Month: May 2017

My Life as a Courgette (Ma Vie de Courgette)

Posted on by victorfraga

This starts off with images of graffitied walls in a family home and only when an animated puppet hand picks up some coloured pencils does it become apparent that the proceedings are animated. Courgette lives at home with his mum who sits in front of the TV and shouts at it. The house is littered with her empty cans of beer, which Courgette builds into a tower in his room at the top of the house. His mother is killed in an accident involving a trap door. So he’s taken into care and driven to a home by kindly policeman Raymond.

At the orphanage, Courgette finds himself alongside a small number of troubled prepubescent children including the attention-seeking Simon and the quiet Camille. The kids are starved of parental affection but Monsieur Paul and other orphanage staff do what they can to compensate. Simon starts out bullying Courgette, but when Courgette falls for Camille, Simon helps him break into the office to see Camille’s records. These reveal she is traumatised from witnessing her adulterous dad kill her mum and there’s a possibility her abusive aunt may try to take custody of Camille to get the state benefit.

Unlike so many mainstream children’s films which are designed to capture young minds by throwing relentless, rapid fire sounds and images at them, this one concentrates on the plight of its characters and how they deal with deep-seated social issues confronting them. A wry observational humour underscores the whole thing, as when Simon explains to the others that the final point of “doing it” is that “the man’s willy explodes”.

Rather than try to be hyperrealistic, the puppetry adopts a very specific style with big wide eyes for the kids who, despite their plight, are smitten with wonder for the world around them and just want to fit in like everybody else. Yet, one girl expresses her unease with a nervous tic that makes her repeatedly bang a fork on her plate at table while another boy vents his hatred of police by emptying a bucket of water on Raymond’s head whenever the latter visits. An essentially good man separated from his partner, Raymond plans to adopt Courgette and give him a decent home.

These puppets so completely engage the audience that you enter into their world. There’s a very French feeling about the whole thing – the simple architecture of the orphanage reminded this writer of the school in Diabolique (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955) – which means the French subtitled version works slightly better than the English dubbed one (both are being released here, so check which one the cinema you propose to visit is showing). The French version also gains from making the voice of the mother considerably more savage, although it must be said that the excellent US English dub is better than most.

In short, this is a striking script adaptation of a book realised with a real love for the craft of the stop frame animation process. Yet it’s much more than that, too: tackling difficult social issues head on whilst delivering convincing child (and adult) characters with lots of rough edges in a simple story which holds the viewer’s attention throughout. One of the year’s best films, despite its brief 66-minute runtime, and absolutely suitable for children… although if you’re an adult, you don’t need to take kids as an excuse to see it.

My Life As A Courgette was out in UK cinemas in June, when this piece was originally writen. It’s out on DVD and Blu-ray on Monday, September 18th. On Mubi on February 5th (2022).

This film is in our top 10 movies of 2017.

Click here for another equally arresting animation out in cinemas right now.

Butterfly Kisses

Posted on by victorfraga

The first feature film by Polish filmmaker Rafael Kapelinski tells the story of a group of friends -Jake, Kyle and Jarred – who always hang out together and whose conversations almost inevitably centre on girls, sex, and pornography. And they always go to a club that is run by an odd guy called Shrek. The movie takes place in London.

Jake who is the most interesting and complex character within the film. He is quiet and sensitive, and still a virgin. Butterfly Kisses introduces the subject of peer pressure with a gripping hand: the teenager must lose his virginity at any cost. The movie depicts Jake’s journey towards self-discovery in a delicate and realistic way, and this path will reveal some disturbing secrets.

Jake apparently has a crush on his neighbor Zara, whose room he always spies from the top floor of his apartment.  The two get closer, but in the end Jake is hopeless. As the film goes on, the clues from the beginning of the story confirm the horrible truth: Jake has paedophilic tendencies. Butterfly Kisses touches gently on the inflammatory taboo subject, but then it moves away in a different direction.

Kapelinski’s sense of direction is remarkable: he uses the horse as an allegory that drives the story plus in the end it appears as an intermittent vision. Still, the movie is not perfect. There are also weaknesses. The story is not totally fluent and fluid and sometimes it ends up being slow and not convincing enough. Some of the characters are a bit contrived: for example, Zara can be perceived as the victim, but she is also merciless with Jake. Some of the protagonists are full of inconsistencies and do not grab out attention.

The cast delivers great performances. Humans’ Theo Stevenson is spot-on in the interpretation of Jake and Liam Whiting; Rosie Day and Byron Lyons are great counterparts. The shining star is the Thomas Turgoose whose presence adds a certain je ne sais pas quoi to the movie. Nick Cooke’s monochrome cinematography is adequate and coherent to this bleak narrative.

Butterfly Kisses may not enrapture you with its narrative, maybe because the characters aren’t entirely relatable. On the other hand, it will entertain you while still touching on complex and potentially incendiary topics. The movie will show in London as part of the East End Film Festival, which will take place throughout June.

8:30

Posted on by victorfraga

If you’ve hit a certain age, you may remember Edward Norton’s character in Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999) justifying a life of insomnia: “Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy”. Strictly speaking, Laura Nasmyth’s 8:30 isn’t about insomnia, but it does seem to come from that same state of mind. It’s as if the sleep disorder materialised right in front your very eyes.

This Austrian film follows the misadventures of a young sales agent (Florian Nolden) that travels to some unnamed suburban place and becomes trapped, in a surreal fashion, since the train he takes keeps bringing him back to the same godforsaken station. Madness ensues.

The funny thing (of which there are plenty) is that the sense of being trapped is established from the very beginning, way before we realise the protagonist’s fate. The framing that leaves the characters uncomfortable amidst the locations’ stern architecture belies their inadequacy, having to walk in these spaces not made for them, which looks like a cue straight from Roy Andersson’s playbook and also brings to mind Robin Collyer’s photographic work of street signs with no text.

We see the sales agent go on with his daily duties with three colleagues, with whom he never talks directly, only through wireless phones. They go about not actually managing to sell anything, being miserable in the most matter-of-fact fashion and even do an impromptu tribute to Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino, 1992). This is the collapse of 21st century youth.

Once we enter the Lynchian part of film, however, other themes surface: like the 70-year-old American filmmaker, the director blurs the line between real and unreal by having their main narrative interspersed with commercials, talking heads interviews and dream sequences, that start to borrow from each other so much that they eventually blend into one being.

For the whole of its running time, the film does not provide much dialogue or even much of a plot, relying on its visuals, that have the look and feel of an art installation, to get its message across. 8:30 is an Austrian production, directed by a Brit, with bits in English, German, Spanish and Italian. In this world of extreme connectivity and a myriad of languages, the helmer proposes that the lack of communication is not due to lack of tools, but a lack of will and focus. In the film, all around the protagonist’s story, content is always been consumed but conversations rarely take place.

Despite its social critique and relatively short duration of just 70 minutes long, the movie does overstays its welcome during its final third. Yet it does manage to create some inspiring surreal moments, specially the one that takes place on a swimming pool (no spoilers there, it’s in the poster). Overall, it seems more suited to museums than to theaters, but that’s hardly a bad quality.

8:30 will show in London as part of the East End Film Festival, which will take place throughout June. It’s a part of the Discovery section.

After the Storm

Posted on by victorfraga

No family drama is too simple. There is a sense of tragedy in every fall out, and yet there is hope in every small gesture. Your good fortune lies in the trivial actions, the banal discussions, the petty events and the unexpected minor twists. After the Storm investigates the professional collapse of Ryota (Hiroshi Abe), and the consequences for his immediate family, as well as his attempts to make up for his shortcomings. The Japanese director Koreeda is best-known for the films Nobody Knows (2004) and Still Walking (2008).

Ryota used to be a prize-winning author, but his success has now faded away, and he now makes money as a second-class detective blackmailing some of his victims (such as unfaithful wives), and he also has to placate a gambling addiction. He can hardly pay for child support for his son Shingo. He often visits his avuncular, aging and still very active mother Yoshiko (Kirin Kiki) following his father’s death, and he suspects that his sister is trying to sponge her off. He is sheltered in his old lady’s house with his ex-wife Kyoko (Yoko Maki) and their son as a typhoon hits town, and he takes the opportunity to try to make amends with them.

The movie is populated with glib yet strangely amusing pearls of popular wisdom, particularly coming from Yoshiko. She explains that “the longer the man sits, the more the flavours set in”, in an indirect reference to the fact her son is also growing old. She also notes that more friends at her age just means “more funerals”. Such comments combined with simple yet very intense dialogues render the film very universal and relatable. There’s beauty in the technical frugality, realistic precision and urgent simplicity of narrative.

Another one of the film highlights is an extremely unusual and visceral link between mother and son kept inside a box.

It’s not coincidence that the most important events in the movie take place during a typhoon. The violent natural phenomenon is a wake-up call, and it forces Ryota inside the safest of all places: his tiny mother’s flat, the equivalent to the maternal womb. In fact her dwelling is so small you have to move away from the table in order to open the fridge and the bathtub (pictured at the top) is about the size of a sink (in fact it’s a Japanese ofuro).

The attempt to reconnect with a different generation plus the location of the film in Tokyo will inevitably generate comparisons to Ozu’s 1953 classic Tokyo Story, possibly the most successful Japanese film ever made. The difference is that here it’s the son, not the parents, who is trying to rekindle the relationship, and the the elderly lady here seems very content in her predicament. It’s worth mentioning that After the Storm is a very personal film, written by Koreeda and filmed at the block where he grew up with his mother (not too different from what Tarkovsky did in Mirror in 1975).

In a way, the mundaneness of the movie is also an ironic commentary on the challenges that a former successfully writer such a Ryota has to face. His son grimaces at the definition of literary talent, thereby highlighting a challenge that any writer – including filmmakers – have to face: how do you constantly find freshness and originality in the trivial and banal? And this also one of the problems with After the Storm: it takes a long time before it enraptures you – with me it happened towards the last third of the 119-minute saga.

After the Storm was out in cinemas across the UK in June, when this piece was originally written. It was made available on BFI Player in the first week of October.

Sodom

Posted on by victorfraga

Will is an English guy handcuffed to a lamppost at the end of his stag-do in Berlin. Waiting for his friends to come back, he meets Michael (Jo Weil) who helps to set him. The two go to Michael’s apartment where he tries to unlock his handcuffs. Their attraction is so intense that they end up having sex. Will (Pip Brignall) can’t stand the idea of having feelings for a man and in a moment of shame and confusion he leaves Michael’s flat, only to return a few minutes later.

What follows is an intimate encounter between two souls. They chat, they make love and they try to achieve mutual self-discovery. The story goes on in only one setting: the confines of Michael’s apartment. The movie does not set out to tell a multilayered and convoluted story. Instead it’s the straight-forward portrait of two men with their pasts, their feelings, their fears and their hopes.

The dialogues drive the story and give us an overview of the lives of the two males: Will is about to get married with a girl and she doesn’t know that he is attracted to guys, while Michael has broken up with his long-time partner. There is a perfect imbalance between these two figures, one is free of constraints and labels, the other is repressed and can’t accept his nature. Their confrontation explores their differences, but also all the possibilities they both are missing. Could they start a life together?

The acting is excellent, with Brignall and Weil capturing your attention with their hypnotic looks and tender conversation. They have an incredible chemistry. And the direction is outstanding. The first-time filmmaker Wilshin has a delicate and discreet approach in examining LGBTQ issues as coming-out, masculinity and also repression, continuing the dialogue established in films such as as The Weekend (Andrew Haigh, 2011) and Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo (Olivier Ducastell, Jacques Martineau, 2016). The main weakness of the movie that it doesn’t add anything new to the conversation, and it’s not shining with originality.

All in all, Sodom is an enjoyable 90-minutes love-story and it is an outstanding debut feature for Mark Wilshin. You will fall in love with Will and Michael and you will be easily trapped in their fascinating intimacy. Also, this is not a predictable movie, and the bittersweet ending wraps up the story magnificently.

Sodom is showing at part of the East End Film Festival starting on June 2nd – just click here for more information about the event, and book your tickets now!

Can hope and joy be a subversive act?

Posted on by victorfraga

As the centenary of the Russian Revolution looms, the enigmatic myth of the Russian soul is as potent as ever. First coined in 1840s by literary critic Vissarion Belinkskii and Nickolai Gogol, ‘Russian soul’ was an intellectual and literary term adopted to express the inexplicable paradoxes at the heart of the Russian people. It began in earnest, as an attempt to help the masses shape their own national identity, a concept that had been previously been dictated by rulers and the elite.

Where the Italians are known for their indulgence in la dolce vita, the Russians have a saying that “suffering purifies the soul”. In pre-Revolution Russia this meant that the pursuit of happiness, beauty and pleasure was an affront to Christ’s suffering. In the collective consciousness self-denial and austerity were coveted virtues. In A Writer’s Diary (1873), Dostoyevsky explains “the most important, most rudimentary spiritual need of the Russian people is the need for suffering, constant and unquenchable, everywhere and in everything.”

After the revolution in an atheist, communist climate, the Russian soul took on a different meaning. Suffering like Christ became suffering for the greater good, and in post-war Russia, the official cultural stance was socialist realism. The welfare of society, collective thinking and utilitarian impulse was what it meant to be a good Russian and their art and literature would come to reflect this. But for Boris Pasternak, the Russian soul was not about suffering domination of the spirit. For him it meant individuality, beauty and above all, hope.

The subversive soul

These attitudes were considered at the time to be anti-social and subversive but Dr Zhivago was hinged on those very themes. Unsurprisingly Pasternak’s manuscript was rejected for publication in Russia. It was covertly published Dr Zhivago in Italy, 1956 and the novel subsequently became a political tool for the US during the cold war. While it won a Nobel Prize and is commonly considered a classic, it was criticised by Pasternak’s peers, paling in comparison to the work of Pasternak’s idol (Tolstoy) and forbears. And while the British filmmakers David Lean’s 1958 adaptation to cinema won many awards, and the adoration of the public, it was not received enthusiastically by critics.

Even today the film is condemned for its shallow, Anglicised interpretation. Richard Roud’s film review for the Guardian felt that the revolution was “reduced to a series of rather annoying occurrences; getting firewood, finding a seat on a train, and a lot of nasty proles being tiresome. Whatever one thinks of the Russian Revolution it was certainly more than a series of consumer problems. At least it was to Zhivago himself.” It is exactly in the observance and appreciation of the minutiae, mundane routines, daily tragedies and natural beauty that are the essence of Dr Zhivago.

To Pasternak these moments were not to be suffered through. To him they represented beauty, passion and the personal, inner life of the individual and in post-revolution Russia, these ideals were trampled by the machine of communism and actively denied by the state. Both Pasternak and Yuri Zhivago looked beyond the suffering, saw past the homogenous utilitarian facades and saw life, blooming and flowering in the shadows.

Both David Lean’s treatment of the source material and Maurice Jarre’s iconic score have been accused of being sentimental, tedious, soppy, ersatz and populist. Critics said Lean’s film was about as un-Russian as it could be; perhaps it was merely some very expensive propaganda. But despite all the inaccuracies Lean and Jarre succeeded in showing us, perhaps the most authentic window into the Russian soul of Pasternak’s era.

Not just a song for the lovers

Lara’s Theme is the title of the iconic leitmotif from Maurice Jarre’s Oscar-winning soundtrack. Its ubiquitous use throughout the film drove critic Roger Ebert to distraction and according to Laurence E. Macdonald’s The Invisible Art of Film Music: A Comprehensive History it’s reduced to serving one simple purpose, identifying with Lara and Yuri’s thoughts of her. However, both Ebert and Macdonald missed the point. The real purpose of Lara’s theme conveys so much more than a love affair.

While Julie Christie plays a beautiful portrait of this character, it remains just that – a portrait. Resulting in not much more than a plot device Lara merely adds conflict and crisis to Yuri’s story. It’s what Lara and her theme represent that’s far more significant. Lara’s theme is not exclusive to Lara and Yuri; we hear it first before Lara becomes an object of desire, and before she is even introduced at all.

When young Yuri stands at his mother’s grave and the earth is shoveled onto the coffin, Yuri envisages his mother’s lifeless body lying peacefully inside the coffin after which he looks up into the sky and watches the wild wind blow the dead leaves from the tree. The delicate motif is juxtaposed momentarily against the stark misery of the scene and from this first instance, it becomes clear that Lara’s theme actually belongs to Yuri. It mirrors his taboo thoughts of beauty and hope in the face of suffering and it is pervasive throughout the film because Yuri’s outlook is equally so.

Happiness is a violation

During the film Yuri is told by a soldier, that “the front is where ever there are enemies of the revolution… where ever there is one dubious poet hugging his private life.” When utility was beauty, and equality and social welfare was Divine, who would dare feel the need to hope for more or for better in the new, Soviet Union? What use is your personal life, your individuality compared to the greater welfare of the State? While Yuri may have wanted reform, he was opposed to communist oppression with his heart and soul.

The theme, like the character of Lara, is a thing of beauty and light against the bleak, misery of a misguided revolution. We hear it whenever Yuri indulges in private flights of forbidden fancy, whether he’s appreciating a dawn sunrise in the midst of a harrowing winter train journey or seeing the delicate ice patterns on a window and dreaming of Lara. It plays when he is faced with the shock of discovering Lara and Komorosky’s affair, when he tends to the wounded after a march massacre. To Yuri, survival and decay, disappointment and joy are all part of the poetry of life.

What Dr Zhivago revealed was the fact that joy, beauty and hope were subversive violations of the establishment and this is what Lean conveyed so thoroughly through the clever use of Jarre’s indelible theme. Dr Zhivago, both film and book, were condemned by critics and beloved by the public. Perhaps the collective mind better understood the complex, delicate and perverse nature of Pasternak’s Russian soul where joy, beauty and hope were subversive, authentic expressions of national identity.

…

Click here for our review of the recent Russian film A Gentle Creature (Sergei Lornitza, 2017), and a very different view of the Russian Soul.

The Summit (La Cordillera)

Posted on by victorfraga

Latin American geopolitics are no straight-forward business. Ten Spanish-speaking countries and Brazil meet for a presidential summit in an idyllic location somewhere in the Chilean side of the Andean mountains in order to make strategic decisions, particularly in relation to oil interests. Yet their allegiances seem divided: Mexico supports the entrance of the United States in a newly-formed alliance intended to mirror Opec, while the other countries align themselves to the Portuguese-speaking giant Brazil.

Meanwhile, the president of Argentina Hernán Blanco (Ricardo Darín, from Pablo Trapero’s 2011 classic Carancho, and possibly the most sought-after face in Argentinean cinema) is also involved in a family drama. His daughter Marina Blanco (Dolores Fonzi) has been involved in a very strange accident and enters a catatonic state. She resumes to talk after a session of hypnotherapy, but strangely the memories that she now has are from events that she never experienced. She begins to confront her father, and he simply doesn’t know how to react.

Back in the political world, Hernán is invited to a secret meeting with the US Undersecretary, where he receives a very tempting proposal which could cause him to switch allegiances or at least throw a spanner in the negotiations, thereby allowing Uncle Sam to make a stealthy entrance in the new alliance. This would allow the superpower to perpetuate imperialism in the continent, but it could open up new prospects for Argentina. Hernán has to make a very difficult decision.

Argentinean filmmaker Santiago Mitre attempts to weave a complex psychological study into the fabric of geopolitics, and he partly succeeds at his effort. With an astounding photography of the snowy Andes plus excellent performances from both Darín and Fonzi, The Summit is interesting and gripping enough to watch for nearly two hours. The problem is that the two narrative strains (the geopolitical one and Marina’s) fail to complement each other. Not that they have to meet. But it seems that the director is trying to get the two plots to communicate, and I just not entirely sure of what he’s trying to say.

Latin America is undergoing a very dramatic political shift, with a US-sponsored coup d’état having taken place in Brazil last year. The consequences for the entire continent will be disastrous, with the autonomy of several countries and the region as a whole severely compromised. Despite promoting itself as a political film, the political commentary in The Summit is a little timid.

The Summit showed earlier this years as part of Un Certain Regard of the 70th Cannes International Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It is also showing as part of the 61st BFI London Film Festival taking place between October 5th and October 15th.

A Gentle Creature (Krotkaya)

Posted on by victorfraga

This is the side of Russia Putin doesn’t want you to see. There are no monumental buildings, no glittering cathedrals, no military show-off, no glitz and glam whatsoever. Instead you will see derelict buildings, dirty roads, poverty and corruption of every conceivable type imaginable: of the establishment, of the individual and of the soul. Of the Russian soul.

A beautiful and unnamed woman (Vasilina Makovtseeva, pictured above) receives the parcel that she sent to her husband in prison, but she’s not given a reason why the item has been returned. She sets off to the prison in search for an explanation as to what’s happened to her spouse, but she just keep hitting metaphorical brick walls along her way. Along her journey she encounters pimps, hookers, crooks, villains, racketeers and swindlers. Mostly people with a rotten soul, with no sense of kindness and solidarity. They don’t smile, don’t make eye contact and they only act in their own self-interest. The police and the prison officials are the most objectionable characters, extremely rude and brutal.

According to Dostoevsky, “the most basic, most rudimentary spiritual need of the Russian people is the need for suffering, ever-present and unquenchable, everywhere and in everything”. There’s plenty of suffering in A Gentle Creature. But he also talks of depth and compassion, and the people whom the woman meets are completely devoid of such sentiments. A Gentle Creature is about the search for kindness in a country that has no time for sentimentality; this is the collapse of the Russian soul.

The fact that the woman and her husband are never named is symbolic of a nation that has stripped its citizens from their individuality. Instead her husband is known by a very long number that’s impossible to memorise. This is very common in Russia, a country where many schools and airports have numbers instead of names, and where bureaucracy is such that citizens are forced to carry a passport even when they travel internally. The town and the region where the story take place are never named either.

In the most beautiful moment of the movie, the woman is ridden to see her husband on a bizarre police rickshaw, to the sound of the Russian song “By the Long Road” (which you may recognise in the voice of Mary Hopkins “Those Were the Days” or Dalida’s “Les Temps des Fleurs”). Will she finally find out what happened to him? Was it all just a bad dream?

The photography of A Gentle Creature is breathtaking, in a very dirty way. There’s a misty and ethereal quality, which combined with the crumbling and yet inhabited buildings may remind you vaguely of Tarkovsky. The film wraps up with a vivid nightmare of the failure of Russia, thereby highlighting the enthusiastic complicity of its citizens in the process.

A Gentle Creature showed at the 70th Cannes International Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It received a long ovation from critics, but there were also a few boos. I can only assume that the disapproval came from disgruntled Russians expressing their indignation regarding the negative portrayal of their country. This is indeed a very good piece of filmmaking.

It is out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 13th. It’s available on all major VoD platforms from December 3rd!

The Double Lover (L’Amant Double)

Posted on by victorfraga

François Ozon probably doesn’t get much sleep. At the age of just 49, the incredibly prolific French filmmaker has authored 40 feature films. While his neoclassic Frantz was still showing in cinemas, the director has already came up with yet another masterpiece called The Double Lover, which premiered at the 70th Cannes Film Festival.

This is an incredibly arresting, sexy and funny study of love, sexuality and emotional breakdown. Chloé (Marine Vatch) begins an affair with her psychologist Paul (Jérémier Renier), after she has recovered from anxiety and some apparently psychosomatic stomach pains. Paul is strong and confident, while Chloé is frail and insecure. Her looks and vulnerability, plus some of the sex scenes, reminded me a lot of Mia Farrow of Polanski 1968 classic Rosemary’s Baby – minus the blond hair. Like Rosemary, she begins to suspect that her husband is concealing something from her and – despite her insecurities – she begins to investigate his life. She soon discovers that he changed his surname, but that’s just the beginning.

Repressed sexuality is one of the central pillars of the movie. You will watch these desires come out in the most varied shapes and forms, from the very sensual to the borderline ludicrous. There is rape, a strap-on dildo in an undesired orifice, sex with identical twins, sex with dicephalic paparagus twins (a siamese with two heads), amongst other dirtylicious depravities in the movie. What’s most incredible is that Ozon manages to tie all of this together in a coherent narrative.

This is also a film about duplicitous and split personality, and how we all have to negotiate with a strange twin living us. We all have to grapple with our inherent ambiguity, and make sure the dominant side doesn’t take over, absorb or kill the weaker one. Ozon creates a breathtaking cinematic allegory for the Manichean duel we all have to stage in our lives, and how repressed sexuality can easily morph in to hysteria or perhaps something more serious. Maybe psychosis?

The acting is superb, the camerawork is impeccable, and this film is in no way inferior to what I consider to be Ozon’s masterpiece Swimming Pool. Like the 2003 film, there’s a huge surprise in store for you in the end, and there is absolutely no way anyone will guess what this is. One side is going to win, but I’m not telling you what that is. Is it the good or the bad guy? Is it sanity or is it madness? Is it reality or is it imagination? Is it the dominant twin or is it the runt? Is it the one penetrating or is it the one who’s being penetrated? For now I’ll leave you guessing. You will have to wait a few months until the cinema comes to a cinema near you in order to find out. Rest assured, the journey is worth it. This is a psychologically orgasmic treat.

The Double Lover was vying for the Palme d’Or this May, when this piece was originally. It was my personal favourite to take the prize. With a sexually subversive mind such as Pedro Almodóvar heading the jury, I thought that the film stood a good chance of walking away with the statuette. Ozon likes it dirty. So does Almodóvar. And so do I!

But I was wrong, and Ozon left without the statuette.

This film showed at the 70th Cannes Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. Itpremiered in the UK in October, as part of the 61st BFI London Film Festival. It is finally out in cinemas on Friday, June 1st (2018).

The Double Lover is in our top 10 films of 2017 – don’t forget to check the full list here.

On Mubi on Sunday, February 13th (2022). Also available on other platforms.

Demons in Paradise

Posted on by victorfraga

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM CANNES

This film is both extremely personal and extremely universal. Personal because Canada-based Tamil-born documentarist Jude Ratnam travels back to his homeland Sri Lanka, which he fled decades earlier as a refugee, and opens up profound wounds of the past. And universal because it’s borderline impossible not to relate to his tragic personal history.

Demons in Paradise explores the Civil War between the dominant Sinhalese and the abject Tamil, which has ravaged the country since its independence from the UK. The demons in the title are the ghosts of an irresponsible handover from the British colonisers to the Sinhalese in 1948, the director clarifies very early on in the movie. This conflict remains largely unknown or ignored in the West, making this documentary an extremely urgent denunciation tool and piece of filmmaking.

One of the most powerful moments in the movie is the emotional moment when director encounters the family who hid his family from the Sinhalese oppressors, who would undoubtedly had killed them. Later on in the movie, the director breaks down as he recalls two friends who sheltered him but never survived the conflict. He also remembers how he had to disguise himself as farmer in order to flee the country, and how speaking Tamil could lead to immediate death. The linguistic oppression might ring some bells in Europe, particularly to Spanish people who experienced the Franco regime. Sadly Jude Ratnam’s experience is less foreign than we’d like to think.

The banal cruelty of the Sinhalese would make an excellent case study for Hannah Arendt. They would pierce Tamil militants in the eyes, burn their back with a hot iron, throw them off fast-moving trains, shoot them through the head (in a practice nicknamed “crown of flowers”) and burn children alive inside tires doused in petrol.

The director wraps up the film by noting that the Civil War may be over, but the latent hatred and fear are not. He believes that the problems haven’t been solved, and therefore the conflict could resume at any moment. This is not the only film this year to expose the consequences of cynical and careless British imperialism in Asia. Gurinder Chadha’s Viceroy’s House dealt with the issue in neighbouring India.

Demons in Paradise is showing as part of the 70th Cannes International Film Festival. The movie is a special screening, and it’s not in the official competition. The importance of the film should not be understated: this is the first Sri Lankan film ever to show in the Festival.

Rodin

Posted on by victorfraga

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM CANNES

The sculptures by Auguste Rodin were not stagnant. The were teeming with turbulent passion, action and emotion. Sadly his biopic is stationery, lifeless and tedious. I wonder why the veteran French filmmaker Jacques Doillon decided to make such a dull and ineffective piece of filmmaking, and why anyone would go to the cinema to watch it.

It’s not that the film is too esoteric; I doubt even die-hard fans of the progenitor of modern sculpture will like it. The movie simply lacks flare and guile, and it’s quite excruciatingly painful to watch at 119 minutes of duration. Vincent Lindon in the main role is quite boring, and there is absolutely no chemistry with Izia Higelin, who plays Camille Claudel. Izia (who starred last year in Catherine Corsini’s Summertime) is extremely limited in her role, and overall it feels like there was no coaching of the actors.

It is widely known that Rodin was quiet and soft-spoken, but the problem here is the delivery: it fails to convey sentiment. Even the erotic scenes are devoid of joy and intensity; when you watch Rodin painting two naked and naughty girls prancing around, you will get neither excited nor aroused. It feels like a failed attempt to emulate the extremely sexy Antonioni’s Blow Up (incidentally, the naked dancing in 1960 film features Doillon’s former wife Jane Birkin).

The film centres on the period of the romance break-up, when Camille moved to the UK and they began to argue as to who plagiarised who. Rodin lived with his maid Rose, and the children which she claimed to be Rodin’s offspring. There’s also the (in)famous statue of a very paunchy Balzac with huge testicles, which provoked a lot of controversy at the time. Paul Cezanne and Claude Monet make a short appearance, and the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke is mentioned multiple times. But the events never gel together. The film doesn’t even feel didactic, but instead as a loose tribute to various historical figures.

Praise must go, however, to the film’s photography and mise-en-scene. This is a beautiful and moving portrait on France in the late 19th century, with beautiful images of the countryside and recreations or Rodin’s pieces.

Rodin is showing as part of the 70th Cannes International Film Festival, which DMovies is covering live right now. The film is vying for the Palme d’Or, but it’s unlikely to take it.