Month: January 2018

Downsizing

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

This being a Hollywood movie, you may find yourself worrying you’re at the right film when it starts off with a Norwegian scientist in a lab. No matter: it soon goes through momentous discovery to big international conference where one Norwegian scientist takes to the stage and opens up a box to reveal another of his colleagues – who has been ‘downsized’ and is now a mere five inches tall. It’s the solution to too many people living on planet Earth with its finite and inadequate resources.

Cut to people watching this on TV in public spaces, among them occupational therapist Paul Safranek (that American everyman Matt Damon). He and his wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig) are currently experiencing budgetary problems and over the next few weeks and months they discover couples that they know who have ‘downsized’ and think it’s the best decision they ever made.

So the couple take a visit to Leisureland, a miniature resort where ‘downsized’ people live after the non-reversible procedure. They learn that if a full-sized person becomes downsized, the financial assets of an average income would turn from just about enough to get by to a millionaire’s income. They’re hooked, the paperwork is signed, the process undergone.

On the other side of the process, it all seems too good to be true, although Paul isn’t really sure if he fits. He is even less sure he likes his constantly partying, Serbian upstairs neighbour Dusan Mirkovic (Christoph Waltz) and his business partner Konrad (Udo Kier). And as Paul watches the TV news he learns there are global issues with the process too: people in repressive regimes are being downsized against their will, such as Vietnamese activist Ngoc Lan Tran (Hong Chau). Who one day turns up as the head cleaning lady in charge of a small posse of cleaning ladies tidying up Dusan’s flat after one of his parties.

If this seemed initially like a utopian existence, Leisureland turns out to suffer from all the financial inequalities that beset other human societies: there are haves and have-nots. Tran takes Paul to her home in the hope that he can administer medicine to her seriously ill flat-mate – on a bus through a vast tunnel to outside the Leisureland complex where the poor live in substandard, run down blocks of flats. The narrative has stranger things to deliver still, as Dusan takes Konrad and the other two to visit the original downsized Norwegian colony…

Sadly, however, while downsizing is a visionary film brimming with radical concepts it’s equally an infuriating narrative exercise where potentially rich ideas, themes or characters suddenly appear only to disappear shortly afterwards before they can be fully explored. So for instance, the ill neighbour for whom Paul supplies inappropriate tablets which Tran gets her to ingest one week is gone when he visits the next week. What happened? “Oh, she died”, says Tran matter-of-factly. No shock, no grief, patently unbelievable. Something similar happens towards the end of the film when Paul, in an episode with the Norwegian scientists’ colony worthy of When Worlds Collide (Rudolph Maté, 1951), has to decide whether or not to accompany the departing colony members into a huge Brave New World deep underground.

Were it not for such serial errors of judgement, this could easily been the film of the year. It’s still worth seeing, though, despite its faults.

Downsizing is out in the UK on Wednesday, January 24th. Watch the film trailer below:

Lover for a Day (L’Amant d’un Jour)

Posted on by victorfraga

Featured on the main slate of the 55th New York Film Festival and winning the Composers’ Prize at Cannes last year, Philippe Garrel’s Lover for a Day offers a contemplative examination of love, anguish, lust and sexual autonomy. Casting his daughter Ester Garrel as Jeanne- a 23-year-old heartbroken after breaking up with her boyfriend Mateo (Paul Toucang) – who consequently decides to temporarily live with her dad (Eric Caravaca). Garrel’s monochrome feature is a piece of artistry upon the very nature of love. Expressive of the greatest poems and literature on the topic, it is a sophisticated entrée into exploring the fragilities of l’amour.

Recently seen on screen in Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name (2017), Ester Garrel’s Jeanne is initially a figure of pain; physically awash with frightening moments of agony. Again adopting the ethos of working with his family members, exemplarily with his father Maurice in Liberté, la Nuit (1983), and his son Louis Garrel in Regular Lover (2005), the lineage of placing those closest to him in front of the camera inevitably imbues the context surrounding her character with a psychological Freudian quality. Still, predating her entrance into the narrative, we firstly see Ariane (Louise Chevillotte) experience a deep sexual moment, against a white toilet wall, with Jeanne’s father, Gilles. It is a moment of pure passion in a public space, leaving one initially in a state of intrigue as to whether or not their relationship is one of lust or a deep spiritual understanding.

On her arrival, Jeanne, claims Ariane as ‘less beautiful’ than her mother amidst her pain. Extending the historicity of alluring French female actors, particularly Chevillotte, a newcomer to the big screen, holds every take with a captivating edge; drawing you closer and closer to her attractive freckled face. Garrel too, in monochrome, attracts the camera to hold on her frequently anguished complexation. Building a relationship henceforth from her residence at her father’s place, the two women allow their lives and secrets to become entwined with one another, away from the knowledge of Gilles. Continually, Ariane is allowed to express her youthful sexual urges to a level of secrecy, Gilles openly adopting the ethos of ‘what you do not know, will never hurt you.’- a very blase European approach to love.

A juxtaposition of each other yet still the same age, Jeanne and Ariane depict two sides of love that are the pinnacle and nadir of the profound emotion. Languid and sexually consuming in her relationship with Gilles, Ariane does not see the age difference between the two as a cause of concern. Further, she is a woman of independence and operates to a level of autonomy that is of verisimilitude. Yet, in light of recent allegations against Woody Allen et al, Lover for a Day, without its nuanced characters and philosophical edge, would be susceptible to backlashes and outright criticism. Nonetheless, at its uttermost core, Garrel and co portray the greatest human emotion of all with a softening touch, achieved through exquisite moments of dialogue, written partly by Philippe’s wife, Caroline Deruas-Garrel.

Surveying the negative aspects of being in a comfortable relationship, Jeanne claims that ‘At least, in solitude, you battle the cold’. Akin to any romantic line of Shakespeare, the solace of Milton’s writing or the lyrical dizzy heights of love in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, it’s a statement in the screenplay which encapsulates the insightfully articulate reflections on love Lover for a Day holds inherent through the narrative, performance and cinematic language.

Lover for a Day is out in cinemas from Friday, January 19th.

The Post

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

In 1971, The New York Times broke the story of the Pentagon Papers. These documents detailed how the incumbent Nixon administration and its predecessors had increased the scale of the US involvement in the unwinnable war in Vietnam for political gain rather than the national good. The administration’s response was swift and repressive: within two days, a legal injunction prevented the paper from publishing further details. The Washington Post (often shortened to The Post, as in the film title), at the time more a local paper than a national one, stepped into the breach with its reporters hunting down the New York Times’ source so that it could publish more of the story as it emerged. Having just floated on the New York Stock Exchange, the paper found itself in the tricky situation of being accountable to conservative shareholders who didn’t like the idea of exposing their investment to risks with the potential to close the paper down for good.

The two main players in this story, as envisaged by Liz Hannah’s original script, were The Post’s editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) and publisher Katherine Graham (Meryl Streep). Bradlee is the hard-nosed newshound gutted that The Times has scooped The Post and determined to make the most of the story once his rival is prohibited from further publication. Graham is the former housewife and mother who, having inherited The Post from her late husband, is determined to make a success of it at a time when women didn’t do things like publish newspapers because their place was unquestionably in the home.

With Josh Singer, the writer of Spotlight (Tom McCarthy, 2015), brought in by producer-director Spielberg to further research and beef up the screenplay’s journalistic element, The Post feels solidly grounded in the world it purports to represent. Spielberg augments the script by finding visual ways to tell his story. His opening has Streep wake and sit up in her bed causing files of paperwork to drop off the coverlet onto the floor. We immediately know Graham is a woman who prepares thoroughly for her work.

Spielberg mines extraordinary performances from his two leads and his excellent supporting cast. An almost unrecognisable Hanks convinces as the quick-witted, determined and conscientious editor who more than meets his equal in his quick-to-learn, publisher colleague. Streep’s role is arguably the more challenging one: Graham finds herself in a place where women simply weren’t found back in the 1970s, in a world of men feeling her way through tough business situations as they present themselves. Moreover, she’s on friendly terms with the powerful likes of Defence Secretary Robert McNamara (Bruce Greenwood) and realises that she will have to choose between looking out for old friends and sticking up for the truth by publishing facts and stories which may run counter to those friends’ best interests.

Comparisons will be made with classic journalistic thriller All The Presidents’ Men (Alan J.Pakula, 1976) which takes up the story at the Watergate break-in at the point where The Post leaves off. Indeed, Spieberg’s film ends with almost identical shots to those which opened Paluka’s. However, the latter was primarily about two reporters chasing a story whereas the former is more concerned with what makes a newspaper tick in terms of the differences between an editor’s mind and a publisher’s. Pakula’s conspiracy thriller takes place in an all-male environment where women are never more than minor players, whereas Spielberg portrays a part of that all-male environment having to deal with a smart and savvy woman engaging with them on her own terms, something it really isn’t used to.

Moreover, whereas Pakula’s movie only dealt with events from a few years before, Spielberg’s retelling of history from over 40 years ago speaks volumes to the present day when the incumbent President wants the media to regurgitate his own, often contentious version of events rather than seek to present objective truth. Two images stick with the viewer long after the film has ended: typesetting printing blocks spelling out “freedom to publish” in the ready-to-roll newspaper presses and the President as a distant figure glimpsed through a window barking angry orders into his phone. This pre-digital US of the 1970s echoes the present day.

The movie reminds us that the US news media exists for the benefit not of the governors but the governed. Because this is a Spielberg movie and therefore by default popular entertainment, that notion will be widely seen by a mass audience both at home and abroad – as indeed it deserves to be – and that’s a pretty big deal.

The Post is out in the UK on Friday, January 19th. It is available for digital streaming from May.

The Final Year

Posted on by victorfraga

It feels a little bit like a love story with a tragic ending everyone already knows. Obama is kind, eloquent and extremely likable, as so are his three associates composing the tripod for this film: US Ambassador at the UN Samantha Power, Deputy Security Advisor Ben Rhodes and Secretary of State John Kerry (pictured together below). Everyone is avuncular and magnanimous. It’s simply delicious to love these adorable people in their final year in office, particularly when you know that a grotesque narcissist is about to succeed Obama in office, and wreak havoc to just about everything that has been achieved in as little time as possible.

It’s very refreshing to see that until recently the people running the corridors of the White House were more liberal and humane. Samantha cries as she talks about being welcomed as an immigrant to the US (she was born in Ireland), as she encourages more people to come to their country. Meanwhile, Obama travels to Hiroshima and talks about “our shared responsibility to look in the eyes of history”, urging people to make no more wars and also to reflect where it all went wrong. This is in stark contract to Trump’s constant ultra-xenophobic rants (such as the “shithole countries” remark) and unabashed belligerence (such as comments about the size of his nuclear button).

A lot of action is quite informal, and sometimes it feels like you’re inside someone’s (very posh) house, instead of the residence and workplace of the president of the US. Ultimately, this is a very romantic and idyllic representation of Obama and his associates, yet not vulgar and jingoist. As everyone already knows, Obama is extremely inspirational and eloquent, and his rhetoric has remarkably conciliatory tones. He’s indeed the bloke would like to have a beer with at the pub. Kerry and Rhodes are a little more stern, but still affable enough. Power is the epitome of altruism: she travels to Nigeria to in order how much the US cares about Boko Haram kidnap victims (reminded me a little bit of Ed Sheeran, except she’s not an artist).

In a nutshell, this is a warm and fun film to watch, but also a piece of US propaganda. It showcases the relatable and and human side of US government to both American voters and the world. The message is: “look, the US used to have a heart, a friendly face”. This heart has since been replaced with a d**k, and the friendly face with an ugly expression of arrogance and indifference. Not to mention a silly finger ready to enter uninvited orifices and press nuclear button at its convenience. The film doesn’t go into the details of Trump’s administration, but we all know what’s happening. Rhodes fears that the new president will destroy what was achieved for the environment, Cuba and Iran. He’s already ruined Cuba and the environment in less than year, and Iran is not far down the list.

The problem with The Final Year is that it lacks any balance whatsoever. While this is indeed a wonderful time to be nostalgic of the Obama administration, let’s not forget its shortcomings. In his final year, Obama dropped 26,171 bombs across the world (three every hour). Plus he never closed Guantanamo Bay, contradicting his very own commitment in his first day in office. His administration tacitly consented to three coup d’états in Latin America (in Honduras, Paraguay and Brazil; all under the same US Ambassador Liliane Ayalde), while the region mostly experienced stability under Bush. The film doesn’t even touch on any of that, choosing to focus on Syria and the usual Russophobia prevalent in the US. The EU and the UK are almost entirely absent in the movie (Boris Johnson is quickly to be seen, but not to be heard in the film). No mention of Assange, either.

The film closes with Obama final trip as president. He visits Greece, the birth of democracy. The mood feels a little funereal, as Trump has already been elected and we all know what coming next. Obama remains balanced and positive, and his message is concise and pertinent as usual. “History doesn’t follow a straight line”, he claims. He also talks about great world powers no longer fighting world wars, and points out that conflicts in the 21st century pale in comparison to the 20th century, and urges us all to sustain this. All extremely well said. If only his actions matched his words.

The Final Year is out in the best cinemas across the UK on Friday, January 19th.

Suggs: My Life Story

Posted on by victorfraga

Known to all as the frontman of the 2 Tone masters, Madness, Graham ‘Suggs’ McPherson has a personality, voice and aura that makes him a joyful presence to watch and listen too. Recording his autobiographical show at Hoxton Hall (in East London), merging it with cuts away from the stage to the real world, Julien Temple brings his keen eye for capturing some of the most colourful and peculiar moments in Suggs’ life story, in Suggs: My Life Story.

Blending the structures of a comedy show, animation and dramatised filmmaking, Temple deploys a plethora of different cinematic vices to tell the story of Suggs. Initially walking onto a small stage accompanied by fellow Madness piano player Dean ‘Deano’ Mumford, Suggs, from the opening moments, is an energetic figure, bouncing around the stage, whilst recounting his life story to a packed out theatre. Translated to Steve Organ’s variety of different shots with Jonny Halifax and Ben Young’s quick edit, the information on screen comes at one thick and fast. As any great comedian would, including the likes of Micky Flanagan, Suggs has a commanding voice that is greeted by his viewers in an incising fashion.

Holding the spotlight was a talent evidently crafted in the backstreet pubs of Camden Town as the band came to fruition in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Guiding us through the back streets of Soho and Camden, his stories are filled with comedic anecdotes regarding blue silk suits and youth culture of the era. Still, a fundamental search lays at the heart of his story – who really was his father? Though not as orientated around lineage as the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are?, it is a narrative beat that creates a significant piece pathos towards Suggs and makes him all the more endearing in achieving the success he has.

Presenting a vivid image of London in the 1970s and 1980s, with its red light glistening Soho streets, credit must be paid to those involved in unearthing such striking footage. Besides Suggs talking, such images interpolate the viewer into his world. Temple’s selection of footage does not undermine the lyrical worlds of Suggs, to the film’s advantage. Though suffused to his words, they elevate his anecdotes to a vibrant position. Supplemented by the diegetic audience laughing, jeering and whistling, the delights held as seeing Suggs’s world is left to flow naturally by Temple.

In the moments of breaking away from speaking to song, the transgression feels natural and unforced simply due to Sugg’s already iconic voice. Supported by his friend and band member, Deano’s piano imbues the live footage with an old fashioned piece of humour and entertainment. There from its starting moments to its last, it is a positive omnipresent voice, just as Suggs’ vocal chords are.

As Madness’ music to this day does SO brilliantly, Suggs: My Life Story fills one with an upbeat feeling and foregrounds Suggs as a national treasure. Just like the buoyant chords that play right throughout their song, One Step Beyond, Temple and Suggs imbue the film with a constant pulse, never leaving a dull moment. Welcome to the house of fun, indeed.

Suggs: My Life Story premiered in cinemas in January (2018). On TV and Sky on Saturday, August 14th (2021).

Cinema is Brexit’s BFF

Posted on by victorfraga

The past 12 months saw three major British war drama hit UK cinemas to a lot of noise. All three dealt with WW2. First came Jonathan Teplitzky’s Churchill last June, then the following month Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk was released, and finally Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour – with an Oscar-baiting performance by Gary Oldman, pictured below twice – was launched last Friday in cinemas across every corner of the country.

The fact that these three films take place during WW2 isn’t the only similarity they have. These movies also have a subliminal message of tub-thumping nationalism and anti-German resentment (and, by extension, anti-European) in common, which resonates with Brexiters. In other words, while not overtly pro-Brexit, these movies instill a sense of self-righteousness and moral superiority in the British people. The analogy is quite simple: the Germans are evil, Europe is under their control and therefore we must out.

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The writing is NOT on the wall

I’m not saying Teplitzky, Nolan and Wright are rabid nationalists and everyone who worked on these films is pro-Brexit. Subliminal messages are far more nuanced, often beyond the control of the filmmaker. They are driven by a much broader historical narrative that paints British soldiers and Churchill as heroes as the Germans as plain evil. There’s a dangerous Manichaeism, which conveniently omits the dark side of Churchill and the British Empire. It’s hardly surprising Nigel Farage (pictured at the top of this article) loved Dunkirk so much, and I would hazard a guess he would also like the other two films.

Churchill was not an nice human being. He was indeed an excellent war strategist, but also a ruthless one for that matter. He is directly responsible for the deaths of three million people in the Bengal famine of 1943. Churchill was driven by nationalistic values, not by solidarity with people in gas chambers. He was similar to Hitler on many levels: he was a racist, a vocal advocate of gassing and an outspoken supporter of eugenics (he once wrote: “I feel that the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be CUT OFF and sealed up before another year has passed”, in reference to “the unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded and insane classes”).

It’s also a mistake to think Churchill was pro-European and would likely be anti-Brexit (I used to think this myself, until I was challenged by one of our sharp readers). Churchill indeed believed in a United States of Europe, but he did not envisage the UK being part of it. His imperialistic values did not fit in with European unity. He once famously said: “We have our own dream and our own task. We are with Europe, but not of it. We are linked but not combined. We are interested and associated but not absorbed. If Britain must choose between Europe and the open sea, she must always choose the open sea.”

All in all, our mainstream cinema lacks historical balance and perspective. The perpetual demonisation of Germans and celebration of “the greatest Briton ever” in British films has played an instrumental role in energising nationalists, thereby letting the ugly beasts of xenophobia, racism and Brexit prejudices out of the cage. And now they are out of control, and no one seems to know how to capture and lock them up again. Under the Brexit logic, Brits are celebrated as war heroes, while Europeans are denounced as ingrates.

Below are some thoughts on the three films mentioned above, and why they help to bang anti-German/European resentment and thereby stoke up the Brexit narrative:

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1. Churchill (Jonathan Teplitzky, 2017):

In terms of message, Churchill is not too different from your average BBC period drama, or a film you’d catch on the History Channel. It celebrates British superiority ad infinitum. It comes under the disguise of exposing the frail and errant side of a mighty leader, but ultimately the message is quite straight forward: “the greatest Briton of all times may have been a little shaky and moody, but he cared about our soldiers and knew how to win the War. Great lad! Britain rules!”

Churchill’s boundless altruism is also constructed in the film. He has the most profound and genuine concern for the lives of the British soldiers, and he’s even willing to make the wrong decision in order to spare human lives. The film conveniently forgets that Churchill wasn’t such a pure and kind human being, and that his altruism was highly selective.

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2. Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan, 2017):

This is a movie about withdrawing from Europe, a heaven-sent analogy for frothing Brexiters. But that’s not all. It functions like a adrenaline-inducing video game or canticle, which can be easily misinterpreted. The Hans Zimmer electrifying soundtrack plays out at 140 bpm, in a tandem with your heart. Highly suggestible young people will undoubtedly leave the cinema subconsciously thinking: “wow, this is so cool. War is like a video game, what a wild ride, I want to be part of it”.

Plus there is no blood in the film, which was a conscious decision by Nolan so that he could get a PG13 certificate in the US and a 12A in the UK. These youngsters will think, again subconsciously: “war is not a bad thing at all. Worse that could happen is I will get covered in slime. I won’t get covered in blood”. That’s why a war movie should never be sanitised and made palatable to young people. These are the young people who Nigel Farage wants to recruit for his patriotic and xenophobic cause.

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3. Darkest Hour (Joe Wright, 2018):

According to this film, Churchill was a solo male figure who, in spite of his fellow parliamentarians’ doubts, stood up against a ruthless German superpower to guarantee Britain’s sovereignty. He even got a popular plebiscite mandate in an imaginary Underground sequence. Ever since the July 2016 Brexit referendum, the UK has faced an onslaught of modern Britain’s most idolised political hero. From polymer £5 notes to Churchill and Darkest Hour, there’s a creeping feeling that we’re gearing up for an epic battle.

It would be far more timely to examine Churchill’s flaws alongside his famed achievements. This is a man who spent his early political career opening concentration camps in sub-Saharan Africa, sending Black and Tan thugs after Irish Catholic civilians and advocating the use of chemical warfare against Kurdish revolutionaries in colonial Mesopotamia. This is a leader who clung onto the dying dregs of the British Empire for so long that he called for the death of Mahatma Gandhi and allowed 3 million people to starve in the 1943 Bengal famine. Is this really the sort of political legacy that 21st century post-Brexit Britain aspires to?

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Note: Richard Greenhill contributed to this piece.

Eric Clapton: Life In 12 Bars

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

You could be forgiven for thinking this is just another music documentary. Blues devotee and English guitarist Eric Clapton rose to fame in the sixties as in such bands as The Yardbirds, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Cream, Blind Faith and Derek And The Dominoes. Since the seventies, he’s had a successful solo career. While Eric Clapton: Life In 12 Bars covers all that material in detail, its main focus is upon how Clapton coped (or didn’t) with the various tragedies in his life, some circumstantial and some self-inflicted.

A happy childhood ended at age nine with Eric’s discovery that his mum and dad were in fact his grandmother and grandfather and that his sister who had long since emigrated to Canada was in fact his mother. Worse, when she visited the family in England, she disowned him. Eric’s faith in humanity disintegrated at the most basic level: trust became impossible. On the BBC’s Uncle Mac kids’ radio show he heard the occasional Muddy Waters record and without any understanding of the music’s roots in the black man’s experience of the racist US connected with an art form that seemed to speak to him in his very core. As a teenager, he bought every blues record he could get his hands on.

Perhaps the film’s most telling clip has Clapton talk about feeling anger and working it out through his guitar. He demonstrates to the TV interviewer by playing a series of clearly angry licks. Years later, he dismisses some of his sixties material precisely on account of its anger.

Eric’s obsession with his best friend George Harrison’s then wife Pattie Boyd in the late sixties gave rise to the Layla album with his band Derek And The Dominoes, a powerful collection of unrequited love songs. He played Pattie the newly recorded work in an attempt to win her but she went back to her husband anyway. Around this time Clapton got sucked in to heroin addition and became a recluse. A few years later he made a comeback with an album and a world tour, but in reality he switched from smack to alcohol and became a wildly unpredictable performer who on one occasion told audiences to go out and vote for (racist British politician) Enoch Powell. As a man who loved the Blues and admired many black musicians, Clapton was deeply ashamed of this particular incident afterwards. He barely remembers the string of albums he made as an alcoholic. To illustrate the point, most of the record covers from the period whizz by in a matter of seconds on the screen.

He seemed to finally get his life on track when he discovered the joys of fatherhood in the late eighties only for his young son Conor to tragically fall out of a skyscraper window in New York a few years later. Determined to live life from then on in a manner that would honour his late son, Clapton wrote the song Tears In Heaven as part of his process of dealing with this tragedy. In recent years he appears to have found genuine happiness as a married family man with three daughters.

His route to his current contentment has been a harrowing one. By documenting Eric’s various personal struggles, his friend and the film’s director Lili Fini Zanuck has crafted a striking portrait which, far from merely showcasing a celebrated guitarist (which task it fulfils more than adequately in passing) tells how, via his impassioned music, this extraordinary individual has worked through the terrible situations in which he’s either placed or found himself.

Eric Clapton: Life In 12 Bars is out in the UK on Friday, January 12th. Watch the film trailer below:

In defence of Catherine Deneuve and wordless seduction

Posted on by victorfraga

Sex is subversive by nature. It must not be regimented and sanitised. “Excuse me, madam, may I please insert my penis is your vagina, but only if it’s not too much trouble, of course” isn’t the sexiest introduction to intercourse. Seduction and flirting often preclude words. Consent can be negotiated in many ways, not necessarily with onerous and unambiguous words. The nuances of sexual attraction often rely on ambiguity. Yet the Swedish seem to disagree. They plan to pass a new law requiring “explicit” and “clearly-worded consent before sexual contact.

This is part of a much broader movement against the rape culture, which is pervasive in many societies and cultures, and the movie industry is no exception. Harvey Weinstein and many others are a testament that women have been consistently abused, and their horrific predicament has been dismissed as futile for too long. But then came the backlash. From women even. Yesterday Catherine Deneuve (pictured below in Bunuel’s 1967 classic Belle de Jour), Catherine Millet and 98 other French female artists stoked fire into the discussion by publishing an open letter defending a man’s right to “hit on women”.

I’m a gay man, and – while of course I agree that the rape culture must not be tolerated – I’m also in agreement with Deneuve and Millet. We must choose our weapons more carefully. There is a lingering puritanism and sexphobia in some of the arguments proposed by the #MeToo movement. We must be careful not to radicalise the movement, therefore opening another can of worms. A woman in the US has recently claimed harassment after a man said “hello”. Plus the anti-rape rhetoric is being used for very questionable political purposes. In Germany, Austria and Scandinavia, the far-right is using rape allegations in order to stigmatise Syrian refugees. Norway is providing compulsory anti-rape courses to male and Muslim refugees. This fuels misandrism, Islamophobia and xenophobia. Three ugly birds out of the cage, all at once.

This is why I would like to take the opportunity to celebrate our freedom to flirt and to have sex. We must not monitor and regulate seduction. Ultimately, if Sweden does approve the law requiring “clearly-worded” consent, the sex that Alma (Bibi Andersson) describes in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966) – in what’s often described as “the most erotic scene in the history of cinema” – could be made illegal. Read it yourself below and reach your own conclusion. Nothing in it is clearly-worded. The women barely speak and the men never open their mouths. And that’s how sex and seduction in cinema should remain: dirty, nuanced and enigmatic.

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“I went to the beach on my own. It was a warm and nice day.There was another girl there. She had come from another island because our beach was sunnier and more secluded. We lay there completely naked and sunbathed… dozing off and on, putting sunscreen on. We had silly straw hats on. Mine had a blue ribbon. I lay there… looking out at the landscape, at the sea and the sun. It was kind of funny.

Suddenly I saw two figures on the rocks above us. They hid and peeped out occasionally. “Two boys are looking at us,” I said to the girl. Her name was Katarina. “Let them look,” she said, and turned over on her back. I had a funny feeling. I wanted to jump up and put my suit on, but I just lay there on my stomach with my bottom in the air, unembarrassed, totally calm. And Katarina was next to me with her breasts and big thighs. She was just giggling. I noticed that the boys were coming closer. They just stood there looking at us. I noticed they were very young.

The boldest one approached us… and squatted down next to Katarina. He pretended to be busy picking his toes. I felt very strange. Suddenly Katarina said to him, “Hey, you, why don’t you come over here?” Then she took his hand and helped him take off his jeans and shirt. Suddenly he was on top of her. She guided him in and held his butt. The other boy just sat and watched. I heard Katarina whisper in the boy’s ear and laugh. His face was right next to mine. It was red and swollen. Suddenly I turned and said, “Aren’t you coming to me, too?” And Katarina said, “Go to her now.” He pulled out of her and… then fell on top of me, completely hard. He grabbed my breast. It hurt so much!

I was overwhelmed and came almost immediately. Can you believe it? I wanted to tell him to be careful not to make me pregnant… when he came. I felt something I’d never felt in my life… how his sperm was shooting inside me. He held my shoulders and bent backwards. I came over and over. Katarina lay there watching and held him from behind.

After he came, she took him in her arms and used his hand to make herself come. When she came, she screamed like a banshee. The three of us started laughing. We called to the other boy, who was sitting on the slope. His name was Peter. He seemed confused and was shivering there in the sunshine. Katarina unbuttoned his pants and started to play with him. And when he came, she took him in her mouth. He bent down and kissed her back. She turned around, took his head in both hands, and gave him her breast. The other boy got so excited that he and I started all over again. It was just as nice as before. Then we had a swim and went our separate ways.”

*All the images on this article are from Bibi Andersson in Persona, except for Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour.

The King’s Choice (Kongens Nei)

Posted on by victorfraga

This Norwegian production takes us back to 1940, at the pinnacle of the Third Reich and WW2. Stepping away from the larger war narratives of Britain, France, Germany and the USA, this film shifts into a smaller gear, detailing with the events that followed Hitler’s ultimatum to surrender given to King Haakon VII of Norway (Jasper Christensen). A quote from Anne Frank fits the predicament notably well: “Our lives are fashioned by our choices. First we make our choices. Then our choices make us”.

In the first scene, Haakon is dressed in black contrasted vividly against the plain white snow, highlighting the stark contrasts and the choices he had to make, such as between family and duty. His dark attire represents the gloomy demands of his position, while the snow represents his mellow heart. He is confronted with the same choice over and over. For example, he has to choose whether to keep the family together or to send them away separately in order to flee from the Nazis. When the narrative is boiled down to these scenes it works wonders. Unfortunately, the film as a whole, doesn’t work quite as neatly.

Curt Braeuer (Karl Markovics), the German diplomat who delivers the ultimatum to Hitler, is the focus of the rest of the movie, but his personal and family story simply aren’t that interesting. Braeuer also has to make many choices, between obeying and challenging orders, peace and violence, and so on. His career sacrifices almost culminate in peace.

The characters and the story feel very real. The visceral cinematography and dizzying camerawork make the film engaging, and sometimes it has a certain documentary feel. Ultimately, this is a film worth watching for its historical content, and as a reflection on the lasting impact of the choices we make.

The King’s Choice is out on DVD in the UK and most European countries on January 15th. This isn’t the only film out right now and dealing with a European leader having to decide whether to collude with Hitler during WW2.

Our dirty questions to Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Posted on by victorfraga

With a career spanning nearly four decades, the 62-year-old Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa has directed more than 40 films, and he has navigated a wide variety of genres, ranging from horror and suspense to romance and family drama. He directed four films in the past two years alone. The filmmaker, who is not related in any way to Akira Kurosawa, is also a film writer, critic and professor.

Kurosawa has recently stepped on European cinema soil where he directed the French ghost story Daguerrotype. This classy art house feature tells the story of a contemporary photographer who employs 19th century daguerreotype plate techniques involving lengthy exposures. Subjects must remain utterly motionless for 20 minutes at a time in order for their image to be captured without becoming blurred. And that might give uninvited entities the opportunity to manifest themselves! Daguerrotype is part of the Walk This Way Collection, which DMovies is promoting in a partnership with The Film Agency and Under The Milky Way. You can watch it at home right now on all major VoD platforms!

In our short existence of less than two years (we celebrate our second birthday in a few weeks, on February 6th), Kurosawa has flown under our radar three times, firstly with Creepy, in 2016, and twice last year, with Daguerrotype and Before We Vanish. So we decided to ask him a few questions about his experience in Europe, his connection if any to Western filmmakers such as Spielberg and Hitchcock, what genres he wants to work on next and whether he can predict the future!

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Jeremy Clarke – How would you describe your experience working with a French cast and crew in Daguerrotype (2017; pictured above)? Was it a good experience? Would you like to work with foreign casts and crews again in the future?

Kiyoshi Kurosawa – It was an amazing experience. Against my perceptions the attitudes of the French cast and crew were very similar to those in Japan. All of them understood their job was “to realise the director’s vision with all their abilities and efforts”. I really appreciated it.

JC – Could you please explain the writing process of Daguerrotype? I see two other names besides you in the screenwriter credit.

KK – Based on an idea of a story which I had been working on over 10 years, I wrote a script set in modern France. The script was translated into French, and then the brilliant French screenwriters rewrote it, so that the script would fit well into the situation in today’s France. So it was a complicated process.

JC – You seem to be a director who enjoys working on a vague idea or theme, and then shapes the movie during the production process bringing in various images, effects, scenes and sequences. Pulse (2001) or Before We Vanish (2017, pictured below) would be examples for this. In which way does this approach specifically appeal to you?

KK – The very base of cinematic expression is to film the reality in front of you using cameras. So, the similarity with the reality would be the feature of a movie. This could be also its limitation, but anyway, I am particularly interested in the fact that a movie is almost the same as reality, but at the same time is slightly different than reality. This difference or unreality is always my starting point when I create my work.

JC – Could you please explain the reason why a low altitude plane comes often at a climax of your works, such as in Pulse or Before We Vanish?

KK – That’s an interesting observation. I never realised it myself! It might be because a movement of a protagonist looking at the sky seems to me very cinematic somehow. However, I can’t explain it that well.

JC – In Before We Vanish, I see influences of Spielberg’s E.T. the Extraterrestrial (1982). Do you appreciate the movie?

KK – Spielberg is one of my favorite filmmakers and I also appreciate E.T.. However, I don’t necessarily consider it as the best work in his filmography. There’s no particular borrowed motif in Before we Vanish. However he has created many human-alien encounter SF movies and my favorites would be Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and War of the Worlds (2005). So it’s possible that there are Spielberg influences at some unconscious level.

JC – Creepy (2016, pictured below) recalls works by Hitchcock (especially Vertigo and Psycho; 1958 and 1960 respectively) as well as Audition (Takashi Miike, 1999). To what degree were you aware of these films when you filmed Creepy?

KK – Sorry, but I was aware of neither Hitchcock nor Miike.

JC – You have been working in various genres. For crime, Creepy and Cure (1997). For drama, Tokyo Sonata (2008) and Before We Vanish. For romance, Tokyo Sonata, Journey to the Shore (2015) and Before We Vanish. What genre or genres would you like to revisit on future movie projects?

KK – In the future I want to work on genres I haven’t worked on yet. I haven’t worked on genres such as musical, historical and comedy movies.

JC – When you join a project (as a screenwriter or director), what makes you do so? How do you know if a story makes you want to tell it?

KK – That’s a difficult question. I cannot name a core element which makes a movie. It also means that there are too many factors. One thing I can say would be meeting people. It might be a producer, an actor or an original writer. Meeting someone, in the end, boosts the production of a movie, I guess.

JC – Looking back at Pulse, that movie catches the historical moment in which people used dial-up internet connections and the internet itself was still new for most of us. In today’s cultural development phase is there anything particular which inspires you?

KK – This question is also hard to answer. When I’m told that Pulse predicted the future, I have to say that was not my original intention at all. How a movie is interpreted by society after its birth is purely accidental.

JC – When you write a screenplay, what is your typical writing process?

KK – When it comes to screenplays, I read the original book or/and hear the ideas of others at first, then play with them a while, and, eventually, write it by myself without asking anyone else’s opinion.

JC – Which qualities do you look for in actors in order to cast roles? When and how often do you refilm?

KK – I don’t refilm. Even if I wanted to, there is no capacity for time and budget in Japanese commercial movies. As for casting, I consider it some sort of destiny. We think somebody is good for a role, she/he also likes the script and the role. And it has to go well with the schedule and guaranteed fee. When everything works well, it becomes automatically the best casting.

JC – In Japanese movie culture, in what kind of position are you or your works placed? And how about in the global movie culture?

KK – I myself cannot say objectively where I would be positioned in Japanese movie culture. However, I feel that I’m at the middle. Not at the top, not at the bottom. This doesn’t mean that I’m in the centre of the culture, of course. I understand myself as being at a small corner of the culture. And in the wider, international world? Many Japanese movies are introduced abroad – and my works would probably be positioned also at the middle of the edge of them.

Image at the top by Bittermelon

A Woman’s Life (Une Vie)

Posted on by victorfraga

Jeanne (Judith Chemla) is a beautiful and young woman returning home from a convent, and with an apparently promising life ahead of her. Her parents are wealthy barons, and they live comfortably in a French chateau. She’s cared for by the doting maid Rosalie (Nina Meurisse), with whom she also brought up. She is soon to be married to the young and charming Julien de Lamare (Swann Arlaud, who looks a lot like Kenneth Williams in his early years). But of course life is never as rosy as it seems in A Woman’s Life.

The direction of A Woman’s Life is firm and steady. This is a movie that delves into the world of a female without being exploitative. Stéphane Brizé’s directorial style is tender, subtle and even feminine. For a few moments, I literally thought that I was watching Claire Denis’s latest movie. Yet this is not a feminist movie. In fact, the French title is simply Une Vie (“One Life”), without the “woman’s” bit. As is Guy de Maupassant’s romance, which is widely considered one of the greatest French novels ever written.

This is a film about the unexpected twists of fate in the life of a female aristocrat. How each every foundation of her life gradually begins to crumble, and how she’s left in a despondent state at old age. Jeanne’s marriage begins with suffering. Sex feels a chore. The moment she loses her virginity will make you feel very uncomfortable, and will also serve as a sordid reminder of how the rape culture is deeply ingrained in our history.

Julien turns out to be gently manipulative and outright unfaithful. They eventually have a child, but then disaster strikes. Jeanne develops a strange symbiotic relationship with her son, and what happens next makes her borderline insane. Then she begins to squander her wealth. Ironically, she ends up relying on the person who helped to ruin her life.

The film narrative is punctuated with water. It rains often. It’s almost as if this water was there in order to to cleanse Jeanne’s life and prepare her yet for another chapter. But rain also turns the soil muddy. And Jeanne’s life is as soaked and soiled as her dresses under heavy rain.

Unfaithfulness and truthfulness are the central themes of the movie. Jeanne longs for honesty. She confesses to a priest she cannot bear lies. But she too struggles to deliver the sheer truth that the holy man demands from her. Such moral dilemma prevails throughout her life. Jeanne is a morally upright person, yet sometimes the truth is way too painful to handle. Ultimately, some secrets are best kept secret.

A Woman’s Life was out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, January 12th. It is available on all major VoD platforms in February.