Month: January 2019

All is True

Posted on by victorfraga

While it is known that in 1613 Shakespeare returned from London to his birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon following the destruction by fire of his theatre, the Globe, there is no record of this period. Ben Elton, the scriptwriter, has created a touching evocation of this time, focusing on Shakespeare’s efforts to rebuild his relationships with his wife, Anne, and his two grown-up daughters, Judith and Susanna.

The central parts are played by actors famously distinguished for their work in Shakespearean drama, Judi Dench, Ian McKellen and Kenneth Branagh, who also directs the film. Each one of them a national treasure per se. In the depth of their portrayal of the characters, they succeed in presenting a rich family narrative much affected by the strong influence of the provincial values of the time. Shakespeare (Branagh) carries the stigma of his father’s poor management of money. The women of the family reveal the effect of discrimination against women. His wife Anne (Dench) is unable to read or write and their daughters are also denied education only available to boys.

While Shakespeare argues that he has done well by the family, ensuring that they have a lovely home and the financial means to enjoy their lives, the sense that the family left in Stratford felt abandoned is confronted. What hangs over them all is the death of Judith’s twin Hamnet some years earlier, at the age of just 11. This provides the central thread of the film. The background to the early death of Shakespeare’s only male heir is sensitively explored and allows for the development of changed relationships within the family. Gender, religion and social status all play a part.

One episode dwells on a meeting with the Earl of Southampton (McKellenn) who had travelled to see Shakespeare. The affection and mutual respect which they hold for each other does not prevent the Earl pointing up the social distance which exists, despite Shakespeare’s attempt to address the problem by buying his own coat of arms.

The production values are outstanding, as is the costume design. The interiors reflect the darkness of the period – the sitting room heated by a brightly burning log fire and illuminated by many candles. Wooden floors accentuate the sound of people moving about. The enclosed interiors contrast with rural landscapes and cloudscapes which provide the backdrop to Shakespeare’s efforts to create a garden in his son’s memory.

The pace of the narrative is rather slow, as befits a study of a man in the final phase of his life. For those familiar with the plays, identifying the source of the quotes which Branagh incorporates in his dialogue adds to the enjoyment of the film, but familiarity with Shakespeare’s plays is not essential to enjoying the film.

All is True is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, February 8th. On Netflix on Sunday, January 3rd.

Ray & Liz

Posted on by victor@dmovies.org

What about this, a piece of British kitchen sink that continues the spirit of Bill Douglas and Terence Davies, without leaning on the crutch of miserablism or heavy-handed political metaphor. Ray & Liz does go to some difficult, dark places, but with a sense of humour, a generous spirit, and a dedication to recapturing the memories of youth. This is photographer Richard Billingham’s reminiscence of childhood in the Black Country, in the West Midlands. Two notable, heartrending stories tied together by present day Ray, who sits around his bedroom drinking himself to death while a neighbour provides him with homebrews. He thinks back to his ’80s home life with his wife Liz, raising kids while sinking into poverty.

But the first story barely features Ray and Liz at all. It’s mostly a two-hander between the amazing British character actor Tony Way as Ray’s simple but sweet brother, charged with looking after the kids, and Sam Gittins as a nihilistic punk who has other ideas. It’s a dynamic straight out of the great Mike Leigh’s Meantime (1984), Gittins channelling one of Gary Oldman’s breakthrough performances.

As played by Ella Smith, Liz is a sensational character, a force of nature who dominates every scene she’s in and whose presence hangs over the film when she’s offscreen. With a flick of the wrist or a well-timed wince, everything that’s going on inside her head comes across, Billingham’s tight photography capturing the air sucking out of a room. Often when a photographer turns to movies, the results can feel somewhat airless, but the style of Billingham’s work is part sitcom, part art-house, all coming together into a complete vision.

The result is the feeling of being told stories second-hand. It’s when you’re visiting an old family member and they tell you about what their cousin used to up to. It’s when you dig through the loft and find a shoebox full of old toys. Because when someone tells you about their past, the rarely contextualise it in a political era. They are far more likely to tell you about specific faces, places, and things. And that’s what Gillingham does. Bad art adorns the walls of this flat. Liz clearly loves pictures of animals, they’re all over her mugs, they’re the jigsaw puzzles she struggles with. This art provides a counterpoint to the events on screen, with effective cuts from a nosebleed to a painting of a caveman poking his own nose. It’s as though the room is speaking to the characters.

By packing so much detail into these memories, Ray & Liz manages to avoid the cliches of the genre. There are no clips of Thatcher on television or mention of the mines closing to set the scene. We don’t need it. Garish ’70s carpets, a cooker black with dust, even a squashed kitchen roll instead tell the viewer the entire socio-economic situation of the characters. In the final third of the film, the characters do come into more direct contact with the system, but it’s not trying to raise eyebrows or stir tweets in the way that recent Ken Loach tends to. It’s Billingham’s story, and the realities of that aren’t turned into melodrama or sermon. And it feels all the more like a remarkable depiction of Britain for it.

Ray & Liz showed at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, when this piece was originally written. On UK cinemas on March 8th. On VoD on Monday, July 8th.

Bathtubs over Broadway

Posted on by victorfraga

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM ROTTERDAM

In this delightful comedy documentary, ex–Late Show With David Letterman editor and first-time feature director Dava Whisenant introduces us to the show’s longest serving writer, Steve Young, and principally, his obsession: the industrial musical. These were full-blown Broadway-style productions for companies like Ford and Xerox, delivered as one-off performances in conference rooms. To give you an idea, one of Steve’s favourite songs is My Bathroom, from the musical The Bathrooms Are Coming. It begins with the lyrics “My Bathroom, my bathroom is a very private place”. They are mad.

David Letterman, one of the great ironists of all time, poked at the form of the Talk Show with such minute dexterity that, during its glory days, it became impossible to tell what was real, fake, smart, dumb. But Bathtubs Over Broadway is about when irony becomes sincerity, which will be a resonant narrative for cynics in a millennial ‘post-post-post-irony’ world. Steve starts out hunting these musicals down because he finds them so funny (he discovers The Bathrooms Are Coming while looking for material for a Late Show segment) but as he delves deeper into this hidden world, his affection and appreciation for the form becomes something else.

The industrial musical echoes through pop culture, filling in the blanks of Mr Show and bands like Ariel Pink. Punk legend Don Bolles and Jello Biafra also appear, superfans, two folks who Steve almost certainly never expected to be friends with. There are great scenes of them geeking out together over the deepest cuts about radiators and management techniques. It genuinely reveals something new. Something that’s more than a sexy dog chow song. It’s an entire piece of American history.

The filmmaking is not exactly what we would call dirty. But in revealing this bizarre subsection of American culture, Whisenant has made a film that lives up to the ideals of the dirt. We touch lightly on the death of American industry, with clips of General Motors in Flint, Michigan as a marker for the change, which caused the decline of the industrial musical (lower budgets, more corporate anonymity). That drama makes this a real snapshot of an American moment, a time which some wish to return to, and also one that doesn’t really exist. That’s glossed into a song and dance routine about a toilet brush.

Bathtubs in Broadway manages to capture a huge time of change in Steve’s life, with the end of Letterman, his building of friendships with figures from the industrial musical scene, and the release of his book. But there’s also an off-the-cuff reference to a separation, to a wife that we’ve heard about but who doesn’t appear. The movie is perhaps too respectful of Steve to go prying into this stuff, but at the same time, that perhaps holds it back from properly investigating his psychology. This is, after all, an increasingly life consuming hobby-cum-obsession, that Whisenant never investigates the reasons for. Which results in a comic figure at the film’s centre who is difficult to really know. It’s a difficult negotiation.

Bathtubs Over Broadway exists in order to shine a light on the industrial musical and maybe delving further into Steve’s head would have shifted that focus, but when he’s such a central figure who is clearly searching to fill some void, you are left wondering.

The film falls prey, as have a lot of recent documentaries, of over-egging the ending, delivering a sequence that seems to wrap up all the ideas, one last check in on the interviewees making their grand statements… and then it keeps going. You could hear the audience, half reaching for their coats, slumping back down. But then Whisenant delivers her most ambitious piece of filmmaking, a full musical finale that features most of our interviewees dancing through the streets, Steve making at least two costume changes. Their singing is questionable, the lyrics corny, but its put together with such love that it achieves what musical numbers are supposed to: capturing a feeling that mere words can’t. Bathtubs Over Broadway is one of the funniest documentaries in years, and I hope it lets many more into the world of My Bathroom.

Bathtubs Over Broadway is showing at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, which is taking place right now.

Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

New York in the 1980s. Published biographer Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy) is down on her luck as she can’t secure an advance from her agent Marjorie (Jane Curtin) for a proposed book on Fanny Brice. Lee likes her whisky and is generally rude and intolerant of other people, an attitude that has scarcely helped her career. She is struggling to pay the bills and when her beloved cat gets sick, the vet won’t give her credit. In financial desperation, she takes a stack of books to a local bookseller but he’ll only buy two – and those for a paltry sum.

At this point, she’s drinking in a bar when she’s spotted by Jack Hock (Richard E. Grant) who hasn’t seen her since they were both “pleasantly pissed at some horrible book party” where, she seems to recall, something happened. He is just as self-centred and rude as she is, if somewhat more outrageous, and they hit it off.

Desperate for money, she sells a treasured personal letter from Katherine Hepburn to book dealer Anna (Dolly Wells) who is incidentally a fan of Lee’s own books. Lee realises there is money to be made and following the chance find of another celebrity letter in a public library, she starts first spicing up real letters via added postscripts then concocting entirely fake ones. Soon she’s using particular types of paper and specific typewriters to churn out fakes by the likes of “Lillian Hellman, Edna Ferber, Dorothy Parker, Judy Holliday, Louise Brooks, Marlene Dietrich and sincerely yours Noël Coward”.

Lee lets the unshockable Jack in on all this and, when her name is put on a list of sellers of fakes, enlists him to sell the home made documents on her behalf. The pair come up with a plan for her to steal documents from archives, replace them with fakes then sell the real letters. They fall out though after he housesits for her, brings a man back to the flat and generally trashes her apartment in her absence. That’s not quite why they fall out, but to reveal the exact reason would be a spoiler so we won’t go there. Meanwhile, their schemes catch up with them in the form of two FBI agents…

Adapted from the late, real life Lee Israel’s biography covering her time as a literary forger, this boasts a winsome performance from Richard E.Grant as the and who “fucked his way through New York” before succumbing to the Aids virus in later years. Far more impressive, however, is McCarthy, previously the brash and irritating comedienne in the likes of Bridesmaids (Paul Feig, 2011) and Tammy (Ben Falcone, 2014) playing an introverted woman virtually incapable of relationships beyond caring for her cherished cat.

With a deftly observed, adapted screenplay by Nicole Holofcener (at one time slated to direct this) and Jeff Whitty, this is a reasonably compelling character study of a woman possessed with an extraordinary aptitude for literary forgery, seemingly unstoppable once she discovers it. McCarthy is a revelation, whether pounding different makes of typewriter, insulting her agent or simply fussing over the cat. This may have something to do with her prior experience playing comedy and her attendant skills in comic timing: actors coming from that background (think: Steve Carell or Bill Murray) often achieve the extraordinary when required to play straight roles.

When McCarthy and Grant share the screen, there’s a palpable chemistry between them. Several other memorable performances include various minor booksellers, among them the aforementioned Dolly Wells and McCarthy’s husband and sometime director Ben Falcone, plus an archive librarian and a vet’s receptionist. The film has its flaws, among them an annoying, very conventional jazz score and lighting which tries a little too hard to be relaxing and easy on the eye. These minor defects scarcely detract from McCarthy’s deeply heartfelt and strongly nuanced performance though. She is a totally unexpected asset here and the main reason to see this film.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? is out in the UK on Friday, February 1st. Watch the film trailer below:

Diamantino

Posted on by victorfraga

Diamantino (Carloto Cotta) is the greatest football player in the world. He’s an artist on the pitch. When he gets the ball, time slows down, and giant puppies appear. He’s also one of the most brainless characters since Mr Bean. Diamantino, a broad, brilliant Portuguese comedy from Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt, presents an awakening by a figure who has not once needed to think about events beyond the pitch, when his easy life comes into contact with refugees, drone surveillance, populism and nationalism.

If that sounds potentially didactic, fear not, because Diamantino is more of a snapshot of contemporary ideas and concerns, in the mould of an Austin Powers or Happy Madison gross out comedy. That’s the immense strength of this film: cycling through genres and styles as Abrantes and Schmidt see fit. From one minute to the next, it can veer from spy territory into sci-fi, political satire, tender romance, or something else. For one montage of Diamantino’s growing relationship with his adopted son the film suddenly adopts Terrence Malick-like cinematography and a track from The Tree of Life (2011) soundtrack plays.

It’s that free-form, Richard Lester energy that lets Diamantino get away with a nonsense plot set in a world slightly adjacent to our own. Diamantino, played with vacant joy by Cotta, is a clear Cristiano Ronaldo surrogate, though it’s not sure how far the parallel goes. Ronaldo is currently under investigation on rape allegations for a 2009 incident. The virginal Diamantino is no monster. He’s a such an empty vessel as to just let everyone in his life walk over him and mold him into whatever image they need, form his manipulative twin sisters to the Portuguese National Front.

Diamantiano is some sort of Prince Myshkin (the happy-go-lucky protagonist from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot) for the Fifa: set, sweet, honest, trying to be good, but adrift in a corrupt world that has no patience for his sort. It’s also fun watching this impossibly shredded man feast on Nutella, waffles and spray cream throughout the film, a secret diet that works wonders for him.

It all kicks into gear when he adopts a young boy, who’s really a female secret agent pretending to be a Mozambican refugee, and who’s carrying on her affair with another agent who has to pretend to be a nun – it’s that kind of movie. Through the plot’s circumstances, Diamantino and Aisha each end up assuming physical aspects of the other gender. This quietly becomes a striking narrative about gender queer identity, where Diamantino discovers he can fulfil desires he didn’t even know he had.

The relationship that builds between Diamantino and Aisha has a sexual undercurrent that the movie just rolls with. There’s not enough time to wonder about morality with any of this because because Abrantes and Schmidt aren’t using their style to do more than its all just so much fun, so whether or not it means anything is quite beside the point. It builds to this kitch b-movie finale, which is absurd but bursts into a gorgeous final scene of lushious dream imagery. The clear vision of this furiously funny, accessible and over-the-top movie needs a big UK release, where its send-up of football culture, Brexit and celebrity is sorely needed.

Diamantino showed at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. On BFI Player in March (2023). Also available on other platforms.

The Mule

Posted on by victorfraga

When I wrote about David Lowery’s autobiographical The Old Man and the Gun (2018), I suggested a more contemporary revisionism, one in which a destructive and cruel white male criminal would be depicted as such, could have made for a more stimulating piece of work. With his latest film The Mule, director and leading man Clint Eastwood seems have applied such a revisionism. While Eastwood’s 90-year-old drug runner might be treated with the same admiration as Robert Redford’s elderly bank robber, his cruelty is clear to see in the way he treats his family, destruction evident in his ostracisation. Yet The Mule is a far less stimulating – and far weaker – piece of work.

This arises, in part, from The Mule’s narrative non-plausibility and Earl’s failure as a consistent, convincing main character. Based on an article published in The New York Times, the film follows Earl (Clint Eastwood), a bankrupt horticulturalist, who inadvertently winds up transporting cocaine for a Mexican cartel. The humorously over-the-top adulation Earl’s plant-loving peers have for him early on is forgivable, but Earl’s recruitment into the cartel by a low-ranking member is too convenient and too contrived to accept as credible.

Earl isn’t the least bit suspicious of what he has gotten himself into, even when confronted by three burly gangbangers clutching automatic rifles, and remains unconvincingly oblivious to the illicit nature of his cargo until his third run – all this despite proving himself wily enough to deter a police sniffer dog just moments after discovering his vehicle’s trunk has been loaded with cocaine. Earl is a poorly conceived character, at once a bumbling, doddery codger and a mentally-competent, physically-able free spirit.

His competence stretches beyond dealings with the cops; sexually, Earl is all there. He engages in two threesomes, leaving all four of his sexual partners satisfied. So great is Earl’s sexual magnetism that women a quarter of his age gravitate towards him whether he’s shuffling about awkwardly on a dancefloor, offending his family at wedding receptions or baring his wrinkled chest at pool parties. Eastwood, presumably, is going for a roguish sort of charm in such scenes but the results – besides being unbelievable – feel vain and creepy. An overlong pool party scene is particularly uncomfortable, with three separate shots beginning on the back of a nameless, faceless woman’s head before skulking down to their g-stringed derrieres, one of which Earl clenches with self-regarding glee.

As with his womanising, Earl’s unintentional racism and homophobia are treated as an adorable, endearing aspect of his personality. Perhaps not surprisingly, given Eastwood’s personal attitude towards racism. Although Earl is quick to apologise, and genuine in doing so, when his inappropriate remarks are challenged, the speed at which Eastwood moves on from such scenes denies the matters at hand any complexity, suggesting complicated issues like racism can be solved with a simple apology. The one exception is a scene in which a dark-skinned man is pulled over by Bradley Cooper’s DEA Agent Colin Bates: placing his hands on the hood of his truck, the man explains to Bates that this is statistically the most dangerous moment of his life. The scene, however, is too on-the-nose to create any lasting emotional impact, undermining its added complexity. Eastwood is far more successful when highlighting Earl’s white privilege, Earl’s ability to transport record-breaking amounts of narcotics without a second thought as to whether he will be stopped by the police, something Eastwood accomplishes with a degree of subtlety.

In spite of all this, Earl’s arc is redemptive. He comes to appreciate the importance of putting his family first and repairs his familial relationships, left in tatters by years on the road (…as a horticulturalist?). While this sounds admirable enough, Earl’s redemption feels unearned. Ex-wife Mary (Dianne Wiest) offers Earl forgiveness so easily it’s doubtful even revelations of Earl’s multiple threesomes would have prevented her from doing so. Mary stands by her man, in the very Tammy Wynette sense. Paradoxically, Earl’s atonement for leaving his family behind sees him leave his family behind to deal with the mess he has created

Other conflicts, like that between Earl and his handler-turned-friend Julio (Ignacio Serricchio), are neglected entirely and lack any sort of satisfying payoff. It’s fitting, in a way, given this is a film about a man who neglects the things most important to him. Eastwood, to his credit, doesn’t neglect the destructive, cruel tendencies of his main character, but handles them so ineptly he might as well have.

The Mule is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, January 25th.

Is it acceptable to portray a horrific real crime in film?

Posted on by victorfraga

One sympathises with Vincent Lambe. How could one not? A simple scroll through Twitter exhibits the cruellest and most vicious of comments levelled at a filmmaker whose newest work many refuse to watch. You can read them here, here and here, plus there was a flurry of further inflammatory comments (and also insults) outside these tweet threads. This little online commotion waas in response to my review of his latest film Detainment, published last week. Admittedly, he didn’t choose the nicest or easiest of stories to deal with. Lambe opened up to controversy by openly dealing with the James Bulger case, a murder that still amazes, horrifies and disgusts those who remember it.

I’m not one of those people. Born in Ireland in August 1993, time and geography has impeded any firsthand knowledge of the senseless Liverpool killings which occurred that February. My knowledge on the subject was rudimentary when I reviewed the film that many were calling for it to be withdraws from the Oscars. What I saw astonished me.

A work of naked reality, temerity and nuance, Detainment is a movie which grabs its viewers with the opening shot of two boys playing truant on the escalators. It is by no means of piece of exploitation cinema. Whisking sweets into their pockets, the boys amuse themselves with a toy soldier, breaking its body in half with glee. The film cuts to a procedural room, a series of officers incredulous that these children, fresh faced in appearance, could murder a toddler. Through memories and flashbacks, the pair walk with a child, watching him stumble, letting onlookers turn to their daily needs, offering him the stations of his own crucifix. Biblical in theme, the film offers a grounded selection of setups and cuts, mindful that this was a true event.

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Children or devils?

A quick click through Google details that the police transcripts which it purports itself on are the real quotes. Verbatim, the leads recite words that Jon Venables and Robert Thompson recorded on tape. Ely Solan’s Jon is teary-eyed, Leon Hughes’s Robert isn’t, the procedural scenes differ from the disconcerting to the vomit inducing. Lambe portrays these developments as realistically as Steven Spielberg did detailing the atrocities of the Holocaust in Schindler’s List (1993) and the actions from Israeli retaliation in Munich (2005; pictured above), using that adjective rarely seen in cinemas predicated to screening Disney and Marvel films: truth.

A truth so unsettling and harrowing, asking viewers not to view their subjects as devils, but children. Children that acted cruelly, horrifically, sadistically and stupidly. Tara Breathnach’s mother doesn’t know how to hug her son after discovering what Jon has done, but cannot bring herself to hate the child she bore. Will O Connell’s detective gleans surprise from his eye overlooking a wanted poster for the two murderers, incapable of comprehending the youth of the killer he is driving to prison. Lambe isn’t making a film about murder; it’s a film about people. “I think people are so used to thinking of these boys as being evil” Lambe admitted to The Standard “that when they start to see something authentic it doesn’t sit very well with them.”

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Monstrous killers in film

Authenticity isn’t always a trait associated with cinema, but, used correctly, it’s one of the more powerful and respectful means by which a message can be delivered. Lambe is much more respectful of his subjects than the popular sitcom Gavin & Stacey (which asked its viewers to enjoy a Christmas With The Shipman’s, despite the deliberate allusions the surviving families had to endure every subsequent Christmas thanks to a real life Shipman) and the subversive Inglorious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino/Eli Roth, 2009; a film featuring Jewish soldiers more aggressive in their killings than the Nazis ) were. Directing a film about killers does not equate to condoning their actions. It just acknowledges these actions happened with the tools available to a filmmaker.

Patty Jenkins’ oeuvre resonates beyond D.C. comics. In 2003, she unveiled Monster (pictured above), a biopic concerning serial killer Aileen Wuornos, a former prostitute who executed in Florida in 2002 for killing six men. It detailed the characteristics Wuornos displayed, traits of antisocial personality disorder and borderline personality disorder within her. Later, David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007; pictured below) detailed the habits and killings an anonymous serial killer enacted, exploring a manhunt that soured the 1960s for many. Harrowing the subject matters are, Zodiac still proved Fincher’s most rewarding work since Seven (1995), while the stellar Charlize Theron provided one of her steelier performances playing the inexpiable Wuornos (Theron was deservedly awarded with an Oscar in 2004). You’ll frequently find both of these films in books detailing the greatest cinema has to offer audiences.

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The Silence of the Lambe

Yet Detainment’s reception has been one of anger and disgust, rather than critical acclaim. Denise Fergus (Bulger’s grief stricken mother) has admonished the Academy for admiring a film about her son’s death. An online petition heralded by Fergus drew more than 100,000 signatures, asking for its withdrawal. President Michael D.Higgins’ Twitter met with uproar when he congratulated Detainment amongst the Irish films nominated for an Oscar. A lot of it is understandable. For all his artistic proclivities and cinematic gifts, Lambe omitted to inform Fergus of his intention’s to make a film detailing a memory far too close for Fergus’s comfort. It was an oversight Lambe has subsequently apologised for, though it might have come at a cost of his public cache.

None of this takes away from what is an exceptional 30 minutes of art. Tight, claustrophobic, searing, the film stars two exceptional leads, actors with abilities which should serve them in their impending careers as actors. Solan is animalistic, Hughes is minimalistic, both are terrific. They find within their characters the authenticity and truth Lambe aspired for, and for that, it deserves its place in the Academy’s shortlist.

On the Basis of Sex

Posted on by victorfraga

It’s 1956 and Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Felicity Jones) is one of the nine female students at Harvard Law School. In this suited and booted world of more than 500 male students, a dress raises many eyebrows. Ruth has to carry the heavy burden of the proof of competence. It’s as if she bore the weight of every single American female on her shoulders. The sex discrimination isn’t subtle. The dean Erwin Griswold asks her and the other females: “what made you decide to take a place that could have gone to a male student?”

Parallel to her studies, Ruth has to look after her young daughter Jane and her ailing husband Marty (the heartthrob Armie Hammer, who bears very little physical resemblance with the real-life Marty), who had been diagnosed with cancer. She also takes classes on behalf of her husband (he’s also a law student). Miraculously, Marty survives and both of them graduate in law, having transferred to Columbia University at the end of their studies.

We than move to 1970. The remaining three quarters of the film focus on the landmark Charles Maritz case, a Denver man denied caregiver tax reduction for looking after his mother because he of his sex (the word “gender” wasn’t widely used back then, hence the film title). Ruth decides to embrace the seemingly dead-in-the-water case because she believes that by fighting gender discrimination on behalf of a man she would set a precedent for both sexes, and achieve a milestone in the history of gender equality and women’s rights. Back then, discrimination on the basis of sex wasn’t just legal, it was also normative. We soon learn that nearly 200 laws across the country were constructed upon gender bias.

From now on, you can work out the rest. Underdog that no one takes seriously embraces an impossible cause and makes history, against all odds. Almost everyone discourages Ruth, including her closest associates and male peers at the American Civil Rights Union. Even the notorious feminist judge Dorothy Kenyon dismissed her cause. Her old Harvard dean resurfaces and he is particularly offensive, and committed to upholding the conservative legacy of justice. Only her husband and daughter believed that she could succeed.

The dialogues are very sharp and punchy, a real American law history masterclass. The debate becomes increasingly angry and sharp-tongued in the final quarter of the movie, when it becomes mostly a courtroom drama. Ruth fights the Moritz in the Supreme Court, the same institution to which Bill Clinton appointed her 23 years later, and where she still works to this date, aged 85.

On The Basis of Sex raises a lot of legal and philosophical questions. What should change first: minds or the law? Is there an equivalence between race and gender equality? How fast and how often should the justice system and the law be prepared to change? And perhaps more significantly: is gender discrimination ever justifiable? One of the Supreme Justice reminds Ruth: “the word ‘woman’ is not mentioned a single time in the American constitution”, to which she promptly replies: “nor is the word ‘freedom'”.

I do, however, harbour a few reservations about On The Basis of Sex. Firstly, the movie opens with a “This film was inspired by real events”. I find that a lame excuse for historical inaccuracy, and a very awkward device given that this is a biopic of a real person, and all the characters are identified by their real name. It’s the equivalent to saying: “this is based on a real story, but we have romanticised infused it with so much saccharine that at times it might be hardly recognisable”.

But this isn’t the biggest problem. My major concern is about the idolisation of a judge, be it a progressive or a liberal one, at least while they are still alive and active. The real Ruth appears at the end of the film walking up the steps of the Supreme Court like a monarch or a celebrity. Judges should remain solemn and away from the spotlight. Read my review of Oscar-nominated RBG (Betsy West/ Julie Cohen, 2019; still showing in selected cinemas and also available on VoD), where I explain in more detail exactly what I mean, and why I think that films like these two represent a sheer perversion of the justice system.

On the Basis of Sex is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, February 22nd.

The Hole in the Ground

Posted on by victorfraga

Sarah (Seána Kerslake) and her young son Chris (James Quinn Markey) move to a very rural Ireland seeking to break away from a recent past of unfortunate events. Their large and creepy house is as remote as it gets, completely isolated in the middle of the woods. And there’s plenty of renovation work to be carried out, and Sarah looks determined to do it on her own. One evening, Chris disappears into the woods. Sarah attempts to fetch him but instead comes across a giant hole in ground. Given its shape, one would assume it was caused by a meteor crash. Despite its enormous dimensions, the titular hole remains hidden amongst the dense vegetation, and other human beings seen unaware of it.

Chris eventually returns home on his own, but is behaviour has changed. He has become distant and cold. Sarah begins to believe that the boy who returned isn’t her son at all. An eerie old lady called Mareen had a similar experience with her son decades earlier, and he ended up dead. As a consequence, Noreen lost her sanity and is now found aimlessly wandering the countryside roas most of the time. Her figure is scarier than most paranormal entities. Could Sarah’s fate be the same? Will Chris end up dead, and Sarah deranged and catatonic?

The Hole in the Ground uses a very conventional suspense formula. Borderline supernatural events (such as Noreen’s bizarre appearances in the middle of the road) take place, repeatedly raising the question: is our protagonist going mad or is something truly supernatural taking place? Females are historically associated with hypersensitivity, hysteria and madness. They are the perfect victims of gaslighting. Plus, females are inherently ambiguous. The narrative arc of Hole in the Ground is effectively constructed upon this ambivalence (madness versus reason).

In the second half of the movie, the apparently supernatural events escalate. Chris has become so strong that he’s able to throw his mother across the kitchen. But did that really happen or was Sarah just dreaming? The director skilfully blends reality, dream and allegory in order to avoid answering this question and many others too soon. As you result, you will remain at the edge of the seat until the final resolution is unveiled. The film ending might raise some eyebrows and it certainly won’t answer all questions, but it’s worth sitting through the 90 minutes in order to find out what it is.

The excellent sound engineering and montage deserve a mention. The climaxes are cut just at the right point to something very trivial such as Chris slurping pasta and a cup of coffee being stirred, bringing your adrenaline level constantly up and down. The cinematography is quite impressive, and the sequences in the woods are particularly sombre and elegant.

The Hole in the Ground premiered at Sundance on Friday, January 25th. It is in cinemas across the UK on Friday, March 1st.

Roma

Posted on by victor@dmovies.org

Overwhelming, confounding, peerless. To watch Roma for the first time is to know that you’re in the presence of something special, an artist at the top of their game, a feat of formalist, analogue filmmaking, the kind of great movie that only comes along once or twice in a decade. It’s a year in the life of a family in Mexico City 1970-71, and particularly Cleo, their maid, as director Alfonso Cuarón takes the opportunity to provide the audience with an experiential roller coaster of set pieces, through high and low society, political upheaval and intimate chamber moments.

This approach has led to critical rapture (including 10 Oscar nominations, tied with the most ever for a foreign language film) but questions have also been raised about the minimisation of a largely silent maid by an upper-middle-class filmmaker. You might find those problems too, but this is a film searching for answers, rather than the open ignorance of your problematic fave. Every time Cleo seems to behave as an organic part of the family unit, by joining in conversation, or sitting with them while they watch TV, it’s stopped dead by someone giving her an order.

Cuarón never allows you to forget about the master/servant relationship, and that’s the point. Especially when the film’s exploration of Los Halcones and the Corpus Christi Massacre becomes the focal point of the narrative, these contexts of power are revealed to feed into each other. True, Cleo doesn’t talk much, but no one does. And when an outburst does finally come toward the end of the film, it is crushing, snapping Cleo’s entire psychology into place and questioning how much we have actually known about her interior life. Gladly, the Academy has seen enough in what Yalitza Aparicio and Marina De Tavira as the family matriarch do to reward their subtle work.

You have to look at this as less about a particular character than it is about the place, the time, the memory. You might think of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Weerasethakul, 2010), or Distant Voices, Still Lives (Davies, 1987), how the camera monitors these ghosts as though unbound by time. That distance is the major change in Cuarón’s style. Where he once relied on the Chivo driven, Steadicam heavy technique as means to immersion, here his distance, heavily detailed production design and costuming, and a well-timed cut creates, funnily enough, a stronger bond with the film than those twirling camera moves of his past few films.

And it’s the details that transport the movie into a poetic realm where we really do feel as though we are watching memories projected: like a man being shot from a canon, a car driving through marching band, children at a New Year party running from a man in a bear costume. The cinema scenes grabbed me. Curtains closing on a film as soon as it ends, so the credits still project onto velvet, is a little touch that puts you into the mind of a young Alfonso Cuarón. The director inserts you into his brain by inserting images from his other films, like locations from Y Tu Mamá También (2001) and a clip of an astronaut from Marooned (Sturges, 1969), which nods to Cuarón’s inspiration for Gravity (2013).

And then there’s the motif of water, from a bucket washing away dog poop to those climactic waves. Cuarón uses them like Woolf did, as a visual expression for bouts of pain and depression. But at times in Roma, water can mea n the very opposite. Because it’s a film of rhymes both visual and audible. The maximalist sound design plays a large part in how we experience and are immersed into this world. The direction is so muscular, it’s a vast undertaking of David Lean proportions where they’ve built full streets and inhabited them to create the most epic experience. That appeals to the Film Twitter bros, and Cuarón always has the tendency to lean into that stuff. But if we accept immersion as his aim, then each moment is imbued with an honest to God purpose that pays off in a way that his other similarly bloated compatriots, ‘The Three Amigos’ do not with their own recent grandiose epics. The Revenant (Iñárritu, 2015) delivers shot after shot of impact, without any camera motivation between shots. The Shape of Water (Del Toro, 2017) is like an episode of Riverdale, empty pop culture references softening the patronising social message. Roma is imposing, it loudly pronounces its cinematic lineage (the Neorealists shout loudest, Fellini and Pontecorvo especially). But it’s the real deal.

I have now seen the film three times: in the cinema, on television, and on my laptop. To complete the cycle, I really need to stream it on my phone, as Cuarón (or at least, Ted Sarandos) intended. I can’t pretend that there isn’t a best way to see it. As with any film, cinema is king. But see it wherever suits you, whenever suits you, just make sure you see it. Because this might be one for the history books.

Roma is available on Netflix and in Curzon Cinemas now!

Detainment

Posted on by victorfraga

What an opening scene! Two boys wander around a multi-storey store, snaffling sweets, running up escalators, breaking toys and sniggering mischievously. Their eyes turn to a toddler, unable to decipher or read the butcher’s sign he walks beside. It’s very clever foreshadowing, yet what happens next is scarcely believable.

But it did happen. James Bulger was denied his third birthday by a pair of 10-year olds. Abducting him at first chance, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables murdered a boy momentarily forsaken by his mother. The real-life Denise Fergus has been, understandably, critical of the film, openly disgusted that it received an Oscar nomination. No mother should ever suffer as she has, yet Vincent Lambe thoughtfully understands that she wasn’t the only parent who grieved on that day. Based on interview transcripts and records, Detainment is a harrowing look at the young convicts, neither of them anywhere close to the age of puberty, let alone adulthood.

The film’s set-up is simple. The boys are separated into differing procedural rooms. They’re asked questions about the day. Ely Sloan’s Jon is especially baby-faced, timid in his descriptions of truth versus lies. Leon Hughes’ Robert walks with much greater confidence, his punchy Merseyside accent confident and assured, especially when he emphatically denies his involvement. Jon is much less confident, bursting into tears at the mention of the Boot Strand. Sloan is extraordinarily gifted, asking his audience to sympathise, despite the atrocity his character has committed. Behind the tears of this convict is a child who just wants his mother to hug him. It’s a provocative performance well beyond his years!

Lambe delivers a tale of pathos, showcasing the various elements to this story, however unfortunate or unlikeable. One death resulted in three boys losing their childhoods. And yet, for all the moments of sympathy, Lambe never forgets that the actions of Thompson and Venables are unforgivable at any age. Flashbacks depict how naturally lies came to these two, while carrying Bulger, to the varying by-standers. Slow motion hand holding scenes amplify the sinister, insidious nature of the crime. The boys are presented with the camera footage that haunted the British newspapers in early 1993, presenting their guilt in black and white pixels.

Lambe succeeds in delivering truth, stirring the screen with cinematic sophistication, but mindful of the documentation presented with. In 30 minutes, Lambe delivers what many couldn’t with triple the time. Harrowing, horrible and heavy, Detainment is one of the most startling shorts in recent years.

Detainment has been nominated for the Best Live Action Short Film Academy Award. There is no release date for the UK, but follow us on Twitter, and we will let you know as soon as that changes!