. The country had undergone drastic changes: In 1956 Gamer Abdel Nasser had overthrown the monarchy and nationalised the Suez Canal. Everything was being questioned, particularly the role of women and the status quo between employers and workers. Despite the ebullient liveliness of some of the scenes, there’s a sinister thread of misogyny running through this psycho-sexual melodrama, Chahine was not for nothing an ardent admirer of Alfred Hitchcock, and DoP Alvise Orfanelli mirrors his use of light and shadow both on the widescreen images of the station and in intimate close-ups that convey the lust, fear and longing in the characters’ eyes. Considered Neo-realist by some critics, the element of male sexual obsession belongs very much to the early 1970s films of Brian de Palma, another Hitchcock disciple.

Told by the elderly narrator Madbouli (Al Barudi), a newspaper seller at the station, the narrative focus is his club-footed employee Quinawi (also played by Chahine) who lives in a porn-decked hovel where he drools over photos of semi-clad females dreaming of the flirtatious drinks seller Hanuma (Rostom). Quinawi is besotted by Hanuma, who sometimes plays him along if it suits her, although she is really in love with station porter and trade unionist Abu Serih (Sawqi), who is active in cutting out the middlemen, who take much of their earnings, giving the film its political angle.

One day Quinawi reads in the papers that a serial killer is on the loose. And while Abu Serih is busy with his union business, Hanuma plays a wicked game with Quinawi: toying with his offer of marriage and taking him up on his idea of going back to his village, where they will marry and raise a family. When Quinawi finds out he has been duped, he strikes out in the same style as the serial killer, blinded by rage and anger, making a fatal error that leads to the shocking finale where he emerges a tragic and pitiful victim.

There are two impressive highlights: the first is a Be-Bop interlude with “Mike and the Skyrockets”, performing in a train, Hanuma dancing along with gusto. The other one shows Quinawi taking revenge for his frustration on a little kitten. There is nothing muted or tender about the film’s characters who are seen in all the cruelty and splendour of the Middle East. AS

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

Maniac (1934) Prime Video

Dir: Dwain Esper | Cast: Bill Woods, Horace B Carpenter, Ted Edwards, Phyllis Diller | US, Horror 51′

Although copyrighted in September 1934, Maniac feels as if it were made five years earlier, both technically and in its extraordinary subject matter; the latter because it was never intended to be exhibited by any of the major theatre chains and thus beyond the reach of the newly enforced Production Code.

To watch Maniac is as if the Production Code had never happened, as it abounds with such brazen flouting of the Code as four young girls sitting about in their underwear discussing current stories in the press in surprisingly highfalutin’ language, a couple of fleeting glimpses of bare breasts, eye-watering and jaw-dropping violence such as a scene involving cruelty to a cat lifted (along with much of the rest of the plot) from Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’ and a remarkably energetic, hair-pulling, clothes-ripping catfight in a cellar between Thea Ramsey and Phyllis Diller that escalates from hypodermics to a baseball bat. (Ms Diller – whose name regularly provokes comment – as the scheming Mrs Buckley is an elegantly dressed, bun-faced middle-aged woman who sounds as if she’s reading her lines off cue-cards and couldn’t less resemble her much younger namesake.)

Crudely made but with a nodding acquaintance with rudimentary cinematic technique, this film is obviously cheap but far from inept. The veteran editor William Austin makes competent use of cutting and dissolves (as well as footage apparently lifted from Maciste all’Inferno), the laboratory scenes are actually quite good-looking and reasonably competently framed and lit by cameraman William Thompson (who also shot Plan 9 from Outer Space!), there’s a satisfactory amount of outdoor photography (although the night scenes are far too dark), including exterior shots of the back yard of a Hollywood bungalow, and the climax looks as if it’s shot in a real cellar.

The script is by the director’s wife Hildegarde Stadie, and she plainly knows her Poe, who is actually name checked at one point. Some of her dialogue is also quite a salty commentary on modern life, like the exchange between the two embalmers: “between the gangsters and the auto drivers, we won’t need another war to carry off the population. You didn’t even mention the suicides”. A lot of the humour is plainly blackly intentional, like the neighbour discussing breeding cats for their furs while feeding them on (and to) rats.

One narrative device that heightens the film’s rather archaic Pre-Code feel is its use of intertitles which periodically interrupt the plot to describe various abnormal mental conditions (all of which sound applicable to the former incumbent of the White House). Plainly fig leaves to maintain the pretence that the film has a Serious Educational Purpose (and accompanied by the only music in the film, apart from the final movement of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth over the opening credits), normally this medical stuff would have been delivered at some point by an actor pretending to be a doctor, but here it’s done with passages cribbed from medical publications. One of these conditions, Dementia Praecox, was a quarter of a century later the condition Elizabeth Taylor was diagnosed with in Suddenly Last Summer and compared by Katherine Hepburn to an exotic bloom (“Night-blooming Dementia Praecox”) in a purple passage that wouldn’t have been out of place here. @Richard Chatten

MANIAC IS ON PRIME VIDEO

Calibre (2018) Netflix

Dir/Wri: Matt Palmer | Cast: Jack Lowden, Martin McCann, Tony Curran, Ian Pirie, Cal MacAninch | UK Thriller 101′

A wee weekend in the Scotlish highlands has no happy outcome for anyone concerned in this gritty thriller that sees the usual low budget British gangland flick evocatively transposed to north of the border.

Calibre is the feature debut of seasoned shorts director Matt Palmer whose canny script certainly makes for gripping if uncomfortable viewing. The only downside is the lack of a spunky female character to counterbalance the fearsome red-bloodied males in a cast led by Jack Lowden (Dunkirk/Small Axe).

After a romantic opening scene the engines start firing when suburban, soon to be father Vaughn (Lowden) bids farewell to his fiancé Anna (Morgan) and heads off with close friend Marcus (McCann) into the wild and rather hostile territory of West Lothian for a spot of deer shooting.

Palmer and his Hungarian DoP Mark Gyori establish the dour milieu of the tartan-shrewn hunting lodge where the two settle down to a night of heavy drinking, you can almost hear the bagpipes grinding ominously in the gloaming. Dawn sees them venturing into bristling gorse-lands nursing hangovers that clearly skew their shooting skills. What happens next is pivotal to the remaining hour or so of the film where the two wish they had spent the weekend quietly at home in Edinburgh rather than drenched in dread and despair up north. A gross error of judgement leaves Vaughn and Marcus toughing it out at the lodge, rather than reporting events to the local police, or even heading home – there’s also a suggestion that some kind of business deal is attached to the trip to explain their staying, but this is a minor flaw in an otherwise gripping little thriller. One mistake leads to another as soon all hell breaks loose with the locals who are not able to forgive or forget. There’s a Straw Dogs feel to the way the film plays out, and it’s brutal and not for wimps.

Most of the violence occurs off-camera with Chris Wyatt’s clever editing skills conveying an unbearable tension that gnaws away as the vehement locals prepare to take matters into their own hands. MT

NOW ON NETFLIX | Calibre won the Michael Powell Award for best new British feature at Edinburgh 2018.

La Grande Vadrouille (1966) Prime Video

Dir: Gerard Oury | Cast: Bourvil, Louis de Funès, Claudio Brook, Andrea Parisy | France, Adventure drama 132′

A colossal box office hit in France but largely unknown here in Britain, where it had a brief cinema release in1968 before soon fading from memory despite the presence of Terry-Thomas. Top-billing goes to Bourvil, who is appealing in the larger but less showy part than that of co-star Louis de Funès, whose mere presence is enough to get you grinning in anticipation.

Glossily shot in Eastmancolor on a variety of picturesque locations (including Paris) by the veteran cameraman Claude Renoir, the plush production and extraordinary running time of 132 minutes does get rather overwhelming when lavished upon some pretty basic slapstick; such as twice ruining SS officer Hans Meyer’s nice smart uniform by covering him in muck. Much of the film is pitched at that level, with people hiding in wardrobes and going into the wrong hotel rooms, although the sequence where Bourvil and de Funès approach an unsuspecting stranger they’ve confused with Terry-Thomas in a Turkish bath by sidling up to him and giving him the eye while wearing only towels and whistling ‘Tea for Two’ enters the realm of the authentically bizarre.

With over twenty years having passed since the Liberation, the film’s makers by now felt able to treat the Germans as figures of fun rather than enmity, and even go to the trouble to let us know that the pilot accidentally shot down by a cross-eyed gunner on their own side parachutes to safety during the tremendous climax set on the border of the Free Zone; in which all the visual treats that have come before are far surpassed by a stunning sequence depicting two bright red gliders hurtling off a sheer cliff against the backdrop of a breathtakingly beautiful mountainscape. @Richard Chatten

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

Hitler: Dead or Alive (1942) Prime video

Dir: Nick Grinde | Cast: Dorothy Tree, Ward Bond, Warren Hymer, Paul Fix | US Drama 70′

This isn’t really very good, but is nevertheless a historically fascinating film that needs to be seen to be believed; if only for the incredible ending, whih is no more far-fetched than that dreamed up by Quentin Tarantino for Inglorious Basterds.

The previous year Geoffrey Household’s pre-war novel about stalking Hitler, Rogue Male, had already been filmed by Fritz Lang as Man Hunt, and I had settled down to this expecting another piece of crass hokum like Desperate Journey with Errol Flynn, which had recently treated killing Nazis as a bit of a lark. At first it seems as if we’re in for more of the same, but the tone darkens considerably as the film progresses, with obvious references to the massacre of civilians at Lidice the previous spring.

Despite being warned that in Germany they speak German, this proves not to be the case; and absurd inaccuracies like the claim that Hitler grew his moustache to cover a scar acquired in a Bavarian brawl in the early 20’s (presumably the First World War photographs of Corporal Hitler sporting an enormous Kaiser Wilhelm moustache were less familiar to the American public at the time of the Second World War) nestle side by side with depictions of cozy confinement in Dachau and children going before a firing squad that would seem offensive in a mere ‘Z’ budget quickie were the serious intentions of the film’s makers to bring in under the radar a passionate piece of anti-Nazi propaganda under the guise of a simple minded action movie not increasingly evident. All the actors give of their best, and Ward Bond in particular grows in the lead and when he later disguises himself with a moustache to look older, he bears a remarkable resemblance to how he actually did look in his later years.

All in all it compares favourably with The Dirty Dozen and Inglorious Basterds on a fraction of the budget. @Richard Chatten

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

The Human Voice (2020)

Dir: Pedro Almodovar | Tilda Swinton | Drama, 30′

This one-hander is a loose take of the original 1930 stage play by Jean Cocteau, which was itself adapted in 1948 by Roberto Rossellini for Anna Magnani

Pedro Almodóvar’s first outing in English premiered last year at Venice and is now on general release. It’s a play that’s ideally suited to an Intimate collaboration between actor and director – not to mention a beautifully behaved dog – and Swinton and Almodovar work together. There is also Ted Kotcheff’s 1966 version starring Ingrid Bergman, and no doubt there will be others to look forward to.

A graceful and imposing Tilda Swinton is ‘the voice’ in question here, a jilted woman suppressing discretely controlled but mounting histrionics as she glides exquisitely around her chic city apartment all dolled up in bright red Balenciaga and various other stylish accoutrements – and welding an axe, the dog picking up on her anxiety.

She is hoping her lover will change his mind about their relationship, but there’s a masterful quality to Swinton’s performance: she is no moaning Minnie but a woman empowered by her pain and driven by a dignified sense of decorum. Powerful stuff. Alberto Iglesias composed the needling violin score. MT

NOW ON RELEASE | Streaming here

My Mexican Bretzel (2019) IFFR 2020

Dir.: Nuria Gimenez; Documentary with Ilse G. Ringier, Frank A. Lorang; Spain 2019, 73 min.

“Lies are just another way of telling the truth”.

Spanish first time director/writer/co-editor Nuria Gimenez pulls off one of on of the greatest coup’s in the history of the “Found Films” genre.

My Mexican Bretzel is one of those documentaries where spoilers are unavoidable. Gimenez was clearing out her grandparents’s attic and came across the 8 mm footage of a film shot by grandfather Frank A, Lorang and featuring his wife Ilse G. Ringier who she calls Vivian and Leon Barrett in her film. The other thing to mention is the flowery quotes from a certain guru Kanvar Khajappali, which are spread through the silent footage enlivened by newspaper cuttings that give a time frame.. These are based on fantasy as Kanvar Khajappali never existing. It’s a fascinating story that shows how life can be complicated and messy behind the facade of family respectability.

As the film rolls we meet Nuria’s well-to-do grandparents in their comfortable home in Switzerland where Leon B. had made money from his involvement in a new drug “Lovedyn”. But a flying accident curtailed his activities and caused him chronic pain and Vivian is not keen on the luxury boat her husband bought, to compensate for the plane, he could never fly again. And when she is allowed to steer the boat he just lets the action roll, to her chagrin, as his obsession behind the camera takes over: “I am fed up with him looking at me through the lens. As if he was aiming at me with a gun, ready to shoot at any time”. Vivian prefers writing but does admit: “I think filming is the best form of self-delusion. And a beautiful way to vanish, and become an animal or God. If you film, you don’t have to live or give explanations.”

Eventually she falls for Leonard or Leo, a Mexican. “I was dragged towards him without thought or willpower. I feel guilty for not feeling guilty”. After a brief affair with Leo she flies back to meet her husband in New York. Vivian and Leon go on living together, but Leo remains the elephant in the room. Later Vivian notices that a friend of theirs, Olivia, is wearing the bracelet Leon gave her some time previously. And she gravitates back to Leo again. “I want to be young again and be with Leo.”

Meanwhile Leon makes up for his lack of desire for her with excessive bouts of attention. Vivian becomes obsessed with death, dreaming she would die on the same day as Pope Pius XII. But when his death is announced in October 1958, Vivian is still resolutely alive and holidaying in Venice.

This is an audacious retelling of a woman’s true story through the 1940s to the end of the 1960s. On the face of it, Vivian/Ilse seems to have the best of both worlds – her life is materially rich, but lacking in emotional fulfilment. And although the couple enjoy their endless trips around the world, the constant movement seems to point to a lack a spiritual serenity or any real meaning – echoed in the meaningless Khajappali quotes.

Gimenez creates a story from images these revealing images, discovering her family heritage quite by chance. My Mexican Bretzel is a little gem, winning Best Film in the “Found Film” section of the IFF Rotterdam 2020. AS

NOW SHOWING AT THE SPANISH CINEMA WEEKEND 2021

London Spanish Film Festival 2021

London Spanish Film Festival
10th Spring Weekend 28 – 30 May 2021

The 10th Spring Weekend of the London Spanish Film Festival is back full of energy and positive vibes setting the mood for an exciting 17th edition in September.

You’ll find the latest film by veteran Fernando Trueba, three decent debuts from women filmmakers, a hopeful and moving reflexion on what life is and a special screening of the latest treat from Maestro Almodóvar.

LAS NIÑAS | Schoolgirls

Celia is an 11-year-old girl studying at a nun’s school in 1992. She’s a responsible student and a considerate daughter but the arrival of a new classmate will open a little window Celia is willing to look out from to discover about the outside world. Together with her group of friends she’ll give her first steps into adolescence and first-times even if that means confronting her mother and questioning everything that meant comfort and security. The film has won several awards among which Best Film, Best New Director, Best Cinematography and Best Original Screenplay Goya Awards.

Fri 28 May | 6.30pm | £13, conc. £11

EL OLVIDO QUE SEREMOS Memories of My Father

Trueba’s latest film tells the story of Héctor Abad Gómez, one of Colombia’s most beloved national heroes, through the eyes of his son. He balances a nuanced portrait of Abad Gómez’s family life in Medellín and the harsh reality of the country in the turbulent 1970s and 1980s, in which corruption is common and the government cannot be criticised. Based on the book written by Abad Gómez’s son, Memories of My Father is a memorable work, a love story and the portrait of a man fighting for the basic human rights of his people: food, water and adequate shelter.

Fri 28 May | 8.35pm | £13, conc. £11 Sat 29 May | 5.50pm | £13, conc. £11

LA VOZ HUMANA | The Human Voice

Jean Cocteau wrote The Human Voice in 1928 and, since then, many artists have staged or filmed their own vision of this woman’s dramatic moments after her lover of the last few years leaves her to get married with to another woman. Almodóvar’s stunning version brings to The Human Voice his sense of aesthetics, of rhythm and his peculiar, subtle sense of humour, making the pièce his own. Chameleonic Swinton, in what seems a wonderful and perfect tuning with Almodóvar, captures the essence of his style bringing to it some delightful British exquisiteness. A must.

The film will be followed by a 40 min video-Q&A with Pedro Almodóvar and Tilda Swinton with Mark Kermode. It will be preceded by a video-presentation by Prof. Maria Delgado

Sat 29 May | 4.15pm | £13, conc. £11

LA INNOCÈNCIA | La inocencia | The Innocence

Lis is a teenager whose dream is to become a circus artist and go traveling. While she knows she’ll have to confront her parents and fight for it, she spends the summer playing around with her friends and with her boyfriend, a few years older than herself and the relationship with whom she tries to keep hidden from the constant gossip of the neighbours. Lucia Alemany’s impressive first feature film is a fresh coming-of-age story that captures perfectly the rural and festive mood without losing any realism nor honesty.

Sat 29 May | 8.45pm | £13, conc. £11

MY MEXICAN BRETZEL

Giménez’s debut film offers, through archive footage of home made movies, a glimpse into the life of a wealthy European couple, Léon and Vivian Barrett, after WW2 and up to the 1960s. The quality of the footage is superb and is accompanied by text from Vivian’s diary offering details of their lives, her thoughts, gossip… Mesmerising and compelling, this is a clever work of direction and of editing by Giménez, and has won her, among others, the Found Footage Award at the Internation Film Festival of Rotterdam last year.

Sun 30 May | 6.10pm | £13, conc. £11

LA VIDA ERA ESO That Was Life

When María and Verónica end up meeting and sharing a hospital room in Belgium, the only thing they have in common is that they are Spaniards who came to work to this country with the hope to find more opportunities than back at home. Slowly a bond grows between them and one of them will start a journey to Almería, where the roots of the other are, initially to meet her family, finally to discover principles beyond those on which she had based her whole life. The film is poignant in his humble and intimate approach. The subtly nuanced acting of Petra Martínez in the lead role as a woman pushing herself out of the boundaries of the role in which she felt confined, adds emotion to this wonderful film.

Sun 30 May | 7.55pm | £13, conc. £11

LONDON SPANISH FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Surge (2020)

Dir.: Aneil Karia; Cast: Ben Whishaw, Jasmine Jobson, Ellie Haddington, Ian Gelder, UK 2020, 100 min.

Director/co-writer Aneil Karia shows how easy it is to lose our grip on reality in these gruelling Covid times. Ben Whishaw is a man in flight, running away from himself and caring less and less about the consequences, or anyone he meets.

The story takes place over 24 hours in London where Joseph works in a soulless job in security at Stansted Airport. We first meet him enjoying a cake with his colleagues – only later do we get to know that this is Joseph’s birthday celebration. Unsatisfied and disillusioned for all sorts of reasons, not least his unresolved relationship with a colleague Lily, Joseph’s life soon spins out of control after a minor incident involving a broken glass.

On the run again and making a bid to help Lily (Jobson) with some computer issue, Joseph soon loses control due to another minor setback. The narrative here is familiar, Karia focusing on mood and atmosphere to create a palpable feeling of desperation and disorientation in her first feature film.

Whishaw gives a flawless performance as the disenchanted Joseph who seems less and less affected by the unfolding mayhem. The graver the situation, the more nonchalant Joseph becomes as he disconnects from reality. Karia brings her feature to a soft landing, Joseph’s outburst of manic anger having run out of steam. DoP Stuart Bentley’s handheld camera follows the path of the tornado, a needling electronic score by Tujiko Noriko underlining the chaos of Joseph’s everyday life. A few cuts would make the result even more impressive, but Karia’s debut is nevertheless a confident tour-de-force. AS

SURGE WILL BE RELEASED IN UK CINEMAS AND ON DIGITAL PLATFORMS FROM 28TH MAY 2021.

Mosley: It’s Complicated (2020)

Dir: Michael Shevloff | Doc, 82′

For most people the name Mosley is often synonymous with Fascism. And Sir Oswald Mosley’s son Max (1940-) – who has died age 81 laboured all his life to overcome his unfortunate family connection, and done a decent job of it with his tireless charity work and successful Formula One racing career. He went on to use the Formula 1 brand to promote road safety both on the track and on the road with Euro ENCAP. But his life is not without scandal and setback.

Tall and elegant, Max Mosley certainly cuts a suave dash in this documentary portrait that chronicles the qualified barrister’s often controversial life and times as the former FIA president and at the head of F1’s governing body from 1993 to 2005, and who now holds the Legion of Honour.

US Director and producer Michael Shevloff teams up with TV producer Alexandra Orton in an even-handed, no holds-barred approach to the story of Mosley’s career and his efforts to raise levels of road safety all over the world. Mosley has cooperated with the filmmakers but this is not an authorised documentary.

The focus here is obviously motor racing but those not interested in Formula 1 will be watching with a beady eye on the emerging private life of this high profile figure born into an illustrious family: his aristocratic mother Diana was one of the Mitford sisters and a ‘Bright Young Things’ during the 1920s and his politician father formed the British Union of Fascists in 1932 for which he was interned during the Second World War, is now a character gracing the BBC’s Peaky Blinders (season 5).

The fearless lawyer presents an inscrutable persona with his fine manners and dapper mien but one cannot help musing about certain elements that emerge from the engaging narrative: Mosley’s spats with Italian racing supremo Flavio Briatore; his penchant for sex parties (admittedly in the privacy of his own home); his landmark victory over the News of the World who tried to put a Nazi spin on their story; his contribution towards the Leveson Inquiry; and the tragic death by overdose of his son Alexander. Despite all this you can’t deny his affable appeal, although his steely stare suggests subversiveness and a strong resolve. Married to Jean since 1960, he is also close friends with billionaire businessman Bernie Ecclestone, another former racing driver who built his empire around broadcasting the sport.

But back to motor racing, and petrolheads who will find this a fascinating watch particularly as Hugh Grant, David Ward, Alan Parr, Gerhard Berger, Jean Todt and Charlie Whiting also add their two penny worth. But former Ferrari team principal Marco Piccinini puts in all in a nutshell “His brain has the most powerful acceleration…but some problem with the brakes”. And Hugh Grant agrees: “I wouldn’t want him as my enemy”. When all is said and done, you come away from the film with a positive impression of a man who was not afraid to stand up for his beliefs. Someone who has tried to improve certain standards of modern life and challenge the gutter press and who clearly had strong friendships despite his detractors – Hugh Grant, who appears in the documentary on the subject of privacy, recently described Max in a Tweet as “very bright, very kind and very, very brave”. MT

Mosley: It’s Complicated will be in UK Cinemas from 9th July, and on Digital Download & DVD/Blu-ray from 19th July. The DVD / Blu-ray can be pre-ordered through Dazzler Media.

Daisy Kenyon (1947) Prime Video

Dir: Otto Preminger | Cast: Joan Crawford, Dana Andrews, Henry Fonda, Ruth Warwick | US Drama 99’

In the hands of George Cukor, this script – which boasts some priceless one-liners rather earnestly delivered – could have been an effervescent marital romp like ‘Adam’s Rib’, but is here directed as melodrama by Otto Preminger, with lighting to match.

The most interesting scenes tend to be those with Dana Andrews, whose amiable fellowship that forms between him and his supposed romantic rival Henry Fonda has definite screwball possibilities, with Crawford – despite the film having been titled after her to appeal to memories of ‘Mildred Pierce’ – somewhat sidelined by their unlikely camaraderie.

Ruth Warrick as Andrews’ histrionic, high-maintenance harpy of a wife (taking her woes out on their teenaged daughters played charmingly by Peggy Ann Garner & Connie Marshall) goes out of her way to make Crawford seem a better catch; but the eventual likely outcome can be guessed at if you bear in mind the Breen Office’s prevailing view at the time of the sanctity of marriage. @Richard Chatten

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

Graft (1931)

Dir: Christy Cabanne | Cast: Regis Toomey, Sue Carol, Dorothy Revier, Boris Karloff | US Drama 54′

At the time this unambitious quickie with a distinctively terse title came and went unnoticed. It’s title today remains more familiar to connoisseurs of old horror movies than of pre-Code cinema, as it occasionally crops up in histories of the horror genre as the film Boris Karloff was making when in June 1931 he was spotted in the Universal commissary by James Whale and offered the role of Frankenstein’s monster. For the remainder of its brief production, Karloff would stay at the studio after finishing his day job on ‘Graft’ for nighttime make-up tests with Jack Pierce.

Few people have seen this movie, and horror authority Carlos Clarens erroneously refers to it as a gangster movie rather than yet another newspaper picture about a rookie reporter going after a big story. The jaunty music over the credits sounds more like something from a Laurel & Hardy picture, and sets the tone for the inconsequentiality of the piece; a point thuddingly underlined by the presence of its dim-witted though ultimately triumphant hero, Dustin Hotchkiss.

Although the film is well directed by Griffith alumnus Christy Cabanne, with superb photography by Jerome Ash, Hotchkiss is so annoying you can’t wait for the thing to end. Regis Toomey was fine in later classics like ‘The Big Sleep’, so the blame lies with the character rather than him. Of the two female leads, bad girl Dorothy Revier easily outshines good girl Sue Carol; but the most striking female presence in the film is Carmelita Geraghty – a leading lady in silent films remembered today for Hitchcock’s debut feature ‘The Pleasure Garden’ (1925) – but here demoted to the uncredited but eye-catching role of the villain’s slinky secretary.

And then there’s Karloff as his henchman “Terry”. Immaculately turned out in what Karloff himself later said was “my best suit”, his unique appearance and diction, allied to an expressed dislike of women, suggests that he bats for the other side. It further attests to Hotchkiss’s uselessness as a reporter that immediately after a murder he runs slap into BORIS KARLOFF – for chrissakes! – yet all he can recall of his appearance was that he wore a hat and a dark coat. @Richard Chatten

The Big Chance (1957) TPTV

Dir: Peter Graham Scott | Cast: Adrienne Corri, William Russell, Ian Colin, Penelope Bartley | UK Drama 59′

Yet another long-forgotten gem doing the rounds on Talking Pictures, the big chance – seized by both with both hands – those of director Peter Graham Scott and leading man William Russell (back then starting to make a name for himself as TVs Sir Lancelot).

Although billed second to femme fatale Adrienne Corri, Russell carries the film just like Joseph Cotton did in Andrew Stone’s The Steel Trap five years earlier, which seems to be its model; dreaming of escape to Honolulu, as Cotton had wanted to get away to Rio. Except here it gets even more complicated than Stone’s film when Corri enters the picture as a high maintenance dame in a fur coat.

Like Stone’s film vividly shot on location, the feature’s rough edges simply enhance the drama; and instead of Dimitri Tiomkin thundering away on the soundtrack we initially get Russell himself narrating the action (actually anticipating Stone’s Cry Terror the following year) and Eric Spear bringing out the cornet he later immortalised in his theme for ‘Coronation Street’.

Amazingly this all is all dealt with in under an hour during which you haven’t the foggiest idea how it’s all going to resolve itself; frequently thinking, as it grows more relentless, that it’s all going to have turned out to be a dream. Or a nightmare. @Richard Chatten

NOW ON TALKING PICTURES TV

The Human Factor (2021)

Dir.: Dror Moreh; Documentary with Dennis Ross, James Baker, Aaron David Miller; USA 2019, 106 min.

Israeli documentarian Dror Moreh (The Gatekeepers) takes a look behind the scenes of the US-led peace mediations between Israel and Palestine, revealing failure on an epic scale, starting under the administration of President Herbert W. Bush and his Secretary of State, James Baker.

The wake up call to pursue his documentary project coincided with the assassination of one of the main protagonists of the peace process, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was killed by an orthodox religious fanatic at a peace rally in Tel Aviv on 4th November 1995, also Moreh’s birthday.

When Bush senior came to power he inherited a new world order: the Cold War had ended in 1991, leaving the USA as the only world Super Power. But President and his Secretary of State still faced unsurmountable difficulties. Baker was known for “getting things done”. He succeeded in getting Israeli and Arab state leaders around the table – a first – but that is as far as it got.

The major part of this documentary is devoted to the efforts of the Clinton administration who felt they had a real chance of success. Mediator Dennis Ross (still affected emotionally by Rabin’s murder) and his chief assistant Aaron David Miller really felt they had the bit between their teeth during some positive years of negotiation but they couldn’t bring things to a satisfactory conclusions. There were two elections in 1992, as Baker stated, “the first one was won by the ‘right’ person, Yitzhak Rabin”.

November 1993 saw Bill Clinton beat George H. Bush to the presidency, which meant an exit for James Baker. Miller was of the opinion that peace could never be achieved between two sworn enemy states at war since 1948, and using the word “peace” would always doom the process to failure.

The preparation for a meeting between PLO leader Yasser Arafat and the US mediators was farcical, the Arafat team were filmed watching the US Soap ‘Golden Girls’ on TV. When Arafat and Rabin first got together on September 13th 1993, most of the meeting was taken up with ironing out the many pre-conditions set by the two men: Rabin agreed to shake Arafat’s hand (whilst keeping him away with his other hand), in exchange Arafat had to forgo his uniform and his gun. In the end he wore a Safari suit and promised not to kiss Rabin.

The body language between the two leaders spoke of their mutual distrust. But by 28th September 1995, when both men signed the “Oslo B Agreement” this had all changed. In a a speech at the reception, Rabin called “Arafat close to being Jewish, for excelling in Israel’s national sport of speech-making”. A month later Rabin was dead. His successor, Shimon Peres, lost the election to ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu (Likud) who was not interested in any long term settlement. In 1999, Ehud Barak’s Labour Party came to power. A general like Rabin, he withdrew Israeli troops from Lebanon and gave the Clinton administration new hope, but the Monica Lewinsky scandal weakened his credibility, and he only just avoided empeachment.

Barak stated openly that he was negotiating in the spirit of Rabin. At the Camp David Peace talks in 2000, he pushed for Arafat to sign over control of the largest Mosque in Jerusalem to Israel – which would have led to a Fatwa being placed on the Palestinian leader. Arafat later wrote to Clinton, calling him ‘a great man’, but Clinton’s response was that he “felt like a failure, because you made me one”. The American negotiators, many of them Jewish, believe in hindsight, that they acted more like lawyers for the US government, viewing the world “as they wanted it to be, not like it really was”. Failure continued to dog the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama who were both complete non-events when it came to a peace settlement. Donald Trump did no better, and actually poured oil on troubled waters particularly on the West Bank.

Moreh ends on a sober note, stating that the demonisation of the enemy has led to growing intolerance. According to Amos Gitai, Arab children associate Israelis with a gun culture, some of them never even seeing a Jew without a weapon. And both sides still claim the right to military intervention. The martyr death of Yitzhak Rabin seems, sadly, to be in vain. AS

IN REAL CINEMAS FROM FRIDAY 28 MAY 2021

The Cry Baby Killer (1958) Amazon

Dir: Justus Addiss | Cast: Jack Nicholson, Carolyn Mitchell, Brett Halsey , Lyn Cartwright | US Drama 70′

Jack Nicholson makes his screen debut in this economy-sized Le Jour se Lève’ for the Drive-Ins where he is second billed to veteran TV and ‘B’ movie tough guy Harry Lauter; here representing the law. Although Roger Corman is credited as Executive Producer, and has one line as a TV cameraman (after which all we see of him for the rest of the film is his right hand resting on the side of the camera), the film is a United Artists release rather than one of AIP’s quickies, with slightly bigger production values; a mixed blessing in the face of TV director Justus Addiss’s lethargic direction.

Corman regulars Leo Gordon (who co-wrote the script) and Bruno Ve Sota (who the same year directed The Brain Eaters) fill out the throng gathered to ogle; and Gordon generously gives Ve Sota one of the script’s best lines, “Teenagers, never had ’em when I was a kid!”

The basic situation dates back at least as far as Jean Gabin in Le Jour se Lève’ (1939), and was probably more immediately inspired by the siege at the end of Rebel Without a Cause. Nicholson doesn’t actually get that much screen time, as much of the action taking place back in the diner and in the forecourt. The script flits from character to character, including Gordon’s own wife Lynn Cartwright, who gives an attractive performance as waitress Julie, united with Ruth Swanson as Nicholson’s mother in her contempt for poison maiden Carolyn Mitchell who started all the trouble in the first place by ditching Nicholson for obnoxious alpha male bully Brett Halsey. (Swanson sums her up as “selfish, vulgar, cruel…rotten!!”)

The film’s unsung hero is Jordan Whitfield as Sam, the black dishwasher who keeps his head throughout the crisis. That we don’t see him get his due as Hero of the Hour at the film’s conclusion is one of several issues left unresolved (including the ultimate fates of both Nicholson and Halsey) when the end credits roll. @Richard Chatten

Sunflowers (2021) Exhibition on Screen

Dir: David Bickerstaff | Prod: Phil Grabsky | UK Do

Exhibition On Screen is a series of documentary portraits of painters and their iconic works. It goes behind the scenes at major galleries and museums offering insight from experts and curators and dramatised scenes that bring the artists to life.

David Bickerstaff and Phil Grabsky have already highlighted the letters and paintings of Van Gogh. This time the focus is on his famous paintings of sunflowers and how they inspired the artist to create a series of pictures that have become synonymous with the Dutch master and his tragic and extraordinary life. The image of the Sunflowers nowadays stands alongside the Mona Lisa as one of the best known and best loved images around the globe.

Van Gogh’s broad brush strokes and vibrant colour palette embody his passionate and intense nature in a prolific and struggling career that was partly funded by his brother Theo, whose letters to Vincent form part of an earlier film by the director duo (Van Gogh: A New Way of Seeing) and Van Gogh in Japan. Other films focusing on the Dutch master are the animated 2017 drama Loving Vincent with Helen McCrory, and Maurice Pialat’s drama Van Gogh

Here the focus is on the sunflowers that inspired five related paintings. These bold and honest flowers that embody beauty, strength and vulnerability somehow grew in significance. The weed-like crop native to the arid fields of France, Italy and Spain, became the subject of a work of art now worth millions of pounds. In the same way, the flowers connect with Van Gogh’s simple and soulful nature and his struggle to find meaning through his art that still resonates deeply with audiences today.

World authorities on Van Gogh’s work provide valuable insight amongst them Louis Van Tilborg from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and Chris Riopelle from the London’s National Gallery who take us behind the scenes to reveal the complexities surrounding the five famous depictions of the Arles Sunflowers from collections in London, Philadelphia, Tokyo, Munich and Amsterdam.

Meanwhile actor Jamie de Courcey (from A New Way of Seeing) again fleshes out the artist in dramatised sequences that attempt to show Van Gogh’s innermost thoughts about what the flowers really meant to him. MT

Sunflowers is released in cinemas across the UK from 8 June, including Curzon, Everyman, Odeon, Picturehouse, Showcase, Vue and independent cinemas. Find your nearest cinema at exhibitiononscreen.com

Vom Reiche der Sechs Punkte (1927) Mubi

Dir: Hugo Rütters | Doc, Silent 95′

A staple genre in Germany during the mid-twenties, and also popular abroad, were these upbeat documentaries known as ‘Kulturfilm’. Of these, Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit (‘Ways to Strength and Beauty‘, 1925) – which can be viewed on YouTube – gained postwar notoriety as the film debut of Leni Riefenstahl, and for being singled out by Siegfried Kracauer in his postwar book ‘From Caligari to Hitler’ for its declared aim to promote the “regeneration of the human race” while Kracauer castigated the ‘Kulturfilm’ as a whole for “their amazing indifference to human problems”.

The new broom that swept Germany after 1933 may indeed have had little concern for the physically vulnerable; but Vom Reiche der sechs Punkte attests to a concern in the days of the Weimar Republic to strengthen Germany by means other than mass murder.

A feature-length dramatised documentary covering the attempts by the medical profession in the Rhineland to equip the blind for lives as productive members of society, this engrossing film intersperses documentary sequences featuring genuine staff and patients along with scenes where actors portray young steel worker Hermann and his fiancée Luise who learn that that he’s going to lose his eyesight through not seeking medical treatment soon enough; and Luise’s discovery of the help available in a home for the blind. (The point that his eyesight might have been saved if he’d seen a doctor soon enough is underlined by the fact that the other patient in the ophthalmologist’s waiting room is a small boy whose eyesight is also impossible to save because his mother didn’t bring him in to get his eyes examined soon enough). Gradually Hermann regains his hope for the future, while Luise joins the home as an assistant.

The documentary portion of the film provides distressing evidence of the damage childhood infections and other afflictions can do to infants’ eyesight, before moving on to the treatment available, including a brief history of various aids to communication culminating in braille (the ‘six dots’ of the title), the manufacture of glass eyes, and outdoor excursions into the country for the kids. Most of the emphasis is on children, although we see Hermann in a class being taught basketmaking and a concert by blind musicians fronted by a blind pianist. A scene with a blind beggar serves as a reminder of the fate in store for so many disabled people between the wars, but strangely enough no mention is ever made of all the soldiers blinded in The Great War.

Purely by dint of having been shot during the 1920s, much of the film appears charmingly picturesque in the handsome tinted and toned print found in the Finnish Film Archive. It would be interesting to learn what a modern ophthalmologist would make of the standard of treatment depicted. @Richard Chatten

The Reunions (2020) Chinese cinema season

Dir.: Da Peng aka Dong Chengpeng; Documentary with Liu Lu, Wang Jixang, Da Pen; China 2020, 80 min.

Chinese writer/director Dong Chengpeng had great success with his comedy City of Rock. But The Reunions is a different beast altogether. Actually, it’s two films in one, conflating the 40-minute doc-drama A Reunion (2018), whose cinema premiere we witness, with a second part, A Final Reunion, exploring contradictions of modern China: the price of success, the chasm between big cities and the countryside and the loosening of traditional family ties. Its languid mood is full of resignation and regret.

The director’s first foray into arthouse territory was inspired on a trip back to his rural hometown of Tonghua, where the family New Year get together will celebrate his ailing grandmother, who has held to the family together. But she died during the shooting, leaving Chengpeng’s original script in tatters. So the real drama unfolding is not the death, but the problem of what to do with Uncle Wang Jixang, a man in his early sixties who has suffered brain damage leaving him with the mental age of a baby, his vocabulary reduced to mumbling the names of his relatives, but leaving out his own.

Structured a little bit like Michael Frayn’s play ‘Noises Off’, we see both sides of the enfolding drama: the docu-drama elements are set against the filmmaking itself, as crew and cast come together as Chengpeng’s intentions are put to the test.

Throughout the film a musical motif glorifies the Chinese Communist Party and its Chairman Mao. Wang had been a high ranking Security official before his illness, and helped many of his relatives to settle in the city, no mean feat. Among those is his thirty-something daughter Lili (Liu Lu), who sided with her mother and benefited from a financial settlement when the family was divided. Lili has a young child and is unable to look after her father, who needs constant care.

Reality and script collide in a pause during filmmaking when Lili asks one of the relatives why ‘she’ had stayed away for ten years from the family: instead of an answer, there is silence – with her real life counterpart looking on. All the feuding family can agree on is that the making of the film had motivated them to attend the gathering – which may well be the last.

Dong Chengpeng serves as his own DoP along with Wang Quinyl to capture the generalised feeling of sadness as well as the colourful New Year’s celebrations with the its impressive fireworks. The director is clearly moved by his own remorse: this long goodbye to the village where he grew up and the slow erosion of the family have finally taken their toll. @AS

CHINESE CINEMA SEASON continues in online screens the Rio, GENESIS, HOME (Manchester), Kinoculture, Sheffield Workstation, Chapter Cardiff, Reading Film Theatre.

Generation Utøya (2021) HotDocs 2021

Dir.: Aslaug Holm, Sigve Endresen; Documentary with Ina Rangones Libak, Kamzy Gunaratnam, Renate Tarnes, Line Hoem; Norway 2021, 104 min.

Commemorating that fateful day of 22th July 2011 when Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 young people on the island of Utøya just off Norway. Aslaug Holm and Sigve Endresen have created a passionate portrait of four women who survived to tell their tale, and they couldn’t be more different.

Kamzy Gunaratnam is the child of modest Sri Lankan’ emigrants at pains to keep their daughter away from politics after their own experiences in the homeland. Kamzy believed in that ‘old chestnut’: ‘It couldn’t happen here’. But it did. On that fateful summer day, Kamzy swam away from the shore in the midst of Breivik’s killing spree that went on for over an hour. Today she is the Deputy Mayor of Oslo, a position she has to fight for at every turn, the Labour Party fully aware that her background may not win her as many votes as a native candidate. But Kamzy is indomitable, she travels the country visiting schools to bring her message into classrooms.

Ina Rangones Libak was shot three times by Breivik – she recalls her experience with an almost clinical detachment: “First he shot my hands, and I thought -that’s not too bad, then he shot at my jaw and finally my chest. I knew I might die, my last thought, at least what I believed it to be, was a drop of water falling on a leaf”. Friends kept her warm, and stemmed the bleeding and after a long battle she recovered. From 2016 to 2018 Ina was Deputy leader of the AUF, before leading the organisation in the following two years. She still has treatment for PTSD, and receives permanent online abuse, particularly after the Justice Minister of the ruling ‘Progress’ Party, Sylvi Listhaug called the Labour Party to task for “putting the interests of radical Muslims before the safety of the Norwegian people”. Ina reminded the Minister that she and her Party had been the target of a terrorist attack.

We watch Line Hoem as she works with her therapist to help overcome the debilitating psychological after-effects of her ordeal. She also finds regular exercise – particularly running – is a helpful way of easing anxiety.

Renate Tarnes has coped with her ordeal in a community-based way, helping to restore the island of Utøya as a meeting place for people who shared the same beliefs as those who lost their lives there 10 years ago: they pick flowers, and put them onto the names of the sixty-nine who were actually shot down on the island, and whose names are engraved in a large ring structure.

The directors avoid sentimentality even though the emotional consequences are never glossed over. Generation Utøya is a testament to survival – not to victimhood – but to the enduring strength of those women who live on. AS

NOW AT HOTDOCS Toronto Canada

End of Sentence (2019)

Dir: Elfar Adalsteins | Cast: John Hawkes, Logan Lerman, Sarah Bolger, Olafur Darri Olafsson | US, Drama 97′

There’s a dicey moment in the opening scenes of this road movie when a grieving husband nearly drops his wife’s ashes on the way back from her funeral in small-town Alabama. This is one of the lighter moments in Michael Armbruster’s tragicomic script that takes the edge off a bitterly violent reunion between likeable father Frank (Johan Hawkes) and his bullying son Sean (Logan Lerman).

Anna’s dying wish was that her husband and their ex-con son would scatter her remains back home in Ireland near her favourite lake. The casket of ashes will become the MacGuffin providing some humorous plot twists in this father and son journey that starts in the Southern States and ends in County Wicklow, the American spiritual home.

We see Sean checking out of a correctional facility where he has served time for crimes unknown. Frank has arrived to meet him only to be rudely rebuffed by the miscast felon, a hardened brute who clearly hates his dad, again, for reasons unknown.

But Frank finally persuades him to go on the trip to Ireland in the hope of burying the hatchet, along with the casket. Once in Dublin there’s no peace for the grieving Frank, Sean giving him an impromptu battering before heading for the hotel bar. He soon takes up with Jewel (Bolger), a savvy call girl who also knows a thing or two about spark plugs, clearly she’s no dumb blonde, just a rather one-dimensional one.

Soon they’re snogging in the carpark, Sean promptly throwing up all over the hire car’s velour seats. It doesn’t take us long to realise that the only good guy on this ‘road to redemption’ is Frank. Sean – his polar opposite – is somehow miscast in a role which has no backstory to give ballast to his fall from grace. Jewel will turn out to be a hollow hooker, minus the heart of gold.

We know exactly what will happen in End of Sentence, John Hawkes making it all watchable with his subtle take on grief. Upbeat for the most part, and lushly photographed in Southern Ireland, the sentimental final scene and earnest score is what you’d expect for a film pitched at an American audience where it premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. MT

BLUE FINCH FILMS on UK digital download | 10 May 2021

The Eternal Breasts (1955)

Dir: Kinuyo Tanaka | Cast: Yumeji Tsukioka, Ryoji Hayama, Junkichi Orimoto | Drama Japan, 104′

A romantic biopic reminiscent of Magnificent Obsession based on the short life of the Japanese poet Fumiko Nakajō (1922-1954) whose anthology of poems Chibusa sōshitsu (The Removal of Breasts), had been published in July 1954, the month before her death from breast cancer aged 31. The following year a young newspaper journalist, Akira Wakatsuki, who had covered her failing health and visited her in hospital created a stir with a memoir entitled The Eternal Breasts frankly describing her final months and the sexually charged relationship that had developed between them. It became a bestseller and this is the film version.

The interest on the part of one of Japan’s leading film actresses, Kinuyo Tanaka, in directing the film ensured a plush production by Nikkatsu to render the grim subject matter bearable, embellished with rich and atmospheric photography by Kumenobu Fujioka (including attractive exterior scenes shot in Hokkaidō) and an expressive score by Takanobu Saitô.

The plot rather resembles Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012), except that while the mind of Emmanuelle Riva as Anne disintegrates while she at first looks superficially intact (like many in the early stages of dementia), Yumeji Tsukioka as Fumiko retains her wits and paradoxically develops a vigorous external lustre (and lust, where Akira is concerned) that belies the cancer eating away at her from inside. In contrast to the prominence given to Fumiko as the film progresses, the poet with whom Fumiko has secretly been infatuated during the first half of the film dies remarkably suddenly offscreen and is swiftly buried, while Fumiko and the rest of the cast seem more shocked at the vandalism wreaked upon her by her double mastectomy than the sentence of death it anticipates. @Richard Chatten

The Doll (2021) Winner of Hot Docs Best International Short Documentary

Dir: Elahe Esmaili | Iran, Doc 32′

A teenage marriage is viewed through the eyes of friends and family in this weirdly tragic ‘smoke and mirrors’ snapshot of modern Tehran from first time filmmaker Elahe Esmaili.

The ‘bride to be’ in question is 14 year-old Asil, a child trapped in a naive middle-aged woman’s persona, from her bright red nails to her fuddy duddy fashion sense, she cuts an odd figure, simpering like the cat that got the cream. It’s an arranged marriage of sorts. It turns out that a man saw her portrait in her father’s photography studio and decided she could make a good match for his son, who doesn’t make much of an appearance although we understand he is much older and has just finished college. We are fed snippets of information. And as the story unfolds an ‘smoke and mirrors’ story emerges making this intriguing viewing.

Their engaged status means the couple are allowed to spend more time together, Asil’s intended courting his giggling sweetheart with fluffy toys and sweeties, much to her delight. No whiff of pheromones or onscreen chemistry here. In fact, there’s something distinctly unconvincing about this young romance that leads us to believe that Esmaili is not giving us the full facts. Asil’s grandmother suspects there’s more to the match than meets the eye, and we tend to agree – Although Asil is not letting on. She may just be out of her depth, or desperately trying to hide the truth. Family photos from the past see her as a cosseted little angel used to being the centre of attention. Is she caught in a trap of her own making, unable to see the unfolding reality of her situation. Or is the romance wishful thinking?.

The family set-up soon reveals cracks in the facade. Asil’s father Alireza is divorced from her mother – although it’s complicated – and there’s a big question mark about his new relationship. The 35-year old father is struggling to bring up two teenagers in a pokey flat, so money is clearly an issue, raising questions about Asil’s boyfriend’s financial status. Meanwhile, Asil’s intended gives lip service to her pretensions at getting an education. Although you get the impression she may follow the more traditional route once celebrations are over. And as Esmaili delves deeper through a series of telling insights provided by members of the family, radical views emerge along with anecdotal stories. The Doll is a cleverly-scripted tightly-packed look at modern Iran where the paternalistic fist still waits in the wings for those who think freedom is now within their grasp. MT

THE DOLL PREMIERES AT HOTDOCS

Winner of Hot Docs Best International Short Documentary

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963)

Dir: Stanley Kramer | Writers: William and Tania Rose | Cast: Spencer Tracy, Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Buddy Hackett, Ethel Merman, Mickey Rooney, Dick Shawn, Phil Silvers, Terry Thomas, Edie Adams | US Comedy drama 215′

Stanley Kramer continues to be damned with faint praise to this day, so his one attempt at crazy comedy was never going to get an easy ride from the critics. But that doesn’t stop it being very very very very funny!!

A group of motorists hear about a crook’s hidden stash of loot, and race against each other across country to get their paws on it.

When it first opened nearly sixty years ago it seemed the height of modern folly. More time having now elapsed since the silent era than when it was itself made now makes it’s shiny colour, sharp suits, classic cars (treated with a lack of respect that would make modern audiences weep) and lack of swearing render it charmingly dated; as does the presence of the likes of long-gone Hollywood legends like Spencer Tracy and Buster Keaton. (It even includes Zasu Pitts, forty years after she starred in ‘Greed’, which would have made an apt title for this). @Richard Chatten

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

Trezor (2018) Netflix

Dir.: Peter Bergendy; Cast: Zsolt Anger, Peter Scherer, Bence Tasnadi, Zoltan Bezeredi, Gabriella Hamori; Hungary 2018, 85 min.

Set against the last knockings of the Hungarian Uprising in Autumn 1956, Peter Bergendy spins a story of police corruption into a fast and furious action thriller with some whip-smart plot twists, finally abandoning grim ultra-realism in a saccharine showdown.

Safe-cracker Janos Beck (Anger), a locksmith by trade, is serving a twenty year sentence for murder after a theft of gold bullion went wrong in the mid 1940s. But the murder was actually committed by secret police officer Kalman Honti (Scherer) during the bungled safe robbery that resulted in the death of one of the perpetrators.

By the Autumn of 1956 Soviet tanks have finally put paid to the Hungarian insurgence, and Honti offers to cut Beck’s remaining time in prison in exchange for opening the same safe, but time the quarry is Honti’s personal file in the Secret Police archives. Beck falls for the plan, but there’s a surprise in store in the vaults: a corpse and man in a tuxedo: pianist Geza Ivanyi (Tasnadi), who overwhelms Beck and chains him to the heating pipe. It turns out, the piano player was celebrating the success of the Uprising a few days previously, and is unaware that Russian tanks have reversed the situation. The two of them get into a philosophical debate, with Beck, who has educated himself while in prison, defending the Stalinist regime. Meanwhile, Honti is tasked with finding a way into the vault by Interior Minister Ferenc Münnich (Bezeridi). Suddenly Beck’s life is once again in danger.

Norbert Kobli’s script adds gravitas with some weighty political debates between Beck and Ivanyi, the former defending his jailers, while the pianist takes a libertarian line. Filming in and around Budapest, DoP Andras Nagy captures the dour prison atmosphere in a cold-blooded totalitarian regime that has long abandoned the credo it started out with. @AS

TREZOR IS NOW ON NETFLIX.

Le Maman et le Putain | The Mother and the Whore (1973) Cannes Classics

Dir; Jean Eustache | Cast: Jean-Pierre Leaud, Bernadette Lefont, Francoise LeBrun | France, Drama, 215’

Three Parisians drink, smoke, copulate and talk, and talk, copulate, smoke and drink for three and a half hours. Much of the talk (in very basic language) is also about copulation, but, being an art movie from that brief, long ago idyll between the introduction of the Pill and before AIDS, no one actually seems to derive much pleasure from all this joyless rutting. For anyone whose first language is not French, keeping up with the subtitles is a daunting challenge throughout.

Jean-Pierre Léaud plays his usual self-centred, garrulous perpetual adolescent, and Bernadette Lafont disappointingly gets a fraction of the screen time of the other two corners of this particular triangle. Shot by Pierre Lhomme in what is presumably deliberately some of the ugliest black & white photography I’ve ever seen, it would be tempting to say that only in a movie could a prick like Alexandre find himself at the centre of a harem comprising two such formidable and willing females. But that, alas, is one aspect of the film that rings only too true. @RichardChatten

SCREENING IN CANNES CLASSICS | 2022

Inside the Mafia (1959)

Dir: Edward L Cahn | Cast: Cameron Mitchell, Robert Strauss, Grant Richards, James Brown | Elaine Edwards | US Thriller 72′

The title of this film suggests a “now it can be told” drama-documentary along the lines of The House on 92nd Street and I Was a Communist for the FBI, but for most of its running time it’s actually more a remake of Lewis Allen’s Suddenly (1954), which had depicted a hit man holding people hostage while lying in wait for his intended target.

The enormous success of the TV series ‘The Untouchables’ having recently sparked a wave of gangster films that nostalgically returned to the 1920s, this lively exploitation quickie from Allied Artists brought the on screen depiction of organised crime bang up to date by purporting to recreate the Apalachin criminal summit of 14 November 1957 at which about 100 underworld bosses were swooped on by the law (rather more than the budget of this film permitted), which had forced FBI director J.Edgar Hoover finally to acknowledge the presence in the United States of the Cosa Nostra and brought both public and official perception of contemporary organised crime bang up to date.

The amount of plot Orville H. Hampton’s script manages to cram into just 72 minutes – engrossingly juggling high-level mafia power politics with a ticking clock and the drama of hostage taking – recalls the classic pre-code crime films of 25 years earlier, as do the sharp suits (although the ponytail and slacks worn by Carol Nugent as the more pert of the two sisters taken hostage serve as a continuous visual reminder that it’s now the 1950s). There is a probably deliberately tongue-in-cheek quality to the way these Mafiosi couldn’t be more conspicuous if they tried. Cameron Mitchell, nattily attired in dark glasses and felt hat (like his equally immaculately dressed henchmen Robert Strauss he keeps the hat on indoors; maybe to signify that he’s on duty) visibly still cared about his acting in those days, and plays the hit man to the hilt. As his intended victim, Grant Richards brings real authority to his role as crime boss Johnny Lucero when he finally appears. Great fun. @Richard Chatten

https://youtu.be/q3TZKB8u69w

Montparnasse 19 (1958)

Dir: Jacques Becker | Cast: Gerard Philipe, Anouk Aimée | Lilli Palmer | Drama France, 108′

The Grim Reaper casts a long shadow over this film depicting the final declining months of Amedeo Modigliani – one of the giants of 20th Century art – who, in January 1920, died in Paris in poverty of tubercular meningitis aged just 35. The original director Max Ophuls had died suddenly at the age of 54, and both his replacement as director and the film’s star were dead within two years of its completion.

Had Ophuls lived we would now be contemplating a very different film – probably in colour and alive with his trademark dolly shots. Having already shown the seamier side of the Belle Époque in Casque d’Or, Jacques Becker wasn’t about to romanticise Parisian life after The Great War. In addition to making drastic changes to Henri Jeanson’s script – which led to rows – Becker (who had just made his two worst films, both in colour, which put him off making a third), instead of lifting the soul by concentrating on the art as posterity’s triumph over the life – as had Lust for Life – takes us on a bleak, monochromatic tour of the lower depths of Modigliani’s cramped and thwarted mortal existence; his mental and physical decline reflected in Paul Misraki’s sinister score.

The film already carries an on-screen disclaimer that it takes liberties with historical fact; and good as they both are as the two doomed lovers, it’s hard to believe the ethereal Gerard Philipe as the sort of brute who could possibly strike a woman, while Anouk Aimée – who has just celebrated her 89th birthday – looks more like a chic fifties left bank existentialist than a vulnerable little waif. A vibrant Lili Palmer, however, is spot-on as Modigliani’s bohemian ex-lover. Representing the art trade, Lino Ventura looks as if he’s barged in from the set of ‘Touchez Pas au Grisbi’; and the final shot of him greedily rifling through Modigliani’s artistic legacy is not for the faint-hearted @Richard Chatten

Lobster Soup (2020)

Dir: Pepe Andreu, Rafael Moles | Iceland, Doc 95′

A strong sense of community is what makes cafe society so successful in the small coastal town of Grindavík on the southern peninsula of Iceland. Before the Bryggjan Cafe came into existence life in the coastal village revolved around nothing but fishing. Then local net-making brothers Alli and Krilli casually decided to set up a bar in the downstairs premises of their business.

It all started with a coffee machine, the genial couple freely admitting they knew nothing about running a cafe – or even coffee, for that matter, back in the day. But gradually with tables and chairs, the place took shape as a cosy meeting place, locals bringing the odd picture or a pack of cards to make them feel at home. And the Bryggjan cafe was born.

Lobster soup was a speciality of the house and soon became the main attraction, offered one night a week, and eventually everyday, due to popular demand. Grindavik’s only cafe is now the place to meet and have a drink and put the world to rights, a welcome refuge from the brutal elements: biting winds and driving snow. The Bryggjan Cafe is also the shipping port’s cultural centre offering a venue for poetry readings and singalongs and giving the locals a chance to wile away long winter evenings: it helps that more or less all of them grew up nearby.

As Alli and Krilli shoot the breeze with the locals and tourists alike, what emerges is a potted history of the region showing how dramatically life has changed in this small corner of Iceland. The influx or tourists and the introduction of quotas is part of the reason why, but surprise eruptions from the nearby volcano adds an elements of danger, threatening their daily existence, along with the unwanted arrival of the US military. Despite all this, outsiders are drawn here by major attractions of the Blue Lagoon and the proximity of a nearby international airport. Iceland has become a wealthier nation as a whole and more integrated into the rest of Europe as part of the EEA.

But former fishermen Alli and Krilli have the future to think about now their net-making business is in decline so they need to take the establishment onto the next phase of its existence. The brothers are not getting any younger, and Alli’s wife would like to get back to her family in Rekyavik. An offer to sell forms the dramatic turning point of this engaging look at a thriving maritime community, vibrantly brought to life here by Spanish filmmakers Jose Andreu Ibarra & Rafa Molés. They act as their own DoPs to create a real sense of the hostile landscape and the bleakness of the great outdoors thats contrast with the warmth of the Icelandic people who have managed to combine the best of both worlds: a strong and traditional sense of community with a decent economy boosted by tourism. MT

Lobster Soup | San Seb premiere | Visions du Réel | Bergamo Film Meeting

Blue Box (2021) Hot Docs 2021

Dir.: Michal Weits; Documentary about Joseph Weits; Israel 2021, 83 min.

Israeli director/co-writer Michal Weits sheds light on a fragile episode Isreaeli history. Examining the Jewish National Fund’s Blue Boxes – part of a successful fundraising campaign to support the purchase of land in Palestine – in which her grandfather took an active part – Weits comes face to face with her own family history that unveils a painful and enlightening exploration of a nation’s past but also some unpleasant home truths.

There’s nothing more depressing than discovering skeletons in your own family cupboard. But this is exactly what happened when Weits delved deeper into the story of her mythological family figure: in this case her own great grandfather, Joseph Weits. Born in 1890 in the small Russian town of Boremal he emigrated to Palestine in 1908 where he joined the struggle for independence helping to lay the foundations for the new State of Israel. He is known as the “Father of Trees”, planting over 80 million trees in the Jewish state.

But further examination of his extensive diary, reveals Weits senior was also the “Father of Transfer”: helping Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to ‘legally’ annexe villages and towns of Arabs, who had to flee after the “War of Independence” in 1948. The majority of the Weits family reacted with an outright denial of the facts.

When Joseph Weits arrived in Palestine, Arabs outnumbered Jews. In 1933, nearly a million Arabs lived with several thousand Jews in what was then the British Protectorate of Palestine. Both sides were unhappy with the status quo, and Jews started to pour into the country, after the rise of fascism in Europe. Zionists, encouraged by Theodor Herzl, tried to organise a steady Jewish immigration. In 1937, the British had plans to partition Palestine in two states. Joseph Weits was aware that the number of Jews living in Palestine would determine the nation’s future size. So he bought villages and land from ‘Effendis’, who lived outside Palestine, and sold the land of their small-holders. He also encouraged to buy directly from Palestine farmers, paying with the money of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), which had been founded in 1901. In his diary Weits writes: “The man was selling his homeland, and the Jews are buying it up. And: “It’s Them or Us. We want to be clear: There is no room for both of us. If the Arabs remain, the country will be crammed and impoverished. The only solution is Israel with no Arabs. There is no room for compromise. Transfer them all!”.

At the beginning of WWII, two of Joseph’s son, Raaman and Sharon, joined the British Army, whilst the third, Yehiam, was a member of the Zionist Underground, and later killed. After the end of WWII, and the discovery of the Concentrations Camps, Joseph writes: “Building the state of Israel will be our revenge”. After the War of Independence in 1948, nearly a million Arabs fled into neighbouring countries, only a few thousand staying put. Meanwhile, the Jewish population had risen to replace what had been an Arab majority.

In Haifa, only a few thousand were left of the once burgeoning Arab population. Joseph was leading the ‘transfer’ of properties, even though “Jaffa’s silence frightens me”. By annexing land and buildings, creating a “Transfer post factum”, the Arab exodus was made permanent. The members of the Transfer Committee, Joseph was one of them, had four guiding principles: 1. Preventing the Arabs from returning to their land; 2. Assisting the Arabs to settle in other countries; 3. Settling Jews in several villages and cities; 4. Destroying as many Arab villages as possible through military action”;

Old newsreels show the bulldozers doing their job. The UN resolution 194 stated clearly that all Arab refugees could return to their properties. Weits and his committee avoided the consequences by selling 250, 000 acres of land from the absentee landlords to the JNF, since the latter was not beholden to International Law. At this point, the filmmaker is confronted by a family member: “I have no idea how this this Transfer business worked. I am not comfortable with you doing this. You would have done the same had you been around in 1948/9. I want no part of this film”.

But Joseph Weits was less in denial than parts of his family: “There are 52 refuge camps, surrounding us. The Prime Minister thinks, the problem will go away with time. But they are surrounding us with hate, they will not desist in years to come. They will be a barrier to peace making. The illusion of occupation is convenient, but the intoxication of our victory has muddled our long term thinking. We have the land, but we did not pay the Arab refugees for their land. If we paid with the blood of our soldiers to get peace, why do we not pay with money now”. In 1966, 2.4 million Jews lived in what was Palestine, in contrast with just half a million Arabs. Joseph Weits left the JNF after 35 years. He was isolated, not even asking for advice anymore. “The West Bank annexation is a burden, now and for the coming generations.”

His great grand-daughter, the filmmaker, and her family have to live with the demystified Joseph Weits: yes, he planted 80 million trees, but he was also the “Father of Transfer”. But his fate is the fate of the nation he served, where good and evil live side by side for the coming generations to solve. With an insightful array of historical documentary material, this is a honest account of a family who grew up believing in the mythos of greatness. AS

SCREENING DURING HOTDOCS FILM FESTIVAL | CANADA 2021

Antoine et Antoinette (1947) Prime Video

Dir: Jacque Becker | Cast: Roger Pigaut, Claire Maffei, Noel Roquevert, Gaston Modot | France, Drama 78′

This charming slice of Parisian street life throbs with vibrant energy in the dependable hands of its gifted director Jacques Becker, whose fourth feature it was. It contains relatively few of the sweeping dollies and tracks that characterised his previous film Falbalas, instead bombarding the viewer with a collage of dramatic compositions (including some of the biggest closeups seen before Sergio Leone got behind a camera) cut together at breakneck speed by his regular editor Marguerite Renoir. All the acting, down to the smallest part, is superb.

The sheer gusto with which this film is put together helps gloss over the bleak reality of its eponymous young lovers’ existence in their tiny attic flat; the lottery ticket that occupies the final leg of the film being something of a red herring. Like the sudden windfall that rescues Emil Jannings from destitution at the conclusion of Der Letzte Mann, the release from a world of petty privations and even more petty employers their lottery win represents is poignant for the fact that it will in actuality never become reality for most young people like Antoine & Antoinette.

The incredibly phoney looking back-projection behind the two young lovers as they head off to the horizon on his new motorcycle at the film’s conclusion may well be intended to highlight the fact that real life, alas, rarely provides endings like this. @Richard Chatten

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

Fair Wind to Java (1953) Prime Video

Dir: Joseph Kane | Wri: Richard Tregaskis | Cast: Fred MacMurray, Vera Ralston, Robert Douglas, Victor McLaglen | US Action Drama, 92′

Barnstorming South Seas hokum in chewy Trucolor of the type Republic Pictures was churning out by the yard at this time, full of plot elements that had earlier done service in their westerns & serials, such as diamonds being sought by a plummy-voiced villain in a carnival mask, endless fisticuffs, and of course Vera Hruba Ralston, wife of Republic’s president, Herbert J. Yates.

On this occasion she pays Kim Kim, a dusky Eurasian exotic dancer with extraordinary eyebrows, and her mere presence causes a stir with the menfolk who all vy for her attention aboard McMurray’s rigger the ‘Gerrymander’. He is later flogged to reveal the location of the diamonds. This was well after his suave double-crossing insurance exec role as Walter Neff in Double Indemnity.

The phoniness of the studio scenes on board the deck of the ‘Gerrymander’ is complimented by the usual overacting by Republic stalwarts Victor McLaglen and Paul Fix, in marked contrast to superb model work by the Lydecker brothers depicting the ‘Gerrymander’ battling pirates at sea and climaxing in the 1883 eruption of the volcano Krakatau and the resulting tidal wave. @Richard Chatten

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

Wall of Shadows (2021)

Dir/Wri: Eliza Kubarska | Polish Doc 98′

As Buddhists, Sherpas are very respectful of spirituality of their mountain habitat as we discovered in Jennifer Preedom’s award-winning documentary Sherpa. Their habitat of the Himalayas has long been exploited by an increasing number of tourists who they depend on for their livelihood, offering expert knowledge of the unique mountain range in return. But recently things have got out of hand with tourists expecting an increasingly luxurious experience that has led to overcrowding of the region that often results in tailbacks and risk-taking.

The focus here in Wall of Shadows, that took a prize at the Bergen International Film Festival in Norway, is once again the intrinsic spirituality of this visually stunning but highly treacherous part of the world, where the weather can change in minutes leaving climbers stranded and in danger.

The film takes place in Nepal’s Kumbhakarna Mountain, the 32nd highest in the World and an outlier to Kangchenjunga, the 3rd highest peak with some highly challenging weather conditions and steep ascents. This is home to a Sherpa family who agree, against their better judgement, to take some experienced climbers who push the guides to uncomfortable emotional limits in order to reach the top. The Sherpas continually voice their concerns, but equally realise they won’t get paid if they don’t complete their contract, forcing them between a rock and a hard place. Meanwhile the Sherpas are clearly uneasy but continue to pray to the mountain spirits.

Their clients are three leading alpinists, the outstanding Polish climber Marcin Tomaszewski and two-time winners of the climbing Oscar (Golden Ice Axe) Dmitry Golovchenko and Sergei Nilov from Russia, take part in the expedition on the eastern face of the mountain which, at 7,400 metres, is one of the most difficult challenges in alpinism today. This is the first time they’ve worked as a team and tensions start to emerge surrounding their different strengths and weaknesses.

DoPs Piotr Rosolowski (who also co-wrote the script) and Keith Partridge conjure up a real sense of awe in the majesty of the locations making this feel like a spiritual journey while at the same time a highly dangerous one. Barbara Toennieshen creates a sense of slowly building tension with her clever editing which never cuts corners in allowing the unique serenity of the place to beguile the audience. To this day, Kumbhakarna’s East Face (7710m) remains unconquered. MT

The film is the third collaboration between director Eliza Kubarska and producer Monika Braid and is a Polish-German-Swiss co-production. MT

IN CINEMAS in the UK and Ireland on Friday 22nd April 2022.

https://youtu.be/Sz5slumAjL0

What If? Ehud Barak on War and Peace (2020) Moscow Film Festival 2021

Dir.: Ran Tal; Documentary with Elud Barak; Israel 2020, 85 min.

In his immersive new documentary Israeli director/writer Ran Tal (The Museum), interviews former Prime Minister Ehud Barak. The upshot? That war has dominated Israel’s history – from before its foundation of to the ongoing stalemate.

Since the State of Israel came into being, the Premier also served as Defence Minister. This changed in 1967, after the war when battlefield hero General Moshe Dayan became Minister of Defence. Since then, five Prime Ministers have been high ranking military men: Yitzak Rabin, Ygal Allon, Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu. Some people may include Menachem Begin, who was a leading proponent of the Zionist Underground, responsible for the death of over 80 British soldiers in the bombing of the Hotel King David in 1946. Barak was only PM for two years at the turn of the 20th century when he met Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat at the failed Camp David meeting in 2000, where President Clinton tried in vain to broker an agreement between the two leaders. It turned out to be the last time a peace agreement seemed possible.

Ehud Barak (*1942) grew up in Mishmar Ha Sharon, a small Kibbutz. He remembers nights round the camp fire when the young members of the modest Kibbutz – a family room was a just 11 square meters, and there was no loo – they sang patriotic songs that told how “it was worthwhile to die for one’s country”. 300 meters down the road was the Arab village, the inhabitants “looking like our biblical forefather”. There was no tension between the two communities, but one day, the Arabs disappeared. The Kibbutz suddenly grew, taking, over the land which had belonged to the Arabs. When Barak became Chief of Staff of the Israeli Army he once asked the Chief of Military Intelligence if they should assassinate Yasser Arafat. The answer was negative, since Arafat was deemed to be a political leader.

A few years later, the situation had changed. Barak saw active service in the 1967 war, which, so he believes, was won, “because we attacked first”. In the Yom Kippur War of 1973 (Barak flew in from California, where he was studying), the roles were reversed: Barak was part of heavy fighting in the Sinai peninsula.

After the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, Barak became leader of an Elite Corps, called the ‘Wrath of God’ who targeted terrorist all over Europe, killing, among others, Abbas al-Musawi, the Secretary General of the Hezbollah which he had co-founded. Asked about the civilian victims of these killings, Barak is clear: “When you operate, not to kill civilians, you won’t do anything.” Referring to the assassination of Sadam Hussain, he claims history could have been entirely different: “Over a hundred thousand lives lost in the Iraq war, might have been saved”.

Strangely enough, the Rabin assassination “is not comparable with the aforementioned terror acts”. Sometimes Barak sounds reasonable: defending the reason to withdraw Israeli troops from Lebanon, or offering to divide Jerusalem in four sections, an offer Arafat refused at Camp David. But then he slips back into the warrior position: “We can not offer the Palestinians an enlightened occupation, that would be an oxymoron”. In 2001 Elud Barak lost the General Election to Ariel Sharon – an ex-general, responsible for the massacre at Sabre and Shatila.

No doubt Palestinian leaders are thinking on the same lines as the Israeli commanders – but how can you sit down and negotiate a peace treaty with somebody you would have assassinated, had you had the chance. This is the real oxymoron. Ran Tal’s feature is sad proof the military conflict between Israel and the Palestinians will go on for a long time: the language of war speaks loudest. AS

SCREEEING DURING THE MOSCOW FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Picture Mommy Dead (1966)

Dir: Bert I Gordon | Wri: Robert Sherman | Cast: Don Ameche, Martha Hyer, Susan Gordon, Zsa Zsa Gabor | Fantasy horror, 82

“The Past is Like a Tiger, and No Matter How You Pet It or Pretend That It’s Tame One Day It Will Turn…”

If I’d missed the start and hadn’t caught the director credit, I would have taken this for the work of William Castle rather than sci-fi and horror specialist Bert I. Gordon briefly venturing into Psycho/Baby Jane territory. The production values are in fact rather more impressive than one would have got with Castle. Greystone, the Beverly Hills mansion in which most of the action takes place is well served by Ellsworth Fredericks’s elegant photography, which gives the film the feeling of an Italian ‘giallo’ (complete with spooky close-ups of dolls, portraits and various childhood relics) produced as a glossy sixties TV movie. Unfortunately, shorn of Castle’s gimmicks Gordon’s direction manages to be even more pedestrian than Castle’s would have been; and fails utterly to energise a talky script in which things are constantly spelled out through dialogue rather than conveyed visually.

In an interesting cast of has-beens, Ameche is wasted as the heroine’s weak and corrupt father; but as the ghastly stepmom – who having already maxed out hubby’s nest egg is now making absolutely no secret of her desire to have her stepdaughter committed so she can gets her mitts on HER inheritance too – Martha Hyer rises to the challenge of convincingly playing a wife even more high maintenance than her predecessor Zsa Zsa Gabor must doubtless have been. (If she hadn’t been busy at the time making ‘Green Acres’, it would have been interesting to see Zsa Zsa and her sister Eva in the role played by the not dissimilar Hyer squaring up against each other in the same movie.) Signe Hasso pops up ominously in a nun’s habit, Wendell Corey is obviously drunk (he died from cirrhosis of the liver two years later) but enjoyably intimidating as the family lawyer; as is Maxwell Reed, who does justice to some wonderfully fruity dialogue as a male Miss Danvers. Anna Lee’s role as a family friend promises to be nicely bitchy too, but she unfortunately disappears almost as soon as she appears. @Richard Chatten

Man of God (2021) Moscow Film Festival 2021

Dir: Yelena Popovic | biopic Drama, 110’ |

Venerated Eastern Orthodox Saint Nektarios of Aegina (1846-1920) certainly had a hard time of it, according to Man of God, screening in Moscow Film Festival’s competition line-up, chronicling the life of this beloved and highly revered religious figure.

Exiled, slandered and convicted without trial, Saint Nektarios gets a worthy but rather lifeless, sepia-tinted drama dedicated to his memory with clunky dialogue more suited Silicon Valley than a 19th-set religious biopic following the trials and tribulations of the ‘Metropolitan’ who was canonised in 1961. Overall Man of God is well-researched and informative in raising the international profile of a lesser known religious figure. It’s a film that will have great appeal to those of an Eastern Orthodox persuasion.

In her first feature as solo director, and producer Yelena Popovic (who scripted L A Superheroes) adopts a straightforward narrative quickly establishing our hero as a pious and quietly-spoken miracle worker serving his community with abject humbleness – in early scenes we see him offering his shoes to a beggar – and Aris Servetalis (Apples) plays him with conviction although never quite achieving the saintly aura of Enrique Irazoqui in Pasolini’s Gospel According to Matthew.

Nektarios is soon ordained as the Metropolitan of Pentapolis (named after the five sacred places in Italy). But his acts of Godliness and virtue and his popularity amongst his flock, but incur the envy of the Egyptian clergy who fear he might become the next Patriarch of Egypt. He is discredited and quietly ushered out of Egypt, one high official still believing in him (“you seem to be the real deal”) securing him a posting in Mount Athos, Northern Greece.

Despite the magnificent scenery, DoP Panagiotis Vasilakis keeps his colour palette muted in religious respect as Nektarios who continues to impress the locals at the same time honing his literary skills which see him promoted to the Rizarios Ecclesiastical School where he becomes a Christian mentor and prolific author. Retiring to Aegina on the grounds of ill health (he still manages to rebuild a monastery with his own hands) he somehow falls foul of the system once again, accused of immorality, and goes to join his maker. The unlikely casting of Mickey Rourke (as a leper) seems appropriate for this tale of saintly redemption and purity, and he becomes the fortunate recipient of Nekarios’ posthumous final miracle at Aretaieion Hospital, in Greece. MT

MOSCOW FILM FESTIVAL | COMPETITION 2021

Four Seasons in a Day (2021) Hot Docs 2021 Winner

Dir: Annabel Verbeke | Doc, 75′

Cross-border conflict is gently played down in this light-hearted look at the Carlingford ferry that brings Catholic and Protestant together in holiday mode as they contemplate another social divide – that of Brexit.

Four Seasons in a Day leaves the Emerald Isle’s legendary ‘troubles’ behind; – at least for a while – on the sea border crossing that divides the UK’s majestic Mourne Mountains from the Cooley Peninsula in the Irish Republic, only 15 minutes away. Families are at leisure reflecting wistfully on the past and future, post Brexit – but religious and nationalistic views are there to stay.

This impressive feature debut is the second foray into geosocial dynamics for Belgium filmmaker Annabel Verbeke – who first looked at the societal legacy of the wartime city of Ypres in We Will Not Forget (2018). Here the tone is as mellow as the gentle landscape but storms clouds overhead warn how quickly the mood can change. A dip in the limpid water warns of an underlying chill: “”the fish don’t change their views” say one bright spark about the border between the two countries, which lies somewhere under the murky depths.

Verbeke lets the camera roll over wide open seascapes and onto the Carlingford ferry to eavesdrop on tourists and locals from both sides of the border to find out what the new boundary means to them. What emerges is a no-holds-barred expose of low-key racism enforced by parents who lived through the ‘troubles’ and are keen to pass their staunch genes onto their family.

A tattooed “Leave”-voting Protestant dad makes his kids aware that although he’s glad the new generation can have Catholic friends, it wasn’t possible back in the day. Meanwhile an Irish mother, sitting down to a mammoth jigsaw puzzle with her son, states categorically – on the verge of tears – that she’ll always be Irish. There are no shades of opinion here.

And while everybody ‘welcomes’ multiculturalism there’s a sneaky suspicion they’re leery of it behind the scenes as we eavesdrop on discussions through windscreens of cars driving off the ferry, in the comfort of the mobile holiday homes, the windy golf course, or even the sandy beach.

Some are celebrating a major birthday, or mourning a loved one. All are delighted to spot the friendly dolphin cavorting in the waves, oblivious of cross-border changes. Kids are there to provide unscheduled moments of humour, and candid remarks on human relations. A discussion about their future romantic plans gets down to basics: “you’ll always need someone to help with the shopping and the bills”. Meanwhile a kindly funeral director takes a sanguine view of both sides of the equation: “make the most of each day, it may be your last”

This reflective and refreshing non-political look at Brexit’s border impact won the EMERGING INTERNATIONAL FILMMAKER AWARD at Toronto’s HOTDOCS 2021. MT

Gli Indifferenti | The Time of Indifference (2020) Moscow Film Festival 2021

Dir.: Leonardo Guerra Seragnoli; Cast: Valeria Bruni Tedesci, Eduardo Pece, Vinzenzo Crea, Beatrice Granno, Awa Ly, Giovanna Mezzogiorno; Italy 2020, 82 min.

The Time of Indifference is a modern-day take on Alberto Moravia’s first novel Gli Indifferenti written in 1929 (when the author was twenty-one) about a Roman family’s changing fortunes during Fascism.

Remakes are a tough call – and this one is a pale rider in comparison with Franceso Maselli’s 1964 original, adapted for the screen by award-winning Suso Cecchi D’Amico who worked with virtually all the Neo-Realist post war directors on Bicycle Thieves, The Leopard and Miracle In Milan. Screen legends Claudia Cardinale, Rod Steiger and Shelley Winters are also a tough act to follow.

Leonardo Guerra Seragnoli’s stylish version is lavishly-mounted and entertaining up to a point, but you can’t replace a strong script with visual and theatrical flourishes, and the director’s attempts to integrate a social media/gaming angle feels flaccid. Moravia’s story has lashings of dramatic potential, a salacious page turner oozing sexual politics, corruption, and intergenerational conflict in a down-spiralling economy – it’s all there for the taking, quite literally, in a “fiddle while Rome burns’ kind of way”. All very much in keeping with the unsettling climate today.

That said The Time of Indifference is not without its merits, and one is Valeria Bruni Tedeschi. Always a pleasure to watch, she makes for a supremely sensitive Maria Grazia, a widowed countess who has fallen from grace, unable to escape the pretences of her former glory or its material excesses. Edoardo Pesce is utterly convincing as her conniving lover, a suave conman who has his eyes set on her property, and her daughter, Carla (Granno), while her ineffectual son Michele (Crea) is unable to take the family forward, despite his better judgement.

Maria Grazia is in love with Leo, but her sexual power is waning, despite her graceful attributes. And we feel for her. But like most men of her own age, Leo is obsessed with youth, and fancies her 18-year-old daughter Carla (Granno). Meanwhile Michele (Crea) affair with his mother’s best friend (and Leo’s former lover) Lisa (Mezzogiorno), also doesn’t work, largely down to miscasting.

What is missing in this version is the elegant decadence of Moravia’s novel. While looking down on Mussolini as an upstart, the Italian upper classes and intelligentsia had made peace with his regime. This status quo gave no quarter to the tragedy unfolding, they just kept going by selling their properties and status no a new middle-class, of which Leo is a symbolic member.

In the end Leo’s greed and desperation shows his true colours, and is pivotal to the family’s salvation – of sorts – due to an act of female empowerment that buys the family time. This all plays out off-scene, resulting in a rather vapid denouement in the scheme of things. Enjoyable Saturday night fare. MT

SCREENING DURING MOSCOW INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Fängelse | Prison (1949)

Dir/Wri: Ingmar Bergman | Cast: Doris Svedlund, Birger Malmsten, Eva Henning, Hasse Ekman | Sweden Drama 79′

Fängelse, like För att inte tala om alla dessa kvinnor fifteen years later, is a fascinating film that throbs with energy and enthusiasm but came a cropper when it opened and was later disowned by Bergman; although it’s by no means a car wreck of the order of the later catastrophe, and was actually acclaimed as “a masterpiece” by Variety’s reviewer on its first appearance. But even on the tiny budget Bergman had to play with it was a commercial flop, and he made far more coherent use of the non-linear narrative techniques flamboyantly used in his attempt to dazzle us with here in his next superficially less ambitious film, Törst.

Fängelse remains an experience to be savoured, superbly shot by Göran Strindberg and punctuated by virtuoso sequences such as the silent movie and the heroine’s dream. The extraordinary face of Doris Svedlund – on display in a whole range of angles and lighting styles – also lingers in the memory. And all packed into less than 80 minutes! @Richard Chatten

Volker Schlöndorff Retro | Bergamo Film Meeting 2021

Bergamo is back with another film festival to mark the city’s triumphant return after the setbacks of the past year.

This 73rd edition – which runs from Friday 24 April – 2 May – celebrates a major retrospective dedicated to director, screenwriter, producer and actor Volker Schlöndorff, one of the most significant talents of post-war German cinema. Bergamo is also set to pay homage to Polish director, writer and artist Jerzy Skolimowsky and one of the key figures of Hungarian cinema, director and writer Márta Mészáros.

But first let’s look at Volker Schlöndorff (*1939) whose career to date spans over 50 years with 23 feature films, nine segments for feature films, seven TV movies, three documentary and seven TV documentaries, an impressive rollcall. If there is one common factor in his feature film output, it’s his penchant for literary adaptations, starting with his 1966 debut, the Musil version of The Young Törless.

Of all the directors of the “New German” cinema – Wenders, Fassbinder and Reitz – Schlöndorff has relied most heavily on others’ work for his inspiration and has courted the critics, even more so than the audience. It is no co-incidence that Schlöndorff took on the leadership of the old Babelsberg Studios after re-unification in 1990, serving as CEO between 1992-1997.

Training in Paris at the prestigious IDHEC, Schlöndorff worked as an assistant to Louis Malle, Jean-Pierre Melville and Alain Resnais. His sophomore feature Törless, shot in black-and-white, bears the influence of the French masters: the story of a boarding school cabal with home-erotic undertones is told with great sensibility and relies very much on the unity between aesthetic and content. Törless is arguably the most mature feature of the fledging New German Cinema.

Michael Kohlhaas – Rebel (1969), based on the novel by German classicist Heinrich von Kleist, is a melancholic study of a failed revolutionary in the 18th century. But Schlöndorff’s major breakthrough onto the international stage was with Heinrich Böll’s adaption of The Lost Honour of Katherina Blum (1975) a film that showcased corruption in the West German establishment, Baader-Meinhoff’s activities undermining the freedom of expression and re-establishing the old Nazi power structure.

Two years late Schlöndorff directed three segments of Germany in the Autumn, a critical portrait of eight directors, Kluge and Fassbinder amongst them, seen against the background of ongoing West German reconstruction. His next feature, The Tin Drum (1979) was to place him firmly in the spotlight, winning the Palme d’Or Golden at Cannes (alongside Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now). German cinema was now a force to be reckoned with. Based on the novel by Günther Grass, The Tim Drum pictures the advent of fascism in Germany from the POV of a little boy reluctant to grow up, self-denial jostling with opportunistic desire.

Success in Europe paved the way for heavyweight productions in the US: Arthur Miller’s Dustin Hoffman starrer Death of a Salesman (1985) and Marcel Proust’s Swann in Love (1984) with Jeremy Irons and Alain Delon. Competent yet indistinctive in their style, these dramas could have been made by any talented director. In 1990 The Handmaid’s Tale followed, based on the novel of Margaret Atwood (that would later spawn the ongoing TV series).

In the mid nineties Schlöndorff was back on form again with The Ogre (1996), based on the novel by Michel Tournier. The film plays out like a horror story, a naive German (John Malkovich) inadvertently taking part in the Holocaust. In 2000 The Legend of Rita, another biographical piece, this time about Inge Viett, a member of the RAF underground, who fled to East Germany, where she settled with the help of the STASI. Based on the play by Cyril Gely, Diplomacy (2014) saw Schlöndorff returning again to German history, a combative wartime episode outlining Hitler’s order to burn Paris to the ground . Swedish diplomat Raoul Nording finally succeeds in convincing the German commander, General Dietrich von Choltiz, to defy the Nazi leader.

Overall, Schlöndorff is more comfortable working with these historical dramas plundering German history, than with blockbuster adaptations of successful novels. But he is still an important part of the German cinema of the early 1960s, whose proponents finally laid to rest the unholy UFA tradition. AS

Retrospective | BERGAMO FILM MEETING 2021

Full Moon | Pun Mjesec (2019) Bergamo Film Meeting

Dir.: Nermin Hamzagic; Cast: Alban Ukaj, Ermin Sijamija, Muhamed Hadzovic, Jasua Diklic, Boris Lehr; Bosnia and Herzegovina 2019, 85 min.

Tales of ‘bent coppers’ are all the rage at the moment. This first feature for Bosnian director/co-writer Nermin Hamzagic is a tense, psychologically brutal account of everyday life in Bosnia Herzegovina where bribery rules, the law protecting the country’s new elite. What makes it even more scathing, is that Full Moon is set in a police station, with the would-be-hero a highly ranked officer.

Rather than making this a moralist roll call portraying the region’s turbulent past and present what develeps is a rich character study centring on Hamza, his homeland and his life.

It all starts with Hamza (Kosovar-born Ukaj) having to be on duty, even though his wife is experiencing a difficult birth in the nearby hospital. A government delegation is in town and needs police protection. The precinct is in chaos and Hamza will spend the rest of the night dealing with the upshot of the lawless corrupt set-up.

Full Moon certainly feels very convincing, Hamzagić and his co-writer Emina Omerović sticking to a traditional narrative structure, the storyline veering into surprising places: Hamza is hardly whiter than white – it turns out he too has had his fingers in the till (which is how he paid for his wife’s IVF). And his decent behaviour doesn’t necessarily reap rewards. Ukaj leads with a gutsy central performance and each character resonates on its own merits. And although Full Moon occasionally falls into the trap of over-the-top sentimentality, there is plenty of textural nuance to break it all up: One of the detainees is a real hard-nosed criminal.

An element that doesn’t quite ring true is the appearance of a young boy in the precinct in the middle of the night, and only Hamza seems able to see him. He could be a metaphor for Hamza’s higher self, a sort of guardian angel, but we are left bemused.

Visually more Nordic noir in style, than grim post Soviet squalor. Full Moon is debut full of rage, filmed with finesse and compassion. AS

BERGAMO FILM MEETING 2021

Hitler: The Last Ten Days (1973)

Dir: Ennio De Concini | Cast: Alex Guinness, Simon Ward, Adolfo Celi, Diane Cilento, Joss Ackland, Sheila Gish | Gabriele Ferzetti, Eric Porter | Drama, 106′

Even before Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Der Untergang (2004) became in most people’s minds the definitive big screen treatment of the last days of Hitler, this 1973 version was already overshadowed by G.W.Pabst’s Der Letzte Akt (1955) with Albin Skoda as Hitler. That said, it’s still a reasonably accurate breeze through the known facts of Hitler’s final days enlivened throughout by the succession of familiar British faces ranging from Diane Cilento’s strapping aviatrix Hanna Reitsch (who in reality was a tiny, elfin little woman) to Andrew Sachs as the notary summoned to the bunker to officiate at Hitler’s wedding; all to the accompaniment of an incongruously jolly Viennese score by Mischa Spoliansky.

Sir Alec, bless him, is marginally less unbelievable casting as Hitler than Liberace or Jerry Lewis might have been. The Führer’s legendary, carpet-chewing tantrums, for example, are wholly beyond him. Like all fictional depictions of the final days in the bunker this film fails utterly to accurately depict the doped-up, trembling, rheumy-eyed physical wreck that Hitler by then was (the famous moustache, for example, had gone completely grey); but Guinness’s frequent ramblings convey extremely well the opinionated, self-absorbed bore described, for example, by Alfred Speer in Inside the Third Reich.

Occasionally the film can’t resist putting words into the Führer’s mouth (Guinness actually uses the word “exterminate” with reference to the Jews, when in reality Hitler just left such tedious details entirely to subordinates like Himmler who actually did his dirty work and were painstakingly careful to avoid explicitly stating such things); and the final scene between Hitler and Eva Braun is particularly unbelievable. But its still worth a look. @Richard Chatten

Spring Blossom (2020) Curzon

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

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

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

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

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

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

ON CURZON ONLINE FROM 23 APRIL 2021

The High and the Mighty (1954) Prime

Dir: William A Wellman | Cast: John Wayne, Claire Trevor, Laraine Day, Robert Stack, Jan Sterling | US Disaster Movie 147′

Indispensable viewing for anyone interested in Hollywood in general and the 1950s in particular, when air travel was glamorous. Former WWI pilot William A. Wellman immediately snapped up the 1953 novel by aviation specialist Ernest K. Gann and the result couldn’t fail to be irresistible box office fodder in the classic tradition of Grand Hotel and Stagecoach (the stars of which it reunites). Sidney Blackmer’s role recalls Berton Churchill in ‘Stagecoach’ and anticipates Van Heflin in Airport while Robert Stack actually parodied his role in this in Airplane!

It’s all very easy to sneer at the way the movie throws in everything but the kitchen sink, and the relentless promotion of Dimitri Tompkin’s Oscar-winning score (the theme of which John Wayne even whistles occasionally), complete with heavenly choirs. There’s also the oversight of not casting any black actors (although it does include an Asian). But with immaculate photography in CinemaScope and Warnercolor by Archie Stout and a fabulous cast there’s something for everyone. So just enjoy! @Richard Chatten

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO | TALKING PICTURES TV

Ghost Tropic (2020) Bergamo Film Meeting 2021

Dir.: Bas Devos; Cast: Saadia Bentaieb, Nora Diri, Stefan Gorm, Guy Dermul, Maaike Neuville; Belgium 2019, 85 min.

Simple but never simplistic Ghost Tropic is a nighttime odyssey in Brussels seen through the eyes of a Maghreb domestic cleaner, after missing her metro stop.

Bas Devos establishes himself as a leading talent in filmmaking with this upbeat picture of a woman but also a city; a melting pot of race, religion and cultures, short vignettes gradually building up a picture of middle-aged Khadija and of Belgium’s capital city.

Khadija’s living room is seen at the beginning with the light giving way to darkness. “What might people think about the person who lives here?” asks a voice-over. The answer is given in the small encounters which amplify Khadija’s experience and the kindness of strangers at the end of the metro line, with no services running till morning.

A night bus is cancelled, and the nearest ATM yields a blank, so she sets out on foot to find her way home amongst those living on the margins of society, stumbling across a dog and a tramp (Dermul), one of them won’t make it through the night. A friendly petrol station worker (Neuville) worker offers her a lift home and another story of misfortune, and we learn that Khadija’s husband Munir died some years ago. A call to her son Bilal, reveals he lives alone, and she spots her seventeen-year old daughter (Diri), with a group of youngsters. She follows at a distance noting her daughter’s burgeoning relationship with a boy, a serendipitous meeting outside another building yields a lucky outcome for Khadija and gradually as daylight dawns we see her home in a reverse proceeding of the opening shot.

Shot on rich Kodak stock by DoP Grimm Vanderckhove, the night seems to shimmer with hope despite her ordeal, the darkness is never threatening, with small moments of beauty thrown in. Buildings loom like lighthouses, illuminating her passage through the gloaming, a journey that started in darkness dawns with a ray of hope – a gradual realisation that life has come full circle – what at first seemed daunting now radiates with light. Full of humanity, Ghost Tropic is a real pleasure to watch – and to admire. AS

BERGAMO FILM MEETING | 24 April – 2 May 2021 | WINNER CAIRO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2019

Bela (2021) Visions du Reel 2021

Dir: Prantik Basu | India, Doc 58′

In Bela, a small village in North Eastern India, time stands still. Lulled by its languorous rhythms the past meets the present in a remote landscape. Filmmaker Prantik Basu creates an evocative picture of tradition where dance, music and ritual is very much part of everyday life.

Avoiding any kind of narrative structure Basu’s camera drifts into reverie and slo-mo sequences, creating a carnival for the senses where vibrant colours of lime green, scarlet and indigo purple meet the softer hues of an eau de nil dusk. When the working day is over women paint delicate creamy ribbons in the sandy ground, each crowned with a crimson centre. Night will see the men enacting a mysterious traditional trance-like masked dance, the Chhau. Mesmerising, fierce and feral, the children scream in delight as the village is transformed into a theatre.

Two years in the making and edited in consecutive days, Bela is a sensory mood piece, a valuable record of people ostensibly living in harmony, everyone calmly aware of their role in the scheme of things. If ever there was a picture of serenity it is here in this land-locked corner where Bela gleams like a jewel in the dust. MT

VISIONS DU REAL 2021 | NYON SWITZERLAND

The Penthouse (1967)

Dir: Peter Collinson | Wri: Scott Forbes | Cast: Terence Morgan, Suzy Kendall, Tony Beckley, Norman Rodway | UK Thriller

British director Peter Collinson was probably best known for his comedy caper The Italian Job with its unlikely casting of Michael Caine, Noel Coward and Benny Hill. But before that he made TV outing The Penthouse which belongs to the extremely nasty genre of the home invasion film.

Two earlier examples, Leslie Stevens’ Private Property (1960) and Walter Grauman’s Lady in a Cage (1964) had already been denied circuit releases in Britain, and in 1967 The Penthouse was following close on the heels of Dutchman and The Incident, both located the same situation, this time in railway carriages.

Far and away the most frightening of these films was The Incident, starring Martin Sheen and Beau Bridges, a powerfully vicious thriller never to released in Britain, with the emotive tagline “hits like a switchblade knife”. Later films that have been structured around similar situations include A Clockwork Orange, Straw Dogs and Funny Games, while real life – alas – got in on the act during 1968-69 with the hideous murders of Ramon Novarro and Sharon Tate.

Pretty obviously based on a play (‘The Meter Man’ by C.Scott Forbes), and directed, for all it’s worth, by first-timer Peter Collinson with Gothic lighting by Arthur Lavis (and occasional strident intrusions by John Hawksworth’s score), The Penthouse draws strongly for its content on Private Property and for its ambiance and dialogue on Harold Pinter.

In reality, Tom (Tony Beckley) and Dick (Norman Rodway), the pair of gurning cretins who invade the adulterous couple’s luxury penthouse suite (£15,000 at 1967 prices we’re told!) would never talk so much or be so articulate; and both their bizarre behaviour and that of the girlfriend (Suzy Kendall) who loses her fear and then her inhibitions remarkably quickly after being plied with booze and marijuana, suggests that gritty realism is not exactly what the film’s makers were striving for.

The film becomes more unbelievable still when less that twenty minutes from the end the couple actually let Harry in, who proceeds to bring the two goons back into the apartment to continue their mind games. But since Harry is played by Martine Beswick at her most fabulous (which is saying something!) I can forgive the film a lot. Well, a bit. @Richard Chatten

Children of the Enemy (2021) CPH:DOX 2021

Dir: Gorki Glaser-Muller | Sweden, Denmark, Qatar | Doc With Patricio Galves, Clive Stafford Smith, Isabel Coles 95′

Like most stories coming out of Syria since the recent reign of terror this is a familiar one chronicling days of anguish amid political turmoil. Children of the Enemy centres on one man’s Kafkaesque journey to rescue his family and take them back to their homeland of Sweden. Meanwhile the Swedish authorities and even the media keep a low profile for fear of repercussions.

Chilean Swede Patricio Galvez cuts a tragic figure as shares his pain with filmmaker Gorki Glaser-Muller. Told simply, its tone of ongoing desperation being the focus, it tells how another unsuspecting victim – his nubile daughter – became radicalised and married one of Sweden’s most notorious ISIS terrorists.

After both were killed in the fight for a caliphate their children were left high and dry, lost somewhere in the Al-Hol prison camp in Northeast Syria. A moving phone montage on Patricio’s mobile phone is all he has left to identify the kids during his nightmarish 45 day recovery mission through Iraq and Syria. Meanwhile every minute could be their last. Days of desperation and disbelief add to the ongoing narrative of this ‘missing persons diary’ in a world that grows more and more hostile, less compassionate as allies and enemies become increasingly indistinguishable. MT

CPH:DOX | WORLD PREMIERE| INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION | COPENHAGEN DOC FESTIVAL 2021

Return to the City 2021 | June 2021 at the Barbican

A hopeful mini series of films that celebrates the return to cinema screens with some urban-themed lesser known documentaries reflecting life in bustling capital cities all round the globe including Paris, Cairo, Lima, New York, Las Vegas and Kaili in South East China.

New Yorkers take in the sights, sounds and rhythms of the 1950s in the UK premiere of Manfred Kirchheimer’s Free Time, US 1960/2020

The filmmaker has meticulously restored and constructed the 16mm black-and-white footage that he and Walter Hess shot in New York between 1958 and 1960. Free Time captures the in-between moments – kids playing stickball, window washers, Manhattanites reading newspapers on their stoops – and the architectural beauty of urban spaces, set to the stirring sounds of Ravel, Bach and Count Basie.

This screening will be introduced by visual artist and writer Will Jennings.

In contemporary Lima the sounds of punk, psychedelia and experimental electronica are the backdrop for Ximena Valdivia and Dana Bonilla’s Lima Screams (Peru, 2018), an ecstatic and visually thrilling journey through Lima, where marginalised communities make beautiful music, and political protests are backed by fierce electronic sounds.

Introduced by writer and curator Awa Konaté, Nationalité: Immigré (France 1975) by Mauritanian filmmaker Sidney Sokhona, blends fiction with documentary in a staggering and radical account of African migrants at the margins of Parisian society in the 1970s.

Cairo Station (Egypt 1958), directed by and starring Youssef Chahine, blends melodrama, neorealism and thriller conventions to tell an unforgettable, disturbing story of love and madness set in Cairo’s train station

Nina Menkes’ Queen of Diamonds (US 1991) offers a glimpse of Las Vegas seen through the eyes of a casino croupier, a place of garish, windowless interiors, but also huge blue skies and desolate desertscapes dotted with burned-out mobile homes, cheaply-furnished apartments, and dried-up lakes

Long Day’s Journey into Night (China, 2018) Bi Gan’s sensuous, dream-like drama set in Kaili in South East China, a labyrinthine cityscape is captured in single, hour-long, gravity-defying take – a must-see on the big screen in 3D.

All films will be shown in Cinema 1 in June. Lima Screams, Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2D version), Nationalité: Immigré and Queen of Diamonds will also be available to watch on Cinema on Demand throughout July.

Donations can be made here: barbican.org.uk/donate

UK Premiere: Free Time (U*) + intro by writer Will Jennings
US 1960/2020 Dir Manfred Kirchheimer 61 min Digital presentation
Tue 8 Jun 6.15pm, Cinema 1

1950s footage of New York comes alive in this beautifully restored city symphony from celebrated filmmaker Manfred Kirchheimer.
In his latest work, Manfred Kirchheimer has meticulously restored and constructed 16mm black- and-white footage that he and Walter Hess shot in New York between 1958 and 1960. Free Time captures the in-between moments—kids playing stickball, window washers, Manhattanites reading newspapers on their stoops—and the architectural beauty of urban spaces, set to the stirring sounds of Ravel, Bach and Count Basie.

The footage was shot in several distinct New York neighbourhoods, including Washington Heights, the Upper West Side, and Hell’s Kitchen, and features evocative stops throughout the city, making time for an auto junkyard in Inwood and a cemetery in Queens.
This screening is introduced by Will Jennings. Will Jennings is a visual artist and writer interested in architecture, politics, history and how built form interacts with wider culture and society.

Lima Screams (12A*)

Peru 2018 Dir Dana Bonilla, Ximena Valdivia 77 min
Thu 10 Jun 6.20 pm, Cinema 1
A pulsing and immersive city symphony dedicated to Peru’s capital city, pumping with the sounds of punk, psychedelia and experimental electronica.

Directors Ximena Valdivia and Dana Bonilla take us on an exciting dive through the streets and music venues of Lima, showing the eclectic and diverse musical talents of the city’s artists against a collage of moments and sensations.

Lima Screams is an ecstatic and visually thrilling journey through the city’s spaces, as marginalised communities make beautiful music and political protests are backed by fierce electronic sounds. As the city screams, you have no choice but to be carried along with it…

Long Day’s Journey into Night 3D (12A)

China/France 2018 Dir Bi Gan 139 min Digital presentation
Sun 13 Jun 2.30 pm, Cinema 1

A search for a lost love animates this sensuous, dream-like drama set in the city of Kaili in south-east China.
After many years away, a solitary man, Luo Hongwu, returns to his hometown for his father’s funeral. There, he is assailed by memories of a former lover, Wan Quiwen, triggering an obsessive need to find her again. Luo’s present-day quest and his memories of their romance intertwine; both play out against a backdrop of marginal, semi-derelict urban spaces – with a weird, near-hallucinatory quality.
The film’s dazzling second act opens when Luo wanders into a dingy cinema and puts on a pair of 3D glasses, whereupon he re-emerges on-screen in a film-within-a-film that begins in a tunnel, then proceeds to a pool hall and an open-air karaoke bar.

His journey through this labyrinthine cityscape is captured in single, hour-long, gravity-defying take – a must-see on the big screen in 3D.
Nationalité immigré (12A*) + intro by curator Awa Konaté
France 1975 Dir Sidney Sokhona 69 min
Tue 15 Jun 6.20pm, Cinema 1

Mauritanian filmmaker Sidney Sokhona blends fiction with documentary in a staggering and radical account of African migrants at the margins of Parisian society in the 1970s.

Nationalité: Immigré dramatises the real-life housing strikes undertaken by Sokhona and his fellow migrant neighbours in a Parisian working-class slum dwelling. Centring identity, socio-economic injustices, and the bureaucratic exploitations of migrants, we are offered a depiction that positions community organising as crucial to simply exist.

With Western capitalism, anti-blackness, and migration at its fore, the film’s politics is more than ever relevant to current public debates on inequalities. Its expressions of resistance and resilience invite us to reflect and inquire, what does life and survival look like on the periphery?

This screening is curated by Awa Konaté, a Danish-Ivorian writer, curator, and founder of the interdisciplinary research platform Culture Art Society (CAS) that methodises African archives for public arts programming.

Queen of Diamonds (15*)

US 1991 Dir Nina Menkes 77 min Digital presentation
Sat 19 Jun 6.15pm, Cinema 1

An alienated blackjack dealer is at the centre of this slantwise portrait of Las Vegas. The many cinematic depictions of Las Vegas typically glory in the glittering casino lights and the drama of the gambling table: the thrill of risk, the joy of winning, the devastation of loss.

Not so this film, which shows the flipside of the city from the point-of-view of one of its worker-residents, a casino croupier, for whom each wager, each hand, carries no excitement, but is part of one long round of drudgery.
Our heroine drifts through a series of encounters. But events are beside the point, the appeal of this film are its images – sad, gorgeous, strange. This is Las Vegas as seen from the margins, a place of garish, windowless interiors, but also huge blue skies and desolate desertscapes dotted with burned-out mobile homes, cheaply-furnished apartments, and dried-up lakes.

Cairo Station (12A)

Egypt 1958 Dir Youssef Chahine 77 min Digital presentation
Sun 27 Jun 3pm, Cinema 1
A disabled newspaper vendor falls obsessively in love with an engaged drinks seller in Youssef Chahine’s thrilling study of passion, sexuality and violence.

BARBICAN | JUNE 2021

Kinoteka 2021 | 6 May – 4 June 2021

KINOTEKA Polish Film Festival in London goes online again this year from 6 May – 4 June. Lockdown permitting the 19th Edition hopes to show some live screenings so watch this space for further details.

Meanwhile back online, some of the UK’s leading cultural institutions will host the festival’s 19th edition: BFI, ICA, POSK Cinema, The International Online Theatre Festival, Second Run and Channel 4’s Walter Presents.

KINOTEKA 2021 launches on 6th May with Mariusz Wilczyński’s award-winning animated debut feature Kill It and Leave This Town, a surrealist reflection on memory and loss (below and review to follow).

In a programme brimming with Polish talent – established and emerging there – will be two strands dedicated to great masters from the 20th and 21st centuries. The Undiscovered Masters strand at Second Run On Demand highlights five lesser-known films from, amongst others, Jerzy Skolimowski, Andrzej Żuławski and Agnieszka Holland (whose Kobieta samotna is the most devastating love story I have ever seen). Meanwhile the Modern Polish Cinema strand on BFI Player brings together documentary and fiction from directors including Krzysztof Krauze, Paweł Łoziński and Agnieszka Smoczyńska.

The Kinoteka x Walter Presents strand at POSK Cinema premieres the first two episodes on VOD of two recent breakout Polish TV productions.

Also to look forward to is the 80th anniversary of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s birth, with the 80 Years of Kieślowski strand on the ICA Cinema 3 platform which commemorates the great Polish auteur’s life and legacy, and will stream from 11 May – 1 June 2021.

KINOTEKA 2021 will also showcase Cannes 2020 Official Selection – Magnus von Horn’s sophomore feature Sweat, exploring the cult of fitness and celebrity at a time when many are yearning for meaningful human interaction and intimacy.

Dekalog 6

80 YEARS OF KIEŚLOWSKI | Dekalog and documentary shorts

The 80 Years of Kieślowski strand highlights a selection of the internationally-acclaimed director’s work pre-1990. The 10-part television series Dekalog is presented in its entirety, with individual episodes available for streaming across the festival period. Additionally, a selection of five early documentary shorts – Refrain (1972), From a Night Porter’s Point of View (1977), Hospital (1976), Seven Women of Different Ages (1978) and Talking Heads (1980) – highlight the formal and narrative motifs that Kieślowski would continue to develop throughout his career.

Fugue (2018)

MODERN POLISH CINEMA | Poland’s leading documentary and fiction films

The Modern Polish Cinema strand presents a selection of 10 contemporary classics. Among the fiction films presented are the gripping thriller Fugue (Agnieszka Smoczyńska, 2018); irreverent comedy Day of the Wacko (Marek Koterski, 2002) and the harrowing Rose (2011) from enfant terrible Wojciech Smarzowski. A selection of recent documentaries includes the moving You Have No Idea How Much I Love You (Paweł Łoziński, 2016), a dreamlike vision of Warsaw in All These Sleepless Nights (Michał Marczak, 2016) and the Oscar-nominated The Children of Leningradsky (Hanna Polak, 2004).

The Modern Polish Cinema strand is available to stream via BFI Player Subscription from 6–27 May.

On The Silver Globe (1988)

UNDISCOVERED MASTERS | Five films from 20th century icons

The Undiscovered Masters strand presents, in association with Second Run, a series of lesser-known films from five renowned Polish filmmakers, many of whom would later gain great international success: Man on the Tracks (Andrzej Munk, 1957), Walkover (Jerzy Skolimowski, 1965),On the Silver Globe (Andrzej Żuławski, 1988), and The Temptation (Barbara Sass, 1995).

The Undiscovered Masters strand is available to stream on Second Run On Demand from 6–27 May.

The King of Warsaw

KINOTEKA x WALTER PRESENTS | Raven and The King of Warsaw

The Kinoteka x Walter Presents strand brings two exciting Polish television productions to UK screens for the first time. In Raven (2018–present), a troubled detective returns to his home town in eastern Poland to investigate a child kidnapping case. There, he quite literally battles his own childhood demons in this supernatural take on the crime genre. An adaptation of Szczepan Twardoch’s novel of the same name, The King of Warsaw (2020) charts the rise of Jewish boxer Jakub Szapiro through the criminal underworld of 1930s Warsaw, as he negotiates not only the political elite but also the growing fascist threat. Both series will be available at a later date via Walter Presents, which already hosts some of Poland’s leading television productions.

Raven is available on demand via POSK Cinema on 20 May and will be followed by a Q&A with lead actor Michał Żurawski.
The King of Warsaw is available on demand via POSK Cinema on 3 June and will be followed by a Q&A with lead actor Michał Żurawski.

DOCUMENTARY | The Wall of Shadows

The Documentary strand highlights the award-winning The Wall of Shadows (Eliza Kubarska, 2020). The film is shot in the Himalayas, where a group of European climbers convince a local Sherpa couple to guide them up the holy mountain Kumbhakarna, against their better judgement.

The Wall of Shadows is available to stream on demand via ICA’s Cinema 3 platform from 13 – 20 May.

KINOTEKA POLISH FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Black Bear (2020)

Dir.: Lawrence Michael Levine; Cast: Aubrey Plaza, Christopher Abbott, Sarah Gadon; USA 2020, 104 min.

Writer/director Lawrence Michael Levine should have heeded home truths: if you have a good subject, stick with it, don’t shut it down halfway through. Particularly when your second part is a film-in-film story – a conceit that has frustrated countless directors – François Truffaut’s, Day for Night serving as an exceptional along with The Exorcist .

Part one (‘The Bear on the Road’) has an often re-played beginning, with actor turned filmmaker Allison (Plaza) sitting near a foggy lake, very decorative in her red one-piece swim suit. Finally, she gets up and leaves for the lake house, starting her script. Writer’s block sets in shortly after the opening title. Instead she goes, Cassavetes style, into war with her hosts, out-of work musician Gabe (Abbott) and his pregnant wife Blair (Gadon). The couple bicker and fight, but instead of staying out of it Allison takes sides in a very underhand way.

The outcome is a coitus-interrupted and a rush for the hospital, all cut short by the titular bear appearing on the road. That’s a pity, because we really want to know what happens next. But the narrative makes a swerve into the same lake house scene, but this time we watch a film being shot. This time around Plaza deftly becomes Allison, the insecure actress, bullied and belittled by husband director Gabe (Abbott again) and threatened by Gabon’s Blair, who seems desperate to change roles after what went on in part one. But Levine doesn’t pull it off with this complicated, over talky second part, even the bear re-appearing near the end. Black Bears tries to be too clever, only to deliver second-hand histrionics in part two’s ‘Bear by the Boathouse’; ending in a rather lame repeat of the introductory shot.

Apart from the symbolic meaning of the titular bear, Levine withholds any reasonable explanations in part two. DoP Robert Leitzell cannot make up his mind if he is shooting a horror flick, or one of Woody Allen’s Bergmanesque features, falling, along with Levine’s script just between two chairs. The actors do there best, the peerless Plaza is always watchable, desperate a difficult role. Black Bear takes a rather tepid story and treats it like an exercise in meta-physics. In the end it’s just a blown-up B-picture. AS

BLACK BEAR – RELEASED ON DIGITAL 23 APRIL 2021

The Strange Woman (1946) Prime Video

Dir: Edgar G Ulmer | Herb Meadow | Cast: Hedy Lamarr, George Sanders, Louis Hayward, Gene Lockhart, Hillary Brooke | US Noir, 90′

Based on a 1941 novel by Ben Ames Williams, whose Leave Her to Heaven had just provided the 40’s Hollywood melodrama with one of its most memorably manipulative female psychos in the form of Gene Tierney as Ellen Berent. Hedy Lamarr chose this as her first independent production and cannily selected Edgar Ulmer to direct, who makes the most of the opportunities provided by unaccustomedly decent production values and a solid supporting cast, while giving Ms Lamarr her head to create a memorable femme fatale.

In early 19th Century Maine, Hedy learns as a child how to manipulate boys for her own spiteful ends. So far, so promising – particularly as portrayed as a worldly, spiteful little vixen by Jo Ann Marlowe – but one apprehensively suspects she will inevitably prove less enjoyably sociopathic when she grows up to be Hedy Lamarr.

Hedy herself as a young woman initially shows promise, wearing lots of lipstick and making eloquent use of her eyes while otherwise cultivating an intriguing stillness as she twists men round her little finger and declares “I don’t want the youngest. I want the richest!”. Learning to cultivate her feminine wiles in the face of brutal patriarchy in the person of her drunken and violent father (played by Inspector Lestrade, Denis Hoey), she promises to become a more alluringly damaged adult than she ultimately proves to be. SPOILER COMING: Ms Lamarr – whose accent increasingly slips as the film approaches its conclusion – loses her nerve towards the end of the film, when she falls victim to true love and dies misguided rather than Bad.

The title is taken from Proverbs 5:3 and doesn’t really fit Ms Lamarr; but The Wicked Lady was already taken, although she doesn’t prove that wicked either. @Richard Chatten

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

Dancing With Crime (1948) Prime Video

Dir: John Paddy Carstairs | Wri: Brock Williams | Cast: Richard Attenborough, Barry K Barnes, Barry Jones, Sheila Sim, Garry Marsh | UK Thriller 83′

London was awash immediately after the war with zoot-suited black marketeers, and this gritty little crime thriller directed by John Paddy Carstairs (remembered for his Norman Wisdom comedies) and slickly shot by Stanley Pavey involves innocent young taxi driver Dickie Attenborough in one of his first starring roles along with his real-life wife Sheila Sim, led by a slightly younger-than-usual Barry Jones and pre-war leading man Barry K. Barnes. Attenborough is a young cabbie who gets mixed up with a criminal gang and sets out to expose them for what they are.

It boasts several formidable females with big hair and even bigger shoulders, none of them with bigger hair or bigger shoulders than reluctant moll Judy Kelly. Most of the rest of the cast are uncredited: including a highly conspicuous Diana Dors and an ironically very inconspicuous Dirk Bogarde (whose bit with his back to the camera – sounding nothing like him – near the end of the film as a police dispatcher is the sole reason the picture is now recalled). @Richard Chatten

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

The Battle of the Sexes (1928) Prime Video

Dir: D W Griffith | Cast: Jean Hersholt, Phyllis Haver, Belle Bennett, Sally O’Neil | US Drama 88′

It tends to be forgotten that D.W.Griffith continued busily turning out feature films into the talkie era, and on the rare occasions that these later films are ever acknowledged it’s usually just to dismiss them as the dying embers of a burned-out career.

Griffith’s 1928 remake of his lost 1914 feature film The Battle of the Sexes – historically noteworthy as his last entirely silent film – turns out to be a lively, intimate contemporary comedy-drama embellished with little visual flourishes like indoor tracking shots and overhead shots (probably suggested by cameraman Karl Struss) rather than the more saucy piece of fluff the rather schematic title seems to promise.

The opening sequence with Phyllis Haver having her frizzy peroxide blonde hair dressed in a salon adjacent to millionaire Jean Hersholt on whom her gold-digging eye alights suggests a typical jazz age comedy vehicle for Miss Haver fresh from playing Roxie Hart in Chicago; an impression reinforced by the sequence that follows in which she engineers their ‘accidental’ meeting in the apartment building in which he and his family live and she has somehow managed to rent a place for herself.

So far so amusing. But this is Griffith we are talking about, and the devastating impact of Hersholt’s dalliance on his family is conveyed with sufficient force to turn the comedy into drama; and the focal point of the film becomes Sally O’Neil as the daughter. (The visual contrast between the petite, bird-like brunette O’Neil and big blonde Phyllis also adds additional weight to their confrontation). Although all eventually ends well, Hersholt hasn’t returned to his wife because of his love for her overcome his desire for Haver, but only because he is presented with incontrovertible evidence even he can’t ignore that she was only ever after his money. The formulaic happy ending remains overshadowed by the mother’s earlier despairing words “It’s too late now” delivered by a drained-looking Belle Bennett; and it seems unlikely that this family will ever return to the idyllic state we witnessed at the beginning of the film. @Richard Chatten

ON PRIME VIDEO

Ostrov – Lost Island (2021) | Visions du Reel 2021

Dir.: Swetlana Rodina, Laurent Stoop; Documentary with Ivan, Anna, Alina, Anton, Galina, Valera, Tatiana, Roman Tamangiz; Switzerland 2021, 93 min.

Time warps still exist even in the 21st century. And one is the island of Ostrov deep in the Caspian Sea. During Soviet times it was home to over 3000 people. Nowadays only a few survive, and most belong to a large extended family. Their existence very much connects to a global narrative of survival for small communities all over the world.

Writers/directors Swetlana Rodina and Laurent Stoop (Citizen Khodorkovsky) take a look at how life has changed there in past thirty years. There is still a hospital, a school and a kindergarten. Ivan (50) and Anna (45), occupy one of the homely wooden houses with their kids Alina and Anton. But their patriarch Tolya is not the only one living in the past.

Every day Ivan takes his ramshackle fishing boat out to sea, always aware of the coast guards who are keen to catch them fishing sturgeon, which for reasons not explained, is forbidden. In the “old days” of the Soviet Union, according to Anna, the family was prosperous, making a good living with sturgeon’s black caviar: another restriction not explained. Military police inspects the island every so often: what they are looking for is one of the many open questions.

Roman and Tamangiz have fled the mainland town to the island – but both are unhappy, being used to city life. Roman admits their poverty has destroyed their relationship, only the cats and dogs are contented stretching lazily in the sun. ‘Make do and mend’ values still survive here out of necessity, Ivan is always repairing something or another – mainly his motorcycle, which has surely seen better days, probably built in the Soviet era. There is a war memorial for the dead of WWII, and the anniversary of 9th of May 1945 is celebrated.

On the newly acquired TV – it works, in spite of Ivan telling us there is no electricity – President Putin is the star attraction. In Donetsk, Russian soldiers give out Russian passports to Ukrainians, the annexation of the Crimea is celebrated. In Germany, meanwhile, Neo-Nazis are marching, revenge hungry, and one more reason for the war in Ukraine.

Anton has had enough of the propaganda but Ivan stays and complains the younger generation does not appreciate the old war songs any more. Not surprisingly, apart from getting drunk and listening to the army radio, there is not much for the youngsters on the island to do.

Tolya dies and is buried in coffin with an orthodox cross. Ivan asks his daughter Alina to take a letter to Putin – and when he doesn’t get a reply, he plans to write another. Meanwhile Putin plays the role of the humble statesman on TV. Ivan refuses to blame Putin for the poverty on Orlov – he believes it is all down to the corrupt and incompetent administration. New Year’s Eve 2020 offers a chance to celebrate all round with drinking and dancing. Meanwhile, Putin hectors on about a bright future, Ivan praising him for building a strong army.

Dop Laurent Stoop is perfectly placed to play the “Fly on the Wall” – unobtrusive his pictures tell a thousand words. The soft limpid colours of the maritime setting give a lyrical feel to this contemporary story, that could be set a hundred years ago.

Orlov is one of many documentaries about Putin’s Russia, showing the parallels to the Soviet Union – minus the social structure of the era. Like Stalin before him, Putin’s obdurate strength is what makes him popular. The fault always lies with his underlings. Orlov tells a poignant story of yesteryear, and displaced youngsters trapped in time between utter boredom and a glorious past. AS

NOW AT VISIONS DU REEL | NYON 2021

The Queen of Versailles (2012) Prime Video

Dir: Lauren Greenfield | US Doc 103′ | With Jacqueline and Davie Siegel

An instructive companion to The Grapes of Wrath and the South Park episode ‘Asspen’, in which the hunter becomes the hunted as – after becoming a billionaire pressuring ‘moochers’ into living beyond their means by investing in his timeshire holiday homes – ‘timeshare king’ David Siegel gets a taste of his own medicine following the financial crash of September 2008.

In The Grapes of Wrath (the novel, not the film), the bank is fatalistically described as ‘The Monster’, which must continue to be fed profits or it will die. Hence the mass evictions of honest, hard-working tenant farmers like the Joads so ‘The Monster’ can devour their assets. In 2008, the bankers who encouraged Siegel in the first place to overstretch himself financially are, instead of going to jail, shored up with taxpayers’ money and show their appreciation in an orgy of foreclosures and asset-stripping of their own victims to sustain profitability as usual.

David’s amiable trophy wife Jackie compares the bank to vultures circling her husband’s business waiting for it to die the better for them to devour its corpse. The modest little home of Jackie’s old school friend faces foreclosure even after Jackie gives her $5,000 to cover a debt that had started out at just $1,700; while David’s bank is putting the screws on him to surrender his own assets to them at knockdown prices.

Jackie initially seems remarkably unspoiled by her immense wealth, and remains seemingly stoical as her husband’s fortunes unravel and she is reduced to travelling by commercial airliner and shopping at Wall-Mart. But the visible deflation of David is painful to watch as for the first time he has to worry about meeting his electricity bill. (It usually takes financial reversals for people to start conducting themselves in an environmentally responsible manner.)

The almost comical lack of irony with which Jackie described the Siegels as “ordinary people like us” lays bare the sheer incomprehension of the 1% of how the 99% live, the political ramifications of which in a plutocracy like the United States include the casual vindictiveness its political leaders (and their paymasters like the Siegels) routinely display and enshrine in legislation against those less fortunate than themselves. (While Jackie stressed her “need” for the additional living space Versailles would have provided, in Britain the same year that this film was released the government of Old Etonian David Cameron introduced a punitive “bedroom tax” in the Welfare Reform Act of 2012 whereby council house tenants with any room considered “spare” automatically had their housing benefit docked.)

We see the reality of ‘trickle-down’ economics in the impact upon the Siegel’s vast army of employees and dependents all the way down the food chain in the fate of their pet lizard, who amidst the confusion is allowed to die of thirst. @Richard Chatten

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Lost Boys (2021) CPH:DOX 2021

Dir.: Joonas Neuvonen, Sadri Cetinkaya; Documentary with Joonas Neuvonen, Jani Raappana, Antti , Lee Lee, Thi, narrated by Pekka Strang; Finland 2020, 99 min.

It all started with Reindeerspotting-Escape from Santaland back in 2010. Its Finnish director Joonas Neuvonen turned out to be a drug dealer from a middle class background, and this fuelled the storyline for Lost Boys, a drug-powered tour of Thailand and Cambodia to celebrate the film’s success. Joining him were petty thief and addict Jani Raappana, and his mate Annti. Reindeerspotting co-writer Sadri Cetinkaya co-wrote the script.

Three months later Jani would be found dead in Phnom Penh. How he met his fate is still uncertain. Indications are he was murdered. Pekka Strang narrates, as the voice of Neuvonen, commenting from his cell. The trio were heavy users of ‘ya ba’, formerly known as yama, a potent mixture of methamphetamine and caffeine, also used as a horse drug, and favoured by soldiers, taxi drivers and sex workers.

Lost Boys chronicles their down-spiralling nightmare into Hell, a modern day, sordid version of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The drug culture inevitably leads to debt, organised crime holds sway with death squads enforcing control. Sex workers are all part of the picture, the exploited leading their clients into the hands of the drug lords. Cambodia’s turbulent past has contributed to the country’s post traumatic stress disorder that started with colonisation and culminated with the Khmer Rouge. Sex tourism involving adults and children is now rampant throughout Cambodia. The country’s horrific history – past and present – plays out in a gruesome montage to the strains of La Marseillaise, as colonialism meets today’s sex tourism.

Neuvonen maintains his sole interest is in saving Annti and finding Jani’s murderer, but at the same he seems ambivalent about his mate, coming clean about the anti-hero of his first film: “I wanted him to vanish. I wanted him to die”. But will he be the only survivor of this trip to Hell?

Meanwhile Jani’s girlfriend Lee Lee and her friend Thi are compliant vessels for the sins of others and Annti is the victim of paranoid psychosis believing the nearby radio masts are there to stalk his thoughts and send the messages to a company called “Sky”.

What makes this quasi detective story so compelling is the way we’re led by its unreliable narrator in a non-linear narrative full of elliptical deceits imbued with hallucinatory visuals from dizzying handheld cameras. More than just a story, Lost Boys captures a state of mind – lies coalesce to cause the downfall of all three men whose paradise of sex and drugs leads them into a maze of death. Colour grading and editing sustain the scratchy edges of the documentary that floats in a woozy soundscape, leading us on a fractious journey as the men drift into a harrowing cul-de-sac. Lost Boys is a visual poem of the cruellest most nihilistic kind.

CPH:DOX | APRIL 2021

Miss Zombie (2013)

Dir: SABU | Japan, Horror 85′

In Hammer’s The Plague of the Zombies (1966) the local squire was resuscitating recently deceased Cornish villagers in 1860 to work in his tin mine, while the American writer William Seabrook claimed to have watched zombies in the late 20’s working on plantations in Haiti.

George Romero later parodied contemporary society in his Living Dead trilogy, so it was only a matter of time – on screen at least – before 21st Century zombie farmers would eventually be supplying zombies (complete with instruction manuals) to do household chores for the affluent.

Shot for the most part in grungy black & black minus the breathless pace that characterised SABU’s earlier thrillers, Miss Zombie – SABU’s first horror film – is pretty evidently an allegory of the developed world’s increasingly insatiable appetite for cheap imported labour, and the bullying and exploitation – including sexual – that goes with it. When Shara starts collecting knives we seem to be entering Jimmie Blacksmith territory and order eventually breaks down with consequences that should be sufficiently bloody to satisfy the gorehounds in the audience. @Richard Chatten

The Artist’s Wife (2020)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ON DIGITAL PLATFORMS + UK & IRISH CINEMAS FROM 30 APRIL

Laddie: The Man Behind the Movies (2017)

Dir.: Amanda Ladd-Jones; Documentary with Alan Ladd jr, Mel Brooks, George Lucas, Ridley Scott, Richard Donner; USA 2017, 83 min.

Amanda Ladd-Jones films countless members of the industry in this eulogy to her talented father, the director and movie mogul Alan Ladd jr (*1937) whom we have to thank for Star Wars, Alien and Blade Runner to name but a few. It’s true to say that Ladd is a winner, and everyone loves a winner, particularly in Hollywood.

Ladd jr started his career in 1963 as a motion picture talent agent with clients including Judy Garland, Warren Beatty and Robert Redford. In 1968 he moved to London to produce, among other features, Villain with Richard Burton (in arguably his most miscast role). Then a return to Hollywood in 1973 saw Ladd becoming Head of Creative Affairs and three years later President of Twenty Century Fox where he was instrumental in fighting for George Lucas’ Star Wars projects, against the majority of the company’s board.

Ladd also turned his magic touch to art house features such as Julia (1977) and would cleverly change the ending of The Omen directed by Richard Donner, letting the malicious child survive, instead of killing him off, thereby spawning a whole new franchise.

The success story continues with Kurosawa’s Kagemusha, which had run into financial difficulties in 1980. The Rocky Horror Picture Show and An Unmarried Woman were also among the projects Ladd supported against a conservative board. His corporate career prospered and in the mid-1970s Ladd named Ashly Boone Fox’s President of Marketing, the first Afro-American woman to rise to this status in the USA. Later, Boone joined Ladd jr at the Ladd Company and MGM, winning the first of his Oscars for Chariot of Fire (1981).

By comparison Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) was a financial disappointment, only to rise to cult status a decade later and showing how masterpieces need to stand the test of time rather the sensation of the moment. Rush (1991) was directed by Lili Fini Zanuck at a time when women directors were nearly unheard of in mainstream cinema. At MGM Ladd jr was responsible for very diverse projects, like Rocky IV and A Fish called Wanda.

In the early 1990s Ladd jr left the executive world for good and established The Ladd Company, winning his second Oscar for Braveheart in 1995. Gone Baby Gone, the debut movie of director Ben Affleck, was to be the last feature Ladd jr produced in 2007.

If this reads like a rather boring celebrity roll call, it unfortunately reflects this documentary itself which is overlaid by Amanda’s over-talkie narration competing with an incessant ‘musak style’ score. Ladd jr himself seems the only participant not praising his own talents and achievements in giving the Midas touch to even doomed projects and transforming putative B movies into Oscar-worthy outings such as Fear is the Key (1972).

Certainly worth a watch for its juicy cinema titbits Laddie could have invested more time in exploring the director’s tragic relationship with his actor father Alan Ladd – or Amanda’s own lonely childhood, when she saw her Dad only in-between films, instead of claiming “He loved me the best he could.” But that would be a documentary expose rather than a eulogy, and Amanda’s telling statement shows great insight into the nature of success from a daughter who was proud of her father and recognised his limitations in the scheme of things. Laddie will certainly be appreciated by fans and cineastes alike as a worthwhile trip down Hollywood’s memory lane. AS

ON SKY STORE, iTunes, Apple, Youtube, Google Play and Rakuten from 26 April 2021

Broken Blossoms (1936) Prime Video

Dir: John Brahm | Cast: Dolly Haas, Emlyn Williams, Arthur Margetson, CV France, Basil Radford, Edith Sharpe | UK Drama

“An effective, if old-fashioned melodrama”: such was the verdict passed by the not easily impressed Rachel Low, and Julius Hagen’s fanciful remake of the Griffith classic – while yet another step in Hagen’s headlong plunge into bankruptcy – looks good today precisely because it’s so old-fashioned. (David Lean had worked at Twickenham Films during the early thirties, and this film probably influenced his equally stylised Dickens adaptations, particularly the cutaway to a shot of a door banging against a sapling when Battling Burrows takes a whip to Lucy.)

Hagen had originally brought D.W.Griffith himself over to direct the film, but when Griffith proved too drunk for the task Hagen instead assigned Hans Brahm (still using his real name), who cast his soulful-eyed wife Dolly Haas as Lucy; so both leads Haas and Emlyn Williams (also credited with adapting the original) have unlikely accents. (If there’s one thing modern audiences sneer at in old British films it’s the accents, especially if they belong to familiar British thespians like Donald Calthrop & Gibb McLaughlin – both of whom later worked for Lean – pretending to be Chinese.)

Bernard Vorhaus had hoped to direct it but was passed over and fobbed of with serving as technical advisor, so he not surprisingly badmouthed the film that resulted. Brahms also brought in German exiles Curt Courant & Karol Rathaus to light and score the film. Brahms’ later Hollywood version of Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square was a travesty of the original but rightly regarded as a classic Hollywood melodrama. His version of Broken Blossoms deserves more sympathetic reappraisal. @Richard Chatten

AVAILABLE ON PRIME VIDEO

Radu Jude Retro 2021

Streaming service DAFilms offers a chance to revisit five films from Romanian director Radu Jude in celebration of his Golden Bear win for Best Film: Bad Luck Banging, or Looney Porn (2021).

This special programme will run from Friday 16th to 30th April 2021 and includes the online debut of his 2020 The Exit of the Trains (Berlinale Forum) in certain territories.

Accompanying the launch of this special programme of the Romanian auteur filmmaker’s work will be a live online conversation with respected Argentinian critic, programmer, and filmmaker Lucía Salas who talks to Radu Jude on Facebook and on DAFilms Live on Monday 19th April at 19:00 CET / 13:00 EST / 10:00 PT.

In English | During the stream, viewers will be able to submit their own questions.

Some Kind of Heaven (2020) digital release

Dir: Lance Oppenheim | US Doc

A life of eternal holidays beckons in a Florida retirement complex in the opening scenes of Lance Oppenheim’s thought-provoking first feature.

Days of sun-drenched relaxation by the pool or a round of golf before cocktails with other mature singles – 130,000 to be precise – all sounds ideal at first, but we all know the reality is quite different. And so does Lance Oppenheim who has made a series of shorts exploring the world of leisure and here digs deeper in his complex exposé of the Florida retirement community who on the surface appear to be thriving in their golden days of freedom.

A sunny place for shady people is how Somerset Maugham described the Cote d’Azur. And South Florida seems to be the US equivalent. A cheerful opening sees well-preserved residents frolicking in palm-fringed paradise. But gradually the clouds gather and the tone grows almost sinister as Oppenheim reveals the truth behind The Villages idyl. Party time gradually descends into a nauseating round of chipper chat-up lines as seedy gold-diggers and petty criminals bask ill-disguised in dapper sombreros, perma tans and Pierre Cardin sportswear, blonde brush-overs barely ruffled by the sultry breeze.

And it doesn’t come cheap. The Villages’ brochure boasts a 401K price tag for this idyllic existence. Most denizens have traded in their urban lifestyles for this semi-tropical resting place – so there’s going back to normality however jaded the guilded cage becomes.

Marriages forged for decades can finally take a turn for the worse, and it’s the women we sympathise with, rather than the men: Anne and Reggie have been married for 47 years, but now find themselves seeking counselling as Reggie turned to cocaine to make his newfound ‘bliss’ bearable. The judge calls him “the rudest person he has ever met” during his court hearing. You feel for Anne as she calmly hopes for the best, patiently talking Reggie through another day.

Barbara is another appealing character whose soulful expression speaks of tragedy back in Boston where she was widowed, and now works full-time in The Villages, hoping to find a soul mate. 81-year-old man-child Dennis is clearly not the answer. Currently living in an illegal camper van on the grounds he hopes to find a rich widow, a ‘nurse and purse’to see him through his final stretch. The Villages is simple a microcosm of real life but the sun shines nearly every day and the garrulous are never lonely.

Some Kind of Heaven is a stomach-sinking experience, a salutary warning that sunny climes and social clubs are not the answer to most people’s dreams. As Anne puts it, all we really want is someone to cherish and respect us, who listens to our thoughts, and cares.

Oppenheim never ridicules his protagonists despite the modern trend of belittling the elderly. There is beauty here in the souls and faces of these people and it shines through clearly, particularly with Barbara who gives a moving reflection of her childhood, or Anne whose gentle eyes belie her tortured tale. Dennis does eventually find a pleasant companion who inadvertently exposes him as two-faced and shallow without really knowing the truth behind his orange tan.

Some Kind of Heaven is quite simply an unforgettable documentary debut that speaks volumes about the final chapter in the human condition. It shows that even though the flesh is weaker, beauty still shines through in Anne’s sensual disco dancing or Barbara’s poetic take on her complex past. MT

ON DIGITAL PLATFORMS FROM 14 MAY 2021

Zinder (2020) IDFA

Dir.: Aicha Macky; Documentary with Sinya Boy, Bawo, Ramsess, Americain, PGG; Mali/France/Germany 2021, 85 min.

Nigerian writer/director Aicha Macky grew up the former leper’s quarter of Zinder, Niger’s second biggest city on the border with Nigeria. It’s a Godforsaken land-locked place where corruption is rife and education and opportunities are few, especially in the backwater of Kara-Kara where Islam holds sway but is hardly a civilising influence, the young men get by resorting to a gang culture and violence.

So it’s left to the women, and one brave soul in particular, to find out what’s gone wrong. Macky talked to those left behind by society, who only know violence as a means to change their lives. Her film is another shocking testament to depravity and disillusionment.

Two men on a motorcycle: on a mast a flag with a drawing of Adolf Hitler emblazoned with Swastikas. These two are joining their friends for a body-building session, explaining that “Hitler is the name of a guy from the USA”. The group might not know their history, but they are proud “because nobody is crossing the gangs of Kara-Kara”. The main enemy are the police: “I pray for Boko Harem, to come and f…k the cops”. Progress in there world sees knuckledusters replacing belts as their main weapons. Gangster movies influence their behaviour and they are proud of their scars.

Some have chosen a profession, like Idrissa Sani Malam, who ‘drives’ a sort of rickshaw taxi and is particularly proud of a scar left by a woman, “we were lovers, or I was at least a regular client.” Sex traffickers are part of the territory, their victims are girls as young as 15. Even women in the “Red Light district” are not protected, least of all by the police: They have not found the perpetrator who had slashed a woman’s throat three month ago. One way or the other, most of them end up in prison, a notoriously sordid place, where the men queue to use squalid latrines.

Meanwhile, Salissou Cikara visits a friend waiting for his trial and blaming ‘snitches’ for his fate. Cikara then goes home to his pregnant girlfriend, whose ultrasound costs the earth: 3000 Francs for the ultrasound, 9500 Francs for a blood test, and that’s not the end of the story. The civilised world has brought medicine, but at a price.

Bawo “has done a lot of bad things”. Like kidnapping girls in short skirts and abducting them into make-shift rooms “where we emptied ourselves into them. If they screamed, we put our hands over their mouths. We were breaking them in, with knives. Over time, they got used to it and became one of us. Reggae music plays all night as we smoke weed and take Tramadol.”

There’s always someone to blame for societal breakdown. This time it’s the ‘foreigners’ for stealing the country’s minerals. Ramatou Ma Main – Ramsess for short – is a hermaphrodite who gets by smuggling gasoline in daring night raids, hunted down by federal custom agents. Rumour has it that the gasoline smuggled into Niger actually belongs to the state of Niger. And votes on election days are rather cheap, 2000 Francs does not go far. Then Cikara has a brain wave: they will give up crime and form a security organisation – but this costs money. So the gang goes and works hard in the nearby quarry, but worse is to come, and Cikara dreams on. DoP Julien Bossé takes us to the centre of the action, his incredible footage particularly of Ramsess’ last raid and confrontation with the custom officers feel like a violent action thriller but this is a real life. Aicha Macky goes where her male director colleges would not dare to go: unflinchingly into the heart of darkness. AS

ALSO SELECTED FOR CPH:DOX | PREMIERED AT VISIONS DE REAL NYON 2021 | NOW SCREENING AT IDFA 2021

Behind the Door (1919) Prime Video

Dir: Irvin Willat | Wri: Gouverneur Morris, Luther Reed | Cast: Hobert Bosworth, Jane Novak, Wallace Beery, James Gordon | US 70′

Walter Schwieger, the U-boat commander who on 7 May 1915 ordered the torpedoing of the ‘Lusitania’ could never of dreamt of the bloodlust against his countrymen that his action fuelled in the United States. It certainly kept Wallace Beery in steady employment playing bestial huns as late as Rex Ingram’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), when he chomps on a chicken leg while instructing a firing squad; and it’s when he makes his first appearance in Behind the Door as a dastardly U-boat commander that this film – which shows hatred of the Hun unabated a full year after Germany’s surrender – comes to life.

It comes as no surprise that Gouverneur Morris’s original 1918 short story was barely two pages long, as most of ‘Behind the Door’ feels simply like preparation for Hobart Bosworth’s vengeance on Beery for what he does to his wife. Bosworth is taxidermist Oscar Krug, who after sampling the hostility welling up in small town America against those like himself of German extraction, shows his patriotism by rolling up his sleeves and commanding a ship to fight the German navy.

It would be interesting to know if submarines in wartime actually did make off with shipwrecked female passengers as spoils of war as Beery does with Bosworth’s wife, but it’s not hard to imagine. Harder to anticipate is the incredible vengeance Bosworth exacts on him when fate bring them together again two months later.

Having already failed to recognise Bosworth as the grimacing face pressed against a porthole as his U-boat dived, Beery is then stupid enough to brag in detail over a cup of coffee about what he did to his wife. The first of two visual shocks that follow is the shot of her being tossed through a doorway to Beery’s sex-starved crew like a bone to a pack of starving Alsations (when they’re through with her she’s then fired out of a torpedo tube); the second is a close-up of Bosworth’s taxidermy tool kit, which Bosworth had conveniently brought along with him. What he does with this kit is not shown, but we’re left in no doubt.

Bela Lugosi did the same to Boris Karloff at the conclusion of The Black Cat (1934) fifteen years later, and in Intolerance (1916) a man has his head lopped off on camera. Doubtless equally gruesome moments exists elsewhere in pre-Code cinema, but in those days such moments were all the more effective for being unexpected; unlike the depressing competition modern filmmakers seem to be constantly engaged in of drawing attention to themselves by outdoing each other in pushing the limits in the depiction of ultra-violence on the big screen. @Richard Chatten

Escape (1948)

Dir: Joseph L Mankiewicz | Philip Dunne | Cast: Rex Harrison, Peggy Cummins, William Hartnell, Norman Woodland, Jill Esmond | US Drama

In the hands of Joseph Mankiewicz, this version of John Galsworthy’s play originally produced in the West End in 1926 with Leslie Howard, and first filmed in 1930 with Gerald du Maurier is predictably verbose, but, like Joseph Losey’s Figures in a Landscape works equally well as a location-shot thriller and as an existential drama.

The law is depicting going about its usual business of persecuting the law-abiding when a boorish detective ends up hitting his head in one of those accidents so common in the movies; for this, war hero Rex Harrison gets three years in Dartmoor for manslaughter. The film doesn’t make it clear how much of his time he’s served when he makes a break for it in the fog, but his chances don’t seem very good; and the evident irony of the title is compounded by plot contrivances like the way Peggy Cummins’ path keeps crossing that of Harrison. Miss Cummins is obviously in a trap of her own, betrothed to a man she doesn’t love; and she’s given a lot of didactic dialogue which it seems as unlikely that a human being would actually say in conversation as some of the things the script requires detective William Hartnell to say.

Never mind. Although you know this can’t end well, there’s plenty of action, enlivened by Freddie Young’s location photography on Dartmoor; and it builds up to a satisfying – and moderately hopeful – conclusion for which we have been prepared by a tremendous scene with Norman Wooland as the sympathetic parson. He talks a lot of sense (“The church was endowed by God, but is managed by men; and where there are men there are doubts and confusion”); and since he has just said “Our human laws are as fallible as the men who make them”, the quotation from Galsworthy with which the film concludes (“The law is what it is – a majestic edifice sheltering all of us, each stone rests on another”) seems intended either to placate the censors or to be taken with a pinch of salt. @Richard Chatten

House of Cardin (2019)

Dirs: P David Ebersole/Todd Hughes | US Doc | With: Hanae Mori, Dionne Warwick, Sharon Stone, Naomi Campbell, Hiroko Matsumoto, Jean-Michel Jarre, Philippe Starck | US Doc

P. David Ebersole and Todd Hughes (Mansfield 66/67) look into the world of fashion icon Pierre Cardin (1922-2020) giving a real sense of who he was and how he shook things up in the early Sixties.

Cardin wasn’t just a fashion designer – he was all about futurism, transforming haute couture, watches, even sunglasses and cigarette lighters with a unique vision for the modern world in the late 1950s and 1960s. Always looking forward to the future and, crucially, maintaining control of his brand, and never selling out.

Born Pietro Costante Cardin near Treviso in summer 1922, his Italian wine merchant parents had fled to France to avoid Fascism, and Pierre grew up near St Etienne with his ten siblings, eventually drifting to Paris after the war to study architecture. Rather than designing buildings he was drawn to fashion tailoring eventually joining the Paris atelier of Paquin in 1945 where he was put to work on the fantasy costumes of Jean Cocteau’s classic Beauty and the Beast, and by 1947 he was heading up the tailleur atelier of Christian Dior. He was 25. Striking out on his own he founded the House of Cardin last three years later where his avantgarde designs focused on geometric Space age forms, rather like his fellow designer André Courrèges (1923-2016).

Ebersole and Hughes opt for a chronological structure and a punchy style of editing that pops with archive footage intercutting soundbites from Cardin’s catwalk models with collaborators from all over the world: this reflects how the designer pioneered international markets way beyond the West in a International branding furore that took in Japan, China and Russia where he was the very first to develop an easy style of ready to wear fashions with a keen eye to the global possibilities on offer.

Cardin’s triumph was to offer women freedom after the constraints of those corsets and tight-fitting styles of the early 1950s, with bright primary colours and futuristic fabrics that were cutting edge: the “bubble dress” was a case in point, fashioned on the bias over a stiffened base. These were not elegant pieces but flirty, fun and functional, offering comfort and flexibility, they still look ultra modern even today. Apart from his global branding initiative, Cardin was also one of the first to choose models from different ethnic backgrounds such as Naomi Campbell and Hiroko Matsumoto.

But there was a price to pay for all Cardin’s maverick desire to spread his brand far and wide: in 1959 he decided to make a range of designer dresses for those with style but a shoestring budget, and fell foul of the strict French federation of haute couture. This was seen as cheapening the designer ethos of the era – even today you will never see Chanel or Yves Saint Laurent in the sale.

Ever the enterprising innovator, Cardin moved on inexorably, branching out into new ventures such as cars, furniture and – in a musical twist – the Espace Cardin, a theatre in the former Cafe des Ambassadeurs in Paris which even featured Alice Cooper, and provided the springboard for Gerard Depardieu’s acting career.

Jean-Paul Gaultier is one of the most amusing talking heads, revealing how Cardin was turned away from Maxim’s restaurant for not wearing a tie in 1960, and duly brought the place two decades later, making it trendy and cool. In 2001 he acquired the former home of the Marquis de Sade, the Chateau Lacoste, where he ran a respected musical drama festival in the heart of the Vaucluse.

Cardin himself appears in footage as rather subversive and cheeky with a glint his eye and a ready quip: like a little boy he loved to be in the limelight, with the talent and foresight to back it all up. But we learn little of the man behind the persona, or of his love life beyond his surface popularity as a sexual conquest – by his own admission “I was very much in demand”. Openly gay, he also enjoyed a long affair with Jeanne Moreau in the 1960s and rather like his countryman Yves Saint Laurent he later became romantically involved with his business partner Andre Oliver. Still firing on all cylinders in his late 90s when this biopic was made, the legendary Pierre Cardin was more than just a designer, he was a major creative force to be reckoned with and is now a household name. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 26 APRIL 2021 ON MAJOR PLATFORMS

Aviva (2021) Curzon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CURZON HOME CINEMA | 30 April 2021

The Hands of Orlac (1924) Blu-ray

Dir.: Robert Wiene; Cast: Conrad Veidt, Alexandra Sorina, Fritz Kortner, Hans Homma, Fritz Strassny, Carmen Catellieri; Osterreich 1924, 92 min.

Four years after his most emblematic feature, Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, director Robert Wiene (1873-1938) filmed Ludwig Nerz’ adaption of Maurice Renard’s novel as a psychological horror feature blending Grand Guignol with German Expressionism. It starred two of the great stars of the German speaking cinema of the first half of the 20th century, Conrad Veidt and Fritz Kortner; both of whom emigrated to the USA, where Veidt would go on to play Major Strasser in Casablanca. The film would be later be reworked as Mad Love in 1935, directed by emigrant Karl Freund and starring fellow émigré Peter Lorre in his Hollywood debuta. Amongst others, there is also a 1960s version of the original which stars Mel Ferrer, Christopher Lee and Donald Pleasence.

Veidt is mesmerising here as creepy tormented concert pianist Paul Orlac (Veidt) who is gravely injured returning from a concert tour when his train collides with one coming in the other direction. At the nearby sanatorium, Dr. Seral (Homma) saves his life by amputating the pianist’s hands, replacing them with those of a convicted murderer. But it’s not only the criminal’s hands he inherits in the ground-breaking surgery, as we discover in a grim twist in the finale.

Based on a novel by Maurice Renard, Wiene vividly brings to life Orlac’s horrifying descent into madness as his genius suffers and his reputation slowly disintegrates, his career in tatters. He is blackmailed by Nera (Kortner) and his father is mysteriously murdered, Orlac’s fingerprints appearing on the weapon. .

DoPs Günther Krampf and Hans Androschin use light and shadow to deft effects in the cavernous set design, making Orlac much more of a genre horror feature than Caligari. Mad Love was Freund’s last feature as a director, but he would go on shooting 45 features, including Key Largo). Meanwhile, Robert Wiene died in 1938 on the set of Ultimatum while in exile in Paris, the feature – starring Erich von Stroheim and Lila Kedrova (The Tenant) was finished by yet another future Hollywood great, Robert Siodmak. AS

COURTESY OF MASTERS OF CINEMA | MAY 2021

West of Shanghai (1937)

Dir: John Farrow | Cast: Boris Karloff, Beverly Roberts, Ricardo Cortez, Gordon Oliver, Sheila Bromley, Vladimir Sokoloff | US 64′

West of Shanghai was the third of four film versions of a play by Porter Emerson Browne (best remembered today for ‘A Fool That There Was’), and was the only version not filmed under the play’s original title of ‘The Bad Man’ or in the original Mexican setting.

Successfully produced on Broadway in 1920, The Bad Man had originally been a comedy, which explains the beguiling flashes of humour sprinkled throughout Ralph Spence’s script; notably in the sassier quips by Lola Galt, and a vaudeville routine in which Fang divests Creed, then Galt, then Dr. Abernathy of $50,000, only for it to eventually end up in Fang’s own wallet.

Boris Karloff is obviously enjoying himself as Chinese warlord General Wu Yen Fang (“I am Fang!!”), despite the uncomfortable-looking makeup, which genuinely gave him blurred vision on the set. His opposite number General Chow Fu-Shan is played by Moscow-born Vladimir Sokoloff, while the authentically Chinese-American actor Richard Loo is the only one not required to adopt an accent as Fang’s US-raised right-hand man Mr. Cheng.

The script does a sort of reverse Psycho by setting up Ricardo Cortez as Gordon Creed as the film’s hero, only to switch allegiance to the boring Jim Hallet (played by Gordon Oliver) and casually have Creed killed off, enabling Hallet to ride off with Creed’s estranged wife Jane (as if anyone cared). Sheila Bromley is so sassy as Lola Galt and Beverly Roberts such a pudding as Jane Creed the film’s switch of emphasis from the former to the latter, and Fang’s unlikely preference for Jane to Lola (“Hair like straw, eye like fog; have wide mouth of fish”) suggests that the script was insufficiently revised to accommodate the casting.

Photography by L. William O’Connell and direction by John Farrow are both up to their usual standard. @Richard Chatten

The Red Kimona (1925)

Dir: Walter Lang | Wri: Dorothy Arzner, Adela Rogers St Johns | Cast: Priscilla Bonner, Nellie Bly Baker, Carl Miller, Mary Carr, Virginia Pearson | US Silent 76′

One of the most sought after missing Hollywood silents is Human Wreckage (1923), a drama about drug addiction that was the first of three crusading independent productions produced by and featuring the actress Dorothy Davenport under the name “Mrs Wallace Reid”.

Number Three was The Crimson Kimona which manages to pack an incredible amount of plot into under eighty minutes while addressing the thorny subjects of prostitution and the rehabilitation of offenders; and, like Human Wreckage, was banned by the British Board of Censors. Unlike the former this happily still survives.

The surprises start early with the name of Walter Lang – whose debut feature this was – prominently displayed as director. For 25 years from the mid-thirties until the early sixties, Lang was a competent ‘A’ feature workhorse for Fox whose name adorns such bland big budget fodder as The King and I without his name ever on its own account ever exciting much interest among scholars. Lang gets solo credit on The Red Kimona (Mrs Wallace Reid getting a separate supervisory one), and does a remarkably good job, aided by excellent photography by James Diamond and uniformly good performances, not all of them credited. (Tyrone Powers Sr, for example, plays Gabrielle’s brutish father, but the pinched-faced actress playing her mother is uncredited). In order to sugar the pill of the earnest Sunday school nature of the subject (complete with biblical quotations), The Red Kimona is replete throughout with blandishments that keep the audience attentive, ranging from coloured inserts of the eponymous Red Kimona (presumably designed to symbolise the heroine’s fall from polite society) to an invigorating car chase through Santa Fe.

Making much of being based on a genuine criminal case in New Orleans in 1917, and scripted by Adela Rogers St. Johns and Dorothy Arzner, the film begins and ends with Mrs Wallace Reid speaking directly to camera, her words conveyed by subtitles; a device routinely used in sound films and on television, but which I’ve never before encountered in a silent film.

Gabrielle’s suitor Howard Blaine (played by Carl Miller) is so repulsive – significantly a bruise can be seen on her upper arm in one scene, and the only kindness she receives later is from the prison matron – one suspects a diatribe against men is in the offing; but socialite Mrs. Fontaine, her Mrs Danvers like housekeeper (played with crow-like malice by Emily Fitzroy) and her coven of clucking lady friends get equally short shrift (another eye-catching performance by an uncredited performer is by the actress who plays Mrs. Fontaine’s cynical maid). Gabrielle meanwhile finds her knight in shining armour in a chauffeur’s uniform in the form of Mrs. Fontaine’s chauffeur Freddy, engagingly played by Theodore Von Eltz.

As Gabrielle herself, Priscilla Bonner’s performance grows on you as the film progresses (which is not in straight chronological sequence) and her character evolves as she rolls her big round eyes lovingly filmed in close up. (Like historical detective fiction author Anne Perry when the release of Heavenly Creatures [1994] outed her forty years after the event as the fifties teenage killer Juliet Hulme, the real life Gabrielle Darley was less than thrilled at having the spotlight again turned on her without her permission using her real name; and in 1931 she successfully sued Mrs Wallace Reid for substantial damages.) @Richard Chatten

Palm Springs (2020)

Dir: Max Barbakow | Cast: Andy Sandberg, Cristin Milioti, J K Simmons, Peter Gallagher | US Romcom 90′

As romcoms go this is a blast of sunshine at a grim time when cheerful moving pictures are just what you need when you can’t be bothered with anything deep. Well that’s not exactly fair – Groundhog Day-style buddy movie with a time-loop conceit is probably the best way to describe a film that seeks to escape the infernal repetitiveness of you know what, powered forward by the frisky frolics of a dynamite duo that is Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti whose budding romance feels real and adds meaning – although nothing surprising – to the party as wedding guests forced to go through the same day again and again. There are laughs to be had and it doesn’t overstay its welcome, perfect for an easy night in (again!). MT

NOW ON DIGITAL PLATFORMS

In the Mist | I Dimma Dold | (1953) Netflix

Dir: Lars Eric Kjellgren | Cast: Eva Henning, Sonja Wigert, Hjordis Petterson, Dagmar Ebbesen, Georg Rydeberg, Sven Lindberg | Noir thriller Sweden 82′

A valuable collection of films by the Swedish director Lars Eric Kjellgren have recently appeared on Netflix, including this rather stylish arthouse noir starring Eva Henning as the kittenish femme fatale Lora (a Nordic Lizabeth Scott).

Based on his own novel Vic Suneson’s script begins as Lora is driving away from her comfortable mansion where her husband Walter (a rather ghoulish Georg Rydeberg) is later discovered shot dead. But the murderer remains a mystery as the glacially elegant Lora demurely teases a coterie of locals – including an earnest detective (Sven Lindberg) and a ludicrous pair of old biddies, into solving the crime.

Boasting bold black and white photography by Gunnar Fischer (Wild Strawberries) this is a joy to watch as it gracefully combines vivid realist street scenes of 1950s Stockholm with lush interiors culminating in a ‘Cluedo’ style dinner party denouement primped by Erik Nordgren’s needling score. MT

ON NETFLIX

The Amazing Mrs Holliday (1943)

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

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

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

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

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

Symphony of Noise (2021) CPH:DOX

Dir.: Enrique Sanchez Lansch; Documentary with Matthew Herbert; Germany 2021, 93 min.

Spanish director Enrique Sanchez Lansch has followed British composer Matthew Herbert for ten years to record his experimental sounds in this rather experimental film that plays out like a performance.

Herbert’s credo is that mankind should listen more closely to sounds, if they want to topple right-wing governments – even though the Kent born composer admits that this target may be too fanciful. The genre-breaker Herbert has a proven track record: over 30 albums, film scores, among one for Ridley Scott, and an Oscar for the score of A Fantastic Woman (although the opening track was actually Alan Parson’s Project classic ‘Time’.

Whether underwater or in outer space, Herbert feels entirely at home, composing even for audiences who are asleep. But it all started much closer to home when Herbert recorded the noises of his newly-born piglets for the rest of their lives – even during their slaughter. He is tired of the repetitive approach to piano and violin, so has learned to play both instruments from scratch, transferring his critique to the cooking of an omelette.

Forty-four eggs are first selected, a bared-footed woman then crunches the shells, the sound creating a sort of entirely new sounds while the omelette is being made. Other sound mixes include people having sex; forests being cut down; and an over-ground train in Berlin. Having lived in the city, Herbert has created a sound Symphony of people dying (79) and being born (183), with his “orchestra” performing the applicable noises like the final breath and first cry.

Mahler’s music is certainly appropriate for a staged funeral, with the composer combining this performance, and discovering that Mahler had to use a flute for a birdsong, whilst the teenage boy Herbert could use a recorder to catch the original sound of the birds.

In the RIAS Berlin radio station, Herbert rehearses his “BrexitBig Band“, to protest against the vote in favour of leaving the EU. “Leave all the fuckers and their hatred behind” is one of the refrains. Having watched Emma swim for 14 hours in the English Channel, we then imagine a love song between an English and French person on the shores of the English channel aka ‘La Manche’.

Tree cutting sounds remind the composer that “we are all living in an emergency situation“. Nevertheless, he still has time to deep-fry his trumpet in a Fish and Chip shop, before ending in space with “the impossible sound of solar winds” and “the sound of virgin lights hurtling through space.”

DoPs Thilo Schmidt and Anne Misselwitz use appropriate images for this cacophony of sounds. And although Sanchez Lansch starts to feel like a mischievous magician pulling too many rabbits to pull out of a hat with his myriad exotic recordings Symphony is certainly inventive and full of weird ideas that occasionally stun and surprise the audience. AS

CPH:DOX COPENHAGEN 2021

Eternal Love (1929) Prime Video

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

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

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

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

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

Effie Gray (2015)

Dir: Richard Laxton | Wri: Emma Thompson | Cast: Dakota Johnson, Greg Wise, Julie Walters, John Suchet, Claudia Cardinale, Richard Scamarcio, Tom Sturridge, Robbie Coltrane | UK Drama 104′

Richard Laxton’s bleak but beguiling Victorian drama transports us back to an era where women were often the sexually oppressed victims of emotionally repressed husbands. Such was the case with the intellectual giant and emotional pigmy John Ruskin (1819-1900).

A British stage actress Mrs Patrick Cambell described marriage as “the deep, deep peace of the double bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise lounge” This was one martial bed that was distinctly frosty.

Emma Thompson’s intriguing script unveils the frigid nature of the leading art critic who nevertheless left his name to an Oxford College – albeit a minor one (Ruskin himself attended Christ Church). Thompson and her husband Greg Wise both star here as Ruskin and the women who ‘exposes’ him – so to speak, at a time where even table legs were often covered up least they dare to offend, there’s a feeling that ardour and ecstasy was slowly burning its way through many a female bodice – and one such garment was worn by Ruskin’s young wife Euphemia (1828-97) – elegantly and dolefully played here by Dakota Fanning – who endured a sexless marriage for nearly six years before escaping, quite legitimately, to the arms of John Everett Millais (Sturridge). Their marriage had never been consummated so it wasn’t even a menage-a-deux, let alone trois.

In keeping with the subject matter Effie Gray is delicately drawn and very painterly despite the gloomy first act where Effie’s spirit is gradually broken within the confines of the marital manor home they share with John’s doting mother (a stern Walters) and her saturnine husband (Suchet). There’s a bit in the middle where the newlyweds escape to Venice for a sweltering sojourn with Claudia Cardinale and her raffish son Rafael (Scamarcio) who sets Effie’s senses on fire, further repressing her boring bed dodger husband, who retaliates by calling her a harlot. Then it’s back to the Lake District where persistent rain falls as Ruskin, Effie and Millais embark on some plein-air painting.

By this stage the arrogant Ruskin has retreated to his books and Effie’s hair is falling out. At this point on to the scene jumps Emma Thompson vivacious as ever, claiming that “the first years of marriage are often hard”. Clearly she something else in mind. But it’s thanks to her Lady Eastlake that Effie extricates herself, culminating in a landmark court case wherein the marriage was annulled.

Laxton avoids melodrama or sensationalism producing instead a rather morbid feature the only passion coming from Thompson’s rather bumptious noblewoman who despite her socialite credentials is still aware of how marriage could often be a stricture where women were forced to honour and obey, even amongst the nobility who found their pleasures elsewhere.

Ruskin was the product of an over-bearing couple who hothoused his talents but stymied his emotional growth, reducing him to a pompous man-child capable of freezing out the warmest of souls, making him a perfect critic but a parlous companion. MT

EFFIE GRAY will re-release in Virtual Cinemas and on VOD 19th April.

Virtual Cinemas

Rio Cinema, Rich Mix, ICA, Home, Plymouth Arts Centre, The Dukes, Watershed, Lewes Depot, The Riverside, Northampton Filmhouse, The Dome, Derby Quad and Bonington Theatre.

Digital Platforms:

Amazon, iTunes, Virgin, IFI Player, Chili, Youtube, Microsoft, Google, Vimeo on Demand, Small Screen Machine

SPECIAL COLLECTOR’S EDITION DVD/BLURAY OUT ON 31 MAY 2021

Les Enfants Terribles (2021) Visions du Reel 2021

Dir.: Ahmet Necdet Cupur; Documentary with Zeynep Cupur, Mahmud Cupur, Nezahat Cupur, Ahmet Cupur; Turkey/Germany 2021, 92 mins.

Taking the title from Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1950 film adaptation of Cocteau’s play this reflection on the past is also a study of a family fighting tradition – and each other – in a world that has seen so many changes.

First time director Ahmet Necdet Cupur is back home in the village of Keskincek, twenty years after freeing himself from the stifling family set-up in south eastern Turkey. Three year’s in the making, the film revisits a bitter domestic battlefield: his brother and sister-in-law on one side; his old-fashioned parents on the other. Nothing changes, or so it seems.

Starting in January 2018 Ahmet makes contact with his sister Zeynep and her audio description of what’s going on with her parents hits a raw nerve: “Keep on writing, you have shown me exactly how your life is”. Now he’s back in situ with a camera to film the goings-on. Teenage Zeynep works in a cloth factory in the nearby city of Antalya but feels too young to be married off by her father who keeps her earnings for himself, whilst mostly loafing around all day. Her dream is to study and go to university, a plan, which both her parents object to, because she is a female.

The family is in a mess and forced to marry the kids off for financial reasons: brother Mahmut was made to marry Nezahat, so as to secure her dowry (known as a ‘mahr’), but the two have never slept together, Mahmut preferring a certain Birsen, whom we never meet. Meanwhile his rather has been trying to unlock his son’s mobile, to check what’s going on.

Mahmut is no spring chicken having already held down a job in Kuwait. But the family Imam Hüseyim Cupur, won’t grant him a divorce on any grounds. And now the village gossipers are out in force wondering if he is ‘a real man’. Zeynep is fully aware that the woman is always at fault in Turkish divorce proceedings, even her own mother won’t support her.

Election Day arrives and the whole family is forced to vote for the father’s choice. Zeynep is particularly annoyed, since this candidate has been in office for donkey’s years and hasn’t made any changes for the better. She takes it all out on her religious mother :”You say, you are old and wise. But you are not, you have never read a book in your life”. But the complaint falls on deaf ears: “Good created us to live here, in our home. And the only book I am going to read is the Koran”.

Ahmet’s involvement certainly a certain tension in the family dynamics – never has “the fly on the wall” been closer to the action. The tone is hyper-aggressive, with both parents and children vowing to kill each other. But in the end,

But despite the conflict, things do eventually move on for both kids, Ahmet delivering a positive, if not ‘happy’ ending. The young generation is slowly taking over: religion and patriarchy are on the back foot. Ahmet’s debut is a vociferous and direct testament. AS

INTERNATIONAL FEATURE COMPETITION | VISIONS DU REEL | NYON | SWITZERLAND | Shared Special Jury Prize Winner 2021

Lifeboat (1944) TPTV

Dir: Alfred Hitchcock | Cast: Tallulah Bankhead, John Hodiak, Walter Slezak, William Bendix, Mary Anderson, Henry Hull | US Drama 97′

That the celebrity of Hitchcock’s films bears no relation to their actual achievement is attested to by the obscurity in which this little beauty continues to languish.

Having already set The Lady Vanishes largely on a train, although Hitchcock never got to make a film entirely set in a phone booth (as he once longingly speculated), he comes close with this bold and stylish exercise that anticipates his own Rope and 12 Angry Men by making a film consisting entirely of people talking within a confined space. (And also contains a ferocious murder unaccompanied by music like that in Torn Curtain.)

Although obviously shot entirely in the studio tank, it’s still a thoroughly cinematic experience thanks to a script as raw as the strictures of the Hays Office would then permit, gothic photography by Glenn MacWilliams capable of virtuoso effects like sweat breaking on a man’s brow and consistently superb performances (one of them from Hume Cronyn, who latter collaborated on the screenplay of Rope), including a typically ambivalent Hitchcock ambivalent villain, as ruthless and resourceful as Eric Portman had been in 49th Parallel.

(Also as in Rope, Hitchcock himself got round the problem of making his appearance by featuring in an advertisement for Reduco – the “Obesity Slayer”. @Richard Chatten

NOW ON TALKING PICTURES TV | PRIME VIDEO

The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) Prime Video

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

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

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

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

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

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

Bellum – The Daemon of War (2021) Visions du Reel 2021

Dir.: David Herdies, Georg Götmark; Documentary with Bill Lyon, Fredrik Bruhn, Paula Bonstein, Aisha Lyon, Sweed, Karolina Bruhn; narrated by Johannes Anyuru; Sweden/ Denmark 2021, 87 min.

War is in the DNA of humans, always has been. The Romans were masters of conquering countries on more than one continent. Their motto was “War pays for itself, so soldiers do not need to be paid, there is always plenty to plunder”. Statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 – 43 BC) was an early warmonger, ending his speeches in front of the Senate for years with the call for war: “Anyhow, I am of the opinion, that we should destroy Cartago”. After a few years, his peers got the message and the African city, capital of a kingdom, was indeed conquered.

This essay film from Swedish director duo David Herdies and Georg Götmark traces the history of war, present and future: veteran war photographer Paula Bronstein delivering some cruel images from Kabul.

But amidst the doom and gloom AI scientist Fredrick Bruhn has a surprisingly upbeat theory about the end of armed conflict, and US veterans Sweed and Bill Lyon are the living examples of survivors of the recent outings of the US war machine.

Not that far from Los Alamos in New Mexico, where Robert Oppenheimer and his team developed the first nuclear bomb in the State of Nevada (his prophetical warnings open the feature) is the location of the US Army’s Drone Operations and Training Base – AFB. Demonstrators with placards protest outside the gates, while veterans Sweed and co, cheer on every car leaving or entering the compound, making fun of the demonstrators. “I bet she borrowed the baby”, comments Sweed on a mother carrying her child.

Later we listen to Sweed and his friend Bill Lyon talking about their active service experience that destroyed people rather than buildings. In training, the drones attacked the simulated town of Kandahar, creating the atmosphere of an arcade game. The images are not just circles any more, but human forms, the intention is to blur the lines between the lines between practice and real actions. But for the veterans, the question is just survival: “When your compound has been hit, you are either dead, or you go back to sleep. For most people this is crazy, but I loved it. It was boring when you get home.”

Meanwhile Bronstein shows the photos of the Kabul victims she asks a boy to give her a smile. He refuses. Paula explains” I want to put some beauty into my photos, some life. To make the victims human. Meanwhile AI developer Fredrik Bruhn is hopeful about the future: “We are twenty years away from the point, when a computer can build the next generations of AI himself, he will replicate human brains, but goes much further than the 500 billion synapses of our brains. I do not see that we can have a world without war, as long as humans are in control. But robots do not have our DNA inheritance, they do not need to act like us. In the end the question will be about human existence, or the survival of digital humanity.

Bellum is perhaps too complex for its limited running time. But it certainly shows the existential question flagging up the need to write humankind out of the script. The documentary is dedicated to Bill Lyon, who, like Sweed, passed away. AS

INTERNATIONAL FEATURE FILM COMP | VISIONS DU REEL 2021

Black Oxen (1923)

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

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

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

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

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

Peril for the Guy (1956)

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

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

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

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

NOW ON BFI PLAYER

Karloff at Columbia 1935-42

Boris Karloff was born in London as William Henry Pratt on 23 November 1887. His parents shared Indian ancestry and his mother’s maternal aunt was Anna Leonowens whose writings inspired The King and I musical. Pratt was tall and well built but suffered from a lisp which adds a rasp to his deep, melodious voice. The youngest of nine children, he was privately educated at Uppingham and went up to King’s College, London with a view to joining the Foreign Office, but eventually ended up travelling to Canada where he fell into acting adopting his stage name of Boris Karloff. He would marry six times, clearly his big break in Frankenstein in 1931 at the age of 45 didn’t put women off.

As one of the legends horror cinema he made six horror films during his time at Columbia, three with Nick Grinde, one with Robert Dymtryk and a final comedy spoof, joining forces with Peter Lorre: The Boogie Man Will Get You directed by Lew Landers.

The Black Room (1935)

Writing for The Spectator in 1935, Graham Greene described Roy William Neil’s thriller as “absurd and exciting”, and “wildly artificial.” praising both the acting of Karloff and the direction of Neill, and noting that Karloff had been given a long speaking part and “allowed to act at last”, and that Neill had “caught the genuine Gothic note” in a manner that displayed more historical sense than any of Alexander Korda’s films.

In the early 19th century twins are born to the DeBerghman family who rule a Czech province from their majestic medieval castle, bizarrely located in the Tyrol and designed by Stephen Goosson (Columbia art director who won an Oscar for Lost Horizon). A curse on the family states that the birth of twin boys will destroy the dynasty forever, the younger will murder the elder one in the infamous Black Room, betrayed by the family dog.

Made for Columbia Pictures at the height of his career, an eloquent Karloff has fun here fleshing out the characters of the gallantly endearing gentleman Anton and his arrantly fiendish older brother Baron Gregor (who women both fear and detest). Magically captured in Allen G Siegler’s luminous black and white camerawork, it’s fascinating to see Karloff getting his teeth into a fully formed, non horror role. The pet mastiff Tor is terrific in support.

The Man They Could Not Hang (1939)

Columbia’s prescient sci-fi themed riff on the Old Dark House theme sees Karloff directed by Nick Grinde in the first (and arguably most intelligent) of his ‘mad scientist’ roles as Dr. Henryk Savaard a kindly and convincing psychopath bringing the dead back to life through the use of an artificial heart, twenty five years before reality. But when his healthy patient dies in a ‘failsafe’ experiment Savaard is tried in a pithy courtroom procedural (“I offered you Life, but you gave me Death”) and condemned to swing. Using the doc’s same methods his assistant, Lang (Byron Foulger), revives him, but Savaard is bitter for revenge.

The Devil Commands (1941)

Karloff really brings out the humanity of a bereaved husband mourning his beloved wife in Edward Dmytryk’s Gothic horror outing based on William Sloane’s novel The Edge of Running Water. It’s a convincing beast from the ‘mad doctor’ stable that explores the afterlife where science meets the surreal in a sorrowful romantic love story stylishly captured by Allen G Siegler’s spooky shadowplay making Karloff look raffishly sexy.

Nick Grinde collaborated with Karloff in two other ‘mad scientist’ films: The Man with Nine Lives (1940) and Before I Hang (1940). MT

NOW ON BLU-RAY EUREKA CLASSICS | 3 May 2021

The Last Shelter (2021) IDFA

Dir.: Ousmane Samassekou; Documentary; Mali/France/ Germany, 2021, 85 min.

Malian director Ousmane Samassekou has filmed random travellers from all over North Africa in a transit home in Gao, near the Sahara Desert. Most have come a long way, the nearest from the Malian capital of Bamako which is 496 km away – and some as far away as Burkina Faso. Their common goal is Algeria, a stepping stepping stone away from France and Italy where there are magic money trees and streets of gold. The reality is migrant camps and years of misery.

The Caritas – House of Migrants caters for mostly young people whose aim is to cross the desert, however reluctantly, to their families in Bamako or more far-flung destinations. Many of the girls and women have spent time in captivity and have been raped. Yet they travel on regardless, risking it all. One 16-year old girl talks about the usual teenage pipe dreams of becoming a celebrity, an actress or a boxing champion. Far from this reverie is the reality of road blocks, where they often robbed on the money to pay the people smugglers taking them over the border. They’d have been much safer staying at home with their families.

Esther doesn’t want to share details of her relative, ashamed that she has not made it to France, even though her family has given her money to support them from Europe. So her dreams are largely built on wild ideas from unrealistic parents who are simply living in the cloud cuckoo land of social media, and she is caught in an invidious trap. Another young woman had ended up in captivity, and only thanks to a benevolent older woman, has been released – but she still wants to try again to get to Europe from this Sahara’s hostile terrain and treacherous sandstorms.

Mariko, an older man, begs staff not to send him to Bamako where they will give him injections which make him sleep all the time. Another young woman was sold by the man who was supposed to be looking after her. Endless stories from Sahara crossings are told: “You die without warning. No matter why, they shoot us like chickens.” The staff warns them over and over again: “Your dreams and illusions make you feel clever, but you will not reach your destinations, it is better to have a job at home, than to dream of abroad.”

Made on a shoestring budget, The Last Shelter could do with a re-edit. But the rawness of the material lends itself to some structural inadequacies, a more polished version would only mask the terror these migrants have been through – and, worse, want to risk all over again. Their lives are so far removed from the dream of the places they want to reach – they think that wearing the logo teeshirt of a millionaire footballer from Barcelona and Arsenal – will transport them on a magic carpet to that lifestyle. They as well might try and reach Mars. AS

Studio One in Hollywood: 1984

Dir: Paul Nickell | Creator/Wri: Fletcher Markle | US Drama

As a huge admirer of Orwell’s original novel I was pleasantly surprised that although inevitably not in the same league as Nigel Kneale’s BBC adaptation broadcast the following year, how much of the basic storyline – and more importantly the mood – adaptor William Templeton’s distillation managed to get into just 50 minutes (minus commercials) broadcast live on a TV budget.

A modern viewer will approach this version with scepticism, knowing that it was made at the height of anti-Red hysteria in the United States and of the blacklist. An opening narration underlined by Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony has been added to Orwell’s story to convey Soviet-style totalitarianism and stresses that “What happens to the people in this story might happen to us. Might happen to you. If we should ever relax in our fight for freedom, if we should allow any individuals or any group of individuals to reduce our freedom of thought, our freedom of speech, our freedom of religion, then what happens to the people in this story will happen to us.” However, the irony implicit in this exhortation forcefully delivered by CBS newscaster Don Hollenbeck in the context of the McCarthyite America of 1953 is probably deliberate; and Hollenbeck himself was hounded into committing suicide by gassing himself the following year by a relentless campaign of press harassment headed by a Hearst columnist named – I kid you not! – O’Brian. (Hollenbeck is played by Ray Wise in the 2005 film ‘Good Night, and Good Luck’).

The production looks suitably expressionistic (the bizarre, vaguely abstract portrait of Big Brother somewhat resembling Dr. Mabuse), and although big, strapping Eddie Albert is as miscast as the undernourished, downtrodden Winston Smith as Edmond O’Brien was in the film version three years later, like O’Brien he gives his usual excellent performance. Fans of ‘Bonzana’ will be surprised to see Lorne Greene as an incisive O’Brien. Norma Crane (little known to film viewers, but memorable as Ellie Martin in ‘Tea and Sympathy’ and Golde in ‘Fiddler on the Roof’) is a sassy Julia who I personally found far sexier in her regulation-issue dungarees & blouse and leather greatcoat than the fifties party frock she changes into during her trysts with Winston (in this version of the future it’s mainly the women rather than the men who wear ties), and the moment when she undoes and discards her Anti-Sex League sash carries quite an erotic charge. @Richard Chatten

NOW ON AMAZON

The Last Photograph (2017)

Dir: Danny Huston | Cast: Danny Huston, Jonah Hauer-King, Sarita Choudary, Stacy Martin, Vincent Regan, Jaime Winstone | Drama, 85′

“everybody’s unhappy, you’ll learn that in time”.

Danny Huston stars and directs for the first time in this slight but thoughtful paean to loss and longing set in a summery Chelsea in the run up to the Lockerbie air tragedy in 1988. Financed by the Rausings and photographed partly in monochrome partly in a washed out aesthetic by ace photographer Ed Rutherford it is based on the best-selling novel by Simon Astaire (who also wrote the script).

Dominating the cast with his star quality and allure Huston plays troubled and tousled-haired pater familias Tom Hammond who finds himself alone in a fusty old mews house, running a dilettante book shop and driving a vintage car (obviously not at the same time). Nobody quite knows what this Hollywood hard-hitter is doing in town with his teenage son Luke (Jonah Hauer-King) who is loved up in a long distance affair with New York based Stacy Martin – referred to as simply ‘the bird’. But the Rausings clearly wrote an open cheque for the project so money was no object although the result feels rather underpowered as we never really feel invested in Hammond’s character before we’re required to feel his pain.

What starts as an everyday story of disgruntled Londoners going about their business, suddenly branches out something more imaginative when Hammond’s life is blown apart by two random events, first his bag is stolen containing the titular photo, then his son gets caught up in the Lockerbie incident on his way to New York.

Clearly Huston had Nic Roeg and Terrence Malick in mind with his melange of dreamy slowmo sequences combined with archive footage and mournful reflections on the River Thames as Hammond mournfully reflects on the tragedy and its implications on a personal and universal level. And although the shifts in tone feel quite abrupt from the banal scenes as the film establishes its plot to the aftermath of the tragedy it doesn’t fall into the trap of easy answers or bogus love affairs, although Sarita Choudary’s character tries desperately to seduce Hammond at his lowest ebb after antagonising him in the opening scenes as his neighbour in the Chelsea Market. Stacy Martin is her usual vapid self as Luke’s girlfriend. Huston light up every scene with his charismatic presence but more about how he came to be this rather morose central character would have been welcome MT

THE LAST PHOTOGRAPH is released in the UK and Ireland to download / stream

from 26th April 2021 from all good digital platforms

A Man and A Camera 2021 | CPH:DOX 2021

Dir.: Guido Hendrikx; Documentary; Netherlands 2021, 64 min,

“What are you doing here? Why are you filming me?” is exactly the reaction you’d expect if you rang someone’s doorbell and randomly pointed a camera at them without any permission. But this uncontrived candid camera approach also throws up some unexpected results.

But this exactly what Dutch director Guido Hendrikx did in his observational documentary that sees him wandering around a small, unnamed town in the Netherlands, candid camera at the ready when doors are opened. The film also works as a fascinating exploration of front doors, many of them works of art.

The reactions of the homeowners in not unexpected. One person threatens quite reasonably to trash his camera, another one attempts it un successfully. Somebody wants to know “is there a deeper meaning” – apparently not. The man with the camera is told by one rather stoic man, who lets him into his house, where he carries on filming, ” he should be aware that the police may take an interest in him, you know, there are group chats, and one may get frightened”. His grandchildren are certainly not afraid.

In the town square we watch two female police officers looking at their mobiles, but no action is taken. Another couple lets him into their home and he keeps filming, whilst coffee is prepared. Gradually people let him into their homes, and their hearts as the film becomes a surprising arm’s length confessional: The wife tells him “I’ll only work for another three weeks, then it’s over. I’ve worked for the same employer 31 years. My husband was laid off two years ago, because of his age, that’s not nice, is it?” But when she goes into the kitchen, she tells her husband: “Keep an eye on him, yes”.

Soon our cameraman is becoming part of the wallpaper for several of his subjects, gaining their confidence as he inveigles himself into their lives. The soon to be pensioners are a case in point. The grandfather is also unfazed by the filming, asks the filming guest to “Leave me a note if you go, and tell me why you were here”. Left alone, the cameraman films the family leaving as Leonard Cohen’s ‘Going Home’ ends a rather enigmatic feature.

At heart we are all social animals in the right conditions. A Man and A Camera is another example of how people often accept unconfrontational intrusion in their lives, taking things a step further than their voluntarily offerings shared on social media. This uninvited guest here offers an opportunity for people to unburden themselves, a non-religious confessional, almost, once a level of trust has been established. Given the placid, unquestioning nature this unsolicited interloper, people are only to happy to let him into their lives. Hendrikx observational film makes insightful impact as an informal social study. He observes and we observe too – no questions asked, or explanations needed. AS

SCREENING AT CPH:DOX | 21 April – May 2021

CPH:DOX | DOX:AWARD – Main Competition

Stella Dallas (1925) Venice Film Festival

Dir: Henry King | Wri: Frances Marion | Cast: Ronald Colman, Belle Bennett, Alice Joyce, Jean Hersholt | US Drama

Anybody even vaguely familiar with the subject of Olive Higgins Prouty’s 1923 novel should know about the famous ending; so I won’t bother spoiling it by discussing it here. More people will be familiar with the 1937 remake made by a better director and with a greater actress in the lead. But moving as she is to watch at the remake’s conclusion, Barbara Stanwyck comes across as naturally more capable and resilient than the rather simple and child-like loser portrayed by Belle Bennett, which is what makes Bennett so heart-breaking to watch.

Although top-billed, Ronald Colman gets only a fraction of the screen time of Bennett and never gets the opportunity to project himself as much more than a bit of a prig as Stella’s husband; and one never really appreciates what drew them to each other in the first place other than on the rebound from other disappointments in love. One can certainly warm, however, to the almost unbearably beautiful Lois Moran as their daughter Laurel, who ages very convincingly from a child to a young woman and whose scenes with Bennett powerfully convey the bond between them. One would have thought that Laurel could have had a quiet word with her mother offering her advice on fitting in with her new up-market circle of friends with a few hints on dress and make-up, and keeping her voice down in polite company (as well as spending a lot less time carousing with the egregious Ed Munn, played by Jean Hersholt, who would cramp anyone’s style; but who she later rather cruelly uses). But it’s in the nature of heart-rending tales of mother-love like this that her sacrifice for her daughter has to go far far beyond the necessary call of duty. @Richard Chatten

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2022 | CLASSICS STRAND 2022

Bergamo Film Meeting 2021 | 24 April – 2 May 2021

BERGAMO FILM MEETING is back for its 39th edition running from 24 April until 2 May in the alpine city in Lombardy, just north of Milan.

Mia Hansen-Løve (France) and João Nicolau (Portugal) are this year’s focus of this year’s Europe, Now!, showcasing a complete retrospective of their films – for the first time in Italy. dedicated to contemporary European filmmakers.

The Festival also includes a slew of recent competition winners and a retrospective dedicated Volker Schlöndorff, director, screenwriter, producer, actor and one of the most significant representatives of post-war German cinema; and Polish Great director, writer and artist Jerzy Skolimowski and Hungarian director and writer Marta Mészáros will honoured with a selection of their films. For animation lovers there is a section dedicated to the complete works of Polish animator Izabela Plucińska along with an array of previews. The complete schedule of the 39th edition will be announced in mid-April.

BERGAMO FILM MEETING | 24 APRIL – 2 MAY 2021

White Heat (1949) Prime Video

Dir: Raoul Walsh | Cast: James Cagney, Virginia Mayo, Edmond O’Brian, Margaret Wycherly | US Crime Drama 116′

Jimmy Cagney was in his fiftieth year when he made this return to the gangster genre, and looks it. But age has neither mellowed him nor slowed him down in this consummate star vehicle with all the trimmings (including a haunting score by Max Steiner – who gets a separate title card all to himself).

White Heat is inconceivable without Cagney, but he’s surrounded by a top supporting cast, most of whom aren’t even named in the credits (I particularly liked G.Pat Collins as the old lag with the hearing aid), with Margaret Wycherley unforgettable as the meanest mama since Ma Barker.

White Heat begins by showing it means business with an incredibly violent train hold-up; after which Cagney continues to display a wanton lack of respect for human life right up to the end. But being Cagney you can’t help rooting for him, and he and Edmond O’Brien (usually unfairly overlooked in discussions of this movie) are both such charismatic presences that it’s almost heartbreaking to see them bond while knowing all along that O’Brien is simply a police plant. Although we’re told well before the end that Cagney is by now hopelessly insane with only brief periods of lucidity, he still seems perfectly functional until the very, very end. (His retelling of the story of the Trojan Horse is particularly cherishable.)

For a late 1940s thriller much of the film actually takes place in the Southern California sun; and the use of locations throughout is exemplary, culminating in the oil refinery on 198th Street and Figueroa, near Torrance, which provides Cagney with a suitably imposing backdrop for his big scene at the end. @Richard Chatten.

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

Backyard Village (2021)

Dir.: Marteinn Thorsson; Cast: Laufey Eliasdottir, Tim Plester, Soley Eliasdottir, Eyglo Eliasdottir, Sara Dögg Asgeiersdottir, Johann Gunnarson; Iceland 2021, 92 min.

Icelandic director Marteinn Thorsson (XL) has adapted Gudmundut Oskarson’s script about grief and how not to deal with it in this zany and often bizarre tragic comedy, set in what can only be described as the back of beyond. Iceland’s hostile terrain and freezing weather lend an icy chill to the tricky human interactions, Thorsson steering his ‘ship of fools’ through to a surprising ending – narrowly avoiding self-parody,.

Colour comes from a few brightly painted wooden huts near a spa where Bryna (L. Eliasdottir) fetches up needing psychiatric help more than physical rehab. Equally disturbed is her next door neighbour, middle-aged Mark (Pelster) from England, who knocks on her door, looking for paprika (yes, it’s a weird one). Both bear the scars of family trauma: Bryna at odds with her mother for leaving when she was only five. Mark is a lone traveller dealing with a recent bereavement. Awkward conversation and a meal cooked by Mark in his self-catering ‘chalet’ allow the two to get to know one another. But their lack of knowing themselves makes it impossible for them to engage in a meaningful way. The next morning the two set off to a remote spot where Mark’s son was discovered after a two-year police search. Meanwhile Bryna’s mother has declared her ‘a missing person’ unable to reach her by ‘phone.

Later, back at base, Johanna (S. Eliasdottir) and sister Gunnhildur (E. Eliasdottir), are livid at Bryna’s sudden disappearance and concerned for her wellbeing. Mark turns up on the scene anxious to defend Bryna with a sudden intrusion that forms the quirky catalyst for a Chekovian showdown of as each desperate character revisits the past.

The feature’s shifting, twisting mood from drama, comedy and outright farce keeps us guessing in an unsettling scenario inflamed by surreal settings, DoP Bergsteinn Björgúlfsson’s stunning camerawork reflecting the magnificent terrain where humans strive to make sense of their existence in an absurd tragic-comedy. AS

Santa Barbara International Film Festival

Rascal (2020) Vilnius Film Festival (2021)

Dir/scr: Peter Dourountzis | Cast: Pierre Deladonchamps, Ophelie Bau, Sebastien Houbani | France, Thriller. 96′

Rascal is a an everyday story of a psychopath played with hard-eyed nonchalance by Pierre Delardonchamps.

There’s nothing sensationalist about the story of Dje. The title might suggest a cheeky playfulness but this couldn’t be far from the truth. Not without charm when he wants something, Dje he can also being quietly menacing as he goes with the flow living by his wits, casually violent if he needs to be. In fact, ‘casual’ sums up a man who never gets worked up about anything. This homeless opportunist is none too shabby in his stylish anorak. A recidivist bottom-feeder who gets by on the streets of Limoges, where we first meet him on a train, rudely intruding on the privacy of his neighbour in a train carriage. But that’s the most harmless trait in his repertoire of antisocial behaviour.

Peter Dourountzis’ first feature takes a detached view of his psychopathic protagonist seen through the steely lens of DoP Jean-Marc Fabre. Limoges is seen as a joyless urban centre where danger lurks at every turn as Dje slips unnoticed in the crowd until he spots an unsuspecting female glance and returns it with a smirking stare. What follows could be a seduction or something more deadly but it mostly occurs off camera, and some women can be extraordinarily accommodating to this enigmatic stranger who is never there when the going gets tough. Of no fixed abode he has no identity papers. Meanwhile, street signs in bus shelters warn women to be vigilant. There’s a killer on the loose. But why would anyone suspect Dje with his boyish looks and clean complexion?.

Rascal was originally made as a short film, Dourountzis cutting himself plenty of slack with the textured script that plays to our fertile imagination and works in a subplot about Dje connecting with an underground network of homeless misfits who offer him room in their squat. Here he meets Maya (Ophelie Bau Mektoub, My Love) and the two have a thing for a while until Dje loses control and needs to move out of the spotlight and back into the shadows. MT

EUROPEAN DEBUT COMPETITION | Best Actor: Pierre Deladonchamps | AT VILNIUS FILM FESTIVAL | 18 MARCH – 6 APRIL 2021 |

The Snorkel (1958) Blu-ray

Dir: Guy Green | Cast: Peter van Eyck, Betta St John, Mandy Miller, Gregoire Aslan | UK Psycho Drama, 90′

In 1968, when I was nine years old, I was about 10 minutes from the end of this gripping Hammer psycho-thriller on Anglia Television when my father amused himself by suddenly packing me off to bed. It’s taken me forty-nine years, but I finally got to see the ending of this film.

Hammer’s psychological thrillers of the early sixties are usually deemed sub-Hitchcock copies of Psycho; but since The Snorkel was released a full two years before Psycho their inspiration is more obviously Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques (1955), from the mystery novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narjejac, who also wrote the book on which Vertigo was based. (Peter van Eyck, the evil stepfather in The Snorkel, actually starred in Clouzot’s previous film, Le Salaire de la Peur.)

The Snorkel was the last film lead played by the unique Mandy Miller, then 13, whose dramatically arched eyebrows and full lips render her still recognisable as the pretty little deaf & dumb girl from Ealing Studio’s classic Mandy (1952). Already convinced that her mother is simply the second of her two parents to be murdered by Van Eyck, a poster of Cousteau’s ‘Le Monde du Silence’ provides her with the clue she needs as to how he did it, and she enters with gusto into a game of cat and mouse with her wicked stepfather. Thus provoked, van Eyck puts on his striped jersey and rubber gloves again, slips her a Mickey Finn, seals off all the windows and doors and turns on the gas, and then…

It’s taken me nearly fifty years to find out what happened next, but it’s a beaut! ©Richard Chatten

NOW ON BLURAY AT AMAZON

Zee and Co. (1972)

Dir: Brian G Hutton | Wri: Edna O’Brian | Cast: Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Caine, Susannah York, Margaret Leighton | US Drama 110′

For anyone who ever hankered to see what a collaboration between the novelist Edna O’Brien and the director of Where Eagles Dare would have looked like, look no further! After two war movies in a row, Brian G. Hutton obviously felt the need to try his hand at something a bit more dangerous; and Elizabeth Taylor in all her big-haired, loud-mouthed and even more loudly dressed glory dominates this delirious spectacle in a way rarely seen since the heyday of Bette Davis.

Taylor and Caine give their all as a self-absorbed pair who make George & Martha from ‘Virginia Woolf’ look like The Brady Bunch. In reality Caine would probably have abandoned or murdered Taylor long ago; but she’s entertaining to watch and listen to – at least for the duration of the movie – and shows a delightful flair for mimicry mocking some of her co-stars. (spoiler coming up: I thought she jumped the shark, however, with her suicide attempt.)

Susannah York understandably seems more than a little overwhelmed by the madhouse she’s wandered into. A few spoilsports have already revealed the twist at the end of this tale. As a bloke I was as surprised and delighted as I was relieved that a woman wrote it; so it absolved me of feeling guilty at being served up with one of my favourite male fantasies about two women.

Whatever happened to these three after the closing credits is anybody’s guess; but the audience I watched it with at the Barbican tonight laughed appreciatively all the way through and gave it an enthusiastic round of applause as the lights went up. @Richard Chatten.

AVAILABLE ON AMAZON

Bad Roads (2021) Vilnius Film Festival 2021

Dir.: Natalya Vorozhbit; Cast: Igor Koltovskyy, Andrey Lelyukh, Vladimir Gurin, Ekaterina Zhurakovskaya, Ekaterina Zahdanovich, Anastasia Parshina, Yulia Matrosova, Marina Klimova, Yuri Kulinich, Zoya Baranovskaya, Oksana Voronina, Sergej Solovyov; Ukraine 2020, 105 min.

Ukraine’s Natalya Vorozhbit shows how women are exploited sexually and emotionally during wartime in this award-winning feature debut adapted from her play of the same name that staged at the Royal Court Theatre in London.

In 2014 Ukraine’s Donbass region was the setting for ongoing hostilities with neighbouring Russia. Women bore the brunt of both sides of the conflict, humanitarian rules were abandoned in the survival of the fittest. Bad Roads explores four episodes in very different settings detailing man’s barbaric treatment of the opposite sex during wartime.

At a casual road stop in the war zone, a headmaster (Koltovskyy) of a nearby school is trapped in a Kafkaesque showdown with two soldiers. The teacher clearly came out with the wrong passport, that morning, and the Kalashnikov rifle in his boot doesn’t help matters. He claims it is a toy model for teaching the students, but the militia men are suspicious. Then it becomes clear why the teacher is driving around: he is looking for a female student; after spotting her, he asks the soldiers to let her go: “You are saying that you defend us, but you are fucking our children. Please leave this one alone, she is an orphan”. The headmaster retrieves his passport and the Captain (Lelyukh), gives the him “the word of honour of an officer that there is no girl in the compound of the militia”. These assurances fall on deaf ears: Both know that he is lying.

Three school girls wait at a bus stop for their soldier friends who bring them cigarettes and cosmetics in return for sex. There’s nothing new in this transactional relationship, but it has a brutal edge as the girls know full well they may be lynched when the soldiers retreat. A grandmother (Matrosova) recounts the past when she and her friends sat on the same bench waiting for their boyfriends to come home from work.

In the most inhumane scenario a human rights journalist (Klimova) has suffers an attempted rape after being detained by soldiers one of whom (Kulinich) shares his childhood memory of a pet hamster who bit him so hard he made the animal drown in his own blood. War makes monsters of these men, death becomes meaningless “at first, you were glad that you were alive, but now there are no feelings left”. The episode ends shockingly.

A young woman (Baranovskaya) driving in the countryside accidentally runs over a chicken. She tries to compensate the old couple (Voronina/Solovyov), who think she has stopped for another reason. “Have you been raped? We can call the police”. They ask candidly. Later on the couple try to bargain with the woman, putting a priceless value on their hen. Bitterness and desperation turn ordinary people to irrational acts of mental cruelty. And there are no happy endings in Bad Roads: Later on the old people hear on their radio that a young local woman was severely injured when her car ran over a landmine.

DoP Voladymir Ivanov oscillates between hyper-realism in the Spa episode, poetic realism in the episode with the three girls and a bit of horror-treatment in the last section. The ensemble cast is brilliant, particularly the three girls, who are non-professionals. But the narratives are grim and unforgiving. Bad Roads is a Hieronymus Bosch painting come to life: utter depravity of mind and body.

VILNIUS FILM FESTIVAL ONLINE | 18 MARCH – 5 APRIL 2021

People We Know Are Confused | Vilnius Film Festival (2021)

Dir.: Tomas Smulkis; Cast: Milda Noreikaite, Gabija Jaraminaite, Arunas Sakalauskas, Paulius Markevicius, Dainus Svobanas, Jolante Dapkunaite; Drama, Lithuania 2021, 102 min.

Hanging on in quiet desperation is the Lithuanian way.

Founded in 1387, Vilnius is still shifting on the fault-lines of its turbulent past according to debut filmmaker Thomas Smulkis, who has made this resonant, unworldly feature debut with a distinct cinematic voice.

Over four summer days Smulkis distills the essence of a modern capital in flux through the surreality of three bewildered inhabitants calling it home – for the time being. An airy feeling of serenity wafts through the summery settings in the limpid light of the Northern hemisphere softened by Sigita Simkuaite’s stylish hues of eau de nil and taupe. Nature plays a signicant part here and Smulkis’ dazzling eye for detail captures everyday life on the streets in unexpected and eerily serendipitous ways.

Goda (Jaraminaite) is the most straightforward of the trio, even though her glorified existence is anything but stable. Will she be able to see the gilded trap she has built for herself? We first meet her overladen with designer shopping bags making her way into a chic apartment in a smart part of town. Goda lives alone so why are a pair of men’s shoes in the hallway? Her sister has invited a colleague to stay, although she lives somewhere else. Clearly Goda is put out, to say the least, calmly asking the stranger to leave via email. But he stays on oblivious taking his leave on his own terms while she wanders round displaced and uncomfortable longing to regain the peace of her sanctuary.

In another part of town, medic Juste (Norakaite) and her partner and co-worker Paulius (Markevicius) are also going through a confusing time. Paulius has been offered a flat in a high rise block outside the city, but Juste does not want to live “in the middle of nowhere”. They carry on oblivious until a negative pregnancy leaves her relieved at the result. The two cycle off, and at the lights Paulius has a something unexpected to say.

In their stylish urban kitchen Vytas (Sakalauskas) placidly asks his wife of twenty years for a divorce. Later he visits his old flame Audrius (Svobanas), who is dying of cancer. A literal and metaphorical car crash sees Elena (Dapkunaite) quietly reflecting on how her ife carried for so many years in tacit denial of an emotional truth that has always been obvious for everyone concerned.

DoP Vytautas Plukas pictures these characters silently reeling in the face of calm contradiction. Vilnius reflects the silent chaos in the rubbish-strewn building sites of the centre: the character of the old city has changed forever, the capital will soon look like any other metropolis in Europe as the past is gently aid to rest – without reflection. Mostly relying on an ambient soundscape, the occasional score by Lina Lapelyte makes a weird intrusion into this perplexed but passionless world. A sensitive and aesthetically mature debut feature. AS

SCREENING AT VILNIUS FILM FESTIVAL 2021

The Naked Kiss (1964)

Dir/Wri: Sam Fuller | Cast: Constance Thomas, Anthony Eisley, Michael Dante, Virginia Grey | US Drama 90′

It was always hard to tell if Sam Fuller was pulling your leg or in earnest in his 1964 follow up to Shock Corridor another potent psychodrama. Female lead Constance Towers (who had recently featured in two productions for John Ford) is yet another otherwise little-known actress only fleetingly given the opportunity to show on screen just what she was capable of. As late as 1994 she still brought a glacial elegance to the role of a sophisticated older woman in an episode of ‘Frazier’, and as photographed by Stanley Cortez in Fuller’s last film in black & white, thirty years years earlier, she is amazing; entirely worthy of Cortez’s previous collaborations with Orson Welles & Charles Laughton. The Naked Kiss resembles a silent film, and parts of it an underground film of the 1970s; (and like them the supporting cast includes a former silent star, in this case in the form of Betty Bronson, who forty years earlier had played Peter Pan).

The Naked Kiss continues to divide the relatively small number of those who have actually seen it. Some consider it a masterpiece, others an utter bore. That said, it remains ahead of its time while exuding retro glamour (especially when Virginia Grey turns up in a beehive and business suit playing a madam). Rejected by the British Board of Film Censors in 1964 it would probably continue to encounter censorship problems today. @RichardChatten

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

Pariah Dog (2020)

Dir.: Jesse Alk; Documentary with Kajal, Milly, Subrata, Pinku; Canada/US/India 2019, 77min.

This homage to the stray dogs of Kolkata is the first feature documentary from US Canadian director Jesse Alk. The decaying glory of the former capital of the Raj provides an evocative setting for his labour of love, and possibly the saddest film of the year. Alk (whose father Howard, directed The Murder of Fred Hampton 1971) influenced by Charles Baudelaire’s ‘Paris Spleen’ a hymn to the street dogs of Paris, who inspired his poetry.

The Indian Pariah dog, aka South Asian Pye dog, has been forced out of its native habitat leaving nowhere left to go in the squalid backwaters of grandiose post-colonial decay: shoeless children play on a riverbank, a man urinates against a wall while a little girl disco dances, oblivious. Shot on the hazy waterways of the coastal delta or at night under velvety street lights where goats are herded through waterfronts and slums, Uber-Drivers dart like ghosts from another cosmos.

But Pariah Dog is more about the four souls who help strays survive. It’s a symbiotic relationship, the dogs are their raison d’etre and their extended family. Artist Pinku tools wooden sculptures by day and drives a taxi at night to pay the bills. A gentle, philosophical man he lives for his menagerie of dogs, a parrot, a rabbit and a monkey, all sharing a decrepit hovel not big enough to swing a cat. Meanwhile Subrata is possibly the first yodelling rickshaw driver. His efforts to raise money with his dog-themed songs are laudable and touching, but his pleas for animal welfare donations fall on deaf ears, so he resorts to street leftovers to feed his grateful pack of hounds. In 2013 he took part in a Bengali TV show, fading posters the proud testament to his moment of glory. Later in the film he transforms into a canine troubadour encouraging others to care for “humans, animals and plants”.

Two women make up the foursome: Milly and her helper Kajal come from different castes of Hindu society, often falling out over their rules of engagement. Millly is a highly educated disillusioned romantic whose husband left her in her decrepit family pile. Of Japanese-Russian descent, she pleads poverty: her land has been taken over by squatters but the authorities couldn’t care less. Kajal lives nearby in a hut the size of a kennel. Devoted to her strays, maimed by passing cars or unkind people, she cares for them until they die, burying them with a yellow garland, a sign of Hindu respect. A supreme love for life and the vulnerable has struck a chord with their feelings of dispossession, carrying these desperate women through ructions and reconciliations, their dignified street marches to raise awareness of animal welfare are to be admired.

For dog lovers, some of the footage is too difficult to watch. Alk conjures up enough poetry in his images without resorting to sentimentality, maintaining a dispassionate eye in this cruel metropolis of 15 million where only the fittest survive. In this ‘Black Hole of Calcutta’ the spirit of Mother Theresa still survives.

AVAILABLE TO VIEW ON TRUESTORY

No Ordinary Man (2020)

Dir: Aisling Chin-Yee, Chase Joynt | US Doc

The story of jazz musician Billy Tipton (1914-89) is seen from the perspective of his sexuality rather than his musical talent in this new, experimental documentary from Canadian filmmakers Aisling Chin-Yee and Chase Joynt (who is trans). They see Tipton as a trans trailblazer, a jazzy gender bender. But his common-law wife Kitty Kelly claims never to have realised he was a woman. And it didn’t end there. Another three ‘wives’ under his belt and three adopted kids later, this trans legend still had everyone fooled almost everyone. And who really cared when he played the piano so divinely and was always ready to improvise when another musician dropped out.

By way of background, Billy was born Dorothy Lucille Tipton in Oklahoma City on December 29, 1914 and was raised by an aunt in Alabama, but later adopted Spokane, Washington as his home. Tipton had shown a keen interest in jazz but was barred from joining the all-male school band at Southwest High School. But perseverance paid off and he eventually developed a serious musical career as a ‘male musician’ by concealing his female form and calling himself Billy Lee Tipton in the early 1930s. By 1940, Tipton was living as a man in private life as well in public.

But rather than sensationalising the reveal of his being transexual, the filmmakers’ focus here is laudably Tipton’s legacy as a ‘transmasculine’ icon, inspiring the lives of many. During his lifetime he was successfully all things to all people: Kelly claiming. “Billy Tipton was a man in every sense of the word,” – “he was the best husband anyone could have dreamed of” adding “He will always be a man. He will be nothing more than a man” to a stunned audience in one of Oprah Winfrey’s chat shows.

Enriched by archive material, newspaper clips and excerpts from Stanford professor Diane Middlebrook’s 1998 biog ‘Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton’, this is an intellectually bracing film informed by a welter of authoritative talking heads, most poignantly Tipton Jr. Amongst them is also author and gender theorist Kate Bornstein who asserts “there was no such thing as a trans man back in the 1980s. But one can hardly blame Billy for embracing the idea that being a ‘man’, rather than a woman, would path the way to success in the music business (or any business) back then. Had he stayed cisgender we may never have enjoyed his brilliant contribution to the world of jazz. Tunes like “Please Don’t Be that Way”.

Susan Stryker, a filmmaker, author and professor of Gender and Woman’s Studies comments on the rampant transphobia of the 1980s, hardly surprising when even nowadays the whole idea of trans sexuality still has some people run, screaming for the hills. But no-one has any proof that Tipton, who began presenting as a man from the ago of 19, made any fuss about his conception of gender identity, one must assume he just got on and did it, joining the party with so many other artists of the era who freely indulged their queer sexuality while being married to ‘women or men’.

What makes this film so innovative is the filmmakers’ framing device that sees a group of talented trans-masculine actors auditioning for the main role in a putative Tipton documentary, taking their cues from the (offscreen) directors in order to perform Billy at pivotal moments during his career – such as his first meeting with Duke Ellington, and so on. This offers them a collaborative springboard to then voice their own experiences and impressions of trans-masculinity with reference to Tipton – a very popular device nowadays – but not if you’re just yearning for a straight up biopic of the legendary musician himself, which hasn’t been done before.

No Ordinary Man does fall into the trap of allowing judgement of the past to be made by today’s standards, with a double time line – twenty years after the Middlebrook biog, and another nearly ninety, since Billy first put on masculine garb. We are living in a hyper-sensitive age where there are so many differing viewpoints and so many platforms available to give these varying stances voice, it’s almost impossible not to offend. But in this instance the film provides pithy insight into the trans experience, widening the debate for those affected by the issues, and offering worthwhile insight into how trans stories are often framed from the cisgender viewpoint – all in a meaty 83 minutes. Poignant also to that Tipton junior is able to hear more about his famous forebear. Well made, engaging and powerful. MT

SCREENING DURING BFI FLARE 2021

Call Northside 777 (1948)

Dir: Henry Hathaway Wri: Jerome Cady | | Cast: James Stewart, Richard Conte, Lee J Cobb, Helen Walker, Betty Garde | US, Noir thriller 112′

The postwar Jimmy Stewart demonstrates his new, hard-won gravitas in this engrossing drama in which background music and narration are largely absent as he investigates a conviction he becomes increasingly convinced is unsafe; while Richard Conte plays a downtrodden Pole rather than a downtrodden Italian as the innocent man sentenced to 99 years.

Most viewers already know (even before Truman Bradley informs us in the opening narration) that Conte is released, so it’s HOW rather than WHETHER he’s cleared that holds the attention; and it all gets rather involved. That those in authority found it convenient to leave Conte in jail is touched upon, while high-tech gadgets like polygraphs and microfilm cameras further the narrative, and such a gadget makes for satisfyingly cinematic climax that anticipates ‘Blowup’ by twenty years. But (MASSIVE SPOILERS COMING:) was it really possible in 1944 to blow up the date on a newspaper as sharply as is done here, and (as my predecessor observed) why did they ignore the pictures on the front page, which we never see sharpened up and would in themselves have confirmed which edition the newsboy was holding?

Real life as usual inevitably denies us such a tidy conclusion as ends the film; since the real Joseph Majcek, actually led a troubled life following his eventual release from prison in 1945 and ultimately ended his days in a mental institution in 1983. ©Richard Chatten

NOW ON TALKING PICTURES TV | AMAZON

Truman and Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation (2020)

Dir: Lisa Immordino Vreeland | Cast: David Frost, Dick Cavett, Voices of Jim Parsons, Zachary Quinto; USA 2021, 96 min.

Apart from in chat shows few people have actually heard the real voices of Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams but Zachary Quinto and Jim Parsons sound realistic in this enjoyable documentary about the friendship between two of the most charismatic personalities in American 20th century culture.

Lisa Immordino Vreeland is a dab hand at as a documentary filmmaker having already showcased the lives of Peggy Guggenheim, Cecil Beaton and Diana Vreeland (her grandmother-in-law). And here she brings the forty-year long relationship between Capote (1924-1984) and Williams (1911-1983) into focus – whilst private secrets are spilled, Vreeland never falls into the trap of sensationalism, the overall structure is enlivened by TV interviews of both men by David Frost and Dick Cavett.

courtesy of Getty Images

Capote and Williams both grew up in the South and had troublesome and relationships with their overbearing fathers, turned to books early on as a way to escape, and had a life-long struggle with drugs and alcohol. They met when Capote was sixteen, and spent most of the years between 1940 and and 1960 enjoying Spain, Italy, France and Morocco with their respective partners: Williams with the actor Frank Merlo (1921-1963) and Capote with the author Jack Dunphy (1914-1992). Truman says, that their relationship was purely “an intellectual friendship”, which did not hinder either of them from making bitchy remarks about the opposite’s spouses.

Courtesy of the Hulton Archive, Getty Images

Capote’s first success came with ‘Other Voices, other Rooms’ in 1948, three years after Williams’ ‘The Glass Menagerie’, which was followed by ‘A Street named Desire’. It may come as a surprise that Williams, who confessed to being “just terribly, terribly over-sexed”, did not have his first (heterosexual) affair before 27, having taken up masturbation only a year earlier, before consummating his first gay affair aged 28 with Frank Merlo.

Truman was blunt about his sexuality stating that it would have been easier to have been a girl, but “I was homosexual and I had never any guilt about it what so ever. I was the only character who was beyond the pale. I didn’t care”.

Williams, assuming rightly, that he would be judged by the many feature films based on his plays, regretted that censorship ruined many endings, even to the point of negating what had gone on before. Capote felt let down by the producers of Breakfast at Tiffany’s claiming he had been promised Marilyn Monroe, his first choice, as Holly Golightly. But they “cheated”, and “cast Audrey Hepburn, who was not right for the part, because Holly was based on a real person, and she was very tough, unlike anything Hepburn was”.

The docu-feature film of Capote’s non-fiction novel In Cold Blood, about two drifters who murdered a Kansas family, “scraped me right down, to the marrow of my bones. It nearly killed me. I think, in a way, it did kill me. I had been a stable person. Afterwards, something happened to me”.

The 1970s and 80s saw both men in decline, Williams complaining he never had a positive review after 1961. “Everything went wrong, private and professional, and ultimately my mind broke”. They died within 18 months of each other. Getting together for the last time at a party a few weeks before William’s death, the latter asked Capote “Where will we meet again?”. To which Truman answered “in paradise”.

Overall Truman & Tennessee does feel like a very private affair, dominated by the revealing ‘conversations’ of these literally giants who lived and breathed through for their writing. DoP Shane Sigler integrates the still photos, feature film clips and the TV interviews into an aesthetically convincing form, with Vreeland showing enough empathy with her subjects, bringing their Icarus-like careers into perspective in this cinematic catnip for literary lovers. AS

Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation is available on Dogwoof on Demandand other platforms from 30 April.

Main image credit: At Sotheby’s 1978 Globe Photos/Media Punch/Shutterstock & Tennessee Williams courtesy of the Cecil Beaton Studio.

True Mothers | Asa Ga Kuru (2020)

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

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

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

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

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

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

TRUE MOTHERS | CURZON home cinema | 16 April 2021

Catch Us if You Can (1965)

Dir: John Boorman | Wri: Peter Nichols | Cast: Dave Clark, Barbara Ferris, David Lodge, Robin Bailey, Clive Swift, Marianne Stone, Ronald Lacey, Yootha Joyce, David de Keyser,

John Boorman’s calling card for Point Blank wasn’t a straight-up musical biopic of the famous early 1960s band (whose 1964 hit ‘Glad All Over’ knocked the Beatles off the top of the UK Singles Chart) but something altogether more interesting, the DC5s music providing the score for a ‘Youth Culture’ escapade. Taking its title from another band hit Catch Us if You Can starts in London then broadens out into an eventful auteurish travelogue of the West Country in an E-type Jag, captured by Manny Wynn’s evocative black and white camerawork. There are some memorable turns – particularly from Barbara Ferris as a model running away with a stuntman (played by Clark) while filming a promo for an ad agency – who then capitalise on the caper. The Five boys don’t have the chops, but they certainly held the tunes – and add a certain cocky verve as ‘Beatle competitors’, and Ferris is amusingly perky as Dinah. Watch out for Yootha Joyce, Clive Swift, Michael Gwynn, Peter Nichols (who wrote the script) and a mellow David de Keyser (who is still with us) as the quintessential Sixties adman adding a touch of edgy class. MT

NOW OUT ON BLURAY, DVD, DIGITAL PLATFORMS – 5th April 2021

The Man Who Reclaimed His Head (1934)

Dir: Edward Ludwig | Cast: Joan Bennett, Claude Rains, Lionel Atwell, Juanita Quigley | US Drama 80′

The few people likely to be familiar with this title today will probably already know enough of the plot to be aware of the spectacular final retribution taken by Claude Rains against Lionel Atwill and assume that it was a follow up to Rains’ auspicious talkie film debut the year before as Universal’s new horror star in the title role of The Invisible Man.

However, Rains had already played the role on Broadway – under that title – the year before he made The Invisible Man, and the film is actually a very thirties pacifist diatribe (albeit garnished with an eye-catching title and plot gimmick) set in France just before and during the first year of The Great War.

No attempt seems to have been made to dress the cast convincingly in period attire, probably to heighten its topicality to the troubled 1930s, when fear of lethal new weapons ran hand in hand with munitions manufacturers in wing collars rubbing their hands with poorly concealed glee at the prospect of the vast fortunes to be made out of another war.

Director Edward Ludwig’s only other brush with political filmmaking ironically appears to have been John Wayne’s red-baiting love letter to the HUAC, Big Jim McLain, nearly twenty years later. ©Richard Chatten

Theodora Goes Wild (1936)

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

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

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

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

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

Wilderness (2021)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Impossible Project (2021)

Dir.: Jens Meurer; Documentary with Dr. Florian Kaps, Oskar Smolokowski, Slava Smolokowski; Austria/Germany/UK 2020, 99 min.

The Digital age may be upon us but humans are still analogue. Austrian documentarian Jens Meurer (Public Enemy) has chosen sides and this bid to champion and hold on to everything analogue is quietly amusing and informative.

Paradoxically Meurer was responsible for the very first digital entry at the Cannes Film Festival back in 2002. His 99 minute uninterrupted digital shot for Alexander Sukuorow’s Russian Ark (2002) was filmed on Sony Cine Alta HDW-F90.

Science and politics dominate and in keeping with his sentiment everything is shot on 35mm film (Arricamera), even the score by Haley Reinhart was recorded direct onto vinyl. In 2008, whilst techno-freaks were celebrating the first i-Phone, Dr Florian Kaps, a former biologist, known as Doc, was invited to Enschede (Netherlands) to the closure of the last Polaroid factory.

Instead of last rites, the Doc proscribed a resurrection somehow managing to scrape together 180 000 Euro to keep the factory going. And while he persuaded the workforce to co-operate, the first products were rather disappointing. Even if their artistic value was cool – the forty minute development time was certainly not. The machines did work again, but the chemicals and formulas for the development of the famous instant photos had been lost. Doc was unperturbed, and the worldwide community of Analogue fanatics helped as much as possible.

Kaps was not allowed to use the name Polaroid for a long time, and called the enterprise ‘Impossible’, with its HQ in Berlin. Meeting the New York based photographer Oscar Smolokowski and his investor father Slava, turned out to be a poison chalice for the Doc: the duo helped to launch a fully functioning Polaroid revival (in 2018 over one million films were sold), but the Doc had the same fate as Steve Jobs: he had to leave the company, the reasons not really explained.

Undeterred, Kaps soon found a new project, the Viennese Grand Hotel Moleskine, build in 1900. At the end, Haley Reinhart and the Sascha Peres Orchestra perform in the presence of the Doc in the restored hotel ‘Ball Saal’ – directly recorded for Europe’s largest Vinyl company, contributing to a yearly sale of 300 million vinyl records in 2019.

Even though Meurer introduces some polemic: “Digital is not real, it’s just a simulation of reality”. There is something to be said for regaining the use of our senses, all five of them – not just the two that are digital, but also taste, smell and touch because they make us happier and healthier”. Overall there is enough humour and self-deprecation in coming to terms with the fact that humans are the most analogue beings on the planet. AS

NOW ON DIGITAL PLATFORMS

The Terror (2021)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Man Who Sold His Skin (2020)

Dir: Kaouther Ben Hania | Cast: Yahya Mahayni, Dea Liane, Koen De Bouw, Monica Bellucci, Saad Lostan, Darina Al Joundi, Jan Dahdouh, Christian Vadim | Tunisia, Drama 104′

A Syrian man turns difficulty into success in this stunning exploitation love story set in the international art world.

This Oscar-nominated follow-up to Beauty and the Dogs gives Tunisian writer director Kaouther Ben Hania another opportunity to question social injustice with her signature sensuous cinematic language.

Powered forward by an unabashedly angry performance from newcomer Yahya Mahayni as Syrian refugee Sam Ali – whose chance meeting with a famous artist sees him agreeing to be transformed into an artwork himself:. a Schengen visa is then tattooed on Ali’s back, securing him a coveted air passage to Europe, Belgium to be precise, where he reconnects with girlfriend Abeer (Dea Liane).

To say that Sam has a plucky attitude is an understatement. But his-blind-sided sense of self-belief certainly opens doors and gets him what he wants. First of all the sympathy of the controversial artist himself, Jeffrey Godefroi (De Bouw) who takes him onboard as a ‘canvas’, despite his chippiness. It also ensures the utter dedication of the artist’s assistant (a blond-haired Monica Bellucci, no less) who panders to his every whim, even after being told “F**k you”.

But what Ali really wants is the woman of his dreams who he proposes to in the deliriously romantic opening scenes, but who is now married to somebody else, and living comfortably in Belgium.

There is a dark Shakespearean downside to the story and one that gives the film a potent message: Ali must agree to give his skin back after his death, as it remains (ironically) the copyright of the artist. And there’s more, poor Ali must also acquiesce to being ‘auctioned’ which seems a gross act of human commodification, in a plotlline that makes this relevant all over the world, not just locally.

This stylish production is shot by award-winning Christopher Aoun (Capernaum). And although the rather schematic plot falls into place rather too easily, the sheer verve of the performances and the highly controversial civil liberty and refugee issues at its core makes it a soulful winner. MT

IN CINEMAS FROM 23 SEPTEMBER 2021

Firebird (2021) Bfi Flare 2021

Dir: Peeter Rebane | Cast: Tom Prior, Nicholas Woodeson, Diana Pozharskaya, Oleg Zagorordnii | US Drama 107′

Firebird runs along similar lines to the recent South African services drama Moffie, this version inspired by late Russian actor Sergey Fetisov’s memoir and set in the Soviet Air Force during the Cold War.

Screening as part of the Hearts strand of this year’s Bfi Flare Festival, the lavishly mounted feature debut draws on the director’s own experience of growing up in Soviet occupied Estonia, yet fails to mine the incendiary potential of a dramatic episode in European history.

Tom Prior co-wrote the script and stars as the unsettled soldier Sergey who is drafted into the services but really has dreams of being an actor. He soon gets involved in an illicit love triangle with a dashing fighter pilot Roman (Oleg Zagorodnii) who invites him to see Stravinsky’s Firebird at the opera. But Roman is also kindling a desire for his female comrade Luisa (Diana Pozharskaya) amid the high octane backdrop of a Soviet Air Force Base.

A friendship across the ranks soon sparks into an amorous escapade involving all three comrades in arms, once again highlighting the risks of love affairs in the time of war, this one spiced up by its forbidden nature, punishable by five years in a hard labour camp. The men’s interest in photography is brought to life by the vibrant aesthetic of Mait Maekivi’s colour-drenched camerawork.

Firebird certainly looks impressive with its authentic settings and lush production values but the film never quite generates enough heat to make us care for its underwritten characters who remain cartoonish and rather glib throughout, Luisa hardly getting a look in as a staid and sketchy also-ran in this so-called menage a trois.

Clearly Prior – so affective in Kingsman – has been brought in to lend star power but here joins the rest of cast of rather robotic stormtroopers bringing to mind Kraftwerk’s heroes rather than real people who we can empathise with in their tortured love lives. MT

FIREBIRD is premiering at BFi Flare

Groundswell (2020) Earth Day 2021

Dir.: Johnny Goran; Documentary with Mark Ruffalo, Nuala McNulty, Olivia Mitchell, Kate Ruddock, Joe McHugh; ROI 2021, 80 min.

Activist and filmmaker Johnny Gogan’s Groundswell explores how Ireland banned the practice of fracking (releasing oil or gas from shale rock) and how Northern Ireland still faces a prospect that has led to tremors, and poisoned water in NE Pennsylvania, where fracking is common.

Gogan guides us through his powerful film showing what is possible with direct action on the ground from his base in Fermanaugh. Political campaigner Nuala McNulty started the fight against fracking in Northern Ireland after the Irish Parliament, the Deil, had given licenses for exploratory drillings to Canadian company Tamboran Resources, whose agent Tony Bazley promised that no chemicals would be used in the process.

Jamie Murphy from ‘Love Leitrim”, remembers the police action in the Northern Irish fight against Shell, one of their slogans was “Farming, not Fracking”. Later a moratorium was reached in the Deil, pending the feasibility study into gas mining in the licensed areas near the border. The area was still suffering confrontations during the “Troubles”.

Arlene Foster, a staunch Fermanaugh activist and Northern Ireland’s First Minister, had an ambiguous relationship with fracking that drew criticism from the Irish border population. Meanwhile Gogan visited campaigners in NE Pennsylvania where diagnosis of cancer had almost doubled in the population, particularly in young people indicating a clear correlation with the fracking activities. The Good Energies Alliance Ireland (GEAI) joined the fight, as did Friends of the Earth: “Fracking is leaving more carbon footprints on the planet than coal.”

A Private Members Bill to legislate for the banning of fracking was introduced in the Deil, but was a victim of the General Election in 2016. Finally, a motion was passed in October 2016, to ban the import of gas gained from fracking, the only bill of its kind in the world. Nevertheless, not all is won: we listen to ex-president Trump announcing that the EU is planning to import fracking products, and in June 2019 Tamboran Resources was given permission to explore for Shale Gas in Northern Ireland – the decision of the restored NI executive is pending…

Gogan’s detailed chronicle is a laudable testament to the fight but instead of appealing to heart and minds, it often bogs the audience down with too much detail, names and organisations making Groundswell a valuable insider documentary rather than for mainstream entertainment. AS

Groundswell will be released on Friday 16th April, ahead of Earth Day 2021 and will be available via the Modern Films virtual cinema platform. It will screen theatrically later in the year.

The Quiller Memorandum (1966) TPTV

Dir: Michael Anderson | Cast: George Segal, Alex Guinness, Max Von Sydow, Sent Berger, George Sanders, Robert Flemyng, Philip Madoc | Uk Drama 106′

Adapted from Adam Hall’s novel ‘The Berlin Memorandum’, this was the only spy film written by Harold Pinter; a sad loss, since he and the genre – with their ambiguous motivations and outright deceptions, complicated here by the fact that almost everybody around him is speaking amongst themselves in a foreign language – were made for each other.

The dialogue scenes between spymasters George Sanders and Robert Flemyng in Whitehall are pure Pinter. While back in Berlin the second most Pinteresque scenes are those where our disarmingly offbeat hero is interrogated by knuckle-cracking neo-Nazi Max von Sydow. Alec Guinness puts in a sinister appearance in the mammoth Olympiastadion at Charlottenburg. Truly the stuff of nightmares.

Senta Berger is the heroine. Meester Quiller!! (She is currently shooting her latest film in Bavaria). While the final scene is a wonderfully Hitchcockian denouement, all the more shocking for taking place in glorious morning sunshine to an appropriately wistful accompaniment from John Barry’s score sung by the mellow Matt Munro. ©Richard Chatten.

NOW ON TALKING PICTURES TV | AVAILABLE ON AMAZON

Human Rights Watch Festival 2021 | Women have their say

Opening this Thursday 18 March, this year’s HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH FESTIVAL kicks off with The 8th about Ireland’s women-led campaign to engineer the impossible – to overturn the 8th Amendment, a constitutional ban on abortion.

In Belly of the Beast two women wage a near impossible battle against the US Department of Corrections to expose modern-day eugenics and reproductive injustice in California prisons.

Mujer de Soldado reveals a deeply moving picture of female solidarity among four Peruvian women, who are bringing charges of historical rape against their abusers.

And in the Closing Night film on 26 March Unapologetic new talent Ashley O’Shay spent four years chronicling the lives of two young, black, queer women within the Black Lives movement in Chicago. In Ashley’s words: Unapologetic serves as a blueprint to that moment (last summer)…. I hope you walk away feeling inspired, and hopeful, and righteously rageful at the systems that have failed women.

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH FILM FESTIVAL 2021 | Tickets go on sale February 18 and can be purchased via the Human Rights Watch Film Festival or Barbican Cinema On Demand.

Tove (2020)

Dir: Zaida Bergroth | Finland, Drama | 100′

This drama about Moomins creator Tove Jansson (1914-2001) is as enchanting as her hippo-like cartoon characters that are celebrated by kids and adults all over the world.

Finnish filmmaker Zaida Bergroth brings the Finnish bisexual artist to life in this delicately sensuous and affecting biopic that showcases her unconventional loves as much as her talent as an author, artist and creator, played here by a captivating Alma Pöysti and scored by evocative soundtrack of tunes from the era from jazz to swing, Benny Goodman’s Sing Sing Sing being the musical motif throughout with Stefan Grapelli and Edith Piaf enlivening the Parisian sequences of the early 1950s.

Eeva Putro’s gracefully paced script focuses on the immediate aftermath to WWII in a discretely decadent Helsinki where Soviet bomb raids fail to spoil Tove’s fun at lively cocktail parties where champagne continues to flow during illustrious soirees. Home is a stylish bohemian milieu where Swedish is spoken. Tove is often put down by her renown but competitive sculptor father (Enckel), although her graphic artist mother (Kajsa Ernst) adores and encourages her creative potential.

Later at art school Tove is nudged by her father towards the more highbrow artistic expression of painting, but prefers illustrating and doodling cartoons for a subversive magazine, and this is where she will eventually make her name and earn a meagre living. All this creativity naturally spills over into amorous encounters. Soon Tove is involved with a married politician (Shanti Roney as Artos Wirtanen) and a wealthy female client Viveca Bandler (Kosonen) in dizzying sexual encounters, both leaving her troubled and unsatisfied as she seeks solace in her art. Bergroth keeps the tempo romantically-charged and touching rather than tortured or soul-searching. Artos eventually proposes but Paris beckons promising other opportunities on the horizon as well as a reunion with the past.

This is such a wonderful film about female creative and sensory expression made more so by its gentle, often handheld, camerawork in Helsinki and Paris – DoP Linda Wassberg often uses that atmospheric technique of fading out the scenes in slow-mo to an echoing soundtrack lending emotional depth and a dreamlike quality to the narrative leaving us contemplating what has gone before and appreciating the intensity of Tove’s artistic and emotional truth. MT

On release from 9 July 2021

Johnny Cool (1963)

Dir: William Asher | Wri: Joseph Landon | Cast: Henry Silva, Elizabeth Montgomery, Richard Anderson, Jim Backus, Wanda Hendrix | US Crime Drama 103’

Before Lee Marvin in The Killers and Point Blank there was Johnny Cool. The name ‘Johnny’ in the title usually means a romantic loner; but this Johnny was such a reptilian thug that by the end I was rooting for him to get what was coming to him in a way that I never did with the likes of Jimmy Cagney.

After possibly the worst title song I’ve ever heard (sung by Sammy Davis Jr., who also contributes a cameo as a dealer in a gambling den in an eye-patch and loud check jacket named “Educated”), what follows is a real curate’s egg vividly shot on location by Sam Leavitt in deliberately ugly black & white with an astonishing cast of cameo players (I particularly liked Mort Sahl’s contribution). The bewitching Elizabeth Montgomery is wasted as a bored socialite who takes a shine to Johnny after seeing him karate someone in a restaurant, yet seems a bit slow to realise that maybe he’s not really a very nice person. (She and director William Asher married the same year and together embarked the following year on the evergreen TV hit ‘Bewitched’, and she was lost to movies forever.)

That the Production Code was by now on its last legs is attested to by macabre details such as the fact that he takes a knife rather than a gun with him to settle one particular score; while he improbably uses a big heavy suitcase with a bomb in it to blow up one victim rather than simply shooting him. And how did he make his getaway after machine-gunning someone else through the top floor window of a high rise office block from a window cleaner’s cradle? However, the film is obliged to show sufficient restraint in its denouement to leave enough to the imagination to make the conclusion far more chilling than had we seen more. (And it’s refreshing to see Elisha Cook Jr. come out on top for once). ©Richard Chatten

Memories of My Father | El Olvido Que Seremos (2020)

Dir.: Fernando Trueba; Cast: Javier Camara, Juan Pablo Urrego, Nikola Reyes Cano, Patricia Tamayo, Maria Teresa Barretyo, Laura Londano, Elisabeth Minotta, Kami Zea; Columbia 2020, 136 min.

Memories of My Father in a spirited family saga set against the background of Columbia’s darkest days.

Based on the (auto)biographical novel ‘El Olvido Que Seremos’ by Hector Abad Faciolince, Spanish director Fernando Trueba and his brother David set their story in the city of Medellin, where fiery militias took the law into their own hands. Both novel and film are a tribute to the Columbian human rights advocate and doctor Hector Abad Gomez, by his son Hector ‘Quiquin’ Abad Faciolince.

The story opens in a monochrome Turin in the early 1980s where student Hector Abdad (Urrego) is watching a South American gangster movie with a girl friend. We hear him later on the phone to his mother Cecilia Faciolence de Abad (Tamayo) discussing his father’s rebellious nature. Glorious colours then flood the screen as we revisit Hector’s ‘Quiquin’ (Cano) childhood world, dominated by his compassionate father (Camara) and his four sisters: teenage Mariluz(Barreto), Clara (Londano), Marta (Zea) and Vicky (Minotta.)

Medellin was a turbulent place to grow up: bombs went off regularly, right-wing militia terrorised the population, drug cartels fought it out, and at university fascist professors made life difficult for Abad Gomez. At home, matriarch Cecilia keeps the family finances in order, whilst Clara changes boyfriends regularly and Marta sings melancholic songs, playing the guitar.

Quiquin and his school friend are up to no good – throwing stones at the window of a Jewish family living next door. The school boys are victims of a reactionary aunt, a nun, who tells Quiquin that the Jews killed Jesus Christ and should be punished. Father Hector takes his son to the neighbours and makes him apologize. The same school friend asks Quiquin “if his father was gay” – since Hector senior likes to cuddle his only boy. The youngster is soon fed up with religion and God, and is ordered by his father to attend church to please his mother. The grandmother is sent to a care home, and Cecilia’s brother, a bishop, warns Hector to be more careful with his critique of the government and militia.

But the lack of sanitation in the poor quarters is appalling, and the doctor is the only one, who cares to get prosthesis’ for the victims of bomb attacks. On the radio, the family listens to accusations against the patriarch, he is branded a Marxist, soon having to leave the country to teach abroad. Then tragedy strikes at the heart of the family and life is never the same.

The feature then circles back to 1983 and black-and-white footage seeing Hector returning to Medellin, where father and son are more and more estranged, since the young man does not understand his father’s social engagement. The first grandchild in the family is born, and Doctor Gomez announces that he is going to run for mayor of the city in 1987. After family tragedy, the scene is now set for confrontation.

DoP Sergi Ivan Castano can take much credit for this engrossing family saga, sometimes told in the style of a tele-novella. The black-and-white images are wonderfully lit, and the colour scenes at the heart of the feature are so vibrant in their crystalline intensity you almost have to squint. The directors avoids a political treaty, focus on the emotional conflicts. Memories is a testament to a man of passion and compassion. ©AS

CURZON HOME CINEMA exclusively from 26th March 2021

Viy (1967) and Sveto Mesto (1990) | Bluray

Dirs: Konstantin Yershov, Georgi Kropachyov | Cast: Leonid Kuravlyov, Natalya Varley, Aleksey Glazyrin, Nikolay Kutuzov, Vadim Zakharchen | USSR Fantasy/Horror 77′

In 19th century Ukraine a young priest is forced to undergo a macabre test of his faith in this whimsical gothic ‘folktale’ based on the 1835 novella by Nikolai Gogol – more Arthur Rackham or Grimm’s than Tarkovsky in feel – inviting us to reflect on the temptations of Lent, with a twist that taunts Russian Orthodoxy with its nihilistic overtones.

Surprisingly avoiding censorship due to Gogol’s revered status in Russia, this first slice of Soviet fantasy horror vividly brings to life the writer’s atmospheric prose and erotic and fantastical elements spiced with a little irony, all glowingly designed by communism’s answer to Walt Disney, Aleksandr Ptushko whose special effects in the delicately creepy haunting scenes make this particularly enjoyable, and include a 360-degree camera movement to create the illusion of a protective circle around Khoma, all enhanced by Karen Khachaturyan’s evocative score.

The film was previously adapted by Mario Bava as Black Sunday (1960) in the same simple storyline. As the purple twilight of a midsummer evening descends three lost novices bed down for the night in a remote wooden farmhouse after persuading the old lady who lives there to give them sanctuary from the wolves. Later she overpowers Khoma (Leonid Kuravlyov) in a bid to seduce him, literally riding him broomstick-style into the twinkly night sky as she turns into a witch. Beating her to death after landing, Khoma sees the crone morph into a dark-haired maiden (Natalya Varley) who later emerges as the dead daughter of a local nobleman who begs him, on pain of a flogging, to pray for her soul on three nightly vigils in the locked church, each ending with the crowing of a rather handsome cock.

Viy could be set in the 15th century of Andrei Rublev with its medieval-looking peasant farmers, but the grotesque humour of Khoma’s weird dance routine echoes Polanski’s Fearless Vampire Killers – made in the same year – and also based on a 19th legend in Transylvania. Romanian actress Natalya Varley is alluring in the role of the young temptress, at just under five feet tall.

Djordje Kadijevic‘s Serbian gothic film Sveto Mesto (A Holy Place) (1990) is a distinctly more scary and unsettling South Slavic take on Gogol’s story, directed as a straightforward gothic drama here by Djordje Kadijevic and starring the darkly alluring Dragon Jovanovic (as the priest Toma), the real life partner of Branko Pujic who plays his onscreen temptress Katerina.

Kadijevic loses the humour but sexes up the storyline of his version where Katerina is an altogether more nasty character: in a lesbian tryst with her maid, an incestuous one with her father, she also castrates one of her manservants after seducing him in a barn.

After dark, Katerina turns into a wailing banshee, needless to say, Toma goes grey. These chapel scenes are really quite terrifying, not to mention the wincingly brutal finale where Toma gets it in the neck and somewhere even more painful, in contrast to Khoma fate in Viy’s wittier fantasy style.

Sveto Mesto was made during the wartorn era of Balkan history when audiences were not looking for more horror in their lives so the film more or less sank without trace, only to re-emerge in recent years to serve as a worthwhile companion piece to Viy. Although technically less innovative, Kadijevic had a much tighter budget than the Soviets, and a dimmer view of society in general. His trump card was to secure as DoP Alexandar Petrovic, one Yugoslavia’s most talented filmmakers of the era, who gives the film a baroque visual style. Particularly choice is the line of dialogue “every woman who grows old becomes a witch”. MT

On Blu-ray from 15 March 2021 courtesy of Eureka

The October Man (1947) Talking Pictures TPTV

Dir: Roy Ward Baker | Wri: Eric Ambler | Cast: John Mills, Joan Greenwood, Edward Chapman, Kay Walsh, Joyce Carey | UK Drama 85′

John Mills has the good fortune to attract the interest of throaty-voiced enchantress Joan Greenwood (like Alec Guinness in ‘The Man in the White Suit’, also playing an industrial chemist, but one far less assailed by doubts and far less appreciative of her) in this atmospheric psycho-drama vividly designed by Alex Vetchinsky, gothically lit by Erwin Hillier, personally produced by Eric Ambler from his novel and marking an auspicious directorial debut for Roy Baker. ©Richard Chatten

ON TALKING PICTURES TV

Enfant Terrible (2020) BFI FLARE

Dir: Oskar Roehler | Cast: Oliver Masucci, Hary Prinz, Katja Riemann, Felix Hellmann, Lucas Gregorowicz | Germany, Biopic drama 134′

German film director and novelist Oskar Roehler (The Untouchable/Die Unberührbare) certainly has the provocative passion of his countryman Reiner Werner Fassbinder to judge by his incendiary homage to one of Germany’s greatest filmmakers screening at this year’s London annual Bfi Flare Festival festival.

Roehler has blazed a trail through New German cinema of the 1990s – and fires this visually alluring biopic with a wild and wilful ardor that would make Fassbinder proud. The German ‘wild child’ comes alive like never before in his heyday of the late 1960s-1980s when he made 41 films in 14 years.

Roehler has had to tread carefully because the source material belongs to the Fassbinder estate, the RWFF, fiercely guarded and controlled by Fassbinder’s editor and “widow” Juliane Lorenz, who is feared and respected in the industry for protecting the director’s reputation, so Roehler and his producers have had their work cut out to remain accurate while also not treading on anyone’s toes.

Successfully sliding under the skin of the private man behind the public facade, this is a biopic that feels uproariously nihilistic rather than uplifting, showcasing a driven and passionately rebellious provocateur addicted to love and politics and whose passions spilled out into his short but prolific career – Fassbinder was dead by the time most of us get going career-wise. At times it feels like Roehler identifies himself with his subject veering into a romantic longing for his wild boy. This heady production certainly echoes Fassbinder’s milieu in taught, neon-lit scenes of sexual jealousy, megalomania and power play in a seedy Berlin’s underworld of1967, crisply lit and shot by Carl-Friedrich Koschnick as a play within a film in the confines of a studio designed by Berlin Babylon’s Markus Schutz.

All trussed up in a leather jacket, fedora and Aviators (and occasionally considerably less) Oliver Masucci – who played Hitler in Look Who’s Back – certainly fills the part of the Enfant Terrible in a beltering performance. Like his fellow mavericks Kubrick, Hitchcock and Von Trier, Fassbinder was utterly committed to his art and demanded the same from his crew and actors: “Why is the idiot looking at the camera? What are you doing man?? We’re shooting a movie here!

Fassbinder enjoyed turbulent relationships with men and women (he was once married to a woman after coming out at the age of 15) but the focus here is on his male partners and collaborators, and he greets a tousled haired besuited Ulli Lommel (Lucas Gregorowicz) when he offers his services, with a snide acknowledgement: “If you don’t want to keep doing your TV shit”

Masucci plays him as a chain-smoking, moustachioed mensch of explosive laughter, sneering repartee and excessive appetites who embraced life with gusto. For Fassbinder his life was his work and he existed in a collective with his collaborators sealed off from the rest of the world, everything playing out within the confines of this interdependent – often toxic – dynamic. Were his collaborators merely there to fire up his own personal narrative or was he just the train-crash victim of theirs? Arguably the former judging by Roehler and his co-writer Klaus Richter. Fassbinder once stated in an interview that it was this “exploitability of feelings” that fascinated him most. And he certainly comes over as a colourfully robust figure who would do anything to get what he wanted for his art. Interleaved with dramatised scenes of many of Fassbinder’s films it’s an entertaining, accomplished and beautifully made feature. MT

NOW SCREENING AT BFI FLARE 2021 | OTHER TITLES AVAILABLE AT

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Strange Journey | El Extrano Viaje (1964)

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

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

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

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

Night World (1932)

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

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

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

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

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

Night Games (1966)

Dir: Mai Zetterling | Cast: Ingrid Thulin, Keve Hjelm, Lena Brundin, Jorgen Lindstrom | Sweden, Drama 105′

Even in her days working in the Hollywood mainstream as Danny Kaye’s leading lady Mai Zetterling always had an air of menace about her; which she more than amply confirmed when she finally got behind the camera herself. Night Games was in its day considered the last word in shocking, but is today largely forgotten; and it’s hard to figure out just how seriously we’re supposed to be taking it all until the Hal Roach-style slapstick and music behind the end credits finally clinches it: we’re not.

Zetterling’s second feature film as a director evokes Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957) both through its elegant shifts back and forth between the hero’s childhood and adulthood; and by the presence of Ingrid Thulin as the hero’s long-dead mother whose hedonistic lifestyle has left him marked for life, and of Naima Wifstrand (who had played Isak Borg’s terrifying mother in Wild Strawberries) as Jan’s dotty old aunt (while Jörgen Lindström, who plays the young Jan, had been Thulin’s nephew in Bergman’s The Silence).

Most of the mother’s entourage disport themselves more like characters out of TV commercials than recognisable human beings; recalling the orgiasts of late Fellini and the decadent weirdos who invade Tony’s home at the conclusion of Joseph Losey’s The Servant. For good measure, the final sordid scramble for expensive goodies resembles the conclusion of The Magic Christian; before Jan finally purges himself once and for all of a lifetime of Oedipal baggage by dynamiting the palatial family home to kingdom come. ©Richard Chatten

Lost in La Mancha (2020)

Dir.: Keith Fulton, Lou Pepe; Documentary with Terry Gilliam, Amy Gilliam, Nicola Pecorini, Lena Mossum; UK 2019, 84 min.

After more than 20 years and multiple setbacks, Terry Gilliam finally got his dream project The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, to the big screen. This is the story behind the project that started with Lost in La Mancha back in 2002 and has now been remastered.

With production costs halved from the original budget of 32 million dollars, and minus Johnny Depp, Vanessa Paradise and Jean Rochefort Rochefort (who had to leave because of illness) – a tornado destroyed some equipment and rain changed the colour of the sand from the earlier scenes. Then John Hurt, who was to play Don Quixote, was diagnosed with his fatal cancer.

It’s good to see DoP Nicola Pecorini, costume designer Lena Mossum (who had kept all the designs from the original shoot) and PD Benjamin Fernandes back together again with Gilliam – they celebrate after shooting day seven: none of the cast had ever made it thus far. Fulton and Pepe decide on a rather sombre tone. After freely admitting to the two of them: “I don’t actually like making films”, and “I have done the film too often in my head, is it better to leave it there?” One has to respect his sheer perseverance, a quality that is often more valuable these days than talent.

And in the 2018 interviews he talks about the ageing of Quixote: “An older man, with one last chance to make the world as interesting as he dreams it to be.” And about himself: “Did I get to change the world?“ Gillian looks, quite reasonably, irritated during the shoot, not helped by a kidney problem that required him to move around with a bag of blood, draining from a catheter, strapped to his leg. Even when it all comes together in the last day of shooting, Gilliam is vehement: “this is my last film. Then there’s a great void ahead of me, and that scares the shit out of me”.

Lost in La Mancha is padded out with clips from Gilliam’s successful features Brazil, Time Bandits and Baron Munchhausen; and the endless comparisons between Gilliam and Quixote become tiring. Interviews on the subject, given by Gilliam since 2000, give the feature even more of a disjointed feeling: There is so much to say about the filming of The Man who killed Don Quixote – but with neither Driver nor Pryce having their say, much remains untold. DoPs Lou Pepe and Jeremy Royce succeed in showing the film within a film: their lively camerawork is certainly a reason to watch it.

The ending is rather elegiac: a still of with Gilliam taking the applause at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, where the premiere was beset by legal controversy over the rights, The Man was screened at the Closing Night, is possibly the best way to remember this documentary – but somehow it feels like Terry Gillian deserved more. AS

Now on release

Zana (2019) digital release

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971) TPTV

Dir: Seth Holt | Starring Andrew Keir, Valerie Leon | UK | 1971 | 89 mins

Adapted from Bram Stoker’s mystical thriller The Jewel of the Seven Stars, this supernatural shocker is one of Hammer’s most enduring classics.

A British expedition team in Egypt discovers the ancient sealed tomb of the evil Queen Tera but when one of the archaeologists steals a mysterious ring from the corpse’s severed hand, he unleashes a relentless curse upon his beautiful daughter. Is the voluptuous young woman now a reincarnation of the diabolical sorceress or has the curse of the mummy returned to reveal its horrific revenge?

Blood From The Mummy’s Tomb was plagued by the sudden deaths of director Seth Holt and the wife of original star Peter Cushing, leading to rumours of a real-life curse. Michael Carreras completed the movie that made a Scream Queen of Valerie Leon as the Mummy who, in a titillating twist, forgoes the usual rotting-bandages and is instead resurrected sporting a rather recherché negligée.

Extras: New featurette – The Pharaoh’s Curse: Inside Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb | NOW ON TALKING PICTURES TV

The Columnist (2020)

Dir.: Ivo van Art; Cast: Katja Herbers, Bran van der Kelen, Claire Porro, Genio de Grot, Achraf Koutet; Netherlands 2019, 86 min.

A writer gets her own back in this provocative ‘woman-sees-red’ dramady that is funny up to a point, going for the jugular in an all out revenge movie that may give some viewers the wrong idea.

In his first big screen feature TV director Ivan van Art cleverly opts for a topical theme that kills two birds with one stone: trolling and female empowerment. The woman in question is journalist and author Femke Boot (Herbers) who is in the firing line from both her editors and readers. A typical day will include sordid e-mails from the public, and readers of the popular rag The Volksrant (a Dutch Daily Mail) calling for her resignation on the grounds of ‘paedophilia’ – she once dated a sixteen-year-old boy three year’s her junior, back in the day. To make matters worse her latest book is in the doldrums becalmed by writing block and a looming deadline.

So Femke strikes back with some online research, and it soon turns out one of the trolls is a neighbour. At this point spoilers are inevitable – Femke pushes him off the roof, and symbolically, severs his middle-finger. Surprisingly she then falls for the laid back Steven Dood (van der Kelen), who runs a popular cookery website, and moves in with Femke (funny how men are always looking for somewhere to live) and her daughter Anna (Porro) and soon, writing side by side, creative juices finally begin to flow.

Strangely though, and this is a questionable plot point – Dood’s positive influence makes no impact on Femke’s state of mind. Her bloodlust powers on, hardbitten by Megxit-style revenge – her next victim is Anna’s teacher who censures a poster penned by the students.

At this point the narrative spins into overdrive with a ludicrous killing spree that seemingly knows no end. DoP Marttijn Cousijn handles the ultra-realism with imagination as the film – scripted by Daan Windhorst – tracks Femke’s decent into darkness. Arbers feels very real as a woman pushed over the top, Porro is also convincing as the apple falling not too far from the tree. There is a surprise ending as the The Columnist endlessly peddles itself as full-throttle entertainment, but you can’t help feeling there’s a subtext here, and it’s not just about the serious conflicts arising from internet trolling. AS

IN UK AND IRELAND from 12 MARCH 2021

Senso (1954) DVD/blu-ray

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOW AVAILABLE ON DVD on AMAZON + CRITERION COLLECTION

The Little Things (2020) Digital release

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Frightened Man (1952)

Dir: John Gilling | Cast: Dermot Walsh, Barbara Murray, Charles Victor, John Blythe | UK Drama 69′

An ultra-noirish cautionary tale (like most Tempean productions superlatively lit by Monty Berman) sternly warning audiences in postwar austerity Britain against the lure of apparently easy money; such as that stands to be acquired from frequent target Hatton Garden in a diamond heist.

Making the most of a meagre budget, John Gilling writes and directs a tighly-plotted and rather unpredicable little heist thriller that sees the profligate Julius Rosselli (Walsh) paying a visit to his adoring, antique shop-owner father (Charles Victor) after being sent down from Oxford University in disgrace. Julius plunders his father’s savings, flirts with the lodger (Murray) and soon falls in with a criminal element in a bid to make money without working for it, in a heist that runs into complications.

The first of two films by Tempean in which Charles Victor played the lead (the second being the title role in The Embezzler) flanked by the usual choice cast many of whom later featured in TV comedy series (Peter Bayliss in ‘The Fenn Street Gang’, Ballard Berkeley in ‘Fawlty Towers’, John Horsley in ‘The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin’, Martin Benson in ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ and Thora Hird and Michael Ward in just about everything else). Richard Chatten.

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO | TALKING PICTURES TV

Fukushima 50 (2020) Digital release

Dir.: Setsuro Wakamatsu; Cast: Ken Watanabe, Koichi Sato, Shiro Sano; Japan 2020, 122 min.

Japanese director Setsuro Wakamatsu pays tribute to fifty courageous workers who averted a Chernobyl-style meltdown when a natural disaster hit a power plant in 2011. This is a blockbuster without any villains – the government and utility executes got away Scot-free, as we soon discover. All the characters are fictional, apart from Watanabe’s Masao Yoshida, the plant’s superintendent, who died – as a national hero – of cancer unrelated to the accident of 11.3. 2011 two years later.

Based on The Inside story of Fukushima Daiichi’ by Ryusho Kadota, Fukushima 50, takes its title from the fifty heroes who stayed to face the music after an earthquake (scale 9 on the Richter Scale) and a massive Tsunami threatened to wipe out the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, and the devastation of eastern Japan, including Tokyo.

All the men in the plant are tough and selfless (unlike today’s young generation in Japan), there are references to the WWII generation, “who lived for others”. Japan’s military forces are also featured, fighting from the front in great numbers. Toshio Isaki (Sato), the shift supervisor, is the embodiment of these attributes: he would have liked a more active role, but his men ask him to stay behind, whilst they try to cool the reactors down with seawater, or reduce the pressure so that the reactors do not explode.

The seawater solution, brought forward by Yoshida, is one of the few pivotal passages of the film: the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), who owns the plant, gives orders to Yoshida not to cool the reactors this way to the plant being damaged by seawater, but the superintendent goes against his orders. Heated arguments add a scintilla of drama but even the Prime Minister (Sano) gets away with a limp performance,oscillating between weakness and bullying.

The lack of a central villain reduces the film to a well meaning fight ballade, everyone striving for heroism. We never find out the cause of the disaster, nuclear power is never questioned, nobody asks if the disaster preparations were adequate or if the country needed to re-think their economic or cultural strategy – after all, idea of WWII being a time of heroism has been successfully propagated by the Japan’s Liberal Party which has been in power since WWII, with the exception of a handful of years.

Compared with the dark and eerie images of Chernobyl, which went for a systematic critique of the Soviet Union, Fukushima does not hold anybody responsible for the disaster – despite the collusion between regulators, government and TEPCO. Meanwhile law suits have been piling up amid ongoing international investigations, the report of the Japanese Parliament (DIET) calls the disaster “man-made”. Nothing has changed since March 2011, and the Japanese Anti-Nuclear movement has lost much of its urgency.

The blockbuster treatment leaves us with good production values (DoP Shoji Ehara), spirited performances by the saviours, but a hapless happy-end, with Isaki being re-united with his family, an unruly daughter and a critical father. Fukushima shows nothing has changed since March 2011, styling his actioner as a boys-only adventure story – thrilling and triumphant with the cherry blossom finale promising an uncritical pastel future where governments turn a blind eye. AS

FUKUSHIMA 50 OUT NOW ON ALTITUDE FILMS and all digital platforms across the UK & Ireland

https://youtu.be/yJ-RSrg3DeI

Five Films for Freedom | BFI Flare 2021

During the FLARE LGBTIQ+ BFI’s annual celebration of all things gay five festival films have been selected to screen free internationally from 17-28 March

Five Films For Freedom 2021 sees filmmakers exploring emerging sexuality, trans-activism, homophobia and genderless love at a time when people may have been adversely impacted by the pandemic.

In a new twist for 2021, audiences will be invited to nominate their Five Films Favourite via a British Council web poll, the winners will be announced via British Council social media channels prior to 28 March. Voting opens 17 March via the #Five FilmsForFreedom homepage.

The FIVE FILMS FOR FREEDOM campaign has been going since 2015 and over 15 million people from more than 200 countries have engaged with it particularly in places where homosexuality can be prosecuted and, in some cases, punishable by death.

Five Film For Freedom programme 2021:

Bodies of Desire (India/Dir. Varsha Panikar & Saad Nawab/3 mins), directed by Varsha Panikar and multi-award-winner Saad Nawab, uses Indian poet Panikar’s work as the basis for a visual, poetic film capturing four sets of lovers in a sensual celebration of genderless love and desire.

Land of the Free (Sweden/Dir. Dawid Ullgren/10 mins) – Ullgren’s tense Swedish drama follows the fictional David and friends as they celebrate his birthday with a nightly swim at the beach. The good mood swiftly changes after two straight couples walk by and laugh – was the laughter directed at them, or something else? Who owns the truth of exactly what happened?

Pure (USA/Dir. Natalie Jasmine Harris/12 mins) is the fictional debut from 2020 Directors Guild of America Student Film Award winner Natalie Jasmine Harris, centring on a young Black girl grappling with her queer identity and ideas of ‘purity’. The film is written, produced and directed by Harris – a filmmaker passionate about the intersection between filmmaking and social justice.

Trans Happiness is Real (UK/Dir. Quinton Baker/8 mins) – a moving documentary from first-time filmmaker Quinton Baker – sees transgender activists take to the streets of Oxford, England to fight anti-trans sentiments using the power of graffiti and street art.

Victoria (Spain/Dir. Daniel Toledo/7 mins) follows a bittersweet reunion between a trans woman and her ex, sparking tension and long buried resentment. Directed by award-winning filmmaker, Daniel Toledo, Victoria also features acclaimed trans actress, writer and director Abril Zamora (The Life Ahead, The Mess You Leave Behind).

All films will be available to view from 17 – 28 March 2021 via the British Council Arts YouTube channel as well as being part of the BFI Flare digital programme on BFI Player and associated platforms.

My Father and Me (2021)

Dir.: Nick Broomfield; Documentary with Maurice Bloomfield, Nick Broomfield, Joan Churchill, Barney Bloomfield; UK 2019, 97 min.

British documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield (Marianne & Leonard – Words of Love) has created a loving portrait of his father, Britain’s pre-eminent industrial photographer Maurice (1916-2010), Despite their ups and downs what shines through here is a genuine warmth and filial respect My Father also serving as a social history of the British working class since the end of WWII.

Maurice’s photos and Nick’s creative output makes this an especially enjoyable father and son portrait: Maurice Broomfield (1916-2010) started his working life on the floor of the factories in Derby where he was born. Taking a degree in photography at night school, he became the chronicler of the excellence of British production, be it Phillips Nuclear Power or Rolls Royce – his brilliantly-crafted photos showed a glamorous, even romanticised image of the workplace, with the craftsman in midst of his products.

Maurice was a contentious objector in WWII and remained a pacifist all his life, but he was still able to see the positive factors in life and work. In 1947, he married Sonja Lagusova, a Jewish emigrant from Czechoslovakia, who had lost half her family in the Nazi concentration camps. She hardly ever talked about her Jewish identity and Nick, born in 1948, only learnt the stark facts that had traumatised his mother for life, in his twenties. In Derby, Maurice’s parents had already picked a local girl for him to marry and were nonplussed at his choice of Sonja, relations between them never recovering. Nick, like his father, was not a good student at all, he was expelled and later went to boarding school. Afterwards, he joined his father on his photographic tours around Britain’s factories, and had his first crush on Maurice’ assistant Barbara. Nick’s grandfather Gogo worked on the film about the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and he and his daughter were somewhat critical of Maurice’s rather optimistic attitude towards society and life in general.

Nick’s work, on the other hand, shared the more critical attitude of his mother’s side of the family. “My Dad and me were competing for Sonja’s approval”. Meanwhile, Maurice tried hard to “unlearn’ his working class accent, his first studio was located in the grounds of the Lady Crossfield’s estate; he even met the Queen. The gulf between father and son widened after Nick married fellow documentarian Joan Churchill (now divorced), the couple have a son, Barney. Their documentary Juvenile Liaison (1976), about an eight-year old boy who stole a toy pistol, and is then shown the inside of a jail by a policeman who frightens the child with dark stories, was banned for thirty years, and could even then only be shown to criminologists.

Maurice did not accept that his son had a different outlook on society, after the private showing of Tattooed Tears (1982), he simply left the screening room without saying a word. After Sonja died at the age of 59 of skin cancer, Maurice fell into a long depression. Father and son reconciled in the wake of Maurice finding a new life with Suzy, who re-kindled his lust for life, taking on painting, and losing his inhibitions. The family saga ends with Maurice, Nick and Barney (who is one of the DoPs of Father) sitting happily together on a bench “talking about nothing in particular”.

The writer/director combines the generational conflict with a short history of how Britain changed from the hopeful new beginnings of 1945 to the social divisions that now face the country. Unfortunately, we are still far away from the reconciliation and mutual acceptance of the three generations of Broomfields. AS

The V&A museum will host a Q&A screening on 4 November of Nick Broomfield’s MY FATHER AND ME exploring his relationship with his father, photographer Maurice Broomfield, to tie in with a display of photographs and book Maurice Broomfield: Industrial Sublime opening at the V&A on 6 November. BBC Four will also air the film in November and stream on BBC iPlayer. More info below and V&A info here – Link

Berlinale Award Winners 2021

Berlinale 2021: The Award Winners of the 71st Competition

The first part of this year’s BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL has drawn to a close and the following winners announced.

Golden Bear for Best Film:

Babardeală cu bucluc sau porno balamuc (Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn) by Radu Jude

Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize: Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy by Ryusuke Hamaguchi

Silver Bear Jury Prize: Herr Bachmann and His Class by Maria Speth

Silver Bear for Best Director: Dénes Nagy for Természetes fény (Natural Light

Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance: Maren Eggert in Ich bin dein Mensch (I’m Your Man) by Maria Schrader

Silver Bear for Best Supporting Performance: Lilla Kizlinger in Rengeteg – mindenhol látlak (Forest – I See You Everywhere) by Bence Fliegauf

Silver Bear for Best Screenplay: Hong Sangsoo for Inteurodeoksyeon (Introduction) by Hong Sangsoo

Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution: Yibrán Asuad for the editing of Una película de policías (A Cop Movie) by Alonso Ruizpalacios

Berlinale 2021: Awards of the Encounters Section

Best Film: Nous (We) by Alice Diop
Special Jury Award: Vị (Taste) by Lê Bảo
Best Director (ex-aequo): Das Mädchen und die Spinne (The Girl and the Spider) by Ramon Zürcher, Silvan Zürcher
Best Director (ex-aequo): Hygiène sociale (Social Hygiene) by Denis Côté
Special Mention: Rock Bottom Riser by Fern Silva

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL PART II | JUNE 2021

Ballad of a White Cow (2021)

Dir: Maryam Moghadam, Behtash Saneaeeha | Cast: Maryam Moghadam, Alireza Sani Far, Pouria Rahimi Sam, Avin Poor Raoufi | Iran/France, Drama 105′

Black clothed women make their way mournfully through grim corridors in this doleful drama from Iranian filmmaker Maryam Moghadam who also plays the main character Mina. It could be medieval times but this is modern day Iran, a million miles away from the thriving colourful capital it was during the 1970s. The film paints a dour fate for women, now at the bottom of the scrap heap, dogs don’t even get a look in, while men hold sway in modern attire, smoking and drinking tea together. And you can go to the cinema.

But like its deeply-religious Western counterpart Texas, Iran still carries the death penalty. Mina (Moghadam who co-directs with Saneaeeha) is distraught because her husband Babak is condemned to death for a crime he did not commit in a miscarriage of justice. Thus begins Mina’s fight for the truth in a tense modern parable.

Ballad of a White Cow is social realism at the coal face, a restrained and thoughtful second feature fraught with hand-ringing introspection contemplating justice and the plight of women in a broken system, down on its knees and dominated by red tape, religious dogma and a corrupt judicial. And with an unexpected sting in the tail. Elegantly framed in long takes the dour monochrome monotony shows Tehran as a a grey place where Mina works in a factory to support her mute daughter Bita. Meanwhile Babak’s brother wants custody of the little girl and his father has her thrown out of their home.

Then along comes wealthy businessman Reza (Sani Far) who has friends in high places and takes pity on Mina offering her a lovely bright flat even helping her to move in. But Reza is a dark horse and Mina’s crisis is far from over. Just when Reza comes into her life with friendship it transpires he has problems of his own erupting during a spring storm and adding a welcome touch of drama, Mina rushing to his rescue, only to discover Bita is also in trouble. And then bad penny Babak’s brother is back.

Moghadam is simply staggering as a put upon woman struggling to do her best for her friends and family, clearly she needs help of her own, and we feel for her. There’s a wonderfully thoughtful scene where she opens her heart to Reza in a subtle display of vulnerability, but it falls on deaf ears. What could she expect? The finale comes like a bolt from the blue. MT

IN CINEMAS NATIONWIDE FROM 10 FEBRUARY 2022

The Last Forest | A Ultima Foresta (2021) Berlinale Panorama 2021

Dir.: Luiz Bolognesi; Documentary with Davi Kopenawa Yanorami and members of his indigenous community; Brazil 2021, 75 min.

The Yanomami tribe have lived in the Brazilian Rain Forest for over a 1000 years. Survival is the focus of this indigenous tribe, who are extremely smart, despite their primitive way of life. In his ravishing docudrama Luiz Bolognesi dives deep into the jungle on the borders of Venezuela and Brazil to uncover their story.

Bolognesi has already filmed the Yanomami back in 2018 gaining the trust of a group with the help of their Shaman and elder Davi Kopeneva Yanomami, who reveals the history of a tribe whose existence predates Brazil as a nation, by 500 years. But there is a new strand to their struggle. Since taking power in 2019, right-winger Jair Bolsonaro has sanctioned continuing deforestation of the Amazon encouraging gold prospectors who dig up the land occupied by the Yanomami, polluting the waters with Mercury and bringing disease, including Covid-19, into the community.

Above all this is a film to watch and marvel at, its enchanting images show an atavistic tribe unalloyed by the march of time, both men and women contributing to their daily subsistence by hunting with bows and arrow and poisoned darts. But there is an important message in Bolognesi’s narrative, and that’s the real thrust of his film.

Legend has it that there were two brothers, Omama and Yoasi who purportedly dug up the forest ground creating rivers and lakes. But the bothers were lonely and longed for women. Then Omama met the water goddess Thuëyoma, who came out of the river to join him, later admitting she had also slept with Yoasi who had treated her badly. Omama found his brother, rubbing his miss-shaped penis against a rock and banned him from the land to the other side of the ocean. “You are not my brother any more”. And Yoasi went away for good, and created death. Yoasi became the spirit of evil, whilst Omama buried the gold deep into the earth, so that Yoasi’s spirit could not be awoken to bring back the smoke of disease, which made us mortal.

Davi has lived with the ‘white men’, but he was lonely, and their ‘products’ put a spell on him. Making use of modern technology, he looks out of place making a phone-call, but this is all for the good of the tribe to organise resistance against the gold prospectors who have already made their negative presence known: In 1986 over 45000 gold prospectors forced the Yanomami deeper into the rain forest, killing between 1500-1800 natives. Six years later, despite of a change in the law granting this territory to the Yanorami. During the infamous Haxima massacre sixteen people lost their lives at the hands of the ‘white people’.Meanwhile back in the village, one woman mourns the loss of her husband: she believes the water goddess has taken him into the river with her, and begs the Shaman to help retrieve her husband.

Despite their primitive credentials the women here are very enterprising and have formed a co-operative to improve production of baskets which they can barter for food from the men, making them less reliant. Davi too is highly intelligent, demonstrating nous and a grasp of capitalism: “Gold prospectors dream a lot, but only about money. But it is the business men who keep the money, the ones who come here, the workers stay poor. It is all about greed”. He also remembers the plight of his relatives’ further north, whose water was poisoned with mercury.

The Yanomami are savvy and sociable people. DoP Pedro Márquez, who also photographed Ex-Shaman (2018), talks of their willingness to facilitate the making of the film, but ensuring they never looked into the camera, believing it would steal their souls. The filmmakers’ hope is that they can persuade investors who work with the Bolsanaro administration, upholding the 1986 law so that the Yanomami can return to their way of life. AS

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL

Voyagers (2021) Coming soon…

VOYAGERS stars Tye Sheridan, Lily-Rose Depp and Colin Farrell coming soon to UK cinemas.

Sounding very much like a remake of Claire Denis’ 2018 Sci-Fi outing High Life Voyagers sees the future of the human race at stake, and a group of young men and women, bred for intelligence and obedience, embarking on an expedition to colonise a distant planet. But when they uncover disturbing secrets about the mission, their training plan is soon abandoned in favour of exploring their most primitive natures, only to be consumed by fear, lust, and the unsatiable hunger for power.

VOYAGERS coming soon

Introduction (2021) Best Screenplay Berlinale 2021

Dir: Hong Sang-soo | South Korea, Drama 66′

Hong Sang-soo serves up his first slice of suggestible social drama for the year, at Berlinale’s 71st edition. Along with his muse (Kim Min-he) the usual sympathetic suspects join the party, the title has us hoping there may be a sudden dramatic epiphany but we’re not surprised when no such breakthrough occurs as the narrative soft-peddles enjoyably through to the end.

This is another short and sweet story, running at just 66 minutes, but make no mistake, the script is rich enough to stretch along for much longer, although the welcome brevity will always keep us coming back for more. No film festival would be complete without the South Korean master’s lightness of touch and teasing humour, and Introduction is no different.

Korean society is so coy and polite reflected once again in this delicate intergenerational piece, that will see the lowkey conflict play out between mother and son, and son and father. In one early scene a young couple meet again ever so formally after spending the previous one together. Maybe they are playing some sort of seductive game by adding an air of detachment to the rendezvous, a ploy that is always guaranteed to add a frisson of sexual tension to each new meeting. They are obviously in love. We have become accustomed to these winsome moments which are part of the director’s idiosyncratic cinema language but why this is called Introduction remains an enigma, and it could just be for no reason at all.

The film drifts peripatetically from South Korea to Germany. But one of the most interesting interludes involves the likeable Young-ho (Shin Seok-ho) who we first meet visiting his father (Kim Young-ho) at his acupuncture clinic in Seoul. The two clearly don’t see eye to eye and his father is under great emotional stress as he desperately tries to take a moment to relax in his private office, before placing strategic needles in one of his patients, famous actor (Ki Joo-bong), who, it soon emerges. dated Young-ho’s mother (Cho Yun-hee), and could be the reason for their marriage breakdown.

Meanwhile Young-ho’s timid girlfriend Ju-won (Park Mi-so) is off to study fashion in Berlin where she stays in a flat owned by a leading artist, and a friend of Ju-won’s mother (Seo Young-hwa), another rather fraught character who wants the best for her daughter in the rather controlling way mothers often do. Young-ho is also at odds with his own mother over his choice of acting as a career. Clearly she disapproves.

The film is full of these moments of tension that are so delicately appealing in their self-containment and so deftly handled with the director’s usual lightness of touch. MT

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL | Best SCREENPLAY

Petite Maman (2021) Berlinale Competition 2021

Dir: Celine Sciamma | Cast: Nina Meurisse, Margot Abascal, Josephine Sanz, Gabrielle Sanz, Stephane Varupenne | Drama France, 72′

Petite Maman shows France’s Celine Sciamma at the height of her powers with an enchanting ghost story contemplating loss and longing through young eyes.

In competition at this year’s Berlinale, the French auteuse once again evokes the subtle sensibilities of human dynamics through her cast of child performers capturing naiveté but also resilience in the wake of a family bereavement.

The director showed a keen appreciation of childhood dynamics in her 2011 film Tomboy. Here the focus is little Nelly and how she copes in the aftermath of her grandma’s death as the family clears out the home so familiar and comforting in the first years of her life.

Avoiding sentimentality Sciamma maintains a pensive ambiguity for most of this almost spellbound drama that sees solemn 8-year-old Nelly (Josephine Sanz) wondering into the nearby woods where she meets Marion (played by identical twin sister Gabrielle), the two striking up a tentative friendship as they build a tree house. These two are so po-faced they almost resemble the couple in Kubrick’s The Shining with their chilly demeanour, but we are far removed from any horror story here in a style that is best described at fantastical realism.

Mature beyond her years Nelly views her bereft mother with detatchment although she cares for her in the days after her own mother’s death, doing chores around the house with her father (Varupenne) who she regards with scepticism chiding him over his chain-smoking smoking. Sciamma gradually abandons enigma in the second half but also keeps us guessing as the story gradually unfolds in an eerie and suspended moment in time.

Building a gentle but detached camaraderie throughout the Sanz sisters give captivating debut performances that evoke confidence but also vulnerability. Meurisse is full of sensitivity as Nelly’s mother carrying her grief with a doleful dignity. MT

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL 2021 |

The End of St Petersburg (1927) DVD

Dir: Vasevolod Pudovkin, Mikhail Dollar | Cast: Aleksandr Chistyakov, Vera Baranovska, Ivan Chuvelyov, V Obolensky | USSR Drama 87′

Despite the grandiose and specific title, and crammed with the usual magnificent images one expects of Soviet silent cinema (aided by Pudovkin’s regular cameraman Anatoli Golovnya), this worm’s eye view of the Revolution is as frustrating to watch as Spielberg’s remake of The War of the Worlds in electing to show momentous events from the perspective of a humble onlooker (Ivan Chuvelev) stuck at the back with a rather poor view of what is unfolding, and assumes a detailed knowledge on the part the audience (which may well have existed in 1927) of – say – the role of the First World War in the fall of the Romanov dynasty to fill in the gaps.

Pudovkin, like Eisenstein, had considerable resources at his disposal when he made this tenth anniversary celebration of the Russian Revolution, and the money’s up there on the screen, but without the cinematic exhilaration of Eisenstein’s October. No film about the Revolution seems complete without its visit to the Winter Palace, however, and The End of St.Petersburg concludes with Pudovkin’s original ‘Mother’, Vera Baranovskaya, wandering into the Palace and up the central staircase without encountering a single other person. How many authentic proletarians in 1917 really wandered about the building so casually in the Revolution’s aftermath? (Just as how many shareholders ever actually visit the sweatshops from which their wealth derives, like the guy in the Hitler moustache and stiff collar who introduces himself to the hero while he’s stoking a furnace?) Richard Chatten

NOW ON AMAZON

Tina (2021) Tribute to Tina Turner

Dir: Daniel Lindsay, T J Martin | With Tina Turner, Oprah Winfrey, Angela Bassett, Kurt Loder | US Doc 118′

The most surprising quality about Tina Turner, according to Dan Lindsay and T J Martin’s revealing biopic about the superstar, was her sheer determination, given her crushing start in life. This new film chronicles Turner’s early rise to fame, her personal and professional struggles and her musical renaissance in the early 1980s. There are snatches of her iconic stage moments, with the American singer’s performance of her dynamite R&B hit:- River Deep…Mountain High being the most notable. The hit marked a move away from her controlling partner Ike, thanks to producer Phil Spector.

And there are snatches of Rolling Down the River, Heartbreak Tonight and Simple the Best – but mostly the focus is on the singer herself, revisited via the original interview audio tapes as well as commentary from the famous celebrity journalist Carl Arrington, in conversation in her Swiss lakeside chateau. Kurt Loder (the Rolling Stone editor), Angela Bassett (who played her in What’s Love Got to Do With It ), Oprah Winfrey and playwright Katori Hall, who wrote the book for the musical, are the most informative talking heads in a film whose first half is, appropriately, still haunted by the shadow of Ike.

She – who died on 24 May 2023 – was born in 1939 in Nutbush, Tennessee, the child of cotton farmers. Her parents fought endlessly and her mother hit back – a defiance that clearly gave Tina her get up go after the two eventually disappeared leaving her and her siblings with a cousin. They never came back.

And she speaks out about her turbulent life and marriage to Ike who beat her with coat hangers, even when she was pregnant, during those Motown years. She admits to being “insanely afraid of him” so much so she attempted suicide two or three times due to his womanising and cruelty, and she finally left him- ironically on the 4th July – finding salvation in Buddhism which changed her life and set her free to be resilient and self-determining – not a victim – during her fifty year career in music. She left her marriage to Ike with nothing but her ‘name’ which is now a brand. So she had to go back on the road to make some money.

The turning point came in the 1980s when she came into contact with the engaging Australian manager Roger Davies who asked her how she saw a new solo career. She told him she wanted to be “the first female roll’n’roll singer to fill a stadium”.

And so he sent her to Britain for a new chapter in her life, setting off with a song she at first detested ‘What’s Love Got to Do with It’, written by Manchester born Terry Britten (and originally recorded for Bucks Fizz) that became the breakout number in an album ‘Private Dancer’, that sold out in two weeks and went on to spawn 50 concerts. Tina was 50. At this point manager Kurt Loder suggested she author a book to ward off the tacky stories that still dogged her time before and after Ike. And they didn’t go away – although the book ‘I, Tina Turner’ became a bestseller.

Restyled and booted, Tina’s terrific body and gyrating hips – not to mention her dynamite vocal delivery – made her a stunning stage presence and the film captures this jubilant wave of female emancipation that lit up London’s Wembley Arena and everywhere else she played.

The final scenes are gilded with a blissful aura as Tina reveals the love in her life in the shape of German music pro Erwin Bach, whom she met in 1986 and married 27 years later. And it’s these golden moments that really shine in a biopic that quietly reflects on the past and joyfully celebrates the tremendous feminine force of nature that was Tina Turner. MT

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL | Premiere

Ted K (2021) Berlinale Panorama 2021

Dir: Tony Stone | Cast: Sharlto Copley, Drew Powell, Amber Rose Mason, Travis Bruyer, Megan Folsom, Andrew Senn | USA 2021 121′

We’ve all felt stressed out by noise and leaf blowers or that Tesco doesn’t stock our favourite break anymore but terrorist Ted Kaczynski took things a stage further killing three people and injuring 23 in his attempt to bring about “a revolution against the industrial system”.

“Yesterday was quite good, the only disruptive sounds were nine evil jets.” wrote Ted, a Harvard Maths professor, in his diary of 25,000 pages penned in the seclusion of a wood cabin in deepest Montana and his sanctuary after dropping out of a society he had grown to hate with a vengeance, Ted is the infamous Unabomber.

Tony Stone’s study of mental disintegration is a slick and engaging procedural drama that moves tensely through its paces to show how a brilliant albeit emotionally disconnected son and brother become a domestic terrorist, prompting the largest manhunt in FBI history. The film focuses on the final seven years from the late 1980s to his capture in 1996 and is screening in Berlin’s Panorama section at this year’s festival.

But Ted K never uncovers what drove Kaczynski into isolation in the first place although we certainly get a glimpse of his family background, through fraught conversations, particularly with his mother who had possibly played her part in his complex personality disorder, and he rails at her in one phone booth conversation, blaming her for his dysfunctional relationship with the opposite sex, claiming to have never touched a woman despite being, by now, well into his forties.

Sharlto Copley makes a formidable lead as the geekishly sinister ‘Basil Fawly’ type character. An unknowable action man who vehemently competes against the elements in the stunningly photographed landscapes of the Big Sky Country on the borders of Canada. There’s a distinct retro feel to the small-town locations where Ted arrives on his easy rider bike to research his victims in computer shops, where one assistant shows him how to correct a sentence on a new-fangled word processor. You can feel the anger coiled like spring beneath his well-formed physique – Christian Bale could have been another contender for the part – although Copley has a meaner look to his craggy features and although irritated by noise and machinery, we see him carefully blow-drying his hair in the mirror after hitting himself on the nose with a brick. And there’s a fascination to watching him go about his daily tasks, often swearing under his breath in terse exchanges, especially when confronted by women.

Stone clearly speculates about Ted – clearly he’s no charmer in the style of Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dharmer who were more intimately concerned with killing their victims. Ted K is all about reclusiveness but he still talks of the tremendous relief at ‘getting his own back’ after after sending mail bombs to his imagined adversaries. Ted’s concern is a more ‘noble’ one aimed at those he blames for destroying nature and allowing technology to take over society’s wellbeing. Rather than intellectually engaging with those causing the damage, he strikes back like a wounded animal, killing them.

Stone makes atmospheric use of an electronic score by Blanck Mass that alternates with soothing classical vibes from Schubert’s No 2, Op 100 (that Kubrick memorably used in Barry Lyndon) But Copley makes no attempt to embroider or dress up the banal evil of his character playing him as a straightforward Mr Angry from Montana whose dour prickly introspection does lighten up a touch when a pleasant woman smiles at him in a shop. Stone’s portrait is more fascinating than thrilling but he doesn’t attempt to fashion it into an arthouse extravaganza – in the style of The True History of the Kelly Gang, and in some ways this is to film’s credit in portraying Kaczynski’s ordinariness and social dislocation. He is a deeply wounded man crying out for attention and rehabilitation. Or at least that’s what comes across in this watchable study of loneliness and desperation. MT

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL 2021

I’m Your Man | Ich Bin Dein Mensch (2021) Best Leading Performance Berlinale 2021

Dir: Maria Schrader, Wri: Maria Schrader, Jan Schomburg, Emma Braslavsky | Cast: Dan Stevens, Maren Eggert, Sandra Hüller, Hans Löw, Wolfgang Hübsch, Annika Meier, Falilou Seck, Jürgen Tarrach, Henriette Richter-Röhl, Monika Oschek | Sci-fi Drama Germany 105’

Dan Stevens plays a sycophantic male escort in Maria Schrader’s darkly comic Sci-fi drama screening in competition at Berlinale 2021.

Slick, sophisticated and satisfying this dating movie with a difference sees things from a distinctly female perspective exploring love and desire in a scenario may remind you of another recent German comedy Toni Erdmann which also starred Sandra Huller as a put-upon professional. Here Maren Eggert plays a similar character, a hard-working scientist at the famous Pergamon Museum in Berlin, struggling to care for her dementia-ridden dad (Hubsch). She accepts an invitation to participate in an extraordinary experiment that will fund her research. For three weeks, she is to live with a humanoid robot. And this is where Dan Stevens comes in as ‘Tom’ a dating machine in human form, with the intention of fulfilling her dreams. But although Tom’s artificial intelligence has been designed to allow it to morph into the man of Alma’s dreams, sadly it is on the spectrum feelings-wise, unable to appreciate human emotion, forcing the couple to seek professional help, from a relationship counsellor in the shape of Sandra Huller.

Maria Schrader, who won a Silver Bear for acting and is the director behind breakout TV mini series Unorthodox and award-winning biopic drama about Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig, directs with supreme confidence adapting her script from a book by Emma Braslavsky, and adding a suggestive cinematic spin to her intuitive grasp of the subtle dynamics of love and dating, and the chemistry behind acting, in a film that reflects the reality that love relies just as much on the lows as the as the highs to be emotionally fulfilling for the human psyche. Maren Eggert is superb as the thinking woman’s love interest in a performance that is fraught with emotion as well as thoughtful dignity, never resorting to histrionics or melodrama. Benedict Neuenfels makes this a pleasure to look at with his lush summery landscapes of Germany and Denmark.

But the film belongs to Dan Stevens who gives a nuanced performance in a difficult role as a robot that teeters between the ideal emotionally intelligent man and a geeky robotic guy you may even and have dated yourself and eventually grown to love – and even fancy – for his truly masculine take on life. I’m Your Man shows a bright future, where women (and men!) can get what they really want. But do they really know what it is? MT

IN CINEMAS FROM 13 AUGUST 2021 | BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Blast of Silence (1961) DVD

Dir: Allen Baron | Cast: Allen Baron, Molly McCarthy, Larry Tucker, Peter Clune | US Noir Thriller 77′

The most valuable asset to an ambitious young filmmaker of the 21st Century would probably be a time machine capable of returning you to the year 1960. Clocking in at just 77 minutes but seeming much longer, Blast of Silence is further evidence that in those days it would have taken genius for an independent filmmaker NOT to create a classic city ‘noir’. Just make sure there’s film in your camera and take your pick from all the breathtaking compositions – complete with vintage cars and sharply dressed passers-by – constantly forming around you; even Michael Winner couldn’t fail to turn in a black & white urban gem three years later with West 11 (1963).

It certainly anticipates Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai (1967) – but then so do Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss (1955) and Robert Wise’s Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) – and plenty have been seduced by Blast of Silence’s aura of monochrome period cool into extravagantly overpraising it. Allen Baron’s inexpressive performance as hit-man Frankie Bono (he resembles a young George C. Scott) certainly provides a perfect blank slate on which to inscribe any profundities or angst that grab you. In his capacity as writer-director Baron at some point late in production evidently felt the need to do just that, calling upon two eminent blacklistees whose services at the time would have been available at an affordable price.

The insistent narration reminiscent of Mark Hellinger’s in The Naked City was written under the pseudonym Mel Davenport by Waldo Salt (who later won Academy Awards for Midnight Cowboy and Coming Home), while the rasping voice of Lionel Stander is uncredited but unmistakable on the soundtrack, providing the glue which with Merrill Brody’s photography holds the film together. Unfortunately much of what Stander keeps telling us on the soundtrack doesn’t really need to be spelled out so relentlessly; while Meyer Kupferman’s jazz score is extremely effective in moderation, but gets very noisy in places.

Despite supposedly being such a pro, Frankie Bono’s murder of Big Ralph (played by Larry Tucker, who I recognised from Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor) is remarkably amateurishly executed, his long-anticipated hit of Troiano no big deal, and he proves remarkably easy to ambush at the film’s conclusion. Richard Chatten

NOW ON AMAZON

The Taking of Pelham 123 (1974) Netflix

Dir: Joseph Sargent | Cast: Walter Matthau, Robert Shaw, Martin Balsam, Hector Elizondo, James Broderick, Dick O’Neill, Lee Wallace | US Thriller 104′

A depressing sign of the times is that Ridley Scott’s underpowered 2009 remake of this classic thriller has far more posts on IMDb, after ten years, than the original after twenty. Mind you, even older viewers would be hard-pushed to recall the name of the actual director. But Joseph Sargent (whose long career in TV included James Cagney’s final role in Terrible Joe Moran) put his long career directing actors to good use in his one major cinema release, filmed in New York with a cast recruited largely from Broadway (including Rudy Bond – who played the judge in the opening scene of 12 Angry Men – as the police commissioner).

A slow-burner with a terrific score by David Shire (whose other films include The Conversation and Zodiac). During filming everyone knew they were making a winner, but at the box office back in the day failed to come up trumps, and the thriller rarely showed up on tv during the eighties. It was eventually resurrected twenty years later as a cult movie after inspiring Reservoir Dogs, which turned the film inside out by not actually showing the caper itself, dealing instead which its planning and aftermath.

In Reservoir Dogs we instead see the squabbling among grown men over who gets what colour, while the black suits worn in Tarantino’s film reflect the simple but effective disguises employed by the original desperadoes (it comes as quite a shock when Mr Grey turns out to be bald underneath his hat).

Frederick Raphael cited the use of the word ‘Gesundheit’ and its implications in the final scene as exemplary of the high standard of the writing; evident throughout the film as when one of the security men observes that “You’d think a million dollars would look like more” or when Garber is surprised to discover that Inspector Daniels is black. The one major flaw is when Blue behaves wholly out of character by going back into the tunnel to kill the plainclothes man solely so that he can get caught (Matthau’s line that they don’t “at the moment” have the death penalty in New York State shows just how long ago this film was made). The scene where Blue kills the guard is genuinely shocking since we have come to care about him, but demonstrates just how ruthless Blue is and justifies his own sticky ending. Richard Chatten

NOW ON NETFLIX

Gunman on the Streets (1950) DVD

Dir: Frank Tuttle | Cast: Dane Clark, Simone Signoret, Fernand Gravey, Robert Duke, Michel Andre | US Noir thriller 86′

Atmospherically shot by the veteran Oscar-winning cameraman Eugen Schüfftan, Gunman in the Streets is the English-language version of a co-production released in France as Le Traqué. The French version is now even more obscure than this, and since it had a different credited director (Borys Lewin, normally an editor) may be substantially different from this one. All those obviously Gallic types speaking English seem a little incongruous and it would be easy to imagine this with subtitles (Dane Clark and Robert Duke were presumably dubbed). Jean-Pierre Melville probably saw Le Traqué, and Fernand Gravet’s police commissioner, suavely hot on Clark’s trail, strongly resembles Paul Meurisse’s Commissaire Blot in Le Deuxième Souffle (1966).

The English-language version bears the name of blacklisted Hollywood veteran Frank Tuttle (before he yielded in 1951 to pressure to name names to the HUAC), which may be why it was never released theatrically in the United States. But it can’t have helped that it’s so relentlessly sordid, grim and claustrophobic, with a hero unlikeable even by Dane Clark’s usual charmless standard.

It starts like Odd Man Out, with Clark on the run on the streets of Paris with a bullet in his shoulder after shooting his way to freedom. He contacts former girlfriend Simone Signoret, curtly informs her that he needs 300,000 francs pronto to get out of the country, and they hole up in the apartment of a creepy admirer of Signoret’s (Michel André) who Clark handles predictably roughly. What Signoret (then in her absolute youthful prime) ever saw in this vicious little runt was beyond me; I guess he must have been dynamite in the sack. Richard Chatten

NOW ON DVD FROM AMAZON

The Mauritanian (2021) Amazon Prime 2021

Dir: Kevin Macdonald | Cast: Jodie Foster, Tahar Rahim, Shailene Woodley, Benedict Cumberbatch, Zachary Levi, Saamer Usmani, Baya Belal | US Thriller 129′

Tahar Rahim plays a longtime Guantánamo Bay detainee accused of masterminding 9/11, in Kevin Mcdonald’s worthy biopic, based on the memoirs of one Mohamedou Ould Slahi – aka The Mauritanian.

The film’s opening scenes unfold in an exotic North African desert location where a tented wedding ceremony is reaching its climax. But not for the white-robed Slahi (Rahim) who is whisked away and later brutally tortured in scenes of extreme violence, after his incarceration. Next we meet ‘no nonsense’ lawyer Nancy Hollander (Jodie Foster) tasked with batting for Slahi in his habeas corpus case, after he fails to be charged or given a trial. Her opponent in the ensuing courtroom potboiler is prosecutor Stuart Couch (Cumberbatch rocking a Louisiana accent is the highpoint of the film) and they make a formidable pair investigating what really happened to Slahi in the infamous prison. Denis Menochet, Shailene Woodley and Zachery Levi offer strong support but feel sadly underused in the scheme of things.

There’s incendiary dramatic potential here, and considerable humanitarian clout – not to mention a fabulous cast – and some swanky locations: New York, Cape Town and Mauritania itself – but somehow Macdonald delivers and underwhelming thriller whose finger-wagging script is so focused on the parlous state of US Democracy it starts to feel preachy rather than powerful in convincing us to care about those affected, particularly Slahi himself. And he comes across – mostly in flashback – as rather a glib character which is disappointing considering his stunning track record in a variety of roles. MT

PREMIERS ON PRIME VIDEO 1 APRIL 2021 IN THE UK | Premiered at Berlin Film Festival 2021

BERLINALE SPECIALS

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021)

Dir: Radu Jude | Drama, Romania, Luxembourg, Czech Republic, Croatia 2021 | 106 min| Romanian | Cast: Katia Pescaru, Claudia Ieremia, Olimpia Malai, Nicoldim Ungureanu

The moral of Radu Jude’s latest film is simple: don’t put anything incriminating on film. But Bad Luck Banging addresses far wider concerns that its title suggests: hypocrisy, misogyny, tyranny, racism and of course sex are the elements of this intoxicating, indigestible cocktail – you may even feel sick by the end. If not, you’ll be left with a real mouthful to chew over. This thematically thorny Golden Bear winner is not for the timid, and unfolds in three distinct parts.

Known for his unbridled dramas, snide social satires and several sombre documentaries, the Romanian provocateur delivers a mordant social satire laced with his usual brand of dark and irreverent humour and set in a crumbling Bucharest. Jude describes his treatise as a sketchbook, a work in progress, an unedited collage of ideas. It’s demanding, aggressive and visually stimulating – and opens, appropriately, with a bout of raunchy sex, between school teacher Emi and her partner Eugen.

Emi, (Katia Pescariu, who ironically last played a nun in Beyond the Hills), finds her career at stake when a video of her carnal encounter, shared on an adult only porn site, ends up on the general Internet. Discovering her flirty faux-pas Emi flees through the streets of Bucharest. And this febrile odyssey fuels the film’s extensive second part which starts as an enlightening architectural tour of the centre, its crumbling facades and landmarks such as the Roman Orthodox cathedral and Nicolae Ceausescu’s Palace, but soon widens into an opportunity for the director to air his outspoken views on the state of the nation in a piquant pot-pourri of archive footage that reeks of subversion with its salacious snapshots and facts from the capital’s colourful past. These include Jewish and Roma atrocities, Orthodox Christian ceremonies, folklore and fables. As images flash before us – a row of pigs heads and a woman performing fellatio contrast with icons and ancient texts – and more or less anything the director could lay his hands on to back up his view that society as a whole is hypocritical, pornographic and deeply misanthropic.

The third act takes us back to Emi who must now face the music in a socially distanced kangaroo court of teachers, religious officials, random citizens, and a man in an unfeasibly large teacosy, who all watch the tape – some quite attentively (especially the males) before holding forth with their vehement views in raucous and melodramatic debate on the rights and wrongs of Emi’s behaviour, working up to the film’s over-excited finale. This is an exhausting film to watch, but one that presents Romanian society as intelligent, fervent in its beliefs and proud to stand by them. And although we never really get to know – or even like – Emi as a woman, she serves the narrative as a fearless self-determining female of the future who refuses to take things lying down. MT

NOW ON RELEASE | WINNER GOLDEN BEAR 2021

Eye of the Storm (2020) Glasgow Film Festival 2021

Dir: Anthony Baxter | UK Doc 78 mins

“In the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is king” Desiderius Erasmus

James Morrison (1932-2020) was one of Britain’s finest Scottish landscape painters and a founder member of the Glasgow Group of artists. A new documentary set to premiere at this year’s Glasgow Film Festival paints a lively and amusing portrait of the painter himself and his vision of climate change that became his focus in the final years of his life when failing eyesight putting an impressionistic spin on what many regard as his finest work. Apart from offering insight into the painter’s substantial body of work and methods, this is the fascinating story of his greatest challenge. With his eyesight failing, one of Britain’s greatest landscape painters attempts one final masterpiece.

Hooking us in with its climate change credentials Eye of the Storm offers much much more. Entertaining and enjoyable, this artist’s impression of our changing world, also works as a mini Scottish travelogue, brought to the screen by Anthony Baxter (You’ve Been Trumped) who shows how the laid back and likeable character was inspired to paint Glasgow’s shipyards, and the countryside of Scotland, France and South Africa, and a series of works reflecting the impact of climate change after travelling to the Arctic. The artist had long be fascinated by the changing face of his native Scotland and the countryside in general was an issue close to his heart.

In his bright and airy studio the tousled haired Morrison shares his horror of not being able to paint – his eyesight dwindling – in the build up to a retrospective of his work in The Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh. His watercolour Green Valley (1972) will feature, amongst other works, in an exhibition dedicated to Angus landscapes. He began to paint the Angus outdoors in the 1970s ‘The Rolling Landscapes of Angus (1973). The following decade would see him moving to the north-west Highlands where he befriended a number of local artists, including the renowned figurative painter Joan Eardley. Yet even his famous landscapes avoid human presence:”I don’t want people, they seem an irrelevance to what the landscape is about”.

After studying art in Glasgow under David Donaldson, who taught him a technique of using a spent match (struck on his shoe heel) to get a head start on his life drawing classes, quite literally starting from a top down approach. Then after consciously moving away from the leftwing vibe of his early fellow painters in Glasgow. Morrison describes how he became increasingly drawn to painting the city’s built environment – some areas which no longer exist – and these sequences are enlivened by archive footage of tenement demolition, along with animated drawings and inter-titles featuring quotes from Cezanne, and pictures of Matisse.

In 1960 a move to the ancient East Coast town of Catterline (Scotland’s answer to St Ives with its artist community led by Joan Eardley) saw Morrison being drawn to seascapes with the fishing boats a frequent subject, a painting from the era ‘East Coast Fishing Boat’ (1962) describes in monochrome detail the magnificent fishing vessels which had already done decades of service in the unforgiving North Sea.

In 1971 Morrison found himself moving down the coast to teach at Dundee’s wellknown Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art where he made the next twenty years of his life about opening the horizons for those learning to paint, rather than setting a curriculum. During these exciting years, Morrison gave his students as much scope as possible. And it was in Dundee that he started painting ‘en plein air’ like the original impressionists, with their famous technique of getting the paint straight onto the canvas, after painting out the white, and without preparatory sketching. His hands on approach included mixing his own paints and stretching his own canvases, and it’s here that we get an impromptu visit to the famous French paintbrush shop Sénnélier in Paris.

His first visit to the Arctic came about after he met a biologist, Dr Jean Balfour (who suggested he should paint there), and these sequences are beautifully brought to life by Catriona Black’s animations and archive footage of Morrison at work. The documentary reaches its finale with a sense of anticipation as the artist goes ‘into the eye of the storm’ with his much anticipated, triumphant final work.

Talking heads include Catriona Black who animated key moments of Morrison’s life for the film, his art historian son Professor John Morrison, and the Montrose writer Dennis Rice. MT

EYE OF THE STORM is released in virtual cinemas from 5th March 2021

McManus Gallery, Dundee

The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh

Jesus Egon Christus (2021) Berlinale Perspektive Deutsches Kino 2021

Dir.: David and Sasa Vajda; Cast: Paul Arámbula, Sascha Alexander Gersak, Roxanna Stewens, Angelo Martone, Benjamin Stein, Zora Schemm; BR Deutschland 2021, 51 min.

David and Sasa Vajda’s debut feature is an uneasy docu-fiction hybrid that follows a motley crew of drug addicts who have found refuge in an evangelical psychosocial support group at the outskirts of Berlin. Rumour has it that one former member Angelo (Martone) was a Mafia boss. Run by a self-proclaimed priest, a self-confessed junkie himself, who often insults and humiliates his ‘flock’, there is no structure in their day-to-day life, just an endless flow of psychotic people, left more or less to themselves.

Egon (Arámbula) is the main focus. Recently new to the group he does his best to fit in having to repeat even short utterances at least twice as he is sinks further and further in his psychosis during the filming. When Ben (Stein), beats the priest at chess, Egon compares him to Michael Jordan: “Ben is a Pro”. It soon emerges that Ben nearly overdosed, and that Egon avoids having a shower, apparently sharing his reluctance with Jesus to clean himself (clearly this is the key to the film’s title).

Egon is full of the usual gestures common to his particular mental illness. Out on the street he waves at the cars flying by, “allowing” them to pass. When a dumpster lorry stops to collect rubbish, Egon gracefully permits the men to get on with their work. Pinky (Schlemm) sings badly into a microphone, before declaring that Jesus is dead. Egon grabs the micro from her, sharing his ‘encounter’ with Jesus the previous night. “He said, he loved me, and does not like to shower. And he smoked cigars. And I said to Jesus, ‘laugh, at least once’.” As the film plays out Egon refers to himself increasingly in the third person singular – a sure sign of an impending split in his personality. He asks the priest if he will go to Heaven. “I want to know now”. At one point during dinner, the priest asks Egon to hoot like an owl, and the latter acquiesces.

We suddenly cut to a Super 8 home movie with the young Jenny (Stewans), who had been sexually abused by her father since the age of ten. Her torment went on for years. The voice-over also confesses Jenny and the family watched TV, a broadcast featuring child prodigies, one of them could remember all street names in Oslo.

DoP Antonia Lange contributes with her very realistic images to this perturbing and very unsettling narrative. Clearly all participants are suffering from major psychosis, and should be looked after in a proper psychiatric unit. The filmmakers’ neutrality is somehow infuriating – even though they stay true to their fly-on-the-wall cinema-verite approach. Benjamin Stein died and the feature is dedicated to him. AS

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL

Day of the Triffids (1963)

Dir: Steve Sekely, Freddie Francis | Cast: Howard Keel, Nicole Maurey, Janette Scott, Kieron Moore, Mervyn Johns | Sci-fi 93′

Nobody ever points out that John Wyndham’s classic 1951 novel actually contains two apocalyptic catastrophes for the price of one; either of which would have provided ample material for an entire book in its own right. The whole population suddenly going blind would have been hard enough to deal with even without the survivors also having to fend off giant carnivorous plants going on the rampage! (As the night watchman at Kew Gardens devoured by one of the exhibits, Ian Wilson without his usual glasses ironically has one of his largest roles ever, with plenty of close-ups, but no dialogue).

Described by Raymond Durgnat as “hideously botched, but interesting”, this, the sole big-screen version yet attempted of Wyndham’s book, had a troubled production, plainly lacked the budget for adequate special effects and has a very abrupt tacked-on resolution. (The original itself lacks any sort of tidy conclusion.) Inevitably it pales by comparison with either of the two films derived from The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) or the TV versions since made. But it treats the original with respect and generally captures it’s mood. Were it’s source not so renowned, it would probably be considered more sympathetically on it’s own terms.

The film suffers from the same problem as the original novel that once the wonderful central situation has been set up it bogs down somewhat and runs out of plot: hence the addition of the scenes in the lighthouse. And it has the affliction of most modern creature features that the triffids themselves are deprived of their original elegance by making them just too slaveringly revolting compared to those in the book; although the noise they make is cool.

But the scene where the word ‘blind’ causes sheer feral panic to sweep like wildfire through a plane in flight is alone powerful enough to justify the film’s existence. Richard Chatten

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO |

Natural Light | Termeszetes feny (2021) Silver Bear | Best Director | Berlinale 2021

Dir: Dénes Nagy | Cast: Ferenc Szabó, Tamás Garbacz, László Bajkó, Gyula Franczia, Ernő Stuhl, Gyula Szilágyi, Mareks Lapeskis, Krisztián Kozó, Csaba Nánási, Zsolt Fodor | Hu/Latvia /France/Ger | War drama Hungarian, Russian | 103’

“My subject is War and the pity of War. The poetry is in the pity’ Wilfred Owen.

Natural Pine is an unusual name for a Second World War film but refers here to the vast snowbound forests of deepest Russia during the long winter of 1943 where Hungarian director Denes Nagy takes us for his powerfully evocative debut feature, screening in competition at this year’s Berlinale.

If ever there was a film to be enjoyed on the big screen it is this one, its inhospitable landscapes, incandescent skylines and sombrely lit scenes of grim human endurance install a feeling of unsettling gloom from the outset as we are plunged into a Russian heart of darkness. The story is simple, the emotional toll is the main focus. Hungarian farmer turned infantryman István Semetka (Ferenc Szabo) is part of a Hungarian task force sent out on a gruelling eight month stint in the snowy wastelands, looking for partisans. This is no action movie but a thoughtful and cinematic contemplation of the moral dilemmas he faces along with his comrades face, and the emotional and physical repercussions that follow. It’s a unique war film. And one that commands respect.

While heading towards a remote village, the company falls under enemy fire and their commander is killed. So as the highest ranking officer, Semetka must take over, guiding his men through a swamp to an occupied village where they regroup and begin to question the locals. In time Sergeant Major Koleszar (Bajko) arrives to take over, his story of a bear attack is restrained and moving. Several villagers escape and, at his own risk, the courageous Koleszar stays on with the weapons and seven of the men, sending Semetka back to base with those injured. At a solemn meeting with his commander in chief, he is ordered to take two weeks leave with his family before returning to his ordeal.

This meticulous film takes its sober subject seriously in portentous, slow-burn sequences that convey the pity of war in the faces of the characters. There is a intimate reportage quality to the way Tamas Dobos’ camera reflects and lingers on the human face of the conflict, alighting on details: an insect on a civilian’s ear, a baby bawling in its mother’s arms, a woman begging for food – echoing the style of Don McCullin or Robert Capa. Each frame brims with restrained feeling. A picture conveys a thousand words. And it’s these painterly frames that carry most weight in Sbabo’s impressionistic first feature. MT

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL | BEST DIRECTOR | Denes Nagy

Minari (2021)

Dir/Wri: Lee Isaac Chung | Cast: Steven Yeun, Yeri Han, Yuh-Jung Youn, Alan S. Kim, Will Patton, Noel Kate Cho | Drama

Lee Isaac Chung’s endearing portrait of a Korean-American family, Minari won the hearts and minds at this year’s Sundance, taking home both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award, and Yuh-Jung Youn went on to win an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.

The pace is gentle and upbeat as Chung unspools his autobiographical immigrant story – mostly in English- that feels real in its depiction of rural American in the 1980s (filmed in Oklahoma) then quite a difference place than the albeit modern Korea of his birth. Brimming with warmth and a touch of nostalgia, this is a universal experience of adjustment but the details are personal, imbued with the Korean sense of humour, and always delivered with a lightness of touch.

Originally starting off in California, farming-minded father Jacob (Steven Yeun) decides that the wide open spaces of Arkansas may be a better option for his family of four — mother Monica (Yeri Han), daughter Soonj (Noel Kate Cho) and son David (Alan S. Kim) — and they soon settle into a prefab with fifty acres in the hope of building up a small-holding. With this idea in mind, Jacob and Monica take a job in the agricultural sector separating male and female baby chicks (or “chicken sexing”).

Monica is the only one who finds this new life a strain, the kids are only too happy to amuse themselves with plenty of land to play on. Grandma’s arrival helps to lighten things up providing a welcome buffer zone between Monica and Jacob – who are now barely talking – and helping with the kids who are the focus with their cheeky antics and naturalistic performances.

Jacob teams up for company with the local Bible-fearing eccentric (Will Patton) who spends a great deal of his time channeling Jesus, dragging a full-sized wooden cross along the main road. Feeling back-footed in his attempts thus far in providing for the family, Jacob’s business hunch finally shows signs of potentially coming good. But dramatic heft and gentle tension is provided when little David is in need of emergency medical treatment. No NHS to help here in the wilds of rural America. And although Minari doesn’t come through with a satisfactory conclusion to all the issues it raises, charisma and a real feelgood factor carries it through, along with winning performances from an impressive cast. MT

Now on release nationwide from 17th May | Oscar Winning for Best Supporting Actress: Yuh-Jung Youn | Glasgow Film Festival 2021

From Where They Stood | À Pas Aveugles (2021) Berlinale Forum

Dir.: Christophe Cognet; Documentary with photos by Rudolf Cisar, Jean Brichaux, Georges Angéli, Wenzel Polack, Joanna Szydlowska, Alberto Errera; France 2021, 110 min.

In his groundbreaking new documentary French director/writer Christophe Cognet shines a light on photographs taken by inmates incarcerated in the Nazi camps of Dachau, Buchenwald, Mittelbau Dora, Ravensbrück and Auschwitz Birkenau. This creative act of resistance is another testament to the horror of the Holocaust.

The film’s French title From Where they Stood is best translated as “Shot Blindly”: Photographers had to work quickly – and undercover – as detection would have meant certain death. Newspapers or odd items of clothing came in handy for their covert reportage of their experiences – a sort of photographic message in a bottle – showing what they all went through during those tragic years.

Cognet unearthed the treasure trove, carefully locating and enlarging the images, before mounting them, framed, on a mini-dolly, so they could be matched with the help of trees to the exact positions in each camp.

Dachau survivor Rudolf Cisar made an album of 50 photos, today housed in the National Archives of Prague. During his time in Dachau Cisar led the resistance group ‘Ruda’ and shot his images of the camp’s sordid SS Museum, providing a day-to-day glimpse of life in the camps. The photos of the overcrowded infirmary, packed with typhoid sufferers, are particularly moving. Cisar also photographed the empty camp during Sundays, a day off, when most inmates stayed in their barracks, with only a few venturing out to talk to friends.

In Dachau Cisar chronicled executions, well aware that he could easily join the victims should he be caught. Jean Brichaux snapped French prisoners arriving and being put into barracks, they were joined by the Spanish writer Jorge Semprun, who had fled his country for France. Georges Angéli’s photos of the Brothel and the Cinema are particularly cruel when you consider that women from Ravensbrück camp were forced here into prostitution, having arrived in cattle trucks. The Germans used the cinema as a torture chamber, a macabre memory of their soullessness.

In Mittelbau Dora camp, Czech prisoner Wenzel Polack recorded the underground factory where inmates where forced to work day and night. His images serve as a courageous act of resistance that saw the inmates take back control of what really happened, even if doing so could have cost them their lives.

In Ravensbrück, Polish inmate Joanna Szydlowska recorded the terrible injuries she, and two of her friends suffered during medical experiments in the “hospital”. Dressed up in the best clothes possible, she bravely tries to smile while showing the long gash in her leg. Szydlowska later gave the photo to the French inmate Anise Postel-Vinay, who stood a better chance of surviving. In the end, both women survived, with Postel-Vinay taking the photos to Paris in 1945.These women were known as “rabbits” – the German word for Guinea Pig is “Versuchskaninchen” (Test Rabbit). The women were injected with gas to provoke gangrene, they were then re-injected with the bacilli, before the wound was sewn up. Prisoners’ limbs were repeatedly broken, severed muscles slashed, the results of these experiments would all be recorded.

Alberto Errera, a Greek-Jewish officer and camp resistance member, took part in the preparations for the Sonderkommando Uprising of 1944 – the same year he was murdered – his photos featured the interior of Crematorium 5 from inside the Gas Chambers, through the very same opening used by the SS to drop deadly gas capsules into the void where inmates would be sealed. The Sonderkommando (featured in Son of Saul) was a special unit of Jewish prisoners, whose task it was to clear the gas chambers, stack up the corpses and take them to the Crematorium to be burned (Sonderkommando members were always executed after a certain time limit by the SS, as not to have any witnesses). Whilst Errera was taking the photos, prisoners watched his back.

From Where They Stood avoids sensationalism at all costs, the filmmaker and his team treat the subject matter with the utmost respect and dignity, echoing Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah: Cognet lets the images tell the story, the trial-and-error attempts of the film team to pinpoint the locations adding a sense of tension to the ensemble as viewer is transformed into a first-hand witness. Another utterly compelling tribute to man’s will to survive and tell the real story. AS

BERLINALE FORUM 2021

Apache Drums (1951)

Dir: Hugo Fregonese | Wri: David Chandler | Cast: Stephen McNally, Coleen Grey, Willard Parker, Arthur Shields, James Griffith, Armando Silvestre | US Western 76′

Growing older makes you release just how shockingly young some of cinema’s luminaries were when they passed on (I have now outlived Max Ophuls by seven years, for example) and that Val Lewton was practically a boy when he exited film history aged a mere 46.

Lewton’s next move would have been to join Stanley Kramer at Columbia, but (having just tread water with two duff programmers for Metro) he went out on a high note with this, his only western, for Universal, that strikingly anticipates Zulu (right down to those under siege bursting lustily into ‘Men of Harlech’) and Assault on Precinct 13.

It was also his only Technicolor production and the potential for colour to heighten thrills is adroitly exploited in judiciously applied splashes of colour, like the green dress heroine Coleen Gray wears and the war paint the attackers come covered in when dramatically hurling themselves through the windows. Those almost expressionistically stylised windows (often visible in the background preparing us for attacks that don’t necessarily come) gradually change colour as the sky goes orange from Spanish Boot ablaze, and night becomes dawn (like the Manhattan skyline in Hitchcock’s Rope) until the door itself is finally devoured by flames when the final onslaught eventually arrives. Richard Chatten

NOW ON PARAMOUNT

Iorram | Boat Song (2021) Glasgow Film Festival 2021

Dir: Alistair Cole | UK Doc 96′

The first ever film in Scots Gaelic and none the worse for it, the native tongue – which has possibly only a year to live in its native setting – adding considerable atmosphere and poignancy to this impressionistic and informative portrait about fishing past and present before globalisation, climate change and Brexit decimated the stock. This film will certainly be meat ‘n bread (and possibly fish?) for dear old Nicola Sturgeon who is very much the poster girl for her country’s fishing industry. Livelihoods are at risk, not to mention the Scottish cultural heritage.

Back in the good old days fishing was the main industry up in the Western Isles around Barra, Vatersay and Cape Wrath, over a hundred miles North of Glasgow where the film screens at this year’s festival. The inhabitants of the islands today are observed on land and on water going about the business of fishing, while the ghostly voices of their ancestors tell stories and sing songs about life at the mercy of the sea.

In the mid-20th century, with the advent of portable sound recording, researchers started visiting the Outer Hebrides to preserve the voices of the islands for future generations. These were the first recordings to capture the oral history of Scottish Gaelic culture which stretches back thousands of years, and once covered the whole of Scotland, but now survives mainly in the island communities off the west coast.

Iorram is a second feature documentary for Alistair Cole whose work explores the link between language and the environment, as here where the evocative seascapes of the Outer Hebrides light up every frame. Music and fishing go very much hand in hand with being a sailor, songs and shanties keeping up the spirits and camaraderie during long or arduous forays into the blue yonder, and award-winning folk musician Aidan O’Rourke provides the film’s entrancing soundscape. Interestingly the word for rabbit sounds similar to the Spanish ‘conijo’.

Gaelic was once spoken across most of Scotland, but sadly Scottish Gaelic has now only around 11,000 habitual speakers, mainly in the Outer Hebrides, according to a recent study by the University of Highlands & Islands. Ironically, interest in Scots Gaelic is booming, with Gaelic schools flourishing in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and world interest in learning the the language has come via the internet and a ‘phone app (Duolingo has more than 560,000 registered learners worldwide signed up to Scots Gaelic).

Alistair Cole works as his own DoP to create stunning 4k observational footage of island life today. While the sailers prepare their creels to set out for the lobster and langoustine catch, and these action sequences are combined with imaginative land and seascapes captured on the widescreen. Meanwhile the film’s narration is composed of archive sound recordings of Gaelic speakers in the Outer Hebrides from the 1940s to 1970s reminiscing about the past when fish were so plentiful that the boats were often out all summer, and the locals time on land was spent busy with the harvest and looking after livestock. Holidays were never even considered, let alone taken. Other filmed footage shows local woman going about the meticulous preparation of the prized catch destined for restaurants all over Europe and these contrast with the lilting voices of the past sharing magical tales of fairies, mermaids and patron saints of the islands keeping the folklore alive.

Over the past decade, the School of Scottish Studies Archives has digitised and restored these recordings. Cole has selected the most emotional and lyrical voices in exploring the often fraught relationship between the fishing community and the stormy Atlantic Ocean.

World Premiere at the Glasgow Film Festival on February 28th 2021, followed by a virtual UK theatrical release from March 5th 2021 via the Modern Films ( in collaboration with key independent cinemas across the UK, and other partner organisations.

The Girl and the Spider (2021) Best Director Ex-aequo | Berlinale Encounters 20201

Dir: Ramon Zürcher, Silvan Zürcher | Cast: Henriette Confurius, Liliane Amuat, Ursina Lardi, Flurin Giger, André M. Hennicke, Ivan Georgiev, Dagna Litzenberger Vinet, Lea Draeger, Sabine Timoteo, Birte Schnöink | Switzerland 2021German 98’

The Girl and the Spider is an ambiguous puzzle of a film exploring the anatomy of a messy break-up. Dreams and anecdotes keep us entertained, while pets – a cat and a dog – steal the limelight.

This second feature from Swiss twins Ramon and Silvain Züricher (Das merkwürdige Kätzchen) sees Lisa (Amuat) leaving Mara (Confurius) to stay in their polyamorous flatshare. Chaos reigns throughout, Lisa’s mum (Ladri) flirts with removal man Jurek (Hennicke) while overseeing the move. Mara swears “Fuck you!”, with Lisa answering “Later, first I move out”. suggesting that all may not be lost.

Clearly though the relationship has hit rock-bottom when Lisa insists on taking the dishwasher, telling Mara “you will never leave this dump, you’ll kick the bucket here”. To complicate matters Jan (Geiger) and Kerstin (Litzenberger-Vinet) also share this female centric ‘love-in’. Jan seems to be keen on Mara. Then there is Nora (Draeger), who spends a great deal of her time in bed asleep.

A young boy and a girl, possibly neighbours, add to the mayhem. And Mrs. Arnold (Schoch), who stole the neighbour’s cat (who is now biting through cables), but has since returned it. The piano will stay in the flat as it belongs to the chambermaid (Schnöink), who once owned the place and is now working as a cleaning supervisor on a cruise ship – not that her short story makes anything clearer.

DoP Alexander Haßkerl conveys the general claustrophobia of this polyamorous set-up that takes place entirely within the confines of the cramped scenario, an obvious nod to the pandemic age, its residents and relationships in continual flux. The titular Spider story creates a constant formal tension in an aesthetically convincing, jumbled mayhem, but the lack of a satisfying narrative arc leaves us wanting more. AS

BERLINALE | SILVER BEAR | Best Director Ex aequo | ENCOUNTERS

Brother’s Keeper (2021) Berlinale Panorama 2021

Dir: Ferit Karahan | Cast: Samet Yıldız, Ekin Koç, Mahir İpek, Melih Selçuk, Cansu Fırıncı, Nurullah Alaca | Turkey / Romania 2021 | Turkish, Kurdish | 85’

In this chilly hellhole – and the cold here is palpable – Turkish teachers subject the poor but gifted Kurdish pupils to regular beatings in spartan conditions where internet connection is random. Once a week, the boys are allowed to shower, and on one such occasion twelve year-old Memo catches a chill in the freezing dorm and by the morning is very ill indeed. His friend Yusuf tries to alert the masters to the boy’s plight but they carry on their collective neglect of Memo’s condition – so desperate are they to keep up the macho facade – until the boy becomes unresponsive, along with the mobile connection to the emergency services.

The tension is spiked by moments of hilarious situational humour – one involving a repetitive slipping sequence, another sees a puppy repeatedly trying to suckle its recalcitrant mother – Karahan – himself a Kurd – uses his largely non-pro cast to impressive effect. Elegantly framed and bitingly relevant this tightly packed drama unfolds in 85 enjoyable minutes. My Brother’s Keeper is an intelligent piece of film-making that makes impressive use of a low budget to create a memorable gem. At the heart of the story is Samet Yildiz’s haunting performance as Memo’s friend Yusuf, a boy whose knowing expression and sad eyes seem to speak volumes for the continuing plight of the Kurdish people. MT

BROTHER’S KEEPER won the FIPRESCI prize at Berlinale 2021 |

BEST SCRIPT, BEST FILM, ANTALYA FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Herr Bachmann and his Class (2021) Jury Prize Berlinale 2021

Dir: Maria Speth | with Dieter Bachmann, Aynur Bal, Önder Cavdar, Schüler*innen der Klasse 6 b, Schüler*innen der Klasse 6f | Germany, Doc 217’

A teacher nearing retirement decides to do his bit for international entente cordiale in Maria Speth’s immersive look at contemporary schoolroom dynamics. In Stadtallendorf, a German city with a complex history of both excluding and integrating foreigners, genial teacher Dieter Bachmann believes that social integration starts at grass roots level, offfering his ethnically diverse pupils a welcome entree into modern Germany

Aged between twelve and fourteen, these pupils come from twelve different nations; some have not quite mastered the German language, so Bachmann adopts a kindly approach to confidence-building, eager to inspire them with a sense of curiosity for a wide range of crafts, subjects, cultures and opinions.

Teaching is not just about loving your subject – it’s about being able to convey information clearly and engagingly. And Dieter Bachmann certainly has the emotional intelligence and patience to inspire his kids helping them to understand that discussion and dialogue is the way forward when dealing with others. His vision of utopia sensitively conveyed here in by Maria Speth and her cinematographer Reinhold Vorschneider, is a testament to something quite ordinary and yet so vital for children everywhere. MT

BERLINALE | COMPETITON 2021

Tag der Freiheit – Unsere Wehrmacht | Day of Freedom (1935)

Dir: Leni Riefenstahl | With Adolf Hitler, Hermann Goring, Rudolf Hess, Heinrich Himmler | Germany, Doc, 28′

As we approach the much awaited days of freedom the renowned German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl was focusing on a Day of Freedom of another kind. Tag der Freiheit marked Riefenstahl’s third and final visit to Nuremberg for the rally of September 1935. Although she would doubtless have preferred for it to have remained missing; the film resurfaced in the 1970s to further challenge her claims of being present at the rallies merely as an impartial observer.

The early 1930s saw her limbering up to film the 1936 Olympics, and both the photography and editing of Tag der Freiheit mark considerable advances on its ponderous predecessor Triumph of the Will; and watching this bellicose display of military machismo it’s again extraordinary to reflect that a woman was directing it.

Subtitled ‘Unsere Wehrmacht’ (‘Our Wehrmacht’), the emphasis is this time squarely on the armed forces rather than the NSDAP, and the film was shrewdly sneaked into cinemas as part of the supporting program for the popular costume drama Der höhere Befehl – thus ensuring plenty of people saw it – as well as screened it in schools until 1938.

The ‘freedom’ to which the title refers to here is from the constraints of the Treaty of Versailles, the disarmament clauses of which had been denounced by Hitler the previous March and which are here shown being brazenly flouted by an aggressive display of military might with cutaways to the Führer looking on in approval. (The fellow with the monocle on Hitler’s left is the newly appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Army, General Werner von Fritsch, later forced to resign on 4 February 1938 following trumped-up accusations of homosexuality by Himmler and Goering.) Exactly where all the bullets and shells supposedly being fired are ending up within the confines of the zeppelin field on which it was staged is alarmingly unclear. For the sake of the spectators and the aircraft shown being fired at, hopefully they’re all firing blanks.

Triumph of the Will had begun with the arrival on the tarmac at Nuremberg of a lone private plane carrying Germany’s new saviour. Tag der Freiheit by contrast ends with the sky filled with military aircraft flying in formation (including a swastika), soon to be deployed in the Rhineland, which showed the direction in which the new Germany was now decisively and irrevocably moving. Richard Chatten.

AVAILABLE ON AMAZON AS A BOX SET

Gatecrash (2021) Digital release

Dir: Lawrence Gough Cast: Olivia Bonamy, Ben Cura, Anton Lesser and

Adapted from a play by Terry Hughes, Gatecrash is a slick home invasion thriller that retains its stagey claustrophobic credentials by keeping things mostly indoors, thus keeping the budget down. As usual with these contempo British indie films, the female character is the victim.

Samuel West has been persuaded to join the decent cast of what is a slim but effective four-hander that ultimately leaves too many questions unanswered. It sees a French woman Nicole (Olivia Bonamy) trapped in an abusive relationship with her hard-edged and controlling husband Steve (Ben Cura). After a night out in their flashy car the couple return to the confines of a plush garage where a vicious row breaks out. Clearly something has gone wrong and they both blame each other, although Steve is clearly the culprit and coerces Nicole to keep schtum.

But it gets worse. Two other characters know what’s happened and they’re not going to let Steve get away with it. As the innocent party, Olivia’s feelings of isolation and fear intensify grow as the pair are increasingly pressurised to fess up – at any cost. MT

Gatecrash will be available for rent or Digital Download from 22nd February in the UK and Ireland.

A River Runs, Turns, Erases, Replaces (2021) Berlinale

Dir: Shengze Zhu | China, Doc

“it is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.” Italo Calvino

Chicago based Chinese filmmaker Shengze Zhu follows her Tiger award-winning documentary Present. Perfect (2019) with this acutely personal almost Proustian love letter to the past. Serving as a paean to pre-pandemic times but also a poignant reflection on how the world continues to change, not always for the better. It also serves as a humble apology for a town she never particularly liked anyway. The town is Wuhan.

Several years ago no-one had ever heard of the infamous city that sprawls along the Yangtze River in Northern China, and whose wet markets would soon breed a global health crisis that would help to decimate our lives. Many of us now feel a complete dislocation from our pre-Covid past. The life we knew, before the pandemic took hold of ‘normality’, is changed forever. The innocence of spontaneity is also gone, another nail in the coffin of freedom – rather like that of post 9/11.

Back in 2010 when she left for America, Shengze remembers the burgeoning industrial metropolis of Wuhan as ‘a stage on which people perform in various ways’ a landscape formed by nature and then dramatically assaulted by roaring machines and rapidly rising infrastructure. A place where ‘memories are buried. The lost place’. But it’s the little things that count here, rather than Wuhan itself. The shop that sold her favourite spicy beef noodles, has shut down, the friendly owner moved away.

In her restrained and strangely alluring treatment Wuhan is very much a character who she remembers – but not always with pleasure. Casting her mind back to the past Shengze avoids nostalgia, instead reflecting on consequences in this contemplation of the past and the lost in a bid to revaluate what happened, and what could still happen.

Five years in the making the film starts in the very recent past, recorded on surveillance footage that pictures empty streets gradually filling again after April 2020 with figures standing in tacit obedience. The images of ‘before’ in the empty streets play out in a series of vignettes held for several minutes in a static camera, a ‘symphony without music’ is how Shengze describes them. Her decision to use the distant ambient soundscape is a wise one, making this so much more transcendent in its eerie beauty, picturing the bustling metropolis with surprising grandeur. There are also scenes of meditative calm – the neon lights of the suspension bridge are strikingly beautiful as they shimmer in the darkness.

A River is imbued with a vague feeling of wistful regret, the whirring neon-lit industrial present slowly pans out into the purple past in the fields beyond where buffalo still graze in contented torpor. And the Yangtze River is the endless glowing connective tissue that keeps on flowing, renewing, cleansing. No one can imagine just how vast Chinese cities are until they visit. But Shengze conveys some of this enormity in a way that never feels frightening or aggressive. Her memories are now locked in the past but the future keeps on coming. A reflective, positive, graceful film that brings hope from so much tragedy. MT

BERLINALE FORUM 2021.

The Good Fairy (1935)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOW ON AMAZON

The Ace of Hearts (1921)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOW ON YOUTUBE

Film Memories from Korea: Five of the Best

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

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

Madame Freedom (1956) Han Hyeong-Mo

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

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

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

Thirst (2009) Park Chan-Wook

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

In Another Country (2012) Sang-soo Hong

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

NOW ON YOUTUBE | ON DEMAND | DVD/BLU

The Wheel of Fantasy and Fortune | Guzen to Sozo

Dir.: Ryusuke Hamaguchi: Cast: Kotone Furukowa, Katsuki Mori, Kyohiko Shibukawa, Ayumu Nakajima, Hyunri, Shouma Kei, Katsuke Mori, Aoba Kawai, Fusoko Urabe; Japan 2021, 121′.

Director/writer Ryusuke Hamaguchi (Happy Hour) weaves three short stories into an emotionally powerful and visually alluring film with narrative that could easily spin out into three more full length dramas, if desired.

In chapter One, ‘Magic – Or Something Less Assuring’, two actresses, Meiko (Furukawa) and Tsugumi (Mori) drive home in a taxi after a shoot. Tsugumi tells Meiko all about a guy called Kazu (Nakajiima). She’s has clearly fallen in love. She also tells Meiko about his emotional trauma with an ex who cheated on him. Little does Tsugumi know that her friend Meiko is the woman in question. And once Tsugumi has got out of the taxi, Meiko goes straight round to Kazu’s office. Clearly things are not over for the couple. When Tsugumi and Kazu meet up in a cafe Meiko casually walks by the window. She is invited in, and the audience are invited to choose one of two alternative endings.

Episode Two – Door Wide Open – follows a humiliated college student, Sasaki (Kei) take revenge on his professor, Segawa (Shibukawa) with the help of his lover Nao (Hyunri) also a ex-student of the professor, and now married with a daughter. Together they hatch a plan that sees Nao walking into Segawe’s office at the university with the aim of securing incriminating evidence of the professor’s unseemly behaviour. She reads him a pornographic excerpt from his prizewinning novel, but despite his reluctance to be drawn into the trap the poor man ends up becoming involved in a salacious encounter, Nao taping the incident and sending the evidence to Segawe’s university mail address, losing hum his job. Nao and Sasaki meet by accident five years later, and all has changed.

The third – Once Again – is by far the most intriguing segment that sees three characters involved in a lose love triangle originally meeting in college and going on to live their lives before becoming involved again in a drama of mixed identities and role play. Natsuko Higuchi (Kawei) meets up with her class of 1998. She is obviously an outsider, hardly bothering to socialise. Next day in Tokyo she meets Aya Kobayashi (Urabe). Natsuko is convinced Aya is really her ex- Mika Yulli, a girl she wanted to spend her life with, but who decided to marry a man. It takes Aya ages to convince Natsuko she is not Yulli. Aya is married with two children before the virus Xeron ruined electronic communications, and sent the world back to mailed post and telegrams. Aya is helpless, before she decides to participate in a role play in which she plays Yulli. Natsuko tells ‘Yulli’ how much she was hurt by her decision to leave her. Now Natsuko regrets the past, she has never fallen in love again. After the women re-bond Aya agrees to play the role of a girl in her class, Nozumi, a boyish girl, on whom Aya had a crush. Aya and Natsuko part as friends, having created a romantic past.

The is an elegantly crafted romantic drama full of twists and turns, a mature masterpiece, with Hamaguchi effortlessly playing all emotional nuances in a satisfying trilogy of different passionate styles. Apart from being a master class in narrative structuring, Wheel is also full of ambiguity and ambivalence: human emotions being shown as destructive as well as healing. Outstanding. AS

IN CINEMAS NATIONWIDE from 7 FEBRUARY 2022 | BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL | GRAND JURY PRIZE 2021

Fabian: Going to the Dogs (2021) Berlinale Competition 2021

Dir: Dominik Graf | Cast: Tom Schilling, Saskia Rosendahl, Albrecht Schuch, Petra Kalkutschke, Elmar Gutmann, Aljoscha Stadelmann, Meret Becker, Michael Hanemann; Germany/Austria 2021, 176 min.

Fabian: Going to the Dogs is the second big screen adaptation of Erich Kästner’s 1931 novel Fabian: Die Geschichte eines Moralisten, and much more successful than Wolf Gremm’s rather facile 1980 attempt.

Directed and co-written by German veteran director Domink Graf (The Invincibles) it does justice to the novel and its author. Erich Kästner (1899-1974) best known for his children books, which often found their way into screen versions, like Das Doppelte Lottchen, filmed as The Parent Trap in 1961. Fabian was his only mature adult novel. His poems and lyrical texts are rather whimsical in their romanticism echoing the of his contemporary Kurt Tucholsky, who emigrated to Sweden where he committed suicide in 1935

But Kästner stayed in Nazi Germany, even though he was present when his books (with many others) were burned as ‘Entartete Kunst’ by the Nazis. The author visited exiled colleagues, but “wanted to remain in Germany as a chronicler”. Unable to write anything but children books, he was not even allowed to join the ‘Reichsschriftstumkammer’, the global Nazi organisation for writers, but nevertheless managed to write (uncredited) the scripts for Munchhausen (1943) and the adaption of his own novel ‘Der kleine Grenzverkehr’ as Salzburg Comedy, also in 1943, under the pseudonym of Berthold Burger.

Kästner was an individualist not given to joining groups in the post-war Federal Republic, he nevertheless remained true to his pacifism demonstrating on the ‘Easter Marches’ against re-militarisation and nuclear weapons, and later against the Vietnam War. Fabian‘s two leading male characters correspond quite closely to the author’s personality .

Fabian is set in and around Berlin in the final years of the Weimar Republic, where Dr. Jacob Fabian (Schilling), in his twenties, works in an advertising agency, enjoying a nightlife of sexual escapades. He meets Irene Moll (Becker) whose husband pays other men to sleep with his wife – if he approves of them beforehand. Fabian will meet Irene on two more occasions: on the first, she gives him work as her assistant in a brothel offering female sex workers for heterosexual men. Later on in a train to Dresden, she offers to take him to Budapest for another sexually charged enterprise. Fabian’s close coterie of male friends includes Dr. Stephan Labude (Schuch) an emotionally unstable intellectual champagne socialist who is writing his post-doctoral thesis on Lessing. Fabian, on the other hand, avoids politics, devoting his time to his lyrical writings. All this changes when he meets meets the young Cornelia Battenberg (Rosendahl), an aspiring actress.

The two fall in love, and their magical nighttime foray in Berlin is one of the film’s highlights, before the two return to the cheap pension where they both live. But money will be their downfall, and after visiting Labude at his posh family estate, Fabian finds himself dismissed from the agency on the grounds of his lack of focus. Enter Cornelia’s more illustrious suitor, the film producer Markart (Stadelmann). At a lunch with Fabian’s mother, Cornelia leaves her lover and sits at Markart’s table. This is the beginning of the end for their relationship, and both struggle to maintain contact.

But worse is to come for the romantically inclined pals who are both subsumed by their political and amorous ideals. Labude falls foul of a prank at the university where the Nazi Germany had considerable support: far from being the party of the underdog the Nazis were a major contingent of the intellectual establishment.

Meanwhile Fabian returns to his parents in Dresden where he continues his life supported by regular phone calls with Cornelia, who visits their favourite cafe every afternoon to wait for him. Having ignored countless public posters of “Learn to Swim”, Fabian ignores them, and goes to the rescue of a boy who jumped from a railway bridge into a river. The boy survives and uncovers Fabian’s bag, full of writings and personal memorabilia.

The is a visually alluring drama despite some tricksy multi-screen images which feel out of place in the period setting. DoP Hanno Lentz and PD Klaus-Jürgen Pfeiffer recreate the era with avantgarde flair. Schilling and Rosendahl have chemistry and make for a believable couple caught in the midst of a ‘coup de foudre’.

But it’s Graf’s direction that really wins the day, creating a German epos full of contradictions, but with universal appeal. Yes, the running length is questionable, the overbearing sex scenes are filmed with the male gaze, women are either total victims or scheming traitors (like Cornelia), – but overall Graf comes close to Bernhard Wicki’s 1989 masterpiece of Spider’s Web, set in the same period in Germany, and based on the novel by Joseph Roth who, like Kästner, was an immigrant with addiction issues. Graf pulls off the “double-suicide” of two romantic idealists unable to face a world that did not reflect their longings. AS

IN COMPETITION BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Courage (2021) Berlinale Competition 2021

Dir.: Aliaksei Paluyan; documentary with Maryna Yakubovich, Pavel Haradnizky, Dzianis Tarasenka; BR Deutschland, 89 min.

A spirited and heartfelt documentary debut from Belarusian director Aliaksei Paluyan who explores the aftermath of last year’s presidential election that saw the country’s authoritarian incumbent Alexander Lukashenko (their first and only elected president since 1994) simply staying in office despite mounting mass demonstrations on the grounds of vote rigging. Paluyan anchors his story in the experiences of three actors three from the Free Theatre of Minsk, who left the State Theatre 15 years ago to combine art and politics.

Maryna lives with Dzianis and their baby – the father resentful at having to work as a car mechanic: “I have betrayed art and I am aware of it. Three years ago I left, because the play was only on for eight days before it was censored for Satanism.” Pavel, the third of the actor’s trio, lives with Nadya, the two discussing a way out of the situation: “Everyone in the Free Theatre is blacklisted by the Secret Police”.

During the mass demonstration after the August election, the theatre has to plan their protests carefully: “Not every member of the theatre can demonstrate, leaving only one person in charge of care parcels and lawyers”. The only way they can all show their disdain for the Lukashenko is by building up mountains of lavatory paper in front of the Presidential Palace. Meanwhile the President is safely ensconced behind the walls guarded by the OMON, a Special Police Force inside the Militsya.

A demonstrator shows off his “gentleman’s travel bag”: toothpaste, toothbrush and 3 changes of underwear”. The OMON throws stun grenades at the crowd, who shout back “Join us, for Belarus!” The few who put their shields down are hugged by demonstrators. Maryna and Dzianis discuss breaking headlines that accuse OMON of using live munition in Brest (on the border with Poland) where one man was killed. Obviously their priority is the baby. Dzianis discusses the news with his father, a former OMON member. It’s very much a case of the load being passed down to the next generation. But naturally Dzianis does not want his child to carry the baggage he leaves.

The only route to freedom is through Poland and Lithuania, who accept political prisoners from Belarus, so the actors discuss an escape plan. Meanwhile we join rehearsals in the Free Theatre where the play’s director – Nikolay Khalezin, watched up with the production on Skype from London – one tense scene features an interrogator officiously demanding a confession from a demonstrator. When asked ‘why’ by the defendant, the secret policeman answers: “Because my job is necessary, yours is not.”

These fraught scenes are juxtaposed with more mellow ones – Pavel and Nadya trying to let a wasp out of the window of their pokey flat: in Belarus even insects want to be set free. Every weekend there are mass demonstrations all over the country, OMON answering with charges, huge military vehicles and water cannons. And finally, we see Maryna on stage in “Discover Love”, the story of Iryna Krasaouskaya whose husband was one of the first who “disappeared” and was found murdered in 1999. The number of forced disappearances in authoritarian states all over the world are read out: a staggering figure runs that into millions.

DoPs Tanja Hanrylchik and Jesse Mazuch follow the action with their handheld cameras, taking us to the heart of the crisis with febrile footage desperately conveying these troubled and tumultuous times. AS

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL | COMPETITION

What Do We See When We Look at the Sky (2021)

Dir/Wri: Alexandre Koberidze | Cast: Giorgi Bochorishvili, Vakhtang Panchulidze, Ani Karseladze, Oliko Bakradze and Giorgi Ambroladze | Georgia, drama 126

Love at first sight is one of those strange human miracles. And this serendipitous occurrence lights up everyday life in a Georgian city in this whimsical sophomore feature from Georgia’s Alexandre Koberidze.

The lovers in question – Lisa and Giorgi – meet in their home town of Kutaisi (north west of Tbilisi) agreeing to see each other the next day – someplace, same time – without exchanging numbers. But a stranger has cast the evil eye on their happiness, completely changing their appearance. When they finally get together, the feelings of passion are still there under the surface, but they desperately try to recapture the magic of that first flirtatious flight of fantasy. They are still the same people, but they look completely different.

Koberidze keeps the action light-hearted and playful, making use of magic realism to show how the lovers (now played by different actors) both fall into new jobs in a local cafe. Meanwhile, we get a glimpse of life in this cathedral city on the banks of the Rioni River, in a series of vibrant vignettes that spill out one after the other, anticipating the excitement of the forthcoming World Cup. There’s an intoxicating feeling of camaraderie but also a hint of wistfulness in the air giving the film a gently poetic feel. We never get to know the protagonists and so they remain distant, locked away in this modern fairy tale.

Intoxicated by its own joie de vivre the bittersweet docudrama tries hard to keep us engaged but rather overstays its welcome at well over two hours. DoP Faraz Fesharaki does his best to entertain and delight with glowing images, using a static camera to enhance the film’s more sober final sequences. In a world with so much tragedy, conflict and seriousness, Koberidze shows us there is still room for dreams if we let our imagination loose. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 25 NOVEMBER | PREMIERED AT BERLINALE 2021

The High Bright Sun (1965)

Dir: Ralph Thomas | Wri: Ian Stuart Black, Brian Forbes | Cast: Dirk Bogarde, Susan Strasberg, George Chakiris, Denholm Elliot, Colin Campbell | UK, 96′

Dirk Bogarde’s ninth and final film for Betty Box and Ralph Thomas. Although King & Country (from which Bogarde went straight into this slick, good-looking guilty pleasure) had been set during the Great War, and this as recently as 1957, this seems more of a throwback than Losey’s film.

The whole thing takes place during Cyprus’ war of independence from Britain in 1957/ Strasberg is Juno Kozani an American archeology student who gets caught up in conflict not only with war but also between a local guerrilla fighter (George Chakiris) and Bogarde’s British Army Intelligence officer who tries to protect her.

Despite the glossy sixties veneer, James Bond-style bouzouki & trumpet score by Angelo Lavagnino (and bona fide Cypriots George Pastell & Paul Stassino in supporting roles who both appeared in Bond films) this is more like one of Bogarde’s fifties war films. One of them, They Who Dare (ironically made by the director of All Quiet on the Western Front), also co-starring Denholm Elliot, had actually been made in Cyprus. Obviously Cyprus was out this time round so the picturesque backdrop is provided by Italy.

In the final scene on the flight to Athens I had long assumed the blonde BOAC stewardess was in league with the bad guy, and it was quite a while before I realised the significant looks she kept throwing his way during the flight were those of a concerned innocent bystander rather than a confederate.) Richard Chatten.

DVD AVAILABLE

Jack’s Ride | No Táxi do Jack (2021) Berlinale Forum 2021

Dir: Susana Nobre | Cast: Joaquim Calcada | Portugal, 87′

Portuguese director Susana Nobre won the prestigious La Femis Scholars’ Award with her short film Provas, Exorcismos. She comes to Berlin with her unusual first feature No Táxi do Jack which is part road movie part ethnological portrait of small-town rural Portugal but there’s a sting in the tale to the concentric narrative.

Jack’s Ride seems quite straightforward at first as we follow the main character Joaquim Calçada, 63, now semi-retired and back home in his village after spending his working life as a taxi driver New York. Joaquim’s day is full of the usual chores, organising his pension arrangements and shopping for food. Nobre establishes the milieu of this rural backwater with its industrial outcrop and traditional neighbourly values, more 1970s in feel than the present day, and this is reflected in the film’s rather florid visual aesthetic, Joaquim is locked in a time warp looking like a character from Scorsese’s Taxi Driver with his dyed black hair, leather jacket and lifts. That said he is a decent, respectful man who cares for his wife, his long-dead parents, and his blind friend, a wheelchair user with diabetes. Nobre paints a portrait of a contented but rather backward place where traditional values still matter.

The rather mundane daily drama plays out against the more intriguing narration by Joaquim – and here there is a dramatic trip over New York’s skyline, provided by archive footage, as he reminisces about his old emigrant days in New York’s mean streets where life was tough as he struggled to make it in the urban jungle, particularly when the law of the jungle saw him challenging someone he thought was his friend. MT

BERLINALE | FORUM 2021

Social Hygiene | Hygene Sociale | Best Director | Berlinale Encounters 2021

Dir: Denis Cote | Maxim Gaudette, Eve Duranceau, Eleonore Loiselle, Larissa Corriveau, Kathleen Fortin, Evelyne Rompre | Drama, Canada,

Singular, original and always refreshing Canadian auteur Denis Cote continues to push cinematic boundaries with a body of work that avoids convention in its freedom of expression.

His latest film – screening in this year’s Berlinale Encounters section – is another curio that defies categorisation, it is certainly highly individual it its style. In a bid to fly in the face of Covid restrictions the film is appropriately set in the wide sweeping landscapes of Cote’s verdant homeland of Canada, this beautiful bucolic setting very much playing a leading role of its own.

Dressed up as a filmed play, the characters pronounce their lines at the top of their voices competing with ambient birdsong in the forest setting, and the dialogue itself is delivered like a piece of 17th century French theatre – in the sonorous style of Racine or Molière – it could almost be Le Misanthrope (with Antonin being the philander Philinte), its characters each representing a distinct point of view. Some members of the cast wear period costume, but not always. Essentially a series of long shots like scenes in a play are broken by an interlude where a young man walks aimlessness across the screen, ‘the play’ then continues its story about a hapless loser Antonin (Gaudette) who looks to his female friends and consorts for guidance and savvy advice.

His sister Solveig (Corriveau) wears modern dress most of the time, whereas Antonin’s ex-wife Eglantine (Rompre) is dressed in period garb. And although the play is delivered in a 17th – or even early 18th – century style the content is very much contempo with its social media allusions and references to the present day.

Eglantine, it turns out, is now involved with another man, but flirts with Antonin suggesting she is opens to rekindling their relationship, on condition that he mends his ways. Meanwhile Antonin still carries a candle for another love, in the shape of Cassiopee (Duranceau), although she has apparently moved on to pastures new. Various other characters highlight Antonin’s crimes and misdemeanours: Rose (Fortin) claims he has not paid his taxes and Aurore (Loiselle), that he has stolen from her car.

Social Hygiene will certainly be remembered as a film made during the time of Covid. But what this comedy of manners is satirising is open for interpretation. MT

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL 2021| Best Director Ex-AEQUO with The Girl and the Spider.

District Terminal (2021) Berlinale Encounters 2021

Dirs: Bardia Yadegari/ Ehsan Mirhosseini | Drama, Iran/Germ 117′

In the near Tehran future will be reduced to a broken down backwater. At least that’s the view envisaged in District Terminal a rather stylish but overlong social and political drama from first time Iranian filmmakers Yadegari and Mirhosseini, screening in the Encounters strand in this year’s 71st edition of Berlinale.

This vision of dystopia and existential angst is seen from the perspective of a mother and her junkie son Peyman (played by Yadegari) who are struggling to make sense of their daily lives as they face a grim and uncertain future in a pokey flat near Tehran’s eponymous transport hub. A lethal virus, possibly the result of environmental pollution, has brought the city to its knees and their local neighbourhood has been placed under round-the-clock surveillance by quarantine officers.

The film’s premise is universal, especially in these Covid times, but District Terminal feels distinctly Iranian in flavour, making use of use of his exotic poems written (and he often chants them in hushed tones in Farsi) on the peeling walls of his bedroom. The junkie moments are given an artful spin by the cinematographer.

There’s nothing unusual about this doom-laden scenario. While his long-suffering mother gets on with the business of running the domestic side of his life, the self-obsessed loser Peyman spends his time shooting up and listening to jazz; over-thinking the status quo (and these moments are envigorated by menacing archive footage of ecological disasters); attending his alcoholics support group; and Skyping a skanky-looking woman in the USA who he has married to get a visa, and who is hoping for great things from this ‘marriage’. Meanwhile Peyman is desperately learning English, while his teeth are falling out one by one.

Sometimes his daughter swings round to see him, chanting Amy Winehouse songs and rocking a beanie – rather than a headscarf – she confesses to her father that she loves dating “assholes” and promptly leaves in a white Mercedes.

His two closest friends Ramin and Mozhgan seem the most edifying companions but Peyman is also in hopelessly involved in an illicit love affair. There’s absolutely nothing appealing about these any of these characters who are locked, almost contentedly so, in their aimlessly existence. After a while living in lockdown does induce people to settle for the lowest common denominator, but there’s also something deeply irritating about the way these characters refuse to aspire to anything more than their days of emptiness, drug-taking and navel gazing. MT

BERLINALE | ENCOUNTERS 2021

Bloodsuckers – A Marxist Vampire Comedy (2021) Berlinale

Dir.: Julian Radlmaier; Cast: Aleksandre Koberidze, Lilith Stangenberg, Alexander Herbst, Corinna Harfouch, Andreas Döhler, Anton Gonopolski, Daniel Hoesl, Mareike Beykirch; Ger/France/Switz 2021, Drama,125 min.

A tour de force of German cinema of the 1960s and 70s slips through the cracks in this riotous summer seaside sortie that sees a penniless Soviet refugee in thrall to an exotic vampire and her love-sick manservant a decade after the First World War.

Gloriously set on the verdant Baltic coast in 1928, Bloodsuckers channels the wacky humour of Woody Allen’s Love & Death with a touch of Bruno Dumont’s Slack Bay thrown in. Just falling short of self-parody in a bizarre two hours, this is high-octane stuff intellectually-speaking; a nuts and bolts grasp of Marxism or the ins-and-outs of Soviet film history will partly explain Radlmaier’s arcane comedy caper and third feature. That said, you’ll either love it, or hate it – to death.

The film unfolds in three chapters with incomprehensible titles but the settings are sumptuously photographed, although not always in keeping with the era costume-wise – occasionally striking a bum note that gives the film the amateurish look of a high school production. Another scene featuring modern Mercedes cars also sticks out like a sore thumb.

Breaking away from an earnest beachside chat between members of a Marxist study group we witness a more intriguing rendezvous taking place between rich heiress Octavia (Stangenberg) and the ‘soi-disant’ Count Ljowushka (Koberidze), who shares his sob story of starting life as a poor factory worker before being discovered by filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein (Gonopolski), who cast him as Trotsky. (Unfortunately, the real Trotsky fell out with Stalin and Ljowushka’s part ended up on the cutting room floor, along with his budding romance).

The Countess invites the young man to stay in her lushly appointed villa where Jakob (Herbst) serves a supper of snails, before they repair to bed. In the dead of night the impoverished Count attempts to crack open the safe but is nipped in the bud by Jakob, and the Countess graciously excuses him – in the spirit of true Marxist values – before the two hatch plans to make a film together in the villa’s ample grounds. Unknown to the Count, Octavia is a vampire (not the only one) and Jakob does the honours with daily supplies of his blood.

Various characters join in the fun including a Chinaman whose stock in trade is a healing ointment for vampire bites, that naturally none of the workforce can afford. The exploitative factory owner turns out to be one Dr. Humburg (Döhler), whose own father is rather tight-fisted with the family purse strings, and is being egged on by his aunt Erkentrud (Harfouch) to marry Octavia and get his hands on her money. Meanwhile Rosa falls for Jakob who isn’t the slightest bit interested and is too taken up with Octavia, desperately trying to impress her by reading Proust, (quite apart from offering her his own fresh blood).

A certain Bonin (Hoesl) then fetches up at the villa, Ocatvia and Auntie had met him on a skiing holiday in St. Moritz. Filming gets under way with Jakob behind the camera and Octavia and the (false) Count cast as the lovers, where the jealous Jakob eats a poisonous mushroom and dies.

Chapter Three (A Wrong Life cannot be Lived Rightfully) brings the feature to a close with Döhler, who is also a vampire, attempting to tap the Russian ‘Count’. Döhler invites Octavia to come on a capitalist-themed jaunt to Budapest, to invest in a sort of early television. A costume ball provides a showcase showdown, with Jacob coming back to life, remembering that famous day in 1917 when the revolution set him free from his serfdom. The Study Group makes a re-appearance, but their leader is shot dead by some fascists, after everyone has watched the Vampire film.

There are some interesting ideas to be had in this ambitious third feature for Julian Radlmaier, who doesn’t quite pull off the comedy element in a film that’s more weird than funny. Performances are game and high-spirited throughout, DoP Markus Koob successfully conveying the painterly feel of the Baltic seaside in summer. AS

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL 2021

The Kentuckian (1955)

Dir: Burt Lancaster | A B Guthrie Jr | Cast: Burt Lancaster, Diana Lynn, Dianne Foster, Walter Matthau | US Action Drama 104′

An attractive slice of Americana shot in rich autumnal colours and in widescreen to accommodate all Burt Lancaster’s teeth. Making this adaptation of Felix Holt’s 1951 novel ‘The Gabriel Horn’ (“with his own face in front of the camera most of of the time”, as the Allans disrespectfully put it) thereafter largely cured Lancaster of his yen to direct.

Set in the 1820s the film follows Lancaster’s Texas-bound Kentucky frontiersman gamely trying to raise his young son while desperately fighting off the evils of liquor and the charms of women, not to mention Walter Matthau’s whip-cracking local businessman.

With an appropriately recherché score by Bernard Hermann, the supporting cast includes John McIntyre as Lancaster’s brother (only their mother could tell them apart) and two blue-eyed elfin charmers in the form of Una Merkel and Diana Lynn. Villainy was supplied by Walter Matthau – looking older and heavier here in his film debut than he did ten years later; while Douglas Spencer & Paul Wexler as the cold-eyed Fromes brothers are a pair of ghouls that look like models for Grant Wood executed by Charles Addams.

The scene depicting the time it actually took to reload a shotgun in those days should be seen by all modern advocates of the Second Amendment. Richard Chatten.

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

Against the Tides (2019) VOD

Dir: Stefan Stuckert | UK Doc 87′

Let go of what’s stopping you. Let go of the doubt.

Extreme swimming fans and psychologists, this is for you. Professionals go one step further and call long-distance sport ‘challenge’ swimming, and Beth French is a pro. Some may call her a fanatic. She is certainly courageous and comes across as extremely plucky and high-active in this Stefan Stuckert’s griping documentary that follows the self-employed, self-funding single mother of one as she takes on the Oceans Seven – a mammoth swimming challenge that could cost her life. It takes in seven terrifying open sea channels across the world, from New Zealand and Hawaii to Japan and Northern Ireland. And Beth will tackle them all in one year.

The sea between Northern Island and Scotland (for one) is certainly no walk in the park. One of the coldest stretches of water in Europe, it is fraught with marine craft not to mention marine life: if the tankers don’t get you the jelly might. And then there’s the inclement weather, tides and currents. During the endurance course she will be followed by a small boat and a canoe.

But there’s more to Beth than just swimming. And soon we begin to understand what motivates to seek out extreme and often dangerous challenges in the water. And it seems that a childhood illness that left her in a wheelchair is the key to her – some may say, fanatical – obsession with endurance swimming.

But that’s not all. Beth believes her young son could also be on the autistic spectrum, but it can’t be easy for a little child to live in constant fear of its only parent dying tragically albeit doing what she loves best. Beth obviously reassures her boy that everything will go according to plan, but she is so driven and single-minded her son takes a back seat, much to the concern of her mother at home in Somerset. Her support buddy Martin eventually parts company with Beth and leaves during the trip.

Beth lavishly shares her thoughts and feelings throughout the feature yet always remains a detached and unreachable character who clearly needs to prove herself, push herself ever harder, an enigmatic soul who seems haunted by a need to keep running, and Stuckert never really gets under her skin. There is clearly a family back story here but are left in the dark experiencing only the emotional fallout rather than the root of the trauma. It’s a shame that Beth never opens up fully about the past. This is a striking and intriguing film but one that leaves so many questions still open.

AGAINST THE TIDES IS ON DEMAND IN THE US/UK from 1st March 2021

UK iTunes link:

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/movie/against-the-tides/id1552700437

US iTunes links

Against the Tides – iTunes pre-order

Against the Tides – AppleTV pre-order

Tabija – The White Fortress | (2021)

Dir.: Igor Drljaca; Cast: Pavle Cemerikic, Sumeja Dardagan, Jasmin Geljo, Kerim Cuyana, Bilal Halilovic, Irena Mulamuhic, Farah Hadzic, Ermin Bravo; Canada/Bosnia and Herzegovina, 85 min.

Writer/director Igor Drljaca follows his 2018 feature The Stone Speakers with another from his native Bosnia-Herzegovina, an alluring and bitter-sweet teenage love story showcasing the elegiac beauty of Sarajevo in lush widescreen images. The White Fortress is an intensive character study, the social background playing a major role.

Teenage Faruk (Cemerikic has the same soulful fragility as Christopher Walken), scratches a living collecting scrap metal with his uncle Mirsad (Geljo). At night he works with his neighbour Almir (Kerim Cutura) ferrying sex workers around for the big boss Cedo (Bravo), who fancies himself as a star gangster, making the two boys bark like dogs in a cafe, to bolster his ego.

Sharing a home with his grandmother (Mulamuhic) who spends her days in bed, revisiting recordings of Faruk’s mother, a concert pianist with the Sarajevo Philharmonic. She died when he was very young, and having never known his father, the young man is at a loss, sleeping with different girls to try and make up for the emotional deficit and hiding his vulnerability with bombastic behaviour.

When he meets Mona (Dardagan) in a shopping mall, it seems like another casual encounter, but the slightly older Mona falls for Faruk. After one of Cedo’s girls (Minela/Hadzic) dies of an overdose after he drove her to a gig, Faruk decides he’s done with the overbearing boss. Mona too is getting tired of her parents, both work as ‘bureaucrats for hire’ for any party who wants them. Mona moans her parents only live together for professional reasons, shouting at her Mum, “you don’t even know where he spends the nights.” Later Mona tells Faruk that her parents have formed a sort of company, where they exchange favours for feelings they do not have at all

Meanwhile the ongoing election campaign echoes along in the background seemingly making no impact on the locals. The reason for Mona’s anger is her parents’ intention to make her move to live with relatives in Toronto. This plan for next year has been forwarded, and deep down Mona knows that she will go. Faruk, whose Hawaii posters on his bedroom wall signal his romantic wanderlust, is also a romantic and both wander around the countryside, on bright sunny days, Mona expressing a desire to live deep in the woods where Faruk will hunt for her with a pack of wild dogs .The romantic leanings of the couple seem to crash with the social reality in a crumbling Sarajevo caught between crass materialism and poverty. But Faruk’s own future looks likely to be dismal, inheriting his uncle’s van, and taking over his business. Meanwhile the pragmatic Vreco wants Faruk to continue pimping for Cedo ,

Backlit nightscapes create a dreamy poetic setting in a Sarajevo that echoes and glows in perpetual twilight, the long poetic panning shots in the streets of the city unfurl like a love letter to a wartorn victim, on its last legs, but with so much still to tell. One can only hope one day the Sarajevans can rediscover laughter and happiness, like in The Book of Fairytales the young lovers are drawn to. Scored by delicate occasional piano music often by Schumann, this elegiac, languid love story, filmed with a fine eye for detail and a magical finale is a gleaming gem.

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL 2021|

The World After Us | Le Monde Après Nous | Berlinale Panorama 2021

Dir.: Louda Ben Salah-Cazanas; Cast: Aurelien Gabrielli, Louise Chevilotte, Sadia Bentaïeb, Jacques Nolot, Leon Cunha Da Costa, Mikhaël Chirinian, Noémie Schmidt, Hyacinthe Blanc; France 2021, 84 min.

Louda Ben Salah-Cazanas’ first feature is best described as ‘Truffaut for the 21st century’. The struggling main protagonist, a young writer, suffers all sorts of setbacks and a strained parental relationship but it will all come together (rather too) neatly in the end. Well acted and photographed by Amine Berrada in realistic images of the two main cities of France, this is a surprisingly tame debut.

Young Labidi (Gabrielli) has written a successful short story and his much older friend Vincent (Chirinian) drags him to off to a publisher, who signs an option for the forthcoming novel after reading the two first chapters. But Labidi, who spends much time in the cafe run by his parents (Bentaïeb/Molot) falls spontaneous in love with another cafe habitué in the shape of student Elisa (Chevilotte).

Love at first sight is a challenge for Labidi, forced to share his living space with the obese but caring Aleksei (Da Costa), so he decides to an expensive flat for some privacy with his new love, although his work for Deliveroo doesn’t even cover the rent, and the writing slips to the back burner in a frantic search for new income streams.

After pulling off a successful insurance fraud, he gets work at an optician where his superior Suzanne (Schmidt) tests his knowledge on customer service. Elisa then go back to live with her mother, and his father dies leaving him with a huge guilt complex: he’s lived off the bank of Mum & Dad for most of his life.

Aleksei turns out to be a really good friend after Labidi suffers more bad luck, Vincent accidentally viewing Labidi’s autobiographical sob story – rather than the putative novel. Vincent is particularly infuriated by the title of the outpouring – which happens to be the film’s title: “This is a title for a bloody French independent film!” While Labidi makes a last ditch attempt to get Elisa back, Aleksei complains about his girlfriend Hyacinthe (Blanc) never giving him a ring. Asked by Labidi “When did you speak to her last”, Aleksei responds “Two hours ago, but I think of her more than she thinks about me”.

The witty dialogue is very amusing but there’s something missing here – and it’s a general lack of social context and thematic monotony. The characters live in a bubble with Labidi’s need for money being the only source of tension; no mention is made of wider-ranging themes. Nowadays a feature debut where the narrative is so disengaged from the general zeitgeist is unusual, particularly in a world where there is so much dramatic potential to be mined and where gender stereotypes are seen as unfashionable. AS

BERLINALE | PANORAMA STRAND.

Breeder (2021) Digital/Bluray

Dir: Jens Dahl | Cast: Signe Egholm Olsen, Sara Hjort Ditlevsen | Thriller, Denmark

This brutal survival horror outing from Denmark’s Jens Dahl’s – who actually wrote Nic Winding Refn’s drug thriller Pusher – is set in rather sophisticated surroundings in a smart part of Copenhagen.

‘Women beware women’ is very much the order of the day here as female themselves are the victims of a curious bio-hacking experiment, run by a ruthless businesswoman (Signe Egholm Olsen) who is using her health supplement company as a front for selecting and abducting them as part of an experiment to reverse the ageing process, which most of the female population could end up benefiting from if only they could survive.

The central character Mia (Sara Hjort Ditlevsen, Borgman) tries to get to the bottom of it all and ends up trapped, branded and tortured in a grim underground facility. Familiar faces start to appear, and Mia realises she is not alone in all this. But does she have the will to survive and escape from the nightmare? Or do we really care?

Dahl has some interesting ideas but lacks the directing experience to pull it all off successfully, and despite his considerable talents as a writer he relies on a script by Sissel Dalsgaard Thomsen. Slack pacing and an unremarkable cast are supported by Nikolai Lok’s camerawork that certainly looks impressive, but you can’t rely on images alone to make a gripping horror film.

Clearly Dahl is harking back to the New French Extreme films at the turn of this century from filmmakers such as Gaspar Noé’s, Catherine Breillat and Leo Carax but Breeder is rather a pale rider in comparison to Polar X, Baise Moi or even Trouble Every Day. MT

NOW ON BLURAY & DIGITAL from MONTAGE PICTURES

From the Wild Sea (2021) | Berlinale Generation 2021

Dir: Robin Petré | Doc, 77′

Weather conditions are becoming much more extreme. Marine animals are needing emergency care due to injuries caused by the effects of climate change on tides and changing oceanography.

The caring efforts of marine conservationists are at the heart of this cinematic nature doc From the Wild Sea from Danish documentarian Robin Petré known for her unconventional short nature films (Pulse, Stream and Distant Water) that push the borders beyond the norm. Along similar lines to Leviathan and Bird Island (2019) this deeply sensory film shows how vets in coastal regions are building up a strong support system of rescue centres to rehabilitate mammals and sea birds.

The sheer power of an image is all that’s needed to convey the tragedy of our changing climate which has given rise to powerful storms raging into Europe from the Atlantic, bringing with them injured and confused animals such as seals, dolphins, whales and seabirds. The film is swift to point out that untrained human interference in nature – however well-intentioned – is not helpful. Moving injured animals that have been washed up on the shore should be avoided at all costs. The changing tides have had a deleterious effect on seal mammals who rely on echolocation to get their bearings and forage of food: One such seal recently lost its its sense of direction and headed to Morocco, wildly off course. After rehabilitation in Cornwall it made its way back north, then took a wrong turn at the Continental Shelf and headed South again only to be re-homed in the Cornish sanctuary. The release of these healthy seals into back into the wild is the film’s highpoint.

Although the work being done in animal rehabilitation is an admirable labour of love, this is a really upsetting film to watch: we see seals in great distress – some of them uttering almost human cries as they struggle to breathe – their airways caught up with plastic or infection – as the trained staff work to help them recover. We watch another seal gradually losing its fight for life, flippers twitching as it cries out in pain, it’s mottled fur coat is a thing of exquisite beauty, its soulful eyes speak volumes of the tragic marine odyssey that has led to its death.

Many animals are suffering the effects of starvation. One seal enjoys a basinful of fish, while another waits patiently for attention by the side of a ceramic bath. It’s extraordinary to imagine that an animal that spends most of its time under the sea can demonstrate so much awareness of a human setting on dry earth. But it’s also worth bearing in mind that thousands of years ago we too came from out of the sea. Whales fare particularly badly: we watch as 19-metre-long whale lies beached like a massive, punctured tyre, off the coast of Cornwall. The team rushes to help but it’s already too late. The animal will not just die from its bleeding injuries but because its sheer weight will crush its organs, unless the tide favours its transport back into the sea. Many whales die due to head-butting from a boat, or multiple injuries from propellers. An autopsy takes place on the beach itself, it must be one of the few times the pathologist actually gets inside a body to do his work. We also witness a fascinating autopsy of a small 4-5 year-old dolphin who has been terribly badly scarred by marine craft and survived and healed, before finally dying of other injuries.

FROM THE WILD SEA | BERLINALE GENERATION

The Lesson | Human Rights Watch Film Festival 2021 | 18-26 March 2021

Dir: Elena Horn | Germany, Doc 60′

It is often said that those who don’t learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. At the age of 14 every school child in Germany is taught about the atrocities that occurred under Nazi rule. Filmmaker Elena Horn returns to her hometown in rural Germany to follow four of these children as they first learn about the Holocaust.

Five years in the making (2014-19), the film touches upon important social and political issues including the resurgence of the far-right, xenophobia, the fractured, disparate collective memory of National Socialism, and the surprising lack of intimate knowledge of the younger generations on the subject.

Screening at this year’s HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH FILM FESTIVAL the documentary opens as the camera pans over the summer countryside where a girl from a village in West Germany (where not much has changed since 1932) recalls talking to a tall, dark athletic American after an evening out with college friends. He turns to her and says: “your grandparents killed my grandparents” this was her first meeting with a Jewish guy and she was 21.

Screening during this year’s Human Rights Watch Film Festival, the documentary goes on to explore with archive footage and clips from the contemporary German classroom how despite the perceived exemplary educational system, new generations are growing indifferent to their nation’s dark past and unwilling to apply the lessons learned to the realities of today. Filmed against the backdrop of changing political scenery during five years of production, in Germany and across the world, the film subtly suggests the urgency and importance in tackling the uncomfortable modern reality of truths therein. MT

Elena Horn is a young German filmmaker who started her career as a media psychologist researching the framing effects in the news coverage of the Iraq War in the US, Britain, and Sweden. Today she is working as a story producer for ZDF, WDR, SKY and SPIEGEL TV Wissen. Elena’s films focus on questions around education, migration, working culture, love, and ethnic conflict, employing visual inspirations from the world of music and dance. As a director, Elena is a fellow of the Logan Non-Fiction Program in New York. Her short documentary Pizza, Democracy and the Little Prince, co-directed with Alessandro Leonardi, earned the “Best Short Documentary Award 2019” at the Sedona Film Festival. Currently Elena is working as a director for ARTE, a French-German culture channel.

SCREENING DURING HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH FILM FESTIVAL 2021

ALL FILMS AVAILABLE TO SCREEN

Spotlight on Pietro Marcello

Pietro Marcello was born in Caserta in Campania in 1976. He began by studying painting at the Naples Academy of Fine Arts. Self-taught, he cut his teeth on “participative videos” shot in the prisons where he was teaching. From 1998 to 2003, he programmed the Cinedamm film events, at the Damm centre in the Montesanto district, of which he was one of the founding members. It was in this context that he directed his first short films Cartaand Scampia (2003). In 2004, he completed Il cantiere, a documentary that won the Libero Bizzarri Prize. The following year, he directed La Baracca. His first feature-length film, Crossing the Line (Il passaggio della linea, 2007), won many accolades. But it was in 2009 with The Mouth of the Wolf (La bocca del lupo), which won awards at Turin and at the Berlinale (Forum section), that he gained international recognition. In 2011, he paid tribute to Artavazd Peleshian in The Silence of Pelesjan (Il silenzio di Pelesjan), while Lost and Beautiful (Bella e perduta, 2015), in selection at Locarno and the Grand prix du Jury at La Roche-sur-Yon, brought him a wider audience. In 2019, Martin Eden, adapted from the eponymous Jack London novel, was presented at the Venice Film Festival and met with great critical acclaim. Moreover, the film embodies the move of Marcello’s work to fiction, while keeping a very strong link with the documentary genre. His new opus For Lucio (Per Lucio) premiered at the 2021 Berlinale.

MARTIN EDEN IS NOW IN CINEMAS

All Eyes Off Me | Misheshu Yoav Mishehu | Berlinale Panorama 2021

Dir.: Hadas Ben Aroya; Cast: Elisjeva Weil, Hadar Katz, YoavHait, Leib Lev Levia; Israel 2021, 89 min.

The sophomore feature of Israeli writer/director Hadas Ben Aroya is as enigmatic as the title suggests but after a while you may recognise an ultra modern low-powered version of Schnitzler’s La Ronde.

Ben Aroya explores personal freedom, commitment and generational dynamics but also questions a society permanently in conflict with itself. The story centres on a group of glib polyamorous characters who seem caught up in their trivial lives but emotionally disengaged from the world at large, and each other.

First up is the appropriately named Avishag who enjoys sexual encounters of the brutal kind, as we later discover. Then there’s Danny (Katz) who becomes fascinated by a dying butterfly on the way to a party in Tel Aviv, and contemplates taking it to the vet. She’s off to join her boyfriend Max (Levia) with a surprise announcement, but is greeted with an earful about the after-effects of another girl’s self-induced abortion when Danny reveals her own pregnancy .

Max, meanwhile, seems unfazed by Danny’s wonderful news. His focus is now on Avishag (Weil) and has surprising news of his own. He and Avi are planning a holiday to the Sinai peninsula. And while Danny tries to appear cool, telling Max not to do anything rash, she is clearly upset. But the next scene sees him in bed with Avishag. Post coitus, she confesses her love of rough sex, and this seems to make Max even more keen to satisfy her needs, bruises and all.

Later Avishag meets up with her neighbour Dror, an overweight man in his forties, and his out of control dog Bianca. Dror talks about growing up in a kibbutz and later attending a religious school where he found himself actually losing faith, to the chagrin of his ultra-religious parents who were furious when he left without finishing his studies. Suddenly, Avishag pounces on him, smothering him with kisses, clearly she has an ulterior motive but poor Dror falls for her advances, he’s so insecure about his body.

Meanwhile Danny is back at the party, still pondering the medical care of butterflies. We know all this talk is meant to hide the film’s real motives. Danny’s encounter with Max proves the point. When Max tells Avishag he really prefers young boys, she remains unfazed, trumping this with by asking for more rough sex, just to keep him keen. But Avishag is content to submerge her sexual desires for the security Dror could provide in his Art Deco villa with its swimming pool and lush gardens. Avishag is only too ready to flee from responsibility, and into the welcoming arms of this pot-bellied father figure, who seems overjoyed that a young woman might want to bed him. These unreachable and unappealing characters remain casual bystanders throughout, seemingly part of a society which “plays” at being at peace, but has turned the conflict in on itself.

DoP Meidan Arama showcases the intimate close-up of the social merry go round, contrasting the casual party atmosphere of the opening scenes with the interiors where the narrative unfolds. Dror’s upmarket home is a world away from the chaotic student flat where Max and Avishag hang out. Everything is flip, lightweight and interchangeable in this pastel-coloured world where integrity has been air-brushed out of sight. AS

BERLINALE | Berlin Film Festival | Panorama 2021

Any Day Now | Ensilumi (2021) Berlinale Generation 2021

Dir: Hamy Ramezan | Cast: Lumi Barrois, Laura Birn, Shabnam Ghorbani, Muhammed Cangore, Pezlman Escandari | Drama 82;

Iranian first time director Hamy Ramezan recalls his own start in a new country with this touching drama that sees an Iranian family waiting to make their new home in Finland.

Ramezan has persuaded Asghar Farhadi regular Shahab Hosseini (The Salesman) to add firepower to this upbeat project but the star turn is his onscreen son Ramin (Aran-sina Keshvari in debut) the only Finnish speaking member of his family who must be responsible to the authorities while also enjoying his first Finnish fling on the school dancefloor.

Any Day Now feels very much a passion project for Ramezan and a way of thanking the Finns for their kindness and hospitality, the family befriending an elderly couple played by veterans Kristina Halkola and Eero Melasniemi who act as mentors when they first arrive.

What stands out here is the way the locals readily accept the new family into their midst (providing stylish accommodation in the detention centre where Alvar Aalto’s legendary cane chairs grace the family dining table). The family adapt well to their new environment and make great efforts to socialise with the rest of the detainees, although it’s not all plain sailing and Ramezan and his co-writer Antti Rautava shows their anxiety and disappointment in a scene where their bid for asylum is rejected. But drama wise there little tension here Any Day Now playing out as more of a cinema verite piece than a real drama, Arsen Sarkisiants creates a lush sense of place both in the rural summer setting and approaching winter when the family experience their first snowfall. This is a lovely positive first feature suitable for all the family. MT

BERLINALE | GENERATION 2021

I Live in Fear | Ikimono no kiroku (1955) Bfi player

Dir: Akira Kurosawa | Wri: Shinobu Hashimoto, Akira Kurosawa | Cast: Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Minoru Chiaki, Eiko Miyoshi | Japan, Drama, 103′

Akira Kurosawa’s reputation both at home and abroad continues to rest mainly upon his samurai films rather than his modern dramas; and this very contemporary family saga addressing the traumas of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ten years earlier – and a critical success – was one of the biggest financial flops he ever made and remains one of his least known films. (It didn’t open in America until 1967.)

although one of his films in which Kurosawa personally took most pride

For me, its timely message acquired additional resonance years later when George W. Bush became president of the United States, and continued to reverberate with the publication of the Chilcot Report into the conduct of the invasion of Iraq. Originally proposed to Kurosawa by his distinguished collaborator, the composer Fumio Hayasaka (who died during production), as a satire akin to Dr Strangelove; the film retains a grimly comic quality that was ahead of its time and anticipates much that has followed since – including Losey’s The Damned, Peter Weir’s The Mosquito Coast and even the seventies sit-com The Good Life – and still has much to say to us today.

Appropriately shot while Tokyo was experiencing a heatwave, 35 year-old Toshiro Mifune gives a towering performance as usual (unusually cast even for him in heavy makeup, greyed hair and spectacles) as Kiichi Nakajima, a 75 year-old iron foundry owner who stuns his entire family by announcing that he is going to sell his business and relocate to Brazil taking them all with him in order to be safe from nuclear war. Their dilemma in many ways resembles the quandary in which Tony Blair fairly rapidly found himself when Bush Jr. became president.

Jean Renoir famously declared that “Everyone has their reasons”; and one can empathise with both sides of these two dilemmas. Nakajima’s family understandably don’t want to give up the comforts of life in modern Japan for an uncertain future in Brazil. But is Nakajima’s obsessive fear of nuclear weapons (or that of nuclear terrorist Professor Willingdon in Seven Days to Noon) really any crazier than the suppression of that fear by ‘normal’ people, one that enables them daily just to get on with their lives? (The central paradox of the Atomic Age is that people today enjoy the highest standard of living that homo sapiens has ever known; while being saddled with the constant anxiety that it could all evaporate in an instant at the push of a button.)

Just as Nakajima’s family desperately want to keep the old man happy for the sake of a quiet life – but the only thing that will shut him up is the one thing that they have absolutely no intention of doing – so when George W. emerged triumphant from the shambles of the 2000 presidential election, it was Tony Blair’s ardent wish to be the new president’s new best friend. (If a freak result had somehow put Charles Manson in the White House, Blair would doubtless have been just as eager to extend HIM the hand of friendship.)

But when Boy George swaggered on to the White House lawn the whole world knew he had unfinished business with pappy’s old nemesis Saddam Hussein to attend to; and that any attempt to remain friends with him would sooner or later mean receiving extremely awkward requests concerning Iraq.

As in many awkward situations the short-term desire to avoid unpleasantness simply by saying ‘Yes’ can have very unpleasant long-term consequences. I saw this film over thirty years ago but remember it as if it were yesterday. Richard Chatten

Azor (2021) Berlinale | Encounters Berlinale 2021

A De Wiel sashays discretely and suavely in soigné villas, lush lounges and amongst the polo ponies, he swiftly gains the trust of the movers and shakers repositioning his bank’s interests with the junta when it dawns on him that his partner Rene Keys had possibly pulled the wool over his eyes bringing his firm into question. But he has another string to his bow, that of deal-making (aka laundering blood money) using his utmost caution. it’s a restrained performance and one of subtlety.

There is more that a whiff of colonialism here. Silence and an evocative ambient soundscape prove to be Fontana’s best weapon in ramping up tension in the final stages of his restrained thriller, a slick seventies score of musak playing out during discrete cocktail parties where these smooth operators mingle under swaying palms, waiters plying them with drinks as they plot and plan how to deal with the trappings of colonialism. MT

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL | Encounters 2021

Dr Crippen (1962) DVD | Talking Pictures

Dir: Robert Lynn | Wri: Leigh Vance | Cast: Donald Pleasence, Samantha Eggar, Coral Browne, Donald Wolfit, James Robertson Justice | UK Drama 98′

Along with Himmler in The Eagle Has Landed this is the role Donald Pleasence was born to play; although ironically Coral Browne, who stars as his abrasive wife, later married Vincent Price who landed the part originally written with Pleasence in mind, of Matthew Hopkins in Witchfinder General (1968).

Nic Roeg is behind the camera here and the focus is Crippen’s love life in a storyline that opens at the start of the doctor’s trial in the Old Bailey, flashbacks fleshing out the gruelling desperation of his marriage to failed performer Belle (Browne), whom he later leaves to elope with his young secretary and mistress Ethel Le Neve (Eggar) only to be arrested on boarding the vessel bound for freedom – and death in 1910.

George Orwell once observed that it shows what society really thinks of the institute of marriage that whenever a woman gets murdered the first person police suspect is always the husband. Making a welcome change from the usual theme of petty crime and bank robberies that British cinema at that time became known for, Robert Lynn’ macabre ‘true crime’ drama followed swiftly on the heals of the Lady Chatterley’s trial that showcased the subject of sexual incompatibility within marriage. Dr Crippen carried an ‘X’ certificate due to its raw depiction of unfulfilled married life, rather than its murderous subject; and in order to potray a very contemporary problem on screen it was necessary to do so in the guise of a famous criminal case over a half a century earlier. Richard Chatten.

ON DVD and TCM | TALKING PICTURES TV

Verdict (2020)

Dir: Raymond Ribay Gutierrez | Drama, 126′

18th and Grand: The Story of the Olympic Auditorium (2020) Slamdance 2021

Dir.: Stephen DeBro; Documentary with Aileen Eaton, Gene Le Bell, Mike Le Bell, James Ellroy; USA 2020, 83 min.

A new film pays homage to Los Angeles’ well known sports arena and the promoter Aileen Eaton (1909-1987) who ran one of the most famed boxing bowls between 1942 and 1980.

Aileen is the focus of Stephen DeBro’s first feature about the only female (so far) inducted into Boxing’s Hall of Fame, an extraordinary achievement and all the more admirable in an era when women, let alone single mothers, were the target of abject discrimination: widowed early on in her marriage Aileen was brought up two sons who would follow her into the family business.

The Olympic Auditorium was built in 1924 and opened a year later in August. It was a great social event in the presence of – among other luminaries – Rudolph Valentino and Jack Dempsey. During the 1932 Olympic Games the venue was used for wrestling, boxing and weightlifting competitions. Los Angeles was a centre of strained race relationships and some of the fights between Latinos and the LAPD turned into riots, and this atmosphere of prevailing violence would shape the history of the stadium.

Aileen had never even seen a fight when she took over the boxing business in 1932, and the sport was in decline. Gangland LA controlled the territory and many bouts had been rigged. Aileen’s sports and entertainment empire extended all the way to the border with Mexico – how she held sway when Mickey Cohen fancied the same turf, is a miracle – her nickname “The Dragon Lady” was well earned.

But boxing was not the only sport staged at the Olympic: Roller Derbies with the LA Thunderbirds were very popular. These encounters were anything but peaceful, serious injuries were common. Director Norman Jewison based much of the action for his 1975 feature Rollerball on these LA skating fights. Staying with the movies, countless films were shot partly in the Olympic: The Manchurian Candidate (1962), the Rocky Trilogy, Raging Bull, Ready to Rumble and Sting II.

Aileen’s son Gene Le Bell was a wrestling champion and stuntman, his brother Mike, rather more sedate, took care of the wrestling empire from a desk – like his mother. On the scene were also Dr. Bernhard Schwartz, ring doctor and bass player, as well Dick Lane, B-movie actor turned wrestling announcer. Mexican fighters dominated the early bills of the boxing events, with Manelo Ramos, Carlos Palomino and Manuel Ortiz three of the World Champions looked after by Aileen. And then there was the legendary fight between Mohammed Ali and Archie Moore in November 1962.

Blues Concerts were regularly staged. The punk movement was headlined by raves when Mountain Jack and Ten Years After performed in the Grand Olympic. GBH, The Exploited, Dead Kennedys, Suicidal Tendencies and New Regime brought in crowds that saw the place fit to bust and overflowing into the surrounding parking lot of the building. The Survivors’ promo video ‘Burning Heart’ was shot in the building in 1985, Bon Jovi was the guest for ‘You Give Love a Bad Name’ a year later, and in 1987 Kiss filmed the music video of the namesake track of their album ‘Crazy Nights’. Later in the mid-1980s, the venue was closed for eight years, before reopening in 1993.

But by 1980 Aileen had already gone. And while commercial considerations clearly played a part, the main reason for her leaving was the death of Welsh boxer Johnny Owen. Owen (‘The Match-Stick Man’) had fought the Mexican Lupe Pintor for the Bantam Weight Championship of the World on 19.9.1990. Owen lost and died in November, a few weeks later. For Aileen, this was a bridge too far: In the 50s and 60s fight pairings were billed with massive posters on the outside of the arena with the feisty warning: “Loser will leave town”. But the brutal reality of Owen’s death forced her wisely into retirement.

Strewn with archive footage and photos to satisfy fan’s nostalgic longing this is an informative piece of filmmaking enlivened by a flood of “Talking Heads” who provide social and psychological context, crime writer James Ellroy’s insight is particularly worthwhile. DoP Tony Peck concentrates on the faces of the survivors, many of whom died during filming. Since 2005 the former arena has been recommissioned as “The Glory Church of Jesus Christ in LA”, a Korean evangelical congregation. Rather like our own Golders Green Hippodrome in London – a 3000 seat music hall that once billed Marlene Dietrich – now serves as an ‘Islamic Centre’ in another religion-based switchover. It seems the world has turned into a much more serious place. AS

SCREENING AS THE FESTIVAL CLOSING FILM | SLAMDANCE 2021

La Mif (2021)

Dir.: Fred Baillif; Cast: Claudia Grob, Anais Uldry, Kassia Da costa, Esther Ndayisenga, Charlie Areddy, Amélie Tonsi, Amandie Golay, Sara Tulu, Amadou Sylla; Switzerland 2021, 110 min.

Swiss director/writer Fred Baillif (Tapis Rouge) explores a few weeks in the life of a temporary children’s home, where the most vulnerable receive special care.

Part fiction, part documentary, the stories told by the children aged 10 to 16, belie the home’s statement that this is their ‘new family’. This staff are certainly overwhelmed and overworked so the centre’s manageress Lora becomes the focus of this startling expose. Bailiff sometimes cuts a scene, only to repeat it later with a proper ending. This technique serves to make the audience pay greater attention to the sometimes confusing non-linear narrative, and helps to set up a proper dramatic arc.

We start with a chaotic scene where police arrive at the home in response to an alarm call that one of the residents Audrey (Uldry) had slept with a minor boy, an offence of statutory rape. Lora (Grob) has too justify the incident in front of a panel of panel of superiors. She is defensive, but agrees that going forward, the policy of co-education will cease and the home will only accommodate girls. But she insists: “A children’s home is not a prison”. Novinha (Da costa) is enraged, shouting at the staff: “You are all manipulative bastards. You call the police when something serious happens.”

Audrey is left clearly aggrieved at being reprimanded for sleeping with a more only three months younger than the legal limit, claiming “my pelvis examination has been like a rape too”. There are grievances all round. New arrival Precieuse (Ndayisenga), who has also apparently been raped, by her father. Another girl Justine (Areddy) complains about her childhood memories and resists going back home, after her stay even though both her parents want her back. Later Justine will admit to another girl: “I had a younger sister, Magali, and when my parents went out one evening, I had to look after her. I run a bath for her, put her in the bath tube and went down to make supper, Then I went back upstairs…” Tamra(Tulu) has had her third appeal against deportation refused. Lora more or less asks Tamra to run away and stay with friends. Alison, (Tonsi), and Caroline (Golay), whose father has just died, go out and get drunk and are brought back by the police.

Later, Caroline threatens to commit suicide, knife at the ready. Fortunately Oumar, a staff member talks her out of it. Caroline will be looked after in a psychiatric ward, she has been flirting with male members of staff. Audrey loses her placement job, because she overslept.

But we always return to Lora, who is been told by other members of staff, that “she has come back too early”. Finally her backstory is fleshed out by her own moving confession: her daughter had committed suicide in her late thirties, and naturally this admission will be used against her by the children: “You said, you want to protect us, but you could not even protect your own daughter”. Precieuse’s mother comes to see her daughter, but Lora denies her access, the mother making an insulting, ageist remark to Lora, who slaps her. Not a good move since Lora is White and the mother Black.

Lora then faces another ‘trial’ by her superiors, Precieuse confesses her father never raped her, but that she was sick of doing all the chores, her being too lazy to do any housework. The staff don’t know what to make of this, and an open fight breaks out – not unlike the one witnessed involving the children. Finally, Lora’s whole story unfolds, round the campfire, the kids looking on.,

La Mif makes for very uneasy viewing, it’s a brutal portrait of an institution, and an alarming revelation of a system intended to help the victims of child abuse. But the “helpers” themselves are often from troubled or dysfunctional backgrounds. The result is chaos, and feeds into the children’s own trauma: their carers have too much of their own psychological baggage to be effective in providing a stable environment. DoP Joseph Arreddy’s often handheld camera captures the febrile setting where continuous psychological warfare unfolds between staff and kids in a cauldron of dysfunction. Honest, raw and disturbing Baillif delivers a shocker. AS

LA MIF is released in UK & Irish cinemas on 25 February 2022

Jungle Street (1960) Talking Pictures

Dir: Charles Saunders | Wri: Alexander Dore | Cast: Jill Ireland, David McCallum, Kenneth Cope, Brian Weske, Vanda Hudson, Edna Dore | UK Thriller 89′

A short-haired Jill Ireland already caught the eye as a dancer in ‘Powell & Pressburger’s Oh…Rosalinda!! in 1955. A few years later we discover her as a glacial hussy flaunting herself in tights in a strip club called the Adam & Eve (along with several other girls, one of them Black) in this vividly sleazy record of a Britain sixty years ago between the end of the Chatterley ban and The Beatles’ first L.P.

Her leading men were later TV stars David McCallum (then looking very lean ‘n hungry and married to Ireland, who later dumped him for Charles Bronson), and Kenneth Cope, introduced in what was then the traditional manner of leaving Wormwood Scrubs.

Noirishly photographed by Walter J. Harvey from a story by exploitation producer Guido Coen, and with an appropriately trashy jazz score by someone called Harold Geller, it vividly evokes a world sixty years ago when £50 was worth committing robbery with violence for, despite it then being a hanging offence. Richard Chatten.

(P.S. Ignore the date given by the IMDb, according to Gifford’s ‘British Film Catalogue’ it was released in October 1961, and 1961 is the date in the credits.)

DOING THE ROUNDS ON TALKING PICTURES TV

Lost Boundaries (1949)

Dir: Alfred J Werker | Wri: Ormond Dekay | Cast: Beatrice Pearson, Mel Ferrer, Susan Douglas Roubes, Robert A Dunn, Richard Hylton | US Drama 99′

During the immediate postwar period Hollywood developed a new maturity and a social conscience on racial matters given expression in 1947 by two dramas about anti-Semitism, Crossfire and Gentleman’s Agreement. Two years later, Lost Boundaries was one of at least four films released in 1949 addressing discrimination against Black Americans preceded by Home of the Brave and followed by Pinky and Intruder in the Dust.

The issues addressed by Lost Boundaries anticipated Imitation of Life and the British Sapphire by ten years, but Imitation of Life itself was already based on a 1933 novel that had been filmed before in 1934. The 1934 version of Imitation of Life is possibly unique in that the daughter who ‘passes’ was actually played by a Black actress, Fredi Washington (1903-1994), who is superb, and whose failure to go on to a fruitful career in Hollywood speaks volumes. The topic remains hot today, with the White House having been recently occupied by the man who sponsored the ‘birther’ campaign against his mixed-race predecessor (who himself once raised eyebrows by describing himself as a ‘mutt’); while in 2015 the whole situation was turned on its head when Black activist Rachel Anne Dolezal was ‘outed’ as White.

Crossfire was actually based on a novel in which the original murder victim had been a homosexual, and the issue of ‘passing’ for straight for the sake of a quiet life also remains a live one, as Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia (1993) testified. (Richard Hylton – who plays the son in Lost Boundaries – ironically returned to the stage after Fox declined to renew his contract due to rumours about his sexuality, and eventually committed suicide in San Francisco in 1962.)

Mounted by Louis de Rochemont to resemble a documentary, Lost Boundaries depicts a world unfamiliar even today to many White audiences of America’s Black professional class, and is based on the case of Dr. Albert C. Johnston (1900-1988), a Black radiologist who along with his wife Thyra (1904-1995) passed as White in 1930s New Hampshire (and was even chairman of his local Republican Party) until his cover was blown when the USN withdrew his commission in 1940 after learning that he was part Black.

The story of Dr. Johnston and his family was the subject of a Reader’s Digest article in 1947, followed in 1948 by a book, Lost Boundaries, by William L. White (author of Journey for Margaret and They Were Expendable) before being turned into this film, which won the award for Best Screenplay at the 1949 Cannes Film Festival and was banned in both Atlanta and Memphis. (Dr. Johnston himself continued to work in Keene, N.H. until moving to Hawaii in 1966).

For modern viewers more used to seeing Mel Ferrer in escapist Hollywood fare like Scaramouche and Lili his role in this is a surprise; but he is in fact one of several actors making their debuts in the feature, notably Richard Hylton – whose discovery that he’s Black just as he was about to enter the navy has a power equivalent to the plight of the daughter in Imitation of Life – and a charming and impossibly young-looking Carleton Carpenter in a smaller role.

The fact that the son’s situation is far from unique is revealed when a Black police lieutenant observes, “Ohh, one of those cases, eh? Some times they really do go screwy”. Canada Lee is excellent as usual as Lt. Thompson, and it’s yet another of the film’s many ironies that when he died of a heart attack three years later at the age of 45 he was at the time being hounded by the HUAC. Richard Chatten.

ON DVD AND TCM in the US

https://youtu.be/1u-YnihAzf0

Moon, 66 Questions (2021)

Dir: Jaqueline Lentzou | Cast: Sofia Kokkali, Lazaros Georgakopoulos | Greece, Drama 105′

A troubled father and daughter relationship is the focus of Jaqueline Lentzou’s feature debut that has its world premiere at this year’s Berlinale. Running along similar lines to Sally Potter’s recent Roads Not Taken this is a less accessible but ultimately much more rewarding arthouse drama that sees two people embarking on a voyage of rediscovery and redemption during one stifling slow-burn summer in Greece.

Artemis is a single 24-year-old living in France when a frantic phone call from her divorced mother calls her back home to Athens — where her father Paris is suffering from multiple sclerosis and has been admitted to hospital.

Annoyed and resentful – the two never saw eye to eye – Artmesis (Kokali) gradually gets to know him again and begins to understand what went wrong.

The story of Artemis’ return to the family circle unfolds in a series of dreamlike early sequences where the focus is the young woman’s fleeting reverie as she heads to the airport in a taxi. Once in the thick of the clinical environment, the gaze remains on Artemis and her thoughts and feelings as Lentzou establishes the gravity of her father’s situation, off camera, in snatched discussions with family members and medical staff.

Eventually Paris and Artemis are thrown together by force of circumstance, the father helplessly in need of his daughter’s care in the first days in hospital and when he moves back to the comfortable family house with its lavish setting. Frustrations emerge for an irritated Artemis who must work through her negative feelings with her sick father while at the same time drawing on her compassion as a human being. And in these scenes her character gradually thaws.

In what is essentially a two-hander, the other characters making only peripheral appearances, Lazoros Georgakopoulos is quietly likeable as her father, turning in a performance of extraordinary physicality considering he is actually not suffering from the disease. Sofia Kokkali copes with a difficult role, a justifiably embittered woman forced to be kind and helpful to a father who has clearly failed her on deep level is a tough call and one which she brings off with subtlety and a gently vulnerable appeal.

The reveal comes as a bombshell rather than a quiet awakening, and takes the film into its final, acceptance phase where child and parent must bond and repair the damage, Artemis is seen taking her anger out on her mother who mutely takes the force of the blame. MT

RELEASED IN CINEMAS ON 24 JUNE

BERLINALE | ENCOUNTERS STRAND 2021

The Great Adventure | Det stora äventyret (1953) Netflix

Dir: Arne Sucksdorff | Cast: Arne Sucksdorff, Anders Nohrborg, Kjell Sucksdorff, Gunnar Sjoberg | Sweden, 93′

The Great Adventure is a lyrical Swedish cinema verite drama that pictures a year on a farm in remote Sweden seen through the eyes of the family who live in the heart of the forest, the director doubling up as the pipe-smoking father.

Arne Sucksdorff’s film won prizes at Cannes (1954) and Berlin, appropriately taking a Silver Bear for the poetic way he combined truly magical wildlife photography with a gripping storyline and evocative score to create a nature tale that plays out like a thriller with touches of humour and sadness – the feel is a cross between Tarka the Otter, My Life as a Dog and Mikhail Kalatozov’s Letter Never Sent. And all the time Arne is offering us a fascinating nature study with the most beautifully observed shots of owls, otters, pine martins, rabbits, squirrels and lynx, in their natural habitat, ever committed to celluloid film in the depths of 1950s Sweden.

Working with his composer Lars-Erik Larsson, and it took Arne two years to film and edit the material for his Berlin winner. Mysterious yet majestic the sly vixen is pivotal to the narrative, somehow emerging the tragic heroine with her family of cubs. Arne’s agile contre-jour camerawork following her antics from Midsummer’s white nights through to the snowbound winter, stealthily slinking through moonshine or broad daylight – one scene shows her toying with silk stockings on a washing line. Always fleeing at the last minute with a plump chicken she darts across swaying curtains of corn or flowery meadows, to feed the cubs.

Man is the villain in this rural adventure, determined to kill the beast, his shotgun poised at the ready. One scene sees the old fisherman springing a vicious iron trap, then opportunistically tracking an otter with an axe. As the otter bobs away across the twinkling snow drifts, the chase gains momentum, a fox cub joining in the chase. Eventually the kids come to the rescue (Kjell is Arne’s son) saving the otter from a burrow and keeping it as their secret pet. Sometimes the mood is upbeat, others more sinister, the animals unwitting players in this often nightmarish murder story, that often ends in tragedy, but there are surprises in store in this incredible journey. MT

THE GREAT ADVENTURE IS ON NETFLIX

To Olivia (2021) Sky

Dir: John Hay | Cast: Hugh Bonneville, Keeley Hawes, Conleth Hill, Sam Heughan | UK Biopic drama, 99′

Roald Dahl (1916-90) was a celebrated English writer known for his children’s books and short stories with a deliciously subversive twist. But his life was also fraught with sadness as we discover in this lush Hollywood-style biopic – based on Stephen Michael Shearer’s biography, Patricia Neal: An Unquiet Life.

Downton Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville and Keeley Hawes star as the slightly wacky Dahl and his famous American actress wife Patricia Neal (Hawes is a dead ringer in the role which she pulls off with aplomb).

Unfolding in the glorious Buckinghamshire countryside where the Dahls raise their large family during the 1960s and 70s, the focus is the tragic death of their eldest daughter Olivia in 1962, although director John Hay and his co-writer David Logan also flesh out the author’s life and marriage to Patricia, a formidable talent in her own right, who had previously dated Ronald Reagan and Gary Cooper before meeting Dahl, the couple eventually divorcing in 1983. Neal (1926-2010) would go on to win an Oscar, for Hud, the year after her daughter’s death, and Sam Heughan makes for a pale rider as Paul Newman (who also stars alongside her in Hud), not holding a candle to the legend but there again who could?). The late Geoffrey Palmer also puts in an appearance (his swansong) as the reverend who tries to console the couple in their grief. It’s also got Conieth Hall (from Game of Thrones) as Hud’s director Marty Ritt.

Most kids sailed through measles (I remember lying in bed with the curtains drawn in broad daylight, and a painful rash) and Patricia was advised: “let the girls get measles, it will be good for them”, but Olivia was unlucky and died from the effects of encephalitis, due to complications. Dahl would become a pro-vax advocate after the tragedy.

Hay and Logan show how Olivia Twenty Dahl’s death at only 7 had a profound affect on the couple’s turbulent marriage, plunging them into grief but also resilience in their respective careers, they had to be strong for the rest of their young family. Finally recovering they went on to have two more children, Ophelia and Lucy, sisters for Theo and Tessa (mother of Sophie Dahl). MT

TO OLIVIA, a Sky Original Film, available on Sky Cinema and Now TV from 19 February 2021.

Calculated Risk (1963)

Dir: Norman Harrison | Cast: William Lucas, John Rutland, Dily Watling, Shay, Warren Mitchell, Harry Landis | UK Drama 72′

Since negotiating today’s icy pavements itself constitutes a calculated risk at the moment, this constitutes a timely revival for a bleak little caper film scripted by the actor Edwin Richfield set against the atmospheric backdrop of the great winter of 1963 (and a notable omission from Chibnall & McFarlane’s 2009 book ‘The British ‘B’ Film’).

Calculated Risk was made on a measly budget of £19,685, and none the worse for it. One critic said of it: ‘The script is tight, the vivid black-and-white photography perfect for the tale that’s told, and even though one of the actors are known in this country – and maybe not even in England – they all fit their characters well, and what more could you want?”. What more indeed.

Atmospherically set in a London still strewn with bombsites and unexploded wartime bombs, our old friend Wormwood Scrubs appears in the opening scene shrouded in snow. Beatles producer George Martin provided the snazzy soundtrack at the same time as he was working on the band’s Love Me Do, and they travelled down during the Big Freeze.

I won’t give away what happens other than mentioning that crime wasn’t allowed to pay in those days. Maybe they should have waited until the weather got a bit warmer, like the pros who carried out The Great Train Robbery that summer. Richard Chatten.

NOW ON TALKING PICTURES TV

Citizen Lane (2018)

Dir.: Thadddeus O’Sullivan; Cast: Tom Vaughan-Taylor, Michael Gambon, Derbhie Crotty, Marty Rea, Boso Hagan, Peter Campion; ROI 2018, 80 min.

This post-modern docudrama raises the profile of controversial Irish art dealer Hugh Lane (1875-1915) and his valiant attempts to set up a modern art gallery in Dublin during the early 1900’s to house his important collection now in the London’s National Gallery. The film succeeds with a lively cast and vibrant images, but there’s simple too much going on, and many viewers may find themselves bogged down by Mark O’Halloran’s dialogue-heavy narrative of staged dramatic interludes and an overdose of verbosity from the many talking heads.

Hugh Lane was born in a suburb of Cork, the only one of many siblings fathered by the Reverend James Lane (Hagan) born in Ireland, where Hugh would perish on the Lusitania in 1915, torpedoed by German U-boots off the coast of Cork.

Educated in England and Europe where Irish culture and identity was experiencing a rebirth, Lane became fascinated by the old Masters, and then of Impressionist paintings which he felt where undervalued at the same time that French dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel was also of that opinion, and considered an important dealer, particularly of Monet, Pisarro and Renoir work, and establishing galleries in New York, Berlin and London and other centres.

Lane’s coterie admired his taste – so much so that when ne looked long and hard at paintings in exhibitions, he would drive up the prices for these so far ‘worthless’ pieces. His travels took him to Paris, and soon his Impressionist collection would make him a fortune back in Ireland, and he fought long and hard for a National Gallery in Ireland’s capital. Sadly he was defeated during his life time, only establishing the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in 1908.

Today, ‘The Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane’ houses one of the finest collections in Europe, but more than 40 of his Impressionist works now hang in the National Gallery, because Lane failed to ‘witness’ the codicil in his Will, that bequeathed the paintings – among them a Monet and a Renoir – to Ireland. Until this day the ownership fight is still ongoing: in 2008 a daring heist saw to men steal one of paintings from the National Gallery in London. The works were returned, but the perpetrators got away Scott free.

Lane enjoyed a wide circle of illustrious friends, amongst them his aunt Lady Augusta Gregory (Crotty), WB Yeats (Campion), Lord Ardlaun (Gambon), and William Orpen (Marty Rea), and staged, fictional conversations with them show him to be snobbish and egalitarian, but at the same time, convinced of his own superiority often clashing violently with the authorities. When we see him walking through the Dublin City Hall Gallery which bears his name – though he never saw it, he looks like a ghost.

O’Sullivan sometimes lets the characters speak directly to the camera, explaining their points of view, an effect which some viewers may find disconcerting. Overall, Citizen Lane is a slow burner, hampered by a torrent of interjecting experts: historians and art historians, amongst them Roy Foster, Paul Rose, Morna O’Neill and Barbara Foster, whose worthwhile and wide-ranging opinions nevertheless overload the 80 minutes running time. AS

ON iTUNES, AMAZON AND GOOGLE on 12 April 2021

Berlinale Specials 2021

Best Sellers – Canada / United Kingdom
by Lina Roessler
with Michael Caine, Aubrey Plaza
*World premiere / Debut film

Courage – Germany
by Aliaksei Paluyan
with Maryna Yakubovich, Pavel Haradnizky, Denis Tarasenka
*World premiere / Documentary form / Debut film

French Exit – Canada / Ireland
by Azazel Jacobs
with Michelle Pfeiffer, Lucas Hedges, Valerie Mahaffey, Imogen Poots

Je suis Karl – Germany / Czech Republic
by Christian Schwochow
with Luna Wedler, Jannis Niewöhner, Milan Peschel *World premiere

Language Lessons – USA
by Natalie Morales
with Natalie Morales, Mark Duplass, Desean Terry
*World premiere / Debut film

Limbo – Hong Kong, China / People’s Republic of China
by Cheang Soi
with Lam Ka Tung, Liu Cya, Lee Mason, Hiroyuki Ikeuchi
*World premiere

The Mauritanian – United Kingdom
by Kevin Macdonald
with Jodie Foster, Tahar Rahim, Shailene Woodley, Benedict Cumberbatch

Per Lucio (For Lucio) – Italy
by Pietro Marcello
*World premiere / Documentary form

Tides – Germany / Switzerland
by Tim Fehlbaum
with Nora Arnezedar, Iain Glen, Sarah-Sofie Boussnina
*World premiere

Tina – USA
by Dan Lindsay, T. J. Martin
with Tina Turner, Angela Bassett, Oprah Winfrey, Katori Hall
*World premiere / Documentary form

Wer wir waren (Who We Were) – Germany
by Marc Bauder
with Alexander Gerst, Sylvia Erle, Dennis Snower, Matthieu Ricard
*World premiere / Documentary form

WORLD PREMIERES

Berlinale Competition – Golden Bear contenders 2021

The Berlin International Film Festival announced a line-up with a distinctly European arthouse flavour for its 71st online edition, taking place during an industry market event from 1-5 March 2021, later that its usual February slot.

Festival regulars Dominik Graf, Hong Sangsoo and Radu Jude will bring their films to Berlin this Spring, and they are joined by French director Celine Sciamma’s latest feature Petite Maman, and newcomers from Georgia, Hungary, Iran and Mexico – as well as homegrown talent from Germany.

From June 9 to 20, 2021 the Berlinale will launch a “Summer Special” for the public with indoor and outdoor cinema screenings all over the German capital whose much awaited new airport will welcome guests flying in.

The competition also features the usual sidebar sections such as Berlinale Special and Berlinale Series, Encounters, Berlinale Shorts, Panorama, Forum & Forum Expanded, Generation, Perspektive Deutsches Kino. The Retrospective showcasing films of Mae West will screen during the summer edition.

GOLDEN BEAR COMPETITION 2021

Albatros (Drift Away)
France
by Xavier Beauvois, with Jeremie Renier (pictured)

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (Babardeală cu buclucsau porno balamuc)
Romania/Luxemburg/Croatia/Czech Republic
by Radu Jude

Fabian – Going to the Dogs (Fabian oder Der Gang vor die Hunde)
Germany
by Dominik Graf

Ballad of a White Cow (Ghasideyeh gave sefid)
Iran/France
by Behtash Sanaeeha, Maryam Moghaddam

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (Guzen to sozo)
Japan
by Ryusuke Hamaguchi

Mr Bachmann and His Class (Herr Bachmann und seine Klasse)
Germany
by Maria Speth

I’m Your Man (Ich bin dein Mensch)
Germany
by Maria Schrader

Introduction
Republic of Korea
by Hong Sangsoo

Memory Box
France/Lebanon/Canada/Qatar
by Joana Hadjithomas, Khalil Joreige

Next Door (Nebenan)
Germany
by Daniel Brühl

Petite Maman
France
by Céline Sciamma

What Do We See When We Look at the Sky (Ras vkhedavt, rodesac cas vukurebt?)
Germany/Georgia
by Alexandre Koberidze

Forest – I See you Everywhere (Rengeteg – mindenhol látla)
Hungary
by Bence Fliegauf

Natural Light (Természetes fény)
Hungary/Latvia/France/Germany
by Dénes Nagy

A Cop Movie (Una Película de Policías)
Mexico
by Alonso Ruizpalacios

BERLINALE | PART ONE 1-5 MARCH 2021

Oscars – International Features – the race is on

The Oscar race has started. Fifteen films will go forward to the next round of voting in the International Feature Film category for the 93rd Academy Awards, from the 93 countries eligible.

The films, with their reviews and trailers are here to remind you:

Bosnia and Herzegovina, QUO VADIS, AIDA?

Chile, THE MOLE AGENT

Czech Republic, CHARLATAN

Denmark, ANOTHER ROUND

France, T WO OF US

Guatemala, LA LLORONA

Hong Kong, BETTER DAYS

Iran, SUN CHILDREN

Ivory Coast, NIGHT OF THE KINGS

Mexico, I’M NO LONGER HERE

Norway, HOPE

Romania, COLLECTIVE

Russia, DEAR COMRADES!

Taiwan, A SUN

Tunisia, THE MAN WHO SOLD HIS SKIN

THE ACADEMY AWARDS WILL BE ANNOUNCED ON 25 APRIL 202

MLK/FBI (2020)

Dir.: Sam Pollard; Documentary with Clarence Jones, Charles Know, James Comey, Donna March , Beverly Gage, Andrew Young; USA 2020, 104 min.

Seasoned documentarian Sam Pollard takes a deep dive into the FBI’s surveillance on Dr Martin Luther King (1929-68) in this searing study proving that systemic racism is still alive and kicking in the USA today.

Enriched by newly released material, Pollard’s findings are inspired by David Garrow’s book ‘The FBI and Martin Luther King’ and cleverly put together by editor Laura Tomaselli and Benjamin Hedin.

There’s still more to this story because the actual wire tapes of the FBI surveillance of MLK won’t be be released until 2027 – but what emerges is a fervent obsession with the subject on the part of the FBI’s director Edgar J. Hoover (who headed the agency from 1924 until his death in 1972). It tells how the cross-dressing Hoover invested at least as much energy in the Civil Rights leader’s political activities as in his sexual conquests.

Hoover directed William Sullivan (for ten years the chief of the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Operations) to wire tap King, not only at home, but during his hotel stays on the campaign trail throughout America. Hoover wanted to probe MLK’s extra-marital affairs to discredit his leadership and his campaign. He and his G-men used the white man’s prejudice with Black male sexuality, to denigrate ‘Black Men’ as animalistic beasts, endangering the sexual purity of white women and the racial integrity of the white race as a whole. This racist pathology, as shown in Griffith’ Birth of a Nation, is still alive today, with White Supremacists storming the Capitol on 6th of January. Back in the 1960s, all polls showed the popularity of Hoover’s agenda: the majority of the nation wanted him to defeat King and his movement.

Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, made him a household name, Hoover and MLK met only once, in November 1964, but sides reported the meeting as amicable, although many supporters on both sides, had a different opinion. Even though MLK was instrumental in the 1956 Montgomery (Alabama) Bus Strike, the FBI did not pay special attention to him back then. MLK only emerged as a one to watch, at least for the FBI, in 1963, when he led the March to Washington and the events of that same year in Birmingham (Alabama) when Governor Wallace, a supporter of KKK, provoked an uproar.

It was unfortunate that one of MLK’s closest advisers, the NY lawyer Stanley Levison, who had faced HUAC trials and was supposed to help communist front organisations, gave Hoover the excuse to build King up into a “Black Messiah” figure, who wanted to destroy the USA with the help of the Communists. Footage of McCarthy-era Hollywood films Walk a Crooked Mile (1948) and I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951) show a real paranoia since the CPUS hardly played any real role in the political arena.

But Hoover and the FBI declared, that Black men and women were particularly suggestible to Communist propaganda. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert, the Attorney General, authorised the FBI wiretapping King and his inner circle. This led to the discovery of King’s extra-marital affairs.

In 1964, President LB Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, and MLK was awarded the Nobel Price for Peace, meanwhile Hoover sent ‘salacious’ material to King’s wife Coretta Scott King suggesting her husband consider suicide before Hoover made the material public – including a sort of ‘hit list’ of his sexual conquests.

The FBI’s actions did not stop with wire-tapping: they had two very influential sources in the MLK campaign who reported back daily on his moves. One was Ernest C. Withers, the “un-official” photographer of the Civil Rights movement, who worked for the FBI for 18 years. Then there was James D. Harrison, who gave the FBI all details of MLK’s personal and political assignations.

In 1965 protests against the Vietnam War become more numerous in the US and President Johnson is quoted as saying “we can’t be defenceless”, while accelerating the USA involvement in the war. King meanwhile was engaged in Southern Christian Leadership Conference ( SCLC), which led to the “Poor People’s Campaign” and the March to Washington in March 1968.

King was very much against the Vietnam War, but he was also aware of a need to support President Johnson. He broke his silence after 18 months of deliberations, stating “silence is traitorous”. At the same time, in March 1968, Sullivan began preparations for “Rape Allegations”, which were supposed to be made public.

On 4th of April 1968 MLK was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis. The perpetrator James Earl Ray was convicted of his murder, even though many questioned how Ray could have acted alone, with the area swarming with FBI agents.

MLK/FBI leaves a bitter taste particularly in the light of the current political situation in the US after the storming of the Capitol. White Supremacis violence threatens the existence of a democratic USA. With the Republican Party hell-bent on destroying the very Constitution, their former President Trump was supposed to be guarding just please supremacist supporters happy, the nation has clearly reached a point when, 43 years after Martin Luther King’s murder, racism is threatening the country in an even more existential way. AS

DOGWOOF RELEASES THIS BAFTA-LONGLISTED DOC TO DVD and BLURAY on 22 FEBRUARY 2021

Letter to Jane: An Investigation About a Still (1972)

Dir: Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin | With Marlon Brando, Moshe Dayan, James Dean, Maria Falconetti | Doc, 52′

Letter to Jane is a 1972 French postscript film to Tout Va Bien directed by the same duo (under the auspices of the Dziga Vertov Group). It came as quite a surprise to me to realise that I had until recently never actually seen this much-discussed polemic from Godard’s radical phase. The fact that the commentary was delivered by Godard himself and Jean-Pierre Gorin in English was another surprise, as I had no idea that Godard spoke English.

As the film progressed I became angrier and angrier at the fact that Godard & Gorin never drew back to let us see the whole photograph for ourselves. Early on in the film (before we’ve had time to get our bearings), a slightly fuller version of the picture appears as part of the original ‘L’Express’ article in which it appeared; so we know that the picture extends further than Godard & Gorin subsequently permit us to see – but we never see the picture in anything approaching its entirety ever again.

Instead Godard & Gorin show us only what they want us to see, while on the soundtrack they didactically ramble on and on; mercilessly bludgeoning the audience with egregious digressions, non sequiturs and name-dropping. It’s as if some officious bore were sitting opposite you holding an 8 by 10 copy of the original picture which they insist on describing to you in great but selective detail; but every time you try to get it off them so you can have a look at it for yourself pulls away and never lets you have it.

This sort of stunt might have worked during the seventies when you were seated in a cinema and couldn’t replay any of the film on DVD or YouTube. But thanks to the internet, as soon as I got home after the screening I was able to immediately look up the full uncropped picture on Google Images; and the enormity of Godard & Gorin’s offense was revealed. Godard & Gorin go on and on AND ON in a wildly speculative fashion (confident assertions beginning “In fact” or “We couldn’t help observing” or “We have proved” rubbing shoulders with frequent caveats like “We think” and “In our opinion”) about the man in the white shirt in the background with his face grainily blown up to show only him; and yet almost completely ignore the man in the pith helmet in the foreground that Fonda is actually concentrating upon. Furthermore, nobody watching Letter to Jane ever sees that on the right of the original photograph there is in fact another woman listening; and only at the beginning of the film can we see that Fonda is holding a camera.

So it’s a bit rich of Godard & Gorin to sanctimoniously accuse ‘L’Express’ of deliberate lying and manipulation while they themselves are throughout wilfully withholding information from the viewer. Richard Chatten

LETTER TO JANE is available in US/CANADA on The Criterion Channel

Chinese Cinema Season | February to May 2021

The first wave of titles have been announced for the first edition of the Chinese Cinema Season. spooling out over the next three months and kicking off on 12 February (Chinese New Year) all over Europe.

The longterm festival will showcase UK Chinese language premieres and highlight overlooked gems and classics to cinema-lovers in the UK and Ireland. New films will be added to the party, along with the usual Q&As and panel discussions with industry professionals, filmmakers and actors, and academics.

Over 50 films will be on offer over the course of the season all available on VOD, along with themed mini retrospectives. Along with Coronavirus this is ‘a love letter’ from China.

Popular films such as festival favourite Youth are available along with a Shanghai Animation strand featuring 10 films from 1950s to the present day. Studio Ghibli is possibly more widely known for Anime titles, but Ghibli’s Hayao Miyaki visited the Shanghai studio back in 1984 setting up his own studio a year later. Features include the delightful Lotus Lantern (1999) a UK premiere.

Documentary wise there will be a chance to see DOUBLE HAPPINESS (2018), A YANGTZE LANDSCAPE (2017) and DAUGHTER OF SHANGHAI (2019).

Double Happiness Limited

Taiwanese director Shen spent seven years detailing eight couples’ lives from falling in love, getting married and having children, getting them to ask each other questions that they would not touch on in their daily lives, and leading the audience to reflect on their own definition of marriage and happiness.

A Yangtze Landscape

Setting off from the Yangtze’s marine port, passing Shanghai, Nanjing, Wuhan, the huge Three Gorges Dam, and Chongqing, all the way to the Yangtze River’s source in Qinghai/Tibet over thousands of kilometres, this unique work of sound and vision utilizes the “Yangtze”, in the director’s words, as a metaphor of the current chaos in China.

Bazzar Jumpers

Three Uyghur friends in love with parkour fight prejudice and family opposition to train for China’s most popular and dangerous parkour event in Beijing.

Daughter of Shanghai

A waltz through the life of Chinese English actress Tsai Chin: the daughter of the Peking Opera master Zhou Xinfang, the first Chinese student at RADA, and the first Chinese Bond Girl. The director Michelle Chen is confirmed to do a Q&A with other contributors TBC to celebrate the premiere of this film.
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FIRST FILM SPOTLIGHT

12 February to 12 May

This section introduces contemporary Chinese directors and their striking debuts. Three films will be shown in the opening month: A First Farewell (2018) by Lina Wang, The Crossing (2018) by Bai Xue, and The Silent Holy Stone (2006) by Pema Tseden. Encompassing Mandarin, Cantonese (The Crossing), Tibetan (The Silent Holy Stone ) and Uyghur (A First Farewell )dialects and cultures, these films reflect how diverse life can be in the different regions of China.

A First Farewell * UK PREMIERE *

Isa Yassan, a young Muslim boy in Xinjiang Province, balances caring for his ailing mother, schoolwork, and farm duties, soon experiences “the first farewell” in his life – as his father decides to send his mother to a nursing home and they leave the village. Lina Wang, from Xinjiang, wrote and directed this film, which won the Crystal Bear and Special Prize of the Generation Kplus International Jury at Berlin International Film Festival, as well as several other awards at Tokyo, Shanghai and Hong Kong film festivals

The Crossing (above)

Sixteen-year-old Peipei crosses the border between mainland China and Hong Kong every day, customs officials waving her through with just a glimpse of her high school uniform and innocent face. She joins a gang to earn quick money by smuggling iPhones across the border, but soon finds herself in way over her head. The debut from BAFTA Leading Light writer-director Bai Xue, was nominated for Best First Feature Award and Crystal Bear at Berlin International Festival, won the NETPAC Award at Toronto International Film Festival, and best first film awards at Pingyao, Hong Kong, and Dublin Film Festivals.

The Silent Holy Stone

A young Tibetan monk returns home for the New Year and discovers a television which he intends to bring to the monastery and show to his master. Tibetan director Pema Tsedan’s debut, immediately preceding his recent feature Balloon (2019), shows how the director established his personal style from the very beginning.

DOMESTIC HITS
12 February to 12 May

In recent years, the world has witnessed the rise of the Chinese mega-blockbuster and the seemingly unstoppable rise of the film industry in China. this section features commercial films that triumphed at the domestic box-office with relatively high production value. For the opening month the following are showing: Sheep Without a Shepherd (2019), Youth (2017), and The Captain (2019).

Sheep Without a Shepherd

Lee (Xiao Yang) and his wife Jade (Tan Zhuo) run a small
video business in Thailand. They have two lovely daughters and live a happy life. However, when his eldest daughter kills a schoolmate in self-defence during a sexual assault, Lee has to bury the body and cover the truth, to protect his daughter and families, Lawan (an impeccably steely Joan Chen, The Last Emperor, Lust, Caution) is the feared head of the regional police, and she is dying to find her missing son. The contest between Lee and Lawan is beginning. The battle of wills between Lee and Lawan begins. The film’s box office reached more than 1.2 billion RMB in China ($185m), even as the start of the pandemic cut short the film’s release. The film is based on the 2015 Indian box office hit, Drishyam.

Youth

Directed by China’s most famous commercial director Feng Xiaogang, Youth takes a look at the lives of the members of a Military Cultural Troupe back in the 1970s Cultural Revolution, exploring their friendship, love, dreams, and devotion to their beloved collective and career. The storyline, to a large extent comprised of the director’s personal memories and nostalgia, also resonates with a generation in China who sacrificed their youth to the country and the ideology.

The Captain

One of so-called “main melody” films, stemming from a true story, The Captain demonstrates a breath-taking moment: a commercial pilot and his crew try to save passengers and land their plane safely while the plane shatters at 30,000 feet in the air. Its box office reached more than 2 billion RMB in China (over $300m).

Upcoming Sections

Lou Ye Mini Retrospective

As one of the “Sixth Generation” directors, Lou Ye has been regarded as a “true artist”, an “authentic filmmaker” and a “constant fighter” of censorship. Despite the controversies, he achieved great success both in China and worldwide. He was nominated and won numerous awards owing to his unique editing style and camera movement, as well as his sharp observations and narratives about marginalised people and typical, but often undocumented, social phenomena in China. In this section, we will premiere Lou Ye’s penultimate film, Shadow Play, which took two years of editing to get the greenlight from authorities.

The platform is powered by Shift 72 (Cannes Marché du Film, SXSW, Macao IFFAM, Tallinn Black Nights) and tickets can be purchased here

Judas and the Black Messiah (2021)

Dir: Shaka King | Scri: Will Berson | Cast: Daniel Kaluuya, LaKeith Stanfield, Jesse Plemmons, Dominique Fishback, Ashton Sanders, Martin Sheen | US, historical drama, 126′

“You can kill a revolutionary but you can’t kill the revolution”

Fresh from its Sundance 2021 premiere comes this dynamite political drama that stars Daniel Kaluuya as Black Panther chief Fred Hampton and LaKeith Stanfield as the FBI informant William O’Neal who betrayed the Illinois Black Panther Party.

Shaka King certainly knows how to stage a film and this is a splashy widescreen thriller that sums up the mean streets of late Sixties Chicago with its rangy limousines, dudes with flick-knives and a moochy Motown score. Partly narrated, and powered forward by an charismatic performance from Kaluuya the story cuts between the undercover activities of O’Neal after he has been suckered in to being a police informant to avoid serving time for a felony that plays out in the propulsive opening sequences (and again the elaborate postscript), and Hampton’s rise to recognition as his galvanises the civil rights movement.

Martin Sheen gets to play a balding puffy-cheeked FBI boss J Edgar Hoover who gives agent Roy Mitchell (Plemmons) a talking to, suggesting he uses O’Neal rather more creatively to stem the tide of ‘Black empowerment’ as the urgent demands of the FBI start to bite, the incendiary threat of the Black Panthers growing every day more credible.

It’s a shame that the relationship between Hampton and O’Neal remains rather underplayed, along with his frisson between the potent Black Panther supporter Deborah Johnson (a thoughtful turn from Project Power‘s Dominique Fishback), as this could have added further nuance to the tale.

Sean Bobbitt is possibly the undercover star of the show with his masterful camerawork both on the widescreen and in close-up giving this a distinctly retro feeling that captures the volatile atmosphere of Chicago’s counterculture in a year that also experienced the Weathermens’ “Days of Rage”, and other revolutionary groups who were not only opposing the status quo, but also each other, in a time of worldwide unrest.

The film culminates in a bloody showcase showdown and while the Will Berson’s narrative does not always hang together perfectly Judas certainly provides convincing entertainment and worthwhile insight capturing the zeitgeist of another restless time for American. MT

Judas and the Black Messiah premiered at Sundance Film Festival 2021 and won an Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Daniel Kaluuya

Berlinale Forum 2021

Work, love, friendship, cinema: today, all these things have to be managed very differently than a year ago. The certainties we were still able to rely on in autumn 2019 have become porous. In other parts of the world where such uncertainties are part of everyday life, people may well be more practised in dealing with them. In a Western Europe geared to planning and feasibility, we still need to get used to a situation reminiscent of an agility workshop on a permanent loop. Whoever manages to shoot and finish a film under these conditions deserves great respect.

The 17-film selection that makes up the 51st Berlinale Forum focuses on works that deal with uncertainties in the world outside by embracing unpredictability in their plots and structures. It gives preference to the fragile over the proven, with more space dedicated to filmmakers at the start of their careers than their more established colleagues. Many films take narrative detours, slaloming between fiction and documentary like Manque La Banca’s debut Esquí (Ski) and dipping into archives to link findings from the past with the present. Jean-Luc Godard’s La chinoise is, for example, subjected to two separate revisions in Ephraim Asili’s The Inheritance and Vincent Meessen’s Juste un movement (Just A Movement) respectively. In her feature-length debut Sichuan hao nuren (The Good Woman of Sichuan), Sabrina Zhao transforms one of Brecht’s learning-plays into an opaque cinematic space. Uldus Bakhtiozina’s debut Doch rybaka (Tzarevna Scaling) tells a straightforward fairy tale on the one hand, while filling her fiction with dizzying culture historical pirouettes on the other. Her characters even have the shiniest diamond-encrusted teeth.

It goes without saying that more established filmmakers also form a part of the selection. With The First 54 Years – An Abbreviated Manual for Military Occupation, Israeli documentarian Avi Mograbi adds to his rich oeuvre with a bitter breakdown of the meaning of occupation. Berlin directors Chris Wright and Stefan Kolbe sound out the possibilities of documentary filmmaking in their usual unflinching manner in Anmaßung (Anamnesis). And Thai director Anocha Suwichakornpong’s Jai jumlong (Come Here) is a confident continuation of what has already marked her previous work (including 2009’s Mundane History): a blend of narrative subtlety with a view of history that cuts deep.

At a time when withdrawing into one’s own country, city, neighbourhood, flat or family is what’s being suggested, there’s a considerable risk that our realms of perception will shrink accordingly. The films of the 51st Berlinale Forum thus act as a significant help in allowing our thoughts and imaginations to stay open to the outside world.

Films of the 51st Berlinale Forum
*World premiere is used to indicate that these films have not been shown to an audience yet. Since they will be available in online screenings to a professional audience (industry and press) only, they will keep their status World premiere until they will be presented publicly in cinemas or at festivals.

*International premiere is used to indicate that these films have not been shown outside their country of origin yet. Since they will be available in online screenings to a professional audience (industry and press) only, they will keep their status International premiere until they will be presented publicly in cinemas or at festivals.

À pas aveugles (From Where They Stood)
France / Germany
by Christophe Cognet
with Christophe Cognet
*World premiere

Anmaßung (Anamnesis)
Germany
by Chris Wright, Stefan Kolbe
with Nadia Ihjelj, Josephine Hock
*World premiere

Doch rybaka (Tzarevna Scaling)
Russian Federation
by Uldus Bakhtiozina
with Alina Korol, Viktoria Lisovskaya, Valentina Yasen
*International premiere / Debut film

Esquí (Ski)
Argentina / Brazil
by Manque La Banca
with José Alejandro Colin, Segundo Botti, Shaman Herrera
*World premiere / Debut film

The First 54 Years – An Abbreviated Manual for Military Occupation
France / Finland / Israel / Germany
by Avi Mograbi
with Avi Mograbi
*World premiere

Garderie nocturne (Night Nursery)
Burkina Faso / France / Germany
by Moumouni Sanou
*World premiere / Debut film

The Inheritance
USA
by Ephraim Asili
with Eric Lockley, Nozipho McClean, Chris Jarrell
Debut film

Jai jumlong (Come Here)
Thailand
by Anocha Suwichakornpong
with Apinya Sakuljaroensuk, Waywiree Ittianunkul, Sirat Intarachote
*World premiere

Juste un mouvement (Just A Movement)
Belgium / France
by Vincent Meessen
with Dialo Blondin Diop, Ousman Blondin Diop, Marie-Thérèse Diedhiou
*World premiere

Mbah Jhiwo (Mbah Jhiwo / Ancient Soul)
Spain
by Alvaro Gurrea
with Yono Aris Munandar, Sayu Kholif, Musaena’h
*World premiere / Debut film

No táxi do Jack (Jack’s Ride)
Portugal
by Susana Nobre
with Amindo Martins Rato, Maria Carvalho, Joaquim Verissimo
*World premiere

Qué será del verano (What Will Summer Bring)
Argentina
by Ignacio Ceroi
with Ignacio Ceroi, Mariana Martinelli, Charles Louvet
*World premiere

A River Runs, Turns, Erases, Replaces
USA
by Shengze Zhu
*World premiere

Sichuan hao nuren (The Good Woman of Sichuan)
Canada
by Sabrina Zhao
with Weihang He, Ruobing Zhao
*World premiere / Debut film

Ste. Anne
Canada
by Rhayne Vermette
with Isabelle d’Eschambault, Jack Theis, Valerie Marion
*World premiere / Debut film

Taming the Garden
Switzerland / Germany / Georgia
by Salomé Jashi

La veduta luminosa (The Luminous View)
Italy / Spain
by Fabrizio Ferraro
with Alessandro Carlini, Catarina Wallenstein, Freddy Paul Grunert
*World premiere

THE 51st BERLINALE FORUM | MARCH 2021

Love and the Art of Seduction series | Bfi Player

LOVE and THE ART OF SEDUCTION

This well-chosen selection explores love in all its forms and offers tempting alternative viewing this lockdown Valentine Weekend.

Love and the Art of Seduction highlights the range of cinematic romance from sweeping love affairs to quirky rom-coms and tales of obsessive desire. It offers classic love stories from arthouse archives all over the world.

THE LUNCHBOX (2014) directed by Ritesh Batra

https://player.bfi.org.uk/subscription/film/watch-the-lunchbox-2013-online

An exquisite comedy-drama featuring from the director of Photograph features some of the most mouth-watering scenes of cooking and eating ever committed to film. It stars the late Irrfan Khan), an ill-tempered Mumbai office worker nearing retirement who who lunchbox mix-up leads to love.

LOVE & FRIENDSHIP (2016) directed by Whit Stillman

https://player.bfi.org.uk/rentals/film/watch-love-friendship-2016-online

An adaptation of Jane Austen’s early novella ‘Lady Susan’, this exquisite comedy of matchmaking and heart-breaking concerns the machiavellian Lady Susan Vernon (Kate Beckinsale) and her artful attempts at finding a husband for herself and for her eligible but reluctant school-girl daughter Frederica (Morfydd Clark). Cast members include Xavier Samuel, Tom Bennett, Chloe Sevigny and Stephen Fry.

THEORUM (1968)

Terence Stamp plays a mysterious young man who seduces each member of the family of rich Italian industrialist, with a particular focus on Silvana Magnani’s soignée lady of the household in the well-appointed villa in Milan. Set against the background of economic unrest Pasolini’s social satire won the Coppa Volpi at Venice in 1968

IMMORAL TALES (1974)

Much less salacious than you may have hoped for, this anthology of erotic short films are of value due to their eclectic settings in an exploration of the psychological side of human desire. The segments depicting the 16th century Hungarian ‘vampire’ countess Erzsebet Bathory, and the incestuous 15th century family of Lucrezia Borgia and her father, the pope, are particularly intriguing.

UNRELATED (2007)

Fans of English director Joanna Hogg will welcome the chance to revisit this pithy social drama that sees middle Londoners at play and at odds in a fraught villa party in sun-drenched Tuscany during the summer hols.

THE ART OF SEDUCTION collection | ON BFI player

BFI PLAYER

The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu 2010 | Autobiografia lui Nicolae Ceauşescu

Dir/Wri: Andrei Ujica | Doc, Romania, 180′

Interesting as it is to be able to observe one of the Cold War’s craziest dictators at such close quarters for three hours, it’s perverse of The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu that it should derive its fascination from the unfamiliarity of the material, but then insist on compromising the impact provided by that very unfamiliarity by deeming itself too cool to bother with fuddy-duddy conventions such as commentary and captions. This would give the audience a much-needed sense of context at critical moments: of which it serves up many.

Two sequences that particularly stand out are a breathtaking North Korean pageant in exquisite colour, staged on Ceaușescu’s behalf by a beaming Kim Il-sung, some time presumably in the seventies; and the 84 year-old communist party veteran Constantin Pîrvulescu taking the podium at the 12th Party Congress in November 1979 and launching into a remarkable attack on Ceaușescu calling for his resignation. (The film left me extremely curious as to what happened to Pîrvulescu next, but it was to Wikipedia that I had to turn to find most of the information I’ve just given you, and that Pîrvulescu, rather than being immediately killed was simply placed under house arrest, survived the Ceaușescu years and lived to be 96; news that ironically revealed the Ceaușescu regime in a better light than I had anticipated).

There has always struck me as a certain aloof arrogance about documentaries that entirely dispense with commentary. (Just as Shoah‘s refusal to include ANY historical footage – so that we don’t even get a photograph of the young Jan Karski during his lengthy interrogation by Claude Lanzmann – actually blunted the impact of the material that Lanzmann piously affected to be giving us unadorned).

Andrei Ujică’s film ironically adheres as stubbornly to its own particular dogma of self-consciously ‘audacious’ minimalism as Ceaușescu himself did to his own dogmas in the political and economic spheres. Would it really have hurt for Mr Ujică just occasionally to provide the viewer – who has invested three hours of their valuable time in watching his film – to have provided the occasional caption dating and contextualising the often lengthy and repetitious film clips that he serves up?

Mr Ujică would presumably argue that he’s just letting the material speak for itself; but simply by selecting three hours of material out of the thousand hours he viewed, he has clearly already decided what we’re going to get and, even with the limited guidance he provides, I could tell that he wasn’t always presenting the material in simple chronological order. (Colour footage of Ceaușescu’s 60th birthday celebrations in 1978, for example, is then unexpectedly followed by him giving a speech in black & white on the occasion of his 55th birthday five years earlier).

Ujică has his cake and eats it all by bookending the film with the kangaroo court Elena and Nicolae Ceaușescu were subjected to on Christmas Day 1989; although once again – presumably deliberately – he throws us a wobbly by not showing us the famous moment four days earlier when Ceaușescu launched into yet another of the speeches we have by now become familiar with, only to be greeted by the unaccustomed sound of booing and heckling.

Should Mr.Ujică ever deign to issue this film exactly as it already is only with captions I will happily revise my rating to Nine Stars. Richard Chatten

NOW ON AMAZON

My Favourite War (2020)

Dir.: Ilze Burkowska-Jacobsen; Documentary; Animation by Svein Nyhus; Latvia/Norway 2020, 80 min.

Latvian director/writer Ilze Burkowska-Jacobsen tells the story of her childhood growing up under Soviet occupation. What shines through is her romantic yearning for the countryside in a self-censored biopic enlivened by delicately drawn animations, interviews and documentary footage.

Young Ilza tells her story of dislocation and dual alliances (voiced by Mare Eihe): growing up in the ancient town of Saldus in Courland where her father was an active propagandist of Soviet values – dying in a car accident when Ilze was seven. Her mother was much more critical of the State, but toed the party line – even joining – to help her daughter advance to university and study Journalism, as her father had done before her.

Meanwhile Ilze’s grandfather, deported to Siberia for opposing the collectivisation in 1930s, was fearful of his granddaughter turning to communism, sending her to play outside while he was listening to a banned Western Radio Station. Ilze was unaware of what was going on still fervently believing in the founder of the Soviet State, Lenin: who hands her an ice cream while she is out for a drive with her parents. Later on she returns home empty-handed after waiting to buy butter, because a veteran of WWII has snaffled the last pack, not needing to queue.

At a meeting of the Soviet Youth organisation “Young Pioneers”, Ilze meets her life-long best friend Ilga who tells her to pull up her socks so as not to spoil the picture of uniformity. There is WWII footage about the Cauldron of Courland, and Ilze and her schoolfriends are literally forced to worship a certain Jacobs Kunders, who scarified himself in battle to save his comrades.

Ilze does everything to get a place at university; and thanks to her efforts she is invited to the most prestigious “Pioneer” camp on the Crimea. Towards the end of the Soviet Union it emerges that Ilze and others were forced to take up shooting lessons in honour of the war heroes adorning the school walls. The class acted in solidarity, unanimously asking to be relieved from the gun exercise. Instead they are assigned to a First Aid course, and this successful class action make a great impact on Ilze.

There are some odd sequences: a Nazi soldier, buried in a mass grave, is seen on the wall of a block of flats under construction, the neighbours taking it as a sign from God and a bad omen that construction is doomed. Another animation shows a WWII Nazi plane flying from Latvia to Berlin with its cargo of cows falling out in mid-air.

And although Ilze stays true to the Soviet cause in secondary school, Ilga becomes increasingly sceptical and this questioning attitude shows up in her final essay which is rejected due to its questioning Soviet norms. Ilga, who is seen often with Ilze in the few life interviews, felt so suicidal after her rejection she nearly killed herself. But Ilze’s mother leaves for the countryside to run her own farm, opting out of a system she does not believe in and could endanger her daughter’s future (My Mother’s Farm).

Somehow, My favourite War is two films in one: the most interesting being Ilze’s stance in acquiescing to the Status Quo, and here the animation sequences are often hilarious. Then there is Ilze second-guessing herself, and drifting off into a very uncritical Latvian history lesson. These two halves don’t make for successful whole, the adult Ilze is much less interesting than her contradictory young self. AS

MY FAVOURITE WAR IS AVAILABLE ONLINE

The Stylist (2020)

Dir: Jill Gevargizian | US Horror, 104′

This slick little slice of horror is stylishly dressed up and not too heavy to be an enjoyable light night watch with its hypnotic soundscape and sophisticated visuals.

The Stylist started life as a short film but funding enabled a feature makeover and filmmaker Jill Gevargizian added grist to the original with a few more peripheral, rather underwritten characters including the film’s original lead Najarra Townsend – who has now honed Claire down to a tee – in narrative that centres on a lonely disturbed stylist with a sideline in serial killing.

We all know how a visit to a hair salon plays out: you say what you want and then desperately dive back into your phone or a newspaper, hoping to avoid the usual generic chitchat. But the salon can also provide a space to offload and talk freely in a detached environment and the film explores these subtle female dynamics.

In a recent poll hairdressers emerged as the most content of professionals. Outwardly pleasant and personable Claire is certainly a dark horse on this account, and Townsend plays her very close to her chest in a performance that is subtle and quite intriguing. At first she appears a stable and self-assured individual but as the story unfolds stills water run deeper, and Claire’s incessant probing questions and private moments of angst (even meltdowns) reveal a tormented, dysfunctional individual, desperately fighting dark urges, with macabre results.

Living alone with only her dog for company, Claire is a woman who fantasises about her clients’ private lives, particularly when she meets longterm client Olivia (Brea Grant) who engages her service on a regular basis in the build up to her upcoming nuptials. But Claire is clearly unsure about the growing intimacy that develops when Olivia pushes the friendship envelope, Claire having to retreat to the dark zone of her personality in order to process feelings of jealousy and latent anger that surface and threaten to engulf the high-performing side of her split personality.

With echoes of Peter Strickland’s In Fabric, The Stylist is a tightly wound chick-flick psychodrama that avoids bleeding into full blown melodrama or even descending into gore-fest territory as it compellingly unpacks the complexities of its sociopathic central character. MT

AVAILABLE ON ARROWplayer 1 MARCH 2021

Focus Hong Kong | February 2021

FOCUS HONG KONG celebrates the Chinese New Year with a UK online programme running February 9th to 15th

Dedicated to celebrating the cinema and filmmakers of Hong Kong, the festival features early works to the glory days of its reign as the Hollywood of Asia, through to new and exciting films.

In February, there’ a strong line-up of UK online premieres, including the new 2K restoration of Tsui Hark’s immortal fantasy wuxia classic Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain, acclaimed contemporary anthology Memories to Choke On, Drinks to Wash them Down, offbeat murder mystery A Witness out of the Blue, the latest film from Andrew Fung, dark psychodrama Till We Meet Again, and the thrilling martial arts drama The Empty Hands, starring Stephy Tang and Chapman To. The festival also features a free to view selection of short films from the Hong Kong Fresh Wave Competition, renowned as the hothouse for future talent in the Hong Kong industry.

March will see another selection with a full festival event later in the year,

FOCUS Hong Kong

Operation Finale (2018) Netflix

Dir.: Chris Weitz; Cast: Oscar Isaac, Ben Kingsley, Melanie Laurent, Haley Lu Richardson, Joe Alwin, Greta Scacci; USA 2018, 122 min.

Another wartime foray this one cleverly adapted by US helmer Chris Weitz (A Better Life) from Matthew Orton’s script about the capture of Adolf Eichmann, the “Architect of the Holocaust”, in Argentina, and his subsequent trial in Jerusalem. Operation Finale plays out as a seething action thriller with some (a-historical) romance thrown into the pot. Ben Kingsley as Eichmann saves the project from banal superficiality, Oscar Isaacs making for a saturnine Malkin.

On the evening of 11th May 1960, a group of Mossad agents captured Eichmann near his house in the Buenos Aires suburb of San Fernando, where the former SS Obersturmbannführer lived with his wife Vera (a graceful Greta Scacci) and two children. His son Klaus (Alwin) actually led Mossad on the trail of his father who worked as a clerk for the Mercedes Benz factory in Buenos Aired: Klaus had a romantic relationship with Sylvia Herrmann (Richardson), her father growing suspicious of Klaus’s story about his family. Hermann senior informed a high-ranking West German prosecutor, Dr. Bauer, of his misgivings, and Bauer tipping off Mossad.

The capture itself is played out Ocean’s Eleven style – with Hanna Elian (Laurent), the anaesthetist of the group, getting over a bad relationship with Malkin after both of them botched their final assignments. Malkin is not trusted by his superiors, demanding why he never got the more glorious operations from the bosses, he answers caustically: ‘Perhaps they are anti-Semites’. Food for thought.

Some scenes lack finesse, particularly one where Malkin tries to convince Eichmann to sign a document declaring his voluntarily arrival in Israel. But there are subtler touches: Klaus and Sylvia enjoy Douglas Sirk’s aptly titled Imitation of Life, in a Buenos Aires cinema. And there are real thrills when Eichmann’s on board a plane with the agents ready to depart for Israel, a horde of Nazis desperately pressuring the authorities to ground the flight, having failed to track him down. The tone darkens as we witness a 1962 trial in Jerusalem – Malkin losing out on Hanna, who plumps for a less testosterone driven partner.

Operation Finale is a mixed bag: DoP Javier Aguirresarobe’s rather conventional images collide with Malkin’s personal memories of the Holocaust, and the Malkin/Elian affair is superfluous – in reality the Mossad doctor was male. The last chapter gets us back on track despite the long-drawn out kidnapping only being a secondary element in the plot. Ben Kingsley makes for suitably sinister Eichmann, deftly dicing between the two ‘Selfs’ of his incarnation of the ‘Banality of Evil’ (Hannah Arendt), lording it over his victims life a Nazi rigout, and his life as a dowdy, downtrodden clerk from an urban backwater. AS

NOW ON NETFLIX

Winners | 50th Rotterdam Film Festival 2021

The 50th Celebration of Rotterdam Festival wrapped after a successful week of films, interviews and Big Talks under the fresh new leadership of festival director Vanya Kaludjercic who took over the reigns from Bero Beyer for this exciting anniversary year.

Tiger Competition 2021 winners Pebbles, I Comete – A Corsican Summer and Looking for Venera will be made available to watch on IFFR.com for an extended period: from Sunday 6 February 18:00 (CET) to Tuesday 9 February 21:00 (CET), with streaming exclusively accessible in the Netherlands. The festival will be back in June for a summer celebration

ROTTERDAM FILM FESTIVAL 1-7 FEBRUARY 2021

Night of the Kings (2020) BFI player

Dir: Philippe Lacote | Cast: Bakary Kone, Steve Tientcheu, Jean Cyrille Digbeu, Rasmene Quedrango, Denis Lavant | Drama, 93′

The Cote Ivorian contender for this year’s Academy Awards is an vibrant and atmospheric modern day riff on the legend of Sherherazade set within the confines of an Abidjan prison.

A second feature for Philippe Lacote who gained International acclaim for his Cannes competition film Run, it sees a young man struggle to survive in the hostile hellhole of La Maca prison (now home to 5,000 prisoners) by keeping the inmates entertain – risking certain death if he doesn’t, by sunrise.

Lacote blends elements of folklore and local history with exotic lighting techniques (casting ghoulish shadows on the felons’ faces) and a rhythmic soundscape that reaches fever pitch by the hyperrealist closing scenes, in this story within a story.

The inmates themselves have taken over this mammoth concrete ‘asylum’ surrounded by the lush tropical scenery of the Ivory Coast, in West Africa (Senegal was used in locations). The chief henchman, Blackbeard (Tientcheu), is head of the prisoners, and will remain in power until he cedes to a more powerful rival, forcing him calmly to take his own life. His successor or ‘Roman’ (literally storyteller) has only just arrived on the prison scene, and seems rather lightweight by comparison but soon rises to the occasion.

On the night of a ‘red’ moon this Roman must mesmerise his fellow prisoners through until dawn with original stories of epic proportions. Luckily he only has to cast his mind back to his own family: his aunt was a noted West African storyteller, who grew up with an infamous rascal called Zama King. At this point the film takes on a fantastical dimension transporting us back in time to the reign of a Cleopatra-like queen (Laetitia Kay) with an outlandish wig.

At this point Denis Lavant arrives on the scene (as Silence) inspiring the young Roman (Bakary Kone) to wax lyrical as he gets into his stride with a tale of increasingly outlandish proportions. Roman reaches fever pitch with the constant threat of death creating palpable dramatic tension, and he diverges again and again spinning another string to his yarn, like some voluable over-excited salesman desperate to keep the patter going. The fellow inmates warm to the story adding their own embellishments with strident body movements, singing and dancing. This is a magical film that lives and breathes its unique sense of place deep in the heart of the mysterious African jungle. MT

BFI ONLINE | The Ivory Coast’s submission to the 93rd Academy Awards won awards in 2020 at Toronto, Thessaloniki, and the Youth Jury Award IFFR 2021.

Cup Fever (1965) Talking Pictures

Dir: David Bracknell | Cast: Bernard Cribbins, Sonia Graham, David Lodge, Dermot Kelly, Bobby Charlton | UK Drama 61’

Five years before Sam Peckinpah brought ultra-violence to Cornwall in ‘Straw Dogs’, cameraman John Coquillon and female lead Susan George had already taken to the mean streets of a wintry-looking Manchester to make this historically fascinating time capsule in which Matt Busby is charmingly stiff playing himself and one catches fleeting glimpses of the young and fresh-faced likes of Bobby Charlton, George Best, Denis Law and Nobby Stiles practising on the turf at Old Trafford.

1965 was far too early for the girls to be playing football themselves (their contribution being confined to making the strips and cheering the boys on), but the fact that they’re bothered about football in the first place was at that time in itself unusual. (Ironically the kids in this film initially pursue their passion for football in the face of constant hostility and obstruction from grown-ups whereas I grew up in a house were football took precedence over old movies and I subsequently spent decades catching up with cinema classics I missed in the seventies because they were scheduled opposite ‘Match of the Day’). Richard Chatten

TALKING PICTURES TV | 17 & 20 February 2021

Twice Round the Daffodils (1962)

Dir: Gerald Thomas, Wri: Patrick Cargill | Cast: Juliet Mills, Donald Sinden, Donald Houston, Kenneth Williams, Andrew Ray, Amanda Reiss | UK Comedy 89′

Carry On Nurse had been the top British moneymaker of 1959, but Twice Round the Daffodils is far from the “Carry On in all but name” it’s usually claimed to be – and was originally promoted as – despite the presence of Kenneth Williams who’s actually rather subdued here. The ‘naughty’ digressions with Jill Ireland clambering through a window in her drawers and Donald Sinden’s roving eye actually go jarringly against the grain of most of the rest of the film.

Based on a play called ‘Ring for Catty’ by Patrick Cargill (who had just appeared in Carry On Regardless) and Jack Beale, originally produced as Rest Hour in 1951. Producer Peter Rogers had owned it for several years and had wanted to film it when he was obliged to make Carry On Nurse instead’. It’s obvious from the opening credits accompanied by Bruce Montgomery’s soaring score, however, that this is a completely different kettle of fish more akin to the ‘Sanatorium’ episode of Trio (1950).

Taking its title from the fervently aimed for constitutional exercise of ‘twice round the daffodils’ indicating possible permanent release from the hospital confines, this is a film best appreciated after a spell of serious illness, or possibly even Covid isolation. When I recently spent two months in hospital, I often thought about this film, and how soul-destroyingly boring hospital life must have been without the iPad my sister supplied me with. Everybody in this film looks far too healthy, the interminable nights and the tedium and melancholy of the days is suggested only by Kenneth Williams’ desperation for a chess partner; and while going to the lavatory isn’t overlooked – and is here treated as a subject of mirth – it looms large in your calculations if you’re stuck in bed all day.

To return to the credit sequence, Amanda Reiss as Nurse Beamish (referred to only as ‘Dorothy’ in the cast list) is listed right at the bottom of the cast despite featuring prominently and touchingly throughout the film itself. Richard Chatten.

COMING UP ON TALKING PICTURES

Archipel (2021) IFFR 2021

Dir.: Felix Dufour-Laperriere; Documentary with FlorenceBlain Mbaye, Mattis Savard-Verhoeven; Canada 2021, 72 min.

Canadian director/writer/producer/editor Felix Dufour-Laperriere has created a visually striking portrait of his hometown Montreal (Quebec) with only a few real names and an assortment of mostly animated super-imposed images making any attempt at categorisation near impossible. One could call it a journey into poetry, music and live action held together by the voice-over of the two nameless narrators: a woman and man trying to communicate.

We never leave the titular Archipelago: old maps, footage and pictures give us an idea of times gone-by: people dominate, working, playing and wandering around in the delta. Names mentioned are Pierre Vallieres, a Quebec separatist politician and Jacques Verron, a reformist doctor. With animation and live-action correlated, we do not always know if this is a dream, even though the change of framing is a further point of reference guiding us, but also threatening to engulf us in this labyrinth of images. The score of Feu Doux underlines a semi-narrative of stream of consciousness and magic. Cryptic, often poetic, musings are like signs in a watery jungle landscape. The Saint Lawrence River keeps the boundaries in place and a native Innu-Aimon poem strikes a poetic and artful tone too hard to define in this multi-dimensional adventure composed of myriad art forms. It certainly transcends any filmic reference, exuding a timeless quality which is both beguiling and discombobulating. Words may dominate, giving us some directions, but overall the enigmatic Archipel does not want be to classified, just to be watched like an seamless adventure; wild, untamed and free. AS

Rotterdam Film Festival | 2021

The Dog Who Wouldn’t be Quiet | El Perro que no calla (2020)

Dri: Ana Katz | Argentina, Drama 73′

A dreamy absurdist meditation on life with man’s best friend seems well-pitched for this time when many increasingly rely on their pets – particularly dogs – to see them through loneliness and crisis. Screaming kids are part of life but not everyone tolerates a barking dog. But our canine friends can often highlight the general mood better than humans.

In her offbeat debut feature Argentinian filmmaker Ana Katz offers a gentle lowkey reflection of the life and times of Sebastian and his canine companion, that gradually opens out to touch on wider concerns. Set in a community struggling to survive economic turndown, Sebastian is struggling to hold down a job but his dog Rita spends her lonely days howling, much to the annoyance of his neighbours. Watching calmly and intelligently as Sebastian deals with the negative comments about her at his place of work, the realisation dawns that he will have to leave his job. But on a walk through the surrounding countryside, the decision is made for him. And this is delicately conveyed in a series of black and white sketches that carry a poignant sorrowful message.

The dog’s anxiety ripples out into a widespread ‘cri de coeur’ expressing the collective concern of a population lacking in agency and forced into passive endurance of their uneventful daily lives.

Essentially this is a series of episodes in Sebastian’s life as he goes from place to place gamely looking for work, while also playing an active part in his mother’s days with her sophisticated friends. This all culminates in a romantic meeting on the dance-floor and a family of his own.

A comet disaster, shown again in drawing form, provides an ecological watershed and the film’s lowkey Sci-fi twist that sees the Earth’s atmosphere become contaminated above ground level. Sebastian, who is now working in a farming collective, is forced to adapt to the confusing changes, including wearing a glass bubble mask (you can appreciate the social resonance here). This new normal situation becomes a routine that Sebastian and his fiends will have to accept. But it somehow is the making of him.

Filming in black-and-white film with an inconsequential original score, this is a promising debut that doesn’t quite manage to hang together despite some strong ideas, and the comedy angle is amongst them. Ana Katz get some naturalistic performances from her cast, and Daniel Katz makes for a likeable Sebastian in the central role. Rita is rather underwritten, and it’s a shame her role is so truncated as she could have provided the link to bringing the narrative together and garnering empathy from dog lovers everywhere. MT.

ON CURZON HOME CINEMA | 21 MAY 2021

ROTTERDAM FILM FEST | WINNER – BIG SCREEN AWARD 2021

Eerie Tales (1919) *** DVD

Dir: Richard Oswald | Cast: Anita Barber, Conrad Veidt, Reinhold Schunzel, Hugo Doblin, Paul Morgan, Georg John, Bernhard Goetzke,

By 1919 feature films were now long enough to accommodate more than just one story (as Intolerance had amply demonstrated), and Unheimliche Geschichten provides five; replete with spooky special effects and atmospherically lit interiors shot by Carl Hoffmann that make good use of depth of field. (The apprehensive-looking fellow who appears in the prologue with Reinhold Schunzel and Conrad Veidt is director Richard Oswald.)

The Black Cat and The Suicide Club (episodes 3 and 4) will already be familiar to most viewers, while the first episode presumably draws upon the same urban legend that originated during the Paris Exposition of 1889 that was most famously filmed as So Long at the Fair in 1950. I don’t know how widely seen this film was during the 1920s, but plenty of the imagery found its way into later, more famous movies (the ghostly clutching hand in The Beast with Five Fingers, the button that can kill the person sitting in a particular chair at the reading of SPECTRE’s financial reports in Thunderball, for example).

With his creepy demeanour, slicked-back hair and tights, moon-faced Reinhold Schunzel as Satan resembles The Riddler, while in the first episode he looks like Kurt Raab. It’s always good to see Conrad Veidt; but the film is particularly valuable as a record of the naughty Weimar-era cabaret dancer Anita Berber, whose adoption of formal male attire in Dr Mabuse was later made famous by her erstwhile girlfriend Marlene Dietrich, and who was the subject of a famous portrait by Otto Dix in 1925. She burned herself out young but here gets ample opportunity to display her corporeal presence in several different roles, as well as her famous androgyny and dancing agility doing the splits in tights and a short smock that display her legs while simultaneously making her resemble a female Hamlet. Richard Chatten

SO LONG AT THE FAIR is now on Talking Pictures TV | Amazon

Identifying Features (2020)

Dir.: Fernanda Valadez; Cast: Mercedes Hernandez, David Illescas, Jesus Varela; Spain/Mexico 2020, 97 min.

Identifying Features is an emotional fireball of a film showing a hell on Earth at the Mexican border with Arizona.

Poor Mexican farmers are caught in a trap between the cartel henchmen and the people traffickers promising financial security to these mostly young and naive locals on the Mexican side of the fortified border: the price is high: and it could cost them their lives.

Childhood friends Rigo and Jesus (Varela) have had enough of their restricted existence and set off from their little village in a perilous journey to the border wall. But the teenagers soon disappear for months without any sign of life, their families starting to imagine the worse.

For Rigo’s mother, the search for her son will be short and painful: photos of young men found dead near the border are shown to her – Rigo, easily identified by a white birthmark on his face, is one of them. The procedure is done in the most bureaucratic and soul destroying way. Magdalena (Hernandez) can go on hoping, and travels on to the border where Miguel (Illescas), a deportee, has just arrived after many years as an illegal in the USA.

The two will meet later. Magdalena does not learn anything about her son from the bus drivers she asks for help – just that buses are often kidnapped by cartel militia. Rigo was one of the victims on that fateful October the 15th, the day the teenagers boarded their bus. But Magdalena is told – in the lady’s restroom of all places – that an old man, who also survived the assault, is living in La Fragua near a canal.

So Magdalena sets out on her journey, meeting Miguel on the way on to see her mother. When the two arrive, it becomes clear that militia has raided her place and most probably killed the woman. But Magdalena presses on with her search for the old man, finally finding him in hiding from the militia. He confirm Rigo had been killed, mentioning his white birthmark, but does not know anything about Jesus’ fate. Trying to get back, Magdalena and Miguel are caught at night by the militia men, who are camping near a fire. In spite of their quick retreat into the woods nearby, Miguel is caught and shot. Magdalena, sure of her own fate, starts praying.

Whilst Hernandez is truly brilliant, the real star is DoP Claudia Becerri Bulos whose images of the countryside show utter desolation. The final part at the feature at the camp fire, where the devil dances, is simply extraordinary, with Magdalena’s face drenched in red.

The camera travels along inconsolable, melancholic and languid, panning Miguel from behind, his fate is somehow foretold, Magdalena remarking on his similarity to Jesus. She offers him a home, somehow fearing that her odyssey in search of her son will be in vain. This artful multi-award winning perspective on the Mexican migrant crisis is the the work of a remarkably mature newcomer, who has a bright future ahead of her film wise. AS

NOW ON DIGITAL RELEASE

Black Medusa (2021) Mubi

Dir: Ismael & Youssef Chebbi | Drama, Tunisia, 95′

The Black Medusa Nada is in some ways emblematic of her home town of Tunis in this enigmatic fantasy thriller portrait of contemporary North African womanhood.

In this first feature Tunisian filmmakers Ismael and Youssef Chebbi are clearly supportive of their embittered main character – who choses not to communicate verbally – investing her with the power to hit back at the male-dominated Arab society where she has grown up in the aftermath of the revolution. Nour Hajri makes for a mesmerising Nada – the aptly named Black Medusa – who modestly goes her about her daily routine before diving into the nighttime shadows to prey on unsuspecting suitors.

Nada’s modus operandi is a ritual of revenge unfolding over nine. First, she poses as a sympathetic confidante to her male suitors – then she stabs them viciously, and seemingly with impunity. But her murderous behaviour soon rouses the suspicions of her workplace colleague Noura, who discovers a knife used in the attacks, and die is cast.

Underwritten characters and a slim but suggestive premise are clearly the result of the filmmakers budget constraints in a feature shot at lightening speed, and scripted in only two weeks. Enigma somehow works to their advantage here but not in the way they had anticipated with Nada serving the narrative as a beguiling counterpoint to the film’s much stronger (and in some ways more interesting) character – Tunis itself, gradually emerging in the nocturnal odyssey through this intriguing capital.

Stylistically brave in its striking black and white beauty and eclectic soundscape, the film makes for a slow and sinuous study of the nighttime antics of urban Tunisians in a voyeuristic expose of this classic coastal city with its ancient medinas and modern architectural flourishes and broad palm-fringed boulevards that will eventually lead to Carthage and Sidi Bou Said.

The directors meld Noir and Giallo styles satisfyingly in a memorable revenge thriller that serves as a sophisticated showcase to a siren-like capital city where a serial killer is on a voyage of discovery to liberate herself from the past. MT

ON MUBI FROM 25 January 2022

Liborio (2021) Mubi

Dir: Nino Martinez Sosa | Dominican Rep Drama 99′

A violent hurricane in the tropical jungles of the Dominican Republic in the early years of the 20th century is the catalyst for transformation deep in this debut feature from Nino Martinez Sosa.

And the focus for change is Olivorio ‘Liborio’ Mateo who takes refuge in a cave only to reappear much later as a messianic figure and force for positive change and healing in his local community. Will this Jesus-like figure bring lasting hope or is he just another false prophet?.

An age old question and one Nino Martinez Sosa explores with some ingenuity in his lively feature debut that shines a light on this largely unknown episode of history. His film imagines a bright and self-determining future for an impoverished farming community in the South of his homeland. And one that serves as a metaphor for our world today where injustice continue despite social and economic advancement, and it will always be thus.

Since Jesus came down from the Cross, people everywhere have being looking for redemption and positive change – through cults, sects and new-fangled religions. Based on local history, Liborio is another figure who captures the collective imagination of his community, and from the time he reappears after the storm his prophecies and healing powers enrich his group of followers who have, up to this time, been dominated by Catholic doctrines. He retreats with them into the mountains to start a commune in the name of freedom, but faces still opposition from invading US marines after the 1916 American invasion when tensions developed into an armed struggle.

Atmospherically lensed by Oscar Duran (who honed his skills on Sexy Beast) this highly sensory tale takes the form of seven scenes showing how Liborio (a luminous central turn from Vicente Santos) inspires the locals with his teachings amid hostility from Catholic believers, much as Jesus got a bad rap from the prevailing Jews in Palestine; the shadow of colonialism eventually making its presence known in the shape of the soldiers.

Today in the Dominican Republic ‘Liborism’ is kept alive in ritual, prayer and song connecting this dramatised history to the present, and is here brought to us by Martinez Sosa’s illuminating historical drama. MT

Rotterdam Film Festival | premiere | this year’s festival kicks off on 26 January 2022

The Edge of Daybreak (2021) IFFR 2021

Dir: Taiki Sakpisit | Thailand, Switzerland | Drama, 116′

Four decades of political turmoil and violent history unfold in this deeply visual monochrome meditation whose intimate focus is the family tragedy at its core.

A thematically rich feature debut for Thai filmmaker Taiki Sakpisit who has made quite a name for himself as a director of shorts to create an impressive body of work linked to his country’s history. He now takes on a much more ambitious project that traces back to the distant history of his homeland in a film that scratches at the edges of Gothic fantasy taking it roots from reality.

Experimental in nature and strangely beguiling carries with it a palpable tension as turmoil in running high in its Bangkok setting. A prominent government figure is spending his final hours in safety before fleeing into exile. In the chiaroscuro shadows DoP Chananun Chotrungroj’s roving voyeuristic camera alights on a naked body and we are led to believe by the film’s narrator this incident is connected to the family who inhabit a decrepit riverside mansion steeped in a mysterious past.

Days are marked out by silent rituals. Pailin, the mistress of the house, is recovering from a traumatic accident involving her daughter Ploy. Wordlessly moving around in spellbound somnambulant state she is one of the female protagonists with little agency, suppressed by her stultifying surroundings in a story that serves as a metaphor for the suffering of the Thai people who have undergone years of repressive regimes and brutal trauma.

Sakpisit directs with confidence keeping his distance from his mysterious protagonists while maintaining a focus on the females, and evoking a creeping sense of dread with an ominous soundscape to create an artistic response to his country’s legacy of militarisation and impunity.

This is a narrative which very much connects to the global concern that psychosis and traumatic stress disorder can be passed down to later generations into the collective consciousness eventually becoming endemic in the nation’s heart and soul.

Rotterdam Film Festival | FIPRESCI Award 2021

Agate Mousse (2021) IFFR 2021

Dir/Wri: Selim Mourad | Lebanon, drama 68′

In Beirut, a man makes a regular visit to his cosmetic-surgeon ostensibly to have his moles checked over. But the discovery of a lump in his testicle and an abscess in his mouth sees filmmaker Selim Mourad at the coal face of his own mortality in this feature debut, an abstruse film essay, which runs for just over an hour, in the main Tiger competition at Rotterdam Film Festival.

After his death – presumably from the tumour – Selim’s image appears in a pretentious photography exhibition in Beirut. Clearly he has captured the imagination of a photographer but there’s no clear idea as to why his portrait is suddenly hanging there. One visitor makes the observation that the round framing of the portraits of the dead people somehow connects with film. The actual film frame then also adopts this circular form, and Selim’s friend Tamara enters the fray.

What follows is an inspired and visually brave piece of filmmaking that attempts to explore the eternal cycle of birth and death, Selim and Tamara finally becoming their own ancestors. A complex and intensely personal rumination on life, death and the idea that the dead are somehow still with us.

A New Kind of Love (1963)

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

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

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

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

Suzanna Andler (2021) IFFR 2021

Dir: Benoit Jacquot | France, Drama, 88′

A romantic chamber piece for Charlotte Gainsbourg to strut her stuff and she makes a soigné star in YSL, faux fur and high-heels in this sophisticated drama from Cesar winning Benoit Jacquot (Farewell My Queen, Eva).

Set in a sumptuous seaside villa in Cannes – reminding us to get our skates on for this year’s revised July festival – it muses on the constantly changing dynamics of love and fidelity, and the continuing fascination for women of a certain age by younger men.

The young guy in this case is Michel (Niels Schneider most recently seen in Xavier Dolan’s Heartbeats). Gainsbourg plays forty something Suzanna Andler who describes herself to the estate agent showing her the villa, as “the most cheated-on woman in the Riviera”. Her millionaire husband Jean (who never appears, but speaks to her over the ‘phone from Chantilly where he also has a lover) will spend two weeks there with the family, she will then be joined by Michel keeping a low profile, naturellement.

Jacquot bases his script on a 1960s play by the famous French novelist, director and actor Marguerite Duras (he worked as her assistant in the early 1970s), set back in the day when it was ‘de rigueur’ to have a lover to compensate for the confines of the marital bed, and here cleverly escapes the strictures of the stage with an evocative seaside soundscape, the lush villa is a character in itself, and a beachside walk with the third character Julia Roy (who also appeared in Eva) as her daughter, Monique.

Staying faithful to the original, this is elegantly performed and delightful to watch, its discursive love story playing out amid gentle lulling waves and seagulls on a spring day on the Riviera, distilling the essence of this magical part of France. MT

Rotterdam Film Festival 2021 | LIMELIGHT STRAND

Pebbles (2021) IFFR 2021 | Tiger Award 2021

Dir: P S Vinothraj | Drama, India 74′

Drought is a killer in Southern India. And the village of Arittapatti is suffering. Women keep calm and patiently carry on – roasting rats to feed the family – but the men are full of rage, against themselves and the environment.

Powered forwards by a seething debut performance from Karuththadaiyaan, who plays the central character Ganapathy, this first feature from P S Vinothraj – essentially a two hander – is as much a social portrait of rural India’s patriarchal society as a anti-buddy movie about a father and his young son (Chellapandi, also a non-pro).

Forget solidarity. The desiccated landscape has reduced humanity to desperation, Ganapathy’s wife fleeing from his domestic abuse to her in-laws in a neighbouring village. Furious and determined to get his back – she is his possession, after all – Ganapathy drags his sons on the 13 km journey across a wasteland, Walkabout style, in the searing heat of the hottest day of the year.

In an odyssey Punctuated by occasional violent outbursts, and intensified by a handheld camera, what we remember most about Pebbles is the silence: this is actually a meditation on the miracle of nature and also the cruelty of man towards the environment, seen largely through the eyes of Chellapandi, a calm and thoughtful boy who refuses to give in to his father’s draconian dominance and physical abuse preferring to marvel instead at their their journey through this ravaged but characterful landscape. At one point they are followed by a stray puppy, the father kicks it away but Chellapandi befriends it and takes it home, he’s emerging a nature boy and the hero of the film.

Despite a dysfunctional relationship with his father the two are inexorably drawn together, the father’s negative energy fuelling the boy’s positivity and resourcefulness. It’s an intriguing study of how opposites continue to stick together somehow complimenting each other in the face of all odds.

Minutely observed and captured on the widescreen, and by use of drones, this wonderful feature, over a year in the making, is an arthouse gem that fills the viewer with a feeling of calm contemplation. A tribute to the patient resourcefulness of poverty-stricken people all over the developing world. MT

Rotterdam Film Festival 2021 | TIGER COMPETITON WINNER 2021

A Glitch in the Matrix (2021) Dogwoof

Dir.: Rodney Asher; Documentary with Nick Bostrom, Erik Davies, Emily Pothast, Chris ware, Jeremy Felts, Philip K. Dick; narrated by Baffy Visick; USA 2021, 108 min.

After analysing sleep paralysis in his Shining spin-off Room 237, director Rodney Ascher has taken on a much grander project: convincing us that everything on this planet is the work of super-advanced computers who have built this super Matrix, perhaps for the enjoyment of equally advanced creatures to watch us earthlings toil on in his never-ending soap opera – a little bit like The Truman Show on an universal level.

To this avail he has summoned four eye-witnesses who have come to believe that humankind is at the mercy of programmers, and who write the narratives we call ‘life’. These ‘believers’ of a world in the permanent process of simulation are suitably dressed, face and torso transformed into video-game avatars, in front of a webcam. A fifth witness, Joshua Cooke could not be present since he is serving a prison sentence until at least 2043 for killing his parents – a result of his obsessions with the Matrix series. But at least he can warn others with this bizarre life story.

The simulation theory is not that new: Plato and Descartes are among many other creative souls who believed in the theory of sleeping humans whose whole lives are just computer-assisted dreams. Here a vast network of AI forms the background of all our life stories, including the vast army of non-player characters. It all feels like a secret message from some liberated creatures – Jehovah’s witnesses or other religious cults who have studied the vast conspiracy so you can eventually join them. But like all religions it’s a question of belief. Nick Bostrum, a Swedish academic, sounds most anchored in some form of reality: “We are not in, what ‘believers’ call, a ‘base reality’ but “in one of countless simulations, its inhabitants have been programmed”.

Much time is given to SciFi writer Philip K. Dick (1928-1982), author of Blade Runner fame , who had written 44 novels (the majority being adapted for feature films) and 17 short story collections. He visited his disciples in Metz, France in 1977 and gave a talk about the counterfeit worlds in his novels.

This how he describes his obsession with these worlds: “My fictional work is actually true, particularly the novels The Man in the High Castle, and Flow my Tears, The Policeman said. Both novels are based on fragmentary, residual memories of such a horrid slave state world.”

Dick also claims to have remembered past lives, and a very different present life; confessing these mystical experiences occurred after dental surgery in 1974. He goes on: “We are living in a computer-programmed reality, and we only realise this when some variable is changed, and some alteration in our reality occurs. Those alterations are felling like a deja vue. An alternative world branched off”.

All complex stuff, but fascinating if it appeals to you. There is much more: Elon Musk and the Mandela theory among others, but we will have to wait until we find out who is in charge of this giant conspiracy. Until then we’ll have to make do with our status “ALIVE BUT NOT LIVING”. AS

NOW ON WATCH DOGWOOF.COM

The Year Before the War | Gads Pirms Kara (2021 IFFR

Dir.: Davis Simanis; Cast: Petr Buchta, Inga Salina, Girts Kesteris, Lauris Dzelzitis, Eduards Johansons, Edgards Kaufelds, Gints Gravelis, Uldis Silins, Daniel Sidon, Janis Putnins; Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Czech Republic | 2021, 95 min.

This stylish third feature from Latvian historian and now filmmaker Davis Simanis is a tour-de-force artfully imagining the final events of 1913 before the outbreak of war. Shot in black-and-white and combining the aesthetics of early cinema with a surrealist twist, it is a ravishing odyssey of ideas and their main protagonists seen through the eyes of nascent revolutionary Petr on his peripatetic journey through a Europe in turmoil. Romantic passion, world revolution, psychoanalysis, and seduction: Simanis’ inspired drama bubbles with ideas in a caldron of change heralding the 20th century when Europe and the world would be transformed forever.

We start the journey in Riga on New Year’s Day 1913. A young fisherman drowns himself in an icy lake “he wants to be with the fish, who know the secret of death”. Meanwhile Petr (calling himself Hans), a doorman in a posh hotel, is fired on suspicion of revolution ideas.

With the arrival of Spring Petr has made it to Switzerland, shooting his newly acquired gun into the air with a triumphant flourish. Somehow he wanders into the “Lebensreform” sanatorium where patients are dancing around naked to escape the ravages of TB and psychosomatic illness.

Petr meets the philosopher Wittgenstein (Silins); and later, at a séance, Alma (Salina), who could be the future spy Mata Hari. Alma is an emotional woman, full of wild and passionate expression and we see her before an audience in a cinema tent, where Biograph pictures are being shown. Alma will reappear in later episodes, emerging as an increasingly enigmatic seductive figure for Petr.

In June, our hero visits Prague and decides to enlist, running into Trotsky (Gravelis) at a political rally. Later in July, the trigger happy Petr visits Vienna where his gun comes in handy for more attacks on the establishment, shooting at a well known politician. Later, in London he will be hailed a hero as more political enemies come under fire. But by August he is already tired of all the killing.

Summer draws to a close and Petr, now in Riga, sees Alma again. He also has a brush up with Lenin (Dzelzitis). Moving to Prague in September, he visits Freud (Kesteris), who, not un-surprisingly, diagnoses Petr with an Oedipus complex, after he expressed his desire to kill his father (who has died in the meantime). The narrative gets more unhinged, with an orgy, an empty coffin and forays to government offices. At a demonstration we spot Schicklgruber (Kaufelds), who tries to break up the anarchist meeting.

All good things come to an end, and finally, Petr must face the music. Winter is once again closing in and Lenin reappears to give him instructions for the planned revolution. The film draws to a close on New Year’s Eve in Riga where Alma begs him to leave and let her die. We somehow jump forward to the Great War, where symbolically Petr satisfies his gnawing hunger by boiling and eating a human hand. He is called by his comrades Petr Ivanovitch, but still insists on being called Hans. By now he is a prosecutor in a Stalinist system, condemning dissidents to death, he “cannot see any meaning at all”.

A visual triumph for DoP Andrejs Rudzats and PD/Kristina Jurjane whose black and white camerawork leads us on a magical journey brimming with intrigue. The second half of the feature could easily have been scripted by Kafka. Sidon, who makes a guest appearance is able to re-imagine the atmosphere of the Golem series, and Jurjane is equally brilliant at re-building cities, as we have seen in the cinema of German Expressionism. There is so much to be admired that – for once – an extra thirty minutes of this stunningly torrid rush of imagination would be most welcome. AS.

Rotterdam Film Festival | BIG SCREEN COMPETITION.

Madalena (2021) Mubi

Dir: Madiano Marcheti | Thriller Brazil 85′

More transexuals are killed in Brazil than anywhere else in the world and this sobering thought provides the touchstone to Madiano Marcheti’s assured feature debut that premiered exactly a year ago at Rotterdam’s film festival’s 50th celebration.

Madalena is a murder mystery that is never solved. We see a broken body lying in a field of lushly swaying soya, but we never discover much more – this is not a crime procedural or a whodunnit. What Madalena does provide is a haunting and unsettling snapshot of the cultural and societal references that support intolerance in this deeply religious, patriarchal and macho part of rural Brazil that remains connected and influenced by the modern world and yet at the same time, tethered in the past. In this sense the setting (where the director himself grew up) is very much a character that influences what has gone before. In this eerie tropical landscape, ostriches strut like creatures out of a Sci-fi thriller and drones trawl the skies patrolling the vast acres of farmland. Meanwhile monsters are being bred in the frivolous disco-dancing, vape-smoking, body-conscious urban hinterland, and they’re called men.

Capturing the vast open skyscapes and deathly silences of the spooky agrarian setting Marcheti stealthily explores the aftermath to Madalena’s death through three protagonists who are unknown to each other as they gradually become aware of her disappearance. The details are left unclear and we never find out how the death eventually leaks out into the news.

Club hostess Luziane calls round at Madalena’s simple village home several times, her mother pressurising her to borrow money, but Madalena is nowhere to be found. The narrative then shifts to body-builder Cristiano who works for his land-owning father, spending his time smoking drinking and injecting himself with hormones. He can’t forget what he’s seen in the soyafields, so he takes his friend Gildo back to where he originally saw the body but it’s a hostile and inhospitable terrain that keeps its secret well hidden.

In a mellow and soft-centred finale it’s left to trans woman Bianca and her girlfriends to pack up Madalena’s possessions as they share memories of happier times with their friend. Marcheti never passes judgement on his characters, they are merely there to serve the narrative – but none is particularly likeable, leaving us to reach our own conclusions on this sinister story and the hostile and unknowable place where it all unfolds. MT

NOW ON MUBI I TIGER COMPETITION

Fade-In (1973) Talking Pictures

Dir: Jud Taylor (as Alan Smithee) Wri: Jerrold L Ludwig | Cast: Burt Reynolds, Barbara Loden, Noam Pitlik, Patricia Casey, George Savalas| US Western 93′

In 1967, Silvio Narizzano was in Moab Utah making a western called Blue with Terence Stamp, Joanna Pettet and Ricardo Montalban

However, the stars also found themselves appearing in Fade-In, with Silvio Narizzano getting a producer credit and Barbara Loden playing a sophisticated movie editor who heads for Mexico to work on a film shoot.

It might be an in-joke that Terence Stamp (starring in the parent production) doesn’t speak for the first forty minutes, yet is the first to say something in this film. Barbara Loden’s eyes, first seen staring intently into a car mirror, are unmistakable, despite this being her only conventional film lead, romanced by local ranch hand Burt Reynolds who has been hired to work as a driver.

The presence over the brow of the hill of the bigger production enabled first time director Alan Smithee to avail himself of the Monument Valley locations and a helicopter suggesting a bigger budget than was actually at his disposal.

The film looks like an imitation of Un Homme et Une Femme and the unique teaming of the star of Deliverance and Smokey and the Bandit with the director and star of Wanda suggest a more estimable achievement than the stubbornly conventional production it insists on being. Richard Chatten

ON TALKING PICTURES 6 FEBRUARY 2021

Girl on Approval (1962)

Dir: Charles Frend, Wri: Kathleen White | Rachel Roberts, James Maxwell, Annette Whiteley, Ellen McIntosh | John Dare | UK Drama 75′

Sandwiched between Rachel Roberts’ roles in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and This Sporting Life. This sensitive little drama in a minor key reminiscent of Ealing Studios’ Mandy would make the first half of an interesting double bill of films with Annette Whiteley; the second being The Yellow Teddybears (1963) marking her graduation from problem 14 year-old foster child who can’t be left alone with sharp objects, to fully fledged sex delinquent.

Backed by a melancholy score by veteran composer Clifton Parker and atmospheric location photography by up-and-coming cameraman John Coquillon, director Charles Frend’s own plight reflected that of most of Ealing’s other talents released like his young heroine into the harshness of the big wide world to fend for himself. Richard Chatten.

NOW ON TALKING PICTURES | PRIME VIDEO

Friends and Strangers (2021)

Dir/Wri: James Vaughan | Cast: Emma Diaz, Victoria Maxwell, Fergus Wilson, Greg Zimbulis | Australia, Comedy drama 82′

Sydney is the setting for this filmic breath of fresh air from promising newcomer James Vaughan exploring displacement and modern ennui with a humorous touch seen through the eyes of an easygoing young Australian. For fans of Joanna Hogg – this might appeal.

Setting off with a jaunty piano soundtrack the film opens with a rather awkward but entirely convincing conversation by two directionless millennials Alice (Diaz) and Ray (Wilson) who are set adrift in the holidays and discussing their putative travel plans in the balmy urban confines of a leafy Sydney’s suburb. Eventually they fetch up camping in a caravan by a lakeside. But the story’s focus then increasingly turns to Ray as his summer adventure broadens.

Defined by its freewheeling style and naturalistic performances (Wilson is particularly good) Friends and Strangers avoids a structured narrative playing out as a series of amusing vignettes that riff on the theme of wanderlust and endless travel for millennials before the constraints of Covid came along. Much of Alice and Ray’s time together is interrupted by members of the older generation adding context to their aimless behaviour and accentuating the solipsistic nature of the young characters un-centred existence. They say a lot but actually mean very little, and there is no real focus to their interactions. Maybe their whole style of language and dialogue results from their inherent lack of direction or need to do anything at all, dictated by the vague unpressurised lives they lead.

Cleverly observed and unhurried in its gentle style Friends and Strangers derives its humour from the fact that nothing really happens in their freewheeling laissez-faire lifestyle. Perceived slights and vague mood changes accentuate their lack of purpose and often arise out of the characters’ need to overthink situations, because nothing of real consequence ever happens as the days stretch out into a pointless void. Vaughan has certainly perfected millennial dialogue with its ubiquitous interpolations of ‘like’ and ‘kind of’ peppered everywhere. And dramatic heft – and texture – arrives in the scenes where Ray finds himself filming a wedding video for a wealthy art collector at an uptown house where the mounting stress levels are much more in tune with modern urban life – adding an hilarious Mr Bean twist to proceedings.

Dimitri Zaunders’ camera occasionally swings into widescreen mode giving us an enjoyable travelogue of Sydney’s sites and monuments not to mention some less crowded beaches and gorgeous modernist villas, where the Mr Bean accident occurs.

Slim but highly entertaining while it lasts, this is an ‘amuse bouche’ of a film that shows Vaughan as an acute observer of life, and a real talent in the making with a promising career ahead of him. MT

IN CINEMAS FROM 8 NOVEMBER 2021 | TIGER COMPETITION 2021

Berlinale 2021 | Jury Announced

Six Golden Bear winning directors will head up this year’s Berlinale main competition jury and decide on the prizes in Competition at the 71st Berlinale.

The festival’s Aristic Director Carlo Chatrian announced there would be no president this year. But expressed his gratitude to the jury members:

They express not only different ways of making uncompromising films and creating bold stories but also they represent a part of the history of the Berlinale. In this moment in time, it is meaningful and a great sign of hope that the Golden Bear winners will be in Berlin watching films in a theatre and finding a way to support their colleagues“,
The members of the 2021 International Jury:

Mohammad Rasoulof (Iran)
Director of the Golden Bear winning-film There is No Evil, 2020

Nadav Lapid (Israel)
Director of the Golden Bear winning-film Synonyms, 2019

Adina Pintilie (Romania)
Director of the Golden Bear winning-film Touch Me Not, 2018

Ildikó Enyedi (Hungary)
Director of the Golden Bear winning-film On Body and Soul, 2017

Gianfranco Rosi (Italy)
Director of the Golden Bear winning-film Fire At Sea, 2016

Jasmila Žbanić (Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Director of the Golden Bear winning-film Grbavica, 2006

Summer Special

From June 9 to 20, the festival offers a Summer Special featuring numerous physical cinema screenings and the opportunity to experience a large portion of the films in the presence of the filmmakers themselves. The start of the Summer Special on June 9 will be celebrated with a festive opening event.

BERLINALE 2021 | MARCH & JUNE 2021

Aristocrats (2021) IFFR 2021

Dir: Sode Yukiko | Japan, Drama 124′

Two women look for love and marriage in this elegant and slickly realised social drama from Good Stripes director Sode Yukiko whose third feature is in the Big Screen Competition at Rotterdam Film Festival 2021.

Dating is a highly sophisticated affair in contemporary Tokyo. Hanako is left in the lurch by her fiancé and has to find another prospective husband to satisfy her wealthy parents. Miki, comes from the other side of the tracks but both find themselves competing for the same man, the upwardly mobile lawyer Koichiro.

Based on a novel by Mariko Yamauchi, Aristocrats is refreshingly rather old-fashioned film – despite its modern setting – describing polite society in the restrained style of Hirokazu Koreeda and same sense of stillness as Kogonada’s Columbus (2017), Yukiko letting the narrative play out in the form of chapters with utmost attention to detail in beautifully framed shots that create a evocative sense of place in this highly organised society that puts great value on class, age and tradition.

The female friendships and solidarity is the remarkable aspect of the plot line, so rarely seen in romantic dramas; Miki and Hanako never vying jealously but retaining their relationship through thick and thin.

The scene where Koichiro takes Hanako back to his family home is particularly impressive. And although the path to true love is fairly straightforward there is a strange underlying tension at play throughout that makes this a compelling film to watch, Yukiko handling the material with a deft lightness of touch and leaving her finale open-ended yet ultimately satisfying and memorable. MT

Rotterdam Film Festival 2021 | BIG SCREEN COMPETITION

Mighty Flash (2021)

Dir: Ainhoa Rodrigues | Spain, Fantasy Drama 90′

Life in Southern Spain hasn’t changed much for the God-fearing and deeply suspicious repressed but dying to burst out from their in rural communities in Extremadura. And women are the keenest to break free. Or at least that’s the impression we get from Ainhoa Rodriguez’ deliciously dark and delightfully observed first feature that unfolds with a cast of non-pros on the widescreen and in intimate – often voyeuristic – closeup.

Mighty Flash is an amusing story of country folk and their sexual frustrations and ethnographical portrait of a remote group of people, spiced up with magic realist touches. These country dwellers may be cut off from the rest of Spain but they are as thick as thieves amongst themselves, supporting one another and sharing tales of farming exploits, folklore and strange happenings in the surrounding countryside – not to mention vicious social gossip. Like Dickens’ Mr Micawber they are constantly waiting for something to turn up, not just the Second Coming or the Madonna at the local Semana Santa processions.

Isa records suggestive messages to herself that speak of strange events: “A mighty flash of light will appear above the village, which will change everything”, she hears herself say. “It is magnificent. We will all get a headache, we will lose our memories and we will disappear.” Cita is a deeply unsatisfied with her life and one morning leaves her warm matrimonial bed and heads to the church to pray, all dolled up in a mini dress and blow-dry. This naturally sparks criticism and wagging tongues amongst the other women: “nothing will come of her” they chunter conspiratorially.

Although the womenfolk are frustrated in the deadbeat backwater, the men seem more contented with their daily grind. Nothing happens but actually everything happens. High hopes are met with unrealised dreams. But the tone here is drole and upbeat, always positive, never bitter.

Loneliness has no place in this community, despite its lack of potential. Days are fraught with the social round. All done up in pearls and fur coats – not to mention high heels – ladies lunch together and talk of sexual desire and personal fulfilment – and their dissatisfaction with the menfolk is fully realised in scenes enlivened by surrealist flourishes. María mourns her deceased husband, Paco. Sometimes, someone hears a sound that escapes everyone else. Can it be real or just a fantasy.? Female imagination catches fire while the men simply hunker down with their mates and animals – especially the little goat farmer who describes tricking a female goat into bringing up a kid from another litter.

Cleverly observed, pert and well-paced with its punchy electronic soundtrack and touches of magic realism deftly woven into the narrative, Mighty Flash is a real one off. Working hard – and successfully – to build a bond of trust with her cast Rodriquez’ first feature fizzes with intrigue behind its zipped-up facade. A brilliantly observed portrait of modern Spain that could be from the dark ages. Ironic, inspired and in the delicate spirit of Victor Erice. MT

NOW ON MUBI | ROTTERDAM FILM FESTIVAL | TIGER COMPETITION | VILNIUS FILM FESTIVAL | EUROPEAN DEBUT COMPETITION Best Director: Ainhoa Rodríguez

The Dig (2021) Netflix

Dir.: Simon Stone; Cast: Carey Mulligan, Ralph Fiennes, Archie Barnes, Monica Dolan, Johnny Flynn, Ken Stott, Lily James, Peggy Piggott; UK 2021, 112 min.

This tender and touching tale about loss and the fragility of life takes place in the soft landscape of Suffolk just as England is entering another World War in 1938.

The Dig is ostensibly about the discovery of an ancient burial site at Sutton Hoo but its historical significance pales into insignificance and the human story is what we remember, sensitively brought to life by Moira Buffini’s skilful adaptation of John Preston’s novel, and Carey Mulligan’s deeply affecting performance as young world-weary widow Edith Pretty who lives at the Hoo with her young son Robert (Barnes).

The repercussions of the Great War are still being felt even in rural Suffolk where Edith maintains a noblesse oblige approach despite her life-limiting heart condition brought on by rheumatic fever. Robert is gently traumatised by the thought of losing another parent, in a household where everyone is crying silently but putting a brave face on things. Ralph Fiennes gradually becomes an unlikely saviour as the stern, pipe-smoking amateur archeologist Basil Brown who Edith hires to investigate mounds of soil on her land. Robert takes very well to the individualist Brown, but it gradually emerges he is married to local lass Mary Brown (Dolan) and that’s another sad story.

Naturally being England, emotions are well buttoned-up despite the balmy summer setting; director Simon Stone possibly had LP Hartley’s The Go-Between in mind with his imagining of events, Buffini making Mrs Pretty decades younger than the book, thus adding a frisson between her and Basil.

But that’s not the only touch of romance going on. There’s a low key flutter between Edith’s cousin Rory (Johnny Flynn) and Lily James -who is curiously underpowered as Peggy, the sexually starved wife of a (gay) RAF officer (Ben Chaplin, looking worried) – although it certainly provides light relief from the rather underwhelming burial discovery which brings with it a motley crew of ‘official’ specialists from London headed by British Museum expert Ken Stott. Pulling rank he places the site under Government control, although Edith is adamant that Brown should finish what he started, especially as he is nearly killed in a landslide.

Drama also comes from the looming shadow of war. A plane crashes in a nearby lake, Rory trying in vain to rescue the pilot. And although Edith is fading away slowly she still lights up every scene with her understated class and decorum, keeping up “a good show”, and trouncing Peggy’s discrete ecstasy with Rory – yes, they do get a coy minute of passion just before he leaves to join the RAF. MT

NOW ON NETFLIX

The Investigation (2021) BBCiPlayer | DVD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strange Holiday (1945)

Dir: Arch Oboler | Cast: Claude Rains, Bob Stebbins, Barbara Bate Gloria Holden | US War Thriller 61′

Despite starring Claude Rains this dream-life dystopia about the Land of the Free coming under the jackboot remains so obscure Andrew Sarris doesn’t even include it in his Arch Oboler filmography in ‘American Cinema’ (despite him italicising Oboler’s semi-remake ‘Five’).

Arch Oboler (1909-87) hailed from Chicago and was particularly noted for his radio dramas, scripts and the suspense-horror series Lights Out. He directed, along with Robert Clampett, the first 3D movie in colour Bwana Devil (1952) that went on to won the Guinness World Record in that year.

Strange Holiday is based on his radio play This Precious Freedom in a storyline that became almost commonplace during the Cold War; most notably Ray Milland’s Panic in the Year Zero (1962), which also depicts a foreign attack on the United States while a family guy is vacationing out of town.

One potentially fascinating scene finds examiner Martin Kosleck – who had already played Dr Goebbels in Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) – now in charge. The potentially provocative idea that he was just an opportunist newly emerged from the woodwork to do the New Order’s bidding raised the intriguing question of where he had been before Rains’ vacation is unfortunately promptly undermined by the speech he then launches into in which he declares “We who believed in our destiny hid and waited”. So he becomes a fifth columnist rather than a collaborator. Richard Chatten

Arch Oboler (1909-87)

Three Strange Loves (1949)

Dir: Ingmar Bergman | Wri: Herbert Grevenius | Cast: Eva Henning, Birger Malmsten, Bergit Tengroth, Hasse Ekman, Mimi Nelson | Sweden, Drama 73′

Based on a short story by Birgit Tengroth who also stars, Three Strange Loves (Torst) is Bergman’s final 1940s film and follows the break up of his second marriage. This relationship strife is echoed in the three-stranded storyline which unravels on a train ride (filming was actually in Hamburg) while energetically employing the same non linear narrative structure Bergman would later bring to triumphant fruition in Wild Strawberries – fluidly shifting throughout in time and place – but put to much less wistful use.

A failed ballerina Rut (Henning); a buttoned down professor (Malmsten) and a bickering couple (she chain smokes as they squabble) all returning to Stockholm in 1946 through a Europe still full of the displaced and disenfranchised;

Only his second film with his first great collaborator as cameraman, Gunnar Fischer, Bergman had a great fondness at this time for sliding his camera through walls, and the film is quite intoxicating to watch. Richard Chatten.

AVAILABLE on the Criterion Collection via AMAZON

Mayday (2021) Sundance 2021

Dir: Karen Cinorre | Cast: Grace Van Patten, Mia Goth, Juliette Lewis, Sam Levy, Soko, Havana Rose Liu, Lucas Joaquin | US, 2021, 90′

Sumptuously shot in Croatia, Karen Cinorre’s action drama debut doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its slick production values – the atmospheric impact undoubtedly leaves the audience spellbound – imaginatively re-working of the Siren’s myth. But the narrative is too often oblique and somehow even at odds with the message, although it’s worth a watch for its female centric storyline and focus on empowerment. There are some terrific performances too – especially from the much-underrated Juliette Lewis.

Ana (Van Patten) is working as a waitress at a wedding reception in a hotel near a beach. She comes across as a troubled character (reason not given), but things get worse when she is raped (off-screen) by the manager. We also meet the anxious bride (Goth) and Dimitri (Pellerin), a war photographer and friend of Ana, and supervisor June (Lewis).

Distraught, Ana causes an electric blowout and puts her head into an oven. She is catapulted into a different word, landing on an island where she joins the bride from the wedding who now calls herself Marsha and leads two other women guerrillas, Bea (Liu) and Gert (Soko), on a defunct U-boot. June is also part of the female force in this enigmatic war where Ana takes refuge in the woods and is – once again – nearly raped by an invading soldier. It soon becomes clear that the four women are luring pilots there with Mayday calls to the island. Survivors are then shot. For no apparent reasons, Ana decides to return to her former existence after meeting Dimitri again after he lands with his parachute in the woods.

A musical number with male soldiers (Busby Berkeley style) is entertaining, even though rather unexplained. Finally, Ana jumps into the sea to reach the beach hotel aided on her eventful journey by the trio she left behind.

Mayday tries very hard to be enigmatic, starting with the – often repeated – titular Morse sequence Mary-Alpha-Yankee-Delta-Alpha-Yankee with which the women warriors lure their prey to the island. Somehow, the effect is a reverse Peter Pan scenario, with some ‘Narnia’ thrown in.

DoP Sam Levy tries successfully to enhance the bizarre setting with moody dreamlike images and Van Patten acts the ‘girl-lost’ part in both universes with great sensibility. But overall there are too many question marks: we totally get it that we have entered an allegoric world. But it is one without inner logic, since the obviously talented filmmaker Cinorre is let down by her own script. AS

SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL until 3 FEBRUARY 2021

Gritt (2021) IFFR 2021

Dir.: Itonje Sømer Guttormsen; Cast: Brigitte Larsen, Marta Wexelsen Goksoyr, Lars Vauler, Andrine Sœther; Norway 2021, 118 min.

Gritt is slowly losing her mind and that’s a feeling many of us can appreciate as we languish in lockdown. Premiering at Rotterdam International Film Festival her story, Gritt, is the focus of first time Norwegian writer/director Itonje Sømer Guttormsen whose portrait of a desperate actor trying to combat feelings of failure by connecting with others through her art. Sadly though, Gritt is her own worst enemy.

Brigitte Larsen really shines in a standout performance as the titular Gritt, based on Guttormsen’s 2016 short film Retrett. We first meet her describing herself as an “undercover support person” in the play described as “3 Colours Ibsen” This involves looking after Marte (Goksoyr) an actor affected by Downs Syndrome, who actually appears to have a better handle on her life than her helper, and has written two books for a major publishing house.

Discussing the rest of the cast, Gritt is drawn to the male actors with a ‘soft’ personality, Marte preferring rough and ready types, like the crime writer Jo Nesbo. But then Gritt nearly falls out with Marte who is far more easygoing about things in general.

Gritt wants to write and perform a play about the end of “patriarchy and capitalism” – but she has no idea how to realise her project. Then she she meets up with a group of actors claiming to be the famous “Living Theatre”, but they are amateurs, just like Gritt.

Next she meets Lars, the director of “Theatre of Cruelty”, who wants to perform a play about the ‘symbolic nature of plastic bags’, which were a sort of currency for Polish women in the run up to 1989 (when the country completed its post-communist transformation) – although this means nothing in the West. Gritt tries to wheedle herself into the project, and soon finds herself sleeping in the theatre when her aunt Rakel (Soether) no longer needs her to housesit. Feeling sorry for Gritt, Lars offers her a room and a role filming actors during rehearsals. But Gritt has other plans: she wants to perform ‘White Inflammations”, a play about men and the middle classes, and she starts casting from refuge centres, angering Lars, and finding herself – once again – homeless.

Seeing a psychiatrist, she is told to solve her own problems, even though a stay in the ward would have been a better solution. Joining a women’s collective, she again cannot convince them to produce her newest brainchild, the Kairos project, about the biblical figure of Lilith.

Leaving with a stolen jacket, she beats a fast retreat to an old friend in the country, who is married with two children. Again, she misjudges the mood, relating the story of Lillith who “came at night and stole the semen of men” in front of the young girls. Finally Gritt retreats to the lake with her aunt.

DoPs Patrick Säfström and Egil Hâskjold Larsen have a tricky job on their hands to convey Gritt’s mental illness: at first, the dolly camera shows a settled environment, leading us to believe Gritt has a future in the world of theatre. Then comes the switch to handheld, and a gradual loss of control, mirroring Gritt’s own state of mind. Finally, we end up with Super eight home movie images during her stay at the lake. Guttormsen directs with great sensibility, treating Gritt like a child who has fallen into the world of adults. But Brigitte Larsen carries the feature, her face (nearly always neutral) showing no change in her close-ups. Gritt is not easy to watch, but very satisfying in the end. AS

ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Landscapes of Resistance | Pejzazi Optora (2021) Heart of Sarajevo

Dir.: Marta Popivoda; Documentary with Sofija Sonja Vujanovic, Ivo Vujanovic; Serbia/ Germany/France 2021; 95 min.

Sonja was one of the first female partisans in Serbia and helped lead the resistance in Auschwitz during the Second World War. Her exceptional journey is the subject of this revealing documentary from Serbian director Marta Popivoda and her co-writer and Sonja’s granddaughter, Ana Vujanovic.

Sonja comes across as a kindly old lady living in her small flat in Belgrade with her cat for company. Ten years in the making the film is brought to life by Marta and Ana’s diary entries make during the shoot along with animated drawings of Sonja’s forced travels in a bleak landscape that further convey a picture of authenticity, Popivoda avoiding any archive material.

Bookended by partisan songs Sonja tells her life story which begins when she was expelled from school for being a member of a Communist Youth Organisation. Her parents would not take her back, so she eloped to Belgrade with boyfriend and fellow comrade Sava, and a forged passport (she was a minor) which allowed them to get married. Joining the Partisans early, Sava becoming one of the first victims of the Nazi occupiers. Sonja was shielded by the men during outbreaks of fighting, but she was no shrinking violet, later killing an SS officer.

Ana’s diary shares the story of a march in Belgrade to celebrate International Women’s Day, once a holiday in socialist Yugoslavia. Reflecting with Marta, Ana admits they looked an odd crowd. Some teenagers asked them what we were doing, then answered their own question: “these fags are celebrating something again”. Later, the two emigrated to Berlin, the diary talking about the clean face of capitalism, whilst the bleak and dirty reality has been banished to the Balkans.

Ana and Marta share their doubts with Sonja, who makes a clear distinction: “It was not the Germans, but the Nazis who butchered us”. Sonja later fleshes out her story in the Banjica camp where she was tortured with a horse whip. After the Gestapo interrogated her in Belgrade, she was then isolated in a small dark cell before being taken to Auschwitz. On their way, they saw Poles making the sign language for gas, so they thought they were going to a processing plant. After a three-day journey they were forced to stand in the sun’s glare all day waiting for a fate that Sonja narrowly missed as she was invited to organise a military resistance group. This involved teaching how to build Molotov cocktails and cut the wires of the electric fence which surrounded the camp. The story of her narrow evasion is riveting and matches any ‘boys own’ war escape story. She was finally saved by Russian troops, Sonja asking them if they were Tito partisans, ready to join the Red Army. The officer laughed: “Why do you want to join the Red Army, the war is over”.

DoP Ivan Markovic lets the images of the open landscape speak for itself, contrasting the hopefulness of nature with the horrible ruins of Auschwitz. We do not see very much of Sonja, long sequences play out in silence. This is an emphatic ‘Trauerarbeit’, dedicated to Sofija Sonja Vujanovic, who died aged 97 on 5.5.2019 – and of the 108 women deported from the camp of Banjica. AS

ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2021 | ? Marta Popovida won the Heart of Sarajevo 2021 for the best documentary #27 thSFF

My French Film Festival | Online festival 2021

Now in its 11th year, MyFrenchFilmFestival shines a spotlight on new generation French-language filmmakers and gives audiences around the world the chance to share their love of French cinema. The 2021 Festival runs from 15 January – 15 February with screenings online and in cinemas around the world. Audiences in the UK can watch these 11 features from this year’s Festival on BFI Player on Prime Video Channels, free to subscribers:

ADOLESCENTES (Sébastien Lifshitz, 2019)
CAMILLE (Boris Lojkine, 2019)
ÉNORME (Sophie Letourneur, 2019)
FELICITÀ (Bruno Merle, 2020)
FILLES DE JOIE (Frédéric Fonteyne, Anne Paulicevich, 2020)
JOSEP (Aurel, 2020)
JUST KIDS (Christophe Blanc, 2019)
KUESSIPAN (Myriam Verreault, 2019)
LES HÉROS NE MEURENT JAMAIS (Aude Léa Rapin, 2019)
MADAME (Stéphane Riethauser, 2019)
TU MÉRITES UN AMOUR (Hafsia Herzi, 2019)

MY FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL 15 JANUARY – 15 FEBRUARY 2021

Feast (2021) IFFR 2021

Dir: Tim Leyendekker | Cast: Trudi Klever, Oscar van den Boogard, Katerina Sereti; Netherlands 2021, 84 min.

A dramatic reconstruction of the infamous 2007 HIV case in the Dutch city of Groningen where drugged guests were injected with HIV-positive blood during sex parties.

Feast is a first feature for Dutch director Tim Leyendekker who is well known in Holland for his short films. This film essay evocatively explores how three men ended up being convicted of rape and infection of others with HIV. The main perpetrator, Peter M. was a nurse at a care home and after his early release from prison actually returned to nursing eventually being disqualified for good.

Feast – an odd and unexplained title – is really a series of seven short films, photographed by seven different DoPs. First off is a police officer (Klever) who empties three boxes of exhibits onto a table, among them many items: a dildo, lubricants, a bathrobe and an empty crisp bag. The static camera is supposed to be symbolic of the formal process leading to the trial, but gives little information. This is followed by a rather pretentious discussion by a group of seven gay men who, were are part of the group invited to Peter M.s sex sessions.

Sometimes these men are watched by another group of males behind a glass partition, another cryptic symbolic cypher. The discussion is mainly centred around Sado-masochistic sex, its rituals and meaning. It also sheds some light on how they met Peter – in one case in September 2007 – and how they viewed their participation in these orgies, where everything was allowed, participants eventually losing sight of whom they had sex with. The argument was made that the internet ads for these meetings categorically stated unsafe sex was to be practised. So the fact that Peter and his friend injected their own HIV affected blood into the bodies of others was unlikely to alter the health status of their victims since they were HIV positive at the outset. There are also explicit descriptions of how Peter injected the infected blood.

After another chapter-dividing interlude (usually a silent night-time image of naked man on a park bench, or in the waiting area of a bus stop), we arrive at the main thrust of Feast: an interview with Peter (den Boogard), who lives with his partner Wim in a very bourgeois house in the countryside. Peter is unrepentant, still maintaining he did not deserve to be sent to prison:”The fourteen people who pressed charges, assumed the role of victims. I only did what they asked me to do. I gave people drugs, but they wanted them. Things have happened, they call it rape, but I do not. They have surrendered themselves to me, when they came voluntarily to my house. In retrospect, I find it quiet beautiful, not criminal at all. What happened there was full of love”. Asked how he feels about being HIV positive, Peter answers, “that it is a nice certification. Form of belonging, sort of beautiful.” This certainly raises questions surrounding freedom of the individual along with that of eugenics.

After that, a biologist (Sereti) shares with us the positive effects of infection on tulips, turning them yellow to green. There again eugenics springs to mind, and this theme continues throughout whole feature. The chapter, in which Max tries to convince us of his right to accuse Peter, turns again into a defence of Peter’s action, with Max being accused “of being a victim”. The final section is the most enigmatic: it features a permanently changing scenes of people bathing at a lakeside retreat.

Perplexing, and often very provocative. Is Leyendekker simply a provocateur, convinced of the outrageousness of his position, or is using his role as a filmmaker to cover his position. We shall never know. If Peter or the rest of the group believed their opinions were completely justified then Feast certainly is provocative, and any criticism lays itself open to homophobia. It is up to the audience, to decide to take sides. AS

ROTTERDAM FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Station Six-Sahara (1963) VOD

Dir: Seth Holt | Writers: Brian Clemens, Bryan Forbes, Jean Martet | Cast: Caroll Baker, Peter van Eyck, Ian Bannen, Denholm Elliott, Biff McGuire, Mario Adorf, Hansjorg Felmy | UK Comedy Thriller 101′

Not a film for anybody currently climbing the walls under lockdown. Station Six-Sahara demonstrates that a wide open expanse can be as claustrophobic as a tiny little cabin; the oppressive desert backdrop (of Libya’s Sahara) vividly rendered by veteran cameraman Gerald Gibbs as a blinding white nothingness stretching to infinity (like snow but also oppressively hot).

Usually mistaken for a drama, Station Six-Sahara is more properly enjoyed – if that’s the right word for such an intense experience – as a very black comedy. Bryan Forbes rewrote Brian Clemens’ original script based on a play by Jean Martet which anticipates The Flight of the Phoenix and Dark Star in it’s unsparing depiction of a group of men who didn’t have much in common in the first place driven further round the bend by being cooped up together; or to suffer the final twist of the knife when Carroll Baker literally crashes in on them.

There’s little overt action, the tension deriving from what’s going on inside them rather than what they are actually doing. Or wish they were doing. Richard Chatten.

NOW on PRIME VIDEO

Bloomfield (1970)

Dir: Richard Harris, Uri Zohar | Cast: Richard Harris, Romy Schneider, Kim Burfield, Maurice Kaufmann | UK Drama 97′

Richard Harris made one foray into directing with this sports drama that drew boos at the Berlin Festival and came home empty-handed at the Golden Globes.

Harris stars alongside Romy Schneider in Bloomfield, also known as The Hero (and the less promising Fallen Idol in Spain) filmed during a drink and drug induced long weekend that lasted over thirty years before he became beloved of a whole generation of youngsters as the original Dumbledore. Suffice to say, his co-director Uri Zohar left the entertainment world shortly afterwards to become a rabbi.

If the words ‘A Richard Harris Film’ didn’t already instil a sense of dread, the credits then declare that it contains ‘Additional Material by Richard Harris’, since the stoned actor took the film over just a few days into production.

It’s not actually too bad, but it’s not very good either, with Romy Schneider completely wasted as Harris’s whiny high-maintenance wife. On paper an Israeli remake of This Sporting Life, it’s actually more like The Champ, with Harris furiously bonding with cute little tyke Kim Burfield, who’d rather be in Brazil since Israel is “a lousy country for football!!” The film, however, is smothered in local colour, along with all the temptations that befall a first-time director: zooms, slow motion, freeze-frames, shots of sunsets and so on. It even has songs; but mercifully not sung by Harris himself but the wonderful Maurice Gibb ! Richard Chatten.

https://youtu.be/6RNeZnwyp5w

The White Tiger (2020) Netflix

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

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

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

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

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

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

Available on Netflix worldwide Jan 22.

The Cemil Show (2021) Rotterdam Film Festival 2021

Dir.: Baris Sarhan; Cast: Ozan Celik, Nesrin Cavadzade, Alican Yücesoy; Basar Alemdar, Fuat Kökek; Turkey 2020, 106 min.

This first feature by Turkish writer/director Baris Sarhan is an inventive spoof, combining ‘old’ footage of classic Turkish B-pictures with a Kafkaesque setting in a modern shopping mall. Charisma alone is not enough on to justify the film’s generous running time, and so much of the playful impact is lost as The Cemil Show strains to entertain for nearly two hours on a wafer thin story.

So the plot is simple: Cemil (Celik) is a security guard in a maze-like mall where he holds down his mundane day job desperate to be an actor. When one his favourite films is due for a re-make, Cemil throws himself into rehearsing the role of his hero, the monster villain Turgay Göral from the original outing. Full of hope he then heads off for an audition, but leaves empty-handed, disillusioned and angry.

There is a silver lining when Cemil discovers Göral (Kökek) is still alive, although very much down on his luck. He then discovers his hero’s daughter Burcu (Cavadzade) is working in the same mall, and has set her heart on Zaher (Yücesoy), the draconian staff manager. A bittersweet but rather weak ending sees Cemil watching old films with his hero Göral (Alemdar), the monstrous villain in all his films.

All said and done, The Cemil Show is a charming romp with its stylish retro B-picture extracts. DoP Soykut Turan gets a chance to show off a variety of skills, his grainy black-and-white images contrasting impressively with the more baroque colour sequences of the parallel action. Sarhan is a talented newcomer who would excels with a more disciplined approach to his filmmaking. AS

BIG SCREEN COMPETITION | ROTTERDAM FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Slalom (2020) Curzon VOD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ON CURZON VOD from 12 February 2021

The Dissident (2020) Bfi player

Dir: Bryan Fogel | Wri: Mark Monroe, Bryan Fogel | US Doc, 119′

Academy Award winner Bryan Fogel’s latest doc dives into the ghastly murder of Washington Post journalist and Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi.

It offers a comprehensive and sobering an account of the execution as one could possibly imagine. Fogel won an Oscar for Icarus (2017), a look into the Russian sports doping scandal, and has now assembled this immersive investigation in an impressively short amount of time; Khashoggi was killed at the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018, but one feels no stone was left unturned in researching and conveying the story in grim horror. As the crime famously implicates the Saudi ruling family at the highest levels, there will be a keen interest in this riveting work across the globe.

Anyone who follows world events knows that Khashoggi, a member of the Saudi royal family who had moved to the United States and wrote for The Washington Post, went into the consulate early in the afternoon on the date in question to obtain a marriage licence. But he never came out. The Saudis denied, delayed and dissembled as long as they possibly could, but finally had to admit that Khashoggi had died on the premises. This resulted in great embarrassment for the royal family and diplomatic distancing by many countries, at least for a while. Eventually 11 men were tried in Saudi Arabia, with three acquitted, three others sentenced to prison terms and five given the death penalty.

Fogel’s investigation is vigorous, thorough and comprehensive. It centres first on one of Khashoggi’s closest friends, fellow dissident Omar Abdulaziz, who lives in Montreal in a state of near paralysing fear of being tracked down by Saudi agents. We then meet Khashoggi’s fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, who waited outside the consulate all afternoon for him to come out. Both of these intimates stand as living testament to their friend’s resolve, the wages of exile and the high anxiety all too plausibly connected with any opposition to the all-powerful ruling authorities.

The Dissident is cut and scored like a dramatic Hollywood thriller, making impressive use of suspense-engendering editing techniques, mystery-building music and other devices to tease out all aspects of the drama, with the entirely reasonable objective of drawing in viewers who might otherwise not readily watch a political documentary. There is absolutely nothing lost with this technique, especially as the film tends to its essential business of revealing the nature of the Saudi regime and its refusal to countenance any dissent.

In a shrewd and discreet way, the film casts a bigger and stronger net as it progresses. References to other comparable events in the Arab world, such as those in Egypt some years before, are useful, as are comments about liberation movements in other countries. It charts the sacrifices made in becoming an outsider in middle life after having so long been an insider in an insular country. And there are extraordinary random sights, such as the crown prince’s commercial-sized private plane being accompanied by six fighter jets flying alongside when he travels.

Building his case as shrewdly as a skilled lawyer, Fogel finally, and shockingly, offers conclusive evidence that Khashoggi was treated like “a sacrificed animal,” cut up with a bone saw after apparently having been suffocated. The deep penetration of the Saudis’ surveillance and, especially, their hacking of private phones and computers, is brought to startling light; it even compromised Jeff Bezos. Especially impressive are the statements by United Nations special rapporteur Agnes Callamard in which she accused the Saudi government of “premeditated extrajudicial killing by high-level authorized agents.”

This is a documentary both tragic and poignant, not to mention maddening – in that only a few acolytes, rather than the perpetrators themselves – will pay for the crime committed in Istanbul. The evidence is all here for the world to see. AS

NOW ON BFI PLAYER | AMAZON PRIME | premiered at Glasow Film Festival

The Last Warning (1928) *** Bluray

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

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

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

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

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

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

ON EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA 15 FEBRUARY 2021

Wild Indian (2020) Sundance Film Festival 2021

Dir.: Lyle Mitchell Corbine jr.; Cast: Michael Greueyes, Chaske spencer, Julian Gopal, Scott Haze, Kate Bosworth, Jesse Eisenberg; USA 2021, 90 min.

1980s Wisconsin provides the setting for this atmospheric thriller that sees two Native American teenagers brought together by a murderous secret. In his first feature competing in this year’s Sundance Film Festival Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr writes, co-produces and directs the intriguing stand-alone narratives that somehow fail to come together as a satisfying whole.

Makwa (Haze) and Teddo (Gopal) are outsiders who spend their afternoons kicking around the neighbourhood where their own parents are struggling to give them a proper home. Makwa’s father is so abusive he has to invent excuses for the bruises he is always covered in. One afternoon in the woods Makwa accidentally shoots a fellow student with a gun, that was lying around at home. Teddo is appalled, but helps his friend to bury the body.

Decades later in 2019, Makwa (Greyeyes) – now calling himself Michael – is a successful accountant in LA, married to the attractive Greta (Bosworth) with a son, Francis, Greta soon giving birth to a second baby. Teddo, on the other hand, has spent most of the last twenty-five years in jail. He blames his ‘bad luck’ on the trauma he suffered helping his friend cover up the murder. Michael is still drawn to violence, choking a sex worker, and threatening the victim’s relative to be quiet, attacking her in hospital. His well-paid lawyer gets him off any charges, police are uninterested in solving the case. But when Teddo fetches up at Michael’s house intent on revenge, there is an ugly and tragic incident.

Nothing tangible connects these two scenarios, Mitchell Corbine leaving the plot underwritten and leaving viewers to grapple in the dark: we have no idea how Makwa/Michael became so successful, or Teddo turned to a life of crime – somehow the trauma of the dead student is left unresolved. Micheal has a curious rapport with his right-hand man (Eisenberg is terribly underused): Michael asking his subservient underling about his haircut amongst other issues.

DoP Eli Born shows two worlds in complete contrast, the LA glitter is wildly overdone. Nice idea to bookend the feature with mythological images and poetry from the canon of the native Americans, but there are too many unanswered questions in this oblique but well-meaning debut. AS

SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 28 JANUARY – 7 FEBRUARY 2021

The Capote Tapes (2020) VoD

Dir: Ebs Burnough | With Dick Cavett, Kate Harrington, Lewis Lapham, Andre Leon Talley, Jay McInerney, Sally Quinn, Dotson Radar, John Richardson, Sadie Stein, Colm Toibin| US, Doc, 91′

“A society that is the sum of its vanity and greed is not a society at all: it’s a state of war” (Mark Twain), and this is the society of Truman – Lewis Lapham

Cinematic catnip for all voyeurs, this new documentary about Truman Capote plays out like a thrilling cocktail party.

A first film Ebs Burnough – who once served as social secretary to Michelle Obama – the broad-brush biopic chronicles Capote’s life and times with his novels forming the background to a glittering social scene that was his lifeblood, and in the end his downfall.

Burnough focuses on interviews conducted by George Plimpton, the most intimate and revealing coming from his ‘protege’ Kate Harrington (the daughter of his “manager” – and lover, as she later discovered), who later moved in with the Manhattan-based author describing him as “calm and nurturing”. He taught her the requisite social graces for operating in New York Society (“you can be a big deal in Boise, Idaho, but the only place that matters is New York”).

Harrington (a costumer designer on The Thomas Crown Affair) describes how the author rose early to write for three hours before embarking on gossip-fuelled rendezvous. There are pithy commentaries from literary luminaries Jay McInerney, Lewis Lapham and Dotson Radar and the late John Richardson (Picasso’s biographer), along with chat show host Dick Cavett (all looking smooth-faced and soigné) who wittily chart Truman’s progress from society darling and ‘court jester’ to social pariah whose writing eventually suffered from his inadvisable over-sharing of gossip, and substance abuse.

Many claim that his obsession with convicted killer Perry (In Cold Blood) was the source of his downfall, but Burnough persuades us that the grandes dames of NY eventually put the boot in to the diminutive blond writer with an extraordinary vocal delivery. In fact, Harrington describes his speech as so bizarre on first meeting him (as a teenager) that she was forced to run from the room for fear of laughing in his face. And the self-deprecating Truman was fully aware that he came across as “a freak”, proclaiming that people only laughed in his company out of sheer horror at his strange voice. It soon emerges that Truman thought little of the socialites in his midst, and harboured resentment over they way he was apparently treated as a “servant” (according to Lapham). These rumours partly led to the suicide of his mother Nina Faulk Capote (1905-54), despite the fact she herself had tried to terminate her prenancy (ref: Capote: A Biography/Gerald Clarke) eventually bringing him up in Monroeville, Alabama where Truman grew close to his childhood friend Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird).

But on a lighter note, this fizzing cocktail of a film is not meant to be the definitive Capote biopic but serves as an endlessly amusing tonic in these days of the ‘doom documentary’, adding frothy context to Truman’s literary works capturing the zeitgeist of the era in which they were penned.

The Capote Tapes is further enlivened by archive clips featuring Norman Mailer and Truman’s ‘best friend’ the socialite Barbara”Babe” Cushing Paley (whose husband William founded CBS Records) and there are quotes from his various novels, ‘Other Voices, Other Rooms’ (1948); ‘Breakfast in Tiffany’s’ (1958); his ‘non-fiction’ effort ‘In Cold Blood’ (1965) which gets the lion’s share of Burnough’s attention on the book front, which was considered pivotal to Truman’s emotional unravelling, along with the repercussions of published excerpts from the author’s unfinished work ‘Answered Prayers’ (published posthumously in 1987 in the US) which was substantially delayed by the infamous Black and White Ball of 1966 – more later – and also purportedly led to his downfall.

The film them flips back to detail the Truman’s assignment with the New Yorker hat would take him away from the rigours of keeping up with the ‘NY Joneses’ to spend six months in Kansas covering the murder case that would form the basis for his ‘non-fiction’ classic ‘In Cold Blood’. On the downside, it also led to his fascination with Perry making it difficult to maintain distance from his source material (an aspect that really jumps out in Douglas McGrath’s 2006 screen adaptation of the novel Infamous .

Burnough culminates his expose by fleshing out the events surrounding the divisive 1966 ball that Truman threw at the Plaza Hotel, publishing a list of those invited in the papers (so that no-one could pretend to have been invited that wasn’t). The gossip columns shared salacious secrets the socialites has shared with Truman – Babe Paley never spoke to him again, much to his chagrin. So the exclusive party that was in part intended to provide source material for a book backfired on its precipitating the end of his writing career, . Jay McInerney comments, quite harshly, that from then on Truman became more a ‘talk-show celebrity’ than a committed author, and was assigned to a life of ‘drugs and disco hopping’ rather than consorting with New York’s beau mode. A rather poignant film but certainly one of the most fascinating you’ll see this year. MT

The Capote Tapes will be available at www.altitude.film and on all digital platforms across the UK and Ireland from 29 January.

Assassins (2020) VOD

Dir: Ryan White | US Doc 104’

In an extraordinary story of deceit and subterfuge Assassins travels from Pyongyang to Indonesia, Vietnam and Kuala Lumpur to investigate what really happened to Kim Jong-nam, the older half brother of the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un who lost his life nearly fours years ago.

This story of a public murder, filmed in the grainy footage of CCTV at Kuala Lumpur International airport on 13.2.2017 is as bizarre as it is mysterious. American director/writer Ryan White (Ask Dr Ruth) has chronicled the murder case and the ensuing trial, the upshot is no cause celebre but a very human story, involved a calculating dictator and two ordinary women.

Photos show a middle-aged man in the airport hall, suddenly being attacked by two young women seemingly rubbing some substance into his eyes before running off, openly looking at the CCTV monitors. The man stumbles on and is taken away by airport security, the two women taking separate taxis back to the city. The victim was Kim Jong-nam. He would die twenty minutes after having been smeared with the deadly nerve gas agent VX. The two women are identified as Vietnamese Doan Thi Huong (28) and Indonesian Siti Aisyah (25), who would soon be arrested for the murder, facing a trial and a certain death sentence by hanging, if found guilty.

Kim Jong-nam (*1971), the oldest son of former North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il, was seen as his eventual successor. But after a scandal regarding his visit to Disneyland Tokyo in 2001, his brother Jong-un took over the regime after the death of his father. Kim Jong-nam, who had renounced any participation in the government of his country, had survived at least two assassination attempts, one at Ferihegy airport in Budapest in 2009, another one in 2012.

Both women “assassins” came from a rural background, where the director visited their distraught parents. Doan had moved to the capital Hanoi, went to college and moved in search of fame to Kuala Lumpur, wanting to become an actress. Siti’s CV is much more dramatic: she had worked in a clothing factory in Jakarta, married the boss and had a daughter at age seventeen, which she lost to her husband after a divorce custody battle. She became a sex worker, still dreaming of fame. Both met a chauffeur called John who promised the women easy work: Video pranks, reminiscent of the “Jackass” trilogy. The payment of nearly 100 US Dollar was good, and preferable to sex work. What happened next is recounted by journalists Hadi Azmir (Bloomberg), and Anna Fifeld, chief of the ‘Washington Post’ in their Bejing office. The operation was masterminded by Mr Y, also known as Hanamori, and a chemist Ri Jong Chol, as well as the Godfather OJong-Gil, all members of the North Koran Secret Service. An airport employee Kim Uk Il was also part of the deadly plot, all operatives got away to North Korea, leaving the two women to fight for themselves.

Their mobiles did not contain any links to North Korea, just rather sad accounts of video pranks which were anything but professional. But the Malaysian government was only too happy to have found two scapegoats who fitted the bill. The trail began on 2.10.2017. The court judge was clearly biased, and Siti and Doan feared for their lives, but what happens next is hardly outlandish but certainly emotionally overwhelming.

DoP John Benam’s camera adds to the tension fly-on-wall camerawork, the ‘Talking-Heads’ often reduced by voice-overs. Although the outcome is positive it could have been quite the opposite. What is shocking is the audacity of the North Korean agents who blithely set people up for the death penalty, with scant regard for their human rights. “They treated us as if we were nothing” comments Siti, in a fitting last word. AS

VOD NOW AT WATCH.DOGWOOF.COM

Bebia: a Mon Seul Desir (2021) IFFR 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ROTTERDAM FILM FESTIVAL 2021 | 6 February 2021

Promising Young Woman (2020) Oscar for Best Script 2021

Dir/Wri: Emerald Fennell | Cast: Main cast: Carey Mulligan, Bo Burnham, Alison Brie, Jennifer Coolidge, Laverne Cox, Connie Britton, Clancy Brown | US. Psychological Comedy Drama 113min

Killing Eve’s Emerald Fennell is behind this sardonic female revenge flic but the firepower comes courtesy of Carey Mulligan. Obviously the writing is spot on in its feminine guile and intelligence but Mulligan takes it a notch even further adding gutsy gravitas to her outwardly ditzy blond lead.

She plays 30 year old part time coffee barista Cassandra who seems to have her sh*t together despite being half-cut most of the time. Very much like the sparky heroine of Fleabag she loves to give the appearance of being dumb but is actually highly shrewd and very much the mistress of the putdown, if ever the was one, toying with her male suitors while actually being bored rigid by their facile advances.

The self-determining Cassie is very much her own person, with a cast iron sense of self and considerable aplomb. She is also extremely good-looking in a wholesome self-assured way, playing her parents off against one another when they try to infantilised their ‘baby’ only daughter.

So what starts as a putative female revenge story soon develops into something much more interesting and amusing, a whip-smart psycho comedy that never takes itself too seriously, and never gets overly kooky in the US mumblecore style. The tonal shifts are brilliantly managed. The first sees the film darken in a worrying way about half and hour into the action when we learn Cassie once held a promising career as a doctor before a mysterious event derailed her future, and involving a girl called Nina. When she meets up with an old schoolfriend who regales her with news of their former classmates.

Fennell accompanies this switch in gear with a sinister soundscape that sees Cassie trawling tight-lipped through her social media to track down one Madison (Brie). The following day the two ‘do lunch’ and the supercilious back-biting flows: “Do you have kids?…you’ll get there…” simpers Madison. “Guys say they want a feminist in College ‘cos they’ve heard that they do the best anal. But at the end of the day they all want a ‘good girl’.” This is the American equivalent of BBC’s Fleabag but there’s an unsettling underbelly to the scenario, and an ongoing narrative with a sinister undertow. We know all along that Cassie’s no ‘nice girl’ but she soon shapes up to be seriously vindictive as the storyline develops, and Mulligan is absolutely phenomenal, bringing considerable weight to the part, which shows her in an entirely new light. We also become emotionally invested in her character.

And Cassie exacts revenge – not for herself, but on behalf of her schoolfriend Nina who was violently gang-raped, one guy going on to a career as a US Supreme Court Justice, Brett Kavanaugh. And the way she does it is chilling and highly amusing, bringing the woman who facilitated his passage into the law to her senses. An incident with a pick-up track is scored by Wagner’s darkly epic piece “Liebestod” from Tristan and Isolde. Next up is Alfred Molina who gives a convincing cameo plays as another legal miscreant, and gets off by being appealing sincere. Meanwhile an incipient romance bubbles along with Bo Burnham’s medical doc Ryan. This has its tender and meaningful moments in a stop, as they two try to work out how to get it on. And once again the tone successfully morphs, this time into a winning candy-coloured romcom sequence illustrating the transformative power of love and understanding.

But at this stage we are only just warming up to the story, as Ryan gets his knees under the family table chez Stanley (Brown) and Susan (Coolidge), Cassie’s parents. The Nina story develops into a serious case of sexual misconduct of the #MeToo kind, and Ryan is deeply implicated. And Cassie is not going to let him get away with it, unable to move on with her own life and caught in a cycle of retribution. Once again Fennell accompanies her change of tone with another screeching soundscape.

But then the mood makes a terrifying volte-face, as Cassie’s plans to revenge Nina come off the rails, and she finds herself fighting for her life in a shocking finale, as Fennell pulls more tricks out of the bag in her twisted tale that sees Cassie getting the last laugh in this impressive tonal hotchpotch that is tragic for everyone concerned. MT

OSCAR winner for Best Script | BAFTA WINNER | Most Promising British Film 2021 |

Curfew (2020)

Dir.: Amir Ramses; Cast: Elham Shahin, Amina Khalil, Ahmed Magdy, Kamel El Basha; Egypt 2020, 96 min.

In this impressive domestic drama that won the main prize at this year’s Cairo Film Festival, Egyptian writer/director Amir Ramses takes on one of the biggest taboos in the Arab world: paedophilia. Flashbacks relating to the crime are coy but nevertheless disturbing considering the perpetrator is a senior member of his family, Ramses finding just the right balance to get his message across without upsetting the censors. s great to see veteran actor Elham Shahin back on the screen again, after so long,

Set in the autumn of 2013, the story revolves around an extended family in Cairo. Faten (Shahin) leaves prison after twenty years, having served time for the murder of her husband. Rumours say it was a ‘crime passionnel’ over her love affair with Yahia (El Basha), who – still lives – in the same apartment block – but the real motive has never surfaced.

Meanwhile, her embittered daughter Layla (Khalil) in waiting for her at the prison entrance with her husband Hassan (Magdy), a doctor in the local hospital. Layla has only visited her mother once in prison and is deeply resentful about her taking her father away from her. A local curfew makes it impossible for the former teacher to escape to her home in the country but she has her granddaughter Donia for company, and she also reconnects with Selma, Hassan’s niece. But Donia and Faten cross the line and reveal an unpalatable secret with tragic repercussions for all concerned.

Hassan is shown as an example of a progressive Arab man, Ramses criticising working conditions for women: the nurses have only one way of promotion: a recommendation of a doctor – for which they have to pay with sex. His decision to stage most of the drama in domestic environments gives the feature an Ozuesque quality in its unity of space and time. The Curfew avoids sentimentality and dramatic overkill, finding a way to raise the profile of a society repressed by a cult of poisoned masculinity, camouflaging itself as religion. AS

THE CURFEW WON THE CAIRO FILM FESTIVAL‘s Golden Pyramid Award, along with BEST ACTRESS for Ilham Shaheen 2020

I Comete: A Corsican Summer (2021) IFFR Rotterdam Film Festival

Dir: Pascal Tagnati | France, Drama 124′

Warm, light-hearted and drôle : this free-wheeling cinema verite take on Corsican village life dances away from a formal narrative capturing the gentle offbeat nature of the Mediterranean island in summer. The first feature film from Corsican ‘theatre-maker’, actor and author Pascal Tagnati plays out in a series of quirky inconsequential vignettes – some of them quite risqué – that picture the locals at play, swimming, flirting, arguing (and even crying) as they enjoy the sumptuous scenery of this hilly island paradise at a time where villagers get together to enjoy the last days of the summer holidays.

Beautifully composed and refreshing, Tagnati’s observational approach cleverly combines drama and fiction, relying on a natural soundscape of birdsong and breeze, occasionally traditional folksongs are heard in the distance, sung in Corsican dialect (which sounds a bit like Italian, unsurprisingly), culminating in the heartrending ‘La mort de Filicone’.

I Comete is very much a collaborative effort between Tagnati and the local villagers in a cast of predominately non-pros – apart from the major roles – ad-libbing most of the way, it certainly offers an essence of the island and its people for those who’ve never been there, it works as an accidental travelogue stimulating an interest to discover more about the place. Franje, appears to be the only black resident of the village, and the kids make an older character the butt of their jokes although he seems a kind and resourceful type, and we feel quite sorry for him in his undeserved role as the ‘village idiot’. In other more downbeat moments Theo reflects on the possibility of the less happier times in his life, and Lucienne talks of freedom.

At the end of the day, the Corsicans are just like everybody else in Europe where daily life centres on friends, football, infidelity and fertility, family traditions probably loom slightly larger here than in Northern Europe but the pace is certainly slower, Tagnati lulling us into a pleasant reverie about his home, that brims with a sense of national pride and a collective joie de vivre. MT

ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | 1-7 FEBRUARY 2021 | TIGER COMPETITION | SPECIAL JURY PRIZE

Wonderful Wong Kar Wai | February 2021 Season on BFI and ICA

As Tears Go By

Hong Kong. 1988. Dir Wong Kar Wai. With Andy Lau, Maggie Cheung, Jacky Cheung. 102min. Digital 4K. 18

The Hong Kong auteur’s first film for the soi disant ‘New Wave’ is a stylish riff on the classic triad tale of loyalty, and sees small time crook Wah (Lai) falling for his beautiful cousin (Maggie Cheung) while keeping his protege in check in the mean streets of Chinatown. A 4K restoration taken from the 35mm original camera negative via Cinema Ritrovata. It may seem like a conventional Hong Kong triad drama on the surface, but this smouldering crime drama about has the beating heart of a romance, offering glimpses of what would become the director’s distinctive signature style.

Days of Being Wild

Hong Kong. 1990. Dir Wong Kar Wai. With Leslie Cheung, Carina Lau, Maggie Cheung, Andy Lau. 94min. Digital 4K. 12A

Two years later, comes this stunning romantic reverie that tells of the most perfect love, that of a son for his mother. Set in 1960 a confused and boyishly handsome young man (Leslie Cheung) lets two very different girls compete for his attractions while he desperately searches for the real love of his life – yes, his mother.

Chungking Express

Hong Kong. 1994. Dir Wong Kar Wai. With Brigitte Lin Ching Hsia, Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Faye Wong, Takeshi Kaneshiro. 102min. Digital 4K. 12A

Christopher Doyle’s sublime cinematography and saturated colours, and slow-mo sequences permeate this freewheeling breathless breeze of a film. CHUNGKING EXPRESS (1994) was shot in only 23 days, marking Wong’s international breakthrough. Weaving through love stories of two broken-hearted policemen and the women they fall for it’s coupled with a dynamic score offering a high adrenalin exhilarating watch.

Fallen Angels

Hong Kong. 1995. Dir Wong Kar Wai. With Leon Lai Ming, Michelle Reis, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Charlie Young Choi Nei, Karen Mok Man Wai. 99min. Digital 4K. 15

Initially devised as part of Chungking Express FALLEN ANGELS shares a similar freedom of spirit but the tone is altogether moodier, exploring the nighttime forays of femme fatales, gangsters and mute ex-cons. Shot through with a twist of humour and a feverish chutzpah, this stylish drama showcases a nocturnal neon Hong Kong with all the glamour of the East.

Happy Together

Hong Kong. 1997. Dir Wong Kar Wai. With Leslie Cheung, Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Chang Chen. 96min. Digital 4K.

Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung are reunited here as a gay couple on a fraught foray to Buenos Aires, where they discover that love can be painful and well as pleasurable. Once again their chemistry sets the night on fire in this inflamed affair, full of tortured vignettes and hopeful glances that say so much more than words can ever express.

In the Mood for Love

Hong Kong. 2000. Dir Wong Kar Wai. With Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Maggie Cheung Man Yuk. 98min. Digital 4K. PG

The Hand (Extended Cut)

Hong Kong. 2004. Dir Wong Kar Wai. With Gong Li, Chang Chen. 56min. Digital. 15

created as part of EROS, an anthology about love and sex which also featured segments directed by Steven Soderbergh and Michelangelo Antonioni. Wong’s segment, which screens at this retro as a new director’s cut, is a sensual and melancholic tale that revisits his fascination with unrequited love. Gong Li is luminous as a high-class courtesan who sparks a sexual awakening in Chang Chen’s young tailor.

2046

Hong Kong. 2004. Dir Wong Kar Wai. With Tony Leung, Gong Li, Faye Wong, Takuya Kimura, Ziyi Zhang, Carina Lau, Chang Chen, Dong Jie, Maggie Cheung, Bird Thongchai McIntyre. 129min.

2046 delves into the pain of romantic heartache and the emotional baggage it leaves behind. Combining period nostalgia with science fiction, this is a visually stunning and beguiling exploration of loss, regret and relationships.

ALSO SCREENING DURING THE COMPLETE RETROSPECTIVE AT BFI SOUTHBANK AND THE ICA WHEN CINEMAS REOPEN

My Blueberry Nights

China/France/USA/Hong Kong. 2007. Dir Wong Kar Wai. With Norah Jones, Jude Law, Rachel Weisz, Natalie Portman. 90min. 35mm. 12A

Ironically, Wong Kar Wai’s star-fuelled US-filmed romantic drama is possibly his least loved film, seen as pretentious and wispy by the arthouse crowd, despite the best efforts of Jude Law, Nathalie Portman and Rachel Weisz in the leading roles and Christopher Doyle lush lensing. Singer Norah Jones makes her acting debut as a woman recovering from lost love by travelling around the US.

The Grandmaster

Hong Kong/China. 2013. Dir Wong Kar Wai. With Tony Leung, Ziyi Zhang, Chang Chen, Zhao Benshan, Xiao Shenyang, Song Hye Kyo. 108min. Digital. 15

Slick by even Asian standards this is precision filmmaking at its best but lacks heart and soul in tracing the story of a Grandmaster and his rise to spiritual evolvement. (Also coming to BFI player).

Ashes of Time Redux (2008)

Wong’s visionary addition to the wuxia martial arts genre is the sumptuously shot epic ASHES OF TIME REDUX that sees a swordsman (Leslie Cheung) wandering the desert recounting stories of love, lust, vengeance and betrayal. There are some outstanding fight scenes but it’s a sense of yearning, not action, which powers this gorgeously sand-swept, lyrical swords-and-solitude drama.

WONG KAR WAI RETROSPECTIVE | BFI Player and ICA Cinema 3 through FEBRUARY 2021

Nulle Trace (No Trace) Slam Dance Festival 2021

Dir.: Simon Lavoie; Cast: Nathalie Doummar, Monique Gosselin; Canada 2020, 103 min.

Canadian writer/director Simon Lavoie borrows heavily from Bergman and Tarkovsky for this sketchy story about civil war in an unknown country. Using odd formats, like a 11:8 ratio, Lavoie’s feature relies on the stunning black-and-white photography of his DoP Simran Dewan – but you cannot rely on images alone to carry a film, however enigmatic.

Filmed in Quebec, Canada No Trace opens with a four-minute close-up of rails, filmed from the moving handcar, which is owned by ‘N’ (Gosselin), who looks like a trapper from a Western. She later emerges a hardened people smuggler who is guiding Awa (Doummar) and her baby daughter. N is afraid the child’s crying might alarm the guards at the border. But all goes well, and Awa will eventually meet up with her husband. But N loses her vehicle – and soon – her way in the forest where she later meets Awa, who has ben raped. N also finds the body of Awa’s husband, and her daughter who has been burned on the sticks.

The two survivors are hostile, with Awa, a Muslim, constantly praying. Lavoie wisely leads leaves the final stretch of his feature open-ended fitting for a film with such a flimsy narrative.

A heavy, menacing score underlines the tone of gloom and doom and the threatening atmosphere, the screen goes blank for a time without any explanation and sometimes garbled language replaces proper dialogue. Nulle Trace is dressed up as arthouse fare, the title ironically symbolic of the lack of artistic coherence. AS

NULLE TRACE OPENS SLAMDANCE FESTIVAL 2021 FEBRUARY 12-25 PARK CITY UTAH.

In Cold Blood (1967) DVD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ON DVD | REMASTERED COURTESY OF PARK CIRCUS FILMS.

Six films to look out for in 2021

2021 promises a bright new slate of films – here are six of this year’s most anticipated releases to get us through the next few months until the jabs bring freedom again.

DEAR COMRADES | releases 15 January 2021 nationwide

Veteran Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky uncovers a little known episode of the Nikita Krushchev era – the Novocherkassk Massacre of June 1962 – in this elegant and restrained black and white feature filmed on academy ratio and starring his muse (and wife) Yuliya Vysotskaya. A follow-up to his last Venice offering – Sin – an imagined drama about Michelangelo – this is a more down to earth film but its refined gracefulness captures the gravitas of the incident with a lightness of touch and even a dash of sardonic humour. MT

TRUFFLE HUNTERS | releases 5 February 2021 nationwide

When it comes to the ancient art of truffle hunting dogs are worth their weight in gold, according to a new documentary that shows how man’s best friend is also a canny breadwinner. Truffles are prized delicacies in gastronomy. These ugly-looking tubers are part of the mushroom family but actually grow underground, and only dogs have the delicate skills to root them out. A single truffle can sell for thousands of euros. The sumptuously crafted doc plays out as a devotional tribute to these knobbly delicacies, elevating the earthy foodstuff into a food for the Gods in an appreciation for those who painstakingly dedicate their lives to tracking down the truffle and cherishing its storied gastronomic potential. MT

THE CAPOTE TAPES | releases 5 February nationwide

More from Truman Capote, this time in documentary form. A deep dive into the archives and fresh interviews, especially one with Kate Harrington who is introduced as Capote’s adopted daughter, (born to Capote’s “manager”) and who became his protege, living with him in Manhattan and learning the ways of New York society. The film explores the legendary writer’s fascination with this beau monde and then visits the many haunts where the good and the great hung out. An informative companion piece to both Truman dramas: Capote (2005, with Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Infamous (2006, with Toby Jones). MT

ANOTHER ROUND | releases on 5 February 2021 nationwide

Vinterberg’s latest is a freewheeling comedy that trades on false bonhomie to reveal the hollow desperation at its core. Set in affluent semi-rural Denmark, the Mads Mikkelsen starrer has a wise and worthwhile look at a community sleep-walking into mediocrity, in a haze of alcohol. Like Festen and The Hunt before it, there is a deeper message to the gently imploding farce. The focus is a close-knit circle of friends united by their common ground as teachers in the local school. The drama ponders a reliance on alcohol and drugs in a bid to find meaning in comfortable but aimless lives. MT

PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN | 12 February 2021

Killing Eve’s Emerald Fennell is behind this sardonic female revenge flic but the firepower comes courtesy of Carey Mulligan. The writing is spot on in its feminine guile and intelligence but Mulligan takes it a notch even further adding gutsy gravitas to her outwardly ditzy blond lead. She plays 30 year old part time coffee barista Cassandra who seems to have her sh*t together despite being half-cut most of the time: what is her secret?. Much like the sparky heroine of Fleabag, Cassie is a mistress of the putdown, toying with her male suitors while being bored rigid by their facile advances. But there’s vulnerability too behind her sassy facade – and we soon find out why in the film’s tragic volte face. MT

APPLES | releases 19 March 2021 nationwide

When it comes to films about pandemics nothing could be more appropriate than this lucid and gently-crafted Weird Wave debut drama from Greek director Christos Nikou, not to say that Apples isn’s subversive in a charming way. The idea came to Nikou long before the coronavirus crisis outbreak and yet it perfectly captures the disarming effects of its character’s gradual meltdown. Aris (Aris Servetalis) becomes a victim of amnesia that slowly spreads through his local community and beyond. An interesting reflection on the creeping hysteria that has forced us into ‘limited personality syndrome’ over the past 6 months, all set to Alexander Voulgaris’ magical soundscape. MT

Konchalovsky and Vysotskaya | copyright BSS/AFP, Venice

SIX FILMS TO LOOK OUT FOR | January – March 2021

The Woman Who Ran (2020) Silver Bear for Best Director Berlinale 2020

Wri/Dir: Hong Sang-soo | Cast: Kim Min-hee, Lee Eun-mi, Song Seon-mi | 77′ S Korea Drama

Love and attraction is explored through the eyes of three very different women in this quirky but sage domestic drama from prolific South Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo.

Once again his muse Kim Min-hee (as Gam-hee) is the focus of this female centric affair that revolves around a get together with old friends while her husband is away travelling. The tentative conversation is pleasant and banal occasionally spiced by a quirky humour unique to this veteran filmmaker. Gradually the pleasantries and layers of her character’s quiet neuroticism are stripped away to reveal serious concerns for her marriage. What emerges is unexpected but also amusingly familiar.

The Woman Who Ran is not as funny as his best drama In Another Country (2012) that had Isabelle Huppert in a lost in translation merry-go-round in a beachside resort. Many find these films tedious but others thrill to the subtleties of the writing and the hidden depths in the seemingly slight encounters.

Each new meeting involves Gam-hee divulging her marital secrets until gradually she’s answering her own questions. Her feelings are at odds with husband’s needs and desires but she has unwittingly submitting to his rather controlling behaviour, until gradually the penny drops.

The various encounters feel slightly awkward and gauche, the parties retreating to safe ground at the first sign of potential conflict, and this is particularly the case with the first visit. Gam-hee is invited to supper at the house of recent divorcee Young-soon (Seo Younghwa) and her roommate Youngji (Lee Eunmi). The three women discuss the topic of eating meat, and discuss Youngji’s grilling skills before finally exploring the possibility of going vegetarian. There is a difficult doorstep discussion with a neighbour who comes round to address the issue of their feeding his cat. They all pussy foot around the subject before elegantly stepping away from any slight contretemps, the neighbour backs off gracefully having achieved nothing, but making it clear he not best pleased.

Gam-hee then goes to visit her slightly older friend Suyoung (Song Seonmi) who talks about a potential new boyfriend in the flat above. Later she confesses her fear of him finding out about her one night stand with another neighbour, who is now pestering her for more. But it is the final meeting that leaves us in the dark as to the film’s title. Woojin (Kim Saebyuk) says she has something important to tell Gam-hee but she never reveals what it is. The film’s enigmatic approach feels rather unsatisfactory, appearing to have been given a random title. The Woman Who Ran is engaging while it lasts but ultimately forgettable once we have left the cinema. MT

The Woman Who Ran is out Friday CURZON curzoncinemas.com/bloomsbury/films

The Bee Gees: How Can you Mend a Broken Heart (2020)

Dir: Frank Marshall | Wri: Mark Monroe | Musical Biopic | HBO Documentary Films

In this new biopic on HBO Frank Marshall takes on a mammoth task in charting the rise to fame and fortune of the legendary brothers Gibb. The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart shows how three guys from Manchester via the Isle of Man and Australia went from crooning popular ballads to the pulsating falsetto phenomenon that was Saturday Night Fever, as the ‘Kings of Disco’. The band were active for several decades generating one hit after another – over a thousand, including 20 No. One Hit singles – across a wide variety of genres.

In all started when brothers Barry, Maurice and Robin Gibb made up the trio taking over from The Beatles. The Bee Gees were Britain’s answer to the Osmonds and the Jackson 5, writing, harmonising and performing their own repertoire of songs and folksy ballads that included: Massachusetts, Words, and I’ve Just Gotta Get a Message to You. They had big hair and big teeth to match, and megawatt smiles.

A simple low budget disco hit of 1978 was the turning point of the ‘boys’ career. Masterminded by their producer Robert Stigwood and starring a snake hipped John Travolta, it captured the imagination of the New York press and set fire to a sizzling string of chart-topping, best-selling hits that had everyone jiving. Suddenly we were all rocking a Kevin Keegan haircut, and wincingly tight Satin trousers (the girls drawing the line at hairy chests). The Bee Gees music was percussive and dance-worthy but always deeply tuneful and their harmonies were made in heaven.

After a brief sashay through the 1960s and early 1970s, the film dedicates most of its running time to how band’s music achieved its famous sound after the producers arrived in the wake of the disco fever. We hear from Eric Clapton whose input proved vital in moving the brothers to America in the mid 1970s and whose band Cream was also managed by Stigwood. Stateside they discovered a revitalising vein of creativity. Producing gurus Karl Richardson, Arif Marden (Atlantic Records), and Albhy Galuten emerge as the major musical facilitators behind the scenes providing engaging insight, particularly for those unfamiliar with their talents, and that included the lesser known band member Blue Weaver.

Barry Gibb is now the sole survivor of the Bee Gees and provides a thoughtful spokesman for the family’s eventful trajectory. From his home in Miami he comes across as a sensitive soul seemingly unaffected by superstardom, and reflecting poignantly on a past touched by the bitter rivalry of his younger (twin) brothers Maurice and Robin. Another clan member in the shape of Andy enabled the band to generate teenage fans with his own material, but he sadly lost his battle with addiction at only 30 (in 1988).

Enriched by interviews and archive footage, the only missing element is the romantic counterpoint so familiar in musical biopics (where were the groupies, the wives and the lovers? only Maurice’s first wife Lulu appears in interviews). The only surviver Barry Gibb emerges a unexpected musical hero who is still musically active and was awarded a Knights Batchelor for his services to the industry in 2018.

Surprisingly The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart is the first feature length doc about the band. An intensely enjoyable experience the film contains some cracking musical performances, and there’s much to discover about the brothers’ tremendous output even before they sang one falsetto note in their disco days and beyond. An ideal collectors item, then – to be revisited time and time again for the sheer dynamism of this musical archive. MT

NOW ON SKY DOCUMENTARIES | 13 December 2020 | DVD and DIGITAL DOWNLOAD | 14 December 2020

Limbo (2020)

Dir/Wri: Ben Sharrock | Cast: Amir El-Masry, Sidse Babett-Knudsen, Vikash Bhai, Ola Orebiyi, Kwabena Ansah, Kenneth Collard | UK Drama, 103′

A group of refugees fetch up on a remote Scottish island in this artful and darkly amusing comedy drama lampooning the migrant crisis.

The common denominator is their single, masculine status. If they were married with kids they would be placed in a stylish new-build in the centre of Edinburgh, or even London. But it’s a grim lot for the single male of the species who arrives in these rain soaked islands looking for a home. And the Scotts director shows the same sober look and lugubrious humour as Pablo Stoll’s cult classic Whisky (2004) or Aki Kaurismaki’s Berlinale winner The Other Side of Hope (2017). However, his visually imaginative style and symmetrical framing also make this a sumptuous treat.

The migrant crisis is certainly no joke. In fact it has become somewhat of a political hot potato as the lost and disenfranchised arrive here hoping for the legendary streets of gold and find instead cold tarmac, wind-lashed landscapes and little to comfort them in their time of need. Sticking out like proverbial pork pies at a Jewish wedding these likeable and nice-looking men are jeered at and taunted as they make their way through chilly seascapes in search of something to keep their minds occupied in the inclement weather.

The painterly piece unfolds in the sparsely populated Western Isles of the Outer Hebrides (North and South Uist) under smoky grey clouds and gentle hilltops stroked by softly wavering grasses and purple skies. “If you’re lucky enough to be here in Winter you may experience the Northern Lights” says their English teacher as he instructs them on the past imperfect, asking for an example of its use in a sentence: one bright spark suggests: “I USED to have a home until it was destroyed by allied forces”.

Essentially a series of carefully crafted episodes – each playing out like an individual comedy vignette – the story follows Syrian Oud musician and war victim Omar (Amir El-Masry) who left his older brother still fighting; Afghani Farhad (Vikash Bhai) and two West African brothers suffering from sibling rivalry. Wasef (Ola Orebiyi) and Abedi (Kwabena Ansah) bicker the hell out of the squalid damp-ridden cottage the men share, warmed only by a two-bar electric fire. They all have convincing backstories and are ridden with guilt and worry about the families they have left behind. Poor internet coverage makes matters worst.

Writing and directing this second feature, Sharrock calls on his own life experience working in a refugee camp in the Middle East where he was inspired by the sorrowful characters he met, all hoping against hope for a positive outcome. Here at least they get “cultural awareness” lessons hosted by a well-meaning couple, Helga (a strangely underused Sidse Babett-Knudsen (The Duke of Burgundy) and Boris (Kenneth Collard). But the even-handed narrative eventually gives way to a grudging mutual respect with their pale-skinned hosts who recognise they are well-educated and versed in the ways of the world. And the tone darkens when a crisis arrives for the sheep farmers during a snowstorm, and Omar is required to pitch in.

The sheep incident unleashes a disturbing magic realist reverie for Omar, transporting him back to his roots in scenes that hint at a gravitas the film does not possess compared with the levity that has gone before. But despite the slight tonal flaw Limbo is a highly accomplished and thoughtful film that cements Sharrock’s place as a promising British talent on the international scene. MT

In Cinemas from 30 July | The International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) Award: CAIRO FILM FESTIVAL

A Christmas Tale (2008) Un Conte De Noel ***

Director: Arnaud Desplechin | Cast: Catherine Denueve, Mathieu Amalric, Anne Consigny, Melvil Poupard, Chiara Mastroianni Cert | 150 mins

Don’t’ expect cosy carols round the tree and a starry-eyed Christmas get-together. But if you’re up for a warts-an-all story of family dysfunction then this one’s for you. Catherine Deneuve is the cool matriarch Junon, inviting the family back for the holidays. But it’s not because she wants them all home. The reason is far more sinister and more selfish.

Smoking her way elegantly through this lengthy family saga Deneuve is a perfect picture of emotional detachment – and possibly the key to why her children are all so screwed up. The fun and games lie in guessing who is the most devoted of her breed, and she plays them all off against each other in ways that will be painfully obvious. Family members gradually bring their lives, loves and secrets to the party in rain-soaked Roubaix. Eldest son Henri (Matthiew Almaric) is a bankrupt alcoholic who has fallen out with his playwrite sister, Elizabeth (Anne Consigny), a depressive with a troubled son and an unreliable husband. Their younger brother Ivan and his seductive wife Sylvie (Chiara Mastroianni) have two challenging boys but seems content until we discover her crush on cousin Simon who secretly lusts after her too and is wasting his life as a painter.

Quite a normal family get together then. Jean-Paul Roussillon is the wise old pater familias Abel, who dotes on them all and offers plenty of advice, lashings of red wine and the odd ‘coup de champagne’ in this well-observed and enjoyable drama that possibly echoes most people’s family Christmas at the end of the day. MT

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

Ishiro Honda in Outer Space

Alan Price remembers the days of X-rated Sci-fi with these three Japanese classics from ISHIRO HONDA, The H-Man (1958), Mothra (1961) and Battle in Outer Space (1959)

Aged thirteen I sneaked, under age, into a Liverpool flea-pit cinema for a double bill of X certificate films. A horror / SF programme kicked off with The H-Man followed by House of Wax starring the charismatic Vincent Price a rising star in the horror film firmament. H-Man was my first viewing of a Japanese film and badly dubbed into English. House of Wax featured effigies melting in a fiery climax. The only thing I remember about The H-Man was an intense screaming followed by a gooey substance running into drains as the rain poured down; this radioactive liquid was being transformed into a glowing green man.

In the cold war years of the 1960s “radiation” was a word constantly on everyones’ lips. To witness a drugs trafficker, exposed to nuclear radiation, and transformed into a poisonous creature, appeared, to my young mind, as dangerously plausible.

Many years later in 2020 I again encountered the 1958 H-Man restored, with all its gooeyness digitised, on Blu Ray. It felt like a re-union of my young fears with an older understanding of things. A force called H-Man never existed but I was still gripped and entertained by a remarkably effective film managing to fuse the crime detective film with an Sci-fi monster movie.

1958 was also the year of The Blob (with the young Steve McQueen). I love the Google description of The Blob – “A misunderstood teen fights to save his town from a gelatinous monster from outer space.” If I had to sum up The H-Man it would be something like ‘an maligned professor tries to convince the Tokyo police force that a criminal has been turned into a radioactive liquid organism.’

Eventually Dr.Masada (Kenji Sahara) manages to convince the police in an apocalyptic climax that takes place in the sewerage system, and the ‘H monster’ is finally destroyed by gasoline poured on water and set on fire. The H-Man gets a hot ending whereas The Blob’s fate was rather more frigid: it is deposited, by aircraft, in the Arctic wastes. The H-Man actually has more in common with another liquefying monster, that of Val Guest’s 1955 outing The Quatermass Xperiment which sees a former human reduced to an undoubtedly earthbound being rather than a menacing alien from outer space.

The original Japanese title of Honda’s 1958 classic is Bijo to Ekitai Ningen that translates as “Beautiful Woman and Liquid Man.” This gives the film an apt ‘beauty and the beast’ slant as the plot forefronts a beguiling cabaret singer Chikako (Yumi Shirakawa) who was once the girlfriend of the trafficker. She is pursued by her ex-boyfriend (now a slithering organism) along the burning sewers to be rescued by the professor, smitten by her good looks, as he saves her and the rest of mankind from their destiny as an ‘H man’ or ‘H woman’.

There is a great deal to enjoy here: the stunningly shot sewer climax is possibly the most outstanding moment in The H-Man, set on a deserted ship where the crew of a neighbouring ship stumble on the creature. It’s a creepy and potently-lit sequence providing both an incredible/believable back story explores the origins of the green substance: all done with a strong feel for the old ghost-ship tale.

There are no liquid men in Honda’s 1961 Mothra. Yet there is beauty in the form of two petite women discovered on an irradiated island (named Infant Island) in the Pacific. The Beast is Mothra, a giant female moth. Mothra is not out to destroy the whole world but only those who get in her away as she attempts to rescue the kidnapped twins (played by a singing duo called “The Peanuts” whose Mothra song “The Girls of Infant Island” was a pop chart hit).

Radiation sickness also surfaces in this story. Yet instead of a traditional monster movie we have more of an enchanting fairy story. The young women are dispatched to Tokyo to appear on stage in a show called “Secret Fairies Show.” Their exploitation reminded me of the chained Kong gorilla appearing on Broadway in the film Mighty Joe Young. But these girls are too good-natured and innocent to really mind performing, though they yearn to go back home.

One of my favourite aspects of Mothra is the editing between the girls singing and the dancing natives beseeching their god Mothra to break out of its giant egg and help. The caterpillar swims the Pacific Ocean towards Japan: becomes an adult moth (with a most genial face) and flies over Tokyo on its rescue mission.

Beneath its fantasy surface Honda is aware of the script’s political satire which he handles with a lovely light touch. Overall this is an irresistibly charming film. Its special effects still stand up and the mythic and adventure element of its storyline draws upon King Kong, Godzilla (Honda directed many of the Godzilla films) and probably went on to influence Bong Joon-Ho’s 2006 The Host.

Battle in Outer Space is the slightest of these re-issued Honda films. Aliens have based themselves on the Moon. They plan to attack and invade Earth. The UN launches two rocket ships on a reconnaissance mission. The battle commences. Finally the alien’s mothership is destroyed and Earth is saved.

The two most remarkable aspects of Battle in Outer Space are its comic book model work, no strings and all smoothly executed, plus a very early sixties optimistic belief in international co-operation: nationalism recedes in the face of universal goodwill to save the planet. How far away are we now from benign diplomacy and world peace in our strongly divided Earth of 2020!

If you search on YouTube I think you will find these Honda films. But they will be the cut, un-restored American versions. Forget them and go for the complete Japanese language originals on Eureka. They look and sound great. Light and dark fantasies from another differently inventive age of popular Japanese culture. ALAN PRICE.

The Inner Sanctum Mysteries (1940-) ****

Lon Chaney Jr is the stars in this fantasy horror compendium of six cult classic features that dabble in Death, dementia and the dark arts. Based on the popular radio shows of the 1940s, Chaney, Jr. (The Wolf Man), gives a timeless performances alongside his leading ladies Anne Gwynne, Lois Collier, Patricia Morison, Jean Parker, Tala Birell and Brenda Joyce in these spooky chillers.

Calling Dr. Death (dir. Reginald Le Borg, 1943) – A doctor is not sure if he murdered his wife and has his nurse uncover the truth by hypnotising him.

Weird Woman (dir. Reginald Le Borg, 1944) – While on a trip, a professor falls in love with an exotic native woman who turns out to be a supernatural being.

Dead Man’s Eyes (dir. Reginald Le Borg, 1944) – When an artist is blinded, an operation to restore his sight depends on another person willing to donate their eyes.

The Frozen Ghost (dir. Harold Young, 1945) – A stage mentalist and a discredited plastic surgeon are involved in mysterious goings-on in an eerie wax museum.

Strange Confession (dir. John Hoffman, 1945) – Flashbacks reveal the events leading up to a man’s revenge on the racketeer who took advantage of his wife.

Pillow of Death (dir. Wallace Fox, 1945) – A lawyer in love with his secretary is suspected of suffocating his wife, among others.

INNER SANCTUM MYSTERIES: THE COMPLETE FILM SERIES starring Lon Chaney, Jr; on Blu-ray as a part of the Eureka Classics range from 18 January 2020.

Beanpole (2019) **** MUBI

Dir: Kantemir Balagov | Writers: Kantemir Balagov, Aleksandr Terekhov | Drama | Russia 114′

A bitter bond of revenge and inter-dependence keeps two Russian women viscerally entwined in Leningrad after the Second World War comes to a close.

Beanpole is Kantemir Balagov’s follow up to his kidnap thriller Closeness which took the FIPRESCI prize in Un Certain Regard two years ago. Based on a story from The Unwomanly Face of War by Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexeievich, it sees the two women brought to their knees physically and mentally after the war has devastated their city. But life goes on for Iya, a tall rangy blond known as Beanpole (Miroshnichenko), and her friend Masha (Perelygina) who served together on the front, Iya returning early due to a neurological condition, bringing back with her Masha’s little son Pashka (Glazkov) in the autumn of 1945.

This gruelling slow-burner is softened by its gorgeously vibrant aesthetic that lends a jewel-like radiance to the girls’ misery, captured in Kseniya Sereda’s brilliant camerawork. Masha is wilful, mercurial and playfully charismatic – Perelygina is simply mesmerising to watch as she plots her way forward, emotions floating across her face like clouds on a winter’s day – Beanpole is a sullen and introverted soul but the two have no one left in the world but each other, and a terrible tragedy that threatens to destroy or deepen their fraught friendship. This close friendship contrasts with the sheer scale of the horror they have experienced on the front. Confined to stuffy interiors and hospital wards the enormity of their emotional pain and suffering swells to bursting point. In the late Autumn of 1945 Iya is a nurse in a local hospital and her neurological affects hermivement. But Pashka is her pride and joy and their closeness is deeply moving.

By the time Masha returns from the front, a dreadful event has taken place. Balagov explores the shifting dynamic between these two women with impressive maturity for a filmmaker still in his twenties, particularly with this female centric story, men taking a backseat – the world-weary head doctor Nikolai Ivanovich (Andrei Bykov) and Masha’s irritating suitor Sasha (Igor Shirokov) who is the son of a Communist party official. Somehow Sasha’s mother and the doctor get drawn into the complex web of need, revenge, and power.

Leningrad is almost romantic in its postwar atmosphere and Sergei Ivanov’s set design adds a homely folkloric touch to the interiors. Memorable scenes are those outside Sasha’s family dacha, and Masha’s tram ride in the final moments of this striking, intense and emotionally resonant drama. MT

NOW ON MUBU : UN CERTAIN REGARD | BEST DIRECTOR | FIPRESCI 2019

City Hall (2020) ****

Dir.: Fred Wiseman; Documentary; USA 2020, 272 min.

Fred Wiseman, who turned ninety this year, proves he is still a force to be reckoned with directing, writing and editing his latest – 45th – feature documentary that sees him back in his birthplace of Boston, where he started his career with Titicut Follies in 1967, a Mental Hospital for the Criminal Insane, just outside the city limits.

City Hall explores another Boston institution whose mayor Marty Walsh is the first major protagonist in any Wiseman feature. Walsh is very much an antipodean of the current 45th president of the USA, whose supporters Wiseman had portrayed recently in Monrovia, Indiana. City Hall is in the same vein as Ex Libris: The New York Public Library, another functioning body of civic administration. City Hall is not as dramatic as Near Death (about Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital), it is optimistic in tone, unlike many Law and Order (1969) or Welfare (1975) which were openly derisive: Wiseman clearly believes in the power of these institutions (unlike the current president), but he is unclear as to how this power is wielded and who benefits in the end.

In City Hall, he shows both sides of the coin in micocosm: there is the story of two Bostonians arriving at the Town Hall to complain about their parking tickets, expecting to be sent packing – but pleasantly surprised when their complaints are upheld. But there’s also the other side of the coin: at a forum where local government members discuss racial bias relating to the allocation of contracts among Boston businesses, a minority business man is appalled at the decision, and a study is needed to confirm this.

There is humour and passion – much more so than in Wiseman recent outings: a joyful registry office wedding ceremony between two women is really moving, Wiseman overcoming his cynicism of his early fare, and demonstrating that ordinary people can make a difference. On a funny note, when Walsh gives a speech at the Greater Boston Food Bank about general levels of insecurity, the Boston ‘Red Sox’ mascot Wally (the team had just won the Baseball World Series of 2018) sneaks up behind the mayor, presenting his green Monster identity, a rather overfed Wally.

Not that this newfound optimism is universal: In a long, nearly twenty-minute sequence, the proprietors of a planned Marijuana Dispensary in Dorchester, one of the poorest parts of the city, are confronted by residents who show open mistrust at the developers’ promises. Obviously, this business would attract unsavoury elements of society, and since one of the main shopping centres is nearby, the elderly and vulnerable are deeply concerned and unconvinced by the Dispensary representatives’ promises of new jobs – marijuana growing is one opening.

There is one wonderful shot of a trash compactor crushing everything from matrasses to a gas barbecue installation. One can imagine Wiseman looking at this scene with the wonderment of a little boy. On the other hand, a building inspector takes a tour of a condominium under construction in a neighbourhood on its way to gentrification. Looking out of the window, and admiring the panorama of the impressive waterfront, he admits that the wonderful view will soon be obscured by the construction of other condos.

As always, Wiseman excels in the editing room, so John Davey’s images are in just the right places to tell his story. When not being entertained by the city hall goings on, we can contemplate the magnificent panoramas of a city which blends the traditional brown-stone with glass and steel, cutting edge design with poverty row, in the vast melting pot that is Boston. City Hall symbolises all the the social contradictions in Maryland’s capital which are slowly healed by the mayor and his team. AS

IN CONSIDERATION | BEST DOCUMENTARY at the GOTHAM AWARDS January 2021 | Venice Film Festival 2020

Adoration (2019) Locarno 2019

Dir: Fabrice du Welz | Wri: Roman Protat, Vincent Tavier |

Begian auteur Fabrice du Welz delivers a painterly if predictable paean to first love in his latest psychological thriller that thrilled audiences at Locarno’s 72nd lakeside festival, and is now on Bfiplayer.

Adoration completes his Ardennes trio that started with The Ordeal and followed on with Alleluia. Once again the director uses a ‘folie à deux’ as the premise for a filmic fantasy that rapidly departs from reality. Based on a delusional notion of love, this warped obsession takes over the life of an innocent pubescent boy living with his therapist mother in a remote residential psychiatric hospital. Played by French actor Thomas Gioria (the award-winning star of Xavier Legrand’s Custody (2017), who at still only 14 is proving to be somewhat of a prodigy), Paul is a gentle but rather suggestible boy who relies on the local wildlife for company until he sets eyes on a pre-teen patient in the shape of Fantine Harduin’s delicately-featured but damaged Gloria.

Swept up by her feisty vulnerability, Paul is entranced and determined to get to know her. And despite warnings from the medical staff at his mother’s workplace, he sees Gloria’s desperate bid to escape from the confines of the institution as an exciting game. Once on the run with his new mate, he becomes intoxicated by her manipulative personality and feral beauty, and is determined to serve her needs and wishes even when Gloria leads him into increasingly perilous territory, both emotionally and physically.

Filming in intimate close-up, Manuel Dacosse draws us into this dizzying, dreamlike midsummer fantasy set in the bucolic backdrop of the Ardennes countryside. Our senses are aroused by sounds of bees and the heady scent of lime trees as Paul is bewitched by Gloria’s disingenuous charm and ruthlessness. Confused by his adolescent feelings, he is more than eager to follow these misguided instincts. Meanwhile, we desperately know that this amour fou will damage him forever when it all ends in tears, as it surely will.

Adoration is a fantasy. And a fantasy that slowly morphs into a convincing nightmare skimming over its many plot-holes, as the pair continue their journey into darkness, helped by a series of concerned and well-meaning adults, the authorities seemingly evading them at every turn. In her delusional madness, Gloria sees everybody as a threat, even when they offer food and shelter: the kindly widow played poignantly by Benoit Poelvoorde, and the loved-up couple on a boat (Peter Van den Begin, Charlotte Vandermeersch) whose sexual chemistry helps to ignite Paul’s burgeoning feelings of pubescent lust. And although Paul is able to appreciate their kindness, he is blinded by the power of his overwhelming feelings for Gloria who merely uses him to serve her needs – and it’s an remarkable performance from Harduin who manages to conjure up facial expressions of pure evil for one so young. Gioria’s Paul is a fresh canvas, a pure vessel that holds only kindness and goodwill as it hurtles towards a wild, uncertain fate. MT

NOW ON BFI PLAYER | LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL | 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dick Johnson is Dead (2020) **

Dir.: Kirsten Johnson; Documentary with Richard Johnson, Kirsten Johnson; USA 2020, 89 min.

US documentary filmmaker and FEMIS graduate Kirsten Johnson (Cameraperson) has directed – as well as co-written and co-produced – an usual escapist style movie that imagines the death of her father Richard Johnson MD, a psychiatrist born in 1932.

Upbeat and innovative it may be as a piece of entertainment, but as a documentary the film’s title is misleading – Mr. Johnson is still alive and kicking, albeit suffering advanced dementia – which sees the interests of filmmaker Kirsten Johnson and the dutiful daughter probably collide. However stunning the outcome, questions should be asked.

There is much to admire in this father/daughter ‘co-production’, the family history is fraught with sadness and poignancy, Kirsten’s mother suffered dementia and died in a care home, a move she resisted vehemently. As a devotee of several memory theories, this illness seems all the more tragic. Kirsten shows us a short video and has to confess that “After thirty years of being a filmmaker, this is all I have left of my mother”. Kirsten’s grandmother was killed on the day of her daughter’s graduation, sitting next to her on the passenger seat of her car. Kirsten muses about the impact this accident had on her own mother’s life.

Growing up in California Kristen would spend every Saturday of in church, her parents were passionate Seventh Day Adventists – the religion forbade, among other things, cinema visits. But when her father took her to Young Frankenstein (1974), she was hooked for good.

Taking her father plus crew on the road, they visit Loma Linda, California, where Dr. Johnson meets up with his college sweetheart, (another Adventist). Both discuss the subject of death, and feeling comforted by their belief in the resurrection. Which leads us to another major part of the feature: Heaven, realised in a colourful sequence where the”deceased” psychiatrist gets to have his cake and eat it, quite literally, as Jesus washes his feet.

A move to New York is inevitable as Dicks’ condition deteriorates, and most of us with empathise with his regret over selling the memory-filled family home. But he is philosophical and accepts his new life in the spare room of Kirsten’s flat, her husbands, and two children live nearby.

Once in the city, Kirsten (and her stuntmen) try their very best to enact Dick’s spectacular deaths – being hit by a metal fan unit falling from great height is one, falling down a steep wooden staircase and cracking his head open (with ample blood-spill) is another, but the scenario involving a knife and copious blood is possibly the most shocking, Dick freely admitting the pain was worse than his heart-attack thirty years previously.

These scenes might be impressive in their own way – and we learn a lot about how stunts work – but they do disturb Richard, and undoubtedly those affected (for me it brought back memories of finding my blood-soaked mother lying dead on a wooden floor, her scull fractured in twenty places). Let’s just remember that Dick is suffering from the disorientating effects of dementia and all the impairments involved.

We then watch an ambulance pull up and witness Dick’s cardiac arrest – or so we are led to believe. At a ‘funeral’ and 86th birthday celebration friends and patients pay their respects with tearful speeches in a packed church. One woman recalls her final meeting with the Doc, when he ‘forgot’ the recent death of her own husband (“The loss of memory is a great loss”). A close friend blows a Jewish ram’s horn in a pitiful goodbye, before he breaks down sobbing, unable to continue. Meanwhile Dick is alive and well and gleefully watching proceedings from a ‘peephole’ in the Vestry.

All this raises serious issues, Apart from these gruesome ‘serial’ deaths poor Dick is subject to during the shoot, there is the ethical question of how much the filmmaker must manipulate reality in order to pull off the ‘comedy’. As her father Dick is was certainly anxious to please her, and is totally under her power, desperate to avoid the same fate as his wife.

But you can’t help feeling Dick has been hoodwinked in some way, and that Kirsten has played with the audience’s emotions, making a mockery of the term documentary – which even at its best is hardly an objective art. Despite all these concerns, Dick Johnson is Dead is not a morose movie with its tour-de-force of compelling images but one that raises some serious issues, particularly regarding filmmaker responsibility. This is a slick and glibly amusing film but one that pokes fun at life-limiting illness. Rather like the blindfolded man whose disorientation raises a titter amongst his amused bystanders, Johnson’s film is a frivolous piece of escapism, but if we laugh, do we laugh in shame?. AS

DICK JOHNSON won the Special Jury Award for Innovative Non-fiction Storytelling at SUNDANCE 2020

Muranow (2020) **** Jerusalem Film Festival 2020

Dir.: Chen Shelach; Documentary; Israel 2020, 70 min.

This haunting documentary debut from Isreal’s Chen Shelach, explores the traumatic past and present of Warsaw’s Muranow, once home to 200,000 Polish Jews before their lives were destroyed in the ghetto, the largest in the nation state that was ‘Greater Germany’. The vast majority were deported to Treblinka death camp where they were murdered in broad daylight.

But Muranow also tells another tale: of the Jewish uprising that took the ghetto by storm – and of those who live there today, still traumatised by the ghosts and demons of their past – but who still deny their fellow citizens collaboration with the Germans.

And the ghosts and demons are still very much alive, according to one flat dweller whose refurbished property adjoins the Muranow cemetery. She claims no one will drink her tap water because the ground below the pipes still contains traces of Jews who lost their lives in the tragic years between 1938-1945.

Only two of buildings have survived the war and Muranow’s subsequent urban regeneration: One houses the Warsaw University’s Psychology department which once was the SS HQ. The other is St. Anne’s Church, where the SS hid paintings and other valuables looted from Jewish homes. Researcher Mattan Steffi contrasts old archive films and photos with today’s modern version of Muranow. The current Polish inhabitants of the quarter are well aware of this gruesome and guilt-ridden past. When interviewed they hide behind lame excuses – even though one of them moved out to Gdansk for two years on account of the ‘ghost’ in his flat – whom he Christened Rachella. Another woman bought a Menora, to fight off the ghosts “from a lost civilisation”. The existence of the ghetto is a taboo subject in schools.

The modern worlds collides too: A Lebanese baker tells about his family’s flight from the Middle-East war zone to Warsaw – and is shocked to learn that he’s actually living on the Nazi genocide victims’ bones.

Then there are the young Zionists from Israel, who visit the bunker where the Jewish Uprising’s victims committed suicide. They are proud of their slaughtered ancestors “you died with pride, so we can fight with pride for Israel”. A commentator is rather forgiving of this failed analogy: “Young people always need a story with a Happy-End.” The Polish authorities work hard to create an image, picturing Jews and Poles as victims of the Nazis alongside each other.

There are demonstrations in Muranow, but these only show how the Holocaust has been hijacked for a new Polish Nationalism: “Poland for Poles only” sing these neo-fascist on Muranow’s highway and byways. Meanwhile bookshops stock titles such as “Zombie Jews Living in the Underground”. Muranow’s new residents are often “sad about what happened to the Jews, but not so sad as to move away” – many still benefit from this Jewish legacy, and live in fear of the Jewish returning to reclaim their land and property.

One collective tries to recreate the Muranow old town with the help of 3D films, creating parallel versions of the old and the new. One writer is making a film about this Ghetto between 1940 and 1945 using a German 16 mm camera dating back to 1935. Mattan Steffi ‘feels’ the bodies under the pavement. The director and writer claim the guy ” is crazy in the head” – but are proud of his obsession with the past nonetheless.

With DoP and producer Micha Livne delivering stunning images of the old and the new, this is a perfect passion project. The saddest point is perhaps the Poles collective denial of what happened. It seems they’ve learnt nothing from history. People never learn. The ghosts and demons are possibly their own projections of a guilty conscience. No one can escape their history – no matter how hard they try. AS

JERUSALEM FILM FESTIVAL 2020

Sundance 2021 | 28 January – 3 February 2021

2021 gets off to a lowkey start with Sundance film festival announcing a mostly virtual edition, along with Rotterdam that follows in its footsteps on February 7th.

Sundance welcomes fewer features to this year’s line-up with 72 feature films as apposed to last year’s 118, but nearly half are female directed and 15% from the LGBTQ+ community.

Themes of retreat, regeneration and renewal are the touchstones to this year’s programme and this seems entirely appropriate given our global experience since March 2020. The world has taken stock of itself but not necessarily come up with the answers. Many film festivals are congratulating themselves for ‘increased attendance record’ with a boost from their online community. Watching films, and attending festivals online works as a complementary form of entertainment in extremis, but make no mistake, the vast majority of viewers still prefer the buzz of the festival experience and the human element that it brings.

As we stand of the brink of 2021 most of us are experiencing some sense of disconnection with our previous existence, and Robin Wright echoes this sentiment in her directorial debut, in which she also stars ,as a woman who seeks a life off grid after bereavement. Very much in the same vein as the Venice 2020 triumph Nomadland, Wright’s film Land is one of the most apposite and buzz-worthy films in the premiere lineup at this year’s Utah festival.

Sundance Institute founder and president Robert Redford is deeply aware of this social and emotional disenfranchisement and comments “Togetherness has been an animating principle here at the Sundance Institute as we’ve worked to reimagine the festival for 2021, because there is no Sundance without our community,”

And this sentiment resonates through the competition line-up. with other narrative features directly alluding to the tragedy that has affected, possibly more than we realise going forward.

A list of films confirmed for the 2021 Sundance Film Festival are as follows.

World Cinema Dramatic Competition

The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet | Argentina (Dir: Ana Katz, writers: Ana Katz, Gonzalo Delgado | World Premiere

Sebastian, a man in his 30s, works a series of temporary jobs and he embraces love at every opportunity. He transforms, through a series of short encounters, as the world flirts with possible apocalypse. Cast: Daniel Katz, Julieta Zylberberg, Valeria Lois, Mirella Pascual, Carlos Portaluppi.

Passing / UK/US (Dir/wri: Rebecca Hall | World Premiere

Based on the 19th century novel by Chicago born writer Nella Larsen, this first feature for Rebecca Hall sees two high old school friends reunited in a mutual obsession that threatens both of their carefully constructed realities.

El Planeta / US/Spain (Dir/Wri Amalia Ulman | World Premiere

Amid the devastation of post-crisis Spain, mother and daughter bluff and grift to keep up the lifestyle they think they deserve, bonding over common tragedy and an impending eviction. Cast: Amalia Ulman, Ale Ulman, Nacho Vigalondo, Zhou Chen, Saoirse Bertram.

Fire in the Mountains / India (Dir/Wri: Ajitpal Singh | World Premiere

A mother toils to save money to build a road in a Himalayan village to take her wheelchair-bound son for physiotherapy, but her husband, who believes that an expensive religious ritual is the remedy, steals her savings. Cast: Vinamrata Rai, Chandan Bisht, Mayank Singh Jaira, Harshita Tewari, Sonal Jha.

Hive / Kos, Switzerland, Macedonia, Albania (Dir/Wri: Blerta Basholli | World Premiere

Fahrije’s husband has been missing since the war in Kosovo. She sets up her own small business to provide for her kids, but as she fights against a patriarchal society that does not support her, she faces a crucial decision: to wait for his return, or to continue to persevere. Cast: Yllka Gashi, Çun Lajçi, Aurita Agushi, Kumrije Hoxha, Adriana Matoshi, Kaona Sylejmani.

Human Factors / Ger, Italy, Denmark (Dir/Wri: Ronny Trocker | World Premiere

A mysterious housebreaking exposes the agony of an exemplary middle-class family. Cast: Sabine Timoteo, Mark Waschke, Jule Hermann, Wanja Valentin Kube, Hannes Perkmann, Daniel Séjourné.

Luzzu / Malta (Dir/Wri): Alex Camilleri | World Premiere

Jesmark, a struggling fisherman on the island of Malta, is forced to turn his back on generations of tradition and risk everything by entering the world of black-market fishing to provide for his girlfriend and newborn baby. Cast: Jesmark Scicluna, Michela Farrugia, David Scicluna.

One for the Road / China,Hong Kong, Thailand (Dir: Baz Poonpiriya, Wri: Baz Poonpiriya, Nottapon Boonprakob, Puangsoi Aksornsawang, Wong Kar Wai) | World Premiere

Boss is a consummate ladies’ man, a free spirit and a bar owner in NYC. One day, he gets a surprise call from Aood, an estranged friend who has returned home to Thailand. Dying of cancer, Aood enlists Boss’ help to complete a bucket list — but both are hiding something. Cast: Tor Thanapob, Ice Natara, Violette Wautier, Aokbab Chutimon, Ploi Horwang, Noon Siraphun.

The Pink Cloud / Brazil (Dir/Wri: Iuli Gerbase, | World Premiere

A mysterious and deadly pink cloud appears across the globe, forcing everyone to stay home. Strangers at the outset, Giovana and Yago try to invent themselves as a couple as years of shared lockdown pass. While Yago is living in his own utopia, Giovana feels trapped deep inside. Cast: Renata de Lélis, Eduardo Mendonça.

Pleasure / Swed/Neth/France (Dir,Wri: Ninja Thyberg | World Prem

A 20-year-old girl moves from her small town in Sweden to L.A. for a shot at a career in the adult film industry. Cast: Sofia Kappel, Revika Anne Reustle, Evelyn Claire, Chris Cock, Dana DeArmond, Kendra Spade.

Prime Time / Poland (Dir: Jakub Piątek, Writers: Jakub Piątek, Lukasz Czapski | World Premierę

On the last day of 1999, 20-year-old Sebastian locks himself in a TV studio. He has two hostages, a gun and an important message for the world. The story of the attack explores a rebel’s extreme measures and last resort. Cast: Bartosz Bielenia, Magdalena Poplawska, Andrzej Klak, Malgorzata Hajewska-Krzysztofik, Dobromir Dymecki, Monika Frajczyk.

World Cinema Documentary Competition

Faya Dayi / Ethiopia/US (Dir/Wri: Jessica Beshir) | World Premiere

A spiritual journey into the highlands of Harar, immersed in the rituals of khat, a leaf Sufi Muslims chewed for centuries for religious meditations — and Ethiopia’s most lucrative cash crop today. A tapestry of intimate stories offers a window into the dreams of youth under a repressive regime.

Flee / Den/Norway/Sweden/France (Dir Jonas Poher Rasmussen | World Premiere

Amin arrived as an unaccompanied minor in Denmark from Afghanistan. Today, he is a successful academic and is getting married to his longtime boyfriend. A secret he has been hiding for 20 years threatens to ruin the life he has built. W

Inconvenient Indian | Canada (Dir/Wri: Michelle Latimer | International premiere

An examination of Thomas King’s brilliant dismantling of North America’s colonial narrative, which reframes history with the powerful voices of those continuing the tradition of Indigenous resistance.

Misha and the Wolves

United Kingdom, Belgium (Dir/Wri: Sam Hobkinson) | World Premiere

A woman’s Holocaust memoir takes the world by storm, but a fallout with her publisher turned detective reveals her story as an audacious deception created to hide a darker truth.

The Most Beautiful Boy in the World / Sweden (Dir: Kristina Lindström, Kristian Petri | World Premiere

Swedish actor/musician Björn Andresen’s life was forever changed at the age of 15, when he played Tadzio, the object of Dirk Bogarde’s obsession in Death in Venice — a role that led Italian maestro Luchino Visconti to dub him “the world’s most beautiful boy.”

Playing With Sharks / Australia (Dir/Wri: Sally Aitken | World Premier

Valerie Taylor is a shark fanatic and an Australian icon — a marine maverick who forged her way as a fearless diver, cinematographer and conservationist. She filmed the real sharks for Jaws and famously wore a chainmail suit, using herself as shark bait, changing our scientific understanding of sharks forever.

President / Denmark/US, Norway (Dir: Camilla Nielsson | World Premiere

Zimbabwe is at a crossroads. The leader of the opposition MDC party, Nelson Chamisa, challenges the old guard ZANU-PF led by Emmerson Mnangagwa, known as “The Crocodile.” The election tests both the ruling party and the opposition — how do they interpret principles of democracy in discourse and in practice?

Sabaya / Sweden (Dir/Wri: Hogir Hirori | World Premiere

With just a mobile phone and a gun, Mahmud, Ziyad and their group risk their lives trying to save Yazidi women and girls being held by ISIS as Sabaya (abducted sex slaves) in the most dangerous camp in the Middle East, Al-Hol in Syria

Taming the Garden / Swit/Ger, Georgia (Dir: Salomé Jashi | World Premiere

A poetic ode to the rivalry between men and nature. World Premiere

Writing With Fire / India (Dir/Wris: Rintu Thomas, Sushmit Ghosh | World Premiere

In a cluttered news landscape dominated by men, emerges India’s only newspaper run by Dalit women. Armed with smartphones, chief reporter Meera and her journalists break traditions on the front lines of India’s biggest issues and within the confines of their own homes, redefining what it means to be powerful.

The Blazing World / U.S.A. (Dir: Carlson Young, Wri: Carlson Young, Pierce Brown | World Premiere

Decades after the accidental drowning of her twin sister, a self-destructive young woman returns to her family home, finding herself drawn to an alternate dimension where her sister may still be alive. Cast: Udo Kier, Carlson Young, Dermot Mulroney, Vinessa Shaw, John Karna, Soko.

Cryptozoo / US (Dir/Wr: Dash Shaw) | World Premiere

As cryptozookeepers struggle to capture a Baku (a legendary dream-eating hybrid creature) they begin to wonder if they should display these rare beasts in the confines of a cryptozoo, or if these mythical creatures should remain hidden and unknown. Cast: Lake Bell, Michael Cera, Angeliki Papoulia, Zoe Kazan, Peter Stormare, Grace Zabriskie

First Date / US. (Dir/Wri: Manuel Crosby, Darren Knapp | World Premiere

Conned into buying a shady ’65 Chrysler, Mike’s first date with the girl next door, Kelsey, implodes as he finds himself targeted by criminals, cops and a crazy cat lady. A night fueled by desire, bullets and burning rubber makes any other first date seem like a walk in the park. Cast: Tyson Brown, Shelby Duclos, Jesse Janzen, Nicole Berry, Ryan Quinn Adams, Brandon Kraus.

Ma Belle, My Beauty / US., France (Dir/Wri: Marion Hill | World Premiere

A surprise reunion in southern France reignites passions and jealousies between two women who were formerly polyamorous lovers. Cast: Idella Johnson, Hannah Pepper, Lucien Guignard, Sivan Noam Shimon.

R#J / US (Dir/Wri Carey William | World Premiere

A reimagining of Romeo and Juliet, taking place through their cellphones, in a mash-up of Shakespearean dialogue with current social media communication. Cast: Camaron Engels, Francesca Noel, David Zayas, Diego Tinoco, Siddiq Saunderson, Russell Hornsby.

Searchers / US. (Dir: Pacho Velez | World Premiere

In encounters alternately humorous and touching, a diverse set of New Yorkers navigate their preferred dating apps in search of their special someone.

Strawberry Mansion / US (Dir/Wri: Albert Birney, Kentucker Audley | World Premiere

In a world where the government records and taxes dreams, an unassuming dream auditor gets swept up in a cosmic journey through the life and dreams of an aging eccentric named Bella. Together, they must find a way back home. Cast: Penny Fuller, Kentucker Audley, Grace Glowicki, Reed Birney, Linas Phillips, Constance Shulman.

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair / US (Dir/Wri: Jane Schoenbrun | World Premiere

A teenage girl becomes immersed in an online role-playing game. Cast: Anna Cobb, Michael J. Rogers.

Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir / US. (Director: James Redford | World Premiere

Amy Tan has established herself as one of America’s most respected literary voices. Born to Chinese immigrant parents, it would be decades before the author of The Joy Luck Club would fully understand the inherited trauma rooted in the legacies of women who survived the Chinese tradition of concubinage.

Bring Your Own Brigade / US. (Dir/wri: Lucy Walker | World Premiere

A character-driven verité and revelatory investigation takes us on a journey embedded with firefighters and residents on a mission to understand the causes of historically large wildfires and how to survive them, discovering that the solution has been here all along.

Eight for Silver / U.S.A., France (Dir/Wri Sean Ellis | World Premiere

In the late 1800s, a man arrives in a remote country village to investigate an attack by a wild animal but discovers a much deeper, sinister force that has both the manor and the townspeople in its grip. Cast: Boyd Holbrook, Kelly Reilly, Alistair Petrie, Roxane Duran, Aine Rose Daly.

How It Ends / US (Dir/Wri Daryl Wein, Zoe Lister-Jones | World Premiere

On the last day on Earth, one woman goes on a journey through L.A. to make it to her last party before the world ends, running into an eclectic cast of characters along the way. Cast: Zoe Lister-Jones, Cailee Spaeny, Olivia Wilde, Fred Armisen, Helen Hunt, Lamorne Morris.

In the Earth / UK (Dir/Wri: Ben Wheatley | World Premiere

As a disastrous virus grips the planet, a scientist and a park scout venture deep into the forest for a routine equipment run. Through the night, their journey becomes a terrifying voyage through the heart of darkness as the forest comes to life around them. Cast: Joel Fry, Ellora Torchia, Hayley Squires, Reece Shearsmith

In the Same Breath / US. (Dir: Nanfu Wang) | World Premiere

How did the Chinese government turn pandemic coverups in Wuhan into a triumph for the Communist party? An essential narrative of firsthand accounts of the novel coronavirus, and a revelatory examination of how propaganda and patriotism shaped the outbreak’s course — both in China and in the U.S. World Premiere, Documentary. DAY ONE

Marvelous and the Black Hole / US (Dir/Wri Kate Tsang, Producer | World Premiere

A teenage delinquent befriends a surly magician who helps her navigate her inner demons and dysfunctional family with sleight of hand magic, in a coming-of-age comedy that touches on unlikely friendships, grief and finding hope in the darkest moments. Cast: Miya Cech, Rhea Perlman, Leonardo Nam, Kannon Omachi, Paulina Lule, Keith Powell.

Mass / US (Dir/Wri: Fran Kranz | World Premiere

Years after a tragic shooting, the parents of both the victim and the perpetrator meet face to face. Cast: Jason Isaacs, Ann Dowd, Martha Plimpton, Reed Birney.

My Name Is Pauli Murray / US (Dirs: Betsy West, Julie Cohen |World premiere

Overlooked by history, Pauli Murray was a legal trailblazer whose ideas influenced RBG’s fight for gender equality and Thurgood Marshall’s landmark civil rights arguments. Featuring never-before-seen footage and audio recordings, a portrait of Murray’s impact as a nonbinary Black luminary: lawyer, activist, poet and priest who transformed our world.

Philly D.A. / US. (Dirs: Ted Passon, Yoni Brook | World Premiere

A groundbreaking inside look at the long-shot election and tumultuous first term of Larry Krasner, Philadelphia’s unapologetic district attorney, and his experiment to upend the criminal justice system from the inside out.

Prisoners of the Ghostland / US. (Dir: Sion Sono, Wri: Aaron Hendry, Reza Sixo Safai | World Premiere

A notorious criminal is sent to rescue an abducted woman who has disappeared into a dark supernatural universe. They must break the evil curse that binds them and escape the mysterious revenants that rule the Ghostland, an East-meets-West vortex of beauty and violence. Cast: Nicolas Cage, Sofia Boutella, Nick Cassavetes, Bill Moseley, Tak Sakaguchi, Yuzuka Nakaya.

The Sparks Brothers / UK (Dir: Edgar Wright | World Premiere

How can one rock band be successful, underrated, hugely influential and criminally overlooked all at the same time? Take a musical odyssey through five weird and wonderful decades with brothers Russell & Ron Mael, celebrating the inspiring legacy of Sparks: your favorite band’s favourite band.

Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street / US. (Dir/: Marilyn Agrelo | World Premiere

How did a group of rebels create the world’s most famous street? In 1969 New York, this “gang” of mission-driven artists, writers and educators catalyzed a moment of civil awakening, transforming it into Sesame Street, one of the most influential and impactful television programs in history.

Midnight

Censor / UK (Dir/Wri: Prano Bailey-Bond, Aris: Prano Bailey-Bond, Anthony Fletcher | World Premiere

When film censor Enid discovers an eerie horror that speaks directly to her sister’s mysterious disappearance, she resolves to unravel the puzzle behind the film and its enigmatic director — a quest blurring the lines between fiction and reality in terrifying ways. Cast: Niamh Algar, Nicholas Burns, Vincent Franklin, Sophia La Porta, Adrian Schiller, Michael Smiley.

Coming Home in the Dark / NZ (Dir: James Ashcroft, Wri: Eli Kent, James Ashcroft | World Premiere

A family’s outing descends into terror when teacher Alan Hoaganraad, his wife Jill, and stepsons Maika and Jordon explore an isolated coastline. An unexpected meeting with a pair of drifters, the enigmatic psychopath Mandrake and his accomplice Tubs, thrusts the family into a nightmare when they find themselves captured. Cast: Daniel Gillies, Erik Thomson, Miriama McDowell, Matthias Luafutu.

A Glitch in the Matrix / US (Dir Rodney Ascher | World Premiere

A multimedia exploration of simulation theory — an idea as old as Plato’s Republic and as current as Elon Musk’s Twitter feed — through the eyes of those who suspect our world isn’t real. Part sci-fi mind-scrambler, part horror story, this is a digital journey to the limits of radical doubt.

Knocking / Sweden (Dir: Frida Kempff, Wri: Emma Broström | World Premiere

When Molly moves into her new apartment after a tragic accident, a strange noise from upstairs begins to unnerve her. As its intensity grows, she confronts her neighbors — but no one seems to hear what she is hearing. Cast: Cecilia Milocco.

Mother Schmuckers / Belgium (Dir/Wri: Lenny Guit, Harpo Guit | World Premiere

Issachar & Zabulon, two brothers in their 20s, are supremely stupid and never bored, as madness is part of their daily lives. When they lose their mother’s beloved dog, they have 24 hours to find it — or she will kick them out. Cast: Harpo Guit, Maxi Delmelle, Claire Bodson, Mathieu Amalric, Habib Ben Tanfous.

Special Screenings

Life in a Day 2020 / US/UK. (Dir: Kevin Macdonald | World Premier

An extraordinary, intimate, global portrait of life on our planet, filmed by thousands of people across the world, on a single day: 25th July 2020.

Sundance Film Festival | 28 January – 3 February 2021

Il Mio Corpo (2020) ****

Dir.: Michele Pennetta; Documentary with Oscar, Roberto and Marco Prestifilippo, Stanley Abhulimen, Blessed Idahosa; Switzerland/Italy 2020, 81 min.

In 2012 Italy had the highest child poverty in Europe and the struggle for these kids to survive and seek a better life is the focus of Italian filmmaker Michele Pennetta. Following in the footsteps of his award-winning compatriot Gianfranco Rosi (Fire at Sea), this thoughtful approach examines lives shattered by conflict, for very difference reasons.

After Pescatori di Corpi, which looked at illegal Syrian fisherman in Italy, Pennetta’s full length documentary hybrid chronicles two parallel lives: teenagers Oscar and Stanley. Stanley hails from Nigeria and is living on a limited visa. Oscar’s mother left his overbearing father Roberto with four children, who are looked after by her sister. Oscar takes the brunt of his father’s anger while his younger brother Marco is the favourite, the family making a meagre living from collecting scrap metal from illegal dumping sites.

The poetic opening scenes see Marco unearthing a miraculously unscathed Madonna in a dump site. They heave her up onto the road, a close-up looking very much like the Jesus statute transported by the helicopter in Fellini’s Otto e Mezzo. Labels are everything in Italy and Oscar hopes to gain social traction with a t-shirt emblazoned “Member of the Club Prive”. But the magic doesn’t rub off. He remains subdued by his father’s animosity and threat to “exchange him for a black man”. An insult as mean as it is racist.

We soon learn the secret of the Prestifilippo family: Roberto accused Oscar of siding with their mother when she snitched on him to the court. The two older brothers (a boy and a girl toddler are always in the background) defend themselves: “Mother beat me, there were no toys promised, no Super Mario, she said ‘I kill you if you don’t obey'”. Roberto relents in the end: “My fault was always caring too much for you guys, your mother’s mistake was leaving for this bastard. If she loved you, she would come back.” But the family dynamics are set in stone, and Oscar will not forgive either of his parents. Later, Roberto tells his oldest son: “The truck is our breadwinner, not you!”

On the other side of the island, life is on hold for Stanley and his Nigerian compatriot Blessed. Both are affected by their visa status and Blessed’s case in still pending. Blessed is critical of Stanley: “If I had a visa, I would leave Sicily immediately”. Stanley’s response is adamant: “You are a parasite, you will be a beggar for the rest of your life.” Stanley has a point: he is eking out an existence doing jobs for the local priest, Blessed just waits for a decision to be made. Eventually the two fetch up at the local tribunal which doesn’t end well for Blessed, Stanley reluctant to translate the the verdict. Blessed is never seen again in a poignant final sequence.

We end on a scripted passage that finally brings Oscar and Stanley together in a dilapidated farmhouse. DoP Paolo Ferrari takes major credit for the success of this melancholic story: his softly lensed images of the rugged countryside where the sun shines mercilessly, will stay in the memory for a long time afterwards. The strength of the feature lies in the contrast between the magic of this island paradise and the tragedy of its broken inhabitants, locked in a cycle of enforced indolence and resignation. Marginalised, for very different reasons, characters like Oscar and Stanley are wasting their lives away, unable to find a meaningful existence beyond hope and brief interludes of joy garnered from youthful bravado. In this craggy mountain idyl their future will be an uphill struggle. AS

IN CINEMAS AND EXCLUSIVELY ON CURZO HOME CINEMA | 11 DECEMBER 2020

The White Reindeer | Valkoinen Peura (1952)

Almost entirely dialogue-free and relying on a spellbinding score from Swedish composer Einar England to drive the narrative forward, it sees a beautiful young bride Pirita – the director’s own wife Mirjami Kuosmanen, who also co-wrote the script – fall prey to a tragic curse when she seeks advice on her love-life from a macabre Norse shamen.

Capturing the ethereal beauty of Finnish Lapland’s panoramic snowscapes, and picturing real herdsman at work in the icebound countryside, The White Reindeer is a magnificent example of low budget effectiveness and magic neo-realism in a simple but thematically rich storyline. Starting out in an upbeat mood Pirita is seen in full Nordic costume riding a sleigh alongside her lover and soon to be husband. But after their wedding night he is frequently absent.

Longing to capture his affection, she takes the shamen’s love potion and is transformed into an elegant white reindeer by night, drinking the blood of local hunters. This lyrical parable is both intriguing and mesmerising melding documentary footage with exquisite lighting techniques and elegant framing to produce a film that echoes Polanski’s Fearless Vampire Killers and Dreyer’s Vampyr with potent references to Norse mythology and themes of longing, loneliness and fear of abandonment. MT

THE WHITE REINDEER (Masters of Cinema) https://youtu.be/ECyp3fJBI20

Amazon https://amzn.to/2RUdXON

David Byrne’s American Utopia (2020) ***

Dir: Spike Lee | US Doc, 105′

Artists crave new audiences. So Spike Lee has filmed David Byrne’s Broadway stage-version of his solo album American Utopia in a bid to attract a younger following. Will it work? Memorable tunes capture moments in our life, and this is true for all ages who will forge new memories from these golden classics. Byrne created a string of them with his famous Talking Heads band in the 1980s and this musical trip down memory lane will have appeal for all audiences. Playing out in a slick re-showcasing American Utopia looks fresh and funky while also appealing to a loyal fanbase.

Agile as a silver fox Byrne sashays across the stage, an eminence gris on acid with his familiar gunmetal tailoring (and this time bare feet) recalling his Stop Making Sense concert movie directed by Jonathan Demme back in 1984 (now on BFI player).

Distant and slightly surreal the quixotic quirkiness is still there as he juts around in perfect symmetry with his musical acolytes: Glass, This Must Be the Place, Once in a Lifetime, Concrete and Stone and many more number are there for your enjoyment in this trippy nostalgia-filled extravaganza. Even the Black Lives Matter box is ticked and dovetails neatly into the narrative with a version of Janelle Monáe’s Hell You Talmabout, Byrne exhorting the audience to recall those who have lost their lives in police conflict.

Byrne is a star. Stars are there to capture our imagination. His allure lies in his unreachability. If he suddenly started sharing his problems or consumer bleats you’d be sadly disappointed. Luckily he remains distant. As he leaves the stage the camera sees him warming to colleagues in his dressing room, and riding home on his bike. For a moment he’s human. MT

IN CINEMAS FROM MONDAY 14 DECEMBER 2020

Personal Shopper (2016) MUBI

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

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

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

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

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

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

Murder me, Monster (2018) ***

Dir Alejandro Fadel. Argentina. 2018. 106′

Murder Me Monster’s widescreen solemnity might bring to mind the murder investigation in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia – and there are vague echoes of Amat Escalante’s The Untamed, but that’s where the similarity ends. This brooding Andes-set crime mystery is the gruesome work of Los Selvajes director Alejandro Fadel, and it is certainly not for the feint hearted with its bestial themes and deformed zombie-like characters. Infact everyone in this stomach-turning horror fantasy is on edge and whispering morosely, for one reason or another. And a series of macabre murders, where heads are torn from bodies, seem to be the reason why.

The opening scene sees the dying moments of a woman whose throat has been severed. As a herd of sheep and some other livestock are slowly make their supper of her remains, a blind man mumbles on about the murder. A feeling of unease creeps over proceedings when it transpires that the bloodshed is connected to a feral beast on the prowl and out of control in this desolate and remote corner of Argentina where the sun rarely shines.

Rural police officer Cruz (Victor Lopez) is tasked with investigating the murders and the finger seems to point to local thick-lipped weirdo David (Esteban Bigliardi) who claims that a savage creature is using certain phrases to commune with him, as if through telepathy, with a ‘silly’ voice that repeats ‘Murder Me, Monster’.

Cinematographers Manuel Rebella and Julian Apezteguia evoke nightmarish visuals often using the same technique as the painter El Greco – where the characters’ faces are often starkly backlit against a murky darkness. There’s a garish otherworldly quality to the outdoor mountain scenes in a film that takes on an increasingly Lynchian feel as the plot thickens. Pus-yellow, murky mustard and puke green make up the colour palette of costume and set designers Florencia and Laura Caligiuri. An atmospheric ambient score keeps the tension brewing.

This is intriguing stuff, if rather too enigmatic for its own good, eventually leaving us stranded in its own mysterious backwater. This study of fear and perversion in a Pampas backwater will certainly made you feel nauseous and bewildered by the end. MT

UK releasee to stream or download or own | 4th December 2020 AVAILABLE

The Mole Agent (2020)

Dir|Wri: Maite Alberdi | Chile, 89′

An 83 year old widower goes undercover in a Chilean nursing home in Maite Alberdi’s topical documentary that looks into neglect in the care system. But what he discovers is something quite different.

Rather like Distant Constellation another recent doc set in a nursing home, the tone here is upbeat and tongue is cheek, primped by a rather suggestive score, but the message is real and very familiar. Alberdi’s quietly observed study gradually develops into a cumulatively moving and important statement about the infantilisation, abuse and loss of dignity suffered by the elderly in nursing homes.

Reports of care home abuse are well-documented all over Europe. But in Chile, the daughter of one resident decides to takes suspicions of her mother’s maltreatment and theft into her own hands hiring a private detective agency to look into the matter. Recently widowed Sergio, 83, gets the job to spend three months in the home as an undercover mole reporting back to the client, via his employer, the suavely dapper Romulo. Apart from mastering the new technology involved: using FaceTime and recording videos – the poor man is still grieving the recent loss of his own wife, and finds the romantic onslaught – even an offer of marriage – from several lonely widows quite difficult to deal with. Meanwhile he struggles with an investigation into ‘suspicious’ residents who are suffering memory loss, loneliness and abandonment by their own families. To make matters worse, his ‘target’ – the resident he has to monitor – is an unsociable woman who has no interest in talking to him at all.

Alberdi also has a difficult task on her hands and one that she manages with great sensitively, skill and imagination in a film that widens its concerns from the outset turning from an enquiry into an illuminating expose that asks more questions than originally intended. Clearly the question uppermost in our minds is the one Sergio has come to investigate. But it’s unlikely that anything untoward would happen in the presence of a film crew. Instead the film turns into a thoughtful observation of institutional life inside a close knit community. The majority of the residents are women who cling to their Christian faith and mourn the loss of their homes, their independence and their families, who rarely visit. Surrounded by people they don’t necessarily want to be with, all they have left are photos and memories.

Sergio is under pressure to report back to Romulo on the results of his snooping which is more or less inconclusive, and don’t reflect back well on Romulo’s client. What Sergio eventually tells him iwon’t come as a big surprise to anyone. MT

WINNER – BEST EUROPEAN FILM – SAN SEBASTIAN FILM FESTIVAL 2020 | THE MOLE AGENT is Chile’s submission in the International Oscars category.

NOW ON BBC 2 | ON DEMAND

Radiograph of a Family (2020)

Dir/Wri: Firouzeh Khosrovani | Doc, Iran, Norway, Switzerland 82′

Firouzeh Khosrovani’s prize-winning documentary chronicles her early life against the background of Iran’s revolutionary recent history.

Delicate and deeply moving – sorrowful even – Khosrovani’s fourth feature is a tragic love letter to a childhood and early adulthood blighted by the growing distance between her parents largely due to the revolution and her mother’s religious fundamentalism.

With its resonant cultural and political touchstones, Radiograph is an compelling and elegantly assembled collage of memories and photographs, narrated by actors and describing the simple joy of her parent’s early days together in Geneva: her father Hossein was training to be a doctor in Switzerland, inviting her mother Tayi to join him there in the early 1960s.

Recorded on Super 8 footage, ten years before the filmmaker’s birth, it tells of a couple who fell in love but whose aspirations turned to dust as the silent shadow of revolution gradually spread into every aspect of their life together, eventually threatening the stability of the family. What stands out is deep sadness and regret, rather than anger or bitterness, and we feel for Firouzeh and her broken dreams.

Switzerland is home to many Iranians and Hosseini had chosen to study medicine in the thriving cosmopolitan lakeside city of Geneva. The hard-working radiographer was able to offer a good life to his much younger wife when she arrived from pre-revolutionary Tehran. For a timid young girl Tayi certainly knew her own mind, praying to Mecca while her husband preferred to meet his urbane friends in glamorous bars and listen to music. Eventually Tayi used her new pregnancy and back problems as the kicker to return home, persuading Hossein to move back to Iran where she was delighted to be reunited with her friends and growing family.

In the 1960s Tehran was a sophisticated, thriving metropolis where the middle classes enjoyed summers by the Caspian Sea and winters on the ski slopes. But once the Shah was toppled things changed, and from then on Tayi became increasingly drawn to her religion.

Khosrovani’s enlivens her portrait with family photographs picturing her parents’ early days in Geneva before moving back to Tehran on the birth of their first child named Firouzeh (herself). Back in Iran, Tayi questions Hossein’s lack of prayer routine as she pursues Islam with growing fervency and self-determination, rejecting her husband’s way of life and even tearing up the family photos and snaps, which the director has since pieced together for her film.

Both visually and narrative-wise Khosrovani uses her family home in Tehran as a recurring motif and the feature’s fulcrum. What starts as a comfortable and soigné home soon becomes the sober backdrop to her mother’s strict religious beliefs: her parents’ elegant bedroom adorned with her father’s favourite piece of modern art (a female nude) soon morphs into a spartan single room where reflection and prayer are the order of the day, a long table accommodating her mother’s new friends, the proponents of the oppressive Islamic regime. “The revolution entered our house,” the director recalls, as her heavily veiled mother is pictured requesting the whereabouts of her Quar’an.

Radiograph is a deeply subjective view of a child’s fond memories projected into an adulthood full of anguish and sadness, that still lives on today. No matter how much happiness and contentment we find as adults, our early childhood experiences will always colour our future. Khosrovani maintains a non-judgemental approach to her parents throughout her film. And although she never condemns her mother, maintaining a neutral acceptance of her beliefs, it is clear that her father embodies her hopes and dreams. Bonds of sadness and regret can often be more resilient that those of shared joy. In the end acceptance is one form of contentment. MT

NOW AT THE DOCHOUSE Radiograph of a Family | World premiered at IDFA documentary festival in Amsterdam, where it won the main prize for best feature

Red Penguins (2019) ****

Dir.: Gabe Polsky; Documentary with Steven Warshaw, Tom Ruta, Howard Baldwin, Victor Rikhonov, Valery Gushin, Alimzhan Tokhtakhonov; USA/Germany 2019, 79 min.

Russian émigré Gabe Polsky (Red Army), now working from the USA, offers a cautionary tale about a time when Russian hopes were high after the fall of Stalinism, and US entrepreneurs believed that doing business with their newly liberated partners would be easy and profitable.

Nothing could be more from the truth – as it turned out. Directing, writing and producing this remarkable and hilarious true story Polsky spills the beans about the “Red Penguins”, a Russian ice hockey team taken over by American financiers. If you remember, in his previous outing Red Army, the key to Russian success lay in ‘working as a team’. Read on.

The film kicks off with the two owners of the NHL (National Hockey League) team Pittsburgh Penguins, Tom Ruta and Howard Baldwin, who were in charge between 1991 and 1997. Back in the early 1990s, many world class ice-hockey players of the former USSR were snapped up by NHL teams. Meanwhile, the sport itself, like nearly everything in Russia, was in the doldrums. Finding investment was the easy bit – Michael J. Fox soon signed up and agreed to finance a takeover of the old Soviet Army team by American owners.

What happened next is told mainly by Steven Warshaw, who was the ‘Red Penguin’s’ Marketing Executive Vice President. He was appalled by the parlous state of the famous “Ice Palace” arena which was anything but palatial: the executive boxes were full of homeless people; the Plexiglas round the rink was splintered – and in the basement there was a strip club.

Alexander Lyubimow, a famous TV journalist, introduced Warshaw and his team to old hands like general manager Victor Gushin who wanted to help with the rebuilding of the once famous crew. But marketing whizkid Warshaw and the US investment team saw the operation less as a sporting venue, more as a marketing opportunity to transform the team into the greatest show in Moscow.

The ladies from the basement were confined to cages where they entertained the crowd by ‘stripping off’. New outfits and logos (smiling Penguins) were rolled out on TV, and finally coach Victor Gusev brought together a team which was at least presentable. But the girls weren’t the only ‘come on’. Bears dressed up as waiters serving ice cold beer to the over-excited punters, and one of the players actually lost part of his finger – clearly the bear was not amused by his antics. But young people loved the circus atmosphere, and advertising did the rest.

Meanwhile back in the USA, Disney became interested in the project, Michael Eisner planning a marriage of Mickey Mouse with the Russian ice hockey team (he later denied contact with the “Red Penguin’s” team). But when Russia fell into chaos after President Yeltsin bombed his own parliament, the collaboration naturally fell apart. Steven and his co-workers were called in to see the Minister of Defence, Alexander Baranovsky, former head of the CSKA sport club, and this meeting confirmed who was really in charge.

On 1994, the owners then took the team on a tour in the USA, but the results were very disappointing. Back in Russia, the Mafia was responsible for 40% of the GDP. Camouflaged as taxmen, they also approached Warshaw who claimed “they were ready for them to steal several hundred dollars, but they took a million.” It was all a little bit like the feature film Sudden Death, shot in the Pittsburgh home of the original Penguins, where a whole crowd is taken hostage.

The fate of the endeavour was finally sealed when Disney cut all ties, Five people involved in the operation were brutally murdered: the team photographer, one of the players, the assistant head coach, a Russian Hockey Federation employee and one of the most high profile personalities of the era TV journalist Vladislav Listyev (who was shot dead on March, 1st, 1995). Warshaw got away with a damaged thyroid.

The film plays out as a farce, DoP Alexey Elagin giving the narrative development a jerky intensity with his handheld camerawork. Polsky later laments Putin’s steady rise to power, as a helpless Yeltsin stood on the sidelines. Red Penguins is a masterclass in power-grabbing, highlighting a moment in history when the Kremlin and the KGB took the opportunity to manoeuvre themselves into the seat of power. Capitalism, bribery and murder was all part and parcel of the new order. AS

BBC Storyville | Monday 7 December 10pm | BBC iPlayer

A Christmas Carol (2020) ***

Dir: Jacqui and David Morris | With: Carey Mulligan, Martin Freeman, Simon Russell Beale, Daniel Kaluuya, Leslie Caron, Sian Philips, Andy Serkis | Fantasy Drama | UK

Carey Mulligan, Leslie Caron and Simon Russell Beale are the stars of this radical new retelling of the Christmas mystery that blends animation, dance, theatre and film into a dazzling fantasy reimagining that touches on the social realist aspects of deprivation and depravity along with the magical power of redemption that brings light to Charles Dickens’ Victorian classic A Christmas Carol with its best known characters Scrooge and Tiny Tim.

This satire on capitalism play within a film begins in the dark days leading up to an 1860s Christmas when a large Victorian family is preparing for their annual home performance with a selection of toys and a cardboard stage. As Grandma (Sian Phillips) begins to read the show takes off, each character performed by an actor who also dances. Russell Beale is Mr Scrooge has a young and old embodiment, Daniel Kaluuya is the voice of Mikey Boateng’s all dancing Ghost of Christmas. Despite the dour social commentary it couldn’t be more glitzy and that’s why it feels like the perfect cheer to bring this dreadful year to a close. MT

NOW IN CINEMAS NATIONWIDE

A Christmas Carol FILM

LIBERTÉ (2019) Bfi Player

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Falling (2020) ***

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

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

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

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Evolution (2015) **** MUBI

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

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

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

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

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

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iHuman (2019) **** | CPH:DOX 2020

Dir: Tonje Hessen Schei, Doc, Norway Denmark 99′

One of the major challenges of our times is how the global community is going to deal with artificial intelligence (AI). Who will control this technology? Has the train left the station, never to be stopped? An unsettling new documentary from Norwegian filmmaker Tonje Hessen Schei explores these issues in the same way as his film Play Again investigated the positive impact on the natural environment of kids development.

iHuman studies the benefits of AI in increasing our potential for the greater good, but crucially also highlights its negative aspects. And there’s no turning back. AI development is hurtling forward with tech companies affiliated to the defence industry and algorithms in law enforcement enhancing existing biases. Once we allow the use of such powerful technology to assist us, the brakes are off: AI is like raising a new offspring: eventually we cannot control everything it does. One day it will be in charge. And this has frightening but seemingly unavoidable consequences.

Hessen Schei has gained impressive access to a variety of leading influencers and they present a wide range of views, from tech optimism in Jurgen Schmidhuber “the father of AI,” to more cautious voices like technology journalist Kara Swisher, human rights lawyer Philip Alston, and Shalil Shetty from Amnesty International. Animated computer graphics visualise a polymorphous, self-developing structure with ever-greater autonomy guiding us forward. Computer scientist and psychographic specialist Ilya Sutskever is one of the most helpful and persuasive talking heads. He is working on how computers can max out our problem-solving abilities while ensuring they share the same goals as us. Computational Psychologist Michal Kosinski is another ‘good guy’. He sees his goal as protecting people against the risks of how algorithms are reading their most intimate motivations.

By 2025 each person will produce 62 gigabytes of data per day. And this information is increasingly being used by the vast tech companies to manipulate each of us in our lifestyle choices: how we live, vote, and even who we chose to date. And this is one of the downsides of everyone getting to have their say on social media. As social animals who enjoy interacting with one another we have chosen the path to our own potential downfall. We have all become hooked to a high performance ad machine in the shape of Twitter, Google and Facebook. Shouting for our various teams has become an enjoyable and addictive pastime, and gradually the world has become more and more polarised, our majority views encouraging others to blaze the trail. Eventually we will become obsolete, unable to finance our lives – with mass employment the result of computers taking over.

The Police and the military are also tracking in an effort to manipulate us but also – they say – to protect us. Their highly advanced systems are set up to predict and track potential criminals from early on in their lives, using algorithms. In the future their intervention and high level surveillance equipment will kick in more and more intensively so as to clamp down on the potential for crime. In the military the use of so-called unmanned systems are actually autonomous lethal weapons to be feared because they could easily turn against those programming them.

Combining her informative talking heads with convincing data and an eerie soundtrack, Hessen Schei gives us plenty of food for thought in this well-paced and good-looking documentary. And the takeaway is positive: Ai has actually forced us to re-examine what it really means to be human. We have created it, now maybe it can re-create us. MT

The film is screening for 8 weeks from 10 December via independent cinemas including Broadway Nottingham, Chapter Cardiff, kinokulture Oswestry, Rich Mix London and Rio Cinema London. Cinema listings can be found here: https://www.modernfilms.com/ihuman

Shirley (2019) ****

Dir.: Josephine Decker; Cast: Elisabeth Moss, Odessa Young, Michael Stuhlbarg, Logan Lerman; USA 2020, 107 min.

Making a name for herself with a stylish array of imagined dramas US auteur Josephine Decker moves into the arena of real life with this febrile portrait of horror writer Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) whose most popular novel ‘The Haunting of Hill House’ has been filmed on numerous occasions, the last being as a ten-episode long production on Netflix.

Based on ‘Shirley: A Novel’ by Susan Scarf the film takes place in 1964 in North Bennington, Vermont – which seems a strange a strange choice, since Scarf actually wrote her novel ‘Hangasman’, whose writing process is the central part of the feature, in 1951. The narrative centres on two couples, the middle-aged Shirley (Moss) and her English professor husband Stanley (Stuhlbarg), and their much younger house guests Rose (Young) who is pregnant with her first child, and her academic husband Fred (Lerman), who tries to get a tenure at Bennington College, as Stanley’s assistant. There are shades of Albee’s Who is Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but, more importantly, Rose and Fred are actually invented characters. But in staying away from a strictly biographical narrative, Decker and her writer Sarah Gubbin enhance the richness of the storytelling – even though the ‘deletion’ of the couple’s four kids, who would have been around in 1951, is another puzzling decision. Shirley is portrayed as a erratic and waspish intellectual who takes no prisoners especially of the female kind.

We meet Rose and Fred on the train on their way to Bennington, where they have rampant sex in the train’s bathroom after Rose has finished Jackson’s Kafkaesque novella ‘The Lottery” from 1949. Bennington also turns out to be a hotbed of sex, eager female students hoping to boost their grades by obliging the academic staff. What was planned as a short stay with Shirley and Stanley, turns into a much longer tenancy, when Fred literally pimps out his wife to look after the bibulous agoraphobic writer who is struggling to focus on her new novel. Meanwhile Rose is in awe of the professor barely fending off his unwelcome advances. Soon Fred follows in Stanley’s footsteps, and sleeps with an undergraduate student leaving the women to look for intimacy among themselves.

A major topic is Jackson’s obsession with death, not uncommon for a writer of her genre. ‘Hangsaman’ is the story of a young student called Natalie, who becomes mentally unbalanced and takes her own life. She is renamed Paula in the feature and played by Young in a part-staging of the novel. But death is never far away – in one scene Shirley spooks Rose by pretending to eat a poisonous mushroom in the woods. And near the end there is a brilliant dream-sequence with Rose standing at the edge of a precipitous cliff with her baby.

Norwegian-born DoP Sturla Brandth Groven underlines the horror-film atmosphere with a subtle array of light movements: even though the feature is told more from Rose’s perspective, awkward handheld camera angles and woozy focusing turn the domestic backdrop into a decadent often delirious chamber of horrors for Rose as she gradually unravels increasingly unsettling by Shirley’s quixotic stabs at familiarity. Shirley’s outings into the campus are also fraught with disaster: at a academic gathering she enjoys vindictively spoiling a new sofa with red wine because she suspects the hostess of philandering with her husband. Shirley and Stanley enjoy a prickly relationship of mutual admiration spiced up by intellectual sparring and power play, this is largely what makes the feature so enjoyable as a piece of entertainment. Somehow, Shirley’s protests against the mediocre, male-dominated society rub off on Rose: when Fred tells her his affair is over, and “soon everything will be back to normal”, she lets him know that this is not the case.

Shirley is a very ambitious feature, even though a great deal takes place away from the camera, Moss and Young are mesmerising enough to keep the audience occupied but Elisabeth Moss and the (once again) much underrated Michael Stuhlbarg steal the show. Shirley Gubbins and Decker have created a valuable contribution to the feminist horror genre, Decker sealing her reputation in a her fourth drama as a director. AS

SUNDANCE 2020 GRAND JURY PRIZE WINNER | LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2020 | In competition NEON AWARDS

It Came From Outer Space (1953) **** Blu-ray

Dir.: Jack Arnold; Cast: Richard Carlson, Barbara Rush, Charles Drake, Joe Sawyer, Russell Johnson; USA 1953, 81 min.

Director John Arnold (1916-1992) was the mastermind behind seven Sci-Fi classics between 1953 and 1958. It came from outer Space was the first, shot in 3-D and based on the short story ‘The Meteor’ by Rad Bradbury and written for the screen by Harry Essex.

Seen as an anti-McCarthy feature at a time when Aliens and ‘Reds’ were both out to destroy the idyll of small town America, Arnold uses small Californian towns like Victorville and the Mojave desert as background to create an exotically eerie backdrop .

Astronomer and author John Putnam (Carlson) has moved to the desert, finding his intellectual viewpoint at odds with the small-time folks back home. He is in love with school teacher Ellen Fields (Rush) who plays truant when the two discover a meteor hitting Earth. It later transpires that an alien spaceship has made some sort of an emergency landing but Sheriff Matt Warren (Drake) is the first to denounce John’s theories after visiting the crash site, he also has the hots for Ellen.

Strange things happen all over town, as citizens are cloned by the Aliens. Among them are Frank Dayton (Sawyer) and George (Johnson) two electricians whose spouses are telling Warren their men folk changed personality before simply disappearing, taking their clothes with them. John, helped by Ellen, finds out that the Aliens are repairing their spaceship, using the tools and equipment of the local engineers and electricians. Then Ellen gets taken over by the strangers, she appears to John in an evening gown and leads him to a mine, where she is taken hostage.

John comes to an arrangement with the leader of the spaceship who appears as a glittering droopy-eyed monster. John pretends to blow up the mine, whilst Warren and his posse (or lynch mob), are closing in on the entrance. The Aliens repair their spacecraft and leave Earth.

DoP Clifford Stine creates some startling black-and-white images, often veiled by an ethereal mist. It Came from Outer Space shows Arnold (who was assistant to Robert J. Flaherty) as a chronicler of the The Eisenhower era, where anti-intellectualism and the McCarthy Witch Hunt was the dominating factor. Arnold’s other classics sided with outsiders, among them Creature from the Black Lagoon (famously restyled by Guillermo del Toro in 2017), Tarantula and The Space Children. He was also known for his Westerns, and one of his last cinema features, The Mouse that Roared (1959) which made Peter Sellers an international star.

A true creative, Jack Arnold later switched to directing TV fare, his seminal ideas providing the basis for some of today’s most popular big and small screen outings. There is hardly a series he did not have a hand from Wonder Woman to Dr. Kildare; The Brady Bunch, Ellery Queen and Perry Mason amongst the very best. AS

BLURAY/DVD AVAILABLE 14 DECEMBER 2020 | FABULOUS FILMS

A Christmas Carol (2020) ***

Dir: Jacqui and David Morris | With: Carey Mulligan, Martin Freeman, Simon Russell Beale, Daniel Kaluuya, Leslie Caron, Sian Philips, Andy Serkis | Fantasy Drama | UK

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A Christmas Carol FILM

Le Havre (2011) **** MUBI

Dir: Aki Kaurismäki | Cast: Andre Wilmes, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Kati Outinen, Blondin Miguel, Evelyne Didi | French with English subtitles. Cert12

Finnish director, Aki Kaurismäki has invented his own genre of ‘contemporary retro’ with an improbable and deadpan drama set in 1950s Le Havre. It’s a drôle French version of The Archers that doesn’t take itself too seriously. You know the kind of thing: an everyday story of gentlefolk in a close-knit community where a kindly lawyer-shoe-shiner (Wilmes) is harbouring a nicely-behaved child deportee, who also happens to be black, from the clutches of absurdly buttoned-up and ineffectual Inspector Monet. Jean-Paul Darroussian gives a tongue-in-cheek turn in the style of Inspector Clouseau.

The man in question is Marcel Marx. At first he strikes an odd figure as this desiccated do-gooder, with his dog-eared existence and wife Arletty who’s also seen better days. But these two are likeable and happy in their threadbare existence, making ends meet with the support of local traders who expect nothing in return for their daily supplies. The grocer (Francois Monnie), the baker (Evelyne Didi) and the brassy barmaid, with her endless aperitifs ‘on the house’ are all well-cast and amusing. There’s a comforting rhythm to this bizarre harbourside drama. Authentic yet highly unlikely, you wish – in some ways – that life was as simple as this. Billed as a comedy there are dark moments too, when Arletty gets cancer and Darroussin goes on the prowl with a pineapple, but this is downtown utopia not Les Miserables.

Kaurismäki originally had the idea to do the uplifting French tale along the lines of “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, but opted only for the latter: “The other two were always too optimistic. But fraternité you can find anywhere, even in France!” Though life is sometimes gloomy in cloudy Le Havre, Aki makes sure the clouds have a silver lining. MT ©

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Cape Fear (1991) **** Blu-ray

Dir: Martin Scorsese | Wri: Wesley Strick from the novel by Joh D MacDonald | Cast: Robert De Niro, Nick Nolte, Jessica Lange, Juliette Lewis,

J Lee Thompson’s cult classic 1961 thriller is undoubtedly a more sober and classy reflection on recidivism with its serious and starkly realised legal procedural, you cannot deny the appealing immediacy of Martin Scorsese’s version, its characters are certainly more relatable in our contemporary gaze. The 1991 Cape Fear has four colourful central performances to enjoy, as well as cameos from key characters from the original, including Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck (in what would be his final film). As a piece of entertainment the 1991 version has everything, including Freddie Francis behind the camera, although some may argue its melodrama and schlocky sensationalism verges on the extreme. It’s a thriller and a fiery one at that, Scorsese finding a brilliant way of bringing things to a climax in the coruscating final act.

Scorsese’s decision to stage the final denouement during a tempestuous rainstorm on the bayou was a masterstroke, the turbulence of the rushing water serving as a magnificent metaphor for the emotional turmoil felt by all the characters, and for different reasons: Nolte’s defence lawyer is hellbent on protecting his family (Lange’s histrionic wife, the innocence of her daughter (Lewis). And a felon just keen to survive as the waves gradually claim the psychotic victim.

Scorsese leaves us in no doubt that his married couple are still enjoying each other, whereas the Peck and his staid onscreen wife Bergen seem to have veered off that avenue of pleasure, despite their relative youth. Robert De Niro makes for a terrifying villain as bible-bashing Max Cady; all quietly persuasive and self-righteous, he emerges a viciously twisted misogynist when riled, and a chilling sociopathic monster in a finale that will remain seared to the memory, alongside Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men (2017). In preparation for the role De Niro paid a doctor USD 5,000 to grind his teeth down and then USD 20,000 to have them restored after shooting had finished. He also used vegetable dyes for the horrific tattoos, that faded a few moths later.

In contrast Robert Mitchum’s 1962 Cady is a standard nasty piece of work, but he doesn’t make our blood run cold, certainly not from a woman’s point of view, coming across moreover as a suave operator who just happens to be a sadistic small time criminal. But Mitchum comes up trumps in the Scorsese version as the heavyweight Lieutenant Elgart. In contrast J Lee Thomson’s womenfolk are twee coffee morning folk, particularly Polly Bergen’s prissy housewife, Peggy. Admittedly it was early Sixties Georgia in America’s staid Deep South (where race riots were still raging).

Martin Scorsese regular casting director Ellen Lewis makes a wise choice with Juliette Lewis for the role of Danielle Bowden, and both she and De Niro garnered Oscar nods for their performances. She gives a great deal of texture to the flirty vulnerable teenager: on the cusp of adulthood, and hormonally charged, she is sexually curious yet still possessing of a young girl’s fragile charm.

Nolte’s Bowden has clearly put a foot wrong in his legal judgement by suppressing evidence that may have kept De Niro’s Cady out of jail, and he continues to blot his copybook on this misdemeanour, flirting with Douglas’s unstable Lori Davis rather than making amends with a decent apology to Cody.

Casting and performance-wise Gregory Peck comes across as a morally superior Bowden, with his finally chiselled jawline, matinee idol demeanour and clean-suited integrity, as against Nolte’s rather scuzzy married man nursing a nascent midlife crisis and sniffing around before the inevitable onset of sexual disfunction. Bernard Herrmann’s thundering score also unites these two films (remastered for the 1991 version), it’s a magnificent and memorable musical calling card to what will follow. As an elegantly realised moral drama the award goes to J Lee Thompson, but as a rip-roaring riveting thriller Scorsese wins with Cape Fear. MT

CAPE FEAR IS NOW ON BLU-RAY | 14 DECEMBER 2020 | COURTESY OF FABULOUSFILMS.COM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961) ****

Dir/Wri: Irwin Allen | Writers: Irwin Allen, Charles Bennett | Cast: Walter Pidgeon, Joan Fontaine, Barbara Eden, Peter Lorre, Robert Sterling, Michael Ansara | US Sci-fi Fantasy, 105’

A feelgood answer to ‘On the Beach’ which owes more to Jules Verne (right down to a fight with a giant squid) than to the Atomic Age, in which the end of the world is averted by the crew of a submarine rather than contemplated by one. Actually rather prescient in predicting global warming, but unlike the same year’s The Day the Earth Caught Fire, detonating a nuclear device at the North Pole averts catastrophe rather than causes it. Enough has already been said on the ‘science’ in this film to fill a book; so I’ll simply confine myself to saying I was most amused by the sight of the North Pole still covered with icebergs despite the sky being tinted red to denote that the Van Allan Belt was ablaze.

I remember the dreary sixties TV series that followed only too well and didn’t learn until much later that there had originally been a film. At $3 million at least the money is there up on the screen; of which $400,000 was spent on the submarine ‘The Seaview’ itself. (The sonic pulses it emitted as it ploughed gracefully through the water remained one of the coolest features of the TV series, and in the film we’re spared those annoying shots of the crew being thrown from side to side that became such a tedious feature of the series.)

Ironically another critic (TheHonestCritic) thought Peter Lorre the only cast member who didn’t look bored, whereas I thought he looked easily the least interested in what was going on around him. Aside from Michael Ansara’s religious fanatic Alvarez (in those days, when a character started quoting the Bible you knew you were in for trouble), the most fascinating performance comes from Joan Fontaine. Still a handsome woman at 43 but washed up as a film star, 1961 began with the finalising of her divorce from producer Collier Young on 3 January, and in November she lost her home in Brentwood to that year’s catastrophic Hollywood Hills fire. Although in her autobiography she dismissed Voyage to the Bottom as “a horrendous film”, wearing high heels, a lab coat and an even more than usually anxious expression on her face she was ripe at the time to play such a neurotic role and gives an electrifying performance. Richard Chatten

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Finding Vivian Maier (2014)

Dir.: John Maloof, Charlie Siskel | Doc; USA 2013, 85 min.

A nanny makes history in this fascinating film that was also one of the most popular documentaries in the year of its release. It’s not often than one finds a genius by accident, furthermore a genius who did not want to be discovered and who hid her art from everybody: but this is exactly what happened to the Chicago neighbourhood historian John Maloof, when researching photos to illustrate a history about his local district in 2007, and obtaining a box of photos from a nanny called Vivian Maier.

Ms Maier died in 2009, aged 83, just when Maloof began to collect all her work (over 100 000 negatives, 27 000 roles of film, audio tapes and 8mm and 16 mmm films) consisting of mainly street photography from the rougher parts of the “windy city”. Her photos are now shown all over the world; the work of a rare talent who hid from the world. Having discovered Maier’s work, Maloof began to research Vivian Maier’s life: this film is the result of his detective work.

Vivian Mayer was born in 1926 in New York, but her French mother and Austrian father (who soon cleared off), moved to a village in the French Alps, where Vivian was educated, before moving back to Manhattan in her mid-twenties. There she worked in a sweat-shop, before moving to Chicago in her early thirties where she was employed for the rest of her working life as a nanny. Maloof has found over a hundred of her ex-charges and their memories are mostly positive (some paid her rent in old age), but a few talked about her temper, or her style draconian discipline. But most remember being dragged by Vivian into the slums of the city where most of her photos were taken, though the more bourgeois quarters, where she lived, are also represented. Maier was an artist first and foremost: when one of the children she was looking after was hurt in a car accident, Vivian took photos of the injured child whilst the mother, rushing on to the scene of the accident, was relieved that it was not the family dog who was injured.

Vivian, who features in many of her photos taken with a Rolleiflex twin lens camera (which she always carried with her), was a tall, imposing woman. But in contrast, to her physical appearance, psychologically, she was very fragile. She was extremely shy, sometimes not even wanting to give her real name, calling herself V.Smith. Some of her former charges remembered that she was very hostile towards men in general, and speculated that she might have been abused as a child.

Looking at the photos it is clear that Vivian identified with the underdog in society, finding a split-second where photographer and subject become emotionally engaged. The same can be said about Maloof and his subject: this documentary is a labour of love, one obsessive collector researching another. The interviews are very informal and lively, and Maloof obviously shares his love of Chicago with Maier. Kafka asked for his writings to be destroyed, and we can thank his friend Max Brod for disobeying him – Maier never wanted the acclaim she is getting now posthumously, and we have to thank John Maloof for discovering her style. History repeats itself sometimes in strange ways – but then, Vivian Maier was in a way very much a stranger on this planet. AS

Vivian Maier Developed: The Untold Story of the Photographer Nanny by Ann Marks | Atria Books £28 pp368

https://youtu.be/t1WlcZ5xBys

Rotterdam Film Festival 2021 – a hybrid two-parter

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

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

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

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

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

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

TIGER COMPETITION | 1-7 FEBRUARY 2021

Agate Mousse (Lebanon) world premiere
Dir. Selim Mourad

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

Bipolar (China) world premiere
Dir. Queena Li

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

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

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

Feast (Netherlands) world premiere
Dir. Tim Leyendekker

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

Gritt (Norway) international premiere
Dir, Itonje Søimer Guttormsen

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

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

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

Madalena
Dir. Madiano Marcheti

Mayday (US) international premiere
Dir, Karen Cinorre

Mighty Flash (Spain) world premiere
Dir. Ainhoa Rodríguez

BIG SCREEN Competition

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

Aristocrats (Japan) international premiere
Dir. Sode Yukiko

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

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

Carro Rei (Brazil) world premiere
Dir. Renata Pinheiro

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

Drifting (Hong Kong) world premiere
Dir. Li Jun

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

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

Lone Wolf (Australia) world premiere
Dir. Jonathan Ogilvie

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

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

Sexual Drive (Japan) world premiere
Dir. Yoshida Kota

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

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

Limelight (World Premieres)

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

Mitra (Netherlands) world premiere
Dir. Kaweh Modiri

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

Masque of the Red Death (1964) Tribute to Roger Corman

Dir: Roger Corman | Vincent Price, Hazel Court, Jane Asher, Nigel Green, Patrick Magee | Horror, US 89′

The Masque of the Red Death is the seventh in the series of Roger Corman/Edgar Allan Poe adaptations produced by AIP in the 1960s. These visually handsome films were praised for an integrity of tone, laced with dark humour; and a careful – though not over-reverential – respect for the period horror genre.

Atmospheric widescreen colour sets and costumes complimented intelligent scripts and sensitive direction. Of course, there were earlier Poe films yet it was only with the Corman features that we experience a remarkable grandeur faithful to the tone of Poe’s writings, which greatly appealed to critics and audiences.

For his ninety minute version of The Masque of the Red Death Corman takes a sparse storyline and makes it rich in atmosphere. Charles Beaumont and R. Wright Campbell worked on a plausible treatment and also added material from Poe’s tale Hop-Frog. As with the earlier Corman film The Pit and the Pendulum (an even starker one prisoner/victim situation) further characters and sub-plots needed to be created.

Alongside the Masque’s hooded figure of the Red Death (often seen as a reference to Bergman’s death character in The Seventh Seal, those monks surfacing in Bunuel’s films and the callous Prince Prospero (malevolently performed by Vincent Price) we also have a selection of court people, dwarf actors and dancers. A rival villain is provided by Patrick Magee’s Alfredo, although Magee gets short shrift in this rather underwritten role, and would have fared better as Prospero, for he conveys much darker undercurrents of evil with his bitter cracked voice and cold stare.

It made sense to move out of the hermetic court and include some villagers. Those chosen are a virtuous peasant girl Francesca (Jane Asher, ideally pure but never sentimental), her lover and her father. The men are kept inside the dungeons while Francesca, against her will, has to join the company of the court. Francesca is probed by the Satan-worshiping Prospero. He sees her belief in Christianity as equalling his attachment to the powers of darkness. Like Prospero’s mistress Juliana (Hazel Court) the peasant girl is ideal for an apprenticeship with the Devil. A quasi-initiation scene, where Vincent Price leads Jane Asher through a series of highly-coloured rooms is fascinating. Like the doors in the legend of Bluebeard’s castle, a diabolic temptation is being presented to the curious, though resistant Francesca.

These new characters are perfectly serviceable although The Masque of the Red Death tends to make them secondary to the sheer beauty of the film. And although the cast do their best, the photography, set design and costumes create an even stronger note, adding to the visual allure of the picture. Of all the Corman/Poe outings Masque is the most opulent, containing some of the most magnificent colour photography to be found in the genre (perhaps only the colour filtering and lighting in the restored Mario Bava, Kill Baby, Kill achieves a Gothic intensity equal to The Masque of the Red Death).

Nicholas Roeg won a BAFTA for his terrific work. His seductive photography is not just skin deep, it offers brilliant texture that lights up the horrible cold decadence of Prospero’s rooms, divorced from reality, and the misty presence of the village – not forgetting the hill and tree where the ominous figure of death lays out his tarot cards. Dan Haller’s set design is remarkable (they are re-used and re-decorated sets left over from the film Beckett) and so are the costumes supervised by Laura Nightingale.

Corman reportedly gave his cameraman a lighting “theme” and said that ‘Nic lit everything really very beautifully.’ So where does that leave Corman’s direction in this intense artefact? Well he directs with a fluid and elegant touch that glides you through the film. None of the performances seem obviously grand guignol. They’re very natural. And given Vincent Price’s tendency to sometimes be hammy, his Prince Prospero is as restrained as his Mathew Hopkins in Witchfinder General.

There’s a sense that Corman trusted his actors to deliver. However The Masque of the Red Death’s danse macabre scene slightly disappoints and is somewhat underwhelming. There’s a feeling of it not being adequately choreographed. Roger Corman has said he thought this sequence was a failure and he’d wished he’d had more filming time. It lacks a sense of pain and ritual, a dress rehearsal for everybody’s dreadful fate rather than the real thing.

This new blu ray comes uncut – so the flesh branding scene and Julia’s satanic hallucinations are intact. And the quality of this restoration does justice to its production values. My personal best of the Poe films still remains The Tomb of Ligiea but The Masque of the Red Death and The Fall of the House of Usher are not far behind.

According to the opening lines of Poe’s short story: “The “Red Death’ had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal – the redness and the horror of blood.” The partnership of Roger Corman and Nicholas Roeg gave such glorious style to this allegory, and combined with ideal casting they achieved a heightened realism to communicate the tale’s poetically despairing descriptions of both a very real, and at the same time, dream-like plague. It’s a classic horror film that’s splendidly stood the test of time. ©ALAN PRICE 2020

Le Trou (1960) **** Prime video

Dir: Jacques Becker | Michel Constantin, Jean Keraudy, Philippe Leroy, Raymond Meunier, Marc Michel | French Thriller 131′

It was bold indeed of Jacques Becker to make another prison escape film so soon after Robert Bresson had created the genre’s masterpiece, Un condamné à mort s’est échappé (1956); but the gamble paid off handsomely.

Based on a book by Jose Giovanni and adapted by the writer, along with Becker and Romanian-born Jean Aurel, the plot is simple: four long-serving inmates planning an elaborate escape cautiously induct fresh blood into their scheme in the shape of a short-term detainee from another cell-block. Will he have the same commitment in his desire to escape?.

Like Robert Rossen’s Lilith (1964), La Trou seen in isolation looks more like the debut of an exciting new talent than the valediction of a veteran in his fifties about to be taken before his time. Released shortly after Becker had died of a heart attack aged just 53, when confronted with such a fresh and modern-looking piece of filmmaking one is vexed by the question of where Becker would have gone next, which we shall never know.

The film remains unusual for its lack of a music score (composer Philippe Arthuys, significantly, is actually credited at the end with ‘Illustration sonore’), and I can even forgive this film for setting a deplorable precedent by being possibly the first to have no credits at the start; they all come at the end, to the accompaniment of a simple piano arrangement of Rubinstein’s ‘Melody in F’ which may have been intended as discrete mockery on Becker’s part of the grandiose use of Mozart’s ‘Mass in C Minor’ at the conclusion of Bresson’s film. DoP Ghislain Cloquet (who was married to Becker’s script-editor daughter, Sophie) achieves tremendous rhythm with his kinetic black and white camerawork despite the claustrophobic and squalid prison confines. Jean Keraudy, a veteran of the original escape, segues smoothly into the uniformly excellent cast; while among the staff, Jean-Paul Coquelin has a beguiling air of dry good humour in his scenes as the cell block lieutenant. Richard Chatten

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

Birdman (2014) **** MUBI

Dir: Alejandro González Iñárritu | Wri: Alejandro González Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Jr., Armando Bo | Cast: Michael Keaton, Zach Galifianakis, Edward Norton, Andrea Riseborough, Amy Ryan, Emma Stone, Naomi Watts | Comedy/Drama, US 119mins

After Gravity comes Birdman, a breathless, funny, sad, esoteric meta-cinematical work that equals the former’s visual feat, but also an about-turn by director Alejandro González Iñárritu, the likes of which has rarely been seen. A return to the limelight comes in Michael Keaton’s great performance as Riggan Thompson, a former star of the superhero Birdman franchise, whose career has faltered into wilderness (comparison to Keaton’s real life are very much intended). He wants to stage a comeback on Broadway to direct and star in his own adaptation of a Raymond Carver short story. But it’s not plain sailing, even for a movie star, as he has to deal with ego-maniacal co-stars, a druggie daughter and disastrous previews. Oh, and he’s haunted by the voice of his Birdman character, and believes he can move things with his mind.

But that doesn’t begin to explain what watching the film is like. Directed to look like one continuous shot alongside Antonio Sánchez’s glorious free jazz score, but set over several weeks (following tricks out of Hitchcock’s Rope, it’s somewhere between the technical mastery of Russian Ark (2002) and the themes and styling of Synecdoche, New York (2008)– but in fact it looks almost like something that’s rarely been seen before. It’s far from Iñárritu’s previous works, which were grim, expansive world-is-connected films, shot with shaky steadycams and quick editing like Amores Perros (2000) and Babel (2006). And what a successful volte-face.

Much of the thanks should go to cinematographer Emmanuel Lubeski, whose redefined 3D in Gravity last year to critics who dismissed stereoscopy as dead on arrival, creating long, dazzling steadycam takes. The first shot is a levitating Michael Keaton, and there are some magic moments – Keaton walking through Times Square in his Y-fronts is just one of many highlights. But perhaps the style’s greatest feature is simplicity, how after a big moment – an argument, a fight, for instance – the film doesn’t cut, change scene, but we find out that rarest of things: what happens in those moments next.

The cast are dynamite together with Edward Norton, Naomi Watts and Zack Galifianakis on top form alongside Emma Stone as Riggan’s dagughter, who delivers a zeitgeisty rant about how Riggan’s play is of little importance in the modern world compared to the 350,000 YouTube visitors that have seen her father in just his underpants. In a way it’s not dissimilar in tone to Truffaut’s Day for Night, also about a dysfunctional troupe of directors and actors. But while that’s about a film set, it struck me how much Birdman is actually one of the great films about the stage, where Broadway’s St James Theatre is as much a character as the players and which reflects the theatre in the film’s very composition – no cuts is, well, like theatre.

It’s also a searing satire of ego-centric thesps, Hollywood and of popular culture, where top actors have been downgraded and are now hired in Hollywood only for superhero flicks (Michael Fassbender and Jeremy Renner are roll called). But also it credibly shows the foolhardiness of putting faith in dreams and the pitfalls of grand artistic pretensions – a hole into which Iñárritu himself fell in the past. Riggan says he went into acting because Raymond Carver gave him a personal note with a good review as a youngster, but, as we soon discover, it was on a bar napkin, meaning the author was presumably (as he often was) drunk. With the film’s subtitle “The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance“, would knowing that have made Riggan more or less happy, more or less willing to plunge into his art? Perhaps ignorance is bliss. The film went on to garner four Oscars, in the Academy Awards of 2015: for cinematography, directing, and screenplay, it also won Best Motion Picture of the Year. Ed Frankyl.

NOW ON MUBI | BIRDMAN PREMIERED AT VENICE 2014 | DVD BLU-RAY IS NOW AVAILABLE

The Parallel Street (1962) **** Mubi

Dir: Ferdinand Khittl | Wri: Blodo Bluthner | Germany/Czechia, Doc 82′

The limited number of people who have seen Peter Greenaway’s The Falls (1980) – extravagant fiction structured as a documentary – will experience a sense of déjà vu watching Die Parallelstrasse, which may – repeat may – be an ethnographic documentary structured as fantasy.

Not for the feint-hearted, The Parallel Street is one of the most enigmatic experimental films of the New German Cinema, produced by GBF, and dealing with subjectivity and objectivity in the medium.

We are addressed at the outset by the minute-taker (Friedrich Joloff) on the third and final night of some sort of symposium shot in jagged black-&-black that recalls the silent films of Fritz Lang (and the behind the camera footage of Clouzot & Picasso in Le Mystère Picasso), for which those under examination have been enjoined to hand in their watches and to submit to various forms of classroom discipline; a process of which he informs us that the final upcoming 90 minutes will be the last in the lives of those on the panel. We are also informed that this process is an endlessly recurring one in which the minute-taker sadly looks on in apparent resignation as panel after panel meander their way through the material in the limited time available; forever missing the fact (staring them in the face) that the files in front of them actually refer to themselves. The committee resembles a ship heading for the rocks while the crew debate the course to take: an appropriate analogy, as much of the documentary footage depicts ships and the sea.

It seemed to me some sort of allegory of the brevity of human existence, and of peoples’ dithering preventing them from resolving their lives in the tragically limited time available to them. The meat of the film – literally in the case of File 269, which includes extensive footage shot in a slaughterhouse – consists of colour travel footage shot by director Ferdinand Khittl and his cameraman Ronald Martini during two extensive expeditions around the world in 1959 and 1960; framed by what may be some sort of celestial inquisition like the one in Outward Bound (1930).

The documentary sequences (perhaps deliberately) are as difficult for the viewer to assimilate in one sitting – especially if you don’t speak German and are trying to follow the subtitles – as the panellists are evidently finding it, because the exotic imagery and the density of the minute-taker’s commentary are throughout simultaneously competing with each other for your comprehension. Plainly a film that calls for repeated viewings. Unless it isn’t. Richard Chatten.

NOW ON MUBI

Sing me a Song (2020) ****

Dir.: Thomas Balmès; Documentary with Peyangki, Ugyen Pelden, Pemba Dorji; France/Germany/Switzerland 2019,101 min.

In a follow-up to an earlier documentary, French director Thomas Balmes returns to a village in Bhutan to explore the impact of modern technology on a once-sheltered society.

Ten years ago French director/DoP/producer Thomas Balmès had visited the remote village of Laya at the foot of the Himalayas. Electricity was coming to the village, and everyone was excited, including eight-year old Peyangki, a monk, who became the star of Happiness. Ten years later, Balmès returned to Laya for Sing Me a Song, probing what TV and internet had done to the village, and Peyangki in particular.

We start with footage from Happiness, with Peyangki frolicking in the fields and looking forward to the electrification of the village but, at the same time, being adamant it would not interfere with his religious study in the monastery. We cut to the classroom of today and see all the monks, including Peyangki, emerged in prayers – but when the camera pans out again they are all stuck into their mobiles, the chanting just enough to cover the din of the devices.

Peyangki, who has now found an admirer in Pemba Dorji, a young monk about the same age as Peyangki was in Happiness, is “moving away from Buddha”. Like his fellow monks he is sold on the internet, particularly WeChat, which opens their world to female companionship. When visiting the local market, the young men find a basket with plastic weapons and start a hilarious war game, with firecrackers replacing life ammunition.

Sadly neither Peyangki’s teacher, not his mother can stop the young man from leaving the monastery for the capital Thimpu where his ‘girlfriend’ Ugyen Pelden is pictured singing with three other young females in a bar. Peyangki has made enough money by selling medical mushrooms (which he has harvested with his sister) to start a new life with Ugyen, who – unknown to the monk – already has a baby daughter from a previous marriage, and plans to emigrate to Kuwait, leaving her daughter behind.

Peyangki is taken back by all this, and Pemba, who has been sent by his teacher to convince his older friend to return to the monastery, is forced to return home alone. Peyangki is consoled by one of the other singers who fills him with positive thoughts, but for Peyangki the world has come to an end

The message of this delightfully poignant coming of age story is clear: devices which help us to connect, can easily tear us apart and destroy our sense of self and alter our identity. Peyangki feels obligated to join modern and his nativity leaves him unprepared for the Pandora’s box, and is unable to rediscover his innocence. The reaction of his fellow monks, their easy way of dealing with consumer goods as well as armed conflicts, show the regressive nature of the online world, where everything is levelled out to mean more or less nothing. For Peyangki, who had once been called the “re-incarnation of a Lama”, the choice is clear: the safety of isolation or the unstructured life of an empty gratification in a world where everything is replaceable at a moments notice, including the people closest to you.

Happiness won a cinematography award at Sundance. The results of this return odyssey are less positive although equally beautiful in their visual allure, the immaculate scenes in the monastery contrasting starkly with the hustle and bustle of the urban environment. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s One World International Human Rights Doc Film Festival. AS

On Demand from 1 January 2021

Rain (2020) Tallinn Black Nights Festival

Dir/Wri: Janno Jurgens | Cast: Aleksi Beijajev, Marcus Borkmann, Meelo Eliisabet Kriisa, Laine Magi, Indrek Ojari, Magdalena Poplawska | Estonia, Drama

Hanging on in quiet desperation is the Estonian Way….

In his astonishing first film that premiered at Tallinn Black Nights, Janno Jurgens opts for a quirky dark comedy approach to exploring complex male dynamics in the wide open lushness of a rainswept Estonian backwater in summer and through to an icebound wintertime. This is essentially a love/hate buddy movie that derives tremendous energy from its widescreen settings, and DoP Erik Pollumaa creates a great sense of place, breathing life into the intense domestic scenes which are imaginative, limpid and gracefully framed despite the quiet hopelessness they often portray.

Taking a freewheeling approach to the storyline Jurgens observes his – largely monosyllabic – family members as they gradually develop, getting to know one another again in a film that relies on its potent atmosphere, wide-screen spaces and breezy occasional score – rather than dialogue- to lead us into an engaging study of masculinity seen from the perspective of a thoughtful pre-teen boy who seems the most mature and grounded of his male family members, possessing a gentle serenity and self-possession despite his tender years. 12 year old Ats (an impressive debut for Borkmann) lives with his morose and conservative ageing father and willowy blond mother Merlin (Kriisa is a dead ringer for Kati Outinnen). His much older brother Rain (Ojari) has finally come home, as a last resort, after wandering around and presumably failing to find a workable life of his own. Although he’s clearly a bog-standard loser, he seems to exert a strange fascination for Ats, although his days are spent mooning aimlessly around until the arrival of Aleksandra (Poplawska) gives him a sense of gravitas. Meanwhile Merlin also has a secret up her sleeve. Jurgens clearly sees his female characters as liberated, stabilising influences over their rather brutish male counterparts. And Ats is clearly learning fast while remaining bemused at some of the bizarre adult behaviour he has to countenance: a violent tiff between his father and brother, and overt sexual signals from his friend’s older sister.

In this quiet corner of Estonia society is clearly changing and there is a clear sense of woe and a confusion for these men who are making an uneasy transition from the gilded past, where they were more cognisant and comfortable with their roles, and an uncertain future. But there are often moments of sublime happiness t00, such as Rain’s drive along the beach promenade with Aleksandra, and Merlin’s dance in the factory.

Rain continues to be at odds with his father, but Ats finds his elder brother an inspiring role model as he ponders the mysteries of becoming a man himself, experiencing that love can be transformative for the male psyche. This is a quirky and memorable drama that gets an emotional kick from its silent sequences and introspective characters given considerable depth by a strong and sensitive cast showing how men often struggle with complex emotions they can’t always express. MT

RAIN | TALLINN BLACK NIGHTS 2020

Dinner for One (1963)

Dir: Heinz Dunkhase, Franco Marazzi | Cast: Freddie Frinton, May Warden,

As we bid a less than fond farewell to 2020, families throughout the German-speaking world and Scandinavia will be gathering around their TV sets to enjoy butler Freddie Frinton getting progressively more sozzled in this 18 minute record of an old music hall sketch by Laurie Wylie and recorded in Hamburg by the German Station NDR on 8 July 1963; which has been regularly screened on German TV every New Year’s Eve since 1972.

Ironically nobody in Britain under the age of sixty has probably ever even heard of Freddie Frinton (1919-1968), while those old enough probably recall him co-starring with Thora Hird in the popular TV sitcom ‘Meet the Wife’. None would be more surprised than Frinton himself that more than half a century after his death he’s a household name in Germany, and the enquiry “The same procedure as last year?” (in English) is considered a thigh-slapper.

Even though performed in English and available for over twenty years in a colourised version it took nearly fifty years finally to be broadcast in Britain on Grimsby’s local channel Estuary TV in 2017. If you didn’t see this article until the New Year (like I did when The Guardian thoughtfully first wrote about it about in the edition of 1 January 1998), don’t worry. It’s now on YouTube! Richard Chatten.

NOW ON YOUTUBE

The Last Ones (2020) Tallinn Black Nights 2020

Dir. Veiko Ounpuu. Estonia, Finland. 2020. 117 mins

The vast wastelands of Lapland are the setting for this tortured tale of limited opportunities for those fighting to survive an uncertain future. Traditionally, mining and reindeer herding offered a reasonable living for men like Rupi (Paaru Oja) and his reindeer-herder father, who occupy their own land. But with resources dwindling mining-wise, the county has issued a contract for forced possession and Rupi’s father is resisting the change at all costs. Rupi is also trapped by his love for the vivacious Riita (Laura Birn) who is married to his Goth friend Lievonen (Back), and has also caught the eye of the mine’s ruthless boss Kari (Tomi Korpela) whose only interest is shoring up his faltering business – which requires him to dig deeper and deeper, quite literally – and keep his staff on the job offering hard drugs as a pacifying incentive to keep on keeping on.

Although the drama loses some of its captivating power by the final stages The Last One succeeds in conjuring up the bleakness and strange beauty of this Northern European country and its pioneering hard-bitten people. Veiko Ounpuu’s ‘Eastern Western’ is Estonia’s Oscar hopeful for Best International feature in the 93rd Academy Awards.

Rupi (Paaru Oja) also deals drugs on the quiet, and Kari is his biggest customer. After a gruelling day the workers kick back in booze-soaked evenings of dancing and carousing where the bibulous chain-smoking Riita is the toast of the town sharing her good humour with all the men on the dancefloor, including Kari, who is intoxicated by her blonde looks, and able to provide the luxuries she only dreams of, stuck with her trailer trash partner LIevonen. But as tensions come to a head between the men, so the narrative spins out of control.

Despite its tonal unevenness The Last Ones works well as an exploration of a community in crisis, the fraught human interactions interweaving with serene sequences of barren tundra landscapes captured in Sten-Johan Lill’s widescreen visuals. Music plays a vital part too, with a 1970s retro feel echoing the lost horizons of these desperate grifters whose lives revolve around survival as they cling to the past. Eventually tragedy is the only outcome for some and this plays out appropriately to the sounds of the Byrd’s Lay Lady Lay, adding further grist to the Nashvillian feel of the piece as these last swingers in town fight to make sense of a future that surely must beckon somewhere in the wilderness, if they can only move on. MT

TALLIN BLACK NIGHTS PREMIERE | ACADEMY AWARDS 2021 Estonia

Meet our contributors at FILMUFORIA

ANDRÉ SIMONOVIESZ

Our ‘Eastern European’ correspondent, André Simonoviescz has over thirty year’s experience as a film critic in a variety of film and entertainment media outlets. He has covered the Berlinale for Hollywood Reporter and written for Berlin-based entertainment publications: HOBO and TIP. During the nineties he was co-editor of the bi-lingual film magazine FILM UND FERNSEHEN and from 2000 until recently, he was film critic at the German daily: Märkische Oderzeitung. He has broadcast as a film critic for RIAS (Broadcasting for the American Sector) in Berlin, and Radio Brandenburg.

ALEX BARRETT

is an independent filmmaker and freelance journalist. His films collectively have been screened at over 60 international festivals and garnered ten awards. His debut feature, LIFE JUST IS, was released in December 2012, after being nominated for the Michael Powell Award for Best British Film at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. His silent documentary entitled LONDON SYMPHONY (2017) was nominated for the Michael Powell Award for Best British Feature Film, and he is currently working on Their Trip to Europe and Sounds Like London. www.alexbarrett.net.

RICHARD CHATTEN

Richard Chatten has written for The Independent, the International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, The Encyclopedia of British Film, The Journal of Popular British Cinema and Cinema: The Whole Story. His favourite film is A Matter of Life and Death (1946).

STEFAN PAPE

Stefan Pape is a film critic and interviewer who spends most of his time in dark rooms, sipping on filter coffee and becoming perilously embroiled in the lives of others. He adores the work of Billy Wilder and Woody Allen, and won’t have a bad word said against Paul Giamatti. His great uncle coined the phrase ‘kitchen sink drama’, but he doesn’t like to go on about it.

MATTHEW TURNER

Matthew Turner (@FilmFan1971) is a freelance film journalist who has written for Empire, Total Film, Hotdog, Metro, The Big Issue and others, as well as spending fourteen years as the weekly film reviewer for ViewLondon. A lifelong film obsessive, he sees around 500 films a year and his favourite film is VERTIGO. He has also not missed an episode of EastEnders since 1998.

MICHAEL PATTISON

Michael Pattison (@m_pattison) is a Gateshead-based film critic whose work has been published by Sight & Sound, Film Comment, Cineaste, Slant Magazine, Senses of Cinema others. He has a regular column at Keyframe Daily and is a programming consultant for a number of international film festivals. In addition to all this, he reports on the more niche European film festivals such as indielisboa; CROSSING EUROPE; Kino Otok; FIDMarseille amongst others. His film debut

ALAN PRICE

Alan Price was born in Liverpool and now lives in Camden, London. He is an ex-librarian, poet, scriptwriter, short story writer, book reviewer for the online Magonia and blogger at alanprice69.wordpress.com Two stories were broadcast on Radio 3 and published, with others, in his 1999 collection The Other Side of the Mirror (Citron Press). A TV film

A Box of Swan was broadcast on BBC 2 in 1980. He has scripted five short films. The last one Pack of Pain (2010) won four international film festival awards. Alan’s debut collection of poetry Outfoxing Hyenas was published by Indigo Dreams in 2012. His pamphlet of prose poems Angels at the Edge (Tuba Press) appeared in 2016. The chapbook, Mahler’s Hut came out in 2017. His new collection, Wardrobe Blues for a Japanese Lady will be published by The High Window in the Spring of 2018. Alan has been passionate about cinema since the age of 5!

ED FRANKL

Ed Frankl (@Ed_Frankl) is a freelance journalist who has been published in the Evening Standard and the Independent. He fell in love with film journalism at the 2012 Venice Film Festival and has never looked back, even after he had to review Transformers 4 at a matinee screening in Slough. He commits occasional crimes against cinema by reviewing theatre for The Stage, and is a sub-editor at the Guardian. His favourite film is Kieślowski’s Three Colours Trilogy, but that doesn’t entirely mean he understands it. His personal blog is edfrankl.com

LINDA MARRIC

Linda Marric (@Linda_Marric) is a freelance film journalist and interviewer. She has written extensively about film and TV for The London Economic, HeyUGuys, FilmLand Empire, Dmovies.com and her own film blog screenwords.co.uk. After graduating with a degree in Film Studies from King’s College London, she has worked in post-production on a number of film projects and had a short stint working at the BFI London Film Festival. She has a huge passion for intelligent Scifi movies (think Phillip K Dick adaptations). Her favourite movie of all time is still Terry Gilliam’s BRAZIL almost 30 years after watching it for the first time.

Contact us at filmuforia@gmail.com

Peeping Tom (1960)

Dir: Michael Powell | Leo Marks | Cast: Anna Massey, Karlheinz Bohm, Moira Shearer, Maxine Audley | Brenda Bruce, Miles Malleson | UK Horror, 101′

Raymond Durgnat later observed that this glossy colour thriller made Free Cinema’s brand of realism look like “expurgated Enid Blyton”. It’s casual acceptance of prostitution and pornography as parts of everyday life (not to mention that we hear someone else’s bath running in the background in one sequence) must have made it an uncomfortable experience for the few people in 1960 who saw it; as it remains today. Hopefully it didn’t reach Manchester, where it would have given Ian Brady ideas.

Based on a story by London-born writer and actor Leo Marks, Peeping Tom centres on a filmmaker and serial killer (Karlheinz Bohm) who records his victims’ dying expressions of terror on a movie camera. Unaware of their content, his neighbour Helen (Massey) becomes fascinated by these documentaries and secretly decides to watch them.

The stunning opening sequence with Brenda Bruce is described by David Pirie in ‘A Heritage of Horror’ as “one of the few genuinely Brechtian moments in the history of the cinema. Every component – the reduced frame, the clicking of the camera motor, the whirr of the tape recorder (sic) and the clumsiness of the camera technique – is designed to enforce our awareness that we are watching a film.” But am I the only person in sixty years to have noticed that we also see the shadow pass over Ms Bruce of what is obviously TWO people, one with the camera mounted on their shoulder (not hidden under their duffle coat as per the plot)? This moment is seen twice since it’s repeated when we then see the film projected. Every time I see the film I hope this goof won’t still be there; but it always is. Richard Chatten.

BACK IN UK CINEMAS FROM 27 October 2027

Dead of Night (1945)

Dir: Alberto Cavalcanti, Basil Dearden, Robert Hamer, Charles Crichton | Cast: Mervyn Johns, Michael Redgrave, Roland Culver, Google Withers, Mary Merrall, Frederick Valk | UK Horror 113′

The biggest mystery connected with Dead of Night is why the studio never made another film like it (Basil Dearden had recently made the literally haunting wartime fantasy The Halfway House; but apart from the multi-story film Train of Events and the spooky anecdote The Night My Number Came Up that was it).

Made by Ealing Studios with individual segments directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden and Robert Hamer, the drama centres on architect Walter Craig (Johns) who has arrived at a country house party in Kent to offer the owner, Elliot Foley (Culver), renovation advice. Craig soon realises he has seen the guests in a recurring dream despite never having met any of them, and senses impending doom as his half-remembered recurring nightmare turns to reality. The guests encourage him to stay as they take turns telling their own supernatural tales.

My personal favourite episode is Robert Hamer’s The Haunted Mirror (I found myself avoiding mirrors for a while after my mother died in case I saw her in them); while Hitchcock plainly lifted the final close-up of Michael Redgrave that concludes the ventriloquist’s dummy episode for the end of Psycho.

Unlike most commentators I rather like the episode about the golfers; especially as it’s always a pleasure to see Basil Radford and Naughton Wayne whatever they’re in. I agree however with Carlos Clarens, who dismissed the ‘official’ ending as “a final farandole which mixed all the stories together”; but consider the repetition of the opening sequence under the closing credits inspired. Since Walter Craig states earlier on that he’s never told anybody else about his dream, the seldom remarked upon comment by his wife that closes the film (underscored by Craig’s disconcertingly slowed-down reaction shot as he draws on a cigarette) gives the lie to that claim, and more than forty years after I first saw it I still haven’t figured out what it’s implications are…©Richard Chatten

NOW ON TALKING PICTURES TV and PRIME VIDEO

No Man is an Island (1962) ****

Dir: Richard Goldstone, John Monks Jr. | Jeffrey Hunter, Barbara Perez, Marshall Thompson, Ronald Remy, Amparo Custodio, Paul Edwards Jr. | US Action drama, 116′

No Man is an Island (aka Island Escape) is based on the 1945 memoir ‘Robinson Crusoe, USN’ by George Ray Tweed (1902-1989), who evaded capture by the Japanese for more than two and a half years after the Japanese invasion of Guam in 1941.

Nearly two hours in length, this Universal release handsomely lensed in colour and scope by Carl Kayser and back in Hollywood edited by veteran cutter Basil Wrangell is considerably more ambitious than the other cheap war movies shot in the Philippines during the early Sixties; with Hollywood star Jeffrey Hunter again finding himself alone on an island dodging enemy bullets just nine years after finding himself in the same situation in the Boulting Brothers’ Singlehanded.

The title quoting John Donne – along with a lead actor who had just played Christ – had made me expect something preachier; but apart from a scene with a local priest there’s actually surprisingly little God talk (maybe there was more in Tweed’s original book). The situation was played for laughs in Heaven Know, Mr Allison! (from which footage reappears) and Father Goose; while the ending recalls Brigadoon. But here – despite one character treading barefoot on a scorpion and others bleeding to death, being decapitated and stripped down to a skeleton by crabs – the treatment is more like a soap opera, with a pet chicken cutely named ‘Admiral Halsey’ and a suitably romantic score by Restie Umali.

Although prominently billed second in the opening credits, Girl Friday Barbara Perez in fact gets a fraction of the screen time of ninth-billed Filipina comedienne Chichay (Mrs Nakamura) as a feisty Japanese-American saloon owner, to whose establishment the film keeps returning. Richard Chatten.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE and Amazon DVD

The Salt of the Earth (2014) **** Mubi

Dir: Juliano Ribeiro Salgado |Writer: Wim Wenders/Juliano Ribeiro Salgado | Doc Biography, 110′

This biopic of famous Brazilian photographer and philanthropist, Sabastiao Salgado, manages to be both illuminating and moving. Directed (and narrated) by Wim Wenders (pictured left at the Cannes premiere) and Salgado’s son Juliano, what starts as an harrowing and dramatic set of photographs from Africa and beyond, soon becomes a narrative with a truly inspiring and heart-warming conclusion, adding real weight to the story of this fascinating and creatively-driven man, now in his seventies.

From war zones in Ruanda and Bosnia to the deepest Amazon, the often shocking images show tremendous compassion, and a desire to connect with his subject-matter. As is often the case for the creatively committed, Salgado’s son Juliano received little attention as a child as the photographer travelled the World, while his wife Leilia, archived and published his works, setting up exhibitions from home and organising financing and funding. There are shades of the late Michael Glawogger to his searingly shocking images and a touch of the David Attenborough to his work with his animals. A peerless tribute to humanity and the animal kingdom. MT.

CÉSAR 2015 WINNER – BEST DOCUMENTARY | NOW ON MUBI

News of the World (2020) ***

Dir: Paul Greengrass| Cast: Tom Hanks, Elizabeth Marvel, Ray McKinnon, Helena Zengel | US Drama 114′

The American Civil War has come to a close and in Texas a virulent epidemic is sweeping through the panhandle. Tom Hanks and German newcomer Helena Zengel star as two lost souls drawn together in the aftermath of the tragedy, this once happened 150 years ago but Greengrass gives a contemporary feel with its migrant central characters.

Set on the wide open panoramas of the Southern desert yet intimate in its personal story of survival, the theme of storytelling is at the heart of this ambitious Western adventure, both for Greengrass and his lead, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd. The soldier has seen active service during the war but several years later has turned to ‘newscasting’ – making a crust out of telling spirited, often didactic stories that connect his audiences with the wider world. As he makes his way across the vast desert landscape, Hanks is believable and appealing as the strong and benign warrior.

Piqued with lively action sequences, News of the World is contemplative rather than swashbuckling but impressive nevertheless, wearing its burnished period detail on a war-torn sleeve, this is a well-mounted and poetic frontier adventure, and a departure from the director’s usual slick modern thrillers such as The Bourne Ultimatum and United 93.

Greengrass quickly establishes his statesman-like hero’s credentials in the opening scenes, a respectable horseman now down on his luck but making the best in his reduced circumstances, he still cuts dash spinning his newsy yarns with languorous dignity during long evenings in candlelit hostelries. One topical item relates to the opening of a new railway line from the Kansas border all the way to Galveston, that was the Pacific Railway’s first foray across Indian reservations.

Essentially a two-hander though with the occasional side-lining vignette, the slow-burning storyline carries a distinct whiff of cultural diversity, the Captain journeying through this lawless territory with a blond 10 year-old he meets while hitching up his waggon in the frontier town of Wichita Falls. And this relationship sets the reflective tone of their odyssey; he is mentor, protector and father-figure, a role Hanks pulls off with a respectable swagger, though the two lack a noticeable chemistry: Johanna is sullen, unreachable, but turns out to be a German orphan raised by a Native American tribe. Hanks finds himself tasked with relaying her to blood relatives in another part of Texas, against her will.

Writing with Bafta-award winner Luke Davies, Greengrass bases his script on Paulette Jiles’ 2016 bestseller that centres on two unlikely companions who gradually develop a mutual bond. Shooting took place in the magnificent scenery of New Mexico by Dariusz Wolski, his jerky intense handheld ‘urban’ scenes contrasting with the feral beauty of big desert countryside where the two encounter all kinds of surprises during their eventful escapade.

It soon emerges that Johanna is subject to some kind of kidnapping and is bound for San Antonio, so Kidd’s wings are clipped by the presence of the minor, who becomes his responsibility in the hostile terrain. The child has been let down by so many adults she proves unruly although vulnerable and lost in this turbulent country where settlers are at war with Native Indians and vice versa. And this milieu of conflict and danger provides a heady atmosphere to the couple’s journey. One episode sees their carriage involved in a terrible accident when the horse loses control over a mountainside. Another involves an ugly skirmish with some Confederate former soldiers (Covino, James and Lilley) who try to ‘buy’ the little girl, and have to be fended off. Johanna’s upbringing in Indian culture brings a spiritual and folkloric element to the Western adventure showing Hanks at his best in a gritty role of guardian for this tough but also thoughtful kid in a surprisingly lyrical piece of Americana. MT

NOW ON NETFLIX

Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) ***

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

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

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

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

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

Wonder Woman 1984 is now on release

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://youtu.be/PxSPu25xbQw

Ivana the Terrible (2019) Locarno

Dir.: Ivana Mladenovic; Cast: Ivanka Mladenovic, Gordana Mladenovic, Modrae Mladenovic, Kosta Mladenovic, Luca Gramic, Anca Pop, Andrei Dinescu; Serbia/Romania 2019, 86 min.

Director/co-writer Ivana Mkadenovic (Soldiers: Story from Ferentari) describes her latest, a fictional autobiography, or docu-fiction hybrid is very much in the vein of this year’s IDFA winner Radiograph of a Family although far more satirical in nature. The past and the present collide in Kladovo, Serbia, near the border to Romania, where Ivana also ‘stars’ as a histrionic millennial jilted by her Romanian lover and suffering the after-affects of PTSD. Her family, friends and former lovers play the other roles.

We first meet Ivana on a train going back home to Serbia for the summer, where we get to experience just how terrible she really is. Freed from her work commitments, she accepts the mayor’s invitation to become the face of a local music festival, and finds herself the latest citizen to be honoured with an award acknowledging the bond of friendship between Serbia and Romania. It just so happens that the Trajan (Friendship) Bridge over the Danube connecting Serbia and Romania, and where Tito and Ceausescu once famously met, is also in Kladovo, on the Serbian side, adding all sorts of bilateral connotations to the narrative, along with the generational conflicts.

Far from triumphant, Ivana’s return puts the cat amongst the pigeons on all front , escalated by her fragile state of mind. To make matters even worse (or somehow better, as it turns out), Ivana’s relationship with a much younger guy is soon the talk of the town (the general consensus being that she should settle down and start a family), but this gossip soon confers a kind of celebrity status on the petulant woman, her erratic behaviour becoming par for the course. Her behaviour certainly challenges social stereotypes in the traditional community. And the arrival of Ivana’s friend (portrayed by Romanian-Canadian singer-songwriter Anca Pop – to whose memory the film is dedicated) is a another game-changer, further enhancing her bad-girl status in the village, and there is much consternation among the old-fashioned local womenfolk when an offer to have their private parts form the basis of a local sculpture is not well-received, to say the least.

Eventually Ivana gets a lift with Anca and Andrei back to Bucharest, stopping on the way to listen to some poets reading on the Friendship bridge. Another dimension to this (un)happy merry-go-round comes in the shape of a story from the Second World War when over a thousand Jews came to Kladovo where they were to be escorted by boat to the safety of Palestine. But the ship never came, and the Jews lost their lives during the ensuing Nazi occupation of the town. MT

ARTEKINO | PREMIERED AT LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL

The Glass Cage (1964) ***

Dir: Antonio Santean | Wri: John Hoyt | Cast: Arlene Martel, John Hoyt, Elisha Cook Jr, Bob Kelljan, King Moody | Henry Darrow | US Thriller

Off-beat to put it mildly, this location-shot murder mystery and psycho-drama was co-written and co-produced by veteran actor John Hoyt, who saw to it that the tiny budget was well employed while enjoying himself as a seasoned cop working the mean streets of early Sixties L.A. It sees two detectives investigating the murder of a local businessman by a mysterious woman.

If you were working on a budget as low as this bizarre cross of William Castle and early Kubrick you could probably do pretty much what you wanted as long as you didn’t go over schedule, made sure there was film in the camera and didn’t upset the censor. Although not exactly good it’s certainly strange enough to linger in the memory and gives a juicy role to TV actress Arlene Martel (billed as ‘Arlene Sax’), best remembered for the very different role of Spock’s Vulcan bride T’Pring in the classic Star Trek episode ‘Amok Time’. The film’s biggest liability is actually a noisy music score.

Slight spoil alert: It also has the bonus of Elisha Cook as the heroine’s father; although despite being billed fourth he appears so fleetingly it feels as it he was just visiting the set while they were filming and offered a walk on (or – since he walks with a stick – a hobble on). We’re told he’s an evangelist but sadly don’t see him in the pulpit. Richard Chatten.

Athlete A (2020) **** Netflix

Dir.: Bonni Cohen, Jon Shenk | With Maggie Nichols, Rachael Denhollander, Jessia Howard, Jamie Dantzsher; US Doc 2020, 104 min.

Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk (Audrey&Daisy) get behind the camera for this worthwhile documentary that chronicles the ongoing sexual abuse of members of the USA Gymnastic team. The person responsible was none other that their trusted team physician Dr. Larry Nassar, who got a custodial sentence of 121 years in 2017 for molesting over a hundred young women. The feature is shot from the perspective of the investigating journalists of the Indianapolis Star, whose efforts are the basis for this documentary.

But the inquiry also uncovered complaints against 54 coaches were made during a course of many years. The President and CEO of USA Gymnastics , Steve Penny (who resigned and awaits trial), helped to cover up the abuses – and he was not alone. But if there is one weak point of the documentary, it pins the entire blame on Penny as the evil mastermind – in reality the whole organisation has to take the rap for the systemic abuse.

The account of survivors make heart-breaking listening: there is Maggie Nichols (the titular Athlete A, named so after her complaint which was followed by blackballing her); Rachael Denhollander; Jamie Dantzscher and Jessica Howard, their stories telling not only the actual abuse but the cover-up which went on for over a decade. Dantzscher states she was so proud of being an Olympian, but after Nassar abused her during the games in 2000, she associated the Olympics with this vestige of shame.

But this is also a story of the Cold War: Until the end of Stalinism in 1989, gymnasts from the Warsaw pact countries had dominated the sport. In 1981, Bela and Marta Karolyi, Hungarian-born coaches of the Romanian national gymnastic team (along with their choreographer Geza Poszar) defected to the USA. They had been responsible for the success of Nadia Comaneci among others. The Karolyis installed themselves in a training facility near Huntsville, Texas, which closed in 2018. They have both been sued for being part of the Nassar cover-up. There is a clip in Athlete A, with Marta Karolyi (who retired in 2016) admitting her awareness of Nassar’s abuse at the “Ranch”. Poszar admitted the method of working with the young athletes “was total control over the girls.” Coaches, not only the Karolyis, abused the gymnasts verbally, emotionally and physically: they were slapped, and told that they were fat.

The norm for female gymnasts was to be 5.4 feet and anorexic. Poszar also claimed these method were acceptable in Romania – and obviously in the USA too. The gymnasts in the Huntsville were isolated, parents were not allowed to visit, the gymnasts were forbidden to phone friends or relatives outside the facilities. Former USA National Team gymnast Jennifer Sey (one of he co-producers of the feature), author of “Chalked Up” talked about merciless coaching, overzealous parents, eating disorders and above all, the dream of Olympic Gold. The line between coaching and abuse gets blurred, Athletes were often forced to compete in spite of serious injuries. We watch Kerri Strug winning a Gold Medal at the 1996 Olympics despite a severe ankle injury. But medals meant good business for the USA Team and their CEO Steve Perry.

Perhaps the most saddening statement comes from one of the victims: “Dr. Nassar was the nicest grown-up in the camp”. This most damning sentence calls for a complete reassessment of the next gymnastic competition in the sporting calendar. Shot with a lively camera by Jon Shenk, Athlete A is another eye-opener: the perverted drive for Olympic medals, reducing young women to “little girls” to be objectified and abused, is just another example of the male gaze and its horrifying consequences, finally emerging after decades of cover-ups. AS

WINNER OF THE US CRITICS AWARD 2020 | coming to NETLIX

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

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

“Take Me to Him, My Black Pimp!”

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

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

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

ON PRIME VIDEO

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sadist (1963) *** Prime Video

Dir/Wri: James Landis | Cast: Arch Hall Jr, Richard Alden, Marilyn Manning, Don Russell, Helen Horvey | US Horror 92′

The ingenuity applied by Samuel Colt to developing his first revolver in 1835 is once again abused when one of its descendants finds a way into the clammy little mitts of grimacing psychotic Arch Hall Jr.; automatically transforming him into the person who gives orders instead of taking them. (Unlike dashing young Martin Sheen in Terrence Malick’s Badlands ten years later, sneering, monobrowed Hall actually resembles the original spree killer Carl Starkweather upon whom both films are loosely based).

An innocent trip to Los Angeles for a Dodgers Game ends in a terrifying nightmare for three naive teachers who encountering car trouble, pull into an old wrecking yard where they are held at bay by a bloodthirsty psycho and his girl friend. The lunatic is none other than Hall’s Charlie Tibbs, (loosely based on serial killer Charles Starkweather), and his girlfriend Judy (Manning). Accompanied by a seething score the ensuing ordeal is a slow-burn trip to Hell that is slim on plot but fraught with atmosphere and nuanced performances – particularly from Hall – his goofy appearance adding a twist of dissonance to the unfolding terror.

Following in a long tradition that dates back at least as far as the hostage-taking drama The Petrified Forest, this nihilistic little exploitation film made in black & white for just $33,000 in two weeks, was ironically the first American feature film shot by Hungarian-born cameraman Vilmos Zsigmond (billed as ‘William’) who was later behind the camera in Deliverance, with which it has more in common than Malick’s dream-like fantasy. Richard Chatten.

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

A Shot in the Dark (1964)

Dir: Blake Edwards | Wri: Blake Edwards, Harry Kurnitz, Marcel Achard | Cast: Peter Sellers, Britt Ekland, George Sanders, Herbert Lom, Tracey Reed | US Comedy, 102′

At work most of my colleagues only vaguely knew who Peter Sellers was; usually responding with the faintest glimmer of recognition when I said he played Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther films. That A Shot in the Dark – filmed before The Pink Panther had even been released – was the only one starring Sellers not to have ‘Pink Panther’ in the title – it’s actually based on a 1960 farce by Marcel Achard called ‘L’Idiote’ which was a big hit on Broadway the following year with a young William Shatner in the role that became Inspector Clouseau – gives a clue as to why it’s so much funnier than the series that came much later.

The film’s long and tortuous production – the plug had already been pulled on an initial film version directed in 1962 by Anatole Litvak; while pre-release tinkering is evident from two editors being named in the credits and the brevity of the roles of well-known actors like Ann Lynn and Moira Redmond in the film itself – and the fact that Edwards swore (after it wrapped) that he would never work with Sellers again, would evidently make a fascinating book in it’s own right; and the two only reluctantly worked together again after both were starved into burying the hatchet after a long run of flops during the intervening ten years.

As for the film itself, the virtuoso pre-credits sequence outside the Ballon house demonstrates what a class act Edwards was in those days; while it has a script literate enough for George Sanders to invoke ‘Macbeth’. (The dancer, shown in close-up commenting in Spanish on her partner’s dancing in the flamenco club, is informing him that he is unique). And the scene in the car stuck in Parisian rush-hour traffic is more literally like a nightmare than anything even Hitchcock ever devised. Andrew Sarris approvingly observed that it “lurches from improbability to improbability without losing its comic balance”.

Both George Sanders and Herbert Lom (of course) are hilarious, the latter later becoming the real star of the series; and all the way down the cast list Sellers is surrounded by first-rate talent, all like Sellers himself (and later series regulars like Andre Maranne and Burt Kwouk) looking shockingly youthful. It’s also good to see Graham Stark playing straight man to Sellers for once.

Had Sellers died from the heart attack he suffered the following spring this would have made a wonderful swansong; instead his last completed film was The Fiendish Plot of Dr Fu Manchu. ©Richard Chatten

NOW ON TALKING PICTURES

The Letter (1940) **** Prime Video

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

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

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

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

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

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

Cat in the Wall (2019) Locarno

Dir: Mina Mileva and Vesela Kazakova | Drama |

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOW FREE TO WATCH ON ARTEKINO | LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL premiere

Mayor (2020)

Dir.: David Osit; Documentary with Musa Hadid; USA/UK 2020, 89 min.

Mayor is clearly a passion project for David Osit. So much so he co-produced, directed, co-edited and even filmed this engaging documentary that follows the real-life political saga of Musa Hadid, the Christian mayor of Ramallah, during his second term in office.

Ramallah is about ten miles from Jerusalem and surrounded on all sides by Israeli settlements and soldiers. Most of the people who live there will never have the chance to travel more than a few miles outside their home, which is why Mayor Hadid is determined to make the city a beautiful and dignified place to live in. By Western standards these people are impoverished, most – included the Mayor – do not even have a TV in their homes. So Hadid’s immediate goals are to repave the sidewalks, attract more tourism, and plan the city’s Christmas celebrations. His ultimate mission: to end the occupation of Palestine. Rich with detailed observation and a surprising amount of humour, Mayor offers a portrait of dignity amidst the madness and absurdity of endless occupation while posing a question: how do you run a city when you don’t have a country?

Hadid comes across as an affable middle-aged man, married with two children, he is particularly proud of his moustache. He is also a mischievous diplomat who enjoys football. During a local match he is asked by some kids if he is “for Fatah or Hamas”, he answers that Al Fatah does not exist any more, and “so we have nobody to liberate us”.

Like most of his supporters he is hoping for an independent Palestinian State, but until that is achieved Hadid is more interested in giving his city a good image around the world. And this needs planning and careful consideration. How should they style the city? Discussions begin with local councillors and a logo is created: “WeRamallah”, featuring in huge letters round the city, where the mayor particularly enjoys hanging out at the “Cafe de la Paix”, opposite his office in the modern Town Hall.

When President Trump declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel, back in December 2017, also promising to move the American embassy there, rioting broke out in the West Bank. Clearly there was opposition to any US presence, let alone intervention. Today nothing has much changed. The filmmakers accompany Hadid to the edge of the town where the fighting between emboldened Israeli soldiers and Palestinian youth still rages. Sometimes the clashes become a little bit too close for comfort. Despite the animosity there will still be a Christmas tree in the city centre – some people campaign for a slogan that lights up with “Jerusalem is our Capital”. Once again, Hadid will have to compromise between municipal services and political messages.

Hadid’s work is never done, and involves ongoing compromise between the townspeople and the Israeli forces. Meanwhile mixed messages come from abroad: Hadid reads a statement from US Vice-president Pence who wants to protect Christians in Palestine. Hadid wishes he could just bring about continued peace, and end occupation. Meanwhile, Prince William visits Ramallah and makes a conciliatory speech, asking for the normalisation of the situation. But back in Whitehall, celebrations for a Hundred Years of the “Balfour Declaration” are underway, as if there is anything to celebrate in the former British Mandate. And there are more contradictions: while Hadid can visit Washington DC, Oxford and Bonn (Germany) to talk about the situation at home, he cannot visit Jerusalem or the nearby coast.

In the midst of the mayhem some younger members of his staff are having another celebration of sorts: “They can put us in a slum, but we still can have a party”. Finally, there is a major confrontation with Israeli troops, who use teargas outside City Hall and make arrests in the Cafe de la Paix”, before everything peters out. The following morning, the debris is cleared away, and in the evening fountains play light games with the music rousing a celebration of hope in a land where conflict has always been the watchword.

Mayor is a humane feature that tells a human story, trying to see the conflict from a purely humanitarian angle. Hadid is a great advertisement for compromise and hope: he is a steady lighthouse in a turbulent sea. AS

IN CINEMAS FROM 1 JANUARY 2021 |

The Tenant | Le Locataire (1976 Blu-ray

The Tenant completes the Apartment Trilogy following on from Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby and a faithful adaptation of the 1964 novel Le Locataire Chimerique. Polanski directs, co-writes and appears as a Polish emigré called Trelkovsky in this allegory of the outsider in society, a poignant reminder of the immigrant in these Brexit-ridden days.

Paris is the sombre star of the twisted psychodrama, squalidly romantic and steeped in Jan Nyqvist’s evocative visual gloom that unearths nostalgia for the Paris of the 1970s with its sleazy backstreets and nicotine-stained bars where seedy raincoated types breakfast on Gauloises and Café Crème.

Based on the book by Roland Topor, this portrait of paranoia is punctured by lewd moments of humour and a scabrid script. Trelkovsky is a timid, insignificant sort of functionary. Despite his newly acquired French citizenship he is painfully aware of his foreign status in the eyes of the chauvinist French. Renting an two-room apartment where the previous tenant has attempted suicide, he remains a doleful character soaking up the ancient atmosphere of the squalid apartment block with its ghostly corridors, strange noises, and litany of neighbour complaints, until he gradually takes on the guise of the former occupant of his flat in the rue des Pyrénées: Simone Choule.

Polanski gives an understated but persuasive performance and one that leaves us reflecting on his own tragic past. The horror slowly unravels to Philippe Sarde’s poignantly plangent score (with its suavely syncopated dance sequence). Trelkovsky’s American colleagues gradually fade into the background leaving him a vulnerable figure troubled by his sniping landlord and accusing neighbours, imagining the worst in this moribund backwater of the city’s former industrial heartland.

The director clearly feels for his character, a seedy little outsider who is desperate to do the right thing. He pours the anguish of his own past into this Polish alter ego, from the loss of his mother in a concentration camp, to a childhood of rejection from foster families on account of being Jewish, to the brutal bloody murder of his wife and unborn child. Trelkovksy also becomes obsessed with Simone and her mysterious past, even entertaining a friend and comforting him when he turns up unaware she had subsequently lost her fight for life in the Hospital Bretonneau. Simone’s funeral is particularly macabre adding a Gothic twist this richly textured saga. Gradually empathising with Simone’s terrifying breakdown he embodies her whole being, dressing in her frocks and a grotesque wig. Haunted by the past the present becomes his reality in flesh and blood, echoing in his horrifying screams that resonate with a wartime siren in the final moments. Pity, shame and humiliation in the Père-Lachaise.

Polanski would go on to win an Oscar for his 2002 thriller The Pianist. The Tenant limped home empty-handed from Cannes, a bruised and broken, intimately private film, feeding into the director’s personal brand of enigmatic psychosis, the outsider’s descent into self-inflicted purgatory that eventually becomes self-realising, or is it just a nightmare?

Strangely Polanski received no acting credit for his quietly appealing role alongside Isabelle Adjani’s nonchalant lover, Shelley Winters’ sulky concierge, Lila Kedrova’s tortured neighbour and her crippled child. Watching the film you can’t help meditating on Paris’ grim revolutionary past. For me, every part of France is a film memory: Claude Chabrol’s Le Boucher is Bergerac; Swimming Pool (2003), Avignon; A Prophet (2009) very much embodies the fighting spirit of Marseilles; La Reine Margot is resolutely Bordeaux: but Paris is The Tenant, one of the most haunting films ever made. MT

NOW ON BLURAY

NOW on BLURAY |

Spiral (2020) Bergamo Film Meeting 2021

Dir.: Cecília Felméri | Cast: Bogdan Dumitrache, Diana Magdolena Kiss, Alexandra Borbely, Theodora Uhrik; Hungary/Romania 2020, 93 min.

This first feature film by Romanian born writer/director Cecília Felméri is a moody character study about a lake somehow taking on the humans living nearby. Part poetic realism, part nightmare thriller, Spiral is enigmatic and beguiling, haunted by a macabre curse. It echoes the theme in Romanian folklore and literature of purification by fire.

Bence (Dumitrache) is an introverted character whose emotions run as deep as his lakeside dwelling in Szödliget where he lives in a comfortable wooden house with girlfriend Janka (Kiss), trying to make a living as a fish farmer. Lost in his solitary world the lake tethers him like an eerie umbilical cord his father having disappeared nearby long ago without a trace. Nourishing and caring for his prize fish provides him with a strange solace – they voraciously gobble up dead rabbits to birds. But his relationship with teacher Janka is fraught: there is a sexual connection but somehow Bence remains unreachable, lost in a perpetual reverie. Budapest beckons for Janka but Bence is keen to put down roots in their bucolic countryside dwelling, where the only internet connection lies deep in the heart of the lake.

Winter approaches and with it comes tragedy in the icebound lake with its chilly secrets. Bence finds himself alone again with only his ‘piranha-like catfish’ for company and random visits from his aunt (Uhrik) who is told that Janka “simply left” – but we know otherwise. Then government inspector Nora (Borbely) arrives to help him with an application for a grant. The two fall for each other and once again the physical is satisfying Bence then busing her away, convinced that the death of his cat is due to the lake casting a hex on everything he cares about. In a spooky twist Nora develops a penchant for his catfish finding them particularly tasty, possibly due to their rich diet. When his aunt finds with a buyer for the farm, Bence will have to make a decision: does he let the lake win?

Silence and subtle musical choices add to the eerie serenity of the piece which plays out appropriately to Mozart’s Miserere mei Deus. DoP Reder György constructs a magical twilight atmosphere where the lake plays a passive-aggressive entity. What starts as a romantic idyll, soon becomes nightmarish for Bence, haunted by the ghosts of the past. Bogdan plays him captivatingly, his morose enigmatic suggestiveness constantly open to interpretation. In her sophomore feature Felméri directs with confidence, never crossing the line to anything overstated – her subtle approach is rare in a beginner and leaves us guessing and ruminating throughout the film and for a long time afterwards. AS

NOW AT BERGAMO FILM MEETING | Awards at WARSAW FILM FESTIVAL 2020 | THESSALONIKI 2020

Glumov’s Diary | Dnevik Glumova (1923) ****

Dir: Sergei Eisenstein | Cast: Grigoriy Aleksandrov, Aleksandr Antonov, Mikail Gomorov | USSR 1923, 5’

Conceived like Orson Welles’ Too Much Johnson fifteen years later as augmenting a stage production. Before The Battleship Potemkin there was Glumov’s Diary; and before the Odessa Steps was a small flight of steps outside the Morozov mansion in Moscow in which the Proletkult theatre was currently housed and in front of which Eisenstein’s enthusiastic young cast cavorted nearly a hundred years ago (including a pipe-smoking bride arm-in-arm with a very camp-looking groom).

Representing the tiny acorn which grew into the mighty, if blighted, oak of the cinematic legacy of Sergei Eisenstein, his illustrious filmography starts with this strange-sounding title in which the young director himself puts in a brief appearance introducing himself to the camera sporting a scruffy beard and an enormous shock of hair.

By the the time he’d been harassed into an early grave a quarter of a century later he’d probably long forgotten this little squib which shows the influence of Melies rather than Kino-Pravda, since it probably contains more special effects than the rest of Eisenstein’s oeuvre put together; including the bizarre transformation of a cavorting clown into a swastika. Richard Chatten.

NOW ON YOUTUBE

https://youtu.be/p2TeqpxVzhU

Quo Vadis Aida? **** Curzon

Dir.: Jasmila Zbanic; Cast: Jasna Buricic, Izudin Bajrovic, Boris Leer, Dino Bajrovic, Johann Heidenbergh, Raymond Thiry, Boris Isakovic | Drama, 2020, 101 min.

Jasmila Zbanic follows her 2006 Berlinale Golden Bear winner (Grbavica: Land of my Dreams) with another intense look at the civil war in Srebrenica when over eight thousand people were butchered by Serbian General Ratko Mladic on the 11th of July 1995.

The action follows Aida Selmanagic (a fierce Jasna Buricic) an interpreter for the UN in the small town of Srebrenica. When the Bosnian Serb army moves in, her family is one of the thousands desperate for sanctuary in the vast UN camp.

The UN commander Colonel Franken (Heidenbergh) has been promised by his superiors that the UN air force will bomb Mladic’s troops, if they have a go at the city. But the planes never appear, and Franken tries in vain to reach somebody at UN HQ. In vain. The UN Secretary General is on holiday. Meanwhile, Aida manages to get her husband Nihad (I. Bajrovic) and two sons Hamidija (Leer) and Sejo (D. Bajrovic) into the safe UN compound (women are the bosses in this part of the world). But when the bombardment does not materialise, ‘saviour’ General Ratko Mladic (Isakovic) his soldiers start “evacuating” the compound to a nearby place of safety. Everybody is aware of Mladic’s real intentions, and Aida fights a hapless battle to get her family on the UN list for safe conduct. The three men are herded with others into a make-shift cinema nearby, before being gunned down from the projection room. In a maudlin epilogue, Aida visits their old flat years later, which is now occupied by strangers: she has to decide if she will take up the offer of returning to her former teaching job.

All very melodramatic in spirit, and carried by the irrepressible Jasna Buricic, Zbanic keeping everything understated, the focus is the personal conflicts at the heart of this human tragedy. Aida has a certain amount of protection due to her UN status, but gradually loses control when Mladic’s troops appear at the UN compound gates. her family reduces to pawns in the fight between Mladic and the UN forces.

Everything is going in her favour at first but as the nerve-racking plot plays out it is touch and go whether their names will appear on the final list, and some of the final scenes are emotionally charged. Major Franken (Thiry) is only technically in charge and when his superiors fail to back him up with the bombardment, he is in the hands of Mladic – having no real power to put a stop to the eventual slaughter. DoP Christine A. Maier uses close-ups to chart the emotional dynamics of Aida and her family. The images of Mladic and his thugs loading women and men into separate buses, brings to mind history’s genocides. Zbanic directs with great sensibility, never letting any of the male protagonists off the hook in this coruscating chronicle of modern war. AS

OUT ON CURZON WORLD | 22 JANUARY 2021 |

One Night in Miami (2020) ***

Dir: Regina King | Cast: Kingsley Ben-Adir, Eli Goree, Aldis Hodge, Leslie Odom Jr. | US Drama, 110′

Four major forces of the black community come together in Regina King’s discursive and smouldering imagined drama that occasionally sparks into life.

It’s February 25th, 1964 and Malcolm X, Cassius Clay, Jim Brown, and Sam Cooke find themselves together in a motel room for a night of lively debate in the wake of the civil rights movement, Clay having just emerged from the Miami Beach Convention Centre as the new Heavyweight Boxing Champion of the World.

King sets just the right tone working from a script by Kemp Powers that immediately transports us back to the era with a dynamic opening sequence that leads into some compelling exchanges with these charismatic characters convincingly captured, Ben-Adir is particularly impressive as Malcolm X. But the film rapidly runs out of steam as the discourse drags on into a rather claustrophobic chamber piece, occasionally glinting with the odd contretemps – a case in point is Malcolm X’s criticism of Sam Cooke’s musical style. King rescues the final stretch ending on an upbeat note to give this worthwhile outing a positive outcome. One Night will be remembered for its commanding and nuanced performances that will remain a cinematic tribute to the cultural icons of the day. MT

VOD RELEASE ON MAJOR PLATFORMS

Night of the Eagle (1962) *** Talking Pictures

Dir: Sidney Hayers Wri: Fritz Leiber Jnr | Cast: Peter Wyngarde, Janet Blair, Margaret Johnston, Anthony Nicholls, Kathleen Byron | UK Horror, 90′

Two years earlier Anglo Amalgamated had realised the horrific potential of modern technology in Peeping Tom. This smart British shocker shows how telephones and tape recorders. as well as tarot cards. are employed by a twentieth century witch to cast spells (aided naturally by a cat) in a terrific Freudian version of ‘Bewitched’, played for chills rather than laughs (just as director Sidney Hayers’ early use of zooms and a hand-held camera anticipates the much clumsier later use of these devices by other directors).

Having already portrayed an evil spirit in Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961), a pre-Jason King Peter Wyngarde is here beset by them himself; and, like any average man, is bewildered and embarrassed when he investigates the contents of his wife’s handbag (her bedside reading is ‘The Rites and Practises of Black Magic’). Meanwhile a bunch of very average men are oblivious of the office politics seething behind their backs amongst a poisonous coven of spitefully ambitious faculty wives (including a tart little cameo from the wonderful Kathleen Byron).

Based upon A.Merritt’s 1932 novel ‘Burn Witch Burn! (its US release title), the triumvirate that adapted it include the venerable fantasy writers Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson, with one sequence of a THING attempting noisily to gain entry worthy of ‘The Monkey’s Paw’, but with a spool of magnetic tape instead of a pagan relic working its malign magic.

The perpetrator wears an enormous fur collar creating the impression of a bird of prey that’s had a stroke, and also adding another layer to the traditional superstition that physical disability was the price paid for striking a pact with the devil. Richard Chatten.

ON TALKING PICTURES | AMAZON DVD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOW ON MUBI

Persian Lessons (2020) ****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On DIGITAL 22 JANUARY and DVD on 8 FEBRUARY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OUT ON BLURAY 25 JANUARY 2021 | BFI

The Steel Trap (1952) ****

Dir: Andrew L Stone | Cast: Joseph Cotton, Teresa Wright | US Film Noir, 82′

The thrillers of Andrew L. Stone have still yet to receive their due; those who have seen them are rightly crazy about them, but they remain stubbornly little known to the general public, and very little – although invariably positive – is ever written about them.

The Steel Trap is one of his best; Planes, Trains and Automobiles played straight, with characters you care about and well acted down to the bit players, moments of dry black humour that can make you laugh out loud at the tensest moments, terrific location photography by Ernest Laszlo (this picture really cries out for Blu-ray), and a noisy Dimitri Tiomkin score that adds to the fun (I particularly liked the Brazilian lilt he adopted every time Cotton’s destination in Rio was mentioned).

Partly filmed in New Orleans, Louisiana, it centres on Cotton’s long term Los Angeles banker who can’t resist robbing his own employer and absconding to Brazil with the cash when he discovers there’s no extradition with the US. He clears it all with his wife Laurie (Teresa Wright) and they hatch a plan, leaving his daughter with the mother in law. But it’s not all plain sailing, far from it. A nail-biting ride that sees Cotten and Wright reunited after Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt. Richard Chatten .

The Exception (2020) ****

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

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

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

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

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

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

Toni Erdmann (2016) Tribute to Peter Simonischek 1946-2023

Director: Maren Ade| Cast: Peter Simonischek, Sandra Huller, Michael Wittenborn, Thomas Loibl, Trystan Putter | 142min | Comedy | Germany

This quirky and hilarious satire from German filmmaker Maren Ade is a European arthouse classic that celebrates the intergenerational gap with humour rather than strife. The film is led by a fine comic performance from Peter Simonischek who would go on to star in The Interpreter.

Maren Ade explores whether comedy is the right way to fix family issues – or whether we should just try to be more sympathetic and understanding. In a film that runs just short of three hours, she achieves a blend of situational comedy, embarrassing incidents, pervy sex scenes and even a good old German nudist party in the style of Ulrich Seidl or even Aki Kaurismaki .

TONI ERDMANN‘s hero is Austrian: Peter Simonichek plays Winifried, a divorced music teacher who loves playing inappropriate practical jokes on his friends but his latest pranks involve his adult daughter Ines (Sandra Hüller). We first meet Winifried in the throes of arranging a surprise musical tribute to an old colleague’s retirement. But not everyone likes surprises or to be part of this harmless fun, least of all his serious-minded daughter who has to be at the top of her game as management consultant in the competitive macho world of Romania. When she realises her father has been up to his tricks in a bid to poke fun at her childless state and perceived loneliness, it’s already too late to block his impromptu visit in Bucharest, after the death of his dog Willi leaves him footloose and a bit down in the dumps.

As a little girl she loved his tomfoolery, but his casual arrival at her offices in fancy dress, makes her extremely irritated. Rejecting his bid to offer fatherly appreciation, Winifried then starts to behave like a stalker, popping up at Ines’ dinner dates pretending to be his alter ego ‘Toni Erdmann’ complete with wig and grotesque false teeth which he claims are from cosmetic dentistry “I wanted something different – fiercer”.

Only a woman can appreciate the intricacies of life in the competitive corporate world where women are supposed to “go on shopping trips” when they travel with their CEO husbands. Rather than hanging with the guys after work, poor Ines is forced to show the women round the shops while the men ‘kick back’ over drinks. Extremely galling. At one point she tells her boss “if I was a feminist, I wouldn’t tolerate guys like you”. Ade’s script is really spot on, brilliantly manipulating this father daughter relationship and drawing some subtle and intricately-played performances from Simonischek and Huller, who start as polar opposites in their frosty stand-off but gradually grow more sympathetic and human during the course of the film. Beneath Winifried’s silliness lies a heart of gold, he appreciates the real world but has withdrawn from it to reflect and his daughter emerges to be far more caring and worldly than he gives her credit for.

Winifried’s old dog Willi sets the furry leitmotive for rest of the film, and he pops up in various shaggy wigs and even a full blown Bulgarian scarecrow outfit. The irony comes from the way Ines intuitively manages her difficult colleagues and local friends; her secretary Anca is the only sympathetic female character and there are some really poignant scenes at the end where Ines and her father finally let their guards down to acknowledge that blood really is thicker than water. MT

PETER SIMONISCHEK 1946-2023 | WINNER OF THE FIPRESCI AWARD CANNES 2016

Venetian Bird (1952) ****

Dir: Ralph Thomas | Wri: Victor Canning | Cast: Richard Todd, Eva Bartok, John Gregson, Morgot Grahame, Sidney James, Meier Tzelniker, George Coulouris | UK Thriller 95′

Another film shot on location abroad despite claiming in the credits that it was “Made at Pinewood Studios, England”. Adapted by Victor Canning from his own novel, and making vivid use of Venetian locations, marred Nino Rota’s noisy score; it attempts to do for the city of gondolas what The Third Man did for Vienna (except the venue for a meeting is the Cafe Orfeo rather than the Cafe Mozart) populated by spivs, sinister foreigners and such well-known Italian types as John Gregson, Sid James, Miles Malleson (who’s plainly been dubbed) and Meier Tzelniker.

A British private detective in the shape of Richard Todd travels to Venice to make contact with an ex-partisan, unaware he is just a pawn in a political assassination plot (hence the film’s US title The Assassin). After a meandering first half the drama picks up considerably midday when it turns into State Secret, complete with a speedboat tearing along one of the canals and Richard Todd obviously doing his own stunts. The cast even includes the earlier film’s General Niva (the equivalent in this film is called Nerva), Walter Rilla, who effetely requests of Todd:”Please don’t get blood on my cushions”.

Leading lady Eva Bartok isn’t called on to do much as the female lead, described by Todd as a “glacial, dark-eyed Madonna”. More interesting are Margot Grahame as a throaty-voiced lady who keeps a gun in her flat, “never kept a man UNDER my bed in my life!” and offers Todd “the nicest hide-out in Venice” as the action hots up. One would also like to have seen more of the young Eileen Way, who makes a dramatic entrance as a rather menacing Venetian policewoman before promptly disappearing again. Richard Chatten.

NOW ON TALKING PICTURES TV | Amazon DVD

Rag Doll (1961) ***

Dir: Lance Comfort | Cast: Jess Conrad, Christina Gregg, Hermione Baddeley, Kenneth Griffith, Patrick Magee | UK Drama 67′

If you peruse a copy of ‘Women’s Own’ from the 1960s or 1970s you’ll almost certainly come across the smiling face of Christina Gregg in the fashion adds after she returned to modelling following a brief film career as a juvenile leading lady during the Swinging Sixties.

In the title role of this cautionary tale from Mancunian Films, directed with his usual flair by Lance Comfort (with a infectious skiffle score by Martin Slavin), she learns the hard way what perils lay in wait behind the bright lights of the capital city sixty years ago (vividly shot in winter by veteran cameraman Basil Emmott); starting like Gun Crazy with the innocent young hero (a girl) and ending like The Asphalt Jungle. The feature had a US release under the title of Young Willing and Eager.

Most of the men are trouble, including Gregg’s abusive stepfather Patrick Magee; predatory night-club owner Kenneth Griffith and bad lad Jess Conrad (who was signed for Decca Records), first seen propping up a bar in a leather jacket; while Hermione Baddeley resembles the Joan Blondell character from Nightmare Alley as a fortune teller predicting that Miss Gregg is “going on a journey”. Richard Chatten

The Exit of the Trains (2020) DocLisboa

Dir: Radu Jude, Adrian Cioflânca | Doc, România 175′

Screening as part of the So Many Stories Left Untold strand in DOCLISBOA’s 18th Edition (14-20 January, 2021), this essay film directed by Radu Jude and first timer Adrian Cioflânca makes use of extensive archive material to reflect on the Romanian genocide of June 26th, 1941, in the town of Iasi, near the Moldovan border. It’s a gruelling testament to man’s inhumanity towards his neighbour, and makes for grim viewing not least for its rather overlong treatment.

The pogrom lasted four days and wiped out most of its Jewish male population. Although occupying German forces had a hand in the tragedy the main perpetrators were actually locals who looted their Jewish neighbours’ property after killing them.

Jude opts for a similar, minimalistic style to his 2017 essay film Dead Nation to chronicle this sudden outbreak of wartime ethnic cleansing. Playing out as ‘an exhibition of the dead’, a voice-over commentary by relatives or neighbours of the victims accompanies the grim images. There are also witness reports of the few who survived. The final segment shares an array of photos of the pogrom itself, shown in chronological order.

The heat of that June morning in 1941 was in stark contrast to the chilling events that would unfold in the Eastern Romanian town. Jewish citizens were assembled in front of the police station where they were beaten and kicked, some were shot. Later the perpetrators sent women and children home, deporting the men in airtight cattle trains (150 per sealed waggon) to Podulloaiei, or Targu Frumos, whence the few survivors were taken to the labour camp of Ialomita.

The witnesses reflect on their next-door neighbours’ role in the genocide, their focus was to steal from the victims, stripping them of their flats, jewellery and money, having already exhorted money for failing to fulfil clemency appeals. Some of the photos are gruesome: particularly the face of a Mr. Lehrer, who was slaughtered right in front of his shop. One women was ordered by the authorities to pay a military duty for her soldier son, even though he had been killed. She was forced to sell her only means of livelihood – a Singer sewing machine. Most of the victims died of asphyxiation: “He died of his injuries and lack of air”. It’s a chilling mantra that resonates with the mass suffering going on today.

Survivors talk about the hours endured with the bodies of the dead or dying, before any escape was possible. The trains were transformed into mortuaries and some of the images are particularly harrowing. Finally, we see a photo of a ‘normal’ passenger train which stopped during the mayhem. It shows the carriages with bodies bundled together, like wood or bricks, before a mass burning – only a few were buried in the Jewish cemetery of Targu Frumos.

The Exit of the Trains is far more than a mere documentary: it is a witness report of how humans suddenly lose their humanity and descend into depravity. What sort of people put petrol into water bottles, then charge inflated prices to revel in the pain and slow death of their captives. AS

DOCLISBOA | 2021 | SO MANY STORIES LEFT UNTOLD | Berlinale 2020

The Overlanders (1946) **** Talking Pictures

Dir/Wri: Harry Watt | Chips Rafferty, John Nugent-Hayward, Daphne Campbell, Jean Blue, Helen Grieve, John Fernside | Action Drama | 91′

This big country wartime western was a resounding success in Australia, although the director Harry Watt was a Scotsman. The Overlanders certainly stands the test of time with its simple message of patriotism and courage in the face of the enemy. Watts had honed his craft as a documentarian and those skills certainly served him well in crafting a rousing cinema verite docudrama, bristling with widescreen action sequences and set in the early days of the war in rural Australia. The locals are being advised by the government to flee the encroaching Japanese enemy, shown in a propaganda poster in the opening sequence, advising a scorched earth policy for their land and livestock.

But not Chips Rafferty. The Australian star in the making (a standout of Wake in Fright) plays pioneering drover Dan McAlpine who takes it all in his stride as an adventure to get his family, precious horses and 1,000 head of cattle down to the nearest safe haven 1500 miles south east in Queensland. The script errs on the didactic side but in an endearing way, making this informative as well as compelling viewing. McAlpine pits his wits against nature in the hostile terrain of Northern Australia, a feat requiring physical force as well as intuitive savvy.

The reason for the docudrama approach stems from the original idea of making a propaganda film for the Australian government who knocked on Watts’ door looking for a well known director and a reputable studios – Ealing naturally fitted the bill, although the film was released after the war was over.

76 Days (2020) **** VOD

Dirs: Hao Wu, Weixi Chen, Anonymous | Wri: Hao Wu | Doc, 2020 China, 91′

Not as hard-hitting as you would imagine, and in some ways faintly amusing given the repercussions that would follow, this cinema vérité snapshot of the first COVID outbreak takes us back to Wuhan, China where it all began, the rest of the world still blissfully unaware and innocently going about its business.

In a Wuhan hospital a woman cries out in anguish as the body of her father is hurriedly sealed in orange plastic by a group of hazmat-suited medics who then hurtle back through the corridors to deliver the toxic bundle into a waiting black van.

Towering skyscrapers dwarf a twinkling ambulance racing over the massive bridge that straddles the vast Yangtze river (think Golden Gate without the glamour), as the city is plunged into a hush-hush yet draconian lockdown, marshalled citizens falling into rank as they meekly obey the eerie tanoyed announcements to ‘stay in their homes’.

Wuhan is a major industrial city in Hubei province, Eastern China, but the scale of the crisis in the four hospitals where the doc was filmed, by director Hao Wu (People’s Republic of Desire) and reporter Weixi Chen, takes on an intimate yet respectfully buttoned-down detached community atmosphere. You never see a medic’s face, such is level of PPE, yet the (mostly old) patients stay wrapped in their own colourful padded jackets as they are tucked up in bed and told to sleep – almost like kids – and referred to as ‘grandma, and grandpa; the middle-aged sufferers; aunty and uncle.

Although the grief and panic is feverishly palpable there is a ordered and kindly feel to proceedings as patients’ personal possessions – in China that means mobile phones – are wiped down with alcohol and placed in plastic bags. There is no triage system here: this is a close up and personal system where the medics themselves deal face to face with the oncoming stream of stricken public who rattle the door handles of hospital’s modest entrance, demanding to be seen first: “Any vomiting or diarrhoea?, Okay – let him go first, he’s limping” says the matron.

The documentary began shortly after the January 23rd lockdown in Wuhan, the filmmakers maintaining a strictly observational eye on the unfolding crisis. There are moments of dark humour surrounding an old fisherman – the doc’s main protagonist – who has found his way into the system and can’t seem to find his way out, although he appears to be suffering from dementia rather than Covid, judging from his candid take on events. The doctors keep forcing him back into his room, telling him to wear his mask ‘properly’: “What a way to treat a person” he laments fractiously. Later he has decided to stay: “Not bad – free food and medicine here, where I come from is so backward”.

Apparently the shoot inside public hospital facilities wasn’t government-sanctioned. Hao was researching a project for an American network, who then abandoned the story when Covid went global, but he continued his own filming using reporter Chen (and his colleague chose to remain anonymous). They have created this raw and immediate take on an outbreak that purportedly originated in Wuhan’s wet markets in the vicinity of the hospitals, and would result in the death of millions worldwide – not to mention the economic, social and political repercussions.

No doubt there will soon be a ‘Covid’ genre – we have already seen a Belgian outing: I Am Not a Hero and Alex Gibney’s Totally Under Control, and there are more to come. The filmmakers formally requested that none of the hospital staff be mentioned or identified “to avoid any potential government interference with the film”. The only possible clues to their identity are available in the delightful drawings that were sketched in marker pen on the medics’ PPE gowns, and they possibly included their names (if you can read Mandarin).

In early April 2020, 76 days after the crisis erupted the Wuhan lockdown is lifted, and air raid sirens mark a gloomy tribute to the dead, masked citizens stopping to pay their respects in the streets, where some are visibly moved to tears. Their government clearly didn’t have the same respect for the World’s wider community in their bid to play down the crisis. But amongst these locals a strong sense of civil cooperation and commitment to a common cause is admirable and poignant. MT

ON RELEASE in the UK | VOD 22 January 2021

Tales of Hoffmann (1951) **** Mubi

Dir. Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger

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

UK 1951, 138 min.

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

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

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

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

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

NOW ON MUBI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOW ON MUBI

Dishonored Lady (1947) ****

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

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

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

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

NOW ON YOUTUBE | Prime Video

Let the Sunshine In (2020) **** Mubi

French Filmmaker Claire Denis is one of the most innovative pioneers of independent cinema and fiercely committed to her singular vision. Growing up the daughter of a civil servant in various African countries, she eventually went home to France and fell in love with cinema in the Cinematheque, Paris. Making films seemed inevitable and after studying at the Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies (IDHEC) she embarked on a career that would see her working with Jacques Rivette (who became the subject of her 1990 documentary Jacques Rivette, Le Veilleur), Dušan Makavejev, Roberto Enrico and Costa-Gavras and Wim Wenders on Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire. Through the musician John Lurie she met Jim Jarmusch and worked with him on Down by Law. But it was with her debut feature Chocolat that she made it to the international stage in 1988. The film was selected for Cannes and the César awards, it also got her together with Agnès Godard who became her regular director of photography for all her films.

So far Claire Denis has made six documentaries and no fewer than 17 feature films, such as Nénette et Boni for which she is awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1996. Beau Travail, is one of the most stark and contemplative French films about war, standing alongside Bruno Dumont’s L’Humanite. It was chosen for Venice line-up in 1999. Set amid racial conflict in a Francophone African state, Isabelle Huppert plays a coffee plantation owner desperately trying to save her crop, her family and her life in Denis’ 2009 outing White Material.

Clearly race and post-colonial themes feature heavily in her work, but Denis has also dabbled in genres – Bastards was a thriller, 35 Shots of Rum a fantasy drama about a father and daughter in Paris. Trouble Every Day reflects the emotional anguish of a loved up but warring married coup, starring Béatrice Dalle and Vincent Gallo it screened at Cannes Film Festival in 2001. Denis has also worked several times with Juliette Binoche, most recently in her critically acclaimed sci-fi outing High Life (2018) and previously in her insightfully playful comedy Let the Sunshine In. where she plays a spirited and intelligent woman trying to find love with a series of unedifyingly pompous losers. Robert Pattinson will join Denis for the The Stars at Noon (2021) which follows American traveller (Margaret Qualley) through Nicaragua during the 1980s revolution, based on the novel by American writer Denis Johnson. Her next project Stars at Noon in set in 1980s Nicaragua during the Sandinista Revolution when a mysterious English businessman and a headstrong American journalist strike up a romance as they find themselves involved in a dangerous labyrinth of deceit. MT

CURZON release NOW ON MUBI

Filmography

• High Life, 2018 • Un beau soleil intérieur, 2017 • Le Camp de Breidjing, 2015 • Contact, 2014 • Voilà l’enchaînement, 2014 • Les Salauds, 2013 • Venezia 70: Future Reloaded, 2013 • Aller au diable, 2011 • White Material, 2010 • 35 rhums, 2008 • Vers Mathilde, 2005 • L’Intrus, 2004 • Vendredi soir, 2002 • Vers Nancy (Segment du film Ten Minutes Older: The Cello), 2002 • Trouble Every Day, 2001 • Beau travail, 1999 • Nénette et Boni, 1996 • Nice, very Nice (segment from A propos de Nice, la suite), 1994 • J’ai pas sommeil (I Can’t Sleep), 1994 • U.S. Go Home (Collection : Tous les garçons et les filles de leur âge), 1994 • La Robe à cerceau (from Monologues, with Chantal Akerman), 1993 • Keep It for Yourself + Figaro Story, 1991 • Jacques Rivette, le veilleur. Part 1 : la nuit (Cinéaste de notre temps), 1990 • S’en fout la mort (No Fear, No Die) 1990 • Man No Run, 1989 • Chocolat, 1988 • Le 15 Mai, 1969

Away (2019) ****

Dir: Gints Zilbalodis | Animation, Latvia, 74′

‘Staying Alive’ is how best to describe this symbolic and gorgeously fluid ‘boys own’ adventure from Latvian animation wizard Gints Zilbalodis.

Away is the culmination of a decade spent honing his craft in a series of delightful short animations such as Aqua, Priorities and Oasis whose focus is the main character’s lone struggle to overcome a powerful force. In this case a King Kong-like shape shifter that pursues him through a preternatural jungle with the aim of swallowing him alive.

Throughout this dreamlike often hazardous odyssey the boy’s only companion is a small yellow bird who he cares for with the utmost tenderness. The film seems to connect with our own everyday battle to keep going in these uncertain times, and above all, to make the right choices. In other words, Away is a metaphor for life that echo Miyazaki’s delicately rendered animes which can work on a simplistic or subliminal level offering appeal for kids and adults alike.

More minimalist than Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo or even The Red Turtle but just as beautiful and and driven forward by an evocative soundscape the film shirks narrative conventions to tell a story that is firmly tethered to the natural while also teetering towards the surreal. Zilbalodis controls his entire project from 3D animation and script through to editing, soundscape and production.

The tousled-haired, wide-eyed teenager lands by parachute on a lush and mysterious island and has to find his way across often perilous landscape to reach sanctuary using an old-fashioned motorbike. Amongst the creatures he encounters on his odyssey are a flock of white birds, a large tortoise and his family, and a pack of black cats who guard a powerful geyser that shoots out of a deep circular crevice, a grassy metaphor for Dante’s Inferno.

Although Away lulls us into a hypnotic sense of tranquility there is always the unsettling presence of the shape-shifter to keep us alert to danger as we start connecting with the angst of the struggling boy hero and his little bird, and indeed the tortoise, who at one point slivers down a snowy slope and on to its back, our hero coming to its rescue in one of many random acts of thoughtfulness. A beguiling and magical first feature with echoes of the best of Studio Ghibli. MT

Gints Zilbalodis (b. 1994) is a Latvian filmmaker and animator. He has made seven short films in various mediums including hand-drawn animation, 3D animation and live-action, often mixing their characteristic aesthetics.

https://youtu.be/B-2xxKAPssk

ON DIGITAL DOWNLOAD PLATFORMS 18 January 2021

Mother (2019) Locarno

Dir.: Kristof Bilsen; Doc with Chutimon Sonsirichai (Pomm), Elisabeth Röhmer, Maya Gloor, Walter Gloor; Belgium 2019, 82 min.

People are living longer but not always enjoying a healthy or happy old age in Western Europe. Kristof Bilsen tackles the alarming truths behind our care home crisis in his heart-breaking documentary that sees a Swiss family sending their mother across the world to live out her final years with perfect strangers.

But before you jump to condemn them, just consider this. Many Thai women come to the UK each year to enjoy the benefits of our strong economy that allows them to make a living by offering their unique talents as masseuses and alternative health professionals. Their kids are left with their extended families back in the East, and see their mothers only one or twice a year. Meanwhile UK care homes charge extortionate amounts of money just for bed and board ( BUPA charge a basic £100,o00 per annum in central London), while bosses cream off the profits and pay their care staff a pittance. Many of them are not trained carers, and are unable to communicate adequately with older residents due to their poor English skills. Often they have little aptitude or interest in their badly paid jobs. It’s a critical situation that seems to indicate that this Swiss family could be doing their mother a favour, and even saving her money, into the bargain.

In Thailand, Pomm looks after Alzheimers patients from German-speaking countries in the Baan Kamlangchay hospice near Chiang-Mai. Her own three children are looked after by her husband and extended family. She too is badly paid but infinitely more compassionate, working an eight hour shift, with another job to make ends meet, her relationship with her husband is strained.

In this tranquil sanctuary, Swiss citizen Elisabeth Röhmer is in the final stages of Alzheimers, but Pomm remembers when she loved to do the crossword and helped the carers learn English. After Elisabeth’s death, Pomm will be responsible for Maya, a mother of three from Zofingen in Switzerland. Her husband Walter and three daughters Joyce, Sara and Tanya are struggling to find suitable care for grandma Maya, so the clinic in Thailand seems the best solution. ”It would be selfish to keep her here so we could see her all the time. She gets much better care in Thailand”. And this true because Maya, like Elisabeth before her, will have three carers working round the clock.

Once she arrives with her family in Thailand Maya takes time to settle down in her new environment, awoken by exotic birdsong on her first morning. She is clearly not as happy about the move as the Gloor family would have us believe as they share their last Christmas together far from home. On a boat trip, they discuss how to say goodbye to Maya. Super 8 mm family films show a younger Maya in happier times. Back home in Switzerland, the Gloors Skype Maya who is still affected by their departure but adapting to her new circumstances.

So is there such a difference between East and West? Clearly in the Far East there is far more respect for adults, their wisdom and experience is highly valued both by the family and society as a whole. This extends to the process of dying as we saw in Locarno winner MRS FANG. It seems like a double whammy when elderly members of the family lose their dignity and need our care and patience while they remain critical, controlling and difficult, as in the case with dread diseases such as Alzheimers. Their dehumanisation process is disorientating, their loss of dignity strangely infantalises them in the eyes of those who once looked up to them and respected their seniority. We expect to look after our kids, but not our parents. And England has now become a child-centric culture, where children have become the objects of desire, admiration and wonder. Rather than wise elders we puts the young on a pedestal, as was seen recently in the case of Swedish teen, Greta Thunberg.

Bilsen remains objective in his fascinating and thought-provoking film, Pomm reflecting that her job has shown her the difference between rich and poor. Really? Maya has three care givers because the Swiss family can afford it, yet the carers in both countries are badly paid. The difference is that over here in the UK the care is poor even when you throw money at it; clearly compassion cannot be bought and that is reflected back in the attitude we have regarding the elderly, who also are our elders. Pomm wonders (as do we all) what will happen to her if she becomes a victim of Alzheimers. Who will care for her? All over the world we are relying on others to care for our loved ones because we are too busy looking after ourselves. MT

LOCARNO WORLD PREMIERE | AVAILABLE ON VOD ITUNES, AMAZON & GOOGLE | 11 JANUARY 2021

Epicentro (2020)

Dir.: Hubert Sauper; Documentary with Leonelis ArangoSalas, Annielys Pelladito Zaldivar, Janet Pena Semunat, Hans Helmut Ludwig, Oona Castilla Chaplin; Austria/France 2020, 108 min.

This new documentary portrait of Cuba from Oscar nominated Hubert Sauper explores the post-Castro era pairing everyday life with an essay on the power and myth-making in cinema. Through his conversation with children, a sex worker and an actress, he shows a Cuba still dependent on tourism, even though some of the values are contrary to the revolutionary movement of “26th of July”.

Ten year-old Leonelis Arango Salas is the star of the show: she explained the 1902 “Tafft Agreement”, which gave the USA the use of the naval base of Guantanamo (!), one of over 900 military bases worldwide, where the American flag is raised, including the Moon. She also elaborates on the sinking of the battleship USS Maine by the Spanish – in reality, the ship sunk because of an explosion in the boiler room but the US used the incident to shoot reels of film showing their soldiers killing Spanish troops who had occupied Cuba for centuries. The boy also shows us the sinking of the ‘Maine’, restaged in a bath tub with lots of cigar smoke. Theodore Roosevelt’s “Rough Riders”, soldiers who fought on behalf of USA in the Cuban War of Independence, were very much ‘Trojan’ horses only interested in replacing the Spanish. And the cinema covered the myth: Media Tycoon Randolph Hearts (on whom the hero of Citizen Kane was modelled) wrote to Roosevelt: “You furnish the war, we furnish the information”.

A sex worker is, not surprisingly extremely disillusioned, regales us with the revelation that all US presidents look the same, be it T. Roosevelt or Trump: “Faces of people who like war and wealth.” Tourists come here for sex, men or women: “Gringas come here looking for black dicks”. And in her own experience, sex workers are just like slave: “I am a piece of meat, when they say do it doggy-style, I go “wow wow”. But she still wants to go to Disneyland and meet Brad Pitt.

In one of the few modern malls, Leonelis and her friends admire a pencil, costing over 2000 US dollars. Her hospital worker grandmother earns just four dollars a week. Even with Sauper’s help, they cannot calculate how long she would have to work to buy this simple writing instrument. Hans Helmut Ludwig, a middle aged tourist from Bavaria, visits a ballet school where he claims the free tuition is very professional. He compares Cuba today with a theatre set: tourists come to participate in a parallel universe full of illusions which will soon disappear. A utopia, never realised.

A street fight between a young girl and her mother is a brutal spectacle. Later we see mother and daughter watching Chaplin in The Great Dictator. “This is my grandfather” the girl tells Sauper. “You are Hitler’s granddaughter?” The girl can not stop giggling: “I am Charlie’s granddaughter”. Her mother, Oona Castilla Chaplin looks calm and collected as she accompanies her daughter and friends on the guitar,.

Epicentro is about reality and film, utopia and dystopia, and the American dream, with its “corrupted ideals and success forged in lies”. Like Robert Altman’s’ Buffalo Bill and the Indians, the truth is not welcome, particularly during the 200 year celebrations. Sauper hits hard, as he did in We Come as Friends when the Sudanese people complain “even the Moon belongs to the white man”. Maintaining a freewheeling and detached approach during his conversations on home-grown politics, the message is clear: Havana is anything but its translation: Heaven. AS

SUNDANCE GRAND JURY PRIZE WINNER | WORLD CINEMA

Moscow that Weeps and Laughs (1927) Devushka S Korobkoy

Dir: Boris Barnet | Cast: Anna Sten, Vladimir Mikhaylov, Vladimir Fogel, Ivan Samborsky, Serafina Birman | Silent Comedy Drama, 60′

The Russian silent cinema does it again with this wonderful comedy also known as Girl With A Hatbox, and starring Anna Sten. She’s such a delight that one watches this film in awe at the near-genius with which Samuel Goldwyn managed to transform her during the thirties into such a pudding – and one of Hollywood’s biggest industry jokes – attempting to mold her into a second Garbo.

Moscow-born Boris Barnet was of British extraction and directed this second feature at the age of 24 having already trained as a doctor. His first film Miss Mend (1926) was over four hours long, this runs at a watchable 60 minutes capturing much of the detail of life in a bustling Soviet city in the same vein as Dziga Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera which would follow two years later.

The film is a portrait of female empowerment. Contrary to the Soviet ideals of the day, money-making and personal enterprise are seen as key to happiness through the eyes of Sten’s Natasha, a lively business-like young woman living in the country with her grandfather, making hats which she sells to a milliner’s shop in Moscow. The hats are high-fashion, the shop owner ‘Madame Irène’ elegantly exotic and high-living. The action is fast-moving – there’s a lottery ticket, a lovelorn young station master, a penniless student (a fluid mover with fetching Petrushka-type felt boots), a lovable old granddad out of many a communist propaganda film, and a pompous husband. Above all there’s a tremendous feeling of fun. A romantic angle sees her pursued by two suitors: an incompetent railway employee from her local train station far outside snowy Moscow whence she commutes everyday to her millinery shop; and a good-looking student whose rent she helps to pay.

Barnet throughout makes dynamic use for comic effect both of the frame and of the movement of characters within it, both indoors and out in the snow; an additional bonus being the fleeting views of twenties Moscow provided in some of the outdoors scenes. The entire cast throw themselves into the proceedings with infectious gusto; and one would have liked to have seen more of Eva Milyutina as the maid, Marfusha. Richard Chatten.

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River of No Return (1954) ***

Dir: Otto Preminger, Jean Negulesco | Cast: Robert Mitchum, Marilyn Monroe, Rory Calhoun | US Western 91’

Rather more rugged to make than Marilyn Monroe was accustomed to, she recalled River of No Return with a shudder as her worst film. This was probably more due to the arduous shoot than because it wasn’t actually any good, since she sprained her ankle while getting drenched on location in Canada and then had to repeat the performance back on the sound stage in Hollywood while Otto Preminger (who compared directing Monroe to directing Lassie) cracked the whip.

Today it holds up well as an atmospheric, entertaining production with two handsome leads, shot largely on location in Alberta in Technicolor and CinemaScope. Although much is made of her flaunting her legs in tights as a saloon girl in the scenes that bookend the film, Monroe spends most of the rest of the shoot in cowboy boots, tucking in a pair of classic rump-hugging fifties jeans she would never really have worn back in 1875 (a pair of which were auctioned off in L.A. as recently as 2017). She cuts an impressive figure shooting the rapids in what was Preminger’s only western and Monroe’s only outdoor adventure. It was also the only picture she ever made with Robert Mitchum who’s at his hunkiest; introduced felling a tree just before we hear him singing the title song. Richard Chatten.

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Pieces of a Woman (2020) VOD

Dir: Kornel Mundruczo | Drama, 127’

Nothing prepares us for sudden death. But the most confusing part of bereavement is how is it affects those around us, and particularly those nearest to us. And this unexpected behaviour is the crux of Kornel Mundruczo’s latest film. It looks at how the loss of a child affects a professional Bostonian woman called Martha (Vanessa Kirby/The Crown) and her stevedore partner, a recovering alcoholic who hails from Seattle (Shia Leboeuf).

The Hungarian director’s first outing in English is as deeply flawed as the title suggests, a tonal mishmash: moving in parts but totally incoherent in others. The euphoric early arthouse scenes – impressively shot in one 24 minute take – show the couple during the birth, and these intensely personal moments are graphic in detail. Almost too much so. But the baby dies shortly after she is born leaving the couple in disarray and arguments and recriminations follow. And as Boston descends into a freezing winter, amid wide panoramic shots of the Charles River, so Martha retreats into herself cutting Sean adrift in an icy silence.

Based on his own personal experiences this is clearly a cathartic film for the director writing with his real life partner Kata Weber. But the film soon drifts into a more glossy family drama where the grief-stricken Martha is persuaded by her controlling mother (Ellen Burstyn in formidable form) to seek compensation from the midwife. As Martha’s relationships deteriorate all round her so the storyline unravels with no real sense of direction. There is a fraught mother-daughter strand; an imploding relationship breakdown where class and racial conflicts enter the fray – Martha is a tough Jewish uptown girl, Sean is soft-hearted but given to brutal outbursts. Their attractions are also part of their downfall when things don’t go according to plan.

Sarah Snook, Martha’s distant cousin, is hired to fight their case as the lawyer taken on to prosecute midwife Eva. And Martha’s mother, a steely Holocaust survivor, offers invaluable advice to daughters everwhere: “you have to take a stand and tell your truth, otherwise you can never move on”. You might not like her but you’d certainly want her on your side: “and when you do move on, burn your bridges”, is another chestnut.

The actors all do their best to carry the film forward and Ellen Burstyn is the most impressive, Leboeuf stymied by an underwritten role. But the script is so focussed on Martha’s simmering resentment that the final reveal – in a coruscating court scene – bears no relation to what has gone before, leaving us unprepared and perplexed.

The unsuccessful shift from arthouse to Hollywood melodrama could be due to various big names jumping on board the project with their money and therefore demanding a schmaltzy Hollywood happy ending, Martin Scorsese has put his money behind the project as exec producer but Mundruczo’s departure from his arthouse style is a bewildering film, certainly watchable but vaguely unsatisfying. MT

NOW ON VOD RELEASE | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2020

Marlene Dietrich at Universal 1940-42

These four classics from the Golden Age of Hollywood showcase the timeless charisma of Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992). Seven Sinners, The Flame of New Orleans, The Spoilers and Pittsburgh were all produced by Universal during the war years of the early 1940s, and capture Dietrich’s enduring persona that had justifiably brought her the fame and riches garnered during her six magnificent collaborations with Josef von Sternberg. Dietrich continued to be the epitome of big-screen glamour and sensuousness, and although she never quite attained the dizzy heights of her time with von Sternberg, she continued working until the early 1960s, her last substantial role being in Stanley Kramer’s Judgement at Nuremberg in 1961. MT

Seven Sinners

Seven Sinners is the first of three films starring Marlene Dietrich and John Wayne – Pittsburgh and The Spoilers followed in 1942. This lively musical showcases the versatile talents of a vampish Marlene Dietrich following her spectacular comeback in the standout Western Destry Rides Again (1939), after being branded “box-office poison.” Once again she plays a dubious gaiety girl and entertainer to John Wayne’s honest and gallant lover, Navy Lt Dan Brent (from Stagecoach). After the Wild West, the South Sea Island setting is luminous and exotic (complimented by Rudolph Maté’s sublime shadowplay). Dietrich’s Bijou sings her lovelorn ballads with a great deal of charm, in a similar vein to her 1930s triumphs with von Sternberg yet somehow bereft of the innate style and emotional heft of these outings, Dietrich trying – unsuccessfully – to keep her troupe of motley misfits under control. There is Antro (Homolka), Dr. Marin (Dekker), Little Ned (Crawford and Sasha (Auer). When Dan Brent enters the fray with a big bouquet of orchids, Dietrich has to save him from the knife-throwing Antro – and also from himself, because an affair would have destroyed Brent’s career chances, and one of Brent’s superior’s quips is fittingly: “the Navy has already got enough destroyers”. In the end, Bijou leaves him to his first love: The Navy.

The script by John Meehan and Harry Tugend is a mixture of songs (by Dietrich), brawls and witty repartee. Russel A. Gausman’s production design, and the Maté’s camerawork are both stars turns in their own right, bringing to mind a Joseph von Sternberg feature. Sternberg, who directed Dietrich in Der Blaue Engel and her first Hollywood films, was known as her Guru, and his style and influence on the actress still shape her appeal. The set design was intricate, with elaborate windows and labyrinthine staircases and an overall ornate richness, coming to life in Maté’s fluid camera. Many of Sternberg’s movies (Macao) fall into the “Exotica” category, here symbolised by the huge gargoyle in the club were Bijou performs, recalling Sternberg’s Scarlett Express, where Dietrich was flanked by huge statues. Dietrich is in perpetual motion, an ethereal angel in satins and haute couture, driving the narrative forward a lightness of touch. Again, in a nod to von Sternberg, Dietrich wears the white Officers uniform, mirroring Wayne/Brent.

This is very much Dietrich’s film (“I am a bad influence”). Wayne is her acolyte – he had only just made the step from support to main player, and it shows. Tyronne Power, who was originally cast, would have certainly been a stronger pendant to Dietrich’s Bijou. Garnett favoured maverick stars for his films, often casting those who’d fallen foul of established society, such as Greer Garson’s Mrs. Parkington (1944) and Valley of Decision, a year later. And whilst Garnett does not always reach the heights of von Sternberg, Seven Sinners is a glittering piece of entertainment. AS

Pittsburgh

With its sequences of social realism picturing the grimness of Pittsburgh mining traditions (as Groucho Marks once commented: “this is like living in Pittsburgh, if you call that living”, Lewis Seiler’s 1942 morality tale is certainly the least glamorous of the trio of films Dietrich made with John Wayne. Greed is the theme here, and Seiler sets the scene from the get-go with a rousing speech from Wayne’s Charles “Pittsburgh” Markham who is hellbent on financial success in the steel industry, whatever the cost. To get there he’ll trample on friends and lovers, but when the sh*t eventually hits the fan, he does get a second chance. The film came out a year after Pearl Harbour, which is also cleverly wound into the plot line. Randolph Scott plays Wayne’s rival and Dietrich the smouldering siren Josie Winters. MT

The Spoilers

This 1942 version of a popular Rex Beach novel has been filmed three times before (twice as a silent) and another would follow. An eventful romantic adventure following a group of crooks adding corruption to its list of themes, the setting is Nome, Alaska, during the Gold Rush days of 1900. Hero John Wayne gets the bit between his teeth, and particularly in the final showdown set-to in the bar with crooked gold commissioner Randolph Scott and good guy John Wayne, all over a woman, and the woman in question is the joint’s owner, Marlene Dietrich.

The swindlers have in their sights the biggest mine in the territory. They also have Scott’s McNamara on their side along with a dodgy Judge (Samuel S. Hinds) and his underling Struve (Halton). They plan to lure the wealthy punters in with the services of an upmarket Helen Chester (Lindsay). John Wayne’s Roy Glennister falls for her. Wayne and Scott take to their action roles with a swagger, and Marlene does her stuff with a succession of elegant and seductive costumes. She’s not just a pretty face but a witty and entertaining hostess enjoying some comedy moments with her maid Marietta Canty. And she’s a mistress of the put-down too, making short shrift of an unwelcome suitor in the shape of Richard Barthelmess, dismissing him with a curt: “Go down below to your table.” MT

Flame of Orleans

After the end of her partnership with Josef von Sternberg, Dietrich echoes her role in Destry Rides Again this time in Rene Clair’s farce Flame of Orleans. Once again she plays woman with a dubious past, this time cutting a dash as a ‘faux’ countess in New Orleans, torn between a stable marriage to a rich banker and her wild sexual attraction for a strapping but penniless captain of a Mississippi steamer. This was the first of the four films that Clair directed in Hollywood during his wartime exile from France. Norman Krasna wrote the entertaining script but Dietrich sets the night on fire with her flirtatious game-playing in a delightful costume drama that was Oscar nominated for Jack Otterson’s stylish art direction, Russell A Gausman’s set design and DoP Rudolph Maté’s peerless visual allure. MT

Limited Edition Blu-ray release on 18 January 2021 | BFI SHOP

Unidentified (2020) ****

Dir.: Bogdan George Apetri; Cast: Bogdan Farcas, Dragos Domitru, Vasile Muraru, Ana Popescu, Kira Hagi, Andrei Aradits; Romania/Latvia/Czech Republic 2020, 123 min.

Very much in the style of the classic French crime thrillers of the 1970s, Unidentified is a modern version of Yves Boisset’s Un Condé, tackling racism and misogyny in one fell swoop in a tightly plotted murder story. Unidentified is the sophomore feature of Romanian director Bogdan George Apetri who also wrote and edited and co-produced drawing from his experiences of working in New York.

It sees scuzzy minor Detective Florin (Farcas) down on his luck, and in need of a scape goat to his appease his boss, Commissar Sef (Muraru). The sacrificial lamb soon fetches up in the shape of Roma security guard Banel (Domitru) whose been unlucky enough to have two major disasters occur during his checkered career, both seemingly connected to insurance fraud with Banel aiding and abetting the perpetrator, the owner of hotel where he was working.

Not that Florin is is squeaky clean from the personal probity angle either. Behind with his car repayments and mortgage, and he badgers his friend Mircea (Aradits) to give him more time to pay off his debts. But money worries are not the only thing getting the obsessed detective down. In Oleg Mutu’s fluid widescreen camerawork, we watch him on a hillside, overlooking a hotel and parking lot, spying on his fiancée Stela (Popescu) who is cheating on him with a married man. It’s hardly surprising given the way Florin neglects her and always seems to be in a bad mood. But what the hell? He hatches an ingenious plan to get rid of both of them in a double murder – the perfect crime. It will involve getting to know Banel and organising for him to work in the hotel where Stela hangs out. It’s got to be meticulously planned, so it looks like an accident: He invites Banel to his home, and makes him touch a beer bottle, which he will later use as a Molotov cocktail to kill Stela. So off he goes to meet Banel in the parking lot of the hotel at nine pm. But in that classic but always effective dramatic device – things don’t go according to plan for Florin. Not during the crime but afterwards, when his boss Sef picks holes in his story.

Apetri is certainly a master storyteller, overlaying his story of detective obsession with the serene score of none other than Chopin’s delicate piano music. Helicopter shots show Florin driving around manically, chasing his prey on a murderous mission. Even at two hours plus, Unidentified keeps us in its grip in exploring a psychotic law enforcement officer, crumbling before our eyes. And apparently there’s more to look forward too, Apetri’s feature is the first of a trilogy set in small town Romania. AS

Special Jury Award, International Competition | Warsaw Film Festival 2020 | Rendezvous with French Cinema 2021

Oliver Sacks: His Own Life (2020)

Dir. : Ric Burns; Documentary with Oliver Sacks, Kate Edgar, Bill Hayes, Paul Theroux; USA 2019, 114 min.

The final six months in the life of eminent clinical neuro-psychologist Oliver Sacks (1933-2015) are the focus of Ric Burns’ immersive biopic. Filmed in the Sacks’ Greenwich village home and taking its title from his New York Times essay of February 2015, penned on discovering he was dying with terminal cancer, this warmly enjoyable portrait reflects Sacks’ compassionate nature as well as his courage.

Sacks appears to make a graceful exit from this world; writing, talking and loving to the end. Not that the doctor’s life had always been so harmonious and well-structured – on the contrary – his homosexuality and extreme shyness, which he blamed on his prosopagnosia (Face blindness), a neurological defect which some of his patients shared.

Born into an orthodox Jewish family in Cricklewood, London in 1933, he was destined to become a medical doctor: both his parents were members of the profession, so were two of his older brothers. Oliver was his mother’s favourite but when she found out he was homosexual (at the age of 18), she declared “I wish you had never been born.”

Oliver and his brother Michael had been evacuated during the Blitz to a boarding school in the Midlands where both were bullied and beaten. Michael was so disturbed he developed full-blown schizophrenia. Oliver was physically strong, but very timid, and on his 18th birthday let his parents know his plan to move to the USA. In San Francisco and LA he found a life very different from that in repressive London. Achieving a weight-lifting record from his body building he also became addicted to amphetamines and his BMW motorcycle. His sex life was a disappointment: he constantly fell for straight men and after a birthday encounter in 1963 at the Hampstead Ponds, on a short-lived return to London, he turned celibate for 35 years.

Back in the Bronx Sacks’ life hung in the balance during a fellowship at the Albert Einstein College. And by New Year’s Day 1966, came the realisation his drug habit had to go. In its place came writing. Seeking the help of psychoanalyst Leonard S (the two where still “getting there” by the end), the late 1960s saw him working at Beth Abraham Hospital, where he discovered the beneficial effects of a dopamine replacement drug (L-DOPA) on victims of the encephalitis lethargica pandemic of the 1920s. His patients recovered and shared their experiences during “Lock-Ins”.

Unfortunately, Neurology had acquired a bad name largely as a result of the widespread practice of lobotomising difficult young schizophrenics, but Sacks’ work with kids in this area was too subjective and therefore regarded as ‘unscientific’. In 1973 he was sacked for criticising the practice of putting troublesome young patients suffering from Schizophrenia into solitary confinement.

But his book on EL, entitled ‘Awakenings’ was not well-received, and his colleagues shunned him. To make matters worse, he had written it during a rapprochement with his mother, who then died during a trip to Israel. So disturbed was he at her loss that he injured his leg during a hiking accident (an obvious act of self-harm/suicide) and it took him years to regain his full mobility. This was made worse by his relationship difficulties – homosexuality was a crime, and even an admittance would mean the end of a career. Prison terms and chemical castration were common punishments. (Ironically Penny Marshall’s 1990 film version of Awakenings, with Robin Williams and Robert de Niro, was nominated for three Oscars).

In 1982 Sacks met the editor Kate Edgar, who became his mother surrogate: organising not only his writing output but running his day-to-day life. Sacks output was prolific: his books are always centred around neurological topics, like the aforementioned Prosopagnosia, which he tackled in “The Man who mistook his Wife for a Hat” and “Egnosias”. His love for music was the main theme in “Musicophilia”, “The mind’s Eye” is a research into the brain recognition process of seeing moving images, where a neurological disorder can slow down our recognition process to a slow motion tempo.

Sacks was an explorer of the mind, observing and empathising with his patients, he became completely at one with them during the treatment process. He considered the hierarchical structures which dominate medicine to this day as deleterious to the profession.

DoP Buddy Squires close-ups of Sacks dominate the feature, with Burns keeping proper distance from his subject – apart from at the end, when he chronicles his late-life relationship with NY journalist Bill Hayes, whom Sacks met in 2008. This story of an outsider who became the part of a professional mainstream tainted by decades of patient mistreatment is an enjoyable and informative watch. AS

NOW ON release in Cinemas

Archive (2020)

Dir/Wri: Gavin Rothery | Cast: Theo James, Stacy Martin, Rhona Mitra, Toby Jones, Peter Ferdinando, Richard Glover, Lia Williams

Just before my father died I thought about how brilliant it would be if I could download his personality along with all the vast knowledge and experience gathered during his eventful life, and save it for posterity. Gavin Rothery has taken that idea and made it into an impressive AI Sci-fi drama, and it’s the human element that makes Archive so appealing.

It persuades us that sex and romance still exist in 2038, and so does humour. It’s also got Toby Jones which is always a good thing. And the robots are surprisingly intuitive, with acute sensibilities, and also enjoy listening to rock music.

Theo James plays George Elmore, an American computer working on a human-equivalent AI. Holed up in a remote Japanese facility deep in a snowbound forest he has been tasked by his draconian boss Simone (Mitra) with finessing the model of a rudimentary female robot, who has also cleverly sussed Simone out (“I don’t like her, she’s a bitch”).

But he’s actually more focused on another state of the art humanoid prototype which is at a critical stage, and this personal and highly secretive project will reunite him with his late wife Jules (Stacy Martin) who he speaks to through a system called ‘archive’ that allows the living to communicate with the dead for a brief space of time. Her personality and memories have been downloaded into the robot’s shell. It’s a brilliant idea and the ideal solution for preserving the essence, vast experiences and knowledge of the people we’ve loved. But woman are complex, especially robot ones, and so Elmore really has his work cut out. Then Toby Jones arrives to inspect the archive and George realises his days are numbered.

Archive is the feature debut of Gavin Rothery who also wrote the script. Rather like the recent Sci-fi outing Ex Machina it looks stylish and wizzy largely because Rothery is also a graphic designer and special effects guru but it’s his plotting and a strong cast that makes this enjoyable, although Elmore doesn’t get the happy ending he’s hoping for. MT

ON DIGITAL DOWNLOAD FROM 18 JANUARY 2021

Dear Comrades! (2020) **** VOD

Dir: Andrei Konchalovsky | Drama, Russia 120′

Veteran Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky uncovers a little known episode of the Nikita Krushchev era – the Novercherkassk Massacre of June 1962 – in this elegant and restrained black and white feature filmed on academy ratio.

A follow-up to his last Venice offering – Sin – an imagined drama about Michelangelo – this is a more down to earth film but its refined gracefulness pictures the seriousness of the incident with a lightness of touch and even a dash of sardonic humour.

Dear Comrades! plays out during three days and is viewed through the eyes of a working woman played often vehemently by the director’s wife and regular collaborator Julia Vysotskaya. Lyuda is divorced and living with her daughter and father in the Southern city where she is a committed Communist Party official who yearns for the days of Stalin, despite its abuses which would lead to millions of Russians losing their lives. We instantly connect with her from the opening scene where she is in a rush to leave her married lover’s bed, keen to get in the supermarket queue before the shelves are emptied – due to the political regime rather than Covid19 shortages.

A strike is later announced at a local factory where Lyuda’s wilful teenage daughter Sveta (Julia Burova) is a worker and desperate to join her co-workers as they mass for the protest. Lyuda is watching the crowd swell from the balcony of her spacious offices but when the workers surge forward and break into the building she and her colleagues are advised to leave through the basement. Soon thousands are joining in the protest and the following days sees a KGB sniper shoots indiscriminately into the crowd and many civilians are killed and injured as they scatter for cover. .

The balanced script uncovers some fascinating contradictions about the Soviet era: Konchalovsky and his co-writer Elena Kiseleva are keen to point out that the army are odds with the KGB and the forces end up taking the rap. The authorities crack down immediately ordering the main roads to be resurfaced with fresh tar macadam to hide the indelible bloodshed which has seeped into the cracks and dried in the searing sun. There is a rapid cover-up: locals are forced to sign non-disclosure agreements and sworn to secrecy upon pain of death. Meanwhile, Sveta has disappeared and Lyuda urges a KGB captain Viktor (Andrei Gusev) to help track her down.

In many ways Lyuda is a conflicted character not only for her political ideals but also for her personal ones: “Are you ashamed to share a bed with another woman’s husband?” complains her daughter when Lyuda complains about her daughter’s tarty habit of not wearing a bra. Lyuda supports a crack-down on the protesters but when Sveta upholds her own constitutional right to protest, Lyuda tells her she should be disciplined. And the following vignette involving her father (Sergei Erlish) is a telling one as he dresses up in his military uniform and dusts down a religious icon of the Virgin Mary while reminiscing over past state abuses.

After a dignified irritation in the early scenes Lyuda start to let her emotions out of the bag in the final act, her anxiety bubbling to the surface but also her nihilistic acceptance of life under a regime which she has both aided and abetted, and is now suffering under. The final reveal topples over into a romantic sentimentalism bordering on melodrama that sits awkwardly with her stiff upper-lipped persona of the early part of the film, but this human drama is richly rewarding snapshot of life in 1960s Russia that doesn’t appear to have moved under Putin nearly sixty years later, according to Andre Konchalovsky. MT

NOW ON CURZON VOD from 15 January | Venice Film Festival 2020 | SPECIAL JURY PRIZE 2020

The Seventh Veil (1945) ****

Dir: Compton Bennett | Wri: Muriel and Sydney Box | Cast: James Mason, Ann Todd, Herbert Los, Hugh McDermott | UK Drama, 91;

Compton Bennett started life as a bandleader and then a commercial artist before he started making his own films catching the eye of producer Alexander Korda who hired him as an editor in 1932.

Later he directed this amusing drama which was Gainsborough Studios’ Oscar-winning contribution to the ‘Lady on the Couch’ genre of the forties, described by the late David Shipman as “a dotty mixture of psychiatry, Greig, Tchaikovsky and so on”.

Also worth mentioning is the script by Britain’s most prolific female director Muriel Box who collaborated with her husband Sydney and went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. It begins like Letter from an Unknown Woman with it’s button-eyed female lead in pigtails as an extremely mature-looking schoolgirl, here getting caned. Soon her wardrobe is far more glamorous, but she’s still being bullied; this time even more expertly by James Mason at his most saturnine with the result that she ends up being treated by psychiatrist Herbert Lom (in the role that made him a star and which he effectively reprised on TV nearly twenty years later in The Human Jungle).

That by now she’s also being forced to chose between three handsome suitors is a problem only too many of the women in the audience wished they had, and it was a huge box office hit. Richard Chatten.

NOW ON YOUTUBE

Cocoon (2020) *** VOD, Bluray

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

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

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

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

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

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

DVD, BLURAY and VOD release from 25 JANUARY 2021

County Lines (2019)

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

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

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

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

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

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

INCLUDING BFI PLAYER, CURZON HOME CINEMA & IFI @ HOME

Crash (1996)

Dir.: David Cronenberg; Cast: James Spader, Holly Hunter, Deborah Kara Unger, Elias Koteas, Rosanna Arquette; Canada 1996, 100 min.

Crash certainly broke ground on its release in 1996. Cronenberg adapted the screen hit from the 1973 novel by JG Ballard’s 1973 who was declared “beyond any psychiatric help” by a publishing house critic back in the day.

The thriller won the Special Jury Prize “for Audacity” at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival, where it was talk of the town, Crash feels rather trite in the age of the Pandemic, twenty five years later.

James Spader plays Ballard, a TV producer ‘enjoying’ an open relationship with his wife Catherine (Unger). The two entertain each other with salacious titbits from their extra-marital affairs. But even this kinky variation does not satisfy them – there is still something missing.

The ‘something’ is rather shockingly (at least at the start) a love for car crash related sex. After one such incident Ballard just pulls through although the other driver is killed. He gets together with the female accident survivor Dr. Helen Remington (Hunter) and she introduces him to fellow crash fanatic Vaughan (Koteas), a veteran of staged accidents, and James is entranced by their post crash sex.

Poor Catherine has to wait for her own crash before she can join the elite circle of sex-crash survivors. Vaughan meanwhile re-stages the 1955 deadly crash which killed James Dean, complete with Dean’s ‘Porsche Spyder’. Not satisfied with his endeavour, Vaughan plans for the re-construction of the Jane Mansfield decapitation. After Catherine finally had her own collision – not a particularly impressive one – she can join her husband again. But this time Rosanna Arquette joins the party in a chrome body suit and leg braces, and the re-united couple and Helen can have a three-some of sorts.

DoP Peter Suschitzky shows a barren, snowbound Toronto in keeping with Cronenberg’s habitual bleak dystopian world inhabited by these hybrid characters. For once the director shares a different view: “Even though people think the movie is cold, I don’t think it’s cold. It begins cold, but gradually fills with emotions. It is subtle and not delivered the normal way it’s delivered in movies.” Viewers might find it difficult to come to terms with this new subculture where the addicts seek “to re-experience the mortality they so narrowly escaped by purposefully getting into more accidents where the only goal is to have sex with fellow survivors”. Cronenberg paints the small elite “of people who understand the crash epiphany, which allows them to relate each other”. By definition, there is a whole outside world, where everyone is irrelevant to the self-styled elite of death-seekers – Freud would have had his fun with analysing them. But Cronenberg seems unaware of his closeness to Nietzsche’s postulate of “Mensch and Übermensch: “The subject of the film is there is no moral stance that you can take. And if impose my own art artificial standards, then I am completely spoiling my experiment, which is to let these creatures have their head and try to re-invent all these things they are trying to re-invent”.

Some films are made to be just for a particular moment, that’s were Crash belongs, a piece of utter decadence, great to look at, but ultimately driving on empty. AS

CRASH IS NOW A DIGITAL RELEASE ON 30 NOVEMBER 2020

The Son’s Room (2001) La Stanza del Figlio | MUBI

Dir: Nanni Moretti | Drama, Italy 89′

Nanni Moretti’s portrait of tragedy is an emotionally intelligent and cumulatively moving drama that won him the Palme d’Or in 2001. Naturalistic, unsentimental yet eventually quite shattering the film unpicks the slow and surprising way the sudden death of a close relative can completely change the way we see each other and the person we lost.

In the first half-hour or so this family is living life as normal in the pleasant coastal town of Ancona. The Sermontis are a happily married professional couple: Moretti plays the psychiatrist father Giovanni, Laura Morante is Paola his wife. Their teenagers Irene (Trinca) and Andrea (Sanfelice) are going through the usual teenage ups and downs at school. But when Andrea dies suddenly in a diving accident, his parents and sister find themselves so lost in sadness, anger and confusion their world is blown apart. But then the bombshell – there is another person involved in the equation: a girlfriend they never even knew existed. Nothing surprising – yet this stranger is pivotal in a drama so strangely gripping and psychologically profound, it forces each member of the family to re-examine life up to the event and going forward. Some films make a big impact but are instantly forgettable, this moving story will stay with you for a long time. MT

NOW ON MUBI | BLU-RAY, DVD & DIGITAL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CRYSTAL GLOBE WINNER | KARLOVY VARY FILM FESTIVAL 2019

Pickpocket (1959)

Dir.: Robert Bresson; Cast: Martin LaSalle, Marika Green, Pierre Leymarie, Jean Pelegri, Dolly Scal, Kassagi, Pierre Etaix; France 1959, 75 min.

Pickpocket, shot more or less at the same time as Godard’s A bout de souffle in the late summer of 1959, is by far the closest the French director got to the Nouvelle Vague. Even though the Bresson worked on his feature for ten months, Godard had rushed off his script on the first day of a shoot that would go on for between 15 minutes and 12 hours, depending on his ‘inspiration’.

Both directors opt for style over content, filming mostly on location rejecting the idea of film as photographed theatre. In both the main protagonist is a thief called Michel, although only Godard’s antihero commits a murder. Both directors had strained relationships with their lovers going on the run and aspiring to be above trivial everyday life. But here similarities end: Godard’s Michel is very much a personification of the classical film gangster, the script of Godard’s A bout de souffle is far more conventional than Pickpocket, and the denouement could not have been more different.

Michel (LaSalle) falls into petty thieving out of boredom rather than necessity, enjoying the surprise ease of the casual encounters which he goes on to study and perfect. At the Longchamp race track he steals money from a soignée punter and is enraptured by the euphoria this gives: “like I was walking on air with the world at my feet – a few moments later, I was caught”. The inspector (Pelegri) who arrests him (having to let him go through lack of evidence) will play a big part in the petty crim’s life. Michel joins a group of highly skilled pickpockets, working mostly in crowded places (like the Gare du Lyon) and the crime takes on the choreographed nature of ballet dancers at the Comedie Francaise.

Michel leads a sheltered existence until he meets meets Jeanne (Green) who will later fall for his only friend Jacques (Leymarie), a fellow pickpocket. The inspector entraps Michel via his book on the art of thieving – but finds no concrete proof of his activities despite a thorough search of his lodgings. After his mother (Scal) dies, Michel goes to her funeral with Jeanne only to discover the dying woman had made a complaint to the police about stolen money – later withdrawing the allegations realising it must have been her own son. Michel flees the country for Milan and Rome, travelling on to London and frittering away his ill-gotten gains. Returning to Paris he meets Jeanne who has split with Jacques but now has his child. Michel turns to thieving again to support Jeanne and her child, finding a sense of relief in his love for her.

Leonce-Henry Burel shot four of Bresson’s features, and his immaculate black-and-white images are absolutely mesmerising in sequences crisply edited by Raymond Lamy that bring a stylish grace, rather than a sordidness to Michel and his illicit activities. There’s an elegant beauty in the intimate delving of hands into plush leather wallets and crocodile handbags elevating the activity to an art form in its own right and one that somehow negates the nefariousness intent. Michel slips into crowds and makes his sinuous escape, ducking and diving like an agile beaver. The locations often dwarve the thieves and they go about their business brilliantly in choreographed dovetailing.

Martin LaSalle is hypnotic as a non-pro, originally from Uruguay, he would disappear off to Latin America and a TV career. Bresson did not cast professional actors, preferring to move his protagonists around the set like mannequins. He specifically did not want professional actors with ‘skills’. So in many ways, Pickpocket feels more radical than Godard’s debut feature which seems superficial in comparison. Bresson focuses on Dostoyevsky’s theme of crime and punishment as a metaphor and thus adds another layer of nuanced meaning (not for the first or last time). Bresson relies on the power of his images, Pickpocket could almost be re-shot as a silent film, the meaning would still be conveyed. A masterpiece.

BACK IN CINEMAS FROM 3 June 2022

Overseas (2019) Locarno 2019

Dir: Yoon Sung-a | Doc, 90′

It you are bored with the daily grind of working from home in these tedious Covid times then spare a thought for Filipino domestic workers in the Far and Middle East. In this startling expose of modern slavery that brings us up to speed on the acceptable ways of serving lunch to a Singaporean lady, or cleaning a lavatory in a Dubai household, there are some shocking revelations, tears and sadness for these young women who are often 0ver-worked and badly treated by their employers. But their training instructors urge them: “Never cry in front of your boss, it’s a sign of weakness and Filipinos are not weak”.

Overseas is the sophomore documentary of South Korea’s Yoon Sung-a, and makes for compelling viewing although it often lingers too long on each repetitive scene. There has been a long tradition of employing Filipino workers and these women are often treated as members of the family throughout Europe. But Yoon concentrates on those destined for the Middle and Far East where the working conditions are considerably more harsh, and employment laws less kind. Clearly the financial incentives to work abroad are worthwhile and makes sense, despite the hardships. Working mothers in the Far East are fully accustomed to leaving their kids with members of their own family while they pursue the financial incentives available overseas in order to provide a home of their own when they finally return retire.

Some of the workers are lucky, but many are made to work long hours in poor conditions: one girl talks of sleeping on the kitchen floor and being woken at 5am to start her day; another was constantly given orders even while eating her meals. There is also talk of sexual abuse in a household in the Middle East.

Overseas resonates with Davide Maldi’s recent feature The Apprentice that examines the service industry in Italy and the ongoing attitudes of those employed in the sector, while Lila Aviles has explored the life of a hotel worker in Mexico City in her darkly amusing, award-winning film The Chambermaid (2018). Throughout the Europe domestic workers are more in demand than ever with middle class families paying to having help at home – both parents are often out working and their adult (working) offspring are still in residence. In the Far and Middle East the class system is more rigidly in place but times are changing and these domestic workers are justifiably become more dissatisfied with their lot. These girls are caught in the crosswinds of change.

Yoon adopts a quietly observational approach to demonstrate how the collective experience of these women is broadly negative – yet is at pains to show that they are individuals rather than just a collective mass known for their placid and obedient nature. MT

NOW ON VOD PLATFORMS

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL | COMPETITION | 7-17 AUGUST 2019

La Haine (1995) re-release

Dir.: Mathieu Kassovitz; Cast: Vincent Cassel, Hubert Kuondé, Said Taghmaoui, Francois Levental, Karim Belkhadra, Edoard Montoute, Ahmed Ghilli; France 1995, 97 min.

French writer and director Matthieu Kassovitz was just 27 years old when he won Best Director for his second feature La Haine at the Cannes Film Festival. Yet he has only made six more features since his debut Cafe au Lait – and nothing since Rebellion (2011). La Haine turned out to be the blue-print for films about disaffected youth violence, not only in France. And unlike the “Hood” features in the USA, La Haine took sides.

The 24 hour chronicle is mainly shot in the HLMs (habitations à loyer modéré) of Chantel up-les-Vignes, forty kilometres northwest of Paris, in grainy black-and-white by DoPs Pierre Aim and Vincent Tulli. La Haine had a personal connection for the director through friends of Makome Bowole, a Zairian emigrant, who was killed by the police in 1993.

Vinz (Cassel) is from Jewish working class stock and lives with his grandmother and sister. He fantasises about murdering a cop, and his impersonations of Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver, are not just wishful thinking. Most of his days are spent hanging out with Said (Taghmaoui), a chameleon-like character looking for an identity, and Hubert (Koundé), a black French African boxer with ambitions to make a better life for himself. Race riots kick off after the police beat up their neighbour Abdel (Ghili) and suddenly something shifts in the dynamic between the three men.

Vinz picks up a gun, dropped by a cop during the hostilities, and swears vengeance on the force if Abdel dies in hospital. The three then take a ‘trip’ to Paris where they feel humiliated by their material poverty. Luxury shops and cultural hotspots are all out of their reach. Vinz feels solidarity with a gang of Nazi-skinheads but lets them get away – somehow he identifies with these other have-nots. But the next day Vinz is accidentally shot by the police and Said stays with him while he dies. A cop cocks his gun at Hubert who aims back with the piece Vinz recovered. We hear only one shot.

There are echoes of Scorsese and Spike Lee in this gang thriller, but La Haine is marked out by its gritty surrealism, a million miles away from the sassy slickness of the US directors. Kassovitz doesn’t point a finger or level any accusations: these three young men have too many contradictions in their beliefs and actions in a feature fuelled by hatred and anger: the melting pot France had become is not a comfortable place for anybody any more. Kassovitz was one of the first directors to flag up to his own nation that everyone in his film is French. Twenty-five years later, the Mouvment de Gilets Jaunes have taken the fight into the heart of Paris. AS

NOW ON BFI PLAYER | re-released by BFI Distribution for its 25^th Anniversary

Le Cercle Rouge (1970) New release

Dir.: Jean-Pierre Melville; Cast: Alain Delon, Ives Montand, Gian-Maria Volunte, Andre Bourvil, Paul Crauchet, Francois Perier, Anna Douking; France 1970, 140 min.

By the early 1970s the varied career of Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-1973) which included wartime dramas, psychosexual character studies and even a collaboration with Jean Cocteau – the two shared the same “do it yourself attitude’ – was drawing to a close. This penultimate feature echoes the fatalism of thrillers such as Le Deuxieme Souffle (1966), Le Samourai (1967) and his last film Le Flic (1972). Dictated by the various criminal criminals and detective codes as the only moral guide, protagonists and their players are often interchangeable, women just peripheral to sex up the scenario (the director was a notorious womaniser) and often admitted that his films were camouflaged Westerns – this clearly informed the choice of Herman Melville as his nom de guerre as a novelist.

Distinguished by a dialogue free 27 minute heist sequence, this stylised feature is very Seventies in feel, a jazzy score often giving way to stretches of silence that focus the attention on the elegant framing and distinct cinematic style of Henri Decaë, one has to admire Melville’s rigour and insistence on style over matter in this spare and soigné caper. The plot is rather convoluted and based on a Japanese proverb.

Commisaire Mattei (Bourvil who would die before the premiere) is transferring the notorious criminal Vogel (Volunte) on the night train from Marseille to Paris, handcuffed to a couchette. Meanwhile Corey (Delon) is spending his last night in prison, where a guard tempts him with the ‘perfect’ heist that sounds right up his street. In a parallel timeframe Vogel has jumped from a train window escaping into open countryside, and is later rescued by Corey, who has robbed his boss, and seduced his girl friend (Douking). Corey is then ambushed by hitmen send by his ex-boss, and Vogel rescues him, shooting the two assassins. The two then set about planning the robbery of an expensive jewellery store at Place Vendome, inviting alcoholic ex-policeman Jansen (Montand), a famed sharp shooter, to join them in the plan. As the day of the heist dawns, all four players are determined to cheat fate.The robbery goes well, but the fence (Crauchet) gets cold feet, and the cat-loving commisaire dupes the trio with an invitation to meet him in the titular ‘Cercle Rouge’, where their fate is sealed.

The robbery itself is shot without any dialogue, like Rififi (1955), which Melville was slated to direct, before the Hakim Brothers, opted for Jules Dassin. Otherwise, the various strands are brought together in a sober and ceremonious fashion, with Delon glancing enigmatically at mirrors, whenever he leaves a room. Melville, who was once called the ‘godfather of the Nouvelle Vague’, later fell out with Godard and the other directors over artistic differences. Melville’s studio had burned down, just before he started shooting Le Cercle Rouge, and he lost scripts among other valuable items.

Le Cercle Rouge has a distinct style seen in the portentious nature of the pacing and the daring existential quality of the narrative. Melville was seen as a godfather of sorts for the French New Wave (Godard giving him a cameo in Breathless). His most personal movie was L’Armée des Ombres, which, though misunderstood upon its initial French release in 1969, is now widely considered a masterpiece. Here the enjoyable trio of Delon, Montand and Volonte make this a memorable addition to his short-lived but fiercely independent career. AS

RESTORED FOR THE FIRST TIME ON 4K HD, BLURAY, DVD AND DIGITAL – 23 NOVEMBER 2020.

Billie (2020)

Dir: James Erskine | US Biopic, 97′

James Erskine’s documentary about one of the greatest jazz legends of all time pays exuberant tribute to its focus: Billie Holiday. Born Eleanor Fagan in Philadelphia, 1915, she would go on to enjoy a career spanning 47 years. Perhaps ‘enjoy’ is not the best way to describe Billie’s Holiday’s often troubled existence echoed through her plangent vocal style and sensual ability to manipulate phrasing and tempo. What lives on is her extraordinary talent in singing the blues through these unique recordings.

Erkine bases his impressionistic film on a stash of recording interviews by the late Washington based writer Linda Lipnack Kuehl, who dedicated eight years during the ’60s and ’70s to her informative book about Billie Holiday. And these interviews and recordings breathe new life into our knowledge of a talented jazz singer who rose to fame in the Harlem of the 30s and 40s and lost her life at just 44 after several decades of heartache.

Heartache is a soulful motif that floods Billie’s repertoire with 30′ tunes ‘If You Were Mine’ and “You Let Me Down” with band accompaniment from Count Basie, Teddy Wilson or Artie Shaw. But there were also more upbeat tunes about love such as “I’m Painting The Town Red to hide a Heart that’s Blue”. And the lively ballads “Twenty Four Hours a Day”; ‘Yanky Doodle Never Went to Town’. and the chirpy “Miss Brown to You” with Teddy Wilson’s wonderful orchestra (from the album ‘Lady Day’).

Through Linda’s recordings Erskine shines a light on a time fraught with poverty, misogyny and racism where women certainly got the rough end of the deal particularly in the music business. Billie inhabited these times with gusto and courage, lamenting them in her songs that reflect back on her deep need to be loved by men – and women, using drugs and alcohol to numb her emotional pain. Living in the fast lane also took its toll: “We try to live one hundred days in one day”. Her story was a sad one, recorded here for the first time from the other side of the microphone – through the memories of those who knew and loved her.

Harsher memories contrast with the warmth of these tribute echoing the exuberance of those early days of jazz, and the darker times – we hear from a vicious pimp who remembers beating the women under his power in an era where such events were commonplace in the backstreets of New York. But the police were often as venal in their approach to Billie, pursuing her day and night throughout her life because of her success as a black woman. “Wasn’t she entitled to have a Cadillac?” says drummer Jo Jones. But often Billie couldn’t even get service when dining in a restaurant. After leaving the Count, she was a black singer in a white band. Eventually she served time for drug abuse but on her release still filled Carnegie Hall with queues round the block.

Erskine doesn’t hero worship or quail away from controversy surrounding the ‘false memory’ of many talking heads, reflecting how time can alter the perspective. Linda Lipnack Kuehl doesn’t let her interviewees off the hook, demanding they justify their recollections. A case in point is Jo Jones’s strident claim that producer John Hammond sacked Billie from Count Basie’s band for not sticking to the blues. Hammond vehemently claims the sacking was for financial reasons.

What emerges is the soulful emotion of a talented artist who by definition was subject to highs and lows in giving of herself to her art and this comes across in visceral archive footage – particularly of ‘Strange Fruit’ – and live recordings that celebrate this timeless singer whose talent will never diminish.

It eventually becomes clear that one of her biggest fans was Linda Lipnack Keuhl who was there throughout her career, feeling a close affinity with Billie and her struggle to succeed, despite their different backgrounds at a time of racial segregation and strife. As Linda points out – the musicians were black but the critics, agents and managers were white. Thanks to Linda’s inquisitive style of journalism this tribute to Billie comes alive. MT

BILLIE is available, on demand, from 13th November on BFI, IFI, Curzon Home Cinema, Barbican. There is a live Q&A with James Erskine on 15 November as part of EFG London Jazz festival and it will be available to buy on Amazon and iTunes on 16 November.

THE QUINTESSENTIAL BILLIE HOLIDAY | Volumes 1,2,3 accompanied by Teddy Wilson and his Orchestra.

Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds (2020) Apple TV

Dir: Werner Herzog | Doc 97′

Close encounters of the cosmic kind are the focus of Werner Herzog’s latest documentary as he joins up again with volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer (Into the Inferno) for a peripatetic odyssey into the world of asteroids and meteorites that could fall to Earth and one day destroy us. Captured on the pristine camerawork of Herzog’s

collaborator Richard Blanchard, whose wizardry makes this all the more astounding.

Arcane and sometimes darkly amusing in its fervent boy’s own adventure style of cosmology – you wonder whether Ulrich Seidl has been involved – this is another of Herzog’s mammoth undertakings and the protagonists get very excited about their subject, often waxing lyrical – in the case of the ‘Brothers of the Stone’: “meteorites have a meaning and it’s up to us to interpret what this is”.

Werner Herzog is obviously deeply worried but remains chipper while communicating his concern about this planetary devastation through a series of eager talking heads compered by Oppenheimer himself. There is Bavarian four-times cancer surviver Jan Braly Kihle (straight out of Im Keller), Jon Larsen, a Norwegian violinist with a penchant for cosmic dust (“Cosmic dust looks eternity in the eye, it is the oldest thing that exists on earth”); Brother Guy Consolmagno, a jolly Jesuit astronomer who heads up the Vatican Observatory; and Paul Steinhardt an expert in natural ‘quasicrystal’ whose field experience had hitherto not extended beyond the lawns of Princeton University but he bravely undertakes to locate and prove these crystals had actually been formed in space.

But the principle concern of Fireball is the exploration of things that fall from space, and the myriad artistic rituals and myths associated with these “visitors from darker worlds”. In tones that can only be described as conspiratorial and febrile, Herzog delivers a killer statement: “We do not know what in the future is coming at us, eventually destroying us” but “untold numbers are still on their way.”

Although Fireball may at first seem rather glib and ridiculous the film soon takes on a more contemplative vibe laced with moments of sheer joy and wonder – visually speaking. We visit no fewer than 17 of the planet’s most remote geographic corners, not to mention university laboratories and government facilities. In Mecca we experience the religious fervour when pilgrims are able to touch the famous Black Stone in the Kaaba (here Herzog relies on footage from ‘a believer’). In Mexico (where people believe that shooting stars transport the souls of the departed) we join a Mayan ceremonial procession featuring a fireball on the famous Day of the Dead. But most impressive of all are the sites where asteroids have actually wreaked palpable damage. An enormous crater in Australia has inspired local native aboriginal artist Katie Darkie to create some highly colourful paintings. And according to local folklore another 300 asteroid purportedly fell on a field in Alsace back in 1492. But the most extraordinary comes later.

Occasionally even Oppenheimer seems fazed by the boyish enthusiam of the experts, especially one who hands him a meteorite called ‘The Dog House’ that apparently fell on a dog’s kennel in Costa Rica (luckily the dog lived to bark again). Apparently heavier meteorites landed in the same region the ground underneath was totally destroyed and turned to glass: “if you were sitting there having a cup of tea, you would undoubtedly be turned to glass” he reflects joyfully. Elsewhere in the same Arizona facility, Oppenheimer gets rather flirty when he meets a highly attractive female meteor expert who giggles excitedly when he points out that some of the samples look like the work of Barbara Hepworth. “We’re all stardust – eventually”; she retorts, and at this point Herzog cannot help joining in the cheeky banter.

In a crater in Rajasthan – near to 11th century Hindu Temples — geochemist Nita Sahai comments that meteorites actually contain protein. “What do you think of Panspermia?” asks Oppenheimer rather sheepishly. Nita answers gamely that Shiva is a god of both creation and destruction in the Hindu religion.

Narrating, Herzog judiciously keeps a firm control on pacing, cutting away from experts who are getting over-excited. From India we move to Chicxulub Puerto on the Yucatan Peninsula, where the most cataclysmic asteroid hit ever occurred over 66 million years ago leaving a hole 30 kilometres deep. Although dinosaurs were destroyed in the event, mammals made it through the catastrophe and were able to regroup – although the crater was not discovered until the 70s.

What is certain is that “a big one is going to hit us fairly soon”. That’s the view of a couple of scientists in Maui who have got it covered when it comes to watching out for these ‘unwelcome visitors’, using telescopes equipped with the world’s largest digital cameras. Luckily NASA is also active in this regard with their Planetary Defence Coordination Office responsible for letting us all known when the moment of doom finally arrives.

Fireball includes footage from recent feature films picturing the arrival of unwelcome celestial visitors and a final sequence that sees Herzog back on top form as a master documentarian in a film that needs to be seen to be believed. MT

NOW ON APPLETV

Camouflage (1976) Barwy Ochronne | Kinoteka 2020

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

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

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

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

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

KINOTEKA FILM FESTIVAL 2020

The Iron Bridge | Zelazny Most (2019) Kinoteka Film Festival 2020

Dir.: Monica Jordan-Mlodzianowska; Cast: Julia Kijowska, Barthlomiej Tapa, Lukasz Simlat, Andrzej Konopka; Poland 2019, 85 min.

The coal mines of Silesia form the gritty backdrop to this fraught menage a trois drama that sees two men caught up by a scheming femme fatale.

The Iron Bridge is a first film for Poland’s Monica Joran-Mlodzianowska and certainly makes a strong moral and ethical statement as the opener of this year’s Kinoteka Polish Film Festival – now celebrating its 18th edition, online.

Julia (Kijowska) is desperate for a child with her partner Oskar (Lukasz Simlat from Never Gonna Snow Again). But Oskar is suffering fertility problems so an affair with his boss and close friend Kacper (Bartlomiej Topa – star of Three Colours White) seems the natural solution. In order to keep Oskar busy while the two have fun, Kacper sends his friend to the deepest and most distant coal seems, where inevitably disaster strikes during a tremor. A nail-biting rescue operation is launched with Kacper’s friend and collegue Mikolaj (Konopka) coming up with an ingenious plan to save Kacper’s face and Oskar life.

There is plenty of dramatic potential here and Joran-Mlodzianowska mines it to great effect along the lines of Poland’s cinema of Moral Anxiety from the ’70 and ’80, clearly she had Kieslowski’s Dekalog in mind. The flaws are those of inexperience: a fractured narrative that breaks the tension along with lengthy flashbacks and clunky dialogue. DoP Piotr Kukla saves the day giving the film some flair and formal elegance with his subtle camerawork. AS

KINOTEKA POLISH FILM FESTIVAL 2020

UK Jewish Film Festival 2020 – ONLINE

The UK Jewish Film Festival presents an online edition from 5 – 19 November 2020 exploring Jewish and Israeli life, history and culture.

Festival screenings will take place on their own secure streaming platform available throughout the UK: watch.ukjewishfilm.org. Films will premiere at specific dates and times across the Festival and remain available to watch for a set period – download the film schedule here. Tickets are limited for each film so we encourage advance booking to avoid disappointment.

To ensure the best possible cinema-at-home experience, take a look at viewing guide for ways to watch as well as our FAQs page. For support to watch the Festival with existing viewing setups, contact the box office and support team throughout the Festival duration (5th-19th November): +44(0)203 405 0710; 12pm-8pm, Sunday-Thursday; 12pm-5pm, Friday; 6.30pm-8:30pm, Saturday.

FULL SCHEDULE AVAILABLE ONLINE

Marek Edelman…And There Was Love in the Ghetto (2020) Kinoteka 2020

Dir: Jolanta Dylewska, Andrzej Wajda | Cast: Aleksandra Popławska, Adriana Kalska, Maria Dejmek, Maria Semotiok, Kamilla Baar Kochonska; Katarzyna Wajda, Mateusz Wajda, Patricya Rojecka, Julia Sierakwoska; Poland/Germany 2019, 79 min.

Jolanta Dylewska and veteran director Andrzej Wajda worked together on this wistful ‘behind the scenes’ story of cardiologist Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943. Edelman talks to the camera about his recollections of love in the ghetto, the romantic vignettes re-imagined by actors and intercut with archive films from the 1940s and contemporary shots from the inside of the Ghetto.

Marek Edelman (1909-2009) was also a political activist in the Polish Solidarity movement, a founder member the Jewish Labour Youth organisation before the Second World War, and later in the Ghetto. He became a cardiologist after 1945, and continued to oppose Zionism after the war, writing a letter of Solidarity to the Palestinians.

His first affair involved Dola (Poplanska) who was a nurse at the Bersohn and Bauman hospital in Warsaw, where Edelman worked. One evening, she invited young Marek into a room, telling him she could inject both of them with morphine so that they could make love. Shy Marek, who was immune to morphine, excused himself, and ran away. Later, Dola met a “Volksdeutscher” (sort of second class German) called Jozefow, who worked for Germans in the Ghetto, and the two fell in love. Dola’s husband, the couple had been divorced for a long time, was suffering from Tuberculosis and Jozefow arranged for him to live in countryside, where he brought food, which Dola fed to the invalid, before making love to Jozefow.

Mrs. Tennenbaum was a doctor at the hospital, and was lucky to get “a white card” which meant, that she was safe (at least for the time being) from deportations to the death camps. But her seventeen-year-old daughter Deda had not such luck, and her mother committed suicide, instructing her colleges in writing not to resuscitate her, but give the White Card to her daughter. Her friends honoured her wish, but Deda fell in love with a young man, and whilst they were living outside the Ghetto, with an American nurse, their lovemaking was so boisterous, that informers betrayed them to the Germans. Edelman does not know, when they were deported.

Tosia was a young woman of very middle-class background. She fell in love with a health inspector, and got pregnant. They got caught up in a round-up, when she was in her sixth month. They were dragged to the “Collection Point” near the hospital, where the Jews were forced into the wagons before deportation to the death camps. An Estonian guard wanted to shot her, but her boyfriend put her hand on her belly. The guard shot through his hand, and he was later executed, but Edelman does not know where Tosia was killed.

Hindusia Himmelfarb (Sierakowska) looked like a model Aryan: she had long blond hair and blue eyes – but she went with the children in her charge to the gas chambers. Others gave her the chance to escape the Ghetto, but she could not leave the children. Edelman comments, that her sacrifice was greater than Dr. Korzak’s – because he was an old man and she a young woman.

Pola Lifszyc was a life puppeteer, who entertained 300 children twice a week, making them happy, transporting them into another world. But Pola was worried about her very sick mother. Her boyfriend Janek, who had a rickshaw, was with her, when she learned, that her mother had been taken to the “Collection Point”. She asked Janek to take her there, and he watched helplessly, as she jumped from the rickshaw and joined her mother entering the wagon.

Edelman was not just a bystander: he watched the deportations, and tried to save friends, which he dragged out of lines into the back windows of the hospital. One day, he was looking for his friend Zoria, whom had saved already three times. But on this particular day, a woman with diamonds, asked him, to save her daughter. “I was tempted, because the diamonds meant, that I could save more people”. But Edelman decided against it, and waited for Zoria – but he failed to save her his time.

There was love in the Ghetto is heart breaking, because there are no happy endings. And we can imagine Edelman staying at the gate of the “Collection Point” to wait for friends he would try to save. The three levels work very well together: particularly the re-enactments in the contemporary Ghetto hit very much home: it could happen today. AS

Screening at KINOTEKA | The Polish Film Festival in London, Kinoteka.org.uk

Night Moves (1975) Blu-ray

Dir: Arthur Penn, US Thriller, 100′

Filming on Night Moves was completed in 1973 right in the middle of the Watergate scandal but its release was held back until 1975. This was probably because the film’s tone of despair echoed the country’s political disenchantment. Dialogue such as this wouldn’t have helped it at the box office: Paula: Where were you when Kennedy got shot? Harry: Which Kennedy? Paula: Any Kennedy.

Night Moves’ sinuous storyline didn’t make for an easy film for Warner Brothers to promote. Certainly Alan Sharp’s screenplay is a dense and entwined narrative. The film’s noirish plot about smuggled Asian art treasures, killings and small plane crashes is made subservient to a riveting study of character: the script’s depiction of loneliness, uncertainty and failure was undoubtedly what really attracted Arthur Penn to direct, more than who did what to whom.

Night Moves is an unusual production, as the mantle of noir is questioned and almost abandoned. It turns into a bleak road map for the private investigator, disturbed by a moral murkiness, that no longer allows for a comfortable resolution to a crime. Criminal intent is blurred with human frailty and responsibility. 1973 was also the year of Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye in which Eliot Gould’s portrayal of Philip Marlowe shunted the private eye into irreverence, parody and even de-construction.

If Night Moves’s investigator Harry (Gene Hackman on great form) doubts the meaning and purpose of his work, whilst struggling with a troubled marriage, he still wishes to enjoy the process of detecting, whereas his contemporary Marlowe strides blithely and disengaged through dangerous and increasingly absurd situations. Harry Moseby is still hanging on to the fact that he does want real answers. Yet Philip Marlowe is tired of asking the questions and now plays along with a crazy game.

L.A. investigator Harry is hired by an ex-actress Arlene (Janet Ward) to find her missing teenage daughter Delly (Melanie Griffiths). He completes the job yet also experiences complex relationships that undermine his professional authority, confidence and marriage.

There are two scenes that are so quintessentially Arthur Penn in illustrating his brilliance at the editing of an action sequence and a great tenderness and empathy for the soul of his characters. Rather than reveal the action/suspense – for the crucial violence is for the most part held back to implode in Night Moves’ still shocking climax – let’s dwell on the intimacy of the film and in particular the bedroom scene between Harry and his wife Ellen (Susan Clark).

It’s a moment that beautifully settles on Harry’s tracking down of information: not simply about the missing girl case, but on his own family. Ellen knows that as a boy Harry was left by his parents and brought up by his relations. She calls him the ace sleuth, the all American detective who did discover his parents. When questioned about his father, Harry tells Ellen: “…this old guy sitting reading the funny pages out of the paper, and his lips were making the words and I just stood there and watched him and walked away.” Ellen: “Why did you never tell me?” Harry: “It wasn’t something I was too proud of. To stand six feet away from your own father and then walk away.”

Penn’s enormous sympathy for people struggling for truth and self-knowledge (An investigation more difficult than detective work) is beautifully on show here in what is one of the greatest scenes in Penn’s films. For me it’s remarkably affecting: a heart of the matter episode that is also equally, if not so intensely, signalled in many scenes with other characters. Night Moves movingly describes people who try and fail to communicate their real needs or live long enough (Young Delly’s murdered in a tampered stuntman car crash) to move forward with maturity and insight.

The despair of Night Moves is not simply one of working out the tropes of noir (An acute visual pessimism of setting and underhand motivations) but a reflection on the loneliness of the self. Penn was always a very European-influenced filmmaker (Bonnie and Clyde exults in his love of the French New Wave). Emotionally he was closer to the passion of an Ingmar Bergman (Of whom Penn was a great admirer) than the cynicism of Hitchcock. No surprise then that a character, early on in Night Moves, talks about going to see Eric Rohmer’s My Night with Maud (A film where a couple spend a chaste night in part-philosophic conversation).

Night Moves was negatively described by one critic as a suspense-less thriller. Yet attend to the suspense of its relationships, over the plot, and the film grips and haunts, so that when the violence is eventually delivered it manages to feel horribly futile and inevitable, though never cathartic. The superb Night Moves is one of the finest, most melancholy and tragic American films of the 1970s. Deeply humane and compassionate and not quite the neo-noir journey we were expecting. © ALAN PRICE

NIGHT MOVES IS NOW AVAILABLE ON BLU-RAY

Nova Lituania (2019) MUBI

Dir.: Karolis Kaupinis; Cast: Aleksas Kozanavicius, Vaidotas Martinaitis, Valentinas Masalskis, Roberta Samuolytie, Roberta Sirgedaite, Egle Gabrenaite; Lithuania 2019, 97 min.

In this striking arthouse debut from Karolis Kaupinis, a Lithuanian geologist comes up with a brilliant idea to save his nation at the outbreak of the Second World War,

Nova Lituania is a complete one-off and a challenge, but stick with it and you will be rewarded. Kaupinis dabbles in some obscure alternative history. He also intercuts his drama with disturbing family scenes of the anti-hero. And Nova makes up for an enigmatic finale with its pristine black and white camerawork filmed on an old-fashioned boxy 4:3 format by DoP Simonas Glinskis.

Lithuania in the late 1930s, and middle-aged Feliksas Gruodis (Kozanavicius) is a geology lecturer at the university in Kaunas. With his small country threatened by invasion from Germany, Poland and the USSR, he dreams up a wacky scheme: a mass exodus to Africa, along the lines proposed in 1938 for the resettlement of Jewish refugees to Alaska.

Presenting this ambitious proposal to government takes some nerve on the humble scientist’s part, but he accidentally bumps into prime minister Jonas Servus who is not unreceptive to the idea. His chief concern is logistics: moving 2.8 Million citizens would take some doing, and several years. But Gruodis is adamant, the arrival of 500 experts would create a good base for further emigration.

The two men put their heads together at a seaside rendezvous where they are embroiled in taking part in a military coup against the president. And homelife for Gruodis is also going through turmoil: his dominant mother-in-law (Gabrenaite) is at odds with his wife Veronika (Samuolytie). Luckily his neice Julyte (Sirgedaite) offers tea and sympathy.

Nova Lituania is very much a retro undertaking. The uncertainty of the mass exodus plan is reflected in the confused narrative structure, Kaupinis often losing sight of the storyline while indulging himself in the aesthetics and some impressive historical re-creations. Ideas are explored but remain unresolved, the overall feeling is one of discombobulation, as if the director has popped several intriguing plot devices into the mix, coming up with a riveting, but not always convincing potpourri. That said, this is a visually alluring and valiant re-imagining of history and as such should be applauded. AS

ON MUBI WITH PRIME VIDEO CHANNELS | GOLDEN ATHENA WINNER AT ATHENS FILM FESTIVAL 2019

‘Til Kingdom Come (2020) IDFA 2020

Dir.: Maya Zinshtein; Doc with Pastor William Boyd Bingham IV, Yechiel Ecksyein, Yael Eckstein, Pat Robertson, Pastor John Hagee; Israel/UK/Norway 2020, 72′.

Maya Zinshtein and her writer Mark Monroe take an in-depth look into the unlikely bond between Evangelical Christianity and the Jewish State in America.

This is represented by US organisations CUFI (Christians United for Israel) and The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCT). The relationship between President Trump, who relies heavily on Evangelic Christians, and Benjamin Netanyahu, whose key support comes from orthodox, radical Settlers in Israel, had triumphant results: Trump moved the American embassy to Jerusalem and declared in January 2020, that Israel could not only legitimately hold on to everything they conquered in war but also occupy the Palestinian West Bank, “because it says so in the Bible”.

We meet Pastor William Boyd Bingham IV in the forest outside the small community of Binghamtown, Kentucky. Here just over a third of the population barely surface the breadline and child poverty stays at 49%. The Pastor takes out an automatic weapon and starts shooting practice. No doubt which side he is on: “We are the people who brought Donald Trump to power, and he pushes our agenda.” Like his father and grandfather, he is part of the evangelical Church and an active member of the IFCJ. The organisation was founded in 1963 by Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein and is now led by daughter Yael. The fellowship has donated over a million USDs to good causes in Israel. Naturally, the focus is the young – he even calls it indoctrination -, who are told that “Jews are better than us, and you need to except that.” His viewpoint rides roughshod over the Scriptures standpoint that Jesus will re-appear in Jerusalem, leading to a seven-year war and finally the battle of Armageddon witnessing the destruction of all but a few Jewish believers who must then join Christianity.

Higher up the food chain, Evangelicals like Vice President Pence and Foreign Secretary Pompeo are less concerned with biblical texts, but ‘real politik’. Meanwhile nearer home, at the banquet of ‘Friends of the IDF’ in the Beverly Hill Hilton, casino magnate and major Republican donor Sheldon Adelson saw the IFCJ donating major funds to the IDF (Israeli Defence Forces). Meanwhile, President of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, Lara Friedman, claims that the state of Israel has written off all Jews in the USA who oppose Trump and his policies.

This detail-laden documentary adds further grist to the mill of donations to Jewish causes to the detriment of Palestinian ones. On a visit to Israel with his flock, the gun-toting Pastor Bingham IV opines: “There has to be more accessibility for the church in politics. That’s God’s plan”. He is thankful Yael Eckstein pays his church a visit as she swings through streets where shops and houses are boarded up. Meanwhile, on the Church-funded Radio WMIK, an announcer is appalled “that bombs were thrown near to children… in Israel”.

In this sobering and depressing Zinshtein and Monroe show a bleak picture of funding and support – the bleakest part focusing on the Kentucky Bible Belt who dream of eternal redemption. AS

CHICAGO FILM FESTIVAL 2020 | IDFA 2020

Waxworks (1924) Blu-ray

Dir.: Paul Leni; Cast: Emil Jannings, Conrad Veidt, Werner Krauss, William Dieterle, Olga Belajeff; Germany 1924, 107 min.

German born filmmaker Paul Leni (1885-1929) was one of the greatest talents of the silent era. His German features include Hintertreppe (Back Staircase, 1917) and The Man who Laughs (1928), but he is probably best known for The Cat and the Canary (1927) made in Hollywood where he often worked as a director of photography. The fantasy drama Waxworks captured the comedy-horror craze (or ‘tyrant’ films) of the 1920s and was Leni’s final German outing before he set his sights on America.

Credited with inspiring The Wizard of Oz (1929) and House of Wax (1953) Waxworks (Das Wachsfigurenkabinett) sees a young author (Dieterle) commissioned to add value to the most popular figures in a waxwork museum by crafting their backstories: they Sultan Haroun al Raschid, Ivan the Terrible and Jack the Ripper. The writer has already fallen for the proprietor’s daughter Eva (Belajeff), and lets his imagination run wild making the lovers part of the fun in all three fairytales where they fight to stay together against all odds.

The first tale sees Emil Jannings as the portly Sultan Haroun al Raschid wondering where the smoke is coming from below his palace. His Grand Vizier (Biensfeldt) is tasked with killing whoever is responsible but when he sets eyes on the baker’s wife Maimune (Belajeff) he fails to execute her husband the baker (Dieterle) instead returning to the palace with tales of her great beauty. That night the baker argues with his wife about money and promise to improve things by stealing the ‘wishing ring’ from the Caliph at the dead of night. The womanising Sultan meanwhile visits the bakery to have his wicked way with the wife. When the baker suddenly returns all hell breaks lose, and the Sultan hides in the oven. But a happy ending is ensured courtesy of Maimune.

The second episode is an exercise in sadism. Czar Ivan (a sinister Veidt), loves to poison his adversaries, real or imagined and employs a special poison-mixer to this effect, although he is warned that the man has too much power. So Ivan does away with him, but the dying poison-mixer puts a curse on his final toxic potion: Ivan’s name on the poison bottle will kill the tyrant.

Meanwhile, the writer and his love Eine (Belajeff) are betrothed to be married, and the Czar is invited to the party. Ivan and the bride’s father are travelling on a sledge, the old man is dressed in the Ivan own clothes. Assassins kill the old man, and Ivan arrives unhurt. He takes the bride and bridegroom to the cellars of the Kremlin, threatening to kill the husband if the bride does not consent to having sex with him. But the poison-mixer’s elixir does the trick, and once again ensures a happy ending.

The third story is the shortest, but by far the wildest. The author and Eva find themselves in a distinctly terrifying fairground sharing a tent with Jack the Ripper (Krauss) who chases them round. Finally, Jack stabs the author in the heart – but he wakes up from the nightmare, having cut himself with his pen.

DoP Helmut Larski, whose exotic images dominate the feature, emigrated 1932 to Palestine before returning disillusioned to Switzerland in 1948. Writer Henrik Galeen (1881-1949), the celebrated author of The Golem and Nosferatu, went to work in Britain the late 1920s returning to Germany for a last film, before establishing himself in Hollywood after the Nazism reared its head in his homeland.

Though this fantasy is not as well known as Caligari or Nosferatu, Kracauer is convinced Waxworks goes even further in “The Procession of Tyrants” by “stressing the role of the fair: which in Caligari merely served as a background” Here the fair is very much part of the action. “In the course of their flight, the writer and the girl hurry past the constantly circling merry-go round while Jack the Ripper himself, Caligari and Cesare in one, pursues them in miraculous dream paths, hovering through a gigantic Ferris-wheel that also turns without a pause. Completing the kindred pictorial efforts of Dr. Mabuse, these images symbolise the interpretation of chaos and tyranny in a definite manner. Waxworks adds the final touch to the tyrant films proper.” Sadly Paul Leni died in Hollywood at the height of his career aged only 44, from a tooth infection. AS

NOW ON BLURAY COURTESY OF MASTERS OF CINEMA | 2020

Dear Werner – Walking on Cinema (2020) Seville Film Festival 2020

Dir.: Pablo Maqueda; Documentary narrated by Werner Herzog; Spain 2020, 80 min.

Spain’s Pablo Maqueda travels in the footsteps of Werner Herzog in this filmic foray that serves both as a tribute to the veteran’s 60 years in filmmaking and a study of the touchstones that brought it all to life.

The documentary is based on Herzog’s own diaries (Walking on Ice) that chronicle a winter journey in 1974, when the veteran filmmaker grabbed “a jacket, a compass, and a canvas bag of essentials” and set out on foot from Munich to Paris to visit his friend Lotte Eisner who was on her last legs – but in the end survived another decade.

The writer, critic, co-founder of the Cinematheque Francaise and ‘mother’ of New German Cinema was seriously ill, and Herzog hoped if he reached her apartment in the rue des Capucines, Eisner would recover and continue to be a fountain of knowledge for him and other young German filmmakers. The trip was a success on all fronts.

Dear Werner takes the form of a prologue, seven chapters and an epilogue, Herzog re-wrote some of his diary records, and narrated. “The book started out as a simple travel itinerary which led me deeper and deeper into Herzog’s filmography. Then I realised there was a film, in a sense, that wold talk about me through him and his cinema”. Maqueda echoes Herzog’s own doubts (he first features were slaughtered by the German press), when saying, “by making this film, I aimed to encourage and motivate my fellow filmmakers not to despair and to keep walking”.

In “Cave of forgotten films”, Maqueda explores a real cave, imagining it as the setting for one of his own stories. He also chances upon in a huge listening device and a ski-jump hill – neither associates well with the nature-orientated images which dominate the film. Suddenly we see bears roaming around, only to discover they are actually behind the fences of a nature resort.

After crossing the border to France, Marqueda visits the War Cemetery in Charmes, and later monuments to Jean d’Arc. A chapter on Eisner’s history follows: she had to flee Germany when the Nazis came to power, but ended up nevertheless in a Camp in France, whence she fled. The future director of the Cinematheque Henri Langlois asked Eisner to hide some valuable German expressionist and Russian revolutionary films in the countryside, fearing their destruction. This meant Eisner had to refrain from lighting fires during her ordeal, the nitro material being highly inflammable,

When Herzog arrived in Paris a fortnight before Christmas 1974, he was so elated he asked the recovering Eisner to: “Open the window, from these last days onwards, I can fly”.

Dear Werner is a love letter to the German veteran and the cinema he represents. Maqueda comes over as a diligent pupil, sometimes waxing hagiographic about his idol – but then, so was Herzog when it came to Murnau. Maqueda presupposes his audience is as knowledgeable as he is about Herzog’s canon. And those new to the party may well miss some allusions. Otherwise, Dear Werner – dedicated by the director to Maqueda’s partner and producer Haizea – is a worthwhile journey. AS

SEVILLE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2020

The Sheltering Sky (1990) ***** Blu-ray

Dir: Bernardo Bertolucci | Debra Winger, John Malkovich, Cambell Scott, Jill Bennett, Timothy Spall | Drama 138′

Bertolucci transforms Paul Bowles’ oppressively mournful novel into a sizzlingly seductive big screen feast. With a talented cast all dressed up in James Acheson’s stylish rigouts and Vittorio Storaro’s lush visual mastery there is also Ryuichi Sakamoto’s teasing score and the sultry scenery of the Sahara to salivate over. So abandon yourself to the sensual pleasures of this richly romantic drama that lingers for over two hours.

John Malkovich and Debra Winger are at their languorous best as the rather louche Americans (Kit and Port Moresby) who are travellers – rather than tourists – in North Africa in 1947. Bertolucci brings out the humanity in this rather dizzy couple – who are unlike their page versions – so when it all ends in tears we actually care in a finale that echoes The English Patient.

There is something Gatbyesque about Kit and Port – spoilt beautiful people they may be but there is a tenderness in their love for each other, however much they suffer their melancholy ennui. Both are casually unfaithful early on in the film: Kit with their travelling companion Tunner (a sultry Scott), Port with a Moroccan prostitute. But the pivotal moment comes when they realise their relationship is doomed while making love under the eponymous sheltering sky.

From then on Algeria morphs from exotic paradise to a place of primitive danger as the trip gradually implodes. This is because Port contracts typhoid leading to a fraught search for medical help. Until then this is a sumptuous swoon of a film full of magnificent sunsets and mysterious beauty. Bertolucci by no means subverts our expectations of the cruel savagery of Africa but triumphs in showing us how terrifyingly Heaven turns to Hell. Kit loses her moral compass after Port loses his life and the enigmatic desert swallows her up in an entirely appropriate denouement. MT

A distinguished and emotive follow-up to his Best Picture-winning The Last Emperor (Academy Awards 1988) and a highlight in an extraordinary filmmaking career, The Sheltering Sky won a BAFTA for Vittorio Storaro’s outstanding cinematography and a Golden Globe for Ryuichi Sakamoto’s haunting original score. MT

NOW ON BLU-RAY COURTESY OF ARROW

https://youtu.be/QxjYwZhtSuw

Silent Running (1971) ***

Dir: Douglas Trumball | Cast: Bruce Dern, Cliff Potts, Ron Rifkin, Jesse Vinterberg | US Sci-fi, 86′

Douglas Trumball’s ecological Sci-fi outing s now nearly 50 years old yet feels more relevant that ever despite its slightly wacky mise-en-scene and a score performed by Joan Baez.

The year is 2001 and 36 year old fresh-faced blue-eyed Bruce Dern plays an evangelical botanist adrift in space in a Garden of Eden. His message is loud and clear, re-working that of 2001: A Space Odyssey (Trumbull was in charge of the special effects): The planet needed saving – and humans were the ones to do it. The Garden planet ‘Valley Forge’ has been carefully nurtured by Dern’s Freeman Lovell to nourish and preserve plant specimens rescued before Earth’s apocalyptic meltdown during nuclear war. But afterwards Lovell defies orders to destroy his nurtured slice of paradise, instead taking off for a spin around space (with Drone robots Huey and Dewey), on a mission to save the Earth in perpetuity.

Working with Deric Washburn, Steven Bochco (Hill Street Blues) and The Deer Hunter‘s Michael Cimino, Trumball’s feature debut is a fabulous ground-breaking idea full of fun and fantastic visuals. Dern brings a febrile intensity to the part keeping things weird and wonderful, striking the perfect tone for a fantasy thriller with more up its sleeve than just space travel. MT

OUT ON DVD | 9 NOVEMBER 2020

All For My Mother (2019) **** Kinoteka 2020

Dir: Małgorzata Imielska | Cast: Zofia Domalik, Maria Sobocińska, Malwina Laska, Adam Cywka, Dobromir Dymecki; Poland 2019, 104 min.

After repeatedly escaping from her orphanage, 17-year-old Olka (Zofia Domalik) is moved to a youth detention centre. With bitten fingernails and scarred arms, the teenager has no desire to ingratiate herself with the guards, like the other girls. She just wants to trace her mother.

All For My Mother – a probing exploration of our most visceral bond – won awards at the Gdynia Polish Film Festival and Warsaw Film Festival and will be screening at this year’s online Kinoteka Polish Film Festival, re-scheduled from March.

In her first feature him Imielska depicts a staggering brutal picture of Polish institutional life in hyper-realism that spares the audience nothing. Confined to a prison-like reform centre Olka’s only desire is to escape. She has been looking for her mother for years, and the endless search has become an obsession. Bullied by the other girls – particularly Agnes (Sobocinska), who calls Olka’s mother a whore – she also meets Mania (Laska), whose mother has killed her abusive father and is serving time.

After another attempt at escape Olka is sent away to foster parents in the countryside. Irena (Budnik) and Andrzej (Budnik) are a dysfunctional couple constantly at war with each other. When Olka is in the barn feeding the rabbits, Andrzej attacks and rapes her brutally. She runs away, but Andrzej catches up with her promising to help her find her mother. But this is just a ploy, and the girl is subjecting to further abuse when the police arrive.

Ola is completely disempowered by a system set up to help her and women like her. Eventually one of the therapists supports her case but Olka has given up hope and runs away again after the principal finally divulges her mother’s address in Szczecin. The search will be a grim and disheartening one, sending Olka to the depths of despair.

This is a heart-breaking film to watch and viewers will be staggered by the seemingly lawless vacuum in Poland, where women are treated as fair game by men and institutions alike. DoP Tomasz Naumiuk pictures a bleak and post-industrial wasteland where the material poverty is on a par with the soulless behaviour of the authorities. An utterly compelling feature, which asks fundamental questions. AS

Showing as part of KINOTEKA – The Polish Film Festival in London, Kinoteka.org.uk

Kinoteka (2020) Celebrating Polish Cinema | November 2020

KINOTEKA Polish Film Festival will be celebrating nearly a month of Police cinema in its new fully online programme for the 18th edition of the festival. Expanding on this year’s earlier postponed programme, the screenings roll out on 12 November with the gripping love triangle debut IRON BRIDGE from Monika Jordan-Młodzianowska. The celebration will continue to work with its partners at the Czech Centre and UK Jewish Film Festival through winter right into next Spring.

NEW POLISH CINEMA Showcasing all that contemporary Polish cinema has to offer from Borys Lankosz’s smart genre blend of film noir and thriller DARK, ALMOST NIGHT to Jacek Borcuch’s complex moral drama DOLCE FINE GIORNATA which features a standout performance from Krystyna Janda that earned her the World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award at Sundance Film Festival. Also featured are Małgorzata Imielska’s touchingly honest ALL FOR MY MOTHER and the family-friendly ROCK ‘N’ ROLL EDDIE.

12.11 | Iron Bridge | Monika Jordan-Młodzianowska

13.11 | Black Mercedes | Janusz Majewski| UK Jewish Festival in partnership with PCI

14.11 | Dark, Almost Night | Borys Lankosz

20.11 | Dolce Fine Giornata | Jacek Borcuch

21.11 – 24.11 | Charlatan | (Agnieszka Holland) In partnership with Made in Prague 2020 On/Off Festival & Czech Centre

27.11 | Mr Jones | Agnieszka Holland

28.11 | All For My Mother | Małgorzata Imielska

06.12 | Rock’n’Roll Eddie | Tomasz Szafrański

DOCUMENTARIES EYE-OPENING STORIES FROM ALL WALKS OF LIFE

Diverse, historical and contemporary portraits of Polish life are presented this year. Themes of isolation in a seemingly all-connected world are explored in Pawel Ziemilski’s IN TOUCH, Japanese students’ struggle with learning the Polish language in Bobik Matiej’s OUR LITTLE POLAND and there is a bold account of the romantic intimacy amidst the tragedy of the Warsaw Ghetto with Jolanta Dylewska’s MAREK EDELMAN… AND THERE WAS LOVE IN THE GHETTO.

19.11 | Our Little Poland |Bobik Matiej

26.11 | Marek Edelman… And There Was Love In Ghetto | Jolanta Dylewska

03.12 | In Touch | Pawel Ziemilski

RETROSPECTIVES UNDISCOVERED MASTERS

A chance to discover subversive, satirical masterpieces afresh including Krzysztof Zanussi’s subtle but fierce critique of Communist Party politics in CAMOUFLAGE, Marek Piwowski’s THE CRUISE which is widely regarded as Poland’s first ‘cult’ film and Wojciech Marczewski’s silver bear-winning film SHIVERS.

12.11 – 6.12 | Shivers | Wojciech Marczewski

12.11 – 6.12 | Camouflage | 1977 | Krzysztof Zanussi

12.11 – 6.12 | The Cruise | 1970 | Marek Piwowski

EXTENDED PROGRAMME

The festival’s extended programme takes in socially-distanced film screenings and events into the new year including MISTER T. from filmmaker Marcin Krzyształowicz, which elegantly mixes post-war politics, vodka and basement jazz in a beautifully photographed look at the absurdities of the communist state.

Venue TBC | Mister T (Marcin Krzyształowicz)

Venue TBC | Charlatan | (Agnieszka Holland) In partnership with Made in Prague 2020 On/Off Festival & Czech Centre

OFFICIAL TRAILER

Downstream to Kinshasa (2020)

Dir.: Dieudo Hamadi; Documentary; Democratic Republic of Congo Belgium France, 90 min.

Twenty years ago a violent civil war raged in the Congo and was fought out between Rwandan and Ugandan forces, who supported the two Democratic Republic’s factions. Over four thousand Congolese lost their lives in Kisangani alone in a war that ignited in June 2000 and became to be known as the Six-Day war.

Acting as his own DoP, experienced documentarian Hamadi zeros in on the domestic detail and the wider issues arising from class structure which leaves a particularly brutal legacy in this post-colonial world. This is a place where life-changing injuries still haunt the victims: double amputees like Mama Kawale and Mama Bahingi, and quadriplegic Mama Kashinde have managed to make their days bearable by playing wheelchair basketball. The atmosphere is intense, and every shot at the basket counts: this is no feeling of competition except with themselves, and their individual scores bolster self-confidence.

Hamadi is familiar with the territory having grown up during the massacre. The victims of Kisangani’s war were thrown naked into mass graves, as one of the survivors recalls: “we are walking on corpses”. The survivors have clamoured for nearly twenty years for compensation from the Central government – in vain. Their plight and pain is never diminished, in fact it gets worse, and club together to select a delegation to travel downstream on the Congo river to the capital Kinsasha, where they will demand justice from government officials and their MP.

Intercut with the documentary are scenes from the Agit-Prop theatre of the survivors, which uses music and short scenes to bring home their message. Two simple boats are hitched together, and the delegation team buys food for the journey from vendors on little boats. Arriving in Kinshasa, the positive carnival atmosphere of the journey changes into disappointment when delegation is banned from accessing the government building. Their local MP is not there to engage with their concerns because of the approaching election. So they are put their time to good use raising awareness of their plight with brightly coloured banners – spelling mistakes corrected – before installing themselves in peaceful protest only to be drenched by torrential rain. It’s a pitiful sight, and we feel for them. Eventually they will have something to cheer about when the unsupportive president of the Republic, Joseph Kabila, is replaced by Felix Tshisekedi in the 2018 December elections. But Kabila leaves a legacy, allowing him to select the incumbent Prime Minster. In an elliptical ending, we return to the lively streets of Kisangani, with the delegation walking proudly with their heads high.

Downstream could be called a Road-Movie but that seems too trite a description for this pilgrimage of humanitarian relief and Hamadi reflects this in his poetic and lyrical visual treatment. Eschewing a sentimental approach as all times, Hamadi never victimises the survivors, but triumphs in their fighting spirit kept alive by their exuberant theatre work and their courageous journey to the capital. AS

DOWNSTREAM TO KINSHASA (EN ROUTE POUR LE MILLIARD) won the Golden Dove at the 63rd edition of the International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film DOK Leipzig, as well as the Prize of the Interreligious Jury |

ON RELEASE ON MAJOR PLATFORMS

The Vigil (2019) ****

Dir: Keith Thomas | Cast: Dave Davis, Lynn Cohen, Menashe Lustig, Malky Goldman, Fred Melamed | US Horror, 89′

A malevolent spirit is the suggestible unseen character in this Keith Thomas’s unique horror debut set amidst Brooklyn’s Hasidic community.

A religious practice known as ‘sitting shiva’ is the premise of the claustrophobic funereal spine-chiller. Jewish family members are required to provide comfort and protection to the deceased by sitting with the body and saying prayers for a seven days and nights. Sometimes a ‘shomer’ is paid to do the honours, as is the case here with Yakov (a convincing Dave Davis) a young Jewish guy who is ingratiating himself back into the tightly-knit community and finds this a respectable and fairly easy way of making money. But clearly a deeply unsettling if redemptive one, as we soon find out.

Thomas creates a palpable sense of terror with his seriously spooky soundscape and nauseous colour palette soaked in ghastly dried bloods and neon greens all shrouded in deathly shadows. Much of the dialogue is in Yiddish adding an exotic twist to proceedings delivering a unique cultural experience. It soon turns out that the deceased, Ruben Litvak, a Holocaust survivor, was himself haunted by a dybbuk (or evil spirit) who followed him back from wartime Buchenwald. Meanwhile his ageing wife Mrs Litvak (Lynn Cohen) is a menacing character who has also suffered in concentration camps and is now scratching around on the foothills of Alzheimers. All this feeds on Yakov’s own mental instability over a tragic event in his past forcing him to make a midnight call to his psychotherapist for some emotional support. Or at least he thinks he’s talking to Dr Kohlberg.

DoP Zach Kuperstein must get some of the credit with his spooky camerawork and lighting techniques during this night of terror and spiritual retribution. This is an intelligent piece of filmmaking that shows how trauma can feed on itself and actually perpetuate mental anguish and paranoia until eventually this scenario becoming hard-wired into the brains of those affected and their descendants. MT

THE VIGIL WILL BE RELEASED ON DIGITAL PLATFORMS ON 30TH NOVEMBER AND ON DVD ON 4TH JANUARY IN THE UK AND IRELAND

King of New York (1990) Arrow Player

Dir: Abel Ferrara | Cast: Christopher Walken, Laurence Fishburne, David Caruso, Wesley Snipes, Steve Buscemi, Joey Chin | Crime Drama, 103′

Abel Ferrara gives this US crime thriller a lyrical almost existential makeover spiked with some vicious violence and an incendiary car chase on a storm-lashed bridge. Haunted by the otherworldly elegance of Christopher Walken as mercurial world-weary crime lord Frank White, a strangely likeable felon determined to do good, having done bad in gangland New York.

Walken carries his villain head and shoulders – quite literally – above the usual hard-nosed mobsters. Not that he doesn’t mince words, and there are some punchy lines thanks to Ferrara’s regular writer Nicholas St John: “are you gonna arrest me, because if so do it because I’ve got people waiting for me”.

Laurence Fishburne and David Caruso also add zest to the mix, Caruso as a frustrated cop: “every time Frank kills somebody out there, it’s our fault, and I can’t live with that”. But this is a film made of memorable moments rather than a true epic feature. Ferrara makes gangland look real but stylish, rather than gritty or dangerous – he a 5 million dollar budget to play with. Bojan Bozelli’s lighting in the high class brothel and neon nights scenes is particularly lush.

Back on the streets Frank White’s game-plan is to rebuild the community hospital out of his ill-gotten gains but his recidivist credentials cannot help getting in the way, especially when the Chinese gangster Larry Wong gets involved. Ferrara portrays a time when New York gangsters made millions and sunk it into real estate, adding to the city’s reputation for iniquity, finally addressed – and rectified – by Mayor Giuliani. Sadly, women only get to play molls and prostitutes (although one pretty boy serves as a nifty receptacle for cocaine). The soundtrack is terrific and Walken does his funky dances and makes some serious social comment about the drug trade. MT

NOW AVAILABLE ON ARROW PLAYER & 4k RESTORATION BLU-RAY/DVD

Luxor (2020) ****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Martin Eden (2019)

Dir Pietro Marcello | Italy, Drama 129′

Based on the 1909 novel by Jack London, Pietro Marcello crafts a sweepingly timeless romantic epic that follows the fortunes of a sailor (Luca Marinelli) in his captivating quest to become a writer.

Martin Eden is a hero in the classic Southern Italian style: his passionate raw charisma hides a vulnerable but trusting heart.
Marcello’s film is set in a nameless Italian port city where it blends a variety of temporal cues while remaining timeless, a restless momentum driving the narrative forward, and keeping the audience absorbed for nearly three hours.

As Eden, Luca Marinelli has an energetic physicality that pulsates with his desire to overcome the odds of his skimpy education. We first meet him as a jobbing sailer, his imagination fired into action by a chance encounter with the sophisticated Elena (a fragile Jessica Cressy) and he becomes infatuated, for a while. But Martin’s intense preoccupation with bettering himself work-wise – and socially too – soon becomes an obsession, alienating those who have helped him, As the saying goes: ‘you can take a boy out of Southern Italy but you can’t take Southern Italy out of a boy” and his humble start in life tugs at his conscience.

Marcello’s decision to shoot on Super 16mm gives the film an atmospheric retro quality that compliments the timeless romance of this aspirational story. The use of archival footage both illuminates and intensifies this haunting flight of human passion. The desire to seek a better life against all odds is both timely and universal. MT

New Wave Films is finally set to release Pietro Marcello’s ‘MARTIN EDEN‘ in UK cinemas on 9th July.

Queen of Hearts (2019) ****

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

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

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

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

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

Queen of Hearts is available to stream and on Prime Video

Looted (2019) ****

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

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

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

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

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

I Am Not a Hero (2019) *** Raindance Film Festival 2020

Dir:Pablo Diaz Crutzen, Stijn Deconinck and Robin Smit | Doc, Belgium

I Am Not a Hero offers a Belgian perspective on the Covid19 Crisis and a serene view of fighting the disease from the experience of the medical staff at the Belgian Centre of Excellence of the Erasmus Hospital in Brussels.

Filmmakers Pablo Diaz Crutzen, Stijn Deconinck and Robin Smit explore the pandemic from the March 2019 lockdown until the situation was well under control in late May. Probably not the most popular release at London’s Raindance Film Festival this November, the film nevertheless offers a contrast of sorts given the lessons learnt as the UK and other major European countries face some kind of renewed lockdown this Autumn.

Not surprisingly Belgium experienced the same issues as Britain, and one of the nurses erupts in total rage with her comments intended for the Belgian government: “Where are the masks and equipments they promised? How can we work in these conditions? Why are the aprons now so thin?” Yep, sounds familiar.

We witness a nurse speaking to the family of a very sick patient who has spent most of her treatment lying face down – hence the marks on her face – the situation looks optimistic, but it’s still early days. Another nurse shares a grim experience of having to deal with the body bag of a patient who died alone without their family – or anyone – for comfort.

Belgium is rather like Britain where hospitals are staffed by multicultural nurses and doctors who nevertheless all get on like a house on fire. And the atmosphere is for the most part cheerful if soberly so. The main commentator here is a ‘bubbly’ Moroccan nurse Meryem – who describes how she copes with having a growing family to look after, and the need to spend a few days with them now and again to keep everyone happy. There is also a pleasant consultant called Fabio who comments encouragingly. “Most of the patients eventually pull though” Those we do see (although faces are hidden) are white, middle-aged men.. But there is also an in-depth chat with a plump, white nurse who describes her symptoms as a dry cough, loss of smell, and she undergoes a really painful nasal swab.

Fabio does allow the family of a dying patient to visit in the final hours of life. And this is particularly difficult to watch as Fabio organises another visit for a man who will certainly die that night. He has been in the hospital for a month and the shock of his deterioration is clearly hard to accept for his nearest and dearest. Belgium is one of the few countries that have allowed these humane visits.

Filmed on the widescreen as the camera hovers over the hospital and impersonal close-ups on the ward and in the morgue, I Am Not a Hero is always respectfully – the focus is a random hand or the fleeting glance of a wheelchair going into an ambulance ensures discretion. As we leave Fabio and his team, the worst of the crisis is over with a jubilant patient leaving the ward and later arriving home, a little shaky but walking on air.

Maryam feels she has enforced her commitment to her profession and is looking forward to going back to ‘normal’. Sadly that ‘normal’ time is still to come as we face the Winter with our unwelcome visitor from China. MT

RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL | 2020

The Interrupted Journey (1949) ***

Dir: Daniel Birt | UK Thriller, 80′

A title that the producers once thought for The Interrupted Journey is The Cord. And in some ways it better describes this compelling nightmarish noir directed by Daniel Birt. A writer eloping with his lover pulls the alarm cord on a late night train throwing his future into doubt and implicating himself in a murder. But did the man really pull the cord, or was it just a dream?

Richard Todd stars alongside Valerie Hobson in this British crime thriller a follow up to No Room at the Inn (1948). Todd is budding author John North in love with his publisher’s wife Susan (Norden) while still married to Carol (Hobson). At a certain point in their train getaway the communication cord is pulled twice. But mystery surrounds who actually pulled the cord that stopped the train, resulting in a crash, or perhaps only a temporary standstill? And did such a thing really happen after all?

The pulling of that emergency cord is nevertheless pivotal to the storyline and its conclusion. The Interrupted Journey’s dramatic twists or contrived let-downs (depending on your point of view) reveal an intriguing dilemma between the depiction of dreams in cinema, and the consequences for realising a plausible thriller. But does this really matter – if you successfully create your own invented world you’ll carry the audience with you? Hitchcock did this time and time again.

At this point if you don’t want to hear spoilers, then stop reading and head straight to the conclusion. In the meantime, let’s examine the plot. John North leaves his wife and runs away with Susan Wilding. On the train he gets cold feet, pulls the communication cord and leaves the carriage. The emergency stop causes a major collision with another train causing considerable casualties. North confesses to Carol that he planned to leave her for another woman. The police discover that Susan was shot dead before the crash. The authorities try to arrest North. He tracks down Susan’s husband Clayton (Tom Walls) who didn’t die in the collision and is the real murderer, who then goes on to shoot North. At this point North wakes up on the train to discover it’s all been a very bad dream. Susan realises that John isn’t prepared to leave his wife. She pulls the cord, the train stops, and John returns home to his wife and a potentially happy ending.

Looking through the reactions of reviewers in IMDB there is a clear divide between those who go with the dream theory and those who don’t. So is the film’s finale insipid or intriguing? I’m on the side of an intriguing dream narrative because the film’s sense of reality is constantly being subverted by a nightmarish apprehension. John Pertwee, in a supposed real sequence of events, seeds his script with self-conscious references to dreaming: all these dream pointers become more apparent on revisiting The Interrupted Journey.

“Now I know it’s a nightmare.’ says Carol to John when she realises the police are on his tail. At this point we cut to a strong reaction shot of Carol that conveys a sense of displacement from her surroundings – we leave her home to go to an insert of an ill-defined studio space where she might in fact be dreaming. She then says angrily, “You shouldn’t talk in your sleep”. This refers back to John’s sleep-talking while in bed with his wife. But he’s talking about Susan, having returned from the train crash.

So we have North’s guilt creating a dream within dream. And Carol’s anxiety about the reality she is experiencing. Such ambiguity is subtly drawn and paced by Michael Pertwee’s deft script, Daniel Birt’s fluid direction and Irwin Hillier’s expressive photography.

There are other small details in The Interrupted Journey that make for a dreamlike atmosphere. Just before the runaway couple board their train they order coffee and cakes in the station cafe. Susan notices that the coffee tastes more like tea, and they leave with their rock cakes uneaten. Later at North’s home, the railway official who has come to investigate the crash is offered the rock cakes, with a cup of tea, as Carol remarks– “Well you can’t just throw rock cakes at detectives!” (A memorable line!) – leftover food and coffee masquerading as tea help to create an uneasy dream-sense of surreal repetition.

Another small detail is the North’s grandfather clock that runs ten minutes slow. This features at the beginning of the film and John casually reminds himself to get it fixed one day. Yet near the climax Carol corrects the time from nine fifty to ten o’clock: a routine reality, hence normality is restored for Carol and John’s relationship. He has arrived home and there wasn’t a crash. But, for a moment, Todd is disturbed by the hooting of the passing train (a lovely edgy twist here). Was it really a dream? Will reality kick in? It does kick in but not for a crash to happen again but only to create a short halt on the track. John’s relieved and embraces his wife. But there is the small matter of him having (in reality?) mailed Carol a letter explaining his affair with Susan. And that letter will arrive in the morning post – now only in the thoughts of the audience: requiring an explanation, long after the credits have rolled up. But will Richard Todd be able to destroy the letter before Valerie Hobson sees it, as he did, once before, in the bad reality or bad dream he suffered earlier?

Two films, both made in 1945, immediately come to mind as having possibly influenced The Interrupted Journey and they are Dead of Night (1945) and Lang’s The Woman in the Window. (1944). A further link with Lang is photographer Irwin Hillier who worked with the director on M (1931) at the UFA studios and later with Michael Powell supplying luminous photography for Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944), and I know where I’m going. Hillier contributes strongly to the sweaty, expressionist fear experienced here by North, through often beautiful lighting and a palpable subjective camera positioning.

More than likely then that Daniel Birt and Michael Pertwee watched those earlier films – a supernatural chiller and a noir of sexual obsession. In The Woman in the Window a murder, committed by Edward G.Robinson, proves to be a nightmare after his waking up to the chiming of a clock in his gentleman’s club (Fritz Lang has convincingly defended his film’s happy ending, for like The Interrupted Journey, I feel there is a wish-fulfilment fantasy at play here). And in Dead of Night we are left with the cyclic horror of repetition on discovering we will never wake up from the architect’s nightmare – but we will, sooner or later, awake from our train reverie..

The Interrupted Journey may hints at no way out yet never descends into morbid psychological horror. And like Woman in the Window, Birt’s melodrama combines thrills with romantic desire and emotional fulfilment. Underneath the trappings of a brilliantly shot and excellently acted noir, marital longing and rejection flourish in Valerie Hobson’s wonderful performance. She was often criticised for portraying the decent, domesticated wife in British Cinema. Yet here she touchingly plays that role with a warmth and unsentimental honesty that convinces us of her sincere love for the Richard Todd character. The railway official repeatedly says to John North, “Don’t you know you have woman in a million?” And this reminder of Carol’s affection and concern voiced by a stranger who soon turns into a prosecutor intent on extracting not only a murder confession from North, but also an acknowledge of his love for a devoted wife. The Interrupted Journey is never a case of surreal ‘amour fou’, more an intense request for fidelity of an English and very late-forties kind. Think of David Lean’s Brief Encounter rather than Luis Bunuel.

The Interrupted Journey is by no means a masterpiece. Its dream content is never as coherently realised as The Woman in the Window nor does it ever suggest a satisfying Freudian sub-text. It can best be described as a modest, technically astute and enjoyably intuitive but finally not as psychologically complex as the Lang feature. Yet as with Lang the film exudes a confident sense of the working out of fate, alternative outcomes and, unlike Lang, the power and responsibility of love.

Coming straight after Birt’s 1948 films No Room at the Inn and Three Weird Sisters then The Interrupted Journey strongly completes a strange threesome, and is by any standards a remarkable directorial achievement for British Cinema in the post war era. And you can currently join the journey and pull, in disappointment or pleasure, its regulation cord, on Talking Pictures TV or Youtube. © ALAN PRICE

Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project ****

Dir.: Matt Wolf; Documentary with Marion Stokes; USA 2019, 87 min.

Director Matt Wolf (Teenage) has created a immersive portrait of Marion Stokes (1929-2012): socialist organiser, civil rights activist, librarian, TV presenter and archivist. Of her many achievements is a collection of recorded American TV News programmes, spanning the years from 1977 to her death. This valuable reference is an achievement that will keep her name alive as long as TV history is being made.

Stokes’ personal history is as uncommon as her prodigious output: she was given up by her mother for adoption and later traced her birthmother to learn that now had brought up a family after Marion had left. A child of the big Depression, the memory of poverty never left her: her first husband testifies to her membershop of the USA Socialist Party, which he calls “a very unattractive organisation”. This, and the fact that she was a civil rights campaigner, cost her the librarian job. Nevertheless, Stokes was anything but a victim or martyr, with her future husband John Stokes (from a family of ‘Old Money’ in Philadelphia), she hosted a local TV programme researching, among other topics, the way news shows were produced.

Her relationship with her own son Michael Metelits (from her first marriage) was frosty, as were her feelings for John Stokes’s own kids from his first marital relationship. For many years she couldn’t forgive Michael for lacking her intellectual rigour. One of John’s daughters relates how she had to sneak up secretly to talk to her father who later begged her not to mention their meeting.

Marion and John led a more and more secluded life, helped by a chauffeur, an assistant and a nurse, who all spoke highly of Marion. The couples’ huge flat in a luxury apartment block on Ritterhouse Square, a prime location, was soon too small to house the 40,000 books even more tapes the couple collected – they rented multiple flats to cope with the overflow. Strangely enough, Marion was a great fan of Steve Jobs, talking about him like he where her own son. She also bought Apple shares when they were valued at only USD 7.00, and collected all 192 Apple computers from the very beginning of ‘The Classic’.

Long before Kellyanne Conway and Donald Trump coined the term ‘Fake News’, Marion had already cottoned on to the questionable coverage of the Iraq/Iran wars. But it was not only the main stories that fascinated Wolf: “Ultimately it was things we were not looking for, that were most interesting”. Such as a 1998 story, of 84-year old Rose Martin, who was buried in her white Cevrolet Corvair.

It took over fifty volunteers to catalogue the 70 000 EP (extended play) tapes with Marion’s comments on the spine giving a clue for the Google spreadsheets. This is a stunning documentary. Keiko Deguchi has done a superb editing job, and Chris Dapkins and Matt Mitchell’s talking head images are one of the better ones. Marion Stokes died on the day the school massacre of Sandy Hooks (Connecticut) unfolded on TV – luckily, accordingly to her son, she died before the news showed the grim images. AS

NOW ON RELEASE.

Havel (2019) *** Czech Film Week

Dir.: Slavek Horak; Cast: Jan Dvorak, Anna Geislorova, Pavel Landdovsky, Anna Kohoutova, Stanislav Majer; Czech Republic 2020, 104 min.

Slavek Horak fails to do his subject justice in this ‘buddy movie’ about Czechoslovakia’s final president and human rights activist Vaclav Havel (1936-2011) framing him as a lecherous womaniser and coward while playing down a prodigious literary talent and author of 245 plays, nine books of non-fiction and six volumes of poetry.

The film focuses on Havel’s adult life leading up to his election as first president of the Czech Republic in 1993, several years after the nation’s “Velvet Revolution” in 1989. There are two time scales: the first one covers his Havel’s life at the theatre in the 1960s the second his imprisonment and dealings in the aftermath to the invasion in 1968. Clearly Horak is not a big fan of the Czech statesman; his treatment plays fast and losse with history, paraphrasing and over-simplifying as it goes along, And this approach is born out in the dialogue. When Havel (played by a game Jan Dvorak) confesses to his wife Olga (Geislorava) “I haven’t been as morally strong as you deserved. But you have always been my First Lady”; Olga replies: “I’d rather be your only lady”. When Havel tries to be philosophical, the result is not much better: “The most interesting thing about the conscience is, that we carry it with us always”.

Havel does not fare any better with his temperamental co-conspirator, the actor Pavel Landovsky (Hofmann), during their illegal battle against the regime after 1968: “You can’t push people to join!…They join us when there are more of us, but there won’t be more of us, if they don’t join us”. Logic prevails. Most complaints come from Olga, who also had to listen to Havel’s ‘confessions’ of his adultery: “for once, would you just NOT tell me”. Further critique follows: “act like a man for once” and “you still think you can have it all?” This plays out during illegality and subversion, after Havel was expelled from the theatre and had to work at a brewery.

But pride of place goes to the exchange between Havel and his mistress Anna Kohoutova (Seidlova), the wife of fellow playwright and conspirator Pavel Kohout (Majer): “My husband is a great fan of yours.” meanwhile “My wife is my biggest critic”. Finally, having declared: “I don’t want to protest, I want to do Theatre”, Havel becomes one of the founder Members of Charter 77, which is smuggled to the West. Again Horak tackles this with platitudes, and not just verbal ones. During interrogation Havel is accused of being a martyr “You are playing the martyr, but when they pressed, you sh.t yourself”. And afterwards, he tells Olga that he only told the authorities what they already knew. “What you don’t know, you can’t tell”. Olga then counters with “Not even to yourself?”

Despite its rather lamentable content this is an elegantly crafted piece of filmmaking. DoP Petr Malasek creates an attractively muted aesthetic all in hued of gunmetal grey and dark blue. Vladimir Hruska’s set design reflects the era but still feels fresh and imaginative. But Horak’s choice of music, scored by Petr Malasek, gives into sensationalism, creating an overwhelming emotional pull that would do any Hollywood blockbuster proud. Surely Vaclav Havel deserves better than this. AS

+ Q&A WITH DIRECTOR SLÁVEK HORÁK
1 – 4 Nov 2020 / Czech Centre Vimeo on Demand / PRE-ORDER NOW

Leap of Faith (2019) ****

Dir: Alexandre O Philippe | Doc, 105

Leap of Faith, a lyrical and spiritual cinematic essay on The Exorcist, explores the uncharted depths of William Friedkin’s mind’s eye, the nuances of his filmmaking process, and the mysteries of faith and fate that have shaped his life and filmography. The film unpacks Friedkin’s filmmaking process focusing here exclusively on The Exorcist, a mystery of faith inspired – according to Friedkin – by Dreyer’s 1955 drama Ordet

Already well known for his documentaries 78/52 and Memory: The Origins of Alien, Philippe jumped at this opportunity of a cosy fireside chat with the iconic director who describes himself of instinctive “one-take kind of guy” who has always relied on his gut reaction and spontaneity to make a film. Spontaneity interests him more than perfection. And this was particularly the case when it came to creating The Exorcist which he calls a ‘chamber piece’ rather than a horror movie.

Friedkin grew up with his parents in a one room apartment in Chicago where he was taken by his mother to see Clifford Odet’s None But the Lonely Heart (1944). A lowly postboy, he wanted to discover more about cinema. But the film that propelled him into a career in film was Welles’ Citizen Kane.

By the early 1970s he had already become a successful director when he happened to read William Peter Blatty’s paperback The Exorcist. Friedkin describes wanting to make the book into a movie against all odds – it seems the whole film popped into his mind fully formed from the novel but Blatty’s script was a fractured narrative with flashbacks. The singleminded Friedkin describes how he had what Fritz Lang once called “sleepwalkers security” about the script. He knew he wanted to tell a straight ahead realist story, just like the book.

The introduction is the underpinning to the whole piece and takes place in ancient Niniver, Iraq. At some point in the town’s early history the citizens had all been beheaded along with the statues and this tragic event sets the tone for the story, the director following his instincts throughout the shoot. Another crucial factor in deciding Regan’s behaviour was an incident during his Chicago, childhood when a local girl was decapitated, her body cut up and thrown into the garden. An ancient medal found in the sands becomes the McGuffin, a significant device providing the motivation for what happens next.

Music had an overriding influence for Friedkin in the The Exorcist. But he wanted to avoid a score that drove the plot forward, and chose instead to soundscape that slowly builds into a powerful force. An overriding sense of dread that stays throughout, starting with a the lowkey opening in Iraq and ending in a quiet crescendo. Father Merrin’s premonition had to be an instinctual moment that the audience has to sense. The supernatural in our midst. An ordinary girl slowly becomes a demon. This “Expectancy set” describes how the audience comes to the cinema wanting to be scared from the outset. Bernard Herrmann was top of the list score-wise but was quite rude about the film. “If you know St Giles Cripplegate’s organ that would be a great inspiration” said Herrmann, who by now was living in London. But what the film needed was music that “felt like a cold hand on the back of your neck” – he found it with a score made up by composer Lalo Schiffer. But that didn’t work either and drowned the subtleness of the early scenes. The score was left untouched, and they haven’t spoken since. Friedkin wanted more of a Brahms lullaby. Then Mike Oldfield then came along.

Friedkin’s use of subliminal cuts and sounds makes the movie into an experimental sound museum. Old colleague Ken Nordine was called on to create Regan’s demon voice – it needed to be a male/female voice of the kind that Mercedes McCambridge had used in the Western (Johnny Guitar/1954). She used a concoction of heavily booze, eggs and cigarettes to produce an un-God-like sound which brought about the required timbre.

Casting was another complex matter that took some time to get right. Max Von Sidow had a problem getting the intensity to play Father Merrin because he didn’t believe in God, although he had played a convincing Jesus in George Steven’s The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965). In the end he played Merrin as an ordinary man because his acting skill came from understatement rather than histrionic emotion. Blatty, who has studied for the priesthood and then dropped out, was desperate to play Father Karras but then Jason Miller stepped forward and he just embodied the priest, although he was a non-pro. Stacey Keach had been signed to the role but was immediately dropped, his contract settled in full. The Reverend William O’Malley was another non-pro perfect for the role as Father Dyer because he understood the territory. Friedkin often shot a gun in the air to achieve the right facial expression from his actors – John Ford and George Stevens also regularly used these techniques. Although he claims this kind of ploy was never needed with a great actor. Lee J Cobb, who played Lt Kinderman, was one.

Friedkin talks a great about ‘rosebud moments’ and ‘grace-notes’ during this engaging documentary which draws on his wide taste in culture and art. Regan’s makeup was inspired by the Belgian surrealist Ensor’s paintings of masks. Magritte is also an influence, the artist’s Empire of Light giving the film its iconic image.Moments of truth such as in Cartier Bressons’ photos and Caravaggio’s tortured figures were also an inspiration. Friedkin’s way of lighting the sides of his character’s faces was taken from Vermeer and Rembrandt. Particularly Vermeer’s View of Delft in 17th century. He describes the scene with the white-robed nuns walking by as one the grace notes in this otherwise grim film. Grace notes are the lovely things you remember forever, and are more significent than the larger events.

Just like Kubrick’s Obelisk in 2001 A Space Odyssey, so the silver medal appears to various characters in the film including Father Karras and Father Merrin, along with a constant subliminal theme of ascension throughout the film. Karras is a figure with an inner torment of his own: taunted by guilt about his mother and his fears for the loss of his own faith, he is the tragic hero of the piece. The Father gives up his life for the life of the young girl. He jumps out of the window taking the demon with him, having invited it into his own body, even though suicide is against the Catholic Church (an idea that departs from the book), and remains an ambiguity in the film. Blatty insists that the devil comes out of his body again before Karras leaps out of the window. He then confesses to Father Dyer at the end but Friedkin is still unhappy about this dilemma, considering it the only flaw in the film.

It seems neither Blatty not the director are convinced about the ending. “Life is so ambiguous and that’s why my films are” he claims. This informative documentary ends with Friedkin reminiscing on life and his visit to the Zen garden in Kyoto where he found peace and a series of rocks surrounded by raked gravel. “The rocks represent continents that will never come together. We are in this World alone, completely separate from each other. Driven to tears he sites this as one his grace notes. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | 29 August – 7 September 2019

When the Earth Seems to be Light (2015) **** Georgian Retro | DocLisboa 2020

Dir.: David Meskhi, Salome Machaidze, Tamuna Karumidze; Documentary, Georgia 2015, 76 min.

A clash of cultures is the subject of this evocative Georgian film screening at Lisbon’s annual documentary festival DocLisboa. It seems nothing has changed five years down the line. In fact most people say tribal warfare is on the increase – particularly in our capital cities – as Covid19 continues to weaken the fabric of society, polarising black and white, left and right, even old and young. When The Earth Seems to be Light looks at how tough it is to be liberal-minded in Tbilisi today.

Prominent Georgian artist and filmmaker David Meshki has got together with a bunch of other creative types and his fellow directors Tamuna Karumidze and Salome Machaidze to explore the ways they all feel pushed to the margins of a society where there is apparently no middle ground between the glory days of communism, or the dog-eat-dog version of modern capitalism.

There are some extremely disturbing images, among them Orthodox priests leading a violent demonstration against the LGBT community. “Our tattoos are our dairies” says another “beatnik”. “You tattoo what you feel, what’s important for you at the moment”. They are existential in their approach, and would have more at home in the St. Germain of the 1950s. Yes, sometimes Molotov cocktails are thrown, but concrete is usually the target. Its all very volatile, with fireworks and computer noise exploding at the same time. The questions are the usual ones, about God, freedom and the meaning of it all. But the experience is deeply personal: some feel bullied because of their hair styles, apparently Georgians cannot except people who look different. The majority still hankers after a life under Soviet rule when outsiders were officially persecuted by the state. Ironic to see older people demonstrating, fighting the young ones. Somehow there is a huge capacity for mass violence – Stalin and Beria are not yet dead here in Tbilisi.

Earth has a unity of of aesthetics and contents. There is an eerie and airy quality to the images, and a no-nonsense approach to the questioning. Somehow it seems to be a clash between the Middle-Ages and a hoped for utopia: Georgia emerges a nation looking backwards with intolerance, the outsiders celebrate a life of hope and despair in equal parts. A well-paced and fine collective work that resonates even more so today. AS

DOCLISBOA | GEORGIAN RETROSPECTIVE 2020

Hoop Dreams (1994) **** Blu-ray release

Dir.: Steve James; Documentary with Arthur Agee, William Gates; USA 1994, 172′.

A sporting dream based on basketball spawned this multi-award winning documentary about two becoming NBA stars.

Hoop Dreams started life as a thirty-minute documentary short for first time director Steve James. But after nearly five years of shooting and two years of editing 250 minutes the running time grew into nearly three-hours.

Arthur Agee and William Gates were fourteen year old Afro-Americans living in different housing projects in the West Garfield neighbourhood in Chicago. Their flair for the basketball that saw them beating their elders and competitors captured the attention of a scout who ‘encouraged’ them to enrol at St. Joseph’s, a middle-class (and therefore nearly completely white school) in a leafy suburb.

The star pupil there was Isiah Thomas an NBA legend. It took the two boys three hours a day for the roundtrip (something quite normal in the US unlike here). But it turned out Arthur was not as promising as they had hoped, so the school literally throw him out in the middle of the academic year, his now estranged parents being unable to pay their part of the school fees, so Arthur had to join his local community school.

William, on the other hand, found a wealthy sponsor in Mrs. Wier, who helped with his family’s finances. No such luck for Arthur, whose parents Arthur sen. (‘Bo’) and Sheila had split up, his father spending seven months in prison, selling drugs on the open-air playground where Arthur often played with his friends. When Sheila lost her job as nursing assistant, electricity and gas in the home was turned off. So the filmmakers decided to help out.

Gene Pingatore, the team’s basketball coach at St. Joseph’s, turned out to be a bully and particularly so towards William who suffered two serious knee injuries, nearly ending his career. Curtis Gates, Williams’ older brother, had been an outstanding player himself, but was called “un-coachable”. He would be shot dead just after the turn of the century. Bo, Arthur’s father, also was murdered in 2004.

Not surprisingly, Sheila was thankful that Arthur was still alive and able to celebrate his 18th birthday. For William, St. Joseph more than supportive: they ‘massaged’ his academic grades so he could attend Marquette University. Arthur too reached university level at Arkansas State, after a detour via the Mineral Area College. Neither men would play in the NBA, though William came nearest in 2001. After training with Michael Jordan, he missed his trial with Washington Wizards because of a foot injury. He is now a Pastor and Youth Team coach in Texas, Arthur does community work in Chicago, funding himself with the USD 200,000 bursary the producers gave each of their subjects after the surprise success of the documentary.

Watching Hoop Dreams, you can understand the Americans’ fixation for ball games of all sorts. Spectators become hysterical in their thousands, and on a scale that far surpasses anything we’ve come to appreciate in Britain. Hoop Dreams could be called the first reality doc: not a second has been wasted on Hollywood structures – a reason, the feature was boycotted by the Oscar jury for Documentaries. The three filmmakers capture the essence of the American Dream: sport and music as an escape from the poverty trap. Sadly, drugs and poverty are now the only release for the huge majority who fail to reach the promised land. AS

NOW ON BLU-RAY

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

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

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

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

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

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

CORN ISLAND | DOCLISBOA 2020 | GEORGIAN RETROSPECTIVE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dedube The Last Stop (2017) **** Georgian Retro | DocLisboa 2020

Dir.: Shorena Tevzadze; Documentary, Georgia 2917, 100 min.

An old couple losing their little shop to a world they don’t understand anymore is the focus of this documentary debut from Georgia’s Shorena Tevzadze.

Dedube was once the last stop on the Tbilisi underground, giving life to a thriving market suburb that opened in 1966. Today the train hardly stops, relegating Dedube to a backwater. Nico and his wife Tsitso pour all their enthusiasm into a store euphemistically called the ‘Veterinary Pharmacy’. Unable to move with the times – they basically sell next to nothing as the stock is now out of fashion: bits and bobs that used to be sought after are pretty much relics from the Soviet era. Tsitso tries to make a bit on the side offering blood pressure tests, and then selling remedies against hypertension, even when the readings are normal. But a customer asking for poison to kill his dog is sent away with a flea in his own ear: “I am a doctor, not an executioner”. Taking life easy is what he’s always done in Dedube’s fast lane: “A simple bite to eat, then a rest to escape this hectic environment”. Nearby a small TV blasts everything from sports to politics non-stop.

Nodar, a local singer, riffs on the dwindling decline with plaintive ballads on his classical guitar. Hoping against hope that things will one day get back to normal “Everything changes, but not Nico”. The shop next to the ‘pharmacy’ has installed an ATM, but this latest ‘mod con’ makes no odds as hardly anyone uses it. Lili, a street vendor, pops in several times a day to moan about the lack of business. Finally, Nico (“I don’t care about the next life”) has to acknowledge defeat and dismantle the place – nobody wants to take anything, not even for free. He puts the shop up for rent and leaves his former ‘paradise’ with the streets flooded and the ATM still unused.

The strength of this documentary lies in the quiet observation of everyday trivia: every last object has a story and a quaint fascination for Nico and Tsitso, they resemble children they never had. Nico hoped patience would help him to survive, but contact with the outside world faded day by day. Tevzadze’s snapshot of a changed world and the loss of identity is pitifully tragic, verging on magic realism. Thoughtfully captured and full of sad humour this intricate portrait of a fading world is a paean of immense quality and a tribute to the lost store holders of Dedube. AS

DOCLISBOA | GEORGIAN RETROSPECTIVE 2020

The Burnt Orange Heresy (2019) ****

Dir: Giuseppe Capotondi | Cast: Claes Bang, Elizabeth Debicki, Donald Sutherland, Mick Jagger, Rosalind Halstead, Alessandro Fabrizi

Claes Bang and Elizabeth Debicki and Donald Sutherland are the stars of this slick English-language debut from Italian director Giuseppe Capotondi (Suburra). It revolves around an art theft that starts well but ends rather badly. Despite this rather unwhelming finale, The Burnt Orange Heresy is saved by its lush locations, dignified piano score and enjoyable performances – even Mick Jaggar is fascinating to watch.

Bang is glib chain-smoking art critic James Figueras who has found a way of boosting his dwindling income by giving talks to rich American punters – and he’s doing a great job of impressing his “art authenticity” audience in the opening scenes by pretending the picture hanging before them is a rare masterpiece, later revealing he actually painted it himself (‘beware the power of the critic’). He ends up in bed with one called Berenice Hollis (Debicki), and after some text-book love-making and tricksy pillow talk whisks her off to Lake Como to do bit of business. This is where Mick Jagger enters the fray, in cameo – as craggy art collector Cassidy letting himself down by mispronouncing “Modigliani”- not once but twice. Bang doesn’t correct him because he is desperate for the money and the reptilian Jagger character is paying well to undertake a thorny mission: to steal a painting of an enigmatic artist and a crafty old devil: Jerome Debney (Donald Sutherland), who lives on his estate. Debney has a habit of setting fire to his work making anything he produces in his final years very much in demand, and therefore valuable. Figueras must gain access to Debney’s locked atelier in order the secure his prize.

Based on a 1971 novel from American writer Charles Willeford, Scott B Smith draws the narrative deftly with some unexpected twists although the tonal shift from jaunty romantic drama to darker sweatier territory reveals the sinister state of affairs for Bang’s desperate character – beware the self-seeking showman with the imploding career.

Meanwhile Debicki is a shrewd cookie and starts to question the motives behind her lover’s charismatic allure, a move that sees Bang morphing into his Dracula persona with disastrous consequences, as an unscrupulous opportunist who will stop at nothing to achieve his goal, in the easiest way possible until it all spirals out of control. MT

IN CINEMAS FROM FRIDAY 30 OCTOBER 2020.

The Hammer Horror Collection | New blu-ray release

Celebrating 60 years of Gothic horror and grisly gore, THE HAMMER HORROR COLLECTION hails from the glory years of this iconic house of horror offering a chilling foray into a selection of British cult classics first spawned by Terry Fisher’s in 1957 outing The Curse of Frankenstein up until the 1970 with Peter Sasdy’s Taste the Blood of Dracula, now making its blu-ray debut. The production house was originally founded 82 years ago by William Hinds and James Carreras.

TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA | 1970, 91’

Atmospherically directed by Hungarian Peter Sasdy, and adapted for the screen by Anthony Hinds – stepping in due to budgetary constraints under the pseudonym of John Elder (he told his neighbours he was a hairdresser to avoid publicity throughout his entire career) this outing actually broadens the storyline into a damning social satire of Victorian repression and upper class ennui. The eclectic cast has Christopher Lee, Geoffrey Keen and Gwen Watford and sees three distinguished English gentlemen (Keen, Peter Sallis and John Carson) descend into Satanism, for want of anything better to do, accidentally killIng Dracula‘s sidekick Lord Courtly (Ralph Bates), in the process. As an act of revenge the Count vows they will die at the hands of their own children. But Lee actually bloodies the waters in the second half, swanning in glowering due to his lack of a domineering role in the proceedings.

BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY’S TOMB

Directed by Seth Holt | Starring Andrew Keir, Valerie Leon | UK | 1971 | 89 mins
Adapted from Bram Stoker’s mystical thriller The Jewel of the Seven Stars, this supernatural shocker is one of Hammer’s most enduring classics. A British expedition team in Egypt discovers the ancient sealed tomb of the evil Queen Tera but when one of the archaeologists steals a mysterious ring from the corpse’s severed hand, he unleashes a relentless curse upon his beautiful daughter. Is the voluptuous young woman now a reincarnation of the diabolical sorceress or has the curse of the mummy returned to reveal its horrific revenge? Blood From The Mummy’s Tomb was plagued by the sudden deaths of director Seth Holt and the wife of original star Peter Cushing, leading to rumours of a real-life curse. Michael Carreras completed the movie that made a Scream Queen of Valerie Leon as the Mummy who, in a titillating twist, forgoes the usual rotting-bandages and is instead resurrected sporting a negligée.
Extras: New featurette – The Pharaoh’s Curse: Inside Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb

DEMONS OF THE MIND

Dir: Peter Sykes | Cast: Robert Hardy, Shane Briant, Patrick Magee | UK | 1972 | 89′

In 19th century Bavaria, deranged Baron Zorn (Hardy) keeps his children Emil (Briant) and Elizabeth locked up because he thinks they are possessed by tainted hereditary madness. It’s up to discredited psychiatrist Professor Falkenberg (Magee) to unravel the dark family secrets involving incest, traumatic suicide and proxy fantasies in this satisfying and unusual late-period masterpiece.
Extras: New featurette – Blood Will Have Blood: Inside Demons of the Mind

FEAR IN THE NIGHT

Dir: by Jimmy Sangster | Cast Judy Geeson, Joan Collins, Ralph Bates, Peter Cushing | UK | 1976 | 94′

A damaged young girl (Geeson), recovering from a recent nervous breakdown, is about to move with her new husband (Briant) to a secluded boarding school in the country but, the night before they are due to leave, she is attacked by a one-armed man with a prosthetic hand. With no evidence remaining, her kindly old neighbour and the local doctor conclude that she may have imagined the attack and the intruder altogether. The terror follows her and at the school she is attacked again but again her story is met by doubt, this time from her kind and loving new husband. She continues to be terrorised by the mysterious one-armed man, but nobody believes her.
Extras: New featurette – End of Term: Inside Fear in the Night

SCARS OF DRACULA

Dir: by Roy Ward Baker | Starring Christopher Lee, Dennis Waterman, Jenny Hanley, Patrick Troughton | UK | 1970 | 96′

Count Dracula (Lee) is brought back from the dead when blood from a bat falls on his mouldering ashes and once again spreads his evil from his mountaintop castle. When a young man, Paul, disappears one night, his brother Simon (Waterman) and his girlfriend (Hanley) trace him to the area, discovering a terrified populace. Thrown out of the local inn, they make their way, like Paul before them, towards the sinister castle and its undead host.
Extras: New featurette – Blood Rites: Inside Scars of Dracula

DR JEKYLL AND SISTER HYDE

Dir: Roy Ward Baker | Cast:Ralph Bates, Martine Beswick | UK | 1971 | 97 mins

In Victorian London, Professor Jekyll (Bates), an earnest scientist, obsessively works day and night haunted by the fear that one lifetime will not be enough to complete his research. Side-tracked from his objective he becomes consumed with developing an immortality serum. Once convinced his findings are complete, he consumes the potion only to discover that he is to become two as he turns into half Jekyll and half Hyde. Desperate to cover up his newfound identity he calls her his sister, but things take a turn for the worse when he realises that he needs female hormones if he is to maintain his existence. Before long he is battling with his alter ego Mrs Hyde (Beswick), as a number of young girls begin to go missing in the streets of London…
Extras: New featurette – Ladykiller: Inside Dr Jekyll & Sister Hyde

TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER

Dir: Peter Sykes | Cast: Richard Widmark, Christopher Lee, Honor Blackman, Denholm Elliott, Nastassja Kinski | UK | 1976 | 95 mins

In 1970s London John Verney (Widmark), a renowned occult writer, is approached by Henry Beddows (Elliot) to help rescue his daughter Catherine (Kinski) from a Satanic cult. Catherine is a nun with the Children of the Lord, a mysterious heretical order based in Bavaria and founded by the excommunicated Roman Catholic priest (Lee). When Catherine arrives from Germany, Verney sneaks her away from her bodyguard and takes her to his apartment. The order, however, are determined to get Catherine back and use all the powers of black magic at their disposal in the ensuing battle between the forces of light and darkness
Extras: New featurette – Dark Arts: Inside To the Devil a Daughter

STRAIGHT ON TILL MORNING

Dir: by Peter Collinson | Cast: Rita Tushingham, Shane Briant, James Bolam | UK | 1972 | 96 mins)

This is not some sort of night of unmitigated lust chez Dracula, but the tragedy of young Brenda (Tushingham), an innocent young girl, who leaves her hometown of Liverpool for London in search of love. By chance she meets Clive (Briant). Attractive, debonair and rich he seems to be the handsome Prince Charming she’s been looking for. Clive is actually a deeply disturbed young man and his psychotic tendencies soon manifest themselves and destroy Brenda’s dreams of a fairy-tale life offering instead a kind of COVID-19 style misery – and we all know about that

THE HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN

Dir: by Jimmy Sangster | Cast: Ralph Bates, Kate O’Mara | UK | 1970 | 95 mins)

Young Victor Frankenstein (Bates) returns from medical school with a depraved taste for beautiful women and fiendish experiments. But when the doctor runs out of fresh body parts for his ‘research’ he turns to murder to complete his gruesome new creation. Now his monster has unleashed its own ghastly killing spree and the true horror of Frankenstein has only just begun…Extras: New featurette – Gallows Humour: Inside The House of Frankenstein

TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA | AVAILABLE On BLURAY AND DVD DOUBLEPLAY | Amazon | Warner Bros

Uprooted: The Journey of Jazz Dance (2020) *** Raindance Festival 2020

Dir: Khadifa Wong

Khadifa Wong’s life experience as a dancer informs her lively if over-talkie debut feature about the origins of jazz dance.

Celebrating its international premiere at this year’s Raindance Film Festival, the film traces the roots of this expressive and iconically American dance form from its early history in the 19th century and through to the current day. And it all start during slavery – wouldn’t you know? Back then it was a vital form of protest, not just a way of expressing enjoyment. Well that certainly makes it a topical film with the current Black Lives Matter month in full swing.

Wong’s ground-breaking documentary also offers a political and social chronicle of the times, alighting on more weighty issues of racism, socialism and sexism while offering up a passionate and thought-provoking musical biopic.

The dancer and director has delved into the archives enlivening her film with cuttings and news footage. Over fifty experts offer up their valuable insight from choreographers to teachers and dancers themselves so it does occasionally feel overwhelming to have so much knowledge and opinion in the space of less than two hours. But the movement and dance elements are what really makes this a winner and Matt Simpkins’ camerawork captures the essence of bodies gyrating to great affect.

Curiously enough it was white men in the shape of Bob Fosse, Jerome Robbins and Jack Cole who really emerged as the forerunners of the form. And one of the most engaging talking heads, dramaturg and choreographer Melanie George shares her thoughts about why these luminaries were so influential while Black innovators were often lesser known. And she discovers that their ability to codify the various forms of jazz dance with Hollywood and Broadway that gave it a different profile that took it above and beyond its roots and origins. The lesser-known artists also have their say, Frank Hatchett, Pepsi Bethel and Fred Benjamin Wong amongst them – although none is particularly famous to mainstream audiences.

Wong cleverly makes the point that jazz dance was actually a pared down version of the tribal form of communication for many Africans, and particularly slaves, enabling them to express themselves with their bodies in highly syncopated, exaggerated and meaningful ways – almost like silent film – relying on strong facial and body language – to make their feelings known. The Pattin’ Juba and Cakewalk were both dances that originated in the plantations of the Deep South where enslavement relied heavily on this kind of vital communication for protest, or even survival.

Eventually jazz became more sophisticated and sinuous moving through the bebop and hard bop years and we start to recognise names such as Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. There is also some impressive clips that show James Brown and Little Richard and really convey the seriousness of their political message – they were not just merely there to entertain.

A documentary about dance expression should always focus primarily on the dancing, and this is the only slight criticism that one can level at Uprooted. Wong has done so much research for her deep dive into the subject seems to focus on talking and commentary over movement and music. When we see Chita Rivera and Graciela Daniele doing their stuff the film comes alive — so their stories of segregation and racial alienation seem all the more poignant. There is a fascinating piece about Patrick Swayze’s mother Patsy, being the only white dance teacher in Texas to allow Black children into her school. If there’s one talent those entertainers have it’s the ability to move their bodies in magnetic and beguiling ways. And Black dancers have it in spades. MT

RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 2020 | 28 OCTOBER – 7 NOVEMBER 2020

CzechMate: In Search of Jiri Menzel (2019) **** Blu-ray|VOD

Dir.: Shivendra Singh Dungarpur; Documentary with Jiri Menzel, Vera Chytilova, Woody Allen, Raoul Coutard, Milos Foreman, Ivan Passer, Ken Loach, Andrzej Wajda, Agnieszka Holland; India 2018, 448 min./Special features 23 min.

Indian filmmaker Shivendra Singh Dungarpur fell in love with the films of Jiri Menzel (1938-2020) after watching the Czech director’s Oscar-winning debut Closely Observed Trains (1966) and this new documentary certainly does his hero justice – weighing in at over seven hours and eight years in the making – it also serves as a deep dive into the Czechoslovakian New Wave (that culminated in 1968 when Russian forces invaded!).

After meeting the Czech master in a Prague cafe ten year’s ago Dungarpur’s obsession grew, and the result is this labour of love – which would take him all over the world – CzechMate re-igniting the spirit of a world long gone by, at a time when Eastern Europe’s right-wing authoritarian regimes have ironically replaced their former Stalinist dictatorships.

Dungarpur had to be persuasive in chasing down the contributors to this mammoth endeavour “It was a challenging, often frustrating task to capture their stories: it took three years and a ruse to convince the Diamonds of the Night director Jan Nemec to give an interview; “I had to chase the veteran actor Josef Somr to a village hundred kilometres from Prague, and still he refused to talk to me. I drove five hours one way from Bratislava only to have Closely Observed Trains star Dusan Hanak refuse to open the door, forcing me to try again later. But in the end, I got them all”.

Jiri Menzel was a subversive rebel in the vein of Czech literary figure The Good soldier Schweijk. He chose to tackle the authorities head-on, unlike his compatriots Milos Foreman (Loves of a Blonde) and Ivan Passer (Intimate Lighting), who emigrated to Hollywood. Most of his films are portraits of small-town life (Cutting it Short, The Snowdrop Festival, My Sweet Little Village, and he brought out the humanity in his provocative characters who were loveable in spite of it all.

During his time at FAMU Film School in Prague, Menzel got to know the writer Bohumil Hrabel (1914-1997), who became the Czech New Wave’s leading light. But it was Vera Chytilova who gave Menzel his first break as assistant director in her 1963 feature Something Different. Hrabel went on to script Menzel’s own debut feature Skylarks on a String (1969) a rather mild comedy about life in a “reform” Camp, more satire than anything else. But it was banned by the authorities and kept locked up, only to be screened in 1989 – before winning the Golden Bear at the Berlin Festival a year later. Meanwhile, Menzel was left out in the cold cinema-wise and in the intervening years worked in theatre with plays by Chekhov, Shakespeare, Michael Frayn, and later Vaclav Havel’s stage adaptation of ‘The Beggars Opera’, (based on the original 1728 libretto), with a film version that would follow in 1991.

Five years after Skylarks Menzel would continue with his comedy output his 1976 Secluded, Near Woods garnering the Golden Shell at San Sebastian in the same year, and Who Looks for Gold (1974) was selected for Berlinale but went home empty-handed, and Cutting it Short receiving at Honorable Mention at Venice in 1981. In 2006 he adapted Hrabel’s novel I Served the King of England, which took the FIPRESCI prize at Berlinale the following year and this was his penultimate feature in a career that culminated with his energetic opera-themed swan song The Don Juans that met with a rather mixed reception, described by Variety called it a “frothy operatic romp” haunted by the spectre of the hated financier.

Dungarpur offers little in criticism of his idol whose only dissenter appears to be Agnieszka Holland, who thought Menzel’s approach to “twee”, particularly his portraits of the Nazis in Closely Observed Trains. For what it’s worth, the Polish director apparently preferred the more sombre confrontational works of the New Wave’s Slovakian filmmakers: Jurak Jacubisco, Dusan Hanak and Stefan Uher.

Menzel’s story is the story of the Czechoslavak New Wave in microcosm. Many suffered more than Menzel: Evald Schorm (Courage for every Day) and Eduard Grecner (Nylon Moon) were banned from working for decades, Stefan Uher (Genius) died prematurely from cancer at 62. Others, like Otokar Vavra (Witchhammer) gave in to the regime, but were criticised afterwards for getting too close. It was a non-win situation.

As for CzechMate, DoPs David Calk, Ranjan Palit, K.U. Mohanan and Jonathan Blum help to keep Dungarpur’s Opus Magna flowing gracefully. As film essays go, this is certainly as comprehensive as possible. It is carried by the playful relationship between Menzel and Dungarpur – echoing the jaunty exuberance of his oeuvre. Passionate and brimming with verve, this is a gem which can be tackled at once, or dipped into again and again for the pleasure of revisiting the Czech master’s life and work. Like most worthwhile things, CzechMate needs time commitment, but is well worth it for the joy of the ride. AS

AVAILABLE ON SECONDRUNVD.COM VOD from 26 OCTOBER | on BLU-RAY 2 DISC SPECIAL EDITION

The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) **** Blu-ray

Dir: Charles Crichton | Script: T.E.B. Clarke | Cast: Alex Guinness, Stanley Holloway, Sidney James, Alfie Bass | UK, Comedy Crime Drama 78′

Of all the British-produced caper films The Lavender Hill Mob has to be the most endearing. Almost seventy years old it still engages and delights with a period innocence that’s now impossible to recreate. Although Crichton’s comedy is on a par with the whimsy of Passport to Pimlico – both films were scripted by T.E.B.Clarke – this is not amongst the very best of Ealing comedies: that accolade still goes to Kind Hearts and Coronets, Whiskey Galore and The Ladykillers. But The Lavender Hill Mob delivers a unique gentleness of tone that makes it special.

The plot centres on the theft of a security van carrying gold bars which are melted down to be encased in souvenir paperweights of the Eiffel Tower, and shipped over to France. A supposed perfect plan, until a few are accidentally sold to a class of English schoolgirls, leaving the mob (each a grown-up kid at heart) panicking over one stubborn child who won’t exchange her Eiffel Tower for a ten shilling note. A simple story of a mob undertaking, with childlike courage, a heist remarkable enough to disarm a complacent British establishment.

Assembling a gang of East End thugs sounds somehow a lot less threatening than a mob of Chicago hoodlums. The spivs and gangsters of violent British films like They Made me a Fugitive (1947) have been replaced here by the mischievous ‘boy’ criminal. Ironically, sweet rationing came to an end in Britain two years after the release of The Lavender Hill Mob, so you can imagine how easily satisfied the British public were prior to that – just a lollipop made people happy back in the day, never mind a gold bar.

I emphasise the adult Lavender Hill mob as being deprived kids because, as in The Ladykillers, they are often subtly and ingeniously infantilised. There’s a delightful scene where a drunken “Al” Pendlebury (Stanley Holloway) and “Dutch” Holland (Alec Guiness) return to their lodgings to be reprimanded by landlady Mrs Chalk (Marjorie Fielding). She calls them noisy “naughty men” for disturbing the other residents. This prim old lady looks forward to Mrs Wilberforce (Katy Johnson) of The Ladykillers. As Charles Barr describes in his brilliant Ealing Studios “She (Wilberforce) becomes a triumphant nanny” on discovering what her furtive visitors are really up to.

Both films depict middle and working class blokes reprimanded for being naughty and irresponsible – even Lackery Wood’s missus forbids him to go on a boat trip to Paris to collect the golden souvenirs. Both films carefully reveal an astute feminine force at work to challenge the behaviour of bad men. If The Ladykillers is a black comedy that finally destroys the would-be murderous visitors then The Lavender Hill Mob is a light (or white) comedy intent to show gentlemanly thieves, without violent impulses or methods, eventually found out by Mum and her detectives.

Charles Crichton directs with confidence aided by the precise editing of Seth Holt. Witness Al and Dutch’s giddy descent on the steps of the real Eiffel Tower. Dizzy from their efforts (like kids after a Big Dipper) they regain their balance just as a car is speeding off with the schoolgirls happily clutching their souvenir towers. The edit from them standing up to witness the car leaving, is superbly done, and one the four chase sequences featured.

Chase two begins with Al and Dutch arriving at the port where the school party will catch a boat to sail back to England. They suffer the last minute frustration of having to buy tickets, go through passport control and customs. Each procedure is a gem of comic observation, culminating in them missing the boat.

Chase three is set in an exhibition hall illustrating how the police force works, or tries to work, in England. The little girl hands over her Eiffel tower model to a policeman friend. The thieves grab it and mayhem ensues. Trapped in a confined space police accidentally pursue other police, including one on an exhibition motor bike.

Chase four is the funniest of all and sees Al and Dutch steal a police vehicle to be pursued by patrol cars – one being driven by a man dressed in Robert Peel period uniform. The cars collide, their radio aerials entwine and Scotland Yard overhears a policeman singing as he cadges a lift by the mob, all this interspersed with loud pig snorts, the song “Old McDonald had a Farm” in time with a BBC radio broadcast.

Each sequence is handled with expert timing that not only recalls silent movie escapades but possibly inspired Cliff Owens’s sublime 1963 comedy The Wrong Arm of the Law – a satirical chase film about naughty villains and a befuddled police force. And Lavender’s fast moving antics are reinforced by an exuberant music score from Georges Auric.

If I’ve stressed the innocence of a film that appears to have no dark content, then I’d make one qualification. The film has a small note of despair. “Dutch” Holland, formerly a timid bank clerk, was lacking in drive and ambition. Alec Guinness (voice over) describes himself as a desperate nonentity. Cut to a shot of documentary footage of similar nonentities, trapped in their boring jobs, crossing over London Bridge. This oddly piercing moment made me think of Eliot’s famous lines in The Waste Land.

“A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many.
I had not thought death had undone so many.”

But to mention Eliot is probably too weighty. For The Lavender Hill Mob is first and foremost a seriously funny comedy more than a serious film. The meek Dutch (Holland’s first and real name was Henry) is transformed from being an anonymous worker to paradoxically a celebrated and plucky local-hero for the bank staff and a cunning mastermind thief who finally absconds to Rio de Janiero; wining and dining whilst generously donating the stolen money to good causes.

We never learn of the final fate of the other members of the Lavender mob. But this irrepressibly charming classic portrays them as typically 1950s post-war English eccentrics, repressed, but not bitter, more sweetly irreverent and decidedly special: characters that challenge the label of nonentity, as scripted by T.E.B.Clarke, with a golden touch of wit, enough to garner the writer a richly deserved BAFTA. ©AlanPrice

NOW ON BLURAY COURTESY OF STUDIOCANAL

Mr Grandmother | Chemi bebia (1929) **** Georgian Retrospective | DOCLISBOA 2020

Dir: Kote Mikaberidze | Silent, Georgia, 80′

This triumph of early Georgian silent cinema mines its absurdist humour from petty bureaucracy when the country was still part of the USSR. The Georgians are a striking bunch whose regular features and dark good looks are particularly suited to silent film – this along with bold Soviet-style editing, expressionist set designs and avant-garde camera angles make My Grandmother an imaginative and amusing insight into a country that was under the Iron cosh but thriving with ideas and rich culture.

Behind the mad hysteria of the frantic satire important truths gradually emerge about the nonsense office workers have to put up with and there is a clear resonance with life today. The film was banned in the Society Union for almost fifty years – not surprisingly – because the overriding message here is “death to red tape” and that is born out, quite literally, in the bizarre finale that certainly mocks the State and does nothing to hide its light under a bushel in doing so.

Director Kote Mikaberidze (1896-1973) would go on to helm several other features in a career that also included acting and script-writing, but was best known for My Grandmother that made use of its special effects, imaginative set design, animation and twisted dark sense of humour that sees its main character, a “bureaucrat” (Aleksandre Takaishvili) fired for his incompetence and lazy attitude.

Narrative wise, the first act minutes is dedicated to satirising the Soviet system – where office life involves doing precisely nothing. Papers are pushed, documents stamped – it’s all about creating work and then not doing it, and the pen-pushers manage to avoid any responsibility for their shoddiness into the bargain.

When “the bureaucrat” goes home jobless to his wife (Bella Chernova) her expressions of disdain are simply priceless. The only way he can avoid a complete loss of face is by finding himself a ‘benefactor’ (0r grandmother) who will write him a letter of recommendation. So off he goes to curry favour with a higher-ranking official who will reinstate him in a job – doing precisely nothing, again.

Although this sounds pretty tedious plot-wise the feature is far from boring. Quite the opposite. Visually it’s one of the most exciting silent films of the era with its clever concoction of fantasy meets reality. At one point, ‘the bureaucrat’ is pinioned to his desk by a giant flying pen which is meant to represent the local newspaper’s lampooning him. Meanwhile, in the background stop-motion animations feature a group of tiny toys and dolls who form a sort of ridiculous audience witnesses his fall from grace. While the support characters are performing their antics with extraordinary energy the office workers are mostly comatose, but objects around them also come to life.

Chernova is particularly brilliant as “the bureaucrat’s” wife, her expressive eyebrows are a legend in their own lunchtime. Imploring with him one moment and ignoring him the next, she is a bundle of belligerent histrionics from start to finish, while he practises trying to hang himself from the light fittings, in shame.

My Grandmother shows the Georgians to be wonderfully eccentric, and completely irreverent as far as politics is concerned, certainly in their early cinema, later political and social satire was more cleverly hidden in subtext. The film was eventually re-released in the 1970s but is rarely seen nowadays and would make an interesting companion piece to the ubiquitous Battleship Potemkin. MT

My Grandmother

SCREENING DURING DOCLISBOA | 22 OCTOBER – 1 NOVEMBER

Aalto (2020)

Dir: Virpi Suutari | Finland, Doc 103min

This comprehensive biopic about one of the greatest designers of the 20th century is both an affectionate tribute to the work of Finnish architect Alvar Aalto and a touching love story. Hugo Alvar Henrik Aalto (1898-1976) and his architect wife Aino Aalto shaped the modern world of design through their cutting edge buildings, furniture, textiles and glassware in much the same way as America’s Charles and Ray Eames and even Britain’s Terence Conran.

Virpi Suutari digs deeps into the archives with her writer and award-winning editor Jussi Rautaniemi (The Happiest Day in The Life of Olli Maki) to take us on a cinematic journey into life of a man whose designs were boosted by rapid economic growth in Finland and encompassed the lofty Finlandia Hall in Helsinki and the practical Paimio Sanatorium. For over five decades, from 1925-1978, the Aalto modernist aesthetic gave rise to iconic creations such as the Beehive light-fitting (1959), and the 406 armchair (1939) which remain essential style markers for the conoscenti. And even if you couldn’t afford a house designed by the Finnish luminary you could at least have one of his curvy Savoy vases (inspired by a Sami woman’s dress). These timeless modern creations could be made on an industrial scale but still retained a sense of simple luxury rooted in Finnish heritage from sustainable local materials such as birch wood, and glass blown in the littala factory.

Finnish documentarian Virpi Suutari shows how Alvar and Aino were not only talented architects but also a popular and cosmopolitan couple whose designs would become classics, defined by their practicality and precision. The Savoy vase won the Karhula-littala design competition in 1936 and would go on to be an iconic and elegant everyday item.

The film then travels further afield to show how Aalto’s civic and private buildings have stood the test of time and still associate well with their natural environment, from the private Villa Mairea in the late 1930s, to a university in Massachusetts, a pavilion at Venice Biennale and an art collector’s house near Paris, these were not ‘starchitect’ projects sticking out of the places surrounding them, but elegant and practical “machines for living” that provided for every eventuality. Aino and Alvar co-founded their furniture design company Artek in 1935, Aino becoming its first design director with a creative output that included textiles, lamps and interior design with clear and simply style, and this made way for complete design package, from lighting to door handles.

Opting for a straightforward chronicle approach Suutari shows how Aalto first set up a practice in his home town of Jyväsikylä in 1921 working on schemes that followed the predominant Nordic classism of the time. Meeting and marrying Aino Marsio in 1925 was the turning point, personally and stylistically, and after the birth Johanna later in 1925 (son Hamilkar would arrive three years later) the couple set off for Europe to discover the Modernist International style. But the groundwork for the practice was founded in Functionalism, and the Paimio tuberculosis sanatorium (1929-1933) was precisely that – providing a user-friendly and practical solution to healthcare (Aalto also designed most of the furniture with the famous Paimio chair devised to assist patients’ breathing).

From then on designs became more fluid with the increased use of natural materials and spatial awareness. The concept once again went from the outside inwards, with interiors and even small details such as fixtures and fittings all forming part of a cohesive aesthetic. One of Aalto’s main achievements was the invention of the L-leg system that enabled legs to be attached directly to the table, he also pioneered the practice of bending and splicing wood, leading to the curved look of the tables and stools. This also meant that furniture could be created on an industrial scale, through defined product lines that were also patented.

Aino and Alvar enjoyed a close partnership in work and in love, with Aino’s travels to source ideas for Artek often taking her away from home until her early death from cancer in 1949. During these times apart the couple kept in touch by a constant of letters, and these epistolary exchanges are woven into the narrative expressing a certain freedom that hints at an open marriage but also a healthy flexibility that helped to keep their relationship alive, according to Suutari’s take on events. This is a love story that brims with positive vibes, and clearly the couple drew contentment and creative energy from their secure family life and love for their children.

After Aino’s death, Alvar was not to be alone for long, he soon married young architect Elissa Makiniemi and the couple would go on to design a villa just outside Paris on their return from Venice. La Maison Louise Carre (main pic) was completed in 1959, for art collectors Olga and Louis who had rejected Le Corbusier deeming his concrete style too austere. Aalto again created a complete package for the couple, with garden design, garage and interiors (now open to the public since since 2007).

Enlivened by family photographs and plentiful archive footage, diagrams and painstaking research, Aalto is a pithy yet concise undertaking that will satisfy professional as well as dilettante appetites. We are left with an impression of the artists as warm, creative and compassionate individuals who would change the face of Finland not just for the few but for the many who continue to celebrate his design legacy all over the world. MT

www.alvaraalto.fi | PREMIERED AT CPH:DOX 2021

Two of Us – Nous Deux (2020)

Dir.: Filippo Meneghetti; Cast: Martine Chevallier, Barbara Sukowa, Lea Drucker, Jerome Varanfrain, Muriel Bemazaref, Augustine Reyes; France/Lux/Belgium 2019, 95 min.

Filippo Meneghetti’s first film tells an unusual love story, somewhere between realism and fairy tale. Nina and Madeleine are neighbours in a small town in the Moselle region of France. But the ladies have been lovers for decades although coming out will be problem, particularly for Madeleine (Mado), whose children Anne (Drucker) and Frederique (Varanfrain) are self-righteous conformists.

German émigré Nina (Sukowa) is the driving force in the relationship: she is keen for Mado to sell her flat and move to Rome. But Mado is only too aware of divorced hairdresser Anne’s feelings, and her son is a misogynist at the best of times, and takes her property off the market angering Nina. But things deteriorate even further when Mado suffers a stroke and is rendered speechless and immobile needing a full time carer in the shape of Muriel (Benazaref), who is quietly possessive of her new charge. Although Anne tries to take over but love eventually finds a way – via Bingo of all things.

Beautifully crafted and sensitively performed Two of Us is a worthwhile and unique lesbian love story that joins films such as in in showing that Love and emotional intimacy is so important at any age and this mature love affair feels fresh and authentic despite its bourgeois provincial setting that gives the drama its glorious settings.

Although the script suffers inexperience plot development wise, veering between fairy-tale comedy and a dramatic critique of Mado’s blinkered children who stay in the way of the elderly couples’ happiness, this is an intelligent film pointing out how small town values are not necessarily ageist ones. That an un-offensive couple like Nina and Mado should live in fear of being ostracised for being lesbians is very dernier siecle – particularly since it would stay in the family, a family Mado would love to leave despite her visceral connection to her children. There is much to enjoy and admire here, but a much clearer approach on genre identification would have been welcome. AS

ON BFI | JW3 NW3 |SELECTED FOR THE 2021 ACADEMY AWARDS.

Mogul Mowgli (2020) ***

Dir: Bassam Tariq | UK Drama, 90 min

Riz Ahmed is screen dynamite as a British Pakistani rapper afflicted by a wasting disease in this dazzling and deeply personal portrait of racial identity and the ties that bind.

Bassam Tariq takes a thematically rich subtext based on Ahmed’s background and sideline in the music world, and winds it into a trippy visual experience with a throbbing soundscape but less punchy script fuelled by the inner turmoil of its main character.

Ahmed plays New-York based rapper Zed on a visit to his parent’s modest London home in the wake of a European-wide concert tour. The homecoming drudges up disorientating memories of racial and religious tension and a longing for the warmth of home life in the light of his imploding romantic relationship with girlfriend Bina. Suddenly he is a brother and son again (to his devout and hard-working father Bashir (Alyy Khan) rather than just a music star with a growing fanbase.

Worryingly Zed also experiences signs of physical weakness and is admitted into hospital for tests which reveal an autoimmune condition, possibly a metaphor for his suffocating family. Despite his family’s religious concerns Zed decides to take up the offer of a promising clinical trial which may however threaten his fertility.

His time in hospital is fraught with anxiety and tension and Tariq channels this into febrile hallucinatory sequences that tap into the social and cultural heritage that Zed left behind him in his struggle for musical and material success. Although this all looks exciting the script fails to mine the dramatic potential to any affect, leaving us constantly on the outside looking in. The constant repetition of ‘Toba Tek Singh’ – a phrase Zed chants obsessively with his father in the final scene – will leave most viewers baffled, given the film’s Muslim sensibilities.

Ahmed is extraordinary to watch lighting up every frame with his febrile intensity, particularly in the scene where he tries to persuade Bina to help him with a ‘sample’. Clearly heartfelt and well-intentioned this portrait of a sensitive artist also occasionally feels self-indulgent and contextually bewildering due to the complexity of the issues involved, but that is clearly the nature of the world we now live in, and the root of society’s modern malaise. MT

OUT ON 30 OCTOBER 2020

Apostasy (2017) ***

Dir.: Dan Kokotajlo; Cast: Siobhan Finneran, Sacha Parkinson, Molly Wright, Robert Emms; UK 2017, 96 min

Dan Kokotajlo’s debut feature is an intelligent study in emotional fascism based on his own experiences. It tells the heart-breaking story of a family in Oldham where three women fall victim to the dogmatic pressures of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, an evangelic organisation with no empathy for its members, and certainly not if they are female.

Ivanna (Finneran) is a middle-aged woman living with her two daughters, college student Luisa (Parkinson) and Alex (Wright) who is still at school. The father is never mentioned, and Ivanna has made sure that both of her daughters are committed to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose ‘Elders’ are, unsurprisingly, all male.

Ivanna embraces every word preached down to her from the institution’s dogmatic Elders and belittles the Catholic Church – hardly a liberal institution – as “airy-fairy, they believe in something like the soul”. Whereas the Jehovah’s Witnesses credo is that the blood of its members is the pure manifestation of the Master God – and should not be messed with, particularly not by medical staff trying to save life.

Apostasy (meaning abandonment of belief) begins in a hospital where a nurse is secretly offering the anaemic Alex a much-needed blood transfusion knowing very well that she has already been stigmatised for having a blood transfusion as a new born. Alex is shy and full of self-doubt largely because she too believes her blood is not “pure” anymore.

Meanwhile, Luisa not only falls in love with an “unbeliever”, but also gets pregnant by him. This causes a great deal of friction between between the sisters and provides most of the film’s dramatic tension. Luisa’s mother’s darkest fears have come true and Ivanna is only too ready to have her oldest daughter thrown out of the church: in an act euphemistically called a “disfellowship”. In reality this means that her family is forbidden to communicate with Luisa.

Ivanna is only to ready to follow these orders, and making sure that the same ‘misfortune’ does not befall Alex, finds immediately a suitable husband for her in Stephen (Emms) a shy, insecure young man with hardly any social manners. He, like Ivanna, repeats the church’s dogmas in everyday life, and seems the perfect partner for Alex, who tries hard to be the perfect little soldier for Jehovah. All members wait for the Armageddon to happen soon (even though there was false alarm in 1975), the new system will replace everything known today, and, needless to say, only true disciples of the church will survive to live in this new paradise.

A shocking event then intervenes to slightly destabilise and dilute this rich character study between the women, as the narrative then focuses largely on the church and its influences, which are nonetheless intriguing, but somehow manage to carry the film through.

This is true horror (Kokotajlo grew up in a household of Jehovah’s Witnesses), and impressively acted, particularly by Finneran. It seems unbelievable that the earnest members of the church, who we all encounter at tube stations or at the front door, are capable of such emotional warfare against anybody who disobeys their commands. Adam Scarth’s images are sparse and lean like the whole production, proving again, that one can create a small masterpiece on a minibudget. AS

NOW ON BBC IPLAYER

Being a Human Person (2020) ****

Dir: Fred Scott | Doc with Roy Andersson and his team, 90′

The Swedish auteur Roy Andersson (1943-) looks back on his life and his filmmaking style in this enjoyable first feature from TV/commercials director Fred Scott.

Made during the run-up to About Endlessness that won Best Director at Venice in 2019 Being a Human Person is Roy Andersson in a nutshell and perfectly describes a filmmaker whose deadpan tragic-comedies give dignity to people who have not been that successful in life: boring husbands, bland businessmen, the socially challenged or deeply unattractive. In other words, these people could be any of us or just those who have lost their way or become bored of their humdrum existence: the dentist tired of his squeamish patients, the clergyman who has lost their faith in God ( the priest in About Endlessness). Andersson sees himself in everyone of his characters – by his own admission – vulnerability and insecurity are the themes of his films, and constantly spill over into his creative process as he as he feels his way intuitively through what is possibly his last project with long-standing collaborators who have grown accustomed to absorbing the daily stresses and strains of the project. His is not an intellectual style but resolutely intuitive, and that means changes are inevitable. A scene that feels fresh and punchy on shooting may lose its clout in the rushes later that day.

Looking like an affable twinkly-eyed Steve McQueen in archive footage shot after his breakout first feature A Swedish Love Story won awards at Berlinale 1970, he claims to have been “disgusted” by the film’s success. Now 76, Andersson has lost none of his gently genial charisma as he moves gingerly round the spacious central Stockholm townhouse acquired in 1981. “Studio 24” remains the headquarters of his daily filmmaking activities. Watching the world go by is a favourite pastime, as is eating in the Italian pizza restaurant opposite which is now home to his proudly-won Venice Silver Lion.

But who is the man behind the enigmatic smile? Something tells us all is not well in Andersson’s world. His staff are not the only ones who have noticed a lack of energy and his increasing reliance on alcohol (“to avoid boredom” opines the director). Andersson freely admits to his penchant for a few drinks. It makes him more calm and docile to work with according to his staff. But do we detect a twinge of existential angst? A dose of rehab is on Andersson’s mind, but he gives up shortly after treatment has started, coming back energised with the realisation that About Endlessness will be probably be his final feature – and he wants it to his best.

Making films is emotionally and physically exhausting. But he fears losing his daily raison d’être. His daughter Sandra appears to give a much-needed nutritious lunch (it’s worked already! laughs Anderson as he knocks back a bright green smoothie). She describes a love-filled childhood in a rented flat seaside flat in Gothenburg, while friends lived nearby in grand houses: “He found it stimulating to be the underdog”. She reflects. Meanwhile, family photos show an extremely affectionate father doting on his kids, and although it emerges his own father suffered longterm depression, no mention is made of Andersson’s own romantic life. “There’s enough material there for another film” says director Fred Scott.

Being a Human Person is a masterclass in the Andersson way of filmmaking. Every feature consists of a string of tableaux, each one taking around a month to build, painstakingly by hand. The actors then perform a series of scenes shot by a static camera. Andersson describes them as short ‘film poems’ about life for ordinary people in scenarios that often give rise to iconic deadpan humour. The ‘greige’ aesthetics in immaculately rendered claustrophobic, airless settings feature ashen-faced characters glum, resigned or on the verge of tears.

As an artist he continues to be appalled and dismayed by his fellow humans’ wrongdoing to humanity itself. This preoccupation is the focus of his “Living Trilogy” with its universal themes of compassion and connection, composed of Songs from the Second Floor (2000); You, The Living (2007) and A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014) . His short film World of Glory (1991) speaks of the unmitigated misery of ordinary life, but his most controversial work Something Happened (1993) was later withdrawn.

Fred Scott offers up an affectionate and illuminating tribute to Roy Andersson that will hopefully encourage those bemused by his films to revisit them with greater insight. His collaborators are clearly fond of him despite his clever way of maintaining artistic control. And although Andersson emerges a man who feels deeply for humanity, Scott never really gets under his skin, his subject is clearly keen to keep his secrets intact:“You are a prisoner of your own mentality and that can be very hard sometimes” is all Roy Andersson will reveal. MT

IN CURZON | CINEMAS FROM 16 OCTOBER 2020

Totally Under Control (2020) ****

Dir.: Alex Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyan, Suzanne Hillinger; Documentary with Rick Bright, Robert R. Redfield, Eva Lee, Alex Azar, Nancy Messonier; USA 2020, 124 min.

Prolific documentarian Alex Gibney and his co-directors Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger got together with a bunch of scientists and US government politicians to try to work out how the Covid19 pandemic wreaked so much havoc in the US, with over 8 million infections, at the time of writing.

Back in January before the world was engulfed by the virus US President Trump was heard to say “Its just one person coming in from China”. By the end of that month Alex Azar, Secretary of State for Health and Human services claimed: “the national testing programme is up and running”. But it was not.

Trump refused to believe the scientists and called the CDC (Centres for Disease and Prevention) a “Deep State” site attempt to undermine his re-election chances. Its director, Robert Redfield had a history during the Aids crisis, calling for abstention and a strictly religious approach to the pandemic. Eva Lee director of the Centre for Operations Research in Medicine and Health Care at the Georgia Institute of Technology, developed a programme called Real-Opt using algorithms to predict the course of the pandemic. Meanwhile in South Korea testing was already well under way resulting in only 300 casualties from the pandemic. Asian countries were accustomed to using masks, and non compliance meant heavy fines. The American approach saw the refusal to wear a mask as a patriotic duty. The death rate soared, the USA representing 20% of global victims on this planet, in a total citizenship of just 4.23 %.

The Trump administration had meanwhile got rid of the Pandemic Crisis Group set up by Obama. Returning from India at the end of February, Trump insisted the US was in a prime position. At Stadium packed with 100 000 he wooed the crowd with open arms, and went on calling the pandemic a hoax:”only fourteen cases were known”. Nevertheless, a special Covid unit under the leadership of Vice-President Pence (who had encouraged cruises and visits to Disneyland) was formed. It consisted of Dr. Deborah Birx, a scientist and diplomat. She has stayed the course within the Trump circle, making compromises all the time, whilst Dr. Fauci, Director of the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases, has clashed with Trump on more than one occasion.

Trump insisted that tests would provided for all US citizens but the reality was very different: it was not just the Test Programme, which was handicapped by the lack of available testing material, PPE equipment and respirators were also short in supply, with fierce competition between the various states to secure specialised equipment after the government had sold millions of masks to China at the beginning of the pandemic. Countless health workers and first responders paid with their lives.

Trump fought hard to avoid a lockdown, but pressed too early for a re-opening: “We are not a country which was built for a lockdown, we do not let the cure be worse than the problem”. Trump replaced civil servants with business men, and fired no fewer than five Inspector-Generals. The president also indulged in “miracle cures” like hydroxychloroquine, an unproven medicine which was promoted by the Rasputin-like figure of Dr. Vladimir Zelenko. After Trump had taken the drug (“A gift from God”), Dr. Birx was asked by reporters to verify this – her answer was “its frustrating, it will rain for three days”. Whistle-blowers like Dr. Nancy Messonier of the CDC, and Max Kennedy (grandson of Robert) helped uncover government secrets such as the too early release of a vaccine in time for the election on November 3rd.

Shot by DoP Ben Bloodwell (and many others) with protective covering between Talking Heads and camera, Totally under Control has nothing particularly new to bring to the party, but chronicles a disaster that cost many their lives. The end is poignant and full of poetic justice: a day after the feature was finished, President Trump caught the virus, but lived to tell the tale. AS

IN CINEMAS FROM FRIDAY 23 OCTOBER 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Prowler (1951) ****

Dir.: Joseph Losey; Cast: Van Heflin, Evelyn Keyes, Emerson Tracey, Wheaton Chambers, John Maxwell; USA 1951, 92 min.

The Prowler was Losey’s favourite among the five Hollywood features he directed before blacklisting forced him to emigrate to Europe. The HU-AC witch hunt also affected the film’s writers Dalton Trumbo, Hugo Butler, PD John Hubley and German émigré writer/director Hans Wilhelm, who co-scripted the project.

The alternative title The Cost of Living, is actually a more appropriate one for this rather nasty little noir thriller that takes its cue from Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity. Losey’s feature has nothing of the grandeur of the Wilder film, being simply a story of mundane greed and lust. Fred MacMurray’s insurance salesman Walter Neff has a a shred of charm and a conscience, even though he ‘mislays’ it. His equivalent here, police officer Webb Garwood (Van Heflin), is just in it for the money and the sex.

LA socialite Susan Gilvray (Keyes, married at the time to co-producer John Huston) has been disturbed by a prowler. Inspector Webb Garwood (Heflin) fetches up at her mock Spanish villa with his partner Bud Crocker (Maxwell) – the good cop – who will shadow his buddy to the bitter end.

Webb is smitten by the lady, but much more impressed by her wealth. Susan is married to William (Tracey)M a late-night radio host who is infertile. After rebuffing Webb at first, Susan falls for him, and they have an affair. Webb then sets up a scene where the “prowler” (who is none other than Webb, having the foresight to use the William’s revolver) shoots the husband dead, grazing his skin.

The inquest is quickly over, but Susan discovers she is four months pregnant by Webb – something the couple clearly need to keep a secret. They travel to a quiet backwater in Yermo, California, to wait for the birth of the child. But complications arise, and Webb fetches Dr. James (Chambers) from LA. Susan, who now knows the truth, is afraid Webb will also do away with Dr. James after he is no longer needed. Webb flees when the cops show up in town, but instead of surrendering, he takes the bullets from his former collegues.

The Prowler is bleak and also rather squalid with its petit-bourgeois values. Webb is corrupt, using his position in society for murder. He is the “typical” victim of circumstances: a former basket ball player, whose career had been cut short by injury. Webb wants to take revenge for his misfortune, and has no qualms about his victims. Susan is a superficial woman, only in the end mustering some moral fibre. This was the last feature for veteran DoP Arthur C. Miller (The Song of Bernadette), who was elected as President of the American Society of Cameramen, dying in 1970.

Producer SP Eagle (Sam Spiegel) had a lot in common with the anti-hero of the piece: making Losey and his writer Trumbo sing for their supper, and in the end having to seek recourse to justice for their fees – including the USD35 Trumbo was paid for giving his voice to the radio host. AS

A GOOD PRINT IS AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE

A Call to Spy (2019) Netflix

Dir: Lydia Dean Pilcher | Cast: Sarah Megan Thomas, Stana Katic, Radhka Apte, Linus Roache, Rossif Sutherland, Samuel Roukin | US Drama 123′

US director Dean Pilcher lifts the lid on a little known Americanised account of World War II history about a group of women recruited by Churchill’s Special Operations Executive a “club unlike any other”. The proviso was that they should know all about France, be passionately against Hitler, and pretty. The film is coincides with this year’s 75 anniversary of the D Day Landings.

Slick, affecting and brilliantly acted this impressive feature never takes itself too seriously thanks to Megan Thomas’ zesty script (she also produces and plays one of the spies) and the film has that distinctive look of TV zipping along at a brisk pace in establishing how the women were recruited and the stumbling blocks they will encounter professionally and personally in the field.

Stana Katic is a chic, no-nonsense Vera Atkins, a Romanian Jew whose accent occasionally lets her down, but she is keen for promotion and in charge of the recruitment drive as secretary to the head of the French section of the SOE (Roache). Keen for promotion, she begins the recruitment drive in the lush countryside of occupied France selecting Noor Inayat Khan (Apte) a French Sufi Muslim, and Virginia Hall (Megan Thomas). All are experiencing the discrimination of British society at the time: Virginia has lost part of her leg in a hunting accident; Noor has been held back by racism, along with her religion’s pacifist credo. But she is a talented wireless operator and her winning personality will clearly be an asset.

The multi-stranded plot is often bewildering as it wears on – there are too many unanswered questions – although this flaw could easily be attributed to inexperience, and the inherent confusion that prevailed during wartime. Strong performances carry the feature through, particularly that of Apte as Noor. Set on the widescreen and in intimate close-up, Baumgartner and Goodall’s atmospheric camerawork evokes the claustrophobia of their secret situation and the perilous, frenzied atmosphere of the covert operations.

The stakes are high and the constant sense danger is ever present as the women soldier on coping not only with the fear of detection and capture from the enemy, but also making quick decisions that affect their lives – not just their jobs – and the frequent errors of judgement made by their male counterparts back at base. And not all will survive to tell their tale.

Enjoyable and passionate A Call to Spy is also confusing at times and may have worked better as a TV series allowing the characters to expand into real people with rounded lives not women just caught up in a difficult war. The women were courageous heroes in the true sense of the word, and will be an inspiration to many who think that success is just about celebrity. MT

Signature Entertainment presents WWII espionage thriller A Call to Spy now on Netflix

The Painter and The Thief (2020) ****

Dir: Benjamin Ree; Documentary with Barbora Kysilkova, Karl Bertil Nordland, Øystein Stene; Norway 2020, 102 min.

Norwegian filmmaker Benjamin Ree follows his Sundance award-winning portrait of chess World Champion Magnus Carlsen with a documentary of a very different kind showing how bitter conflict can be resolved through art.

It all starts in 2015, when small time criminal Karl-Bertil Nordland and an unnamed accomplice stole two large paintings by Czech artist Barbora Kysilkova from an Oslo gallery. They were caught on CCTV, escaping with the rolled up canvases. Nordland was arrested and charged for the theft of ‘Swansong’ and ‘Chloe & Emma’, worth about 20,000 Euro. Particularly striking was the way the thieves took their time – removing a hundred or so nails to liberate the artworks – a task which would take over an hour. In court, Kysilkova asked Nordland why he stole her paintings, to which he answered simply “because they are beautiful”. He claimed diminished responsibility on the grounds of a four-day heroin trance. Kysilkova, a striking woman in her mid-thirties, asked to paint Nordland in ‘retribution’ for his crime.

This was the beginning of a close relationship of ‘Seelenverwandschaft’, a form of congenial understanding of two seemingly very different people. We learn about Nordland’s fight against drug dependency as a result of his mother leaving with his two siblings, leaving him to contend with an emotionally cold father. Becoming a respected carpenter he then feel prey to drugs abuse and prison. His upper body is heavily tattooed, with an inscription reading “Snitchers are a dying Breed”. When Nordland saw his portrait he cried like a baby, so overwhelmed that somebody saw him worthy of a portrait. “I do not deserve to be happy”. Barbora also painted him with his girlfriend, who left him after he bought heroin on the way to Rehab.

Nordland and Barbora are polar opposites yet their relationship develops against the odds, clearly brought to each other by some sort of soul connection through which they also learn a great deal about themselves – including their respective inherent attraction to dangerous habits. They are like Hansel and Gretel, abandoned by the adult world to fight for themselves in a threatening environment. The dark wood is a good symbol for a world both don’t fully understand.

Sentenced to one year in Halden prison, Nordland distance from Barbora’s feels somehow therapeutic for them both. But the re-discovery of one of her paintings ‘Swansong’, (hidden by Nordland’s partner in crime in an underground labyrinth) fills her with ecstatic happiness.

Rees and fellow DoP Kristoffer Kumar produces images of ethereal beauty, particularly in the shots showing Barbora painting in a trance-like state. What started as a ten-minute short film develops into a profound exploration of two survivors, who accidentally find a way to each other. AS

In cinemas 30 October 2020 | Winner – Sundance 2020 – Special Jury Prize for Creative Storytelling

The Ladykillers (1955) ****

Dir: Alexander Mackendrick | Drama | UK 83′

Celebrating its 65th Anniversary The Ladykillers was the last of the legendary Ealing Comedies., a subversively amusing caper that proves the undeniable civilising force of charming female influence. The female in question is Katie Johnson’s Mrs Wilberforce, a genteel little old lady who agrees to let a suite of rooms in her St Pancras abode to a ghoulish looking ‘musician’ with unfeasible dentures (Alex Guinness). As we soon discover, his intentions are far from honourable when joined by a motley crew of what turns out to be rather gentlemanly crooks: Peter Sellers, Herbert Lom, Cecil Parker and Danny Green. The Ladykillers reflects on the kindness of strangers – but reminds us never to look a gift horse in the mouth – in a world that sadly no longer exists.

In a role originally intended for Alistair Sim, Guinness looks almost macabre as Professor Marcus, whose plan to dupe the seemingly naive Mrs Wilberforce into being part of a heist goes pear-shaped after the crew rob a security van. But the heist is just a vehicle for darkly amusing antics that involve a parrot, a tea party and a strange old house facing St Pancras Station in Euston Road, but now no longer exists.

This gothic caper is far superior to the Coen Brothers’ 2004 remake, the humour derived from Mrs Wildberforce’s typically English way of derailing the gang’s activities with her innocent requests for assistance, and offers of cups of tea. Meanwhile they try to conceal their sculduggery by posing as a farcical string quartet, though they are unable to play a note and are in fact miming to a recording of Boccherini’s Minuet. In the end the gang pull off the robbery, but none of them could have predicted that their greatest obstacle to escaping with the loot would be their well-meaning hostess.

The Ladykillers was the last Technicolour three-strip film shot in Britain and went on to win Best British Screenplay for William Rose and Best British Actress for Katie Johnson, in the film that made her a star at the grand old age of 77.

Restoration-wise a 35mm Technicolor print was used as a reference for the colour grade to ensure the new HDR Dolby Vision master stayed true to the films original 1950s ‘Colour by Technicolor’ look. In total the remaster benefitted from over a 1000 hours’ worth of 4K digital restoration to achieve a sparkling new digital print. MT

IN CINEMAS FROM 23 OCTOBER 2020 | UHD, BLU-RAY/DVD includes Forever Ealing Documentary narrated by Daniel Day-Lewis and BBC Omnibus Made in Ealing (1986) featuring interviews with Alexander Mackendrick and William Rose.

Summer of 85 (2020) Mubi

Dir|Wri: Francois Ozon. France, Romcom, 100′

This upbeat breezy retro teenage love story is set in seaside Normandy over six weeks in the summer of Summer Of 85. As usual Ozon doesn’t take things too seriously but the romance feels real and the lively score of ’80s hits and memories of holidays in Normandy make this a sunny treat for everyone.

Aiden Chamber’s paperback original ‘Dance on My Grave’ took place in Southend-on-Sea but Ozon choses the Normandy coastal town of Le Tréport for his version of the tale with its strong emotional undercurrent stemming for the elation and them pain of first love showing how the central character discovers writing as a therapy for his broken heart.

Summer of 85 is more tragic than comic but Francois Ozon has a clever way spicing his dramas with subtle and subversive humour always leaving it open to individual interpretation. And there are random moments that may raise a smile, or may not. The balance is always delicately poised.

Alexis (Félix Lefebvre) is a cherubic blond 16 year-old, who hints in the opening scenes that see him in police custody, that the film will end in tears but we are not told why. And this is the enigma that hooks us into the plot driven forward by his literature teacher Mr Lefèvre (a moustachioed Melvil Poupaud) disguise) who tries to persuade Alexis to write about his experience even if he can’t talk about it.

Gradually the story spills out in flashback narrated by Alexis who takes us back to the start of summer when he decided to take his friend’s boat for an afternoon’s sailing. Storm clouds soon gather and he is thrown into the water only to be rescued by another sailer in the shape of David Gorman, (Benjamin Voisin) a dark-haired 18-year-old adonis who certainly knows the ropes.

Soon the two are back at David’s where a voluptuous Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi plays a welcoming Jewish mum Mrs Gorman who also runs a business specialising in sailing tackle. Admiring Alex’s own tackle she runs him a hot bath. Realising her son needs a close friend, but does realising yet just how close, the boy’s budding relationship blossoms, and he is offered a role in the business. But there’s good fun to be had — riding David’s motorbike and sailing – not to mention between the sheets in this hedonistic affair that positively froths with youthful exuberance especially when a Kate (Philippine Velge) a frisky young au pair from England joins the party. Meanwhile Alex’s mother (Isabelle Nanty) and father are a more down to earth couple anchoring him in the reality of their working class set-up.

Summer in Normandy in always going to be a winner visually, whether down on the beach or in the verdant hinterland the setting is strikingly beautiful and DoP Hichame Alaouie conveys a retro feel with his Super-16 camerawork. And one of the best things about Summer of 85 is its rousing soundtrack of ’80s hits from The Cure’s ’In Between Days’ to Rod Stewart’s ’Sailing’. As David, Benjamin Voisin’s striking charisma carries the film: his confident intensity and effervescent charm set him out to be a star in the making. MT.

NOW ON MUBI

Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful (2020) ****

Dir/Wri: Gero von Boehm | DoP: Sven Jakob-Engelmann | 89′

Gero von Boehm dives deep into the life and work of maverick German fashion photographer Helmut Newton (1920-2004) for a second look.

Back in the 1980s I was a great admirer of Newton’s cutting edge gaze at the female – and male – form. After a photographer boyfriend told me “you look like a Helmut Newton model” I was determined to track down this controversial man and learn more about him. Then I remember standing on the Kurfurstendamm in Berlin and watching glamorous leather-clad ladies of the night pass by all stern and supercilious with their whips and red lips. Clearly these proud professional were Newton’s disciples. And this warm tribute celebrates the subversive side of the genial provocateur who was born into a comfortable Jewish family in Berlin during the edgy Weimarer years.

Enlivened by fascinating insights from Newton himself along with his Australian wife June and numerous collaborators Gero von Boehm’s Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful discovers a man who loved women and gave them the confidence to show their bodies off in a way that was empowering, seductive and even darkly humorous – even dangerous. By the end you may have a different view of his innovative approach, considered by some to be exploitative. Look again.

Once of Newton’s challengers was feminist writer Susan Sontag, who is seen sparring with him on a French chat show calling him out on his penchant for shooting naked women (mostly in high heels) in objectified scenarios, but the disdainful expressions or steely glint in these women’s eyes tells a different story, and despite their nakedness they are proud potent Amazonians who glare out at the viewer, and this is his talent to amuse. It was also one that earned him a great deal of money enabling him to winter in California’s luxury Chateau Marmont for over 40 years until his tragic death in January 2004.

Ironically his famous models heap him with praise. Isabella Rossellini – who considers herself a feminist – waxes lyrical about her friend recalling a famous portrait he made of her with her then-partner David Lynch. his approach seems to expose latent truths in the female (and male) psyche, after all we are all animals who love to dominate or occasionally be overpowered in the right circumstances. And this is the essence of the sizzling sexual chemistry behind his photos. Another glowing account comes from Charlotte Rampling, who has more than a twinkle in her eye looking back on the smouldering naked portrait that helped launch her career around the time of The Night Porter.

Von Boehm then delves into Newton’s past: he was 13 when Hitler came to power, a time when Leni Riefenstahl’s athletic images of women in rigorous exercise formations were everywhere to be seen. In Australia he met his wife to be and major collaborator, June, who went on to be his art director, while honing her own craft behind the camera. It was a successful love and business partnership akin to that of Charles and Ray Eames.

Coming across as affable and also vulnerable, Newton plays up his ‘naughty boy’ image in front of the camera and seems like the sort of guy who would be charming and easygoing company. But Boehm keeps a distance from his subject in an enjoyable foray that never attempts to eulogise or condemn. Clearly Newton had a well-developed erotic imagination but his love and devotion to his wife is a clear indication that, at heart, he was a decent if decadent man. MT

ON CURZON HOME CINEMA | DIGITAL DOWNLOAD 23 OCTOBER

Nomadland (2020)

Dir/Wri.: Chloé Zhao; Cast: Frances McDormand, David Straithearn, Linda May, Charlene Swankie, Melanie Smith, Derek Endres, Bob Wells; USA 2020, 108 min.

A woman loses everything and embarks on a epic journey across America’s midwest re-discovering her heart and soul.

Nomadland is the follow-up to Chloé Zhao’s breakout indie The Rider and captures the same spirit of emotional release and redemption in the big country as the 2017 award winner. This time with a fatter budget and star-power, the Chinese director adapts Jessica Bruder’s 2017 autobiographical study “Nomadland: Surviving America in the 21st Century”. The nomads in question are victims of the 2008 financial crisis – now in their 60s and 70s – live in camper vans and trailer parks, not unlike the Hobos of the Great Depression.

Shot in Nebraska, South Dakota, Nevada, Arizona and California, the film is carried by Frances McDormand who is the quietly resilient Fern, a vigorous defender of her freedom: “I am not homeless, I am houseless”. Since her husband died and her employee folding – shutting down the entire town of Empire, Nevada (including the postcode) -. she has joined the growing army of casual workers taken to moving around the vast expanses of the mid West in a camper vans, rather than returning to the (now broken) places of their youth. Something has changed for good: and instead of yearning for security they celebrate real American independence – with all its drawbacks – a private plumbed in lavatory, or the lack of it, is one. And talking of toilets, Fern now cleans them in restaurants as one of her casual jobs, Another is being an “Amazon Ant” in a huge warehouse, possibly not much different from the factory floor back in Empire.

Fern – McDormand in indomitable form – gets a proper introduction to life as a traveller by a pioneer of the movement: the anti-capitalist orator Bob Wells, who plays himself. Long-term cancer survivor Charlene Swankie, is another. Charlene is philosophical about her terminal cancer: as long as she avoids hospital, she can cope. A string of small encounters make Fern’s story memorable, young Derek Endres remembers her generous gift of cigarettes when they meet by accident again; a Shakespeare Sonnet is a point of reference for longing and loss they have all endured. “See you down the road” becomes the travellers “mot du jour”.

There are also long term relationships. Dave (Straithearn, one of the few professional actors), has a crush on Fern. After he decides to go back and live like a proper grandfather to his family, he invites Fern to visit him and offers her the shelter of a comfortable home. She is tempted – at least for a while. But when she leaves the house at night for the security of her van, we all know what will happen.

And then there is her sister Dolly (Smith), who represents the life she has left behind. Fern visits on the pretext of borrowing money, but declines the invitation to move in despite her sister twisting the emotional screws: “Your leaving has left a big hole”. But Fern has found a new direction from the ashes of her past.

Back on the road and bathing naked in a lagoon, Fern is at one with nature come rain or storm. The desert is like a magnet, replacing the longing for an orderly way of life: the strictures of yesterday have been replaced by serenity as she draws strength from solitude, and herself. In the end, her father’s phrase:”What’s remembered, lives” sums up an atmosphere close to the Woody Guthrie songs of the 1930s, when solidarity was born out of a new rules of survival. And this is the positive message of this life-affirming film about true spiritual status quo: when we become truly at one with ourselves.

DoP Joshua James Richards images, particularly of the desert, are quietly mind-blowing, yet his scenes of the daily grind and other “inconveniences” do not stint in grubby detail. Frances McDormand’s performance is an understatement bordering on the miraculous. She represents stoicism, unflinching and without compromise, finding poetry in the everyday, she carries the past without denying the loss, striding forward to another exciting meeting with a new friend down the road. AS

Best Film, Best Leading Actress BAFTA 2021 | GOLDEN LION WINNER | VENICE 2020 | Oscars for Chloe Zhao and Frances McDormand.

Ronnie’s (2020)

Dir: Oliver Murray | Doc with:

The sheer exhilaration of live music is one of life’s pleasures. And Oliver Murray conjurs up the vibrant spirit of Jazz in this documentary tribute to a man who was always “gracious, inviting and free to share his ideas with everybody” in the words of American record producer Quincy Jones. This is the story of Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club. Soho’s storied jazz club in London.

Ronnie Scott (1927-1996) was an English jazz tenor saxophonist who played alongside some of the most famous figures in the world of Jazz in a small basement location in London’s Frith Street in the heart of Soho.

Once described as a “very nice bunch of guys”, Ronnie was all things to all people, everyone describing a different side of his charismatic personality. And Murray saves the darker side for the final chapter of this layered biopic. Scott grew up in a working class Jewish family in the East End of London where he trained on the saxophone just like his father before him, founding his iconic jazz club in 1959 and unintentionally creating a den of cool and a meeting place for luminaries of the jazz world and their aficionados.

Still going after 60 years, Ronnie Scotts is now a household name, inextricably linked to the word Jazz, the current manager (and talking head) Simon Cooke has been keeping the place going for the past 25 years. Owned by theatre impresario Sally Greene and the entrepreneur Michael Watt since 2005

Fascinating archive footage forms the background to a later interview with Ronnie – taking us through the history of his East and West End childhood and early adulthood in the 1940s where he became a dance-band saxophonist (like his father) and then falling in love with Bebop and learning his Jazz style on board oceans liners bound for New York. Here he discovered Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and eventually, sailing back to London, he dreamed up the idea of his own jazz club – he would be the star-power – starting the evening in compare mode with a series of dry jokes – his fellow musician Pete King was the business brain. The idea came together with the aspiration to provide keen musicians with the first ever place to perform in Gerrard Street (just round the corner), although Americans were forbidden by the Musician’s Union to play in English venues. This made the financing complicated because only the Americans bought in the money. This led to a long-standing feud with the UK musician’s union.

Five bob (UK shillings) was the charge for the Saturday ‘all-nighter” and there was generous hospitality shown to regulars and those who worked there. Later the club moved to bigger premises at 47 Frith Street and welcomed the likes of Sonny Rollins, Dizzie Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, Roland Kirk, Miles Davis, Nina Simone, Oscar Peterson, Buddy Rich, Thelonious Monk, Chet Baker and Sarah Vaughan, and even Van Morrison all of whom perform in the clips that Murray interweaves into this lively biopic.

Scott was the frontman while macho straight-talker King took care of the business. Their close relationship was likened to a marriage, by King’s wife Stella, who describes Ronnie as a complicated man who, unknown to friends and fellow musicians, suffered from low moods that he shook off by playing his music. And bankruptcy was often round the corner, Ronnie recalling the bailiffs being on site one time even pricing up the piano while the show went on. Ronnie often gambled away the takings but he was also the life and soul of a place fondly remembered here by those who enjoyed it over the years amongst them Mel Brooks, music journalist John Fordham, Ronnie’s daughter Rebecca, and his various wives and partners Mary Scott, Francoise Venet, and others who help flesh out the complicated artist he was.

But the unique feel of the place and Ronnie’s soulful charisma dominant this jubilant often deeply poignant biopic about a man with a vision, and a club that still attracts crowds as never before and will hopefully carry on. MT

ON QUALITY PLATFORMS

New Order (2020)

Dir/scr. Michel Franco | Mexico/France | 86 mins.

Michel Franco delivers a blistering arthouse thriller that pictures a potential cataclysmic recompense for Mexico’s class divide.

After Lucia, Chronic and April’s Daughters were all astringent social dramas this short sharp shock of a feature is an extreme expression to his country’s corrupt social and political divide and delivers an uncompromising gut punch that has a distinct shades of Costa Gavras’ 1972 outing State of Siege.

The aesthetic is brash and the pace fast-moving – bewildering almost – as payback delivers payback, all done in less than 90 minutes. Three factions are involved: the wealthy, the Military and the working classes and no one emerges a hero, or even particularly likeable or distinguishable, they are all just ciphers for the sectors they represent.

The action takes place in Mexico City but the anger is universal reflecting a world increasingly polarised between the have and the have-nots’. And the have-nots are certainly not having it anymore here in Mexico City which is seized by a violent uprising that boils over in the opening scenes. Patients are ousted from their beds and in a local hospital, and doused in green paint. Nearby a wedding is taking place behind the security-guarded walls of an upmarket compound: Marianne (Naián González Norvind) is getting married, but some of the guests arrive splattered in green paint.

The feverish pace quickens in the dizzying hand-held camerawork. A feeling of doom pervades. At the wedding the talk is of drugs and property deals, while the indigenous Mexican staff whirl around with champagne and canapés. Marianne is given envelopes rather than packaged gifts – money talks louder than toasters and crystal here in Mexico. But when a former member of staff turns up asking his ex employer to finance urgent hospital treatment, Marianne is the only one to oblige, with a hug and a helping hand.

A scuffle breaks out and we are catapulted into a muddled, military-style coup. The staff grab jewellery and watches, while guests are bundled into black vans and dragged away screaming, under the cosh. Anyone travelling there will know that guerrilla kidnappings are very much par for the course in modern day Latin America – but this is a big time operation, and it’s vicious, and well-orchestrated with no happy ending.

The Mexican flag flies high over the final scene that carries the chilling words ‘Only The Dead Have Seen The End Of War’ (purportedly a quote from the Spanish philosopher Jorge Ruiz de Santayana 1963-1952 not Plato – although this is debatable). Franco’s film takes no prisoners – quite literally – and there are no memorable performances, the characters are only there to serve the narrative. The takeaway is the powerful message New Order delivers. An unflinching and prescient work. MT

IN CINEMAS FROM 10 SEPTEMBER 2021

The Other Lamb (2019) **** MUBI

Dir: Malgorzata Szumowska | Wri: Catherine S McMullen | Cast: Raffey Cassidy, Michiel Huisman, Denise Gough | Ireland-Belgium, US. 92′

Malgorzata Szumowska’s first English language film has a striking visual aesthetic and a storyline that bears a distinct resonance with Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale. Szumowska’s regular cinematographer Michal Englert creates a heady mystical feel that magics up a sinister sense of place in the wild, windswept landscapes of this quirky dreamlike horror feature.

The Other Lamb is a young girl who refuses to kowtow Michael Huisman’s butchly pretty cult leader ‘The Shepherd’ who rules over his flock of febrile females deep in their forest commune. The women followers compete cattily for his favours in a way that makes this movie, directed by a woman, vaguely unpalatable with its themes of toxic masculinity and hero worship. But Szumowska has a string of cultish fantasy dramas under her belt, amongst them In the Name of; Body and Mug. marking out her distinct talents as a pioneering filmmaker with a unique offbeat style. The latest is Never Gonna Snow Again (2020).

The subject of cults has long been a source of inspiration for filmmakers (Midsommar and Mandy are recent outings), and the women’s devotion to their leader feels akin to Vanessa Redgrave’s adoration of Oliver Reed in Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971). Australian writer Catherine S McMullen gives an otherworldly twist to this female centric set-up that thrives tucked away from modern civilisation in an enduring fairytale that speaks to the past, present and future. The dank misty murkiness of the setting adds to its doom laden morose atmosphere.

Two groups vie for attention, the children are clad in blue, and the wives in red, but when they grow older the Shepherd gives them the pushover. Selah (a glowering Raffey Cassidy) is one of the children born into the community. Wayword and bewildered by the cult worship of The Shepherd she forms her own opinion – partly due to fear, and partly due to ignorance of what is happening to her changing body as she reaches womanhood – and The Shepherd turns his attention on her like a search light in the fog. Visions of dead birds, hostile rams and stillborn lambs haunt her daytime reveries and at night she experiences strange longings for The Shepherd, willing her to take action. Slowly it dawns that Selah represents women everywhere who not only question but are also minded to disrupt and dismantle the accepted patriarchy, male domination and misogyny of any kind.

THE OTHER LAMB is available on MUBI from 16 October 2020

Frida Kahlo (2021) DVD and Digital

Dir.: Ali Ray; Documentary narrated by Anna Chancellor; UK 2020, 90 min.

Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) had more than her fair share of set-backs in a short life marked by tragedy: after suffering from polio as a child, her heart was set on becoming a doctor. Eventually a life-changing accident in Mexico City proved the making of her as Mexico’s most well-known figurative artist.

Helmed by Ali Ray, Frida Kahlo takes a deep dive into the cultural history of Mexico in an engaging and informative study that starts in turn of the 20th Century Mexico City where Kahlo was born into a professional family of Germany heritage. Inspired by Renaissance art and European Avant-garde Kahlo channelled her pain (caused by a road accident) into portraits of family and friends, painted from her bed, with a special easel suspended from above.

The straightforward narrative chronicles a life marked by Kahlo’s dedication to finding an artistic outlet to her feelings as a semi-invalid in need of constant surgical intervention to manage her afflictions. Her paintings explore post-colonial gender, class and culture at a time where her country was experiencing seismic shifts in its transformation away from Hispanic influences and back to Mexico’s native roots in magic realism and folklore. She was the first painter to depict a miscarriage (her own), and, as a devout Catholic, she even painted herself as the baby Jesus cradled in the arms of Mary.

Kahlo’s relationship with wealthy, political activist and painter Diego Rivera marked a significant turning point in her life in1928. Both were members of the Communist party and they married a year later – Rivera was 20 years older – to form a union that would be influential but turbulent for the rest of her life. Crucially it also meant that Kahlo was able to afford the hospital treatment that would keep her going. Despite his obesity Rivera was a flagrant womaniser – even sleeping with Frida’s younger sister and close confident. “I had two accidents in my life, the tram and Diego. He was by far the worst”. She reflected later in life.

Kahlo may have been avant-garde in her outlook, but styled herself as a traditional Tijuana woman and painted in the naif style of the ‘Mexicanidad’, a romantic nationalism which adopted motifs from the pre-colonial era. In the early 1930s the couple moved to San Francisco where Rivera – as part of the Muralista movement – took on an assignment to paint the walls of an industrial plant with historical murals, a mammoth undertaking that would later see the couple move to Detroit and New York. But while Rivera worked, Frida tried to have a family. Her 1932 work “Henry Ford Hospital” was considered the first painting to feature a miscarriage, an attempt by the 25 year-old Frida to process the shock. She continued to paint expressing her inner trauma using symbolism and iconography which bordered on the surreal. Andre Breton being entranced by her style, even though Kahlo herself never used any categorisation for her work.

Frida yearned for Mexico and their eventual return saw the couple housed in separate dwellings, connected by a bridge where they could visit each other at will. It was at this time that Rivera took up with Kahlo’s younger sister, and the disappointed Frida turned to expressing herself through religious tableaux painted on copper and zinc – but not in the traditional form of an icon: one painting: “My Nurse and I” (1937) depicts her as the baby Jesus, and Maria as a Mexican woman. “The Two Fridas” (1939) is a split-personality portrait, whilst “Self-portrait with cropped Hair” (1940) is about her androgynous self, not surprisingly since she had affairs with women as well as men during her chequered sexual career. Her increasing alcohol intake, and Diego’s affairs with high profile lovers, led to a divorce in 1939, but they would remarry a year later.

Kahlo only had two solo exhibitions in her lifetime (the last one in 1953, just before her death). In 1938 her paintings were part of “Magic Realism”, an exhibition in Paris, where Picasso gave her critical acclaim. In Kahlo’s final years her paintings became more and more graphic in their depiction of trauma. “A Few Nips” shows a prostitute being murdered by her pimp, and “The broken Column” (1944) is a self-portrait, her body in a corset, her spine held together by bandages. “Self-Portrait with Thorn Neck Lace and Hummingbird” (1940) shows her with a monkey and a black cat – a semi-religious portrait which again is a role reversal of gender roles. Perhaps her most complete painting is “The Love embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego and and Senor Xolotl “(1949), a quasi-religious panorama in which Frida holds the adult Diego like a baby in her arms.

Ray’s filming technique show the paintings at their most vivid and clear, but the academic Talking Heads become too intrusive: Anna Chancellor’s concise narration offering adequate insight, the paintings speaking for themselves. Kahlo’s work and personality elude any academic approach – her life and work defied categorisation as a unique expression of life experience couched in the enigma of an extraordinary woman who succeeded against the odds. AS

FRIDA KAHLO: RELEASED ON DVD, DOWNLOAD & STREAM ON 22 FEBRUARY

Limbo (2020) **** Bfi London Film Festival 2020

Dir/Wri: Ben Sharrock | Cast: Amir El-Masry, Sidse Babett-Knudsen, Vikash Bhai, Ola Orebiyi, Kwabena Ansah, Kenneth Collard | UK Drama, 103′

A group of refugees fetch up on a remote Scottish island in this artful and darkly amusing comedy drama lampooning the migrant crisis.

The common denominator is their single, masculine status. If they were married with kids they would be placed in a stylish new-build in the centre of Edinburgh, or even London. But it’s a grim lot for the male of the species who arrives in these rain soaked islands looking for a home. And the Scotts director shows the same sober look and lugubrious humour as Pablo Stoll’s cult classic Whisky (2004) or Aki Kaurismaki’s Berlinale winner The Other Side of Hope (2017). However, his visually imaginative style and symmetrical framing also make this a sumptuous treat.

BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2020

African Apocalypse (2020) ***

Dir.: Rob Lemkin; Documentary with Femi Nylander, Amina Weira; UK 2020, 88 min.

This new documentary sees Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel ‘Heart of Darkness’ from the natives’ perspective. Oxford University student Femi Nylander goes on a real voyage of discovery to illuminate the bloody massacres in Niger at the end of the 19th century when the French government to unite the French colonies in West Africa backfired with tragic consequences and costing over 15,000 African lives.

Following in the footsteps of French officers Captain Voulet and his adjutant Lt. Julian Chanoines were tasked with unifying the colonies of what is now Chad, Niger and Burkina Faso, to fend off British colonial forces. After Voulet’s worst massacres in Birnin Konni, word of Voulet’s depravity and violence reached Paris, and Army Command sent Lt. Colonel Jean Francois Klobb to relieve Voulet. On Bastille Day in July 1899 Klobb confronted Voulet and was later killed.

Lemkin accompanies Nylander and his co-researcher and translator Amina Weira on their journey through West Africa, where they discover written material relating to Voulet’s massacres and his descent into madness, declaring: “I have become an African, and would be the King of Paris”. They also dredge up a tape recording from the 1970s narrated by an old women retelling the gory details, which was tantamount to genocide, and would land Voulet in front of the Den Hague Court.

Nylander feels like in outsider in the old Etonian world of Oxford, and he is also to made to feel a stranger once in Africa: his interviewees challenge him on his lack of empathy with the victims’ grand children. DoPs Claude Garnier and Shaun Harley Lee sustain a fly-on-the-wall presence, keeping a welcome intimacy; whilst their panoramic impressions of he river landscapes are of exceptional beauty. Lemkin’s attempt to integrate Nylander with his current BLM activities is not always successful, since the ‘retelling’ of the Conrad narrative can very much stand on its own. But the African images are much stronger than contemporary, middle-class dominated UK protest meetings, which feel anaemic in comparison. AS

SCREENED DURING BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2020

A Common Crime (2020)

Dir.: Francisco Màrquez; Cast: Elisa Carricajo, Mecha Martinez, Eliot Otazo, CeciliaRainero, Ciro Coien Pardo, Lantaro Murna; Argentine 2020, 96 min.

This slow-burning psychological thriller is a seething study in guilt wrapped around a mesmerising central performance from Elisa Carricajo as a lecturer whose life slowly unravels in the wake of tragedy. A Common Crime is the second feature from the Argentine director whose subtle approach calls to mind Lucrecia Martell’s The Headless Woman and Juan Antonio Bardem’s Muerte de un ciclista.

The drama is bookended by two scenes in a fair ground that capture the cataclysmic events Cecilia (Carricajo) has witnessed in a suburb of Buenos Aires where she lives with her son Juan (Pardo). We watch her enjoying a fairground attraction with friend Claudia (Rainero) and their boys. Later she has lunch at home with the housekeeper Nebe (Martinez), who turns a blind eye to her employer’s absent mindlessness with a motherly smile. Nebe also has son, Kevin, who is the focus of the tragedy. Meanwhile Cecilia is emerging a typical bluestocking who berates her pupils over their shoddy presentations, but relies heavily on those around her for practical help.

One rainy night Cecilia is woken by banging at her front door. She can make out the figure of Kevin in the darkness but for some reason decides not to let him in. Next morning brings tragic news from Nebe and Cecilia offers her a month off to gets her thoughts together. Cecilia clearly feels guilty, although she didn’t commit a crime as such. But the tragedy haunts and disorients her and she wanders around in a daze, unable to concentrate, even phoning her ex-husband by accident.

Juan picks up on her anxiety which strangely tunes up her compassion towards her students, who are all baffled by the change. Eventually she confesses her feelings of guilt to Nebe, but is unable to assuage the negative emotions. DoP Federico Lastra captures this claustrophobia in intimate close-ups of an imploding world where Cecilia slowly loses her mind and sense of self. AS

ON BFI PLAYER

Another Round (2020)

Dir. Thomas Vinterberg | Cast: Mads Mikkelsen, Marie Bonnevie, Thomas Bo Larsen | Denmark. 2020. 115′

Vinterberg’s latest is a freewheeling comedy that relies on false bonhomie to reveal the hollow desperation at its core. Set in semi-rural Denmark, Another Round is a wise and trenchant look at a community sleep-walking into mediocrity, in a haze of alcohol.

Like Festen and The Hunt before it, there is a deeper message to the gently imploding farce that took the Best International Feature award in the 2021 Oscars. The focus is a close-knit circle of friends who have known each other for quite some time. United by their common ground as teachers in the local school gives them time on their hands to discuss the meaning of life and the film encourages us to do so too with its elegant pacing and intelligent script. Punctuated by the gentle rigour of patriotic anthems that lend a rousing gravitas to this boozy study of social mores, the musical interludes hark back to the country’s heroic past that paved the way for the peace and security they now enjoy in this outwardly affluent locale with its glorious scenery and stylish design.

Martin (Mads Mikkelsen) teaches history and drinks too much. In fact they all do. Relying on alcohol to get them through their banal everyday existence. He is joined by Bo Larsen’s sports teacher, wealthy psychology prof Nikolaj (Magnus Millang), and the music-master Peter (Lars Ranthe), the only one without kids.

Married to Marie Bonnevie’s Trine, Martin has lost his mojo and so drinking provides a comfort blanket to get him through the day. It also exposes some serious issues with Trine. Wondering aloud whether he’s has become boring, her reply: “compared to what?” indicates the level of generalised ennui that inhabits their marriage. Clearly Vinterberg and his writer Lindholm are having a dig at Denmark’s drinking culture, but there’s more at play in this universal story that hints at a society that has never had to strive hard to enjoy a leisurely companionable lifestyle and comparable material success.

The story revolves around an experiment with alcohol. And filming must have been entertaining, with cut glasses tumblers never half full: the finest vodka, wine and champagne known to humanity is very much the order of the day. And seen with sober eyes the antics occasionally seem decadent. But that’s very much the intention. Rather than savouring the taste or delicacy, the alcoholic kick is the watchword here. Apparently there is a theory that we are all born with a deficit of alcohol in our bodies, and a steady stream helps us operate on a more positive, relaxed level. Comparisons are drawn with great leaders such as Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt and the men enjoy imbibing as the tone gradually darkens.

Martin relies on a steady stream of alcohol to give him confidence and expansive energy for his rowdy and questioning teenagers who have noticed lapses in his concentration, and are now more engaged in the learning process. But gradually the drunken episodes become more frequent for all them – and their manic booze-fuelled binges in the summery countryside gradually take the film on a more sombre journey that ends in a sobering wake-up call all round. MT

OSCAR – BEST INTERNATIONAL FEATURE 2021

Dementia (1953/55) ****

Wri/Dir: John Parker | UK Drama 56mins

A woman’s paranoia proves to be more than just a nightmare, in John Parker’s influential 1953 horror film Dementia.

Made on a shoestring and certainly none the worse for it, the film shows how much can be achieved with a slim budget.

Attracting a great deal of controversy surrounding censorship, Dementia had a doomed start in life: it fell foul of the New York State Film Board in 1953, who deemed it “inhuman, indecent, and the quintessence of gruesomeness”. It had a limited release two years later, and was then re-named Daughter of Horror in 1957, and given a VoiceOver narration by Ed McMahon. Well ahead of its time, it is a startling portrait of a woman working through vivid emotional trauma to come to terms with her troubled family past.

Dementia was Parker’s only film, expanded from a short, it barely makes the full length feature category. Garnering cult status after appearing on TCM’s late night horror spot ‘The Underground’, furore for the film’s strange blend of Gothic and fantasy horror gradually developed.

It came into being as a result of a dream experienced by John Parker’s then secretary Adrienne Barrett, who plays the main character. Awakening from a nightmare in a squalid hotel room in the back streets of Los Angeles (where the film was also shot), ‘the gamin’ begins her journey into the deep recesses of her mind – whether real or imagined. Clearly her reverie connects with some deep hidden anxiety. Armed with a flick-knife she sets off into the night where darkness envelopes her, along with a string of menacing and exploitative characters.

An interesting companion piece to The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920), Dementia is also a harbinger of the sinister brand of psychological drama that would follow: The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) : Roman Polanski’s 1965 outing Repulsion strikes a chord, although visually Dementia connects with Guy Maddin’s hallucinatory fantasy outings such as Keyhole (2011) or even the cult classic Blue Velvet (1986). There are film noir and expressionist elements in the oblique black and white camerawork, the shadow-warped backstreets and pervasive paranoia. Narrative-wise Dementia could even come out of the pages of a Shirley Jackson novel with its chillingly sinister sense of foreboding; the heroine sinking into madness, consumed by terror.

Dialogue is minimal – apart from the occasional scream or laughter – the focus is on tone and atmosphere, with an unsettling soundscape by George Anthiel (Ballet Mécanique). ‘The gamin’ rushes through the empty streets where she collides with a series of weirdos and wayfarers (including a deranged flower-girl), culminating in a salutary meeting with the lascivious, cigar-chomping Bruno Ve Sota. He takes her on the town, only to be mesmerised by a suggestive nightclub performer.

Meanwhile the woman is gripped by a fantasy of her own which takes the shape of a foggy graveyard vignette, where she is approached by a black-hooded man carrying a lamp. As she stares down at her mother’s grave, the incongruous figure of a glamorous woman is seen smoking on a chaise-long. The woman – potentially her mother – is involved in a violent encounter with a smirking man. These characters are clearly symbolic yet shrouded in mystery, and the evening comes to a dreadful end.

The director (1899-1980) remains an elusive figure. According to a back copy of Variety magazine he was the son of Hazel H Parker who owned a chain of cinemas in Oregon.

ON BFI DUAL FORMAT BLU-RAY/DVD/DIGITAL on 19 OCTOBER 2020 | simultaneous release on iTunes and Amazon Prime |EXTRAS include a newly recorded commentary, and an alternative cut of the film, retitled Daughter of Horror (1957) which has added narration by actor Ed McMahon.

Carmilla (2019) **

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

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

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

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

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

NOW IN CINEMAS | 16 OCTOBER 2020

Chess of the Wind (1979) **** Bfi Film Festival 2020

Dir.: Mohammad Reza Aslani; Cast: Fakhri Korvash, Shoren Aghdashloo, Mohamad Reshavarz; Iran 1976, 100 min.

The Iranian filmmaker Reza Aslani, now seventy-six years old, never thought he would see his first feature again. But like the filmmaker himself it has aged extremely well, and become a cult classic ripe for revisiting.

Aslani was only thirty-three when Chess premiered in Tehran in the presence of Shah Pahlavi. A second showing played to an empty auditorium, proof that the negative reviews had sone their job. And Chess did not appeal to the religious fanatics who took over the country in 1979 – they objected to strong female leads and a sexual relationship between two women. Aslani, whose third feature The Green Fire was completed in 2008, had given up on ever finding his lost masterpiece again.

Aslani’s daughter Gita Aslani Sharestani had not given up. Working as a film historian in Paris with a PhD focusing on Iranian auteurs, and began a search for the lost reels with her brother Amin. In 1973 a couple of cans of film turned up in a junk shop. Inside was the precious film which he smuggled to Paris, so father and daughter could begin the painstaking work of restoration.

Chess of the Wind takes us back to the final years of the Qajar dynasty (1789-1925) a time where the Socialist Soviet Republic of Iran had come to power for a brief reign. The death of a wealthy matriarch leads to a power struggle between her young paraplegic heiress (Korvash, chained to a wheelchair) and her stepfather, nephews and the local commissar. The only support she has is from her handmaid (Aghdashloo), and the two women become very close. Long candlelit dinners bring to mind Barry Lyndon, but the overall mood is strictly Visconti’s La Caduta Degli Dei, with act three akin to Knives Out, as an”Upstairs Downstairs” tussle emerges. The finale is abject horror, Aslani’s prophecy echoing in our ears: “competition in increasingly worldly gains diverts you. Until you visit the graveyards”.

This lushly mounted decadent period piece is lensed to smouldering perfection by Houshang Baharlou: The painterly frames more vivid than the moribund characters who hover around like exhausted ghosts recalling the Salina Clan in Visconti’s Il Gattopardo, after their arrival in Donnafugata. Sheyda Gharachedhaghi’s haunting score blends classical Iranian music and a-tonal jazz. A chorus of washerwomen completes the spectacular but doom laden ensemble.

Meanwhile Aslani is delighted to be “re-united with his baby”, and has not given up the hope for a forth feature: he has been writing the script for the past ten years. Bring in on. AS

BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL | CLASSICS 2020

The Reason I Jump (2020)

Dir.: Jerry Rothwell; Documentary with Amrit, Joss, Ben, Emma, Jestina, Jim Fujiwara; UK/US 2020, 82 min.

Autism is a condition that restricts social interaction. But Jerry Rothwell explores how those affected do not necessary lead less rich lives as a result of being on the spectrum.

Autism Spectrum Disorder sufferer Naoki Higashida was only 13 when he decided to put his feelings down on paper, and this book forms the basis of Jerry Rothwell’s engaging film. Now in his twenties, Naoki declined to appear in the film so Rothwell chose five other cases to illustrate the near impossible barriers these young adults face.

Perhaps closest to Notes on Blindness, Jump, using the translation by David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas) and K.A. Yoshida, who have a child also affected by ASD. It features young autistic Jim Fujiwara, who runs along a beach and is a sort of stand-in for Hagashida, talking about his problems, with the camera of DoP Ruben Woodin Dechamps visualising his locked-in status.

In Noida, India we visit Amrit and her mother. The young woman channels her frustrations into powerful paintings – leading to a solo gallery show. Joss (son of the film’s producers Stevie Lee and Jeremy Dear) lives in Broadstairs where he suffers from emotional problems leading to violent mood swings. More verbal, he is also stuck in time, constantly referring to the house where he spent his early years.

Videos of him on the trampoline underline the words of Higashida’s book: “The reason I jump on the trampoline is that my body seizes up, like being by lightning. I shake off the ropes which tie me down. It is as if my feelings are going upwards to the sky. If I could only flap my wings and fly off to some faraway place.” With great regret, his parents have placed him in a school for his special needs.

In Arlington, Virginia, the filmmakers meet teenage best friends Emma and Ben, who are close allies in their SEN (Special Needs) school. They communicate with friends, teachers and parents via letter-boards, punching in a single letter at a time. “They denied us our Civil Rights” says Ben, talking about their former, not particularly progressive, school.

In Sierra Leone, the filmmakers interview Jestina and her parents, who have had to fight to keep their Freetown school opens. Jestina is one of the lucky few: many autistic children are left to die outside in the bush. But before we classify these people through our European gaze – Elders in African countries believe these kids are ‘bewitched’, it’s worth keeping in mind the Nazis murdered their autistic children in gas chambers.

Jump’s biggest triumph is conveying what it means to be classified as non-verbal ASD. When we look at an object, such as a car, we immediately contact with our memory of cars, and without questioning, it goes into the right category. But many ASD sufferers see only details, which literally jump at them. They cannot ask for help, and become more and more anxiety-ridden as a result.

Jump is not a bible, unlike Higashida’s book, but it illuminates the pathway to understanding the ASD sufferers’ feelings. Atmospheric camerawork combined with the David Charap’s exemplary editing make this journey like an echo from an inner struggle. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 18 June 2021

Cheaters (1930) **** Bfi London Film Festival 2020

Dir.: Paulette McDonagh; Cast: Marie Lorraine (Isabel NcDonagh), Arthur Greenaway, John Faulkner, Joseph Bambach; Australia 1930, 94 min.

Australia’s Paulette McDonagh (1901-1978) was a pioneer of the silent film era. Working with her sisters Phyllis (art direction) and Isabel, who stars here as Marie Lorraine, Paulette was a victim of the emerging sound film. The Cheaters was shot as a silent movie, McDonagh writing and editing. Later it was partly re-shot with sound-on-disc and the result was disappointing. Paulette would only direct one more feature film, Two minute silence in 1933.

After embezzling a small sum to help his sick wife, clerk Michael Marsh (Greenaway) begs his superior John Travers (Faulkner) not to involve the police. But his pleas fall on deaf ears. Travers is a self-righteous cold fish and Travers ends up in jail, with his wife dying.

Travers goes on to forge a criminal empire. Paula Marsh (Lorraine), supposedly his daughter, heads up many of the heists, her alluring beauty coming in useful for duping the victims. But somehow her heart is not in it, and we soon discover she is not even Marsh’s real daughter. After falling in love with Lee Travers, son of Michael, she is on the verge of leaving her ‘father’, before he tells her the truth. Nothing stands in the way of a happy-end for the lovers, and Marsh, hunted down by the police in his castle, commits suicide by taking poison.

Surprisingly, there are many parallels here with Fritz Lang’s Mabuse series. although the setting is far less sinister setting. Marsh’ castle and his army of helpers are very comparable with Lang’s silent feature, revenge being a strong motive in both cases. Marsh is just as deranged as his German counterpart Mabuse, only his love for Paula brings out the humanity in him.

McDonagh’s art direction is marvellous, the castle rooms are particularly full of brooding horror, DoP Jack Fletcher makes the most of this with his fine camerawork. Paulette McDonagh was a very talented director, but soon the Australian market fell victim to the Hollywood talkies. This restauration gives us a taste of what could have been a stellar career for Paulette McDonagh. AS

BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2020

Herself (2020)

Dir: Phyllida Loyd | UK Drama, 97′

It certainly helps to have friends in high places according to this utopian crowdpleaser that sees an abused wife and mother making a new start with her two girls in Dublin.

Playing out like an uplifting female-centric companion-piece to I, Daniel Blake this is a film along similar lines and is certainly better crafted than Ken Loach’s flung together social realist agitprop, that bizarrely went on to win a Palme d’Or.

Herself is the latest from English director Phyllida Lloyd who is best known for her blockbusters Mamma Mia and Iron Lady. Newcomer Clare Dunne co-wrote the script based on her own life experience, she is also impressive as an idealistic but enterprising home-help called Sandra who finally comes to end of her tether marriage-wise after a violent set-to with her troubled husband (Ian Lloyd Anderson). From the safety of an upmarket hotel room (courtesy of social services) she decides to make a new home for herself and her daughters after seeing a self-build model on the internet.

One good idea leads to another and the project gains momentum when her wealthy boss Dr O]Toole (Harriet Walker) offers to lend her the £35k – the good doctor became close to Sandra’s mother, her longterm domestic and support. Soon a motley crew of friends and tradesmen band together to help Sandra realise her dream, enjoying the camaraderie of this self-help exercise and the buzz it generates all round. Naturally the project doesn’t run smoothly and febrile flashbacks to the grimness of Sandra’s former life with her nasty husband counterbalance the saccharine scenario of the present.

Predictable in its cheesy outcome and off-the-peg characterisation this is a cheerful life-affirming film that also manages to combine a feisty courtroom segment with the false bonhomie of the home-building effort just for good measure. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE

Supernova (2020)

Dir/Wri: Harry Macqueen | Cast: Colin Firth, Stanley Tucci, Lori Campbell, James Dreyfus, Ian Drysdale, Pippa Haywood

Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci play long-term lovers on holiday in the Lake District in Harry Macqueen’s gently poignant follow-up to his first film Hinterland.

Colin Firth (Sam) and Stanley Tucci (Tusker) have an easy chemistry that makes this two-hander all the more enjoyable even though tragedy is the order of the day. On a romantic break in scenic Cumbria it soon emerges that the quietly amusing Tusker is suffering from early-onset dementia overshadowing their future together as a successful professional couple who are still in love.

Many actors have gone from Britain to the US but Stanley Tucci has done the reverse and already made several features together with Colin Firth: Conspiracy (2001) and Gambit (2012). Meanwhile Mcqueen cements his career as a writer and director joining fellow creative talents from Leicester including: Stephen Frears, Michael Kitchen, Una Stubs, and the Attenborough brothers. Firth and Tucci perfectly compliment one another’s star power with Sam being the more thoughtfully anxious of the two and a perfect foil for Tusker’s sardonic charm.

Whether or not Firth entirely suits a beard as a renown semi-retired concert pianist Sam, is up for question, but he is deeply enamoured of novelist Tusker and their warmth and genuine feeling for another is what really powers the film forward – along with Tucci’s caustic sense of comic timing.

The brooding hills and dales of the Lake District give this soberly-toned piece an added chill of encroaching winter – not only thematically but visually – in Dick Pope’s painterly camerawork. Old age, lasting love and mental decline are issues of universal concern, even more so in these pandemic days that have rocked our emotional wellbeing to the core.

After the jokey, love-affirming scenes of the camper van journey and the bonhomie of a shared evening with friends and family, the tone becomes more downbeat as the two plummet the depths of despair in their tortured soul-searching. But Mcqueen does not labour the point, taking a less is more approach and focussing on the wit and repartee that makes these two so close as a couple. All we need to know is conveyed by the emotional weight of the performances, and Tusker’s comment : “I want to be remembered for what I was, and not for who I’m about to become”, putting the focus on the positive side of their relationship. It is a dreaded phrase that speaks volumes for those affected by illness and has a uniquely 21st century ring in these days of dread disease. Sam retorts: “You’re not supposed to mourn somebody when they are still alive” But sometimes this is the best way.

Mcqueen also addresses a less obvious aspect of mental illness showing how an unexpected change in dynamic can derail the most stable of relationships and put the status quo into question. And this is the dark stain that slowly spreads across the film as the pair consider the future. Mcqueen’s deft scripting handles these dark night of the soul moments with a lightness of touch that hints at the trauma while avoiding a full blown meltdown. And this is where Firth and Tucci really come into their own, giving the film a textural richness and humour that is vital to make it all watchable and enjoyable, rather than mentally exhausting. Firth has the emotional range to explore the issues and Tucci the dexterity to deliver tenderness with just the right gravitas.

After the spectacular countryside of the expansive early scenes the film becomes more of an introspective chamber-piece as it gradually closes in on an intimate finale. Supernova brilliantly exudes a sense of Englishness: decent, noble, restrained and strangely satisfying. MT

NOW IN CINEMAS 2021

Shirley (2019) **** Bfi London Film Festival 2020

Dir.: Josephine Decker; Cast: Elisabeth Moss, Odessa Young, Michael Stuhlbarg, Logan Lerman; USA 2020, 107 min.

Making a name for herself with a stylish array of imagined dramas Josephine Decker moves into the arena of real life with this febrile portrait of horror writer Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) whose most popular novel ‘The Haunting of Hill House’ has been filmed on numerous occasions, the last being as a ten-episode long production on Netflix.

Based on ‘Shirley: A Novel’ by Susan Scarf the film takes place in 1964 in North Bennington, Vermont – which seems a strange a strange choice, since Scarf actually wrote her novel ‘Hangasman’, whose writing process is the central part of the feature, in 1951. The narrative centres on two couples, the middle-aged Shirley (Moss) and her English professor husband Stanley (Stuhlbarg), and their much younger house guests Rose (Young) who is pregnant with their first child, and her academic husband Fred (Lerman), who tries to get a tenure at Bennington College, being Stanley’s assistant. There are shades of Albee’s Who is Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but, more importantly, Rose and Fred are invented characters. But in staying away from a strictly biographical narrative, Decker and her writer Sarah Gubbin enhance the richness of the storytelling – even though the ‘deletion’ of four kids, who would have been around in 1951, is another puzzling decision.

We meet Rose and Fred on the train on their way to Bennington, where they have rampant sex in the train’s bathroo after Rose has finished Jackson’s Kafkaesque novella ‘The Lottery” from 1949. What was planned as a short stay, turns into a much longer tenancy, when Fred literally pimps out his wife to look after the alcoholic and and agro phobic writer, with the philandering husband making unwanted advances. Soon Fred follows in Stanley’s footsteps, and sleeps with an undergraduate student leaving the women to look for intimacy among them selves.

A major topic is Jackson’s obsession with death, not uncommon for a writer of her genre. ‘Hangsaman’ is the story of a young student called Natalie, who becomes mentally unbalanced and takes her own life. She is renamed Paula in the feature and played by Young in a part-staging of the novel. But death is never far away – in one scene Shirley frightens Rose by pretending to eat a poisonous mushroom in the woods. And near the end there is a brilliant dream-sequence with Rose standing at the edge of the cliff with her baby.

Norwegian-born DoP Sturla Brandth Groven underlines the horror-film atmosphere with a great array of light movements: even though the feature is told more from Rose’s per perspective, the flurry, wandering light seems to make the house into a prison for Jackson. Her outings into the world are also fraught with disaster: she enjoys vindictively spoiling a new sofa with red wine because she dislikes the hostess of the academic gathering. Somehow, Shirley’s protests against the mediocre, male-dominated society rubs off on Rose: when Fred tells her his affair is over, and “soon everything will be back to normal”, she lets him know that this is not the case.

Shirley is a very ambitious feature, even though a great deal takes place away from the camera, Moss and Young are mesmerising enough to keep the audience occupied. With Shirley Gubbins and Decker have created a valuable contribution to the feminist horror genre. AS

LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2020

I Am Woman (2020) ****

Dir: Unjoo Moon | Cast: Tilda Cobham-Hervey, Evan Peters, Danielle Macdonald | Biopic Drama 116′

There are two iconic feminist anthems that stand out in the memory: one is Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive, the other is I Am Woman.

Written and sung by the not quite so famous Seventies singer Helen Reddy, her theme tune nonetheless comes from a place of calm confidence. Is not strident, desperate or defiant but sure of its positive message. Yes, I am a woman but I’m also warm, approachable and secure.

Of course Reddy – played here by a fabulously feline Tilda Cobham-Hervey – was an accomplished artist who made a number of hit records during the late 1960s and 1970s. And Unjoo Moon’s fond but enjoyable rags to riches debut biopic shows how she made it from nowhere to become one of the most popular singers of her generation.

Her story starts in 1966. The mother of a 3 year girl Tracey, she arrives in New York from Sydney hoping for a recording contract from a major music producer who immediately patronises her in a film fraught with the ingrained prejudice of the era: “you really flew over from Australia all by yourself?” He denies her a contract claiming the trend is for male bands “the Beatles are all the rage”. Trying to make her way, she is later denied equal pay as a nightclub singer on the grounds of her status as an illegal alien. But she is not deterred. And with Emma Jensens’ script painting her as a purring lowkey diva, Cobham-Hervey’s Reddy has to figure out how she can keep her canny charisma and move on from being just another talented female vocalist to an assertive, no-bullshit ballbreaker – just like a man – to get to the top. But the Seventies is the era of the singer-songwriter (with a selection of gracefully performed numbers featuring here, dubbed by Chelsea Cullen) so Helen has come to America at just the right time.

Based on Reddy’s own memoirs The Woman I Am, Moon and Jensen do their best to tether the feature to the current upswell of gender parity issues. But it’s not only fame and success as a female Reddy has to conquer but also several tricky relationships, not least her budding romance with potential agent Jeff Wald (Evan Peters), who becomes Helen’s second husband, putting his own life first along with the other high level clients in his portfolio, mostly notable being the rock band Deep Purple. The two form a feisty partnership Jeff spurred on by his wife’s calm determination to pioneer her gently feministic easy listening style. The couple are now living in California where Reddy has bought a poolside mansion with cash.

Meanwhile, the ego-driven Jeff is proving a handful and needs to be managed with an iron fist. Reddy’s other key relationship is with her compatriot Lillian Roxon (Danielle Macdonald), who is making her way in music journalism and is known for the first rock encyclopedia in 1969. But both these relationships will falter: Jeff turns into a belligerent, megalomaniac coke head running through all the couple’s money, and Lillian dies of an asthma attack.

The film’s focus is very much Reddy’s invidious relationship with Jeff but fails to examine why the singer stuck to easy listening style in a career that was successful (Angie Baby, I don’t know How to Love Him and Ain’t No Way to Treat a Lady) but never really had a narrative arc of its own or a progression beyond her female-centric ballads. We do see her attempting to break into the Jazz style she had always been keen on, but this desire is stymied by Jeff and her advisors who control her activities to secure their own profits. And the sheer will and perseverance of making it anyway must have taken up most of her emotional energy, with two children to rear and a mercurial misogynist husband and manager to deal with.

Dubbed “the queen of housewife rock” by Alice Cooper, Reddy is clearly a symbol of female empowerment but more in the style of Phyllis Schlafly than her fellow chanteuses of the era Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon or Carol King. Cleverly the film never comes across as women’s lib story – and in a one certainly doesn’t get the impression Reddy was a ‘bra-burner’, more as a tribute to a woman whose talents as a singer is showcased in Cobham-Hervey’s sinuously stylish performances that make her really appealing to watch and listen in the film. Yet looking back on her music as a teen of that era Reddy was never on the radar as being remotely ‘cool’ or ground-breaking in the style Mitchell and Simon.

Superbly lensed by Oscar winning DoP Dion Beebe, the film’s final scenes therefore come across as an afterthought and tonally out of kilter with what has gone before. That said, this minor flaw does nothing to detract our enjoyment of Cobham-Hervey’s performance that carries the film through with an astonishing tour de force of grace, poise and fervent femininity. MT

IN CINEMAS FROM FRIDAY 9 OCTOBER 2020

The 180 Degree Rule (2020) **** Bfi London Film Festival 2020

Dir.: Farnoosh Samadi; Cast: Sahar Dolatshaki, Pejman Jamshidi, Azita Hajian, Hassan Pourshirazi; Iran 2020, 83 min.

Best known for her award-winning screenplays, Iran’s Farnoosh Samadi gets behind the camera single-handedly for this tightly-wound domestic drama set in Tehran. Told in a detached, brisk style, it shows how a repressive, dogmatic society leads to the breakdown of a family and the wider implications that ensue.

Teacher Sara (Dolatshaki) lives with her aloof and controlling husband Hamed (Jamshidi) and their five-year-old daughter Raha. He is a work-obsessed bureaucrat whose obsequious telephone calls to his superiors, contrast sharply with his dismissive attitude to his wife. For weeks, she has asked him to take a few days off for her younger sister’s wedding in the north of the country – but Hamed’s priority is always work, and he’s relieved to be let off the hook when his boss needs him to go on a business trip. Having refused to support Sara, he also forbids her Sara to travel to the wedding with Raha, even though the little girl is looking forward to it, having been chosen as bridesmaid and rehearsed her song to perfection.

But the two will go and the trip will end in tragedy with Sara relying on her family to get her through the aftermath. Samadi packs her storyline with the knock-on affects of the trip showing how difficult it is to conceal things, not only from her difficult husband but also his family – without revealing the entire plot line, suffice to say that Sara eventually ends up involved with the Police.

School life is no easier with Sara having to deal with a pupil’s overdose due to an unwanted pregnancy. Samadi shows how women live in daily fear of their perceived authority figures in a society that is determined to control and undermine them, and even reduces them to pawns in the hands of their husbands. But what makes 180 Degree Rule so impressive is the casual emotional aggression Hamed uses to punish his wife: treating her like a child, but without the love he has for his daughter.

The feature is complimented by its dour interiors – in contrast, the tonal relief of the wedding scene is a little master-piece of imagination, a fairy-world much removed from the dreary reality of everyday life. Avoiding melodrama at all times, Samadi gives this restrained and quietly assured debut a hopeful conclusion with the news that Sara’s sister has married a more progressive husband who at last holds Hamed in contempt. AS

BFI FILM FESTIVAL | 2020

Saint Maud (2019) **** Bfi player

Dir/Wri: Rose Glass | Cast: Morfydd Clark, Jennifer Ehle, Lily Frazer, Lily Knight, Marcus Hutton, Turlough Convery, Rosie Sansom, Carl Prekopp, Jonathan Milshaw, Noa Bodner, Rosie Sansom | UK, Fantasy Drama 84′

Rose Glass has been making films since she was 13. Her accomplished first feature is a restrained brew of horror and psychological thriller built round intoxicating performances from Morfydd Clark and Jennifer Ehle as nurse and patient.

The real St Maud lived in 10th century Germany, the daughter of a Saxon nobleman known for her healing hands, but this Maud has a distinctly Welsh sensibilities. Clark is clearly cast for her angelic face, although we see her with fresh blood on her hands in the opening scene which suggests that she is not as pious as she would have us believe when she arrives at the Arts&Crafts villa of a surprisingly vivacious diva who is dying of cancer.

Amanda (Ehle) is clearly not going to “go gentle into that good night” in the words of Dylan Thomas. Fond of Art Deco prints, mid-Sixties furniture and the music of Al Bowlly, Ehle dusts down her purring North Carolina accent and often dons a wig and false eyelashes to create a ravishing portrait of faded glamour which echoes Dorothy Parker or even Cyd Charisse. Bored rigid by her own mortality, and relying on her lover Carol (Frazer) to entertain her, Maud responds by stroking her ego, as a tender nurse whose new found religious fervour reaches orgasmic levels, inspiring both patient and carer to hope for better things in the next life – saved by the power of God. But Maud is jealous of Carol, and her tenure ends in tears. This elegantly crafted first act is bewitched by the squally winter skies of Scarborough, Adam Janota Bzowski’s booming sensaround soundscape and lush lensing from Ben Fordesman.

Once Ehle has left the stage (she does return for a brief blast) the film turns into a rather more disturbing study of untreated mental illness, Glass directing with inventive flourishes clearly influenced by The Devils and Repulsion. Maud is a disturbed and delusional character suffering from loneliness and a desperate need to control, and clinging to her Christian faith and its emblems for succour. And we really feel for her in this astonishing turn from Clark.

It soon emerges from a chance encounter in the street that she was previously known as Kate, and worked in a hospital where something bad happened. Now offering palliative care through a private agency, Maud has poetically re-styled herself as a contemporary version of Florence Nightingale, and Glass has given clever thought to this imaginative re-branding: Maud is also dogged by dangerous moods and these sequences are accompanied by magic realism and glowing special effects – in one Maud sprouts luminous wings, another sees her incandesce in a really shocking finale.

Maud’s delusional episodes grow increasingly florid as she finds herself alone and unemployable in a dingy basement flat. By the end the reality and fantasy become indistinguishable although this ambiguity never entirely satisfies. But Glass clearly enjoys honing her beast and adding further layers of texture to a characterisation that has haunting implications. Ehle is sadly underused but makes the best of her tortured diva in this really frightening first foray for the British director. MT

IN CINEMAS 9 OCTOBER 2020

I Am Samuel (2020) ** Bfi London Film Festival 2020

Dir: Pete Murimi | Kenya/USA/Canada, 70′

Being gay is not easy in Kenya as we discover in this matter of fact feature debut from TV filmmaker Pete Murimi that looks at gaydom in a male-dominated homophobic society, but fails to address the deep misogyny still at its core.

Paradoxically, it is not illegal in to be gay in Africa but homosexual acts are nevertheless classed as criminal offences, and violence is often meted out to those who cross the line. Samuel introduces us to “the love of his life” Alex in opening sequence where they frolic in a Nairobi waterfall having met the previous year. There are lively discussions amongst his gay friends who share their experiences of life in modern Kenya. In common with many people in the UK, Samuel runs two jobs to keep afloat in Nairobi where he works on a building site and as a netball coach. The two are now enjoying an easygoing relationship together but keeping a low profile is hard.

The film then moves to Western Kenya and the close-knit rural community where Samuel grew up. Samuel describes how it was impossible to have any kind of private life away from the gaze of his family and the close traditional Christian setup where we witness a ceremony of baptism in the local river. He was always being ‘nagged’ to find a girlfriend but describes feeling ‘different’ from the age of 14.

It then emerges that Samuel did give into his family, and fathered a child ‘to help with the farm’ before leaving for Nairobi and meeting Alex. Tellingly we never meet his wife or hear what she has to say on the matter, but his young daughter appears on camera and Samuel assures us their relationship is a good one, but worries about her finding out the truth. Samuel’s ageing farmer parents Redon and Rebecca seem a calm and genuine couple who agree to allow the cameras in their private lives.

Back again in Nairobi Samuel has discovered that his parents know the truth about his life with Alex. He shares a fear that his father may take action “to teach him a lesson” although his mother has been more accommodating. He looks forward to gathering with friends for his 26th birthday even undergoing a ‘marriage ceremony’ with Alex.

Meanwhile his father is painstakingly building Samuel a home of his own. To an upbeat soundtrack, Samuel describes the quiet shock of his father as ‘a silence’ between them grows. In Nairobi Samuel admits that his father wanted to disown him. Clearly the old man is dismayed but his views are never shared, neither are those of his mother or wife who are kept in the background, presumably forced to accept Alex as a fait accompli.

This is particularly alarming when the breezy narrative urges us to be non-judgemental, only introducing us to Samuel’s daughter halfway through the film, and ignoring his wife. Not only does this reveal the continuing misogyny of Kenyan society in order to maintain the status quo, it also sees the filmmaker acquiescing with this point of view. The focus is always on Samuel’s POV in a fractured narrative that is structured to blur the lines creating a one-sided perspective.

Always lively and colourful in its cinema verité style I Am Samuel shows how gay men get on with their lives in modern Kenya, despite the dangers, while women continue to be duped and take the line of least resistance just to ensure their men are satisfied. And although we are sympathetic to the male cause, Murimi never really addresses this issue of Samuel’s wife and the remainder of his close family. The film plays out with cheery music and a message addressed to ‘queer Africans’ “May you all live in truth”. MT

BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2020

Shadow Country | Made in Prague Czech Film Festival 2021

Dir.: Bohdan Slama; Cast: Magdalena Borova, Stanislav Majer, Csongor Kassai, Denisa Bresova, Robert Miklus, Petra Spalkova, Marie Ludvikova, Jiri Cerny; Czech Republic 2020, 135′.

In this stark but illuminating drama Bohdan Slama chronicles the longterm social consequences of “ethnic cleansing” in a Czechoslovakian village near the Austrian border from the 1930s until the late 1950s.

German”Sudetenland’, as it was known at the time, consisted of about three million people who lived under German occupation during 1938/9. German became the official language – although Czech remained the lingua franca. Seventy five percent of the Jewish population (around 590,000) was exterminated by the occupying forces and their Czech collaborators, property was confiscated, along with that of the Czech inhabitants. As one villager puts it, in his lifetime, he lived in 3 different countries without moving house

In 1943, the Allies made plans for several million Germans to leave the country, a process that took nearly three years. But as the War came to an end in 1945, over 60,000 were Germans were forcibly evicted by Czechs, some even killed with the silent consent of the government and political parties across the board. .

The famous Singer Sewing machine becomes the symbol for these tortured events from the late 1930s onwards. Given to a couple at the christening of their new-born child, it will change hands often before being discarded the the rubbish in the end. Ivan Arsenyev’s script follows a married couple: Marie Veberova (Borova) is Czech and her German husband, Veber, is a trader. In order not to attract attention to themselves many Czech citizens ‘forget’ their language. Jews are required to leave, their property is ‘shared’ with the remaining, often well-off, Czechs. Resistance is sparse, only Joseph Pachl (Kassai) and a few others try to arm themselves against their enemies. Pachl is soon arrested and sent to a concentration camp. Life in the village changes completely: an previously innocuous woman discovers her love of Fascism, forcing her school kids to sing the Nazi youth hymn “Unsere Fahne flattert uns voran”. Veber and others look after Joseph’s daughter, Zdena Pachlova, but take her property in payment.

Essentially an account of how ordinary people respond to these changing circumstances with all the contingent ideological and racial implications involved this is a deeply affecting film that avoids melodrama or a sentimental approach, drawing comparisons with recent outings on a similar themes such as The Painted Bird and Charlatan.

Several years in the making, the Slama works with a cast of actors and non-pros drawing on real incidents without creating a drama documentary; the film focuses on a collection of characters showing how divisions are rife. Petty thieving becomes the order of the day, everyone stealing from their neighbours. Symbolically, one old woman steals three cups from her recently departed neighbours. When they return after the end of the war, she shamelessly returns them with the comment “I wanted to have something to remember you by”.

The end of the Nazi occupation has dire consequences for those who have collaborated. The woman who led the singing is raped, and Pachl, who has returned more dead than alive from the camps, is put in charge of the community. Later, soldiers make him responsible for a ‘show trial’ against a group of collaborators, amongst them is Veber. The victims are forced to dig their own graves. Pachl is later appalled by what he has done, and is accused of making the trial into a shambolic farce by the authorities.

With his use of 35 mm real film stock, DoP Divis Marek ensures unmitigated bleakness throughout. Early scenes are shot on the widescreen in a bid to create a collective feeling of community – capturing thirty or so people in one panoramic take. But this sense of unity soon breaks down into violence and greed. Needless to say, there are no heroes, just victims of various kinds. The male-centric narrative has no room for sympathy, although a few women rise about the parapet in their attempts to shine light on the darkness and depravity of this devastating episode in history.

Slama’s outlook for humankind is as depressing as his film. History tends to repeat itself, and the Czech director shares his thoughts in a recent interview where he talks about the burgeoning sense of Nationalism sweeping through Europe as populations feel increasingly swamped by the social pressures of mass migration. AS

MADE IN PRAGUE FILM FESTIVAL 2021 | 17 NOVEMBER 2021

Yield to the Night (1956) *** Blu-ray release

Dir: J. Lee Thompson | Cast: Diana Dors, Michael Craig, Yvonne Mitchell, Geoffrey Keen | Drama UK 99′

This sober female-centric prison thriller, echoing the Ruth Ellis case, stars Diana Dors as a hard-nosed convicted criminal waiting for a possible reprieve in her grim prison cell.

In stark contrast, the upbeat opening sees Dors ‘shopgirl’ strutting along in black stilettos, a cool articulate London blonde with love on her mind. Tired of her inattentive husband she has fallen for the darkly dishy musician Jim Lancaster (a sultry Michael Craig). Her romantically troubled past seems over and the future finally looks bright with her Prince Charming, or so it would appear. But Lancaster has feet of clay and and no money, and is unable to break off his existing relationship with well-healed socialite Lucy Carpenter (Mercia Shaw). But when Jim’s relationship with Lucy takes a tragic turn, a heartbroken Mary snaps, her love for him transformed into bitter hatred turns for her rival as she takes matters into her owns hands.

Adapted for the screen by John Cresswell and Joan Henry (from her own novel which preceded the Ellis affair), this anti-capital punishment study of stoicism and unrequited love stands out as a rare female led 1950s drama – both in terms of the story and the fact it was written by a woman. Mary Hilton was a precursor to the “Angry Young Women” ushered in the British New Wave realist features with their aggrieved girls like Jo in A Taste of Honey (1961), Eva Koenig in That Kind of Girl, 1963) and This Sporting Life’s Margaret Hammond, of the same year.

Dors maintains a dignified presence throughout, her radiant charm and vulnerability eventually giving way to dignified impenitance as she takes off her make-up and dons drab prison garb. Despite her incarcerated status she still pulls rank over the female prison officers in a role that received nods to best actress at Cannes and the BAFTAs in the year of its release. Michael Craig makes for an alluring low-level lothario, and Mercia Shaw a petulant and sophisticated woman of means.

Yield to the Night is makes for rather distressing viewing with its death sentence theme overriding the more exciting sequences where Gilbert Taylor’s artful black and white camerawork is given full rein. But Mary’s claustrophobic confinement certainly exerts a sinister thrill during the countdown to the inevitable. MT

FULLY RESTORED ON BLU-RAY, DIGITAL AND DVD ON OCTOBER 12

Blood and Money (2019) *** Digital/DvD

Dir: John Barr | Cast: Tom Berenger | US Drama 90′

This solid vehicle for Tom Berenger makes enjoyable autumnal viewing keeping us glued to the screen despite a generic storyline. Berenger’s laconic style and suave economy of movement have made him a cinema stalwart throughout his long and undervalued career as a talented actor in mainstream titles and B movies such as this first feature for John Barr, who makes a well-worn plot watchable with solid production values and Berenger at the helm.

Essentially a one-hander Blood and Money is also slim on dialogue that somehow suits its peaceful snowy setting in the wilds of a winter-bound Maine. Berenger is Jim Reed a man of few words with a laid back approach to life that seems to stem from his poor state of health and possible terminal illness. Despite regular coughing fits that spray blood onto his parka he doesn’t make any bones about it, and Barr weaves this cleverly into the narrative as a McGuffin. It soon emerges his daughter was killed in a car accident and Reed was at the wheel.

On a last ditch solitary vacation all togged for the icy conditions he cuts a rugged figure trudging through snow near his makeshift cabin in the woods. A custom jeep waits to transport him homeward to a comforting diet of peanut butties and painkillers washed down with milk, and a post prandial cigarette before sleep takes over, his sole mission to shoot a male deer is the only thing waking him up the morning. And he keeps missing his target.

One target he does manage to hit is a lonely figure hurrying away with a bag of money. What happens next is largely immaterial because we’re somehow lost in reverie contemplating the pointlessness of life and the weakness of the human condition when the chips are finally down. A big shoot out adds some spice to the final stretch but there is also a satisfying human twist to this lowkey thriller that takes us mildly by surprise but pleasantly so. MT

BLOOD AND MONEY IS AVIALABLE COURTESY OF SIGNATURE ENTERTAINMENT ON DIGITAL HD from 16 October and DVD 19 October 2020.

Stray (2020) Bfi player

Dir/DoP/Editor: Elizabeth Lo, Doc 78′

In Istanbul every dog has its day. Especially the city’s stray dogs who enjoy an almost charmed existence in this luminous documentary debut from newbie Elizabeth Lo.

The best thing about Stray is that no dogs loses its life, at least not during filming. There are fights and skirmishes but these take place between the beasts themselves, the locals showing a keen almost kindly affinity with their canine city companions. In her finely calibrated camerawork Lo shows how these dignified dogs take centre stage in widescreen panoramas of the ancient capital as well as close-up, and their soulful expressions will melt even the hardest heart, hinting at a life of hardship and uncertainty. Night and day they navigate urban highways and byways foraging for food and forging bonds of friendship with their canine compatriots. Meanwhile, ordinary city dwellers’ lives go on in the background, the petty contretemps and snippets of conversation are greeted with nonchalance by the dogs whose higher concerns for food and survival add a touch of deadpan irony along the way.

Intertitles highlight Turkey’s compassionate attitude towards their street dogs who, for decades, were subject to widespread culls. Today the authorities take a more laissez-faire attitude and it is now illegal to capture or euthanise the strays. Lo keeps her agile camera near to the ground as the dogs scamper through parks and along the banks of the Bosphorus, scavenging for food and water is their main occupation. .

Although usually pack animals, these noble-looking dogs live independent lives of dignity as we see them going about their business – real and figurative – in the early scenes that follow Kartan, Nazar and Zeytin. All three are big enough to look after themselves, but also take a keen interest in each other and the humans they befriend. Contrary to expectations the locals are very kind to their urban fauna and watching them all interact is enjoyable and sometimes amusing, the odd canine tiff adding texture to the otherwise freewheeling proceedings.

Six months in the making, Lo’s thoughtful doc is one of several recent animal-themed outings – Gunda at Berlin in 2020, and IDFA Special Jury awarded Chilean indie Los Reyes (2018) that followed a pair of canny canine caretakers living in Santiago’s largest skatepark. All three challenge us to reconsider preconceived ideas about our lives with man’s best friend. The most heart-rending sequence here involves a little black and white puppy who is picked up as a companion by a young Syria refugee. What seems like a kindly gesture at first soon feels rather sad for the little mite as it looks sadly around for the family pack, eventually unable to keep its eyes open from exhaustion.

In a poetic twist Lo peppers her self-edited piece with apposite quotes from Diogenes and other ancient philosophers. On a comedic note, two copulating dogs interrupt proceedings in a Women’s Day demonstration, clearly these canines would rather make love not war. Lo leaves us with a tenderly haunting final scene that shows that strays may be loners but they are still very much part of the community, atuned to spiritual awareness, just as much as they are to the more banal aspects of everyday life in Turkey’s capital. MT

NOW ON BFI player

About Endlessness (2019) ****

Dir: Roy Andersson | Drama, Sweden 78′

A man and a woman are carried aloft in floating clouds like some Swedish version of Marc Chagall’s couple. This is the opening image in About Endlessness the putative final drama from Swedish auteur Roy Andersson.

The next sequence shows an older couple surveying the painterly panorama of modern Stockholm for a quiet hillside bench above the city. Meditative and calming, like a warm afternoon in Autumn, the scene is also strangely comforting: “it’s September already” the woman says laconically.

Essentially a series of short visual poems – in Andersson’s own words – his idiosyncratic films view the lives of ordinary people through a deadpan lens in these delicately sober vignettes. All constructed as painted tableaux in his Studio 24 in Stockholm they form a painted backcloth for the characters to enact their mournful roles to camera. The locations are sometimes identifiable: a Stockholm street (as in the opening scene); a dental surgery, or even the vestry as the vicar prepares for a service of communion. Later we will see a couple drifting above a ruined townscape: it could be Dresden – the devastation is so widespread – but nothing is clear.

Andersson is possibly best known for his ‘Living Trilogy’ – Songs from the Second Floor (2000), You, the Living (2007) and A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Contemplating Existence (2014). His films are auto-biographical, shaped by his own character traits of vulnerability, insecurity and a general sympathy for the underdog. These characters are bland and pasty-faced, often overweight or gaunt, verging on hysteria or in abject misery but sometimes just inquiring. The immaculate backdrops are claustrophobic and ‘griege’ in colour and design, although some are delicately rendered to recreate cityscapes or empty streets. Swedish history also intervenes as soldiers populate the frame, echoing its military power during the 17th century.

This time Andersson is more sorrowful, more meaningful, his tragi-comedy more poignant, raising only a knowing smile before fading to black. The poems mostly start with a woman’s voiceover saying: “I saw a man having trouble with his car” or “I saw a woman who loved champagne, so much”. Then there is the priest literally driven to tears by his loss of faith. He haunts his church congregation, then he appears at the doctor’s surgery – not once, but twice – before he is asked to leave. It seems even the medical profession has lost its compassion according to Andersson’s sorrowful gaze (clearly this was before Covid19).

Some of these episodes are deeply moving, but most of all they leave us with ample time for quiet reflection on our own lives. Have we lost compassion for our fellow man? Have we lost our way? Andersson’s films are as prescient now as ever they were, even more so as we contemplate life through the pain of man in the dentist chair, or the desperation of the tearful vicar – and we yearn to be those lovers in their romantic heaven. MT

IN CINEMAS AND EXCLUSIVELY ON CURZON HOME CINEMA – 7 NOVEMBER 2020 | BEST DIRECTOR VENICE 2020

A Perfectly Normal Family (2020) ****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One Night in Miami (2020) ***

Dir: Regina King | Cast: Kingsley Ben-Adir, Eli Goree, Aldis Hodge, Leslie Odom Jr. | US Drama, 110′

Four major forces of the black community come together in Regina King’s discursive and smouldering imagined drama that occasionally sparks into life.

King sets just the right tone working from a script by Kemp Powers that immediately transports us back to the era with a coruscating opening sequence that leads into some compelling exchanges with these charismatic characters convincingly captured, especially by Ben-Adir’s masterful turn as Malcolm X. But the film rapidly runs out of steam as the discourse drags on into a rather claustrophobic chamber piece, occasionally glinting with the odd contretemps – a case in point is Malcolm X’s criticism of Sam Cooke’s musical style. King rescues the final stretch ending on an upbeat note to give this worthwhile outing a positive outcome. But what out stands out is four commanding and nuanced performances that will remain a cinematic tribute to the the cultural icons of the day. MT

IN CINEMAS 11 OCTOBER 2020

Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint (2020) ****

Dir.: Halina Dyrschka, Documentary with Iris Müller-Westermann, Julia Voss, Josiah McElheny, Johan af Klint, Ulla af Klint; Germany 2019, 93 min.

The life of abstract artist and mystic Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) – who purportedly created the first abstract work in 1906 – is the subject of this impressive first feature from German director Halina Dyrschka.

Painted out of art history by male supremacists, it shows how the pioneering Swede was creating colourful visionary works – inspired by her interest in Theosophy – five years before Kandinsky, who is supposed the first in this field – the dubious circumstances of which add a controversial twist to this informative arthouse documentary.

They tens mainstay IV (1907)

When Hilma af Klint died at the age of nearly eighty-two, she left 1200 paintings and 26 000 pages of diary to her nephew Erik, with the clear proviso that nothing should be sold from a body of work that would only be exhibited twenty years after death, because she felt the world was not ready for her groundbreaking ideas. She was dead right – the first major exhibition had to wait until 2013, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm having refused to take her paintings as a gift from the Hilma af Klint Foundation during the 1970s.

In 1882, at the age of twenty af Klint was admitted to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, where she set about successfully creating traditional portraits and landscapes earning substantial sums. At the Academy she met Anna Cassel, the first of four women who would join her in the collective The Five (De Fem), the others being Cornelia Cederberg, Sigrid Hedman and Matilda Nilsson. But there was another more spiritual side to her life and she was actively involved in Theosophy, participating in séances, a normal pastime for middle class Avantgarde intellectuals at the turn of the century.

Theosophy was the only spiritual movement which allowed women to be ordained as priests, teaching the oneness of all human beings. Af Klint’s interest in the theories of fellow Theosophist Madame Blavatsky led her to geometrical paintings where: “the pictures were painted directly through me, without any preliminary drawings and with great force. I had no idea what the the paintings were supposed to depict; nevertheless, I worked swiftly and surely, without changing a single brush stroke.”

In 1908 Af Klint met up with her longterm friend Rudolf Steiner, but her abstract work made little impact on the Swiss anthropologist. He would later show her paintings to a fellow Theosophist Kandinsky who claimed his 1910 “Untitled” to be the first ever abstract work ever produced. Nobody will ever know if af Klint’s paintings had influenced Kandinsky.

The Ten Largest: Adulthood No 7 (1907)

Steiner’s rejection of her work led to a four-year-long creative block for af Klint, lasting until 1912. Her confidence had been battered, but her work on the Temple series carried on and was prodigious, counting 193 paintings divided into sub-series. One theme gave rise to massive canvasses in a series entitled, ‘The Ten Largest” (1907) describing the various stages of life (childhood, youth, adulthood, old age etc).

Clearly af Klint’s work is still an influential creative force over a hundred years after her first foray into the art world. Looking at Warhol’s quartet of Monroe paintings, we find an exact duplicate in af Klints’s oeuvre, showing four identical portraits of an elderly woman. The experts and the film’s Talking Heads agree: Art History has to be re-written to find a place for Hilma af Klint, a courageous woman who only unveiled her abstract talent once during her lifetime: at ‘Friends House’ in London, 1928. AS

IN CINEMAS from 9 OCTOBER 2020

Memory House (2020) ** San Sebastian Film Festival 2020

Dir.: João Paulo Miranda Maria | Cast: Antonio Pitanga, Ana Flavia Cavalcanti, Aline Marta Maia, Sam Lowyck, Soren Hellerup; Brazil/France 2020, 87 min.

Miranda Maria’s debut feature is not a welcome calling card with its protracted sequences of gratuitous violence against animals. A more muted version would have certainly benefited the overall evaluation of a film which never quite reaches its potential in exploring the key issues the Brazilian newcomer seeks to address in his first feature, namely social injustice in Brazil.

Essentially a reflexion on modern colonialism Memory House opens with an absurdist scene that takes place in a European style 1950s office, involving the central character, a black indigenous worker Cristovam (Antonio Pitanga, once the star of the ‘Cinema Nuevo’ in the 1960s). He is listening to a tirade from his boss Kainz, speaking in German, his female assistant translating. The message is clear: Cristovam has to take a pay-cut to save his pension plan.

Things get even more bizarre when his fellow workers are forced to wear T-shirts bearing a separatist message and to sign a petition demanding independence for the South. A speaker spews out a message: “we came from Europe to bring innovation, a new perspective to the new country, but we can no longer continue to be the region which pays the most tax and receives the least in return, taking orders from the lazy folks in the North”. Cristovam, having been a “member of the Kainz family for over twenty years”, is one of many workers who re-located with the company from up North.

Cristovam’s reaction to this bad news is passive resistance: he steals a pair of security gloves which he later throws away on his way home from the factory in a village dominated by white, German speakers. The kids taunt him, not surprisingly, given his habit for carrying a bull-horn which he blows everywhere, even in the pub. There he has a desultory relationship with a much younger woman (Cavalcanti), highlighting his loneliness. But everything changes when he stumbles over an abandoned house which allows him to escape the alienation of the village. Here he makes into a new home for himself, gradually adding new things and developing a parallel, hallucinatory universe together with ferocious wild cats, jaguars, bulls with blazing eyes and objects that come alive.

Christovam takes up the life of a vengeful cowboy, driving the two worlds he inhabits into violent confrontation: The old way of living in harmony with nature collides with the exploitative colonial style capitalism, which has no place for him here.

The director’s intentions are clear but his didactic and schematic approach often undercuts the aesthetics of the feature. The inevitable climax is somehow telegraphed, losing some of its impact. But the main point of critique is the unbearable violence against animals, who Miranda Maria singles out for suffering much more than Christovam, who seems more of a Christian martyr than anything else. There is much to admire with the use of mysticism, but the director has to find a different ways to express himself if his work is to be acceptable to international audiences. AS

San Sebastian FILM FESTIVAL 2020

Beginning (2020) MUBI

Dir: Dea Kulumbegashvili | Cast: Ia Sukhitashvili, Rati Oneli, Kakha Kintsurashvili, Saba Gogichaishvili | Drama, Georgia/France 125′

Dea Kulumbegashvili won the top prize at San Sebastian 2020 for her serenely self-assured yet sorrowful portrait of dispossession that ripples out into wider concerns for her native Georgia and the world in general.

Seen through the eyes of a disenchanted woman living in provincial Georgia this debut feature is a sensual and stunningly cinematic exploration of all that is wrong with society from religious intolerance to misogyny and the erosion of rural life pictured in the film’s devastating scorched earth finale.

On the crossroads between Europe and Asia, Georgia is an independent country and of the most ancient Christian nations dating back to the 4th century. The film opens in a small town in the Caucasus Mountains bordering on Azerbaijan where, as the wife of a Jehovah’s Witness leader, Jana (Sukhitashvili) must play a rather subservient role to her husband David (Oneli). This film opens during a chapel service which is firebombed by an explosion, causing the frightened congregation to flee into nearby countryside. The incandescent blaze glows on silently for a while afterwards igniting Yaha’s own inner turmoil that will smoulder through this slow-burn Tarkovskian drama, delicately touching on its thematic concerns in a way that nevertheless speaks volumes for the audience.

Light plays a vital role in Beginning. Playing out as a series of vivid tableaux vivants, the jewel-like frames are often glow with a viridescent pool of light, Arseni Khachaturan’s fixed camera scrutinises the main character in each frame who is often bathed in a shaft of light, or closely observed while the speaking character is out of sight. One sublime take sees Yana lying in a bed of autumn leaves, the ambient bird song slowly dying out as she is transformed into a bliss-like state. Captivating for some viewers (it lasts for around 7 minutes), it may however test other’s powers of endurance. What Dea achieves here is a meditative intimacy with her character. And as we are drawn more closely into Yana’s orbit, we feel a deep affinity with her state of mind; the affect is quite astonishing and deeply calming.

Yana emerges tolerant and forbearing, inspiring our sympathy despite her inner discontent; she is never angry or histrionic even when the children she is preparing for their first religious communion collapse in a fit of giggles. She exudes an almost saint-like endurance except when talking to her self-absorbed husband who professes his deep neediness of her despite his inattentiveness. Shutting down her feelings of futility, he responds patronisingly during a conversation early on in the film: “Let’s find you a job”. Yet as she toils away in the kitchen, Sukhitashvili’s Yana is a luminously compelling heroine, resembling a latter day Jeanne Dielman, a woman who carries on calmly amidst gruelling domestic trivia, a loving mother bewildered by the lurid sexual abuse meted out on her by a visiting police detective come to investigate the chapel fire.

There is one scene where David and Yana appear to be on the same page in their tender pillow talk although David’s chief concern is rebuilding the chapel so his career path is not derailed despite his wife’s calmly-voiced inertia, her own work as an actor having been on the back-burner since their son’s birth.

The film’s painterly views of nature evoke Dea’s appreciation of her homeland and concerns for a rural existence threatened by the future. In a scene towards the end of the film a uniformed hunter looks menacingly into the camera possibly hinting at Georgia’s ongoing tricky relationship with Russia. One more puzzling scene contrasts a violent rape attack (Yana and the detective?) with the wild beauty of its rocky riverside setting where two figures tussle violently at the extreme right of the frame where they are almost indistinguishable from the flow-strewn purple and white undergrowth.

A visit to her mother reinforces Yana’s feelings of subjugation and disempowerment as a woman. Recalling her own difficult marriage, her mother warns Yana not to mention the incident for fear of rocking the boat. Yana is clearly alone in the world with two males who depend on her but never consider her own emotional well-being.

Finally, on a drive home one night David discusses their future in small-town Georgia. A move to Tbilisi is on the cards but David sees it from his own perspective as the camera looks out onto a dark and rainy road ahead. Yana remains locked in silence, a receptacle for everyone’s needs but her own. MT

NOW ON MUBI | San Sebastian | WINNER OF THE GOLDEN SHELL AWARD 2020

Rialto (2019) ***

Dir| Peter Mackie Burns | Drama, Ireland, 90′

A father is forced to admit his true feelings in this thoughtfully filmed and acted drama from Peter Mackie Burns.

Based on Mark O’Halloran’s award-winning play ‘Trade” (penned before Ireland passed the marriage equality amendment in 2015) this Dublin-set story is full of loss and longing exploring a gay awakening – there, I’ve given the main plot away – but that is the crux of the narrative. Career port official, Colm, 46, is a pretty average bloke with a wife Claire (Dolan) and kids Kerry (Sophie Jo Wasson) and Shane (Scott Graham) when three unexpected events take over his humdrum existence.

First he loses his domineering father, then his job. Finally – in the gents loo at his workplace – he meets teenage rent boy Jay who will change his life forever. Tom Vaughan-Lawlor gives a quietly moving performance as Colm, a man whose life is blown apart by these surprising and devastating circumstances – although the film never resorts to melodrama, completely the opposite, in fact. And that is its strength. The film’s weakness is its cinematic drabness, most of the action takes place in glum domestic interiors, despite an impressive widescreen opening shot (by DoP Adam Scarth) that sees Colm looking down from a container crane. The rest is downhill visually.

The theme of fathers and sons provides context to this rather mournful drama. To add to the complexity of the sexual developments, Jay has just had a baby with his 19-year-old girlfriend and is also on the breadline, so when he discovers Colm’s wallet in the lavatory cubicle, he heads straight over to his office and asks for money in exchange for keeping quiet. The pair are then hooked into a relationship of dependency – Colm needing sex, Jay money – and as Colm sinks into further into depression his life spirals out of control worsened by his loss of earning power, and a dependent family. Jay meanwhile struggles to adapt to new fatherhood.

Rialto is a decent and nuanced study of ordinary working class men suddenly unable to cope with their emotional lives, it’s also quite a depressing film to watch and one that is instantly forgettable once the titles have rolled. MT

IN CINEMAS FROM FRIDAY 2 OCTOBER 2020

This Gun for Hire (1942) ***** Blu-ray

Dir.: Frank Tuttle; Cast: Veronica Lane, Alan Ladd, Robert Preston, Laird Crogar, Tully Marshall, Mark Lawrence; USA 1942, 81 min.

Frank Tuttle gives the full film noir treatment to Graham Greene’s themes of guilt and redemption in this highly influential thriller with iconic performances from Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd.

Adapting Greene’s 1936 novel of the same name, the action is transported to wartime US where hit man Philip Raven has killed a blackmailing chemist and his girlfriend on the orders of shady operator Willard Gates (Crogar), who is after his research paper on poison gas. Gates works for Alvin Brewster (Marshall), the wheelchair bound Nitro Chemical boss, who wants to sell US secrets to the Japanese. Cat-lover Raven is quietly ruthless swearing revenge when he discovers his pay-0ff is counterfeit.

Nightclub-owner Gates has meanwhile hired magician and singer Ellen Graham (Lane), who, unbeknown to him, is working for a Senate committee on the trail of Brewster. Ellen is also engaged to police Lieutenant Michael Crane (Preston), who is hunting Raven. On a train journey, Raven and Ellen meet by accident, and he is smitten. Gates, who is also on the train, believes Ellen is Raven’s girl and plans to abduct and kill her. But Raven will save her life, finding her chained in a wardrobe in Gates’ mansion where Gates’ servant Tommy (Lawrence) is about to dump her in a river. Ellen and Raven are on the run, trying to nail Gates and Brewster. Meanwhile Crane is hunting the two, unsure if Ellen is still on his side.

DoP John F. Seitz (Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, The lost Weekend) conjures up smouldering noir settings, among them an underground chase (with shades of The Third Man) in a gas works where Ellen and Raven are fleeing from the cops.

One of the most revered and successful film noir hits of the 1940s This Gun for Hire would see Lake and Ladd team up again although this remains their standout feature as a duo. Raven is a frightening yet oddly sympathetic hit man, Ladd bringing out his humanity in a breakout debut turn that transformed him into a star. As The New York Times said of Ladd upon the film’s 1942 release, “He is really an actor to watch. After this stinging performance, he has something to live up to – or live down.”

Working with writers Albert Maltz and WR Burnett, Tuttle also underlines Raven’s ambiguity as a broken individual suffering from an abusive childhood. This wariness of people has kept him an outsider, and the narrative revolves round his strengthening relationship with Ellen whose life as a female nightclub-chanteuse also put her in a vulnerable position in the society of the day. And whilst the censors would have insisted on a happy-end for Ellen and Crane, there are moments when Ellen is hard pushed to choose sides. Stunningly cinematic, This Gun for Hire is also a clever character study of forbidden love. AS

ON BLU-RAY | EUREKA CLASSICS RANGE | 14 SEPTEMBER 2020

Private Information (1952) *** Talking Pictures

Dir: Fergus McDonell. Sr: Gordon Glennon, John Baines (from the former’s play). Cast: Jill Esmond, Jack Watling, Carol Marsh, Gerard Heinz, Mercy Haystead, Norman Shelley, Lloyd Pearson, Henry Caine, Brenda de Banzie. Drama, 65′.

Another topical little gem hiding in plain sight on Talking Pictures is this British drama cheaply shot at Nettlefold Studios directed by veteran editor Fergus McDonell (the last of three) on behalf of ACT Films.

As relevant today as it was nearly seventy years ago (except that most council houses were long ago sold off). In barely an hour it updates and transposes the plot of ‘An Enemy of the People’ to the fictitious small English town of Hamington in postwar Britain.

Female characters and their concerns take centre stage, principally those of Lawrence Olivier’s first wife Jill Esmond as a middle-aged council house tenant against whom a venal male establishment automatically close ranks and use their financial clout to attempt to muzzle her when she learns of the health risks posed by defective drains; which sure enough leads to an outbreak of typhus. Richard Chatten

SCREENING ON TALKING PICTURES TV

David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet (2020) *****

Dirs: Alastair Fothergill, Jonnie Hughes, Keith Scholey | UK Doc 83′

Eco-documentaries too often rely on just their worthwhile subject matter to carry them through. A Life on Our Planet is not only thematically important but also impressively crafted and entertaining with a positively uplifting final kick.

It all begins and ends in Chernobyl showing how the Ukrainian social utopia became a nuclear bomb site, and is now teeming with wildlife and lush vegetation – humans are nowhere to be seen. Then dear old David emerges from a ruined building with a stark warning: Nature will eventually take over the planet, do we humans want to be there or not?

Candid, relevant and revealing, David Attenborough: A Life On Our Planet is a powerful first-hand account of humanity’s impact on nature since the last time a comet destroyed all lifeforms, before the Holocene ushered in the wonderful world we all know. And this will happen again, for many of us within our lifetimes. But there is a way forward. And it’s not just about plastic bags.

Now nearly 94, Attenborough reflects back on his extraordinary life as an naturalist exploring the remote and wild corners of the globe and documenting his experiences for all of us to see and enjoy. And he does reflect on the devastating changes that are still unfolding in subtle and troubling ways. But it’s not all doom and gloom.

Neither is A Life on our Planet a worthy or ‘ticking off’ rant but a fascinating testament to the magnificence surrounding. There is a tangible and sustainable way forward to continue living in harmony with nature and making the most of life in our amazing world. MT

DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: A LIFE ON OUR PLANET WILL PREMIERE IN CINEMAS ACROSS THE GLOBE ON 28TH SEPTEMBER FEATURING AN EXCLUSIVE CONVERSATION WITH SIR DAVID ATTENBOROUGH AND SIR MICHAEL PALIN. IT WILL BE RELEASED ON NETFLIX GLOBALLY THIS AUTUMN. attenboroughfilm.com

Capital in the 21st Century (2020) ****

Dir.: Justin Pemberton; Co-Dir.: Thomas Piketty; Doc with Rana Foroohar, Professor Joseph Stiglitz, Thomas Piketty, Ian Bremmer, Francis Fukuyama; France/New Zealand 2019, 102′

Justin Pemberton makes economics anything but dry in his thrilling – and frightening – screen adjunct to Thomas Piketty’s ground-breaking book. Brisk and entertaining like a filmic history lesson, some 400 years are condensed into a palatable mouthful that lacks somehow the depth of the page.

The New-Zealander has raided the archives enlivening Capital in the 21st Century with TV clips as well as graphics and archive footage of newsreels, financial ‘experts’ adding their pennyworth in a bid to clarify the mess we are in. According to Piketty – who also appears as a talking head – nothing has changed since the 17th century when feudalism ruled and the medium life expectancy was seventeen. So what does that tell you?

Feudalism saw one per cent of the population own seventy percent of land. Back then the only way of earning a living (apart from servitude) was itinerant farm work. In films terms, the world was like just like Elysium (2013), where a charmed few lived in splendour and the rest in grinding poverty. The French Revolution tried to break the mould but the real change came with the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century when machines took over the manual work but the power structure was the same: workers being in hock to their employers (who took all the risks), strikers ending up in jail.

Many Europeans emigrating to North America for a new start soon discovered that hard land-based work was still the order of the day, the small family unit unable to compete with land-owners, who bought in slaves and exploited them on the cotton fields of the Deep South. Meanwhile Europeans were out colonising and exploiting the natural resources of the newfound territories, finding unchallenged markets for their products and building fortunes and empires into the bargain. ,

European workers’ resentment increased between 1870 and 1914, while an emerging Middle Class got used to a new term: fashion. In the US meanwhile, the class struggle was much more vicious, employers hiring their own militia, backed by a Federal Army who quelled many strikes. The outbreak of World War I channelled class envy into a national identity, the aftermath saw the suffragettes making inroads into male dominance with their fight for the right to vote.

Pemberton then leads us through the more erratic midsection of the documentary which deals with the 20th domination by banking power, nationalism, Depression, war, the welfare system and workers rights. Working class lives improved immeasurably during the late 1950s when prime minister Harold Macmillan proclaimed: “You’ve never had it so good”. He was probably right. The establishment of a Welfare State led to a vigorous middle class which would become the backbone of society, but that backbone has since been severely tested by an erosion of values that has polarised society, particularly now as the gulf widens again between rich and poor. Since the 1970s Oil Crisis, middle class income has sharply declined in the US, where ‘stagflation’ soon became the order of the day.

In the 1980s, President Reagan dismantled the welfare state, and Wall Street and Main Street diverged: what was good for the City and the big corporations (with Joseph Stiglitz’s ideas of trickle down economics) was not seen as a benefit to Main Street with its mainly family-owned small businesses. The US was suffering from competition from Japan and Europe, and Reagan’s battle cry “to make America great again” created a war against trade unions, and native workers disgruntled by a growing number of immigrant labourers. With the slogans like “Greed is good” dominating, more deregulation was supposed to facilitate a “trickle down” of wealth, which never happened. The result is that the bottom 90% of the population has suffered a loss in family income, and the real wages (purchasing power) are on a level last experienced in 1960.

The credit boom, another contributing factor of the 2008 crash, camouflaged a dire situation: since 1970 wages have increased for 90% of the population by 800%, but for the top ten percent the increase in capital was 2000%. This has led to the Super Rich not re-investing their capital in production, but in keeping their wealth in an endless loop, where the same people buy and sell capital commodities, bringing a 4.5% average return. This compared with 1.6% return on investments in industry or other productive enterprises.

When all is said and done, the super rich will always be able to employ the best legal advice to fight their way out of taxation. In 2015, Google Alphabet had made a profit of 15.5. billion USD – offshore in Bermuda. shell companies and numbered accounts for the Elite keep them free from punitive taxes.

Meanwhile, new technologies create new jobs. More than ever ,individuals are setting up companies and gaining financial freedom and clout. But when robots replace humans, humans will slide down the pecking order. Vehicle drivers now make up the second largest group of people in employment. With the advent of the driverless car, what will eventually happen to them?

So the outlook is grim. But it always was. The rich will always be rich, and the poor will always be poor, but the disadvantaged have more opportunities that ever before. Pemberton includes a psychology experiment that exposes a sinister side to human nature suggestive of a positive mind set that also comes into play.

The consequences can only be controlled politically. But who will be controlling capitalism? Certainly not the middle classes, if their erosion continues. The film tries to end on a positive note: “Creating a more equal society is possible from a technical standpoint”. But in reality we all know this is unlikely to happen due to the inherent flaws of human nature. AS

NOW ON RELEASE IN CINEMAS | 25 SEPTEMBER 2020

Eternal Beauty (2019) **

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courtroom 3H (2020) **** San Sebastian Film Festival 2020

Dir.: Antonio Méndez Esparza; Documentary; Spain 2020, 115 min.

Madrid born writer/director Antonio Méndes Esparza has been living in Tallahassee (Florida) for eight years, combining teaching film at university with directing.

His first two features were fiction, Here and Now won the Cannes Critics Award in 2012. The titular court is the Tallahassee United Family Court, where families must appear when charged with negligence or even abuse against their minors. Although most court hearings in the US are open to the public, juvenile court hearings are usually held in camera – but the judge gave special permission to the filmmaker and his crew (mainly students) to be the flies on the wall for this astounding piece of filmmaking.

Shot in 30 days and consisting of Hearings and two trials, the emotional assault is huge. After all, parents are threatened with losing their children, jeopardising their most visceral human bond. While the children’s faces are blurred, the close-ups of the adults are often too painful to watch. Whatever might have happened before, mothers and fathers become fierce tigers when the chips are down, fighting to keep their young ones onside.

Speaking of the victims, the little ones are often desperate to be re-united with their abusers. The compassionate judge does his best to keep the families together, if at all possible. But there are exceptions if the child’s safety is threatened; the tears and sobbing of those parents who had hoped for a different outcome will stay with viewers for a long time. All this to the background of incessant noises: transcription keyboards and mobile phones tapping away.

A James Baldwin quote reminds us: “If one really wants to know how justice is administered in a country, one goes to the unprotected and listens to their testimony.” The director himself was at a critical point of his own life, which was also falling apart. “I was going through a divorce and a custody battle. Part of my survival was to make this movie and reflect on my own relationship with my children and responsibilities. You start to understand your faults and poor judgement – in the defendants I saw myself.” Even though filming meant catharsis, Esparza was still “afraid of documentaries, because I thought docs could hurt people to a certain extent. You deal with real people who can be offended by a movie.”

DoPs Barbu Balasooiu and Santiago Oviedo create a intense personal atmosphere with their close-ups, never falling into the trap of the Hollywood court drama. Far from being a set piece of dramatic arcs, this is cinema verite, challenging the perceptions of its director and the audience. What could be a higher form of storytelling? AS

SAN SEBASTIAN FILM FESTIVAL | 18-26 SEPTEMBER 2020

John Llewellyn Moxey | Obituary

Richard Chatten looks back over the life of prolific British TV film director John Llewellyn Moxey (1925-2019) best known for a string of hits such as The Saint; The Avengers; Hawaii Five-o and Mission Impossible

There were two John Moxeys. First came plain John Moxey who worked in British TV before making a few black & white thrillers for the cinema during the early sixties. Then came John Llewellyn Moxey, one of American colour TV’s busiest directors of the seventies.

Anyone unclear as to the difference between cinema and TV, and which is a director’s and which a writer’s medium, need only compare the most celebrated work of the two different Moxeys. The City of the Dead (1960) is an extraordinary-looking memento of the lost splendours of black and white cinematography; made for a poverty row outfit called Vulcan and obviously shot on a shoestring, The City of the Dead is equally obviously a film which – in the words of David Pirie – “remains the English horror film coming nearest to reproducing Val Lewton’s RKO work in the 1940s”. John Lewellyn Moxey’s The Night Stalker (1971), on the other hand, despite its clever script by Richard Matheson and beguiling leading performance by Darren McGavin (who reprised his part in a short-lived TV series), never looks like anything other than the glossy Aaron Spelling TV production that it is.

Christopher Lee in City of the Dead (1960)

An even greater triumph for the former Moxey, and probably his masterpiece, was Face of a Stranger (1964), a bleak little tale of greed, passion, deception and murder with a towering lead performance by Jeremy Kemp, co-starring a young Rosemary Leach, and made with a kinetic force that is pure cinema.

Moxey was born in Argentina where his family owned a plant. Back in Britain, he was taken at the age of ten by his parents to a film studio and resolved he would one day return to earn his living. World War II however intervened and he spent most of 1945 in psychiatric hospitals in Belgium and Britain after being wounded and suffering battle fatigue. Finally demobilised in January 1946, he was soon back at the studio visited as a boy, where he worked on a couple of dramatised documentaries for the RAF, became an assistant director and played small acting roles before a slump in the film industry led him to try TV.

By 1950 he had become a “vacation director” at the BBC who filled in while the regular directors were on holiday. There in 1955 he was offered a contract with the newly established commercial channel ITV as a full director. Producer John Taylor, who remembered him from their time together on official shorts, later gave him his first feature film assignment with Foxhole in Cairo (1960), a WWII yarn featuring Albert Lieven as Rommel, after which the two tried their hand at another genre piece with The City of the Dead.

Despite the presence of Christopher Lee in the cast, Moxey consciously set out to make the exact opposite of a Hammer Horror with this incredibly stylised production made for just £45,000 and set in a perpetually fog-shrouded Lovecraftian New England village constructed in its entirety on one enormous sound stage at Shepperton and shot in gothic black & white by veteran cameraman Desmond Dickinson. Although shot before Hitchcock’s Psycho, Moxey’s film anticipated so many elements in Hitchcock’s film – including unexpectedly dispatching its heroine (Venetia Stevenson) in a fashion almost a graphic as the death of Janet Leigh in Psycho – that it was actually accused of copying Hitchcock when finally released in America under the catchpenny title Horror Hotel in 1962.

Darren McGavin in The Night Stalker (1971-2)

Moxey was by then under contract to Anglo-Amalgamated, for whom he made six of the second features drawn from stories by Edgar Wallace. One of them, Ricochet (1963), comes gloriously to life upon the intrusion of the late Dudley Foster as a slimy blackmailer. Better still was Face of a Stranger, perhaps the best of all Merton Park’s Wallace adaptations, in which Moxey managed on a tiny budget and at breakneck speed to turn in a minor classic. The fact that financially the film was barely even a ‘B’ had the additional advantage of making it possible to conclude on an uncompromising note of lurid tragedy that would have been beyond the reach of a more mainstream production.

Klaus Kinski in Circus of Fear (1966)

His prolific TV output meanwhile included episodes of Z Cars, The Saint, The Avengers and The Champions. After his last and least feature film (also his first in colour), Circus of Fear (1967), Moxey was invited by New York producer David Susskind to direct a TV version of Dial M for Murder shot in London, and in America TV versions of A Hatful of Rain, a disastrous version of Laura and three episodes of the series N.Y.P.D. before coming back to Britain. His return proved fleeting, however, since a personal tragedy encouraged him to leave Britain again for what this time proved to be for good when early in 1968 he took a liking to California and decided to stay.

On the advice of a numerologist Moxey now added ‘Llewellyn’ to his professional name. It evidently worked, for he remained continuously in work for the next twenty years, his output including episodes of Run for Your Life, Mannix, Mission: Impossible, The Name of the Game, Magnum, P.I., and Murder, She Wrote, plus over forty TV movies (ending with Lady Mobster in 1988) and the pilot episode in 1976 of Charlie’s Angels.

John Llewellyn Moxey, film & TV director: born Hurlingham, Buenos Aires, 25 February 1925; married 1970 Jane Moxey, two sons

7 Films to look forward to this Autumn | LFF 2020

This Autumn’s scaled down Covid special has some treasures to look forward in a real/online melange that plays out across the UK from October 7-18.

Undine, Ammonite and Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland, starring Frances McDormand, are films to look out for in this slimmed down version which opens with Steve McQueen’s latest Mangrove.

In this strange and subdued year for the cinema world, the virtual premieres will play at a set time and have the bonus of an introduction or Q&A with the talent or programmers. But it won’t be quite the same as the usual jamboree which fills the streets of Soho with a jubilant crowd of cineastes.

UNDINE (2020) Berlinale premiere

Christian Petzold’s fantasy love story reworks the myth of Undine, the water nymph, wrapped up in a contemporary story that reflects on the history of Berlin. Petzold’s latest muse Paula Beer is united with her star-crossed beau from Transit Frank Rogowski in this tone-shifting tale interlacing romance with suspense.

GENUS PAN (Lahi, Hayop) 2020 Venice premiere

Philippine filmmaker Lav Diaz is know for his valuable contribution to the slow cinema movement and this latest drama (a mere 150 minutes) is another colourful human story involving murder and mayhem – set on the island of Hugaw during the Japanese occupation.

THE DISCIPLE (2020) Venice premiere

Arguably the definitive film about Indian Hindustani classical music The Disciple explores creative endeavour and perseverance in our climate of quick fix celebrity and overnight success, through the life of an earnest young musician in modern Mumbai. Chiatanya Tamhane imbues his story with the same intensity and sense of detail as his 2014 debut Court, but ironically the film works best in the freewheeling scenes picturing ordinary life.

NOMADLAND (2020) Venice premiere

Chloe Zhao’s indie breakout hit The Rider (2017) followed a modern day cowboy in his search for a new identity in America’s midwest. Nomadland does this again from a female perspective and the phenomenal, flinty performance of Frances McDormand as the sixty-something Fern who embarks on a cinematically reflective journey this time in a white camper van.

NEVER GONNA SNOW AGAIN (2020) Venice premiere

Malgozarta Szumowska’s latest is a flawed but fabulously entertaining Polish-set social satire with a score that makes it all worthwhile. Alec Utgoff is hypnotic and quietly muscular in the leading role as an enigmatic guru-like dark horse drawing us in to a story that is both intriguing and unsatisfying.

NOTTURNO (2020) Venice premiere

Award-winning documentarian Gianfranco Rosi (Fire at Sea) turns his compassionate camera on ordinary lives in the wartorn Middle East. Banal and tragic, the film’s intensity lies in the raw intimacy of these everyday moments. Luminous camerawork gives the piece a poetic quality.

AMMONITE (2020) Toronto premiere

Francis Lee set gay hearts a flutter with his earthy tale of Yorkshire farming folk, God’s Own Country. Cut from the same cloth, this sumptuous-looking 1840s costume drama soon gets down and dirty in telling the lesbian story of paleontologist Mary Anning (Kate Winslet) and her close companion Charlotte Murchison (Saoirse Ronan).

And one to avoid…

SIBERIA (2020) Berlinale premiere

A raddled old swinger looks back on his life and concludes nothing from his self-indulgent navel gazing in this turkey from veteran talent Abel Ferrara. Not so much a feature, more a series of random widescreen sequences, Siberia is a drama without any meaningful dramatic arc, let alone any heft in addressing a cliched and well-worn theme.

BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2020 | 7 – 18 OCTOBER

80,000 Suspects (1963)

Dir: Val Guest | Drama, US 113′

Another pandemic-themed gem on Talking Pictures is this prescient drama depicting the quarantining of Bath during a smallpox epidemic (based on Elleston Trevor’s 1957 novel ‘The Pillars of Midnight’). 80,000 Suspects follows close on the heels of the same director’s The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), which had anticipated global warming. To add further topicality to our current crisis there had been a real smallpox outbreak in Bradford the year before the film was shot.

Veteran cameraman Arthur Grant, who had vividly rendered Manchester in the late summer heat for director Val Guest in the tough 1960 thriller Hell is a City, does the same for a Bath again crisply shot on the widescreen in black and white and transformed into an icy wilderness by the great freeze of 1963 (which had served as a dramatic backdrop for several other notable British films then in production, including The Caretaker and The Servant). Both films were shot on the widescreen in black and white.

Despite having been a writer for Will Hay, Guest’s thrillers were always better than his comedies. Fat boy Graham Moffat (who had retired from acting to run a pub in Bath) pops up briefly as a local man passing out in the queue to be vaccinated, while a pivotal supporting role is played by Guest’s wife Yolande Donlan and ‘Daily Express’ editor Arthur Christiansen reappears from The Day the Earth Caught Fire, again playing a newspaper editor. Richard Chatten.

NOW ON TALKING PICTURES | UK TV

Mademoiselle (1966) **** blu-ray release

Dir.: Tony Richardson; Cast: Jeanne Moreau, Ettore Manni, Keith Skinner, Umberto Orsini, Paul Burge; France/UK 1966, 105′

Based on a story by Jean Genet and adapted for the screen by Marguerite Duras, Tony Richardson’s sinister arthouse drama Mademoiselle did not fare well with the critics (or the public) when it was released after its Cannes premiere.

Perhaps audiences expected something different from an MGM release: in those days there was a chasm between mainstream and independent cinema. It could have been down to the fact that neither viewers nor critics were aware of Richardson’s sublime subversiveness, even though it was not the first time his idiosyncratic style had been aired on the silver screen.

Jeanne Moreau is the Mademoiselle in question, a school teacher and an inverted version of Colin Smith from The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner played by Tom Courtenay, a few years earlier. Here Moreau’s teacher rebels in a series of spiteful acts on her village community, each time covering them up with over-adjustment.

The attractive, middle-aged Parisian arrives in the country town of Corrèze (the film was shot in Le Rat, with cast and crew living locally for the duration) looking for a new start in life, and hoping to up the ante with her sophisticated urban ways. Put simply, she wants to be a big fish in a small pond. Posing as a respectable buttoned-down teacher during the day, the nighttime transforms her into a pyromaniac, setting fire to houses and barns, she poisons farm animals and even creates a flood of biblical proportions during an annual get together.

But the blame falls squarely on the resident Italian lumberjack, Manou (Manni) whose lady-killing potential have made him unpopular with the village men. Fellow Italian Antonio (Orsini) asks Manou to move on, but suggests his son slightly backward son Bruno (Skinner) should stay on at school where his studies are progressing rather well with Mademoiselle. But Bruno is no fool when it comes to male intuition, and he smells a rat when it comes to his teacher. Picking up on these bad vibes she lashes back calling him a ‘gypsy’ and demonising him in the classroom.

Meanwhile, a subtle chemistry simmers between Mademoiselle and Manou; and this fatal attraction drives the story forward, her covert lust fuelling the incendiary acts of rebellion. Sadly the farm animals come off worst, many of them losing their lives in the process. Eventually the two come together for a rather wild night of passion in the pastoral splendour. Arriving home the worse for wear, Mademoiselle is asked by a concerned neighbour “was it him?”. Her tacit agreement thereby signing Manou’s death warrant that sees him lynched by the angry male mob. Mademoiselle leaves for good shortly afterwards, Bruno spitting at her from a distance, having found evidence to confirm his suspicions – although lacking the confidence of his convictions.

Look Back in Anger DoP David Watkin once again joins Richardson’s Woodfall crew, his delicately rendered black and white images creating a bewitched and magical wonderland in the English countryside evoking folkloric associations with Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Wicker Man. Mademoiselle is an exercise in Freudian dualism. Ironically Richardson and Moreau began an affair during film, fired up by the heady atmosphere in the summer heat. Over fifty years later, the film still feels fresh and real with its central theme of xenophobia and mistrust.

NOW ON BFI BLU-RAY/DVD from 21 SEPTEMBER 2020

The Ground Beneath my Feet (2019) Pride Month

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Truffle Hunters (2020)

Dir. Michael Dweck/Gregory Kershaw | Doc, Italy/Greece/USA, 84′

When it comes to the ancient art of truffle hunting dogs are worth their weight in gold according to a new documentary that shows how man’s best friend is also his canny breadwinner.

Truffles are prized delicacies throughout the world of gastronomy. These ugly-looking tubers are part of the mushroom family but grow underground, and only dogs have the delicate skills to root them out. A single truffle can sell for thousands of euros. Grated over an omelette or in a pasta dish they transform the most meagre meal into an aromatic banquet for the senses and a luxurious treat. Recovering this culinary treasure is a dying art that takes place each autumn in the remote wooded areas of Northern Italy’s Piedmont region.

The Truffle Hunters plays out as devotional tribute to these knobbly delicacies elevating the earthy foodstuff into a food for the Gods with sumptuous camerawork and appreciation for those who painstakingly dedicate their lives to tracking it down and cherishing its storied gastronomic potential. The film unfolds in a series of sumptuous tableaux vivants each each one glowing with wonder and delight in vibrantly vignetting the various stages of the hunt that starts with the dog and his handler, and ends in the serious business of relishing the wafer thin slivers that transform any simple dish into a fragrant delicacy.

Rather like their aged counterparts in Il Solengo the truffle hunters or tartufoli are the stars of the film, along with their treasured dogs: Birba, Bibi, Charlie and Titina, who often receive a blessing in the local church. Theirs is an ancient and revered metier – instinct, dedication and experience are the tools of the trade and Carlo, Aurelio, Egidio and Gianfranco guard their arcane methods fiercely, newcomers fearing the masters will take their atavistic secrets to the grave.

The thrill of the chase is captured in the jerky POV of the dogs as they descend into the bosky wilderness wearing webcams round their necks. For some bizarre reason some locals have taken to planting poison in the bushes so each day could in end in these dedicated dogs’ demise. This element of danger brings a tragic twist a story that celebrates the lifelong bond between the hunter and his canine colleague, the heart and soul of this foodie film that shows how dogs can also bring home the bacon – or truffle in this case. MT

IN CINEMAS 9 JULY 2021

Bird Island (2019) ***

Dirs: Maya Kosa, Sergio Costa | Doc, 60′

The healing power of nature offers therapy for a young man recovering from cancer in this quietly fascinating second feature by Maya Kosa and Sergio Costa.

Antonin (played by an actor) has retreated to Bird Island’s Ornithological Rehabilitation Centre in Genthod in Geneva where he gradually recuperates by helping injured birds to get back on their own feet before being released into the wild. The docudrama shows how rats bred to feed the birds of prey ironically become predators themselves when several escape into the aviary injuring their feathered friends who are then put down.

A series of slow static camera shots taken from a distance and in intimate close-up combine with a subtle palette of earthy greens and blues and an ambient soundscape make this restful and calming film despite its leisurely pacing. This is also the affect it has on Antonin himself who drifts into a comatose state while watching Paul go about his business which involves killing a rat. At one point Antonin actually falls asleep on one of the work counters, in another he literally falls like a felled tree when walking across a field.

Some scenes may upset those uncomfortable with dissection and animal euthanasia (we watch a bird slowly succumbing to chemical death) and this lends a unsettling touch to this increasingly surreal documentary that drifts into the realms of soulful philosophy in considering our own fragility as humans beings in the context of these delicate yet highly evolved and intelligent creatures. MT

NOW ON VOD | Premier FID MARSEILLE 2020

Simple Passion (2020) San Sebastián

Dir/Wri Danielle Arbid | Drama, France 100′

Lebanese director Danielle Arbid has made some impressive films but this flawed affair is vapid and rather impotent. Unsure whether it wants to be a soft porno movie or a reflective chick-flick about female empowerment, it fails on both counts. The timid narrative is not raunchy enough for the former or satisfying enough for the latter, and has the same Seventies look and setting as a Claude Chabrol thriller, without the dramatic bite or originality (come back Stephane Audran!).

Single mother Helene (a rather ditzy Dosch) lives with her young son in a large country house financed by alimony from her ex-husband (played in a sneering cameo by Gregoire Colin). We then see her in one of those large university literature theatres her quoting Baudelaire to her students, although Dosch’s Helene doesn’t make for a convincing blue-stocking, wafting around half-naked with a pouting expression verging on tears. We soon discover the reason why. She has fallen for a charmless Russian security guard (played by Sergei Polunin) who is keen on Putin, covered in tattoos – and married, into the bargain. After scenes of rather saucy sex – but somehow devoid of real passion – the two confess their obsession with one another, after which the Russian leaves without so much as a smile.

Helene mopes around in a daze unable to focus on anything. At one point she has an ‘existential’ conversation about female ’empowerment’ with her friend over coffee, but that’s about as meaningful as this story gets. When the Russian suddenly announces his departure back to Moscow, Helene is bereft and consults a shrink (Slimane Dazi) who listens rather too lasciviously to her love confession. She admits to have visited Moscow “for a few hours” hoping to bump into her lover in the snowbound streets “just to breathe the air he breathes”.

Fast forward eights months, and the tone is considerably more positive, and Helene has a spring in her step for reasons that are unclear. When Sergei calls out of the blue one day they agree to meet up again in a finale that is both underwhelming and inconclusive. The only question that remains: Why was Passion Simple selected for the main competition in a major film festival such as San Sebastian. MTAs

WORLD PREMIERE AT San Sebastian 2020 | 19 SEPTEMBER 2020

Petite Fille (Little Girl) 2020 ****

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rocks (2019) Bafta | Rising Star Award Bukky Bakray 2021

Dir: Sarah Gavron | UK Drama, 90′

Rocks is a sharp-witted sassy sashay into life on the multicultural streets of east London for a group of teenage schoolgirls .

British director Sarah Gavron has a keen aptitude for stories about often marginalised outsiders struggling to fit in or cope with exceptional challenges as we saw in Village at the End of the World, Brick Lane and Suffragette. Rocks is back on the same territory, its upbeat realism driven forward by convincing characters and drenched in dramatic heft.

In a Hackney council estate British-Nigerian teenager Shola ‘Rocks’ Omotoso (Bukky Bakray) lives with her younger brother (D’angelou Osei Kissiedu) and a mother who soon clears off, leaving the two of them penniless and bereft. So Rocks is left to look after her kid brother while desperately avoiding the social services and coping with her own sense of loss.

Authored by British-Nigerian Theresa Ikoko, Claire Wilson and Gavron herself who have spent a year of workshopping with the girls to produce something fresh and authentic that never feels clunky in combining the young girls’ naivety with their sense of streetwise cockiness. All the cast are newcomers who have come to the project via various youth clubs, and they should be proud of their feisty performances; some are more appealing than others.

Sumaya is particularly likeable with her strong moral compass and genuine kindness, while Bakray is more laid-back and finds it difficult to admit to failure or defeat, despite the sweet-natured support of her easy-going younger brother (seven-year-old Kissiedu is astonishing).

Gavron lets the camera roll on some naturalistic performances and this gives the piece its raucous and unstructured charm, while a steely narrative works away in the background assuring highs and lows on the emotional front, peppered throughout rather than left to the finale. What emerges is a feeling of reality that captures the zeitgeist of modern teenage life in the ‘Hood. MT

ROCKS IS on NETFLIX

Violation (2020) *** Toronto Film Festival 2020

Dir.: Madeleine Sims-Fewer, Dusty Mancinelli; Cast: Madeleine Sims-Fewer, Anna Maguire, Jesse LaVercombe, Obi Abili; Canada 2020, 107. min

A rape and revenge thriller that goes all the way, yet we never lose empathy for victim in this collaborative first feature from Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer, who also stars in the main role as Miriam.

Miriam and her husband Caleb (Abili) have come all the way from their London home to visit Miriam’s sister Greta (Maguire) and her husband Dylan (LaVercombe) in the Canadian wilderness. As their solitary car motors along the winding forest roads, we are reminded of the opening scenes of the The Shining; a wolf and his dead prey plus a mournful score by Andrea Boccadoro makes up the ominous picture.

Miriam and Caleb hardly talk to each, and are clearly heading for an existential marriage crisis. In contrast, Greta and Dylan frolic around in nature, happy killing animals and eating them for dinner. Greta considers her rabbit slaughtering skills as a big achievement: “I have learned not to rely on others to do things for me”. Hmm. Miriam and her husband obviously have a much more sophisticated life in London, and Miriam tries in vain to talk her sister into joining her in the capital. There is obviously a long history between the two, symbolised by Miriam’s dream about her sister hanging herself in the next room. But the real secret is Dylan’s rape of his sister-in-law: when Miriam is courageous enough to tell her sister, Greta takes the side of her husband, blaming Miriam, who – left alone by everybody – plans her revenge which forms the main part of this grisly but innovative drama.

DoP Adam Crosby’s camera follows the emotional ups and down with brutal close-ups and long bird-eye shots. There are parallels to Jennifer Kent’s Nightingale, as the shaming of the victim looms large until total obliteration is the only way out. But the images avoid female exploitation, which so often is mistaken as empowerment. A non-linear narrative is sometimes bewildering, but in the end helps to enforce the sheer hell of its main protagonist. Violation is often vicious in its rough hewn depiction of abuse which so often relies on melodrama to deliver its gruesome message. AS

TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL 2020

A Good Man (2020) *** Toronto Film Festival

Dir.: Marie-Castielle Mention-Schaar; Cast: Noémie Merlant, Soko, Vincent Dedienne, Anne Loiret; France 2020, 108 min.

This trans fertility threesome is not as good as it could have been despite an impressive second performance from Portrait of a Lady on Fire’s Noémie Merlant who here plays a cis woman in the throes of becoming a trans man .

Marie-Castielle Mention-Schaar produces, writes and directs her follow up to Le ciel attendra (Heaven Will Wait) reuniting her with Merlant who as Benjamin agrees to interrupt his sex reassignment surgery in order to carry and birth the child his partner Aude wants so badly but cannot carry to full term.

Aude (Soko) lives with the community nurse in the village of Groix on an island off the Brittany coast. They have moved here from Aix-en-Provence, where Aude was a successful ballet dancer. One of the many flashback scenes pictures the couple on their first date when Benjamin was still Sarah. They have now been together for six years and want to cement their relationship with a child. In other flashbacks, Benjamin’s mother Eve (Loiret) complains about not having a real daughter “I could not even talk to her”. His brother Antoine (Dedienne) is married with a child and also has a poor relationship with Benjamin.

Ben is not secure in his changing physical status, and does not allow Aude to see him in the bath. He claims his old self, Sarah, could never had a child due to body dysmorphia. And while Benjamin gradually adjusts to his status as a pregnant mother, Aude feels, rightfully, left out: she has given up a great career, and now the mother role she craved so much is also taken away from her – albeit by a caring Benjamin.

This creates a double-bind, but instead of evaluating her misery the director simply writes her out of the script only to bring her back at the very end of the feature as an afterthought. She is not the only under-explored character: many of Benjamin’s patients find his pregnancy rather odd, but in the end they all come around to it – as if by magic. Benjamin himself always occupies the centre stage but is only fragmentarily explored: we see more reaction from the outside than from his own point of view; apart from one outburst against Aude when he gets his revised birth certificate. This makes A Good Man difficult to engage with – surprising for a feature stuffed with such explosive emotions.

DoP Myriam Vinocour’s claustrophobic camerawork fails to reflect the wild beauty of the island setting that added so much allure to Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Life for the couple seems so restrictive, even though Benjamin gets around a lot visiting his patients. But the main downside to this complex drama is its fractured narrative: few features succeed in integrating so many flashbacks – and A Good Man is no exception. This is still a worthwhile experience that makes a brave effort to explore complex gender roles in today’s every-changing world. AS

TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL 2020

Beans (2020) *** Toronto Film Festival 2020

Dir.: Tracey Deer; Cast: Kiawentiio Tarbell, Violah Beauvais, Rainbow Dickerson. Joel Montgrand, Pauline Alexis, D’Pharaoh Mc Kay Woon; Canada 2020, 91 min.

This feature film debut of Canadian director/co-writer Tracey Deer is both a coming-of-age story and an autobiographical take on the Oka crisis of July 1990. Then a conflict broke out between the Mohawk and the city of Oka, Quebec in Canada, the latter wanting to enlarge a golf course, which would have infringed on holy burial sides of the native Canadians. After 78 days of blockades and strife between Mohawks and the Canadian Army, supported by local police and a ‘White Power’ mob local police, the dispute was settled with the loss of only one life. This was the first of many conflicts between indigenous groups and authorities in Canada.

We meet the titular Beans, brilliant debutant Tarbell when she is still the “good” girl, going for an interview at the posh Queens Height High School. Mother Lilly (Dickerson) is pregnant and over-protective. When the conflict breaks out everything changes for the twelve-year old and she gravitates towards the slightly older and certainly tougher neighbouring children April (Alexis) and Hank (Woon). They have a lot of freedom at home because their father is permanently drunk. When Beans’ father (Joel Montgrand) and his friends decide the women and children should be evacuated Lily, Beans and little sister Ruby (Beauvais) are pelted by rocks, the latter ending up covered in shattered glass. Having finally reached the hotel, Beans goes to a party with April and her friends where she kisses Hank as a ‘dare’ in the closet. Later she has a fight with another girl, trying to show how tough she is to April and Hank. Lily, exhausted and close to giving birth, takes all four children back home, but they are again attacked by white residents. Whilst her mother is giving birth to a baby boy, Beans has a sordid encounter with Hank who wants a blow job – a term Beans had never heard off. This sets up a rather predictable finale.

Archive films show a white mob, not very different from the current Trump supporters. There is sheer hatred in their eyes. In the feature, the scenes at the shop are particularly disturbing because the white women, having shopped a life time with their Mohawk friends, suddenly turn nasty, and shove them violently out of the shop premises.

DoP Marie Davignon’s images are impressive, particularly the Mohawk convoy of women and children being pelted by rocks by screaming white men show a frightening intensity. Whilst the ensemble acting is admirable, director Deer is let down by a rather formulaic narrative, which leans very towards mainstream features. Nevertheless, one does now look at the “clean” image propagates by Canadians with a different eye – racism does not stop at the longest international border between states.

AS
***

Space Dogs (2019) ** mubi

Dir.: Elsa Kremser, Levin Peter; Documentary with voice over by Alexey Serebryakov; Germany/Austria 2019, 91 min.

Writers/directors and producers Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter cobble together a rather meaningless documentary featuring long shots of rather scruffy dogs on Moscow’s contemporary streets. Making up more than seventy minutes of the running time, the seemingly unstructured images are edited in an unsatisfactory montage with clips from USSR spacecraft history, with a focus on experiments with dogs and turtles. The combination of the two central strands is rather tenuous, and a pretentious voiceover by Alexey Serebryakov is not always helpful.

Laika was found roaming the streets of Moscow where she was captured and sent into Space, never to return. In November 1957 she started her journey, circling the earth, before dying. In contrast, the US Space programme used a chimpanzee, captured in Cameroon, and named Number 65. He survived his journey but found himself back on Earth in a zoo in Washington DC where he was lonely having got used to human company. Number 65 died overweight and of liver failure. To bring the message home, we are shown a couple of humans in Moscow dressing a chimpanzee called ‘Buh’ like a waiter, for a performance in a nightclub. More clips from the USSR Space programme show returning dogs having an ECG and being comforted by the female medical staff. More up to date clips show dogs savagely killing a toy cat, the voice-over extolling their heroism. When two turtles approach a dog, we are informed the pair were supposed to be the first creatures from Earth, orbiting the moon. But the Soviet space capsule drifted from its calculated course, and the turtles floated through space, “hopefully finding a new world in another universe”. It all culminates with cute puppies in front of their rather ramshackle den. Above them a nightingale sings, but its warning is too late: humans put poisoned meat in front of the puppies’ den.

The mythical comments do not fit the images of the rather ordinary, scruffy dogs whose surroundings are squalid, to say the least. DoP Yunus Roy Imer succeeds in makingmodern Moscow look like a provincial town on its last legs – not just the dogs. The directors’ premise is vague. What are they trying to establish: Animal cruelty? Animal bravery? A missed opportunity. AS

NOW ON MUBI

Genus Plan | Lahi, Hayop (2020)

Dir.: Lav Diaz; Cast: Bart Guingona, DMs Boongaling, Nading Josef, Hazel Orencio, Joel Saracho, Noel Sto. Domingo, Lolita Carbon, Popo Diaz; Philippines 2020, 150 min.

Philippine filmmaker Lav Diaz (*1958) is known for his valuable contribution to the “Slow Cinema” Movement with features often lasting between 225 minutes (his 2016 Venice winner The Woman Who Left) and roughly eleven hours (Evolution of a Filipino Family (2004). His most popular film Norte – or the End of History (2013), a re-working of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, coming in with a middling 250 minutes.

So it is quite remarkable that Genus Pan lasts a mere 150 minutes – truly a short film project for Diaz, who for the first time found international producers for his Locarno 2020 project When the Waves are Gone, a Dumas re-setting of the Count of Monte Christo, interrupted by the Covid19 pandemic.

Genus Pan is set on the island of Hugaw, known as ‘dirt island’ because of its history. During the Japanese occupation (one of many colonial powers who have invaded the Philippines) Japanese soldiers kidnapped and raped indigenous women, using them as sex slaves. Today the Vargas family rules the island with help of a para-military army, led by the Captain (Popo Diaz, who acts as PD).

The story follows a trio of miners, the young Andres (Boongaling) and the older Baldo (Josef) and ex-circus worker Paulo (Guingona), who have decided to seek work on the pier of the nearby city. Their journey across the jungle is an eventful one fraught with memories of their time at the Circus, Andres being angry with Baldo for taking a “placement fee” from the younger man, as did the exploitative bosses and soldiers back at the mine. Paulo, a devout Christian believer, smooths things over by paying Baldo the fee so he can give the money to Andres who needs it for his sister’s medical treatment. Under the influence of alcohol, the old men remember how they murdered the ‘Clown’, before killing each other. Meanwhile Andres blacks out.

Without revealing the entire plot suffice to say this is a another colourful human story involving murder and mayhem in a tight-knit community of divided loyalties and fierce family allegiances, the colonial past colliding with future hopes and dreams.

Once again the themes of Diaz’ work resurface retracing his homeland’s fractured history, the present still caught up with the repressive regime of President Marcos and today’s President Duterte. Strong mysticism also plays its part particularly in rural areas, adding a vibrant spirituality shaped by the Catholic faith and the Easter processions with traditional rituals of self-flagellation and dedication to the Virgin Mary.

But Diaz’ overriding strength is his potent visual aesthetic that helps us to live in the film and be completely enveloped by the experience. There are no dramatic arcs: Diaz’ films mimic life itself: there are no chapters or “artificial new beginnings”, everything flows on as a unit. A scene often begins with an empty frame showing the opulence of the jungle where Diaz’ characters will live out their experiences. Leaves flutter in the wind, clouds wander, and water ripples by. “I am trying to unify space and time” he says. The audience joins the protagonists in a daily experience that mirrors their own Cinema is “an engagement with life” for Diaz, just as it was for Tarkovsky, who is quoted: “Time becomes tangible when you sense something significant, truthful, going on beyond the events on the screen; when you realise, quite consciously, that what you see in the frame is not limited by its visual depiction, but is a pointer to something stretching out beyond the frame and to infinity, a point to life”.

Diaz’ cinema follows the flow of dreams and ideas. It takes us back to our childhood reflecting loss, joy, remorse and the harshness of everyday life. We can find a new home for our memories in his flowing images. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 1 SEPTEMBER | Venice Film Festival 2020 | ORIZZONTI AWARD for BEST DIRECTOR

Selva Tragica (2019) **** Venice Horizons 2020

Dir: Yulene Olaizola | Cast: Indira Andrewin, Gilberto Barraza, Mariano Tun Xool, Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez, Eligio Meléndez / Mexico, France, Colombia 96’

Mexico’s Yulene Olaizola delves into her homeland’s mystical culture in this eerily suggestive fantasy drama set deep in the Mayan jungle on the border between Mexico and Belize in 192o, a lawless territory where myths abound.

Suffused with cool lime greens of the lush rain forests this is a mediative feature that vibrates with the ancient lores of its remote and hostile territory, ambient sounds of wildlife occasionally breaking through the barrier of silence. Into this peacefully balanced ecosystem comes an unwelcome intrusion in the shape of a group of Mexican gum workers who cross paths with an enigmatic young Belizean woman dressed in white wandering around in the wilderness seemingly on her own. The jungle assumes a dominant role of antihero taking its revenge on the men its poisonous plants, swarms of mosquitos, fierce animals fighting back as they desperately try to master its unknown depths and exotic creatures with their weapons and wilful presence.

Meanwhile Agnes is carried off by the men who take her with them as a lowkey hostage causing deep tensions in the group and arousing their fantasies and desires. Filled with new vigour, they must face their destiny, without realising that they have taken captive the legendary spirit of Xtabay, a powerful feminine spirit who beguiles them life a succubus leading them to their fate.

Selva Tragica serves as an intriguing metaphor for our ongoing destruction of the planet. Olaisola meanwhile offers up another fascinating and impressively crafted foray into Latin American culture that is currently enriching the independent arthouse film scene today. MT

Venice Film Festival 2020 | HORIZONS 2020

Dear Comrades! (2020) **** Venice Film Festival 2020

Dir: Andrei Konchalovsky | Drama, Russia 120′

Venice Film Festival 2020 | SPECIAL JURY PRIZE 2020

Notturno (2020) Mubi

Dir: Gianfranco Rosi | Italy, Doc 90′

Notturno is cinematic but too enigmatic in its broad brush impressionist study of everyday life in the war-torn Middle East.

Italy’s leading documentarian Gianfranco Rosi has spent three years filming life behind the battle lines in his latest film in competition at this year’s Venice Film Festival.

Endowed with his signature poetic gaze but lacking a formal narrative that made Fire at Sea so compelling, Notturno is essentially a collection of filmic episodes that drift from one to the next exploring the corrosive effects of the ongoing conflict on ordinary people. Wartime is clearly the theme behind these vignettes but without any point of contact we are left imagining, guessing and wondering rather than gaining worthwhile insight into the hapless lives, makes Notturno a largely dissociative and unsatisfying experience although some may enjoy its more freewheeling approach. And his camerawork is stunning.

The war serves as a latent but corrosive and destabilising presence for the local Libyans, Iraqis, Kurdistanis and Syrians who try desperately to keep their world together when all around them combat rages on. No finger is pointed at the perpetrators although ISIS is mentioned several times when a veiled and tearful mother takes a call from her frightened daughter.

The film opens to the rhythmic marching of soldiers in a training base, in the distance the thud of bombs and ammunition is heard as distant flames flare up in the night sky – whether they are explosions, or oil refineries is uncertain. A troupe of camouflaged female fighters let their hair down and relax drinking tea after their day is done. Five children settle down for the night on the floor of their main room where their mother will then wake the eldest at the crack of dawn to go hunting with an older man who pays him to spot flying prey. Another hunter drifts peacefully around his boat amid rushes and ducks oblivious to the danger, he carries a gun but the only gunshot is heard in the far distance. Each of these studies is revisited in finer detail.

The most disturbing segment explores the naive drawings made by children in nursery school. These feature black-masked men, torture and beheadings rather than innocent depictions of their parents, pets or playtime. A psychologist listens to their thoughts and recollections about being roused by ISIS to be tortured and witness the death of adult prisoners. The images are often sublime in contrast to the sorrowful subject matter.MT

TO ACCOMPANY NOTTURNO MUBI IS SCREENING A COMPLETE RETRO OF GIANFRANCO ROSI

The Splendour Of Truth: The Cinema Of Gianfranco Rosi, starting in February. Boatman (1993), Below Sea Level (2008), El Sicario, Room 164 (2010), Sacro Gra (2013), and Fire At Sea (2016) are an unconventional account of life on the margins, starting where the news headlines end.

Sacro GRA – 22 February
Fire At Sea – 23 February
Tanti Futuri Possibili – 22 February
Boatman – 5 March
Notturno – 5 March
Below Sea Level – 10 March
El Sicario, Room 164 – 17 March

To the Moon (2020) CPH:DOX 2021

Dir.: Tadhg O’Sullivan; Documentary, ROI 2020, 71 min.

This first solo outing for writer/director and editor Tadgh O’Sullivan is a hymn to the moon compiled of countless clips and texts from over 130 films featuring the lunar planet. Like most compendium films To the Moon stimulates the desire to revisit the originals – mostly Nordic and German films – not just as quotes – but in their entirety.

This moon admiration marathon is divided in sections with the first three entitled: ‘Because the Moon feels loved‘; ‘Because its always alone in the Sky‘ and ‘Loom of the Moon‘. The goddess of the Moon is apparently called Luna, yet ironically the word has now come to be connected with the mentally challenged here on Earth (lunatics).

The next chapter, ‘The Werewolf’, explores intruders into the home after the hours of darkness, and particularly those of a canine variety. ‘Ebb Tide has come to me’ is a melancholic segment dealing with ageing and featuring as its themes water and death in the moon shine: “Winter of age which overwhelms everyone”.

‘Part of a Dream’ looks at children’s relationship with the moon and we watch, among others, a clip of Edgar Reitz’ Heimat, where the young narrator asks himself “Is it the same Moon over Russia as over Schabbach?”

A little boy asks a father if he is part of the moonlight dream in ‘The Moon is Ours‘ and we enjoy a clip from Fritz Lang’s horror outing The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960). Meanwhile a very unromantic Italian man drives his knife into a tree, destroying a heart carved into the trunk, his female companion looking hopefully up to the gleaming planet. Finally, ‘Earth Fragment‘ brings us back to the cruelty of nature, an owl is attacking a rabbit in the moonlight.

Three years in the making To The Moon is a labour of love, O’Sullivan has certainly done his homework, but one wonders how much is really to his credit. Impressively edited and entertaining To the Moon is an enjoyable foray into the film archives testing the audience’s knowledge of film history AS

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | VENICE NIGHTS 2020

UK films featured in To The Moon:

– Dangerous Moonlight, (Brian Desmond Hurst, 1941)

– The Smashing Bird I Used to Know (Robert Hartford-Davis, 1969)

– The Tell-Tale Heart (JB Williams, 1953)

– Ulysses (Joseph Strick, 1967)

– Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey, 1962)

– Der Mude Tod (Fritz Lang, 1921)

– Magic Myxies (F. Percy Smith, Mary Field, 1931)

– Floral Co-operative Societies (Mary Field, 1927)

– Cottage on Dartmoor (Anthony Asquith, 1929)

– Buxton Well Dressing (George Kemp, 1904)

– Children’s voxpop: Y Dydd (1969)

– The White Shadow (Graham Cutts, 1924)

– Lobsters (John Mathias, 1936)

– A Throw of Dice (Franz Osten, 1929)

Laila in Haifa (2020)

Dir: Amos Gitai | Drama, Israel, 90′

Gitai certainly brings out the exotic edginess of this Israeli port city bordering on the Lebanon in his feisty social satire that sees Palestinians, Israelis and Lebanese enjoying a local night spot.

Those familiar with the territory – political, cultural and social – will certainly appreciate a drama set in this complex part of the world Some of the intrigue will be missed by the mainstream unable to identify who’s who. And although we’re constantly led to believe by the British press that Arabs and Israelis are constantly at each others throats, Gitai shows us otherwise – in a multicultural set-up where opposites attract amid a heady brew of sexual chemistry that fuels the various interconnecting vignettes in a rather stagey drama with its awkward performances – often feeling as if the cast is just reading from the script. Yet there’s something mesmerising about the seedy characters. You might not trust them to post a letter, but they’re intriguing to watch

The setting is Haifa’s Fattoush Bar & Gallery adjacent to a busy railway line that occasionally drowns out the conversation between business people. And while negotiations are going on in the art gallery part of the venue, gay couples are carousing in another corner of the venue.

Laila (Maria Zreik, Villa Touma) is the owner of the gallery. She is married to canny Palestinian Kamal (Makram J. Khoury) who doesn’t give her credibility as a businesswoman or agree with the political nature of the photos in her current exhibition picturing the Palestinian Resistance, although he does appear laissez faire about her relationship with Gil the artist who shot them (actor and singer Tsahi Halevi) – the two are seen embracing before Kamal arrives on the scene.

There’s an odd scene where Kamal is accosted by a rather fiery young Arab woman (Behira Ablassi) who tries to bribe him for money by hiding in the back of his ‘top of the range’ Mercedes. He handles the situation with nonchalance cleverly giving her short shrift.

Gil entertains a sob story from his half-sister (Israeli actress and dancer Naama Preis) complaining about her sexless marriage. She turns her attentions to a good-looking young Arab guy who plies her with drinks before the two disappear into his car for a quickie.

In another part of the bar a stocky young black Arab is on a blind date with a bewigged Jewish widow (Hana Laslo). Candidly admitting he was expecting somebody younger, she confidently retorts: “I was expecting someone more Jewish”. A bizarre episode features Arab chef Hisham whose wife Khawla (Khawla Ibraheem) unwisely makes a play for his friend Gil.

Gitai’s snapshot of the Middle East feels very much like a filmed play – entertaining at times but also rather forced and artificial in its depiction of this multicultural social brew. MT

IN CINEMAS FROM 5 NOVEMBER 2021

200 Meters (2020) *** Venice Days 2020

Dir.: Ameen Nayfeh; Vast: Ali Suliman, Anna Unterberger, Lana Zreik, Gassan Abbas, Motaz Malhees; Palestine 2020, 95 min.

In his first feature Palestinian writer/director Ameen Nayfeh tries his best to stand on the fence while exploring human rights infringements caused by the border between his homeland and Israel.

200 Meters refers to the distance between a family living on the contentious wall dividing Palestine and Israel. Mustafa (Suliman) is stayIng with his mother on the Palestinian West Bank, while his wife Salwa (Zreik) and the couple’s three children Noora, Majd and Maryam are just two hundred meters away on the Israeli side of the barrier but the family can see each other during the daytime, Mustafa crosses over to work in Israel.

His son Majd is a Liverpool fan, and particularly fond of their Egyptian striker Mohamed Salah. His mother is keen to enrol him with an Israeli football team, Maccabi, but Mustafa favours a Palestinian side. Salwa is much more pragmatic than her husband who is driven by ideology.

One day, Mustafa fails the finger print test at the border facilities, his work permit has expired and he is sent back. A day later Majd is injured in a car accident and Mustafa if forced to use a team of people smugglers to get him over the border to visit his son in hospital. The smugglers take his 350 Shekel fee, but Mustafa is forced to wait until more passengers arrive.

Along comes Anne (Unterberger), a German filmmaker who is crossing over to video a family wedding with her companion Kifah (Malees). Also in the car is Sami, a young man is search of work, and Mustafa suggests his own uncle and boss Aba Nidal (Abbas), as a possible employer. But the crossing is a botched affair and both drivers and passengers are left stranded: One of the smugglers attacks Anne, believing that she a Mossad agent, and knocks her out before fleeing. Sami almost manages to climbs over the border wall before a rival gang causes him to fall and break two ribs. Mustafa’s only chance is Anne, and her German passport. But can he trust her, or should he side with Kifah, who suspects Anne of being in league with the Israelis.

200 Meters is shot imaginatively in documentary style by DoP Elin Kirschfink. And although the ensemble acting is impressive, Anne’s near permanent presence takes away too much from the central conflict given that her character is never really satisfactorily explored leaving a gaping hole in our understanding of her role. Nayfeh’s flaws are those of a new filmmaker and he will have learned a great deal from his first outing, handleD masterfully on a shoe string budget. AS

VENICE DAYS | 8 SEPTEMBER 2020 |

Careless Crime | Jenayat-e Bi Deghat (2020) **** Venice Horizons 2020

Dir.: Shahram Mokri; Cast: Babak Karami, Razieh Mansouri, Abolfazl Kahani, Mohammad Sareban, Adel Yaraghi, Mahmoud Behraznia, Behzad Dorani; Iran, 139 min.

Iran’s Shahram Mokri won a Special Prize in the Venice Horizon Section in 2013 for Fish & Cat. His latest is another welcome surprise, Rivette-like in structure its repetitions coming together like a love letter to Cinema, connecting the past to the present, Mokri shows how history repeats itself. the McGuffins are all over the pace and the director works hard on his labyrinthine narrative, the past meeting the present in mirrors, the only reality being the film within the film.

In late August of 1979, six months before the Iranian Revolution, four men entered the Cinema Rex in Abadan (south-west Iran) and set fire to it with petrol. 478 People died whilst watching The Deer, directed by Masud Kimiai and starring the popular actor Behrouz Vosoughi, with the feature having a clear anti-Shah message. The arsonists had locked and removed the door handles to the only locked exits which opened inwardly so many people were crushed to death. Furthermore, the projection booth had been doused with petrol, and burst into flames. None of the cinema employees was present during the blaze. The fire engine arrived late, its water tank was empty. Only eight people managed to escape, among them one of the arsonists, Hossein Takbalizadh, who was later hanged. To make matters even more opaque, an interview in the Iranian News Update in August 2020 claimed the real arsonists now sit as MPs in the Iranian Parliament.

We meet Takbali (Kahani) who is desperately trying to get hold of his anti-anxiety medication, finally tracking down a man who might be able to provide the drugs. Ironically he works at the National Cinema Museum. Excerpts of The Crime of Carelessness, a 1912 silent movie by Harold M. Shaw, are interwoven into the narrative. Shaw had a big phobia about fire and his film centres on an arsonist.

Meanwhile Takbali meets his contact, a man in a costume, walking on stilts. He gives him the medicine, asking him to deliver a book to a friend. This leads Takbali to another cinema in the capital where The Deer is being shown, mainly to an audience of film students. Here Takbali meets Fallah (Dorani), Yadollah (Behraznia) and Faraj (Sareban), the modern day arsonists who he helps to douse the cinema in turpentine. But that doesn’t do the job, so Takbali buys gasoline to have another go later on.

DoP Alireza Barazandeh makes use of long tracking shots for his crowd scenes in the city, reserving a handheld camera for the countryside. If you’re looking for something different Careless Crime is highly recommended. AS

Venice Film Festival 2020 | WINNER BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY | SHAHRAM MOKRI

Never Gonna Snow Again (2020)

Dir: Malgozata Szumowska Michal Englert | Drama Poland 120’

Poland has come a long way since its communist days according to this surreal and stirring social satire. Never Gonna Snow Again sees the nouveau riche residents of a soulless gated community outside Warsaw, unable to heal their own lives despite their comfortable existence.

Meanwhile from a poorer part of town lives a Ukrainean migrant masseur called Xenia. Each day he trudges each from his stalag style apartment through a Grimm’s fairytale forest and into this neurotic new town to spread his balm over troubled waters. Alec Utgoff is hypnotic and quietly muscular in the leading role but he remains a dark horse drawing us in to a story that is both intriguing and unsatisfying.

This Venice competition title is the latest from Polish director Małgorzata Szumowska and her regualr collaborator cinematographer Michał Englert. Their previous films have explored outre and challenged individuals and this is the most mysterious and eerie to-date (Body, Mug and The Other Lamb).

A hotchpotch of amusing domestic vignettes play out and is more exasperating than the last held together by the alluring central character of Xenia whose background is gradually revealed but who potential is never properly explored. By intention he is the only appealing character, and we are impelled to watch this movie because of him, and only because of him. The idea of a guru who saves the disenchanted is one of the most powerful themes in history and is ever relevant particularly now in our time of turmoil. But it often feels like the filmmakers are trying too hard and rather than focussing on their strong storyline they throw in endless crude titbits that are distracting and also downright irritating unless you share this particular brand of humour that often mocks those in tragic circumstances.

Elements of Gothic horror, porn and melodrama seep into a story whose characters are all suffering significant loss. We feel for the woman whose husband undermines her, for the bereaved widow who has lost the love of her life, and for the husband who will shortly die of a cancer he desperately tried to defeat: we also start to understand how Xenia coped hen he was bereaved and this enriches his significant healing skills and calm charisma. The others feel no such insight into their lives but meeting Xenia gives them a sense of empowerment and hope.

There are some exciting moments in the Polish modern fairytale with its pounding soundscape full of danger and exotic promise yet somehow – like the treatment or potion that promises to deliver – Never Gonna Snow Again is the same. Busy being loud and clever it drowns out the truth behind its story and thus never lives up to its enticing potential. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 15 OCTOBER 2021

The Painted Bird (2019)

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOW ON BFI PLAYER

Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time (2020)

Dir.: Lili Horvat; Natasa Stork, Victor Bodo, Bennett Vilmanyl, Peter Toth, Andor Lukats, Julia Ladanyl, Linda Moshier; Hungary 2020, 95 min.

Natasa Stork plays a woman who gives up her shiny life in America to return home to Hungary in Lili Horvat’s enigmatic counter-migration movie.

Natasa Stork is forty–year old neuro-surgeon Marty Vizy who leaves a glittering career in New Jersey to start a new life when she falls for a colleague at a conference. Vizy had put all her energy and talent into her profession in a 24/7 week of total commitment. The new man in her life, Dr Janos Drexler (Bodo), promises to meet her a month later at the Pest end of Liberty Bridge in Budapest. But when she gets there he is nowhere to be seen and later insists he has never even met her.

What could have been daft or pretentious is made intriguing by this stunning lead performance that lifts the feature out of the mundane and into a sinuous psychological game of cat and mouse.

Marta is a very sober woman – in spite of her coup de foudre – and determined to get to the bottom of Drexler’s change of heart she continues as arranged back in Budapest (at the same hospital as Drexler) her new colleagues, especially the elderly Dr. Fried (Lukats), suspecting some kind of personality disorder, rather than the more simple explanation that she’s been ditched. Even her psychiatrist (Toth) doubts her version of events.

Her only close contact in Budapest is her friend Helen (Moshier) who helps her to rent a flat. But soon Drexler and Marta start trolling each other openly in the city in an intricately choreographed waiting game, Marta growing increasingly jealous of a young blonde woman who seems to be close to Drexler.

In her immaculately crafted sophomore feature Horvat brings all the ends together in the final ten minutes, with Marta changing from hunted to huntress. DoP Robert Maly puts an idyllic spin on Budapest, not quite an ad for the city but along those lines. But Stork steals the show, hard-edged and soulful in equal measure. The running time is just right, anything longer would have toppled the poetic structure of this modern fairy-tale. AS

Curzon announces the release date for Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time – On Curzon Home Cinema – 19th March | premiered at VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2020 | VENICE DAYS

Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams (2020)

Dir: Luca Guadagnino | Doc, Italy 120’

Luca Guadagnino‘s warm tribute to the life and work of celebrity shoemaker Salvatore Ferragamo positively glows with pride in showing how his fellow countryman rose from humble beginnings to international fame through sheer hard work and perseverance.

In his lifetime Ferragamo designed iconic shoe styles that are still in production today: such as the famous rainbow sandals created for Judy Garland and the red jewelled stilettos worn by Marilyn Monroe. The craftsman rose to fame as a favourite with the stars of the silent screen such as Pola Negri, Lilian Gish and Mary Pickford who became friends and confidents, and he was eventually providing footwear for epic productions by Cecil B. EMille.

Guadagnino takes us through the complex step-by-step design and assembly process that continues today in Ferragamo’s famous Florence workshop, stressing how comfort was the watchword even when vertiginous heels were the order of the day. And every design was carefully patented. Ferragamo was a shrewd business man as well as a talented cobbler.

Guadagnino dedicates lavish attention to Ferragamo’s family ethic and his rise to fame in the early years of the 20th century when as a 13 year old he set his heart on becoming a cobbler, even though it was considered ‘lowclass’, and sailed for America from his small village of Bonito, Naples, just before the First World War. Relatively soon he found success in the early years of Hollywood along with other pioneers who were finding their feet in this new playground.

The film is enlivened with interesting archive footage of the era and interviews with Martin Scorsese, Manolo Blahnik, Christian Louboutin and Ferragamo’s extensive family, including his wife who gives insight into their first meeting (the couple married soon after and had six children).

Clearly Guadagnino is interested in the glamour of it all and the importance of family, tripping rather lightly over the commercial side of the business which saw some ups and downs particularly during the Depression when Ferragamo was forced to file for bankruptcy. And after his death at only 60, there is no explanation as to how his wife and eldest daughter Fiamma took over the business to ensure its continued success today. In two hours there was ample time to touch on this but clearly Guadagnino has erred on starry-eyed indulgence with his subject matter. And there is a so much to enjoy in this bumper Italian success story you somehow let him get away with it. MT

NOW ON NETFLIX | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2020

Nocturnal (2019) ***

Dir.: Nathalie Biancheri; Cast: Laura Coe, Cosmo Jarvis, Sadie Frost, Amber Jean Rowan; UK 2019, 86 min.

Nathalie Biancheri gets off to a great start as a filmmaker with this appealing indie drama that really benefits from Michal Dymek’s imaginative visuals, but the narrative’s ambitious underlying conflict is let down by an underworked script.

At the titles suggests the film plays out mostly at night in a small English coastal town where sixteen-year old Laurie (Coe) has recently arrived. Her emotional is far more difficult to handle than would have us know. An experienced athlete she is now running middle-distance at club level, but even professional life sees her as an outsider. Her mother Jean (Frost) seems uncomfortable too. Meanwhile she crosses paths with Pete (Cosmo) a 33-year old decorator in an unsatisfactory relationship with Jade (Rowan). Pete is a drifter who avoids any commitment, but falls into a laid back friendship with Laurie. But Laurie wants more, and when Pete re-coils – the long telegraphed -secret is out. When Pete moves to Rotterdam, Laurie is left to pick up the pieces, and her mother is unable to make her realise what has actually happened.

Biancheri and her co-writers rely on atmosphere and enigma to make up for their undeveloped script: skimming over characterisations to pack it all into into 86 minutes. We only get to know the bare essentials about the main trio, most is left unsaid. There is no real introduction to the characters, and whilst we very soon cotton on to the secret, there is no dramatic arc, because the building blocks are missing. Jean is particularly under-sketched, and there’s no explanation as to why she is so cold to her daughter. We are left with a great atmosphere, the nights are full of shimmering lights and the desolate amusement pier is captured with enticing allure. But this cannot make up for a script needing much more work. AS

IN CINEMAS AND CURZON WORLD FROM 18 SEPTEMBER 2020

The New Gospel (2020) Venice Days 2020

Dir.: Milo Rau; Cast: Yvan Sagnet, Maia Morgenstern, Enrique Irazoqui, Marcello Fonte, Samuel Jacobs, Papa Latyr Faye; Switzerland/Germany 2020, 107 min.

Swiss writer/director Milo Rau gives Jesus and his apostles a contemporary makeover as migrant workers from Africa in his ambitious attempt to breath new life into Christianity’s central premise.

Filmed in Matera, Basilicata, in exactly the same location as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel according to Matthew (1964), and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of Christ (2004), Rau has also assembled actors from the original dramas. Back in the early 1960s, Pasolini picked an economics student with an astonishing spiritual radiance to play Jesus. This time veteran actor Enrique Irazoqui plays Judas Iscariot. Meanwhile, Maia Morgenstern reprises her role as Mary from the Gibson feature.

Rau lets cast and crew watch parts of the Pasolini film. Once again, a relative newcomer plays the role of Jesus (Cameroonian activist Yvan Sagnet) who really has to suffer in this no holds barred contemporary version. He is styled as the leader of the “Revolt of Dignity”, a migrant organisation that fights against the exploitation of African workers by the Mafia. The Police intervenes after a demonstration, and the workers have to leave their dilapidated camp. In keeping with the spirit of Pasolini’s Neo-realist take, tourists and citizens of Matera are included in the shooting. They play the spectators, their modern outfits clashing with the historical costumes. The crucifixion has been filmed in the Murgia National Park, in exactly at the same spot where Pasolini and Gibson filmed: the original holes for the three crosses could be used again.

The mayor of Matera, Raffaelo De Ruggieri, was offered the Pontius Pilate role, but he declined, choosing instead to play Simon of Cyrene, leaving Pilate’s part to Italian professional actor Marcello Fonte. Particularly convincing are Papa Latyr Faye as Peter, and Samuel Jacobs as Judas.

DoP Thomas Eirich-Schneider makes everything look real and the strong cast of professionals and newcomers make it all feel very convincing. But Rau’s project to “put Jesus back on his feet” is not an overall success. An attempt to give Jesus’s story a “black lives matter ” spin – is an avantgarde idea, but a bridge too far, confusing the delicate issues at stake by conflating two very different themes. Having the crowd of Jews shouting at Pilate “crucify the Black man”, somehow takes the action out of context, and leaves the audience with some question marks. AS

VENICE DAYS | GIORNATE DEGLI AUTORI 2020

My Tender Matador (2020) *** Venice Days 2020

Dir.: Rodrigo Sepulveda; Cast: Alfredo Castro, Leonardo Ortizgris, Paulina Urrutia, Julieta Zylberberg; Chile/Mexico/Argentina 2020, 93 min.

Venice winner Alfredo Castro (From Afar) is the main attraction of this full on melodrama with political overtones from Rodrigo Sepulveda (Aurora).

Based on Pedro Lemebel’s 2001 novel of the same name, this gay love story plays out in the Chile of 1986, when resistance fighters blew up Augusto Pinochet’s security offices in an attempt to assassinate him.

Carlos (Ortizgris) is part of an underground cell, planning to eliminate Pinochet. The action kicks off during a raucous evening in a local club where Castro’s ageing transvestite drag queen La Loca del Fuente is in full swing. The performance is interrupted by Military Police who kill one member of the troupe and arrest others. Carlos saves La Loca’s life, pretending they are a heterosexual couple, while the soldiers look for more victims.

La Loca lives in a derelict house in one of the poorest quarters of Santiago where he earns a modest living as a needle-smith. Smitten by the handsome revolutionary, he allows Carlos to store some boxes with “books” in his house, and also accords them total privacy when Carlos’ group has meetings, although La Loca wises up on discovering a cache of guns in the boxes, and objects to being asked to embroider a table cloth with the Chilean flag for one of his clients, Donna Clarita (Urrutia), who is entertaining Pinochet for dinner. Carlos threatens La Loca with a visit from the Political Police if he refuses the commission.

The pair become close, La Loca accompanying Carlos on a ‘scouting’ trip for the planned assassination, but La Loca comes home one evening, to find that the guns are gone. Carlos backs off after the failed attempt on Pinochet’s life, leaving La Loca lonely and heartbroken. But after Julieta has driven him to a meeting with Carlos at the beach, La Loca must make a very personal decision

In this beguiling feature Sepulveda lifts the lid on the gay scene of Pinochet’s Chile when transvestites and other sexual ‘deviants’ were much frowned upon by communists and their class enemies – especially in Castro’s Cuba. As La Loca points out to Carlos: “there are no gay communists”. Both neither Carlos or La Loca are winners. Carlos has to flee the country after the failed attempt on Pinochet’s life, not knowing the event would eventually be the end of the end of the dictatorship. La Loca knows very well that in the macho terrain of South America, sexual orientation is not a matter of choice.

DoP Sergio Armstrong plays with a bold palette of prime colours; the subdued lighting chez La Loca echoing the psychological state of its inhabitant: shutting out the day and just living for Carlos’ nightly visits. A classical melodrama, very much in the vein of the great Mexican director Emilio Fernandez. AS

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2020 | VENICE DAYS

The Wasteland (2020) ***** Venice Film Festival 2020

Dir: Ahmad Bahrami | Ali Bagheri (Lotfolah), Farrokh Nemati (Boss), Mahdieh Nassaj (Sarvar), Touraj Alvand (Shahoo), Majid Farhang (Ebrahim) | Drama, Iran 103’

Ahmad Bahrami’s second feature is a work of stark elegance in contrast to its soulful setting in a remote mudbrick factory on the verge of shutdown in a dusty corner of Iran. A metaphor for modern Iran The Wasteland echoes Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Abbas Kiarostami in its chiaroscuro grace and artful framing and nothing is spare in a storyline that gradually smoulders to a coruscating conclusion.

Workers of varying cultures and creeds toil tirelessly in the searing heat their simmering resentments felt but barely seen until the shutdown of the factory is imminent, the boss no longer able to finance a traditional concern in a world that has changed forever. The building trade is using concrete and other sustainable products and the traditional art of compressing and baking earth into rectangular blocks has no place in the 21st century.

Forty year old Lotfolah has dedicated his life to the factory as foreman and supervisor – man and boy – now he has nowhere to go with his only companion, a trusty horse. The workers look to their boss for the future but he cannot sustain them. He must settle up their wages and send them on their way to the city. Up to now they have been united in their differences focussing on a common goal. But petty resentments and quarrels now start to break out and the smouldering environment fires up their bitterness. Ebrahim, an Azerbaijani Turk, is in love with an Iranian girl called Gohar. But her father Mashebad has other plans for his daughter back in their village. Kurdish Shanu insists on wearing a sleeveless teeshirt much to the anger of the Muslim men. But he has more pressing problems to sort out, with a father on death row. An intense undercurrent of emotion burns between Sarvar and Lotfolah who has set his heart on a future for the two on them. But Sarvar remains an enigma, proud and silent. Scenes of her in quiet contemplation against the backdrop of factory arches are amongst the most inspired in this arthouse treasure that uses academy ratio to set the action firmly in a distant era unconnected to the modern world yet reliant on it for survival.

Ahmad Bahrami uses a clever narrative device that centres on the factory owner’s announcement that the factory is to close. This speech is played out five times throughout the first half of the film, and each time it accumulates, another part added to the existing message, the camera taking the POV of each workers, their story is then amplified into its own vignettes. The worker then returns to his family and after a discussion they eat and go to sleep.

But Lotfolah is alone in his life and we feel for him. Ali Bagheri gives a monumental and thoughtful performance that conveys a weight of emotion simmering under his mournful demeanour. As his co-workers slowly pack up and go he remains a figure of quiet desperation going about his business as diligently as in the past. And in the final act a feeling of gloom and despondency builds towards a doomladen finale. This sober end of worlds thriller came to the Venice Horizons competition modestly without noise or representation standing its ground as a minor masterpiece. MT

Venice Film Festival 2020 | HORIZONS

Hurt by Paradise (2019) ***

Dir.: Greta Bellamacina; Cast: Greta Bellamacina, Sadie Brown, Lorca Montgomery, Robert Montgomery, Bruno Wizard; UK 2019, 83 min.

An interdependent friendship between two women is explored in this stunningly shot drama debut from British filmmaker and poet Greta Bellamacina who is clearly aiming for a Woody Allen, Baumbach Gerwig type of filming in her debut drama set in Soho and the Kent coast. It’s a worthwhile try but doesn’t quite make the mark.

Hurt by Paradise is both naive and infuriating. Co-writing with Montgomery and Brown, Bellamacina also stars as poet Celeste Blackwood in the female centric cast alongside Tanya Burr, Sadie Brown, Jamie Winstone and Camilla Rutherford. The film unfolds in ten verses, with headings like “You are a Mammal eating the soul of a dead Bird in the Sky”.

Celeste is having a difficult time of it with various publishers and Stella (Brown) is an actor, often thwarted at auditions, and mostly employed (but not regularly paid) as babysitter for single mum Celeste’s baby son Jimi (L. Montgomery). The women are used to being rebuffed by the world and Celeste’s family doesn’t help: her posh sister, pedantic husband, and paranoid mother are all self-centred and superficial. Celeste’s efforts to find a boyfriend end dismally when she meets airline pilot Harry (R. Montgomery), whose ex is still firmly in his head. Stella’s internet relationship isn’t faring much better with Roman. All this comes to a shattering conclusion when Stella goes missing, Celeste plays detective, with Jimi in tows. But Stella soon fetches up in Margate with the famed Roman (Wizard), whose identity you have probably already guessed.

Shot in saccharine pastel colours by Fabio Paleari and Emily-Jane Robinson, the best thing about Hurt by Paradise is listening to Celeste’s entertaining inner monologue in poetry format, but it’s unsure if the intended tone here is irony. This can’t be said for the narrative which is rather clichéd along with most of the dialogue in this feature shot by family and friends, without enough critical distance between theme and characters AS

RELEASES IN CINEMAS | 18 September 2020

Waiting for the Barbarians (2019) ***

Dir: Ciro Guerra | Cast: Mark Rylance, Robert Pattinson, Johnny Depp | Historical drama 110′

Colombian filmmaker Ciro Guerra continues his exploration of imperialist oppression with this stunningly scenic saga set in magnificent desert surroundings where Mark Rylance plays the humanitarian face of colonialism.

WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS is the Oscar nominated director’s third drama and his English language debut following on from Embrace of the Serpent and Birds of Passage. Based on the novel by Nobel Prize-winning South African writer J.M. Coetzee, who also wrote the script, it takes place in an unspecified country and feels like a small scale version of Lawrence of Arabia with its exotic magnetism. But this is a far more sober parable that sees Rylance’s archaeologist ‘Magistrate’ falls prey to his own desires – there’s no fool like an old fool – when he falls for a young nomadic woman who has been captured in a desert raid by soldiers in the remote outpost where the he has made a niche for himself and gained the trust and respect of the locals.

‘The Magistrate’ is a cultured gentleman who speaks the local language and understands the customs – although the characters are made up of a multi racial group from North African to Mongolian and the locations are in Morocco. His experience of the country is a peaceful one very much in the vein of “live and let live”. His view is that Colonial rule is an imposition rather than a civilising influence, and that forcing the local populace to accept the ways of the interloper is tantamount to to war.

When Johnny Depp arrives as the po-faced effete Police Chief Joll he has other ideas. A couple of local “barbarians” have been arrested for thieving, Inspector Joll insists on a draconian interrogation, leaving them bloody and beaten and extracting from them a putative admission of treachery that enables him to maintain his position of colonial oppression.

All this power-posturing is as relevant now as it ever was but the choice of a non-specific cultural backdrop is more difficult to reconcile on film than it is on the page, left to our imagination. And its odd to see Mongolian tribesmen roaming around in the Moroccan desert. But the hero of the piece eventually turns into an outcast after he becomes sexually obsessed by the “barbarian” girl (Mongolian actress Gana Bayarsaikhan). His subsequent decision to return her to her family is deemed a dereliction of duty, allowing Joll to come down heavily with his metal cosh – another fantasy element to the narrative, along with the alarming finale.

Waiting for the Barbarians is an admirable drama but one that leaves us contemplating its message rather than its characters, who unreachable despite the best efforts of a stellar cast. Robert Pattinson is handed a rather bum role as Joll’s sneering secretary Officer Mandel, a farcry from his strong recent run with the French Dauphin in The King, High Life and The Lighthouse. Rylance manages to make us pity and root for The Magistrate up to a point, even though he becomes a figure of fun in the end for his Christ-like goodness. Fortunately the baddies get their come-uppance: and Rylance eventually finds redemption giving the film a satisfactory conclusion and some scary moments such as the menacing final scene. MT

NOW AVAILABLE TO WATCH ONLINE

Residue (2020) *** Venice Film Festival 2020

Dir.: Merawi Gerima; Cast: Obinna Nwachkwa, Dennis Lindsey, Taline Stewart, Jamal Graham, Melody Tally, Ramon Thompson; USA 2020, 90 min.

This debut feature chimes with today’s Black Lives Matter theme
through the Merawi Gerima’s personal homecoming memoirs seen through the eyes of through of his main character Jay (Nwachkwa, also a debutant).

Jay is back From studying film in Los Angeles. But his old stamping ground of Washington DC: once called Eckington, now NoMa (North Massachusetts Avenue), doesn’t feel the same anymore. Gentrification has since set in. But although Gerima is keen to point out that his film is not about gentrification, it is hard to interpret otherwise.

Jay’s parents (Ramon Thompson/Melody Tally) are hassled by property developers, and his childhood friends are seemingly hostile. The parallel sequences of his happy boyhood are truly nostalgic, and ring sometimes much truer than the contemporary alienation narrative.

Jay’s parents have always been a touchstone for the troubled youth of the area, and these issues continue to abound along with unsolved drug problems and new confrontations with the White interlopers. Of Jay’s childhood friends, Mike is dead; Dion (Graham), his former older idol (Jacari Dye plays a young Jay) is in prison; and Demitrius is nowhere to be found. Delonte (Lindsay) is one of many indifferent to Demetrius: “He moved to Maryland, I think”, he tells Jay. But Delonte had his own family issues to deal with, including the death of his mother at the hands of his father, Jay is a traitor: “Don’t forget, you left us! You can’t save me now. You lived the big life in LA, whilst we held down the city. Don’t ask ‘where is Demitrius, as if you really care. You only care only about yourself and the motherf…g movie you are shooting. Anyhow, we are paved over by the Whites, like we never existed”.

Jay’s relationship with his girl friend Blue (Stewart) is also troubled. She feels rightly neglected and, after a party, a jealous Jay storms off when he sees Blue consorting with his mates. The most impressive scene is Jay’s prison visit for Dion, whose letters he had never answered. Instead of the depressing penitentiary background, Gerima stages their meeting in the woods of their childhood. This is much more intense than the staged titular scene, where a White woman’s dog craps on the Black home owner’s lawn. While the dog’s owner is cleaning up, the house owner complains “about leaving residue on my lawn”.

With the riddle of Demetrius unsolved we are left with Jay’s partly irrational anger about changes: he has lost his childhood friends and environment and struggles to replace them. The filmmaker and his main protagonists seem to have hit a wall.

Impressive camerawork by DoP Mark Jeevaratnam cannot make up for a narrative that leaves too much unresolved. A more structured approach would have helped greatly. Nevertheless, Residue is strong on intensity and benefits from convincing performances from both the younger and older Jay. AS

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | Venice Days 2020

Pieces of a Woman (2020) *** Venice Film Festival 2020

Dir: Kornel Mundruczo | Drama, 127’

Nothing prepares us for sudden death. Pieces of a Woman sees a couple suffer the loss of their newborn child. But the most surprising upshot of bereavement is how is it affects those around us, and particularly those nearest to us. And this unexpected behaviour is pivotal to the narrative and how it plays out for a professional Bostonian woman called Martha (Vanessa Kirby/The Crown) and her stevedore partner, a recovering alcoholic who hails from Seattle (Shia Leboeuf).

Hungarian film director Kornel Mundruczo’s first outing in English is as deeply flawed as the title suggests: moving in parts but also totally incoherent in others. The euphoric early arthouse scenes – impressively shot in one 24 minute take – show the couple during the birth and these intensely personal moments are graphic in detail. Almost too much so. But the baby dies shortly after she is born leaving the couple in disarray, arguments and recriminations follow. And as Boston descends into a freezing winter, amid wide panoramic shots of the Charles River, so Martha retreats into herself cutting Sean adrift in an icy silence.

Based on his own personal experiences this is clearly a cathartic film for the director writing with his real life partner Kata Weber. But the film soon drifts tonally into a more glossy family drama where the grief-stricken Martha is persuaded by her controlling mother (Ellen Burstyn in formidable form) to seek compensation from the midwife. As Martha’s relationships deteriorate all round so the storyline unravels with no real sense of direction. There is a fraught mother-daughter strand; an imploding relationship breakdown where class and racial conflicts enter the fray – Martha is a tough Jewish uptown girl, Sean is soft-hearted but given to brutal outbursts. Their attractions are also part of their downfall when things don’t go according to plan.

The unsuccessful shift from arthouse to Hollywood melodrama could be due to various big names jumping on board the project with their money and therefore demanding a schmaltzy Hollywood happy ending, Although with Martin Scorsese being one of the exec producers this does seem surprising for this missed opportunity at Pieces of a Woman staying true to its arthouse origins.. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2020 | BEST ACTRESS WINNER Vanessa Kirby

The Disciple (2020) Netflix

Dir: Chaitanya Tamhane | Musical drama, India 127’

Chaitanya Tamhane dedicates the same intensity and sense of detail to The Disciple as his first feature Court (2014). This impressive second feature must surely be the definitive film about Indian Hindustani classical music, and that is something for Tamhane to be proud of. A film about devotion to the task at hand and focused perseverance is refreshing in these modern times of quick fix celebrity and overnight success.

The main character Sharad Nerulkar is a rather doleful young man determined to perfect his knowledge and skills in this most complex and subtle of traditional musical styles. And although the actor does his best to get us on board with his emotionally pent up loner, he remains a detached and avoidant soul, given to binge-eating and bouts of self-righteousness.

The task he undertakes is a difficult one, Tamhane reminding us that artistic expression relies on a relaxed mind and body to flourish and flow. His musical guru Sha Guruji (Arun Dravid) impresses this upon his rather tense student who is so desperate to pay his bills and look after his future in this classical field that he slightly misses the point for most the drama.

The musical excerpts performed by skilled practitioners are quietly mesmerising, often reaching fever pitch. But the most enjoyable scenes revolve around simple everyday life in Mumbai when Tamhane takes the camera roving to unexpected and delightful places. The musty heat of the night is almost palpable during Sharad’s slo-mo motorbike rides on the city’s highways. It’s the only time he seems really at peace. MT

Now on NETFLIX | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2020 | AWARD FOR BEST SCREENPLAY
Chaitanya Tamhane

Max Richter’s Sleep (2020) ****

Dir.: Natalie Johns; Cast: Max Richter, Yulia Mahr; The American Contemporary Music Ensemble: Grace Davidson (Soprano), Emily Brausa (Cello), Clarence Jensen (Cello), Isabel Hagen (Viola), Ben Russell (Violin), Andrew Tholl (Violin), Max Richter (Piano, Keyboards Electronics); UK 2019, 99 min.

Director/writer Natalie Johns offers up a unique experience with the filming of the first outdoor performance of composer Max Richter’s eight hour long grand scale epos SLEEP in LA’s Grand Park in July 2018.

The composition was published by Deutsche Gramophone in 2015, and since performed at in-door arenas including The Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Sidney Opera House and London’s Barbican; and was also produced by BBC R3. 215 pages of sheet music are testament of the first open night performance in front of 560 listeners/sleepers in their numbered cots.

German-born British composer Max Richter (*1966) and his partner in love and art Yulia Mahr comment on the history of the piece and this particular performance. Richter, who came up against the Classical Music establishment, finances his albums, heavy on synthesisers, like ‘Memoryhouse’ and ‘Songs from Before’ with over fifty film scores, the later being Ad Astra by director James Gray.

Richter calls SLEEP a work in the Lullaby tradition, and points to Indian music for over-night settings and the 1960ies Flux experiments. For the first seven hours, the music is mostly southing and very structural, but with the sunrise, the last hour is more vigorous, high-frequency, rather like a not so gentle alarm clock. Purple-ambient light dominates at this phase. Richter explains that SLEEP “should be seen as a piece which could work as a holiday reality from our data-saturated world”. Thus “the people sleeping are the story”. He emphasises that SLEEP “should not be listened too, but experienced, like a landscape one is in”. Which makes sort of sense, since Mahler seems to be one of the influences on Richter’s music.

Soothing and ethereal, the music brings out the best in the audience: there are back-massages and help with yoga exercises. One male member of the audience even writes a note to his partner: “Alice, I love you, and I am sorry that I am so often a shitty partner”. A French woman is rather more morbid: “Very strong, we almost felt death coming”. Overall, one has to admire the musicians, being on stage such a long time, only interrupted by a few breaks for drinks and sustenance.

DoP Elisha Christian takes much credit for her “light games”: always finding new angles to put the music into images, flitting from the sleeping audience to the panorama shots of LA. Particularly impressive are the slow transitions from night to day. Overall SLEEP is very much an elitist experience, a sort of quiet protest. Neuroscientists, who feature briefly appear, support the composer, who wants his music “to re-connect people, who have been lost in modernism”. Having said all that, with the average attention span being three minutes these days, an eight-hour experience might not be such a bad thing after all – elitist or not. AS

IN UK CINEMAS ON 11 SEPTEMBER 2020

Lovers (2020) ** Venice 2020

Dir: Nicole Garcia | Drama, France 102’

Venice Film Festival is hot to trot with a selection of eclectic new European arthouse titles but this pale rider is one of the least convincing.

All dressed up with nowhere to go Lovers looks slick and sassy enough but plays out with a passionless pipe and slippers banality despite a starry cast and Nicole Garcia’s talent to amuse as a seasoned filmmaker.

The story unfolds in three chapters in Paris, Mauritius and Geneva. Catering student Lisa (Stacy Martin) is in lust with her chef boyfriend Simon (Pierre Niney), who has a sideline in drug-pedalling to wealthy Parisians: “I’m only doing it for us” he opines, as they roll naked in their fashionably taupe sheets although the sex is pretty much lifeless.

When one of Simon’s clients dies of an overdose, the two make an escape plan, but Simon disappears leaving Lisa to marry Benoit Magimel’s stout and successful bon viveur Leo, who has a chain of luxury hotels and a penchant for vintage wine. A pregnancy is not on the menu but the couple plan to adopt “a little black one” in Mauritius. But as luck would have it Simon is still the captain of Lisa’s heart although she enjoys Leo’s money and masterfulness.

Lush locations abound in Christophe Beaucarne’s elegant visuals. The interiors are straight out of House and Garden, and you notice every detail because the love story is so tepid in comparison. Lisa pines for Simon and they can’t stop following one another, but Leo is no cowering cuckhold and eventually puts his designer clad foot down. What ensues is instantly forgettable because fail to care for these lacklustre individuals and their trivial love triangle. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2020

Conference (2020) **** Venice Film Festival 2020

Dir.: Ivan I. Tverdovskiy; Cast: Natalya Pavlenkova, Olga Lupshina, Kseniya Zueva, Alexandar Semchev; Russia/Estonia/UK/Italy 2020, 135 min.

On October 23rd 2002 850 spectators were held hostage in the Dubrovka theatre of Moscow during the performance of the musical “North-East”. 170 people lost their lived when troops stormed the auditorium. The perpetrators were aggrieved Chechnyans.

Russian writer/director Ivan I. Tverdovskiy (Zoology) reconstructs the events and explores the personal recriminations of the survivors in this impressive, but doom laden feature.

Centred around Natasha (Pavlenkova), a survivor turned nun, who returns to Moscow for the seventeenth anniversary meeting of victims’ families. We learn that she is estranged from her family: her daughter Galya (Zueva), who looks after paralysed husband Oleg (Semchev), cannot understand why her mother returns every year to open old wounds: Natasha’s thirteen-year-old son Yegor was killed in the massacre. Supported in her efforts of reconciliation and remembrance by Sveta (Lupshina) – who lost husband and daughter that night – Natasha tries to convince Galya to come to the memorial in the theatre. But her daughter leaves her with Oleg, storming angrily out of the flat, even though she would later appear at the theatre.

The ‘reconstructing’ is painful to watch: everyone has to chose an inflatable mannequin to sit next to them: white for the victims, black for the attackers and blue for the survivors who could not come on the day. They talk about the surprise attack, and how it was initially thought that the attackers, who shot at the ceiling on stage, were part of the show. Only when the first victim was shot, did the gravity of the situation set in. Aslan, the terrorists‘ spokesman, asked the audience to phone their friends and families. Later the mobiles were collected and stored outside the auditorium where a young attacker played video games and talked to the friends and relatives. Many of the hostage-takers seemed to be very young: one of the Shahidwomen even prayed with the hostages. The survivors also re-enact the arrival of the buffet-trolley, the hostage takers shared snacks and water with their victims. But they also shouted at the audience, that “you got to the theatre here, whilst we have to live with war”. After a few hours, the caretaker of the theatre wants the memorial audience to leave, but Natasha talks him out of it. The witnesses talk about resistance on the night: one man hitting a Shahid woman, and another hostage-taker shooting at him but missing, killing a young woman sitting near the aisle, who is hit in the stomach. The caretaker appears again, this time he is adamant about the closure, and switches the light in the auditorium off.

By now, Galya has joined, and she listens to her mother’s accounts of the escape on the fateful night. The hostages had to queue to go to the toilet. When Natasha’s turn came, she was with a woman who opened the window and jumped out, telling the hysterical Natasha to jump too, and stop shouting. After Natasha jumped, she knew she had made a mistake, but her legs were injured and she could not go back.

After police has ended the memorial well after midnight, the theatre manager takes back the charges, and Natasha makes a final attempt to reconcile with her daughter, only to find Oleg being loaded into an ambulance, with Galya asking for her help.

DoP Fedor Glazachev changes from panorama shots of the auditorium to intensive close-ups, showing the incredulity of the situation. Pavlenkova is brilliant, so is the ensemble acting. But Tverdovskiy goes right to the bone in this no holds barred account, and while one agrees which his approach intellectually, the end of this tour-de-force of grief, denial and guilt cannot come too soon. AS

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | Horizons 2030

Apples (2020) Curzon online

Dir: Christos Nikou | Drama Greece, 90

When it comes to films about pandemics nothing could be more serene than this lucid and gently crafted weird wave debut drama from Greek director Christos Nikou.

Not to say that Apples isn’s subversive in a charming way. The idea came to Nikou long before the coronavirus crisis and yet it perfectly captures the disarming effects of its character’s quiet meltdown. Aris (Aris Servetalis) becomes a victim of amnesia that slowly spreads through his local community and beyond.

There’s nothing of the mass hysteria experienced through the globe just recently. Here the treatment is not a vaccine but involves a series of exercises to re-build his memory. And at first Aris submits willingly the tasks under the care of his amiable medical consultant. Every single event must be dutifully recorded on a camera – visits to the cinema or shops, even amorous encounters. Everyone submits to the same regime but Aris slowly starts to object to this authoritarian situation.

There are subtle echoes of Yorgos Lanthimos here: Nikou actually trained under the director so it comes as no surprise. But the wry and slightly soporific tone makes this pleasurable to watch allowing languid time out for our own thoughts and feelings. MT

Exclusively on Curzon Home Cinema from Friday 7 May | Apples will also be available to cinemas nationwide as they reopen from lockdown closures | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | HORIZONS 2020 review

Final Account (2020)

Dir: Luke Holland Doc, UK 90’

British filmmaker Luke Holland goes the other side of the fence in this definitive documentary that plunders the memories of German Second World War veterans involved in Hitler’s Nazi regime.

Final Account is a candid film that pulls no punches in its trenchant expose of German and Austrian wartime veterans – both men and women. And although the director maintain his distance – his grandparents lost their lives in the camps; what emerges is startling and often depressing.

Blue-eyed witnesses now in their 80s and 90s reminisce over their joy and excitement at being part of the Hitler Youth Movement that allowed them to indulge in a variety of sports such as swimming and athletics that had previously been denied them during the early 1930s in Germany.

But others even ended up engaging in sports of a more gruesome nature when they decided to join in Hitler’s ethnic genocide and become direct participants in the horrors of the prison camps. What emerges is not always palatable to watch and several interviewees continue to deny the gravity of their actions in the name of their country, whether through selective amnesia or embarrassment.

Twelve years in the making and enriched by footage and photographs from the personal albums of those involved Final Account is a vital and worthwhile addition to the Holocaust canon. But the casual denial and abdication of responsibility of those who took part in the Wehrmacht, or SS, will be a bitter pill for most viewers to swallow.

Most Germans claim to have been carried along on a wave of nationalistic pride, or were ‘just obeying orders’. Others state allegiance to the Hitler’s view that German Jews were becoming too successful and clicquey. One ex SS office is honest enough to admit that he didn’t particularly care when hundreds of synagogues were burnt down on Kristallnacht in 1938. Another man, pictured in his farm, explains he didn’t hesitate to telephone the police when his Jewish neighbours tried to hide in his barn to avoid capture, bringing to mind the ‘banality of evil’. Another man remembers a childhood song about “Knives sharp enough for Jewish bellies”. He now admits to be shocked at the memory. A group of women in a care home cast their mind back to the smell of burning and black smoke billowing from a nearby furnace, while they gleefully enjoy coffee and biscuits.

These are tragic recollections superbly edited by Stefan Ronowicz in a film that never descends into sentimentality or melodrama – just a stark and sober revelation of human indifference. MT

NOW ON RELEASE

Kitoboy (The Whaler Boy) **** Venice Days 2020

Dir: Philipp Yuryev | Drama, 94′ Russia, Poland, Belgium

In a remote whaling village on the edge of the world a teenager dreams of a girl he met on the internet and sets off to find her across the vast wasteland of the Bering Strait that divides Russia from America. Kitoboy brings to mind Sarah Gavron’s 2012 feature Village at the End of the World, more ruminative and soulful in tone, but not without irony in the final reveal.

Loneliness, sexual awakening and whale hunting are given a poetic makeover in this thoughtful rites of passage drama seen through ‘whaler boy’ Leshka’s eyes. Desperate for a girlfriend and living alone with his dying father, he leads a very uneventful life out at the far edge of a male-dominated community where the longing for female companionship accentuates feelings of alienation, and wonder about the opposite sex.

The internet’s recent arrival in the village puts the young man in contact with attractive girls thousands of miles away who dance entrancingly on the screen of a constantly buffering erotic webcam chat site. Leshka can’t take his eyes off the girls as they leer and gyrate lasciviously before his tender glances. Yet he talks to them respectfully in an intimate and caring way, almost falling in love at first sight. Rather than treating these semi-porn sites as lighthearted entertainment, Leshka’s desire to find love fires a feral determination to discover the physical girl behind the camera, a journey that leads him into the real world in a bleak, boys’ own adventure where reality bites.

In his first feature film as director, award-winning Russian cinematographer Philipp Yuryev crafts a delicately unusual and visually resplendent low budget action drama about an experience that is relatable for thousands of men (and women) all over the world. The drama then turns into something unexpected and alluring with an eclectic and atmospheric soundscape that resonates and often dissonates with the film’s quirky storyline. At the same time Kitoboy connects with the narrative of surviving communities on the verge of extinction in the Russian Far North, whose cultures and customs are evocatively brought into focus in this stark but richly satisfying feature. MT

VENICE DAYS 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE from 7th September 2020

Undergods (2019) Bfi Player

Dir Chino Moya | Fantasy drama

A murky home invasion thriller echoing Harry He’s Here to Help is one of the dread-drenched mini-dramas interlocking this dystopian deep dive into dysfunction from award-winning Spanish-born filmmaker Chino Moya.

Screening at Fantasia Festival 2020 the film is set in a post apocalyptic urban industrial wasteland that looks like Belgium or Northern France (recalling that title sequence from Andrei Zvyagintsev’s The Banishment). Undergods is long on atmosphere, rather short on surprises, deftly reworking well-worn themes of alienation, loneliness and paranoia in suspense-laden mood piece that feels relevant yet surreal. It certainly packs a spooky punch, recommended watching for those twilight hours. MT

NOW ON BFI Player Premiered at FANTASIA FESTIVAL | Montreal Canada

Les Miserables (2019) ***

Dir: Ladj Ly | Cast: Damien Bonnard, Alexis Manenti, Djebril Donga, Issa Perica | Crime Drama, France 104′

Nobody is a winner in this incendiary urban thriller that turns on a good cop bad cop premise as violence erupts in the multicultural melting pot that is Les Bosquets in the backstreets of Montfermeil to the east of Paris.

As the title suggests these are grim times. First time director Ladj Ly, who has himself had a brush with the law knows, the territory well. His high octane movie opens with an ecstatically joyful pre-credit sequence and builds to a cataclysmic crescendo that will leave you deflated and down in the dumps at the depravity and disillusionment of our times, admittedly no worse that those of Victor Hugo whose 1862 novel Les Miserables captured a similar time in the early part of the 19th century when the June Rebellion caused violence in the French capital. We are left with the realisation that are no answers. And that makes this a depressing watch.

The film kicks off in jocular mood as two hard-nosed local cops Chris (Alexis Manenti, who co-wrote the script) and Gwada (Djibriare Zonga) shoot the breeze with their new colleague from the provinces Stéphane (Damien Bonnard), and their boss (Jeanne Balibar in witty form). But soon the fraught intricacies of this urban terroir are exposed, along with the ethnic divisions governed by the key figures in a locale where policing has become just another dirty word on the streets. Chris has linked in with his own strategic network, a local, nicknamed “The Mayor” (Steve Tientcheu), who acts as a police go-between. Another ‘neutral’ authority figure is Salah (Almamy Kanouté), a reformed jihadi who has been busy converting people to Islam.

The action is sparked off by Issa (playing himself) a young tearaway who has stolen a lion cub from a gypsy travelling circus. The cop trio must cruise the streets and gather ‘intel’ from their informants in order to recover the animal. But the situation soon escalates after the police are ambushed as they chase their suspect through the playing fields, one of them ‘accidentally’ firing a ‘flashball gun’ that injures Issa. What’s worse is that the incident is being filmed by a drone, spelling disaster for Chris and his colleagues.

Amid the simmering violent ambience, Stéphane soon emerges as the ‘good cop’ and is determined to hold his colleagues to task: they often resort to what they consider ‘necessary’ tactics, and there are times when you actually root for them given the complexities of the task at hand in this understandably lawless environment. The paucity of influential female characters makes this a very macho affair which works best in the scenes where livid anger, resentment and retribution sizzle below the surface. The mayhem that erupts in the finale – though cathartic for Ly himself – feels overblown, destabilising the subtle human stories at the tragedy’s core that are worthy of a more thorough and satisfying exploration. But Ly opts for full-on mayhem and melodrama. And these brilliantly executed crowd-pleasing moments will have appeal for those who identify with the young reprobate Issa. Les Miserables is France’s entry to next year’s Academy Awards. MT

IN UK and IRISH CINEMAS | 4 SEPTEMBER 2020

Buster Keaton | Blu-ray (1923-1927) ****

The celebration of Buster Keaton on Blu Ray continues with Eureka’s three film package of Our Hospitality, Go West and College. These features have been lovingly restored from the best film elements available. If you own their previous Keaton issues then this set is self-recommending.

I’ll begin with a masterpiece, Our Hospitality (1923). In this wonderfully charming and tender film (above) we have Keaton successfully integrating amusing set pieces (not merely clever gags) with a dramatically involving story. A family feud, with murderous consequences, is an old idea, ripe for comic exploitation: suspense being created in order to ward of bloodshed. Not only does Keaton achieve his reconciliation, through a brilliant inventiveness and tour de force timing, but films Our Hospitality‘s story, of the McKay’s v the Canfields, against the backcloth of a lyrically realised 1830s American South.

The film’s period charm is enhanced by sequences featuring a Stevenson’s Rocket train complete with stagecoach carriages. Like Keaton’s The General a train becomes a quirky character in its own right: watching it bravely travel over a rocky terrain proves irresistible. Two very funny incidents involve the shifting of the track to accommodate a wilful donkey, and the moment an old man pelts the train driver with stones, so that logs of wood are then thrown back and collected by the villager to be used as firewood. Halcyon days they maybe but vulnerable to interruptions.

In order to survive Keaton mustn’t leave the house – the Canfield’s code of Southern hospitality says they will not kill a McKay whilst indoors. At one point Keaton has to dress like a woman, run out the building and create a decoy by dressing a horse in his discarded clothes. A superbly paced comic rythm is established as McKay desperately flits in and out of the Canfield home and although guns are fired a lot in the film no one gets injured.

At the end when peace is achieved and the Canfield’s lay down their pistols, it turns out the victimised McKay was carrying an armoury far bigger than their own. Keaton’s most dangerous moment actually occurs attempting to rescue the Canfield’s daughter (played by Natalie Talmadge, Keaton’s wife) from rapids flowing into a waterfall. Keaton does it with such poetic skill – and not a stunt man on the set!

Although Go West (1925) never achieves the sublimity of Our Hospitality this is a lovely film: captivating, surreal and even flirting with sentimentality. That last objective is much more Chaplin than Keaton territory – David Robinson (Chaplin’s great biographer) noted that Keaton’s friendship with a steer named Browneyes, recalls the tramp and flower girl affection in City Lights. “Do you need any Cowboys today?” asks the forlorn New Yorker named Friendless (Keaton) to the ranch owner. A classic inter-title question that gets him the job. Of course the city slicker does everything wrong but finds consolation with Browneyes.

Apparently Keaton was disappointed with the film because he couldn’t get the cows to stampede through the town fast enough in the final scenes. Keaton does manage to evoke both their docility and action to splendid surreal effect. I love how the steer stroll into department stores, lumber into a barbers and agitate the local police force. And I can’t help thinking that Bunuel’s L’Age d’Or (with its dead donkeys over a piano) wasn’t influenced by Keaton’s Go West. Bunuel’s on record as adoring Keaton’s filmmaking. Of Keaton’s expression he said it was “as unpretentious as a bottle.’

Of course the clown-bottle genius never smiled. In College (1927) Keaton puts himself through so much physical effort trying to prove his athletic prowess to the students (and his girl) that you almost want him to break into the relief of smiling: then as a boatswain he eventually triumphs – the irony of the film is that in reality Keaton was arguably the most athletic of the silent comedians.

College has some excellent gags and as in Our Hospitality and Go West Keaton is revealed as a master of framing and deployment of space. However the film doesn’t have a coherent structure, being more a succession of incidents that are deftly, but routinely orchestrated. A very different but more rewarding college silent movie is Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman. Lloyd’s breezy personality is more at home in this
material.

I could have reviewed this entertaining boxset just by describing in great detail the wealth of gags. But words would fail me. Here we have a genius on the road to perfection; Keaton’s first fully fledged expression of greatness. With his deep impassive countenance, Keaton orchestrates his antics while remaining acutely aware of his commanding presence as the world implodes around him, knowing that, philosophically at least, he will always rise stoically above every threat and misfortune. ALAN PRICE 2020.

NOW ON BLURAY COURTESY OF EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA

She Dies Tomorrow (2019) Bfi Player

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOW ON BFI PLAYER

Tenet (2020) ****

Dir/Wri: Christopher Nolan | John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Kenneth Branagh | Action Adventure Sci-fi | 150′

Missing a dose of international travel this Summer? Bold, bewildering and brilliantly spectacular, Tenet takes you to the most glamorous corners of Europe and beyond in an action-packed peripatetic two and a half hours that will make a dash for the nearest airport tempting, quarantine or not.

Attention spans may flag in the final hour where the complex narrative trips itself over, ambitiously conflating an over-demanding Sci-fi idea with a slick action-packed espionage thriller: The former detracts from the latter, enjoyment-wise. But overall Tenet is up there with the best of the Bond films, and this time ‘James Bond’ is played by John David Washington.

Nolan has always loved the notion of time: Memento, Interstellar and Dunkirk have played about with the concept. Tenet does the same. This is not a film about time-travel, but a complicated idea about replaying the past that is actually the film’s Achilles heel. And although this is constantly explained from one character to another, by the end nobody really gets the bullets that go backwards – back in time that is – and the “technology that can reverse an object’s entropy” – according to Clemence Poesie’s tight-lipped scientist in the films opening scenes. Car chases and combat scenes are played backwards in discombobulating ferociousness. So best to sit back and enjoy the astonishing scenery and set pieces and the charisma of Pattinson, Debicki and Branagh, who is so vicious as her husband – a misogynist Russian gangster – he almost makes you want to laugh out loud at the absurdity of it all.

There a some astonishing sequences thanks to DoP Hoyte Van Hoytema (who was Oscar nominated for Dunkirk): after an astonishing siege at the Kiev Opera House, Pattinson and Washington (‘The Protagonist’) scale the front of a vertiginous apartment building in Mumbai; he then joins Debicki and Branagh for an electrifying chase in a high speed catamaran, all driven along by Göransson’s pounding sound design. There are brutal fight sequences involving meat tenderisers and cheese graters, and an amusing finale where Debicki wreaks revenge on her control freak husband on the deck of his luxury yacht moored off the coast of Vietnam. It’s all very bold but believable.

The cast is superlative: you can’t take your eyes off Robert Pattinson’s tousled-haired, linen-suited Neil who has an edgy glamour suggestive of a foxy foreign correspondent in some Mediterranean backwater. He also does action man well, having honed his body since the Twilight years. Washington is all muscled, melodious-voiced and masterful, never hinting at anything but well-intentioned professionalism. Kenneth Branagh comes late to the party, but is well worth waiting for as the hard-nosed arms trader Andrei. “How would you like to die”: he snarls at Washington “of old age” — comes the casual reply.

Clearly Nolan has spent a great deal of time thinking through his premise, it’s a shame then that nobody seems to understand how it all fits together, least of all the audience (ideas – on a postcard, are welcome). But the espionage element is thoroughly enjoyable, along with the serrated-edge love hate romance that sees Debicki as a vodka slurping virago one minute, and an Hermes-clad mummy the next.

In this first big cinema blockbuster post lockdown, Tenet once again shows Christopher Nolan at the top of his game when it comes to high octane thrills and magnificent mise en scene. Sorry Netflix, you’ve had your moment – the big screen is where cinema is and always will be. MT

IN CINEMAS FROM 26 AUGUST 2020 NATIONWIDE

Hope Gap (2019) **

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

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

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

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

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

NOW ON RELEASE FROM 28 AUGUST 2020

Coup 53 (2019) joins the Rotten Tomatoes 100 percent club

Dir.: Taghi Amirani, Documentary; UK/USA/Iran 2019, 118 min.

Director/co-writer Taghi Amirani (Red Lines and Deadlines) fled Iran as a teenager and brings his life experience to bear in this detailed examination of the British/American coup of 1953, which brought down the government of the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minster Mohamad Mosaddegh (1882-1967).

With the help of editor Walter Murch (Godfather), who is credited as co-writer, Amirani has plunged the archives to piece together the events of August 1953 which still reverberate not only in the region but all over the world.

The suggestion that Mosaddegh was a communist was not far from the truth. And the British and American propagandists certainly concurred with this line of thinking. Apart from being a staunch nationalist, Mosaddegh was a member of the royal Qajar dynasty, a much older Institution than that of his opponent Shah Mohammed Raza Pahlavi, whose father had forcefully overthrown the Qajar dynasty in 1925. In the eyes of Prime Minister Mosaddegh, Shah Raza, of the house of Pahlavi, was an upstart. Mosaddegh had studied law in Europe and went on to nationalise the oil industry which was run by the Anglo-Iranian Oil company (AIOC) back in 1951.

News reels show the company’s tearful British employees leaving Iran. In reality, Mosaddegh had asked them to stay. But Britain and the USA did not want a functioning oil industry run by Iran: they organised a world-wide boycott of Iranian oil on the world market. When this plan did not work out, British Prime Minister Churchill and US president Eisenhower met in 1953 and decided to get rid of Mosaddegh during a coup. Organised by CIA chief Allen Dulles (brother of US foreign minister John Foster), and executed on the ground by Kermit Roosevelt (grandson of President T. Roosevelt) and Britain’s Norman Darbyshire, chief of the Iranian branch of MI6, the so-called operation Ajax was not always plain sailing. Only after Tehran’s police chief Mahmoud Afshartous, a staunch supporter of the Prime Minister, was abducted, tortured and murdered by General and Prime Minister Fazlollah Zahedi, did the coup look like succeeding.

One reason for the remaining question marks lay with Shah Mohammad Raza Pahlavi himself. He had fled the country and retreated to a luxury hotel in Rome with his wife Soraya, and continued to live his previous life of privilege, albeit in exile. His twin sister, Princess Ashhraf, was much more wily and helped the plotters actively. It was Kermit Roosevelt who made the difference in the end: he organised a “spontaneous” popular uprising against the Prime Minister, paying just 60 thousand US dollars for his rented mob. Mosaddegh was put on trial and ended his life alone under house arrest and in solitary confinement for the last fourteen years of his life.

There is a particular British transcript to the affair: In 1985 a TV production of End of the Empire interviewed some participants of the 1953 Coup, among them Norman Darbyshire, who, according to the transcript of the interview, was very open about his contribution. But he never appears in the finished documentary. The quotes used for the interview were neatly cut out and seemed lost – before an anonymous person sent the missing lines of Darbyshire’s interview to the Observer. Amirani landed his own coup, letting Ralph Fiennes read the incriminating sections.

Coup 53 allows us to imagine what could have happened in the region if democracy in Iran had been allowed to flourish. Today we are still confronted with the clerical-fascist Islamist regime of Iran – belated vengeance for the Coup for oil. AS

REAL-LIFE THRILLER COUP 53 JOINS THE 100% CLUB ON ROTTEN TOMATOES

NOW ON DIGITAL RELEASE | LONDON FILM FESTIVAL review 2019

Five Graves to Cairo (1943) **** Bluray release

Dir: Billy Wilder | Cast: Eric von Stroheim, Franchot Tone, Anne Baxter, Akim Timaroff, Peter van Eyck, Fortunio Bonanova | US War thriller 96′

Before he made one of the most lauded film noirs ever committed to celluloid Double Indemnity Billy Wilder directed this gutsy Second World War espionage thriller that froths with energy despite its rather stagey confines of a chamber-piece. He had only been in Hollywood for a decade but Five Graves proves that Wilder and screenwriter Charles Brackett—who would collaborate on thirteen films, winning screenplay Oscars for The Lost Weekend and Sunset Boulevard—were already at the top of their game having cut their teeth together on a star-studded comedy The Major and the Minor with Ray Milland and Ginger Rogers, the previous year.

Enjoying an equally strong cast of Franchot Tone, Anne Baxter and Eric von Stroheim (who gets some of the best lines, including the fiendishly misogynist: “I don’t like women in the morning, go away”) the thriller is based on a play by Hungarian writer Lajos Biro, and retains a slightly claustrophobic feel despite the stylish camerawork of Oscar nominee John F Seitz who creates evocative shadow-play within the confines of the hostelry and inthe wonderful opening desert scenes (filmed in Arizona) recalling those velvety sand dunes in Laurence of Arabia.

The plot is an engaging one. Tone is British Corporal Bramble, the only survivor in his unit after a battle with Rommel’s soldiers in North Africa. After falling from his tank and staggering to the isolated Empress of Britain hotel, he is offered sanctuary by owner Farid (Akim Tamiroff) and his French employee Mouche (Anne Baxter). But Eric von Stroheim’s Rommel soon fetches up crunching on a cigar and shooting the cuffs of his elegant desert rig-out (designed by Edith Head who really goes to town on the costumes). He soon commandeers the hotel in an extraordinary performance and claims it as the new quarters for his Nazi sidekicks. Meanwhile Bramble is back-footedly forced to assume the identity of a recently killed waiter. It soon emerges that this waiter was also serving as a German spy, a role Bramble now has to adopt for his own survival. And while Mouche knows Bramble’s true identity, she has her own reasons for not wanting to aid and abet him as they survive in close quarters in this nest of wartime vipers.

Named by Quentin Tarantino as one of his favourite films, Wilder enriches the minimal action scenes with archive war footage and explanatory inter-titles. The interior scenes dice between light-hearted wittiness and sinuous tension as the disparate group of characters are huddled up hiding their own secrets and ulterior motives. The director would soon become one of Hollywood’s most lauded talents, but his genius was clearly evident in this early work.

Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present the film in its UK debut on Blu-ray from a new 4K restoration

https://youtu.be/rmrE1FHUyjY

Ava (2019) ****

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

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

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

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

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

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

OUT ON 21 AUGUST 2020 | BFI PLAYER

Away (2019) ****

Dir: Gints Zilbalodis | Animation, Latvia, 74′

‘Staying Alive’ is how best to describe this symbolic and gorgeously fluid ‘boys own’ adventure from Latvian animation wizard Gints Zilbalodis.

The tousled-haired, wide-eyed teenager lands by parachute on a lush and mysterious island and has to find his way across often perilous landscape to reach sanctuary using an old-fashioned motorbike. Amongst the creatures he encounters are a flock of white birds, a large tortoise and his family and a pack of black cats who guard a powerful geyser that shoots out of a deep circular crevice, a grassy metaphor for Dante’s Inferno.

Although Away lulls us into a hypnotic sense of tranquility there is always the unsettling presence of the shape-shifter to keep us alert to danger and we start to feel for this unknown boy and his little bird, and indeed the tortoise, who at one point slivers down a snowy slope and on to its back, our hero coming to its rescue in one of many random acts of thoughtfulness. A beguiling and magical first feature. MT

https://youtu.be/B-2xxKAPssk

AWAY OPENS IN UK AND IRISH CINEMAS from 28 AUGUST 2020

Wonders in the Suburbs | Merveilles a Montfermeil (2019) **

Wri/Dir: Jeanne Balibar | Cast: Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Beart, Ramzy Bedia, Bulle Ogier | Comedy | France, 109′

Seasoned actress turned Jean Balibar first satirised France in Par Example, Electre, starring and directing alongside Pierre Leon. Six years later her stylish but structureless solo attempt at anarchic comedy is far from wonderful but certainly colourful. Shot on location in the Parisian suburbs of Seine St. Denis and Montfermeil, it features over seventy locals and a star-studded cast, but sinks under the weight of conflicting ideas.

Kamel Mrabti (Bedia) and his wife Joëlle (Balibar) are a divorcing couple at the centre of the unfolding political farce. As active members of a new task force they are working to revitalise the locale with some exciting ideas, and although their marriage is over and new lovers have already entered the fray, the two must support their latest mayor Emmanuelle Joly (a fine Beart) in implementing a set of initiatives that include the new Montfermeil International School of Languages with the teaching 62 local languages; the ‘slowing of urban rhythms’; the introduction of a ‘Nap programme’; and social support for sexual satisfaction.

Marijuana is not only legalised under this new regime, it’s actually provided by the council, along with fresh vegetables. Naturally this is all very New Age and exciting. But behind the scenes chaos rules: the Mayor is losing it slowly, undermined but a more senior government official, and Kamel is suspected of being in league with Paris – the big enemy of devolution. Meanwhile, Joly’s secretary is learning Mandinka to keep up with her Malian lover, and the Army is lurking in the woods nearby, ready to strike.

DoP Andre Chemotoff’s visuals vamp up the histrionic mayhem in a production that looks slick and very professional. And although Amalric, Beart and Balibar shine in the leading roles they can’t rescue Balibar’s rather flawed script: breaking eggs on a sculpture of President Macon is, like the whole affair, not particularly original or impressive. MT

NOW ON MUBI | LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 7-17 AUGUST 2019

Babyteeth (2019) *** 2019

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

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

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

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

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

Horse Money (2014) |Best Director | Locarno 2014 | Bluray Release

Dir/Wri: Pedro Costa | Cast: Ventura, Vitalina Varela, Tito Furtado
Portugal Drama 104mins

Drenched in profoundly mannered grief, Pedro Costa’s tortuously paced HORSE MONEY (CAVALO DINHEIRO) is a magnificent monument and/or an egregious folly, demonstrating the Portuguese director’s expertise in arresting compositions as well as the decidedly acquired taste of his opaque minimalism. Starring Costa’s regular protagonist Ventura, a charismatically stalwart, mononymic Cape Verdian, the film won Best Director at LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL’s 67th edition and is now playing in the Journey Through History strand at this year’s celebration (viewable online via MUBI).

Though German Expressionism might be an unlikely source of inspiration for Costa, there’s more than a touch of Robert Weine’s THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (1919) about his latest feature, which before anything else seems to entrap its listless characters in harsh quadrants of chiaroscuro lighting, with ominously shadowy depths encroaching from the extreme edges of frame. Cinematographer Leonardo Simões employs wide-angled lenses and canting horizons to distort the film’s claustrophobic interiors into a nightmarish grid of dilapidating geometry. It’s as if the very axes of the earth shifted a long time ago—and people are only now adjusting.

Also like CALIGARI, HORSE MONEY is set for large portions of its narrative in a medical centre, unfolding as a succession of dreamily purgatorial fragments that suggest a kind of hallucinatory hotchpotch of somnambulant trauma. Ventura is one of only a few patients left at this half-abandoned outpost, being treated for a nervous disease after being badly beaten by soldiers sent in to displace him and others from the Cape Verde settlement of Fontainhas decades previously (forgoing traditional drama, Costa presumably assumes his audience is familiar with the real-life history so obliquely referenced here). Claiming he’s 19 years and 3 months old, Ventura may or may not be a reliable narrator: one consequence of state violence is, apparently, the aggressive onset of senility—which of course benefits a state eager to bury its colonial guilt.

Our visibly shaken hero is visited by ghosts from rosier pasts. This circle of displaced pals posthumously places its trust in Ventura to unshackle memories and preserve the truth. Chief among such friends is Vitalina, a benumbed widow who speaks only in a monotonously stately whisper—as if wary of disturbing sleeping dogs from their slumber. In a concluding sequence, Ventura is confronted by long-suppressed horrors in an elevator—a space he shares with a street performer-like ‘human statue’ dressed as a soldier from the Revolutionary Army. Large parts of this scene arrive intact from ‘Sweet Exorcism’, Costa’s largely insufferable contribution to the typically uneven portmanteau project CENTRO HISTORICO (2012). At least on this occasion we’re given a little more context.

Like the elevator itself, the film as a whole seems reluctant to move forward: though Ventura is eventually discharged from the facility, his mental wounds don’t appear to be healed. In fact, stasis is one of the film’s visual strengths: it opens stunningly, with a series of Jacob Riis photographs. Hereafter, Costa repeatedly shows himself as a potential master of still photography, having his performers pose motionless within absorbingly framed scenarios. Moments such as that in which Ventura walks along a road in his red underpants only to be stopped at a crossroads by armed soldiers and a tank, for example, have such a potency and urgency about them that one can’t help but wonder if the director’s thematic aims would be better served by a stills exhibition.

Until then, we’ll endure these glacial temporalities the Lisboan dares to impose upon us. In passing, we’ll merely note that challenging, politicised cinema doesn’t need to be a challenge to sit through. But at least this pertains to somebody’s idea of a worthwhile artistic experience—which, for any artist wanting to do things her or his own way, is sometimes enough. MICHAEL PATTISON

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2020 | A JOURNEY Reviewed at LOCARNO

Stranger than Paradise (1984) **** Locarno Film Festival 2020

Dir.: Jim Jarmusch; Cast: John Lurie, Eszter Balint, Richard Edson, Cecillia Stark; USA 1984, 89 min.

Writer/director Jim Jarmush (*1953) developed his first feature film Stranger than Paradise from an earlier short film project from 1982. It won the Golden Leopard at LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL where it is currently playing in the A Journey Through History strand for the 2020 special edition. It also won the Golden Camera for best first feature at Cannes in 1984 and put Jarmusch on the map of the Indie movement of that era – which also included Aki Kaurismäki, who, known for his lack of lack of dramatic highlights, called Jarmusch “the slowest filmmaker on the planet”. A compliment indeed.

Willie (Lurie) lives the contented life of a full-time loafer in his dilapidated NY bolt-hole. Now and again he meets Eddie (Edson), his soul mate, who shares in Willie’s main ‘activities’: watching American Football and eating junk food, a leisurely existence. Then a tornado hits their idyll: Willie’s cousin Eva (Balint) arrives in the Big Apple on a stopover to Cleveland, where she will visit auntie Lotte (Stark). Whilst Eddie is taken by the charm of their intruder, Willie mostly ignores her, even leaving her out of the cinema visits. But Eva is soon gone, and the ugly flower dress given her by Willie, and thrown into the trash, is all that remains of her.

Eddie and Willie stay on unperturbed, making a living from cheating at poker. After a lucky run, they decide to take an old Dodge for the journey to Cleveland. Auntie Lotte is, in contrast to our duo, hyperactive, and talks non-stop in her Hungarian mother tongue. Willie and Eddie don’t give up in their attempt to impress Eva: taking her to Florida with the intention of enjoying night life and beaches. But neither materialises, and life continues in the same vein as in New York. No beach or highlife, just tedium and cigarettes. Until fate takes over.

Unlike his characters, Jarmusch keeps everything under tight control, using only first takes, his episodic scenes often divided by a black screen and the laconic black-and-white images of Tom DeCillo (who would later direct Living in Oblivion). The original sound heightens the intimacy: we are in the same room as the protagonists, who speak in sound bites, nobody making too much of an effort. This is minimalism in its purest form. John Lurie’s score creates just the right atmosphere for this modern version of ‘Waiting for Godot’. AS

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2020 | A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY

Germany Year Zero (1948) Mubi

Dir. Roberto Rossellini; Writers: Roberto Rossellini, Carlo Lizzani, Sergio Amidei | Cast: Edmund Meschke, Ingetraud Hinze, Ernst Pittschau, Franz- Otto Krüger, Erich Gühne; Germany/Italy/France 1948, 78 min.

Rossellini’s neorealist gem scooped the Grand Prix and Award for Best Original Screenplay at Locarno Film Festival I 1948, completing his war trilogy that started with Rome Open City (1945) and Paisà (1946). Filming kicked off in Berlin in August 1947, and when it came to the interior scenes in Rome later in that autumn, the cast of non-professional actors had to be put on a crash diet as they all looked too well to confer the privations of famine and war. Unlike the two first parts of this trilogy, Germany was shot with back projections of the ruined Berlin. Some critics, amongst them Andre Bazin, considered this step backwards even though the film was generally met with acclaim.

Germany mines the dramatic potential of the post war crisis while avoiding melodrama. It’s a harrowing watch, and we feel for Edmund in the same way as we did for Umberto D in De Sica’s story of survival, several years later. It follows the Köhler family in bombed out Berlin with a focus on twelve-year old Edmund (Meschke) whose father (Pittau) is seriously ill. His older brother Karl Heinz (Krüger) is in hiding, fearful of being arrested for war crimes, and his sister Eva (Hinze) has a hard time keeping the family afloat, Karl Heinz living illegally in their household, without even a ration card. Eva scratches by on a shoestring, managing to avoid prostitution as a means to an end, unlike so many women of that time. Edmund is too young for gainful employment, so child labour is his only option – with limited success.

One day on his way through the bombed city, Edmund meets his old teacher Henning (Gühne) who is still very much a Nazi in his ideology, making use of local kids to work the Black Market with his old Nazi chums. Henning suggests that Edmund kills his father “because only the strong deserve to survive”. Edmund does as he is told and poisons his father, but Henning, afraid that he might be prosecuted, refuses to have any more dealings with the boy and Edmund goes back on the breadline desperate, and now also rejected by his football-playing peers. He watches his father’s body being removed from their house, from a ruined rooftop. But when his sister calls out for him, tragedy ensues.

Rossellini seems to get more and more forgotten in the canon of neorealist directors, but his themes are just as relevant as they ever were, and his style evokes the “pity of war”, as English First World War poet Wilfred Owen put it: “the poetry is in the pity”. French critic Gilles Deleuze echoed this sentiment, just after the Iraq War: ” It seems an apt time to be screening a film such as Roberto Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero as the war in Iraq draws to a close and disputes over the post-war management of the nation take on a disturbing shape. Centring on the experiences of a young German boy wandering the streets of Berlin after Allied liberation, Germany Year Zero escorts us about a city excavated by bombs and missiles – a city constituted almost entirely of rubble. Watching Germany Year Zero while images of Baghdad relentlessly penetrate my living room, I cannot shake off the uneasy feeling that in the ruins of one city I see ghosts of the rubble of the other”.

NOW ON MUBI AND PRIME VIDEO

The Ninth Gate (1999) Prime video

Dir: Roman Polanski | Cast: Johnny Depp, Frank Langella, Lena Olin, Emmanuelle Seigner, Barbara Jefford | DoP: Darius Khondji | Wri: Roman Polanski, John Brownjohn, Enrique Urbizu | 133mins Horror Thriller

A book collector pops his clogs – quite literally – during the title sequence of this amusingly sardonic thriller starring Johnny Depp as Dean Corso, a shady book dealer hired to locate the last remaining copies of a demonic manuscript purportedly written to raise the Devil.

Perfectly indulging Polanski’s penchant for the macabre, the idea was taken from ‘El Club Dumas’ a novel by Spanish writer Arturo Perez-Reverte, and is one of five horror films the maverick filmmaker has made so far in his eclectic career.

Wojciech Kilar (The Pianist) conjures up an atmosphere of sinuous evil with pristine camerawork from Darius Khondji (Funny Games), Polanski once again surrounding himself with the crème de la crème to create an enjoyably unsettling foray into a world of conspiracy, murder and satanic ritual.

The Ninth Gate (which gets its title from a fictional work ‘The Nine Gates Of the Kingdom of The Shadows’ (1666) by Aristide Torcia) was not well received critically, despite a well-judged turn from Depp as a tough and noirishly scuzzy lead who is soon joined by a foxy and sinister sidekick in the shape of Emmanuelle Seigner, who follows him around in an anorak in similar mode to her Mimi from Bitter Moon (1992). But the film did pave the way for The Pianist (2002) which was greeted as a much-awaited return to ‘form’ and won his an Oscar for Best Director.

Judge for yourself. Ninth Gate is a good-looking, globe-trotting tale of intrigue with Hitchcockian overtones that unspools in a shadowy New York and travels to the more edgy corners of fading 20th century Europe (Sintra, Toledo and Cathar France) involving a range of seedy characters – and it’s the performances that really make this worthwhile. It then wanders down a rather absurdist plotline until a denouement which strangely echoes Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999). In The Ninth Gate Polanski blends style and technical finesse with the playful nonchalance of a director who has already done it all and can afford to have some fun with this outlandish but engaging tale. MT

THE NINTH GATE IS ON PRIME VIDEO

The Man Who Laughs (1928) **** Bluray release

Dir Paul Leni | Silent Drama, 100′

This visually remarkable late silent film is an adaptation of a French novel (by Victor Hugo) within an English setting, directed by a German filmmaker (Paul Leni) in an American studio. By the end of the 1980s critics were complaining that cultural identity in Trans-euro pudding films was neither one thing nor the other. Yet in 1928 the ingredients were well-baked: The Man who Laughs is no flat hybrid, but a splendidly risen cake. And the icing on top is the charismatic actor Conrad Veidt.

England in the 1680s and King James II has had his political enemy Lord Clancharlie killed. His son Gwynplaine is disfigured by Dr. Hardquannone who works as a comprachico (a dealer in mutilated children intended to play fools or dwarfs at Court.) The grown-up Gwynplaine (Conrad Veidt) now has a permanent fixed grin, due to his disfigurement, and is reduced to working as a clown in a freak show carnival. He falls in love with a blind actress named Dea (Mary Philbin.) Meanwhile, a jester at the Court of Queen Anne, ‘discovers’ Gwynplaine and reveals his royal lineage and inheritance. Yet the estate is now owned by a seductive vamp, the despised Duchess Josiana (Olga V. Baklanova.). And when Gwynplaine is bought to Court, emotional and political turmoil ensues.

First, let’s get one thing out of the way. The Man Who Laughs is today seen as an influence on the Joker character in the Batman comics and movies. However, the only resemblance between Conrad Veidt and all the actors who’ve played The Joker, is the fixity of that grotesque grin. Unlike Batman’s adversary Veidt’s Gwynplaine is not malicious and wears no pronounced makeup: in other words the two characters have nothing in common with each other.

Conrad Veidt uses his hypnotic eyes to convey a complex personality that both attracts and repels women. Veidt was a highly intelligent and subtle actor: throughout The Man Who Laughs he evokes the anguish and joy of Gwynplane’s thoughts – his performance is an master class in how the eyes can be used to express deep emotion. Writer Daniella Sannwald cleverly puts this into words in an extract from The Oxford History of World Cinema:

‘Veidt’s face reveals much of the inner life of his characters. The play of muscles beneath the taut skin, the lips pressed together, a vein on his temple visibly protruding, nostrils flaring in concentration and self discipline. These physical aspects characterise the artists, sovereigns and strangers of the German silent film…’

Of course, no film is solely the landscape of a great actor’s face. The design and spatial excitement of Paul Leni’s film, a German silent tradition enriching American silent cinema (often as lyrical as Murnau’s Sunrise), is considerably enhanced by his spry and stylish direction. The Southwark fair scenes; the chase at the London harbour and the episodes at Court are full of exciting mobile camerawork and editing.

The Man Who Laughs is more of a tender love story than a horror film. Veidt’s scenes with Mary Philbin (the heroine of the silent The Phantom of the Opera) are genuinely touching and steer well clear of sentimentality. Their romance is unconsummated yet charged with erotic tension– how far does Gwynplaine want to go in the relationship? He is terrified that Dea might just possibly regain her sight and then see how strange he looks.

Gwynplaine’s frustration is put to the test in a deliciously sexy scene where Duchess Josiana (perversely attracted to Gwynplaine’s grin) attempts to seduce him. Here Conrad Veidt’s placing of a face cloth over his lips is in order to resist temptation. Whereas when with Dea, he does it to hide his shame. Olga V.Baklanova really lets rip, giving a glowingly photographed scene much sexual animalism. There are even some earlier nude-back scenes of her emerging from a bath, risqué for 1928, or maybe not given what Eric Von Stroheim was up to in his 1928/29 Queen Kelly.)

Of course the film changes Victor Hugo’s ending. Best not to divulge, and it really doesn’t matter, for it perfectly suits the fate of the two romantic leads (who we really care for.) My one complaint about The Man who Laughs is the over-use of a faithful dog with the obvious name of Homo the Wolf, played by a dog called Zimbo: it’s a case of a canine melodramatic over-drive.

But the case for Paul Leni’s film (for me his greatest) doesn’t need to be argued, just experienced. And in this beautiful restoration from a 4k source I was enthralled by the passion of The Man Who Laughs. ALAN PRICE©2020

OUT ON BLU-RAY COURTESY OF MASTERS OF CINEMA ON 17 AUGUST 2020

Perfumes (2019) ***

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

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

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

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

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

Metropolitan (1990) **** Locarno Film Festival 2020

Dir: Whit Stilman | US Drama 98′

Whit Stilman’s first stab at social satire feels very dated to the modern gaze, yet thirty years ago it much have been ground-breaking with its acerbic insightfulness and lowkey wit the American director making some valid points about class; the workplace and feminism in a preppie Manhattan of the at turn of the 1990s that are still hold true today and Metropolitan set the tone for his brilliant career as a comedy satirist that still continues today with his finely-tooled scriptwriting.

Cinematically uninviting this modern day take on F Scott Fitzgerald takes place in upmarket apartments belonging to a coterie of upper class Manhattanites (the “urban haute bourgeoisie” party circuit).. And it was a masterly debut -convincingly characterised, well-paced and gracefully performed by a cast of new-comers who manage a mannered style with aplomb. He has honed his talent for wit and repartee in the films he has made subsequently: Barcelona, The Last Days of Disco, Damsels in Distress and (particularly) Love & Friendship so let’s hope his upcoming outing Dancing Mood continues the trend.

Metropolitan revolves around timid debutante Audrey (Carolyn Farina) and her love interest falls Tom Townsend (Edward Clements) – who isn’t quite up to her social standing – although she falls for him and their romance provides the dramatic heft of what is essentially a polite chamber piece and won Stilman the Silver Leopard at LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 1990. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2020 | A JOURNEY IN HISTORY

Venice Film Festival 2020

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

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

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

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

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

Competition

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

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

Quo Vadis, Aida? | Dir. Jasmila Zbanic

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

The Disciple (India) | Dir. Chaitanya Tamhane

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

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

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

Padrenostro (It) | Dir. Claudio Noce

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

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

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

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

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

Sun Children (Iran) | Dir. Majid Majidi

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

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

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

Dear Comrades (Rus) | Dir. Andrey Konchalovsky

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

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

Lovers (Fr) | Dir. Nicole Garcia

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

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

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

The World To Come (US) | Dir. Mona Fastvold

Physical and emotional privation gives rise to a surprising love story in Norwegian filmmaker Mona Fastvold’s drama set in an US East Coast frontier town during the 1850s.

Le Sorelle Macaluso (It) | Dir. Emma Dante

In Between Dying (Az-US) | Dir. Hilal Baydarov

Out Of Competition – Drama

Lacci (It) – Opening Film | Dir. Daniele Luchetti

Mosquito State (Pol) | Dir. Filip Jan Rymsza

Night In Paradise (S Kor) | Dir. Park Hoon-Jung

The Duke (UK) | Dir. Roger Michell

Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren lead a cast of Fionn Whitehead, Matthew Goode, Anna Maxwell Martin for this British drama based on the theft of Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in London in 1961.

Assandira (It) | Dir. Salvatore Mereu

Love After Love (China) | Dir. Ann Hui

Mandibules (Fr-Bel) | Dir. Quentin Dupieux

Lasciami Andare (It) – Closing Film | Dir. Stafano Mordini

The Human Voice (approximately 30’) is a loose adaptation of the original stage play by Jean Cocteau, directed by Pedro Almodóvar and featuring Tilda Swinton as ‘the voice’. It tells the story of a jilted woman (Swinton), hoping her lover will get in touch. This is Pedro Almodóvar’s first time shooting in English. Alberto Iglesias composed the score.

One Night in Miami by Regina King

Set on the night of February 25, 1964, the story follows a young Cassius Clay (before he became Muhammad Ali) on the night her defeated Sonny Liston to win the title of World Heavyweight Boxing Champion. Clay – unable to stay on at the venue because of Jim Crow-era segregation laws – instead spends the night at the Hampton House Motel in one of Miami’s historically black neighbourhoods, celebrating with three of his closest friends: activist Malcolm X, singer Sam Cooke and football star Jim Brown. The next morning, the four men emerge determined to define a new world for themselves and their people. In One Night in Miami, Kemp Powers explores what happened during these pivotal hours through the dynamic relationship between the four men and the way their friendship, paired with their shared struggles, fueled their path to becoming the civil rights icons they are today.

Out Of Competition – Documentaries

Sportin’ Life (It) | Dir. Abel Ferrara

Crazy, Not Insane (US) | Dir. Alex Gibney

Greta (Swe) | Dir. Nathan Grossman

Salvatore – Shoemaker of Dreams (It) | Dir. Luca Guadagnino

Final Account (UK) | Dir. Luke Holland

Looking at the other side of the coin, Holland cobbles together interviews from those Nazis who perpetrated the Holocaust.

La Verita Su La Dolce Vita (It) | Dir. Giuseppe Pedersoli

Molecole (It) | Dir. Andrea Segre

Paolo Conte, Via Con Me (It) | Dir. Giorgio Verdelli

Narciso Em Ferias (Bra) | Dirs. Renato Terra, Ricardo Calil

Hopper/Welles (USA) | Dir. Orson Welles

Yes, another documentary about Orson Welles – can there ever be too many? This unscripted one captures a conversation between the maverick multi-talented Welles and the ingenu filmmaker Hopper that took place in 1971 over dinner, shooting the breeze over politics, personal issues and, or course, filmmaking. Made available courtesy of The Other Side of the Wind (Venice 2018) producer Filip Jan Rymsza.

City Hall (USA) | Dir. Frederick Wiseman

Out Of Competition – Special Screenings

Princesse Europe (Fra) | Dir. Camille Lotteau

30 Monedas – episode 1 (Spa) – series | Dir. Alex De La Iglesia

Orizzonti

Apples (Greece-Pol-Slovenia) – Opening Film | Dir. Christos Nikou

La Troisième Guerre (Fra) | Dir. Giovanni Aloi

Milestone (India) | Dir. Ivan Ayr

The Wasteland (Iran) | Dir. Ahmad Bahrami

The Man Who Sold His Skin | Dir. Kaouther Ben Hania

I Predatori (It) | Dir. Pietro Castellitto

Mainstream (USA) | Dir. Gia Coppola

Genus Pan (Phil) | Dir. Lav Diaz

Zanka Contact (Fr-Mor-Bel) | Dir. Ismael El Iraki

Guerra E Pace (It-Switz) | Dirs. Martina Parenti, Massimo D’Anolfi

La Buit Des Rois (Ivory Coast-Fr-Can) | Dir. Philippe Lacote

The Furnace (Aus) | Dir. Roderick Mackay

Careless Crime (Iran) | Dir. Shahram Mokri

Gaza Mon Amour | Dirs. Tarzan Nasser, Arab Nasser

Selva Tragica (Mex-Fr-Ger) | Dir. Yulene Olaizola

Nowhere Special (It-Rom-UK) | Dir. Uberto Pasolini

Listen (UK-Port) | Dir. Ana Rocha De Sousa

The Best Is Yet To Come (China) | Dir. Wang Jing

Yellow Cat (Kazakhstan-Fr) | Dir. Adilkhan Yerzhanov

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2-12 SEPTEMBER

Pinocchio (2019) ****

Dir: Matteo Garrone | Fantasy Drama, Italy 122′

Matteo Garrone’s enchanting version of Carlo Callodi’s 1883 classic has appeal for adults and pre-teens with its endearing characters and sharp social commentary.

Best described as a bedtime cautionary tale in the dark style of the Grimm or Hoffman, Garrone’s latest has shades of his 2015 Tale of Tales in the extravagant costumes. But here animals pose as humans and vice versa, although clearly it’s not salacious, veering more into terrifying territory in warning of the disastrous consequences of childhood misbehaviour in an exaggerated way.

This Pinocchio stays faithful to the page, Roberto Benigni is the woodcutter Geppetto, who begs a trunk of wood from his friend and crafts a puppet to replace the son he never had. But Garrone keeps Benigni under control – his weird 2002 adaptation in which he also starred clearly came to mind – and he’s gone after the first couple of scenes, 8 year-old Federico Ielapi’s Pinocchio running away to seek his fortune armed with 5 gold coins, as a naive but disobedient wooden puppet child. But not before burning his feet by the fireside, in one of the film’s more sinister sequences.

The ancient fishing villages near Bari and the baked landscapes of Sienna provide the vivid backdrop to a story that is certainly compelling, and the Berlinale press audience looked on with a childish fascination and very few walk-outs.

Pinocchio and some of the other puppets have authentic looking wood-grained faces and eyes that are living behind them. A tiny talking cricket (Davide Marotta) is particularly cute and so is the money-like judge (Teco Celio) who sends Pinocchio down “because the innocent always go to jail, and the guilty go free”. This is the tenor of its social satire. In one delightful scene, Pinocchio’s nose grows out when he lies, serving as a branch for starlings to peck at.

Garrone and Massimo Ceccherini collaborate on the script that is essentially as series of adventures showcasing how Pinocchio refuses to do his homework, and keeps making mistakes, as all boys do, eventually turning into a donkey sold into a life of slavery. He is also almost eaten alive and falls prey to a pair of feline fraudsters (played by Ceccherini and Rocco Papaleo), desperate to get their paws on his money. Enter the famous “magic money tree.” well known to Jeremy Corbyn, although that particular fantasist doesn’t have a part in this fairy story. The Blue Fairy does, however, and she grows into a beautiful woman (Marine Vacth) who looks after Pinocchio, assisted by her snail-like housekeeper. And eventually the boy comes good, and his reward arrives in a moving and magical finale that drags its heels but finally delivers the classic happy ending. MT

OUT ON 14 August 2020 | premiered at BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL | 20 February – 1 March 2020

American Pickle (2020) ***

Dir: Brandon Trost | Cast: Seth Rogen, Sarah Snook, Molly Evensen, Eliot Glazer, Kalen Allen, Sean Whalen, Jorma Taccone, Kevin O’Rourke, Marsha Stephanie Blake | US Comedy 90′

Seth Rogen gives not one but two clever performances – as a Brooklyn techie and his Eastern European immigrant great-grandfather – in this upbeat and intelligent cultural satire bringing to mind Fiddler on the Roof.

An American Pickle underlines just how far we’ve come in the political correctness stakes. Notions of family rivalry and what it takes to succeed in in life are served as a refreshing cocktail of black humour, the weight behind the storyline offering home truths and caustic observations and making this comedy worthy of serious consideration, although Simon Rich’s script based on his novella Sell Out slightly loses its sting in the final stages.

In the Hollywood style opening scenes Seth Rogen plays a fiery but likeable downtrodden Polish peasant Herschel Greenbaum who accidentally falls into a vat of pickling brine in the Jewish community of Schlupsk during the Cossack invasion of 1919. Re-surfacing perfectly preserved in present-day New York (please suspend your disbelief) he meets his tech-designer ancestor Ben, a subdued singleton who has spent his last five years develop0ing an app, and is now looking for investors.

Director Brandon Trost has worked with Rogen before in comedies such as This is the End, The Night Before, The Interview. This latest is fraught with Jewish jokes and immigrant references but the strong theme of hard work and perseverance against the odds rings true more than ever before and resonates with the tough times we’re all going through.

Herschel Greenbaum fetches up in Brooklyn ‘penniless’ and moves in with great grand-son Ben, determined to pay his way by inventing home-cured pickles using rainwater, recycled jars and gherkins thrown out by neighbouring restaurants. This ‘natural’ product this goes down a treat with the ‘woke’ locals (Eliot Glazer and Kalen Allen), and soon he’s making a few dollars.

Determination and self-belief keep him going and spur him on to buy the local Jewish cemetery where his wife Sarah (Snook) is buried, and where construction workers put up a billboard for Russian vodka. The thought of ‘Cossacks’ invading once again is the motivating force for his beef. When the workers refuse to remove the sign, a punch-up ensues and he and Ben find themselves in prison custody, scuppering Ben’s chances of securing finance from ethically conscientious investors. Furious, Ben hits back at Herschel and secretly shops him to the ‘health and safety’ authorities, Herschel losing his pickle livelihood on the grounds of consumer safety.

There is much to enjoy in the tussle between Herschel’s old-fashioned hard-grafting verve and his more passive aggressive modern relative Ben and the family rift drives this feel good comedy forward showing that in the end blood is always thicker than brine. MT

IN CINEMAS FROM 7 AUGUST 2020

Sputnik (2019) ***

Dir.: Egor Abramenko; Cast: Oksana Akinshina, Fyodor Bondarchuk, Pyotr Fyodorov, Anton Vasiliev, Aleksey Demidov, Vytalya Korniyenko; Russia 2020, 113 min.

This fist feature film by Russian director Egor Abramenko is an impressive variation on the Alien theme. The Sci-Fi adventure is set for the most part in a drab security Laboratory in Siberia in 1983, underlining the inhuman story to be told. After a brisk opening hour, it loses steam even although the final twist redeems some of the earlier promise.

In Cold War era Russia Tatyana Klimova (Akinshina) is a rebellious neuro-physiologist who has fallen foul of the Stalinist leaders of her Institute in Moscow, an episode that has left her constantly on painkillers as a result of a back injury.

Meanwhile Colonel Semiradov (Bondarchuk) is a Secret Police commander in charge of a compound in Siberia where two cosmonauts, Konstantin (Fyodorov) and Demidov (Averchenko) fetch up after a botched space mission. Tatyana soon discovers that Konstantin is host to an alien creature which leaves his body every night. The 1.5 meter-tall creature, channelling a locust/scorpion, is a benign host sharing Konstantin’s likes and dislikes. Daunted at first, Tatyana eventually manages to manipulate the strange creature by singing one of Konstantin’s favourite love songs. Klimova also discovers it eats the same food as his host, but resident biologist Yan Rigel (Vasikiev), keen on winning a Nobel Prize for his research, discovers some other grim truths about the eerie entity.

Writers Oleg Malovichko and Andrei Zolotarev create an inventively alarming storyline complimented by Maxim Zhukov’s terrific camerawork in this weirdly ominous netherworld where it never gets really light. The alien itself is not particularly frightening, but it does not need to be because the focus here is the psychological war. Akinshina does well as a plucky fighter, but her love affair with Konstantin is less convincing. Sputnik is an ambitious debut with some strong ideas but rather too many clichés. AS

OUT ON 14 AUGUST 2020 ACROSS THE UK/IRELAND

A Matter of Life and Death (1946) | New 4k Restoration | Poetry

Dir: Michael Powell | Writer: Emeric Pressburger | Cast: David Niven, Roger Livesey, Raymond Massey, Kim Hunter, Marius Goring, Abraham Sofaer, Robert Coote, Joan Maude, Kathleen Byron, Bonar Colleano, Richard Attenborough | UK / Fantasy / 104min

Although by general consensus it is now accorded the status of a classic, it actually took quite a while for this beautiful and unique film to be considered as such. Lindsay Anderson at the time actually used it as his yardstick for mediocrity when he despaired in ‘Sequence’ of audiences that “allow themselves to be diverted by A Matter of Life and Death, but confess themselves too lazy for Ivan the Terrible“, while as recently as 1973 it had been dismissed by Angela & Elkan Allan in ‘The Sunday Times Guide to Movies on Television’ as “[e]xtravagantly awful… told not as a comedy, but as a serious, ludicrous drama”.

When it first appeared plenty of critics grumbled at its lack of realism, although director Michael Powell himself took great satisfaction in the fact that everything in the film was psychologically explicable as a hallucination on the part of the hero, Peter Carter (engaging played by a young David Niven). The light-hearted backdrop of fantasy, however, made palatable the graphic depiction of the violent death of two of the film’s characters (we first see Bob Trubshawe [Robert Coote] looking very realistically dead with his eyes open), since within the context of the film’s narrative they are both soon depicted jauntily bounding back to life, when in reality at the film’s conclusion they would both have been very much dead, and remained so for all eternity.

Under the baton of maestro Michael Powell, A Matter of Life and Death is an enormously satisfying exercise in organisation, with the many components that make up a feature film – Emeric Pressburger’s literate script, the enthusiastic performances by a uniformly fine cast, Jack Cardiff’s Technicolor photography, Allan Gray’s music, Alfred Junge’s production design, Reginald Mills’ editing and so on – smoothly coalescing into a sublime whole, which Powell himself prided himself on making it all look so easy, when it had been anything but. It was typically audacious that the film chose at so early to reverse the convention already emerging in cinematic fantasy by depicting real life in Technicolor and Heaven in black & white. The transitions are smoothly organised, although some took exception at Marius Goring’s line – breaching the fourth wall – that “One is starved for Technicolor up zere…!” Depicting Heaven in black & white was perceived by Raymond Durgnat as satirising the welfare state, and in an odd little book published in 1947 called ‘The World is My Cinema’ E.W. & M.M. Robson heaped page upon page of abuse on the heads of Powell & Pressburger accusing them of being unpatriotic fascist sympathisers (although it’s worth noting that nobody from the Axis Powers is anywhere to be seen, the Chief Recorder is a woman (Joan Maude) and The Judge is played by an Asian actor [Abraham Sofaer]).

A remarkable amount of Britain’s imperial dirty linen indeed receives a very public airing during the heavenly tribunal (including a laugh-out-loud moment depicting the introduction of an Irish juror in standard IRA uniform of trilby and trenchcoat) led Richard Winnington of the News Chronicle to suppose it was there just for “American box-office purposes”, which ironically attests to the artfulness with which Powell & Pressburger’s company The Archers had camouflaged their propaganda, since the whole reason for the film’s existence had been a request from the Ministry of Information to make a film stressing Anglo-American friendship (relations between the Allies were becoming strained even before Germany surrendered). Anyone else would have simply obliged with a conventional romance between a Brit and a Yank, but The Archers didn’t do conventional, and only they would erect such a formidable edifice to get their message across.

It’s hard to imagine any other national cinema or filmmakers combining such technical and philosophical ambition with such boundless exuberance in its telling. The whole film looks so extraordinary, it’s easy not to notice the skilful use of sound throughout – from the hollow, echoing acoustics of the opening scene narrated by John Longden taking us on a tour of outer space, through the ominously ticking clock in the control room at the air base, to Allan Gray’s exquisite and atmospheric score, his last for an Archers production.

A Matter of Life and Death represents both the culmination and conclusion of The Archers’ first phase, since as their later productions became more ornate they in the process lost much of the gusto and graceful good humour which had characterised their earlier productions. ©RChatten

The film also inspired Alan Price to compose this poem:

A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (1946)

No one has ever dramatised a brain seizure like you guys.

An airman hallucinating on earth and its WW2 ‘heaven.’

Pilot Peter Carter, so English a fighting poet. One moment

in a three-strip Technicolor village, the next on a staircase

to a monochrome beyond. Blaze of aircraft crashing down.

A beach. Her cycling. You meet; grab the falling handlebars,

embrace and kiss. Not some visionary sight of a nether world.

Nor a surgeon spying the street with his camera obscura.

Nor the French messenger who lost his head. Nor the smell

of fried onions can change my mind: the idea of a sacrifice

for love. June got her man. Peter got his woman. Emeric and

you Michael got the film you wanted. AMOLAD determined

my fantasy after-life. I was born premature three years later:

taken out of my pram; nurtured in a cinema, entranced by

black & white pearls with the option for wide screen rainbows.

Hovering betwixt and between, knowing I’d never starve.

©ALAN PRICE

My Rembrandt (2020) *****

Dir: Oeke Hoogendijk | Doc, 97′

Oeke Hoogendijk (The New Rijksmuseum) once again delves into the art world in her visually ravishing new documentary that plays out like a thriller. Set amidst the world of the elite in a multi-stranded narrative that grows more exciting by the minute My Rembrandt is a story of art dealers, connoisseurs and collectors whose lives revolve around the sale and acquisition of masters old and new.

Hoogendijk certainly knows how to build suspense and has a good nose for a story. It also helps to be on first name terms with her illustrious characters: The Duke of Buccleuch; Dutch art scion Jan Six, Baron Eric de Rothschild; and billionaire philanthropist Thomas S Kaplan. She finds herself in a discrete Scottish castle, Champs Elysses apartments, and canal houses of Amsterdam where this fascinating film takes place. Ironically there’s not an ounce of avarice in the faces of these extraordinary collectors who are genuinely charming and pleasant. My Rembrandt is a seductive film with a surprising finale whether the subject is of interest of not.

We meet businessman and philanthropist Thomas Kaplan, who is a passionate Rembrandt collector who set himself the noble task of making these works available in the public domain and who has buying up canvases for the past few decades. Kaplan is an appealing man Kaplan who confesses to having actually kissed a Rembrandt portrait of a woman. Clearly well-connected he goes about his business amongst world leaders at media events connected to his pastime. The Duke of Buccleuch is more lowkey in his approach and we see him celebrating his looking his Rembrandt, Old Woman Reading, in the privacy of his sitting room. Rijksmuseum director Taco Dibbits helping him to select a safe place to hang the portrait in order to involve the old woman in everyday life as a true member of the family.

Meanwhile Baron Roschild is a kindly man who has reluctantly parted with two Rembrandts – the wedding portraits of Marten and Oopjen – which have been in the family for generations, in order to help his brother pay taxes. The sale of these masterpieces threatens to derail the entente cordiale between the Louvre in France and Holland’s Rijksmuseum as they each bid for paintings.

All these titbits are brought together by the work of Dutch art dealer Jan Six XI, the ancestor of a 17th-century art dealer whose portrait was actually painted by Rembrandt and stills hangs in the family home. The film opens with his discovery of an as yet unknown canvas by Rembrandt, and a second follows shortly after the first. Jan Jnr is not just a pretty face but a Rembrandt expert, and what he doesn’t know about the painter could be written on a Holbein miniature. Jan has also made a career out of the old master. He recently spotted both canvases at a Christies auction and snapped them up for a relatively low price. But he needs to prove these paintings are actually by Rembrandt and not just one of his disciples. And this is where Rembrand authority Professor Ernst van de Wetering comes in. The ‘Fake or Fortune’ twist then takes over as we are compelled to discover whether Jan has made a clever purchase or bough himself a proverbial ‘pup’. And the finale is spiced up by a fellow trader coming into the fray, accusing Jan of cheating him.

What is remarkable is that Rembrandt’s paintings have lost none of their appeal in the 350 years since his death. Collectors worldwide relish the Dutch master’s work. My Rembrandt offers insight into what makes the work of this Dutch master technically so extraordinary, and why people are so passionate about paintings in general. In her brilliant documentary Hoogendijk shows how the sober art world can be a source of drama and gripping plot twists. MT

ON RELEASE IN UK CINEMAS and ON DEMAND from on 14th August.

The Hater | Sala Samobojcow Nejter (2020) **** Netflix

Dir.: Jan Komasa; Cast: Maciej Musialowski, Gabi Krasucka, Danuta Stenka, Jacek Koman, Agata Kulesza, Adam Grandowski, Maciej Stuhr, Piotr Biedrom; Poland 2020, 135 min.

Polish director Jan Komasa (here teaming up with again with his script writer Mateusz Pacewicz from Corpus Christi fame), goes from strength to strength, his latest outing Hater, a blend of sexual and party politics, went on to win this year’s Best International Narrative Feature Award at Tribeca.

It follows Tomasz (a strong Maciej Musialowski) who has just been sent down from his Law studies for plagiarism, and is licking his wounds in the company of God parents Robert (Koman) and Zofia (Stenka) and their daughter Gabi (Aleksander) in their plush Warsaw flat. Leaving his mobile behind on purpose so he can eavesdrop on their negative comments about him, he is left deflated. Their relationship goes back a long way, the Krasuckas and Tomasz’ family often holidayed together, and the young man has always carried a candle for Gabi, who is already involved, and has dropped out of university due to drug problems.

Tomasz is hungry for affection from the Krasuckas, but also hell bent on revenge. He joins the social media agency run by the devious Beata Santorska (Kulesza), and soon he is on the staff of liberal politician Pawel Rudnicki (Stuhr), who is running for mayor, Krasucka family are among his main followers. Tomasz wins Rudnicki’s trust, the young man ‘thanking’ him by luring the seemingly bi-sexual candidate into an LGTB club. But the scandal doesn’t impact negatively on Rudnicki. Then Tomasz goes for broke, arranging a march by Rudnicki’s supporters next to a “White Power” demonstration. Failing again, he uses his last ace, Stephan ‘Guzek’ (Grandowski), a mentally impaired right-wing weapons addict. The ensuing bloodbath is nothing compared with the brilliant twist at the end.

Tomasz is a baby-faced psychopath who does everything to undermine the Krasuckas, but still is desperate for Gabi’s love. There is a world of difference between Tomasz’ behaviour at work (where he cruelly dismisses his former boss Kamil, having overtaken him in usefulness for Beata), and his miserable home life. Tomasz is almost reduced to tears when Gabi leaves with her new boyfriend for New York. Komasa shows how social media can become the last resort for the frustrated, masochistic loser, desperate for revenge and needy of love. DoP Radek Ladczuk’s hard-edged images leave nothing to the imagination: Kieslowski would have been proud of his soulless city where superficial consumerism and racist hatred has replaced the drabness of Stalinism. AS

NOW ON NETFLIX.

The Woman in Black (1989) **** Blu-ray

Dir: Herbert Wise | Cast: Adrian Rawlins, Bernard Hepton, Pauline Moran, David Ryall, Clare Holman | UK Horror Thriller, 100′

Originally made for TV and screening on Christmas Eve 1989, Herbert Wise directed this well made and effective thriller that takes us back to the Gothic tradition of storytelling in a Victorian ghost fantasy based on Susan Hill’s original 1983 novel. The Woman in Black follows the same formula as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, minus the blood-sucking Count who is replaced by an equally menacing woman in black, and the boxes of earth by a trunk full of evil trappings.

On the request of his crusty old boss young lawyer Arthur Kipps (Adrian Rawlins) travels from London to the North Eastern coastal town of Crythin Gifford, and out across the eerie salt marshes to attend the funeral of a friendless old widow, Alice Drablow. During the church service a be-hatted, black-robed woman appears to be watching Arthur Kidd from a distance and reappears on the marshes later that day, her face set in a ghastly grimace.

Wise’s film is chockfull of ghastly horror tropes. The wind moans and gulls screech as Kipps makes his way in the swirling mists to Eel Marsh House, only to discover a mournful legacy of untimely death and ghostly appearances in this miserable corner of Victorian England. A talented British cast includes Bernhard Hepton who plays a kindly professional Sam Toovey a sort of Devil’s advocate in explaining away the terrifying sounds and occurrences. The other locals are a sceptical bunch. And no one can explain how a ball comes to be bouncing and a little boy’s voice greets Kipps laughingly in a room that has apparently been locked since Alice’s death. Not to mention a recurring sound of a carriage crashing amid blood-curdling screams outside the house. All this has been recorded on a phonograph by Mrs Drablow herself. Meanwhile, Kipps seems to be losing his mind – not surprisingly. And things don’t improve when he returns to London, freaked out by the whole affair which continues to haunt him in the film’s shocking finale. Made in the late 1980s this reliable horror story still has an undeniable kick thanks to Wise’s able direction. MT

https://youtu.be/wYfKkf_0Pnc

The worldwide Blu-ray debut of The Woman in Black is available exclusively from the Network website on 10 August

Unhinged (2020) *

Dir: Derrick Borte | Cast: Russell Crowe, Rachel Pretorius, Jimmi Simpson, Gabriel Bateman | Thriller, 90′

In the shocking opening scenes of Unhinged a man is seen axing down his wife and her lover in the privacy of their home. Essentially a road movie driven by anger, the focus then broadens to shards of news footage featuring road rage incidents on America’s highways. The intention is clear – to establish the climate of downright fury endemic in society today. But you can’t base an entire feature on road rage without a plausible, gut-punching storyline, and this is where Derrick Borte and his writer Carl Ellsworth run out of fuel.

‘The man’ in question is Russell Crowe in psychopath mode and his tantrum feeds into a generalised fury demonstrating how simmering resentment spills into everyday life, especially on our roads. There is no real reason for the man’s vendetta against random motorist Rachel (Pistorius) and her young son Kyle (Bateman), who merely serve as the butt of his rage for the entire duration of the thriller.

After a torpid breakfast scene in the family kitchen, Rachel sets off in heavy traffic to meet her friend and divorce lawyer Andy (Simpson) – but they never get there. At the traffic lights they become the inadvertent victims of Crowe’s psychopathic cuckhold who pursues Kyle and Rachel whose only mistake was to hoot him when the traffic lights turned green.

Making mincemeat of the rest of the cast – particularly Simpson who gets it in the neck, quite literally – Crowe walks his way robotically through this psychological thriller full of plot-holes but lacking in dramatic mileage. The car chases are spectacular but that’s not enough to fuel an entire feature even given the modest running time. MT

OPENS ONLY IN UK AND IRISH CINEMAS 31 JULY 2020

https://youtu.be/40M7RxLRsiY

Casting (2017) *** Digital release

Dir.: Nicolas Wackerbarth; Cast: Judith Engel, Gerwin Haas, Corinna Kirchhoff, Ursina Lardi, Stephen Grossmann, Milena Dreissig; Germany 2017, 91 min.

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant was a study in female sado-masochism and one of the best films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s short-lived but sparkling career. Casting is a pale rider in comparison. The play within a film sees Nicolas Wackerbarth attempting to update the original. It requires the audience’s familiarity with the 1972 feature, and the fate of the Fassbinder crew and cast, who were a close-knit family. Here Petra becomes a man – in line with the assumption that Fassbinder himself was the model for Petra (Margit Carstensen) – who sexually objectifies younger lover Karin Thimm (Hanna Schygulla).

Newbie director Vera (Engel) is five days away from the first day of filming, but she still hasn’t found her lead. Well – she thought she had, in the shape of Almut (Lardi), but rumour has it that Vera and producer Manfred (Grossmann) are now looking for a younger actress, possibly Mila Ury-Teche (Sellem). The action gradually closes in on Karl (Haas), who is just a ‘prop’ reading the parts of the actors who can’t be on set. But he somehow fits the part of Petra, and hassled by the commissioning TV editor and the producer, Vera gets more and more keen on the idea of the part being male, and gradually Karl seems to fit the bill in resembling the original Petra. But will it all work?

Casting settles down to an odd mixture of comedy and drama: the majority of films in Germany are TV co-productions and rely on the goodwill of commissioning TV editors. Although the lampooning works successfully here, the narrative is too episodic to keep us interested and the haphazard handheld camerawork makes this worse, the protagonists dodging in and out of the frame in a ‘running gag’ that becomes irritating, undermining its original intention.

Wackerbarth’s description of his female characters stays true to that of Fassbinder who once commented “women use their repression as terror weapons. I am not a misogynist, I am just honest”. The message here is the same. Michael Ballhaus’s images are light years away from Jurgen Carle’s would-be-avant-garde approach. On the whole, progress still seems an uphill struggle for German Cinema. AS

CASTING IS SET FOR A DIGITAL RELEASE ON 31 JULY 2020

Proxima (2019) **** Rotterdam Film Festival 2020

Dir: Alice Winocour | Wri: Alice Winocour, Jean-Stephane Bron | Cast: Eva Green, Lars Eidinger, Matt Dillon, Sandra Huller | Sci-fi Drama 107′

Proxima is Alice Winocour’s most ambitious film to date and certainly her most unique and cinematic. It depicts the struggle of an ordinary mother (Green) who is an outstanding engineer and cosmonaut. Melding docudrama with a moving love story, Proxima is full of haunting images heightened by Ryuichi Sakamoto’s ethereal score, all enveloped in a gripping storyline: Will a woman deeply attached to her young daughter make it into Space and back.

Green’s female engineer Sarah is at the heart of Proxima. She is a luminous presence – fragile tough and strangely otherworldly. Given the opportunity to join the European Space Agency’s Mars probe mission along with other seasoned spacemen – including Matt Dillon’s macho but golden-hearted leader – she takes the plunge. What starts out as matter of fact preparation for the long term mission soon becomes a fraught and increasingly affecting exploration of what is means to love, to be a parent, to meet professional goals, and to thrive and appreciate our own planet. Proxima is a ground-breaking and beautiful film as much about our life here on Earth as is about this perilous journey into the unknown.

The Parisian-born part Russian director, who has Russian blood, avoids melodrama until the final remarkable scenes. And she doesn’t stint on detail when describing the gruelling physical and emotional preparations for space travel. The final titles include a roll-call of famous cosmonaut mothers – because the crucial twist here is that Sarah must leave her daughter Stella (a determined Zelie Boulant) for six months to join the mission. Convincingly shot on location in the ESA facilities in Cologne and in Star City near Moscow, Winocour spent two years researching and writing the script (with regular Jean-Stephane Bron). It shows how motherhood can thwart ambition particular when along comes a small, needy child. And it cuts both ways – Sarah often being driven to tears of doubt and remorse rather than her toddler Stella – kids are tough! And this element gives the drama its rich emotional underbelly.

Green is convincing both as the highly driven scientist and the tender-hearted parent who may lose her life. Lars Eidinger is a lowkey but supportive presence as the astrophysicist dad. There is a subtle suspense at play throughout this remarkable journey and the moving love story at its core. MT

NOW AT UK PICTUREHOUSES| ROTTERDAM FILM FESTIVAL 2020 |

Venice Film Festival 2020 | Main jury complete

Preparations for the real time 77th Venice Film festival are gaining momentum with the announcement of an impressive jury headed by this year’s president Cate Blanchett – currently appearing in the BBC’s breakout series Mrs America.

Australia’s Blanchett is an internationally acclaimed and award-winning actress, producer, humanitarian, and dedicated member of the arts community. In 2018, she was one of the most engaging and affective Jury Presidents at Cannes Film Festival. A winter of three well deserved BAFTAs, two Academy Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, as well as numerous award nominations. Blanchett is equally accomplished on the stage, having led the Sydney Theatre Company as co-Artistic Director and CEO for six years with her partner, Andrew Upton.

Veronika Franz (Austria), arthouse auteuse and screenwriter, Franz started her career in journalism for the Viennese daily Tageszeitung Kurier. Since 1997 and has more recently worked with director Ulrich Seidle as an artistic collaborator, and co-screenwriter on Dog Days (Hundstage, 2001), Import Export (2007) and the PARADISE trilogy (2012/13). The documentary Kern (2102) was both her debut film as a director, and the first film she made with director Severin Fiala. It was followed by her first fiction feature film, Goodnight Mommy (Ich seh Ich seh, 2014), which she co-directed with Fiala and presented in Venice in the Orizzonti section. The film won numerous awards and was selected to represent Austria at the Academy Awards. The two directors then made their first film in English, The Lodge, starring Riley Keough and Jaeden Martell, presented at the Sundance Film Festival 2019.

Courtesy of Wikipedia

Joanna Hogg (Great Britain), is a director and screenwriter, unique for her depictions of middle and upper class life in London’s creative milieu. Her first feature-length film, Unrelated (2008), starring Tom Hiddleston, won the Fipresci Prize at The London Film Festival. Her second film, Archipelago (2010) won a Special Commendation at The London Film Festival and had a successful theatrical release. In 2013 she made Exhibition, starring the Slits guitarist Viv Albertine, and British artist Liam Gillick. Her most recent semi-autobiographical film The Souvenir, executive produced by Martin Scorsese, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival 2019 where it won the World Cinema Dramatic Grand Jury Award.

Nicola Lagioia (Italy), a writer, is the director of the Salone Internazionale del Libro in Turin since 2016 and also a radio broadcaster on Rai Radio3. He writes for publications such as «Repubblica», «Il Venerdi», «Internazionale», «La Stampa». His books have been translated in 15 countries.

Christian Petzold (Germany), leading protagonists of the German ‘New Wave’ and one of the most significant film directors working in Germany today he won the German Film Critics’ award for Best Film three times for Die innere Sicherheit (The State I Am In, 2000), presented in Venice, Gespenster (Ghosts, 2005) and Yella (2007), presented in Berlin. In 2008, he was in Venice in Competition with Jerichow, for which he won the Deutscher Filmpreis in 2009 as Best Director. He won the Silver Bear in 2012 for Barbara (above) in Berlin, where in 2018 he won great critical acclaim for Transit. In 2020, again in Berlin, he won the FIPRESCI award for Undine.

Cristi Puiu (Romania), director and screenwriter, made his debut as a director in 2001 with the low-cost road movie Stuff and Dough (Marfa şi bani), presented in the Quinzaines section at Cannes and considered to be the film that ushered in New Romanian Cinema. In 2005 his second feature film, the black comedy titled The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, won critical acclaim and the Un Certain Regard prize at the Cannes Film Festival. He had equal success with Sieranevada, presented in Competition at Cannes. In 2020 Manor House (Malmkrog) won the award for Best Director in the Encounters section of the Berlin Film Festival.

Ludivine Sagnier (France), is an actress whose screen debut was in Alain Resnais’ 1989 drama in I Want to Go Home! In 1990 she appeared in the epic film Cyrano de Bergerac. In 2003 she played Tinkerbelle in P. J. Hogan’s film Peter Pan. One French director François Ozon regulars she also starred in: Water Drops on Burning Rocks, 8 Women and Swimming Pool, alongside Charlotte Rampling and has become one of the most renowned and esteemed French actresses. Her most recent films include The Truth (La Vérité) by Hirokazu Koreeda, the opening film of the Venice International Film Festival 2019, and the second series The New Pope by Paolo Sorrentino.

MATT DILLON has now replaced Cristi Puiu

The Jury of Venice 77 will award the following official prizes to the feature films in Competition: Golden Lion for Best Film, Silver Lion – Grand Jury Prize, Silver Lion for Best Director, Coppa Volpi for Best Actor, Coppa Volpi for Best Actress, Award for Best Screenplay, Special Jury Prize “Marcello Mastroianni” Award for Best New Young Actor or Actress.

The Heiress (1949) **** Tribute to Olivia de Havilland

Dir: William Wyler, Script: Ruth Goetz, Augustus Goetz | Cast: Montgomery Clift, Olivia De Havilland, Ralph Richardson, Miriam Hopkins, Vanessa Brown, Selena Royle, Betty Linley, Ray Collins, Mona Freema | US Drama | 110mins

Dame Olivia de Havilland, who has died aged 104, claimed her second Oscar for leading actress in William Wyler’s stirring drama, based on Henry James’s novel, ‘Washington Square’. She had already won an Academy Award for Mitchell Leisen’s To Each His Own (1946) and was one of the last surviving cast members of the 1939 epic Gone With the Wind.

As the sister of Joan Fontaine, she was not only an acclaimed actress but also a feisty member of the Hollywood studio system and had had the presence of mind to successfully sue her employers Warner Brothers in the famous “De Havilland decision” – that was a victory not only for female performers but but actors in general.

The Heiress was originally a play by Ruth Goetz that successfully ran on Broadway, with Basil Rathbone and Wendy Hiller headlining. Betty Linley is the only one to survive from the play, here reprising her role as Mrs Montgomery. Goetz’s husband Augustus then adapted the play for the screen

It’s a silken, subtle piece really, about human psychology and the impact that loss can have on a person and on those around them. Ralph Richardson plays the imposing, exacting father to a naïvely young Catherine Sloper (de Havilland), an heiress in waiting to a fortune, both from her already deceased mother and eventually, her father; inexperienced in the ways of the world at an age when she should be out meeting potential suitors, rather than staying at home endlessly threading tapestries.

The entire production was beset by off-screen politics. In the Forties and Fifties the director was often chosen by the actors and, indeed, de Havilland chose Wyler, confident he would push her enough to get the requisite strong performance. Word is that Method actor Montgomery didn’t regard her as much of an actress though and this, combined with Ralph Richardson improvising through his scenes in the hope of stealing as much of the limelight as possible, made it a very bruising experience for her. But de Havilland triumphs with a wonderful performance that garners Best Actress.

Wyler championed her and protected her throughout the shoot and their mutual support and belief in each other paid huge dividends, the film going on to take down four Oscars, including Best Actress for de Havilland, but also Costume, Art Direction and the last for a very interesting score by Aaron Copeland.

Copeland was a true talent, but what is less known is that Wyler was uncomfortable with his score and is rumoured to have had it heavily rewritten and re-orchestrated. Not the first time an Oscar has been awarded to the public face of something potentially ghost written, and certainly not the last. Copeland was ahead of his time with his spare score but traditionalist Wyler was unsure of this new sound.

Clift was chosen over Errol Flynn for his more subtle and committed brand of acting and indeed, learned the piano for the scenes where he plays and sings, however, he was unhappy with his performance in general and walked out of the premier, disgusted.

The Heiress doesn’t run as a standard ‘play by the book’ drama and is so much the better for it, especially when compared to so much of the current derivative screen fare, and Monty was perhaps not the best judge of his outstanding talents and certainly too harsh on himself. He is perfectly suited as the devastatingly handsome and charming love interest, whose true motives remain tantalisingly cloaked as the story unfolds.

Made in an era when depth of character, superlative crafting and inventive choices were the touchstone of filmmaking, this well-constructed drama is a tribute to a British star who has now taken her rightful place in the glittering Hollywood firmament. MT

THE HEIRESS

The Plot Against America (2019) HBO Series 1-6

Dir.: Minkie Spiro, Thomas Schlamme; Winona Ryder, Morgan Spector, Zoe Kazan, John Turturro, Caleb Malis, Azhy Robertson, Anthony Boyle, Jacob Laval, Kristen Sieh, Eleanor Reissa, Michael Kostroff, Caroline Kaplan, Ben Cole, Graydon Josowitz); USA 2020, 360 min.

This ground breaking six-part HBO TV series is outstanding. Written by David Simon and Ed Burns (The Wire) and based on Philip Roth’s 2004 alternative history novel of the same name, it shows how Fascism came to America in 1940. A brilliant cast, imposing re-creation by PDs Dina Goldman and Richard Hoover, who, like the directors Minkie Spiro (Jessica Jones) and Thomas Schlamme (Westwing) share the six episodes of this staggering production of alternative US history: “It Could Happen Here”.

Many will remember the theme tune “The Road is open Again”, an old Warner Brother’s short film score promoting Roosevelt’s New Deal episodes. This ushers in the Levin family in their home in Weequahic, Newark/New Jersey in the summer of 1940, a few months before the Presidential Election in the autumn of the year. ‘Its a done thing’, that Franklin Delano Roosevelt will be elected, at least for his staunch supports Hermann Levin (Spector), selling life insurance for a living, and his wife Bess (Kazan), who keeps the family tightly organised. Their oldest son, teenager Sandy (Malis) has a talent for drawing but disagrees with his father’s outlook on life, that only Jewish affairs matter. The youngest, Philip (born like the author in 1933), is much more interested in his friends than in politics. Hermann has just given up the idea of a promotion which would enable the family to move into a bigger house, having seen beer-slurping members of the Fascist “German-American Bund” in what would have been his new neighbourhood.

Opposing Roosevelt in the election is the pilot-hero “Lindy” Lindbergh (Ben Cole) of ‘Spirit of St. Louis’ fame, who is a believer in eugenics, a supporter of ‘America First’ and a vicious Anti-Semite. The real Lindbergh, who shared the political outlook of his fictional double, was not selected as candidate of the Republican Party. Lindbergh put a simple phrase forward and repeated it at nauseam: “This is between Lindbergh and War”, implying that President Roosevelt would ‘drag’ the USA into the European War. Lindbergh won in a landslide.

Meanwhile Bess’s sister Evelyn (Winona Ryder back and better than ever) is looking after their mother (Reissa), and has fallen for conservative Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf (Turturro), an avid supporter of Lindbergh. A grateful president gives Bengelsdorf the leadership of the “Office of American Absorption”, a scheme designed to evict Jewish families from their homes on the East Coast, to the American “Heartland” of the South, where the KKK and other racist organisations hold sway supported by the authorities. This brings about another conflict between Sandy and his father, the teenager claiming to not having seen KKK members when he spent six weeks in Kentucky with a farmer. Cousin Alvin (Krumholtz) is a small-time gangster and clashes with Hermann, but gets the thumbs up from Sandy. Alvin finally flees to Canada, where he joins the Army, losing a part of his leg. In a bid to bury their differences Hermann invites Alvin (“family is family”) to live with them again. Alvin is able to gain the attention of his boss’s daughter, helping her father to fight off a gang robbing his arcade machines, and setting up a lucrative future and marriage, thanks to his skills as radar operator acquired in the in the war.

But Lindbergh has changed the political climate: with slogans such as “the USA will not be part of the war in Europe, because it was caused by Jews”, the Jewish minority is victimised, Anti-Semitic attacks having become common. Hermann is hassled by FBI agents for offering a home to a ‘criminal’ like Alvin: the young man has contravened the American Neutrality Act which forbids any involvement in the War.

Philip is ‘introduced’ by his wealthy friend Earl Axman (Yosowitz) to the world of female underwear. Meanwhile the father of his friend Seldon (Laval), the Levin’s next door neighbour suddenly dies. Jews start to emigrate to Canada, including Hermann’s best friend Shepsie (Kostroff), the projectionist of the newsreel cinema in Weequahic, where the two watched Hitler’s rise in Europe. The Levins are now put on a list for a new “home”, Hermann has been “transferred” to Kentucky by his company. He resigns and works for a greengrocer. Bess insists on emigrating to Canada, after begging her sister Evelyn in vain to be taken off the list for the ‘exile’ in Kentucky. Seldon and his mother Selma (Sieh) are not so lucky, they have been put on the list for Kentucky, because Philip told his aunt Evelyn that he would miss Seldon, if only the Levins would have to move. One day, the troubles rising, Bess gets a phone call from Seldon: his mother is missing. Hermann and his two sons drive to Kentucky, only to learn that Selma has been burned alive in her car by the KKK. Even though the roads in the South are full of patrolling KKK members, Hermann brings Seldon ‘home’. Then, in the midst of a looming civil war in the country, President Lindbergh, flying his own plane, is reported missing.

There is so much to enjoy and admire in this series: Turturro’s operatic appeaser; Evelyn’s social climbing – she even dances with Nazi Foreign Secretary Joachim von Rippentrop at the White House during his visit; history unfolding as Hermann and Shepsie watch from the projection room at the cinema; the entire social dynamic of the Levin family.

Put at its simplest, The Plot Against America is an eye opener: the ‘America First’ and White Supremacist movement has always been virulent – but it takes a populist president to give them credence and light the fire. Never has history been so cleverly and affectively foretold. AS

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