Month: July 2020

Story of a Love Affair (Cronaca di un Amore)

Posted on by Paul Risker

When a rich industrialist decides to have the past of his young wife Paola (Lucia Bosè) investigated, the detective’s enquiries rekindles an old affair with her former lover Guido (Massimo Girotti). The opening images of Story of a Love Affair offers an interesting portrait of the filmmaker. Missing is the slow, observant approach that would become so familiar. He begins with a rapid fire dialogue and exposition of why Paola’s past is under scrutiny. This is a striking contrast to his fifth feature L’Avventura (1960), where we can begin to see the noticeable signs of his evolution. There is no mystery in Story of a Love Affair – all the sordid details are laid bare. In L’Avventura however, the fate of the woman who has mysteriously disappeared is left unexplained.

With Antonioni, mystery and ambiguity are not necessarily the focal point of evolution. While Paola and Guido are expressive and open, the characters in his later films are silently expressive. He begins to insist that his audience have a more proactive role in reading the characters emotions, and projecting their own thoughts and feelings. Story of a Love Affair contrasts to his later works, and frames Antonioni’s journey as one from extroversion to introversion.

We witness an emerging respect for and reluctance to intrude upon the space of his characters. He chooses to observe or follow, and to not frame them as objects. This compliments the introverted expression and desire to have his audience project. There are signs in Story of a Love Affair that looks ahead to his observational and non-intrusive approach – a lack of reliance on the edit within a scene and longer takes that slow the pace of the film down.

Amidst the fast paced dialogue of the early scenes, when the detective visits Matilde (Vittoria Mondello), a former friend of Paola’s, Antonioni interrupts this tempo by locking the camera. The action revolves around it, the camera only zooming in to pick out an action, and only cuts when it’s a necessity. Story of a Love Affair contradicts Antonioni’s belief that, “A film that can be described in words is not really a film.” There is a clear narrative series of events as past and present collide with fatal consequences. The French writer Pierre Leprohon noted in his book, The Italian Cinema (1965) that The Postman Always Rings Twice (Garnett, 1946) was an inspiration on Antonioni’s film.

The dramatic arc of Lana Turner and John Garfield’s illicit love affair was preceded a few years earlier, when insurance agent Fred MacMurray fell for Barbara Stanwyck’s feminine wiles, in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944). Antonioni’s film however is not an act of imitation, instead he changes the narrative that revolves around the premise of two lovers conspiring to murder a husband. Nor is it an act of borrowing from American noir, because the premise is one that pre-dates cinema, used by literary writers such as Émile Zola for his 1867 novel Thérèse Raquin.

Antonioni’s film belongs to a period of notable collaboration between American and European cinema. French director Jean Pierre-Melville drew inspiration from classic American gangster films of the 1930s and 1940s, and American crime films were an obvious influence on François Truffaut’s Shoot the Pianist (1960). Like his French counterparts, Antonioni created a film that had a European sense of feeling, but with an American connection. This feels a bygone era now, an innovative period of filmmaking that presented cinema as a collective unconscious of shared dreams, yet with the capacity for the filmmaker’s individual vision.

We should never underestimate the poetics of the artist nor their tendency to contradict themselves. We can question the truthfulness behind their words and whether they themselves believe them to be true. Our human instincts make us good at lying to ourselves, or saying or doing for the purposes of dramatic effect. Or we feed the reality as we like to imagine it, a stage upon which we find ourselves.

Artists or creative types have a heightened self-awareness, which sharpens the inclinations towards dramatic ideological statements. But such statements can also be the voice of the ambitious dreamer, who wants to propel the art form to greater heights. That we can describe Story of a Love Affair in words does not make it any less of a film. While Antonioni’s debut feature does not honour his words, it occupies an interesting place in his cinematic evolution, a critically important work. It is without question an example of a first great work of a master filmmaker.

Story of a Love Affair is out now on Blu-ray, on digital and on demand

Flash Gordon

Posted on by victorfraga

Flash (Sam J. Jones) is a football champion with more brawn than brains who transported to the outer rims of time and space. Liberated from the chains that trapped him on earth, Flash throws himself into the stations that release the inner hero from within him.

Mike Hodges’ great masterpiece of bawdy humour and rich, decorative opulence both celebrates and ridicules the sci-fi genre it so longingly floated over. Fitting for a film that modelled itself on the serials that dazzled children in the 1930s, Hodges turns another tent-pole by which he bases the structure of the film. The film’s farcical elements come into the fore as Flash finds himself a literal Dorothy, gazing in wordless awe at the dazzling planets that take his earthly breath away. Furthering the similarities the film-deliciously dripped in décor and droll dark humour-yearns for a time when telefoni bianchi (a genre of Italian cinema, modelled on contemporary Hollywood dramas) excited viewers with their frisson, fashion and comforting sense of bonhomie. (Prior to Hodges involvement, producer Dino De Laurentiis earmarked stylist Federico Fellini to man the picture; nonetheless, the movie flows like an Italian art piece in everything but language.)

Without question, Flash Gordon is a rocket ride that blasts through the proceedings with an almost hazardous, certainly hallucinogenic, energy. Plastered from head to toe in kitsch, kaleidoscopic insignia, the film’s camp, colourful creativity sat badly against the more earnest orbit 1977’s Star Wars: A New Hope (George Lucas) journeyed on. And yet, free from the many sequels that have proved the continuation/ruination of George Lucas’s cache, Flash Gordon holds a flavour that’s entirely its own and sits as singularly in the canon of 1980s’ sci-fi masterpieces in the same way Ridley Scott’s probing Blade Runner (1982) does. More than that, the film’s dizzying use of psychotropic colours, showy performances and incredible, metallic soulfulness were topped only by the rock score that burned behind the scorching visuals that flickered down the screen.

The soundtrack, Brian May’s creative acme as a producer, boasts Queen’s indelible stamp on an instrument they’d spent the entirety of the seventies avoiding. Without lyric to play to, synthesisers float with steely abandon, conjuring images even more detailed than the panoply of illustrated set pieces that pierce towards the viewers ever reaching eye. No less a luminary than Max Von Sydow overlooks the parading Hawkmen whose skies, planets and kingdoms they hope to re-capture. Sydow, relishing the pantomime that spits from his mouth, decorates himself in a series of extraordinary outfits, planting himself every bit the sartorial centurion for whom a galaxy would pride on.

Beneath these set pieces stands Jones, all blond hair and chest pecs, every bit the 1980s’ heartthrob he never quite became. Instead, that honour went to supporting actor Timothy Dalton (the wolfish Prince Barin), who in 1987 beat out t.v. stalwarts Sam Neill and Pierce Brosnan to become the fourth actor to play James Bond. Strident in his green garment, Dalton commands the screen by virtue of his governing pose, mellifluous voice and neat, natty moustache. Dalton is brilliant, Jones fiery, but it is Brian Blessed-hairy, hoary and fiery in spirit who proves the film’s most successful scene-stealer. Blessed are the Hawkmen who follow the Yorkshire born’s baritone; buoyant is the energy that ripples through the veterans voice as he watches Barin and Flash whip each other down a deathly precipice.

Eager to capture the palettes that energised the youth that read Flash’s fantastical fairy tales for the first time, Hodges paints the scenery with a choice selection of splashy, showy colours. Shot after shot, the cinematography is rich with detail, every battle piece grander in scope than the story it follows. And yet the plot, deceptively simple, complies to the conventions of science fiction more faithfully than any of the Star Wars movies ever did. Rescued from the blandness that surrounds the earth Flash lives on, the triumph that pushes him onto the next level of escapism makes for riveting watching.

It would be reductive and restrictive to categorise this re-release as timely, but for the many watchers aching for their excitement from a world cornered by Covid-19, that’s how many will view it. Such is the nature of fairy tale storytelling, that it comes to us at times of great distress as much as it does in great contentment. So obviously dazzling is the product, that even the most hardened of Kansas farmers would fall for the majesty of the story that existed beyond the tornado that led them to their fantasy. But Flash Gordon accomplishes something even greater: not only does it make you chuckle, it also makes you smile!

The 40th anniversary 4K restoration of Flash Gordon is in cinemas on Friday, July 31st. It’s on DVD and Blu-ray in the following weeks.

Last and First Men

Posted on by victorfraga

The Icelandic composer of Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario (2015) and Arrival (2016), died at the age of 48 in 2018 but not before filming his adaptation of Olaf Stapledon’s science fiction novel, Last and First Men, which premiered at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. Shot on black and white 16mm film and narrated by Tilda Swinton, Jóhannsson defies the conventional sci-fi flick with his reflective look at the marriage between the human race and the supernatural.

Set two billion years into the future, Jóhannsson’s camera captures the austere and haunting Yugoslavian landscape. With the exception of Swinton’s mellow voice, no actors are present, only the natural wonders of the world as Jóhannsson’s music guides us through this 70-minute journey. The only images of colour shown are when a sonar pixel jumps and weaves to Swinton’s narration echoing the intimidating HAL computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, minus the deadpan voice. The static shots of the gothic architecture and rock formations, coupled with Jóhannsson’s ethereal score, add a layer of mysticism to the awe-inspiring beauty of the world’s natural surroundings.

Like Jóhannsson’s white-knuckled score to Arrival, his music heightened the visual sensibilities of the placid, yet intimidating presence of rock formations that we might as well be looking at a spacecraft landing on Earth. The maternal feminine presence of the ruins reminiscent of both Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings and the German Expressionist gothic art of the Weimar Republic add emphasis the important role Mother Earth plays in preserving the planet more than its inhabitants.

Beyond the source material of Stapeldon’s novel, the film is, at its heart, a documentary. For Jóhannsson, he is attempting to answer the unsolved questions of humanity and nature before shuffling off this mortal coil called Earth. When asked about his choice for sonic arrangements in films like Sicario and Prisoners (Denis Villeneuve, 2013), Johannsson said, “That’s a slow process that happens over time, really, and I guess a lot of it is determined when I see the first image”. Through his music, we hear a soundscape of drones that evoke the sounds of the spiritually arresting Gregorian Chants of bygone millennia while his camera slowly captures the head-scratching beauty of the natural world and the never-ending, unsolved mystery of man’s presence on this planet.

Walking away from Last and First Men, I felt like I had just left a religious ceremony invigorated by the introspective nature of humanity presented on screen. I was unable to keep my head out of the clouds with wonder over whether or not Johannsson is capturing us all from that great film studio in the sky. We can only hope that he is.

First and Last Men is on BFI Player on Thursday, July 30th.

Summerland

Posted on by victorfraga

If there is one bright spot to be had for movie lovers this year, it’s that smaller independent stories are getting the chance for a bigger platform, having an increased presence as cinemas open up with precious little new content to exhibit.

One title is Summerland, a low-budget British drama worth seeking out. Gemma Arterton stars as Alice, an abrasive writer living alone in a coastal town during World War 2. She is surprised to learn that she is the guardian of an evacuee from London named Frank (Lucas Bond). While Alice initially rejects the new arrival, the pair grow close and force her to confront the pain of her past.

The premise is nothing new: a young evacuee stays with a loner who protests at the predicament, only for the two to form a bond. It’s the stuff of numerous tea-time TV dramas, but beneath the surface is something richer. It is in the subplots and character development that this story begins to soar.

Director Jessica Swale’s script crafts a broad and interesting arc for Alice. Arterton’s portrayal of the character begins as almost spiteful, confronting the local headmaster and playing a cruel trick on a child in a sweet shop. However, the film slowly reveals why she is angry and the world, and begins to plant the seeds of change. Alice and Frank warm to each other in a very natural way, finding a common interest in Alice’s study of mythology, particularly the idea of Summerland, a coastal mirage believed to have been a vision of the afterlife.

Youngster Lucas Bond is enjoyable as Frank, precocious but not in the stagey way child actors can sometimes be. He strikes up an adorable friendship with his classmate, the self-proclaimed ‘individualist’ Edie (Dixie Egerickx). It’s all quite cosy and comforting, until we begin to see into Alice’s past.

We learn that she is haunted by the memories of a past love, a woman named Vera (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) who brought out the best in her, but whose memory now only brings her pain. The flashbacks portray a tender relationship, free of the sensationalism that often accompanies queer relationships. The excellent Mbatha-Raw is a spirited counter-balance to the stern character we had seen to this point, and the pair create a believable connection with relatively little time.

Arterton reacts to each memory as if wounded, including a heart-breaking scene where Alice reveals to Frank she was once in love with another woman, and upon witnessing his innocent acceptance, gasps through tears “most people think it’s wicked”. It’s a powerful but skilfully underplayed moment by Arterton that bonds the two stars and gives her character so much more depth than expected.

The remaining cast are pleasant but mainly there to deliver news. Tom Courtenay is fun as the village headmaster, and Penelope Wilton bookends the the film as an older Alice. A third act twist stretches credulity, but somehow it works within the story’s wistful setting where characters look out toward the sea from idyllic cottages.

Summerland is in cinemas on Friday, July 31st. On Amazon Prime on Friday, August 28th. On Sky Cinema and NOW on Saturday, July 31st. Also available on other platforms.

It’s not the end of the world!

Posted on by Paul Risker

A happily married Parisian wife, the titular character of the drama, finds her life turned upside down when she discovers that her husband has emptied all of their accounts, they’re a year behind on their mortgage, and he has squandered all of her inheritance on prostitutes. Desperate to support herself and her son, Alice (Emilie Piponnier) begins working as a high-end escort.

Alice is director Josephine Mackerras’ French language feature debut. It’s a story about empowerment that offers a thought about how one should live their lives that can resonate with all of us. An unassuming film, it mixes humour and anxious emotion with humanity and a little romanticism to good effect. Under her skilled direction it finds a way to be what it needs to be in any given moment, and effectively compromises the seriousness of drama with the lightness of comedy.

Australian born, Mackerras has lived in China and France, and has since returned to her native Australia, where she lives outside of Brisbane, Queensland. Her previous credits include shorts shot in three different languages: English – A Sign (2007), French – Diva (2007) and L’enfant perdue (2008), and Czech – Modlitba(2010).

In conversation with DMovies, Mackerras reflected on the struggle from production to post-production and beyond, the importance of passion and a fighting spirit, and her humble hopes for the film.

…

.

Paul Risker – Why film as a means of creative expression? Was there an inspirational or defining moment for you personally?

Josephine Mackerras – I’d been very heavily involved in the theatre since I was about nine-years-old, and that had always been my number one passion, followed by music and art. When I discovered film it was like finding my life’s mission – everything I loved just came together. Theatre is so much about the writers and the actors, and then film brings that altogether with sound and image, which is art. So once I discovered film, there was nothing else on the planet I wanted to do.

PR – How significant was the experience of short filmmaking as a means to prepare you for feature filmmaking, and how do you compare and contrast the two forms?

JM – Short films are you’re schooling and you learn a lot of your mistakes. You can’t compare the two because there’s a specific art to doing short films well, and it’s a very different craft to making a feature film. In terms of the writing, with feature films you can go deeper, whereas I feel a short film is just a different craft.

If I were to do a short film today, I would do it very differently to how I was doing them in the past, because I feel I’ve understood that they’re not the same thing. Someone can make a brilliant short film and it doesn’t necessarily translate to a feature, and vice versa. But in terms of the market place, feature films cost so much money and nobody could have prepared me for deliveries. Nobody talks about that, but you don’t want to be on your own dealing with them. First of all you have to technically understand it all and I didn’t. It costs so much money and it’s so long and detailed, and it’s so boring. You should be enjoying the festival circuit and the film finally going out to the public, but actually you can’t. You’ve got to deal with music rights, you’ve got to deal with the amity and all of this stuff, and I didn’t know what half of it was.

A feature film is the long haul, it really is, and so that’s the difference. I shot Alice guerrilla style and my inspiration for doing that was that I’d made an 18 minute short, and so I thought, ‘Well, times that by four or five and you’ve got a feature.’ This was how I was calculating it in my mind and thinking, ‘I can do this.’ I did it, but gee, if I’d known, I don’t know, I really don’t. You need help and you can’t do it alone.

PR – When I interviewed Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín, he spoke of how you discover the film in the final cut. With how you approached Alice as a series of shorts, was this your experience?

JM- The film did come together in the final cut and I discovered things that weren’t in the original script to make it work. I was banging my head at the end trying to make the ending work, and I had to reshoot. There are a couple of shots that bring that ending together and those I did at the very end, and so I’d agree.

I could have given up earlier, and my editor and people were like, “Give it up already” because I had been editing for so long. I was so often accused of being an over-perfectionist, of not being able to let go. But I kept going, and I’m very glad I did because I discovered the key to the film in the final cut.

PR – Would you agree that it’s the responsibility of the filmmaker to be willing to go to war for their work, to nurture and to protect it, and to make sure it’s as good as it can possibly be?

JM – I totally agree with that and I did that all the way through this. I was exhausted because I had to fight constantly [laughs] just to get the shots I needed, and to keep on going in the editing.

I think good films come from this passion. I very often find, not with everybody but with directors, that their best films are their early films, and you think, ‘Well, why is that?’ It’s because of that passion and fighting to the end to make sure this thing is protected, and it’s whatever is in your head and you know to be true for this film, and you fight to make sure it gets there.

PR – Could we say that the creative process can become as natural as breathing for a filmmaker, who either loses the passion or their need to continue making film lacks an earlier creativity?

JM – It is interesting and maybe it doesn’t stop at filmmakers. You see that with groups too, when their best music is at the beginning, or with actors when their greatest work is in their early days, and you can see they get a bit lazy. I don’t know, but passion is definitely the key to good art; there’s no doubt about it.

PR – Do you believe there is a transformative aspect to the creative process where you change as a person, and do you think the audience should also be transformed by experiencing a film?

JM – I can only speak for myself, but that’s certainly my hope. I am more enticed by the questions rather than the answers, and I love the idea an audience is left contemplating – thinking about it the next day and contemplating what it means to them. What I love about film is how it’s able to access the unconscious mind. There’s something that’s not fully logical about it, and hopefully if it’s a good story and it’s done well, there is something where it reaches an unconscious level.

Some people are blown away by the movie, it’s a cathartic experience for them, and other people don’t like it. Every human being is completely different, but that’s why I hope to just continue making work that’s very personal to me, because I feel the more personal you can be, the more universal it is – [Konstantin]Stanislavsky said that and I think it’s very true.

How wonderful it is if it’s a transformative experience [laughs], that would be the ultimate aim. I’m not so arrogant to think that it is, but hopefully for some people will be.

Alice is on Curzon Home Cinema, The BFI Player, Amazon Prime Video and Barbican Cinema On Demand from Friday, July 24th.

The image at the top is of Josephine Mackerras (provided by EUREKA! Copyright: David Santini); the image in the middle is a still from ‘Alice’.

Life is a Long Quiet River (La Vie Est Un Long Fleuve Tranquille)

Posted on by Paul Risker

When nurse Josette (Catherine Hiegel) is spurned by her married lover, Doctor Mavial (Daniel Gélin) one Christmas Eve, she spitefully switches two babies. Twelve years later the two families are thrown together when they learn of her vengeful act – the wealthy Le Quesnoy family took home a daughter, Bernadette (Valérie Lalande), while the disreputable Groseille family took home a son, Momo (Benoît Magimel).

Director Étienne Chatiliez’s debut feature provokes mixed feelings. While it possesses charm and humorous beats, it feels decidedly lethargic, which is counterintuitive to satirical comedy. John and Roy Boulting’s I’m Alright Jack (1959) and Heavens Above! (1963), two works which cement the comedic genius of Peter Sellers, are a benchmark for satirical cinema. They have not only abundant energy, but they show restraint, and convey the satirical message visually and verbally. But this is absent in Life is a Long Quiet River (La vie est un long fleuve tranquille), which is a little too quiet, and even at 90 minutes, it begins to feel long.

Watching filmmakers take shots at social establishments or the class system is a rather enjoyable activity – we are so often powerless and our voices unheard, but satirical comedy gives our collective frustration some gusto. But here, the situational comedy of two families from different walks of life thrown together, seems more content to poke fun at itself than to develop itself into a reputable rebuttal.

The class issue is not a diminishing concern for us socially nor economically, albeit the way it’s perceived or discussed has changed across the years – the image or news reports of homelessness to middle class working families queuing at food banks paints an evolving picture of the contemporary class system. Three decades after its release, Life is a Long Quiet River finds itself caught between the past and the present. It is timely to a degree as a satire of class, albeit the changing reality for the bourgeoisie makes it outdated, and yet it serves to convey the changing face of the class system. Reality is hurting the bourgeoisie, or disenfranchising members of the once middle class, and satirical comedy may no longer be called for to issue a scathing attack.

The theme of nature versus nurture arises, which agitates any consideration of class, and the limitations of one’s station of birth that can broaden the conversational relevance of Chatiliez’s film. The structure, with a type of prologue and epilogue sees the adulterous doctor and nurse dismissed for much of the film, and their absence is unfortunate as they make a delightful dramedy double act. Even the serious racial and immigration issues are underdeveloped, from the opening act of violence against immigrants, to the relationship of Hamed (Abbes Zahmani), the Arab store keeper with the Groseille family, in which ethnicity creates another tiered class system.

In an interview featured as part of the Blu-ray extras, director Chatiliez spoke about taking time away in a remote location with his co-writer Florence Quentin, and how the pair bought books on how to write a screenplay. He says that during walks she would pose him questions, and this is how he came across his story. His first feature was a rousing success at France’s César Awards, picking up prizes for best screenplay and début work. In spite of his previous experience directing short films, his foray into feature filmmaking had been delayed by his doubts about executing a feature. What’s problematic is that watching this interview, the filmmaker is more interesting than the film itself, which never got going.

Life is a Long Quiet River is out now on Blu-ray.

Alice

Posted on by Paul Risker

A happily married Parisian wife, the titular character of the drama, finds her life turned upside down when she discovers that her husband has emptied all of their accounts, they’re a year behind on their mortgage, and he has squandered all of her inheritance on prostitutes. Desperate to support herself and her son, Alice (Emilie Piponnier) begins working as a high-end escort.

When we allow someone to love us, we hand that person the power to irrevocably hurt us. Alice’s introduction portrays a seemingly picturesque life: apartment, husband, child and friends. But this is the proverbial calm before the storm, and when her perfect life is suddenly uprooted and she learns the truth, we feel her powerlessness, we feel her anger, we feel her sense of despair and hopelessness. She chose to trust her husband François (Martin Swabey) and she pays the price for it.

Director Josephine Mackerras and actress Piponnier, convey a dramatic moment with an emotional authenticity that reaches across the screen. We connect with Alice through an empathetic understanding, bonding with her through a shared vulnerability, a rooted fear of betrayal and dismissal. The actress’ skill is the delicate impression she first casts of Alice, who seems impervious to rage, but then her meekness gives way to anger, frustration and an ambivalent temper. Piponnier nurtures her character, but never loses touch of its delicate soul. The startling revelation feels genuine by the way she emotionally morphs, and throughout the drama, Mackerras and Piponnier sync Alice with the theme and idea of change – the Parisian housewife skin shed, yet whose aura remains unchanged.

The story is thematically centred around not only how one copes with adversity, but what one will do to survive. If the film successfully engages with the audience, it will provoke us to contemplate whether admiration for the strength to survive adversity supersedes social mores of acceptability? Mackerras offers us a litmus test, subtly asking, ‘How do you see Alice?’ When she first meets fellow high-end escort Lisa (Chloé Boreham), she’s told that the reason she’s chosen by the agency is, “It’s that good girl thing you have going.” As Alice sets on down this path, the question whether we see her is not framed by such extreme terms as either a moral condemnation or acquittal, but the nuanced question of whether we see her differently?

In one scene Alice says, “I don’t feel any different.” Lisa responds, “You mean now that you’re a fallen woman? If you’re in love, having sex may be the best experience of your life. If you are raped, maybe it’s the worst. But in our case, things are under our control, the exchange is fair. So why should you feel different?” Our experiences inevitably change us, but the film looks to whether we place too much emphasis on the idea of change, contemplating whether there is a core sense of self or identity that remains intact. If Alice does not feel any different from these new experiences, then should we see her as a different person? Alice challenges us to ask if our empathy is genuine, and whether we understand the complexities of identity, and do we apply that to how we engage with people outside of experiencing stories? Our response to this film may offer an insight into whether we are agents of humanity or slaves to judgement guided by naïve social mores, because as Alice says, “Prejudice is more powerful than logic.”

It often feels that we are living in an ignorant world, populated by cruelty and indifference. Mackerras’ Alice is a film aware of the black and white morality, because as the family lawyer, one of Alice’s first clients warns her, “When it comes to society’s morals and ethics, there will always be innocent victims.” It’s ironic in a world that is often missing its ethical spine that such distinctions should exist. Alice, who together with Lisa, offer a refreshingly mature and non-adversarial perspective that there are no victims, only players in a drama. Here we discover a humility, a momentary relief or escape from the hubris of our contemporary world.

At its heart, Alice is a story about empowerment, and it offers a thought about how one should live their lives that can resonate with all of us. Aside from the familiar notions of trust and love turning sour, the way in which the drama unfolds reminds us of the larger point that love is a privilege, it is not a right. Mackerras’ feature début is unassuming, mixing humour and anxious emotion with humanity and a little romanticism to good effect. Under her skilled direction it finds a way to be what it needs to be in any given moment, and effectively compromises the seriousness of drama with the lightness of comedy.

Alice is on Curzon Home Cinema, The BFI Player, Amazon Prime Video and Barbican Cinema On Demand from Friday, July 24th.

Make Up

Posted on by Paul Risker

Teenager Ruth (Molly Windsor) arrives at a Cornish holiday park to see her boyfriend Tom (Joseph Quinn). When she finds smeared lipstick stain on his mirror and a strand of red hair on his T-shirt, she becomes fixated on a mysterious red-haired woman.

It’s night, and Ruth watches her taxi leave. In the background the silhouette of a woman stood in the lit open doorway draws our gaze. From the dark exterior to the lit interior where she meets Shirley (Lisa Palfrey), the manager of the holiday park, this simple image, this singular moment is a metaphor for the drama set to unfold.

Director Claire Oakley constructs her psycho-sexual drama with a template of the interaction between the conscious and the unconscious. She directs our attention to the mystery that fixates Ruth and its narrative expectations, before a stirring of Ruth’s sexual desires and eventual awakening – repositioning the film as introspective and not extrospective, of the unconscious exerting dominance over her conscious.

Ruth chooses to repress her suspicions, staying silent as the pair continue to consummate their relationship. This echoes the friction between repression and confrontation that forms the drama of psychology. When she begins working alongside the vivacious Jade (Stefanie Martini), the scarlet nails and the hint of red in her hair only heightens Ruth’s growing fixation. The reason Ruth chooses repression over confrontation is because she has chosen Tom and this place as her escape from home, leaving her with nowhere to go. How this event will impact or shape her future is uncertain, but apprehensively passive, she finds herself caught off guard by something stirring inside.

The film conveys an interest in the angst of transformation and of not knowing ourselves. It motivates us to question how our natures are forged, and are there aspects to us lying dormant, waiting until it’s awoken? Is life similar to the tide washing up on the beach and gradually revealing new layers of ourselves? Ruth’s experience is one that bonds us all, because we are caught between planes we do not control: the unconscious and the external world. While the latter can stimulate us, rousing our emotions and sexuality, so what feelings, thoughts and ideas that dwell in the unconscious can surface. We control neither and both are stimulated by stimuli that we cannot necessarily consciously recognise. Ruth is an example of how our identity and persona, our life is a narrative we co-author with a mysterious metaphysical collaborator.

Film is a mosaic or a jig-saw puzzle, and Oakley meticulously puts the pieces of her puzzle together. In one scene when Ruth is picking out a shade of nail varnish, Jade tells her, “It’s not what it makes you look like, it’s how you feel.” These words find the soul of the film, and Jade who is in touch with herself, her emotions and sexuality, juxtaposes effectively with Ruth’s repressed anxiety or ambivalence. The haunting touches borrowed from genre cinema convey the of emotion and desire swelling beneath the surface. It’s about what we can feel or sense, not necessarily what we can see. The haunting set pieces where Ruth sees someone in a vacant caravan, or the eerie feeling that danger lurks, uses horror to convey the tension and discomfort of Ruth’s internal angst. Her unconscious becomes a tangible presence, and yet it does not compromise the emphasis on sense of feeling.

Oakley shows she is a little mischievous, playing her own game of concealment in one haunting moment, by revealing what Ruth saw in a later flashback. She understands the need for her protagonist to know more or have seen more than we have, that turns Ruth’s mind into a labyrinth of images and thoughts, in this case sexual ones that heighten her unrest. We often live or experience life inside our mind, and never too heavy-handed with the narrative, Oakley allows the spark of something to just occur. This is true to the way emotions, thoughts and impulses are triggered without warning. The fading relevance of the smear of lipstick and strand of red hair conveys our shared difficultly to understand the origin of certain experiences.

Those that want to know how this awakening defines her will be disappointed, and they will have missed the point. What this event means for Ruth is unclear, the ending a statement that an experience will come to pass, and however it changes us, we move on with the tide of life. The closing image recalls François Truffaut’s 1959 first feature, The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups) – the character gazing out to sea, to the uncertain future upon which they will set sail. For all its uncertainty the drama circles back to the opening visual metaphor, and the definitive transition from the dark into the light.

Make Up is in cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema from Friday, July 31st. On BFI Player in November.

American Fighter

Posted on by victorfraga

Tthe latest film from stuntman/filmmaker Shaun Paul Piccinino is a fictional sequel of Alex Ranarivelo’s semi-biographical American Fighter: The Wizard. Set in California in 1981, Ali Jahani (George Kosturos reprising his role from four years ago) is a college freshman on a wrestling scholarship faced with the daily racial discrimination in Reagan’s America while trying to raise money to sneak his ailing mother out of war-torn Iran. With the little money that he has, his roommate (Bryan Craig) introduces him to his Uncle McClellan (Tommy Flanagan of Westworld and Sons of Anarchy) who manages high-stakes underground fights. In the tradition of Rocky and The Karate Kid (John G. Avildsen, 1976 and 1984), Ali trains and saves up every penny he has to make sure his mother has a new life in America.

Unlike the 2016 film written by Ali Afshar, which was based loosely on his life as a Persian teenage expat who was a wrestler at California State University before setting his sights on film, Piccinino and screenwriter Carl Morris run roughshod over the 2016 drama with a film that is a clunky pastiche of Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Amy Heckerling, 1982) meets Out of the Furnace (Scott Cooper, 2014) with the obligatory 1980s-styled montages of training and fighting with the not-so-subtle images of bar-brawling violence.

The film attempts to acknowledge racial discrimination with shiftless energy exemplified in a scene when Ali’s love interest (Allison Paige) comforts Ali after being victimised by members of the wrestling team as she says, “It’s 1981, racist assholes like that should be tarred and feathered.” Apparently, she didn’t vote for Ronald Reagan or watch the Moral Majority’s decade-long televised onslaught towards people of colour, various religious affiliations and the LGBTQ+ community.

While giving up his pounds of flesh in the underworld of illegal fighting, Ali builds a complex comradery with Duke (Sean Patrick Flanery), a booze-addled medic and reluctant lackey for McClellan who tries to ply Ali’s head with philosophical musings that would make Terrence Malick scratch his head with confusion. The conflicting and strained relationship between Duke and McClellan is enjoyable for anyone who’s either missed Million Dollar Baby (Client Eastwood, 2005) or has been living under a rock when Creed (Ryan Coogler, 2016) was Sylvester Stallone’s return to Hollywood recognition.

With the series of flaws the film poses, the only saving grace is Kosturos who gives a solid performance elevating the film from its sporty schmaltzy script. As a stand-alone film, it does follow the upbeat-Rocky-styled narrative but the whitewashing of Afshar’s original story is as painful as a 90-minute full-nelson.

American Fighter is out on VoD on Monday, July 20th.

Cruel Intentions

Posted on by victorfraga

Fitting for a movie celebrating its 21st birthday, Cruel Intentions centres around teenagers embracing the rewards adulthood offers. Sebastian Valmont (Ryan Philippe), a timid, tempered teen tempted by the bodies women hide, is offered the congenial deal of a lifetime. Setup by the wills, wants and shoulders of stepsister Kathryn (Sarah Michelle Geller), Sebastian sets out to relieve high school sweetheart Annette (Reese Witherspoon) of her cherished cherry. Led by the ultimate incentive, Sebastian is promised the fullness of his stepsister’s body, gifting the teen the opportunity to sleep with two hot babes.

And so it follows on the sensual, sexual heels Stephen Frears’s Dangerous Liaisons and Milos Forman’s Valmont (1988 and 1989, respectively) started. Kumble’s yearning, youthful tale completes a trilogy of Choderlos de Laclos’ vignettes. Set in the swanky Manhattan squares, the film tastily updates the continental stakes into something more contemporary, considered and American. (Bathetically, Cruel Intentions ended up starting its own trilogy; it shouldn’t have!)

Desperate to shock its audience, the film revels in its aristocratic domain. Taken in the context of today’s standards, the film isn’t too extraordinarily outrageous, but it does proffer some steamy moments of inspired introspection.

Ten minutes into the film, and the flirtatious gears ramp up. After an-on-the nose conversation between the terrible siblings, Sebastian sets out on his mission, with nought to lose but his overpriced jaguar. Money seeps its ugly head in every scene, capturing a proposition even more alluring than sex. Kathryn, her laced legs ready to prey on her next victim,enjoys the surroundings of her plush, pillowed bed. Sex fills her language, her lifestyle and her literal tongue. It’s less a lifestyle choice, and more a life choice. Behind all the furnishings, comes a woman who finds herself vilified for enjoying the past-time that has lingered since time began. Prescribing to the behaviours, properties and clothing of a lady, Kathryn nonetheless aches for an acceptance of her wilder character.

Then there’s Annette, the apple of her father’s eye. She’s the pawn of the story, an object of her father’s notoriety. Eyeing up the daughter of his school’s venerable headmaster, Sebastian regards Annette less as an object of desire, and more like an immaterial object. Without spoon-feeding them, Kumble admirably lets his viewers impart their own moralities on the persons in question. The one exception is Sebastian- played by a slightly wooden Philippe-who begins to question the carnal crusade he has set out for himself.

Sebastian makes for a perfect yuppie, yielding financial and material reward over spiritual, soulful gain. He’d make a good President-yes, a Trump joke-relishing the rewards a woman’s thighs delivers. But more importantly the quest for satisfaction carries him on a more important route to self realisation.

Cruel Intentions is on Amazon Prime on Friday, July 24th.

Spaceship Earth

Posted on by victorfraga

A popular history documentary of mid-century America isn’t complete without a quick montage of carefree hippies with bell-bottoms and flowers in their hair. Of course, many of these young baby boomers would eventually decide that it’s hip to be square, but not all hippy communes were so passing. Spaceship Earth tells the story of a commune that was as countercultural as it was ambitious, pragmatic and genuinely brilliant.

The group, led by eccentric polymathic explorer John P. Allen, was inspired by theatre, art, business and science. And instead of picking just one of them, they chose to pursue all. Their first big project took them from San Francisco to New Mexico, establishing the Synergia Ranch 15 miles south of Santa Fe. There they thrived in self-sufficiency and anti-consumerism, displaying all kinds of grit and ingenuity. Key inspirations during this time were notions of ecological disaster, especially those found in the work of William S. Burroughs.

Admirable stuff, but their next project is where Spaceship Earth has you checking the facts (it’s all true). The team relocated to the California coast to build Heraclitus, a sizeable ocean going vessel based on the junk boats of Hong Kong harbour. The ship was a resounding success, giving them access to the world’s oceans and continents.

All of the enterprise and freedom is compelling to behold. This is living. But then there’s that nagging question – how did they fund all of this? Well, they weren’t a commune but a corporation; they established companies and turned profits. And not only did they have the business nous to make deals, they had Ed Bass, heir to a billion-dollar oil fortune. Therein lies the formula for success – ideas, leadership and hard currency.

During this period they embodied the idea that “small groups are engines of change”, but their final project would grow beyond their dynamic and their control. It was the Biosphere 2, an enormous domed ecosystem reminiscent of Silent Running, Douglas Trumbull’s 1972 environmental sci-fi. Recognising the weight of this undertaking, the group indulged their pastime of shouty, sophomoric am-dram dross with a production of ‘The Wrong Stuff’, a farce about all the ways in which the project could go wrong. Performing this, apparently, would avoid the problems manifesting in reality. A frank and open discussion would have sufficed, surely, but each to their own.

Alas, despite the majesty of their creation, the $200 million project would unravel before the media, public and Ed Bass’s Wall Street cronies. The damage of cynical mass attention and internal power struggle was just too great. Thankfully, Biosphere 2 would become University of Arizona property by 2011, fulfilling some of its original purpose rather than becoming some meretricious theme park.

The three-tiered narrative of Spaceship Earth captures the big ideas and big energy of the troupe, but it is not a documentary that will make you feel. You are unlikely to be invested. However, it casts light upon a massively overachieving microcosm of hippy culture that, judging by the critical reception, is news to many.

Spaceship Earth is out on digital platforms and in selected cinemas on Friday, July 10th.