The techniques used in this remarkable short include both computer and puppet animation, with all the surfaces of both the puppets and the sets resembling that of a canvas painted with oils. It’s the perfect artistic form in which to express the story the film wishes to tell.
Louis is a painter suffering from dementia. Neither he nor his wife and model Michelle are coping well. He struggles to recognise different items of food by name at the dinner table – a bit of a problem when Michelle asks him to pass the pepper – and attempts to eat a banana without taking the skin off it first.
He jokes about degenerative mental diseases when being interviewed by a visiting health professional, but can’t recognise the mobile phone on the table in front of him. As his memory banishes the very concept of a mobile phone to beyond Louis’ mental grasp, the already disfigured object breaks up into little black droplets floating upwards before him.
Worse is to come: a system of post-it notes each containing a simple drawing attached to its appropriate object, such as a sun to indicate an anglepoise lamp, starts to break down. The notes fall from their designated objects creating a sea of incomprehensible imagery to wade through and for Michelle to tidy up on the floor. Louis is shocked to discover the bathroom occupied – his wife has to point out that the alien occupant causing her husband such distress is in fact only his reflection which he no longer recognises as such.
At one point in the proceedings, she’s had enough and sinks to locking him in his room so he can’t pester her. At another, she explains there are no fish in the fish tank because Louis failed to feed them.
Finally, he mistakes his wife for a hired carer. He comes on to her, but pulls back telling her, heartbreakingly, that his wife gets jealous and waltzes round the room with her instead. As they dance, she is reduced to an empty space parts of whose surface is defined by her husband’s sparse brushstrokes to which he adds a few more.
This is dangerous, emotionally charged and highly challenging material underscored with commendable humanity.
Memorable (Mémorable) played in Annecy where it picked up three awards – a jury distinction for powerful storytelling, a junior jury award for a short film and an audience award – making it a likely contender for this year’s Best Animated Short at the Oscars. Watch an extract below (French no subtitles):
This Argentinan short, although computer generated, has the feel of stop-motion. It brings to mind work by Lars Von Trier, the Brothers Quay, Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch. A narrative conveyed by a series of disturbing vignettes (think: the opening minutes of Melancholia (Lars Von Trier, 2011) is put together with the same kind of fastidious technical attention to detail you find in the Quay Brothers’ films. A couple of scenes borrow directly from one of the murders in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), but in a clever way that shocks you much as those scenes in Psycho originally did. There’s a Lynchian feel about the whole thing – not just in the strange, quasi-industrial sounds recalling Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977) or the weird lighting and heavily controlled mise-en-scène, but also in the overall feel of strange and terrible things happening within families and local communities, people adrift within the darkness of human existence.
One single viewing is not enough for this film which really only reveals itself on repeated viewings. There’s so much going on here in the characters of a father, a mother, a teenage boy and flashbacks to the teenager as a small baby. After the death of the father who is run over while drunk, the relationship between the son and the mother moves into abuse as she hits him for not eating his food and voyeurism as he spies on her through her bedroom keyhole, referencing similar scenarios in Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986) and, again, Psycho. Added to the mix are an animal corpse, a gratuitous rabbit killing and human murders. One particularly shocking scene involves the boy’s estranged friend kissing a girl near an abandoned, wrecked car and the boy hurling a brick at the amorous couple from behind a wall.
The vignettes make the locations appear as model sets suspended in darkness, each built upon a square patch of ground lifted from a wider Cartesian grid. These scenes don’t just appear then disappear in time, their appearance is also isolated spatially from everything around them. It’s an extremely unsettling experience and a unique, highly idiosyncratic vision. One can imagine Casavecchia going on to further forays short or feature length, animation or live action. If he does start working in live action, I hope he keeps returning to animation too because his use of the medium is part of the reason the film works as well as it does here – and it feels as if he has a great deal more to offer audiences.
Drive (Pulsión) played in Annecy where it won a jury distinction for powerful storytelling. Watch the film trailer below:
Wendy (Lena Headley) is an immigration officer whose task is to reject as many refugees as possible. She’s recognised amongst her colleagues for her ability to spot bogus asylum seekers, promptly and efficiently rejecting the more dubious applications. Through her interrogation, she must figure out whether Haile (Ivanno Jeremiah) is telling the truth, or if his alleged predicament is but a concoction of an opportunistic economic immigrant.
This refugee drama takes sides straight away by noting that 70 million people have been forcibly displaced around the planet, more than the population of the United Kingdom and Ireland combined. It’s as if the entire population of the British Isles was fleeing war or persecution. Wendy does not seem to concerned about these figures, instead searching for loopholes preventing her applicants from settling in the UK. Haile’s case is a very straightforward one: he lied in his application, he does not have any dependants and he attacked two police officer upon being found in the back of lorry that crossed the Channel. All of the odds are against him.
Despite the difficulties, Haile is kind and serene, even affectionate. He tells Wendy that she shares the name with his mother. An officer interjects: “now that’s a new one”, suggesting that he is not telling the truth. The Home Office assumes that applicants lie by default. That’s a sheer perversion of justice.
At first, Wendy is the epitome of heartlessness. The perfect bureaucrat in a world where kindness and altruism are becoming increasingly rare. Or even criminalised, such as in the US and also right here in Europe, particularly in Italy. Helping others has become a criminal offence punishable with a lengthy custodial sentence. Ironically, Haile is also being penalised because of his humanity and solidarity. He refused to kill a rebel in homeland Eritrea, and he’s now wanted for “treason”. His selflessness also shows on his journey from Calais to Dover, where he risked his own life in order to save other refugees concealed inside the same lorry.
While very audacious in its message of solidarity in a world increasingly xenophobic and intolerant, The Flood is very conservative in its format. The narrative is formulaic and sanatised. All the right moral questions are asked, and yet the story lacks a little rawness, such as in the Wolfgang Fischer’s far more riveting Styx (released earlier this year). Some of the most dramatic moments (including an armed altercation between refugees and a death) feel banal and contrived. Plus the story is very predictable. You will work out in the first five minutes that the coldhearted Wendy will gradually sympathise with Haile and eventually switch alliances, culminating is a very noble gesture that could cost her her job. She is undergoing a “car-crash” acrimonious divorce involving a child, and being constantly reminded of her frailties and vulnerabilities. As a consequence, she feels compassion.
The Flood is out on demand and also in cinemas across the UK on Friday, June 21st, and then on VoD (Curzon Home Cinema) the following Monday. The film’s release coincides with World Refugee Week. Curzon is working with the Human Rights Watch in order to promote awareness of true-life stories. Worth a viewing.
This is true working-class tale. It works well as both character portrait and social realist documentary. While timid and perhaps a little unassuming upon first glance, it slowly reveals potent political flavours underneath.
Amin (Moustapha Mbengue) works hard as a labourer in France to support his wife Aïcha (Mareme N’Diaye) and three children back in Senegal, whom he rarely goes back to see. Early scenes see him collect money to take back to his hometown, where he proudly donates to his childhood school. He is treated like a small hero. As the man who provides. He boldly promises his wife he will one day be back for good and they will live in the house they are building together. Yet Amin has already been in France nine years. The separation takes a heavy toll and nothing seems to change.
While a lesser director may set up France to be a place of wonder and opportunity and Senegal a land of hardship, Philippe Faucon doesn’t make things so easy. France may be a place where “if you have money, you have fun” — as one young man puts it — but this means nothing thanks to the weak economy, leading ordinary workers, immigrant or not, to get shafted in the process.
Through slow scenes carefully placed on top each other, Faucon portrays the passing of time and the missed opportunities that entails as an inevitability of poor working conditions, making Amin’s ambitions more and more of a faded dream. The strain of being apart means he barely remembers his children; at one point quietly surprised to learn that his youngest daughter has already grown old enough to have to cover her hair in line with Islamic tradition. One cannot blame him then, when single mother Gabrielle (Emmanuelle Devos) — suffering a bitter separation from her husband — invites him in for a cup of coffee, and he quietly obliges.
For Amin, to be an immigrant is to be always caught between two worlds, yet feel truly home in neither. He is neither weak nor strong, only a normal man with normal needs and vulnerabilities; excellently portrayed through glances and physical body language by Moustapha Mbengue. His relationship with the white housewife isn’t presented as a racial binary, but a chance of genuine connection between both characters — who are not as far apart as initially seems. A certain sense of tenderness is then teased out by Faucon, who is far more interested in who these people are than why they act in such a way, giving the film an uncommon depth for what is ostensibly such a simple tale. Slow on plot, its languorous mood allows us to dwell in the implications of every single act.
Supporting players, chorus-like, help to tease out the different shades of immigrant life. They are all linked together by the large dormitory they live in, a place where nothing ever seems to happen. At first seeming rather aimless, these elliptical digressions create a portrait of a world where times are tough and joy is fleeting. One Moroccan young man visits a French-Algerian prostitute but seemingly cannot perform when she doesn’t open up about her heritage (it’s still a French film after all, so of course sex is used as a metaphor for the immigrant experience). Another has lived in France most of his life, but finds out from his smart French daughter that his pension payments have amounted to almost nothing.
While this sounds all very sad on paper, Faucon has a way of making it all seem very matter-of-fact, making sure to point out the dignity of such people’s lives and their essential character through solid gestures and powerful dialogue beats. While not everyone is given such rounded portrayals — Gabrielle’s ex-husband and Amin’s brother feel like cartoon cutouts from lesser dramas — one senses that the 90 minute drama could go on for another hour and the film would only build in richness.
The flow of money is the true tissue between both worlds. Money (or the lack of it) makes (or doesn’t make) things happen, obliterating racial and geographical distance in the name of broader class difference. The need for capital escapes no one. For example, when Amin sends money home via Western Union, his scene is partnered with another woman transferring cash to Algeria.
It’s a simple contrast that hammers in the film’s central theme of how capitalism keeps families apart, regardless of anything else.
With simple doubling techniques such as these, interspersed with poetic interludes and broader fly-on-the-wall documentation, Amin has one foot in the arthouse and the other in the social realist school; leading to a conclusion that is both bittersweet and politically apt. A delicate balancing act, Faucon’s tale manages to pack a strong political punch while never seeping into didacticism. A small marvel.
Amin is out in cinemas on Friday, June 21st. Its release is timed to coincide with Refugee Week.
In response to the ongoing recovery following the 2008 financial crisis, which saw Britain enter a period of austerity, former Prime Minister David Cameron’s message was that we were all in this together. Just shy of a decade later, Theresa May in her Brexit speech to the House of Commons in March of 2017 said, “…when I sit around the negotiating table in the months ahead, I will represent every person in the United Kingdom – young and old, rich and poor, city, town, country and all the villages and hamlets in between.”
What we hear in these disingenuous words are patriotic pandering to the masses. These are words chosen for effect, with the specific intent of convincing us that they are our champions or representatives. Yet of concern is how to the political elite, the diverse life experiences are an abstract concept, and their words or political spiel becomes a disingenuous version of the American Dream, better termed the “aspirational society”. And it is here that James Gardner’s feature debut Jellyfish is a scathing social and political indictment, bursting their proverbial bubble of a utopian dream of British unity.
.
A stinging piece of filmmaking
Set in Margate, Jellyfish centres around 15-year old Sarah Taylor, who between struggling to get along with her school classmates and dealing with her overbearing boss at the amusement arcade, is forced to look after her unstable mother and two younger siblings. One day her drama teacher challenges her volatility, suggesting she look to devise a stand-up comedy routine for the graduation showcase.
From city bankers and financiers to Margate’s 15-year old vulnerable adolescent. From a former PM claiming we were all in it together, who owned shares in an off-shore investment fund, and May’s own financial interests secured in blind trusts, to a vulnerable young person giving hand jobs out the back of the amusement arcade to top up her part time wage, even conning men on the prowl late at night. While rich and poor, like so many words or phrases are abstract terms in political spiel, they have a real meaning for those they describe. Gardner’s film is a piece of socially conscious filmmaking, with its finger on the pulse of our contemporary society, that pierces the disingenuous.
So, is Jellyfish a fictional dystopia, or is it the truth beneath the lies of a disingenuous political system – one motivated by personal agenda and ideology?
Yes, Sarah is a fictional character played by an actress, but a film does not exist in a vacuum, especially cinema that leans towards social realist cinema. Similarly to the cinema of Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, it captures a snapshot of genuine experiences of the impoverished in our society. What this hopefully achieves is to create a greater empathy for individuals whose lives are blighted by such struggles as Sarah’s, using visual storytelling in order to create a visceral emotional understanding.
With its finger on the pulse, Jellyfish is in a unique position to humanise what the mainstream news media struggles to – the latter prone to evoking shock and anger. However, by taking us inside of the experiences of the impoverished, Gardner allows genuine empathy to flourish. Sarah is not only a victim of her situation and an ineffective social infrastructure, she is also a human being that can empower herself if supported by her society, and her rousing performance at the graduation show, of teacher and student empowering one another, is a testament of this.
Brexit has become the proverbial blame game for Britain’s inadequacies, echoing U.S President Donald Trump’s pulling out of storage Ronald Reagan’s “Make America Great Again” slogan. Ironically, it was Reagan and Margaret Thatcher that would play a significant role in deregulating the financial sector, that led to the 2008 crisis. If history has taught us a lesson, it is that a nation’s pursuit of greatness or prosperity leads to a greater division between the rich and the poor. The pursuit of British independence from the European Union has created what is effectively a smokescreen for the Tory government to install the Universal Credit system, criticised heavily for its ineffectiveness. Taylor’s sexual activities echoes recent concerns raised in the tabloids of March this year, reports of “survival sex”, of women on Universal Credit forced to turn to prostitution in order to survive.
.
Very Brexit problems
Gardner’s films shows a dystopian truth beneath the disingenuous political system – of a PM who on the one hand asserts she is champion of the poor, yet compounds their poverty by supporting a withdrawal from the EU’ that has seen Labour opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn unable to fully challenge the failings of the Universal Credit system.
In one scene, the camera pulls back and leaves Sarah her in the managers office, where she is sexually assaulted. A character leads us on the journey through a story, and this is important to consider in looking at Jellyfish as a political critique. Gardner has delivered a genuine message of a Britain fractured, and while as a nation or a union of four nations we are a part of the Brexit narrative, sub-plots divide the life experiences of a diverse population. The abandonment of Sarah should act as a reminder of how connections are a matter of convenience or necessity, and just as she is necessary to the story, and May and Cameron had to appeal to the country, this connection can be terminated at any point by the person or persons who hold the power in the relationship.
Gardner through his decision to abandon Sarah becomes a metaphor of the British government, echoing the manipulative political machinations, specifically how Brexit juxtaposed with Universal Credit, the current political Tory elite are uninterested in uniting the country. Yet more poignantly, Sarah’s unseen suffering taps into a deeper feeling that has followed Brexit – of individuals no longer represented by the system, left to feel essentially invisible, as the rich and wealthy leading Tories gamble with future stability, selling off parts of the NHS in trade deals with Trump’s America. And who will be the one’s that will pay the price for these choices? The Sarah Taylor’s of our country, whose life experiences are an abstract concept to those individuals in power.
.
Redemption through creativity
Jellyfish by its conclusion is a mix of cautionary optimism, remaining cynical towards the political establishment. It is indeed a celebration of the creative expression of the individual, and how art is a unifying force. Sarah finds a means to express herself and connect with people in a way she had previously been unable to, but beyond the end credits, Jellyfish is a cautionary tale of aspiration. The question lingers on what follows this momentary success for Sarah? Will she be allowed to succeed, to overcome her social and economic status, or will she remain stranded in an impoverished existence? The creativity of her comedy as a means of expression, in this age of austerity in which arts funding and creative careers are facing increasingly difficult times, leaves one with the impression that there is caution to be applied to aspiration. It calls for cynicism towards the political system that represents a select few – arts and creatives often a justified sacrifice.
Not every one is represented, but like Sarah in that room, there are those of us that abandoned or overlooked, and in this adversarial era of Brexit, it is the political elite pursuing their own agendas and self-interest. Can they really be said to be representing us all, or even a majority? The main two parties fight inner battles amongst their ranks, while other parties including the Liberal Democrats and The Greens are fighting to get the message across that they hear our voice. Yet whose voice? Beyond Brexit, there are sub-plots impacting ordinary Britons, and the adversarial disagreement between ‘Remain’ and ‘Leave’ only threatens to increase the hardships of the most vulnerable in our society.
Jellyfish is available on digital HD on Monday, June 24th.
The story begins on New Year’s Eve in the streets of Glasgow. Office worker Elena (Spanish actress Laia Costa, best remembered for the lead role in Sebastian Schipper’s Victoria, from 2016) attempts to hail a cab, but marine biology PhD student Jake (Josh O’Connor, from Francis Lee’s 2017 God’s Own Country) succeeds to capture the driver’s attention first. Elena challenges Jake, and the kind and polite young man offers to share the cab and even to walk the intoxicated and crotchety woman home. He eventually visits her flat, and they bond over Elvis Costello’s raw masterpiece I Want You. What started out as a small quarrel soon develops into a full-blown romantic relationship.
The young and intelligent Jake moves in with the beautiful and yet vaguely dysfunctional Elena. He’s mostly unfazed when Elena tells him that she’s in reality five years older than him. Or nine even. Elena is 35, while Jake is a mere 26 years of age. The age gap does not seem to affect their relationship until Jake asks Elena to expand their family, and they encounter successive problems conceiving a child. Perhaps after Elena’s age (and particularly the age of her eggs) is indeed a barrier to a happy future together?
Jake never blames Elena for her inability to carry a pregnancy. Quite the opposite, he’s understanding and supportive. His father pays for private IVF, after they exhaust their attempts in the NHS. The first private IVF clinic turns them down in order to preserve their sterling stats (ie. a very high success rate). As a result, Elena feels increasingly insecure. She repeatedly challenges Jake, convinced that he will eventually abandon her in favour of a younger and broodier female. Despite her partner’s positive attitude, she feels the burden of a society that pressurises women into motherhood.
First and foremost, Only You is a film about the the vain attempts to create the elusive “perfect family”. Other families seem better than theirs. After all, the grass is always greener. Elena is perplexed to find out that their friends just separated because their offspring was unplanned, in what the father described as a “shock pregnancy”. They were not as happy as they seemed. Nevertheless, Elena grows increasingly touchy and apprehensive. She’s convinced that Jake will eventually leave her.
This is also film about the pressures to become a mother. The burden is almost always on the female. It’s never mentioned or even acknowledged that the difficulties conceiving might be related to the father’s sterility. Some people, however, might think there’s an element of sexism in how the female is portrayed as mostly irrational and distraught. I see it differently. I think that Harry Wootliff (who happens to be a female director) is rather compassionate towards the film protagonist, and she does not seem to blame her for her own internalised ageism. This is a very emotionally frank movie.
On the other hand, Only You is too long at 120 minutes of duration. Very little happens during the course of the movie. The repeated visits to IVF clinics and constant quarrelling get a bit tiring in the second half of the story. Plus, Elena and Jake’s ordeal might seem a little petty for LGBT and elderly childless couples, people who opt to adopt and those who are simply not interested in having a child. A little vanilla.
Only You is out in cinemas and also on demand on Friday, July 12th.
Submarine dramas can make good movies. Witness the huge success of Das Boot (Wolfgang Petersen, 1981), both in Germany, its country of origin, and worldwide. The claustrophobic atmosphere of the submarine, the dangers lurking beyond its walls, attacks from above and the sinking of ships by the successful crew, the tensions of men thrown together in a small space make for good drama.
Yet submarines are also travelling coffins. If all goes well this type of life must be exciting and adventurous. If it does not, death in a submarine is like being buried alive. For the unfortunate crew of the Kursk, a major Russian nuclear submarine, in August 2000 this was their fate. After an onboard explosion, the Kursk was trapped at the bottom of the Barents Sea, and after a delay, during which it was believed that some crew members could have been saved, it became apparent that all 118 crew members had died.
Even superficial online research shows that the precise nature of the accident on the Kursk and the possibility of rescuing the crew are very much disputed. This is not to support the Russian government in any way. The Kursk disaster became a byword for the cruelty and inefficiency of Putin’s government, which refused foreign help to rescue crew members. The incident caused a storm even within the Russian media, normally well controlled.
This movie takes up these themes. The obsolescence of so much Russian military equipment after the collapse of the Soviet system is revealed. The clamp on a diving vessel that would have allowed, through a specific hatch, the crew members to escape in decompressed conditions can’t be attached because it is too worn out, due to inadequate maintenance. The desperate families of the sailors are kept in the dark about what is happening to their loved ones are told lies and half-truths. One desperate woman is sedated by agents in a meeting because she is becoming embarrassing to the presiding naval officers. A foreign helping hand is declined and even when the nearest Russian admiral relents and calls on the services of a nearby British naval officer (Commodore David Russell, played by Colin Firth), he is promptly dismissed, and his post taken by a substitute.
The movie attempts to depict the suffering of the men waiting to be rescued. Here is where submarine drama kicks in. Matthias Schoenaerts (Mikhail Averin) does a brave job trying to keep up the morale of his men. He undertakes an incredibly long, underwater dive to release hatches trapping other crew members. Magnus Millang (Oleg Lebedev) tells silly jokes about polar bears and is generally the funny man in the desperate situation. The men bang pipes and walls of the submarine when they think they are going to be rescued. They have one last feast from ship’s rations before they die.
Their women – especially Léa Seydoux (Tanya Averina) – hold meetings, desperately trying to harry the authorities to be open with them. The lives of the crew’s families are depicted which includes a colourful Russian Orthodox wedding with cheerful singing and feasting afterwards, contrasted with the dull, Soviet-style flats in Murmansk where they live.
All this is well done and convincing. We get great performances from big beasts of the cinema such as Max von Sydow (Vladimir Petrenko), acting as a craggy, patriarchal Admiral, a faithful servant of the state, who will not be moved by the distress of the families. He takes little Misha’s (the captain’s son; Artemiy Spiridonov) refusal to shake his hand after his father’s funeral in his stride. Colin Firth (Commodore David Russell) is exactly right as the compassionate, but stiff upper-lipped, British naval officer.
Having said all this, at two hours this movie is a bit long. We know what the fate of the sailors will be. This undermines the tension of the submarine drama. Much of the drama in the submarine is pure speculation. Some think that their rescue was virtually impossible. Others maintain that, harsh though it was, Russia’s refusal to allow foreign powers to access a top-secret nuclear submarine was only to be expected. In similar circumstance the British and American governments might well have taken the same attitude. Nuclear warfare is a zero-sum game for everyone.
Kursk: The Last Mission is in cinemas and digital HD on Friday, July 12th. On Netflix in February.
In 1993, Steven Spielberg released his most rewarding work. Schindler’s List, a dissertation of Holocaust despair, left its director, critics and audiences emotionally ragged. Spielberg explored one of Europe’s most shameful acts in black and white palettes, including Jewish citizens entirely dehumanised in crated trains. Cut from the same cloth, director Marius A. Markevicius chooses to film his adaptation in luminous flushed colours, which makes one particular rape scene more tangible and repellent than Ralph Fiennes’ equivalent in Spielberg’s opus.
Often overlooked in scholastic history books, the Soviet purges in the Baltic nations and beyond were every bit as horrific as the Nazis. The youthful teenager Lina joins her mother in a concentration camp. Separated from her precious Lithuania and father, Lina must use the pen, paper and artful insight to prove to her father that she is alive and well. Bel Powley proves herself a commendable artist, echoing the collected pain as the camera stares at her alone as she and others are carted like untamed animals into a confined carriage.
Through her flashbacks, we see a contented life where motor cars, scenic rivers and charming romantic ventures come plentiful. That it cuts back to an army barricaded prison. Misery makes the transition even crueller. Ashes In The Snow prides itself on latent, visceral violence, hidden beneath the characters reddened, saddened eyes.
There is a humanity at play. Offended that they cannot stay safely in someone’s house, Lina’s mother (Lisa Loven Kongsli) informs her children that they are criminals in the eyes of the Soviets. Upholding herself with all the courage she has, tears are only a heartbeat away, anger and violence a few seconds. Markevicius keeps his attention on the characters he follows, finding truth behind the people ahead of the concepts. Behind the political ideologies, idiosyncrasies and ideals, it was humans who suffered at the hands of their leaders.
Through her art, Lina finds her voice in its purest form, just as Markevicius finds his voice in the many Linas who felt this reality all too keenly. Evocative, incisive, inclusive and invigorating, this is the spiritual successor to Schindler’s List.
Ashes in the Snow is out on DVD and digital from Monday, July 15th.
Following the success of his surrealist film L’Age D’Or/The Age Of Gold (1930), film director Luis Buñuel finds his main source of funding cut off when the strongly Catholic mother of his primary investor puts pressure in the latter. At the same time, a stranger named Eli Lotar strikes up a post-premiere conversation with the director saying he saw no influence of Dali in the film and presses a book Las Hurdes into Buñuel’s hands.
Frustrated at the lack of funding for his films, Luis decides to film the book which details the appalling living conditions of poor people in a remote village in rural Spain. He visits old friend Ramón Acín who has a family and recently sold a sculpture, immediately ploughing the money into a school for poor locals. They go drinking and Ramón buys a Christmas lottery ticket, joking that if he wins, he’ll fund the film. Amazingly, he wins.
So as producer, Acín accompanies Buñuel to a remote village in Spain to film the documentary Land Without Bread/Las Hurdes (1933).
This fits neatly into the genre of films about filmmaking and film history. Its production in the two dimensional cartoon medium allows for elements as Buñuel recreating for the camera such true life scenes as a goat falling to its death from a dangerous mountain ledge and the occasional dream or fantasy sequence – Daliesque elephants on stilts walking the streets of Paris, a dream in which a beautiful, half naked woman turns embarrassingly into first The Blessed Virgin Mary and second his own mother. Excerpts from L’Age D’Or and Land Without Bread are live action clips from those films.
There are also minor nods to Japanese 2D animation maestro Hayao Miyazaki, with characters lying on the ground on a hot day staring at a clear blue sky.
Whether you’re familiar with Buñuel or completely new to this giant of Surrealist cinema, this Spanish/Dutch production is well worth seeing. Even if the obvious selling image of elephants on stilts doesn’t accurately represent most of what it’s about.
Buñuel In The Labyrinth Of The Turtles showed in Competition at the 2019 Annecy Animation Festival, when this piece was originally written. It’s out on VoD on Thursday, July 16th (2020).
Two very different people inhabit the body of the subject of this documentary. On one hand, there is the puny and diminutive Diego, who born in the year of 1960 in the extremely impoverished city of Villa Fiorito in Greater Buenos Aires. On the other hand, the demigod Maradona, the second greatest footballer of all times (after Pele), respected and revered everywhere he went. The problem is that Diego and Maradona often collided. There is no way these two people could share the same abode.
This is Asif Kapadia’s seventh feature film and third documentary. Amy (2015) won Best Documentary both at the Baftas and Oscars and became the highest-grossing UK doc ever, knocking into second place his very own first feature-length documentary, Senna (2010). In Maradona, for the first time he directs the biopic of a living person. Yet the director hasn’t leveraged this to his benefit. His latest film is inferior to the two movies that catapulted him to fame.
Maradona focuses largely on the years between 1984 and 1991, when the Argentinian footballer played for Napoli and became the “King of Naples”. During this period, the Italian team won the Italian title and the UEFA Cup for the very first time. Maradona had previously played for Barcelona, but he did not enjoy the experience. He enabled the underdogs of Italy to triumph for the very first time. Neapolitan football fans were routinely insulted by their rivals: “wash yourselves”, “you are the sewer of Italy”, “you are infected with cholera”. Maradona made them raise their heads with pride. That, however, came with a price tag. Maradona was the most expensive player in the world at the time, and Naples was “the poorest city of Italy”.
The insecure Diego vanished for many years while Maradona enjoyed unfettered fame and success. Neapolitans likened him to Jesus. Many fans has his picture on their altar. A local doctor took his blood to the local church, presumably because he believed that it could atone for his sins (like the blood of Christ). Even the Camorra respected him. He remained unchallenged. Until one day cocaine came along and his confidence began to crumble. The fearful and touchy Diego made a gradual comeback.
The movie also reveals that Maradona was also instrumental in Argentina’s World Cup win in 1986. The quarter final match between Argentina and England became the most important game of the year, perhaps the decade. That’s because England’s defeat felt like a revenge for the Falklands War four years earlier (won by England/Britain). Plus this is the match where the both hand of God and the goal of the century happened. The final was played against West Germany.
It wasn’t until the 1990 World Cup, however, that Maradona’s relationship with Naples and Italy began to collapse. That’s because The Argentinian player scored a penalty against Italy in the semi-final, shattering the country’s dream of a fourth World Cup title. He instantly became “the most hated man of Italy”, and lost the privileges and the protections that he enjoyed from the media and the justice system. His cocaine addiction was splashed on newspapers and magazines, and he was soon indicted for his drug use. His hedonistic sex life was also exposed.
The film is punctuated with a few facts about Maradona’s personal life. We learn that he married his long-time fiancée Claudia Villafañe, that he helped his parents to buy a house in Argentina and had three children (including one boy from an extramarital relationship in Naples, whom he only recognised in 2016).
As in his previous documentaries, Asif Kapadia opted against talking heads interviews. The film is exclusively made of archive footage, with Maradona’s friends, family and associates (such as journalists and personal trainers) narrating the story in voice-over. The sprightly music score is suitable for Maradona’s energetic performance on the football pitch and erratic lifestyle in Naples’ nightlife.
The problem with Maradona is that it almost entirely neglects everything else in his life. His early years in Argentina and then Spain are only very briefly discussed, while the last three decades of his life are tightly packed into the last 10 minutes of this 130-minute documentary. We learn absolutely nothing about his Sevilla years (in 1992-93), his return to Argentina and the many football teams that he has managed in the past 25 years. We see a video of a morbidly obese on Argentinian TV in 2004, yet we never find out whether he eventually beat his addiction (which he did). The film is far more interested in his contentious relationship with Italy and the country’s fiery temperament.
Maradona’s controversial political views are also strangely left out of the movie. His friendship with Fidel Castro and his staunch support of Hugo Chavez are never mentioned. Maradona is such an outspoken left wing activist that he has a portrait of Castro tattooed on his left leg and one of fellow Argentine Che Guevara on his right arm. These facts are by no means irrelevant in the life of Diego Armando Maradona.
In a nutshell, this is an entertaining yet partial and timid biopic of a man bigger than any football team in which he played. And, in many ways, bigger than life. By focusing too much on one short period of his life, Maradona neglects the other facets of a fascinating human being, and it misses the opportunity to investigate lesser-known aspects of the footballer’s life. Neither an own goal nor the goal of the century.
Maradona is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, June 14th. On VoD on Monday, November 11th.
Raju (Moin Khan) is a lovely boy, handsome, ever cheerful, always relaxed. He is very likeable. The trouble is that he keeps breaking his poor parents’ hearts. This is the fourth time he has failed his engineering exams and there seems to be no chance that he will progress from his family’s humble one room apartment to a good profession – the escape route for so many Indian families to respectability and a decent income.
His mother Laxmi (Neha Bam) must go out to wash other people’s kitchenware. His poor father Krishna (Saagar Kale) has for 30 years been the lift boy at a block of apartments pushing buttons all day to pay for Raju’s college fees. India is a country where, like 19th century Britain, many members of the population have to survive by doing mind-numbing work that those who are better off could perfectly well do themselves.
Poor Krishna has a heart attack and must take complete bed rest for three weeks. Who can do his work? – a serious economic problem for the family. Raju steps in and suddenly present himself at the block of flatsto the rather grumpy Maureen D’Souza, who besides keeping the keys to the lift, is also one of the chief tenants. Raju is so charming that he soon catches the eye of Princess (Aneesha Shah), the local resident pretty girl, who has her own problems. Her mother Mrs. Kapoor (Shilpa Tyer) is pushing her to be an actor, a career that Mrs. Kapoor did not succeed in herself.
This film raises themes much associated with India – crushing parental expectations, the inexorable demands of potential poverty, the desperate need to free oneself from class and caste status. These can be dark themes but don’t worry, this movie is essentially a fairy tale. Like its hero, it has a likeable, comic feel to it – the watchman who is always asleep in his chair outside the building, Raju break-dancing outside the lift when he should be cleaning it, his large friend Shawn (Damian D’Souza) who offers Raju outrageous advice on how to pass his exam, Raju reading the Great Gatsby in the lift while pressing buttons (he really wanted to study English literature).
How, you might ask, does poor Krishna, pay for his son’s college education on a lift boy’s earnings? Well, it would be a spoiler to tell you how this is, but it turns out that the initially grumpy Mrs. D’Souza is the fairy godmother of this fairy tale. Raju does pass his exams (but not in English literature) and the main characters really do live happily ever. This is, unfortunately, the film’s problem.
Maybe the dark sides of Indian life – class and caste consciousness, the threat of poverty, the weight of family expectations – have become so perennial they are the subject of comedy. I have no problem with comic films that deal with serious themes – think Spike Lee’s last year’s BlacKkKlansman – but if they do not pay enough attention to the serious issues they are addressing, they risk becoming a sort of apology for oppression. Peter Farrelly’s Green Book (also from last year) with its feel-good ending sails close to this danger.
The Lift Boy with all its charm and gentle comedy will please many in India and elsewhere but I fear that it is too romanticised. It reminds one of the Victorian nightmare of being caught in the wrong class, as in Dickens. The poor little middle-class boy born in the workhouse (Oliver Twist), the Micawbers (Little Dorrit), who are detained in the debtors’ prison, all represent the perils of a system where social mishap can spell social exclusion. The fact that Dickens uses these themes for comedy and vivid characterisation (which he does superbly) shows, that even he, who suffered such a fate temporarily during his boyhood, accepted the inevitably of such a system. So, in The Lift Boy, the failure to get that degree means living the rest of one’s life in one room. The fact that social tragedy can be turned into a feel-good fairy tale tells you a lot about the realities of India.
The Lift Boy showed at the The Bagri Foundation London Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It’s on Netflix from April (2020)
