Twelve-year-old Paul (Thomas Gioria, familiar here as the child in Custody (Xavier Legrand, 2017) likes caring for animals. Such as, for example, the fallen chaffinch he discovers at the bottom of the tree in which he’s building a treehouse. He’s used to foraging outside for food. He spends much time in the woods surrounding the mental institution where his single parent mum works and has their accommodation. One of her conditions of employment, stressed by her female boss Dr. Loisel (Gwendolyn Gourvenec), is that Paul not have any contact with any of the institution’s patients.
One day, his playing is interrupted by thearrival of a girl about his own age in a red dress. The staff are looking for Gloria (Fantine Harduin). Before they find her and take her back into their care, she and Paul have made friends. Aware of the rules, he has admonished her that the institution must not even so much as see them together.
Over time and many further clandestine meetings, their relationship deepens and grows. Eventually, Dr. Loisel discovers it and Paul is warned away from Gloria by his mother: the girl has done and is mixed up in some very bad things. However, the two kids continue to spend illicit time with one another, culminating in Paul’s stealing the institution’s keys to unlock the room in which Gloria is being held. This leads to a tense scene when the pair of them confront Dr. Loisel on a spiral staircase.
After that they go on the run together cross country following a river, pausing briefly to go off a high up bridge and swim together in the water. From there they leave behind a small trail of devastation with those people en route kind enough to take them in – a young couple (Peter Van den Begin, Charlotte Vandermeersch) and their baby on a moored boat, an older widower (Benoît Poelvoorde) who lives alone and keeps chickens.
As in earlier outings Calvaire (2004) and Vinyan (2008), du Welz proves himself adept at handling slow burning, character-based narratives with a deep underpinning of terror. The contrast between Paul, so easily turned from the light side of things to the dark and yet somehow moving back towards the light side, and Gloria, possessed by dark forces and misapprehensions about life that she doesn’t quite understand, is stark.
Paul is very much with Gloria while somehow she is forging her own path forward and will do so whether or not he comes along. He is being manipulated and she really doesn’t care that she’s doing it. Paul is so instantly likeable that you wince at his numerous bad choices with Gloria; she is so unconsciously devious and twisted that try as you might to like her, something about her makes your skin crawl.
Through it all, du Welz employs his trademark, matter-of-factly unpolished cinematographic imagery, quite literally grounding the film and rendering his narrative highly potent: while you marvel at the ordinariness of it all, he slips some really unpleasant ideas under the surface to unsettle you. Currently lacking a UK distributor, this dirtylicious gem is well worth tracking down while you can find it in the LFF.
Adoration plays in the BFI London Film Festival. Watch the film trailer (French language only, sorry) below:
It seems to be constantly raining in urban Singapore. Ling (Yeo Yann Yann) is forever sitting in her parked car injecting insulin. She has a job teaching Mandarin to a class in a local boys secondary school. Half a dozen of them are such poor students that she sets up a remedial class after hours to get them up to speed, but while they’re made to attend, they really aren’t interested. With one exception.
Wei-lun (Koh Jia Ler) will be in trouble with his parents if he doesn’t do well in Mandarin. As the other boys bunk off the remedial class with the slightest excuse, it pretty quickly develops into Ling teaching Wei-lun on a one-on-one basis. He doesn’t live that far from her home, so she often gives him a ride home in the car afterwards, unaware that behind her back he has for a long time been taking pictures of her with his mobile phone in class.
Ling has been trying to have a baby with her husband Andrew (Christopher Lee Ming-Shun) for some eight years. He’s long since lost interest and their relationship is severely strained, with Andrew hardly ever at home working long hours in his high pressure, financial job. Thus it falls mostly to Ling to look after Andrew’s wheelchair-bound father (Yang Shi Bin) who lives with them who is unable to dress, bathe or feed himself and requires a high level of care. He spends his days when Ling is out at work watching TV reruns of kung fu movies.
As Ling’s tuition of Wei-lun proceeds, he asks if she can accommodate his attending after school wushu (a form of martial arts) classes. She starts to tutor him in her home so that she can keep an eye on her father-in-law at the same time. The boy seems to get on with the elderly invalid, at least in part because of a shared enthusiasm for martial arts. Eventually, Wei-lun invites her and her father-in-law to watch him represent the school at a national wushu contest. Focused on becoming pregnant and frustrated by Andrew’s lack of romantic interest in her, Ling fails to notice the boy’s increasingly obvious infatuation.
The constant rain seems almost like a fifth character in this drama beating on car or building windows and sweeping across roads making driving conditions treacherous. While it looks naturalistic, the rain has been staged for the cameras at considerable expense. It adds much to the overall atmosphere of the piece, not least to the sense of impending disaster.
Both Yeo Yann Yann and Koh Jia Ler appeared in Anthony Chen’s earlier Ilo Ilo (2013) but the director didn’t set out to cast them again, it just worked out that way. The child actor is now considerably older than he was on the earlier film and, as such, almost unrecognisable.
In this newer film, both leads give terrific performances, with Yeo’s nuanced portrayal of a woman under numerous forms of stress finely observed while Koh’s role as a teenager completely out of his depth in a world of more complex adult issues convinces.
Various details come together: the incessant rain, Ling’s stress caring for an infirm and ageing parent scarcely helped by pressures of trying to conceive a child with little encouragement from an increasingly distant spouse, the increasing isolation of teacher and student as they increasingly find themselves sharing each other’s company. Chen never loses his grip delivering his uncompromising vision, a powerful experience which never lets up. Here’s hoping an enterprising UK distributor gives this the release it deserves.
Wet Season plays in the BFI London Film Festival and the London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF). Watch the film trailer below:
Werner Herzog opens up his heart to the former Soviet leader: “I love you”. It’s not often that you get to see the kind and affable side of the enfant terrible of German cinema, more widely recognised for his raw and bleak tone. He goes on to explain that his love and gratitude are due to Gorbachev’s role in the reunification of Germany. Then his provocative streak surfaces: “You probably thought the first German you met wanted to kill you”, in reference to WW2 grudges. The avuncular Gorbachev, however, dismisses the claim: “The first German I met was my neighbour, and I have very fond memories of him”. Gorbachev speaks in his native Russian language. Herzog speaks in English. Perhaps the Teutonic tongue doesn’t bring good memories, despite Gorbachev’s insistence that the two nations have since become good friends.
Herzog’s interview with Gorbachev is friendly and relaxed, despite touching on some very difficult topics and open wounds. The conversations are interspersed with archive footage portraying the most significant moments of Gorbachev’s admirable career. Herzog’s admiration for the octogenarian is very real and palpable, making this an unusually and unabashedly romanticised film. This filmic portrayal of Gorbachev is treacly, doused in saccharine. (unlike the sugar-free and diabetic-friendly chocolate cake that Herzog gives him for his 87th birthday).
We learn that Gorbachev was a skilled politician in touch with the working class from a very young age. In the 1960s, he visited peasants in the countryside and helped to implement new shearing mechanisms. This was a far cry from Soviet leaders such as Stalin and Brezhnev, who never mingled with the people and instead preferred to keep a distance, concocting a stern and formidable image. There were other differences. Gorbachev was eloquent and magnanimous. Never before had a Soviet leader circulated so smoothly in West. He was the new face of communism: transparent, democratic and with a profound respect for state of law. He was friendly with both Reagan and Thatcher, who did not conceal their admiration for the Soviet leader.
Meeting Gorbachev is a history class about the Cold War, nuclear disarmament and the demise of the USSR. We watch Reagan and Gorbachev meet during the Reykjavík Summit of 1986, and witness the handshake that helped to rewrite world history and likely avert an eventual nuclear war. We also learn that onus of the destruction of Soviet Union (and the consequent unleashing of unfettered capitalism and neoliberalism) lies with Yeltsin rather than Gorbachev. Tanks and shock doctrine ensured that the communist era came to an end. Russia was electroshocked into a new order.
There were two very painful deaths in the life of Gorbachev: the USSR in 1991 and his lifelong partner Raisa in 1999. He nearly breaks down when asked about them. His face is contorted with pain, a tear about to fall. But he holds himself together in silence. He dreamt of a united USSR and Europe, but sadly such marriage never came to fruition.
Overall, this is an auspicious and effective documentary about a fascinating human being. But as with any highly romanticised movie, it has a few flaws. Meeting Gorbachev quickly mentions in passing that many Russians perceive Gorbachev as a traitor, but it fails to analyse this in more detail. It almost entirely ignores that the fact Gorbachev does not enjoy as much popularity in his home country as he does abroad. It also fails to question: was Gorbachev naive in trusting Reagan and Thatcher? And what about Pope John Paul II, who is often credited with playing a pivotal role in the demise of the USSR? The pontiff is strangely absent from the movie.
Meeting Gorbachev premiered at the Cambridge Film Festival, which took place between October 17th and 24th. It is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, November 8th. On VoD on Monday, December 2nd.
The Cambridge Film Festival is now nearly four decades old, making it the third longest-running film festival in the country!
This year’s diverse programme includes over 150 titles from 30 countries from all continents. They range thrillers and dramas to comedies and documentaries created by the very best of both established (such as Ken Loach, Francois Ozon and Werner Herzog) and emerging filmmakers (such as Mati Diop and Aaron Schimberg).
Now in its 39th year, the Cambridge Film Festival celebrates cinema in all its forms while also tackling some of the critical issues facing our world today, including climate change, human rights, women’s rights, prison conditions and mental health.
Because it’s always to decide where to begin in such a large film event, we have decided to lend you a little helping hand. Below are our top 10 dirty picks from the Festival, chosen exclusively for you. Don’t forget to click on the film title in order to accede to exclusive dirty reviews (where available). These are listed in alphabetical order.
Ada (Mama Sané) and Souleiman (Ibrahima Traoré) are young and in love with each other. They walk along the beach and gaze into each other’s eyes. They hold hands and kiss. The next day Souleiman sets off on a primitive pirogue towards Spain, like many other refugees have done. Ada is left to contend with an arranged marriage to wealthy and arrogant Omar, whom she despises. After the ostentatious wedding ceremony, however, strange things begin to happen, such as the nuptial bed that suddenly catches on fire. The police suspect that Souleiman never left and is involved in the arson, and Ada is his accomplice.
This may sound like your traditional love story, but it isn’t. In reality, Atlantics is a an eerie ghost story imbued with religious, social and political commentary. Djinns (supernatural creatures in Islamic mythology) haunt the locals. The dead return in order to seek justice for their loves ones. Perhaps Soulemain died at sea and his ghost is playing tricks with the living?
Atlantics won the Grand Prix at the latest Cannes Film Festival.
Francois Ozon is best remembered for his psychological dramas, psychosexual thrillers and twisted comedies. He has now moved into an almost entirely new territory: Catholic faith and paedophilia. The outcome is nothing short of magnificent. The director paints a profoundly humanistic portrayal of the sexual abuse victims of real-life priest Father Bernard Preynat (Bernard Verley), thereby denouncing the silence and the complacence of the Catholic hierarchy.
By the Grace of God, which won the Silver Bear at the latest Berlinale, follows the steps of 40-year-old father-of-five and respectable professional Alexandre (Melvil Poupard). He decides to confront Father Preynat, who abused him 30 years earlier, upon finding out in 2014 that the priest still working closely with children. The problem is that the crime took place in 1991 and it has now prescribed (exceeding the 20-year threshold for legal action), and so Alexandre searches for more recent victims of Father Preynat, in a Goliath versus David battle against the extremely powerful and millenary Catholic Church.
Ozon’s latest film is also pictured at the top of this article.
Aaron Schimberg’s film about a European auteur directing their first English language movie was never going to be an average movie. In this American film, the bucolic blond Mabel (Jess Weixler)is a beguiling beauty who struggles working with a co-star who is anything but the epitome of conventional beauty. Although she plays the blind lead who falls disgracefully in love with a facially disfigured man (Rosenthal, played by British actor Adam Pearson, who has an actual facial disfigurement), her real-life interactions showcase a Draconian demeanour out of character with the charitable character she inhabits onscreen. It’s one of the many canny references swimming in Chained For Life, a work steeped in residual reference.
This distinctive film strives for originality. Schimberg is unashamed at displaying his innate knowledge of cinema, commencing with the silhouetted opening titles. Opening with one of Pauline Kael’s sparkier quotes, the movie is overtly proud of its understanding of the world of cinema, peering behind, before and between the goings on of a film.
Iranian cinema can be as well defined by what it doesn’t show as by what it does. Women’s hair is never seen, characters never drink and sex is never depicted. Filmmakers, like Jafar Panahi (still technically under house arrest), must find novel ways to skirt restrictions to say what they want about life and society. What’s truly incredible is that despite these restrictions, Iran can lay claim to one of the richest cinematic cultures in the world.
Style follows form, the government’s rigid censorship paradoxically leading to some remarkably powerful works. Could the metafictional stylings of Abbas Kiarostami or the tightly wound social dramas of Asghar Farhadi have come out of a more liberated society? Perhaps I have been thinking about it all wrong. As the documentary Filmfarsi shows — surveying popular Iranian cinema up until the Islamic revolution of 1979 — Iranian cinema has always been characterised by wild invention, improvising with what you have and melding genres together.
This a sensory experience. One that you feel with your skin. Feel the heat, feel the fog, feel the humidity. Director Oliver Laxe and his crew received fire training in order to join the Galician forest brigade as they battle the very large fires that routinely castigate the Northeastern nation of Spain. A very audacious feat. You will be caught right in the middle of hell, surrounded by collapsing trees and gigantic flames. Laxe didn’t even know whether his film equipment would survive. Fortunately for us, it did. Despite this, plus the fact that the actors use their real names, Fire Will Come (which won the Jury Prize for the Un Certain Regard strand of Cannes) is not a documentary.
This is as close as you will ever get to a tropical Douglas Sirk. Karim Ainouz’s eighth feature film and the second one to premiere in Cannes (after Madame Sata in 2001) has all the ingredients of a melodrama. The 145-minute movie – based on the eponymous novel by Martha Batalha – is punctuated with tragic relationships, epic misfortunes, fortuitous separations and untimely deaths. All skilfully wrapped together by an entirely instrumental and magnificent music score.
The titular character (Carol Duarte) and her sister Guida Gusmao (Julia Stockler) live with their traditional parents. Their Portuguese father Antonio is rude and formidable, while their Brazilian mother Ana is quiet and passive. The action takes place in the charming and quaint Rio the Janeiro of the 1950s.
A mother sends her children to her widowed father for fear of losing them to the New York foster system. A frosty man by nature, he agrees to care for them in the Mexican rustic desert, while his daughter fights for her right to live as an American citizen. It’s not the most original of stories, but it offers moments of raw, impactful soulfulness, proving that blood is indeed thicker than water.
This slow-burn drama is deftly punctuated by Pedro Damian’s steely lead, a no-nonsense grandpa none-too-impressed by his child’s request to unsettle his blissful boat rides by minding her three children. His gruff demeanour is a country away from the metropolitan lifestyle they have become accustomed to.
The story takes place in 1770 in rural Brittany. An Italian aristocrat (Valeria Golino) has found a wedding partner for her beautiful young daughter Heloise (Adele Haenel), who just returned from a convent to live with her mother is her enormous estate house. Her husband-to-be lives in Milan, and Heloise has never met him. Her mother commissions Marianne (Noemie Merlant) to paint her daughter in secret because Heloise would never consent to it (presumably because the picture will be sent to her prospective husband). Marianne pretends to be Heloise’s mere companion, working alongside the housemaid Sophie (Luana Bajrami). Heloise’s sister has recently committed suicide, likely due to the prospect of a similar marital arrangement. This means that the burden on Marianne is enormous. Could Heloise too attempt to take her own life?
This is a film almost entirely made by women. The writer director is female, and so is the cinematographer (Claire Mathion). Virtually all the characters are female, too. Men are only seen in the end of this 119-minute movie,
Though it advertises itself an attempt to document the long-range effects cinema brought to Italy, this film is much more interested and successfully in representing the social history it so readily represents. From the profuse luxuriance explored on the screen, it was the penpushers, the workers and the everyday women who made this possible. In its own way, it’s a tribute to Italy, Italian cinema and the indomitable nature of the Italian woman.
The film’s ambitious time-lapse method, converging from the present to the past, is presented in an assemblage of photo clips, showing the women both in their prime and in the fortunes of their Autumnal years. As is the nature of time, these subjects won’t likely be here to detail their story of a sensational decade when the next sensational decade begins.
Last but not least on out least is Ken Loach’s latest heart-wrenching drama. Ricky (Kris Hitchen) is a building worker with an impeccable CV, living with his family somewhere in suburban Newcastle. He persuades his wife Abbie (Debbie Honeywood) to sell off her car in order to raise £1,000 so that he can buy a van and move into the delivery industry. A franchise owner promises Ricky that he’ll be independent and “own his own business”, and earn up to £1,200 a week.
The reality couldn’t be more different. Ricky ends up working up to 14 hours a day six days a week. He literally has no time to pee, and instead urinates in a bottle inside him own vehicle (I would hazard a guess that Amazon’s infamous practices inspired scriptwriter Paul Laverty). His draconian delivery targets and inflexible ETAs (estimated time of arrival) turn him into a delivery robot. A small handheld delivery device containing delivery instructions virtually controls his life. Ricky has been conned. His “independence” is but an illusion. He might own his car, his company and his insurance, yet he’s entirely at the mercy of his franchiser.
For nine days, nearly 100 movies made by Indigenous filmmakers in every corner of the planet will be showcased in a variety of London venues. They include Nigerian Yoruba, Filipino T’boli, Yakutian horsebreeders from Russia, and a even a very transgressive Indiqueer Canadian Cree filmmaker. Many artists will attend the Festival, showcase their work, and debate the challenges of Indigenous life and filmmaking with an enthusiastic audience of Indigenous people, activists, researchers and film lovers in general. The action kicks off on Saturday, October 12th, Indigenous Peoples’ Day in the US.
Native Spirit Film Festival was founded by Mapuche filmmaker Freddy Treuquil in 2005. It is the UK’s first and only independent annual festival promoting contemporary Indigenous Cinema, MediaMakers and Artists and are event participants with Unesco International Year of Indigenous languages.
Below are the some of the most important Festival highlights. Click on the titles in order to accede to the individual reviews. You can see the full programme either on our calendar, on Native Spirit’s Facebook page or Eventbrite, where you can also purchase your ticket.
Thirza Jean Cuthand was born in Saskatchewan and grew up in Saskatoon, and she is of Cree origin. Starting in 1995, Cuthand began exploring short experimental narrative videos and films about sexuality, madness, youth, love, and race, using national, sexual and Indigenous experiences to showcase in unfiltered raw exteriors.
Make no mistake, there is purity at play here. Collecting the confines, conditions and contractions of Cuthand’s milieu, the varied works slip together into one continuous narrative written years, even decades, apart. More to the point, the essays cross genres from the pointedly visual into the realms of performance arts.
Young T’boli princess K’Na (Mara Lopez) finds herself trapped in an undesirable dilemma, as she has to balance realising her personal dreams with her duties as a village dream-weaver. Chosen by her town-folk to fill the vacant position, K’na is freighted with delivering visions through colourful abaca fibres. Tied to the boughs that hold her village afloat, K’na fancies the courtship from the broad-shouldered Silaw (RK Bagatsing), before Royal duties divide her impressionable intentions from her personal. The tribes follow tradition with the punishing reverence of survival, but K’na and Silaw share some moments of unbridled flirtation. Animalistic in their desire, their collegiality needs to be subdued.
The highs and lows of extreme rural living are expertly depicted in 24 Snow, a documentary that dives into life in one of the most inhospitable places on earth. Alternating scenes of natural beauty with a down-to-earth character portrait of an middle-aged Yakut horse breeder, it celebrates traditional forms of living while lamenting their slow erosion to the forces of modernisation.
Sergey Loukin’s story takes place in the area around Sakkyryr, Russia, one of the coldest inhabited places on earth, where temperatures regularly plummet below minus fifty degrees. It’s so cold in the winter that sheets of ice cling to the horse’s fur and must be removed with axes, and reindeer and husky-pulled sleds remain the only form of transportation. There is no electricity, no internet and no shops for miles around. Sergei must make do with his immediate surroundings alone. We follow him for around a year, from snow to summer to snow again.
Jazz creole artist Etienne Charles is one of the genre’s most inventive musicians, garnering acclaim for three impressive and well-received albums for his own Culture Shock Music imprint. A man still in his twenties, Charles understands the vitality and power Creole music holds on those who listen to it, inviting audiences to see, listen and feel the music he espouses on a daily basis. His style of raw playing has been hailed hailed by The New York Times as “an auteur” and by Jazz Times as “a daring improviser who delivers with heart wrenching lyricism”.
Through a trilogy of short films, Charles shows the beauty Trinidad holds in both its visual and musical form. Charles’ blend of improvisation and first-class musicianship has an infectious quality that attracts fans of all ages. The films capture the artists pure spontaneity, thriving and diving through the Trinidad streets.
This a sensory experience. One that you feel with your skin. Feel the heat, feel the fog, feel the humidity. Director Oliver Laxe and his crew received fire training in order to join the Galician forest brigade as they battle the very large fires that routinely castigate the Northeastern nation of Spain. A very audacious feat. You will be caught right in the middle of hell, surrounded by collapsing trees and gigantic flames. Laxe didn’t even know whether his film equipment would survive. Fortunately for us, it did. Despite this, plus the fact that the actors use their real names, Fire Will Come is not a documentary.
The bulky, rough-looking and yet somehow gentle and affable Amador has just left prison after a two-year stint for arson. He returns to his mother Benedicta, a bespectacled and petite octogenarian, so wrinkly that her mouth has shrunk and lips are hardly visible, donning a old rag dress and dirty trainers. Despite her age and small frame, Benedicta’s presence is momentous. The actress delivers an extravagantly demure performance. She is delighted to have her son back, welcoming him with a concise “Are you hungry?”
The story takes place in the deep Galician countryside, a region of Spain famous for non-savoury weather. There’s snow and constant rain. Once the soils dries up, comes the titular fire. It’s never entirely clear why Amador set fire to the forests, or even whether he is indeed guilty. We learn that he has a profound dislike of eucalyptus trees because they have “kilometres-long roots that suffocate other plants”, in his own words. Eucalyptus trees are not indigenous to Galicia, but they nowadays they are grown across the nation for their timber. We can only speculate that Amador became a pyromaniac because he wished to rid his land of the invasive species.
The film is entirely spoken in Galician language. A remarkable feature, absent from another recent and equally superb Spanish film set in Galicia, Isabel Coixet’s Elisa and Marcela. The director Laxe is the child of Galician immigrants, just like myself. In fact, this was the first time in my life I watched a film in my father’s native tongue. The depiction of the Galician countryside is extremely accurate. The verdant hills, the ancient stone houses, the old-fashioned iron ovens, the small-scale cattle ranching (Benedicta has about five cows with whom she has a very tender relationship). And, of course, the menacing fires (in 2011, more than 2,000 fires burnt nearly 2% of the Galicia’s territory). The characters (mostly peasants) are played by locals, and they too are very convincing. Laxe conducted the casting himself.
The lyricism of Fire Will Come is conspicuous. The contrasting images of Benedicta walking through the woods before and after the fire are astounding. There’s Tarkovsky everywhere: the cows of Andrei Rublev (1966) the exuberant green fields of Stalker (1979), the foggy vastness of Nostalghia (1983) and the house on fire of The Sacrifice (1986). Plus the the meditative pace of all of his films. The operatic soundtrack is sombre and dramatic, with songs by Vivaldi and Haas. Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne is also played to great effect during a short car ride. There’s also a very disturbing sequence of a wounded horse running emerging from the arson. A sordid and painful reminder of the unforgiving might of fire.
All in all, this if the perfect combination of sound and imagery. A breathtaking movie. Literally.
Fire Will Come premiered at the BFI London Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It won the Jury Prize of the Un Certain Regard strand of the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, a much deserved accolade. In cinemas Friday, March 20th. On Curzon Home Cinema on Friday, April 3rd (following cancellation of theatrical release due to the coronavirus pandemic).
Aaron Schimberg’s film about a European auteur directing their first English language movie was never going to be an average movie. In this American film, the bucolic blond Mabel (Jess Weixler)is a beguiling beauty who struggles working with a co-star who is anything but the epitome of conventional beauty. Although she plays the blind lead who falls disgracefully in love with a facially disfigured man (Rosenthal, played by British actor Adam Pearson, who has an actual facial disfigurement), her real-life interactions showcase a Draconian demeanour out of character with the charitable character she inhabits onscreen. It’s one of the many canny references swimming in Chained For Life, a work steeped in residual reference.
This distinctive film strives for originality. Schimberg is unashamed at displaying his innate knowledge of cinema, commencing with the silhouetted opening titles. Opening with one of Pauline Kael’s sparkier quotes, the movie is overtly proud of its understanding of the world of cinema, peering behind, before and between the goings on of a film.
Paradoxically, considering the film is concerned with shallowness and superficial, Chained for Life is deliciously beautiful to look at, with a dazzling assemblage of coloured textures. The camera wafts over the set, green tinted in colour, filmed with Gilliam-focused attention. Tellingly, the film’s fictional director, Herr Director (Charlie Kosmo) is a skilled German auteur, and a bohemian with an extraordinary background in circus training. His cast members boast their director’s values for bringing European sensibilities to an American film. The script is killer, parading an emblem of witty remarks.
Mabel looks the slinky sensual star while shrouding herself in the most luxuriant of red dresses. Her co-star Rosenthal suffers from neurofibromatosis type 1 (a genetic condition that causes tumours to grow along the nerves). It’s a real life ailment, rarely seen in the parameters of cinema. For those working on the film, he is the film’s real life bête noire, as production assistants throw script re-writes into his hand with neither curtsy nor courtesy. Mabel stares out at her lonely, lofty co-star, pain-stricken at her hypocrisy and the crew’s cruelty. In its glorious way, it’s both a love letter and a middle finger salute to the film industry. There are complexities, contradictions and conflations. The film and the film within the film shift from shot to shot in metacontextual frisson.
At one point, Rosenthal is bombarded by a fan for a photograph. Unsure of the disciple’s intention, he protests he doesn’t know the person. With focus on the pair of them, the enthusiast declares “I am who I am, I can’t change that” staring directly at the camera. The direction is obvious; the film’s aiming that comment at us, the audience. And why not? As purveyors of visual entertainment, we are as culpably superficial as the creatures we condone on the screen! Brilliant movie.
Chained for Life premiered at the Cambridge Film Festival. It’s out in cinemas on Friday, October 25th. On VoD on Monday, February 17th.
There’s a moment midway through Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman that seems hauntingly melancholic as it is inadvertently emotive the more you think about it. Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) has just acquainted the teamster president, Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino). They’ve only marginally confided with one another, speaking subtextually for what’s to become of their partnership. As Frank is getting ready to rest, Jimmy descends to his room, leaving the doors ajar as a thinning see through before turning the lights off.
This particular moment has a nuance spanning through the film’s 210-minute run time. It suggests more than what it simply emits, and not so much in character but in the philosophy which commentates the ethos of the inevitable means the men in this history prevail upon. The moment lingers with Frank placing his revolver on a night stand and quietly remaining still, guarding and inhabiting the confines of what’s to become his own solitude.
This is one of many moments in The Irishman, an engrossing epic of an unexpected power, that proposes a different kind of attitude towards a very familiar subject Scorsese is relatively known for. It is a rather bleak, at times dryly funny, and senescent biography of Frank Sheeran, a World War II veteran who became a hitman for the mafia, and then a union leader, and who had a simultaneously trusting friendship with Hoffa and Northeastern Pennsylvania mob boss, Russell Buffalino (Joe Pesci).
The film, adapted by Steve Zaillian from Charles Brandt’s book I Heard You Paint Houses opens in a retirement home, finding the back of an old Frank Sheeran, sitting on his wheelchair as the gliding long shot spirals to his front. He’s a boulder of an appearance, wearing shades over his leaden eyes and never once straining his mouth to evoke an expression. His entire demeanor is ghostly but living, and the moment he speaks, his statements become the narration of a history expanding through crime and politics, an intertwining of mafia history and American history. If Sheeran’s account on his own life were to be taken to credence (which, from the sources of many crime historians and investigators, it most definitely wouldn’t), then Frank would’ve been the Waldo in the rooms and events of pivotal moments in American history.
This would include the rise of Castro and the Bay of Pigs, John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the ‘blood feud’ between Bobby Kennedy and Jimmy Hoffa, and the mob wars spanning a decade. And somehow, all through the film, Frank seems as passive as he is old and immobile from when we first see him. It is from his narration that relays a denial of how everything went down, how his choices may have defined him and an uncertainty of what he must’ve felt. Capable of great violence, but neither pensive nor neurotic by the degree of his own violence, Frank is mostly a content figure lingering behind the talkative wise guys, the eccentrics more reckless and domineering for absolute rule. He is more reactive to abide, is muted by a nature that is never truly explained, and is perfectly capable of talking himself out of perilous confrontations. He’s introduced to the legacy of the Buffalino crime family by taking on petty theft jobs that involve running meat-truck scams and by simply being in the right place at the right time, meeting the right people. This begins with Felix “Skinny Razor” DiTullio (Bobby Cannavale), the teamster lawyer and cousin to Russell, Bill Buffalino (Ray Romano), and regarded Philadelphia crime boss Angelo Bruno (Harvey Keitel). Through these interactions, Frank describes his severe choices from their influences, and several murders made willingly as occurrences of complete arbitrary.
The unusual thing about The Irishman is how self-contained Scorsese is with helming a saga perhaps all too larger in pretext than Goodfellas (1990) and Casino (1995). There’s an admirably prolonging commitment to the film’s deadpan comedy, the deviation of its characters (in particular Pacino, and Katherine Narducci as Russell’s wife, Carrie), and it’s at times underwhelming response to the crux of every demise at the forefront. There’s rarely a saturation in the film’s design to introduce a variety of characters from an elder construct or the bombastic renaissance of figures such as Anthony Provenzano (Stephen Graham), and “Crazy” Joe Gallo (Sebastian Maniscalo). At the same time, from the constraints in which the film liberties the potential of never masking its heavily crestfallen semblance of its essence, the film faintly falters on that expense by keeping certain aspects unfulfilling.
Key players such as Anthony Salerno (Dominick Lombardozzi, unrecognizable in his aging prosthetics), DiTullio, Bill Buffalino (whose daughter’s wedding serves as a ploy for Frank and Russell to take a road tip that metaphorically denotes life, itself), Hoffa’s son Chuck (Jesse Plemmons), and Angelo Bruno all penetrate an emotional presence by introduction but their motives are fairly vague. As people, they’re almost difficult to define. It is evidently clear they’re involvement in the narrative is to essentially be rather than become a figure of influence that isn’t simply mannequinned by default.
Scorsese has never been one to feature a defining female presence in his crime-inducing films, unless one were to recount both Sharon Stone’s role in Casino and Lorraine Bracco’s all too knowing wife of Henry Hill’s in Goodfellas. They’re an element of the wise guy’s awakening, a somewhat entity of masquerading devotion, allured by embellishment curated by inherent sin. They are, for the most part and put bluntly in the world of Scorsese’s wise guys, their downfall. The women are manipulated from the expense of machismo lifestyle, they’re ignored and misunderstood. It is a dynamic in the romances from those films that are absent here for something potentially more refining in poignancy but is left as a minor study of fatherhood. That is from one of Frank’s daughters (the others are rarely characters) Peggy (Anna Paquin), who’s more of a muted astute ghost than Frank, himself. In the span of her lifetime involving Frank, she’s at first a witness to his brutality towards a grocery store runner who regrettably enforces physical disciplinary action towards her. His involvement with Russell and absentee as a father becomes more of a visceral frame of memory. It is cold, and thematically, the greatest loss in the war of politics and crime that Frank, by the end of the film, probably still doesn’t even realise.
There will be concerns regarding the de-aging technology used on De Niro, Pacino, Pesci, and Keitel. For the most part, it isn’t quite there yet, but as the film progresses that technical factor becomes less patent and goes to great effect (especially with the latter three, De Niro’s at first glance can’t go unnoticed). Another reason it almost seems so seamless through its entirety is on the basis of its performances that are apparent from the mild evolutions that transpire through the timeline.
You can see and feel the range of Robert De Niro and his years from this faded performance. His years as an actor are assembled (and not even instinctively) to the bare minimum of every trademark and energy he’s refined in ways only De Niro can deliver (and in specifics, his collaboration with Scorsese). This could be said the same for Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, and Harvey Keitel (who spends most of the time in the film sitting behind a table, with faint sway). It is unusual to see Pacino in a Scorsese film, in the same way it was for Jack Nicholson purveying his anomalous energy in The Departed (Scorsese, 2006). You question why they haven’t worked together before. And Pacino shares a great amount of screentime with De Niro that become less of a spectacle, than let’s say, their one scene in Heat (1995, Scorsese), and their overly prompted back and forths in Righteous Kill (John Avnet, 2008), and more interactive by an unexpected depth of compassion. Pacino in particular, shares a few scenes with De Niro and one incredible scene with Pesci that are so masterfully performed, and so simplistically constructed by Scorsese that it echoes the Herculean spirit of The Godfather.
Which makes this viewing of The Irishman almost more personal than analytical in the sense that this was premiered at the 57th Annual New York Film Festival, with a 35mm IB technicolor print screening of The Godfather Part II (1974) just a few days after. That film serves as a case study for Michael Corleone’s obsession for protecting the family name by blood, business, and a legacy sprawling from one too many prides tampered by conceited desires (given Sonny’s recklessness for violence, and Fredo’s weakness for respect and riches, and Tom’s loyalty over a name that isn’t even his), and his own family (Kay, and his children).
Michael is at the forefront of all the other eccentrics who deem power, but is for the most part ghostly in his rule, and desensitised to the convictions of those around him that he, by the nature of his own impassiveness to what’s of importance, loses just about everything he’s built (as in the case of The Irishman, Frank Sheeran). The parallel of this to young Vito Corleone (played by De Niro) establishing a new wave of crime from a more respectful and family driven angle, is perhaps the underlying and all too certain decree of what destroys the Corleone’s in its saga of betrayal, politics, the mafia, and essentially the pride of its maleness vitality.
For Frank Sheeran to pose a paralleling figure of Michael Corleone seems almost too determined and instinctual, but then you’d have to consider Pacino and Pesci’s take on the egos surrounding Frank. How unavoidable many contrivances could’ve been if meshing politics with crime would be of no reality. For every action and incentive, originated by a pureness for altering a time utilising on the vices that seem everlastingly timeless, paradoxically foil to the sin of what inspires no other measure other than the final and fatalistic destination.
And as one film illustrates this from a more operatic, and family oriented view in sin. Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman revisits this from an angle he’s approached in almost every film in his filmography, but is perhaps the most personal in delving from the vintage Scorsese that has transitioned to an elder Scorsese, one who’s lens is clearer from intense imagery to a sombre casualty of the many characters of his whom are left in the isolation of their attempts to unravel in nothingness. What was their aim at the end of all things? What do we make of Frank Sheeran, old, confused, scarred by a history that repeats itself with fresher spectators, sitting to a door left ajar?
It is unclear (and by design, perhaps) whether Martin Scorsese is using this narrative to unveil what could be his struggling, or at this point, accepted conviction of religion and sin. The 76-year-old American director can easily retire after this feat, which will live on with the powerful aspect of never being confessional to that idea, or many more viewers will choose to analyse when noting the hauntingly impassive nature of it’s lead.
The Irishman premiered at the New York Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It’s out in cinemas on Friday, November 8th. On Netflix in January.
Henry (Will Smith) is a mercenary sniper so skilled that, in this film’s bravura opening sequence, he can shoot a distant target through the carriage window of a fast moving train. He’s getting on in years, though, and has decided to retire because he feels he’s losing his edge. He should have shot the mark in he head not the neck, and he could so easily have shot by mistake the inquisitive little girl who was briefly standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.
No matter, he’s retiring and plans to spend his time sailing on the open sea and generally doing nothing. He hasn’t yet realised that the target sold to him as a terrorist was, in fact, innocent – and consequently he”s about to become a target himself. Moreover, because his skills are unrivalled, his employers represented by Clay Verris (Clive Owen) have cloned him, raising the clone to capitalise on his strengths and improve on his weaknesses. And to eliminate him, they’ve sent his clone – a younger, leaner, hungrier and arguably more efficient version of himself.
Thus, the film is basically old Will Smith hunted by young Will Smith with, as is the way in Paramount action thriller franchises from Mission Impossible to Jack Reacher, a female companion thrown in for good measure, here in the form of Mary Elizabeth Winstead. Benedict Wong plays an old friend of Henry.
It seems we haven’t quite reached the point yet where an actor can be scanned into a computer as in The Congress (Ari Folman, 2013) and turned into a career’s worth of movies. Young Will Smith is played by the actor and then changed into a younger, leaner version of himself via reference footage of himself in old movies and mountains of CGI work. It’s impressive; you really feel like you’re watching a real life, younger Smith. Ang Lee is, after all, the man who pushed effects technicians to create the central character of Hulk (2003), a technically groundbreaking if flawed film. There as here, he’s pushing at the limits of the medium and learning all the time as he goes.
As if that wasn’t enough innovation for one movie, Lee here redefines the action movie deploying the combination of 3D and HFR (High Frame Rate of 120 fps) that he employed on Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2016) although it was shown in only five cinemas around the world in that format (New York, Los Angeles, Taipei, Beijing and Shanghai). It’s not clear exactly how many cinemas will be able to play Gemini Man in the exact format Ang Lee intended – see here. Sadly, not every director is Ang Lee and as with 3D, there will no doubt be a rash of not very good 3D + HFR movies so that ticket prices can be upped. A rash of run of the mill 3D movies is why 3D is now widely looked down on.
So, what’s so impressive about this particular movie in 3D and HFR, then? Well, Lee thinks about every shot in terms of 3D, conceiving it as not a flat photographic image but sculptural, three dimensionally blocked out, staged action – whether that’s two people talking in a room or an above the water / under the water shot of two fighting people falling a couple of storeys into water. On top of that, the increased number of frames per second makes everything feel more real, and when you’re talking about fast paced action stunt work that actually makes a considerable difference to your viewing experience. My question on emerging from the press screening, for the record at London’s Cineworld, Leicester Square on the digital Imax screen, was, “What exactly have I just watched?” (I’ve been unable to ascertain what frame rate was used at that screening, although it felt much higher than 24 fps.) If all directors were as talented as Ang Lee, the answer would be, “the future of cinema”. One can but hope.
Gemini Man is out in the UK on Friday, October 11th. On VoD in March. Watch the film trailer below:
Seoul, South Korea, 1994. Less than 10 years since South Korea has become a democracy. The year of the Winter Olympics, the death of North Korean leader Kim Il-sung and the Seongsu Bridge collapse. The latter incident will leave its mark on some of the characters here.
Teenager Eun-hee’s mum and dad (Jung In-gi and Lee Seung-yeon) run a small food store, sourcing “only the finest ingredients”. On occasion, they deliver to other suppliers and the whole family is roped in to make sure the orders are prepped and sent out on time. They are fiercely proud parents who want only the best for their kids. The best, as they understand it, is doing well in the school and university system, presumably with the idea of getting a well paid job afterwards.
This message is reinforced by her school. A male teacher has the girls chant, ” I will go to / Seoul National University / instead of karaoke”. He also gets his class to nominate the top two delinquents among them, defined as those who smoke or date instead of studying. Eun-hee is the top nominee. Or, as two of her classmates with a clear sense of privilege put it when talking about her, “dumb girls like that don’t make it to college and they become our maids”
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Her brother Dae-hoon (Son Sang-yeon) is achieving good grades at school and looks set to go to university. He has a nasty side too: he periodically bullies and hits Eun-hee, making her home life a misery. Her sister Soo-hee (Park Soo-yeon) is out a lot and looks less devoted to academic work, on one occasion hiding in a cupboard to avoid their father.
Eun-hee herself (Park Ji-hoo) is an outsider who doesn’t really fit in at school. She likes to draw and wants to b a comic artist.
She has a boyfriend of sorts, schoolboy Kim Ji-wan (Jeong Yun-seo) who she tentatively gets to kiss her who is later dragged from her presence by his overbearing mother. A later same-sex romance with the shy Bae Yu-ri (Seol Hye-in) comes to nothing.
A lump under one ear will later cause her to be hospitalised.
Her parents send her to the local Chinese cram school, but that doesn’t motivate her academically until her teacher is replaced by university student Miss Kim Young-ji (Kim Sae-byuk), first seen smoking a cool cigarette on the school stairwell, who gets both Eun-hee and Calvin Klein clothing-obsessed fellow student Jeon Ji-suk (Park Seo-yun) to talk about themselves and their interests, the only person in the film to do so.
When the two students go shoplifting and get caught, Ji-suk reveals Eun-hee’s father’s name to the understandably incensed owner. It is Miss Young-ji to whom Eun-hee talks about the crime and in whom she subsequently confides, the one person in the film who brings her out of herself and gives her good advice, e.g. to stick up for herself when her brother beats her. Consequently, they become friends. And Eun-hee becomes vaguely aware, through titles on Miss Young-ji’s classroom bookshelf, of politics and such schools of thought as feminism.
It’s a bleak period picture of an emerging democracy where almost everyone seems to be focused on career at the expense of relationships or family. At the same time, though, it’s highly affecting as a sympathetic portrait of a teenage girl’s life which also exhibits an optimistic undercurrent in the character of a teacher who goes against the grain and shows a genuine interest in her pupils.
House Of Hummingbird plays in the BFI London Film Festival and the London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF). Watch the film trailer below:
Jazz creole artist Etienne Charles is one of the genre’s most inventive musicians, garnering acclaim for three impressive and well-received albums for his own Culture Shock Music imprint. A man still in his twenties, Charles understands the vitality and power Creole music holds on those who listen to it, inviting audiences to see, listen and feel the music he espouses on a daily basis. His style of raw playing has been hailed hailed by The New York Times as “an auteur” and by Jazz Times as “a daring improviser who delivers with heart wrenching lyricism”.
Through a trilogy of short films, Charles shows the beauty Trinidad holds in both its visual and musical form. Charles’ blend of improvisation and first-class musicianship has an infectious quality that attracts fans of all ages. The films capture the artists pure spontaneity, thriving and diving through the Trinidad streets.Those of a cynical disposition might not regard the films as much more than “how to” television manuals, but there is a vestige of biting humour which merits the viewing of these films. And at least the music sounds stellar, which is more than you could say about a One Direction film!
To the many unversed in cultivated Caribbean culture, opening film Carnival the Sound of a People (Research) proves a tasty photograph, as an assemblage of clips shows a city dancing to the tribal appetisers of his trumpet playing. His mantras and manouevres incorporate the rhythms from the French, Spanish, English and Dutch speaking Caribbean formats in one salty menage. Music is often used as an act of rebellion and Bamboo opens with a title card reminding viewers of the terror British Colonial Rule threw down on the masquerade bands of 1884. Tumbling and towering the drums shimmer through the soundwaves, as a conflate of images show the power the percussive instruments still hold centuries later. For once these films seem frustratingly short, yet dissuade the view that drums and movies do not mix.
Which is where Jab Molaisse comes in, tying the triumvirate together in a cross cut patio of pop videography. Blue painted drummers begin the tribal rhythms that cuts from musician to musician with transcendental fusion. Together, the jive style silhouettes flips from percussive precision as the film speeds without dialogue, a six minute video of clever cuts and cross-shapes. In its own way, the films speak to each other with the sweet music that melodically sings in the listeners ear. So, a bit more than a trio of “how to” manuals!
Etienne Charles’s Docushorts shows on October 12th at 17:00 at the Soas Brunei Theatre, as part of the Native Spirit Festival. Grab your ticket now here!
