A bravura opening shot pulls from rainswept Tokyo in through a hospital window to a girl waiting by a patient’s bedside, recalling nothing so much as the heroine of everyone’s favourite anime identity thriller Perfect Blue (Satoshi Kon, 1997) reflected against a train carriage window with a Tokyo cityscape visible beyond, but where Kon uses such imagery as an entry point to multilayered realities, Weathering With You’s vision never really extends beyond trying to recreate and repeat the formula that rendered its director’s previous Your Name (Makoto Shinkai, 2016) such a runaway success.
Like Your Name, Weathering With You centres on a teenage boy/girl romance but instead of the gender body swap and time travel devices in the earlier film – which probably shouldn’t have worked but somehow did – Weathering has an equally flimsy plot device about a girl named Hina who possesses the ability to turn rain into sunshine. This is set against a far more interesting backdrop of Tokyo being permanently shrouded in rain with echoes of global warming thrown in for the closing epilogue, two years after the main story, in which large parts of the city have disappeared beneath the rising sea level.
Most of the film centres around 16 year old runaway Hodaka who has come to Tokyo presumably to escape the type of small town existence portrayed in the rural sections of Your Name as Shinkai tries desperately not to repeat himself, a goal at which he succeeds admirably for about the first reel or so, arguably Weathering’s most engaging section. An early highlight during Hodaka’s inbound ferry journey sees him rush onto deck just in time to be caught in an exhilarating downpour only to be saved from being swept away by the swift action of unkempt, grownup Kei who subsequently gives the boy his card and tells him to get in touch if he ever needs help.
Hodaka knows better, so walks away – but after living as a homeless person on Tokyo’s mean and rainswept streets for a while and being unable to secure work to support himself because of Japan’s stringent minimum working age laws, he changes his mind and ends up the technically illegal and poorly paid if housed and fed dogsbody at Kei’s magazine publishing company where alongside a young woman named Natsumi he starts to research supernatural and paranormal stories for possible publication.
Kei sends Hodaka out to investigate the phenomenon of the sunshine girl, who can temporarily cause the rain to stop and the sun to come out, in turn pushing the plot towards boy meets girl romance when Hodaka befriends sunshine girl Hina and her primary school age little brother Nagi. Here Weathering repeats Your Name’s teen romantic clichés without holding the audience’s attention quite as effectively.
Shinkai also falls back on a visual, fantasy device, a temple which turns out to be a portal to another world where Hina floats in the sky as if underwater surrounded by mysterious shoals of sky (or are they sea?) fish. Your Name cleverly wove its not dissimilar visual conceits into a complex tapestry but Weathering can’t quite to pull its various constituent parts together, leaving the viewer to founder somewhat even as he or she admires its more impressive elements.
However the rain and sunshine imagery, while it may be a sideshow to the main romantic event, proves itself a considerable and genuinely captivating asset. Much artistry has gone into animating rain dripping down window panes or splashing in multiple drops onto pavement surfaces – and there are a great many such sequences. Equally, when Hina halts the rain for a few hours which she does with Hodaka as they attempt to earn a little extra money, the blue sky, sunshine and bright light provide a welcome contrast to the constant downpour and drab colour elsewhere.
The final flooding of Tokyo builds effectively on all this, but sadly it’s too little, too late. You can’t help feeling that far more could have been done with this flooding concept in both script and overall design. Despite the promise of that opening shot, Weathering ultimately fails to deliver the multiple reality levels of Kon’s Perfect Blue. Worse, it never integrates its ideas into a coherent whole the way Shinkai’s own, earlier and superior Your Name did while its romance simply isn’t as engaging. A great pity.
Weathering With You is out in the UK on Friday, January 17th (2019). On Sky Cinema and NOW TV on February 3rd (2021).
Opening with and periodically punctuated by documentary footage of Hitler and the Third Reich, this is Malick’s retelling of the wartime life experience of a real life couple. Deeply in love, Franz and Fani Jägerstätter (August Diehl and Valerie Pachner) run their farm near a remote, mountainous Austrian country village. With the Third Reich on the ascendant, he gets called up for military service and is billeted in a nearby castle and trained while she, the kids (three girls) and her sister Resie (Maria Simon) struggle to manage the farm without him.
When France surrenders, many men are released from national service and Franz is allowed to go back to farm, wife and family. However it’s only a matter of time before he’s called up again. And this time, the only way out of signing the oath is to go to prison.
Other hands might have turned the real life history on which this is based into a pedestrian movie that wouldn’t do any favours to the memory of those involved. Malick, however, uses the couple’s written correspondence when the husband is away as the spine of his narrative so that when he hangs his images and sounds upon it, they add something to a solid story that already makes sense in its own right.
So he starts off with fields and mountains and a couple very much in love, intermittently throwing in images of family life and agriculture before showing us life in army barracks then prison. Although the whole runs the best part of three hours, it never feels like it, more like a very slow paced, leisurely 90 minutes in which time sometimes seems to stand still and the film’s content slowly seeps into the viewer.
That content is, to express it at its simplest, what are you supposed to do in society when bad people are in charge? Franz wrestles with the Christian injunction to be subject to the governing authorities but at the same time to resist evil. First friends then acquaintances and finally judges tell him how much simpler his life would be if he only signed the oath to Hitler. His devastating response is that, if he doesn’t sign, he is free. A challenge to us all, especially if we find our society asking us to comply with ideas or actions which run counter to our conscience.
In retelling this story on the screen in the way that he has, Malick brilliantly expresses the numinous good and the fact that some ideas or values are so important that everything else must take second place to them, even if it means going against what most people think. This is a profoundly moving experience on a very deep spiritual level, rare in cinema. It’ll be a long time before we see another film with the same theological depth that speaks so eloquently to the problem of human suffering as this one does.
A Hidden Life is out in the UK on Friday, January 17th. Watch the film trailer below:
Sixteen-year-old Noor (Zara Webb) is in Kashmir for the very first time in her life. This is where she meets her grandparents, and attempts to create a connection with a region that was hitherto entirely foreign to her. The adolescent is British/Western in every way: her accent, her attire, her obsession with taking selfies and publishing on social media.
She meets the local village boy Majid (Shivam Raina), who is of the same age, and they immediately bond. There’s a touch of teen love, nothing too graphic and extreme, palatable for a more conservative Indian audience. They find out that their respective fathers were very good friends as young men. It’s not entirely clear what happened to the men since. Most assume that they died in the violent conflict that has plagued the contested region for decades. Because of uncertainty of their real fate, their wives are often described as “half-widows”. The only one who seems to know the truth is Arshid (played by the director Ashvin Kumar), who was a close friend of the two men. But Arshid refuses to disclose any information. So Noor and Majid set themselves on a mission to uncover the truth.
The two teens get lost in a dense forest as they search for the answers about their elusive family history. But they soon get in trouble, being arrested by patrol soldiers. This is war-ridden region with little regard for their adolescent adventure. Being British-born gives Noor an advantage over Majid, and she’s soon released. But what about the village boy, who enjoys far less rights and protections than his foreign friend?
This is a tender coming-of-age story set against a very tragic backdrop. Noor’s freedoms and joie-de-vivre are contrasted against the far less peaceful and civilised existence that the Kashmiris have to lead. The performances are strong enough to keep you hooked throughout the 108 minutes of the story. Most characters are rather flat and their psychology is easy to understand, making the narrative straightforward and borderline didactic. The only exception is Arshid, the most psychologically complex and ambiguous personage. It’s never clear what his secrets and motives are. Until he unexpectedly takes justice into his own hands…
The contextualisation of the conflict, on the other hand, is far less clear. You won’t find out, for instance, that both India and Pakistan claim Kashmir in its entirety, and that the Indian government recently revoked the special status accorded to the region in its constitution, the most controversial political move in nearly 70 years. They sent thousands of troops , thereby imposed a curfew, shut down telecommunications and arrested political leaders. It will help if you have some understanding of the conflict before you watch the movie.
No Fathers in Kashmir is in cinemas on Friday, January 24th.
My first encounter with the films of Chilean-French filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky was a complete accident. Stumbling around Bestival on the Isle of Wight as a young and impressionable teenager, I walked into a tent at midnight just as The Holy Mountain (1973) was about to begin. I had absolutely no idea what to make of the movie; all I knew was that I was in the presence of something completely unique and utterly brilliant. The random nature of this encounter felt Jodorowskian in and of itself, a bizarre coincidence that later left a huge filmmaking impression.
The deranged nature of Jodorowky’s films almost invites the viewer to be somewhat under the influence (like I was then, although just rum and not psychedelics!) when watching them. His breakthrough hit, El Topo, is no exception, a bizarre romp through the Mexican desert that shocks and beguiles in equal measure. Filled to the brim with endless rituals, symbols, animals, dwarfs, deformed people and highly mannered performances, it can be a difficult film to interpret. Seen with an open mindset however and El Topo is a highly cathartic experience, an expiation of sin through brutal violence.
Jodorowsky stars at the eponymous hero, a black-clad gunfighter wandering the desert with his naked son (played by Jodorowsky’s own son Brontis Jodorowsky). He is on a mission to defeat four gun masters to become the finest fighter in the land. With just this basic description El Topo sounds like a traditional Western, or at least a Spaghetti Western — violent deconstructions of the genre filmed by Italians directors like Sergio Corbucci or Sergio Leone — yet Jodorowsky has a completely different aim in mind, using the power of the desert’s almost endless plains to investigate the nature of human morality.
It’s ultimately a deeply religious film, albeit one that explores ideas of spiritually and faith through extreme violence. El Topo can easily be read, like the star of The Holy Mountain, as a type of Jesus-like figure, especially when he finds himself in a cave filled with outcasts who have become deformed through incest. He even quotes New Testament scripture when he asks “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” right before his hands are shot, forming wounds like that of the stigmata. Both blasphemous yet oddly affecting, it foreshadows the intense exploration of Christianity found in the films of Martin Scorsese, especially The Last Temptation of Christ (1988).
Yet the film cannot easily be interpreted as a one-for-one Christ allegory. As Roger Ebert mentions: “He makes not the slightest attempt to use them so they sort out into a single logical significance.” Unlike the similarly mannered films of Sergei Parajanov, which can probably be interpreted correctly with a degree in Eastern European studies or specialist knowledge of pre-Soviet Ukrainian, Georgian and Armenian culture, Jodorowsky’s films cannot be solved through specialist knowledge as many of the symbols more or less contradict each other. This is the key pleasure of Jodorowsky’s films and what makes them such iconic Midnight Movies. You just simply have to go with the flow, bring your own perspective to what they offer, and enjoy the experience. Intoxicants are optional.
A restoration of El Topo is in selected cinemas across the UK on Friday, January 10th.
American marijuana kingpin Mickey Pearson (Matthew McConnaughey) has made a legendary name for himself in London. Looking to sail out from the life he’s made for himself, Pearson involves himself with Matthew Berger (Jeremy Strong). Investments come at a price in this “Mockney” caper, as the criminal underbelly side with the upper classes of British Establishment.
After 10 years directing the more cordial Sherlock Holmes (2009), King Arthur (2017) and Disney’s Aladdin (2019),Guy Ritchie´s returned to the very genre that made his name in the first place. Maybe he shouldn’t have bothered. Those East End tropes had tired as early as Rocknrolla (2008). There’s an arrogance to the film that won’t win him any favours with audiences and critics, though I suspect he already knows that; it might explain why a character rubbishes The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974) as a cheap throwaway line!
Ritchie was never a critical darling, unlike Snatch (2000) producer Matthew Vaughn, and The Gentlemen shares a glaring resemblance in palette, colour, design and costume to Kingsman: The Secret Service (directed by Vaughn in 2014). Jokes about ´Jewish gangsters´ and ´Irish boxers´ are one thing, but when Dry Eye (Henry Golding), a “Chinese James Bond”, is said to possess a “ricence to kill”; there’s a genuine six-letter word for it beginning with ´r´!
So no, this is not a good film. But thanks to one character actor, playing beautifully against type, it’s not entirely an inessential one. Since weathering in age and appearance, Hugh Grant has re-emerged in recent years as one of Britain’s most enjoyable actors. He works as the film’s narrator, spurning the narrative turns with broad Michael Caine like glee. He’s revelling onscreen with panto like glee, walking across the screen with broad, fulsome strides. It’s a testament to his ever-growing “Grantnaissance”, while McConnaughey´s Pearson adds little of value to his supposed “McConaissance”. He looks tired, bored even, in a script of Class B Hollywood material. But Colin Farrell’s a blast, revelling onscreen as a charming boxing instructor, while Eddie Marsan enjoys himself as ´The Daily Print´s Editor-in-Chief. It’s nice to see Grant, Farrell and Marsan having so much fun. Shame they forgot to include the audience!
The Gentlemen is in cinemas on Wednesday, January 1st.
Life pivots on our uncertainty. Death comes in many forms, pirouetting in a practice that has outlived our existence. The cosmic condition of knowledge, power, passion and pain come together in one final performance, bowed as we are to the inevitable.
Hinging on the turn of death, art turns to our turmoil, our torrents and our illnesses as a means to comfort both ourselves and others. In this list, we have selected a corpus of cinema, each an elegy, a prayer and a mantra to the end. We have elected two conditions equally universal and evil in their nature. The 1980s and 1990s were concerned with the Aids epidemic, concerned as they were by a disease that spread from body. Aids of course is not longer a terminal disease, with HIV being considered an entirely manageable chronic condition instead. Those on that list that do not concern Aids are related to cancer, the reprobate that has made its way into families all over the world. Though none of these films would classify themselves the easiest of watch, each has a power that merits them as an essential viewing. This piece is to all the millions who died at the hands of the illnesses and a tribute to the bravery of the filmmakers in showcasing the honesty of their conditions. In times of great healing, films prove great companions and in times of great illness, great comforts when we need them most.
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1. Love Story (Arthurd Hiller, 1970):
It’s nearly 50 years since Love Story, a bona fide box office smash and cultural conversation-starter, opened up on the unknowing public. Deeply romantic in tone and nature, the immense love and chemistry Jenny Cavilleri (Ali MacGraw) and Oliver Barrett (Ryan O’Neal) held overcame numerous class barriers, dismissive parents and extreme poverty. What it couldn’t defeat was cancer, the terminal illness that drove Jenny to an untimely grave. Eager to follow his chivalric code, Oliver opts not to tell her when he hears the news, allowing her to discover the news after confronting her doctor in a gut-punching scene. Yet cancer isn’t enough to kill their love, a love stronger than words, Oliver comforting himself in her memory that “love means never having to say you’re sorry”. Saturated in the most wonderfully romantic rhetoric, the film opened to extraordinary box office results, heralding the modern day tragic ‘chick flick’ template that were felt in Titanic‘s (James Cameron, 1998) beats, The Fault In Our Stars‘s (Josh Boone, 2014) story. What Love Story holds over both those stories is a heartfelt romance that makes the moments where Jenny organises her own burial that bit more gut-wrenching to watch.
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2. Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman, 1972):
Heedful of the experiences which formed his creative muse, director Ingmar Bergman was terribly moved by his memories of a mortuary at Sophiahemmet Hospital. His autobiography The Magic Lantern demonstrated an unstaunched, funereal horror no boy should ever witness:”The young girl who had just been treated lay on a wooden table in the middle of the floor” Bergman writes. “I pulled back the sheet and exposed her. She was quite naked apart from a plaster that ran from throat to pugenda. I lifted a hand and touched her shoulder. I had heard about the chill of death, but the girl’s skin was not cold but hot. I moved my hand to her breast, which was small and slack with an erect black nipple. There was dark down on her abdomen. She was breathing.”
Gaped with the terminal image lodged firmly in his skull, Bergman sought to capture the response in a triumvirate of psychological dramas. Persona (1966) and Hour of the Wolf (1968) captured the essence of terror, but Cries and Whispers (1972) satisfied the director’s thirst in its purest, most final form. Bed-bound in her domiciliary abode, Agnes (Harriet Andersson) waits on sisters Maria and Karin (Liv Ullmann and Ingrid Thulin) for her comforts. Dying from uterine cancer, Agnes finds the compassion missing from her siblings in the arms of servant and friend Anna (Kari Sylwan). Liturgical in form, the film defies genre convention, exploring the Marxist, feminist and hereditary permutations celebrated in all of Bergman’s works.Yet there’s something achingly beautiful as the film ends on Anna, Agnes’ closest compatriot, delving into her Lady’s diary, exploring the life and thoughts of a spirited girl untouched by illness.
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3. An Early Frost (John Erman, 1985):
An Early Frost expertly captures the fears of Aids people sincerely felt in the 1980s. Irish actor Aidan Quinn stars as Chicago attorney Michael Pierson, doubling the burden of attending a family get together by exposing himself as an Aids victim to them. In typical 1980s lad-led bravado, Pierson refuses to tell his parents until the spluttering, the nausea and the coughing becomes too great. An impasto of its timely ilk, An Early Frost shows the everyday stigmas people associated with the disease, Michael castigated for greeting his mother with a familial kiss. As with every family, forgiveness is reached, a parent’s love for their stronger than any syndrome‘s hold on their child’s body.The film’s characters are ignorant, but it did project the widespread ignorance the decade held back on its viewers. “It was one of the more rewarding, or most rewarding, jobs I ever had because of the effect it had on elevating the education about the Aids epidemic,” Quinn remembered in 2015. “I get stopped on the street to this day, like an old woman will grab my hand and say it really helped her understand her son.”
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4. Hawks (Robert Ellis Miller, 1988):
Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees, who penned the coruscating song Stayin’ Alive, found himself in his very own moral compass as he discussed the precariousness of life with David English. Conceiving their own solutions to delightful non-permanence, Gibb and English asked writer Roy Clarke to compose his own percipient elegy, one lead star Timothy Dalton boasted was the greatest script he’d ever read. It was a cancer comedy, an odd collocation of terms in 1988, yet holds up nicely in an age where a millennial indie comedy is often more spear-like than slapstick. Much like the book-ending Bond films that coincided with this expose, Dalton’s performance in the sombre Hawks would prove decades ahead of its time. There is life to Dalton’s bed-ridden Bancroft, verged as he is for one last adventure. Talking Anthony Edwards’ Deckermensky into parting with him, the pair escape the poisonous hospital for the cycle paths and lasses of Amsterdam. Flirtations with romances masks the pair’s flirtation with death, sharing the absurdity with a roguish red nose for comfort.
It starred James Bond, it was soundtracked by a Bee Gee, yet Hawks only made reasonable business in box office receipts. The film struck a chord with many real life patients though, their appreciation a great comfort to Dalton in later years; “at the time I was overwhelmed with letters by cancer victims and the husbands, wives, and children of cancer victims who were just saying, “Thank you so much.”
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5. Longtime Companion (Bruce Davison, 1989):
Although history would dictate that the earliest signs of Aids were found in chimpanzees and simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) from the 1920s, the epidemic as recognised in the modern day medical idiom stems from the 1980s. Concerned with the piercing, poisonous contagion, cinema acted with caution to an illness it knew little about, had little to espouse. John Hurt’s mellifluous voice cautioned television watchers of a death by ignorance, populating the British airwaves with a harrowing impasto of images over tolling graves, while the irascible James Bond kept his clothes on whenever the mirthful Maryam d’Abo fell into his arms. Dracula, Francis Ford Coppola’s delicate monster, emerged more pitiable than ever as audience members questioned the blood that passed his lips.
The sprawling Longtime Companion proffered an explanation to the impetus of a disease that robbed many of their sexual liberties, sexual adherences and, often, sexual partners. A New York Times moniker, the ‘longtime companion’ coin described the surviving same-sex partner of someone who had died of AIDS as a delicate way of honoring the deceased in a homo-suspicious society. The film chronicles the impact the harrowing disease held on a series of men, serialising the contagion from 1981 to 1989. What starts as a group of care-free men sours as violently as the illness they hold. A section which finds the deceased David (Bruce Davison) eulogised for his choice of red dress is one of the more genuinely affecting moments. Then there are the hospital clutters which finds the virile Sean (Mark Lamos) withering in bed bound vegetation. Throughout the movie, men discuss the implications of death at a time when they should be enjoying the thrill of life. It’s a harrowing watch that matches the importance of the subject, a subject very close to the hearts of the creative crew; director Norman René succumbed to the deadly virus himself in 1996.
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6. Philadelphia (Jonathan Deme, 1993):
Philadelphia has dated in the last 27 years, but for many Jonathan Demme’s raw character piece was their first dealings of an openly gay man struggling with more than just the “gay disease”. Inspired by the real life Geoffrey Bowers’ case, Philadelphia delves into the wrongful termination of an upstanding lawyer. Determined to fight for his name, Andrew Beckett (Tom Hanks) haunts his librarians with tenacious fervour, before the cynical Joe Miller (Denzil Washington) agrees to act on Beckett’s behalf. Aids provides the backdrop, but this is a film about a different type of survival. Surviving through bigotry, imprudence and public humiliation, Beckett stands with partner Miguel Álvarez (Antonio Banderas) in valedictory guise at the film’s close. A film of the early nineties, there is no happy fate for Beckett, the treatments that would save millions still an impossibility by 1993. Hanks is outstanding, his first Oscar his more deserved of the pair, yet Washington is the real stand-out, prying and preening through his own prescient condition; homophobia.
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7. Majorettes in Space (David Fourier, 1996):
Asked for his own opinion on contraception, Pope Francis was cryptic in 2015. “Yes, it is one of the methods; I think that the morality of the Church finds itself on this point before a perplexity: is it the fifth or the sixth Commandment? To defend life, or that the sexual relation be open to life? But this isn’t the problem. The problem is greater. ” His predecessor, Pope Benedict, was even blunter; “It is of great concern that the fabric of African life, its very source of hope and stability, is threatened by divorce, abortion, prostitution, human trafficking and a contraception mentality”.
The 1990s saw Pope John Paul II reigning over the Catholic Church, his mulish views over condoms felt in every corner of his church. Director David Fourier took this mentality into his own hands, conjuring a six-minute short film critiquing the ridiculous nature of this protest on a planet that saw whole families dying from Aids. Focused with surrealism, two cosmonauts float in space without contraception, a young couple make love in outdoors, a brilliant young man contemplates his Aids diagnosis, all the while showcasing a scholarly pope parading from one airport to another. In pristine French narration, the film’s voice cuts through the assemblage of images, critiquing humanity’s need for sexual pleasure, chasing the madness of intergalactic space travel and wagging a well earned finger at the establishment that discouraged any association with safer forms of intercourse.
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8 Y Tu Mama Tambien (Alfonso Cuaron, 2001):
Alfonso Cuarón stands as a five time Academy Award winning giant, a titan proudly following his excellent Harry Potter And The Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) adaptation with statuettes for directing a doublet of cosmic epics. How very different the director stood in 2001, unveiling a road movie as rustic in advertising itself as it advertised the director’s native Mexico. Hand held cameras capture the crashing, clattering engine lead characters Luisa, Julio and Tenoch must drive together. “This all goes back to our original idea of 15 years ago,” Cuarón admitted, ” in which we would do a low-budget road movie that would allow us to go with some young actors and semi-improvise scenes and have a bare storyline but not be afraid of adding things as we went.”
Cuarón’s naturalistic approach carries added weight when Luisa, the object of two boy’s companionship, mentor and carnal desire, comes to terms with her terminal decline. Determined to keep this from the boys whose hips she airily shares with on the dance-floor, Luisa’s steely resilience and joy for life leaves an imprints on her passengers. So much so, her imprint, vigour and rectitude breaks up the duo on two heart-wrenching occasions. The first comes in her lifetime, when an agitated Julio catches her in Tenoch’s arms, the second through her death, as a despondent Tenoch promises to catch up with Julio for a passage that never comes to pass.
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9. 50/50 (Will Reiser 2011):
It was near impossible to avoid Seth Rogen in 2011, the perennial star of entertaining, if lightweight, populist buddy-comedies. They were punchy, polished works that tellingly said little about the human condition. That all changed with 50/50, a genuinely affecting look at life chasing through chemotherapy, based on a script written by cancer survivor Will Reiser. It was an unvarnished look at his own demons and dealings with the illness, but bravely the script was warmly received, one encouraged and accommodated by Rogen,
Reiser’s real life friend since Da Ali G Show. Rogen stars as Kyle Hirons, the ear piece to the ailing Adam Lerner (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Together, they walk through the terrible disease with punch lines pluckier than the courage Lerner needs to face the illness. The film is pointed, but never flippant, posing over Lerner’s shaven head with placid, courtly observance. Illustrated all over the film’s promotional materials, the head-shaving scene was one its cast did not take lightly. “We only had one take because you can’t shave your head twice.” Gordon Levitt admitted. “It was the first day of filming” Rogen corroborated at the film’s awaited premiere. We improvised the whole thing, which is not wise when it’s something you have one take for, but it turned out funny.”
Humans live in a cycle of periods, passages, philosophies and stages. The stages we live in our life come together in a collective condition. Death and grief work in their peerless property as a reminder of the love we’ve held for ourselves, our lives and our loved ones. Accomplished writer Billi Wang (Awkwafina) walks into that particular potent pool as she celebrates her Grandmother’s life in her final weeks on earth.An American film about Chinese communities, Lulu Wang’s self-penned handiwork illustrates the different ways each of us responds to death. Western ideologies place the act of dying solely on the individual, while Wang shows a community that puts the action of leaving as a collective feat.
Through her ailing grandmother (Nai Nai), Billi learns a perspective none of the books she hopes to study provide her, giving both her and Nai Nai a purpose for life. In it’s own way it provides one of the greatest voices on death, as a family lie provides one of cinema’s more devastating truths. It’s too early to tell if this adventure proves one of the more important cancer films; but it’s not too early to say that it more effectively shows communal grieving than any other on this list.
The Farewell is also pictured at the top of this article.
We’ve all had that friend, that one person who looks in every direction for an answer to their life. Lou Farnt (Katie Brayben) is that 30-year -old, surrounding her life in self-coach tapes and books, desperate for a life away from her controlling, self-satisfying mother. When Val (Poppy Roe), a precocious life coach brimming with worldly ambition, arrives in her hometown, Lou decides to travel with her. On the surface, it seems like a deal from heaven, Lou escaping the confines of her lowly town for a high-octane journey across Britain’s alternative therapy camps. Yet it’s apparent to everyone that Val hasn’t told Lou everything, as bodies start lining outside the tents the women share. It’s the kookiest script Simon Pegg never wrote, a bloody delicious one at that!
The one-liners slash through the proceedings like sharp, gut-throbbing belly laughs. Arriving at their premier camp, Lou packs the duos bags unwittingly on top of a pallid, pale corpse that sits in their boot. Their varied meditative coaches (one of them Fleabag’s Sian Clifford, discussing the horrific serenity of childbirth with a sharp Scottish accent), aroused as they are by life, are only moments, dalliances and knife cuts away from death. Together, the pair find themselves growing more and more attached to the art of killing. “You’re my best life coach” Lou attests, her mouth free from the vomit she’s just spewed. “You might be my best client” Val replies, leading her comrade to their next victim. Wicked stuff!
There’s a point being addressed behind all the choking and beatings. Ben Lloyd-Hughes stars as Chuck Knoah, an oily haired coach who addresses the needs of his customers with monetary, instead of medicinal, interest. Faced with the two assailants, Knoah sees the value in crime, offering his kidnappers the chance to co-author their work. In a world of Netflix serials situated on serialkillers, internet videos intoxicatexd with violence and sex and family comedies that names their characters after the insidious Doctor Harold Shipman, the film addresses the sick fantasies audiences expect from the real world. Lloyd-Hughes is excellent as a scenery chewing theorist, but Roe is the real star, discussing the starved needs of Sudanese babies with the same decided measures she brings to bashing a hostess’ head with a wooden bread roller. Feisty eyed, lasso-haired and tight-lipped, Val makes one of the most exciting villains of the last 20 years. Dirtylicious!
A Serial Killer’s Guide to Life is on VoD on Monday, January 13th.
