Month: April 2018

The Deminer

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The distance between life and death, between a normal life and a life of severe disfigurement or disability, has never been shorter than this. Just a couple of centimetres can make all difference. In what’s perhaps the most dangerous job in the world, a little mistake can culminate in a huge explosion. And tragedy. Just five kilos are enough to set off a mine.

Fakhir Berwari has to be extremely precise with his feet (in order to avoid stepping on a mine) and with his hands (in order to defuse the explosive device). It’s roughly 2013, and Mosul (in Northern Iraq) has finally been freed from Daesh, after three years under their control. But they left the soil infested with mines. Some are the size and shape of a biscuit tin, while others are the size of a large kitchen device. All tightly packed with gunpowder. Mining is one of the most perverse devices of war: it turns land uninhabitable and unusable.

This documentary is almost entirely narrated by Berwari’s son, and there are no talking heads interviews. There is plenty of very graphic footage. Four large bombs explode (including a suicide bomber), limbs fly around, shrapnel gets deeply lodged into living bodies, blood is splattered everywhere. Berwari himself loses a leg, and arm and has a profound shoulder wound after one of the explosions. He carries with his job undaunted, despite his horrific injuries. “The children who step on these mines are like my children”, he justifies his determination. He disarmed more than 600 mines, we are told.

This is a film about boundless altruism. Berwari is entirely selfless, and his bravery is unfathomable. But the film is also a little disjointed. The political context is very blurry. Curds celebrate the capture of Saddam Hussein in the beginning of the movie, and we are then told that the Ba’ath regime has become increasingly violent, yet we never learn how all of this ties in with Daesh. Another problem is that Berwari’s son is a little dour and laconic. He fails to express passion for his father’s heroic life, and so the film feels somewhat cold and distant. I even struggled to make out who Berwari was in the first third of this 82-minute film.

The Deminer is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, April 27th.

Dirty expectations: 10 films to look out for in Cannes

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The 71st annual Cannes International Film Festival starts on May 8th for 12 days, and the programme has already been announced. The event continues as auteur-driven, internationalist, prestigious, innovative and, of course, anti-Netflix as ever. The Festival demands that all films in the programme get a theatrical distribution in French cinemas, which caused the streaming giant to pull out last minute, just before the programme was announced.

The list is teeming with big director names from all parts of the planet, and the Competition alone includes eight newcomers, from a total of 21 films selected. A jury under the presidency of Cate Blanchett will announce the winner. A grand total of 1,906 feature films were viewed by the various selection committees. At least 100 movies have been announced for the various sections of the Festival so far: Un Certain Regard, Director’s Fortnight, Critic’s Week, Classics, Special Screenings, etc. Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s psychological thriller Everybody Knows will open the Festival. The Official festival poster (pictured above) features Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina from Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 film Pierrot le Fou. It is the second time festival poster was inspired by Godard’s film after his 1963 film Contempt just two years ago.

Below is just the the tip of the iceberg. Our very dirty picks, films that we think you should be looking out for. Don’t forget to follow us for live updates at the event, as we watch the films below and reveal they were worth the wait.

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1. Climax (Gaspar Noe):

The Argentinean provocateur, who has worked most of his life in France, returns three years after the 3D explicit sex romance Love. which saw an actor ejaculate on the audience and the camera assume the penis perspective as it enters a vagina. Everyone is curious what antics the enfant terrible has under his sleeve the time, and whether audiences will leave the cinema feeling orgasmic. The movie is in the Director’s Fortnight section,

2. The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (Terry Gilliam):

Terry Gilliam’s long-delayed feature will be the Festival’s closing film. Production began exactly 20 years ago (!!!). And yet the film encountered new problems, and a legal challenge almost prevented it from being shown this year. The movie is a blend of fantasy, adventure and comedy loosely based on the Spanish super-novel Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes. The film, which is pictured below is in the Competition.

3. Pope Francis: A Man of His Word (Wim Wenders):

The 72-year-old German filmmaker has largely focused on producing and directing documentaries in the past couple of decades, including the iconic Buena Vista Social Club (1996) and Our Last Tango (2017, directed by German Kral). This time he has created what looks like a romantic portrait of the current Pope, in which he speaks directly to the people. The film is also in the Competition. Let’s just be grateful he didn’t do a film about his countrysake and previous pope, aka God’s Rottweiler. Meanwhile, Wenders has a feature film coming out in cinemas later this year.

4. Donbass (Sergei Loznitza):

The Ukrainian director’s previous film, a creepy tribute portrayal of Russia, A Gentle Creature is showing in cinemas across the UK right, and one of the dirtiest films you could catch right now. The film was in the Festival’s Competition last year. This year, the director returns with a film named after the region of the Ukraine that Russia recently attempted to annex (although Putin will dispute this). We would hazard a guess that the new film, which is in the Un Certain Regard section, will be no more sympathetic of the largest country in the world.

5. Three faces (Jafar Panahi):

The Iranian director of The Mirror (1997), Offside (2006) and Taxi Tehran (2015) started his career in the 1990s as the assistant director of the late Abbas Kiarostami. His films often dealt with controversial and fiery topics (such as women attending football matches in Offside), and the director himself was arrested in 2010. Three Faces is described as a “mountain travel” film, and it’s in the Festival’s Competition

6. Shoplifters (Hirokazu Koreeda):

Firmly established as one of the most prolific and creative voices of Japanese cinema, the director of the dirty gems After The Storm and The Third Murder (both released last year) returns with Shoplifters (pictured below). The film, similarly to After The Storm, focuses on a dysfunctional “family”, as a group of petty criminals and crooks take in a child from the street.

7. At War (Stephane Brize):

Perrin industries decide to shut down a factory and fire 1,100 employees, despite record profits and huge financial sacrifices on the part of the lower employees. The 52-year-old French helmer once again exposes the ugly face of capitalism, corporate values and labour rights in Europe, after dealing with the subject two years ago in The Measure of a Man. Also in the Competition.

8. Everybody Knows (Asghar Fahradi):

This psychological thriller will open the 2018 Festival, and it features Spanish actors Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz and Argentinian Ricardo Darín. The double-Oscar winner refused to travel to the US last year in order to collect his statuette for The Salesman, in retaliation to Trump’s racist and Islamophobic government. The new drama Everybody Knows, which we expected to be as profound and multi-threaded as his previous films, the first time the director works in Spanish language, and it’s also only the second time a Spanish language movie opens the Festival.

9. BlacKkKlansman (Spike Lee):

Spike Lee is back, and he’s ready to set fire to his increasingly racist and reactionary homeland. The film follows the first African-American police officer to infiltrate the KKK, back in 1979. The urgency of the movie cannot be overstated. Hopefully Lee will not slip into platitudes and sexist cliches, unlike two years ago with Chi-Raq. In the Competition.

10. The House that Jack Built (Lars von Trier):

The staunch persona-non-grata has now made piece with the Festival, after being banned “for life” in 2011 following some controversial remarks about Hitler’s good qualities. His new film, which is named after an English nursery rhyme, stars Matt Dillon and follows with a highly intelligent serial killer. Von Trier described the film as celebrating “the idea that life is evil and soulless”. The film is running our of the Competition.

Western

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A group of German construction workers are sent to the deep Bulgarian countryside next to the state’s Southern border. All but one of them approach their visit with the preserved hostility of European post-Cold War stereotypes and dynamics. The exception here is Meinhard (Meinhard Neumann), a quiet and private middle-aged man who, despite the language barrier, prefers the company of the locals.

The Bulgarians, we soon learn, are no less prejudiced when it comes to newly arrived strangers. Caught in the timeless capsule of their village, the last time the locals remember seeing Germans was during the Nazi occupation of WW2. Despite the contrasting sentiments, a bond is eventually forged. Meinhard befriends one of the locals, Adrian (Syuleyman Alilov Letifov), and we witness the formation of a special relationship between two men whose willingness to connect and understand one another defies verbal communication.

In contrast to the harmonious microcosm Meinhard is trying to create, tension gradually builds up everywhere elsewhere in the movie. Eventually, a conflict between “occupiers” and “occupied” occurs, when the Germans and the locals have to share the scarce water in the village.

The film examines a heavily male-populated and patriarchal society, offering some sensitive insight and debunking myths. The macho-men chasing foreign girls on a river bank we see at the beginning are entirely deconstructed in the end of the film. While keeping male experience as central to the world of Western, Grisebach successfully portraits the private worlds and psychological complexities of all characters. Ultimately, no one is as weak or strong as they seem, and there are no vigilantes.

By depriving the film of non-diegetic sound, prioritising individual experiences over script, and casting non-professional actors from (except for a very professional stunt horse), Valeska Grisebach creates a cinematic piece so deeply rooted in realism that it transcends everyday life, in the Bazinian sense. Western is a very European movie. It’s literal and poetic. It accurately portrays the boundary between East and West, and – perhaps most importantly – it demonstrates that no barrier is unsurmountable.

Western was out in cinemas on April 13th. It’s available on all major VoD platforms on July 9th.

WARNING: film spoilers can kill!

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Since its release, British horror film Ghost Stories, co-directed by Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson (pictured below), has been getting pretty rave reviews. “Genius!” wrote a critic quoted in the film poster, “Best British horror for years”, said another piece. But delving into these reviews beyond the catchy taglines, you’ll be hard pressed to find many which discuss the film in full. The vast majority refuse to pass comment specifically on the ending for fear of giving away spoilers. Nyman himself has taken to Twitter to thank professional critics for not spoiling the film in their reviews and request that amateur film bloggers take a similar approach.

This raises the question though: how can you possibly review a film thoroughly without reviewing all aspects of it? Surely, to have a comprehensive discussion and analysis of a film, you must discuss and analyse the film in full, including the ending, even if it gives away spoilers.

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To spoil or not to spoil, that is the question

One might argue that critics could pass judgement on a film – or an ending specifically – without giving away details, a simple, ‘the ending is great,’ or, ‘the ending sucks,’ sufficing. But this isn’t enough; a thorough review must explain why an ending is good, bad, or in Ghost Stories case, a massive cop-out. If not, a critic loses integrity and their review lacks transparency.

For films that hinge on a twist, it is even more necessary to discuss spoilers, for the twist is likely the most shocking, thrilling, and important part of the narrative. With a film like Ghost Stories, the twist is what some critics believe elevates the film to ‘a classic,’ and what others believe causes it to fall flat. Without discussing, commenting on, and critiquing such a significant aspect of the story, what is the point in a review?

I don’t intend to single out Ghost Stories, or Nyman himself, though I do take issue with his suggestion that critics and bloggers shouldn’t discuss the film’s ending for this deters a full and fair analysis of the film. If a potential viewer should choose to read a review before having seen the film, that is on them. If they don’t want spoilers, they can watch the movie before seeking out the very arena in which spoilers are intended to be discussed.

If they wish to know whether a certain critic liked a film or not, they can check Rotten Tomatoes – there are no spoilers there, just a plump red tomato or a snotty green splat next to a critic’s name (pictured above). But for these critics’ actual reviews, in-depth pieces of film criticism, there should be spoilers aplenty. Otherwise, where else are spoilers going to be discussed?

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Note from DMovies’ editor:

Many distributors and PR agencies require that reviews are devoid of spoilers. The Film Distributors’ Association (FDA) emphatically demands that all pieces do not contain spoilers. Plus some of our readers get quite angry and vocal when they see one!!! So, despite Charlie’s wishes, we shall be keeping our reviews mostly spoiler-free, at least for the time-being!

Image at the top: from Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), one of the most important spoiler case studies in the history of cinema (Hitchcock demanded that no material or even the film trailer disclosed Marion Crane’s murder, which unusually happened in the middle of the film).

Happy Prince

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His 19th century looks are sterling, the vintage photography crisp and soothing, and the costumes look exceedingly beautiful and elegant. Has Rupert Everett mastered Oscar Wilde, both behind and in front of the camera? The English actor both penned and directed the Happy Prince, plus he also stars as the film’s protagonist.

The story starts in Paris, where an impoverished and ill Oscar Wilde is recovering from his prison stint in England, after being found guilty of gross indecency. His love affair with Lord Alfred Bosie Douglas and unrepentant attitude in court had shocked the country. He is now seeking to indulge in small acts of pleasure and hedonism in France and Italy, as his health fades and the end is increasingly nigh, it seems. He’s a man desperately seeking redemption through sex and beauty.

The film proposes to revisit Wilde’s very final days, as “desire and loyalty face off, the transience of lust is laid bare, and the true riches of love are revealed”. Everett embraced a mammoth task and a huge responsibility. Wilde is a subversive genius far ahead of his time, and there is no shortage of films, TV series and books about him. Will the English actor (who’s also gay himself) have anything new and fresh to say about the poet, or will he just slip into the same old cliched platitudes about “the love that dare not speak its name”? The trailer suggests a very conventional biopic. But has the -thespian-scribe-helmer perhaps infused his latest film with little dirty flavours?

The film features a top-drawer cast, including Colin Firth, Emily Watson, Colin Morgan and Edwin Thomas.

The Happy Prince premiered earlier this year at the BFI Flare London LGBT Film Festival. It is out in the best cinemas across the UK on Friday, June 15th.

Never Steady, Never Still

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Judging by the title, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this a a hectic and disturbing film, with a disjointed and uncontrollable pace. But it’s not quite. Quite the opposite. This is a warm and delicate movie, full of peace and kindness, despite the predicament of its main characters. It’s a remarkable achievement for first-time Canadian scribe and helmer Kathleen Hepburn.

The film opens up with a voice-over from the protagonist Judy (Scottish actress Shirley Henderson, best remembered for playing Gail in Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting in 1996) as she describes the grief and pain of losing a child (she gave birth to a stillborn baby years earlier). She also reflects on the meaning of life and death. This meditative monologue sets the tone for the movie, a profound existential piece about overcoming the big obstacles of life however unsurmountable they may seem.

Judy suffers from early onset and advanced Parkinson’s Disease. She shudders uncontrollably most of the time, and even the most trivial tasks such unscrewing a lid and removing a ring become arduous. Her voice is as frail and as child-like as it gets. Her panting and squeaking with pain and frustration are heart-rending. Yet she’s not victimised by the filmmaker. There’s no time for self-pity, despite the horrific and irreversible condition, which can only be partially mitigated. Life must go on. She insists in driving and carrying on with other mundane chores, sometimes without even taking her medicine.

Henderson delivers an impeccable performance, brilliantly reconciling vulnerability and self-determination. She’s beyond convincing, and you might find yourself wondering whether they recruited a real Parkinson-sufferer for the role. Even her physique is appropriate for the role. Her scrawny figure, with every single vertebra visible, is symptomatic of Parkinson’s. Patients lose weight because they can’t feed themselves properly. I lost my aunt Ivonete to Parkinson’s just a few weeks ago, and so Judy rang many familiar bells in my head.

Suddenly Judy’s husband Ed passes away at sea to a heart attack. Judy is the first to come across his lifeless body on the beach, right next to his fishing boat. She attempts to pull him from the sea. This is the most dramatic sequence of the film, as Judy is faced with her physical limitations and the tragic death of the most important person in her life, both at once. Their son Jamie (Theodore Pellerin) is the other central pillar of the story. He’s 20 years old, shy, introverted and grappling with his apparent bisexuality. Now mother and son are left to comfort and support each other, but at first it’s unclear whether they’ll pull through.

Gradually, the coy youngster and the quivering mother complement each other. In an awkward way, her frailty dovetails with his insecurities, while the landscape offers soothing and healing. The vastness of rural and remote British Columbia, all tinted with pastel hues and a lingering twilight, provide mother and son with a certain quietness. They remain stoical towards the tragedies that have befallen them. It’s as if their emotions dissipated into the landscape.

The director’s firm grip and acute sensitivity are conspicuous throughout the movie. There’s even a little dash of humour. And copious amounts of maladroit yet sincere kindness. Ultimately, Judy and Jamie must find mitigation in their family bonds and attempt to forge new relationships, however closely-knit and remote their community may be.

Never Steady, Never Still is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, April 20th, and then on VoD the following week.

This is no laughing matter!!!

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One of the greatest joys you can experience as a cinemagoer is settling into your seat at the local theatre to watch a film you’ve been looking forward to for weeks and weeks, only to realise 10 minutes in that what you’re watching is an hilarious, side-splitting farce of a film. A recent addition to the “unintentionally funny” category includes Tomas Alfredson’s shambolic The Snowman (2017), a film that audiences were excited to see considering its effective trailer and the talent involved in the production – as it turns out, it’s a laugh-out-loud pile of garbage. An “unintentionally funny movie” isn’t just a turkey or a cult film. It’s far worse than that. It’s so bad it’s good!

One of my own favourite cinema-going experiences was back in 2008, when a group of friends and I went to see M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening (pictured below, in the iconic scene in which Mark Wahlberg talks to a plastic plant). The trailer had freaked us out, Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999) had frightened us and blown our minds in equal measure (we were 15, give us a break!!!), and even the opening credits were suitably creepy. We thought we were in for something that would really scare us. Ten minutes later we were wiping away the tears rolling down our cheeks, howling with laughter at the way an old lady smashes through a windowpane with her face and a driverless lawn mower runs over a man’s head. The experience was one of utter joy.

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Reading against the text

The hilarity, though, was borne out of the fact that we thought we were going to see something that would terrify us but instead made us laugh. Had we known The Happening was going to be so bad, the experience would not have been the same. We would probably have laughed still, sure, but the ‘shock factor’ – that golden moment of realisation – would have been lost.

Many reviewers, however, particularly those on YouTube, recommend going to see unintentionally funny films by telling their audience to ‘watch it as a comedy.’ This, unfortunately, eliminates any potential golden moment of realisation. We shouldn’t tell people to view an “unintentionally funny film” as a comedy because the humour lies in that we think it’s actually going to be a scary, thrilling, or dramatic film, and then being let down. Big time. If we know it’s going to be funny-bad, we might laugh, but not nearly as hard, or as surprised, or most importantly as genuine as we might have done had we been blissfully unaware of the goldmine of hilarity we were about to stumble upon.

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Shhh, don’t tell anyone!!!

In a way, us fans of “unintentionally funny films” have an obligation not to ruin the surprise element of a film’s disastrous nature by saying, ‘it’s really bad, but watch it as a comedy and you’ll enjoy it.’ If we have to recommend a film, just to get a fellow film-lover to see something so bad they really shouldn’t miss it, tell them it’s really enjoyable (which isn’t a lie!), nudge them in the direction of the movie without giving the hysterical surprise away.

This is, admittedly, harder to do for classics of the genre like The Room (Tommy Wiseau, 2009; pictured above) or Samurai Cop (Amir Shervan, 1991; pictured at the top of this article), which are less known outside bad-film aficionado circles, but for new releases, those wonderful pieces of drivel inadvertently vying to join the ranks of Battlefield Earth (Roger Christian, 2000; pictured below), the Star Wars prequels, and most things starring Nicholas Cage, we can keep from ruining the surprise. Let people discover the unintentional comedy for themselves – that’s where the magic is.

Pyewacket

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Slow-burn suspense-horror Pyewacket is most aptly described as a cautionary tale of the dangers of impulsive feelings, the failure of familial communication and the isolating and fractious nature of grief. Shrouded within an eerie suspense that delights one’s salivating hunger for that tense and nerve-shredding experience, it echoes the dual inclination of storytelling as both entertainment and parable.

Following the death of her father, teenager Leah (Nicole Munoz) is forced by her mother (Laurie Holden) to up sticks and move to a house in the woods somewhere in rural Canada. Obstinately facing the reality of having to leave her school and friends behind, in anger she turns to black magic and naively performs an occult ritual that summons the otherworldly Pyewacket to kill her mother. Upon realising her error, she desperately attempts to reverse the spell, but in order to undo the original spell, she must repeat it.

By way of the fractious internal and external family dynamic of a grieving mother and daughter, the story pulses with the telltale heart of emotional authenticity. Thematically this struggle to mourn amidst the transformation of the family following the death of the patriarch emerges with a strong resonance, symbolised by the relocation of the family and the spatial contrast of the woods to the urban. More significantly, it reveals the innate conflict within the collective bonds of friendship and family, offset by our individual needs and sense of belonging. Yet the internal angst of the film’s protagonist coupled with the emotional authenticity of the personal drama, highlights the skill of MacDonald the storyteller to tap into that which lies beneath the story, the characters and its audience.

Pyewacket’s nature to take on many forms casts this supernatural entity as a reimagining of Christianity’s great deceiver, who similarly to the devil, its true identity is unknown. Hence the evil Leah awakens is the purest form of terror, that which is unseen, existing only as a spiritual entity without a permanence of physical form. In as much as cinema is a visual medium, what is unseen is of paramount importance. MacDonald understands the power of inference, using our imagination as a tool to create anticipatory fear, rather than exhausting the onscreen space and actions. He evokes our imagination, using our negative associations of black magic and spells, of the afterlife, and memories of creaking floorboards, as well as the disquieting feelings of being watched or followed to create suspense that is borne out through our feelings.

Here the camera movement and sound are a means of manipulating our emotional or sensory reactions. This practice asserts the filmmaker’s understanding that a film lives inside the minds of his audience, the onscreen a gateway to the real stage upon which fear manifests. It is not an external but an internal one, echoing Leah’s internal angst, who in turn draws us into her web whilst MacDonald looks to that which lies beneath with a deft hand.

The appeal of Pyewacket and its very simple plot could – with all due respect – be labelled an effective Friday night horror film. Yet look a little closer and there is something appealing about its simplicity. Unlike The Orphanage (J.A. Bayona, 2007) and more recently The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014), which also dealt with themes of grief, painted with a richness of detail and colour, Pyewacket is a black-and-white rough sketch. It lacks the finesse touches yet retains a raw thematic and narrative simplicity that the others forego.

Here is a film that will be dismissed by those with a desire for a more intellectual realisation of its themes, yet it is misguided to dismiss MacDonald’s methodical slow-burn execution, offsetting emotional family drama with an unsettling, and in moments oppressively suspenseful and disquieting atmosphere. The extremes of entertainment and intellectual exploration of the themes aside, Pyewacket is a modern parable, haunted by the spectre of this tradition, in just as much as its lead protagonist enters into a Faustian dance with her own supernatural antagonist. Therein, the simplicity is justified, serving the two masters of cautionary tale with an entertaining and suspenseful horror.

Pyewacket is released on HD VoD on April and DVD on 23rd April 2018 from Signature Entertainment.

Let the Sunshine In (Un Beau Soleil Intérieur)

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Tentatively exploring the sheer visceral power of cinema and its unique ability to overpower an audience through visuals, a new Clare Denis will forever be a notable occasion. Unwavering in its devotion towards Juliette Binoche as Isabelle, an influx Parisian painter, Let the Sunshine In across its long winding takes induces one into a tentative emotional state, resulting in a final few moments that hit a truly sensitive resonance.

Loosely based on the collection of essays A Lover’s Discourse by the seminal French philosopher Roland Barthes – an adaptation which Denis has frivolously denied – the film is a series of Isabelle’s failures to capture Cupid’s love arrows. Introduced whilst engaging in sex with the brutish business man Vincent (Xavier Beauvios), the end result of their earthly pleasures is whipped up for comical affect. Choosing to get the whole thing over and done with before she comes, Isabelle simultaneously does not bow to any man’s forthright masculinity, yet liberally searches to a lover who is not married, as Vincent is.

Capturing the vibrant qualities of life in this interaction, Denis enables her latest feature to progress in this comedic tone throughout. Merged with the precarious affections Binoche’s character searches for, the narrative substance enhances is verisimilitude. Absent of any implicit analytical indulgence from Barthes, Let the Sunshine In is profoundly stirring.

Striking the fine balance between joyous experience of life and an overwhelmingly crippling pain of heartbreak, Binoche is in riveting form here. Akin to a light switch, she can fluctuate in scenes from sorrow to join and back again. Projecting her character’s inner distress in such a manner absorbs one beyond the confides of the 1.66:1 aspect ratio. Flourishing in the role underlines that an actor’s abilities are not solely dependent upon their youthful charm, evidently a notion held dear by the grotesque Harvey Weinstein and corporate suits in the film world. Exhibiting her craft in a masterful light, without her brilliance, Denis and Christine Angot’s script would cease to flourish so brightly.

The loose nature of the narrative clearly reflects the quasi-adaptation from Barthes’ collection. Pieced together with the numerous sexual and intimate moments, Isabelle experiences with other men, all in the quest to find some tangible form of love, could be a humdrum story in the hands of a lesser director. Binoche is the main driving force for sustaining an emotional connection, still, the script allows itself to never be taken too seriously- epitomised when Isabelle and her friends take a weekend retreat to the countryside.

Accompanying the complexity of her pursuit for love, social implications lay in pursing such means to an end. Again, away from the hands of Denis and Binoche, these class substructures would come crashing to the forefront, thus overriding the central theme. Deployed with a delicacy that does not loudly state its presence in the script, the bullish Vincent declares Isabelle’s brilliance, whilst proclaiming his wife as ‘extraordinary’. Implicit of the bourgeoisie’s attitude towards those not of their social standing, in the lexical choice and deliverance by actor Beauvios, a patriarchal and systematic hierarchy explains the rationale behind Vincent’s inability to leave his wife for Isabelle.

Finishing on a flowing sequence with Gérard Depardieu’s relationship adviser discussing the pitfalls of romance, Denis’s merging of end credits and final scenes leaves one astounded at the intricacies Let the Sunshine In builds thoughtfully and slowly throughout its running time.

Let the Sunshine In is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, April 20th (2018). On Mubi on Monday, December 26th (2023).

Milos Forman dies aged 86

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A native of the now defunct Czechoslovakia, Milos Forman was raised by foster parents and attended film school in Prague in the 1950s, where he quickly became recognised as a rebellious filmmaker. He migrated across the pond in the 1960s, as his work was deemed too satirical and subversive for the censorship in his home nation. The country was under firm Soviet grip (and many Russian artists were migrating too).

Milos Forman will always be best remembered for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a tragic comedy about mental sanity and repression in an institution, starring Jack Nicholson. He won five Oscars – including Best Director and Best Picture – for the English language film in 1975. He became firmly established as the voice of the marginalised and subversive in Hollywood, demonstrating that the Academy was prepared to embrace a countercultural gaze.

His next big achievement came nine years later with Amadeus (1984), a period drama adapted from a stage play by Peter Shaffer. The film is a fictionalised biography of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and his music is heard ostensibly and extensively throughout the entire film. The story also focuses on Italian composer Antonio Salieri, the musician’s biggest nemesis. The film received 11 Academy Awards (including Best Picture), as well as various Baftas and Golden Globes. It was ranked 53th in the American Film Institute top 100 films of all times.

The dirtiest film of his career, however, came a few years earlier. In 1979, Milos Forman authored the musical anti-war drama Hair, which was based on the eponymous Broadway musical play. It follows the footsteps of a Vietnam War draftee who mingles with anti-war hippies donning plush and fanciful clothes and long hairdos (hence the film title). That’s how he experiments with marijuana, LSD, free love and various drafts of sexuality. The film established a compelling and urgent dialogue between the peace movement and the war machine that prevailed at the time.

Nick Cave, Ennio Morricone and a lot of gunshots!

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Cinematic stereotypes, narratives and iconographies remain in filmmakers’ consciousness leading a deconstruct or reworking of the tropes that made a genre so influential. This is true of both Neo-Noir and Neorealism. No exemption to this statement, the Western is a genre continually revised by contemporary film creatives. In recent years, Slow West (John MacLean, 2015), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, 2007) and Sweet Country (Warwick Thornton, 2017) have all reshaped the themes of the genre to their contemporary socio-political and geopolitical issues, none more so than the latter.

All of these films build upon the enduring legacy created by the maverick Italian director Sergio Leone, often described as the King of Spaghetti Western. In particular, though separated by 51 years, Hell or High Water (David Mackenzie, 2016, pictured below) uniquely works inside and outside the filmic and musical framework assembled in For a Few Dollars More (Sergio Leone, 1965; pictured above and at the bottom of this article). Crafted by masterful musicians in Ennio Morricone’s 1960’s score and Nick Cave’s recent collaboration with Warren Ellis, when studying the intertwining nature of character, setting and ambience, it is indisputable to not see the links between this Neo-Western and its predecessor.

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Music is the spaghetti of the soul

Crafting a new template for further neo-Westerns to abide by or reconstruct, Leone in A Fistful of Dollars (1964) built upon the legacy of John Ford et al – heightened by his acute Italian sensibility of style and atmosphere. The director and composer Ennio Morricone in For a Few Dollars More produced a film with deeper musical roots to its characters, alongside eclipsing the visceral cinematic imagery and budget of Fistful. Resulting in an opening credit that imbues the barren landscape with a merciless quality, the twinging and sporadic guitar strings merge with an ambiguously innate whistling, rapid gunshots and passing flutes. Before any of the main cast has appeared on screen, the thematic underpinnings of Morricone’s orchestra have come to prominence; shaping his career and recreating the Western’s musical framework.

Revelling in its genre of filmmaking, the blood red filter accompanies the vast long shot to elicit the assassination of the lone rider, who is seen falling off his horse moments previous. Methodically designing this symphonic layering ‘Sergio asked for simple themes, easy on the ear, tonal, popular themes. He falls in love with the music and wants more from it’, as stated by Morricone himself in Christopher Frayling’s 2000 book Sergio Leone: Something to Do with Death. Rejecting any form of filler melodies, swaying the audience towards a particular emotion, the prolonged effect of sustaining intimate tones towards Clint Eastwood’s Monco, Lee Van Cleef’s Colonel Douglas Mortimer and sinister El Indio (Gian Maria Volonté) makes the trio’s final showdown all the more overwrought.

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Where the wild west grows

A virtuoso craftsman, Nick Cave’s (pictured above) compositions, with fellow collaborator Warren Ellis, in Hell or High Water employs a comparable symphonic arrangement to Morricone, inducing the Western milieu into an unforgiving state. The opening track, Comacheria, is structured around strings, equivalent in For a Few Dollars More’s fluttering guitar score. Yet, the melancholic drawn out quality possessed in the violin strings and piano is firstly classical. Orchestrally akin to an overture, the elongated strings permeate, until the introduction of a solemn piano.

Integrated with the decaying mise-en-scene of Texas as the graceful camera of Giles Nuttgens follows the brothers before and after their first bank robbery, the space created between the expanding notes away from one another accentuates the idealised American notions of masculinity, eventually allowing them to take centre stage. Taylor Sheridan’s script balances these themes, equally with the aid of Chris Pine, Ben Foster and Jeff Bridges’ performances. Sheridan tapers his tale towards the two Howard brothers, Toby and Tanner

Finely tuned, sorrow is sustained by the detached compositions of Cave and Ellis. Working alongside each other on their third Neo-Western – after The Proposition (John Hillcoat) and formerly mentioned The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford – the inventiveness demonstrated in scratching away at the thin veneer of assertive masculine in these two previous films comes to an accumulative impact in Mackenzie’s film. Gone are the relatively whirring pitches of Morricone. What remains is a score that has “scale and emotion”, yet “does not feel manipulative or overwhelming”, as the Scottish director wrote in a statement previous to the soundtrack’s conception.

Allegorical of the Western genre’s lingering impression over a false sense of identity, Sheridan’s sheriff Marcus Hamiltion (Bridges) nears the end of his lengthy career. Similarly, both Toby and Tanner are lead to rob banks due to their disenfranchised by witnessing the destruction caused by the Iraq conflict, a post-global financial crisis and the threat of their home being re-financed. The strains of contemporary society wrap themselves around this barren land, leaving scavengers as Toby and Tanner in its wake.

In a way, Hell or High Water is a post-cowboy world where the gun slinging heroes of Eastwood and Van Cleef have long gone. Operating in a foreboding fashion, Mackenzie, along with Cave and Ellis, use the template of the Western to speak to a greater truth- the fading of the America’s global dominance. Still, divided in their motifs, the musical formations of this Neo-Western and For a Few Dollars More, unknowingly or not, share an analogous construction of genre. Irrespective of their time of production, both these Westerns deploy a harmonious transition of sight and sound to incite a cinematic odyssey into the wild wild West.

For a Few Dollars More is showing at the BFI South Bank as part of the Sergio Leone season taking place right now!