Month: August 2019

The Last Black Man In San Francisco

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

The tides of gentrification cannot be quelled in The Last Black Man in San Francisco, a deeply felt exploration of the African-American experience in the USA. Mixing melancholy with naivety, beauty with desolation, this is a resounding and exciting debut from director Joe Talbot.

It stars Jimme Fails playing a fictionalised version of himself. As the last name tragically suggests, he isn’t doing so well. He has a job as a carer in an old person’s home, but still cannot afford a place of his own, so sleeps in the same room as his good friend Montgomery Allen (Jonathan Majors). He has his eye on somewhere to move in though, an old Victorian-looking house on Fillmore Street.

It used to be a predominantly Japanese area, until the WW2 internment camps left them empty. African-Americans then moved in (including Jimmy’s grandfather, who we are told built the house himself) leading the area to be dubbed “the Harlem of The West.” But Jimmie’s family split up, and for one reason or another, they lost the building completely. When the white couple who now occupy the house break up, Jimmie has a window of opportunity to restore to its former glory.

Gentrification pervades the entire movie. Black folk feel that the city no longer works for them. Although there are many obvious signifiers, such as a “party tram”, segway tours and annoying white girls, the effects of the tech boom are mostly absent. The fact it isn’t really tackled head on only strengthens the film, as it shows just how shut off locals have become from the city’s vast growth in wealth. Nonetheless, this isn’t a dictatic piece, a late in the game revelation turning simple political theses on their head. Instead, Talbot and Rob Richert, working from Fails’ story idea, zoom in on Jimmie himself (both literally and thematically), allowing the piece to grow in both complexity and universality.

The Last Black Man in San Francisco

After all, having your own place to live is a simple human right, currently unavailable to the vast majority of people in the Bay Area. This is an issue across the entire States, where there isn’t a single county where a minimum wage job can pay the rent for a two-bedroom apartment. Additionally, in cities as diverse as London, Berlin and Paris, rich white people move in, and non-white communities find their way of culture completely priced out. What’s remarkable about the film is that the director himself is white, yet, finds no need to insert a white perspective into the film. It’s rare to see so much humility in telling other people’s stories.

The Last Black Man in San Francisco is a quintessential debut film: deeply felt, ambitious and full of life, but also messy, structurally flawed and lacking spatial awareness. Talbot and Fails have put their heart and soul into this piece, always looking for the emotion in every scene, lusciously complemented by a clarinet and string-heavy soundtrack; at times it feels overdone and uneccessary, and interrupts the flow of the screenplay, yet at other times they hit on something truly vital. They have put absolutely everything into the film and it really shows.

It makes sense that A24 acquired and distributed this film, containing many of their trademarks: skateboarding, an obsession with faces, and neat musical moments that can easily be shared via Twitter. Yet The Last Black Man In San Francisco is not simply form for its own sake; ambitious camerawork and musical moments bringing the city to life, doubling up as a documentary of faces and places, culture and customs, a testament to a city on the precipice of irreversible change.

The Last Black Man In San Francisco premiered at the Locarno Film Festival, when this review was originally written. It’s out in UK cinemas on Friday, October 25th. On VoD in April!

Wilcox

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

Sean Penn’s Into The Wild (2007) gets an arthouse update in Wilcox, a tale of isolation in the great Canadian wilderness. The second film from Quebec auteur Denis Côté this year after Ghost Town Anthology, it’s a quiet, modest effort that doubles down on his increasingly minimalist approach.

Looking like a runaway member of the army in his khaki clothes, huge backpack and high boots, Wilcox (Guillaume Tremblay) trudges around the countryside, living in the moment and connecting with nature. Breaking into either abandoned or at least unfurnished homes, stealing from the supermarket or relying on the kindness of strangers, Wilcox is a man who lives entirely off other’s contributions. He meets many local, older men, and judging from the smiles on their faces, it’s evident that they get along well. But as we never hear anyone speak, we can never tell for sure.

Wilcox is presented as a film with no dialogue, which didn’t quite prepare me for how quiet it actually is. In fact, the film barely features any diegetic sound at all, Côté overlaying most scenes with a light ambient hum. The camera palette is both filled with light and rather smudgy, as if someone has rubbed their greasy finger over the lens. It gives the film both a dreamlike feel and a distancing effect, forcing the viewer to project themselves onto the story instead of being swept up by it. In addition, brief archival clips of a tortoise with a rabbit, and a man with facial scars are inserted into the story like something from a dream, adding unnecessary flourishes that may increase the film’s artistic cache but did little to invest me emotionally in its story. These aesthetic choice may hamper Wilcox‘s chances of hitting cinemas, but it fittingly stresses his isolation, and perhaps makes it a perfect choice for a feature length installation piece.

Wilcox

As we never hear Wilcox speak, we never know the reasons for his journey. Despite the film’s attention to detail — such as the tragic looking tinned food he eats, the way he sets up a tent for the night, and how he opens windows of other people’s houses — he is more an idea representing social isolation than a fully rounded man in and of himself. This seems to be Côte’s intention, rarely editorialising but allowing the main chunk of the story to speak for itself.

Nonetheless, the beginning and the end of the movie is bookmarked with short texts telling us of North American explorers who abandoned the civilised world and ended up either dead, missing or in jail. These include Christopher McCandless of Into The Wild-fame and Lillian Alling, a Russian expat who tried to walk back home to Siberia, and was last seen about to cross the Bering strait. Wilcox is presented as both compendium and tribute to these daring souls. Nonetheless, by lacking the drive of either McCandless or Alling, Wilcox is a hard man empathise with, making this a fascinating aesthetic experiment which lacks in truly emotive drama.

Wilcox premiered at the Locarno Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It shows in October at the Cambridge Film Festival.

Echo (Bergmál)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

This film is basically Love Actually (Richard Curtis, 2003) directed by Roy Andersson. Comprised of only 56 static takes, Rúnar Rúnarsson calmly takes Iceland’s pulse during the Christmas season; delivering a panorama that is equal parts funny, sad, ironic and loving. Displaying a supreme confidence in direction and writing, this is a major step up in form and content.

I’m surprised Rúnarsson had something so sentimental within him. His last two films, Volcano (2011) and Sparrows (2015), are far harsher visions of life. In contrast, Echo takes in nearly every human emotion, all wrapped up in an inescapably sentimental Christmassy bow.

It spans through the Advent season to the New Year, that time of year when families are reunited, stress levels are high, and wallets are strained. Everyone is in the mood to either try and enjoy themselves, or simply get through the darkest days in the year. Spanning from rich to poor, old to young, alone or surrounded with family, it feels like all of Icelandic life is contained within this film.

The static frames work wonders, Rúnarsson cleverly using these aesthetic limits to his advantage. Like in Andersson’s “The Living Trilogy” (2000-2014) the wide lens allows for multiple stories to play out in the same frame and for stories to change in perspective depending on whether characters are in the foreground or the background. It would’ve been easy to simply have filmed these stories in a conventional way, but this ambitious arthouse approach elevates it into the sublime.

Some scenes work as self-contained short stories. From the girl visiting her father hilariously upstaged by her step-sister to the stressed dad wondering what Christmas tree to buy to the poor woman visiting her grandfather with dementia, we get a sense of entire personalities, conflicts and histories through the fleetest of glimpses. There are elements of the documentary too, real people captured in the midst of old traditions (singing Silent Night in Icelandic) and the modern world (a huge gym full of TV screens and people on treadmills).

Echo

Nonetheless, this is no mere depiction of standard Western practices and customs, but a specifically Icelandic piece that also tackles the most problematic parts of its society. The Panama Papers scandal is invoked, as is the wealth gap, food banks and drug addiction. The question of immigration is also a hot topic here: from an African-American expat using a sun-bed to ward off darkness-induced depression to border police raiding a sanctuary church, we see that Iceland is a nation in the process of significant demographic change. While not containing anything as shocking as the ending of Sparrows, Rúnarsson deftly shows how Iceland’s relative success still doesn’t work for everyone.

Juxtaposition is constantly used, sometimes for humour (when a Christmas pageant is contrasted with a bikini body-building contest), sometimes for profundity (the birth of a child occurring directly after the New Year celebrations are rung in) and sometimes for political effect (contrasting people queuing up at a food bank with a lavish family meal). The editing by Jacob Secher Schulsinger is crisp and precise, everything compressed into a transient 79 minutes. Watching it is akin to reading an epic poem, with each image boiled down to its purest essence.

What’s interesting to note is that there are few images of Iceland’s natural beauty. Instead the people themselves are the main focus of this tale. When you consider that the population of the country (338,000 people) is just above that of Coventry, it can be safely asserted that at least 1% of the entire nation is represented here. One of the Christmas traditions in Iceland, at least according to this movie, is to give each other a big hug when the Church bells chime in the big day. This is an apt metaphor for the movie itself, which acts as a warm, loving embrace from one of the world’s coldest places.

Echo showed at the 2019 Locarno Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It’s on Mubi in August 2020.

Echo is in our list of Top 10 dirtiest films of 2019.

Notre Dame

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

The old cliché that no publicity is bad publicity certainly rings true with Notre Dame, the latest breezy comedy from French auteur Valérie Donzelli. She could’ve had no idea while making the film that ancient church’s roof would set ablaze on April 15, making her latest work something of an accidental bittersweet lament for the France’s most enduring symbol.

The burning down of the French cathedral was immediately seized upon as a symbol of the deterioration of France; another debilitating sign, along with Islamist terrorist attacks, the rise of far-right nationalism, the Church sex abuse scandals and the Gillet Jeunes protests, that this is a country slowly losing its way. And Notre Dame eerily captures this downbeat spirit, displaying a capital city and country uncertain of itself, paranoid and on edge. The French Open has been inexplicably cancelled, Lake Annecy has dried up, people randomly slap each other in metro stations, refugees sleep on the streets, and Paris is endlessly drenched by torrential rain. To rally spirits once again, the mayor calls for a “Grand competition for the Grand dame”, putting out an open call for a new esplanade design.

Our unlikely hero Maud Crayon (Valérie Donzelli herself) — built in the mode of Woody Allen’s early comic nebbishes — may be an architect but has little intention of entering the contest herself. She’s too busy paying off her debts, battling with her boss, trying to get her kids to school and finally kicking her ex-husband (although they haven’t signed the divorce papers) out of her flat. Then in a moment of sheer, unexplained magic, her design for a playground mysteriously floats out of her flat window all the way to the mayor’s office. The bold design is picked as a new way forward for the city and she’s instantly put in charge of the most important project in all of France.

Notre Dame

Given that the Notre-Dame itself took one hundred years to build, this premise would be enough conflict for an entire TV series, let alone a zippy ninety minute movie. But Maud’s travails don’t stop there. Firstly her ex-boyfriend (Pierre Deladonchamps) comes back as the journalist covering her story, secondly she finds out she’s pregnant, and thirdly she must contend with her ex-husband trying to win her back. Underscoring this theme, her daughter acutely asks her: “Why do women have to do everything?” To make matters worse, it turns out her design looks kinda like a phallus (the jokes aren’t subtle here), sparking outrage across the nation, and calls for construction to be indefinitely postponed.

France has a fine tradition of protesting its finest symbols. The construction of the Eiffel Tower was once petitioned against by writers as influential as Maupassant and Dumas. Likewise Mitterand’s Grands Projets was looked upon at the time as a sign of grandiosity. Yet now it would be hard to imagine the Paris skyline without the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre without its pyramid. The sheer absurdity of Crayon’s design is the point: showing through satire how even the most outlandish designs should be encouraged due to the way they can help establish and reinforce a city’s unique identity.

Yet if anyone is expecting a serious inquiry into the nature of architecture, they will be sorely displeased. Donzelli’s work is gleefully self-centred, neurotic and strange, casting herself in goofy, off-the-wall tales that make Amelie’s escapades look normal and well adjusted. Notre Dame has a childlike yet bawdy spirit, throwing in the entire kitchen sink, including musical interludes, silent movie homages, quick verbal barbs and politically incorrect sex jokes. Thankfully the movie, flawed as it may be, is inherently enjoyable, Donzelli’s bizarro charm proving infectious and her style strong enough to overcome any imperfections.

At the end of the day, its not really about the Notre-Dame at all, but a woman coming to terms with the chaos of her life, the power of great responsibility, and figuring out what’s actually important. It’s just ironic that Valérie Donzelli will be suddenly thrown into the spotlight due to an event completely out of her control. Talk about life imitating art!

International Sales are handled by Playtime. The film is scheduled for release in France only so far, on 18 December 2019.

A Voluntary Year (Das Freiwillige Jahr)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

A tale of adolescent indecisiveness, fatherly overbearance and the inability to communicate, A Voluntary Year is a painful, funny and slyly profound work. Spinning gold from the most basic of premises, it is also another fine addition to the “German awkwardness canon” (a phrase I coined myself).

In recent years, ranging from Maren Ade films such as Everyone Else (2009) and Toni Erdmann (2016), running through to elements of I Was At Home, But (Angela Schanelec, 2019) and The Ground Beneath My Feet (Marie Kreutzer, 2019), German-Language directors have been particularly adroit at mining social awkwardness and communicational failures for bitterly dark comic effect. A Voluntary Year follows in this recent, rich vein, creating moments of genuine comedy from relatable, personal failures. They work because no one acts like they are in a comedy. By treating everyone’s issues very seriously, the comic beats land harder, making you laugh while you cringe.

It starts on the way to the airport. Urs (Sebastian Rudolph) is driving his daughter Jette (Maj-Britt Klenke) there so she can take a flight to Costa Rica, where she will spend a gap year in a hospital. She looks less than pleased, still roiling from the breakup with her boyfriend Mario (Thomas Schubert) and nervous about what this future halfway across the world will bring. Not that her father notices. He thinks she’ll have a wonderful time.

A Voluntary Year

“You can’t please everyone all the time,” Urs lectures his unsure daughter, all the while showing how disastrous it is trying to be an expert on everything. An early scene involving a changed lock quickly establishes Urs as an unreliable father; panicking over nothing instead of taking the time to think rationally. Meanwhile Mario turns up to say goodbye, throwing her central conflict into sharp relief. Perhaps she won’t catch that flight after all?

In the hands of a less confident director, these personal issues would’ve been more obviously telegraphed through endless backstories. This limited viewpoint works wonders for the film, which is all about how the desires we project onto others affects our own lives. The flight to Costa Rica is the central metaphor here, seen by Urs as an escape from small town life and by Jette as a great plunge into the unknown away from Mario. The conventional script of teenage escape versus parental provincialism is flipped, the film expertly blurring the lines between the generations.

Sebastian Rudolph does fine work as the hubris-laden father, fully chewing into a screenplay that allows him to be arrogant, stupid, naive and caring all at the same time. Whether it’s his strained relationship with his brother, his joyless affair with his married secretary, or his negative attitude towards his own patients at the clinic, he cannot seem to maintain a truly wholesome relationship with anyone. He’s not a stereotypically bad person, yet his myopic viewpoint — stressed by the film’s use of limited perspective — blinds him to the real issues at hand. Klenke is equally game, flitting endlessly between rash decision-making and indecisiveness, sometimes in the same scene, showing that even if father and daughter have different viewpoints in life, they deal with their issues in often the same way.

Ulrich Köhler keeps the viewpoints close, never cross-cutting, only following characters from one point to another if they have met in the same space. This is a particular effective technique as it truly lays bare how easily miscommunication can happen. Taking place over only a couple of days, A Voluntary Year provides a convincing snapshot of German provincialism. Complemented by overcast skies, sodden fields and barren woods, A Voluntary Year makes a good case for escaping the complications of small town living, but only if you can escape yourself first.

No release date has been set yet for A Voluntary Year, which debuted in the Concorso internazionale at Locarno, but expect a warm release in Köhler’s native Germany.

7500

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

The limited thriller has been growing in popularity in recent years. Whether its the police responder drama The Guilty (Gustav Möller, 2018) or the man-in-the-car-with-great-phone-reception talkie Locke (Steven Knight, 2013), the thriller has been pushed further and further in terms of doing more with less. You can now count 7500 — referring to the code pilots used when being hijacked — on that list, a German production that reinvents the wheel by trimming it down to the absolute barest essentials.

Bar a few opening scenes via CCTV, the entirety of the movie’s point-of-view is from the cockpit of the airplane. Once we are in the cockpit of a plane going from Berlin Tegel to Paris, it starts with almost rigorous realism; both the pilot (Carlo Kitzlinger) and his first captain (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) going over in fine detail about procedure that no one but a pilot or radio controller could understand. Taking place in almost real time, 7500’s premise isn’t very subtle. We know from the beginning that there will be some kind of Islamist threat, it’s how it goes about it that makes it such an entertaining, turbulent ride.

7500

Patrick Vollrath and his cinematographer deserve credit for keeping things interesting inside such a close space, quick exchanges of point-of-view, insert shots and close-ups allowing momentum to continuously build. This is all edited with invisible precision, easily allowing us to go along with the plot despite the limited amount of scenarios that are possible. All extraneous cutaway scenes plane hijacking thrillers are known for — such as the control tower going haywire, the police chief facing a difficult decision, or the accompanying fighter jets — are completely missing, referenced only through radio and seen through the plane window. This works very effectively because a) these scenes are almost always completely rote anyway and b) they allow us to use our imagination instead, making the film far more unpredictable and enjoyable.

All in all, it’s an almost perfect pure thriller, with the extra thematic elements — such as the threat of Islamic extremism and German-Turkish conflict within cities like Berlin — almost completely unnecessary to the plot itself. These hijackers could’ve been far-right fascists, money-grabbing freeloaders, Quebec nationalists, or pro-Brexit extremists and the film would’ve worked in almost exactly the same way. It’s a little bit of a shame that in a post-9/11 world that the de facto plane hijackers are still Muslim when there are so many conflicting ideologies across the world ready for adaption, but this plot is really just a threadbare line to hang the enjoyable ride upon.

Ultimately this isn’t a film about themes; this is a film that rests purely upon style and succeeds tremendously. With Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the main role, 7500 has the potential to be a breakout hit. While his Americanness doesn’t add much to the screenplay — which in fact may have worked better if he were simply a white German — his recognisable face and over-the-top acting style perhaps tells us much more than a lesser name could. It also means that it has more potential to be seen. Let’s just hope its rollout isn’t as limited as its premise.

7500 debuted to strong acclaim in the Piazza Grande open-air section. Amazon Studios are helming this one in all territories apart from German-speaking regions. Expect it in a cinema near you!

Space Dogs

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

For mankind to see if it could survive the perils of space exploration, it tested one of its first flights on a dog named Laika. She made it into space but was incinerated upon re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere. This is depicted in Space Dogs with a 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) inspired level of wonder; both in its epic range and its psychedelic play of sound and colours. Yet this violent and strange beginning is only a harbinger of what’s to come: a very weird deep dive into man’s worst tendencies to man’s best friend.

This is unlike any documentary I have ever seen. Part obtuse-Angela Schanelec movie, part Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979), part Aleksey German Jr’s Under Electric Clouds (2015), it’s a fragmented, overly repetitive and narratively angular depiction of stray dogs living in Moscow intercut up with an essayistic exploration of the Soviet Space program. While not everything works — some scenes are simply too long to keep us engaged — duo Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter deserve credit for the boldness of their vision and the steadfastness of their execution.

Space Dogs

By far their biggest score is the narration by Russian veteran Aleksey Serebryakov — best known for McMafia (Hossein Amini and James Watkins, 2018-) and Leviathan (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2014) — whose unmistakable timbre lends the film a certain authority and tragic inevitability. He recounts the legend that Laika didn’t permanently disappear but actually returned to the streets of Moscow as a ghost. Our hero in this “documentary” is also a Laika— who either is the Laika herself, a descendent of the Space Program dogs, or another dog entirely — who endlessly roams the wide avenues of Russia’s capital, finding little respite from man’s eternal cruelness.

Space Dogs often films these animals from the ground, allowing us to imagine life from their perspective. In comparison, the momentous tower blocks and orange-tinged sky of a relatively unpeopled Moscow — filmed in the dusk and dawn — creates a sense of unreality and oppression that the main Laika and its roaming gang of companions simply cannot escape. Like the best of Soviet science fiction, the concept of space travel and exploration is something of an Escher’s staircase, looping back to humanity itself, and its own seemingly unsurmountable issues.

The film debuted at the festival with a very apt content warning. If you are in anyway an animal lover, Space Dogs is a relentlessly difficult watch. Yet I felt that its very dedication to exposing man’s absolute cruelty to his kindest animals achieves a bizarre kind of moral. It’s closest comparison might actually be White Bim Black Ear (Stanislav Rostotsky, 1977), a Soviet doggy-centric take on Au Hazard Balthasar (Robert Bresson, 1966) that is even more heartrending due to its manipulation of the audience’s hopes and dreams. Yet it shares a similar theme in showing how we treat dogs — ostensible big balls of kindness — reflects back on us as a society. After all, if we cannot be kind to man’s best friend, how are we ever going to be kind to one another?

Space Dogs prompted many walkouts in my screening, meaning it may be a hard sell for distributors. Deckert Distribution have the rights, and may try have some success in the arthouse circuit.

Available on Mubi is September.

Nimic

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

A cellist has a mind-bending encounter on the New York subway in Nimic, a brief riff on the theme of The Double from Greek maestro Yorgos Lanthimos. Baffling and inviting in equal measure, it will delight die-hard Lanthimostans while easily alienating fans of conventional three-act structures. In any case, it shows what Lanthimos is capable of with smaller resources and only 11 minutes of runtime.

The film begins with dramatic music scoring Father (Matt Dillon) waking up next to his wife (Susan Elle) and eating breakfast with his children. The music stops and starts, quickly revealing the Father rehearsing an orchestral piece. This deliberate use of artificial music helps to set the tone for Nimic, which is all about artificiality of performance itself. After rehearsal, he takes the New York Subway. He asks a woman (Daphné Patakia) the time. She pauses, looking like a typically antisocial user of New York transit systems. Then she copies him: “Do you have the time?”

This is a deliberately repetitive movie, working like a piece of music itself, repeating brief poetic motifs — a boiling egg, a subway ride, a cello being played — at a smooth and intriguing rhythm. She is his mimic. She follows him. He goes home to the mother of his children and says: “Children please, tell your mother who their real father is.” The mimic repeats the same, and the children respond: “How should we know? We’re just kids.” To the average person, this should seem obvious, but in Yorgos’ world, it’s a deliberate provocation; asking us to question standard norms in favour of strangeness and paranoia.

For Lanthimos completists — who are more likely to seek the movie out than the average viewer — Nimic presents all of his usual tricks. The usual perspective distorting fish-eye lens is here, along with whip pans and lateral tracking shots. Actors in Yorgos Lanthimos films do not emote very much. Like in Kubrick, their deadpan faces are part of the theme itself; a reflection of a dystopian world where nothing makes sense. Circling upon itself with twisted glee, this is a concept that could conceivably go on forever, a kind of Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993) for nihilists.

Perhaps the title can give us a clue, yet it seems to be another one of Lanthimos’ tricks. On first glance Nimic looks like a deliberate misspelling of mimic, yet a cursory look at Wiktionary tells me that it’s the Romanian word for both “nothing” and “anything”. This double meaning is a fitting descriptor of the film itself, which some will find laden with deeper themes and others will find rather empty. Perhaps I need to watch it again. And again. And again.

The film premiered as part of the Fuori concorso: Shorts programme in the Locarno Film Festival 2019, when this piece was originally written. It premieres in the UK in October, as part of the BFI London Film Festival. Out on Mubi on Friday, November 27th (2020).

Adolescents (Adolescentes)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

Charting the lives of two girls from thirteen to eighteen, Adolescentes is an immersive documentary depicting the vicissitudes of youth. Five years in the making, filmed twenty-four days a year and composed from 500 hours of rushes, it has the flow of a fine naturalist drama, standing nicely alongside Young Solitude (Claire Simon, 2018) and Belinda (Marie Dumora, 2017) as yet another brilliant French documentary about the complexity of growing older.

On first glance Emma and Anaïs seem like very different girls. Emma comes from an affluent background, loves to sing songs from musicals and appears very driven, while Anais is from a poorer background, gets distracted easily and finds it hard to concentrate in class. Right from the start, we learn that education is the main priority, both girls told by their teachers that the way they act in school could easily shape their whole life.

In a traditional feature, the differences between the two girls and their respective outcomes would be more pronounced, but director Sébastian Lifshitz has something much subtler in mind. In real life people cannot be put into boxes, meaning that A rarely leads to B or even C. In keeping with this thesis, little is played for dramatic effect, purposefully stopping the viewer from ever making concrete predictions about these girl’s fates. Omission is constantly used, significant events often only seen before and after and huge swathes of time often passing within the cut of a frame; the audience only learning afterwards that the summer has finished or the school is finally over.

Adolescentes

Artificially skipping the so-called most essential moments of each girl’s life makes the film a fascinating, unpredictable watch, yet this mix of objectivity and narrative slipperiness can make it feel like something of an academic exercise. This is especially true when philosophy and literature classes — whether it’s the concept of Skepticism or the story of Emma Bovary — act as a kind of Greek chorus on the action, underscoring its major themes in a way that can feel quite forced. It’s easy to think a lot watching this movie; it’s much harder to feel anything significant.

Things turn more emotive when the personal meets the political, these girls lives often brutally interrupted by key moments in recent French history, from the Charlie Hebdo and Paris attacks to the election of Emmanuel Macron. While these moments could easily have come off as glib, Lifshitz seems to find more to say than André Téchiné in the recent, misguided Farewell to The Night (2019) about the destabilising effects of terrorism upon a nation; a moment of unreality that puts the grand and noble project of education under existential threat. One moment in particular, when Anaïs seems to have changed her political persuasion in the blink of an eye, confronts simplistic political diagnoses head on, showing how the French character is far more complicated than anyone could imagine.

What’s highly notable is the sheer amount of conversation; ranging from the banal (getting the right grades to move up in school) to the profound (how life seems to imperceptibly change without you even knowing it). Whether it’s chatting with each other, arguing with their parents, or listening to the words of their teachers, people talk and talk and talk, never at a loss for things to say. In fact they are so composed and at times so eloquent, one could be fooled into thinking they are watching a scripted drama. Complemented by intuitive editing, the film finds a way to accrue these moments into something both profound and mystifying: asking what defines a person while boldly skipping any definitive answers. The question it seems, is to keep asking.

Adolescents showed at the Locarno Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It premieres in the UK in October as part of the BFI London Film Festival. Out on Curzon Home Cinema and MyFrenchFilmFestival from Friday, January 15th. On Mubi on Saturday, July 9th

Maternal (Hogar)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

What constitutes motherhood? Is it something that is hereditary or something that can be earned? This is the question wrestled with in Maternal, which slyly reimagines the story of the Virgin Mary for modern times. A deeply Christian tale, both in its sense of empathy and its themes, Maternal is a precise chamber Italian-Argentinean co-production that wrestles with the meaning of motherhood, finding no easy answers yet imploring the viewer to bring their own faith and meaning to each scene.

It takes place almost entirely within an Italian nunnery in Argentina which doubles up as a sanctuary for single mothers. Either through abuse or paternal neglect, these women, some heavily pregnant, others already taking care of several kids, are given a free space to find their life anew under the patronage of the Catholic Church.

Maternal

Luciano (Agustina Malale), however, seems to be more concerned with meeting up with men than taking care of her own child Nina, who she tells to leave her alone while applying her make up. Her best friend, the heavily pregnant Fatima (Denise Carrizo), is rather different, hewing to the rules of the institution and finding solace in the comfort of the nuns. When the young Sister Paolo (Lidiya Liberman), a novate from Italy, arrives to take her final vows, and gets closer to Fati, the two women’s relationship is strained.

Like many Argentinian films, Maternal is a quiet and thoughtful movie, more dependent on implication than express, underlined meanings. To highlight this point, there is no non-diegetic score telling us how we should feel in any given moment — even the credits are simply accompanied by the sound of traffic. This is a movie of faces, shot with soft light and tender appreciation; we are invited to look and feel as they feel, to imagine what goes through their mind even if they won’t tell us. As we are given such a clear overview of the nunnery — a place awash in pure white cotton, soft billowy curtains and muted candles — and its various rules, it is easy to understand the implications of each scene. Additionally, there are no speaking role for men in this movie; their affects upon these woman more pronounced through their absence. By focusing solely on these women and their life within the nunnery walls, debut director Maura Delpero treads a delicate and focused line right up until the final frame.

Maternal

There is no judgement here. Instead Delpero equally weights the runtime between all three women, giving us ample time to understand their point of view. The central conflict is between the nuns, who are by nature celibate, and the mothers themselves: asking if they can really understand what it’s like to be a mother if they don’t have children of their own. This dramatic tension is heightened when Sister Paolo gets rather close to the neglected Nina, acting as a kind of mother figure herself. Is this right? Can she even be a mother? It’s worth considering that Mary, The Mother of God, herself was a virgin. Yet by resisting easy diagnosis, Maternal leaves it up to the viewer to decide.

Maternal debuted at Locarno Film Festival in the competition slate, when this piece was originally written. It premieres in the UK in October, as part of the BFI London Film Festival.

Last Night I Saw You Smiling (Yub menh bong keunh oun nho nhim)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

The White Building, built in 1963 by the Cambodian government in collaboration with the French-Russian architect Vladimir Bodiansky, was once a true example of proper low-cost housing and New Khmer architecture. In 1975, the building was abandoned when the brutal Khmer Rouge cleared the capital city of Phnom Penh, only for it to become a hub for artists and civil servants after 1978. Afterwards the once grand building fell into disrepair, lined with prostitutes and drug addicts. Documentary Last Night I Saw You Smiling shows us the final days of the building after it’s bought by a Japanese company with help from the Cambodian government and all 493 families are slowly cleared out.

Like in Hotel Jugoslavija (Nicolas Wagnières, 2017), this single building is used to explore the state of a nation; both as it exists in reality and as it existed in the people’s popular imagination. Old ladies show us pictures of the building as it used to be, their warm nostalgia aptly complemented by sentimental songs playing over the radio.

Last Night I Saw You Smiling

Cambodian resident Kavich Neang may have a personal stake in the matter — his own father is a resident of the building — but he takes an inclusive approach to depicting its residents. Spanning from young, seemingly oblivious, kids running up and down the hallways to old ladies complaining that they have nowhere else to go, Last Night I Saw You Smiling paints a panoramic and melodic picture of a place slowly fading from view, doubling up as commentary on a world that ultimately favours capitalist over socialist values.

For inhabitants who have strong memories of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime, these developments are doubly-painful. It’s as if the government hasn’t learned any lessons from its past. As one inhabitant says, it feels like the same thing, only this time they have trucks, have to clear out the rooms themselves, and are getting paid for their troubles. While the government may use the money payout as justification for the redevelopment, it’s evident that the cheques aren’t big enough. Some even arrive too late for some residents who cannot afford to move any of their things. Additionally, while the disused nature of the building may have justified its redevelopment, the fact that these residents are given little say in the matter leaves a sour taste in the mouth.

Using boxy, static frames, Kavich Neang allows his subjects to speak for themselves, even when they’re not saying anything at all. Whether its watching TV, listening to the radio, bickering amongst themselves, or cleaning up, we get a true sense of an authentic lived-in place. By slowly accumulating these images on top of each other, the failures of government policy are quietly laid bare. Now construction has begun on a new 21-storey building, totalling $80 million. The film doesn’t directly state whether any of these former residents will be able to afford one of these fancy new apartments. Yet it doesn’t need to. It speaks entirely for itself.