If you have spent your entire life in academia, you may feel that you are only suited for one thing. This is certainly the case of Pietro Zinni (Edoardo Leo), a neurobiologist, who upon losing his university contract realises that the only thing he is suitable for now is creating party pills. He is 38, behind on all of his bills, and has no idea how to apply himself to new work. Enrolling a gang that includes a cultural anthropologist, an archaeologist, and two Latin scholars, the hapless Pietro enters the black market only to find himself way in over his head.
The film is a clash between the “rise-and-fall” gangster genre and a traditional fish-out-of-water comedy. Director Sydney Sibilia does a great job of depicting his group of oddballs adapting to their new life. Plot-wise, comparisons to the TV series Breaking Bad are inevitable, but while the acclaimed TV series carefully built up its world block by block, I Can Quit Whenever I Want is a much looser affair. In fact, with all its hyper-specific nerd jokes, it is closer in tone to The Big Bang Theory. The mileage of these jokes will vary with how much you understand each subject.
Hidden behind the comedy is a critique of a society that has left its smartest people behind. All these men are more than qualified to hold positions in university, but are now working menial jobs to get by. The results of the financial crisis as well as Italian austerity looms heavy over the film. With endless bills to pay, as well as his girlfriend Giulia (Valeria Solarino) pressuring him to buy a dishwasher, Pietro doesn’t think twice about the ethical implications of taking up this line of work. After all, you don’t think about ethics when you can’t afford anything. This situation is later milked by the fact Giulia works in social care looking after drug addicts. While her position as the nagging girlfriend could’ve reduced her to a common stereotype, Solarino does great work here to make Giulia a three-dimensional character, giving the movie a moral depth it might’ve otherwise lacked. She is crucial to humanising what could have been a trivial movie.
Like nearly all gangster movies, the rise in I Can Quit is accompanied by a fall. The gang are not used to such lavish wealth and suddenly find themselves surrounded by escorts, wearing fine clothes and splashing cash on extravagant cars. But they are not the only men in town, finding out that they have muscled in on top dog Murena’s (Neri Marcorè) turf. As far as villains go, he is neither comic or scary, instead coming across as rather generic. We do learn more about him, in a nice twist that sums up the overall feel-good vibe of the movie.
With a style reminiscent of early Guy Ritchie films, the movie constantly distorts traditional gangster tropes. For example, when they need to rob a pharmacy, they use ancient guns that were originally intended for The Hermitage. Then, in a true Ritchie locale, a crucial drug deal is conducted at a traditional Sinti wedding. What makes it different from classics such as Ritchie’s Snatch (2000) however, is the kind of breathless non-linear storytelling that forces the viewer to imagine some of the details themselves. With a little more daring in the editing, more voiceover, and more montages, I Can Quit Whenever I Want could’ve been as cinematically entertaining as it is comically satisfying. Nevertheless, for fans of Breaking Bad and Guy Ritchie movies, this movie will go down just like a good pill.
Denis Villeneuve’s 2015 thriller Sicario was an exquisitely executed Neo-Western. Like Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian, it followed a group of nationalists murdering almost everyone they come across on the Mexican border as an assertion of dominance. Mutilated bodies lined the streets, building the cartel myth, drawing its American audience into fully believing its bandit homeland while consciously ignoring the perspective of the Mexican characters it hastily sketched out. Cinematographer Roger Deakins used rule of thirds so heavily that the viewer is helplessly drawn to the centre of the screen, turning you into the Emily Blunt character – so focused on one perspective that you cannot see the entire picture. It was a perfect modern example of Robin Wood’s ‘Incoherent Text’, wherein a well made film’s problematic textual aspects are inconsolable, but essential to its meaning. The depiction of Mexicans (an almost entirely unseen mass of victimhood, or a gang member), the treatment of women: utterly problematic, but true. It’s an incoherent world. It was an overwhelming experience of powerlessness, a cinematic vanishing point. But its sequel is everything that Villeneuve warned us about.
From Stefano Sollima, director of the sprawling Gomorrah TV series, there is an ambitious attemp to show the spread of the drug war into all corners of society. But this is not Traffic (Steven Soderbergh, 2000).
Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado opens with a title card telling us that immigration is in fact controlled by cartels, then cuts to a scene in which a group of people attempt to cross the US-Mexico border illegally. As they get captured by a patrolling helicopter one of their number prays in Arabic before blowing himself up. Let’s be clear here, no US terror attacks have ever been linked with the Mexico border, and there has never been any such incident as the one Sollima depicts here.
Clearly, Sicario 2 is not set in the real world.The first time we see our CIA agents they have just jumped out of a plane – that’s right, they float down from the heavens to save the day. This is what the ICE chuds think they are, a bunch of bros being bros, protecting the family. The shrill Catherine Keener gets in their way with insulting lines like ‘POTUS doesn’t have the stomach for this, he’s shutting us down’ and ‘He’s not worried about winning.’ That gesture to the generic offscreen presidents of old, but do not chime with the current US administration. And for the filmmakers to ignore this is for them to endorse it. It’s like the Starship Troopers (Paul Verhoeven, 1997) sequels, where the subversive elements of the original are ignored in favour of a cheap b-movie.
Taylor Sheridan, who wrote the first movie alongside Hell or High Water (David Mackenzie, 2016) and Wind River (Taylor Sheridan, 2017), is perhaps the new John Milius, a strong authorial voice who needs to come up against an equally strong director in order to give his screenplays something beyond the right-wing masculine power fantasy that he tends to indulge in. There are however, still interesting ideas at play. As the CIA build a phony war between cartels, by kidnapping Isabel, a Cartel boss’ daughter, we see the construction of the American hero narrative in real time. Whenever the film pauses to critique its characters’ actions, usually by having someone stare wistfully at the landscape, they always come to the conclusion that it’s a necessary evil. Instead of an Emily Blunt to identify with, the audience surrogate is Josh Brolin, who sounds and increasingly looks like Dog the Bounty Hunter, the character from the eponymous American tv series. If you’re still watching, it seems to say, you like what we’re selling you.
After Isabel’s attempted escape from the CIA, the film justifies her recapture by showing the vicious, leering cartel members out to save her. This initiates a sharp turn for the movie, which largely abandons Brolin and becomes a redemption tale for Benicio Del Toro, who attempts to get her to safety across the border. Del Toro, a chilling, magnetic presence from the first film, is interpolated into a more traditional. We get a direct reference to the last shot of The Searchers (John Ford, 1956), and he even dons a Stetson. As the film avoids politics for a good 20-minute stretch, the action becomes somewhat compelling. But its twists and turns rely on grotesque coincidences and build to a sequence in which the cartel split children and parents for the crossing. It’s a hell of a dog whistle.
This is all too coherent a text. This a fake, reactionary blockbuster masquerading as investigative scoop. It’s almost worth watching this piece of propaganda as a way of seeing how easily Hollywood can craft these dangerous narratives, and worst of all, how easily we can fall for it.
Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado is out in cinemas Friday, June 29th. It’s out on all major VoD platforms on Monday, November 2nd.
A lot of British people would rather forget the oppressive history of the British Empire, and instead bask in the glorious notion of British self-determination, all blended with a tacit sense of racial and cultural superiority. These people are not interested in historical balance and revisionism, and will dismiss Britain’s dark past with a succinct “no country is perfect”. Nationalists will also denounce those asking for a broader and more critical historical debate as anti-patriotic. Why should anyone get these ugly skeletons out of the closet? A lot of really interesting historical facts we miss because of the accumulation of assignments. But you can take advantage of a website that help do your homework, which will significantly increase your free time to study what really interests you.
Two years ago, the emblematic Ken Loach told us in an exclusive interview: “Gordon Brown once said that we need to stop apologising about the British Empire, but I don’t recall there ever being an apology. The British Empire was founded on land conquests, enslaving people, transporting them to other countries, stealing people’s natural resources, exploitation, brutality, concentration camps. We do need to tell the truth about that. I’m not saying we should wallow in guilt. This is what happened and we need to know our history, that’s all. The fake patriotism of Britannia rules the waves is nonsense.”
There are a countless British films celebrating British history and nationalism, particularly on the topic of WW2 and its aftermath. DMovies‘ editor Victor Fraga argues that films such as Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour, released this January, “have a subliminal message of tub-thumping nationalism and anti-German resentment (and, by extension, anti-European) in common, which resonates with Brexiters.” He concludes: “These movies instill a sense of self-righteousness and moral superiority in the British people.”
On the other hand, movies dealing with the atrocities of the British Empire – such as the Bengal famine of 1943 (pictured above), the concentration camps of the Second Boer War and destructive meddling in nearly every corner of the planet – remain rare as a hen’s tooth. That’s why we decided to compile this little list for you. The films are listed backwards in chronological order. Click on the film title in order to accede to our exclusive dirty review (where available).
This 50-minute featurette is a extremely succinct and clear lesson on the causes of said famine. You will learn that the British wilfully crippled Bengal and Orissa (in what’s now Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal) in order to prevent the Japanese from occupying the region. They burned the harvest (in what is described as the “scorched earth policy”) and sank the boats in an attempt to render the land unusable. Churchill simply wasn’t interested in the “collateral damage”: up to five million deaths (three million according to questionable figures from the British Empire). The mere redistribution of food from places of abundance to places of scarcity would have solved the problem. That could have been easily done had Churchill been a “nice man”, the film claims. There was no shortage of food, and the 2.5 million Indian soldiers fighting for the British Empire were well fed. To add insult to injury, Britain was importing grain from Australia and the ships would stop at India, before the staple was stored in the Middle East for future consumption in Europe.
asking a coloniser with organising the independence of its colony is the equivalent to assigning Josef Fritzl with the social reintegration of his kids. The outcome is inevitably disastrous, yet the captor will never cease to believe that his victims are to blame. The British-born film director of Punjabi Sikh Kenyan Asian origin Gurinder Chadha opens her film with a quote from Walter Benjamin: “history is written by the victors”, gently reminding British viewers that they must rewrite they history in order to acknowledge the gargantuan atrocities of the past.
The importance of Viceroy’s House as a historical register cannot overstated. It effectively busts the myth that the Partition of India was necessary in order to prevent a bloodshed, instead revealing that it was established as convenient tool for hegemonic and oil interests in the Middle East. It would be much easier to exert control over a small and conservative Pakistan than over a socialist-leaning India, the movie reveals.
Let’s talk about Iraq: “We promised an Arab government with British advisors and delivered it the other way around. We tried to govern and failed. In my opinion, we tried to govern too much”. Does this sound familiar, like these words were uttered last decade? In reality they are from Gertrude Bell in the early 20th century. This British woman, often nicknamed the “the female Lawrence of Arabia” is considered one of the champions of Iraq independence, if often overlooked. The irony that her commentary remains so current a century on suggests that British meddling in the Middle East hasn’t changed so much, perhaps just reinvented itself.
This documentary made out of black and white photographs and moving images, some reenacted and some original, contains so much historical information that you will either need a pen or a prodigy’s brain to in order to retain most of it. With Tilda Swindon as the voice of Gertrude Bell, the movie will take you on a journey and history lesson of British Imperialism, vested interests and female representation.
This is a film highly celebratory of the British monarchy, but not without criticism of the British Empire and British colonial mindset in the late 19th century. The movie tells the story of the deeply affectionate relationship between Queen Victoria (with the usually impeccable performance by Dame Judi Dench, a film royalty herself) and her Indian spiritual guide (munshi) Abdul Karim (Ali Fazal). They first met as Abdul travelled to the UK in order to hand a present to Her Majesty, who was also the Empress of India at the time. He broke protocol by making eye contact, and Queen Victoria immediately became very fond of the tall and attractive young man.
Victoria and Abdul is a very funny and witty film, with plenty of subtle comments on tolerance (or rather on the British inability to embrace it at the time). The court’s reaction to Abdul’s burka-clad wife and mother-in-law arriving in the UK are particularly amusing and symbolic of the British failure to embrace tolerance.
This film is both extremely personal and extremely universal. Personal because Canada-based Tamil-born documentarist Jude Ratnam travels back to his homeland Sri Lanka, which he fled decades earlier as a refugee, and opens up profound wounds of the past. And universal because it’s borderline impossible not to relate to his tragic personal history.
Demons in Paradise explores the Civil War between the dominant Sinhalese and the abject Tamil, which has ravaged the country since its independence from the UK. The demons in the title are the ghosts of an irresponsible handover from the British colonisers to the Sinhalese in 1948, the director clarifies very early on in the movie. This conflict remains largely unknown or ignored in the West, making this documentary an extremely urgent denunciation tool and piece of filmmaking.
Another film about the largest forced displacement of people in the history of mankind, the Partition of India. The joy of independence in India didn’t last long: it was closely followed by the pains and the jolt of the Partition. On the 14 of August 1947 two twin nations were born, covered in blood and hatred: India and Pakistan. Toba Tek Singh, directed by the commercially and critically acclaimed Indian filmmaker Ketan Mehta, utilises a lunatic asylum – the common name for psychiatric institutions back then – as a metaphor of the madness, division and turmoil that the region experienced back then.
The institution is located in Lahore, then part of India and now firmly in Pakistan. Its inmates are almost entirely young men, with the exception of Bishen Singh (played by Pankaj Kapur, pictured above), a mostly silent old Sikh man who allegedly hasn’t slept in 15 years. Perhaps his self-imposed insomnia is a prescient sign of impending fate of his homeland. The Partition was very violent, with notions of national identity torn to pieces, family and friends divided.
This one isn’t directly aimed at the British Empire, but it reveals how it lent a helping hand to its murderous associates in Italy, ensuring that war criminals remain unpunished. After all, what are friends for?
The movie investigates the most recent symbol of the Italian colonial past, the 2012 monument in Affile (a commune in Rome) dedicated to Rodolfo Graziani, a prominent military officer who acted as Mussolini’s viceroy in Ethiopia. The erection sparked an uproar, voiced by left-wing politicians and national commentators, such as Igiaba Scego, an Italian writer and activist born to Somali parents in Rome, and the collective of Bologna-based writers Wu-Ming. Scego even launched a petition. This monument stands at the centre of Ciriaci’s documentary as Graziani himself; unlike their German and Japanese counterparts, Italian war criminals never faced trial.
For many years, Ethiopia tried to put the officer on trial, but these efforts were halted by Italian and British authorities, despite the fact that his name was on the UN list of war criminals. The British Foreign Office vehemently opposed Ethiopia’s inclusion in the UN War Crimes Commission and the trial on Italian crimes committed during the 1935/36 invasion.
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8. White Mischief (Richard Radford, 1987):
A number of wealthy British aristocrats fled Britain during WW2 for Kenya, seeking refuge and a safe haven. They indulged in a debauched and hedonistic life, with little regard for locals and local customs. This film dramatises the events of the Happy Valley murder case in Kenya in 1941, when Sir Henry “Jock” Delves Broughton was tried for the murder of Josslyn Hay, Earl of Erroll.
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9. Gandhi (Richard Attenborough, 1982):
This epic historical drama is based on the life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the leader of India’s non-violent, non-cooperative independence struggle against the United Kingdom’s rule of India. It covers his life from the late 19th century to his assassination in 1948. Key moments include Gandhi for being on a “white” carriage of a train in South Africa and the Sal March, against the British-imposed tax on salt. The film also deals with violence against independence protesters and Gandhi’s occasional imprisonment, both perpetrated by the British colonisers.
Ok, we have cheated. And we love cheating on our Top 10 lists, as long as there’s a very good reason for that. Poor Cow isn’t a film about the British Empire, about how ugly life inside Britain can be. It’s a film about how our motherland can mistreat and abuse not just those outside our small island, but also those inside it. The film is authored by Ken Loach, the loudest voice of British social and political consciousness.
Based on the eponymous novel by Nell Dunn, Ken Loach’s debut drama follows the life of a young working-class mother in all of her traumas and tribulations. The beautiful Joy (Carol White) is married to Tom (John Bindon), a physically and emotionally abusive criminal who ends up in prison. She is left alone bringing up her son, and soon finds comfort with Tom’s associate Dave (a very cocky, charming any playful Terence Stamp). But he too ends up incarcerated, and Joy is once again left to fend for herself. She has to work in a pub, to do erotic modelling and to engage with richer boyfriends in order to make ends meet.
The living conditions were squalid, there was hardly any cultural diversity, the job market was scarce and as a consequence many people opted for a criminal life. This is a very powerful reminder of the conditions of the British working class five decades ago. This is not to say that everything has changed since then.
The third film from independent US directors Benson & Moorhead following Resolution (2012) and Spring (2014) sees them cast themselves as characters with their own first names. Here, Justin and Aaron are brothers whose lives seem to have lost direction since they escaped to LA from an isolated cult out in the desert some years ago. Specifically, Justin pulled the pair out of there when he became convinced that the cult members were about to enact a mass suicide. However, Aaron is not convinced that Justin’s suspicions were correct.
These tensions surface with the arrival through the post of an old videotape from the cult which suggests its members are still very much alive. Aaron has fond memories of great cooking and a family of sorts so wants to go back and visit; Justin hesitantly agrees provided they stay one night only and then leave. But once they’re there, Aaron doesn’t want to leave and one night becomes two and then more. The people at the camp seem outwardly friendly but there are some very odd occurrences. Things are clearly not what they at first seem.
Benson & Moorhead’s new – for want of a better term – fantasy thriller is likely to be among the most enthralling movies of its kind you’ll see all year. While the two brothers themselves are compelling onscreen characters, so too are the assorted cult members such as benevolent and beatific leader Hal (Tate Ellington) and Anna, the girl Justin fancies (Callie Hernandez from Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenantand Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, both from last year). Then there are people living in the nearby desert scrubland who may or may not be part of the cult such as Shitty Carl (James Jordan).
Serial messages keep cropping up on a range of media – videotape, cans of film and more – seemingly sent from somewhere inside the camp. Indeed, enough of these have already turned up that there’s a literal shedful of them on the premises.
Add to that a mysterious tug of war where contestants at one end pull on a rope which ascends into the night sky at the other and other seemingly inexplicable scenarios like a man trying to set fire to his own house and you have a real brain teaser of a movie.
And that’s the great thing about The Endless: it plays with your head, an act it pulls off seemingly effortlessly, and in a very dirty way. Where it employs special effects, it does so both sparingly and highly effectively. You’ll come out pondering its peculiar network of relationships, asking yourself what you just saw and wanting to go back in and see it again in order to work out exactly what it was you saw.
Numerous big budget movies with high profile ads make want to see them then turn out not to deliver on their promise. The Endless is the other way round. Don’t expect a massive advertising campaign, just make the effort to seek it out on the big screen while it’s there. If you like your cinema dirty, you won’t be disappointed.
The Endless is out in the UK in cinemas and digital HD on Friday, June 29th. Watch the film trailer below:
Tami Oldham (Shailene Woodley) and Richard Sharp (British heartthrob Sam Claflin) met in the idyllic Pacific nation of Tahiti in 1983. The two good-looking youngsters immediately fell in love, and just a few months later they embarked on a 6,500 km journey to deliver the yacht Hazana to San Diego in 1983. They thoroughly enjoyed their adventure, basking in the sun and each other’s company in the luxurious and romantic setting. Until something went wrong.
It’s the narrative structure of Adrift makes it extremely engrossing and effective. Audiences find out that something went wrong, presumably a very powerful tropical storm, right in the beginning of the film, as Tami wakes up disorientated and on her own inside the wrecked yacht filled with water. But you don’t find out exactly what happened until the end of the movie. The story, which is loosely – but not entirely – based on real events, zig-zags back and forth in time to before and after the tragic event. The director cleverly contrasts the peaceful and heavenly journey against the aftermath of chaos.
Tami eventually locates and rescues a seriously injured Richard from a tiny capsized lifeboat and fights to keep him alive. The problem is that the radio communications, the boat engine and much of the sailing equipment are all broken, and the hapless couple are left adrift in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, very far away from their final destination in California, and with the winds blowing in the opposite direction. They decide to turn around and head towards Hawaii instead, aligned the support of the air currents. But will the scarce amount of food last for the duration of their voyage? Will Tami cope with all the physically challenging work (as Richard is hardly able to move, with an exposed fracture on his leg and several broken ribs)? Will she challenge her vegetarian convictions and fish with a harpoon? Will the couple manage to find Hawaii with the limited navigation equipment? Will the hallucinations caused by malnutrition and sleep deprivation affect their will to survive and ultimately their sanity?
Adrift was supervised by the real Tami Oldham, who is still alive and sailing to this date. She gave her blessing to the entire project. She’s a heroine of resistance and epitome of human resilience, no less. Having such a gigantic person looking over your shoulder while you are trying to reenact a younger version of her in the most dramatic moment of her life is no easy task. But Shailene Woodley does an excellent job, blending female gentleness with visceral survival skills. She literally wears the soaking wet shoes of this incredible woman.
Tami previously wrote a book about the whole ordeal entitled Red Sky in Mourning: A True Story of Love, Loss, and Survival at Sea. You will benefit for not having read the book, and allowing yourself to wilfully fall in the psychological traps of the film.
The Icelandic director claims that this is a film about “real power that comes from within, not from the muscles”. He concludes: “Movies like this strip you down to essentials”. The subject of the sea is familiar territory to the filmmaker, who previously directed The Sea (2002) and The Deep (2012). The visual effects are very scary and impressive. I just can’t help wondering what this film would have looked like had it been directed by a woman.
Adrift is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, June 29th.
With a title that makes an audience of Millennials think of one hit wonder The Rasmus, In The Shadows is a neo-noir that shows real potential for first-time feature director Dipesh Jain. Opening on a William S Burroughs quote that cues the audience in to the film’s ideological intentions, the film introduces a fragile Khuddoos (a terrific Manoj Bajpayee) watching Delhi through CCTV that he hooked into his apartment. He cuts a figure of an obsessive junkie. But it’s not drugs that are sending him on a downward spiral; it’s the oppressive cycle of a city that seems unable to consolidate its traditions with the technological needs of capitalist society. The paranoia of the city and a distrust of oneself gives the film a dreamlike element.
It’s a dynamic view of the city as shot by Kai Miedendorp: strong shadows intensify a noir aspiration blended with social realism. These play off each other well, such in a brutal scene where Khuddoos listens to his next-door neighbour brutally beating his son. That sets him on an ill-thought-out saviour quest. This element of the story gestures toward a Searchers (John Ford, 1956)/Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1956) lineage to some extent, or might remind an audience of Jaques Audiard’s 2015 Palme D’Or winner Dheepan.
This is a film about a man sickened by his surroundings and taking matters into his own hands. ‘This place is a fucking maze. Once you’re in, you can’t get out.’ This isn’t the sun-kissed labyrinth that we see in LA-set noir, but something closer to distopia. Wires hang loose from walls, hidden alleyways are so narrow you find yourself sucking in your breath to get through them. Derelict buildings line the street. It may be a maze, but it’s one that Jain navigates with ease.
Posters of Vertigo (Hitchcock’s 1958 classic, that’s being re-released later this year) and a scene after scene of characters watching each other on screens or from behind a corner, calls back to the master of suspense and his disciples. A winking shot of blood dripping down a drain makes the link even more apparent. But Jain doesn’t merely try to replicate the technical wizardry of his influences. The director’s confident style juxtaposes the action and mise-en-scene of a thriller with toned down performances and handheld camerawork with flavours of social realism. He exploits the audience’s expectations and keep us unseated, enables the film to delve further into the paranoid psychology of Khuddoos. Imagine if Jafar Panahi remade The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 2002) and you’re halfway there.
It is however these kitchen sink elements, particularly in the story of Khuddoos’ neighbours, that hinders the film. The little boy’s perspective lacks a real subjective viewpoint, so it comes through as a rather generic coming-of-age story. It sometimes seems like Jain is drawing a parallel between man and boy (they both see the city in a similar way) but In the Shadows is never quite bold enough to pull it off. The film gives it so much time as to distract from the driving horror of Khuddoos’ descent. Trim 20 minutes, and this could be exceptional. But as it stands, there is a contrived sentimentality and moralising to proceedings that dilutes In the Shadows of the intense power it promises.
In the Shadows runs as part of the 9th edition of the Bagri Foundation London Indian Film Festival, that runs at 15 cinemas, across London, Birmingham and Manchester, from June 21st to July 1st, with 27 films, including features and short films, in competition. It is the largest South Asian film festival in Europe. Buy your tickets here, or at the respective cinema box offices.
This is a film that should be shown in a prime time television slot on the BBC. Sadly, that’s unlikely to happen. That’s because Britain is still very uncomfortable with discussing the atrocities of the British Empire, and the mainstream is not interested in historical balance. Most people would rather conveniently forget that Churchill is directly responsible for the deaths of up to five million people in the Bengal famine of 1943, and instead just continue to celebrate him as “the greatest Brit of all times”.
This 50-minute featurette is a extremely succinct and clear lesson on the causes of said famine. You will learn that the British wilfully crippled Bengal and Orissa (in what’s now Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal) in order to prevent the Japanese from occupying the region. They burned the harvest (in what is described as the “scorched earth policy”) and sank the boats in an attempt to render the land unusable. Churchill simply wasn’t interested in the “collateral damage”: up to five million deaths (three million according to questionable figures from the British Empire). The mere redistribution of food from places of abundance to places of scarcity would have solved the problem. That could have been easily done had Churchill been a “nice man”, the film claims. There was no shortage of food, and the 2.5 million Indian soldiers fighting for the British Empire were well fed. To add insult to injury, Britain was importing grain from Australia and the ships would stop at India, before the staple was stored in the Middle East for future consumption in Europe.
Churchill was a racist and he hated Indians. Not only he famously blamed the Indians for the famine because they were “breeding like rabbits”, but he also described them as “beastliest people in the world, next to the Germans”. Some of his associates were far more radical. Churchill’s scientific adviser Lord Lindemann was so violently racist that he would be physically sick at the mere presence of a Black person. This is the man who advised Churchill on eugenics, a philosophy enthusiastically embraced by the British Prime Minister. Both men believed in their racial superiority and therefore had a profound disregard for the lives of the “feeble and dirty” Indians.
The film also reveals an ironic fact. It was the staunch belief in racial superiority that allowed the Japanese to make huge advances in WW2. Both Americans and Brits assumed that non-whites could not be military efficient, let alone military superior to them. Once they realised they were wrong, the Japanese had already bombed Pearl Harbor and were on the Indian border, ready to take over.
The most powerful moment of the film is when a survivor of the famine describes how she witnessed a baby die of starvation while her mother tried to squeeze a few drops of milk from her breast. Upon realising the death of her baby, the mother immediately proceeded to offer these drops of milk to another mother who was also attempting to breastfeed her starving baby. The interviewee explains that she saw this with her very own eyes. This made me cry, and concocting the images in my head gave the nightmares. Reenacting this in a fiction movie would be borderline impossible, and it’s questionable whether it should ever be done. This would be the ultimate dirty film sequence.
The film ends with people embracing a statue of Churchill in London, while also taking pictures. This is sordid evidence that the country is simply unwilling to remember his very dark side. The refusal to talk about the Bengal famine of 1943 in the British mainstream media (instead just churning out tub-thumping nationalistic garbage such as Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour, from earlier this year) is indicative that a certain sense of superiority still lingers somewhere in the minds of the British. The deaths of five million Indians simply isn’t worth debating.
Bengal Shadows runs as part of the 9th edition of the Bagri Foundation London Indian Film Festival, that runs at 15 cinemas, across London, Birmingham and Manchester, from June 21st to July 1st, with 27 films, including features and short films, in competition. It is the largest South Asian film festival in Europe. Buy your tickets here, or at the respective cinema box offices.
It’s hard to summarise this film as anything but a British Wes Anderson. Widened shots of piers and roads, acerbic dialogue, sardonic dealings of death (particularly when Pete throws his Gran’s ashes to avoid arrest over a beach bridge), a tasteful use of The Velvet Underground and luminous uses of yellow trousers matching the Parisien dark coats of the two main characters. So far, so Anderson, right?
But the film has such a nice level of frisson and joie de vivre, it works on its own terms as a piece. It’s a delightfully postmodern look at the classic tale of boy searching for his father. The film has many visual highlights, but it is the engagement party (which includes a reading from Omar’s mothers’ diary) that stands as the most memorable. During a mass confusion in, Pete and Omar unwittingly accuse a man of sleeping with their mother – the wrong man, even though incidentally he did cheat on his wife!
The film delves into the topics of infidelity and paternal abandonment with the thickest tongue-in-cheek, darkly flippant and ironic tone. “She had those eyes, almost as if something was wrong with her” Irfan (Asim Chaudry) tells Omar (Antonio Aakeel) about meeting Omar’s mother. Aakeel and Chaudry are on fine form, but Jack Carroll, playing the disabled Pete, is the real scene-stealer. Simply watching him trying to act anything but impish in a seduction scene (across from the sultry Natalie Davies) shows a comedic talent that stands beside the decided discomfiture of Peter Sellers and Stan Laurel.
Kevin Eldon, Johnny Vegas and Hayley Tammaddon punch up the supporting cast with strong supporting performances, with the right hint of subtle xenophobia. Despite his background, Omar’s foster mother suggests that he belong with “his own” (pointing to his Indian father), a particularly potent and shocking moment and one that supports an exclusivist England that voted for Brexit and one that touches on an all too potent nerve.
But it’s the way the film is shot and edited that proves the film’s selling point. Those long crane shots over a dawning beach, a blue silhouette of aquatic location and a kaleidoscope of flaming fireworks complete a cyclical montage of psychedelic pictures. Bar the thick Southern English accents, this film brims with the frisson of Nouvelle Vague. And it’s one Wes Anderson would struggle to beat!
Eaten by Lions showed at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 2018, when this piece was originally written. It’s out in cinemas across the country on Friday, March 29th. On VoD on Monday, July 22nd, and then on VoD on Monday, July 29th.
Fifteen-year-old Maquia is from the Clan of the Separated, where all members are blonde females who stop ageing in their mid teens and proceed to live for centuries. She is warned never to fall in love with an outsider because this would inevitably lead to loneliness. That’s because the loved one will age and die long before her. The problem is that Maquia is an orphan, and so she feels very lonely anyway. One day, a foreign army invades their otherwise peaceful land, seeking to unveil to secret of their near-immortality. Maquia manages to flee, and she miraculously encounter a baby boy who’s also an orphan during her escape.
The two orphans predictably bond. Maquia adopts the baby, whom she names Ariel. Maternal love ensues. The problem is that Ariel is not from the Clan of the Separated, and he will age very quickly. This interesting twist on motherhood is precisely what makes Maquia: When The Promised Flower Blooms clever and engrossing. It’s impossible not to be moved by the protagonist attempts to forge a relationship with the baby and then watch him grow old while she remains the same. She is suffering in silence, presuming that she will watch him die one day, leaving her once again alone. This is probably the biggest conceivable pain for a mother. This is where the female sensibility of the filmmaker blooms.
The photography of Maquia is typical of a fairy tale, and it’s pleasant enough to watch. At times, the images are sumptuous, teeming with blue skies, verdant hills, medieval-looking castles, white dresses and blonde hair, much like an old-fashioned European princess story (including a vulnerable female who gasps and cries all the time). There is also an elegantly somber facet to the movie, with red-eyed dragons called Renatos, earthly colours and mouldy walls. Impressive enough for children and adults alike.
But this is also a film with many flaws, mostly in its epic narrative. Its multilayered arc is too elliptical. I struggled enormously to follow the plot. The story has more twists and turns than a garden hose. I wouldn’t even know where to start describing it. It would have benefited from a simpler narrative.
Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms is out in cinemas across the UK on Wednesday, June 27th.
This is a film so visually stunning and elegant you will be dazzled for its entire relatively short duration of just 81 minutes. The 61-year-old Polish born and UK-based director of Ida (2013) delivers yet another black and white film teeming with music and innovation. He has once again teamed up with Polish cinematographer Luzasz Zal, who – in addition to Ida – also recently signed the photography of Dovlatov (Aleksei German Jr, 2018).
The film follows singer and dancer Zula (Joanna Kulig), who has a stormy relationship with the pianist Wiktor. The story starts in Poland in the immediate aftermath of WW2, as artists are persuaded to embrace the communist ideology as vigorously as they can in their performances. The notions of folk purity and Slavic charm must prevail. They leave the country in order to tour the Iron Curtain, and they eventually elope to the West. By the time they settle in Paris, they have separated. But fate has more in store for them, and their paths inevitable cross again.
Zula and Wiktor’s relationship epitomises Europe after WW2: it’s fragmented, unstable and volatile. They are constantly seeking their identities and their allegiances, but they are simply unable to work out “where the heart is”. Home is an elusive concept. The final line of the film sums it all up (don’t worry, this is not a spoiler, I won’t disclose the context in which this happens): “Let’s go to the other side. The view is better from there”. Cold War is a film about the perpetual search for something else, and the inability to settle where you are/ with what you have. This is extremely similar to Ida, in which the later character closes the movie with the line “so, what’s next?”, expressing her frustration with what she has achieved as well as her desire to move on (or move back). These are two fine examples of “punch on the face” closing lines, comparable to Billy Wilder’s “Nobody’s perfect” of Some Like It Hot (1959).
In addition to the photography, the film’s score is a musical tour de force. The director blends dramatic folk laments with urban warbles, jazz and even rock music, and it all fits together neatly. How else could you get Adriano Celentano’s 24,000 Baci, Bill Haley and His Comets’s Rock Around The Clock, Ella Fitzgerald’s The Man I Love, plus Mexican, Russian and Mexican folk songs all in the same film? Many of the songs are performed by Zula and the other characters, and the dance numbers and equally quaint and ravishing.
The director describes his film as a “melodrama”, but I can only see this in relation to the etymology of the word (melodrama means “musical drama”). The hawkish sentimentality we normally associate with melodramas is entirely absent. The most dramatic moments of Cold War are either entirely removed or subdued (such as Wiktor’s short prison stint, and the reaction of lovers as they depart or meet again). The “Cold” in the title seems to refer to both the conflict between the East and the West and the stoic nature of the romantic battle between the two lovers. The chemistry between the two actors isn’t particularly strong, but this is not a huge problem, as the director and DoP concoct drama through the climactic photography and montage (with high contrast images and mostly static cameras with a solid focus point).
Cold War is an impressive movie, and it serves to consolidate Pawel Pawlikowski’s partnership with Lukasz Zal and their singular style. This is a move away from the Pawlikowski of the noughties, with the lighthearted tone of MySummer of Love (2006) – which is in our top 10 hottest films of all times.
Cold War showed at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, when this piece was originally published. It is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, August 31st. On Mubi on Sunday, July 17th (2022). Also available on other platforms.
Racism and xenophobia don’t always come in the shape of verbal abuse, chants or even a pig’s head left in front of a mosque. Sometimes they operate in ways so obtuse and inhumane, that at first one struggles to believe that such actions could be justified solely by the colour of the skin and the origin of the victim. In In The Fade, neo-Nazis blow up a small office in Hamburg belonging to a Turkish man called Nuri Sekerci (Numan Acar), claiming the lives of the owner and his only child, a boy called Rocco (Rafael Santana). The non-German origin of the victims was the sole motivation of the crime.
At first, the police fail to believe that this could be related to indigenous German terrorists (aka neo-Nazis), instead insisting that Nuri, who previously served time on marijuana charges, was a drug dealer and had a number of enemies. We learn the perverse rationale of the investigations: a foreigner is always on the wrong side of the law, particularly if he’s a former convict. His German wife and mother of his child Katja (an electrifying and superb Diane Kruger) and her lawyer Danilo Fava (Denis Moschttto) about the only ones who beg to differ, but Katja ‘s reliability is questioned due to her own petty drug use. She attempts to take her own life in one of the most graphic and disturbing suicide scenes I’ve seen since Alan Clarke’s Scum (1983).
Two neo-Nazi suspects are finally identified, and Katja’s reclaims her will to live in an attempt to make justice for her late husband and son. The court proceedings are particularly jarring. The two deaths are described in detail, as is the homemade bomb consisting of oil, fertiliser, 500 nails and a detonator. Katja chooses to face the people who likely murdered her family. Her sanity and her late husband’s moral integrity are often under question. At times, it feels like it’s Katja and Nuri who are under trial.
A very pertinent political twist is added roughly halfway through the movie. The neo-Nazis have links to the Greek far-right party Golden Dawn, which has several seats in Parliament. This is a sordid reminder that the neo-Nazi movement isn’t confined to Germany, but rather a pan-European and also a global trend. The film, which premiered at Cannes last year, was finished before Donald Trump was elected and began his ultra-racist and white supremacist tirade, in a vile attempt to perpetuate and redeem xenophobia. The neo-Nazis of In the Fade would undoubtedly feel at home in Charlottesville, and would be described by the Pussy-Grabber-in-Chief as “very nice people”.
Be prepared for a shocking film ending with a highly symbolic connotation.
In The Fade is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, June 22nd. On Mubi on Friday, May 21st (2022).
