Month: February 2020

Days (Rizi)

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Jean-Luc Godard has infamously thrown tantrums when his films were shown with subtitles against his will. Such was the case with Notre musique in Cannes in 2004, which left the French provocateur infuriated. Sixty-two year-old Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-ling has preempted this possibility by adding the following words to the beginning of his latest feature: “this movie is intentionally unsubtitled”. Yet the two directors couldn’t be more different in their objectives: Godard wishes to alienate his viewers, while Ming-liang wants to engage them, if very slowly.

The pace of Days remains is extremely observational. The takes are very, very long. The camera is almost entirely still, allowing viewers to investigate every nook and cranny of the slowly moving images. This is not slow motion. This is rather the pace of real life. The problem is that most of us are used to such fast-paced cinema that realism can cause estrangement. Unsurprisingly, there were a few casualties: about 10 people – likely unfamiliar with Ming-liang’s filmmaking – walked out of the cinema in the first 30 minutes of this 127-minute drama.

We watch a male wash lettuce and chop cucumbers for nearly 10 minutes. We gaze into the eyes of a man – barely a blink – in bed for minutes. We literally stare at a wall – barely a sound – for much longer than you may have ever done. This is a borderline sensory experience. A meditation exercise. An opportunity to immerse yourself in the world exactly as it is, to pay attention to the details that otherwise remain unnoticed. It is thoroughly enjoyable if you allow yourself to sit back and engage in the very subtle yet very affecting action.

The narrative does exist. It just happens to be a very simple one. Two men carry on with their lives as normal on the streets of Taipei. One of them (Anong Houngheuangsy) is young and poor, and prepares a meal in his humble dwelling. The other one (Lee Kang) is a little older and seemingly wealthy, judging by the hotel room that he hires. This is where they meet. The conversations are sparse and wilfully “unsubtitled”. The younger man gives the older man a sensual massage, which gradually develops into full-on sex. The action is delicate and sensual, with a palpable sense of intimacy. The two characters develop a bond, helped by the quietly effervescent chemistry between the two actors. There’s also a touch of tenderness. The older man gives a tiny music box to the young one, which appears again in the end of the movie. The two men are inextricably linked through their memories, embodied by the unusual trinket.

Tsai Ming-liang’s uses various devices from his previous films, which fans will easily recognise. The copious amount of water (from the rain, hoses, sweat, etc) represents the fluidity of the fleeting moments, and also the flow of sex. The liquid bonds the two bodies, and it also serves to cleanse them. Water played a central role in films such as The River (1997) and Wayward Cloud (2005), with even the titles alluding to the vital liquid. Plus, Tsai Ming-liang’s latest movie climaxes in a slow and laconic gay sex scene between an older and a younger man, just like in the 1997 movie. The queer Asian filmmaker has once again crafted a quietly transgressive masterpiece. Indeed a precious gem. Perhaps not the dearest jewel in the crown of the unusual king, but still a very valuable stone.

Days is showed in Competition at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It premieres in the UK in October, as part of the BFI London Film Festival.

There Is No Evil (Sheytan Vojud Nadarad)

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Iran is a peaceful and civilised country, at least on the surface. A father lives with his wife and daughter in the bustling and surprisingly safe Tehran. They discuss banalities of daily life, go to the supermarket, eat pizza at the restaurant. Their lifestyle is relatable to any Western family. The father is doting and avuncular, his devotion to the two females clear to see in his pearly black eyes. This is the uncle you’d love to have, the neighbour with whom you’d happily share a beer (or perhaps a coffee since alcohol is prohibited in the Middle Eastern nation). But your allegiance might change in one split second, once this man pushes a single button. What follows is perhaps one of the most jarring sequences in the history of Iranian cinema. It feels like a punch in the stomach.

In the second short story, a young man serving in the military has been chosen to carry out an execution the following day. All he has to do is kick a stool under the convict, allowing the man to die by hanging. But he is unable to bring himself to do it. There is no way out: military service is compulsory for young males in Iran. And they could be court-martialed if they refuse to abide by the rules. The hapless man attempts to negotiate with his fellow soldiers so that someone can carry out the grim task on his behalf. Money comes into the equation. Complex moral questions about accountability are raised. Is handing the task of killing over to someone else a noble or a cowardly action? Who is accountable for the death, the government or the executioner? And does the law offer a reliable moral compass? I can’t tell you what happens next without spoiling the story for you.

A soldier returns home for three days so that he can attend his girlfriend’s birthday, for the third instalment. But the rural community where she lives is mourning the death of a much cherished member. The local teacher was executed due to his political activism. For some reason, the young soldier is sad and introspective, unable to share the joy of the occasion. What follows is an extremely awkward and bizarre birthday celebration. A song overflowing with ironic and sombre lyricism. And this isn’t the film’s only musical glory. The anti-fascist anthem Bella Ciao is played earlier. But you will have to watch the film in order to find out why.

For the fourth and final part of the movie, also set in rural Iran, a young woman returns from Germany in order to visit some relatives. One of them is dying, and he has a secret to share with the female before he passes away. He invites her to kill a fox that’s eating his chickens so that she can learn how to shoot, but she turns down the offer. Once again, moral questions are raised. Do human beings have the right to kill animals in order to protect their property? Are the lives of animals worthy less than the lives of human beings?

This is not the end of There Is No Evil. There’s a final twist that connects the short stories in more ways than one. It’s entirely unexpected, profoundly heart-warming and poignant. This is not a didactic movie. The title suggests complacence, but the four stories reveal a far more complex morality. The theocratic regime that rules Iran will not be pleased about such audacious sociopolitical reflection. In fact, the government has imposed a lifetime filmmaking ban on the 48-year-old director, who has been repeatedly arrested and convicted. He is accused of “gathering and collusion against national security and of propaganda against the system”.

This is Iranian cinema at its very best, in every sense. It has the virtuous sensibility of Mohsen Makhmalbaf, the ingenious car conversations and technical wizardly of Abbas Kiarostami, the political explosiveness of Jafar Panahi, the multilayered personal relationships and surprising twists of Asghar Farhadi.

The cinematography of the last two stories, set in two very different rural areas (in the arid mountains and the verdant woods), is nothing short of spectacular, with vibrant and explosive colours. The actors are brimming with humanity and compassion. A genuinely unforgettable movie. Be prepared for shocking twists, and a truly mind-bending experience. This is one of the most powerful movies I have seen in years. Perhaps in my lifetime.

There Is No Evil showed in Competition at the 70th Berlinale, when this piece was originally written. It won the much coveted Golden Bear. It was out in the UK between March 7th and 10th as part of the Glasgow Film Festival. In cinemas on Friday, December 3rd. On various VoD platforms (including Netflix and Amazon Prime) on Friday, December 17th.

Charlatan

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The latest film by the Polish direct Agnieszka Holland takes place in Czechoslovakia, the country where she studied film in the 1970s. It follows the steps of Jan Mikolášek (Ivan Trojan), a healer who used exclusively herb-based remedies in order to treat his fellow citizens, and even Germans during the occupation. Throughout his lifetime, he saw up to four million patients, including Nazi Party Chancellor Martin Borman and Czechoslovakian Prime Minister Antonín Zápotocký.

Mikolášek learnt his skills from an old female healer during his youth. At first she shunned him, but decided to give the young man a chance upon realising that he was indeed gifted. He bought a large mansion and turned it into a medical institution. He became established and wealthy. The assertive and yet kind physician identified several diseases, or at least the organ affected, simply by observing the patient’s urine. Sediments indicated an infection, flakes suggested sterility, and so on. The Nazis were impressed at his ability. After the War, he remained a much cherished member of the community, credited with saving thousands of lives. He also became a notorious philanthropist, helping children and local charities. On the other hand, Czechoslovakian authorities often questioned his methods and described him as a charlatan. His popularity, however, seemed to shield him from prosecution.

The unorthodox doctor was supported by his loyal assistant František (Jurad Loj), with whom he also maintained a romantic and a sexual relationship. All is well until one day the regime decided to challenge his status. Both Jan and František were accused of killing two government officials by providing them with medication spiked with strychnine. They have been framed, yet the two men seemed to have no idea why. What was indeed very clear is that they needed to fight very hard for their innocence, as the prosecutors had proposed the death penalty. Could the two secret lovers (at a time when homosexuality was criminalised) dodge the accusations and resume their lives as normal? And could Jan’s public notoriety work in his favour, or could it become a handicap?

This is a very conventional historical drama. The topic choice is fascinating, although it’s unclear how much is true and how much is fictionalised. There’s very little literature in English about Mikolášek, so it’s difficult to check the veracity of the events in the movie. The screenplay, penned by Marek Epstein has more holes than Swiss cheese. The narrative zigzags back and forth in time and it’s often difficult to establish what year we are in, where the actions is taking place, and who the real enemies are. The political landscape isn’t clearly contextualised, the interests of the Czechoslovakian government as blurry as some of the urine samples. Weak research? Poor screenwriting? Unsteady direction? Only the real Mikolášek could establish the diagnosis.

Charlatan premiered at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival as part of the Gala Specials section, when this piece was originally written. It’s out on BFI Player in June, 2002. Also available on other platforms.

Berlin Alexanderplatz

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QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM BERLIN

The weight of the responsibility on the shoulders of 39-year-old Afghan-German film director Burhan Qurbani is no less than gigantic. Berlin Alexanderplatz is a screen adaptation of one of the most innovative German novels ever written, and the one most closely associated with the nation’s capital, penned by Alfred Döblin in 1929. Even more crucially, the book had been previously turned into a film in 1980 by not less than Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The 40-year-old production had a mammoth budget of 13 million DM, a record at the time, and the late Bavarian director considered it his masterpiece (he claimed: “I am Franz Biberkopf, in reference to the film’s protagonist). Fassbinder’s 15.5-hour epic is one of my favourite movies of all times. Plus the film premiered at prestigious Berlin International Film Festival, in the heart of the very city where the action takes place. That’s why I walked into the cinema with very high expectations, and a very sharp eye prepared to challenge and criticise every little detail. I was not disappointed, and I doubt that Fassbinder and Döblin would.

In Qurbani’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, Franz Biberkopf becomes Francis from Bissau (Welket Bungué), a Portuguese-speaking refugee living in the German capital. The Tegel Prison from which Franz Biberkopf is released in the beginning of the 1929 story becomes the Atlantic Ocean. That’s because Francis departed from the coastal African nation of Guinea-Bissau by sea, in a dangerous and deadly journey familiar to many African refugees.

This is not a pointless remake. This is an audacious film that places a 100-year-old story in an entirely new context. And it all fits together incredibly well. Perhaps that’s because the plight and the stigma of an African refugee in modern-day Europe isn’t too different from the plight and the stigma of a former inmate. It’s as if Francis had committed a horrific misdeed, except that immigration isn’t a crime at all.

Francis befriends Reinhold (Albrecht Schuch), a dealer working for the drug lord Pums (Joachim Król). But Francis does not wish to get involved in the illegal trade, and so he merely cooks for the gang. The pressures for him to corrupt himself, however, are enormous. It’s borderline impossible for a vulnerable refugee to survive without breaking the law. Reinhold resents Francis’s reluctance to support his criminal activities and attempts to kill him, throwing him off a moving vehicle but instead Francis just loses an arm.

Despite his disability, which has a strong impact on his morale (he feels like “half a man”, he confesses), Francis begins a relationship with the beautiful prostitute Mieze (Jella Haase). He forgives Reinhold and eventually deep dives into the criminal trade, having now given up his intention to stay “pure”. But Reinhold is a selfish and deceitful psychopath. Unbeknownst to Francis, his best friend envies his relationship with Mieze, and he will do everything within his reach in order to destroy it.

As Francis progressively fits into German society, he encourages recently-arrived refugees to embrace their newfound national identity wholeheartedly, in the same way he did. He acquires a German passport under the name “Francisco Cabeca de Castor” (Portuguese for “Franz Biberkopf”). It’s as if Francis was saying: “The new German is foreign-born, foreign-speaking and black”. This is a very transgressive and courageous statement. While Brits have been debating for years whether their national film hero James Bond could be black, Germans moved one step ahead and put a African actor to play the movie character most closely associated with their capital.

Qurbani enjoyed some advantages that Fassbinder did not in 1980. Firstly, he could shoot in the actual Berlin Alexanderplatz area. Fassbinder couldn’t do that because Berlin Alexanderplatz was under communist rule 40 years ago, and therefore not accessible for Western filmmakers. Plus, digital technology has helped to make Francis’s amputation far more visible and credible. In the old film, the actor Günter Lamprecht had to wear a shirt the entire time, even when he was alone at home. This time, the wound is graphic and vivid for viewers to see.

Modern-day Berlin has many similarities to the Berlin of the Weimar Republic depicted in the book and the 1980 movie. The Golden Twensties were a time of sexual freedom and transgressive artistic expression, and the German capital possesses these qualities at present. The fetish clubs described in the novel are conspicuous is Qurbani’s film, just like in reality. The slaughterhouse and slaughter analogies are also present. The director opts for voice-overs for the most lyrical parts of the book, without ever slipping into cliches and platitudes (a very common pitfall when portraying brothels and such).

I do miss some elements that Fassbinder that explored in a lot more detail. such as the various lovers that Reinhold and Franz shared, the profound friendship between Franz and Eva (Annabelle Mandeng) and Reinhold’s homosexual tendencies. But I can’t hold that against Qurbani. You can’t do in just three hours what someone else did in 15.5.

Berlin Alexanderplatz is showing in Competition at the 70th Berlinale. An instant classic, and a fitting tribute to the German capital, cinema and literature. Plus a timely commentary on fast-shifting national identity of the Teutonic nation. It’s a very strong contender for the Golden Bear, and I will be rooting for it.

DAU. Natasha

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QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM BERLIN

This highly controversial Russia movie is the first instalment of a series of 13 films crafted from more than 700 hours of footage. The shooting involved mostly non-professional actors, including real-life prison wards and scientists. The project was originally intended as a more conventional biopic Soviet Nobel Prize winner Lev Landau, but suddenly morphed into something far more extensive and transgressive.

The storyline is rather simple. Natasha (Natasha Berezhnaya) and Olga (Olga Shkabarnya) work in the canteen of a very secretive research institute somewhere in the Soviet Union. The two women bond through the contempt that they feel towards each other. They have violent cat fights, but they can also be supportive of each other, and confide intimate secrets of their love life to each other.

Following a vodka-fuelled party, Natasha has a sexual encounter with a French visitor called Luc (Luc Bigé), who is working with the resident scientist Alexei (played by Alexei Blinov, who also happened to be the movie’s technical development lead, and sadly passed away last year shortly after the completion of the movie). But having sex with a foreigner is deemed a highly dangerous act in such an environment, and Natasha gets punished for her misdemeanour. She gets humiliated and raped by the profoundly sadistic institute’s chief Vladimir Azhippo (Azhippo).

Both the consensual and the non-consensual sex sequences are extremely graphic, borderline pornographic. At one point, Natasha is forced to insert a bottle into her vagina. These sequences are also very extensive. The fact that the actors were amateurs and used their real name helped to vouch for the authenticity of the sequences, in a strange blend of fiction and reality. Ultimately, this is a film about personal power struggle. The protagonist Natasha Berezhnaya described her experience: “In some ways, it was scary, it was oppressive. We had fear, we had love, we had relationships”. This is a wilfully voyeuristic, exploitative and provocative movie.

Lensed by renowned German DOP Jürgen Jürges, DAU. Natasha is a truly jarring viewing experience. You will feel literally trapped with the hapless, perverse and deranged characters. There are no establishing shots, no outdoors sequences, not even windows. The duration of 145 minutes helps to ensure that the unrelenting psychological and sexual violence lingers in your mind for a very long time. Not a positive image of Russia/ the Soviet Union at all. Which is what you would normally expect from a Russian film in a major European film festival anyway . I don’t recall ever seeing a rosy depiction of the largest country in the world in either Berlin or Cannes, the two festivals that I routinely attend.

DAU. Natasha is showing in Competition at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival.

The Roads Not Taken

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British director Sally Potter, supported by both the BFI and BBC Films, crossed the pond and the Channel in order to make her latest feature, a drama set between New York, Mexico and Greece. The cast is entirely non-British, as is the story, which was penned by the 71-year-old London-born and raised helmer.

Leo (Jarvier Bardem) lives in a shabby New York flat facing the railway. He barely speaks and is unable to carry out menial tasks. A carer looks after him. One day, his daughter Molly (Elle Fanning) shows up in order to take him to the dentist and optometrist. What should have been an easy and straightforward journey turns into a Herculean task, as Leo is unable to understand basic commands (such as opening his mouth and keeping his head still). His behaviour is increasingly erratic and unpredictable: he jumps off a moving car, and wanders off aimlessly barefoot.

Molly is trying to reconnect with a father that she barely knew. Leo left her as a baby because he could not reconcile fatherhood with his career as a writer. The young woman’s attempts to bond with a father who isn’t entirely there are genuinely emotional. It’s never entirely clear what Leo suffers from, but the symptoms suggest early onset Alzheimer’s. In fact, Molly never verbalises that his father is mentally impaired, speaking in euphemisms instead: “Can’t you see he’s now well?”. As a result, people often assume that Leo’s just a dangerous crook, landing him in hot water more times than one.

Parallel to his mental twilight in New York, we see Leo in Mexico with his partner Dolores (Salma Hayek) mourning the death of his son, presumably a few years earlier. We also watch him on a Greek island attempting to write and to make sense of the mistakes of his youth (such as abandoning Molly). That’s where the first symptoms of the malaise begin to show: Leo inexplicably collapses in front of two young women, about the age of his daughter.

The present-day, ill version of Leo has very short episodes of lucidity. His ailing mind is constantly attempt to reconstruct the past, but the outcome is often disastrous. He murmurs words and names, but is rarely able to string a coherent sentence together. He hugs a stranger’s dog assuming that it’s his beloved pooch Nestor, which has been dead for some time. Security are called upon him, as the animal’s owner assumes that Leo is trying to kidnap her pet.

Sally Potter’s ninth feature (and the second one to premiere in Competition at the Berlinale in just four years (after 2017’s disappointing The Party) has very convincing performances from its three leads, Bardem, Fanning and Hayek. But it’s often shallow and oversimplified. The relationship and the chemistry between Bardem’s and Hayek’s characters could have been explored in a lot more detail. The only connection examined in detail is the one between father and daughter. The many subplots have a lot of loose ends (such as Leo’s professional career, his son with Dolores, and so on). The narrative is as fragmented as Leo mind. This was likely an intentional creative choice, yet not entirely effective. This relatively short movie (with a duration of just 85 minutes) would have benefited from more character development for the secondary personages. As a consequence, The Roads Not Taken fails to achieve its full potential, and to move viewers more profoundly. Not an unpleasant ride, but Potter should have taken us all the way down the road.

The Roads Not Taken premiered in Competition at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It is out in cinemas on Friday, September 11th. On VoD on Friday, January 11th.

True History Of The Kelly Gang

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In his fourth feature, director Justin Kurzel has plunged Antipodean folklore into a hellscape reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch, creating a harsh, barren experience that is surreal yet acutely human.

Anyone expecting a history lesson will be disappointed by the opening announcement “nothing you are about to see is true”. After all, Ned Kelly is to Australia what Rasputin is to Russia – a figure of mythical proportions. Adapting Peter Carey’s 2001 novel, screenwriter Shaun Grant uses this line to fix a postmodern filter on all that follows, commenting on the distortions and controversies of Kelly’s legacy.

We are introduced to Ned Kelly as a boy (Orlando Schwerdt) living in a charred wasteland with his cruelly dysfunctional family, led by venomous matriarch Ellen Kelly (Essie Davis). They are at the mercy of local authority figures in this quasi-lawless land, the latest being Sergeant O’Neill (Charlie Hunnam), a smug cavalryman who uses Ellen for sex.

However, he is soon replaced by Harry Power (Russell Crowe), a gruff, charismatic bushranger with a dubious appetite for violence. Building upon the anger and poison of the family dynamic, Power takes Kelly under his wing, imbuing him with a foul-mouthed contempt for authority – British authority – and familiarising him with weapons, torture and murder.

The depiction of Kelly’s formative years breathes humanity into that steely mugshot known by many an Australian. Young and ingenuous, we see him beguiled by his own mother that to be a man is to main and kill. He is shown to be a victim moulded not so much by the imperial bogeyman of legend but his own family. Whether this vulnerability is accurate is almost incidental because it’s a convincing, compelling yarn.

But make no mistake, there is some real British nastiness here. As Constable Fitzpatrick, Nicholas Hoult thrives in the role of pompous imperial bastard, giving an almost Alan Rickman level of villainy. In this respect, Kurzel very much feeds into the Kelly myth and it’s some of the best stuff in the film.

But all of that patrician arrogance cannot restrain George McKay’s snarling, physical turn as Kelly. As lean and vicious as a wild dog, Kelly leads his troupe of cross-dressing anarchists into frenzied oblivion. Yet despite all his grit and fury, there is that wounded humanity to this character.

Kurzel’s film, then, is a curious biopic; it at once subverts and supports the legend of its source material with a post-modern veneer of ambiguity and harsh, sensory aesthetics. It’s divisive but dirty.

True History Of The Kelly Gang is in cinemas on Friday, February 28th. On VoD on Monday, June 22nd.

Never Rarely Sometimes Always

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Autumn (Sidney Flanigan) leads an ordinary and uneventful life in Northumberland, Pennsylvania. She plays the guitar and sings, but her artistic skills are challenged when she’s insulted on stage. She has a family and a boyfriend, but neither one is either kind or supportive. One day, Autumn is faced with a very unexpected and unwanted pregnancy. She challenges the doctor: “is there any chance that the positive result is wrong?”, only to be told, “no; a positive is always a positive”.

She works in a supermarket with her cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder), the only person on which she can count. At first, she attempts a self-induced abortion by drinking toxic substances and punching her own abdomen (to the point of covering herself with shocking bruises). She then decides to travel to New York, since Pennsylvania law requires her parents’ consent for a termination, and she wishes to keep her pregnancy secret. Skylar steals some money from the tills, and the two girls embark on a short journey to the City that Never Sleeps, in the hope to return home without the unwanted child inside Autumn’s womb, thereby resuming their lives as normal.

Autumn is quiet, almost laconic. She is unable to convey her emotions in detail, and instead just internalises her pain. The film’s most crucial moment is when a New York doctor confronts her about her health, sex life and relationship to her boyfriend and family. She has to choose between “never”, “rarely”, “sometimes” or “always” when asked questions about psychological and physical violence. She isn’t always able to verbalise the answer, but the responses are written on her face. Autumn has experienced abuse.

Never Rarely Sometimes Always is as close as it gets to an American version of Christian Mungiu’s 4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days, which won the Palme d’Or in Cannes in 2007. Both protagonists are young and naive, confronted with a bureaucratic establishment unwilling to support them. In this sense, Ceaușescu’s Romania isn’t too different from present day US. Despite certain types of abortion being legal in the US, young and vulnerable women and teens have to grapple with an onerous and expensive insurance system, Both films are also rather graphic, with details of the procedure made very clear. Neither movie, however, is exploitative.

Hittman has created yet another auspicious drama – alongside with 2018’s Beach Rats – about a despondent young person dealing with the consequences of sex. The 41-year-old New York director has smoothly sailed from firmly male into resolutely female waters. She’s successful at both attempts. She keeps a respectable distance from her characters, allowing the action to unfold in a realistic pace. The outcome is neither fetishised nor sanitised. They are just young people full of doubts and dilemmas, and prepared to resort to extreme measures in order to rectify their lives.

Never Rarely Sometimes Always showed in Competition at the 70th Berlinale, when this piece was originally written. It won the Silver Bear. It’s out on VoD On Wednesday, May 13th.

Downhill

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Avalanches may plague the same mountains every now and again, but lightning seldom strikes twice. Downhill, the English-language remake of Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure (2014) tries its very best to do justice to its source material but the results are as pale as snow in comparison.

Here, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Will Ferrell are Billie and Pete Staunton, an American couple who are out of their honeymoon phase and are trying to make the most out of a skiing getaway in the Alps. Despite the occasion, Pete is distant throughout, constantly checking his phone and envying the life of his younger pal Zach (Zach Woods). When an avalanche engulfs the balcony of a restaurant where the family is resting and Pete abandons his wife and kids. The family rift is laid bare and the couple must confront their issues head-on.

At centre stage, the Stauntons’s family drama renders itself an uncomfortable two-hander by amazing actors. Louis-Dreyfus and Ferrell – top-notch comedians who share a history of playing larger-than-life characters – give some of their most restrained performances here.

Between the two, the star of Veep gets the meatiest role and Billie’s narrative arc allows her to explore a fuller range of emotions than Ferrell’s character. Acting as an agent provocateur, zany hotel manager Charlotte (Miranda Otto) is a great source of humour, despite being relatively one-note.

If the casual viewer watches this with no previous background, they might have a good time depending on their tolerance for cringe comedy. Directors Nat Faxon and Jim Nash emulate the aura of its predecessor with some success and, for the most part, plays out like the European art comedy upon which it’s based.

However, the resemblance is frost-deep. The acidity and sheer discomfort of Östlund’s writing is considerably toned down for mainstream audiences. The jabs don’t hit as hard and there doesn’t seem to be any explicit reason for this project to come to light – especially considering how well the Oscar-nominated Swedish film tackled this tale of miscommunication, marital distress and fragile masculinity just six years ago.

The fact that it opens in cinemas in the very same month as Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (which made history by becoming the first foreign language film to nab the Oscar for Best Picture) As streaming widens the global appeal for foreign-language productions like never before, with some of them garnering great popular acclaim, will Hollywood rethink its old-fashioned model of pointless English-language remakes? Only time will tell. In the meantime, Downhill stands as a film that, while not exactly bad, doesn’t say anything new and whose memory melts away quickly.

Downhill is in cinemas across the UK on Friday, February 28th.

The Invisible Man

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Conventional stalk-and-slash thrillers make an ally of the darkness. After all, it is in the shadows that monsters hide, and that the imagination, starved of visual stimulus, fills the empty spaces with its own panicky projections. Written and directed by Leigh Whannell (Insidious: Chapter 3, 2013; Upgrade, 2018), and adapted with extreme creative licence from H.G. Wells’s 1897 novel, The Invisible Man certainly involves a lot of stalking and slashing, and certainly many of its scenes are set in the dark – but it is the premise outlined in its title which makes this a rather unconventional slasher. For even when its beleaguered heroine Cecilia Kass (Elisabeth Moss) goes about her business in daytime hours, even when at night she switches on the lights and dispels the darkness, her assailant’s invisibility means that every place in the film becomes increasingly the locus for a paranoia and dread which the viewer fast comes to share with Cecilia (whose very name is etymologically associated with blindness). Here, what you cannot see can hurt you – even in broad daylight.

At the beginning of the film, Cecilia wakes at 3.41am, carefully leaving her husband Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) – who shares his surname with Wells’s antihero – asleep in their bed, and executing a methodical plan to sneak out of their beautiful modernist dream home with its clear view of the Pacific Ocean beyond San Francisco. Adrian is charming, handsome, very wealthy, and a celebrated pioneer in the science of optics – and to all appearances, his and Cecilia’s marriage is picture perfect. Yet Adrian is also, Cecilia claims, a narcissistic sociopath, and extremely controlling of his wife – something which not even Cecilia’s sister Alice (Harriet Dyer), who picks her up outside the house, nor Cecilia’s old friend turned SFPD officer James Lanier (Aldis Hodge), who offers her refuge in his home with his teenaged daughter Sydney (Storm Reid), is entirely sure whether to believe.

In other words, Adrian’s insidiously abusive behaviour towards Cecilia is invisible to all even before he feigns suicide and dons the high-tech suit of his own invention which renders his actions more literally invisible. Now able to insinuate himself back into Cecilia’s life unnoticed by anybody – except Cecilia – he sets about terrorising and victimising her all over again, knowing that nobody will ever believe her crazy accusations against a dead man who, well, clearly isn’t there. While this makes for astonishingly tense and creepy cat and mouse, all brilliantly handled by Whannell to exploit our constant sense, in any and every scene, of a possible presence that we simply cannot see, and superbly embodied in Moss’ depiction of escalating incredulity, resigned despair and calculated defiance, it also serves as a compelling allegory for the kind of bullying and gaslighting that occur in toxic relationships, where victims are constantly expected to keep quiet, or if they do not, are so often simply not credited with telling the truth.

Indeed so twisty is the film’s narrative structure, and so blinkered the perspectives that we are invited to share on what is happening beyond the film’s visible spectrum, that we too at times are made to question Cecilia’s sanity and to entertain the suspicion that she might after all be merely inventing her nemesis as her own personality fractures. No one will listen to Cecilia, and everyone thinks she is suffering a mental breakdown – until she either is left with “no choice” but to learn to live with her persecutor’s domineering aggression (like the protagonist of Sidney J. Furie’s in many ways similar The Entity, 1982), or else start to turn the tables on her oppressor and take back some control (in the process perhaps becoming a monster herself).

Paul Verhoeven’s The Hollow Man (2000) introduced us to a science prodigy, who is also an alpha-male ‘maverick’ – the kind of figure who is typically the hero and point of identification in a Hollywood film – and then, as it followed his experiments in invisibility and the stripping away of his moral compunctions, asked us, step by step, how comfortable we still felt following this all-American winner on his eventually rape-happy, murderous descent. In Whannell’s film, Adrian is just as vindictive and even more devious, but the focus here is far less on the unseen antagonist than on the victim with whom he is messing, even as similar questions are gradually raised about the degree to which we find Cecilia’s responses to her impossible situation to be acceptable. For ultimately The Invisible Man is a variant – with sci-fi underpinnings – of the rape-revenge film, and enters all the moral grey areas associated with that subgenre.

Much as Adrian manipulates Cecilia and others, The Invisible Man manipulates the viewer, panning to, or just lingering on, the negative spaces in its locations to generate maximum unease from what would normally just be inconspicuous background, and to suggest a presence to all the absence. Coming with shades of Jaume Balagueró’s Sleep Tight (2011), Steven

Soderbergh’s Unsane (2018) and Justin Edgar’s Stalked (2019), Whannell’s film confidently updates the source material not just in terms of its science, but also in terms of its gender politics, repurposing the barebones of Wells’s premise as a potent metaphor for what we so often fail or even refuse to see in the power relationships between men and women.

The Invisible Man is in cinemas across the UK on Friday, February 28th. On VoD in June.

Curveball

Posted on by victorfraga

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM BERLIN

The truth isn’t always what it seems. The establishment has the habit of subverting facts in order to suit their purpose. Reality is an elusive concept. People lie, governments lie. Sometimes they do it in order to seem to seem more powerful. Sometimes they do it in order to justify the unjustifiable. German bio-weapon expert Arnd Wolf (Sebastian Blomberg) lied to his American lover about his marital status, claiming that he was married, so that he did not “look too weak”. Iraqi Rafid Alwan (Dar Salim) lied about having worked as a chemical engineer for Saddam Hussein because he wished to become an informant for the German government and therefore settle in the European country

Rafid arrived in Germany in 1999, claiming to possess detailed information about a plant that manufactured mobile biological weapon laboratories (bio-weapon lorries) as part of the alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction Programme. He was simply telling Germans what they wished to hear. He became a prominent informant, and received a code name, the titular Curveball. He understood that the “truth” was meant to mirror the West’s desire to vilify Saddam Hussein, and that reality should be relegated to the confines of his knowledge. In fact, the idea about the lorry came from a document that Wolf himself had written. Rafid was feeding back to Wolf and others in the BND (the German Secret Service) a bizarre theory that they had concocted themselves.

Soon, the BND realised that Rafid was but a fraud, but that didn’t matter. The false information that Curveball provided suited their agenda. Our clumsy hero Wolf was the only one with a scintilla of integrity. He considered going to the press and denouncing the farce. Rafid’s “knowledge” was particularly helpful to the CIA. The Yankees would resort to extreme measures in order to obtain a statement from him. The Iraqi “informant” lived in danger, possibly persecuted by both Saddam’s secret service, the Mukhabarat, and the American intelligence agency. A bizarre incident took place on New Year’s day 2000, months before the Iraq War, and Rafid was kidnapped. Wolf came to his rescue, in a entertaining sequence including car chases and slapstick elements. In fact, the entire movie is dotted with comedic and farcical elements, as if mocking the conveniently malleable nature of “the truth”.

Crucially, we learn about Germany’s complicity in the Iraq War. Despite technically opposing the occupation, the German government failed to reveal that the “intelligence” used by the US was a merely a shoddy fabrication. The German Foreign Minister watches in silence as Colin Powell presented detailed drawings of the “bio weapon lorries”, despite knowing that never existed. We also learn that one of the BND officials who helped to ensure that the lie was never uncovered is now one of the most powerful politicians in Germany. Similarly to the CIA agents responsible for Iraq torture programme, who has now become a prominent director (as revealed in Scott Z. Burns’s The Report, released last year). The writing is on the wall: lying pays off, both in Germany and the US.

Curveball is showing in the 70th Berlin International Film Festival, in the Special Gala section.