Month: August 2018

Nice Girls Don’t Stay for Breakfast

Posted on by victorfraga

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM VENICE

You have probably heard of Bruce Weber, the photographer and the occasional filmmaker. He’s best remembered for his black and white shots of Abercrombie & Fitch’ sexy shirtless men. This time, he delivers another type of American masculinity, one covered in many layers.

The documentary Nice Girls Don’t Stay For Breakfast is a tribute to Hollywood’s anti-hero Robert Mitchum (who passed away in 1997 shortly before his 80th birthday). Weber could have made a film about a more gentlemanly personality, such as Cary Grant or Clark Gable – the kind of stars that always had their hair combed. But Weber said that he has always been fascinated with bad guys – those rare celebrities who enthusiastically shun good manners, a little bit like Jack Nicholson.

Shot at times in colour and at times in a grainy black and white, the doc is a jazzy collection of anecdotes from the people who worked with him, or simply admired him. It includes interviews with Johnny Depp, Liam Neeson, Benicio Del Toro and his granddaughter. She recalls an occasion when she prevented her father from committing suicide. Johnny Depp reveals that there are two boogeymen hidden inside in his closet: Bela Lugosi’s Dracula and Robert Mitchum.

Mitchum also had a more romantic side, particularly when it came to music. The film is titled after the eponymous Julie London song, Mitchum’s all-time favourite. He co-starred with her in The Wonderful Country (Robert Parrish, 1959) and never missed a concert. You will also see footage of Robert Mitchum recording a jazz album that was never been released at Capital Records in Los Angeles. His hoarse voice is manly and yet melancholic. You will meet an entirely different man as he chats and sings with Marianne Faithfull. He’s playful and warmhearted.

He talks to flirtatiously to female fans on the phone, sharing recycled jokes and exposing his self-deprecating humour. Everybody knows that Mitchum has always been a ladies’ man. He had countless affairs, and perhaps he fell in love many times. Yet never left his wife Dorothy (who also happened to be high school sweetheart). Even the most adventurous of Casanovas needs stability, or – let’s say – a mother dressed up as a wife. It’s unclear why Dorothy stood by her man.

Nice Girls Don’t Stay For Breakfast is wild at heart, honest, glamorous and very, very jazzy. It is showing as part of the 75th Venice International Film Festival, which is taking place right now.

Charlie Says

Posted on by victorfraga

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM VENICE

Serial killer Charles Manson is dead. He passed away at the age of 83 last November. But there is still plenty of curiosity surrounding his leading role in a series of nine murders across California over a period of five weeks nearly five decades ago (in the Summer of 1969). The eyes of a female filmmaker investigates the nuts and bolts of the horrific true story. She sheds light on the episode with the help of the three “Manson girls”: Leslie Van Houten, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Susan Atkins. Yet this is not a documentary, but a drama film instead.

The director faces a major challenge: how to humanise these three girls without redeeming them. She doesn’t want to demonise her characters, yet she doesn’t want to endorse their crime. Graduate Karlene Faith (Merritt Wever) guides the narrative. Leslie Van Houten plays Hannah Murray. Marianne Rendon is Susan Atkins. And Matt Smith (yes, the guy from Doctor Who and Netflix’s series The Crown) plays the ring leader Charles Manson. Smith has raised the bar and demonstrates that he can play just about any role.

Charlie Says reconstructs the events through an entirely female perspective. It raises and attempts to answer many pertinent questions. Why and how were these three girls brainwashed? What was it like to be a woman in the US in the late 1960s?

There are elements of violence, sociopathy ans sheer perversion all over the film. These women were just the tip of the iceberg. The film reveals that no less than 100 became part of the infamous cult led by Charles Manson, which spread fear, anger and blood all over California. Charles Manson wished to become to become a pop icon of the grotesque. He succeeded, it seems.

Guinevere Turner’s script is based on Ed Sanders’s book The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion. Charlie Says has plenty of mainstream appeal is probably intended to become a blockbuster, but that’s about it. It lacks a little edge. This film will never become a cult (no pun intended). It won’t be remembered forever.

Charlie Says is showing at the 75 Venice International Film Festival, which is taking place right now.

Yuva

Posted on by victorfraga

This is probably as close as you will get to a sensory experience in film. Yuva pays an enormous amount of attention to colours, textures and – above everything else – sounds. You will feel like you are in the middle of the woods with the two protagonists, while the wind rustles the leaves, caresses the trees, animals howl, coo and hoot in the distance. The sounds are so vibrant and realistic that they caused my chihuahua Lulu a lot of anxiety, and she was barking throughout the film. I don’t mean this in a derogatory way at all. Quite the opposite. Yuva hypnotised my canine daughter and I.

Veysel (Kutay Sandikci) lives in the woods almost like a hermit or a caveman. His hair and beard suggest that he has avoided contact with razors and scissors for countless years. He communicates with animals. He yodels, he pants, he growls, he roars and he howls. But there are still signs of civilisation. He inhabits a small shackle created from man-made materials, wears some clothes and he does speak Turkish. He engages in a conversation with his brother Hasan (Eray Cezayirlioglu), a smartly dressed and good-looking man of about the same age. We soon find out that developers are claiming the land inhabited by Veysel, and Hasan has come in order to convince his brother to leave. “These people are not joking”, he warns his sibling.

The photography of woods is particularly impressive, with the occasional natural light beam finding its way in, shining on our protagonist like a spotlight. Each frame looks like a painting in itself. Sometimes there is no movement for a few seconds, as if time froze. The camera hardly moves, shots are lengthy and protracted, action is languid and laconic. It reminded me a lot of Alexander Sokurov’s Mother and Son (1997), which revolves a son seeking to help an ailing mother in an equally idyllic and remote setting. The difference is that the Russian director used maternal love as the leitmotif, while the Turkish helmer Emre Yeksan opted for fraternal affection instead.

This is a movie about our relation to nature, the shock between the modern and the essence. Veysel represents a profound connection with nature, while Hasan symbolises a more affected existence. Animals, particularly dogs, play a central role in the film. They are often our closest connection to nature (Lulu can vouch for what I’m saying). In the third third of this nearly two-hour long film, an animal is hurt with a shocking outcome. This is the strongest sentence in the movie, and yet’s neither graphic nor exploitative. The violence is communicated through sounds.

Stay tuned for the very end of the movie, immediately before credits begin to roll. A very beautiful cathartic dance to an electronic soundtrack. It’s strangely liberating.

Yuva has just premiered at the 75th Venice Film Festival taking place right now, and it was funded by the Biennale College Cinema. It’s also available to view it at home until September 19th as part of Festival Scope – that’s how my chihuahua Lulu and I managed to see the film without leaving the UK, and you can do the same too from the comfort of your home until September 19th.

Anchor And Hope (Tierra Firme)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Eva (Oona Chaplin, from Game Of Thrones) lives with her partner Kat (Natalie Tena, also from Game Of Thrones) on the latter’s barge which is mostly moored near the Anchor And Hope canalside pub in London’s Clapton. Against Eva’s better judgement, Kat invites her friend and inveterate ladies’ man Roger (David Verdaguer) to stay while he’s visiting London from Barcelona. In the course of a drunken evening, tensions surface between the two women as Eva reveals her desire to have a baby and Roger offers to father one for her. The morning after, Kat is horrified by the idea since she very much likes the relationship the way it is and isn’t ready for kids.

This British-Spanish production cleverly employs its two national cultures so as to satisfy audiences from both. Tena and Verdaguer play some scenes in English and some, particularly when alone together on the screen, in Spanish. To some extent, this riffs off director Marques-Marcet’s earlier Spanish language outing 10,000 Km (2014), in which the same two actors play a heterosexual couple attempting to keep their relationship going when she moves to Los Angeles while he stays in Barcelona. In Anchor And Hope, the chemistry between Tena and Verdaguer effectively plays off against that of Tena’s onscreen lesbian relationship with Chaplin.

It’s exemplary as an exercise in casting actors who fit parts well – and to some extent building roles around particular actors. In case any further proof were needed that Marques-Marcet is really good at this, he throws in Oona Chaplin’s real life mum and screen legend Geraldine Chaplin as her onscreen mother. While Geraldine Chaplin’s few scenes are a real pleasure, she never upstages the younger generation cast members who get considerably more time onscreen overall. It’s all beautifully balanced in terms of casting; Tena, Verdaguer and Oona Chaplin prove highly watchable.

Moreover, the director has a clear knack for exploiting the wider assets with which he has to work. The film wasn’t originally conceived as set on a barge, but when Marques-Marcet discovered that Tena owned one he reworked everything around it. This lends the proceedings a unique feel for a London movie, the drama punctuated by scenes of Tena’s boat travelling up and down the canals, the cast opening and going through lock gates and so on, putting a rarely seen aspect of London on the screen – with waterway locations to die for, making you wonder why no-one’s ever done it before.

As a drama clocking in at nearly two hours, Anchor And Hope deftly juggles its deceptively simple constituent elements. Who can forget the hilarious scene where the eager to help Roger struggles to balance a porno-streaming mobile on the bathroom taps in order to fill a receptacle with donor sperm? And when Kat and Eva eventually, inevitably split, the audience wants nothing more than to see the two of them get back together again even as it wonders whether there’s any real possibility of them doing so. In short, this is a beautifully understated, real gem of a relationship movie. With its cool London canal landscapes, it’s also the perfect cinematic trip following this year’s baking hot English summer.

Anchor And Hope is out in the UK on Friday, September 28th. Out on VoD on Monday, November 12th.

The King

Posted on by victorfraga

This is not a conventional documentary about a music star. This is not a romantic portrait of an artist bigger-than-life, and which changed the course of history. This is neither a compilation of songs nor a biopic. The King is a very provocative documentary about American culture, politics and race that merely uses The King of Rock and Roll as a barometer of change.

Eugene Jarecki takes a musical road trip across the US more than four decades after the untimely death of Elvis Presley. He uses the 1963 Rolls-Royce that belonged to the artist. Diverse guests join the director, including Alec Baldwin, Rosanne Cash, Chuck D, Emmylou Harris, Ethan Hawke, Van Jones, Mike Myers, and Dan Rather (some inside the car, some in talking heads format elsewhere).

The director visits Elvis’s birthplace in Mississippi, including the house where he grew up (it was unbeknownst to the current dwellers that such an iconic figure had lived in their property), the places where Elvis lived and performed in Memphis (described as a place of “confluence” of cultures), and he traces the singer’s legacy in New York and Las Vegas. But this is a very unusual road movie. Jarecki does not celebrate Elvis Presley’s legacy. His music is only scarcely heard in the movie. Instead, the director investigates Elvis Presley in relation to the American Dream. Did the singer epitomise a country “where you can be whatever you want if you work hard” or was he in fact a subversion of such ideal?

Elvis Presley was born in the middle of what the film described as the “American Nightmare”: segregation. Not just in terms of time, but also in terms of location. Elvis was born in the Deep South, in the heartlands of racial hatred. Chuck D from Public Enemy (pictured above) is the most fierce critic of Elvis’s twisted legacy. He argues that Elvis was no more of a king than Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. The lyrics of his song Fight The Power are anything but subtle: “Elvis was a hero to most, but he never meant shit to me”. The topic of cultural appropriation is also central. Elvis “stole” from Black culture, yet he was nowhere to be seen during the Civil Rights Movement – unlike other prominent artists at the time, such as Jane Fonda and Marlon Brando.

The King of Rock and Roll was the right person to sell Black music to a predominantly white and racist country, hence his tremendous success. He was young, sexy, talented and – of course – white. This selfish and perverse appropriation is used as a metaphor of the US. “The American Dream is someone’s fantasy or drunken nightmare”, someone explains. “The US is a country that inflicts pain on Black people and then benefits from their cries”, we are also told.

The connection between Elvis American hegemony is also investigated. The film reveals that – bar his military service in Germany – Elvis Presley never left the US, and all of his performances where on American soil. Despite this, we was extremely well-known in every corner of the world. He was described as “the most celebrated soldier since Napoleon” during his short stint in Europe. His films, videos and music became synonymous with American cultural supremacy, the most powerful instrument of Imperialism. The imagery was often associated with guns and military symbols.

The elusiveness of celebrity, as well as the superficiality of Las Vegas are also addressed.

The movie wraps up with the election of Trump, the very twisted self-appointed king. The current Potus is juxtaposed against Elvis’s fall from grace. Elvis is used as an epitome of democracy. We see a fat and sick Elvis, and then we see Trump. We all know what happened next to Elvis. The clever montage seems to suggest that the same could happen to American democracy. The film credits roll. Not to the groovy Suspicious Minds, but to something far more somber instead.

The King is out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 24th.

What Keeps You Alive

Posted on by victorfraga

How much do you truly know about the person you love? One way of finding out more is by taking a trip to a remote location together. You could learn new things you never knew before, but this approach carries with it an inherent risk. What if those secrets were never meant to be exposed?

This is the premise of What Keeps You Alive, an elegant Canadian thriller-mystery centring around a couple spending a romantic weekend in a remote, picturesque location in the woods. They are Jules (Brittany Allen) and Jackie (Hannah Emily Anderson) and they’ve come up here to celebrate their one year anniversary. At first everything seems to be going well, with both women commenting on how beautiful the location is, joking about how they could stay there forever, and getting ready to spend a romantic, sexy evening together. Then a knock on the door changes everything. It’s Sarah (Martha MacIsaac) from across the lake, an old childhood friend of Jackie’s. At first it seems that this might be a past lover, but the secret Sarah hides is far darker than that, and threatens to destroy both women.

What Keeps You Alive is one of those films that anything after the first third counts as a spoiler, its first twist changing the dynamic of the movie completely. Let’s just say that it isn’t outside threats that either girl needs to be afraid of, with the thriller, Hitchcock-like, centred around the bonds of their love. It asks a key question of the viewer: Why has Jackie taken Jules here in the first place if it is such a source of sadness for her? This mystery powers the stripped-back narrative, leading us to its inevitable, deadly conclusion.

An enigmatic wide-angle is used for filming, allowing the vast mountain scenery and bucolic lake surroundings to do a lot of the emotional heavy lifting. Veering between an old-school psychological drama and a cat-and-mouse chase thriller, What Keeps You Alive boasts strong performances by the two leads, who sell both the romantic and survivalist sides of their personalities. (Martha MacIsaac and Joey Klein, who plays Sarah’s husband, don’t fare as well — perhaps the movie would’ve been tighter if their underwritten roles were cut.) These performances are complemented by a diverse soundtrack, ranging from classic rock to some choice Beethoven cuts — yet most importantly, the film knows when to go deathly quiet, allowing the action to speak for itself.

Sadly, What Keeps You Alive runs out of steam by the end, forcing situations for the sake of spectacle instead of letting the plot play out naturally. While building up a great sense of foreboding in the beginning of the movie — using a mixture of chilling anecdotes and gorgeous scenery to create an uneasy yet enticing vibe — the final stages falter significantly, circling back to the same tired tropes instead of saying anything new. It could’ve done much better to milk that feeling of uncertainty for longer, really allowing us to delve deeper into the distorted psychology of its protagonists.

Nevertheless, managing and subverting genre expectations can be a tricky tightrope to walk. Too much subversion and it’s hard to find a rhythm, too much deliverance and a film can end up being too predictable. Credit has to go to writer-director Colin Minihan for taking what looked like a traditional cabin in the woods horror story and finding a different, smarter way to tell it. Here’s hoping next time he manages to stick the landing.

What Keeps You Alive is out in cinemas and also available on VoD on Friday, August 24th (US). UK viewers can catch it at FrightFest on August 25th. The director Colin Minihan is one half of The Vicious Brothers, known for their cult horror films.

The Children Act

Posted on by victorfraga

Both Emma Thompson and Ian McEwan are national treasures. The London born-actress already has a multiple number of Oscars and Baftas under her belt, normally recognised for playing strong-minded and witty characters in period dramas, aristocratic settings and literary adaptations. The Children Act is no exception, as she plays a super classy and stern high judge handling extremely complex cases. The iconic thespian teams up with one of the country’s most prolific novelists and screenwriters, the Hampshire-born Ian McEwan. His books seem to turn into films as a smoothly as the waters running down the Thames. Recent adaptations include Atonement (Joe Wright, 2007) and On Chesil Beach (Dominic Cook, 2018).

Directed by Richard Eyre, The Children Act tells the story of Fiona Maye (Emma Thompson), an affluent high court judge handling morally and ethically challenging cases. She works in the Royal Courts of Justice. The prominent building located on the Strand is featured consistently in the movie, both from inside and outside. Fiona’s work demands are very high, and they soon begin to take their toll on her marriage to Jack (Stanley Tucci). He’s frustrated with Fiona’s coldness and complete absence of sex, and insists that he should have an affair in order to compensate for the non-compliance of her “marital duties”. Fiona feels insulted by his proposition.

The first half of the film is a court drama in every conceivable aspect. Fiona is asked to rule on the case of Adam (Fionn Whitehead, whose scrawny face and expressive complexion you will probably recognise from Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, 2017), an intelligent 17-year-old Jehovah’s Witness who refuses a life-saving blood transfusion on religious grounds. Adam’s parents are adamant that death is preferable to receiving someone else’s blood into their body, in a sheer display’s of the religion’s strict doctrine. Because Adam is a few days short of his 18th birthday and therefore still a minor, the decision lies in the hands of Fiona. She takes the very unusual decision to visit Adam in hospital in order to decide whether he’s has been duped by his parents or is genuinely convinced about his fate. The two bond in a very unexpected way: through music.

I can’t tell you too much about the second half of the film without spoiling it, but let’s just say that Fiona makes a decision, and the tension moves away from the court room into her personal life. The ghosts of her ruling come to knock at her door wherever she goes. Literally. She is consistently confronted about her coherence and toughness. Meanwhile, she also has to grapple with her collapsing marriage. Fiona is confident and firm, yet unable to discuss her relationship with her husband. The very English inability to voice their feelings resurfaces, also present in On Chesil Beach. This is a film about reconciling professional judgment with personal judgment.

Emma Thompson is sterling. Could you conceive a bad performance by the award-winning actress? She’s also elegant, stern, a little motherly and very feminine. Naturally, this is an Oscar-baiting film. Thompson was immediately tipped for the Best Actress Academy Award.

But this is isn’t a perfect movie. The abundance of topics it attempts to approach makes it a little convoluted. They include Jehovah’s witness faith, the difference between law and morals, monogamy, female sexuality, right to die, and a lot more. But where it does succeed it does so extremely well, particularly in the topic of how a judge separates his personal from his professional life. Also, the second half of the movie is far less credible than the first part.

There is also an issue with some of the plot devices. A certain Newcastle visit feels redundant and unexplained, and even the relationship with Jack seems a little disconnected from the rest of the story. I wonder whether these elements were explored in more detail in the book, and just got lost in translation in the film screenplay.

This is also a film for American viewers, always hungry for “classy” Britain material. All of the ingredients are there: aristocratic London, with piano recitals, poems by W. B. Yeats (who was, in fact, Irish, but still British-sounding enough for American viewers), plenty of wigs, forensic pomp and circumstance. All very effective, if also extremely formulaic. All in all, the whole thing feels a little bit like a television court drama, except that its duration of 105 minutes is more suitable to cinema audiences.

The Children Act is out on general release in UK cinemas on Friday, August 24th. It’s out on VoD on Friday, January 11th.

Along With The Gods: The Last 49 Days (Singwa hamkke: Ingwa yeon)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

When people die, they are taken to the world of the afterlife by specially designated guardians. Dead people undergo up to seven trials in 49 days in order to determine whether they will be reincarnated. That’s the basic premise of Korea’s Along With The Gods franchise.

The original film Along With The Gods: The Two Worlds (Kim Yong-hwa, 2017, pictured below) wowed audiences by piling on extraordinary set pieces exploring a series of hells and their attendant court chambers that comprise the afterlife. It also introduced the guardian captain Gang-lim (Ha Jung-woo), tormented by memories of his human life on Earth as a warrior in the Goryeo dynasty just over a thousand years ago, and his two sidekicks: one a young male warrior type Haewonmak (Ju Ji-hoon), the other motherly young woman Lee Deok-Choon (Kim Hyang-gi), both of whose earthly memories have been wiped.

This time round in Along With The Gods: The Last 49 Days, the three guardians’ human charge is deceased soldier Kim Su-hong (Kim Dong-wook), accidentally shot in the original film by fellow soldier Won Dong-yeon (Do Kyung-soo) then buried by Won and his commanding officer Lieutenant Park (Lee Joon-hyuk). A suggestion here that Kim might not in fact have been dead at the time of his burial is echoed in 1,000-year-old flashbacks of Gang-lim hinting he may have similarly failed to rescue his warrior king father from beneath a pile of battlefield corpses.

Pleading for soldier Kim, the two assistant guardians are forced to return to Earth to capture renegade guardian Sung-ju (Ma Dong-seok) whose self-imposed exile in the house of a grandfather has prevented the latter’s ascension to the afterlife. This forces the film to juggle an effects-laden journey through vast otherworldly landscapes with a more parochial, comic story based around a house and its immediate courtyard area lacking the same epic scale.

Sung-ju reveals the two guardian assistants’ past histories. They lived on Earth at the same time as their captain, effectively throwing in a further plot of a wintry historical epic about warrior sibling rivalry and a homeless girl caring for a group of orphans.

It might be less well balanced overall, but this second film nevertheless achieves some very impressive, state of the art visual set pieces, among them immersion in a sea of biting flying fish, a journey across a burning rock field disgorging humanoid lava monsters and a Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993, and sequels) homage featuring velociraptors, a T. Rex and a mosasaurus. Yet at the same time it delights in throwing in constant narrative complications with scant regard for character development making it all too easy to drown in multiple plot details.

Like its arguably superior predecessor, Along With The Gods: The Last 49 Days been a massive hit in its native Korea. Marvel-type teaser scenes at the end suggest plans for further franchise instalments (there are apparently two more films already in the pipeline) and it all works well enough as visual spectacle or lightweight, popcorn entertainment. However, given the good and dirty idea of people coming to terms with the consequences of their past actions nestling at the margins of the script, it’s a crying shame more couldn’t have been been done with that element on a par with the extraordinary visuals.

Along With The Gods: The Last 49 Days was shown as a London East Asia Film Festival teaser and is out in selected cinemas across the UK on Thursday, August 16th. Watch the film trailer below:

https://vimeo.com/281567990

The Last Witness

Posted on by victorfraga

Piotr Szkopiak’s film needs to be considered alongside Andrzej Wajda’s Katyn (2007). Szkopiak himself sees it as a sequel and both directors have family connections to the Katyn Massacre. However, the two films are light years apart in their approach to the story. Wajda’s film surges with action and emotion with strong visual imagery.

In the current film, this historic cover-up of what was a hideous war crime is framed in a very British thriller format. It seeks to engage an audience that likes history dished up in a palatable form, very differently from the 2007 movie. The tropes of a classic WW2 drama are all present: attractive female army officers with uniforms that fit rather well, the subtle passing of ‘black market’ meat as rationing (still enforced in 1947 Britain), gruff provisional police officers and just a touch of ‘chocolate box’ post War streets. The Polish displaced persons camp looks well sanitised. The cabbages are tilled by jaunty girls in a scene framed with impossibly white washing hanging artistically on neatly strung lines. This provides the cover for the introduction of the romance between central character journalist Stephen Underwood (Alex Pettyfer) and Jeanette (Talulah Riley). Jeanette is the wife of Mason Mitchell (Henry Lloyd-Hughes) a strict government security chief. So far, so BBC primetime drama.

Journalist Stephen follows a trail that begins with increasing suicides amongst the Polish men awaiting repatriation. This leads him via an accidental meeting with a Russian man Michael Loboda (Robert Wieckleicz) to uncover a secret that the authorities have taken great care to keep hidden.

We are drawn into Stephen’s mission to discover why Loboda is pretending to be Polish, as he steals a box containing letters and a diary from him. This material belonged to a victim of the Katyn massacre. The constantly brooding central character defies his editor Frank Hamilton (Michael Gambon) and his brother Captain John Underwood (Gwilym Lee) by arranging to interview Loboda. The Russian has been taken into hiding by Colonel Pietrowski (Will Thorp).

As the plot twists further, the scope of the cover up extends to the government repressing the truth in order to maintain diplomatic relations with Stalin. Mitchell is implicated and manipulates Jeanette into giving away Loboda’s location. Stephen’s brother is persuaded to provide his pass allowing the determined journalist access to the records that have been hidden in a London archive.

At each step the investigation is underscored with mounting music suggesting drama that is not really seen on screen. Stephen shifts documents on his desk and in a dark and noir looking archive and we are only allowed a very brief flashback to the actual event that the cover up is about. As a way into this powerful story Underwood is not a compelling enough character and we feel cheated out of hearing more from Loboda. The story provides us with an example of a politically-motivated government cover-up. Parallels can be drawn with Loboda’s murder and the journalist who is trying to bring his story to light to current alleged poisonings and our own government’s less than firm approach to the foreign powers that may be involved.

Ultimately this is a formulaic thriller with the central horror at its core not given enough weight. We know more about the British characters who hide or unearth the story than we do about the people whose story it is. Although it is a UK-Poland co-production it is tied up in a very British package and would have been better delivered in a dirty bundle with the action and pain uncovered and allowed to seep through.

The Last Witness is out in selected cinemas from Friday, August 17th.

Distant Constellation

Posted on by victorfraga

One day, we’ll all become stars. Meanwhile, while we’re still alive, every single one of us is entitled to shine. Even those in their twilight years. Distant Constellation is a tastefully crafted and profoundly lyrical documentary that celebrates life in a retirement home somewhere in Turkey. Despite the inescapability of senescence, these elderly people have not given up their will to live.

The female director Shevaun Mizrahi interviews several residents as they reminisce about their past and cling on to their liveliness in different ways. She neither infantilises nor romanticises her subjects. They don’t bemoan their physical limitations and relative confinement to a grey, soulless and oppressive building block. A partially-sighted photographer boasts about his three cameras, despite the fact that he’s no longer able to operate them. A filthy old man (note: “filthy” is a compliment at DMovies) talks about his sexual adventures at young age in graphic detail, while also quoting passages from Nabokov’s Lolita. Each resident is moving and charming in a very personal manner.

But not all is beautiful and rosy. An Armenian woman (pictured at the top) remembers the 1915 genocide and how her entire family had to convert to Islam in order to survive. “My younger brother was born in 1915, a disastrous year for Armenians in Turkey. We used to be a well-off family with a cow and a donkey”, she remembers. A man regrets his impatience and anxiety, while coughing dry. He explains: “I was worse when I was younger”. Perhaps his anxiety partly vanished with the ambitions of his youth. There is also a very disturbing scene of an elderly man writhing and panting. Maybe he suffers from advanced Alzheimer’s. Or maybe he was passing away. Either way, this sequence reminded me of the extreme realism of the care home in Ulrich Seidl’s Import Export (2007).

Executed on a very low budget and with semi-professional cameras, Distant Constellation is an impressive feat. The images are somber, languorous and often static. The persistent greyness might be difficult to capture on a television screen; this is a sensory experience for the cinema theatres. Almost like an art piece. The sounds are distant and hypnotic: the wind blowing and whistling, white noises, the clanking of an elevator going up and down, and the occasional song in the background.

There are also many symbolic devices. The elevator is a recurring theme. Elevators convey a sense of confinement and movement, both at once – a little bit like the confined residents who are still budging. There are also cranes, construction sites and an airplane flying past. They are signifiers of slow change and reconfiguration, an allegory of the cycle of life itself.

The film is dedicated “to the memory of Roger, Osep, Gerald and Selma”, four residents who presumably passed away shortly after the film was completed las year. A reminder of the ephemerality of old age and – more broadly speaking – life itself.

Distant Constellation is showing in selected cinemas across the UK from Friday, August 17th.

The Guardians (Les Gardiennes)

Posted on by victorfraga

This is a film about females. Quiet female warriors. The unsung heroes of war. Those who never took arms and yet played an instrumental role in keeping the family and the country together. The country in question is France. The conflict is WW1, which celebrates its 100th armistice anniversary in a few months, on November 11th. The original film title (in French) Les Gardiennes emphasises that this is indeed a film about women, but the gender distinction simply doesn’t exist in English (“The Female Guardians” would sounds rather cumbersome).

Inspired by prize-winning French author Ernest Pérochon’s 1924 eponymous novel and marketed as “an affecting human drama of love, loss and resilience against the backdrop of WW1”, The Guardians portrays the women of the Paradier farm. They are under the purview of the elderly, affable and yet strict family matriarch Hortense (Nathalie Bayer). She is in charge of the farm while her two sons are sent off to the battlefield. She grudgingly hires an adolescent orphan called Francine (Iris Bry) in order to help out her daughter Solange (Laura Smet) with the rural errands.

Francine is charming and hard-working, and she begins an affair with Hortense’s son Georges (Cyril Descours) shortly before he’s sent off to fight. The problem is that Georges is already committed to a childhood sweetheart, and this new romance could compromise the stability of the household. Hortense might have to interfere and to make some very tough decisions. The senior female has to “safeguard” the nuclear family, and this could have unjust repercussions for others. In fact, the word “unjust” is repeatedly used throughout the film, as characters attempt to reconcile their personal ambitions and the security of those close to them.

Despite the women protagonists, this is not a film about female equality and emancipation – neither one of these notions were very prominent during WW1. This is a film about dignity and humanity. There are no villains. Instead, there are people who are fallible and make the wrong choices, and who choose to castigate others in the name of what they believe to be a far more important purpose.

The Guardians is a stunning visual experience, and a lot if communicated with the eyes and with gestures. The dialogues are scarce and sparse. Characters are most laconic. I haven’t read the 1924 romance, so I can’t comment on how the original dialogues were translated into images. But I can ascertain that this was an effective creative choice. There are long moments moments of reflective silence. When one of the males returns from combat (in one piece), there are no screams and epic reactions. Instead, he’s met with silence and perplexity. Hands say a lot, whether they are crunching against each other with anxiety or caressing a rock in a moment preliminary to lovemaking. The sex sequences are very realistic and moving, without slipping into tawdry voyeurism and exploitation.

The cinematography is impeccable, with every single frame of this 140-minute-film transporting viewers to a bucolic and rural France. There’s abundant sunlight, bail, cracked walls, stone houses and cows being milked. The seasonal changes are also depicted, and there are beautiful moments under a few layers of snow. There are no images at the trenches and the battlefield, except for a powerful dream sequence, suggesting that Georges could suffer from PSTD.

While Hortense epitomises the protection of the traditional family by hook and by crook, Solange is the moral bastion of humanity. Laura Smet’s performance is the strongest one in the film. Solange is the only one strong enough to confront her *unjust” mother. She’s also the only one candid enough to expose her frailties and desires. A short dialogue about her sexual desires and lack of regret in having sexual contact with an American soldier is the most powerful and liberating moment of the entire film.

The music score is signed by the iconic French composer Michel Legrand, who is now 86 years old. The movie wraps up with a beautiful and ironic song about love being like a child’s toy, in a little live performance. My only criticism of The Guardians is its duration. It could have been 30 minutes shorter. It took me at least an hour to get enraptured, and I did snooze for about five minutes before the subtle action and emotions got into my heart.

The Guardians is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, August 17th. It’s available on all major VoD platforms in November, just in time of the centenary of Armistice Day.