Month: February 2017

Ana, mon Amour

Posted on by victorfraga

Ana (Diana Cavallioti) is a university girl to whom most people would find it difficult to relate. She suffers from depression, anxiety, panic attacks and she’s prone to all sorts of emotional outbursts. To most, she would be simply “annoying”. Her family background is deeply dysfunctional, and there are clues to suggest that she was molested by her stepfather as a teenager. She is unable to voice with the origin of the woes, and she struggles with the various types of medication she has to take. Yet her fellow student and boyfriend Toma (Mircea Postelnicu) is extremely patient, comprehensive and supportive of the extremely unstable and vulnerable young woman.

This might sound like the perfect plot for a languid and dire movie, or an unabashed tearjerker. Yet Ana, mon Amour has enough vigour, candour and pronfundity to make for a very convincing and compelling 127-minute viewing experience. The movie shuns a traditional chronology in favour a very irregular zigzag. Ana and Toma move back and forth in time from the early days when they met to their marriage, children all the way to separation. At time you won’t be able to determine when the action is taking place, and that’s ok. There’s no build-up towards an epic revelation at the end of the movie, and the dramatic strength of the movie lies instead in the subtles twists of fate and gradual changes of personality, supported by very strong performances.

Tamo will constantly seek answers to Ana’s mental health problems, but he will often fail to find them. Audiences will embark on a similar quest, being able to join some dots, but not all of them. Tamo will slowly begin to experience uncertainties of his very own, and he too will turn to others for support: first a priest then a psychoanalyst. The jolly, generous, affable and emotionally balanced young man will begin to morph into something else, and so will Ana. Those who identified themselves with the highly likable male character in the beginning of the film have a surprise in store waiting for them, as he too falls prey to his fallibility.

The anatomic realism of Ana, mon Amour is certain to be misinterpreted. Prudes will cringe dismiss some of the scenes as “unnecessary”. There’s real sex and ejaculation, a bloodied vagina following an unidentified medical episode, plus Toma applying cream to his son’s penis. These sequences are never exploitative, in fact they are rather fast and banal, even tender in their simplicity. They are still enough to unsettle Brits uncomfortable with anything too close to the bone.

Ana, mon Amour showed at the 67th Berlin Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. Forty-one-year-old Călin Peter Netzer won the award just four years ago with the film Child’s Pose. It is showing at the BFI London Film Festival.

Have a Nice Day (Hao Ji Le)

Posted on by victorfraga

Dilapidated buildings, cracked walls, chipped doors, neglected railway tracks, shabby cars, mangy dogs, plenty of rain and blood: this is more or less the filthy image of China that will you see in this highly imaginative animation and black comedy from the People’s Republic. Have a Nice Day premiered today at the Berlinale (when this piece was originally written, and it’s a breath of fresh air plus a welcome break from a streak of stern and languid pieces such as the Korean On the Beach at Night Alone (Hong Sangsoo) and the Portuguese Colo (Teresa Villaverde) in the Festival’s Competition).

The movie looks almost like a rotoscope animation due to the realism of faces and places, but a few dissonant elements effectively cater for the more ingenious and resourceful side of the endeavour. There’s a thin line of smoke coming up undisturbed from a cigarette, there are paintings with a very different texture and there’s a very plush allegorical montage blending dreams with symbols of pop culture (from which the image above was taken). And there’s cheesy Chinese music to top it all up, sometimes coming from bad quality speakers, as if you were in a student’s room.

The premise of the film is rather simple. A bag with one million yuan is enough to change the life of anyone who comes across it. These greedy Chinese commoners will lie, cheat, run and kill in order to keep the money and fulfil their capitalist fantasy: to give up work, to pay for your girlfriend’s plastic surgery or to move to the promising Shangri-La. Needless to say, their plans go terribly awry and these people one by one encounter a very bloody fate. Failed communist ideals turn into violence. These people literally go from red to red.

This is the parody of the ambitions of a country stuck between its communist legacy and a megalomaniacal consumerist dream – which turns out to be a bloody nightmare!

One of the most interesting dialogues of the film reveals the absurdity of modern Chinese philosophy, when a man lectures a friend about the three types of freedom: farmer’s market freedom, supermarket freedom and online shopping freedom. It does seem indeed that the life of the Chinese revolves around purchasing. No wonder they will do anything for one million yuan!

The film also jokes about our very own failed capitalism and ambitions in the UK, when a character asks another one: “Why do you want to go to England? It’s not even part of Europe anymore!”.

What’s most remarkable about Have a Nice Day is how it successfully transposes the aesthetics of an arthouse cinema into animation, thereby throwing in comedic elements. Some of the takes are long and still, as if there was a static camera capturing the mood of the external environment. The movements are harsh, almost spasmodic and cars drive past extremely fast, contrasting with the slow action otherwise. It’s almost as if a knife cut past the screen when vehicles and people begin to move. You will feel threatened and entranced.

Have a Nice Day was in the Official Competition of the 67th Berlin International Film Festival earlier this year, but it did not take the prize from jury led by Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven. This piece was originally written back then. The film was in the the 61st BFI London Film Festival taking place from October 5th to the 15th, and then the London East Asia Film Festival the following week. The film is out in US cinemas on January 26th, and then out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 23rd.

Without Name

Posted on by mjbstaging

Some films are a trap. The post-modern French philosopher Gilles Deleuze broke down the cinematic experience into three varieties of images: the perception-image, the action-image, and the affection-image. These images relate respectively to the perception of sight, the interaction between characters and their positions, and to emotional experience. In Without Name the images are a hypnotic poison. The three varieties of images are presented in such a compact way that your senses are magnectically caught by the screen. There is no way out but to watch the film until the end.

It starts by introducing the land surveyor Eric (Alan McKenna). He takes a job in a plot land inside a deep and dense forest. He has to measure the land but some strange events begin to unfold. He doesn’t really know who has hired him and where exactly he is, as the site is not on any map. His personal life seems to have driven him into a dead end road: his marriage is falling apart and he has a very distant son. He is having an affair with his young assistant Olivia (Niamh Algar), an inquisitive woman who brings him more trouble than help. Everything evades Eric’s control and you feel tempted to rescue him from the void in which he is falling.

Without Name‘s narrative is a clever construction of stimuli with the purpose of giving you fear and goosebumps. Eric’s disturbed state causes commotion. His motivations are similar to the clumsy police officer Jong-goo in The Wailing – Read our review here. Eric is also trying to decode the secrets of the dark woodlands surrounding him. Just like the South Korean character, he surrenders to the environment. He finds some notes written by the former surveyor, who has mysteriously abandoned the job as well as the house where Eric and Olivia sleep. The notebook describes “The knowledge of the trees”, including a hallucinogenic mushroom that grows in that hidden forest. Soon both Eric and Olivia succumb to the drug.

The plot then becomes a little bit predictable. Eric’s fragile psyche evolves into a pitiful condition. Suddenly people disappear. He can hear plants talking. His girlfriend leaves him alone. You become anxious to anticipate how the filmmaker Lorcan Finnegan will solve this mystery. Is it a simple tale of a revengeful mother nature?

The film goes very well in the first half, when the acid-trip descends into some sort of eco-horror.

Unlike Wernor Herzog’s filmography, in which the concept of individual ambition is pitted against the forces of natural world, Without Name has a silly ending. In the fiction Fitzcarraldo (Herzog, 1982), for instance, the Herculean hero takes a Sisyphean turn, which explains Herzog’s general animosity towards those who see themselves as masters of the natural world. The same happens in the documentary Grizzly Man (Herzog, 2005), in which a man is devoured by bears because he thought he had tamed them. The human ambition versus nature is present in several of Herzog’s movies.

Finnegan, though, chooses a very different solution, with plenty of spectral lights and visual effects, thereby losing some of the film focus.

Without Name is out this weekend in the UK. It is also showing at Glasgow Film Festival on 18th and 23rd of February. For more info about the festival, click here:

Watch the film teaser trailer below:

On the Beach at Night Alone (Bamui Haebyun-Eoseo Honja)

Posted on by victorfraga

A film critic once famously said that seeing an Eric Rohmer movie was the equivalent to “watching paint dry”. Now Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo has excelled the late French director and created a film with a pace even more painful and sluggish. This is a hitherto unthinkable achievement. On the Beach at Night Alone is equivalent to watching paint fade.

Younghee (Kim Min-hee) is a famous actress who travels to Hamburg to meet a friend. They walk through wintry parks and riverbanks reflecting about the meaning of love, men, ageing and so on. The beautiful artist, who is probably in her 30s, reveals that she has recently ended an affair with a married man. Back in South Korea, Young-hee meets up with some old friends in the coastal town of Gangneung. They engage in prolongued conversations about more or less the same platitudes.

At less than 100 minutes, On the Beach at Night Alone isn’t a particularly long film. But the dialogues are so banal, that the film becomes insufferable after just 30 minutes or so. Similarly to Rohmer, the movie is almost entirely conversational and much of the “action” takes place in parks or around the dinner table. The beach in the film title refers to the place where Younghee goes to relax and meditate. She sits in front of the sea staring at the horizon for long periods of time. It’s almost as if she was waiting for a magic sign from the waters, just like in Eric Rohmer’s The Green Ray (1986). Unsurprisingly, nothing ever happens.

What might surprise you is that, in reality, I like Eric Rohmer’s movies a lot. I have seen nearly every one of them. On the other hand, On the Beach at Night Alone was an excruciating experience. I have some possible explanations for the disconnect:

Perhaps the problem is a strange camera zoom-in replicated in almost every sequence of the movie. Maybe it’s the constant repetition of Franz Schubert’s Cello Quintet in an apparent attempt to emphasise solitude and inwardness. Despite liking Schubert, the tune is mercilessly piercing my brain right now as I write this. Or it could be the triviality of the girly chit-chat and petit-bourgeois themes: “which girl is the prettiest?”, “am I too old?”, and so on. Or maybe I’m just too Western in order to understand Korean sensibility?

Whatever the answer, I think you may have gathered by now that neither I enjoyed and nor would I recommend this film to anyone. Unless you enjoy watching paint fade.

On the Beach at Night Alone showed in February as part of the Berlin Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. The film is showing as part of the 61st BFI London Film Festival taking place between October 5th and 15th.

It is worthwhile noting that the film was, at least in part, a response to the rumours that the director was having an extra-marital affair. In March, he confessed that he is dating the lead actress.

A few months later, after watching a couple more films by the Korean director, Victor Fraga changed has had a change of heart about Hong Sang-soo. Click here in order to find out what he thinks about Hong Sang-soo now!

Joaquim

Posted on by victorfraga

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM BERLIN

Few Europeans know that the Independence of Brazil took place as late as in 1822, nearly half a century after the US and also posterior to most countries in the continent. And mostpeopl remain oblivious to the fact that the largest country of Latin America was the last one to abolish slavery in the New World. Joaquim goes back in time to the late 18th century and opens up the wounds of colonisation, exposing a deeply corrupt Brasil where racism and subservience to the Portuguese Crown prevail.

Joaquim José da Silva Xavier, nicknamed Tiradentes, was a leading member of a failed revolutionary movement fighting for Brazilian Independence. Joaquim was arrested tried, decapicated and quartered. The pieces of his body where publicly exhibited in order silence any sort of dissent. His execution on April 21st later became a public holiday in Brazil, and Tiradentes is now celebrated as a national hero and a martyr, the film explains in the opening by the means of a voiceover.

The revolutionary figure is played by the Júlio Machado: he has long-hair, olive skin and a rough, manly complexion. He looks like some sort of cowboy Jesus Christ from the Brazilian Backlands. He is a lieutenant hunting illegal gold-diggers on behalf of Queen Maria of Portugal. He is enamoured with the slave Blackie (the exceptionally beautiful Portuguese-Angolan Isabél Zuaa, pictured above), but he does not have enough money to buy her. He gradually begins to despise the system to which he belongs, realising that Brazil would be much better off without the rule of the Portuguese Crown.

Director Marcelo Gomes reveals an exhuberant country teeming with diverse cultures, races and languages. You will listen to Brazilian Portuguese, Creoule Portuguese, as well as African and Indigenous languages – all of which except for the first have but disappeared since. There’s African singing, indigenous yodelling and a Portuguese guitar. It would be safe to say that the filmmaker did a very good job with his homework in anthropology.

With equal success, the director also debunks the colonial myth of moral supremacy. The Portuguese often described the Brazilians as “bandits, corrupts and lazybones”, but Joaquim realises that this a reflection of their own flawed character, and a vain attempt to patronise and to demoralise Brazilians. That’s when he decides to switch allegiances and to fight for the ideals of independence, influenced by the teachings of Rousseau.

Joaquim is not the only film in the Berlinale this year to deal with the subject of a coloniser describing the colonised as inferior. Viceroy’s House (Gurinder Chadha) reveals a profoundly racist Churchill who said that Indians were “primitive”. Both Britain and Portugal shared a delusional sense of racial superiority. But have they now overcome these prejudices?

There’s a very short dialogue that’s central to the movie, when Joaquim expresses his desire for Brazil to be like the US. He hazards a guess that everyone in the former British colony is now free and equal, and that such a nation would never be oppressive towards others. The director is making a tongue-in-cheek commentary about the hypocrisy of Americans Imperialism.

Joaquim is showing in the Official Competition of the 67th Berlin International Film Festival, and it’s a viable contender for the much coveted Golden Bear. DMovies is following the event live – just click here for more information.

Don’t forget to watch the teaser trailer below:

The Bar (El Bar)

Posted on by victorfraga

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM BERLIN

A small bar in central Madrid is not a particularly momentous place in the morning: regulars sip their coffee, a lady walks in search of a phone charger, while a beggar asks for food and drinks. Suddenly someone is shot outside and very strange events defying logic begin to unfold. Passers-by vanish and a male in the toilet begins to convulse and to display very nasty symptoms. These people are suddenly trapped in the bar, and they have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen next.

Director Álex de la Iglesia has a career spanning more than 25 years, and he is recognised for his ludicrous and grotesque cinema style. His films are a blend of horror with a comic and vaguely erotic edge to it, and he is often compared to Mexican helmer Guillermo del Toro. Fans are guaranteed to enjoy The Bar, and absolutely nobody will get bored during. There’s a major twist every 15 minutes, and the whole conjecture changes. It’s almost as if you were in a videogame moving from one stage to the next. Not surprisingly, de la Iglesia was once invited to shoot Doom (based on the videogame), but sadly the deal fell through.

The unabashed absurdity and unpredictability make The Bar a very fun and engaging movie. Halfway through the action you will realise that there are just way too many loose ends, that it’s impossible they will connect in the end. So you will just sit back and enjoy the preposterous and outlandish predicament of the characters, and their increasingly dirty and scanty clothes. The only thing that is consistent throughout the movie is the religious rhetoric that the beggar hurls out. He’s the harbinger of the Spanish apocalypse.

At first, you may think that this is a new twist on the Spanish horror REC (Jaume Balagueró/Paco Plaza, 2007), but then the film veers away from zombies and strange infections into… oiled-up bodies, sewers, syringes and an extremely deranged Jesus Christ lookalike. This is a deliciously filthy and contagious story, in the literal sense of the two adjectives. Sit back and be disgusted. Just don’t try to make sense out of it!

El Bar is showing at the 67th Berlin International Film Festival taking place this week – click here for more information about the event.

Below is the film trailer:

Colo

Posted on by victorfraga

The Portuguese are best known for their unrelenting nostalgia, yearning and suffering. Those familiar with the work of the late filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira (who passed away two years ago still active at the age of 106) will recognise that the pace of Portuguese cinema is not for everyone’s taste. The melancholic and slow rhythm can cause strangement, stupor and even sleepiness in those more used to convoluted scripts and fast action.

The economic crisis of Europe has deeply affected the confidence and the morale of the country. A mother, a father and their daughter Marta slowly see their relatively stable household crumble to pieces. The father is unemployed and vanishes for days without explanation. The mother works tirelessly, but she’s still unable to make ends meet. And Marta befriends pregnant girl at school, who has a very dark secret.

Colo is a warm and deeply feminine movie. A large part of the film takes place inside a maroon-hued middle-class flat somewhere in Lisbon. These three people are seeking some sort of affection, but they are unable to vocalise it. The action in the movie is mostly dispassionate and laconic. The title of the film is Portuguese for “lap”, the most intimate place for rest and nurture. The three people desperately need “colo”, but they are unable to find it.

In the end of the movie, the three family members make very different and unorthodox arrangements so that they can carry on with their respective lives. Despite a couple of peculiar twists and a convincing photography, Colo is just too slow and too long at 136 minutes, and it’s unlikely to appeal to much broader audiences. Unless you are into low-wattage and low-tension prolonged misery.

Colo is showing in the Official Competition of the 67th Berlin Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. You can view it online for free between December 1st and 17th as part of the ArteKino Festival.

The Misandrists

Posted on by victorfraga

Not since Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) and Patty Jenkins’s Monster (2003) have you seen such rabid females expressing their repulsion of men. They despise their odour, their presence, their proximity and their existence. They refuse to live in a phallocentric society. What’s more, they do not strive for equality, as they don’t want to mirror themselves against what they see as a corrupt establishment. Welcome to the world of The Misandrists.

Bruce LaBruce’s latest film is a return to the politics of sex, which he explored in minute detail in Rapsberry Reich (2004), plus a commentary on extreme feminism. These female characters seek “to reconcile the revolutionary need with sexual politics” by rejecting men and setting up their Female Liberation Army (FLA) in an unidentified remote location.

Seven young women live under the purview of Big Mother (Susanne Sachsse) and her loyal sidekicks Sister Barbara, Sister Kembra, Sister Grete and Sister Dagmar. Until one day Isolde (Kita Updike) decides to harbour a wounded male fugitive in the basement, despite knowing that this represents a gross violation of the rules. Her misconducted is finally exposed, but that’s not the only surprise she has in store. Plenty of commotion and blood will follow.

LaBruce has retained his usual auteur trademark, as he weaves elements of pornography with Marxist rhetoric, plus throwing in a few experimental devices. It’s also a tribute to cinema itself, as the cinephilic director references a number of movies, including The Beguiled (Don Siegel, 1971) and The Dirty Dozen (Robert Aldrich, 1967). There are probably many more which only the extremely observant and fine-tuned will be able to identify. The film is also dotted with washed-out images of pillow fights, which are a tribute to lesbian erotica from the 1970s.

Some of the most recognisable devices of extreme feminism are also present: the desire for parthenogenesis (reproduction from a non-fertilised egg, where males are redundant) and the replacement of HIStory with HERstory (despite the etymology of the word having no connection with males whatsoever). Such extreme ideas are often associated to the writings of Andrea Dworking and Catharine MacKinnon, and dismissed as too radical by moderate feminists.

At least three sequences deserve a special mention. Firstly, the way the director breaks the fourth wall and invites the audience into the movie towards the end of the film. Secondly, when the females subvert the infamous Jewish blessing “Dear God who has not made me a woman” in their favour. Thirdly, when one of the girls find a very unorthodox use for a chicken egg. You’ll know what I’m talking about if you’ve seen Nagisa Oshima’s Realm of the Senses (1976). Otherwise, just use your imagination and I’m sure you can work it out just as well.

The fact that the director is a “pendulous” human being (quoting the vocabulary from the movie itself) could come across as a blasphemous (blaspheminine?) attack on female integrity, and on the overall identity of the movie. Bruce LaBruce confessed that at times he thought: “why am I doing this”. In reality, The Misandrists is an elegant and colourful tribute to feminism, if from a male perspective. LaBruce confessed in an interview with DMovies last year that working with so many women was a novelty, and that he “let the girls guide themselves, and do things the way they would do it” while making the film. The director is indeed very respectful of the females, yet his gaze is still pervasive, and this ultimately remains a very masculine Bruce LaBruce movie.

The Misandrists premiered at the Berlinale in early 2017, when this piece was originally written. It is showing in September at the Raindance Film Festival of London and then in November at Fringe!. It’s out on DVD on April 30th (2018).

The Other Side of Hope (Toivon Tuolla Puolen)

Posted on by victorfraga

Scandinavian humour is dark, harsh and droll, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that it would be entirely inappropriate to use such a cold and bleak device in order to criticise Europe’s failures at implementing multiculturalism and embracing refugees. But you are wrong. Finnish screenwriter and filmmaker does just that to very convincing results in one of the most eccentric comedies you will ever come across in your life.

Khaled (Sherwan Haji) is a Syrian refugee who arrives in Finland on a coal freighter. He is literally covered in black as the film begins. He applies for asylum despite knowing that his chances of succeeding are very small. His application is promptly turned down and so he does a runner. He eventually finds a job in a local restaurant owned by Wikström (Sakari Kuosmanen), a former shirt salesman who hit tha jackpot during a poker game. The arrangement turns out to be extremely convenient for both sides. Khaled then acquires a fake ID and begins to live the relatively primitive yet stable life of an illegal alien.

The camera in The Other Side of Hope barely budges, and all the characters seem to be intoxicated with an overwhelming feeling of stoicism or lethargy. Their gestures are scant, their facial expressions scarce and the tears entirely absent. The movie is a very strange hybrid: it’s almost as if the characters were deadpan comedians delivering a sketch of the Theatre of the Oppressed. In other words, their predicament is very serious, yet their reactions are very calm and self-contained.

Aki Kaurismäki holds up a mirror to Europe and its consistent failures at multiculturalism, integration and supporting the refugee cause. Finland likes to be perceived as a free and welcoming country: prime minister Juha Sipila committed to opening the doors of his very own house to Syrian refugees in 2015. But the reality is a tad little different. Khaled was refused asylum despite the extremely dangerous and the almost certain prospect of death in Aleppo. And the prime-minister dropped his promise not long after.

The failure to implement multiculturalism is also a central theme. Wikström changes his restaurant menu from local to Japanese and then to Indian in no time, and the staff have to adapt to the changes. Meanwhile, right-wing extremists target Khaled and for a very unusual reason, revealed only at the end of the movie. Europe still has a long way to go befofre it can embrace change and diversity wholeheartedly, it seems.

Ultimately, The Other Side of Hope is a parody of the old continent. The developed and free society into which Khaled wants to fit is in reality a cold, bleak and anhedonic place. The sites are ugly and soulless. One can’t help but to ask: if this side of hope is so humdrum and tiresome, just imagine what the other side must be like. Most Europeans are either unable or unwilling to fathom life in a warzone, and so they conveniently choose to believe that refugees are envious mendicants. Luckily Kaurismäki begs to differ.

The Other Side of Hope showed the 67th Berlin International Film Festival, when this piece was originally written, and it showed in cinemas in May. It’s showing again on December 2nd as part of the London Migration Film Festival. It’s available on Mubi in October (2020).

Multiple Maniacs

Posted on by victorfraga

John Waters’s 1970 classic Multiple Maniacs was shockingly prescient. Divine is a big, fat, grotesque, sexually deviant, sadistic, misogynous, manipulative, megalomaniac and extremely dangerous American who will destroy everyone on her way. Move 37 years forward, replace the black wig with a blonde one, add a few tones of orange, replace Mink Stole with a Slovenian lover, and the movie protagonist is once again immediately recognisable.

Multiple Maniacs remains one of the most provocative, outright filthy, plain insane and unabashedly disgusting movies ever made. It is also John Waters’s most complex film, dealing with sexual and religious taboos in the most graphic and contentious way conceivable. Despite the extremely brazen, impudent and overtly trashy tone, Multiple Maniacs is an intellectual piece and also a harsh criticism of American society, and it remains ever so politically and socially relevant nearly four decades later.

Lady Divine is the owner and operator of an itinerant freak show called The Cavalcade of Perversion, which showcases gay men kissing, a heroin addict going cold turkey, puke-eating and other delicious subversions. The show is free, with the performers persuading and even seizing reluctant passers-by to attend, who eventually embrace the degradation and the Schadenfreude. At the end of every show, Lady Divine comes in and robs the patrons at gunpoint. She has the enthusiastic support of her lover Mr David and her prostitute daughter cookie, as well as a large troupe of delinquents. All the actors in the movie use their real names (the artistic, not the birth ones).

One sunny day, Lady Divine decides to excel, thereby murdering her patrons instead of just robbing them. Upon fleeing the murder scene, she finds out that Mr David is cheating on her, and immediately decides to pursue the adulterers. She is raped on the street by two glue-sniffers, but quickly finds redemption in a local church with a strange young woman (Mink Stole). Her devotion then morphs into sexual energy, and she engages in a sex act with Mink still inside the church. The intensity of the moment is such that Divine agrees to receive a “rosary job”, ie. to have the holy beads inserted in her most private orifice. She finds Jesus in the most unlikely of places!

Increasingly bizarre twists follow, as Mr David and his lover decide to kill Divine in order to protect themselves. You will witness multiple murders, cannibalism and possibly the most preposterous rape scene you will see in your life – performed by a giant broiled crustacean called Lobstera. At the end, Divine turns entirely maniac and goes on a violent spree destroying cars and killing everyone on whom she can get her hands. The film ends with the appearance of the National Guard, when Divine finally meets her maker – accompanied by the sound of Kate Smith singing ‘God Bless America’. The movie soundtrack also includes Alan Dean’s ‘He’s Got the Whole World in his Hands’ – I’ll leave it to you to work out where the song is used, judging by its title.

The characters in Multiple Maniacs – as in all of John Waters’s early films – don’t talk like normal people. They yodel and make highly nasalised singy-songy utterances, often inflecting the beginning of the sentences. Think of a confrontational five-year-old speaking up. It’s as if they were both disgusted and outraged by their own actions and absurd words, which where mostly non-scripted. There is an element of irony and self-deprecation in the tone of their voices, which matches the primitive props and non-existing visual effects (the murders are as non-realistic as possible). John Waters wants to foreground the trashy cinema apparatus as much as he can. He wants people to know that he is the master of parody and self-mockery. It’s extremely easy to laugh and to be repulsed by a society as bizarre as the US – a country that forcefeeds its citizens with religion, prudishness and violence.

Multiple Maniacs is the Dismaland of cinema, and you will derive enormous pleasure from the creepy activities. John Waters will deftly test your morals, yet he will not challenge your senses. The butchery is purposely shambolic and unrealistic, and so you won’t be disgusted at the blood. It’s the director’s boldness that will shellshock and perhaps repulse you.

It’s every filmlover’s duty to go to the cinema and praise Lady Divine. Let’s also pray that she rises from the dead to rescue and redeem us – sadly she passed away in 1988 due to obesity and an enlarged heart. Divine is much needed nowadays: she’d eat Donald Trump long before he could grab her pussy. Dear God, please give us Divine back so she can reclaim the title of filthiest, most erratic and unpredictable person alive from the POTUS!

Multiple Maniacs in UK cinemas from February 17th. Make sure you can stomach the trailer below before watching the film!

The Party

Posted on by victorfraga

Kristin Scott Thomas, Timothy Spall, Cherry Jones, Emily Mortimer, Cillian Murphy, Patricia Clarkson and the celebrated Swiss actor Bruno Ganz – they are all in there. Talented, highly-skilled and easily recognisable actors. Surely such a stellar cast vouches for a successful movie? The Party is the proof that the answer isn’t always “yes”.

Janet (Thomas) has been appointed Health Secretary in the shadow cabinet of the UK Parliament, and she decides to throw a close-knit party in order to celebrate her lifetime achievement. But the cosy gathering turns sinister as her husband Bill (Spall) has not just one, but two very shocking revelations to make. Lesbian couple Martha (Jones) and Jinny (Mortimer) also seize the opportunity to reveal the latter’s pregnancy with triplets. Meanwhile, the dysfunctional Tom (Murphy) snorts cocaine, while summoning courage to take revenge on one of the guests. To top it all up, the German Gottfried (Ganz) shares some shallow and tedious thoughts on spirituality, to his wife’s (Clarkson) despair. Commotion, violence and a possible death or two soon ensue.

The black and white, high contrast and sharp photography gives the environment a classy, elegant and almost aristocratic feel. This is not your average party. Ordinary people are not invited. These celebrations are exclusively for distinguised actors. It feels like the movie wants to celebrate the artists rather to examine their characters in more detail.

Scribe and helmer Sally Potter probably wants to create a light-hearted yet sharp-tongued comedy with strong females and plenty of commentary on a handful of modern issues: female representation in politics, lesbianism, male foolishness, atheism versus spirituality, xenophobia towards Germans and so on. But sadly the script is full of clichés and stale humour. Some of the jokes – about having a man penetrate a lesbian, and the importance of the hairdo for a female politician – are vaguely funny, but that’s about it. The actors are never given the opportunity to fully develop their flat characters, and the might of their performances are confined to a few facial expressions and gestures,

The Party premiered at the 67th Berlin International Film Festival in February, when this piece was originally written. It’s showing at the BFI London Film Festival taking taking place October 5th to 15th, and finally out in cinemas everywhere across the UK on Friday, October 13th (2017). It’s available on VoD in October 2018.