Michael Moore’s latest documentary starts with the US election which was a shoe in for Hillary Clinton, with the US polls predicting with 100% certainty that she would win. Except that the exit polls showed something different and, as we know, victory went to Trump. As Moore says, how the fuck did we get here?
Some of his argument is well-worn, familiar material. The Democrats overruled their grassroots, replacing popular, anti-neoliberal candidate Bernie Sanders with party elite favourite Clinton, disenfranchising many Democrat voters who, simply, didn’t see any reason to vote after that. This thesis has been recounted elsewhere, although the idea that the Democrats actually lied about Sanders’ winning voter numbers saying he’d lost perhaps hasn’t been touted so widely.
ext up, Trump’s campaign: not so much an attempt to win the presidency as to boost ratings and up his TV appearance payments – which backfired and got him sacked by the network. Faced with this situation, Trump was persuaded to attend the two rallies he’d organised and the campaign grew of its own momentum, unexpectedly demolishing first the other Republican candidates and secondly Clinton’s Democrat opposition. Both loser Clinton and winner Trump were taken aback.
But not Michael Moore. The director has previously had warned that he understood how people in places like his home town of Flint, Michigan think. And therefore how they vote. Indeed, the film’s most powerful segment tackles the pre-Trump scandal of Michigan’s governor’s Rick Snyder switching Flint’s clean water supply source from the crystal clear Lake Huron to the polluted River Flint simply because it’ll turn a higher profit. Never mind that it gives everyone irreversible lead poisoning.
But the kicker is yet to come. Moore isn’t kind to Obama either. He cites Obama’s record on drone strikes among other things.
Anyway, the then President Obama visits Flint to sort out the crisis and drinks a glass of local water. In order to show it’s potable. When all the stats say it isn’t. And when I say drinks, I mean touches the water to his lips without actually consuming any of it. Yes, it’s a stitch up between elitist Republican governor and equally elitist Democrat president. One less reason to vote for either.
Overall, however, this is a partly fascinating Flint material and partly uninspired rehash of well rehearsed arguments about Trump that add nothing new to the debate. Which is a pity because Moore has made better films and I really wanted to see him on top form tackling Trump and everything for which Trump stands.
Fahrenheit 11/9 played in the London Film Festival, where this piece was originally written, and is also in cinemas from Friday, October 19th. It’s out on VoD on Friday, February 8th.
The Cambridge Film Festival is now nearly four decades old, making it the third longest-running film festival in the country!
At this historical juncture in the UK’s relationship with Europe, the Festival strives to reflect the vast diversity and richness of European filmmaking. With 57 features (two thirds of the programme) from 19 different European countries, the selection affords fascinating insights into cultures which tend to be less familiar to us. Look out for Austrian Focus, Catalan sidebar and ‘Eye on Films’, a special showcase of emerging talent from countries such as Kosovo, Belgium and Macedonia.
Looking not only at Europe but also beyond, the Festival is to open up windows on the wider world, with features and documentaries addressing such urgent themes as the plight of migrants seeking a better future, the rise of artificial intelligence, the need to combat prejudice in all its forms, and the struggles of those trapped in repressive regimes. Even our ‘classics strand’, with its tales of US presidents in crisis, is full of contemporary resonance.
Because it’s always to decide where to begin in such a large film event, we have decided to lend you a little helping hand. Below are our top 10 dirty picks from the Festival, chosen exclusively for you. Don’t forget to click on the film title in order to accede to exclusive dirty reviews (where available). These are listed in no particular order.
An inhabitant of Istanbul claims: “in a way, street animals are our cultural symbol”. Roaming the urban streets, Istanbul’s cats live a life away from the veiled domesticated environments associated to them in the West. Cared for by the inhabitants of the city, these animals are never far from adoration. However, the community’s attention towards such cats runs deeper than simply feeding them; it exposes Istanbul’s deep understanding of nature and its historicity. Directed by Ceyda Torun, who grew up in Istanbul in the 1980s, ths documentary flows poetically and reminds one of such ‘city symphonies’ as Mark Cousin’s I Am Belfast (2015) and Terence Davis’ Of Time and the City (2008).
Set in present-day Prishtina (the capital of Kosovo), The Marriage (also pictured at the top of this article) is the story of an impossible love. It’s also the very first LGBT film from Kosovo ever. Anita (Adriana Matoshi) and Bekim (Alban Ukaj) are adding the final touches to their wedding. Their preparations are almost complete and they will tie the knot in just two weeks. Anita has been living with the trauma of her missing parents during the Kosovo War of 1999, while Bekim is very much an established man in the city. In the course of their wedding-planning, Bekim’s secret ex-lover from the past, Nol (Genc Salihu), returns from France. His return changes course of events and establishes a new connection between characters.
Terry Gilliam’s intended magnum opus is a very divisive film. DMovies’ editor Victor Fraga wasn’t particularly keen on it. He wrote: “It’s gooey inside, deflated and burnt. Its texture isn’t consistent. But it’s still digestible with some very tasty bits“.
Ian Schultz begs to differ. He travelled all the way to Paris in order to watch the movie. He wrote: “Like all of Gilliam’s films, despite being grand, it’s intensely personal. Toby and Quixote portray the director’s two sides: Toby personifies the deeply frustrated would-be artist whose passion and determination have been channelled into commerce, while Quixote is the dreamer whose life was enriched and yet damaged by the story”. Read his article by clicking here.
Now it’s your turn to make up your mind and decide whether you like it or not!
It’s big clit vs small dick energy in Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Suspiria, an aesthetic update of the original by turns confounding and magical – that neon soaked Argento look is replaced by the muted palette and instagram friendly architectural design/framing of Guadagnino. There’s enough glass brick on display to make you think twice about throwing stones, and enough conflicting, contradictory messages by this movie to have you frustrated, stupefied and eager to come back for more.
But there’s fairly little DNA shared with the Argento original. A fondness for split-focus dioptre shots aside, the closer comparative point is Possession, that masterpiece of writhing bodies in Berlin. That’s because Suspiria is far less interested in copying the emotions of the original than it is with taking a few of the themes and ideas (particularly that of displacement and cultism) through a modern lens.
How far would you go for your green card? How much is the American dream worth? Romanian nurse Mara (Mălina Manovici) wants to settle in the US because she feels that the country could offer her and her 10-year-old child Dragos more opportunities than her homeland. She isn’t fleeing poverty or war. She came to the US in a work placement for six months, and then succeed to marry one of her patients. She’s well trained and educated. But she’s soon to discover that the “Land of the Free” isn’t quite ready to welcome her with open arms.
The story starts in the impoverished and aptly-named rural town of Inviolata (Italian for “inviolable”), where a group a group of peasants work as sharecroppers in conditions analogue to slavery for the pompous Marquise De La Luna and her son the eccentric Marquis De La Luna. The decrepit buildings and working conditions suggest that the town is in the South of Italy, although its exact location is never revealed. Lazzaro helps both the peasants and the bosses without drawing much attention to himself. He’s prepared to do anything for this people. He will offer his very blood is asked to do it.
Suddenly, De La Luna’s “great swindle” is uncovered. She’s arrested and the farm abandoned. The peasants move to the city in search of pastures green. Then the film moves forward several years. The actress Alba Rohrwacher, who happens to be the director’s elder sister, plays different characters at the different times. Everyone ages. Except for Lazzaro. He looks exactly the same; even his plain clothes remain unchanged.
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7. If (Lindsay Anderson, 1968):
Lindsay Anderson’s biting satire on public school life and the British establishment is generally reckoned as one of the best – and most subversive – British films ever made. The mesmerising Malcolm McDowell plays the leader of a group of disaffected sixth-formers who plot to bring armed revolution to their school Founders Day. A brilliant distillation of the spirit of 1968, a legend of popular culture, and a must for anyone who has ever felt stifled in school uniform.
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8. Malcolm is a Little Unwell (Malcolm Brabant/ Trine Villemann, 2018):
This film chronicles the descent into madness of award-winning BBC foreign correspondent Malcolm Brabant after he receives a routine yellow fever vaccine required for an assignment in Africa. He begins hallucinating and starts to believe he is the new Messiah, being directed by the ghosts of dead friends who, like him, covered the siege of Sarajevo. Brabant suffers several relapses, psychotic episodes and bouts of treatment in psychiatric hospital. He captures one episode on camera himself, while his wife Trine Villemann keeps video diaries in order to document his transformation…
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9. Roobha (Lenin M. Sivam, 2018):
A unique romantic tale that deals with the complexities of gender identity. Roobha, a trans-woman, struggles to find her place after being ostracized by her family. Her chance encounter with a family man, Anthony, leads to a beautiful romance. But their blissful relationship soon comes crashing down for reasons not their own. Roobha is a beautiful film that confronts the transgender stigma and biases that exist within the Tamil community. Although revered in ancient times as incarnates of the Mohini, transgender members of the community now often find themselves ridiculed and stigmatised.
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10. Miss Dali (Ventura Pons, 2018):
Salvador Dalí’s complex personality is thoroughly explored in Ventura Pons’s luminous biopic. Based on the memories of Dalí’s sister, who studied for some years in Cambridge, she recounts her life with the famous painter with her British friend. Ventura Pons met Dalí on many occasions as they both admired the Catalan village of Cadaqués, background to many of Dalí’s paintings and to Pons’s beautiful film.
Getting the disability biopic right can be a difficult task. Lean too hard on the struggle and it can feel exploitative, lead too hard on the sentimentality and it can feel mawkish. Life Feels Good, directed by Maciej Pieprzyca, manages to avoid these pitfalls to discover the deeply human story underneath. Depicting one Polish man’s struggle with cerebral palsy from 1987 to almost the present day, Life Feels Good is a heartwarming and uplifting tale that never softens the edges and is that much stronger for it.
We start with Young Mateusz (Kamil Tkacz) in the 1980s, visiting the doctor with his mother (Dorota Kolak). The prognosis isn’t good. Claiming to give an objective opinion about his condition, the female medic declares that Mateusz will never improve and is better off at a hospital for the mentally ill. Naturally, his mother disagrees and takes him straight home. There he stays with his two siblings and his kind father (Arkadiusz Jakubik), who may drink too much but really cares for his son and often points out to him the names of the constellations in the sky. But when his father dies, and Mateusz (now played by Dawid Ogrodnik) becomes too heavy to be carried by his mother, he has is taken to an institute for the mentally ill.
The story is a familiar one that gathers its strength from the power of its performances and the way it is framed. Maciej Pieprzyca often films in single takes, allowing the emotion of each scene to speak for itself. By not shying away from the horrific reality of not being able to walk or talk, we are invited to empathise with Mateus’s struggle. The resulting message is a simple yet profound one: don’t judge someone merely on their outward appearance.
Mateusz, who also narrates the story, is a very smart and capable lad, only he doesn’t have the right means to communicate. He is like Christy Brown, dramatised in My Left Foot (Jim Sheridan, 1989). Also, just like Daniel Day-Lewis’ character, Mateusz, as a great fascination with sex. Yes, disabled people have a libido, too. In a manner that would perhaps be crass in a conventional biopic, we are shown his obsession with women’s breasts, the camera often highlighting them from his eye-level. But women are more than just something to be ogled at here, his relationships, first in childhood and then again at the institute, giving him a brief respite from the banality of his regular life. These scenes are the best in the film, giving us levity, heart and heartbreak, often within the same short space of time.
Spanning a time when the nation went from communism to capitalism, a one-party state to fair elections, Mateusz’s struggle to communicate mirrors the nation’s own progress. This isn’t stressed in any real allegorical way (in fact, when Mateusz’s father wants to go out to celebrate, his mother tells him that he has to fix the lock) but does helps to give the film a certain historical flavour – also helped by the subtle changes in period design.
This kind of films either succeed or fall apart as a result of their central performance. Dawid Ogrodnik does a great job here of balancing solid character work with nailing the tics and behaviours of someone with cerebral palsy. Crucially he doesn’t go over-the-top with any of the mannerisms, but conveys large amounts of emotion with his eyes alone. Mateusz is a strong, intriguing character not because of his disability but despite it. By focusing on character first, and circumstance second, Ogrodnik and Pieprzyca have crafted a deeply-empathetic tale that shows the importance of always looking beyond the obvious to find what’s actually there underneath.
While you’re wondering about why Peter Jackson’s assemblage of Great War archive footage put together in collaboration with London’s Imperial War Museum should be in 3D, he opens his film with a tiny, mid-screen window-boxed image of soldiers marching to war. The greyish white piece of archive footage is in 3D and we are – to use a well-worn phrase – looking through a window on the world.
The window grows larger, filling first the Academy (4:3) frame and then the full wide-screen image. At various points in its running length the film switches back to Academy, but unusually for me, I found the experience so engrossing that i didn’t notice the change until after it had happened.
As for the 3D conversion, it definitely adds something on the level of involving you in the footage: this is one to see with the glasses as a 2D version wouldn’t gave the same impact.
Jackson starts off his soundtrack with nothing but readings from extracts of testimonies from those who attended WW1 as soldiers. So just black and white archive images and spoken word on the soundtrack nothing else.
The testimony snippets cover a whole range of subjects – what people were doing when war was declared (playing football with a German on the team and deciding not to call him The Enemy ’til tomorrow), younger boys lying that they were 19, army boots which came in sizes that didn’t fit but could be softened up by urinating in them, marching round the town and scamming hapless locals to join up. It’s compelling, but you wonder how long word, footage and nothing else can sustain a film.
Then we get to the Front and the fighting and Jackson plunges us into the full horror of war by colourising the 3D footage to make it feel that much more real and adding in all sorts if sound effects – shells flying, bombs exploding and so on. I’ve seen countless war or violent action films over the years, but very little as harrowing as this.
(Quick aside: the one film that was actually more harrowing still was another Imperial War Museum production, their restoration of the British propaganda film German Concentration Camps Factual Survey (Alfred Hitchcock, Sidney Bernstein, Baron Bernstein, 2014), intended to show the Germans how they’d been exterminating the Jews in the death camps, complete with footage by the first Allied cameramen who went in there not knowing what they’d find.)
So, anyway, there are bombs blowing up. Men seriously injured or dead. And lots more battlefield footage. So horrible that you wonder, why do people do it. There’s a lot of this stuff and it feels relentless. There’s testimony on feet freezing inside boots, going gangrenous and requiring amputation. There’s testimony on all sorts of other tough material too.
It’s a difficult one to judge, but although it’s often (too?) hard going, They Shall Not Grow Old succeeds in communicating what it must have been like to be member of the British army during that particular conflict. Which is quite an achievement given that many if those who fought never discussed the experience with their loved ones but instead kept silent about it often taking their experiences to the grave with them.
This is very different from the three – no six – part Lord Of The Rings adaptation Jackson made. It’s good to report that it’s a highly impressive and sensitive exploration of a very difficult subject indeed. Something of a change of pace for this maverick New Zealander but definitely with catching up with. And if you can hold out through the end credits, Jackson runs a superb recording of the soldiers’ popular prostitution song ‘Mademoiselle from Armentieres Parlez-Vous’ over them.
They Shall Not Grow Old plays in the 62nd BFI London Film Festival, where this piece was originally written. It’s out in cinemas everywhere on Friday, November 9th.
Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) was a self-styled ‘poet’, a versatile, avant-garde French artist who worked across a number of different media – novels, visual art, design, theatre, cinema as well as poetry. 1950’s Orphée is one of his most celebrated films. And rightly so.
Famed poet Orphée (Jean Marais) is going through a bad creative patch when newcomer rival Cégeste (Edouard Dermithe) is killed by two speeding, leather-clad motorcycle riders. Orphée becomes obsessed with messages transmitted over the radio of the car belonging to Cégeste’s patron the Princess (Maria Casarès) which seem to him better than any lines he’s written recently.
So obsessed with these broadcasts does Orphée become that he fails to pay enough attention to his wife Eurydice (Marie Déa) who becomes increasingly restless. Every night as he sleeps, the Princess – who a voiceover (read by Jean Cocteau himself) informs us is actually Orphée’s death – visits his room through his wardrobe mirror to watch over him. When Eurydice dies following her too being hit by the motorcyclists, Orphée must venture through the mirror and across the Zone to get her back from the underworld. But once there, he’s confronted by a panel of men judging the Princess for trying to seduce him into going there…
It’s a fairly basic production by today’s standards. The director’s understanding of the mythology is profoundly inventive. Cocteau’s ideas easily transcend not only its budgetary limitations, but also the contemporary 1950 French café society setting in which it was made. As well as the motorcycling Angels of Death, some of the amazing visuals include running the camera backwards so that, for example, dead people are resurrected for their journey into the underworld by reverse falling from horizontal on a bed to an upright standing position. People travel through the surface of mirrors, with one extraordinary close up image created by rubber-gloved hands being plunged into a vat of mercury, a special effect that would probably not be allowed today for health and safety reasons. And in the Zone, Orphée and the Princess’ chauffeur Heurtebise (François Périer) pull themselves along walls as if climbing or are sucked past them as if towards a vacuum.
Orphée is an extraordinary special effects fest, underpinned by Cocteau’s poetic sensibility, storytelling ability and visual flair. There’s no obvious reason why such seemingly extraneous material of radio messages such as “a glass of water illuminates the world” should make such an impression on both Orphée and us, but they do. Once we realise that not only is the Princess in love with Orphée but Heurtebise has fallen for Eurydice, we sympathise with each of them in their various plights as well. Plus, the film is packed with incredible images that, once seen, aren’t easily expunged from your head.
It doesn’t hurt that Cocteau knows how to cast actors who are visually striking in addition to giving compelling performances. Leading man Jean Marais is just as memorable in Orphée as he is in full beast make-up in the director’s earlier Beauty and the Beast (1946) while Maria Casarès is both elegant and enigmatic as Death.
You could beef up the effects by spending more money – but Cocteau’s inventiveness with the minimal resources available to him remains more impressive than most if not all contemporary megabudget movies. In the cinema of magic, mythmaking and enchantment, Cocteau has no equal and has left a lasting imprint on film cuture. You can see Orphée‘s influence in works as diverse as Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) and Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977). Orphée’s pursuit of the Princess who vanishes into thin air in a colonnade anticipates the sequence in Vertigo where the pursued woman vanishes into thin air in the McKittrick Hotel, not to mention the setting of a colonnade at the Spanish Mission later on. And the dogtooth pattern on Orphée’s bedroom floor prefigures the one in the protagonist’s dream in Eraserhead, not to mention the room where the dwarf appears in Lynch’s subsequent TV series Twin Peaks (1990-91).
Society has changed a lot since the 1950s. You might think the relationships in the film would benefit from being more explicit, but somehow the lack of bodily flesh on display here adds to the film’s charm: why be explicit when you can do it all with subtle hints and suggestion? The one area where the film might be made differently today is in its portrayal of women. If the strong willed Princess is impressive enough, Eurydice does little beyond pine for her husband and desire to make him happy. Also, the committee that sits in judgement on the Princess consists entirely of men, whereas today one would include both sexes. And although Cocteau himself was openly homosexual (no-one used the word ‘gay’ in his lifetime), there are no LGBT characters as such here. Perhaps in today’s more open society he’d have realised his characters slightly differently.
Nevertheless, there’s really nothing else in cinema quite like Orphée just as there’s really no-one else in the wider world of the arts quite like Jean Cocteau. Orphée is just as dazzling today as it was when first released two thirds of a century ago. The BFI’s new 2K restoration of this classic in cinemas provides the perfect opportunity either to revisit it for the umpteenth time or to view it for the very first.
Orphée is out in the UK on Friday, October 19th. Watch the BFI’s brand new film trailer below:
The premise brings Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man to mind, though if you thought Hardy’s film was shocking, wait until you’ve seen Evans’s. Gone are the bizarre folk music interludes of the 1973 classic, in their place extended scenes of blood-letting and skull-boring. In some ways, Apostle is more akin to the Hostel series than the comparatively quaint world of British folk horror, but what it does retain of its The Wicker Man-influence is a sense of mystery, human sacrifice for the Earth and creepy masks!
Even before he arrives on Erisden, Thomas Richardson (Dan Stevens) is forced to decipher clues as to how to survive and navigate the island. His mission, as a drugged-up, faithless Neil Howie, continues in this vein for at least half the film’s runtime before turning more to the supernatural and the savage.
In this way, Apostle also recalls Ben Wheatley’s Kill List (2011), beginning as one beast before morphing into another bloody and brutal creature entirely. Michael Reeves’s Witchfinder General (1968) and Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971) round out Evans’s confirmed influences, though the barn-like dwelling of Her (Sharon Morgan) evokes the thorny labyrinthine maze of Carcosa from True Detective season one.
To Evans’s credit, the mythology of Her, a perverse personification of Mother Nature, is never over-explained, though what is revealed bears similarities to the abduction of Persephone, the daughter of Zeus and Demeter, by Hades: infatuated with his niece, Hades abducted Persephone (with the despicable Zeus’s aid, it must be noted) before tricking her into returning to the underworld each year by feeding her blood-red pomegranate seeds. Whilst Persephone was gone, Demeter neglected the Earth to search for her daughter, causing Greece’s crops to perish and leaving its people on the brink of starvation.
Like Hades, Prophet Malcolm and his right-hand man Quinn (Michael Sheen and Mark Lewis Jones, respectively) abduct Her after discovering her on the Utopian Erisden. They imprison her and force her to consume the blood of animals (and later humans), which they figure begets the island’s vegetation to grow. When this fails, leaving Erisden’s inhabitants hungry and broken, Quinn ousts Prophet Malcolm as the leader of the commune, his plan to keep Her sustained involving not pomegranate seeds but seed of another very different kind.
Evans and long-time collaborator Matt Flannery capture some majestic imagery amongst the broken bones and bloodshed, and in wholly inventive ways. During a flashback to Thomas’s missionary work in Peking, Flannery’s camera begins upside down, inverting a burning cross as Thomas’s world is flipped on its head and his faith in God is shattered. One point-of-view shot, as a man’s skull cracks in a vice and semi-transparent crimson blotches the screen, is nauseating and horrific in equal measure.
Bill Milner and Kristine Froseth’s performances aren’t quite up to the same standard as those given by Dan Stevens, Michael Sheen, and Mark Lewis Jones, but Sebastian McCheyne as The Grinder is Apostle’s standout star. A beehive-like mask covering his entire head and face, McCheyne hobbles around his house of horrors like a murderous Quasimodo or deranged ape. He’s perhaps not an instant horror icon, but is possibly Apostle’s most memorable aspect, alongside its sheer amount of violence and gore. Likewise, Apostle isn’t an instant horror classic, but will probably go down as an underrated and underseen gem.
Apostle is available to view exclusively on Netflix from Friday, October 12th.
Get set for both a personal and a political journey. From the moment we enter Irene (Anna Gieslerova) and Anna’s (Judit Bardos) apartment, we are clearly in Eastern Europe during the Communist era. The evocatively decorated surroundings with ‘pull out bed’ and utilitarian furnishings, the drab clothing and simple bread and cheese breakfast immerse us immediately in this world. The country is Czechoslovakia, and the decade is the 1980s.
As Irene switches on the ‘Free Europe’ radio channel, we meet a woman who is willing to risk listening to forbidden news, glimpsing her position on the political system under which she is forced to exist. Mother and daughter share the extraordinary ability of elite athletes, giving them opportunities not afforded to most citizens. Irene, whose husband emigrated when their daughter (Anna) was small, puts all her energy into supporting Anna’s running career holding onto her plan of her daughter making her escape to the West while at the Olympics.
That this plan is not shared with her daughter is a decision that drives her to make extreme choices that are in conflict with her daughter’s wishes. The blurring of the personal and political leaves Irene making decisions that put her and Anna at risk of discovery and imprisonment, something that could ultimately jeopardise her daughter’s chance of escape. She wants Anna to have a chance at a free life, but also wants to cling onto her own principles.
The broader canvas of this story are the dilemmas that the citizens, of a Communist regime that does not do ‘fair play’, are thrust into. Anna and her mother agree to her having ‘Stromba’ injections to enhance her athletic ability. The state’s motivation is to prove that “Communist athletes are the best in the world”, Anna’s coach Bohdan (Roman Luknar) seems to want the best for his students, but is also conspiring with the secrecy of this system to protect his own job in fear of repercussions. Anna signs the agreement for the drugs programme but after being taken to hospital as a result of a collapse, decides to stop taking what she has found out to be anabolic steroids that could make her infertile. The state wants to control her body and potentially deny her the rights over her own reproductive life “everyone is watching me as if I was just muscles and weight” she proclaims.
We see Anna plucking hairs from her nipples and chin and becoming dissociated with her own body. Many of the threads in this narrative serve a dual purpose. The main players and their relationship with the state deeply compromises their relationships with each other. Anna’s relationship with Tomas (Ondrej Novak) illuminates her adolescent awareness of herself as a sexual being and also highlights the ‘class’ system that exists even in this supposedly socialist utopia. Tomas’ family have obvious wealth, displayed for us in the expanse of their apartment. At a crucial moment in the narrative Anna’s inability to obtain a permit to visit her father in West Germany is juxtaposed with Tomas’s family’s emigration to Austria.
Each of the individual performances is worthy of note, from the main characters to the smallest moments. The cinematography draws us in, Anna’s small frame perched on a giant statue of Lenin is a wonderful image of the individual being dwarfed by the enormity of the state. We care about these people and ache as they pick their way through each situation life throws at them.
Unfairness runs throughout Irene and Anna’s journey like a stick of rock. Ultimately they are united in choosing principle over personal gain, a decision that is vindicated in a final illustration of Soviet grandstanding where the government is more concerned with how they appear to the world rather than being tested in fair competition. Nothing is ‘Fair’ in this system and ‘Fair Play’ remains an important film, a very human depiction of life under an inhumane regime.
Fair Play is available for viewing at home right here and right now:
It’s big clit vs small dick energy in Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Suspiria, an aesthetic update of the original by turns confounding and magical – that neon soaked Argento look is replaced by the muted palette and instagram friendly architectural design/framing of Guadagnino. There’s enough glass brick on display to make you think twice about throwing stones, and enough conflicting, contradictory messages by this movie to have you frustrated, stupefied and eager to come back for more.
Dakota Johnson is the young American gone to Berlin to join a ballet troupe. We already know that her predecessor, played by an energetic Chloe Grace Moretz, has disappeared after ranting about a cult of witches, but rumour bounds that she has joined The Baader-Meinhof group. Johnson, shy but talented, finds more than just herself. There is, of course, some madness lurking in the halls of the Markos Dance Academy.
But there’s fairly little DNA shared with the Argento original. A fondness for split-focus dioptre shots aside, the closer comparative point is Possession, that masterpiece of writhing bodies in Berlin. That’s because Suspiria is far less interested in copying the emotions of the original than it is with taking a few of the themes and ideas (particularly that of displacement and cultism) through a modern lens. There have been countless comparisons to Aronofsky’s Mother! (2017) Which need to stop right here. Aronofsky’s edgelord antics mistake intensity with psychological intimacy. Guadagnino has far more control, each shot is charged and every cut purposeful. It’s a high style, high energy film that confounds genre, rebukes narrative threading, and is a far more exciting, bewitching film for it.
Everyone in Suspiria is in a cult. Whether it’s the Mennonite community Johnson comes from, the dance crew, the coven of witches, the terrorist cells in the background, noisily grabbing our attention, or the weight of a Nazi history that oppresses the characters, the cast is divided into cliques. Guadagnino wants to know how these interact, and whether they define us. That’s why the Berlin setting is integral, and why close ups of stamps on passports or on train lines, contain a communicative power that might catch you off guard.
Suspiria is fascinated by lines of communication and travel, about what throbbing power comes from within. That’s his egotistical flourish. The director speaks to us through these lines: love me, appreciate me. We’re all sort of in the Guadagnino cult no matter where you stand on the man’s work. I’ve always found him a difficult filmmaker, one in thrall to auteurism who uses his influences (especially the Italian New Wave and Rohmer) as a shorthand to Arthouse success. Art is always political for Guadagnino, who here uses dance like Call Me By Your Name (2017) used archaeology, or A Bigger Splash (2016) used music. To allow the character to visually express their soul. But here, he finds a groove by speaking almost directly to us. It is his dance, precise and cut in service of the story.
This is a guy who used the lush setting of his gay Merchant Ivory pastiche as an excuse to ogle the young women on the film’s periphery. It’s hard to buy him as more interested in women’s’ stories than his own. “I’m the hands” Mother Suspirium says. A vision of feminine oneness is all that the film can tentatively explore, the story representing a vague return to a more primal, earth mother vision of femininity. As the faculty and students celebrate around a vast dinner table in a cafe dressed as though Parisian (simulacrum comes up again and again), Tilda Swinton and Johnson sit at opposite ends, staring at one another in malevolence. Female pain is avoided and instead the film observes interior turmoil and bodily transience. Scenes in the mirror room where characters see themselves fully for the first time, or one key character literally pulling their chest open to expose their insides, are obvious symbolism that is actually quite welcome in such a glacially paced film.
Swinton delivers a bout of transformative performances that must be a nod to Peter Sellers in Dr Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1964). Without spoiling too much, one appearance even has her staggering out of the wheelchair “mein Mother Susperium! I can walk!”. I see Swinton in a Guadagnino movie as a stand-in for the director – perhaps due to her presenter role in his debut The Protagonists (1999). Her roles as the stern dance instructor is full Swinton, with a subtle arc that really hits at the film’s climax. But it’s her heavily made up role as octogenarian German man Dr. Jozef Klemperer that deserves plaudits. It’s through his story that Suspiria really covers its key theme of generational trauma, as his softening coincides with his reckoning. It’s a shame that the promotional trail has reduced this performance to Andy-Kaufman-esque hoaxes, because taken on its own merits Swinton is doing her best work in years.
Johnson wins the screen by doing little outside of the extraordinary physical dance moments – like her mother there is a sensuality that she is confident to let sit. Then Jessica Harper from the original shows up in a small but vital role. Her face, older, but warmly recognisable, is the perfect meta-moment for a scene about the clash of the past and present. Guadagnino frequently uses this doubling of text and meta-text, like subverting the creative effects of the original for an infrequent pulse of CGI blood. It operates as a distancing effect. There’s enough going on that even if half of the film doesn’t work for you, there are half a dozen more elements that do pay off. Guadagnino doesn’t just eschew the original, he seems disinterested in the entire supernatural element of the film. Suspiria is really about all the other stuff, and when the witches get out of its way, it works like gangbusters.
Suspiria premieres at the BFI London Film Festival taking place between October 10th and 21st. It then shows at trhe Cambridge Film Festival, between October 25th and November 1st. It’s out in cinemas on Friday, November 16th.
Raised in the countryside by her mother (Moon So-ri) but dissatisfied with life there, Hye-won (Kim Tae-ri) moves to Seoul and acquires a boyfriend. But after both of them have taken their exams, she returns to the village in which she grew up to get some space and think about her life.
The boyfriend has passed his exams and is hoping she has done the same, leaving messages on her voicemail to this effect, but she’s still waiting for her own result to come through. She doesn’t respond to his messages.
For reasons that aren’t immediately apparent, but which surface to a degree in the course of the narrative, her mother has left, presumably to start a new life now that the job of raising a well adjusted daughter is complete. She very much exists in Hye-won’s memories though, in which psychic location we she quite a bit of her onscreen, often interacting with Hye-won’s younger self as a little girl.
We also learn that her mum was a single parent after her husband died of an illness when Hye-won was small.
The girl doesn’t really miss the big city and there are compensations. There’s a boy Jae-ha (Ryu Jun-yeol) around her age who has returned from his travels to become a farmer and absolutely loves what he now does. And a girl Eun-sook (Jin Ki-joo) who works at the bank in the nearest town. The latter confesses to Hye-won her designs on the former and good-naturedly warns her to keep her hands off. The three of them spend a great deal of time together, either in pairs or as a trio.
The three-way friendship is genuinely engaging. It could very easily have been played as a love triangle but director Yim Soon-Rye never goes down this route and the film is arguably all the better for it. That was one of the reasons I personally liked this film even more than critical favourite Burning (Lee Chang-dong, 2018) which has a UK distributor whereas, at the time of writing, this one sadly doesn’t. Running through the whole thing as a non-narrative thread is Hye-won’s cooking, a series of episodes of mouthwatering Korean food porn to make you drool. There have been other movies in this select category over the years: the Danish period drama Babette’s Feast (Gabriel Axel, 1987) and Taiwanese outing Eat Drink Man Woman (Ang Lee, 1994) spring to mind.
In fact, the whole film is like a little taste – or numerous glimpses, culinary and otherwise – of paradise. That’s not just the food either – the three characters occupy a very attractive world that you can’t but help to want to live in. The pace of life is slow and moves with the seasons, the film starting off in Winter with snow on the ground and slowly working its way through the rest of the year. There’s something deeply satisfying about watching this in a movie, at least the way it’s done here. It’s a total slap in the face for the ‘get a steady boyfriend, conform’ ethos that to Western eyes seems to underpin feminine notions of Korean social mores.
The property was originally a 2002 manga in Japan by Daisuke Igarashi which spawned a two-part, Japanese big screen adaptation Little Forest: Summer/Autumn and its sequel Little Forest: Winter/Spring (both Junichi Mori, 2014). Judging by the new Korean version, it translates well between different Oriental cultures.
The result is gem which deserves to be picked up for a proper UK theatrical release. (Did I mention this before?) Not least because it may help more accurately redefine notions of manga here. Which in this case denotes rural existence, the passing of the seasons – and cookery.
Little Forest played in the 62nd BFI London Film Festival (LFF), where this piece was originally written. It can be seen again in the London Korean Film Festival (LKFF) on Saturday, November 3rd, 18.30 at the Rio Cinema, Dalston. Tickets here. Watch the film trailer below:
A teacher in a French classroom stands by the window, watching his students as they work. We share his gaze at the back of their necks, sweaty as the sun sits high in the sky. After a moment of careful consideration, he opens the window wide and jumps out. The children’s screams bounce around the audience’s mind throughout School’s Out, filmmaker Sébastien Marnier’s sophomore feature.
Following his 2016 debut, Irréprochable, Marnier remains concerned by obsessive paranoia born from a generational misunderstanding and shifting value systems in French society. Laurent Lafitte, who you probably haven’t forgotten as the neighbour in Elle (Paul Verhoeven, 2016), plays Pierre, brought in as a substitute teacher for this class of advanced students, who brag about being a year ahead in their studies and exert their special status over Pierre, who wants to teach them how to behave like normal students. But what initially seems like a Mr Chips rehash soon takes on darker shades. Lafitte has this smug, naturally sinister presence. In different circumstances, you could imagine his character spending his nights going deep on Joe Rogan videos. Instead, he’s obsessing over his students, who he has become convinced have more involvement in these occurrences than the school faculty seem to believe.
The film is good at looking. We share Pierre’s gaze, as he crushes on his best friend, on another teacher, and as he becomes ever more curious about his students. Pierre isn’t entirely out of the closet, which these savant children clock on to and use to imply that his interest in them has a lustful edge. And, perhaps it does. We become implicated in that look the more depraved and self-destructive it becomes. It reminded me of Alain Guiraudie’s brilliant thriller Stranger by the Lake (2013), full of slow pans and Chabrolian dread.School’s Out wraps you so tightly into its protagonist’s perspective that his reality becomes indistinguishable from the audience’s.
An ominous hum overcomes the soundtrack, as the camera pans from the sky down to take in shot after shot of vast fields, you get the impression that this is one of the first movies to bear the influence of Shyamalan’s The Happening (2008), and I mean that as a compliment. That stark sound design intrudes onto the characters’ psychology, slipping into a score reminiscent of Carpenter or Goblin. When a rhythmic alarm blares in the classroom, the students hide against a wall, clearly tired of the regular terrorism drills. “This is the third one this term,” a student blankly tells Pierre. With children beginning to take a stand against these practices, these scenes take on a post-Parkland context that isn’t pursued as the entire end of the film, but rather, is one element of a piece that observes a post-millennial revolution from the outside.
When one of the children is bullied, kids in the background quietly film on their phones. Only in French movies do you see buffed up school teachers showing for work in a tight black tee, or getting into a fistfight with a student on the playground, or huffing fags by the basketball court. But this lack of boundaries is precisely what makes the film’s moral compass so difficult and compelling to follow. The teachers are a complacent clique, oblivious to the harm they cause each other.
Marnier also clashes a use of video camera footage of environmental disasters with the plush digital photography of the main narrative, to question our immersion into the story space. As Dimitri, one of the student ringleaders says, the video camera gets at something more real or authentic, seeing the world as it really is. When this group of Randian teenagers stare into the quarry where they meet to practice improving their pain threshold, I couldn’t help but think of the site as like Galt’s Gulch, the objectivist paradise at the heart of Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged.
Their self-isolation asks questions about environmentalism as egotism. While it’s hard to argue that fear for our future is the same as objectivist self-preservation, Marnier might be arguing that wokeness as superiority impinges messaging from reaching the layman, as we see in that bullying scene. While Marnier toys with the children’s malevolence, he withholds their perspective, keeping their motives in the shadows for long enough to constantly suggest Machiavellian intent. But it’s a distraction.
Marnier has presented a slight of hand. The final scene, one of abject terror shot in the lush surroundings of a local lake, presents the relief of our paranoia proved right. The only display of emotion is in that final scene: a reality, a reckoning. Lafitte is framed alongside the children; they are the same now. Its something like an ending of submission, an inevitable nightmare that brings the whole film’s mess of images and messages into sharp focus. What a film for right now.
School’s Out shows at the 62nd BFI London Film Festival, taking pl;ace between October 10th and 21st.
There is much to be made from death leading to life. Tonio (Chris Peters) is a 21-year-old finding joy through photography. His ambitious father, novel writer Adri (Pierre Bokma), has a differing view on life, while his wife Mirjam (Rifka Lodeizen) plays the peacekeeper in what still appears to be a functional family unit. The film cuts quickly to the untimely death Tonio undergoes and the grief his parents have to endure from now on.
At times the film tries to find answers to grief, an unanswerable commotion, and the performances are stellar. A cutback to the past shows two new parents finding joy sleeping with their new baby. A follow-up shot of the pair, decidedly older looking, drink themselves silently to sleep. There are measures and contradictions here, a senseless death has driven them further apart and closer together.
Bokma is particularly good, fixated on uncovering his boy’s final steps, whatever the cost. Huddled over notebooks, ideas jotted, thoughts plodding, the actor gives a very nuanced performance of a man aged over every parent’s worst nightmare. A hallucinogenic funeral sequence feels especially testing; it demonstrates the sleepiness feeling the parents experience to the audience, scoped in a similar manner to The Beatles Magical Mystery Tour. The scene ends with Bokma, starved of affection, recounting the last time hehugged and kissed his child.
The film operates in an effective non linear manner, changing from the brightly lit kitchen where Tonio informs his mother of a girl he’d like over to photograph forwarding to the same kitchen, now darker, where same said mother declines telephone calls to the outside world. Through his journey, Bokma finds out about his son’s love for vodka (a drink he savoured at parties) and his eager and earnest attempts to seduce a girl he fancied.
Elsewhere, his excessive drinking becomes apparent sitting on a table, his heavy gut open and his bare chest exposed in his private kitchen. Tonio, by contrast, is ordinarily handsome and free spirited, photographing each assignment he is given with excitement. Long haired in rock star regalia, Tonio is everything his father will never again be.
The film ends on an ambiguous note, where Bokma overlooks his sons drawings and personal objects, little indicator of whether the audience should feel happy or sad about the characters fates. But when it hits, it really hits and this is a tale about death that will make you grateful for life.
