Month: May 2018

My Little One (Ayka)

Posted on by victorfraga

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM CANNES

Life in Russia isn’t easy if you are Russian. Recent films such as Loveless (Andrey Zvyagentsev, 2017) and A Gentle Creature (Sergei Loznitsa, 2017) have painted a very negative picture of the largest country in the world. People in these movie have absolutely no time for altruism and compassion. But it could be far worse. My Little One follows illegal Kyrgyz immigrant Aika (Samal Yeslyamova) as she attempts to survive in Moscow. She is entirely dehumanised. Her existence is nothing short of hell on Earth.

The story begins in a hospital, as Aika gives birth and then flees through the window, leaving behind a healthy baby boy. The subsequent events suggest that Aika had absolutely no means of looking after the unnamed child. She dwells with other illegal immigrants under the purview of a rude and greedy landlord, who doesn’t mince his words when insulting and threatening tenants. Police raids are a routine occurrence. No make matter worse, Aika owes a large sum of money to a local mob. She works in an chicken abattoir, but her unscrupulous bosses have vanished without playing the employees. She eventually finds a job as a cleaner in a veterinary clinic in an attempt to raise money and save her very own skin. If she doesn’t raise the money, she’ll probably end up like the chickens.

Blood prevails in the first half of the movie. Due to child labour, Aika is haemorrhaging large amounts of blood, which doesn’t prevent her from walking around the city, using public transport and even working. Her face is consistently contorted with pain. The second half of the film is soaked in maternal milk. Aika stops bleeding after seeing a gynaecologist, but the doctor also tells her that she’s lactating and could develop matitis if she doesn’t breastfeed. Since the baby is not around, she resorts to the most absurd ways of expressing milk.

This is a film extremely crude in its realism. My Little One lacks the artistic touch of Zvyagentsev and the vaguely surreal hand of Loznitsa, which makes it far more disturbing and painful to watch. This is not to say it is a movie without artistic merit. The complexity of Dvortsevoy’s film lies in its rich symbolism.

Extreme winter is central to the narrative. The story takes place mostly under a heavy blizzard. Aika finds a short stint ploughing snow. A television report informs viewers that there are 5,000 ploughs and 35,000 people working non-stop on the streets the Russian capital alone. This is an arduous and thankless Sisyphean task. The snow is extremely vulnerable and yet resilient. Just like Aika.

There is also plenty of symbolism in the animals. Aika plucks and cleans the chicken. The dead birds are just as hapless as she is. In the veterinary clinic, dogs receive better medical care than she did herself. An ailing mutt receives an operation, supported by a large team of clinicians. A bitch breastfeeds her litter, despite being ill with some sort of haemorrhage. This is the maternal bond Aika that could never afford to have. Sometimes animals have it better than human beings.

Moscow is a city of stark contrasts. On one hand, it has the largest number of millionaires of any city in the world. On the other hand, there are many illegal immigrants like Aika. They dream of becoming rich (as Aika herself reveals to a friend on the telephone), but the ride is far more difficult than they anticipated. At one point, Aika walks past a workshop entitled “How to Get Rich”, in which an immigrant reveals how he rose from nothing and became successful. But will the meritocracy also work for this poor young woman?

This is also a film about the collapse of the relationship between Russia and her “sister” nations, the former Soviet republics. Aika does not even have the right no live in Russia. She’s not welcome. Immigrants are not welcome, unless they work and keep their mouth shut. It seems like Kazakh director Dvortsevoy has a relation to Russia not dissimilar to Loznitsa (who is also from a former Soviet republic, the Ukraine). Russia is such a horrible place, isn’t it? Well, she’s not alone in how it treats those who come from countries she once ruled. Just think of the Windrush scandal in the UK.

My Little One is showing at part of the 71st Cannes Film Festival taking place right now, and it’s in the Official Competition. The winner will be announced tomorrow (Saturday, May 19th).

2001: A Space Odyssey (50th anniversary, 70mm)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is back in a brand new 70mm print struck from new printing elements made from the original camera negative. Like known champion of physical celluloid over digital print Christopher Nolan who was involved in the process, I saw the film in a cinema as a boy with my father, although in my case I saw one of its many reruns in the seventies. Nevertheless, I relish the chance to go back and see this brand new ‘unrestored’ 70mm print because it recreates what audiences saw on release, no remastering, re-edits or redone effects.

The film absolutely holds up against present day efforts (one of the few remotely like it is Nolan’s Interstellar/2014). In its day, 2001’s visual effects were far superior to anything previously seen in science fiction and although cinema effects technology has moved on considerably, this aspect of the film remains convincing.

However, the visual effects are far from being the strongest aspect of the film which was conceived by director Kubrick with SF author Arthur C.Clarke. The plot is deceptively simple. (Skip the rest of this paragraph to avoid spoilers if you’ve never seen the film.) A monolith (sides ratio: 1:4:9) appears on Earth and inspires primitive apes to make weapons, it reappears thousands of years later in the Tycho crater on the Moon and after being excavated unexpectedly sends a one-off transmission to Jupiter. So mankind sends a space mission to Jupiter, but the ship’s on board computer malfunctions and attempts to kill the crew. The one surviving astronaut undergoes a journey which culminates in his going through the door of the monolith and emerging as a gigantic star child.

Considering the magnitude of the themes involved here, it’s surprising how dull or banal much of the movie is. If this sounds like negative criticism, I don’t mean it in that sense. The film’s execution is never dull or banal, rather much of its subject matter is dullness or banality. Hitchcock once described drama as “life with the dull bits cut out”; Kubrick’s genius in 2001 is that he forces us to watch these dull bits. And they make for compelling viewing.

Thus there are scenes of apes gathering at a watering hole or huddling underneath rock ledges at night against the cold. There are scenes of a flight to the moon via an intermediary space station when a jump cut could have taken us straight there in terms of plot. There’s a briefing in a conference room at Tycho where Dr Haywood Floyd (William Sylvester) addresses fellow scientists about cover stories and the need for secrecy from which the film cuts away just before telling us (a scene we never see) what he knows about the object excavated in the crater. There are hours of the two man crew Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) – there are actually five crew, but three are in hibernation – and the HAL 9000 computer (voice: Douglas Rain) going about their daily routines aboard the Discovery One spaceship to Jupiter. There is the weird interstellar journey which plays out like an incomprehensible drug trip and, finally, the surviving astronaut’s emergence into a world of rooms in which eighteenth century furniture sits upon a grid of white squares lit up from below. It’s hard to find anything like any of this elsewhere in cinema, science fiction or otherwise.

Set against these scenes are moments of great import: an ape trying out as a club a bone found on the ground, a group of spacesuited astronauts on the moon overcome by sudden, unbearable noise from the monolith, a spacewalking Jupiter Mission astronaut struggling frantically after his breathing line has been cut and the heartbreaking disconnection of HAL one memory terminal at a time.

The wider panorama here contains unforgettable moments predicting the minutiae of space travel which may not have come true in the year 2001 but still feel like they could be just around the corner in 2018, the date of the film’s title notwithstanding. Take the celebrated sequence travelling to the space station. A sleeping Pan Am passenger’s pen floats in zero gravity, an air-hostess (or space-hostess) enters shot right way up and walks in a circle until her feet are above and her head below to walk out of shot upside-down, a rotating space ship slowly docks with a space station with which its rotation is in sync – all to the strains of Strauss’ Blue Danube waltz. And as testament to the incredible detail in the notoriously obsessive Kubrick’s intensive research, widescreen TVs on the backs of the seats inside the passenger cabin. Unremarkable today, but possibly little more than an idea on a drawing board somewhere in the TV manufacturing industry when the director built them into his film as something of a major coup.

If 2001 remains unchallenged as the greatest SF film of all time, there is however one aspect in which it has aged badly overall. Aside from the group of four Russian scientists with whom Dr. Floyd has a conversation, three of whom are women, it’s notable that women aren’t given any real position of prominence in 2001 – hostesses and receptionists plus a handful of minor/secondary scientists characters – and that’s it. If Kubrick and Clarke were alive and writing the film today, I’d like to think that’s something they might change. Otherwise, though, 2001 could have been made yesterday and seeing it in this brand new 70mm print is a real treat.

2001: A Space Odyssey (70mm) is back out in the UK on Friday, May 18th. Watch the film trailer below:

Allure

Posted on by victorfraga

This is the story of 30-year-old Laura (Eva Rachel Wood), a woman with a troubled past who befriends unhappy 16-year-old Eva (Julia Sarah Stone). Presenting herself as a friendly confidante, she encourages the teenager to runaway from home and stay at her house. It is not long before the older woman is forced to resort to emotionally exploitative tactics to make Eva stay, and a dysfunctional relationship of co-dependency, emotional and sexual, develops between the two women.

The inference of suffering is integral to writer and directors Carlos and Jason Sanchez’s drama. Just as the notion of man born of original sin, the need for conflict or provocation in storytelling casts it with its own form of inevitable anguish. Here it is a resource for Wood to lose herself within a compelling character and the two storytellers to construct a dark dramatic character study around.

In spite of her dubious manipulative tactics, Laura’s emphasis of ‘choice’ stresses the reality that suffering is not only individual, but communal. And as the story of the relationship with her father and Eva unfolds, the complex concept of liberation from individual, as well as communal suffering emerges to form a key philosophical theme of the drama. Whilst the famous line from Sir Walter Scott’s poem Marmion reads “Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive”, in the shadow of Allure, the tangled web is not solely woven through deception, but fractured relationships and a conflict of needs and a sense of happiness – the contentious nature of human relationships.

Confident in its restraint, this character study unfolds like an unsettling piece of music, the rhythm ominously ‘piano’ (soft) with occasional ‘forte’ (loud) peaks. It has that feel of a film that thwarts expression, a film one almost feels with the mind and the senses; a stifling experience that is disquieting, yet also evokes pathos. Wood delivers a performance of sustained conviction, yet acknowledgement should duly be paid to Stone and Denis O’Hare (Laura’s father) for their noteworthy and poised performances that are vital to the impression forged by Wood. The success of the film is in the reflection on suffering, to anchor the drama in the realm of ideas.

One of the most effective aspects of the Allure is the emphasis on Laura’s emotional and sexual needs, and how her relationship with Eva addresses the human tendency to turn a person into a possession; an object which fills one’s life. This touches upon perception and how one person sees another person within their interpersonal dynamic. In this type of story, there is typically that defining moment in which the camera will frame the predatory character watching their naïve prey. It is a single moment that ensures a feeling of completeness, or so it feels, capturing in a single sequence the pure visual spiritual essence of the story.

Allure is a film that demands the engagement of its audience: spectatorial lethargy is poison to the intent of this filmmaker. The overriding concern is whether it has anything new to express on the subject of abuse, yet we must keep in mind that one dimension of storytelling is about confronting the dark realities. It is not the sole responsibility of the filmmaker to offer commentary, or to make concluding statements. The strength of presence of storytelling and art is to humanise or familiarise even those realities that are not our own. Hence, Allure can only be exploitative of its subject if we its audience fail to engage and contemplate the insight into human nature that it offers. This is in spite of never being able to express the reality victims of abuse suffer, nor should it, as art is only a mirror to suffering.

The Canadian drama Allure is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, May 18th.

Capharnaüm (aka Capernaum)

Posted on by victorfraga

In some of the most developed parts of our planet, there is a nihilistic vision that mankind is intrinsically bad and life simply isn’t worth living. Lebanese actor-turned-director Nadine Labaki gave this notion a little twist. Capharnaum tells the story of 12(ish)-year-old boy Zain (Zain Alrafeea), who lives in poverty-stricken Beirut. He is very angry at his parents because they brought him and his siblings into this world. And he has perpetrated a horrific crime with his own hands: he stabbed a person. He’s entirely unrepentant of his deed.

At first, Zain comes across as callous and merciless, almost psychotic and inhuman. He is the epitome of misanthropy and sheer evil. The two-hour movie opens in court, where Zain explains to a judge how much he despises his parents and does not regret the stabbing. He’s sentenced to five years in prison. It made me think of Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, which won Cannes nine years ago. The Austrian movie tells the story of murderous children during the Weimar Republic, who eventually grew up to become Nazis. Is Zain just as intrinsically corrupt?

The answer is no. After the court scene, the movie moves to a recent past, and we begin to understand that Zain isn’t that bad at all. He abandons his abusive parents and dysfunctional household in order to live on the streets. His parents are so neglectful that they don’t even know his age and birthday. He helps an illegal Ethiopian immigrant called Rahil (Yordanos Shifera). Zain looks after Rahil’s toddler Yonas (Boluwatife Treasure Bankole) while she long shifts in order to pay for her fake ID.

Zain and Yonas wander aimlessly around town on a makeshift trolley (made of a kitchen utensils on castors) and develop a fraternal bond. They come across several children who live in subhuman conditions, constantly engaging in vandalism and petty crime. There is a very strong sequence certain to raise quite a few eyebrows: several small children smoke cigarettes together and (clearly inhaling). This is a very bold and original film in terms of content.

In terms of structure, on the other hand, the movie isn’t quite as accomplished. The story gets a little incoherent at times. I struggled to put together all the puzzle pieces at the grand finale. The director attempted to blend too many fiery ingredients in one large gumbo: stolen childhood, failed motherhood, illegal immigration, arranged marriage, undesired pregnancy plus a few more topics I can’t disclose without spoiling the movie. There are also problems with the dramaturgy. The court scenes look contrived, and some of the actors aren’t convincing enough.

Capharnaum showed at the 71st Cannes Film Festival in May 2018, when this piece was originally written. It’s out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 22nd. On VoD on Monday, August 5th.

Show Dogs

Posted on by Alasdair Bayman

M an’s unconditional love for his canine friend has been expressed throughout cinematic and world history. Exhibited earlier this year in Wes Anderson’s touching Isle of Dogs, the undying affections shared between man and animal have not been more poetically expressed since De Sica’s Umberto D (1952) and the little Jack Russell Flike. On the reverse side of this artistic expression, peculiar films as Cats and Dogs (Lawrence Guterman, 2001) use CGI to its mischievous advantage to depict real dogs imitating human speech, thus taking anthropomorphism to a whole new meaning. Following in the pawsteps of such noughties releases, Show Dogs resurrects this family-friendly entertainment in a narrative template that has been seen a thousand times over.

Slowly becoming the auteur of the talking dog film, Raja Gosnell’s previous filmography brings a level of predictability to the unfolding events of his fourth feature on the titular creature. Rottweiler Max (Ludacris) is a brooding NYPD dog who is the best in the business. Exhibiting his strengths in a flashy opening sequence that introduces the film’s mcguffin – a rare baby Panda – the CGI talking extends to some eye wateringly bad computerised dog front flips and sliding, all done by Max to chase down the bad guys. Stolen from China by a cocky villain Berne (Andy Beckwith) for a rich client, you know it’s a piece of Hollywood produced pulp entertainment when the villain has a British co-criminal. In a cross specifies moment of CGI dialogue, Max promises to the little Panda that he will save him – hence the tedious narrative driving force of the film.

Thankfully for Max, a real-life human being is forced to accompany him on his mission. Frank (Will Arnett) is initially antagonistic towards Max from the first scene, still, they must work together to evidently stop animal cruelty once and for all. Flying to the dizzy heights of Las Vegas, the dog show proves to be the complete antithesis from the reserved, tweed counterparts at Crufts and The Kennel Club. Accompanied by the finest ear blasting EDM on the over-saturated market, the exclusivity of this dog show is elicited through flashy dresses and an obligatory establishing shot of the famous Caesar’s Palace Hotel.

In Arnett’s performance, intertextual references to his role as Lego Batman are planted into the script, or possibly through improvisation, by writers Max Botkin and Marc Hyman. Feeling somewhat deployed to wake parents up from their dozy sleep, the incorporation of lines of Aristotle’s philosophy from a Buddhist dog plays out in a similar fashion. One only has to look at the excellence deployed at Pixar to see that films do not have to be a binary – either family friendly or not- to be a success amongst children and adults. The fundamental essence of CGI talking dogs clearly creates a strange onset environment for all human actors involved- demonstrated in some shoddy acting from the whole cast.

Max’s adventures in Las Vegas force him to team up with a little Papillon, who was the former world champion show dog, Philippe. Played by Stanley Tucci with a gusto that stands out in the flat script, it is surely a harbinger for light in the dark caverns of witnessing dogs with talking mouths.

Formulaically unfolding, it became apparent when watching the final act that Raja Gosnell’s style feels outdated firstly in its heteronormative conclusion and lack of true engagement with a subject matter – clearly not void of ‘kids’ films as My Life is a Courgette (Claude Barras, 2017) or Song of Sea (Tomm Moore, 2015). You clearly cannot teach an old dogs new tricks…

Show Dogs is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, May 25th.

Dogman

Posted on by victorfraga

In most Muslim nations, calling someone a “dog” is one of the worst insults conceivable. Even in the West, calling a female a “bitch” is far from a compliment. But are our canine friends such horrible creatures? The Italian film Dogman is loosely inspired in the real story of a coked dog groomer who imprisoned a man in a dog cage and tortured him for ages in 1980s. So perhaps it’s us humans who are barking mad, and far more bestial than out furry companions.

In some unnamed and extremely impoverished coastal town in the South of Italy, Marcello (Marcello Fonte) runs a small dog grooming business aptly named Dogman. He is also a part time coke dealer. He befriends a Neanderthal thug called Antonio (Edoardo Pesce). Together they engage in a life of petty crimes and nights out. They seem to complement each other in s very strange way: Marcello is puny, ugly, calm and with a squeaky voice, while Simone is bulky, considerably better-looking, extremely irascible and with a hoarse voice.

Marcello is a very morally ambiguous character, and at first it’s difficult to understand his psychologically. He has a very kind and sweet side, particularly when he’s with his daughter or with dogs. He handles his clients – a bulldog, a dalmatian, a chihuahua, a poodle and many more – with uttermost care and affection. He returns to scene of robbery upon finding out that one of his associates put a chihuahua in the freezer, in one of the film’s most moving moments (well, at least for a chihuahua owner, like me). Somehow, he manages to reconcile his pure and humane side with his dark and hedonistic adventures with Antonio. One thing is certain: Marcello’s most human side emerges when he’s in the company of animals.

It’s unclear what sustains Marcello and Simone’s friendship. It seems like the frail and diminutive Marcello is strangely fascinated and infatuated with the manly Simone (the bromance type of infatuation). Simone finds it extremely easy to manipulate Marcello with the currency he handles best: violence. Marcello is willing to take the blame for a robbery in order to spare Simone from incarceration. After a one-year stint in prison, however, something clicks inside Marcello, and his fascination morphs into anger and a very twisted type of revenge. He finds a very unorthodox way of asserting his masculinity and exhibiting it to town.

The crumbling buildings, the collapsed walls and the broken pavements partially covered in sand from the beach provide the perfect backdrop for Marcello’s broken masculinity. The photography is nothing short of spectacular. In the final 10 minutes, Marcello parades through town at dawn with his newly-found trophy. The greyish skies gradually turn baby blue sky, reflecting Marcello’s state-of-mind. He’s elated by his very own demeanour. Plus, he’s in the company of man’s best friend. These images will stay with you for a long time.

Dogman showed in the competition of the 71st Cannes Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. Marcello Fonte won the Best Actor prize. The film premieres in the UK a part of the BFI London Film Festival taking place between October 10th and 21st. It is out in cinemas on Friday, October 19th. On Mubi on Sunday, June 12th (2022). Also available on other platforms

The Dead and the Others (Chuva e Cantoria na Aldeia dos Mortos)

Posted on by victorfraga

This is a blend of documentary, fiction and ethnographic register of invaluable social, political and historical importance. Less so from a filmic and artistic perspective. The Dead and the Others is a two-hour-long Brazilian-Portuguese co-production about the Kraho indigenous people of Northern Brazil, who inhabit the forests near the Pedra Branca municipality. The directors Joao Salaviza and Renee Nader Messora (who are also partners) are respectively Portuguese and Brazilian, but the film is almost entirely spoken in Kraho.

Fifteen-year-old Ihjac (played by Henrique Ihjac; all the actors use their real name) talks to the disembodied spirit of his father at the foot of a small waterfall in the first scene. The small indigenous tribe is still coming to terms with the (apparently) tragic and unexpected death of the much beloved man. Ihjac is assigned with the funeral arrangements, but he struggles with the pressure. He is married to Koto and father to a baby boy himself. Anxiety suddenly befalls him, and he seeks medical from the local health service at Pedra Branca, only to be told that he’s a hypochondriac. He’s forced to return to his tribe against his will. But will he manage to cope with his adult duties, or will he have a mental collapse?

This is a film about a young man’s coming-of-age, who’s also seeking his social and his cultural identity. At first, the film feels like an intimate look into a mostly untouched tribe. Then the signs of civilisation gradually begin to emerge: a metal pan, a shirt wrapped around the waist (covering the genitalia), a football, and so on. At Pedra Branca, we realise that Ihjac’s tribe isn’t that insular after all: the young father speaks reasonable Portuguese. The flashing vehicles and televisions in the city probably exert a certain fascination on the young father. The tacit promise of a “civilised” adult life probably plays a part in Ihjac’s refusal to return to his family.

Filming the indigenous peoples of Brazil is never an easy task. Most of the tribes are under the threat of genocide by poachers and loggers, there’s the language barrier, and the communities are often located in remote areas of very difficult access. Plus their acting skills are very limited. They don’t go to drama school, so getting them to perform naturally in front of the cameras is extremely tough. It seems like the directors of The Dead and the Others did not take issues into account. The result is somewhat monotonous and amateurish. Perhaps the directors intended to make a docudrama with a touch of Jean Rouch’s ethnofiction. Sadly, they failed. It could be that their profound respect for their subjects, or the search for naturalism, prevented them from eliciting more impassioned and intense reactions from their subjects.

There are also post-production issues. The image contrast and the saturation are often very high. The forest green looks more like the phosphor green. The quality of the footage is so grainy and poor that you might ask yourself whether you are watching a film from the 1980s. All of these problems could have been easily remedied with a little more work at the studio.

Joao Salaviza has previously won Cannes with his short film Arena (2009), which probably gave him a helping hand this year. The Dead and the Others showed in the 71st Cannes International Film Festival in 2018, when this piece was originally written. On Mubi in June/July 2020.

Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Di Qiu Zui Hou De Ye Wan)

Posted on by victorfraga

This is as close as you will ever get to an arthouse-themed fun ride in the amusement park of cinema. Your seat will be propelled into the dirtiest and most unlikely sites of China at night. In his second feature film, Chinese director Bi Gan takes viewers on an spectacular 3D journey. The experience is extremely ambitious and nothing short of breathtaking. Sensory cinema at its most extreme.

The first 75 minutes of this 13-minute film are not in 3D. The story revolves around Luo (Huang Jute), a nostalgic loner who constantly reminisces about his long-lost love Wan Quiwen (Tang Wei). He comes across several women whom he mistakes for the beautiful female. His reflective thoughts are communicated by the means of voice-over. Suddenly the film flashes back to the year of 2000, and he relives an altercation with a thug and the murder of a dear friend named Wildcat (Lee Hong-Chi).

Luo can no longer distinguish between actual facts and concocted memories. “Memory rusts”, he justifies. He also meditates about the reliability of memories and cinema, reaching the conclusion that neither one is a perfect reflection of reality. The film becomes purposely disjointed, echoing Luo’s recollections and state-of-mind. A lot like Tarkosvsky’s Mirror (1975).

Bi Gan pays a lot of attention to water and wall textures. Rain is a constant feature. Cracked walls, mouldy floors, weedy pathways, leaky roofs and a decrepit bathhouse are also prominent throughout. Flickering lights are used in abundance and to great results. Bi Gan uses a lot of dirty glasses and mirrors in order to becloud and distort his characters and their surroundings (once again, in good ol’ Tarkovsky style). There is a remarkably beautiful image of the a prospective Wan Quiwen walking in front of Luo’s car while the thick precipitation blurs her body. Then the car abruptly enters a tunnel and her figure changes completely.

Luo attends a 3D cinema (a cue for audiences to put their 3D glasses on) in an attempt to rekindle (or maybe to reinvent?) his memories of Wan. This is where the former lovers shared some of their most intimate moments. But then Luo falls asleep. And a very different film is projected in front of his eyes. The movie theatre is a place for escapism, whether you are awake or asleep.

This is when the director Bi Gan embraces every lyrical freedom available, and the real “journey begins”. The entire dream sequence lasts 55 minutes and is filmed in one single take, and at night. Luo walks down lonely corridors, plays pin-pong with 12-year-old, rides a motorbike and abseils down a mountain into a partially-ruined village. There’s even a Ballhaus-inspired 360-degree camera whirl around embracing lovers. The technical boldness and the aesthetic magnificence of this film cannot overstated.

Long Day’s Journey Into Night showed at the 71st Cannes Film Festival, as part of the Un Certain Regard section (2018). It premieres in the UK at the BFI London Film Festival taking place between October 10th and 21st. In cinemas Friday, December 27th (2019). On VoD on Monday, March 9th.

At War (En Guerre)

Posted on by victorfraga

It’s just three years since Stéphane Brizé directed The Measure of a Man, a riveting fiction movie about a factory worker unable to decide whether his allegiances rest with his coworkers or with his employers. He then went on to make the literary drama A Woman’s Life last year. He now returns to the previous topic. While not a sequel per se, At War is extremely similar to The Measure of a Man on many levels, and it does represent the continuation of the labour rights discourse.

Laurent Amédéo (veteran French actor Vincent Lindon, who also played the protagonist in The Measure of a Man) is a factory worker, activist and union spokesperson at Perrin Industry, the automotive supplier branch of a larger German conglomerate. Two years earlier, the union had agreed with the bosses to work five extra hours a week without remuneration in exchange of a guarantee of employment for five years. The employees have kept their word, but the employers have suddenly decided to close down the factory, making 1,100 people redundant. Laurent and his associates refuse to budge. They decide to go on strike and to wage a war against the unscrupulous executives.

This is a film certain to please French hard left leader Jean-Luc Melanchon. Brizé dissects globalisation and capitalism, revealing how vulnerable workers are left at the face of neo-liberal interests. Despite irrefutable evidence that the factory is returning a profit, and that the company shares continue to soar, top management use rhetorical acrobatics in order to convince Laurent that the decision was inevitable. For example, they cynically argue that “everyone is on the same boat”, to which one of the strikers replies: “yes, except that we are in the bottom deck with the shit and the rats”. Government and courts are mostly complacent with sheer injustice, siding with corporate interests. You will cringe at the dirty tricks used by the big bosses. And you will regret that business interests must always prevail above the ordinary workers’.

Just like its topical predecessor The Measure of a Man, Brizé’s latest film also feels a lot like a documentary. Most of the film takes place on the streets and at the negotiation tables, as if captured by a journalist assigned to report on the events. These images are interspersed with fictionalised TV news and interviews. Overall, you are in for a frenetic and uncomfortable experience, with a jarring closure. After all, a working man’s life is no child’s play.

At War showed in competition at the 71st Cannes Film Festival taking place right now, when this piece was originally written. The timing of the film launch wasn’t irrelevant: May 2018 is a very special month for workers in France and elsewhere.

You can watch At War right here and right now with DMovies and Eyelet:

The House That Jack Built

Posted on by victorfraga

Watch this on an empty stomach. This is a film that has immediately entered the pantheon of the most gruelling movies ever made. Lars von Trier wilfully challenges his audiences for 150 minutes, testing how far they can take their sadism. This is the second most disturbing film I have seen in my life, second only to Pasolini’s Salo or 120 Days of Sodom (1975). The difference is that it lacks the unequivocal political connotations of the Italian film. As a result, the maelstrom of violence feels mostly gratuitous.

Jack (Matt Dillon) is a highly prolific serial killer. He believes he’s intellectually gifted and entitled to kill. He’s a self-confessed and proud psychopath. He’s accompanied by the voice of a character named Verge most the time. Verge appears in person at the end of the movie, played by the Swiss actor Bruno Ganz. Uma Thurman is also in the film; the big and beautiful star dies at the very beginning, very much à la Drew Barrymore in Scream (Wes Craven, 1996). The cast also includes Riley Keough and Siobhan Fallon Hogan, who also meet a horrific death. Jack boasts that he has killed more than 60 hapless people. Most of them are “dumb” females and children, but then there is an unexpected twist at the end of the movie.

As with most of von Trier’s most recent films, the time is unspecified and and so is the location. Given the accents, the action probably takes place in the US. The director has a strange fascination with the Land of the Free, a country on which he has never set foot. All in all, the film feels detached from reality. This is the world as perceived by a very twisted mind (in this case, both director and character). Von Trier thrives on rejection and controversy. He was banned from Cannes seven years ago for making ambiguous comments about Hitler during a press conference, but the Festival and the Danish man have now made amends. There is absolutely no doubt that he wanted to cement his reputation as a misanthrope and the enfant terrible of the Festival this year.

Other trademarks from von Trier are all over the film. The erratic fast editing (with shots rarely exceeding 20 seconds), the breakdown into chapters (five “randomly selected incidents” and one epilogue), the handheld camera interspersed with drawings, cutaway footage and baroque images, the incessant intertextuality (constant references to other films and literature), and so on – all of these devices are in The House That Jack Built. David Bowie, which is central to various of his films including Dogville (2004) and Mandarlay (2005), is also a recurring element, with Fame being played over and over again.

Extremely queasy violence is abundant. Children are sadistically murdered, a breast is severed, faces are mutilated, a duckling has its leg cut with a pair of secateurs and is placed back in the water, butchered and defaced corpses are posed in awkward positions for photographs. All as graphic and realistic as possible. And there’s a grand finale, the pinnacle of the the preposterous and the monstrous.

The beauty of decay is one of the central topics of the film. The role of art is another one. Von Trier questions the very purpose of cinema by showcasing images from various other films – including his very own Antichrist (2009) and Melancholia (2011). He also displays images of concentration camps, Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin. Maybe he’s trying to define evil. Or maybe he’s trying to celebrate it. One way or the other, take it all with a pinch of salt. There are also elements of sarcasm: the film title is the name of a nursery rhyme (and there’s nothing puerile in the film), while the end credits roll to the sound of the groovy song Hit The Road Jack.

All in all, this is an artistically accomplished film, but also a very pretentious one. In a way, Jack’s murder spree is an analogy of Lars von Trier’s filmography: they both become increasingly violent and culminate with a very grotesque feature. I don’t think that the Danish director could push it any further, at least in terms of violence.

The House That Jack Built showed at the 71st Cannes Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It ran out of competition. That’s because the Festival director Thierry Fremaux decided that the film was simply too controversial for the event’s main prize, the Palme d’Or. It’s out in UK cinemas on Friday, December 14th. The perfect way to spread that Christmas cheer!

On Mubi on Sunday, June 26th (2022). Also available on pother platforms.

BlacKkKlansman

Posted on by victorfraga

Spike Lee is in great shape again, after the relatively disappointing Chi-Raq (2016). BlacKkKlansman follows Black detective Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) as he and fellow Jewish officer Flip (Adam Driver) investigate the KKK, and succeed to foil a terrorist attack. The action is based on Stallworth’s book, Black Klansman, and it takes place in Colorado Springs in 1979. Stallworth was the first black detective/police officer in the city. The film was produced by Spike Lee and Jordan Peele (director of the acclaimed racially-charged horror Get Out, from last year).

Nigger and kike make a wonderfully dynamic duo. They are intelligent, nimble and able to mimic each other with perfection. Ron speaks to the KKK leader David Duke (played by Topher Grace, pictured above) on the phone using his real name pretending he’s a white racist keen to join the group, while Flip “incorporates” Ron and attends the KKK meeting in person. They are in serious danger if their real identities are revealed to the white supremacists, who hate both black people and Jews. Ron and Flip complement each other with perfection, with their dirty blackness and Jewishness.

The “twoness” described by Black American philosopher W.E.B. Du Bois is the central pillar of the film: how can you be American and Black? But this isn’t the only duality highlighted here. Ron reveals to his activist girlfriend Patrice (Laura Harrier) that he’s a “pig” (a cop), and she confronts him with the following question: is it possible to make changes to a racist system from inside (i.e. by working for the police) or should one fight from outside? She urges him to abandon his job and to join the revolutionary Black Panthers, on which he has been grassing.

Spike Lee isn’t just a filmmaker. He’s a great maestro. BlacKkKlansman is a philharmonic orchestra with a multitude of players and instruments working in perfect harmony. The photography, the actors, the editing, the montage and the soundtrack are all immaculate and exquisite. The colourful clothes are extremely colourful and elegant. The fact that the film is set in the 1970s helps to justify the plush costumes (in Chi-Raq, set in the present day, the attires came across as a little too extravagant). Plus Lee has mastered filming black skin in the chiaroscuro (during the Black Panthers meeting inside a hall in the beginning of the movie).

The montage is phenomenal: a character played by Harry Bellafonte narrates witnessing the lynching of Jesse Washington (who had his fingers and testicles severed before being burnt alive, his body parts being sold as souvenirs and pictures being turned into postcards), and the images are contrasted against a KKK meeting, as they put on their hood, get riled up and chant. All of this happens to the sound of an electric music score. It reminded me a lot Raoul Peck’s equally impressive montage techniques in I Am Not Your Negro (2017).

At the end of the film, Spike Lee shows real and very graphic footage of the Charlottesville neo-Nazi demonstrations, including the moment racist James Fields rammed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing a woman and injuring 35 people. Next, we see Donald Trump describing both sides as violent and claiming that many of the white supremacists were “very nice people”, and present-day David Duke praising the president’s demeanour. The American flag then fades into black and white. An urgent eye-opener and call-to-action.

BlacKkKlansman showed in the Official Competition of the 71st Cannes Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. This writer was enthusiastically rooting for this film, but sadly it did not win the Palme d’Or, taking home instead the Grand Prix, widely perceived as second highest award. It wasn’t the first time that the Festival overlooked Lee: nearly 30 years ago the clear favourite Do The Right Thing (1989) also failed to win the Palme.

BlacKkKlansman is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, August 24th. It is out on VoD on Monday, December 24th.