Don’t Look Now

Warning: this review contains spoilers

Cinema, perhaps better than any other medium, has the ability to completely collapse time through the power of editing. Think the epic transition between the prehistoric era and space travel in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968), the non-linear structures of Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994), allowing viewers to experience cinema in terms of thematic connection and not simply A-to-B storytelling. Don’t Look Now is another classic example of how editing can transform material into something truly haunting and marvellous. Yet here, instead of freeing the story, Don’t Look Now’s editing chokes it, creating a sense of dread that is palpable from the very first frame to the last.

Nicolas Roeg had experimented with fragmented storytelling techniques before with editor Antony Gibbs with Performance (1970) and Walkabout (1971), yet this collaboration with Graeme Clifford represented a major step up in form; its use of fast-forwards, flashbacks and frequent, sometimes lightning-quick insert shots a true masterclass in form.

Everything is set from the very first frame, entombed in stone like Venice’s churches. While John (Donald Sutherland) and Laura Baxter’s (Julie Christie) daughter — clad in an iconic red mackintosh — is playing with a red ball outside a pond, John is working through some slides. As he spills water on the slide of a church, the scene turns completely red, linking his daughter’s drowning with his own eventual bloody demise.

They move to Venice, where John works on restoring a church. The city is treated as one giant mausoleum, emptied out and shrouded in mist. It’s wintertime, everyone is wrapped up in hats, scarves and coats, and there are endless shadows emanating from its tiny, winding alleyways. As the psychic blind woman says, expressing her sister’s view: “it’s like a city in aspic, wrapped over from a dinner party, where all the guests are dead or gone.” It’s a place, like John and Laura, stuck in time, seemingly unable to move forwards or backwards.

Their relationship suffers, as demonstrated by its now iconic sex scene. It is still rare to see a film use sex as a thematic point rather than simply plot advancement, Laura and John desperately writhing together as a means to cling on to the little spark of life they have left. Intercut with scenes of them getting dressed afterwards, it stresses both their togetherness and estrangement, showing the difficulty of maintaining passion after suffering such a momentous loss. Grief has this power to rent people apart, giving them little to cling onto other than the memory of their daughter.

When Laura meets fellow British tourists Heather (Hilary Mason) and Wendy (Clelia Matania) and Heather explains how she can communicate with her daughter, she is naturally intrigued by these odd yet mystical duo. In a common horror theme from Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polasnki, 1968) to Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018), her husband doesn’t believe a word she says. But when he starts seeing a little hooded figure in a red mackintosh who looks just like his daughter, mysterious happenings start to question his grounded and skeptical beliefs. Perhaps he has the ability to see things too.

The technicolour cinematography allows the red of his daughter’s jacket to really pop out, contrasting violently with all the other muted colours. It is perhaps one of the most famous uses of the colour in cinematic history, alongside the little girl in a red coat in the otherwise black-and-white Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993). To stress the murderous aspect of the colour, Roeg often uses dissolves, allowing red objects to bleed into one another with nightmarish regularity.

Things double and double, the use of repetition and doppelgängers constricting the narrative to its deadly eventuality. John’s hubris is in thinking he can make sense of what he sees in front of him. With bodies fished out of the river at regular intervals, and a sighting of his wife on a boat with the two women, John frantically searches for his wife despite the fact she has gone back to England to see her son, who has had a mysterious accident. What he has in fact seen is a premonition of his own funeral. The ending — which is either haunting or oddly bathetic depending on who you ask — then reveals that the red cloaked figure is not a phantom but a murderous dwarf, who quickly dispatches him with a knife. Then in a remarkably edited sequence, the whole film seems to pass before his eyes, revealing its narrative to be almost completely circuitous.

There is a religious component to the dazzling editing. If God exists, then He would not see the world in a linear fashion, but everything that has ever happened and everything that will ever happen simultaneously. Everything is predetermined, nothing happens by chance. This is the true horror: not jump scares or bloody mutilations, but the idea that nothing you can do can ever change your fate. Only the gifted such as Heather and John can see parts of the future, but this doesn’t mean they can do anything about it. A truly terrifying prospect indeed.

A 4k restoration of Don’t Look Now hits UK cinemas on Friday, July 5th (nearly half a century after its original release in 1973)

Vita and Virginia

Virginia Woolf’s novels are wholly original, dazzlingly sensational texts that sing right off the page, able to conjure up whole worlds, smells and sensation through the innovative use of stream-of-consciousness. A woman able to carve out a literary career in a world in which men still had all the advantages, she is a true feminist icon and one of the greatest writers of all time.

A large part of her later success is down to the inspiration of Vita-Sackville West, her friend, confidante, fellow writer and lover. Famously Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992), featuring a gender-shifting protagonist, is based on her cross-dressing style. Like Scott and Zelda Fitzgerland, or Henry Miller and Anäis Nin, this is one of the great literary relationships, and ripe material for cinematic adaptation.

Literary biopics can go one of three ways. In the first two, they either take inspiration from the writer himself, and ape his style, such as in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Terry Gilliam, 1998), or have a completely different auteurial approach, like Alexei German Jr’s melancholic look at Sergei Dovlatov’s life in the eponymous 2018 film. Yet too many take the third route, in which the major events of a person’s life are simply lifelessly recounted. Vita and Virginia is perhaps one of the most egregious examples of this, yet considering the specifically lesbian subject matter, even more of a greater disappointment.

Love has rarely seemed more anodyne than in Vita and Virginia, which has a miscast Gemma Arterton and Elizabeth Debicki playing the two lovers. Here one of the most important women to have ever put pen to paper is reduced to a wholly passive, sickly, and sad woman, devoid of any true emotion, inspiration or true internalisation. Her lesbian lover, Vita Sackville-West fares no better, Gemma Arterton more focused on her aristocratic mannerisms than her transgressive personality or desire to shake the system. Together they seem like they’re still reading through the script.

Rent apart by circumstance and repression, the two women read their letters to each other looking straight to the camera Barry Jenkins-style (although without any of the same cinematic tenderness). Here one line-reading struck me as symptomatic of the film’s laziness as a whole. The text on the screen reads “We can live in the present moment – together”. There is a dash between the words “moment” and “together” yet Arterton rushes straight through the phrase, giving her plea no weight whatsoever.

Everything feels off. There is little at stake and even less to care about. In better hands, there might have been something vital to say about the role of women in society, the patriarchy, the coded nature of same-sex desire, the power of romantic inspiration and the relationship between life and art, but Vita and Virginia — based on the 1992 play by co-writer Eileen Atkins — is devoid of any nuance, allowing characters to simply say things out loud that another film would’ve played out through genuine conflict.

For the vast majority of people, passion and desire is a mixture of mental and sexual sensations. When you’re homosexual in a repressed society, this can result in a great conflict between the two — for example in the great Call Me By Your Name (Luca Guadagnino, 2017), which elegantly linked physical motifs with mental sensations to a highly sophisticated degree. Here, Vita and Virginia may spend a lot of time discussing the nature of desire — sometimes embarrassingly through a heterosexual mouthpiece who asks stupid questions like “How do women really have sex?” — yet is remarkably tame when it comes to the physical component; even recycling the same sex scene twice. It reflects the British biopic’s still reticent nature to portray homosexual relationships with any true spark or joy, resulting in a boring suffering-narrative that is potentially more damaging to homosexuals than truly helpful.

The overwrought score by Isobel Waller-Bridge, full of ahistorical synth nonsense, takes us out of the past and retrofits their romance to try and suit modern times. These aren’t helped by the cony sound effects, kisses bizarrely complemented by extremely kitsch ASMR breathing sounds. This Luhrmannisation is both annoying and alienating, elevating Vita and Virginia from the bland to the outright awful. Woolf deserves much better than this.

Vita and Virginia is in cinemas on Friday, July 5th. On VoD on Monday, November 4th. Stay at home and read a book instead.

DMovies selected Vita and Virginia as the turkey of the year of 2019…

Support The Girls

General manager Lisa (Regina Hall) unlocks the premises for another day’s work at the Double Whammies sports bar. Maci (Haley Lu Richardson) tells Lisa there’s a strange banging sound coming from the room with the safe. Maybe a trapped possum? Lisa will investigate. Meanwhile, though, she’s got to interview some young women for waitress posts. And she needs to get Danyelle (Shayna McHayle) to sweet talk Jay (John Elvis) from Sounds Town into lending them a sound system for tonight’s big fight on cable. On top of that, she’s running a car wash fundraiser under the moniker “Support The Girls” to help out Shaina (Jana Kramer) who’s in trouble.

Welcome to the world of Double Whammies. It’s an essay on boundaries. Lisa continually refers to Double Whammies as a “family place” and the institution walks a fine line between bare-midriffed young women in skimpy tops sporting curves and cleavage bearing the words “Double Whammies” and something altogether far dirtier. “They know where to find a strip joint if that’s what they wanted,” she says. She has issues with the rules laid out by the white male owner who hires her to do the daily hands on management of the place, presumably so he doesn’t have to do it himself.

Early on, Lisa and Maci run an interview with several applicants for waitress positions. We watch as they demonstrate any number of sales routines to put the customers at ease and keep their behaviour the right side of acceptable. Throughout the day, we watch the new girls deal with abusive customers as Lisa struggles to keep them on the right side of the that line, mostly successfully. At the same time, she’s has the cops in to deal with a thief who got trapped in the air vent whilst trying to access the company safe and damaged the cable TV feed needed for the evening’s aforementioned big fight, leaving Lisa the headache of getting the cable company to reconnect everything. Then she has to go for a long drive with her boss the owner who doesn’t think she’s running the place properly.

This boasts a clutch of fantastic performances from Regina Hall and Haley Lu Richardson downwards, not to mention the wonderful Lea DeLaria as the butch Bobo, a woman not to be messed with. More importantly it’s a superb script solidly directed with a real understanding of how actors can bring words on a page to life on a screen. A microcosm of the American Dream and some very ordinary, down to Earth women trying to survive within it, there’s a real freshness about it. An absolute must see.

Support The Girls is out in the UK on Friday, June 28th. On VoD on Monday, October 28th. On BFI Player from Monday, September 27th 2021.

Anima

A twelve or so minute collaboration between director Paul Thomas Anderson and musician Thom Yorke of Radiohead, this is being screened in Digital IMAX at various locations round the world this Wednesday. To some extent it has a built in audience. Admirers of the director, who has dabbled in 70mm movies (The Master, 2012) and worked with Radiohead on three 2016 promos will want to see it. More significant for the money men ( and women) is Radiohead’s and Thom Yorke’s audience. The band and he pretty much have creative control over everything they do, never worry about so-called commercial concerns and (when they don’t give their work away) sell albums by the truckload.

Anima, described as a one-reeler, is set to three new Yorke songs and features Yorke and a plethora of dancers. He wakes up on a tube train where other sleeping upright in their seats passengers clad in manual labourers’ clothing move in their sleep. Heads collapse onto waiting hands or jerk on necks. At some point you realise you’re watching a dance routine and your perception of the whole thing changes. And at some point, he is eyeing up a girl (Dajana Roncione) who is likewise eyeing him up among the other passengers.

At a station, the doors open and everyone disembarks. Thom Yorke picks up a metal lunch box that someone has left and goes after them with it – we’re not sure if he actually saw who left it, but anyway he goes with the flow. After a lot of walking, with his fellow passengers snapping awake as they leave the carriage, the exit barriers refuse to let him through. No-one else has this problem and before he’s resolved it with a run at the barriers and a dive over, a lady passenger has taken the lunch box.

There follows an episode in which Thom Yorke has to cross an area where a group of dancers are themselves moving as one across the area in a way that prevents anyone else doing so in a contrary direction. Sitting in this area is the lunch box, which Yorke wants to retrieve. Although the ground is flat, at some point it must have switched to a 45 degree incline because that’s how Yorke and everyone else stands on it, at a 45 degree incline.

After this he finds himself leaning on the wall. The girl is there. Together they roll along the wall, a dance of life. They and other couples run joyously, together then board a bus.

The whole plays as a one man against the system narrative. Along with boy meets girl and, presumably, they all live happily ever after. Although the monotony of the workers ‘ existence might suggest otherwise. Visually, the whole thing is spectacular, a full-blown dystopian dance movie like an update of the shuffling workers in Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927). Radiohead and Thom Yorke fans will like it as an extension of the band’s Gen X persona, and it’s worth seeing as an interesting addition to Paul Thomas Anderson’s impressive, wider body of work

Anima is in select IMAX cinemas from Wednesday, June 26th and on Netflix from Thursday, June 27th. Watch the trailer below:

Life lessons from gambling?

Gambling movies tend to fall into a few different categories. Some revolve around the glitz and glamor most people associate with Las Vegas. Others show the seedy underbelly of the industry. Some are high-octane fuelled adventures, and some are funny buddy movies.

It doesn’t matter; they all have one thing in common – they’re exciting and teach us a lesson. In this post, I’ll go over my favourite gambling movies and what fun life lessons they can teach us.

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1. Casino Royale (Martin Campbell, 2006):

The lesson learned here is that it’s always possible to remake yourself. Up until that point, the Bond franchise had become a little stale. It was the same formula over and over again:

  • Super-villain versus super-spy – no points for guessing who always won;
  • Some over the top plan;
  • Camp humour; and
  • Weird, wonderful gadgetry that was just way too convenient.

It worked brilliantly back in the 1960s, and I still find those movies fun to watch. But box office statistics showed that Bond needed a makeover. It was a big departure from the previous movies and something of a gamble itself.

In true form for a gambling movie, the bold bet paid off. It won critical acclaim and approval from a somewhat unexpected source. It was the only 007 movie to make it past Chinese censors.

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2. Rounders (John Dahl, 1998):

This is one of those movies that show the more sordid side of gambling. It’s all high-stakes and entirely illegal gambling. Malkovitch, as usual, delivers a gritty performance as the villain of the piece. That said, it is also quite humorous at times.

The life lesson learned? Never give up and don’t believe what you see on the big screen. This movie makes a gambling addiction seem like nothing serious when, in fact, it can be just as devastating as alcoholism.

Click here in order to find out the key talking point from John Dahl’s Rounders.

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3. Rain Man (Barry Levinson, 1989):

This movie is an example of what good acting and directing are all about. Production cost $25 million, but the box office takings were $345.8 million. It’s about a hustler played by Tom Cruise with an autistic brother who’s great at gambling.

The classic life lessons are that you can never judge someone entirely from what you see outside, and that family is important. (Especially, in this case, when being estranged from your father loses you your share of $3 million).

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4. Ocean’s Eleven (Steven Soderbergh, 2001):

The lessons in this movie were simple:

  • No one gets hurt;
  • Only steal from the bad guys; and
  • Go all in.

George Clooney played the lead role as a recently paroled ex-con working a heist. It’s extremely entertaining thanks to the complexity of the plan. It epitomises the idea “go big or go home”.

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5. Maverick (Richard Donner, 1994):

Okay; so this is a pretty ancient movie by modern standards. That doesn’t make it any less fun to watch. It’s a gambling movie set in the wild west, so what’s not to love? Maverick is a clever poker player who meets his match in the feisty Annabelle.

The movie is fun, and the message is clear – sticking to the straight and narrow is good, but sometimes being a bit of a cheat is fun too.

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That concludes the roundup. Are these the life lessons that you learned from the movies? If not, why not let us know what you thought the lessons were?

10 films that depict the post-Holocaust experience

From The Counterfeiters (Stefan Ruzowitzky, 2007) and Bent (Sean Mathias, 1998) to Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1994) and Son of Saul (László Nemes, 2015), cinema has approached the Holocaust from almost all of its ghastly facets. This list collates a selection of the relative few that consider not the immediate act of genocide but its pernicious spectre. Some concern the overwhelming emotional impact on survivors, such as Sophie’s Choice (Alan J Pakula, 1992) and The Pawnbroker (Sidney Lumet, 1966), while others, like Hannah Arendt (Margarethe von Trotta, 2012), Labyrinth of Lies (Giulio Ricciarelli, 2014) and Denial (Mick Jackson, 2016), concern comparative outsiders’ attempts to quantify the event and, in some cases, enact hard-nosed justice.

Below is the full list. The films are listed in chronological order.

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1. The Pawnbroker (Sidney Lumet, 1966):

An oft-neglected entry in Sidney Lumet’s remarkable career, The Pawnbroker is a sombre performance piece led by Rod Steiger as Sol Nazerman, the titular pawnbroker. Nazerman is a learned man who, before the soldiers came, had a fulfilling life of family and intellectual curiosity. He managed to survive and flee to the United States, but the murder of his family has reduced his psyche to a barren, nihilist wasteland devoid of joy and personality. The burden of his terrible suffering has ground him down until he just cannot function emotionally, so he treats everyone and everything with a distant contempt. It is only when well-intentioned locals impose themselves on him that he is fired up, albeit with the purpose of trenchantly castigating their ingenuous, pedestrian lives.

The arrival of the warm, empathetic Geraldine, a neighborhood social worker, poses a test to the complexities of Nazerman’s granite exterior, but the film provides no easy answers to his trauma or the crime and hardship of the Manhattan slum in which he exists.

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2. Sophie’s Choice (Alan J Pakula, 1982):

Sophie’s Choice may appear to have that stale ‘prestige drama’ aura that The Reader has, but the titular ‘choice’ of this unusual film is far ghastlier than one can imagine. I entered with foreknowledge of her ‘choice’, but it is preferable that one does not, so it will not be repeated here.

The novel thing about Sophie’s Choice, for better or worse, is how we are told Sophie’s story through the perspective of Stingo, a soft southern writer. Some may make ideologically charged claims of the ‘male gaze’ when discussing Stingo, but he is better described as simply a distraction, an unnecessary narrative device. After all, Sophie’s desperate struggle and Streep’s virtuosic performance are more than enough to steer the narrative.

A justification for Stingo’s character, however, is that he serves as an amiable, grounded perspective in the utterly maniacal relationship between Sophie and Nathan (Kevin Kline), her psychotic partner. We join Stingo in observing the tempestuous dynamic that Nathan steers, which can range from displays of passionate affection to theatrically nasty arguments over the course of just one day.

Kline is excellent, genuinely unhinged; it is a performance that you remember. He takes second place, though, to Meryl Streep, who, with a pitch-perfect accent and masterful dramatic range, utterly becomes the tragic figure of Sophie Zawistowski.

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3. The Reader (Stephen Daldry, 2008):

The Reader has been described by several critics as ‘middle-brow’, a term that can smack of snobbery yet is appropriately leveled here. Stephen Daldry’s film concerns a whirlwind affair between Michael (David Kross), a bright young man with a flair for reading, and Hannah (Kate Winslet), an intense, aloof woman in her thirties who, in a rather contrived fashion, is revealed to have been a guard at Auschwitz and a separate, smaller camp.

Now the best thing about this somewhat middling film is the erotic candidness of their relationship. Their strange dynamic has real intimacy and a mystique that’s warped and unnerving. More pertinent to this list, though, is how the film depicts Germany’s reaction to the unique ghastliness of their recent history. During Hannah’s trial, there is a strong sense of unwillingness amongst the jury and the gallery to consider the abhorrent details of the Holocaust. They do not want justice, they want catharsis, so they will just convict whoever is accused in an attempt to reach it. This mob-thinking attitude is evident in both the jury and Michael’s university classmate Dieter (Volker Bruch), whose emotionally driven rants are unbecoming of a law student. However, these themes of collective memory and shame are better explored in other entries in this list.

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4. Sarah’s Key (Gilles Paquet-Brenner, 2011):

The title of this French drama echoes that of Sophie’s Choice and its significance is similarly hateful. The film opens by thrusting the viewer into a cramped apartment in Nazi-occupied Paris; in it is a family of four, gripped with fear as the authorities bang at their door. For thousands of Jews across France, this was the beginning of the end. French complicity in the Holocaust killed some 77,000 people, and Sarah’s Key depicts the frenzy and maddening injustice of the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup and beyond with visceral energy.

These moments are relayed to us through flashbacks, for the bulk of the film concerns Julia (Kristen Scott Thomas), an American journalist living in Paris. Having written about the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup in the past, she becomes deeply curious when her French husband inherits a Parisian flat that his grandparents moved into in August 1942. Convinced that Jews had been evicted the property, she doggedly investigates until the ghastly truth is unraveled for all concerned.

It is an absorbing film, no doubt, and Thomas’s performance has a subtle and affecting emotional range despite her default frostiness. However, the contrast in intensity between the flashbacks and the contemporary story causes one to wonder if Sarah’s Key would have been better if it was solely a period piece, a feeling that is somewhat reinforced by lashings of melodrama towards the end.

And yet, despite the distractions of the narrative’s toing and froing, Sarah’s Key manages to thoroughly absorb, intrigue and invest you.

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5. Hannah Arendt (Margarethe von Trotta, 2012):

When the capture of Adolf Eichmann stirred up the collective memory of the Holocaust in 1960, the reaction was one of disgust and incredulity, even amongst the learned circles that Hannah Arendt belonged to. Eichmann was caricatured as an evil monster that was to be confronted with his crimes in a dramatic show trial and then sent to his death once some sort of catharsis had been achieved.

Such emotionally driven responses were understandable but most often crass and unhelpful. Arendt had no time for such simplistic, knee-jerk thinking and instead sought to understand and explain Eichmann’s reasoning and ideology. Her conclusion was the now famous ‘banality of evil’, which posited that Eichmann was not a psychopath but a mere bureaucrat – a normal person with petty careerist aspirations. This thesis alone was a cause for concern amongst friends and colleagues in academic and media circles, but it was her claim that some Jewish leaders acted in a quasi-complicit manner during the Holocaust that triggered a vicious backlash. Arendt became the target of character assassination from the press, her peers and the public, who inundated the New Yorker with angry phone calls and threatening, abusive letters that made the risibly stupid accusation that Arendt was somehow a Nazi sympathiser. Hit pieces were also published in the New York Times and her faculty ‘recommended’ that she resign. It was a despicable act of feeble group think that is all too familiar in our age of no-platforming and safe spaces.

To her credit, Arendt remained absolutely steadfast, skewering her hysterical critics with considered argument and barbed wit. Barbara Sukowa’s performance captures Arendt’s conviction brilliantly, both her intellectual conviction as well as the intimate love she has for her husband Heinrich, which is keenly reciprocated. Of course, Arendt was not beyond reproach, no intellectual is, but the controversy depicted in Hannah Arendt was not a sensible dialogue but mob-thinking outrage. The ultimate message of this story is that the bulwark of reason, logic and dialogue should always be upheld, even when faced with the most horrendous circumstances.

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6. Ida (Pawel Pawlikowski, 2013):

Ida (also pictured at the top of this article) is firmly within the Eastern European tradition of harsh realism; its brooding tone and stark aesthetic having much in common with films like A Short Film About Killing (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1988) Import/Export (Ulrich Seidl, 2007) and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, 2008). Where Ida differs is its overwhelming reliance on mood to tell it story. It is reserved, perhaps to a fault, but the glumness of the characters, their situation and their surroundings go some way in capturing the zeitgeist of post-war Poland, which had survived the apocalyptic brutality of one enemy only to be occupied by another for four and half decades.

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7. Everything is Illuminated (Liev Schreiber, 2014):

Adapted from Jonathon Safran Fore’s precocious autobiographical debut novel, Everything is Illuminated is by some measure the most offbeat and unconventional film in this list. It has more than a whiff of Wes Anderson in the visual way it depicts the protagonist’s obsession with mementoes as well as the quirky characters that assist him in his Ukrainian odyssey. Despite this, it avoids poor taste for it eschews sentimentality and does not overbear you with its idiosyncrasies.

Some critics have noted the loss of substance in the transition from page to screen, and it is, to be frank, one of the more frivolous entries in this list, more so than Remember. While ‘frivolous’ is not a word many would like to be associated with this subject, Everything is Illuminated has enough offbeat charm and striking cinematography to find an audience.

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8. Denial (Mick Jackson, 2014):

In 2016 British director Mick Jackson returned to form with Denial, which depicts the Irving vs Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt trial, a landmark event in postwar Holocaust denial. Early in the film, a student of Deborah Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz) asks a question regarding Holocaust denial to which Lipstadt replies that she does not debate Holocaust deniers. This sentiment would be acceptable for your average Holocaust denier or troll, but David Irving, an historian whose early work has been praised by the likes of John Keegan and Hugh Trevor Roper, wasn’t and isn’t that.

This is a problem, for the best way to defeat a warped, dishonest argument is with a reasoned, factual one – not indignant dismissal. Weisz’s Lipstadt displays this righteous indignation on several occasions and it is rather unbecoming of a professional historian, Jewish or not. The veracity of Weisz’s performance is unclear, but it felt as if these moments of emotional anger – especially during heated exchanges with her legal team – were written for the purpose of conflict and drama. It would have been better if these passages were replaced with wider dissections of Holocaust denial, chiefly the Leuchter Report. Despite the brevity of the trial scenes and Denial’s rather televisual style, though, it remains a robust drama that captures the stress and weight of the courtroom and serves as a stimulating gateway to the subject of Holocaust denial.

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9. Labyrinth of Lies (Giulio Ricciarelli, 2014):

Labyrinth of Lies is not an emotionally involving film, but as a dramatisation of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials it is well considered and illuminating. It follows Johann Radmann, a young, quixotic lawyer whose righteous indignation sees him launch a pointed investigation into those who collaborated with the concentration camp system.

He points out that just 150 people were convicted at Nuremberg, yet this figure seems to be sufficient for the average citizen of Frankfurt, for the knowledge of what happened in the camps was seemingly too much to bear. Indeed, the film’s depiction of the Germans’ wilfull ignorance of their immediate history is shocking as it is compelling. It reflects the paradigm shift that occurred in Allied foreign policy, which sought to transform their former enemy into a bulwark against the new Red Threat. Once the immediate denazification process was complete, seeking justice for the Holocaust was not a key interest or indeed an interest at all amongst much of the German and Nato establishment. It is in this contentious atmosphere that Radmann pursues the almost insurmountable task of bringing the collaborators to justice, and we see both the nobility and toxic alienation that comes with hardnosed perseverance against the maddeningly blinkered status quo.

The best exchanges are between Radmann, his journalist ally Thomas Gnielka and Auschwitz survivor Simon Kirsch, who develop some degree of comradeship. Again, though, Labyrinth of Lies does not leave an impression on an emotional level. It focuses instead on period detail, both aesthetically and politically, illustrating the willful amnesia and eventual reckoning in the formative years of the German Republic.

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10. Remember (Atom Egoyan, 2015):

The premise of Remember stretches credibility to its limits, beyond it in some cases, yet Atom Egoyan’s film is compulsive viewing thanks to its energetic plotting and Christopher Plummer’s superb central performance as Zev Guttman, an elderly Auschwitz survivor, Alzheimer’s sufferer and recent widow who resides in an American nursing home.

Zev’s Alzheimer’s manifests itself in sudden bouts that can attack at any moment, yet fellow resident and Holocaust survivor Max Rosenbaum (Martin Landau) reminds Zev of what he promised to do when his wife died. In a haze of confusion, Zev agrees to honour his promise, which is to hunt and kill Otto Wallisch, the SS Blockfuhrer who murdered their families before immigrating to America under the name of Rudy Kurlander.

Armed with a Glock handgun hidden in his wash bag, Zev’s mission takes him across North America in what film critic Richard Roeper described as a ‘mash-up of The Terminator, Marathon Man and Memento’. Roeper’s summary makes it seem more ludicrous than it is, though, because the immediate and overarching concern is not the confrontations Zev has to make but the jeopardy of his advanced age, which coils you with unease as he navigates a world that he can barely operate in. Indeed, Plummer succeeds in distracting you from the implausibilities of the narrative by imbuing his performance with vulnerability and grandfatherly benevolence that causes you to invest in his character and his story.

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HONOURABLE MENTIONJudgment at Nuremberg (Stanley Kramer, 1961):

Much like Labyrinth of Lies would do 50 years later, Judgment at Nuremberg depicts the messy, overwhelming task of holding to account the bureaucrats and middle managers of the Nazi regime. Like all good legal dramas there are scathing zingers fired between the prosecution and the defence, but the film’s three-hour commitment to educating its audience despite being merely inspired by the Nuremberg Trials causes one to wish they were watching an actual documentary account of the event rather than a semi-fictional one.

In Fabric

A wildly inventive and unashamedly British affair, Strickland’s latest film mixes tacky 1970s aesthetics with several workplaces – a large clothing store, a personal loans company and a washing machine repair firm. Clothing emporium Dentley & Soper is run on a series of arcane regulations, obedience to the seemingly arbitrary rules for conduct of personnel at Waingel’s Bank is encouraged by smarmy middle management types Stash and Clive (Julian Barrett and Steve Oram) while washing machine repair firm Slaverton’s Wash insists any personnel who mend their own machines must do so on the firm’s books.

Although the film is constructed on the portmanteau template used in many horror films, whether it’s a horror movie as such rather than a very strange and stylish arthouse movie is open to debate. Loosely linked narratives are woven around serial characters – Waingel’s employee Sheila (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), Slaverton’s repair man Reg Speaks (Leo Bill) and his fiancée Babs (Hayley Squires). Each of them one way or another in turn acquires the dress. Sheila is a middle-aged wife whose husband has left her and whose adult son is living at home. She wants the dress to impress potential blind dates. Reg is given the item to wear on his drunken stag night and Babs stumbles upon the garment in their home.

The dress seems to possess a life of its own, moving along floors, slinking under doors, hovering in domestic spaces, causing washing machines to break down when it’s put in a load and occasionally even hurling itself at people. It also appears in some bizarre dreams and causes its wearers to develop nasty chest rashes.

Yet, except at the most perfunctory level. Strickland’s interest doesn’t lie exclusively with the the mechanics of the horror movie. The director is fascinated by petty corporate rules and regulations, and their verbal manifestations. Dentley & Soper shop assistant Miss Luckmoore (Fatma Mohamed from director Strickland’s earlier The Duke Of Burgundy, 2014, Berberian Sound Studio, 2012 and Katalin Varga, 2009) spouts her own esoteric sales patter scarcely comprehensible to the average shopper. Stash and Clive constantly refer to Waingel’s rules on employee conduct while Reg appears to go into a trance state whenever he starts to talk in detailed technical language about issues with specific washing machines, as if reciting a pre-written speech from an unseen technical manual.

A further fascination with surface is evident throughout the piece. Little sequences comprise runs of static photos shot on film, announcing that the sales season has started or a newspaper page informing us that the woman who originally modelled the offending dress for the Dentley & Soper catalogue has met an untimely end. The whole thing has a 1970s feel: people have telephone landlines and leave messages on each others’ answerphones, while some of the store’s shop floor graphics and promo ads couldn’t have come from any other decade. And the fastidious and highly mannered Miss Luckmoore who initially sells the dress to Sheila, is straight out of that decade.

Strangest of all is the ritual of Miss Luckmoore and several colleagues, seen in the Dentley & Soper TV promo ad, which seems to consist of a group dance luring customers into the store like a coven of witches in pursuit of some nefarious purpose. At night, Luckmoore removes a wig to reveal a bald head then crawls foetus position-like into a dumb waiter and descends, only to ascend back to the same room the following morning. The store and its highly cultured staff seems like a distant cousin to the malevolent witches’ coven running the dance school in the Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977) and given Strickland’s early essay on Italian giallo horror film making Berberian Sound Studio (2012), that connection may be no accident, underlined by Cavern of Anti-Matter’s highly eclectic musical score. Incidentally, the lower echelons of the cast include sometime David Lynch soundtrack composer Barry Adamson (as Zach, one of Shelia’s dates) and improvisational musician and Strickland alumnus Adam Bohman.

There’s much here to satisfy a variety of tastes – whether you admire classic giallo horror, lurid seventies material or arthouse movies in general. Critical favourite Strickland is slowly developing a fascinating body of work. In Fabric, odd and off-kilter though it may be, is as impressive as anything else he’s done. Don’t miss.

In Fabric is out in the UK on Friday, June 28th. On Curzon Home Cinema in August.

Kurier

Hunched over a fulgent light, Jan Nowak-Jeziorański (Philippe Tłokiński) is commanded to offer some sort of documentation from the insides of his car. Jan, nonchalant in gesture and smile, turns to his pocket and shoots the advancing soldier with a bullet sharper than his quips. That Tłokiński bears a passing resemblace to OO7 incumbent Daniel Craig would suggest a tale of encouraged espionage to its audience. Tłokiński, steely eyed, blond rimmed and devastatingly handsome, is the perfect lead to star in a World War caper, steeped in the collected charm of David Niven’s A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell/ Emeric Pressburger, 1946).

What Jan has over James Bond was his genuine existence. Affectionately nicknamed The Messenger from Warsaw, Jan worked as an emissary, spreading himself over the commanders of Poland’s Home Army resistance movement and the Polish Government while living in exile in London, at the height of the WW2. His investigation is slow, deliberate and arguably ponderous. It’s not a perfect tribute to the real life spy, the film spends an inexplicable 15 minutes to set itself up and there are some moments that feel too much like tacked-on fan-servicing (a priggish early scene featuring the disputatiously poised Winston Churchill is groan inducing).

More happily, we can report that there are moments of claustrophobic fused tension in an atmospheric escapade, endearing in snow rimmed decor, cascading in dimly-lit neon night action scenes. Dapper, natty and focused, Tłokiński looks good with a pistol in hand, branding his weapon as romantically as he seduces the irrepressibly pretty Doris (Julie Engelbrecht). If nationality weren’t a factor, Tłokiński might make a very strong James Bond in future years. Cannily, a high proportion of the film is accomplished through spoken English, inviting a different type of audience to appreciate Polish cinema, channeling the imprint of British sixties spy craft in its cinematography.

Changing geographies suits the film. Director Władysław Pasikowski keeps the movie flowing with hotel seated conversations, cross country shoot outs and barbarous civilian line-ups. Confidently flipping from gritty determination to louche absurdism, Tłokiński cements a strong lead. The emphasis is on the individual, heroism and the pointlessness of war.

Kurier is out in cinemas across the UK from Friday, June 28th.

The Biggest Little Farm

The year is 2010. John and his wife Molly are your average Californian urbanites. They dwell in a very small flat in Santa Monica, a coastal district of Los Angeles. John is a established documentarist, while Molly is a chef. One day they adopt a black pooch called Todd, saving him from certain death at local dog pound. But Todd won’t stop barking while his parents are away. As a consequence of the nuisance noise, all three get evicted from the building. They have just 30 days to find a solution and move out.

Giving Todd away isn’t an option because they are firmly committed to keeping the animal for life. Moving into a different block would probably see a similar closure. So they decide to move into the countryside near Los Angeles and set up a farm. They don’t have any money, but friends and investors promptly chip in. The farm isn’t just about Todd’s well-being. Molly always wanted to plant her own vegetables, while John is a also a environment lover, having worked in many nature shows for television. So they set the Apricot Lane Farms, where they grow a plethora of vegetables (from lemons and avocados to tomatoes and greens) and raise a variety of animals (chickens, goats and a pregnant pig called Emma, who succeeds to give birth to no less than 14 piglets). In total they plant 10,00 orchard trees in more than 200 different crops. Their farm is in stark contrast to the neighbouring establishments, mostly gigantic monocultures.

Their initiative is indeed fascinating and it epitomises the escapist fantasies of many large-city dwellers. This tallies well with our vision of cinema as a tool for personal liberation. They hire a local consultant who helps them to overcome the successive challenges year after year. A few years later, however, tragedy strikes and they are left to fend for themselves without professional help. The challenges are numerous: pest (coyotes, snails and small rodents), draught, flood, ferocious winds and changing climate patterns. Little by little, they learn how to grapple with the constant changes and barriers on their own

The most touching moment of The Biggest Little Farm is the realisation of inevitability of death. John notes that his idealisation of Todd’s life did not prevent from shooting a coyote. He now understands that the ecosystem is “energised by the impermanence of life”, and that biodiversity is entirely contingent on species killing and eating one another. Their puerile awe at the recognition of the food chain in endearing to watch. It’s something we all learn in primary school, but most of us never have the privilege of observing from so close.

This American doc – which follows the couple for eight years – is extremely well crafted. It’s evident that the director/subject had extensive experience with the movie camera. There are plenty of cute animals and delectable family moments to awe. Perhaps too many even. The entire film is constructed as some sort of fair tale for children with pretty animations et al. It’s borderline didactic. It gets a little soporific for adults able to separate romanticism from reality. This is not helped by an irksome music score with an unrelenting country guitar.

I also found it very strange that a cash-strapped couple could create such a large, ambitious and undoubtedly expensive endeavour virtually overnight. Their business plan must have been made of gold. I wish there was more emphasis on how they managed to seduce investors and raise so much money so quickly. That is far more miraculous than the cycle of life itself.

My Biggest Little Farm premieres at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. It shows in London on July 4th at the Cine Lumiere. It’s in general release on Friday, November 29th.

When violence gets dirty…

Warning: this article contains minor spoilers

Plenty of films have violent content, that’s easy. Fewer possess a genuinely visceral quality that, for better or worse, leaves a lasting impression on you. But fewer still are actually about violence, about how it feels and what it means for victims, perpetrators and wider society. Here are 10 examples of where cinema has broached this darkly compelling subject, listed in chronological order.

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1. A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971):

Kubrick’s idiosyncratic masterpiece begins with Alex (Malcolm McDowell) and his droogs beating, raping and stealing their way through dystopian Britain in one of the most electrifying – and objectionable – opening sequences in cinema history. It is a stunning synthesis of Kubrick’s wired, aberrant vision and McDowell’s supremely confident performance, creating a spectacle of the most indulgent amorality that draws the viewer in, almost making them the fifth droog.

Alex’s run is short-lived, however, and he finds himself locked up, with his only ticket to freedom being the revolutionary ‘Ludovico technique’. This turns out to be every Libertarian’s worst nightmare – a neurological procedure resembling abject torture that brainwashes its patient (or victim?) to hate whatever they are being forced to watch or listen to. In Alex’s case, he is programmed to hate – be physically reviled by – sex, violence and, as an unfortunate byproduct, his beloved Beethoven.

Now, this treatment certainly stops little Alex from tolchocking and doing the old in-out in-out, but whose idea of justice is this? Certainly not the prison chaplain’s (Godfrey Quigley), who remarks indignantly:

‘Choice! The boy has no real choice, has he? He ceases to be a wrongdoer… he ceases also to be a creature of moral choice.’

This is the dilemma at the centre of A Clockwork Orange. Could we afford the state this power, ostensibly for the greater good? Where would it start, where would it end? Would the treatment be extended to petty criminals? How many brains and lives would be ruined? Kubrick’s film posits many questions but provides no easy answers.

Click here for our dirty review of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.

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2. Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971):

Much like Deliverance, Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs mires an ordinary (and slightly effete) man in a situation of animal violence. Anyone who’s been in a playground will recognise the bullyboy behaviour – the leering glances, hostile posturing, mocking remarks. All are designed to push the boundaries until all pretences are fatally dropped. This toxic dynamic looms over the film, giving it a nasty, foreboding dread.

Most unsettling is Amy’s (Susan George) relationship with Charlie (Del Henney), her broad, masculine old flame. Her persistent attraction to him – despite being married to David (Dustin Hoffman), an academic – represents the idea of women being attracted to dominant and potentially violent male behaviour.

This notion becomes particularly direct and controversial in two moments – a rape that becomes consensual and the manner in which David asserts his dominance over Amy in the violent climax, slapping her face, pulling her hair and ordering her to ‘stay there and do as youre told, or I’ll break your neck.’ Although the film tells us little about the future of their relationship, there can be no doubt that David’s aggression gets both her attention and her respect. It is part of the toxic message that runs through Straw Dogs violence, even sexual violence, can be a viable option.

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3. Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971):

Dirty Harry’s lowbrow appeal – and aestheticisation of violence – disguises a film that asks hard, dangerous questions about crime and punishment. It seems almost risible now, but long before Inspector Harry Callahan became the proverbial anti-hero stock character, critics took Dirty Harry really rather seriously, with some even labelling it “fascist”.

If you enter this film addled with political notions then perhaps you could see it as fascist. After all, Eastwood’s eponymous supercop plays fast and loose with the law breaking and entering, torturing a suspect and ultimately becoming something of a free agent in the film’s denouement. But the question at the heart of Dirty Harry is an uncomfortable one. If you were the powerless victim of an unhinged and uncaught criminal, who would you want in your corner – the desk-bound bureaucrat or the ballsy, hard-nosed Inspector?

Ultimately, Callahan serves justice in his signature style, goading the snivelling, hateful Scorpio into retrieving his dropped P38 with the famed ‘Do I feel lucky?’ line. As he picks it up, Callahan delivers the last .44 round straight through his heart, blowing him off the jetty and into the quarry lake. Yet, as Callahan watches Scorpio’s twisted face submerge into the murky water, there is little catharsis. To the score of Lalo Schifrin’s haunting End Titles, Callahan detaches his seven-point star and throws it into the lake, utterly disillusioned with everything his profession stands for.

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4. Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972):

This timeless survival thriller places the viewer in the proverbial ‘what-if?’ situation. What would you do in the face of such rapidly escalating danger, where initiative and ruthlessness are the deciders of life and death? This is the situation faced by Lewis (Burt Reynolds), Ed (Jon Voight), Drew (Ronny Cox) and Bobby (Ned Beatty), four ‘city boys’ from Atlanta venturing into the wilderness of northern Georgia.

The infamous rape sequence – which has lost none of its ugliness – is cut short by Lewis’s broadhead arrow, which thuds through the chest of the mountain man in an agonisingly protracted death scene. What follows is a desperate argument over their plan of action – what are we going to do… do we get the authorities… have we done anything wrong… what’s our story… who’s still out there?

Alas, their situation goes from bad to worse as bones are broken, Drew goes missing and Ed is tasked with a cliff face and a mountain man who’s looking to finish what he started. It is a brutish, dog-eat-dog story that makes one appreciate every pedestrian comfort and societal institution they’ve ever taken for granted.

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5. A Short Film About Killing (Kristok Kieslowski, 1988):

This fatally bleak realist drama is about the use of violence. After an aimless young man wantonly murders a taxi driver, he is executed by the Polish state in an act that some would argue is equally senseless. The dilemma of this film, delivered with unremitting miserablism by Kryzstof Kieslowski, made such an impression that it shaped both public opinion and political persuasion in the twilight years of communist Poland.

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6. Elephant (Alan Clarke, 1989)

The most direct and unusual film on this list, Alan Clarke’s Elephant is quite simply 39 minutes of men walking up to other men and shooting them dead. Here Clarke uses his noted penchant for Steadicam shots to comment on the cyclical nature of the Northern Irish conflict and the wider issue of how violence begets violence. 

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7. Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992):

Clint Eastwood’s metafictional revisionist Western examines the jarring disparity between real and romanticised violence, between the myth of the Old West and the cruel, ugly reality. Much of the savagery of its central character, William Munny, is depicted not with explosive bloodletting but with sparse, disturbing dialogue that gives an authentic weight to his character. 

Of course, the metafictional element is deeply personal to Eastwood, who had spent the preceding 30 years shooting dozens of outlaws with preternatural accuracy, often with little to no blood. There’s a scene in Unforgiven, however, that depicts the real suffering inflicted by a bullet to the gut, as well as the wrenching shame of the perpetrators, especially Ned (Morgan Freeman), who passes the rifle to Munny, unable to finish the job.

Towards the film’s end, as Munny stands in a barren, windswept scene, he summarises the terrible loss of killing better than any other film in this list – “It’s a hell of thing killing a man. You take away all he’s got, and all he’s gonna have”.

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8. Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999):

Central to Fight Club’s nihilist cry against consumer culture is bone-crunching, face-smashing violence. For the Narrator (Edward Norton), nothing else matters after Fight Club; the rush of pummelling or being pummelled into the concrete negates every banal concern. His rudderless existence is given meaning and vitality by pain and sacrifice. However, his rejection of society’s material narrative in favour of this savage masculinity proves to be a doomed rabbit hole of toxic nihilism.

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9. No Country for Old Men (Coen Brothers, 2007):

Old men – and old women – have lamented the state of society since time immemorial. In the fourth century BC, Plato remarked: ‘What is happening to our young people? They ignore the law. They riot in the streets, inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying.’ 

No Country for Old Men opens with a similar sentiment, only it’s delivered in the world-weary drawl of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones). His fear of society’s mores slipping into a violent abyss, which is reactionary yet resonant, is set against one of cinema’s greatest cat-and-mouse thrillers, which bursts with tension and pitiless violence. And once it’s over – just another episode of conflict and misery in Bell’s long career he sits at the kitchen table, retired yet dejected, unsure of the world and his place in it.

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10. Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy, 2014):

Nightcrawler is a Schraderesque character study of a man far more dangerous than Travis Bickle. Utterly opportunistic and completely without a moral compass, Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) is introduced as a drifter with a creepy flair for dogged self-promotion. He has scraped a nomadic existence of skulduggery and crime – some petty, some definitely not – but the film’s events begin as he finally stumbles upon his life’s calling – paparazzi photojournalism.

In this field, Lou provides what so many of us can’t look away from. Road accidents, home invasions, carjackings gone wrong – anything that involves blood, gore and misery is good for business. After all, who hasn’t looked when they’ve passed a traffic accident, a fight, or someone in the throes of cardiac arrest? We know it’s in poor taste but we just can’t help ourselves. For people like Lou, however, it’s positively thrilling.

Nightcrawler is a satire of this tasteless voyeurism – content that’s perhaps interesting for the public but decidedly not in the public interest, a distinction that is gleefully ignored in favour of lucrative morbidity and cynical scare mongering.

Marona’s Fantastic Tale (L’Extraordinaire Voyage De Marona)

We here at DMovies don’t usually get excited by an animated film about a dog and its owner. It would have to be a very special movie indeed to make that happen. Well, Marona’s Fantastic Tale is just such a movie.

It’s bookended with a device straight out of film noir. The main character has been hit by a car and is lying in the road, dying, in the arms of an old friend who got to him a few seconds too late to prevent disaster. Him isn’t correct though: both characters are female. Marona is a dog while late teenager Solange is her owner.

The narrative flies in the face of the idea that people take on pets and everything is hunky dory thereafter. Marona never has a stable life. She’s the last of nine puppies in the litter, so her mother names her Nine as if knowing that her daughter may not be around long and that a new owner will likely give her a new name.

The last to be born is the first to be given away as Marona is placed with her father, a haughty Argentianian mastiff of high birth unable to resist the charms of Marona’s seductive mongrel mother. We see very little of him as Marona only lasts about a day there and ends up walking the streets.

She is taken in by the kindly Manole, a penniless acrobat who busks for peanuts and rehearses wire walking and trapeze artistry in his garrett atop a building. He names her Ana. All is going well until he lands a circus job with a no pets contract.

Next, she attaches herself to construction worker Istvan who names her Sara. Initially, he lets her live on the building site where he works, then moves her in with his ageing mother for company. This sours when the old lady, given to violent turns, hurts the dog. So Istvan moves Marona into his home. Unfortunately, his wife regards the dog as little more than a fashion accessory and soon tires of her. Despite Istvan’s best efforts, the dog is soon homeless again.

Small girl Solange finds the dog in a park, renames her Marona and tales her home without telling her single mum or her grandpa. Her mum is furious, but somehow Marona is allowed to keep the dog. As a child she loves it dearly, but when she becomes a teenager, she finds looking after Marona a nuisance as she’s rather be out spending time with friends. One day, she abandons the dog in a park tying her lad to a tree so she herself can catch a bus downtown. When Marona breaks free and follows her, you know it’s not going to end well, especially after the dying dog sequence at the start of the film.

Visually the film is a treat. Manole the Acrobat is rendered in orange and yellow, moving with a captivating fluidity light years away from what you’d get in a classic Disney film. Istvan the gentle construction worker is a stocky blue body outlined in purple while his self-obsessed wife resembles a yellow version of a spooky ghost from a Fleischer Brothers cartoon. The portrayal of Solange and her family is more homely.

There’s a breathless street chase at the end as Marona follows the bus Solange has boarded, hard to watch because you’re expecting something to hit the dog at any moment.

Marona works not only as a film about the life of a dog but also as a series of snapshots of various sections of society – the insecure showman, the worker enslaved by the whims of his wife, the single parent family. On top of that. It’s a colourful, visual tour de force that will take your breath away. It fits the bill as a much better kids’ movie than most of the more commercial fare foisted on audiences by the major studios and it should equally delight dog lovers. Having said that, as a person who neither has young kids or dogs, I adored it. And I suspect you will too.

Marona’s Fantastic Tale showed in competition in Annecy. Watch the film trailer below: