Month: November 2017

Daguerrotype (Le Secret de la Chambre Noire)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

In a large house in a rural French town, contemporary photographer Stéphane (Olivier Gourmet) employs 19th century daguerreotype photographic plate techniques involving lengthy exposures. (The “chambre noire” of the title is the French term for both “darkroom” and “camera obscura”.) Subjects must remain utterly motionless for 20 minutes at a time in order for their image to be captured without becoming blurred. Stéphane attaches his models to metal rigs designed to hold them in place for the duration, an experience both uncomfortable and sometimes painful for them. He makes a living from fashion shoots set up by his colleague Vincent (Mathieu Amalric).

In between paid gigs, Stéphane obsessively photographs on a larger plate camera life-sized images of his 22-year-old daughter Marie (Constance Rousseau) just as while she was still alive he previously lensed his late wife Denise (Valérie Sibilia). Exposing his daughter for longer and longer periods of time of around 60 minutes, he sometimes has her drink liquid compounds to help her keep still.

Marie is concerned that the mercury-laden chemicals required for her father’s work, spillages and seepages of which can kill vegetation, are stored near the greenhouse in which she’s grown rare plants since she was a child. She wants to study botany and gets accepted on a course in Toulouse. This would mean moving away from home. She’s deeply unhappy about the father-daughter relationship and her father’s new assistant Jean (Tahar Rahim), talking to estate agent Thomas (Malik Zidi), hatches a plan to convince Stéphane of Marie’s death so that he will sell the house at a low price enabling Jean and Marie to make a fast buck by reselling at market value. It’s the sort of plot from which Hitchcock or Chabrol might have made a terrific suspense thriller.

“He’s confused photography and reality for so long he can no longer tell the difference between the living and the dead”, Marie confides to Jean. A few minutes in, when neither Jean nor the audience have been introduced to Marie, he spots her as a silent apparition in a blue, nineteenth century dress moving slowly up a staircase to be briefly framed like a pictorial subject in the circular landing above. Have we just seen a ghost?

Occasional creaks, blackouts and apparitions recall classic ghost stories like The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961) or The Haunting (Robert Wise, 1963). There’s a scene when Marie emerges from a bedroom that recalls the a similar scene in Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) and there are echoes in the father’s moulding his daughter into her departed mother which recall Obsession (Brian DePalma. 1976), itself a reworking of Vertigo. The heavily melancholic/ romantic score by Grégoire Hetzel, while light years away from Bernard Herrmann’s work for Vertigo and Obsession, has a similar effect.

However, those expecting a shocker like Kurosawa’s own Pulse/Kairo (2001) or Creepy (2016) are likely to be disappointed. Admittedly, an unexpected fall down some stairs proves as unnerving as anything in Pulse/Kairo and unsettling corridor lighting cues recall rival J-horror ghost outing Dark Water (Hideo Nakata, 2002). Yet the film largely eschews J-horror shock tactics to deliver a far more meditative, languorous and fluid experience to dreamlike, ethereal effect – as you might expect from a film based around the slow processes of nineteenth century photography.

Despite the French cast, crew, locations and architecture, this feels every inch a Kiyoshi Kurosawa film with numerous echoes of his other, Japanese-shot work. Opening exteriors recall the house that opens Before We Vanish (2017) and in almost every scene, there’s a clean feel to the composition familiar from those other films. Away from his native Japan, Kurosawa has imposed his own unique visual sensibilities on French culture and come up with something at once recognisably French and at the same time strangely alien to that culture.

(A note on spelling: the photographic plate is referred to as a ‘Daguerreotype’ after its inventor Louis Daguerre, while the film’s title drops the second ‘e’, presumably to make the English title’s pronunciation easier for a popular audience.)

Daguerrotype is available to stream on all major VoD platforms, and is part of the Walk This Way collection. And don’t forget to check our interview with Kurosawa!

A Caribbean Dream

Posted on by victorfraga

I was looking forward to this film. Not only had I never seen a Barbadian film, but this one was also made by a young black and female filmmaker. I went with an open heart, but unfortunately I was very disappointed. Despite making an interesting statement about interracial marriage, very few elements of A Caribbean Dream are redeemable. Ultimately, this is a clumsy film.

I confess that my knowledge of Shakespeare is limited and I have never read A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but this shouldn’t be mandatory for a film which only claims to be inspired by the bard. It introduces some of the Caribbean’s supernatural legends such as Papa Bois, Douens and Wata Mama into the famous Shakespeare piece, and even the emblematic Nigerian King Jaja makes it into the story. The action takes place in modern-day Barbados, where a music and arts festival is taking place. The problem is that the script is highly convoluted, and the outcome is a little fragmented and disjointed. Sometimes the action is hardly intelligible.

Despite the fact that the film was made by a local, it often looks like an infantile colonial caricature, with jolly local eternally prancing around. Predictably, all the poverty is sanitised and the film climaxes with multiple interracial marriages. It feels a lot like a sycophantic imperial allegory, where oppressor and oppressed make up and live happily in peace.

Plus the settings and the visuals effects are very primary school, with trailing glittering lights and spinning kaleidoscopic images. The lighting is poor, and so is the make-up. And the actors aren’t highly skilled. The soundtrack reminded me of The Little Mermaid (Ron Clements/ John Musker, 1989), and I could almost picture the sea creature playing the shell-xylophone in front of me. Oneiric is not a lame excuse for tacky. It feels like a cheap folkloric and touristic advert.

A Caribbean Dream is out in UK cinemas on Friday, November 10th. It’s rather surprising this film has received UK distribution.

Dalida

Posted on by victorfraga

This a movie that will make you dance and cry, both at once. The Egyptian-born Italian singer best remembered for singing in French captured the enormous sadness, loneliness and melancholia of chanson and later even infused music disco with her very own touch of desolation and heartache. In fact, Dalida is one of the best-selling artists of all times (in all languages, not just French), with nearly 200,000 million albums and singles sold worldwide, yet her name isn’t instantly recognisable in the English-speaking world.

If you’ve never or only vaguely heard heard of her, this is a golden opportunity to both listen to her songs and learn about her tragic life. If – like myself – you’re already a huge fan, this is an excellent chance to enjoy fabulous picks from her extensive repertory, attached to a mostly convincing reenacting of her life.

Dalida’s insecurities started a child because she had to wear thick glasses and was constantly bullied at school. She also described her father as an abusive figure. The sad and ugly duckling grew up to become an astoundingly beautiful woman, and she was even crowned Miss Egypt at the age of 20. Yet, other issues would arise in a life that came to epitomise female tragedy better than anyone else in the history of music.

The long-haired and tall brunette is played here by the Sveva Alviti, who’s also extremely attractive. Her stage performances are touching enough, but of course she gets a helping hand from Dalida herself (the audios are original). Hits such as Je Suis Malade, Le Temps des Fleurs, Paroles Paroles and the disco classic Laisse Moi Danser are played almost in their entirety, and you will also listen to her singing in Italian, Arabic and Japanese. Dalida recorded and performed in 10 languages. Alviti, on the other hand, sometimes lacks a little depth in the most intense moments of the movie. The profound sadness doesn’t always show in the eyes of the newcomer actor.

The film follows Dalida’s life in chronological order. All of the big events are there. Three of her lovers committed suicide: Luigi Tenco shot himself shortly after the two became engagement, her former husband and agent also shot himself (in the apartment where they lived together), while Richard Chanfray gassed himself (after they separated). Her inability to conceive a child also took a huge toll on her. She only found out at a very advanced age that she had damaged her tubes when she had an abortion at the age of 22. She felt guilty and unfufilled, and she hopped from one lover to the next feeling consistently empty and lonely. She also felt old, as reminded in her ballad “Il Vient d’Avoir 18 Ans”, about a woman infatuated with an 18-year-old. But she’s twice his age (at 36).

The film also follows her attempts to reconnect with herself, includes her spiritual journeys to India to meet with a guru and to meditate. It also remembers her short return to Egypt to record her role in Youssef Chahine’s comedy The Sixth Day. She was welcomed by the Egyptians like a proper diva, with the streets flooded with fans.

Those who understand French will grasp that her lyrics also defined her tragic life. She sings “Je suis vivre parce que je t’aime” (“I’m alive because I love you”), “Je n’ai plus envie de vivre ma vie, je suis malade” (“I have no desire to live life, I’m sick”) and “Je veux mourir sur scène, sans la moindre peine” (“I’m going to die on stage, without hesitation”). The last song is played as the film credits roll, after she killed herself with an overdose of barbiturates in 1987. She left a note saying: “life is unbearable, please forgive me”. She was 54 years of age. That’s three times 18.

In the end of the day, music didn’t seem to purge her enormous suffering. Perhaps it even catalysed it. We’ll never know for sure. Fortunately, Dalida lives through her music. And now also through this film.

Dalida is showing on Thursday, November 9th at the French Film Festival, and it’s out on all major VoD platforms on December 5th.

David Lynch gets Lifetime Award and answers our dirty questions

Posted on by victorfraga

It was a foggy morning in Rome last Saturday. The stone pines were obscured in the horizon by a very Lynchian haze. I came to the festival listening to the Sycamore Trees’ song and I almost mistook the stone pines from Rome with the trees from Twins Peaks: Firewalk with Me (1992). Then, just like the episode 8 of television series Twin Peaks: The Return, there was a bright light shining in the sky. It was not a nuclear bomb; it was just the sun. I instantly felt ready for a whole day of enlightenment.

I had some questions in my mind, and it was a challenge to elaborate them. Lynch doesn’t like meeting journalists and he avoids explaining his films. In fact, the start of the press conference was a series of almost monosyllabic answers. He dodged a question about Harvey Weinstein with a succinct “stay tuned”. Lynch rarely comments on politics and controversial issues. Instead he tends to drive conversations in a more abstract direction, talking the evolution of the human being and the importance of art.

Our dirty questions

Soon the mic landed on my lap and I popped a question: “your actors always mention that there is a feeling of trust on set. They trust you and you trust them. At the same time, you are in the control of the whole filming process. How do you balance trust and control?”

Lynch promptly replied: “you control the people you trust. The whole thing is to be true to an idea. We talk and talk until we realise that we are all going together on the same road.” Indeed, Lynch’s method on set is based on rehearsals, not improvisations. He continues: “when I first meet the actors in the studio most often their interpretation can differ from what I had in mind. So we do a few rehearsals and we get there in the end.#

Lynch’s creative process is solidly based on Transcendental Meditation, which he has been practising for 44 years. So I asked him: “how does meditation help in your work?”. He gave me a surprisingly detailed answer, suggesting he’s perhaps in his comfort zone: “meditation is connected with creativity. There is a lot of stress and negativity in the world. Transcendental Meditation is a key that opens the doors to creativity. Stress, sorrow and depression kill creativity. In the deepest level we are all one. Meditation brings us back to our home, to our Self. This is our future. One day we will all enjoy enlightenment. Suffering is not necessary. The artist does not need to suffer in order to show suffering“.

For sure meditation gives Lynch a state of satisfaction that is rare in artists. Artists most often hate to watch their films again, and are often dissatisfied with the outcome. With the exception of Dune (1984), a film that “I did not have the final cut”, Lynch enjoys all his movies.

The conversation with the journalists ends up with compliments to David Bowie and Harry Dean Stanton, both artists had passed away recently and collaborated in his films. We then had a three hour interval – Lynch went to an ostentatious lunch, and Italian coffee of course — and then everyone returned to the Award Ceremony.

A lifetime in the pictures

The second part of the day, which was also to the public, began with scenes from Eraserhead (1977) and something entirely new to me. Lynch explained : “My greatest inspiration for Eraserhead was the city of Philadelphia. I love it because it’s dirty, filthy and violent.” He then goes on to talk about each of his other movies. He confirmed exactly what I wrote earlier this yes: that Mulholland Drive (2001) is indeed a tribute to Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950). He adds that Sunset is a “sad film about longing”. Indeed both titles of the films are name of locations.

“Gordon Cole is a character in Sunset Boulevard and also in Twin Peaks. In LA, if you want to go towards Paramount Studios, you will pass two streets: Gordon Street and Cole Street. I am sure Billy Wilder got the name from the locations. Wilder had a sense of place.”

Lynch also remembered the two occasions in which he met Federico Fellini in Rome. The last time they saw each other was two days before Fellini entered a coma. They had a nice conversation about the changes in cinema.

At the end of the night, Italian director Paolo Sorrentino came up on stage. He delivered the Lifetime Achievement Award to the 71-year-old-year director from Montana. A much deserved and timely recognition!

Fancy an emotional walk through European cinema?

Posted on by victorfraga

This Autumn take a walk on the wild side of European cinema without leaving the comfort of your home. DMovies is delighted to announce that we are joining forces with Under the Milky Way and The Film Agency in order to reclaim the hidden gems of European film often overlooked. These movies are part of the Walk This Way project, which is funded by EU Media (a sub-programme of Creative Europe) and is aimed at fostering and promoting straight-to-VoD European cinema. The Film Agency is handling the PR and communications of the initiative.

So we took the opportunity to talk to Muriel Joly, Head of the Walk this Way project, and find out why we should be watching European films on VoD, what’s so special about the Collection, how it all started and where we’re going next!

DM0vies – Where did the idea for the Walk this Way Collection come from?

Muriel Joly – The idea came from the fact that too few European films are seen outside their country of origin each year (only 37% out of the 1740 European films produced on a yearly basis). Indeed, a “traditional” distribution (meaning in theatres) for these films can be complex, costly and not profitable, while a straight to digital release can be much less expensive and highly flexible (you can target the territories you want, stop the distribution when you need).

As an aggregator, Under the Milky Way is a real pure player in terms of digital distribution. Hence building these collections of films and distributing them on global and local VOD platforms throughout Europe is really our core business.

So, with the support of Creative Europe MEDIA we decided to create a real editorial line to highlight the wealth of European Films regrouping them by genre (thrillers or comedy) or by commercial potential.We invest a lot in subtitling and marketing to maximise the distribution effort.

DM – How does VoD help to give visibility to innovative European cinema overlooked elsewhere?

MJ – VoD is really opportunity for this European cinema for two main reasons. On the one hand, for these European films, hardly distributed, VoD represents really low entry costs. In addition, the existence of pan-European platforms covering many territories with only a single point of entry for the supply allows for a considerable smoothness in term of process, and a real cost efficiency.

On the other hand, for the VoD platforms these films do represent a real opportunity to diversify their offer and differentiate themselves towards their audience.

DM – Which Way are we Walking next?

MJ – To the rest of the world !! For the first time this year, we enlarged our distribution to the US, Canada, Latin America and Japan. We are thrilled to see how our European films will be welcomed over there! [end of interview]

Our first four films are part of the Award Winning Collection, which is being launched on November 6th. They are fabulously dirty movies that deservedly snatched various prizes and accolades across the globe in the past four years. There are gems from Portugal, Germany, Iceland and France (with a scary Japanese twist). Enough to keep you entertained every Friday night this November!

All films are available on iTunes, Google, Sony, Microsoft and Amazon Instant Video. Daguerrotype is also available on Sky. Stay tuned for our exclusive dirty reviews in the next few weeks, as well as the upcoming Men of the Edge Collection (in December):

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1. Daguerrotype (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2016):

From acclaimed Japanese master Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Tokyo Sonata, Pulse), comes the French-Japanese production Daguerrotype, a classic ghost story bent through the lens of one of the most singular horror visionaries at work today.

Jean (Tahar Rahim), a young Parisian with few skills and even fewer prospects, seems an unlikely candidate for assistant to famed photographer Stéphane (Olivier Gourmet), an obsessive perfectionist living in isolation since his wife’s unexpected death. Yet he soon finds himself in his new employer’s vast, decaying mansion, helping to create life-sized daguerrotypes so vivid they seem almost to contain some portion of their subjects’ souls. Their model is most often Stéphane’s daughter and muse, Marie (Constance Rousseau), and as she and Jean fall in love they realise they must hatch a plot to leave Stéphane’s haunted world forever. But is there something malevolent within the massive daguerrotypes that will prevent their escape?

Kurosawa has recently directed Creepy (2016) and Before we Vanish (2017), both already featured on DMovies.

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2. Saint George (Marco Martins, 2016):

Portuguese director Marco Martins reunites with Nuno Lopes after the success of his first acclaimed feature film ‘Alice’ (2005). Drowning in debt, unemployed boxer Jorge (Nuno Lopes) is on the verge of losing his young son and his Brazilian wife. He is one of shocking amounts of Portuguese families and companies unable to repay their loans in the time of European troika bailout measures. Due to his intimidating physique, Jorge must reluctantly accept a job with a collection agency which drags him into a world of violence and crime.

Nuno Lopes role of boxer Jorge was awarded with Best Actor en the Venice Horizon Award 2016.

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3. Metalhead (Ragnar Bragason, 2013)

This dirty gem comes from Iceland. It’s the year 1970 and as Black Sabbath record their first album and mark the birth of Heavy Metal, Hera Karlsdottir (Thora Bjorg Helga) is born on the cowshed floor at her parents’ farm in rural Iceland. The years of her youth are carefree until a tragedy strikes when her older brother is killed in an accident. In her grief she finds solace in the dark music of Heavy Metal and dreams of becoming a rock star.

Director Ragnar Bragason is one of Iceland’s most popular and critically acclaimed filmmakers of the younger generation. He is best known for his twin feature-films Children (2006) and Parents (2007) and the popular TV series trilogy The Night Shift.

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4. All of a Sudden (Asli Ozge , 2016):

A German film with a Turkish gaze. After the party in Karsten’s apartment, everybody leaves except Anna (Natalia Belitski). Admiringly, Karsten (Sebastian Hülk) approaches this mysterious woman. How could he have known, that in a moment of weakness, his well-established life would spiral out of control and turn into a disaster? In this small provincial German town, disappointment soon fuels anger, justice hides behind hypocrisy, and evil gradually unfolds.

Istanbul-born, Germany-based director Asli Ozge was recognised for All of a Sudden with the Label Europa Cinemas – Special Mention award at Berlin International Film Festival 2016 and the Fipresci Award at the Istanbul International Film Festival 2016.

Two Doors (Doo gae-eui moon)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The story of the Yongsan tragedy. Yongsan is an area of Central Seoul which had been the site of a US military base and the infrastructure such as bars and prostitution which had grown up around it. Once the US military decamped to another area, the developers hoped to move in and regenerate the area. For ‘regenerate’ read ‘gentrify’, a situation not entirely unfamiliar in parts of the UK at present. In Yongsan, when some tenants in one particular housing block refused to move out, activists seized on this and helped stage a protest.

Instead of listening to their grievances as the protesters would have hoped, the authorities surrounded the block with police whose presence only served to aggravate the protesters into throwing firebombs. The police subsequently stormed the building with intent to remove the protesters who barricaded themselves inside and whose last stand would take place in a lookout structure on the roof of the building.

With water cannon concentrated on both the block and the lookout, a SWAT team was lowered onto the roof in a container carried by a crane and the protesters retreated into the lookout. Tensions were high on both sides when the lookout suddenly burst into flames. The ensuing inferno claimed the lives of five protesters and one police officer. Initially, no-one was quite sure what had happened.

A court case followed. It concluded that the police operation had been necessary to uphold the rule of law and incarcerated four protesters who’d managed to survive the fire.

The Pinks film making collective didn’t think these arguments were good enough and set out to make a documentary about the incident. The surviving protesters being in prison weren’t available for interviews, so all the filmmakers had to work with was the footage shot by journalists and police at the incident plus audio recordings of the trial. There are also a few interviews of people on the protesters’ side.

Out of these limited materials came an extraordinary film. You feel like you’re watching the tragedy unfold in real time with commentary after the event trying to piece together exactly what happened. What emerges for a viewer unfamiliar with recent Korean political history is a terrifying picture of a repressive, right wing regime where ordinary people are stamped on in no uncertain terms.

The police going inside the building and the SWAT team airlifted in by container are clearly under extreme pressure. This is one of those cinematic experiences where you believe one group (the police) to be in the wrong, yet at the same time they’re in an impossible situation and you feel for their plight. That doesn’t render their actions right, correct or good, but it does in some sense put you alongside them and elicit a degree of sympathy.

As documentaries go, this is a must see and whilst it obviously would have a particular resonance for a South Korean audience, for an international one it transcends such concerns with its picture of a repressive regime and the toll exacted from those charged with maintaining it on the ground. Although it’s a very different situation, UK residents will recall the Grenfell Tower tragedy too.

Two Doors plays in the London Korean Film Festival. A follow-up film The Remnants was made by the Pinks film making collective five years later and is also showing at the Festival.

The Remnants (Gong-Dong-Jeong-Beom)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Set to open in Korea in 2018, this is the follow-up documentary to Two Doors (Kim il-rhan/ Hong Ji-you, 2012) about the Yongsan tragedy in which a policeman and five protesters were killed in a fire atop a housing block during a protest. One of the limitations imposed on that film was the incarceration of those protesters that escaped the burning rooftop lookout atop the Yongsan building. Viewers of the first film kept asking what had happened to these people.

The short answer is: four years after originally being sentenced, they were pardoned and released. This meant that they were now available to tell their own stories, so Kim and Lee from the Pinks film making collective and their crew started talking to them on camera. Slowly, a second film started to emerge. It’s not exactly a sequel, more a follow up. Which is to say, it’s dealing with different aspects of the same story but constructed around a different template and operating within a dissimilar set of parameters.

In the process, this second instalment starts to unpack elements that were never fully explained in the first film. For one thing, the rooftop lookout is now described as a simple structure erected by the protesters themselves rather than an original architectural feature, with interview material of the rigger who oversaw its construction.

This second doc also explores areas into which the first’s limitations prevented it from venturing. One question is that of how the fire in the lookout actually started in the first place. Two Doors drew upon a number of sources. The exterior footage shows the structure unexpectedly, suddenly burst into flames with no obvious visual clue as to why. There’s no police footage of what occurred inside the structure presumably because cameras were turned off when the Swat team moved onto the roof. The official report which formed a major part of the evidence in the court case goes suspiciously quiet when it comes to this part of the operation. It was something which therefore got passed over in the original film, but with access to those who were inside the inferno and survived, the various factors leading up to the deadly combustion are explained in some considerable detail.

This access makes The Remnants much more people-centred than its predecessor. It becomes clear that there were two camps among the protesters, those from the building itself and those activists who came in from outside to help them in their struggle. In prison, the two factions became polarised. After their release, three survivors wanted to meet together on a regular basis to talk through and collectively process the trauma they’d experienced. By way of contrast, the fourth survivor’s way of dealing with it was to go to rallies and remind people of the tragedy to keep it in the public eye. The first three want him to meet up with him and talk about it, but for a long time he refuses, believing this to be a waste of time. Eventually though, the four are brought together in an event attempt to try and understand what happened on the day of the fire: this also serves as a catalyst for the unwilling party to engage (argue with) the others which proves cathartic for all concerned.

Any documentary about survivors of a tragic fire will bring to mind Grenfell Tower for UK residents, although the specifics of that tragedy are very different. Inevitably, because The Remnants concerns the Yongsan tragedy survivors rather than the authorities, the film feels more inwards-focused than its predecessor. But it’s a striking work for all that.

The Remnants plays in The London Korean Film Festival.

In Blue

Posted on by victorfraga

For me, film festivals are exciting because they are a little bit like the theatre. They are a singular live experience. Even if you have planned it well, there is always room for surprise. There will always be a movie whose director you never heard of, spoken in a language you don’t speak, with a very unexpected plot. In Blue is one those films. It’s a film so original and daring that it deserves a review.

Spoken in Dutch and Romanian, In Blue has two protagonists: an independent Dutch flight attendant called Lin (Maria Kraakman; the film title refers to her uniform) and a 15-year-old boy called Nicu (Bogdan Iancu), who lives on the streets of Bucharest. In the first scene, Lin delivers a passenger’s child in mid-air. Meanwhile, Nicu’s (Bogdan Iancu) washes his teeth in a dirty train station toilet. Despite looking dirty and scruffy, Nicu seems quite concerned about his teeth. He gives his sister a toothbrush as if the little girl would value it more than a doll. The second time Nicu washes his teeth we learn that he just gave someone blow job. Nicu happens to be a rent boy.

Nicu literally crosses Lin’s path. Lin is late to the airport. She gets on a taxi and asks the driver to hurry, which he does until he runs over Nicu. She follows the boy to emergency and suddenly they bond. To the extent that she swaps her shift with another flight attendant so she can be with him.

We cannot figure out what sort of relationship they have. Lin behaves motherly but she also puts on perfume and make-up whenever they are about to meet. Nicu becomes dependent on Lin’s affection and care, and perhaps he also has a vested interest her money. Such intriguing connection resembles the one in Pixote, the Law of the Weakest (Hector Babenco, 1981). Likewise Pixote and and the prostitute Sueli in the Brazilian movie, Nicu and Lin stage a pietà moment for the cameras.

In Blue conquers your heart with its ambiguity. The filmmaker illustrates Mother Teresa’s quote: “I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, that can be no more hurt, only more love.”

Little by little, we understand why Lin is infatuated with the boy, and you will probably forgive her for it. She seduces a minor, buys him clothes, invites him to her hotel room, pays him to show her the streets of Bucharest. But there is more to than meets the eye. Life is never what it seems. Life is far more complex. The cinematography, on the other hand, is far simpler and closer to reality. The places where Nicu goes, the corners he inhabits with other homeless people give you a real feel of life on the streets Romania, and how the country its failing its poor people.

In Blue is showing at Rome International Film Festival. Highly recommendable for other festivals and also for distribution.

Freak Show

Posted on by victorfraga

The English actress, producer and filmmaker Trudy Styler confessed to me that she was once a freak. Her debut fiction feature as a director Freak Show takes her back to her old school days, when she was too scared to march down the building corridors, in what she described as the “walk of shame”. That’s because her schoolmates would taunt and call her “scarface”, referring to a mark left by a lorry accident at the age of three. Freak Show tells a story parallel to Trudy’s own predicament.

Based on the novel by James St. James, the story follows Billy Bloom (Alex Lawther), a cross-dressing teen who studies in a high school in some American red state. Everyone despises him just because he looks like different. Following a bullying episode, Billy gets seriously wounded and needs to be hospitalised. His parents are divorced and he lives with his wealthy father. His affection towards his mother is bigger than towards his father, yet she is not present. When Muv (Bette Midler) does come back, a long time after Billy was in hospital, she will not rescue him. Muv has her own issues and she cannot be a devoted mother.

Billy is naturally gifted and clever. He loves irony, just like his favourite writer Oscar Wilde, who was jailed from 1895 to 1897 for gross indecency with men. Billy is in love with Flip, a popular and presumably straight guy in school. He welcomes the friendship, in an apparent bid to gain access to the mansion where Billy lives, which is dotted with art pieces. Flip is a sportsman but deep inside he wants to be an artist. He can’t, though, as that means disappointing his father.

Freak Show isn’t aimed at LGBT people, but instead at young people as a whole. It’s more about parenting than equality rights. It’s about identity too, and there is nothing more genuine than a youngster searching for his individuality. Billy’s identity is at risk. But Billy is determined to be who he is. He refuses to stop wearing his outlandish outfits, even when he’s at his nadir. He goes wild and decides to run for Homecoming Queen, a contest exclusively for girls.

Flip’s sexual identity is also at stake. Can he be friends with a queer? His girlfriend does not seem to approve of the friendship. Meanwhile, Billy’s father is trying to understand and to accept his son, although he struggles to understand the meaning of cross-dressing.

The movie soundtrack includes freaky Boy George performing Elvis Presley’s Viva Las Vegas.

Freak Show excels in costume design. Designers Colleen Atwood and Sarah Laux got the right balance between the gaudy and the luxurious. Billy’s outfits are somewhere of Priscilla Queen of The Desert (Stephan Elliott, 1994) and Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, 2006).

But what’s the use of costume if there is no one to strut around with pride? Alex Lawther nails it. He understands the depths of his character very well. Billy is in almost every scene. Without him, Freak Show would be freaky indeed. This is not Lawther’s first role as a gay man, he was also the protagonist of the Franco-British Departure (Andrew Steggall, 2016).

Freak Show showed at the Rome International Film Festival, attended by Trudie herself (who happens to be married to Sting) in 2017, when this piece was originally written. The film is out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 22nd, and then out on VoD on Monday, July 2nd.

Suburbicon

Posted on by victorfraga

Most critics have slammed George Clooney’s latest directorial endeavour, which was universally described by Rotten Tomatoes as a “misfire”. And indeed the film is not without faults. But it’s not a complete disaster, either. Far from that. Despite some shortcomings in the script (which was penned by the Coen brothers) and in the acting, Suburbicon is still fun to watch. Perhaps most importantly, it’s a film with its heart at the place, and a witty take on American “suburban” or capitalistic values.

The film title refers to a supposedly peaceful and idyllic community with affordable homes, impeccable lawns and residents donning immaculate dresses and hairdos. The film opens with images as if taken from a hairy tale homes brochure. And the entire vintage has a charming vintage from the 1950s. It looks like the ultimate concretization of the American dream. George Clooney, however, begs to differ: the dreamlike world slowly descends into a nightmare, as locals become intoxicated with their very own petit bourgeois inclinations and racist views.

Gardner Lodge (Matt Damon) is the father of a small family in Suburbicon. One night, the home of the Lodge family is broken into by two sadistic robbers, who proceed to sedate the whole family and to kill the matriarch Rose. Gardner is left to raise his child Nicky (Noah Jupe) with Rose’s twin sister Margaret. Both sisters are played are Julianne Moore. It predictably turns out that Lodge’s relationship to Margaret is far more profound that initially revealed, and that he may have an obscure connection with the local mafia as well as vested interests in the death of his wife. And so the American dream begins to collapse.

Parallel to all this, a black family has moved next door, and they immediately encounter rabid racism from the neighbours. The community erects a fence around their house, shouts profanities and vandalises their property while flying the Confederate flag. The only viable connection between the black family and the white community is the friendship between Noah and their black son of about the same age.

The best moments of the film are with the savvy death insurance agent played by Oscar Isaac (pictured above), who suspects there’s something “fishy” with the claim. Isaac is witty and sadistic, and he finds a very clever way to deal with the situation.

The biggest problem with Suburbicon is that these two narrative strands (the Lodgers and the black family) neither tie together nor complement each other. In fact, they compete with each other. The film would have worked much better without the black family. The very last scene is an attempt to fix this, but it simply doesn’t work. You will you catch yourself thinking: “what the heck?”. Also, Nicky’s character evolves to become the only ray of hope and decency in the story, but Jupe’s performance isn’t strong enough to support such a central role.

Suburbicon is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, November 24th.

Raving Iran

Posted on by victorfraga

Music is a weapon for personal liberation and freedom of expression. And it’s a very powerful weapon. Just like cinema, it can bring about profound change in individuals, communities and societies as a whole. This is not unbeknownst to Iranian authorities. They are well aware of such transformational potential, which is something their deeply conservative regime does not welcome. In Raving Iran, DJs Anoosh and Arash face an uphill struggle to play their music without breaking the country’s strict laws.

They have to change locations of the parties last minute in order to avoid attention in the neighbourhood and to dodge police (this might ring some bells with ravers in the UK in the 1990s). But Iran is far more oppressive, with hundreds of arrests every year on charges of “immorality” inside “satanic raves”, the doc explains. They also attempt to register their duo “Blade and Beard”, and to negotiate with authorities what’s permissible. The options are extremely limited: English lyrics are not allowed, except to praise Iran, women can only sing in the background and even piercings are a no-go. An official asks what “house music” is, and Anoosh responds: “like our music, only instrumental”, but he doesn’t look convinced with the answer. The duo also consider bribing, but that turns out to be too expensive at $900 for four days, and they would probably have few guarantees anyway.

Despite all difficulties, Arash and Anoosh carry on playing their music, and they seem to have a horde of followers. The movie captures some beautiful party moments, even if most faces are concealed for obvious reasons. A particularly beautiful moment is when they decide to throw a party in the evening in the middle of the desert, speakers, lights et all. They then nurse their hangover (or perhaps just tiredness, it’s not entirely clear whether they consumed alcohol) on the scorching sands of the same desert.

The government’s Vice Squad (also known as the Morality Police) often keep an eye on the two young men. They eventually gatecrash an illegal rave and arrest Arash, while Anoosh manages to flee with the equipment. But every cloud has a silver lining. Shortly after Arash is released, the two are invited to play in Switzerland, for the Street Parade of Zurich. Despite Arash’s conviction, they manage to get a visa and the two artists fly to Europe. They bask in the apparent freedom of the old continent. A “drug-checking” tent for verifying the quality of drugs is particularly surprising to them, in a testament of the country’s pragmatic attitude to narcotics.

Everything looks wonderful, and so they begin to contemplate immigration to this newly-found haven of personal and artistic freedoms. Until they are confronted with a disturbing figure: 50.3% of the Swiss population object to any type of immigration. Should they stay in this xenophobic “paradise” or should they return to their oppressive homeland?

Raving Iran is showing as part of the Doc’n Roll Film Festival taking place between November 2nd and 19th.