Month: October 2020

Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful

Posted on by victorfraga

Everyone has an opinion about how women should act these days. If you ask Julie Bindel, she’d call the act of surrogacy an act of patriarchal oppression; if you ask Cardi B, she’d describe her newest hit single WAP as her purest act of femininity; and if you ask Russell Brand, he’ll mumble about the “actions of women in the gaze of men”, in various forms of undress. And it is in this changing landscape that we watch Helmut Newton’s work open to delirious and derisive eyes. Newton conjured (yes, yes), whole portraits of women, dressed in their most intimate guises.

A landscape artist, Newton covered his subjects with the contradictions, colours and shapes their naked forms best espoused. Depending on your prerogative (mine will go un-aired), Newton either liberated his subjects, or subjected them to his liberal fantasies. Director Gero Von Boehm is reluctant to offer his audience any concrete answers, instead leading viewers to impart their opinions on the process itself.

Straight from the beginning, the film lunges into the deep end with wild, wonderful abandon. Newton directs a model -her breasts angled directly to the camera’s shifting eye – as to how best she should convey the emotion needed to sell the “scene”. She bows to his every command, capturing a primacy that millions of models have exhibited in the many art forms exhibited around the world.

Newton, whose work developed from intuitive feeling, had a work ethic that better resembled an artist than a craftsman, and the detail that runs through each and every portrait shows a master committed to their work. Vogue editor Anna Wintour considered his art a contrast to the beauties that splashed all over her pages; vocalist Grace Jones thought his perversion matched her own; while Marianne Faithfull- a chanteuse who had watched the steamy 1960s through the vehicles she rode with The Rolling Stones – felt he showed her true self with nothing but a leather jacket to cover her.

Amidst the dazzling panoply came two photographs which shocked viewers with their resolve. The first decorated viewers with an assortment of wheelchair apparatus, while the second posed Isabella Rossellini in an uncomfortable stranglehold. Rossellini, impressed with David Lynch’s singular talent, understood the emblem as an artist in their director’s hand, but the violent imagery proves hard to reconcile for a generation calling out for a more considerate Hollywood.

And yet, complaints are few and far between for the artists. Jones admires the photographer’s resolve to cover her most private areas with shrewd, stern effect. It was a man who captured the models on film, but it was the subjects who brought life to the stills. Newton, who died in 2004, is represented by virtue of his wife, and the film predominantly features women as central players, producers and performers. It’s not my place to call this documentary a feminist statement, but it certainly adds to the growing conversation.

Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful is available on Curzon Home Cinema and Digital on Friday, October 23rd.

Striding Into The Wind

Posted on by victorfraga

To some, few clichés are as beguiling as ‘the grass is always greener on the other side’, especially when it pertains to travel. Mountains, beaches, the open road; wherever one wants to go, they expect joy, excitement and catharsis. However, the truth may be closer aligned to that other phrase, “same face, different place”.

Kun (You Zhou), a recalcitrant and disillusioned young man, is certainly seduced by the former. During a break from his film course in Beijing, the sound recordist buys a battered old Jeep from a car dealer, who inspires him to take it off-roading across Inner Mongolia. The vast grasslands of the Mongolian plains are a heady thought, yet none of this excitement transfers to Wei Shujun’s Striding Into the Wind, which is rendered torpid by a bloated documentary style that focuses on, oh well, not very much.

Many scenes unfold with the camera fixed in place as people enter and leave the shot, getting on with their business. Typically, this amounts to improvised chattering which is all very natural but not very interesting. Scene after scene outstays its welcome, causing your eyes to wander as the film preoccupies itself with banalities. So much of its 135 minutes could have been nipped and tucked, allowing time develop the personality of Kun, an insouciant figure in baggy trousers and a loose, flowing shirt. He’s all mullet and morosity with very little registering on his glum face, lacking the depth and sympathy of Christopher McCandless, the real life figure of Into The Wild (Sean Penn, 2008) who rejected society for an ill-fated journey across the American continent.

We follow Kun for what feels like several hours as he meanders from scene to scene, attempting to raise funds for his trip. The camera floats around, observing both Kun and the wider environment, providing a fascinating snapshot of the Chinese vastness. Some of Kun’s exchanges resonate, too, especially when his girlfriend points out his lack of action, “You said you’d go to Tibet… the Khingan Mountains… stop sticking your head in the clouds.”

Eventually, Kun makes the trip with a film crew, yet the experience is far from what both he and us, the viewers, hoped for. Frustratingly, Striding Into the Wind does have something to say about the futility of young men’s anger and travel’s failure to break one’s malaise, but it says them in a manner that utterly fails to engage either the heart or the intellect.

Striding Into The Wind has just premiered at the BFI London Film Festival. Its was shortlisted at the Cannes Film Festival in 2020 as one of only two finalists among Chinese-language films.

Rose: A Love Story

Posted on by victorfraga

This British indie shows the potential of director Jennifer Sheridan and its claustrophobic setting makes it perfect for late-night home viewing, despite a few gaps in the narrative. Rose (Peaky Blinders’s Sophie Rundle) is an aspiring writer who lives in a remote cabin in a snowy forest. She’s in the company os her husband Sam (Bodyguard’s Matt Stokoe), who hunts their food and provides for their general well-being, they live a seemingly idyllic life far from the madding crowd.

Rose is coping with a strange illness that prevents her from ever leaving the house, Sam has the habit of locking her up when he goes outside and leeches very often seem to be on the house menu. There is something is rotten at the heart of this bizarre lovenest. All tensions come to the fore and when the couple opens their doors an uninvited guest one fateful evening.

The script, penned by Stokoe, deftly zeroes in on the borderline parasitic nature of the helper. On one hand, Rose is an ailing person who sees herself powerless towards her partner’s sense of duty and entitlement over her life. She feels that her condition is a burden. She seems to concede that this domestic arrangement is somewhat wicked. Sam is dominant and doting primarily because he loves his spouse. Eventually, however, he reveals his monstrous face.

With so much to mine from, it is unfortunate that the story resorts to predictable turns, with the attentive viewer able to see them from a mile away. Once established, neither of the protagonists fail to develop any further, and the dialogue becomes hackneyed and flat. There is some action in the middle of the story, but that too feels a little tiresome.

The filmmaker fares much better when making use of their location in order to create tension. There is pervasive and disturbing sense of dread, elegantly captured by cinematographer Martyna Knitter. The photography inside the cabin constantly raises the question: is the real danger lurking indoors or outdoors?

It certainly would have been easy to tell this tale through the constraints of classic horror, with gory images and jump scares, but that is clearly not the film Sheridan set out to make. Instead, Rose: A Love Story presents is a tale of doomed love, and how two people can united through darkness.

Rose: A Love Story has just premiered at the BFI London Film Festival:

One Night in Miami

Posted on by victorfraga

The premise of this film, adapted from Kemp Powers’ 2013 stage play, is audacious. It tells a fictionalised meeting between Cassius Clay (Eli Goree), Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) and Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge), which sees them converge in a Miami hotel room to celebrate Clay’s victory over Sonny Liston in February 1964. To imitate such iconic figures is hard enough, but to make them credible and compelling is even harder. Regina King’s debut feature does both.

The men are introduced in various states of adversity. Ali is knocked down by Henry Cooper, Cooke bombs at the Copacabana, and Jim Brown meets with a seemingly benevolent white man who leaves him standing on the porch, “You know we don’t let niggers in the house.” Malcolm X, meanwhile, is disillusioned with Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam, the organisation that provides him with everything, from housing to security.

These problems are sidelined when they arrive in Miami, invigorated by their friend’s historic victory. Each figure and actor is given the floor, and each of them impresses. As Cassius Clay, Eli Goree is under the most pressure but he quickly proves his deftness, capturing the rhythm and tone of Clay’s Kentucky accent in a performance that’s as good as or even superior to Will Smith’s turn in Ali (Michael Mann, 2001).

Similarly impressive is Leslie Odom Jr.’s work as Sam Cooke. His vocals have a remarkable likeness to Cooke’s velvet smoothness, perhaps the most beautiful voice in all of popular music. It is his clashes with Malcom X, however, that leave the biggest impression. Indeed, their altercation serves as the story’s heart, for it represents the contrasts and controversies of the civil rights movement.

Malcolm objects to what he sees as Cooke’s impartiality. Unlike his peers, Malcolm sees everything through the prism of race and he vouches not for equality but for black supremacy. Jaded by the political arena, he is bitterly strident in his worldview and becomes vindictive in his attacks. For instance, he plays one of Cooke’s records to the men and lambasts the content of its lyrics. Malcolm then contrasts this to the work of Bob Dylan – whom he dismisses as a ‘white boy from Minnesota’ – suggesting that Cooke couldn’t hope to achieve such craft.

“You just don’t get how everything’s not so black and white”, Cooke retorts. A businessmen as well as a singer, Cooke explains to Malcolm how his nous as a producer has put money – lots of money – in black musicians’ pockets. During a brief lull, Brown concurs, “I don’t think you should begrudge Sam for being about his business. If the goal is for us to be free, then the key is economic freedom.” Frustrated with Malcolm’s tirade, Clay makes his own interjection, “We’re supposed to be friends.”

During their exchanges both good and bad, One Night in Miami excels as a film of period and performances. Like in most good stage adaptations, the setting is small but the characters are big, their dialogue punchy and engrossing. Most importantly, though, is that the imaginings of the script ring true, presenting a compelling vision of four black icons at a crossroads both personal and political.

One Night in Miami premiered at the BFI London Film Festival in 2020, when this piece was originally written. It’s on Amazon Prime from January 15th, 2021.

Limbo

Posted on by victorfraga

Based on its imagery and synopsis, Limbo may appear to be a grim piece of social realism; a Loachian call to action in the vein of I, Daniel Blake (2016) or Sorry We Missed You (2019). However, Ben Sharrock’s film is a quirkier affair than that, with shades of Local Hero (Bill Forsyth, 1983) and Withnail and I (Bruce Robinson, 1987).

The story concerns Omar (Amir El-Masry), a young Syrian refugee sent to a remote Scottish island to await the outcome of his asylum request. There, he meets a cross-section of the refugee crisis, all of them young single men from places such as Afghanistan, Nigeria and the Middle East.

These characters put a human face on the crisis. “There is better signal in the middle of the Mediterranean,” laments one African man as he observes the harsh Scottish terrain. Indeed, there is an elemental force in Limbo; the breeze, the cold and the emptiness cast a stark pathetic fallacy over the men’s purgatory. The titular limbo has lasted 32 months and five days for Farhad (Vikash Bhai), another middle-aged Afghan at the mercy of the Home Office. Just how long Omar will have to wait is a crushing prospect.

The bleakness of the Hebrides is compounded by their dour accommodation, which is practical but not conducive to any kind of happiness. The walls are pallid, the carpets are hideous, and the blocky television plays low-resolution episodes of Friends, that milky fodder of a sitcom.

Again, Sharrock’s film is not relentless miserablism. The monotony and anguish of these men’s lives is often drily humorous, especially the moments with Helga (Sidse Babett), an offbeat official with corkscrew hair, and Boris (Kenneth Collard), her paunchy sidekick with a 1970s’ wardrobe. Together they teach them about social norms and run childish exercises such as ‘I used to’, which descends into farce as it exposes the refugee’s boredom, “I used to… be happy before I came here”. It shows an understated wit that is a welcome creative choice from Sharrock, who also wrote the screenplay.

The quirks and pathos of Limbo’s characters are framed by Nick Cooke’s novel cinematography. The 4:3 ratio that gives the aesthetic a photographic quality, like an old viewfinder. It serves to highlight the men’s constriction, how they’re afforded a mere snapshot of a country that may reject them in an instant.

Limbo is showing at the BFI London Film Festival. It will be on Mubi soon!

The mastermind behind the shooting

Posted on by victorfraga

Michel Franco recently achieved Silver Lion success at last month’s Venice Film International Festival for his latest movie New Order – a cautionary fable of a violent class revolution against Mexico’s 1%ers. Franco was invited to the San Sebastian International Film Festival to act as an Official Selection jury member under President Luca Guadagnino and to exhibit his film in the audience’s choice section, known as Perlak.

Despite a hectic schedule of screening, galas and award givings at San Sebastian, Michel found time to sit with DMovies and representatives from other publications for a round-table interview to talk about the social climate of Mexico explored in New Order, his thoughts on revolution (ill-advised), politics (defiantly apathetic) and whether he is interested in exploring the televisual medium (adamantly opposed).

Before sitting with Michel, I had only met two Mexicans in my life. One was a bioscience researcher in Spain for a conference. He recounted to me his six-hour daily commutes across Mexico City and spoke passionately of his gratitude for the opportunity to visit Europe as something that he never imagined possible for himself. The sincerity of his words would have melted the most frigid of hearts. The other was a stuck up, privately educated student on her year abroad whose family owned horses. This neatly illustrates the ongoing tensions of the city and country at large that are explored by New Order. Our own Editor Victor Fraga was lukewarm on the film when seen at Venice, citing fatigue for the fetishisation and stereotyping of violence in films coming out of Latin America (Victor is Brazilian). Indeed, the film is extremely and, perhaps, gratuitously violent.

Instead, I found that the casual, clinical nature of the physical and systemic brutalities illustrates the futility of violence and the film itself contains no winners from either side of the class divide. It even stops short of the everyday atrocities committed against Mexican immigrants in US detention centres (see recent whistleblower accounts of forced hysterectomies in border detention centres). With these points in mind, we turn to Michel for more in-depth analysis. Spoilers follow.

New Order premieres in the UK in October as part of the BFI London Film Festival.

…

.

Charles Williams – What is your background? Which side of the class divide are you on?

Michel Franco – You can guess – I’m part of that privileged bubble, of course. I live four blocks away from the Louis Vuitton store. I could walk to the filming location, three minutes and I was there. However, there are eight main characters. I try to have Martha and Christian as their roles are as important or more important than the others. I try to balance things, if that’s possible in an 80-minute movie. It was quite ambitious. I don’t know if I achieved it or not.

On dystopia as reality:

I started thinking about the movie six years ago, writing four years ago and the script was finished three years ago. Shooting ended a year and a half ago, so it’s been a long process. I was thinking of something set in the near future but socially it was already relevant – with the Yellow Vests and Chile, the Arab world and Hong Kong and, later, Black Lives Matter and the pandemic. Each of those was a confirmation that there was a real need for the movie. Plus, the race of fascism, of governments putting more effort into controlling people and militarising instead of improving living conditions. So the dystopian world seemed to be closer than I thought six years ago.

On real-world social movements today:

MF – They’re having to do all those demonstrations in 2020, 60 years after Martin Luther King was assassinated, just to prove that Afro-Americans need to be treated equally. Jesus, I mean let’s not kid ourselves. The only positive thing is that with Black Lives Matter you see a mix of people – it isn’t only Afro-Americans on the streets. That was a nice image of “okay, we are all against this way of living”.

On the use of the lurid green paint as a symbol for the revolutionary movement:

MF – Green is on the Mexican flag and green is the colour of hope – you know, for the ecology movements. I like to think that there’s a backstory even though it’s not portrayed in the movie that maybe this started as peaceful and then it kept growing up until the point that it’s portrayed in the movie.

On remaining apolitical:

MF – I really prevent talking about politics because it’s been so hard to make this fucking movie. So hard. It was really walking a thin line and I’m afraid if I talk about politics, even a little bit, all the attention will be rerouted. It’s not only “Michel doesn’t want to talk about politics”… I’m interested in the social dimensions of the conflicts that I’m portraying. Politicians come and go and if you make a movie for political purposes, or reasons, the process of making a movie is so long that by the time you release it the political purpose will be gone. Lost. So I don’t care about politics.

On the brutal violence depicted:

MF – I think showing violence is a positive thing if you portray it in a realistic way. If you portray violence for the audience to enjoy watching it then the director is picking it from a wrong angle.Ii don’t think that the violence in this movie is ever meant for the audience to enjoy and most of the violence is off-screen anyhow. It is just getting started when I cut away. I think what’s really violent is the everyday interactions when, for example, Pilar commands the nurses to help around the house and clean this or that. When Daniel accuses the woman who took care of him when he was growing up as a kidnapper. That he can easily point her out as a criminal without any basis – to me that’s the real violence, isn’t it. When these wealthy people are doing these violent things it’s almost invisible.

On the inevitability of class movements resorting to violence:

MF – When poorer people are rioting there is blood because they have no other way to show their discontent. I think the system is made in such a way that the vast majority of people cannot succeed and cannot progress. I’m convinced that the system is built in this way. I like the ending of The Leopard (Luchino Visconti, 1963), there’s this famous saying “everything had to change and be moved around in order to stay the same”. Many people, when the film is finished, they say “why new order” if it’s what they had before, or worse?” That’s exactly what I mean.

On the Mexican film industry:

MF – There’s a lot of things that make Mexico a hot country for cinema now. When I made my first movie, eight movies were shot per year in Mexico. Or 10, maximum. Now we have 200, only 12 years later. That has to do with the support of the government and with the community. We have a great film community but there are constant threats of pulling back the government aid so that would kill cinema. Especially with the pandemic, they’re cutting money here and there. Countries that see cultural, educational cinema as a luxury will pay a much bigger price in the long run.

On the support of fellow Mexican directors:

MF – Before going to Venice, and after, I got phone calls from, you know, Cuarón and Iñárritu. Reygadas, Amat Escalante and Gabriel Ripstein. We’re all saying to each other “if you need anything…”. Now Iñárritu is going to be back in Mexico shooting like Cuarón just did. So, whatever he needs, everyone is waiting. It’s a good community.

On future filming plans:

MF – I want to keep making movies in Mexico, because that’s where I was born and raised. Writing is the hardest part, I think, and writing about a place I know and people I know in my own language is already super difficult. I already made a film in the States, which is Chronic (2015), with Tim Roth. I think I’m going to make more in the States, only because I want to work with certain actors but also because Mexico and the States, we are so close. It’s by far the country that I have visited most. We always say that we’re “too far from God and too close to the states”. Poor Mexico.

CW – Do you want to continue working at this scale?

MF – Yes, yes – I don’t like big budgets. The question is super easy. The bigger the budget, the less control you have and the less freedom. If you take more money from more people they have more to say… I’m just happy making a movie every two years, or even every year if I could. If I can, I’d love that.

On his early film influences:

MF – The first few movies that caused a strong impact on me… When I was 14 or 15 I saw A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971), Los Olvidados (Luis Bunuel, 1950) and Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino). Pulp Fiction came out in 1994, I was 14 and it blew my mind, you know. Of course now we know it, there was nothing new in it but at 14 you see the main character killed halfway through the movie and then he reappears… Actually I also saw in cinemas a Mexican movie, Midaq Alley (Jorge Fons, 1995), and it also has that kind of structure. That was great because I said “Ah! Not only Tarantino can make that but you can!” You know what movie I’m talking about? It’s the only Salma Hayek movie in Mexico. It’s a great one, based on a Nobel prize-winning Egyptian novel and it’s a great movie. It’s playing with the same structure so those movies were important to the Mexican movies from the 1990s.

CW – This might sound odd but I wanted to ask whether you play any video games? Some of the environmental storytelling techniques on display in New Order are very reminiscent of modern games. The clues are made available for the viewer to piece together the wider story.

MF – It’s not a bad question but, I just play soccer, Fifa. I guess I’ll play some video games then. They’re fun, I’m not against playing video games… I hear they’re very violent though!

On streaming and the possibility of directing a series:

MF – By far, I prefer working for cinema. I like cinema a lot more than TV. I thought about it before shooting the movie and I might do it. My favourite filmmakers – people like Fassbinder, Bergman and Kieślowski -, they all made TV. To begin with, the size of the screen. You shoot differently when you’re thinking of cinema and TV. But I think these series are killing the mystery of cinema, they’re really going backwards. They’re just like this storytelling without any cinematic purpose and the problem is that young directors and actors don’t even notice the difference. You hear silly things like “you can go deeper because you have more time on the screen”. They don’t understand that the art of cinema is the opposite. Read Bresson, his notes from years ago… It’s dangerous. This streaming culture is super dangerous.

CW – I had a very strong experience when I left the film. It was the first film I saw in an unfamiliar venue and as I left the room the attendant from the festival was there, in his black uniform with his mask, ushering me in a direction that I hadn’t entered by. Having just seen faceless soldiers processing people through violent detention I had a very real, visceral urge to recoil from this authority figure. You don’t get reactions like that from small screen viewing.

MF – When I was still editing the movie and doing the sound design, we were already in the current situation. It was so strange to emerge from my editing to see empty streets and so on… [Here in Spain] they are going back to curfews, but mostly for populous areas and not the posh neighbourhoods.

Michel Franco is pictured at the top of this interview. The other images are stills from his latest feature.

The Reason I Jump

Posted on by victorfraga

In 2007, Japanese teenager Naoki Higashida penned The Reason I Jump, a short biography. At the time, Higashida was a 14-year-old nonverbal autistic child, his communication with the world totally stifled. Some may have thought he had no emotion or imaginative intelligence, but this book proved otherwise. It revealed a mature introspection that conveyed his perspective with real insight and articulacy.

Higashida’s book is the spine of this film, his commentary relayed to us by narrator Jordan O’Donegan. With this context, filmmaker Jerry Rothwell sets across the globe, capturing the lives of those with nonverbal autism. We meet Amrit, a painterly teenager from India; Joss, a young man from Kent; Ben and Emma, hockey-mad high schoolers from Virginia; and Jestina, a mid-teen deemed a ‘devil’ and a ‘witch’ from Sierra Leone.

There is variation in their conditions. Some talk, others are almost completely silent, but they’re all classed as non-verbal, unable to articulate basic thoughts and urges. There is variation in temperament, too. Ben and Emma generally appear happy and motivated by their friends, family and hobbies. Amrit and Joss, though, display a greater deal of anguish. We see Amrit’s face coil with displeasure as she obsesses over her latest artwork, and Joss is prone to violent outbursts, screeching as he throws his weight around.

Of course, this behaviour can be intolerable – hateful, even. Yet their actions are not out of spite but immense frustration; they are shackled by their inability to express themselves. It is here that Naoki’s commentary explains why he jumps: “I react physically to feelings of happiness and sadness. So, when something happens that affects me emotionally, my body seizes up as if struck by lightning. But, when I’m jumping, it’s like I’m shaking loose the ropes that are tying me down, as if my feelings are going upwards to the sky. If only I could just flap my wings and fly off to some faraway place.”

Time and again, the narration illuminates with its observation and insight, as does the articulacy of Ben and Emma when they speak through letter cards, which allow them to spell their utterances letter by letter. It’s easy to mistake their blank silence for a lack of empathy or awareness when really it is a tragic disconnect between their mind and their mouth. So when Ben spells, letter by letter – “I think we can change the conversation around autism by being part of the conversation” – it will be an affecting realisation to some that people with nonverbal autism can very much speak for themselves.

However, there is a big caveat to all of this, one that is not mentioned in the documentary. It is claimed that Higashida dictated The Reason I Jump using the aforementioned letter cards, a technique of facilitated communication and rapid prompting, both of which are classified as pseudoscientific practices. Consequently, some researchers have disputed that Higashida is the author, arguing that the book’s content has been greatly influenced by David Mitchell, the English translator, and the adults in Higashida’s life. It is disingenuous of director Jerry Rothwell to ignore this important consideration. However, his film remains a compelling piece of work, depicting a series of case studies with a sensuous visual style.

The Reason I Jump is showing at the BFI London Film Festival.

Wildfire

Posted on by Paul Risker

Two sisters are reunited when Kelly (Nika McGuigan), missing and feared dead, returns home. Lauren’s (Nora-Jane Noone) conflicting feelings of relief and anger are complicated by her sister’s mental fragility, and the intense bond of a shared childhood trauma. Living on the Irish border in a community that was torn apart by the Troubles, Kelly and Lauren’s anxieties are as political as they are personal, and her return unsettles her sister’s peace at home and in the community.

In an early scene, Kelly startled by a barking dog runs off and passes a placard that reads, “Prepared for peace. Ready for war.” What should we make of these hand-painted words that are an intentional backdrop?

Set in the present day, Brady opens her drama with archive news footage around The Good Friday agreement, and the pressure on the British government to protect the peace agreement during Brexit. The words are a cry of the difficult reality of forgiveness in a country scarred by extreme pain, and the embers that continue to burn in an imperfect and fragile peace agreement. There are those still spoiling for a fight, those who see the agreement as a betrayal.

In the context of Brady’s study of sibling relations, Kelly and Lauren have been ripped apart and shaped by the political turmoil. As the eldest, what Lauren knows about their mother’s death that Kelly doesn’t, emphasises that which is not spoken. In one scene, Brady shows us the compromises that have made peace possible, that lands with a visceral and unsettling force. Brady taps into looking past the truth of what has happened, for the sake of moving forward. She also addresses the lineage of suffering, passed down from one generation to the next.

British audiences with any sense of conscience should question their governments ignorance during this Brexit process, and the foolishness of any action that could reignite the troubles of the past. In one scene Kelly swims in the lake which sits on the border, and she tells some teenagers who are also in the water, that you can simultaneously be in the south and the north. It’s a simple moment, but next to a darker moment when out swimming, Kelly infers the peace of no border, and the danger of a border.

Wildfire goes beyond the politics to offer us a glimpse of the human cost of the violence. It’s an Irish story about the past through a story of sibling relations. Brady appears to suggest that future generations will find a distance from the pain, even if the hurt from the Troubles can never fully heal. The trauma and its scars are a part of the history of Northern Ireland, just as the siblings can never disavow, only resolve their personal troubles.

The dog in this early scene is a metaphor for the unresolved past snapping at Kelly’s heels, and as the story unfolds, the words are those of certain persons. Kelly remembers her mother saying, “This place is hell. With those murderers free, I’ll never be at peace.” Neither daughter is prepared nor ready – they are representative of those that are caught in the crossfire of the Troubles, just as their mother was. Reconnecting and confronting the past, secrets are revealed, and together they are entrenched in their personal conflict to find a peace their mother knew she never would. This sibling relationship is symbolic of the country’s story – the difficulty to distance oneself from the past, and the courage and strength to find a means to move forward

We hold our breath as we watch Lauren in particular, who has a husband, friends and a job, stand on the precipice of holding her life together versus it falling apart. The emotions Lauren experiences reach out from the screen, possessing a raw reality as she simmers or boils over. For anyone battling issues of anger and frustration, feelings of hurt or anxiety, Wildfire will strike a raw nerve. It’s a film that compels you to watch until its conclusion, but through identification with how one thing being said or done spirals out of control, versus the compartmentalisation of thoughts and feelings, it’s an uneasy yet emotionally rewarding experience.

Wildfire is showing at the BFI London Film Festival

Relic

Posted on by victorfraga

There is something distinctly unappealing about the houses of elderly, lesser-visited relatives. Peeling wallpaper, yellowed crockery and the whispered suggestion of piss stains; a kind of mustiness that recalls the slipping of decades past, heavily blanketed with forgotten perfumes. With her feature-length debut horror, Natalie Erika James invokes and twists these sensations to their exaggerated conclusions, examining in the process the excuses we give for not attending to our vulnerable dependants as often as we perhaps should.

In a boondocks town outside of Melbourne, Kay (Emily Mortimer) and her daughter Sammy (Bella Heathcote) have returned to their ancestral home. Grandma Edna (Robyn Nevin) hasn’t been seen for several days and a concerned neighbour has phoned it in. It’s not the first time Edna has had episodes but nothing like an outright disappearance. The house and backwoods are searched to no avail and so it is surprising and unsettling when Edna returns some days later, bruised and dirtied but acting like nothing has happened. She’s somewhat… changed, though. Whether this can be ascribed to progression of dementia during the “several weeks” since her daughter last visited or whether something darker lurks beneath is the central dilemma of the piece.

The metaphor of cognitive decline is inspired fodder for the horror treatment and, thankfully, it doesn’t play as cut and dry as “the real horror was mental illness all along!” However, in providing a broader approach, there is an overburdening of ideas that muddies the water and shows up those elements that could do with greater finessing. These slow burn, intimate family horror flicks live and die by how well they layer increasing levels of tension upon one another within a cohesive overall structure. To take the obvious comparison of Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018) as an instructive example, there lies a perfectly constructed diorama of a film where all elements feed into one another like clockwork. In the pursuit of perfection, slight mistakes are therefore egregious. The sound design of Relic is particularly at fault, a speaker cone-rupturing intro giving way to a tone that tends big and overly-portentous in otherwise dead-end moments. Intriguing concepts and clues as to the overall picture are thrown up at such a rate that they cannot all quite resolve in time.

Not to say that there aren’t some expert flourishes. Twisting angles and stuffed corridors create the illusion of telescoping space and a sequence of in and out fades gives a sighing sensation from the mouldering, decrepit dwelling. The house takes on an animus of its own and it is unclear whether the delusions of Edna are ultimately feeding it or vice versa. This choice to display the sometimes toxic codependency between the elderly and their habitual homes as a major theme is a beguiling one and helps to establish Relic amongst the more cerebral horror offerings of contemporaries Ari Aster and Robert Eggers.

The family element is delivered well, too, with believable inter-generational casting helping to carry the point. Kay and Sammy have one of those first-name basis relationships that speaks to past troubles but are pragmatic enough to pull together when needed. Mortimer and Heathcote sketch this out well and Robyn Nevin capably manages the mood swings and mutterings that could speak to dementia but could also allude to something darker. In all, Relic is a great first showing for Natalie Erika James – a thoughtful horror that might lead you to visit your grandparents more often. Whilst you’re at it, maybe take some cleaning products with you and do something about that black mould… Before it’s too late.

Relic is showing at the BFI London Film Festival. A theatrical release is scheduled for Friday, October 30th. On Shudder on Tuesday, May 11th

The dazzling colours of British-Pakistani rap

Posted on by victorfraga

The British drama Mogul Mowgli has just premiered at the BFI London Film Festival, and BFI Distribution has picked up it up for a highly sough-after theatrical slot later this month, on October 30th. It tells the story of a British-Pakistani rapper about to embark on his world tour, when he’s tragically diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. The movie was directed and written by American-Pakistani helmer Bassam Tariq, and co-written and starred by British-Pakistani actor Rizwan Ahmed.

Dan Daniel sat down with Bassem in order to find out more about the origins of the film, his creative collaboration with the Ahmed (who happens to be a rapper, and all the songs in the movie), the learnt lessons and also a curious visual connection between Islam and the NHS!

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Dan Daniel – Riz Ahmed has a writing credit on the film. How collaborative was the process of making Mogul Mowgli?

Bassam Tariq – Massively collaborative. We took every step together on building the character of Zed (Riz Ahmed). He’s an amalgamation of both him and I. And you know, the world that we built around Zed, so much of it was his family and my family and the conditions and everything – we took bits and pieces of both of our lives and that’s how we put it together.

DD – So how did it all begin? What made Riz and you decide that you could make this film?

BT – Yeah, that’s a good question! Cinereach are this incredible arts organisation who gave us some money – seed funding – to go to Pakistan to explore. So Riz and I went to Pakistan together and it was really our first time getting to know one another and seeing what we were about and how we can work together. And in that relationship, there in that trip, it cemented to me the importance of music in this film and how we could possibly use music to ground these experiences and build something that was unlike anything we had ever seen before. And I think I wanted to use the arc of music and Riz’s lyrical capacity because I think it’s quite exciting, so I wanted to push him musically. So much of this film was seeing how far I could push Riz into doing exciting and weird things!

DD – Were the lyrics penned by Riz in their entirety?

BT – Yeah! Riz would pen all the lyrics but he would always run them by me and I’d say, “I don’t know if that makes sense, maybe we could try it this way or this way etc.”. But it’s all Riz, sitting there in a room right before we’re about to film like “uh what if we say this? What if we say that?”. I also have to say that Adam Biskupski our editor did a phenomenal job of building out some of the lyrics because some things got really long, so we had to cut it down and work out, how we do make sure the lyrics are still making sense and we are cutting in a way that feels elegant and we are not losing the rhythms of the words, or the intensity?

DD – Your film is a great character study. Did you and Riz have any rehearsal time in order to build his performance?

BT – We had maybe a day or two in rehearsal, man. I was able to meet with all the actors one-on-one and tell them, “look, we are all going to be figuring this out on the day and we are bringing our best”, and I think that kind of worked for us, that element of throwing ourselves into it and not having too much preparation, so I think it was giving people the space to explore and bring their best, and it was exciting to see how people were really able to shine that way. There were a lot of meetings I had with Nabhaan Rizwan, the actor that plays RPG, and of course Riz and I were working non-stop on the project together, so everything was like a weird rehearsal when we were figuring things out.

DD – How long did it take from writing to shooting the film?

BT – No, not much. We were just writing and I had written a draft and people would come on board and we were like “oh no, we have to make this better and better”. We were building the tracks as the train was moving.

DD – You used a lot of greens and teal shades and the aspect ratio is unusual. Please tell us how you styled the film visuals.

BT – Yeah man, so green is a really important colour in the Islamic culture as well as the Persian and South Asian Pakistani heritage. And the thing about teal is that it’s the colour of the NHS, like gowns and outfits. It felt like we wanted colour to be in the film was very sparse but when there was colour, we really wanted it to hit you so it always quite earned. It was tough. We knew most of this film would take place in hospitals so we wanted to figure out a way to build up to the points of colour and the rest of the film to be quite neutralised. It’s a risky decision I would say, and it’s a bit hard to watch sometimes because we’ve purposefully made the film a bit messy and it’s tough thing to sometimes look at because you want to make things prettier as a filmmaker, right!. But you know you have to be in service of the story, and the story called for it to be shot this way and I felt that’s how we had to bring it to life.

DD – Have you gained any more insight or learnt something about about yourself while making this film?

BT – Oh man. I think every experience you have as a filmmaker is honing your instincts, helping you understand how to work with different kinds of people. You’re learning so many things along the way you know, somebody said to me once, “if you are not embarrassed of who you were a year ago, you’re not learning enough” and I find that to be so great because when I look back where I was last year, I feel so embarrassed versus where I am now, because it’s like “oh my god I can’t believe I did those things, and I think that’s a good way to exist, when you look back and you see all those things that you’ve learned.

I’d say the biggest thing I’m learning is how to really trust your instincts and to really guard them, and also bringing people in in a really respectful way and how you speak to them. If there’s one thing I’m really proud of that we did in this film was that we tried to create a very welcoming environment and we tried to be very kind and respectful to everybody in the crew.

They could’ve been on any other project but they chose to be on mine so it really meant a lot to me. I think also having a sense of gratitude in every step that I take when I work on this stuff. Because you never know if your stuff is gonna get made as a filmmaker. You don’t know. This could be my first and only film. And that’s what I have to learn to live with.

DD – I do hope we’ll see more films from you in the future!

BT – Thank you Dan, that means a lot to me.

The image at the top of this article is of Bassam Tariq, the one in the middle is of Tariq and Ahmed, and the one at the bottom is a film still of Ahmed

Mogul Mowgli

Posted on by victorfraga

This is a very personal and intense labour of love by director/writer Bassam Tariq and co-writer/star Riz Ahmed. Ahmed has established himself as one of Britain’s most versatile actors, with Mogul Mowgli serving as a showcase for his acting talent as well as his rapping skills.

Zed (Ahmed) is a Pakistani-Muslim rapper who has left behind his closely-knit family in London in search of a gig in the US. He is divided between his successful rap career abroad and his cultural identity at home. In other words, he is split between modernity and tradition. After two years without seeing his family, he flies to the UK for a short visit. He’s about to start of his first world tour. Tragically, he is diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease while preparing for the new challenge and also attempting to reconnect to his parents. We learn that “his body is attacking itself”.

Tariq is a visceral director. He deftly uses fast editing, complex soundscapes and vibrant colours in order to take viewers into Zed’s British-Pakistani world and his conflicted mind. The visual compositions inside the mosques, the concerts and the hospital are awe-inspiring. The pre-Covid parties are brimming with joy and splendour. Shades of green and teal blue add a touch of tradition and melancholy to the story. Ahmed’s rap creations – which he penned himself – are both lyrically and rhythmically impressive. It is exhilarating to hear his inner struggle through his art.

Gradually, this drama becomes more interested in Zed’s medical condition than in his identity struggle. We experience the well-trodden ground of physical therapy and difficult medical chats. However, we never dive into Zed’s mind deep enough in order to understand his suffering in more detail. While the visuals and the songs are very compelling, the writing isn’t strong enough to support the narrative. The use of medical suffering as a proxy for inner struggles does not work entirely.

Mogul Mowgli showed at the BFI London Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It is out in cinemas on Friday, October 30th. On VoD the following week.