Behind Herzog’s Homeric body of work, many of his films are tied by a singular, solid theme. It’s family. This tale brings it one step closer, by opening on a young girl accosted by man claiming to be her father. She stares pensively, apprehensively and curiously, trying to connect this man’s face to the parent who left her at a very young age.
But of course he isn’t. He works for Family Romance LLC, an agency that hires actors to pose as surrogate fathers. He’s been instructed to twitch his eyes, a habit his subject practised continuously, as he brings Mahiro (Tanimoto Mahiro) on a shared boat ride. And this is where the interesting dichotomy comes in.
Though entirely based on a lie, Herzog films the dialogue with as much truth as he can. There, he and his camera find meaning, choice and actions behind the supposed father and daughter activities. With these two as our guides, we see a Japanese commune cherishing their daily activities. It’s a glorious travelogue, heralded by two unlikely people.
It’s less Wrath of God (1972) as it is Wrath of Father.Our lead finds himself more and more comfortable in his position of parental liar. Yet he too falls under his duplicitous weight. In one of the film’s more revealing moments, he confides to an unhappy wife about the weight of his uncontrollable burden. She leaves, he pines and the camera turns to a display of statued foxes, each one looking evasively at the camera. The film’s tonal message is one of spirited reasoning: Those who live, lie. Those who stand back, judge.
Much more impressive than the characters are the visuals. Between scenes, the film focuses on the exquisite Japanese landscapes, as helicopter shots and wide angles decorate the beauteous countryside. Where there’s purity, there’s foul-play, not least when Mahiro convinces her “father” to bring a young girl she’s just met for a walk. Taking pity on the bullied child, the pair bring her on a stroll through the park. The child’s parents? What is a parent, anyway?
He brings both girls to a multistory building, bonding to their particular needs. When Mahiro asks him for a hug, he takes his eye off the little girl hanging from a glass window. In one endangered shot, he’s proven why he shouldn’t be a father by anyone’s definition of the word.
Yet there’s love. He hugs Mahiro, starved of affection, when she asks him too. He speaks to the birds, as anyone who loves the feathered animals would. And his intentions, more than ambitions, are at least in the right place. Through the film he seeks for truth, finding it in the eyes of a girl. Herzog’s family might be dysfunctional, but they’re never anything less than charming.
Parallel to the main plot, various subplots address peculiar “hire” family members/ stand-ins.
Family Romance, LLC. is out on VoD on Friday, July 3rd.
Sixteen year-old Lise (Melissa Guers) is accused of murdering her best friend. From afar we watch a family on the beach, the scene a carefree one until a man dressed in black enters the frame, followed by a police officer in uniform. The picturesque scene is immediately transformed, and soon afterwards the daughter of the family comes closer, leaving the beach in police custody.
We do not hear the voices of the officers or the father from our vantage point, offering us no explanation, except that we can infer that the girl has found herself in trouble. But she’s young, aged around sixteen-years-old, so it’s likely a silly adolescent mistake. But we don’t know, and director Stéphane Demoustier has no interest in sharing this vital piece of information that sets the stage for his courtroom drama.
This is not a pedantic description of what you will see, but an acknowledgment that Demoustier, uses this opening sequence as a visual anticipation of the films narrative.
In the early pre-trial scenes, Lise is a character who we know seldom anything about. The drama paints an image of a young woman, whose friendships have become complicated by emotion and sexual experimentation. While we may think we come to know Lise, we can never feel secure in the impression we have.
It becomes difficult to decide if Lise is guilty or innocent. She answers questions and volunteers testimony in court with a demeanour, and in a tone that is matter of fact. We are left to wonder about her emotional detachment, and whether her coldness is a sign of guilt? She contradicts the impression we form of her – there are moments she seems emotionally detached, and then the opposite seems true. She never comes across as cruel, just emotionally numb, and her lack of emotive expression conceals her humane pulse. Or is she a methodical killer, and moments of emotion are manipulative ploys? Guers commits to screen a captivating performance as Lise, a character all the more compelling for the uncertain and awkward position she places us in. While we feel sympathy for her, we never know if we are sympathising with a killer.
The Girl With a Bracelet is an exercise in creating compelling drama out of a detached coldness. It’s not possible to separate the soul of the film from that of Lise. A courtroom drama, we would rightly suppose the films preoccupation is to decide whether she is guilty or innocent. Demoustier honours this narrative arc, but in as much as the defendant is on trial, so to is the judgemental nature of society.
As the drama progresses, it becomes clear that Lise is not only on trial for murder – her personality and her sexual attitudes are under scrutiny. During the trial, the prosecutor expresses bewilderment at Lise’s apparent ability to separate emotion from the sexual act with a male witness (Nathan), and asks provocatively, “Would you say you’re what is known as ‘easy?’” Lise replies, “Why not ask Nathan if he is ‘easy’ too?” Her attorney in her closing arguments states, “…Lise Bataille would not be in the dock today if she had not shown the freedom of morals, however commonplace, on which the public prosecutor has dwelt so insistently. However much it may offend some, one can be 16 and have a sex life, be 16 and have a desire to live and laugh. Both have been stolen from Lise Bataille.” The question becomes who is the victim, and is there more than one in this trial? Sex becomes a moral litmus test as Demoustier introduces themes that touch upon patriarchal prejudice, and oppression and victimisation through social mores – the role of the female prosecutor makes for an interesting intellectual analysis.
The film is an enigmatic work, its restrained aesthetic, the cinematography and editing, sparse music effectively mirrors Lise’s coldness. Demoustier creates a compelling drama, and the exchanges in the trial are absorbing. In place of words or conversation outside of the court, characters are developed through observation, or in the case of the mother, her absence. There is effortlessness in the characterisation, which carries across to the ideas and themes, that emerge through the testimonies in court.
The opening wide shot presents the unfolding confrontation, but also the contradiction at the heart of the film. In as much as we come to intimately know the characters, there remains that distance. As the credits roll, we are left to question how we feel about Lise, because in that lies the answer to the question whether she’s innocent or guilty, that we must answer for ourselves.
The Girl With a Bracelet is streaming on Curzon Home Cinema from Friday, June 26th.
Anthony and Claire Bueno’s Cleanin’ Up the Town: Remembering Ghostbusters, is a retrospective deep-dive into the making of this 80s classic. It features never before seen archival material, and while Bill Murray’s absence is noticeable, although likely expected, director Ivan Reitman, co-writers and stars Harold Ramis and Dan Ackroyd, along with cast members including: Ernie Hudson (Winston Zeddemore), Sigourney Weaver (Dana Barrett), Annie Potts (Janine Melnitz) and William Atherton (Walter Peck), as well as an extensive number of the crew, all reminisce on their experiences.
More than a deep-dive, Cleanin’ Up the Town is a piece-by-piece jigsaw puzzle of the story behind the film, as the filmmaker siblings uncover the painstaking work that went into bringing this classic comedy-horror to the screen. It’s the authoritative making-of, that does for Ghostbusters what Full Tilt Boogie (Kelly, 1997) did for From Dusk Till Dawn (Rodriguez, 1996), and Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (Bahr, Hickenlooper, Coppola, 1991) did for Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979). The documentary renders the making-of Ghostbusters a moot point, this piece-by-piece jigsaw puzzle complimented by the Blu-Ray extras is a comprehensive account.
Capturing the spirit of its subject, just as Full Tilt Boogie and Hearts of Darkness shared a kindred spirit with their respective films. It’s fitting that outsiders, and not a crew leading an industry production were the ones to tell this story because as Anthony Bueno observes, “At the beginning of the documentary Mike Smith says that you’d be surprised to find out Steven Spielberg had nothing to do with it, and that’s the thing with Ghostbusters – it wasn’t made by the big players back then; it was made by Ivan Reitman. …This was his first big film.”
These documentaries are not exposés that ruin the magic, but add to the allure a film commands, although the outlier in my opinion is the enthralling Full Tilt Boogie, which From Dusk Till Dawn pales in comparison to. Cleanin’ Up the Town will face the expectations of the audience to not ride the success of Ghostbusters, but add to its lore, and create a deeper cultural understanding. Early in the film any questions of the films integrity are silenced, when Dan Ackroyd reminisces on his family’s connection to the story, that conveys a depth of detail and with it a sincerity.
The materials they have access to are rich are the way they’re used give the film an authoritative presence. From the call sheets with information circled, date stamped, to stills and cutting to clips, this is a jigsaw puzzle layered with artistic touches. But it’s also the way the edit or cut is appreciated – the intercutting of separate interviews to create a cross-cutting dialogue infuses the informative narrative with energy. Anthony Bueno, who edited Paul Davis’ documentary Beware the Moon: Remembering An American Werewolf in London (2009), and his co-editor Derek Osborn use the edit to synthesise the sources of information, to tell a visually interesting and well crafted narrative that will hold the audience’s attention.
Cleanin’ Up the Town reveals the collaboration that goes into the filmmaking process, painting a detailed picture of how Reitman, Ackroyd and Ramis’ vision grew into one shared by many. While it’s an exaggeration to say that it shows the warts and all, there are moments in which frustrations are expressed: Bill Murray irritating Annie Potts with his tardiness and attitude, and the crews amused response to her retort, and Hudson’s recollection of his role shrinking. But the most shocking reveal is the studios omission of around 100 of the effects crew from the credits, that led to an ad being taken out in Variety to acknowledge the work of all those artists. What was a mostly amicable production, these moments reveal the commitment to the project and one another, that paints a picture of a loving family who like any have their moments.
Essential viewing for Ghostbusters fan, the strength of the film is that it reminds us how we still view these seminal films from our youth through a nostalgic gaze. For an entire generation, Cleanin’ Up the Town transports us back in time, but more importantly, this is a necessary piece of documentary filmmaking that records how films of the era were made and how film production evolved.
Cleanin’ Up the Town: Remembering Ghostbusters is available on Digital and Blu-ray from Monday, June 22nd.
With the world erupting in chaos and corruption, the safest place to be is up in the stars. The movie begins with archival footage of Yuri Gagarin, the first man to orbit space in 1961, being greeted with cheers and applause as he inaugurates the now-demolished apartment complex on the outskirts of Paris that bears his name, Gagarine Cité. The film jumps ahead to 50 years later as Gagarine Cité is close to being demolished.
Youri, (played by newcomer Alséni Bathily), an aspiring astronaut, tries to save the building from collapse as he converts the council flat into a spaceship by rearranging the electrical wiring of the building to growing hydroponic crops and making water filters based on YouTube videos of cosmonauts living in space. With the help of former residents Diana (Lyna Khoudri) and Houssam (Jamil McCraven), Youri attempts not only to save their home, but the history and memories that held the council flat stronger than any concrete foundation. As Youri risks life and limb to save his home/spaceship, he passes the point of no return.
What originally started as a critically-panned 2014 short film of Liatard and Trouilh filming the residents of Gagarine Cité, the film evolved into a theatrical narrative as members of the non-profit, Neighbors Without Borders, helped Liatard and Trouilh make the film by having the residents talk about their memories and living conditions in the 370-apartment housing project.
Rather than filming a gritty, kitchen-sink drama about life in a dilapidated building, Liatard and Trouilh managed to create a poignant story that bridges the starry-eyed, sci-fi escapism of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) with the vérité-styled objectivity of Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake (2016). Cinematographer Victor Seguin’s rotating camera gives you the feeling of spiralling into space and beyond reality even when your feet are firmly planted on the ground. The crimson red lighting of Youri’s apartment is reminiscent of The Discovery One from 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968). Adding to the visual spectacle is Amin Bouhafa and Evgueni Galperine’s hypnotic, drone-infused score.
Bathily brings both a physical intensity and big heart as a dreamer trying to save the building that has housed his memories and ambitions. Luna Khoudri brings a nurturing and freewheeling presence to the film as she tries to help Youri not fall out of orbit with the world they inhabit leading to a memorable scene set on a tower crane. Finnegan Oldfield’s performance as a tough, small-time drug dealer adds to the humour and poignant energy of the film. My only regret about Gagarine is not seeing it in a packed theatre. However, regardless of screen size or the future of socially-distanced cinema, Gagarine is a moving and ambitious film that signals the arrival of new and vital talent in the guise of directors Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh.
Gagarine is in the Official Selection of Cannes 2020. It premieres in the UK as part of the Glasgow Film Festival between March 4th and 7th. In cinemas on Friday, September 24th. On Mubi on January, 2022. Also available on other platforms.
Fame and celebrity are as instant and all-consuming as fast food, if not more so, as anyone can be famous with a few keystrokes. Set over a period of three days, Sylwia Zając (Magdalena Koleśnik), a Polish, 30-year-old fitness personality and social media influencer with 600,000 Instagram followers, reexamines her fame and obsession with celebrity after she realises she is being stalked by a perverted fan (Tomasz Orpiński) as he parks outside her apartment masturbating in his car. Inspired by Ricardo Lopez, a crazed fan who attempted to kill Björk in 1993, Sweat is a cautionary tale about fame and the consequences of success in the digital age.
Along with the fear of being stalked, Sylwia is being ousted on the internet after revealing a tearful video message to her followers about the inability to find intimacy in her life. She is never without her phone or recording almost every detail in her life from working out at the gym, leading a fan-filled workout at the mall, or climbing the stairs to her apartment. Sylwia’s fandom reaches such heights that an unknown fan confides to her about her troubled marital life in the mall food court. In her brief moments away from her phone, Sylwia wrestles with inner turmoil and depression expressed through her workout regimen or when she visits her apathetic mother. By the end of the film, I was dripping sweat from the film’s intense third act.
When making the film, von Horn said that “Emotional exhibitionists fascinate me, probably because I am on the opposite side of that spectrum; I keep my emotions on the inside and rarely share them because I fear being judged. So, when I meet people who effortlessly and without shame express themselves I feel envy. On social media, I am a passive observer.” Von Horn’s objective camera uncovers Sylwia at her most raw and vulnerable when she’s taking selfies after going to the gym or putting on makeup with a giant portrait of her with a Medusa-stare in her mirror-clad apartment.
There is a shot of her entering her apartment building that echoes the stalking, female gaze in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), and Brian De Palma’s Body Double (1984) foreshadowing the events that would change her life. Additionally, von Horn evokes the satirically flamboyant and vein decadence of Paul Verhoeven’s 1995 Showgirls (minus the hardcore nudity and Joe Eszterhas’s bog roll of a script) along with intense close-ups of Sylwia in her apartment that is not dissimilar to Catherine Deneuve’s paranoid-ridden heroine from Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965).
At the centre of the film is Magdalena Koleśnik giving a stunning performance of a fitness guru who is emotionally out of shape. We first see her full of energy and pep when she’s working out with her legions of fans, but in her moments of working out alone, it’s as if she is chastising herself into the body that she wants rather than the body that she already has with the deep-seated desire for perfection. If there’s one film that’s sure to provoke debate over internet-based celebrities and the insular-based nature of social media, Sweat is pouring with all of that and more.
Sweat was part of Official Selection of the 73rd Festival de Cannes. In cinemas on Friday, June 25th. On Amazon Prime in July. On all major platforms on Monday, August 23rd. On Mubi on Friday, September 17th.
Sofia Bohdanowicz’s MS Slavic 7, co-directed with actress Deragh Campbell is a delightfully charming drama, coming in at a brief 65 minutes. Campbell plays Audrey Benac, literary executor to her great-grandmother, Zofia Bohdanowiczowa’s estate. She travels to the Houghton Library at Harvard University, where she discovers letters written between 1957 and 1964 to Jósef Wittlin, a fellow Polish poet living in New York City. Coming up against her aunt’s disapproval as well as other complications, as Audrey digs into her great-grandmother’s intimate past, she faces her own troubled present.
Zoifa who first writes from her home in Wales, UK, before she moves to Toronto, Canada, bridges a physical and emotional distance, as she conveys to Jósef how he vital he has become for her. Meanwhile, Audrey bridges the past and present, which along with the choice to merge drama and documentary in favour of a dramatic narrative aesthetic, permits the look and the story to complement one another. This does not quantify its merit, rather it’s merely a pleasant observation of parallels.
MS Slavic 7 is not escapist cinema, it is the antithesis of bloated commercial cinema. From its terse running time to its sparse aesthetic, the film asks the audience to look, rather than presenting an entertaining and passively engaging spectacle. Yet it’s not altogether different from commercial cinema and the Marvel films. It too is about whether we enjoy spending time with Audrey, just as we get caught up in the drama and the heroics of the characters in commercial cinema.
A silence runs through the film, a portrait of Audrey with a lack of detail expressed. Repeat viewings will allow for a closer excavation of the connections between the words of Zofia and Audrey herself, an insight restricted on a first viewing. MS Slavic 7 is the type of film that requires you to have to mind a question to keep your focus, because while it’s a film that presents Zofia as the subject through her correspondence with Wittlin, the necessary question is in what ways do the words convey who Audrey is?
Zofia, her words and relationship with Wittlin should not be taken as a thorough reflection of Audrey, only a fractional one. Like her great-grandmother, Audrey casts an impression of being an outsider. Both are displaced, but in a wholly different context, because while one was displaced through the violence and atrocities of the Second World War, the other’s displacement is unlikely rooted in such extreme trauma. Whereas Zofia seems to connect and form relationships, this seems to be a struggle for Audrey. She interacts with family, albeit these interactions are not seen outside of her seated at a family gathering or the tense interactions with her aunt.
In the intimate postcoital scene where Audrey lies in bed, distanced from her momentary lover played by Aaron Danby, who has helped her translate the letters, the pair cover themselves with the bedsheet. There is an unmistakable coldness that is offset by the intimate readings of two pieces of Zofia’s writing. When it’s Audrey’s turn to read a piece and she does not register his kisses upon her back, the artificial intimacy of the scene is clear. The distance presents Audrey as not necessarily a cold or matter of fact person, albeit she does seem most alive in the film when functioning in an intellectual and thoughtful capacity. One can sense an unspoken emotion, of possibly pain or a person who is yet to find her place in the world.
Audrey is a mysterious character that lives out of the past and distances herself from her own present. Without having seen Bohdanowicz’s Never Eat Alone (2016) and Veslemøy’s Song (2018), in which Campbell plays Audrey, it’s preferable to stay non-committal about the character, of which MS Slavic 7 is only one piece of a larger portrait. And aside from its mysterious young woman, there is an appeal in the abstract impression we have of Zofia and Jósef’s relationship, that is forged through the written language only, that contradicts film as a visual form.
Bohdanowicz and Campbell’s film is one we must appreciate as a series of moments, from Audrey defending her right to manage the literary estate of her great-grandmother, the author’s ideas over structure and grammar, and of people connecting physically, emotionally and intellectually through words. MS Slavic 7 is blessed with moments that make it an intriguing work that is both intimate and distant. It’s a curious work that requires for us to look, and search for clarity in its ambiguity. While appealing to only a limited audience, the film should appeal to those who appreciate letters and the written language, who will be willing to look beyond what is seen, to discover the reality behind the words, gestures and interactions.
MS Slavic 7 is available on Mubi from Monday, June 8th.
On Saturday, June 13th, far-right protesters took to the streets of London with Nazi salutes proclaiming that they wanted to preserve the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square after Black Lives Matter activists called for its removal. That’s because the wartime Prime Minister has a history of racism. After a BLM protester knocked a white nationalist to the ground in Trafalgar Square, Black British personal trainer Patrick Hutchinson carried the wounded man to safety before turning him into the police. Hutchinson’s act of selflessness has become a symbolic gesture at a time when racial tensions have reached a boiling point.
The social and political upheaval of the past three weeks has made the movie-streaming experience more of an educational tool about systemic, institutionalised racism more than just passively escaping into reruns of sitcoms. Although, that has since become a hotbed of debate after the iconic Fawlty Towers episode, The Germans (Season 1, Episode 6), was pulled due to its pre-PC dialogue and quickly reinstated to the streaming platform, UKTV. But one artefact from the pre-PC, nationalistic era of Margaret Thatcher’s conservative reign that deserves to be watched is Franco Rosso’s 1980 powder keg of a film, Babylon.
Directed by Rosso, shot vérité-style by Oscar-winning cinematographer Chris Menges and with a soundtrack featuring music from Aswad, Johnny Clarke, Yabby You, Cassandra, I-Roy, and Michael Prophet, the film is both a celebration of Reggae music and a gritty indictment on the overt racism in Thatcher’s Britain. Set in the Brixton and Deptford neighborhoods of London in the late 1970s, the film follows aspiring DJ Blue (Brinsley Forde of Aswad) and his crew, Ital Lion, trying to gain fame in Britain’s evolving Reggae music scene. A week before competing in an underground DJ duel with the rival Jah Shakra, Blue and his friends are subjected to racial epithets at work, violence from members of the National Front, and profiling from the police. When a white neighbour berates Ital Lion for their loud music and marijuana smoke telling them that the neighbourhood was lovely before “they” moved in, Beefy (Trevor Laird) responds by saying “This is my country lady, and it’s never been fucking lovely, it’s always been a fucking tip, for as long as I can remember!”
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Citizens of nowhere
Britain has had a love/hate relationship with immigration and was ratcheted up by the end of WW2. It was during this period that Britain saw a postwar boom with the arrival of South Asian, Nigerian, and Caribbean immigrants as they fulfilled duties within the growing transportation industry and the National Health Service. Coincidentally, there was also a rise in UK natives (i.e. Scottish, Irish, and British) leaving their home countries for work in the US in the late 1940s and early 1950s. By the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s, the Tories fuelled the fires of racial divide leading to the rise of white nationalist groups being close to gaining seats in Parliament, where they would have been lawmakers of equal stature like the Conservative Tories, the Labour Party, and the Libdems.
As for Britain’s entertainment industry, films and television shows about the country’s diversity were far and few between unless you were watching The Old Grey Whistle Test or Top of the Pops. The Black and White Minstrel Show was on British televisions until it ended in 1978, yet blackface and racial stereotypes were still a form of comic relief for BBC sitcoms like Are You Being Served? (The 1976 Christmas episode where Mr. Granger puts shoe polish on his face) and To the Manor Born (a spliff smoking African musician is commissioned by Audrey Forbes-Hamilton to perform at an all-white gala). But when producer Gavrik Losey, son of the American-exiled blacklisted filmmaker, saw a script of an abandoned Play for Today version of Babylon penned by Rosso and Quadrophenia (Franc Roddam, 1979) screenwriter Martin Stellman focusing on the lives of teenagers in South London, he saw potential in making “a youth film”, as he told Jenny Craven in Films and Filmmaking magazine, that would appeal to the black youth culture. Little did Losey know of the uphill battles he would face with the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC).
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Too controversial for school
After the film was in the can, Losey wrote to James Ferman, the Director of the BBFC from 1975 to 1999, pleading for an AA rating for Babylon citing that “we regard it as being concerned with the general problem of youth today although it is ethnically oriented around British West Indians in South London.” Ferman responded by giving the film an X rating writing in an October 1980 letter, “Young teenagers would be …attracted by the music and perhaps confused and troubled by the message”. Despite a brief, not-so-gory, stabbing scene towards the end of the film, Babylon is light compared to the visceral images of sex and violence depicted in films like Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971) or Alan Clarke’s Scum (1979), both films that received X certification.
Franco Rosso was no stranger to the streets of Brixton. The white, Italian-expat filmmaker made a name for himself with the 1979 Omnibus documentary, Dread, Beat N’Blood. Chronicling the life of Jamaican-expat poet and activist, Linton Kwesi Johnson, the documentary features Johnson reflecting on the racism he endured in the British school system when he moved to Britain in 1963, a year after Jamaica’s liberation from British rule. In one scene, he recites his song “Doun de Road” to a classroom filled with students. Afterwards, when two students asked him why he wrote about violence versus love, Johnson replied, “I suppose that because it is that which has sparked my imagination… the whole world is a violent place. I come from Jamaica, a violent place, and I grew up in Brixton. I mean, you experience violence every day in the schools, parties, in the pubs, in the park, everywhere. Even in the House of Commons from time to time, things get a bit hot.”
Following its release at the Cannes and Toronto Film Festivals, Babylon was set to premiere in America at the New York Film Festival until it was pulled due to the film’s incendiary content. As Vivien Goldman lamented in Time Out, the film went unreleased in the United States for “being too controversial, and likely to incite racial tension”. Almost 40 years after the film came and went in theatres, Babylon has since gained a wide audience thanks to a newly restored print overseen by Chris Menges and distributed by Kino Lorber. Additionally, it’s hard not to see films like Do The Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989) or La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995) and not think that Babylon was a touchstone for Spike Lee and Mathieu Kassovitz. In this current wave of racial injustices and public outcry, the film is ripe for the picking.
After watching Babylon, I couldn’t forget the act of heroism displayed by Patrick Hutchinson. Despite the political views of the unnamed right wing protester, Hutchinson responded to his actions by saying: “I just want equality, you know, equality for all us. You know, at the moment, the scale was unfairly balanced and I just want things to be fair for my children and my grandchildren.” As Hutchinson was saying this call for peace, I couldn’t shake off the last lines of Johnson’s “Doun de Road”, With brother stabbing brother stabbing brother/ Them just killin’ often one another. But when you see brother blood just flow/ Futile fighting then you know the first phase must come to an end/time for the second phase to show”
You can watch Franco Rosso’s Babylon on all major streaming platforms. The images in this article are stills from the movie.
Unlike Scrooge (the protagonist in Dickens’s novel), the greed of university professor Maria (Mastroianni) is not financial, but sentimental: over the years of her marriage to Richard (Benjamin Biolay), she became closed and reserved, having numerous extramarital affairs with younger men.
After one of these escapades, Richard finds compromising messages on her cell phone and confronts her, which makes her leave the house and spend the night in a hotel across the street. There, she is visited by a twenty-something version of her husband (Vincent Lacoste), as well as all of her former flames – and is forced to face her past head-on.
One visitor in particular arrives with an indecent proposal: Irène (Camille Cottin), the lover Richard left previously to marry Maria, asks for permission to rekindle the relationship with him. Being delighted to magically find the version of Richard she fell in love with decades ago, she allows Irène to try her luck with the older version of her husband.
The script – penned by Honoré himself – makes the plot unfold as a great marital discussion filled with fantastical elements. Richard is the man who, in the face of marital disappointment and the return of his former love, wonders whether he has made the right decision. Maria is a multifaceted creature.
She believes in love, but lies to herself about its nature. She does not show an ounce of remorse for her infidelity and always finds a justification for her behaviour. During the fight with Richard, she goes so far as to say that affairs are the way long-term marriages survive.
By romanticising the past, she holds onto the version of Richard who was left behind and, because of that, she always looks for new men to experience again that passion of yore, refusing to build something out of the present. Her husband gets to the heart of this very issue by concluding, around 50 minutes into the film: “Love is always a shared place, a past”.
Ultimately, On a Magical Night is a fable about reconciling with your emotional baggage. It raises pertinent questions about love. With an impeccable production design (courtesy of Stéphane Taillasson) and charms galore, the film is the perfect pick for a romantic night in. Just be prepared for a difficult conversation with your partner afterwards.
On a Magical Night is out on VoD on Friday, June 19th.
While on a road trip in France, Rex (Gene Bervoets) and Saskia (Johanna ter Steege), stop for a break at a roadside service station. When she goes off to buy a couple of drinks, she vanishes leaving no clues as to her whereabouts. Three years later and Rex, now in a relationship with Simone (Bernadette Le Saché), receives taunting postcards from Saskia’s abductor Raymond (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu), that draws him into a dangerous game of cat and mouse.
The Vanishing investigates the damaging and infectious nature of obsession. Raymond’s actions are the injury that sparks Rex’s obsessive drive to find out what happened to Saskia. For Raymond, his obsession, having already identified himself as having sociopathic tendencies, is an answer to a question that ironically emerges out of innocence. After his daughter sees him save a girl from drowning and calls him a hero, he feels the impulse to answer the question whether his heroism is genuine? The film echoes an idea, or a warning in Swiss psychoanalyst C.G. Jung’s writing about the conflict of consequences – how a positive action can yield a negative outcome.
It’s a fitting moment to recall the words of the dramatist David Mamet: “The main question in drama, the way I was taught, is always, ‘What does the protagonist want?’ That’s what drama is. It comes down to that. It’s not about theme, it’s not about ideas, it’s not about setting, but what the protagonist wants.” The drama of Sluizer’s film is primarily driven by what the characters want, and the themes and the ideas emerge from their desires.
The Vanishing is a contemporary parable, a cautionary tale of the dangers of our impulsive desires or emotions, the perils of exploring ourselves and the disruptive and dominating force of the shadow complex. It’s also about the need for closure or resolution on the past, without which the present and future is susceptible to disruption. An entertaining piece of filmmaking, Sluizer does not pander to these themes and ideas, rather he tells a story with a deliberate approach to the thriller genre that still retains an originality.
Cédric Kahn’s 2004 thriller Red Lights, is similarly about a wife who vanishes, and not a girlfriend, that makes it a fitting comparative work. There is however a key difference what follows the disappearance. Kahn chooses to stay with the husband Antoine (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) after he leaves the bar and finds his wife missing, while Sluizer after a frantic but futile search, chooses Raymond as the focus of the story. Typically, the suspense hinges on the pursuit, and while there is still a search to find the man behind the taunting postcards, the bared bones adrenaline fuelled effort to discover the fate of the missing woman is absent. Instead, The Vanishing‘s interest is in observing the sociopath – seeing him at home and at work, and watching him hone his method of entrapment. Yet as much as the focus shifts to Raymond, in keeping with Mamet’s assertion, the protagonist re-emerges, because the emotion in the drama lies in Rex’s obsessive quest.
Important to also note is that Raymond’s experiment to test the legitimacy of his heroism recalls Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, that centred on two young men’s attempts to commit the perfect murder. Hitchcock contradicts the protagonist’s desire as an exclusive source of the drama, in a way that The Vanishing still falls back on the plight of the so-called good character. Together Sluizer and Hitchcock through their respective narratives of immoral experiments, confirm and challenge Mamet’s theory.
The second act lacks the suspense common with this type of story, although a tension is present in certain scenes when Rex tries to find Raymond. Sluizer effectively creates tension by allowing us to catch glimpses of Raymond – on a VHS recording of a crowd with his daughter, or in the distance, even positioning the camera behind Rex that creates a tension by showing us how near, yet how far Rex is from finding him. These subtle touches work and elevate the artistry of the film, before it evolves into a game of cat and mouse in the third act.
Donnadieu’s performance neutralises the lack of traditional suspense – Raymond is a compelling subject for our gaze. Watching the abduction routine unfold time and again, a work in progress, Sluizer conveys a genuine terror because nothing is instinctive, it’s methodically plotted and perfected. And the ending should resonate viscerally with a contemporary audience amidst social justice protests and frustrations with narcissistic American and British political administrations. Rex’s fate is a possible metaphor for how many people across the world are feeling.
The Vanishing is available on VoD, DVD and Blu-ray from Monday, June 8th.
Hank (Jeremy Gardner) wakes up alone one morning in an empty home with a cryptic parting note from his girlfriend Abby (Brea Grant). Heartbroken and depressed, he finds himself visited by a mysterious monster nightly. When his reports of the strange nightly occurrences to his best-friend Wade (Henry Zebrowski) and Abby’s brother, police officer Shane (Justin Benson) are met with scepticism, Hank slips further into paranoia and loneliness.
“What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams” said German filmmaker Werner Herzog. In the same breath, cinema without its monsters would be lacking a presence that goes beyond simply a series of terrifying forms.
From the early days of the Universal horror movies, and the question whether the creator or the creature is the monster in Frankenstein, their purpose has been nuanced. Fast-forward to 1995 and the vampire Peina, played by Christopher Walken in Abel Ferrera’s 1995 horror The Addiction, speaks about having almost overcome his monstrous addiction. It’s a story that positions vampirism as a metaphor for not only addiction, but the tussle with impulse over reason, and the concept of guilt with a self-loathing towards one’s identity. And in After Midnight, the monster turns up at the door and claws to get in. Hank fires his shotgun to repel its attack, with repeated skirmishes until one of them is dead.
Abby tells Hank, “You have everything you want here” and hypothesising about if they’d moved away to the city, where they could hear the neighbours above them and the traffic outside, she tells him he wouldn’t have had, “any of the things that made you, you or gave you purpose.” Hank’s heartbreak and his fractured relationship with Abby gives meaning to the savage monster, wrapping it up in the motifs of the story.
After Midnight is about a common experience of compromise, of two people converging their personal life paths to travel the future together. Writer/director Gardner and his co-director and cinematographer Christian Stella offer us a snapshot of the conflict between the need for a soul mate versus one’s nature and sense of purpose that compels a reluctance to change.
The film is structured around the monster as a metaphor for the competing desires that the two sides of Hank have for his future. It’s a physical manifestation of the emotional and psychological reluctance to change, allowing the struggle between man and beast to neatly tie in with the fate of the relationship. The film is about how change is a violent and painful process, and it questions the realistic expectation that someone can change by discovering new things to fulfil the needs of their sense of self, and to find a new purpose. It’s also about how we can become a prisoner within ourselves should we not change and grow with a soul mate.
In contrary to this deeper and thematic thoughtfulness, After Midnight is a subtle nod towards those simple but effective plot driven genre movies, particularly John McTiernan’s Predator (1987). It’s difficult to not perceive beyond the personal drama of heartbreak a simple plot of a monster that picks a fight with a hunter, that is essentially Predatoresque. Through the filter of Gardner and Stella’s creative voices however, After Midnight feels original in its expression.
For much of the 83 minute running time, the pacing is sharp, but sadly towards the end Gardner and Stella seemingly become apprehensive to pull the trigger on the moment that will resolve the story. Adding to this noticeable distraction, the staging gives an impression that the filmmakers were struggling against the pressures of budget and time. In spite of this one qualm, After Midnight is a solid piece of genre filmmaking, one whose delights outweigh any imperfection.
After Midnight is out now on all major VoD platforms. There is also a limited edition Blu-ray from Arrow Video.
It’s never too late to get the travel bug. Three adorable retirees want to move abroad, preferably to a cheap country where they can stretch their scant pension and drink as many beers as they like. The golden drink costs just €1 in Sofia, or even less if they are prepared to venture a bit further out, to an exotic country such as Cuba or Indonesia. They are not alone: more than 50,000 Italian pensioners have moved abroad in search of a more comfortable life.
The avuncular trio have very different lifestyles and personalities. Professor (played by the director himself) is a quiet and stern Latin teacher, while Giorgetto (Giorgio Colangeli) is a boisterous Roman struggling to pay his bills, and Atillio (Ennio Fantastichini) is a laid-back antique dealer and bon viveur, attempting to reclaim the excitement of his youth. They spend most of their time together, hanging out in bars and restaurants, discussing the exciting details of their new life. Their selection criteria are rather peculiar, almost puerile: they want to live in a country without floods and hurricanes; they decide against Australia because the island is apparently “surrounded by jellyfish”. In a way, the search for the perfect destination is the journey per se.
They find unusual ways of collecting funds for their impending journey, including copious lottery cards. They keep the money in a little box. But then the fears and anxieties begin to set in. Is it safe and is it feasible to move to a brand new country at old age? Giorgetto’s body begins to show signs of faltering. He feels pain in his liver, only for his doctor to tell him that the organ does not have any nerve endings. The pain is all in his head. Perhaps he’s are not prepared for such a bold move after all.
Along their quest, they encounter an African teenager named Abu, who also wishes to leave the country. Abu wants to meet a cousin and settle in Canada. Unlike the three pensioners, he has neither relatives nor a safety net in the Italian capital. He has to fend for himself. He makes ends meet by selling goods on the bustling streets of the city centre, constantly having to run and evade the police. His predicament represents another type of immigration, under constant duress and hardship.
Citizens of the World is a gentle comedy about solidarity and brotherhood. It’s not a laugh-out-loud type of movie, but it’s guaranteed to put a broad smile on your face. Worth seeing on a day you are longing for pastures green. Perhaps your dream destination isn’t as far as you think!
Citizens of the World is on VoD on Friday, June 12th.
