Month: March 2018

Call it by another name!!!

Posted on by victorfraga

It’s rare for cinema to come quite so close to perfection as Call Me By Your Name (Luca Guadagnino, 2017).

The Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay earlier this month was well deserved, and the legions of devotees on Twitter to be expected. That Instagram account where lead actors Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer are superimposed over Monet canvases captures the essence of the picture perfectly (pictured above and below), in a bizarre way.

Much like a snatched afternoon trip to the Musée de l’Orangerie, with its impressive exhibition of Monet’s waterlilies spanning the entire length and breadth of the walls, Call Me By Your Name feels like a fleeting glance into something much bigger than oneself. A snapshot of a world more delicate, more fragile, than our own. A world where you’re welcome to come and look, but unfortunately where you can’t stay. The museum is closing, and the reel has run out of film.

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If you are gay, you’ll suffer

It’s is also unique in the way it depicts gay romance, being that it is one of the only noteworthy works I can recall which does not eventually circle around into some sort of unbearable misery. The traditional queer breakdown scene is absent, as is the tearful coming out, the familial rejection, the violent assault, the tragic untimely death.

The overwhelmingly negative story arcs occupied by gay characters in both mainstream and arthouse media have a funny habit of leaving a bad taste in the mouths of young LGBT people. And I’m not talking about homophobic works, about the queer coding of villains, but the films the community reveres and holds up as our own.

Brokeback Mountain’s (Ang Lee, 2005) Jack Twist is murdered by a gang of passing homophobes. Sook-hee and Hideko’s relationship The Handmaiden (Park Chan-wook, 2016) verges on abusive, founded on a veritable mountain of lies and deceit. The eponymous Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015; pictured below) loses custody of her daughter. Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016) is a lifelong chronicle of one man’s struggle to come to terms with his identity. The message starts to become clear. You’ll suffer, if you’re queer.

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A rosy existence

While Call Me By Your Name may not neatly tie a bow around Elio and Oscar’s relationship with all the fairy tale charm of a romantic comedy, at no point does their homosexuality cause them undue heartache or suffering.

Neither feels ashamed of their attraction to the other. Their family and friends are accepting of the relationship. There isn’t even any ill will from Elio’s ex-girlfriend Marzia, who gets a rather raw deal from the entire situation. No one is left beaten to a pulp on the pavement. Chalamet’s tearful Visions of Gideon closeup does not play out underneath the yellow light of a hospital ward, as his lover wheezes out his final breath. Elio and Oscar may not ride off into the sunset together, but the extenuating circumstances which tear them apart are not founded in prejudice or violence.

This is what made the film radical. Call Me By Your Name demonstrated that queer love could exist on screen, not to be some parable of noble suffering, but to simply play out for its own sake.

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So, what’s next?

Director Luca Guadagnino told USA Today on the Oscars red carpet that a sequel was in the early stages of production, loosely based around the epilogue of André Aciman’s original novel. He plans to set it five years on – the original film is set in 1983 – and deal directly with the AIDS crisis.

This is where the proverbial fly begins to make its way into the ointment.

I preface what I’m about to say with the following: queer narratives where characters suffer as a result of their queerness remain deeply relevant, and will do as long as the community continues to face undue discrimination and misery. This particularly applies to stories concerning the AIDS crisis. Furthermore, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that Elio and Oliver get an easier ride than other queer characters because they’re two affluent white men, which is worth keeping in the back of the mind when discussing LGBT sorrow in film in this context.

Gay narratives can hardly be expected to exist in an a political vacuum, at least not quite at this stage in history. But to create a sequel to Call Me By Your Name which leaves the rose-tinted world it presently depicts, to hit it with a cold harsh dose of reality, dilutes what was ultimately innovative about it. It’s like spray painting a vital political statement over Monet’s water lilies. There’s a time and a place, and for once it’s not here.

Only having access to queer cinema pockmarked by pain is devastating for children growing up gay, as they come to believe this is all their life can ever be. Subliminally, they are told they carry within them a defect, and someone somewhere will always be conspiring to punish them for it.

I’m sure Guadagnino would create a work of abject beauty for this proposed sequel, if his filmography thus far is anything to go on. I’m sure I’d enjoy it, too. But if this is the direction he plans to take, then I fear it may dilute what made it the original work beautiful. By all means, make a film about the Aids crisis – cast Chalamet and Hammer all over again, for what it’s worth. But make them different characters, make it a different world. Let us keep our happy gays. We have so very few.

We need positive queer narratives. We need stories where boys can fall in love with boys and girls can fall in love with girls without fear that some outside force will make them hurt for it. We need bike rides through the Italian countryside, we need impromptu dances parties set to the Psychedelic Furs, we need that whole saga with the peach. We need friends and families who accept us as we are, we need beauty and art and life, and we need to know that if it all falls through it’s not because we were queer and that meant we weren’t allowed to be happy in the first place.

We need Call Me By Your Name. Unadulterated, and as it is.

The curious case of marketing Netflix

Posted on by Alasdair Bayman

In an ever-growing era of competitive streaming services, the internal marketing of Netflix and Amazon Prime are quickly becoming pivotal parts in selling a film to the viewer. Scrolling and swiping at the speed of light, audiences on these services are prone to ‘binge-watching’, leaving little room for time to read more than the synopsis or look at the image given. A consequence, this small image internally becomes the streaming services form of distribution.

Though most of the time Netflix do get the marketing of their content correct, when they do not, it consequentially stands out from the crowd. In the very recent example of Annihilation (Alex Garland, 2018), its images on the service do not advertise the splendour of the film justice. Likewise, in the Netflix cards of Elle (Paul Verhoeven, 2016), Mudbound (Dee Rees, 2017) and Okja (Bong Joon-ho, 2017) the images that are given do not corroborate with the essence of the films. The antithesis to designers like Saul Bass, these small yet vital images do not evoke the film’s themes. Comparably, Netflix lacks clear marketing campaigns when selling their original content. In their recent success, indie kings A24 have regularly deployed a cohesive set of campaigns to maximise their film’s reception, most efficiently in publicising Robert Egger’s The Witch in 2015. Through their mis-selling, Netflix tarnishes the reputation of some of the best films available to stream.

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Marketing is everything

Cinema before the internet was a very different place for marketing. Including radio clips for trailers, the introduction of social media- particularly Twitter- has widened the capacity for innovative types of distribution. Starting with The Blair Witch Project (Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick, 1999) and Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2018), these two theatrical campaigns, specifically the latter, created viral conversations of deep anticipation. Capitalised on by A24, the demonic figure of Black Philip in The Witch gained his own Twitter profile to a rapturous reception. Taking nearly $40 million worldwide, the whole strategy deployed by A24 led to financial and critical praise. Admittedly, Netflix does not release their films at the box office so this form of reward is exempt from them. Nevertheless, the mode of business success still does.

Besides the standard form of teaser trailers and posters, Netflix lacks a clear cohesive or innovative formula when it comes to releasing their films. In the case of Annihilation, the film’s riveting production design could have been extrapolated away from, leading towards a marketing campaign on the botanical plants and creatures of the mise-en-scene. Simple, still effective, Cloverfield’s campaign underlined the importance of creating curiosity. Granted, acquiring the right for Garland’s sci-fi piece from Paramount in a rushed fashion, the team at Netflix may have just decided to focus their efforts elsewhere. Regardless, a film with the nuance of Tarkovsky and one that is only available on streaming deserves to be promoted in the correct fashion.

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Design Matters

As recent as 2015, the American entertainment company redesigned their browsing system to squeeze as much content onto the page. Vice President of Product at Netflix, Todd Yellin, stated at the time that “We’re not just looking for clicks here because that’s not a good metric. We’re looking for finding the right people to watch the show because we want to promote our shows to the right people who will actually play it through.”

In the example of Elle, the lead protagonist, portrayed by Isabelle Huppert (pictured below), is replaced with the more youthful image of actor Virginie Efira. In the narrative, Efira’s character is a supporting role, not the lead. In their attempts to marketing Elle with an attractive younger woman in the central role undoes the attempts of Verhoeven highly the life of an older woman.

It comes as a strange decision that the internal promotion of Netflix Original films as Mudbound (pictured above) and Okja feature peculiar images that do fit the narrative, selling a false product. In the case of Dee Rees’ Mudbound, a classic American story of a white family is fostered in their image. Such decisions are not down to pure chase as ‘By the time you see the cover for the next season of House of Cards, it likely will have already gone through several rounds of virtual focus groups to see which design drew the most intrigue.’ claims The Verge’s Josh Lowensohn. If these images have been filtered through different levels at Netflix, then why do they not correctly sell the films in question?

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Room for growth

With around 99 million users and a plan to increase original content spend to an eye-popping $8 billion, its undeniable that Netflix is a true force in the industry now – besides the teething problems it faced last summer in Cannes. Though a handful of films are represented poorly this is simply an anomaly in their system. Sticking out like a sore thumb, however, every film on the service, big or small, deserves the correct marketing to respect the efforts of all those involved in the work. Let’s just hope they do not market Martin Scorsese’s upcoming The Irishman wrongly or else….

My Golden Days (Trois Souvenirs De Ma Jeunesse)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The director revisits the main character of his earlier, three hour long My Sex Life… or How I Got Into An Argument/Comment Je Me Suis Disputé… (Ma Vie Sexuelle)(1996). Anthropologist Paul Dédalus (played once again by Mathieu Amalric) prepares to leave Tajikistan for Paris to take up a new job in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He remembers childhood trauma, political intrigue and the love of his life as a young man in and out of the Northern French city of Roubaix (incidentally Desplechin’s home town).

The childhood trauma involves irreconcilable differences between small boy Paul (Antoine Bui) and his mother Jeanne (Cécile Garcia-Fogel) which result in lengthy shouting matches between parent and child and the boy moving out to live with his grandmother while his younger brother and sister remain with their mother. It’s gripping stuff and lasts maybe ten minutes. The young Bui is a beautiful bit of casting: you immediately see him and think he’s Amalric as a boy.

The political intrigue takes place when sixteen year old Paul (Quentin Dolmaire, who sadly looks nothing like Amalric or Bui and therefore defies believability as the same character) via his best mate Zyl (Elyot Milshtein), full name Marc Zylberberg, agrees to bunk off a school trip to Minsk so Zyl can deliver a package of money and other items to a refusnik community and Paul can give his passport to a refusnik teen who looks like him. It all goes horribly wrong, but because they’re privileged Western kids they return to France without too much difficulty. Shortly after this, the Zylberbergs move out of Roubaix and Paul loses contact with Zyl.

The story comes to light in the present day frame story when Paul is stopped at French airport customs owing to passport irregularities: specifically, a second Paul Dédalus holds a passport with many identical details. Again, it all works out fine. This episode runs about twenty minutes and feels less focused than the opener.

This leaves an hour and a half for the third flashback about the love of his life which again features Dolmaire as Paul in his student days, occasionally mediated by present-day recollection scenes featuring Amalric. It’s the story of his initially tentative, subsequently full on and finally disastrous romance with Esther (Lou Roy-Lecollinet, recently seen in I Got Life!/Aurore). She seems to have several men in tow from the moment he first meets her and their relationship goes from teaching her to play Go through passionate letter writing to a combination of letters when Paul is away from Roubaix and a consummated physical relationship when he’s there. Eventually, as he spends less and less time in that city, she dumps him for a rival who actually lives there.

The romance delivers some striking scenes. When Esther/Roy-Lecollinet enters a crowded party, she’s electrifying as the camera lingers on her. When she can’t say goodbye to Paul when he boards a train, you’ll be on the edge of your seat. But a few strong scenes among a lot of so-so ones does not a great film make. The relationship meanders all over the place with no sense of what was so amazing about it. When Paul embarks on an affair with the older Gilberte (Mélodie Richard) in Paris, you don’t particularly care.

And in a way that’s like the overall film. Someone looks back at their life. And…? What was so significant about that? What’s different, or remarkable, or special about them or their life? In this instance, it’s hard to pinpoint anything. Former cinematographer Desplechin ensures the film looks good overall, and his matter-of-fact shooting of sex scenes as narrative development rather than gratuitous titillation is to be applauded. Ultimately, though, his meandering script with its overall lack of focus proves an insurmountable obstacle.

My Golden Days is out in the UK on Friday March 16th. Watch the film trailer below:

Crowhurst

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

So you’ve seen The Mercy (James Marsh, 2018) – or perhaps after reading our three star review you passed. And now, a few weeks later, timed likewise to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of 1968’s Sunday Times Golden Globe round the world boat race, along comes Crowhurst, a second telling of the same historical episode. Should you bother with Crowhurst? The answer, whether or not you saw its higher-profile rival, is most emphatically yes.

It’s such a great story – British underdog and amateur sailor Donald Crowhurst enters the race hoping to win the prize money which will extricate him and his business from severe financial difficulty. He signs a deal with a backer that will destroy him if he doesn’t win. As competitors drop out, it looks as if he’ll make the fastest time. But his voyage is based on deceit – he’s not circumnavigated the world at all and his logbooks won’t stand the scrutiny a winner would receive. His boat turns up without him on board somewhere off the Cayman Islands. His diaries are there – but Crowhurst has disappeared, never to be seen again.

The other was the medium-sized feature with big-name stars and expansive locations. Rumley’s version – like its eponymous hero played with pluck by Justin Salinger – is the low budget outsider entry competing against impossible odds. Crowhurst comes with unfamiliar actors and is shot on land in England and at sea in the Bristol Channel doubling for vaster, international waters. (In something of a coup, the scenes in Crowhurst’s family home are shot in the real-life Crowhurst family home.) With that low price tag comes artistic freedom. No quarter is given to marketing demographics. Rumley goes for his own idiosyncratic take on events. His film is all the better for it.

Lacking the budget for exotic seascape locations, Rumley zeroes in on the inside of his protagonist’s head as impossible events conspire against Donald and he begins to fall apart. He imagines a live fish out of water trying to survive inside his cabin, on one occasion making a racket trapped inside his first aid box. There is ultimately no way out and with each closing loophole the images become increasingly fragmented and the photography more and more bleached.

Intermittent broadcast TV scenarios explain how one at a time his rivals are dropping out of the race, but they seem very distant and Crowhurst is about the trapped Donald, not them. So too with the other major players – wife Clare (Amy Laughton) and four kids, overbearing and grotesque press agent Rodney Hallworth (Christopher Hale), shrewd backer Stanley Best (Glyn Dilley) whose watertight contract Donald signed. All seem distant, as if in a dream. Or a nightmare. From which Crowhurst will never wake.

As the wide-open sea gives way to close in on the cabin, Donald’s surroundings become increasingly claustrophobic. He believes himself transcendent in his delusion. He becomes convinced he can control everything. A scribbling biro gouges a hole in a map. Eventually, he utters the last words from his diary: “It is finished. It is finished. It is… The Mercy.” In the film of that name, those lines seem vague, lost. In Crowhurst, they represent the full blown end of an irrevocable descent into madness and, by implication, death.

Threaded through this terrible downward trajectory are songs familiar to every Englishman or woman: Land Of Hope And Glory, Silent Night, God Save The Queen. It elicits subliminal nationalist, Christian and monarchist songs delivered as dirges, widespread inculcated beliefs reduced to superficial nursery rhymes; an entire national psyche rendered redundant. These days, the world has moved on.

Crowhurst is out in the UK in March. Out on VoD in October.

10 superb trans films from the past two years!

Posted on by victorfraga

Just a few years back, finding a film dealing with the subjects of transsexuality and transgenderness was equivalent to finding a needle on a haystack. And the few and far between often used cis actors (in a practice described as transface), such as Eddie Redmayne as Lili Elbe in Tom Hooper The Danish Girl (2015). There were also lyrical and artistic portraits of trans people, such as Tilda Swinton is Sally Popper’s Orlando (1992). Realistic representations of trans people using trans people, on the other hand, were almost non-existent.

Times have changed quickly. Just last week, the Best Foreign Language Picture Academy Award went to Sebastián Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman. This superb Chilean drama tells the story of a transsexual woman called Marina Vidal (played by trans actor Daniela Vega) dealing with the unexpected bereavement of her lover and the undesirable encounter with his children and former wife, and the moment all the ugly transphobia gets out of the cage. This is a major achievement for transsexual people, but of course a swallow doesn’t make a summer.

So we decided to compile a list of 10 films dealing with transsexual and/or transgender characters from the past two years that everyone should see. They come literally all corners of the world, from Latin America to India, from Uganda to Albania! Click on the film title in order to accede to our exclusive dirty review!

And don’t forget the next BFI Flare London LGBT Film Festival starts in just a few days on March 21st!

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1. The Pearl of Africa (Jonny Von Wallström, 2016):

Homosexuality is a taboo in Uganda, to say the least. The country actively and consistently persecutes LGBTI people. In countries there is often tacit acceptance and complicity as long as the homosexual marries a partner of the opposite sex and lives a dual life. Such possibility does not seem to exist in Uganda, where the mere suspicion of homosexuality or any sort of deviant sexuality is often a trigger for social convulsion.

This doc portrays the life of 28-year-old transgender Ugandan Cleopatra Kambugu. She was biologically born a man, but already in her early years begins wearing female clothes and identifying as a woman. She found the support of her lifelong partner and mother and, against all odds, lived a relatively hassle free life in her home country. Until the local tabloid Red Pepper decide to “denounce” and “gay-shame” her, forcing Cleopatra into hiding.

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2. Sworn Virgin (Laura Bispuri, 2016):

Hana (Alba Rohrwacher) lives with her sister Lila (Flonja Kodheli) and their parents in the remote mountains of Albania. Lila then escapes to the West in the hope of a better life, leaving Hana to care for her parents. Hana then decides to become Mark so that she can perform the family duties that only a man is allowed to carry out (such as handling a shotgun and hunting), according to strict social rules. She undergoes a conversion ritual, cuts her hair and begins to wear male clothes, all with the full consent and support of her parents as well as the rest of the community.

Sworn Virgin tells two stories in parallel: of Hana becoming Mark in rural Albania, and of Mark becoming Hana once again in Italy. After the death of his parents, Mark moves to Italy in order to live with his sister Lila, now married and with a child. He slowly settles in the new environment, and begins to shed the male clothes and identity, which she has carried for so long.

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3. Transit Havana (Daniel Abma, 2016):

Cuba is a country of stark social and political conflicts and paradoxes, and perhaps no one epitomises those contraditions better than the few transsexuals living in the country’s capital. Despite major advances and the staunch support of Mariela Castro Espín (Raúl Castro daughter), Odette, Juani and Malú they still face religious intolerance, discrimination, sexism, poverty and sometimes a life in prostitution. Meanwhile, they wait for surgeons from Belgium and the Netherlands to perform a much-coveted sex change surgery on them.

These transsexuals have to reconcile a number of forces in their lives: Catholic faith, the army, a dictatorship and prejudice. While washing the dishes, Odette explains that she is the most experienced tank operator in the nation. She is not referring to a domestic appliance; she operates war tanks instead. She also has to battle her family who are reluctant to accept her choices. They strongly discourage her from engaging in the irreversible and life-changing operation.

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4. Naanu Avanalla Avalu (B S Lingadevaru, 2016):

It’s not easy being a woman in India, let alone a transsexual one. The male-to-female transgender community has existed in the country for centuries, and their members are commonly described Hijras. Unfortunately, they are still outcasts even today. It is virtually impossible for them to find a job, and they almost inevitably have to resort to either begging on prostitution on the streets of a large city.

Inspired by a real story, Madesha (Sanchari Vijay) is an educated and effeminate boy from rural Karnataka – they speak the Kannada language, little known to Europeans. From a very young age, he cherishes his female persona and gorgeous saris and bindis. His sister enjoys his natural flair and joy. After completing his studies, he moves to Bangalore in search of acceptance and a castration surgery known as Nirvana. He is undaunted, despite knowing that the options for transsexuals are very limited.

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5. Tangerine (Sean Baker, 2015):

This one is the only film on our list which is from more than two years ago (just about). It deserves to be on the list because it’s revolutionary in terms of format (made on iPhone) and content. It’s a genuine masterpiece, plus a Christmas classic!

Entirely set on Christmas Eve, this micro-budget movie sounds like the antipode of the snowy, Christian and holy holiday. It is set in the sunny and tawny-hued streets of Los Angeles, its protagonists are transgender sex workers and there is ardent commotion throughout most of the movie. Yet this is one of the most poignant Christmas movies that you will see in your life, urgent in its candour and integrity. This is sobering holiday entertainment, as it rescues humanity from the most unlikely places and situations: a lonely performance in an empty club, a blow-job in a car wash, a transphobic attack, a wig soaked with urine.

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6. Golden Years (André Téchiné, 2017):

André Techiné, possibly the most influential living LGBT filmmaker, celebrated 50 years of filmmaking last year in Cannes with a five-star and five-splat film, impeccable in style and profoundly subversive in its subject. The film tells the real story of the French WW1 deserter Paul Grappe (Pierre Deladonchamps) and his wife Louise (Céline Sallette). In order to avoid being caught and forced into military service, Paul disguises himself as Suzanne. He quickly and enthusiastically embraces his new identity and turns to prostitution in order to make ends meet and cater for his wife.

Paul/Suzanne seems to be fully bisexual, enjoying orgies and all sorts of sexual experiments with people of both genders, while still in love with his wife. She remains devoted to her husband despite his sexuality, which was extremely unorthodox for the times. At first, she seems entirely indifferent to his job and “perversions”. Eventually Paul/Suzanne becomes a cabaret act, but then the split identity begins to haunt and to suffocate him. Suzanne wishes to take over.

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7. A Fantastic Woman (Sebastián Lelio, 2017):

Marina Vidal (Daniela Vega) is simply a woman. And she happens to be transsexual. The only way she ascertains her gender is by living her life like any other woman would: she works in a restaurant, she has a partner and she also has a hobby: she sings (extremely well). There’s nothing unusual about her lifestyle. The fact that her gender identity is not aligned with her biological sex neither defines nor limits her life. There is no gender “dysphoria”, as the medical establishment puts it. Marina is just another human being living in Santiago, the capital of Chile.

Marina is often laconic and stoic. Her piercing gaze says far more than the frugal amount of words coming out of her mouth. Her unapologetic and determined attitude is sometimes mistaken for deceit, but Marina is as integral and honest as one can be. Yet Orlando’s family and the establishment try to humiliate, to disarm and literally to disrobe Marina. They address her with an inconvenient “he” and even with her birth name “Daniel”, they make ugly faces of disapproval, they taunt her. Sonia dubs her “a chimera”, a fire-breathing female monstrosity from Greek mythology (with a lion’s head, a goat’s body and a serpent’s tail).

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8. Just Charlie (Rebekah Fortune, 2017):

This British movie follows the dynamics of a family as their youngest teen Charlie (Harry Gilby) comes out as male-to-female transgender. Charlie has always been a football prodigy. Strangely, he lashes out in anger once offered an once-in a-lifetime opportunity that could take him closer to the Premier League. His father’s expectations grow, and so Charlie gets increasingly stressed. There are a few clues early on that this isn’t just a surge of hormones in a teenager’s body: the character’s growing alienation and battle with gender dysphoria are clearly documented in several scenes, and the boy soon starts transitioning to her authentic self.

The incredibly humane portrayal of the parents – a preoccupied and yet supportive mother (Elinor Machen-Fortune), and a hesitant and absent-minded father (Scot Williams) – is perfectly aligned with the main character’s inner conflict. Between doctor visits, replacing her old clothes and having to face the world outside. the film does a very good job at balancing Charlie’s personal trauma with the feeling of loss that her parents experience.

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9. Tranny Fag (Kiko Goifman/Cláudia Priscilla, 2018):

inn da Quebrada (“Broken Linn da) is neither a woman nor a man. She’s not your conventional transsexual, either. She’s something between all of these identities. She’s a tranny fag, a term she coined herself. Linn da doesn’t conform to labels and pre-established orthodoxies. She’s deliciously subversive. She’s a beautiful aberration. She’s unabashedly confrontational, yet she’s tender and affectionate.

This doc follows the footsteps of the 27-year-old Brazilian singer, who only recently rose to fame. You will watch her stage performances and read her deeply transgressive lyrics, translated into English in the subtitles. The highly intelligent and eloquent artist composes songs dealing with gender fluidity, and describes her own body as a political instrument. She’s an outspoken advocate for sexual minorities, and Magnus Hirschfeld would undoubtedly be proud of her.

The picture at the top of this article was taken from Tranny Fag.

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10. Touch Me Not (Adina Pintilie, 2018)

The winner of the 2018 Golden Bear isn’t a film solely about transsexual people, but it deals with various bodies and approaches to sexuality, and it’s refreshingly sobering in its candidness. Romanian director Adina Pintilie establishes a dialogue with several real-life characters, in what can be described as a documentary with flavours of fiction, in a roughly congruent arc. Laura, Tómas, Christian and Hanna and Hanna have a very different relation to their sexuality and bodies, and they are all working together in order to overcome their fears and and claim control of their lives.

Hanna, a 50-something-year-old transsexual extremely confident of her sexuality and her body, despite knowing she doesn’t fit beauty standards. Laura wants to learn how to be as relaxed and liberated. Hanna and Christian are the two least normative individuals. Yet they are the ones who are most satisfied with their bodies and sexuality. They are perfectly happy to get naked and to carry out new sexual experiments. They are both regulars in a BDSM club, where punters perform their sexual fantasies in front of each other.

Gook

Posted on by victorfraga

Telling a story against the backdrop of wider significant events is a great way to automatically inject a sense of foreboding into a film, as the viewer can assume a lot of context simply from the date and the location. This is especially true of Gook, which relies on April 29th, 1992, the day of the Rodney King trial, to do a lot of the heavy lifting before any key events have occurred in the movie. The date is even emblazoned in big bold letters just so we don’t miss it.

As the USA is insane, the cops who beat Rodney King up got off scot-free, triggering city-wide riots in Los Angeles that led to 60 people being killed. By putting his protagonists in the midst of such events, we can already tell where Justin Chon’s movie will lead. This is both its strength and its weakness. While having many interesting things to say about race in America, the plot is almost painfully predictable.

Thankfully Gook mostly works due to the sharpness of its characterisation. It focuses on two Korean-American brothers, Eli (Justin Chon) and Daniel (David So), who run a shoe shop in LA bequeathed to them by their late father. Eli is the stressed-out one, relying on a good sales day to make the next rent payment. Daniel is far more dreamy, giving shoes away to prospective customers in the hope of getting laid, and trying to make it as an RnB singer in his spare time. Together they have to have a good day in the store if they are going to pay their bills on time.

Like the Italian pizzeria in Do The Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989), the shoe shop is in the midst of an African-American neighbourhood. Kamilla (Simone Baker), an 11-year-old black girl, is a regular, playing truant from school in order to work with the guys. The film adopts a black-and-white aesthetic and a day-in-the-life narrative reminiscent of Kevin Smith’s Clerks (1994), instantly transporting us back to the slacker vibe of 1990s independent cinema. This is reflected in the easygoing spirit of the film’s earlier scenes, content to see these characters hanging out and relating on a human level. But this idyll can only last for so long as the riots threaten to spread across the whole city, and elements of Eli’s past threaten to repeat themselves.

Gook is a great example of how to make a low-budget film feel bigger. We feel that the riots are near but we never directly see them, instead being shown plumes of smoke towering into the sky far away. When violence does arrive in the form of brutal beatdowns, the camera keeps a tight focus, giving one the impression of more people existing outside of the frame.

The early 1990s will be remembered as the time capitalism beat communism then almost immediately turned in on itself. LA was the boiling point, eventually spilling over into the Rodney King Riots. They have been covered in some detail in the past couple of years, most notably in the majestic O.J: Made In America (Ezra Edelman, 2016) and Spike Lee’s Netflix special Rodney King (2017), but Gook stays relevant by the way it looks at the relationship between Korean Americans and African Americans at the time. Although unmentioned in the film, another key cause of the riots was the murder of 15-year-old Latasha Harlins, shot in the back of the head by a Korean store owner (something eerily paralleled by scenes of Kamilla bickering with an old Korean immigrant working at a shop across the street). Neither African-Americans or Koreans are let off lightly here, director Justin Chon aiming a judgemental yet still empathetic eye at all-comers.

Nevertheless, while the film borrows heavily from Do The Right Thing in both its construction and moral ambiguity, it lacks its righteous energy, resorting to weak storytelling clichés that rarely surprise and hit you in the gut. It doesn’t really subvert or comment upon its own flimsy construct to become a truly compelling movie; eventually flattening initially exciting characters to basic plot points. Promising something raw and honest about race in America, a necessary firebomb in the time of white supremacist Trump, Gook sadly flames out when it should just be getting started.

Gook was out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, March 16th. Out on DVD and all major VoD platforms on April 9th.

Annihilation

Posted on by victorfraga

In Jeanette Winterson’s magic-realist novel Sexing the Cherry ‘Time has no meaning, space and place have no meaning, on this journey. All times can be inhabited, all places visited.’ This very notion is permeable towards the sci-fi genre, specifically Alex Garland’s latest feature Annihilation. Roughly adapted from Jeff VanderMeer’s 2014 novel of the same name, the cinematic imprints of Stalker (Andrei Tarkosvky, 1979) and Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2017) are plainly in sight. Nevertheless, behind these influences rests a complex composition of human grief. As always with the fascinating genre, it serves as a mirror to which contemporary societies’ anxieties and fears can be projected and reflected upon.

Following in the footsteps of Alex Garland’s first feature Ex-Machina (2015), the film opens with Lena (Natalie Portman) caged inside an interrogation room as Lomax (Benedict Wong) questions her. Compressed inside a radiation suit mask, the face of Wong is alien and unwelcoming. The nature of his cross-examination is a force known as ‘The Shimmer’ – a growing strange zone that takes no prisoners (in an apparent reference to The Zone in Stalker). Consequentially flashbacking to Lena in a state of deep grief surrounding her husband’s, Kane (Oscar Isaac), departure for a disclosed mission 12 months previous, life is a macabre affair aside from her biologist work.

Proceeding further back in time, Lena recalls being enwrapped in her lover’s company. Simply observing Rob Hardy’s colour palette in these scenes, it’s plainly a brighter time for both of them. Part of the military, Isaac’ brutish physique informs the viewer on everything about his demeanour. In his decision to initial interchange time, its swift employment creates an eerie imprint when Kane suddenly returns home. The result is a questioning of Lena’s mental state and recalls the chilling execution of the occult in David Lowery’s A Ghost Story (2017).

Jumping forwards, Lena is compelled to venture into ‘The Shimmer’ with a team of fellow scientist to discover the true origins of this alien force. Comprised of Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), Thorensen (Gina Rodriguez), Sheppard (Tuva Novotny) and physician Josie Radek (Tessa Thompson), it is a team filled with some of the best minds. An antithesis to the U.S. Government’s previous designs of sending solely military men, including Kane, the new approach is a last chance to make it to the source The Shimmer – a lighthouse where a meteorite sparked the whole occurrence.

From the moment the team enter the alien environment, the production, art direction and design of the milieu entrances you with its beauty and danger. Dually eliciting both in the nature world of The Shimmer, as the team get deeper and deeper into its grasps, the more vicious nature’s power. Stated previous, evoking Tarkovsky Stalker is always a danger game to play, yet Annihilation’s powerful aura simply could not exist without the former. In this, the intuitive reaction to key scenes in Garland’s film are primitive moments of awe filled fear. Formulated with inventive CGI work from Milk VFX and Double Negative – who worked on Ex-Machina – the creature and natural surroundings that inhabit the screen are staggering.

Maintained by responsive performances from all the cast, particularly Portman who emulates the physicality of her lead role in Darren Aronofsky’s devilish Black Swan (2010), Garland follows up one sci-fi masterstroke with another.

After being dropped for theatrical release in the UK by Paramount for seemingly being too ‘intellectual’ for contemporary audiences, Netflix have picked up a genuine rare species of film. Sadly observing the film on my TV, its cinematic charm would only be heightened in an amphitheatre, as referenced with Sweet Country (Warwick Thornton, 2017; out in cinemas right now). Irrespective, Annihilation only reiterates that in contemporary film a piece can never be above an audience’s intellect. Working from the script to screen, Garland is slowly becoming a distinguished auteur, with his latest feature more than contributing generously to his stunning milieu.

Annihilation is out on Netflix on Monday, March 9th.

The Marriage (Martesa)

Posted on by victorfraga

Set in present-day Prishtina (the capital of Kosovo), The Marriage is the story of an impossible love. Anita (Adriana Matoshi) and Bekim (Alban Ukaj) are adding the final touches to their wedding. Their preparations are almost complete and they will tie the knot in just two weeks. Anita has been living with the trauma of her missing parents during the Kosovo War of 1999, while Bekim is very much an established man in the city. In the course of their wedding-planning, Bekim’s secret ex-lover from the past, Nol (Genc Salihu), returns from France. His return changes course of events and establishes a new connection between characters.

First, Bekim and Nol recreate their love and desire for each other, while Anita embraces the “friendship” between the two men, constructed under heteronormative and traditional beliefs. Nol uses his time in Prishtina to make his way back into Bekim’s life, reassuring him that his love remains as strong as in the past.

Bekim and Nol began their relationship during the Kosovo War, as they took shelter with Bekim’s family. They face oppression on two levels: the Serbian terror against ethnic Albanians, and the widespread homophobia. The film states: if there’s one thing capable of uniting Albanians and Serbians, that’s hate for gay people. Bekim and Nol lie next to each other in a central moment of the film, during the War. Nearly two decades later, they reunite just before Bekim’s wedding, in a passionate lovemaking scene, the first of its kind in the history of Kosovo cinema.

Forbidden love is a source of great pain. And being a gay man in Kosovo is no easy ride. Nol is brutally beaten by a group of men, supposedly after a hook-up, and Bekim refuses to hire out his bar for an LGBT event, in two fine examples of different ways how homophobia manifests itself in the young nation of the Balkans. This is not a filmic shortcoming, but instead a actual reflection of attitudes towards homosexuality in Kosovo.

The movie also highlights the strict gender roles and hegemonic models everyone in Kosovo is subjected to, not just gay men. Bekim (Alban Ukaj) is determined to marry Anita. He’s an oppressed gay man unable to accept his sexuality as an identity, and instead chooses to internalise homophobia. The film neither rises above these phenomena nor offers any real solutions. Veteran Adriana Matoshi delivers an outstanding performance. She conveys the notion of female sacrifice extremely well. Genc Salihu makes a brilliant debut as Nol.

The Marriage is a dirty and thought-provoking movie, directed by a woman. Perhaps it’s not a militant LGBT movie, as many activists would like to see, but indeed it succeeds to raise awareness and stir debate around a diehard taboo. It showed in Kosovo last months to sold-out screening for two weeks. It’s has featured on various film events, and showing at Roze Filmdagen Amsterdam LGBT Film Festival, on March 10th. It premires in the UK as part of the Cambridge Film Festival taking place between October 25th and November 1st.

Sweet Country

Posted on by victorfraga

The adorning vistas of F.A. Young’s photography in Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962) are a testament to the 2.20:1 aspect ratio and the power of celluloid. Adopting a similar ratio (2.35:1) Warwick Thornton’s Sweet Country is a sweeping epic that tips its hat to those sand filled landscapes of Young. Set in Australia’s Northern Territory during the 1920s, Thornton’s Special Jury Prize winning film, received at Venice 2017, holds morality and the law close to its thematic chest. Enclosed with enthrallingly subdued performances and a requirement to be seen on the largest screen humanely possible, Sweet Country packs a meaty cinematic punch.

After killing a delirious white farmer in an act of pure self-defence, aboriginal farmer worker Sam (Hamilton Morris) is forced to flee into the desolate Australian landscape, and with it an odious bloody man hunt ensues. Lead by Sergeant Fletcher (Bryan Brown), the nearest town’s hierarchical leader, he is a man painted in shades of grey, not simply black and white. With touches towards his reserved romance towards a barmaid in the township, Fletcher is tinted with humanity, regardless of his brutality. Still, fuelled by the burning heat of the country, every sweat seeps off the screen into a curdle of tense anxiety.

In the barren scenery, a disconcerting absence of justice permeates everyday life. To the white farmers Harry March (Ewen Leslie) and Mick Kennedy (Thomas M.Wright), their aboriginal workers are as lowly as their cattle. Required for the film to absorb the audience, in initial scenes, a bedrock of racial and sexist prejudices is established by Thornton. Handled with an agile touch, the abuse on screen is never deployed in sadistic practice. Practising Christian values in the most hellish place, Fred Smith (Sam Neil), works with Sam and his wife on a small plot of land where the couple have their own home. A stark juxtaposition to March and Kennedy’s treatment of their ‘property’, Archie (Gibson John) has been programmed, most likely through violence, to call every white man he encounters ‘boss’. Though the phrase is used by Sam similarly, the lexical repetition of the noun in Steven McGregor and David Tranter’s script constantly elicits white supremacy.

In the hands of a lesser director, Hamilton Morris’ Sam could have been deployed as a noble savage figure, outlined in Michel de Montaigne’s essay ‘Of Cannibals’. Thought at its time of creation a liberal and genuine notion, it is an idea one that seeks to divide natives into a category. Selecting to imbue Sam with complexity, Thornton offers an empathetic perspective to his lead character and his wife (Natassia Gorey Furber) – away from the noble savage theory. Sam is a fully fleshed out human being and not just a caricature or silhouette for white notions to be projected upon.

Recalling the harsh realities of the wild in S. Craig Zahler’s Bone Tomahawk (2015) – whilst recanting the sweeping grandiose of Dee Rees’ Mudbound (2017) – Sweet Country requires to be seen in the cinema, away from screaming. Unlike Rees’ film, thankfully Thunderbird Releasing are handling the proper theatrical run of film and not Netflix. Comparable, Alex Garland’s latest feature Annihilation will suffer the same fate of being restricted theatrically in the UK to the small screen. Thornton’s epic is a timely reminder of cinema’s place in an amphitheatre, and not at home.

The director Warwick Thornton is of aboriginal background himself. His mother Freda Glynn founded and was the first director of the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (in the remote Alice Springs).

Climaxing with a moment of pure compassion, knowing little about the film before viewing, it’s hard not be in awe of Sweet Country’s stirring its cinematic and poignant trappings. A true knockout from down under. It is showed in cinemas in March. It’s out on all major VoD platforms on Monday, July 2nd.

You Were Never Really Here

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Dazzling. Kaleidoscopic. Violent. Psycho. Taxi Driver. Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s latest film is at once a rare piece of virtuoso cinema playing with the possibilities of the form and a dark journey into a Hellish American underbelly. The images are the cinematograph’s answer to great paintings courtesy of production designer Tim Grimes and director of photography Thomas Townend: the music is an unforgettable, sometimes pounding score by Jonny Greenwood interspersed with classic songs like If I Knew You Were Coming I’d’ve Baked You A Cake, in this context all the more unsettling for their homeliness.

Joaquin Phoenix’s performance is completely out there. One could say he dominates the movie, but actually Ramsay’s images and sounds dominate it just as much as Phoenix does. He has a much bigger role here than he does playing Jesus in Mary Magdalene, out next week. It seems almost disingenuous that of the two roles, You Were Never Really Here is the one that should tower above the medium. Maybe that’s the problem with portraying good and evil: it’s much easier to make evil stand out. Not that Phoenix’s character here is entirely bad: his antihero possesses a certain moral ambiguity.

Joe (Phoenix) is a mercenary employed by rich fathers of disappeared teenage girls to track them down and rescue them from captivity – meaning enforced sex work in houses used by paedophile rings. Joe’s modus operandi is to work out how many people including guards or security are inside, then take a hammer and bludgeon them to death as he encounters them one by one in order to safely remove his client’s daughter and return her to her father.

But this is no linear plot. The narrative is fractured so that, for example, events seen at the start turn up again later on. Were you watching a flashback? A flashforward? These games are constantly played with the audience, so much so that the piece may actually play differently to you if you go back and watch it again. There are moments cutting from the adult Joe to glimpses of him experiencing trauma as a child, for example breathing with a polythene bag over his head. Who is Joe? What happened to him in the past to make him the way he is now? We are given hints but told nothing specific and expected to draw our own conclusions. A multiplicity of interpretations, perhaps?

He constantly looks in on the home of his ageing mother (Judith Roberts) to check she’s okay. When he first visits, she’s been watching a TV rerun of Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) and it’s scared her. As in, she’s enjoyed watching a really scary movie. She takes a shower. She’s as independent and strong-willed as he is – and Joe is torn between being frustrated by the fact and being a devoted son. He mimics knife-slashing outside her bathroom door while she showers inside.

The other major female character is Senator’s young daughter Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov), drugged to her eyeballs when Joe rescues her from a paedophiles’ brothel. A young girl with no idea of what’s going on or being done to her. Very different from the seemingly savvy underage child prostitute played by Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976) and apparently at the opposite end of things from Joe’s own mother – young, healthy and adrift rather than old, frail and anchored. And yet, these archetypes are undermined in the course of the film: mother has become the victim and Nina has been rescued.

Finally, who is Joe? In the closing minutes, he performs an extreme act of violent self-harm right before our eyes. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it’s in his imagination. Or perhaps it isn’t and the narrative’s happy ending is in his imagination.

Cut to somewhere in the middle of the film. Joe has delivered hammer blows to the head of two suited thugs. One of them, who has admitted that he wasn’t the murderer on this occasion, lies dying on the floor. Joe lies down beside him and allows the dying man to hold his hand. A moment of tenderness in the aftermath of violence.

The film constantly shifts the audience’s allegiances like this. Sometimes we warm to Joe. At other times, he’s our worst nightmare. He doesn’t say a lot. The strong script is generally sparse on dialogue, preferring to provide the wherewithal for the film to weave its magic/wreak its havoc in sounds, images, performances, editing and music. As such, it’s a highly visceral experience almost unimaginable in a medium other than cinema. It’s also indubitably dirty in its subject matter, in its manipulation of the cinematic medium and in its dealings with the audience. Even down to its enigmatic title, taken from the book from which it was adapted. If you were never really here, then that begs the question, where were you really? Should you have been here or should you have been somewhere else? Or did you really imagine the whole thing?

You Were Never Really Here was out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 9th. It’s available for digital streaming on Monday, July 2nd.

Liquid Truth (Aos Teus Olhos)

Posted on by victorfraga

This Brazilian film is high on morality, but low on originality. The boundaries of a teacher-student relationship is a topic that has been filmed throughout Hollywood in high blown spectacles such as Doubt (John Patrick Shanley 2008) and lowbrow indie drama such as The Chorus (Christophe Barratier 2004), to name just a few. What Lucas Paraizo’s script lacks in originality is made up for in Azul Serra’s cinematography.

Visually, this is a very arresting film. Serra highlights the greys and blues a swimming pool inhabits (incidentally, his name means “blue mountain range” in Portuguese), bringing lighter palettes during the film’s success (brimming with children and happiness), darkening the décor and light during Rubens darker moments of self-reflection. Accused of kissing an eight-year-old by an irate parent, Rubens is aware this accusation may not only ruin his career, but also his life.

Oliveira is a commanding lead, devastatingly handsome, effortlessly charming and convincing of bringing the right level of nuance to the hard-hitting moments. Supporting actors Luisa Arraes, Gustavo Falcão and Luiz Felipe Mello are all solid as supporting characters, leading the audiences to suspect, doubt, question Rubens in a film that offers few answers.

Surprisingly, for a film that treats its audience with such intelligence, it’s tame in its display. The cordiality of male teacher and student is one that resonates worldwide, whether connecting to those in Catholic Ireland (the sexual abuse cases) or those watching the legions of actresses making a stand at the Oscars in support of #MeToo. Liquid Truth is simply too tame at points. For a film with such a hard-hitting theme, it simply hints at dramas and the consequences of actions. It sometimes a little too fey and passé for a film that has a Scottish release in 2018.

But film is primarily a visual medium and Carolina Jabor is an accomplished stylist. Silhoeuttes of Rubens by the pool evokes the magnetism of sixties icons Brando and McQueen, the leit motifs of women showering display the harsher effects of a tidal rain and there is a nice contrast of light and shade coming from the dirtier décor and luminous pools (for reference, its visually reminiscent of the excellent eighties thriller Manhunter). It’s an engrossing piece of visual cinema, hampered by a script that, at times, is undeserving of such cinematic measures.

Liquid Truth is showing at the Glasgow International Film Festival.