Hollywood. 1969. Screen actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) has been reduced from former star of TV Western Bounty Law to villains in other serial episodes. He needs to do something to get his career back on track. His stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) acts as his driver and general handy man and is also a trusted friend and confident. As Cliff drives around the city, he sees hippie girls hanging out or thumbing lifts on the Los Angeles roadside, some of them as he will discover members of Charles Manson’s now infamous ‘Family’ cult. Rick’s next door neighbours on Hollywood’s exclusive Cielo Drive are celebrity film director Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha) and his pregnant, rising star actress wife Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), although Rick has never met them.
Littered with pop culture references ranging from movie posters on billboards and titles on theatre marquees to clips from film and television, popular music from the period and even radio ads featuring Batman, Tarantino’s script mixes fact and fantasy, real and fictional characters. A part of it takes place in February 8-9 1969 then leaps forward to August 8-9 of the same year. The latter date is that of the real life Tate murders when members of the Manson Family broke into the Polanski/Tate home and killed everyone who was there, including the eight and a half months pregnant Sharon Tate. The Manson Family were living on the Spahn Movie Ranch, a former location for shooting Westerns owned by the now blind George Spahn (played in the film by Bruce Dern in an astounding turn). A little of Sharon Tate’s movie career is covered too, specifically The Wrecking Crew (Phil Karlsen, 1968) which is playing at a cinema that the actress visits.
Although the Rick Dalton/Cliff Booth characters and story are pure invention, they intertwine with more factually and historically based material. There’s an apocryphal sequence of Rick playing the Steve McQueen (Damian Lewis) character in The Great Escape (John Sturges, 1963) with DiCaprio cleverly replacing McQueen to interact with the other actors in otherwise genuine footage from that film. Booth gives flower girl Pussycat (Margaret Qually) a lift to the Spahn ranch hoping he might be able to visit his old boss whom he hasn’t seen for years. Tarantino has a lot of fun with all this, both on period Hollywood Studio lots and in the wider world of L.A. and beyond, at one point staging an impromptu fight between Booth and Bruce Lee (Mike Moh) when he was playing Kato in The Green Hornet.
The whole thing runs for the best part of three hours but never outstays its welcome. Tarantino here makes full use of his lengthy running time, packing in a riot of incidental visual and aural detail and allowing scenes to play out for just as long as they need. The whole thing is a love letter to Hollywood, to L.A. and to the tail end of the 1960s and is hugely entertaining. Pitt and DiCaprio make memorable onscreen buddies. Neither of them has ever been better. Nor, arguably, has Tarantino. The amazing cast to be found in its numerous, additional bit parts includes Dakota Fanning, Luke Perry, Timothy Olyphant, Al Pacino, Kurt Russell, Emile Hirsch, Michael Madsen, Zoe Bell, Scoot McNairy and Brenda Vaccaro. And the level of sheer background detail may make this a film you’ll want to return to again and again.
Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood is out in the UK on Wednesday, August 14th. On Netflix on Wednesday, July 7th. Also available on other platforms.
While it takes place in consistently bright sunshine near a Turkish habour town, there’s nothing pleasant about the family dynamics portrayed here. Although Sascha (Victoria Carmen Sonne) arrives at a Turkish airport wearing summer clothing and lugging a case at the start, the narrative wouldn’t do too well in the Bechdel Test as all her dealings with the world appear to involve men and revolve around sex and/or violence – real, implied or refused. Pretty quickly she’s in a parked white car with Bobby (Yuval Segal) and explaining to him that she’s €300 short. He complains that “pretty girls think everything is for free” and gives her a pretty unpleasant warning on behalf of the boss to ensure she’ll never make another mistake like that. Her one and only warning which is never discussed again.
Later Sascha is picked up by boyfriend Michael (Lai Yde) and his number two Bo (Bo Brønnum) in the same white car. They drive to the villa where the rest of the ‘family’ are waiting. Swimming Pool. Drink. Drugs. A couple of other women, one of whom Tanje (Laura Kjær) looks as young as Sascha. There’s clearly money to burn and Michael has put some of it into the tacky hotel where Sascha stayed overnight after her flight.
Male hijinks and larking about quickly give way to something darker. Take the loyal Musse (Adam Ild Rohweder) who barks when playfully called a dog. At one point he puts a foot wrong: he comes back to the villa after someone hasn’t shown up. Michael is concerned that Musse may have lead the police there. They take him from outside into a downstairs room while Sasha, Tanje and a child are sent to watch TV in the lounge. The three turn up the volume to hide the sounds of whatever’s going on in the other room. Later bearing flesh wounds he hands out presents to Michael, Bo and others. Michael tells him everything is okay and gives his an envelope of cash. His philosophy is to punish bad and reward good.
How this works out for the women in this group is much more sexual. Sascha is abused in some pretty unpleasant and explicit ways by Michael, which immediately earn the film a BBFC 18 certificate (and the same for its trailer below, although the material in the film itself is considerably stronger and far more unpleasant than what’s shown in the 18 trailer).
Not all characters here are as nasty. Dutch yachtsmen Tomas (Thijs Römer) is an easy going type who, it later emerges, has given up the cutthroat world of sales and marketing for a life sailing round the world with his pal Karsten (Stanislav Sevcik). Sascha meets the pair in an ice cream parlour queue and later takes Ecstasy with Tomas on the local beach. He’s a nice guy who is later going to wish he hadn’t come anywhere near Sascha.
Holiday consistently looks good with Turkish sun burning into every bright blue skied, daytime frame and the night time environment appearing just as idyllic. No-one can accuse the cast of not trying really hard.
Eklöf previously had a screenplay credit on Border/Gräns (Ali Abbasi, 2018) but her feature directorial debut is nowhere near as complex or skilfully orchestrated as either that, Burning (Lee Chang-dong, 2018) or Dragged Across Concrete (S. Craig Zahler, 2018). Both these latter films contain an element of misogyny. Yet while the female-written and -directed Holiday’s intention to express the voices of women placed in positions of submission might be admirable, this backfires in the finished film by failing to offer any way out of a misogynistic cycle of violence in which women are abused by men. A few unsettling scenes and shocks, not least in the closing 10 or so minutes where the piece veers off in one or two unexpected directions, aren’t really enough to lift the whole above that. Perhaps Eklöf should take a lesson from Revenge (Coralie Fargeat, 2018) which at least attempted to turn the tables.
Holiday is out in the UK on Friday, August 2nd. On VoD on Monday, August 26th.
Although F.Murray Abraham who won the Oscar, it was Tom Hulce’s arc which led Milos Forman’s astonishing Amadeus (1984) through the cascading chordal changes which haunted Mozart as he wrote his librettos. Staggeringly situated in solemn sincerity, Forman explored the prowess classical opera held and holds on its listeners. Marc Collin, on the other hand, explores the power of electronic music of the 1970s, an esoteric genre as captivating as Mozart’s, imposing an impressive piece, much of it triumphantly directed.
Jodorwsky’s Ana plays the captivated fan, eagerly awaking during the film’s opening to a cigarette and Giorgo Moroder. Sinewy, sensual, sanguine, sagacious, Ana pirouettes periodically from the bathed bed to the multi composed keyboard from where she writes in one of the film’s more outstanding set pieces. This niche genre of avant pop music calls Ana in all its undiluted qualities, while others perceive its improvised mechanics as an affront. Captivated by the raw rigidity, Ana wastes hours reconnecting her thoughts to that of the music, as deadlines and past-times pass her by.
Despondent, her manager informs her that he’s called ten times to no reply, oblivious to the obvious charm this style of music holds. The apartment scenes are gorgeously decorated, spacious halls lit by exterior reflections cascading the outer world from the inner, rugs ravished under the barefooted composer. Working through the sound systems of a device she wishes to buy, Ana finds as much pleasure from the dropped needle as Trainspotting’s (Danny Boyle, 1996) Renton takes from the sharpened device.
It’s a finely accomplished piece of filmcraft, bathetic beats bearing becomingly between the various edits. One telling scene shows Ana writing with another female artist, writing their perspective truths in an industry both phallocentric and underplayed. Between them, the two women embody the steamiest sections seventies youth culture shows in all of its most glorious of detail.
And yet the film lacks the panache posited on personal conversation. At times it comes across a little robotic in delivery, just like the machines portrayed. On the other hand, the soundtrack is reliably stellar!
The Shock of the Future is in cinemas on Friday, September 13th.
The titular photograph of Miloni (Sanya Malhotra) is the thread connecting the episodic narrative. It is taken by Rafi (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) a freelance photographer, eking out a living by taking pictures of tourists at the attraction of the Gateway. Against all the odds and despite the difference in age, background and education, they develop a strong connection.
Said photograph, which is never seen clearly, appears to transform Miloni into an image of beauty. Otherwise, she appears a self-effacing young woman devoted to her studies. Her willingness to go along with her family’s wishes is illustrated by her mother choosing the colour of the dress which suits her best. By volunteering the photograph taken by Rafi, she is compliant in responding to her parents plan to arrange an introduction to a suitable match for her. Despite her own interest in becoming an actress, she studies accountancy at college.
In contrast to the comfortable home where Miloni lives with her parents and sisters, Rafi shares one room in a multi-occupied building with a convivial group of friends and fellow photographers. They and others of Rafi’s acquaintance make much of the fact that his grandmother, living in his home village at a considerable distance (three days journey by train) wants to see him married. He has provided a dowry for each of his sisters and sends money regularly to his grandmother leaving himself with no means of setting up home himself.
Left with extra copies of the photograph of Miloni, it occurs to Rafi to send a sample to his grandmother as proof that he has a girlfriend, not anticipating that this will result in his grandmother coming to see for herself. This sets off a chain of reactions which form the main body of the film. Miloni goes along with the deception and even creates a back story for herself as an orphan. The character of the grandmother (played by Farrukh Jaffar) motivated by the need to see her grandson married, is a an unusual portrayal of a woman in old age, well able to adapt to life in the big city.
Various encounters with taxi drivers, visits to the cinema, a meeting with prospective husband (whose aim in life is to get away from his parents) expand our understanding of the characters of the couple. Miloni with the awareness of Rafi waiting in the background manages effectively to get away from her unpleasantly assertive college lecturer. She benefits from advice from the more worldly-wise maid within her parents household.
Despite the differences in background, Rafi and Miloni each have stories which demonstrate their strong attachment to their grandparents. Little is said but they manage to meet up quite successfully and spend time together. The specially composed music supports the screen images, often creating a melancholy but intimate atmosphere. Who knows how their friendship will progress but each appears to have a deepening understanding of their importance to each other.
Photograph is in cinemas across the UK on Friday, August 2nd.
This film spends most of its running length inside an unnamed Mexico City hotel (actually the real life Hotel Presidente). There are scenes with views of the skyline from glass windows mostly on either the 21st or 42nd floors, including a running gag about lowering the blinds to shut out the prying eyes of the amorous window cleaner on his platform outside, ultimately paid off when the title character leaves the blind up, sits on the bed and strips off down to her knickers.
This scene is uncharacteristic of the film as a whole, in which chambermaid Eve (Gabriela Cartol) quietly and dutifully goes about completing her daily workload tidying, cleaning and replenishing items in guest rooms on the 21st floor for which she is fully responsible. To do this, she must leave her home at 4am to get to the hotel by 6am. We never see her home, but we learn that she takes showers at work because her home doesn’t have one.
Eve conscientiously hands in personal effects left behind by departed guests. These include a red dress which she covets and for which she has put in a request should the owner fail to reclaim it within a given time and about which she periodically asks both lost property and her boss. She’s an undeniably hard worker whose loyalty is in part retained by her employers’ dangling in front of her a promotion looking after the recently opened, more luxurious 42nd floor. This promotion is the carrot that keeps her going until towards the end of the film the certainty of her getting the new job looks like it might evaporate with the position going to someone else.
The other thing that keeps Eve going is an adult education class run by the hotel workers’ union (until the class is shut down for reasons never fully clarified) which improves her maths skills and gets her reading a copy of ‘Jonathan Livingston Seagull’. It also helps her make friends with the extroverted Minitoy (Teresa Sánchez), a woman who likewise works as a chambermaid on the 16th floor. Elsewhere in the building Eve is periodically hassled by Tita (Marisa Villaruel) who wants to sell her hand lotion and plastic lunchboxes.
We also glimpse the guests as she works around them. The opening scene features a nightmare mess of a room in which Eve discovers what at first appears to be a body on the floor under some sheets but is quickly confirmed when he gets up and starts wandering around to be a dazed old man who has presumably fallen out of bed. Another man does voice overs for or vocal recorded reports on nature films and consistently demands further quantities of amenities be brought to his room. Argentinian mother Romina (Agustina Quinzi) complains about her lack of freedom and gets Eve to look after her small baby while she takes a shower. Eve has a four year old at home and a friend drafted in to look after then child and it’s hard to believe the well-heeled, hotel guest mother’s life is anything like as difficult.
The form of the piece relies heavily on the job of a chambermaid, the camera watching passively in long, unbroken takes as Eve goes about her work in bedrooms, bathrooms and the laundry area. This appears to be grounded in much on location, pre-shooting research by the director because it has an almost documentary feeling of everyday reality about it. And that’s the film’s great asset which makes it so compelling to watch – an entry point into an unfamiliar yet fascinating world which, in turn, takes us inside Eve’s head.
The whole movie, while it must have been scripted, is largely low on dialogue (although Eve communicates with her boss at intervals via walkie-talkie) and feels like episodes may have been moved around a great deal during the editing process. (In terms of its editing it’s among the best films you’ll see all year). For the first hour, you wonder where it’s headed and then the final half hour pushes the piece in some very definite directions. However, it might have been better off without any such attempt at narrative closure, as the more meandering first hour is arguably more satisfying.
The Chambermaid is out in the UK on Friday, July 26th, and then on VoD the following Monday (the 29th). On Mubi for a month on Tuesday, December 27th (2022)
They were in a relationship for eight years. They spent about six months a year together in the Greek Island of Hydra. Then four months. Then two months. Then two weeks. After the eight-year period and the relationship name to an end, they would still see each other for a couple of days a year, Leonard Cohen joked. The two lovers remained connected through music and memories. After all, there ain’t no cure for love. Until one day Marianne became fatally ill. This time, she had to say farewell. She died in July 2016. Leonard Cohen wrote a love letter: “Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine”. He passed away just three months later.
The latest work by English documentarist Nick Broomfield – more recognised for controversial and inflammatory pieces such as Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (1992) and Sarah Palin: You Betcha! (2011) – is tender, intimate and respectful of his subjects. Broomfield himself was a friend of Marianne Ihlen, as well as an occasional lover. She is described as “extremely kind and generous” throughout the movie. Marianne and Leonard: Words of Love is a love letter to the titular characters.
The film starts in the 1960s in the idyllic Greek island. Cohen was a writer struggling to make ends meet. His latest book was panned by critics, who described it as “verbal masturbation”. He wasn’t a singer yet. He was neither rich nor famous. He met Marianne and her toddler Axle and became some sort of father figure to him. Marianne – who was extremely shy and never thought of herself as beautiful – became his muse. He then composed the famous song So Long Marianne, which catapulted him to fame. She first thought that the song wasn’t for her because her name is pronounced “Mariana”. Ironically, it was the fame brought by the song that caused Leonard Cohen to drift from the sun-kissed Norwegian beauty.
Everybody knows that the 1960s were a time of sexual freedom and LSD, and Leonard Cohen was extremely famous and attractive. He became a magnet for females. He also became very promiscuous. He described his life as a “blue film”, and as with any blue film “without romanticism”. He also started a relationship with Suzanne (the one from the eponymous song) in Montreal. He argued that his constant travel and departures, and inability to settle were not a symptom of selfishness, but instead a mere question of survival. Eventually, Marianne decided to split up and move back to Oslo, where she married a seemingly loving and devoted husband.
It’s not easy to make a film about Leonard and Marianne in equal measures. Marianne’s life was far less eventful than Leonard Cohen’s. That’s why Broomfield focuses primarily on the Canadian artist. We learn about his Russian mother, his recurring depression problems, his stint at the Bald Zen Center at Los Angeles, and so on. There’s a lot trivia most die-hard fans such as myself are likely familiar with, including the Janis Joplin blow job at the Chelsea Hotel and his creepy experience working with gun-toting Phil Spector. Strangely and disappointingly, Leonard Cohen’s songs are mostly absent from the movie (a live extract So Long, Marianne and Bird on a Wire, the two songs inspired by Cohen’s Scandinavian muse, are only briefly heard).
The end of the movie is beyond powerful. Marianne reads Cohen’s final poem to her on her hospital deathbed, being reminded of the frailty of their bodies and their imminent end. She finds peace in his final words. Their relationship finally came full circle. Hey, that’s the way to say goodbye!
Marianne and Leonard: Word of Love is in cinemas Friday, July 26th.
A day in the life tale of a racially divided block in Brooklyn, the one-of-a-kind talent’s fourth film rightly catapulted his rise to fame and ushered in a new era for black film in America.
This is Spike Lee at his best: direct, unflinching and didactic. He implores the US to find its better self, and to rise above the hatred and to sort out its differences. In the light of his recent, far more politically pointed yet structurally looser works such as Chi-Raq (2016) and BlacKKKlansman (2018), Do The Right Thing stands out for the way it feels both contained and generous, its plot slowly simmering to boiling point while allowing a whole world to teem and bustle within its frames.
In one of the best bits of self-casting in cinematic history, Spike Lee plays the protagonist Mookie, working in a pizzeria in a predominantly black neighbourhood, hereby acting as a bridge between the Italian and African-American community. He also embodies the tensions of a black man in a neighbourhood where all the economic power seems to be contained in the hands of others — both Italian and Korean, with nothing left for the African Americans.
Danny Aiello excels as Mookie’s boss Salvatore, whose pride in his role as the block’s pizza provider borders on the patronising. While not as blatantly racist as his son Pino (John Turturro), he seems wilfully blind to his own prejudice. While often seeing himself as the voice of reason, he quickly rises to anger when his authority is challenged, displaying the privilege of the white man in relative power. Mookie resents his role as the poorly paid delivery man, constantly telling the mother of his child (Rosa Perez) that one day he’ll quit and finally make something of himself.
This central conflict is played out against the wider backdrop of community life, panoramically staged. It often feels like it is channelling the fleeting, joyful and observant poetry of Langston Hughes, the great African American writer who dazzlingly teased out the contradictory realities of black life in America. Whether its the middle-aged men on the block, who shoot the breeze all day while sweating in 100 degree Fahrenheit heat, or the old drunk, acting like the conscience of an entire nation, or the jazz-like rhymes of Samuel L. Jackson as a radio host, Do The Right Thing could have worked as a mere observational piece like Smoke (Wayne Wang and Paul Auster, 1995). What Lee does that’s so clever is weave these different, contrasting lives into the narrative itself, until clashing ideologies finally force the dam to break.
The film functions like a Russian doll of racial conflicts. Episodic scenes such as the Italian-American driver getting his car sprayed by a loose fire hydrant, the white brownstone owner told to leave the predominantly black neighbourhood and Mookie’s own conflicts with his Hispanic mother-in-law, are mini-stories within the main story, showing how on hot days, any small conflict can potentially spill into violence. The spark in this case may be Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito) demanding a black person adorn the walls of Sal’s pizzeria — which features only famous Italian-Americans such as Al Pacino and John Travolta despite catering to a mostly black clientele — but on another day it could’ve been something else entirely.
Perspective is everything. Its constant change is brilliantly reflected by Ernest Dickerson’s cinematography, excellently using skewed angles to portray differing viewpoints in the neighbourhood. This is complemented by the fine deep shots and wide angles, allowing side characters to constantly flit in and out of the background, giving the impression of a corner constantly bustling with life. Then in one brutally effective sequence, characters talk directly to the camera, shouting every racist epithet under the sun, showing how prejudice is something of a performance in itself; a tale as old as time, perhaps impossible to unlearn.
When s**t hits the fan and the police finally arrive and brutally strangle Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) to death in a scene that horrifically predates Eric Garner’s murder by about 25 years, it becomes clear that the issues facing this neighbourhood cannot be solved within the neighbourhood alone. These are structural problems built upon a fundamentally racist society. Do The Right Thing is so brilliant precisely because its representation is so knotty and its conflicts seemingly unsolvable. It’s not a fairy tale like To Kill A Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan, 1963) where racism can be evaporated through taking your jacket off and giving a good speech.
With everyone so set in their ways, finding a way through can seem almost impossible. But it is not the role of a filmmaker to provide solutions, but to start the kind of conversations that can lead to solutions further down the road. Spike Lee possibly does this better than anyone. With the jury still out on whether Mookie did the right thing by throwing the garbage bin through the pizzeria window, its the kind of conversation-starting cinema that’s needed now more than ever.
Despite its essentially timeless nature, the only thing that seems dated is the portrayal of the Korean shop-owners, put in to provide extra colour but lacking a own perspective of their own. While Lee is usually so good at transcending basic stereotypes (consider the heft given to the complex racial past of the Italian-Americans) the Asian characters have no part to play apart from owning a shop while withstanding prejudice from both black and white patrons. It just goes to show that even Spike Lee has a lot of learning to do. We all do.
The 30th anniversary edition of Do The Right Thing is in cinemas on Friday, August 2nd.
A film exec produced by Martin Scorsese with a top-drawer cast (including Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Shannon and Nicholas Hoult) is almost guaranteed to become an instant hit. But then Harvey Weinstein – who owns the film distribution company – was brought down by a series of sexual misconduct allegations, the ensuing scandal tarnishing and delaying the film release. This would have been a real pity if The Current War was a great film. Unfortunately this is a squeaky clean historical drama with hardly any colour and vigour.
It stars Cumberbatch as the the business and inventor Thomas Edison (often described as “America’s greatest inventor”) and his competitors American entrepreneur and engineer George Westinghouse (Shannon) and the Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla (Hoult). The film starts out as Edison is about the bring electrical power to Manhattan for the very first time, thereby astonishing the entire world. Meanwhile, Tesla invents modern alternating current (AC) electricity, while Westinghouse put all his resources into developing and marketing Tesla’s idea. They are in competition against the Edison’s direct current (DC) system.
The film title refers to the battle between AC and DC. Westinghouse and Tesla sought to split the energy market between the two organisations, but Edison was far less magnanimous. He was not interested in compromise, instead forging ahead on his own. Edison is ambitious, unscrupulous and mercurial. Westinghouse is dandy, cocky and entrepreneurial. Tesla is shy and lacking confidence. The bright Serbian inventor is eventually left penniless, while the two big titans fight for the money and prestige. Westinghouse receives the recognition that he longed for in 1911 by winning the Edison Medal “for meritorious achievement in connection with the development of the AC system”. The irony of the award name speaks for itself.
The topics of xenophobia and unfettered capitalism are touched throughout the film. Tesla believes that being an immigrant in the US prevents him from gaining the recognition that he deserves (perhaps little has changed since). He also believes that it’s “currency” and not “current” that moves the world, thereby highlighting the deceitful and ruthless nature of the business battle. These two topics are extremely interesting and yet secondary.
We also learn that electricity was soon applied to the death penalty. We watch the first electric chair executions, and the very gruesome deaths (particularly the bungled ones, where the person has to be electrocuted over and over again). At first, Edison regrets that his invention is being used for such morally questionable purposes. But eventually business interests prevail, and he becomes uninterested in the deadly use of electricity. He was never overwhelmed by guilt.
The Current War could have been an interesting and informative historical drama. The problem is that it relies too heavily on the mise-en-scene, visual gimmicks and the music, while the script is all over the place. There is a climax and a twist every five minutes from the very beginning of the movie. It becomes exhausting after 20 minutes. And tortuous after 108 minutes. A little bit like the bungled executions portrayed in the movie. Plus the nuts and bolts of the actual story are very difficult to put together. I never understood why Westinghouse and AC won the first round of the war, and how come Tesla was left to fend for himself. If you want to learn more about the history of electricity, watch a good documentary instead.
All in all, The Current War is a mediocre fantasy thriller trying really hard to tell a real story (and failing tremendously at doing so). Plus, it’s a film guaranteed to fail the Bechdel test. Women are pretty-looking, entirely flat characters devoid of any psychological depth. Maybe a little bit how Weinstein perceives females.
The Current War is out in UK cinemas on Friday, July 26th. On Netflix on Monday, July 26th (2021). Also available on other VoD platforms.
In 1952, Jean Markham (Anna Paquin) returns to the small Scottish town where she grew up to take over her father’s medical practice as the local doctor. She left in her teenage years under scandalous circumstances which, we’ll learn later, involved falling in love with another girl in an age when such things were frowned upon. When young Charlie Weekes (Gregor Selkirk) turns up at her surgery with a minor injury, recognising he may be going through something of a hard time she takes him back to her house to show him the bee hives she keeps in her garden. She tells him you can share any secret with the bees and they’ll understand.
Charlie’s mum Lydia (Holliday Grainger) isn’t having an easy time of it either. Her husband Robbie (Emun Elliot) became a changed man during the war and their relationship is over. He has to all intents and purposes moved out of the family home. Lydia holds down a factory floor position at the mill where her less than sympathetic sister in law Pam (Kate Dickie) works, but is behind on the rent and eviction is not far off on the horizon. Lydia’s fury at the new doctor taking her son to his house is mitigated when she meets Jean and discovers the latter is a woman, not a man.
Once Lydia and Charlie are evicted, Jean gives them lodging. When Lydia is laid off, Jean gives her a job as housekeeper. On news of her eviction, Lydia – a keen dancer – heads to a local pub, hits the drink and is all over the first man to join her on the dance floor. Charlie spots her through the window and feels betrayed. If you’ve seen the trailer or publicity stills which accurately pitch the film as a lesbian romance you’ve got a pretty good idea where this is going – although the narrative has a few surprises in store towards the end.
Henrietta and Jessica Ashworth’s adaptation of Fiona Shaw’s novel proves effective for the most part, capturing the feel of a small town where everybody knows everybody else and no secrets stay hidden for long. In passing, it delivers believable portraits of bailiffs working for landlords and the harsh, shop floor working conditions of (mostly female) mill workers. Doctors working within the newly founded NHS find that patients can’t quite get used to the idea that medical treatment is free and consequently are slower in seeking advice or treatment than they might be today (at least, while we still have an NHS free to all at the point of need). Finally, in an unexpectedly harrowing subplot, a backstreet abortion goes wrong threatening to kill off a minor character.
Beyond the young Charlie, the few other male characters are deftly sketched if mostly on the fringes of the narrative. Lydia’s husband Robbie is a brute given to occasional bouts of violence, unable to relate to his wife yet still tragically in love with her. He contrasts sharply with Jean’s kindly solicitor friend Jim (Stephen Robertson) who proposes to her then remains genuinely interested in her well-being even after his advances have been rejected. Elsewhere the boy with whom Charlie plays in the woods talks to him about “a dirty dyke”, the only words on offer to describe Jean’s sexual preferences.
All the performances are top notch (why doesn’t Kate Dickie get more decent roles?). A mention should also go to the decision to shoot with real bees rather than special effects: the bee wrangling and cinematography yield spectacular results.
The one place the film trips up follows a scene in which the outraged Robbie plunges his fist through one of Jean’s hives. If you kept bees and discovered someone had done this, you’d most definitely have a reaction. But, inexplicably, Jean doesn’t ever appear to notice this has happened. (It may not be a script error – it’s possible this material was there and either not shot or cut out after shooting to bring down the running length.) It’s an irritating plot hole that knocks the film down at least a star on our rating. Which is a shame because, that sole misstep aside, the whole thing works as a serviceable, small town, post-war, lesbian, romantic drama. With a young boy’s perspective thrown in alongside those of the two women for good measure.
Tell It To The Bees is out in the UK on Friday, July 19th. On VoD on Monday, November 11th.
Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s The Candidate is a political thriller, and as with many political thrillers, it is a little too long. But it does produce a juicy effigy, conspiratorial in division, to make for a strong night’s viewing, much of it genuinely thrilling and affecting at points. Manuel (Antonio de la Torre), a charismatic, louche politician finds himself the victim behind a leak involving a corruption scandal, which threatens to break his entire party and decimate a drowning man politically.
Conversations infused with cigarettes light the fiery backstage conversation. Manuel is threatened with thinly veiled references to his daughter’s Nati (Maria de Nati) well-being, causing moments of dubious self-reflection and introspection. Protracted smears seemingly chase the downtrodden man, ably and brilliantly articulated by the star of the seminal The Fury of a Patient Man. Antonio de la Torre, magnetic in sneer, smirk and sinewy appearance, divides charm, charisma with low lying latent violent demeanours.
Asking for a receptionist’s book, Manuel walks the thin line between commanding and threatening, shades of Joe Pesci’s past performances alarming the audiences. He’s a vigorous, virile lead and though the final third makes the unlikely leap action hero formula, Manuel is a prescient presence, presiding the pain, panache and poetry a man in his position and disposition must conquer. The silence looks good on de la Torre, yet the valiant speeches he gives exude the right level of character and charisma for the script’s valedictorian purposes.
Causes and causeways call on the Madrid pathways, leading to one of the film’s more explosive scenes. Manuel exits a taxi, towering under the towers which have serviced his wallet for decades. What follows is the film’s centre-piece, a tense talkative throwback to the Spanish films of the 1990s such as All About My Mother (Pedro Almodovar, 1999) and Butterfly’s Tongue (Jose Luis Cuerda, 1999), punchy in spirit and word, clenched fists dropped for worded hits, the barbed threat more realised than the physical punch.
Ana Wagener’s angry insults match Manuel’s finger pointed barbs, both decrying each other for their hypocrisies. Two political masterminds, mixed in their ministerial duties and demonstrations, drench one another in aggressive angular answers. The construct of human maturity displaying the actions of infantile immaturity, this telling moment shows how petty the political performances can shape left to their personal devices.
And yet the run time simply drags the audience’s attention at points, at times taking from one of Antonio de la Torre’s most rewarding performances. It needs splicing from the unnecessary amount of exposition, for a punchier product. A near-perfect film.
The Candidate (aka The Realm) is in cinemas and digital HD on Friday, August 2nd.
As with every July 12th, the Orange Marchers cornered the Queen’s avenues of Belfast with the zest of 1690 ringing through the 2019 buildings. It’s a march that symbolises the divisions that exist still in Ireland’s most northerly province. These divisions led to a war, starting in the 1960s, only the shared power-sharing handshakes of The Good Friday Agreement ceased a 30-year conflict. Chaos and conflict have narrative properties, a quality which has been showcased in several films. Though the most galling depictions of The Troubles were saved until the millennium, many fine reflections of conflated conflicted truths found their to the cutting room floors, some telling reflections of Her Majesty’s Government serialised in serial film.
And yet neither the Loyalist nor the Republican Movements acted with great compassion, the torment of war encased in the artillery on both sides. This list neither wags nor holds a finger at the disputatious activities which involved three nations. Rather it seeks to understand the artistry which reflected a war divided over monarchic loyalties, hibernal loyalties and a statement of Northern Irish identity. The impact of a Brexit Vote (which Northern Ireland voted against) may cause a future return to the struggles. For some, reunification seems paramount, for others, an affront to their proud identity. As it stands the first opens in an Ireland preparing, the last in Scotland finishing a war, while the eight impress the haunting conflicts of a residual, never ending battle.
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1. Ryan’s Daughter (David Lean, 1970):
The gun toting, bog smoking antics of the Republican movement matches the backdrop of David Lean’s cinematic portraiture, the Kerry landscape wistfully romantic in spirited woodlands. Soldiers and bullets enter the mountainous backdrop as a local married pub lady enters into a liaison with a soldier whose comrades kill her townsmen. David Lean’s pastoral, political spectacle carries a covert change cutting the myriad of masked freedom fighting memories in the backdrop of a Britain awaiting the toll of The Troubles.
Steely in appearance, Robert Mitchum strides as the apprised Charles Shaughnessy, a local teacher whose father in law informs the soldiers from the provincial puissant of his tavern and whose wife sleeps with one of the soldiers Shaughnessy personally and politically opposes. Often unfairly compared to the majesty of Lean’s earlier efforts, Ryan’s Daughter is a seismic work, understated in the historical backdrop Ireland and Britain still share. Gun smuggled capers echo the bordered insanities Irish men experienced in the 1970s, writhing to the efforts of an Empire uninterested and unimpressed with the isles it inhabits. The agrarian agricultural beauty envelopes the romance the fervent fancies Rosy (Sarah Miles) shares with an exhibit of soldiers, waiting to offer their flame fancied pistols.
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2. The Outsider (Tony Luraschi, 1980):
An American ascending from the American dream to a hibernal one, Craig Wesser acts convincingly in the dual role of actor and Vietnam veteran, violently entering the indolent Belfast hovels. Notorious on release, The Outsider suffered the ignominy of being dropped from a London festival after filming in Northern Ireland had proven unsustainable. And yet there’s a power to the film foolishly ignored by the festival goers, crept as it is in crepuscular imagery and masculine fragility. Behind the array of metallic weaponry comes a tale of generational fortitude. Wesser plays the torn-down American, eager to follow his Grandfather’s career in ridding Ireland of a British burden. Then there’s Sterling Hayden, the aged grandparent, burdened with a secret of British platitude.
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3. Maeve (Pat Murphy and John Davies, 1981):
The Irish Times called it “Ireland’s first bona fide feminist film”. If an oversimplification (I’d make a strong case that Ryan’s Daughter pipped it), the story at least understands the struggles of the everyday woman returning from the liberal London lounge-ways for a Belfast betrothed to gender politics. Maeve (Mary Jackson), scarf worn and headstrong, stands in front of a machine gun poking heavy, imbuing the Godardian French Wave milieu in her dress. Director Pat Murphy was a founder of the feminist film and video distribution network Circles, tellingly calling both England and Ireland for their questionable exemplars in gender representation at the turn of the 1980s.
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4. Cal (Pat O’Connor, 1984):
Orange Orders open lacerated words, as Loyalists lacerate young Cal (John Lynch) for his allegiances to the provisional Irish Republican Army. Amidst the towering bombs which batter the broken pebbles they walk comes one of the most deeply romantic movies of the last thirty-five years. Mark Knopfler, a thoughtful Glaswegian entranced in his six strings, soundtracks Helen Mirren, a widowed, willowy ingenue cascaded in her heart strings. Entranced in Marcella’s arms, Cal crosses the threshold of Catholic guilt, slain in his love for her posture, demonstrated in his killings of her slain husband. The leisured love stems from screenwriter’s Bernard MacLaverty’s liturgical prose, learned in the perspective Belfast prisons Cal must enter and Marcella must wade through a doleful dalliance as bested battleground breaks them down.
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5. Elephant (Alan Clarke, 1989):
A dawn rises. A car passes. A man turns to his urinal. He’s bulleted into the toiletry fluids, pouring his own bodily blood over his bodily fluid. Alan Clarke’s uncompromising, punchy work works without dialogue, the camera acting out the variety of killings which haunt Northern Ireland on a daily basis. The naturalistic handheld manner of this short film won Clarke plaudits; his producer, Danny Boyle, would direct serial zombie thriller 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002) with a very similar setup. Shooting the shootings that come unresolved to the world, Clarke’s observational style called back to Yoko Ono’s late 1960s’ commentary Rape, shocking audiences with a style less glamorous than scurrilous. It’s largely silent, though take warning. Some of the killings are deafening in their protrusion.
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6. In The Name Of The Father (Jim Sheridan, 1993):
Daniel Day Lewis won three Oscars, one as a paraplegic writer, one as a Western Oil Baron, one as America’s liberator of slavery. Yet Day Lewis never gave as fiery a performance as he did incarcerating the incarcerated emotions he endeavoured through Gerry Conlon’s real life trajectory. Arrested as one of The Guilford Four, Conlon was jailed in 1975, wrongfully sentenced for fifteen years as a supposed Provisional IRA bomber. Sinewy in appearance, leathery in hair, Day Lewis walks with rock assurance during the film’s telling climax, the pathway to a journalist rimmed front door a small solace after fifteen years a wronged convict. Emma Thompson works remarkably in her appearance as Conlon’s trusted lawyer, while Pete Postlethwaite wades in his cell as the dejected Giuseppe Conlon. Where Day Lewis gives his best, so does Postlethwaite, two brilliant English actors with impeccable Northern Irish diction. Fittingly, Postlethwaite’s final performance came as Fergus Colm, the callous Irish crime lord in Ben Affleck’s excellent The Town.
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7. The Informant (Jim McBride, 1997):
Before Harvey Weinstein shocked the world with professed lechery, he shocked the film world when the lightweight Shakespeare In Love (John Madden) championed the astonishing Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg) for the 1998 Best Picture Award. In the midst came an unvarnished showtime movie, dedicated to showcasing the trichotomy of male perspective. The capricious Gingy (Anthony Brophy) must stand against his IRA compeers to work with, beside and for the will of an English Lieutenant (Cary Elwes) and a proud Protestant detective (the hoary Timothy Dalton) in a war none will ultimately win.
“The movie is important, because it exposes the complete abdication of morality that happens when two nations go to war” the two-time Bond recalled. “Most people believe, in a war, that one side’s bad and one side’s good. But the minute you go to war, the rules go out the window and both sides become bad.”
In a Dublin licked up to explore the battle beaten Belfast, Jim McBride’s exploration into the human spirit examines the why’s, how’s and who’s of the conflict, relegated to television at a time when no major distributor would have promoted the film. And yet there’s a telling humanity to the proceedings, not least when Maria Lennon’s Roísín berates Dalton’s DCI Rennie for recruiting Catholic women for sexual pleasure.
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8. Bloody Sunday (Paul Greengrass, 2002):
Audiences who knew James Nesbitt as the unflappable lead from the comic Cold Feet could scarcely imagine the depth, nuance, stealth and steel he’d bring as the real life Ivan Cooper. A proud Presbyterian unaware of the circumstances behind Bloody Sunday, Nesbitt took to reading the script while filming another project in Manchester. It moved him as effectively as he moved his audiences in what’s arguably the performance of his life. Detailing the real life tragedy of a peaceful protest, the paramilitary killings outraged many in Britain. Vanessa Redgrave marched for resolution, Paul McCartney issued a musical statement, U2 commemorated the song in one of their more potent pieces. Fittingly, Bono’s voice closes the film with gravitas.
“I’ve seen the film six times now,” the real life Cooper revealed “And my first thoughts were that it was an emotional experience. I’m able to say with confidence that it was made with great integrity.”
Helmed by director Paul Greengrass, the film’s naturalistic style of filming added a padding of telling realism, driving viewers into the middle of the senseless 1972 killings. Hollywood took notice of his skill: Greengrass earned his place as Jason Bourne (2016) director largely on the strength of Bloody Sunday.
Bloody Sunday is also pictured at the top of this article.
9. Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008):
One take. A 17-minute, unending, uncompromising take. The priest talks of God, the prisoner talks of country. Steve McQueen’s first, finest and most harrowing work came from the true life horror stories from the HM Prison Maze, innocent by-standing men stripped by their dignities by a Government shadowed overseas. Just as it took an English director to paint the atrocities of Bloody Sunday, another brilliantly ambitious English man saw the truth in the sullied cells which starved the intellect of its prisoners as harshly as they starved their bodies. We could write an entire article on why this film should be remembered, but instead I’ll focus on sinewy dialogue, Michael Fassbender’s Bobby Sands and Liam Cunningham’s Father Dominic Moran exchanging sharp words, cutting in their veneer, tense in their timing. Involving, issue non resolving, the scene sits in solemn penance, one long take with few of the pyrotechnics employed throughout Birdman. Staggering.
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10. The Journey (Nick Hamm, 2016):
It started with the barbed shot, it ended with the barbed retort. The Journey chronicles the voyage Republicanism and Unionism joined, fittingly embodied in a taxi driven by an impartial driver. Colm Meaney and Timothy Spall star as Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley, two political combatants who worked in close collaboration to steer their shared country through the devolution of power in the region. Brilliant and bathetically, the claustrophobic taxi’s engine mirrors the distressed sounds a battle ground surrounded these two men. The furnished Scottish woodlands echoes the planted fears these men share. As a reverend, McGuinness sees Paisley’s position as more polemic than parochial. As a former member of the Irish Republican Army, Paisley sees McGuinness’s political convictions with criminal conviction. Meaney paid tribute to McGuinness in a 2017 Guardian, a man whose demise followed the real life Paisley’s. And yet the film attributes and pays tribute to the figureheads, whose shared journey lead to a safer home neither of them experienced.
