Author: Jack Hawkins

Amanda

Posted on by Jack Hawkins

When Isis surpassed Al-Qaeda as the leading jihadist group in 2014, the following three years would see a wave of terrorism sweep across the Continent, killing dozens in France, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, Spain and the UK. Of these countries, France was hit hardest, with over 200 people dying between 2015 and 2017. This spectre of tragedy looms over Amanda, Mikhaël Hers’s quiet, unassuming drama.

The title refers to 7-year-old Amanda (Isaure Multrier), who lives with her mother Sandrine (Ophélia Kolb), an English teacher at the local école. Amanda and her mother have an authentic chemistry that’s established in flowing, naturalistic sequences in their light and airy Parisian apartment. Particularly endearing is a scene in which Sandrine explains to her curious daughter the meaning of ‘Elvis has left the building’, which, I must add, educated me as well as young Amanda.

All of this is tinged with dread, for Sandrine, we know, will be killed in a terrorist attack. When this moment comes there is no punch to the gut, but there is no cheap sentimentalism, either. The real pain comes after the event when David (Vincent Lacoste), Sandrine’s twenty-something brother, has to explain to Amanda what happened to her poor mum.

It is David who carries the bulk of the emotional weight in this tragedy. His occupation is that of factotum; when he’s not greeting tourists at Gare du Nord for a vaguely dubious landlord, he’s pruning trees and shrubs at local parks. He’s a good guy though; he may lack ambition and direction but he has a shaggy-haired affability that suggests he’ll get his sh*t together at some point.

David’s prospects are spiced up when he meets Lena (Stacy Martin), a Gallic beauty who moves into one of his employer’s properties. You feel the butterflies in their stomach as they hit it off, such is the understated power of Hers’s direction and the actors’ performances. Lena, however, is also caught up in the attack, suffering wounds to her arm and, most perniciously, her mind.

This is what Amanda is about – the fallout of tragedy. A moment’s violence can cause a lifetime of suffering, but it can also heal old wounds, too. For David and Amanda, Sandrine’s tragic death becomes an olive branch to Alison (Greta Scaachi), David’s estranged mother who moved to London long before her granddaughter was born. It is unclear whether amends will be made in the long run, but the situation rings true for those who have experienced such familial shock.

Ultimately, despite its context, Amanda proves to be a warm, subtle film with an effortless naturalism, yet it lacks a visceral quality that could have made it a more absorbing, affecting piece of work.

Amanda is in cinemas Friday, January 3rd.

1917

Posted on by Jack Hawkins

When the trailer for 1917 debuted, it bore a similar aesthetic to Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan, 2017) – not an entirely bad thing, but not the preferred style, either. I had shared the minority view that Nolan’s film was, in the words of The Guardian’s David Cox, ‘bloodless, boring and empty’. The menace and spectacle of its opening quarter petered out into litany of tepid peril overcast by Hoyte van Hoytema’s gloomy cinematography.

Thankfully, 1917 makes a quick break from these facile similarities with its tight pace, raw emotion and staggering camerawork. It is one of those rare films where, as a reviewer, you risk getting stuck in a rabbit hole of superlatives – so here goes it.

Firstly, the performances, though good, are not what drive this film. It is instead an intensely sensory experience that demands to be seen on the biggest and best system. Roger Deakins’s masterful camerawork bobs and weaves through the trenches of the Western Front in seemingly one unbroken take, capturing the men of the British Expeditionary Force with a visceral fluidity. After ten years of excellent cinema, 1917 will be counted amongst the decade’s most impressive and absorbing.

Everyone in this film is under overwhelming pressure – few more acutely than Lance Corporals Blake (Dean Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay). The young men are ordered to carry a message across enemy territory that will prevent a British battalion of 1,600 men, which includes Blake’s brother, from charging into a death trap.

Chapman and MacKay both give strong performances. Blake is a chipper lad given to jocular anecdotes and crude jokes, while Schofield, apparently the more experienced of the two, has developed a war-weary reserve. There’s a mutual respect and affection for each other, though, and their extraordinary experiences only makes their bond stronger.

This tight, simple premise and character dynamic sets the stage for one of the most remarkable portrayals of combat in recent memory. It may not have the thematic depth of Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick, 1957), but Mendes conveys the all-consuming stress, misery and exhaustion of total war. Many of the men Blake and Schofield meet are in varying depths of hate and prostration, but most are driven by a stoic resolve to keep moving forward, whatever their dismal fate may be.

Key to the film’s immersion is Dennis Gassner’s epic set design. We follow the troops as they traverse yard after yard of dank trenches, and the scope becomes even more grimly arresting when they scale the parapet, entering a vast, ghoulish wasteland of sodden craters, splintered trees and mangled bodies. Indeed, there are moments across No Man’s Land that resemble the body horror of David Cronenberg; the attention paid to the grisly details of death and decay is disturbing as it is appropriate.

Inspired by the stories of his grandfather, director Sam Mendes and DOP Roger Deakins have made the biggest and best First World War film of the 21st century. This is important, because for better or worse, cinema has the power to reinvigorate history, to spread knowledge and awareness. After all, the First World War has been overshadowed by the conflict that followed, with its clearer moral compass and even greater level of destruction. Mendes’s film, while not a depiction of the war’s terrible stalemate, will nonetheless assault one’s senses and give them some idea of what their forebears endured in Britain’s deadliest war.

1917 is in theatres Friday, December 10. On VoD on Monday, June 1st. On Netflix on Friday, September 10th (2021)

Jojo Rabbit

Posted on by Jack Hawkins

Jojo Rabbit is like watching a sixth form revue whose student cast has just finished the CliffsNotes history of Nazi Germany and decided to play it for self-satisfied laughs. Now, Taika Waititi’s offbeat humour may have worked for Thor but it does not work for Nazism; his shtick is far too lame and toothless to produce anything nearing satire. And this is what Waititi thinks he has made, satire. It is a high-minded ‘anti-hate’ piece aimed squarely at contemporary right-wing populists. A worthy target, many would agree, but this edgeless juvenilia won’t challenge their beliefs for a moment.

The film’s milky satire is doubly disappointing, for the Nazis – both the first wave and their pathetic admirers – are very sensitive to parody. Charles A. Ridley realised this back in 1941, when he edited footage of Nazi processions from Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1935) to fit the tempo of the Lambeth Walk, which one Nazi Party member had dismissed as ‘Jewish mischief and animalistic hopping‘. When Joseph Goebbels saw Ridley’s film, he was reportedly so furious that he burst out of the screening room – all 5ft 4 of him – and expressed his impotent rage by ‘kicking chairs and screaming profanities’. Alas, Jojo Rabbit is unlikely to rankle the contemporary far-right in such a fashion.

Parody aside, the central conceit of Waititi’s film is a tired morality tale. The story concerns Jojo (Roman Griffin), a 10-year-old boy whose imaginary friend is none other than Adolf Hitler (Taika Waititi). A committed member of the Hitler Youth, Jojo’s fanaticism is challenged when he discovers his mother has given refuge to a young Jewish girl named Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie), who hides in the rafters of the house. What are the odds that Jojo slowly warms to Elsa and sees the inhumanity of Nazism? That’s right, it’s essentially American History X (Tony Kaye, 1998) thrown into a dull stew of Life is Beautiful (Roberto Benigni, 1998) and third-rate Mel Brooks.

However, trite narratives can be buoyed by strong performances, witty dialogue – all manner of things. But in Jojo Rabbit there is nothing more than a litany of tired jokes and perfunctory German accents, with the worst of all coming from Rebel Wilson – the corpulent comedian of the moment. Negligibly better is Sam Rockwell, who coasts along as Captain Klenzendorf, a washed-up veteran. Waititi himself features as Adolf Hitler, in a performance that may have been daring 80 years ago but still wouldn’t have been funny.

A notably bad cameo comes from Stephen Merchant, who plays local Gestapo leader Captain Deertz. It is Deertz and his men who are most guilty of the film’s tiresome “Heil Hitler” gag, which consists of the characters repeatedly saluting Hitler to each other in a convivial manner. Clearly, Waititi thought this gag was a real winner, for in one scene each man of Geertz’s crew greets Jojo and Klenzendorf with cheeky salutations to the Fuhrer – it is an insufferably naff attempt at parody.

But remember, Jojo Rabbit isn’t just a parody, it’s an ‘anti-hate satire’; it’s here to help, to educate. In an interview with Vanity Fair, Waititi said, ‘there’s a danger we will forget the events of World War Two and there is another, deeper danger that some of those things will repeat themselves.’

This is an utterly risible statement. How can Waititi expect his film to comment on reality when it bears no relation to it? Jojo Rabbit is a facetious mess that presents Nazi Germany as a wacky pantomime full of goofy caricatures – it couldn’t complement even the most junior history syllabus. After all, the Gestapo did not consist of lanky, bumbling fools; they were sadistic thugs who maimed, tortured and killed – and that should be made abundantly clear to any student of history.

It would be unfair, however, not to mention the few, minor strengths. Scarlett Johansson gives the best performance as Rosie, Jojo’s mother. She has a ballsy eccentricity that steals several scenes, especially one in which she pretends to be Jojo’s absent father. There’s also Yorki played by Archie Yates, who shows a knack for dry humour that could bode well for the young actor.

But make no mistake, Jojo Rabbit is an abject failure. With its witless script laced with cringeworthy modern slang, you’ll find sharper humour in a YouTube Downfall (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2004) parody. And as a commentary on racism, there is more satire in five minutes of Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2013) than the entirety of Jojo Rabbit. Waititi said that his film will ‘piss off a lot of racists’, but with an offering this milquetoast I’m afraid that’s just not going to happen.

Jojo Rabbit is in UK cinemas Wednesday, January 1st. On VoD on Monday, April 27th.

Shooting the Mafia

Posted on by Jack Hawkins

Letizia Battaglia followed a most dangerous career path – capturing the life and crimes of the Mafia in Palermo, Sicily’s capital. John Gotti may have loved celebrity, but none of the Mafiosi from the old country appreciated a young, brazen woman confronting them with a Pentax. ‘If he could, he would have killed me’, Letizia remarked of Luciano Leggio, a leading figure of the Sicilian Mob.

Her work, presented in stark monochrome, depicts death and suffering in the arresting style of Don McCullin and Philip Jones Griffiths. Thematically, however, Letizia’s work may share more with that of Alexander Gardener, who used photography – then in its infancy – to confront the public with the horrors of the American Civil War.

This is what compelled Letizia to take some 600,000 photographs for the L’Ora newspaper – to shatter any romantic notions of the Cosa Nostra by depicting the rank brutality of their war on civil society. And it worked, her catalogue of dead men, women and children made a powerful impression on the people of Sicily, driving support for the heroic anti-Mafia judge Giovanni Falcone.

Shooting the Mafia isn’t just an organised crime documentary, though. It is the story of a girl and woman making her way in Sicily’s patriarchal society. Longinotto presents her subject in an intimate, engaging way, placing Letizia’s narration against a combination of stock and archival footage to tell her story.

However, this look into her personal life can overstay its welcome. Letizia’s early life is given a quaint, romantic quality, yet the continued emphasis placed on her later relationships can be of dubious interest. After all, it is her association with organised crime that makes her interesting, not her love life. Yet, despite this, there is a resonant tenderness about how she and her lovers talk about what their relationships meant. There is no acrimony, just an open discussion of why things transpired the way they did. It’s a reflection of the contentedness that can come with age.

Her work in public life makes for the most interesting viewing, though. Letizia states the importance of having a clean political system and she is absolutely right. Corruption is the harbinger of dysfunction, destitution and death. And the man who took the fight to the Mafia – Giovanni Falcone – was a hero. When asked about his life-risking commitment to the state, he answered, ‘it’s not about state, it’s about society’.

And the island society he was trying to save was wracked with terrible violence. ‘We’d never known violence like it, there were 1000 murders one year’, Letizia recounts. She confronted this menace head-on, documenting as many crimes as she could. Indeed, it was the photos she didn’t take that ‘hurt her the most’.

Shooting the Mafia is in UK cinemas on Friday, November 29th.

The Cave

Posted on by Jack Hawkins

The Cave opens with an establishing shot of Eastern Al-Ghouta, a dusty tableau of decrepit rooftops set against the mountains of the Syrian desert. Five to ten seconds pass before the scene is disturbed by a black object hurtling towards the ground, exploding in a billowing cloud of smoke. It’s a missile, and it’s followed by five more, causing untold terror and misery to the 400,000 people trapped in the devastated city.

This was the reality of the Siege of Eastern Ghouta, which the Syrian Government laid upon anti-government forces from April 2013 – April 2018, killing some 18,000 people and displacing 105,000 more. The Cave is a sobering depiction of the siege and the remarkable people who laboured to restore the threads of their crumbling society. Sadly, it is a struggle that continues in towns and cities across the ruined country.

The focaliser of the story is Dr. Amani Ballou, a young female paediatrician who managed a subterranean hospital known as the Cave with her colleagues Samaher, Dr. Alaa and Dr. Namour. We see bed after bed rush through the emergency entrance, the victims screaming in pain or sprawled out limply, clinging to life. Many of them are so young that they can barely articulate their suffering, they just cry or stare in confusion, covered with blood and detritus.

Dr. Amani is stoic and decisive in the face of this immense pressure, yet the carnage of the civil war is not the only thing she faces – she also receives attacks on her gender. The most notable example of this occurs when a man blames the medicine shortage in Al-Ghouta on her being a woman, ‘find someone who can help me… a male manager who can do a better job.’ What follows is a patriarchal spiel of how women should stay at home, but he is left stumped when Dr. Namour interjects, ‘as a doctor, has my work been bad in the presence of a female manager? Hospitals don’t rely only on one person, it’s teamwork.’

The filmmakers – led by director Feras Fayyad – observe this teamwork with skilful humanism. We see the chemistry between them amongst all the chaos; there are jokes, stories, bickering, but above all there is unerring purpose and perseverance. They make maximum use of the limited resources at their disposal and employ little rituals to keep them sane, such as the classical music Dr. Namour plays on his iPhone during surgery- ‘we don’t have anaesthetic, but we do have classical music!’, he tells one ailing patient.

For some, Syria has become a war rather than a country; a place of relentless violence, partisanship and religious fundamentalism. The Cave shows us the humanity of this awful conflict, immortalising the heroes who risk their lives to save thousands. And if you needed yet another reminder of the terrible loss this conflict has wreaked, four staff members lost their lives during filming of The Cave. They were: Abdul Rahman Alrihani, managing director; Wassam Albas, ambulance driver; Ezzedine Enaya, nurse; and Hasan Ajaj, nurse.

The Cave is out in UK cinemas Friday, December 6th.

Clemency

Posted on by Jack Hawkins

A mood-driven piece about the morality of capital punishment, Clemency depicts the pernicious effect this macabre, bureaucratic practice has on those who implement it. Particular attention is paid to Bernadine Williams (Alfre Woodard), a death row warden who is prostrate with all manner of grief.

The film opens with Bernadine overseeing her latest execution – a lethal injection – as it goes horribly awry. We see the veneer of protocol and civility fall desperately apart as the prison doctor fails to find a vein in the inmate’s writhing body. Eventually, he manages to pierce his femoral artery, into which he pumps the three following chemicals – midazolam, to sedate; vecuronium bromide, to paralyse; and potassium chloride, to stop the heart. It is a genuinely visceral sequence that brings to attention the 75 botched lethal injections that have occurred since 1982, when the method was first implemented in the state of Texas.

However, the power of the opening belies Clemency‘s overall glacial pace – it is, to be frank, a portentous slog of a film. Of course, this is a subject that requires tact and solemnity, but Clemency has all the tiresome earmarks of a ‘serious’ indie – the staring, the drawn-out takes, the sparse dialogue. That’s not to say the film’s performances aren’t impressive – they are. As Bernadine, Alfre Woodard makes the best of the laconic script, imbuing her every fibre with barren anguish. Aldis Hodge brings a similar pain to his character Anthony Woods, who is scheduled to be Bernandine’s next execution. Both actors know how to command a static camera but their dramatic range is stunted by the coldness of Chukwu’s script and direction – they may be impressive, but they’re not involving.

The film is so lifeless, so torpid, that it feels like it’s taken a shot of midazolam with a dash of vecuronium bromide. But this is doubtlessly intentional, for Chinonye Chukwu’s film is very much a mood-piece that’s personified by Bernadine’s dejected malaise. She is, as her husband Jonathan (a charismatic Wendell Pierce) puts it, an empty shell. This mood and characterisation is all rather one-note, though. We can only be exposed to her lugubrious expression for so long, and the protracted sequence of her snotty nose towards the film’s end – in full 4K – is just beyond the pale.

All of this speaks to the myopia of Chukwu’s canvas and the brevity of her dialogue; she should have looked beyond Bernadine Williams and the procedure of capital punishment. Take the example of Dead Man Walking (Tim Robbins, 1995). It offers a more dynamic account of capital punishment for it considers perpetrators, victims and the state. The characters’ emotional range goes beyond glumness and apathy, too.

Clemency premiered at the BFI London Film Festival in October, when this piece was originally written. It’s out on VoD on Friday, July 17th.

Rambo: Last Blood

Posted on by Jack Hawkins

It’s been 11 years since we last saw John Rambo kill dozens of people with guns, arrows, knives and even his bare hands – and with good reason. Rambo (2008, Sylvester Stallone) was so genocidally violent that we needed this respite, this breather.

Stallone had seemingly gone mad, directing a film that was far more vicious than the previous three films combined. He lifted the stark, savage aesthetic of Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998) and applied it to the pulp of the action genre. There wasn’t a single memorable character in it, granted, but as a spectacle of murder it was something to behold.

So when the teasers for Rambo: Last Blood did the rounds, I had flashbacks of gore drenched .50 cal machine guns and all the other wanton gratuity that had so amused me as a 15-year-old boy. Surely Rambo had been a one-off, a moment of madness? After all, The Expendables 3 (2014, Patrick Hughes) was a 12A.

The BBFC’s issuing of an 18 certificate, then, came as a very welcome surprise. Not even the litany of negative reviews – or Rambo creator David Morrell’s abject disgust – could dissuade me from spending £8.50 at the Tottenham Court Road Odeon (there were no press screenings).

Well, the results are mixed. It starts off strongly with Rambo breaking a man’s clavicle, digging his finger into the wound and roughly fiddling with the bone until it breaks off. It’s nice – you don’t see that everyday.

Rambo then visits a brothel wielding not his signature 10” blade but a big metal hammer, which he proceeds to bury in the heads – and crotch – of several punters. This was a bold move to take, because whether it’s Drive (2011, Nicolas Winding Refn), Kill List (2011, Ben Wheatley) or You Were Never Really Here (2017, Lynne Ramsay), we live in a culture that’s saturated with hammer-based brutality. And I’m delighted to report that John Rambo, although being late to the party, decidedly holds his own here.

After remorselessly stabbing and even beheading a few more loathsome goons (he used his knife for that one), Rambo invites the cartel back to his ranch, which sits upon a labyrinth of weaponised tunnels. It is here that John reminds us of the full extent of his bloody ingenuity, using a variety of blades, tools and bombs to dislocate, dismember and destroy. However, while there’s some good stuff in there, it doesn’t match the sheer scale of Rambo’s Burmese massacre (perhaps that should have been the title?), and it’s for that reason that Rambo: Last Blood isn’t quite the send-off I had hoped for.

It is, even to the most nostalgic fan, a shockingly empty piece of work. The revenge plot is the tritest fodder imaginable and the dialogue was clearly written by someone in a catatonic state. Speaking of catatonic states – Sly Stallone’s performance borders on the inanimate. Of course, John Rambo has never been a character of great range, but Stallone’s work here is barely distinguishable from that of The Expendables, Escape Plan and his other recent, derivative efforts. In fact, the whole film is barely distinguishable – and that is a sure sign that John J. Rambo should go on permanent R&R.

Rambo: Last Blood is in theatres in September. On Sky Cinema and NOW on Friday, May 21st (2021).

Coup 53

Posted on by Jack Hawkins

I learnt of the 1953 Iranian coup d’etat during research for my masters dissertation, which considered British media coverage of the Suez Crisis. I viewed the Anglo-American staged coup, which came as a result of Prime Minister Mosaddegh’s nationalisation of Iran’s oil industry, as a precursor to President Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal 3 years later. However, the Iranian coup had far greater consequences. The toppling of the democratically-elected PM sowed lasting resentment not only in Iran but the wider Middle East. To understand the current state of Iran-US relations, one has to understand the Iranian coup of 1953.

Coup 53 certainly wants us to understand, but not in the BBC style of traditional, top-down history. Rather, filmmaker Taghi Amirani puts himself front and centre in the documentary’s opening half hour, inviting us into his personal 10-year journey of archives and interviews across the world. During this he brims with information and passion, yet there is a growing sense of self-indulgence – is this just an esoteric passion project, or is Amirani really going to contribute to the history of the coup? It is only when he begins to pursue the details of the UK’s involvement in Mosaddegh’s downfall that Coup 53 gains some traction. After all, only the US has begun declassifying relevant CIA documents – the UK remains officially cagey.

Amirani’s most pointed investigation centres around British operative Matthew Darbyshire, a mysterious quasi-Bond figure whose presence has been banished from tapes and snipped from archival transcripts. There is a moment of genuine curiosity and excitement when Amirani unearths a full transcript of Darbyshire’s account of the coup, but what is he to do with it? His solution couldn’t be better – ask Ralph Fiennes to play him. The passages with Fiennes, who delivers the transcript with a caddish charisma, gives Coup 53 a much needed theatrical and narrative boost, giving the project a greater sense of not only purpose but also intrigue and entertainment.

Ultimately, however, its most insightful moments come in the final stretch of summaries from the many distinguished talking heads. They pose one of the more probing questions of counterfactual history – what would Iran, a regional power of over 80 million inhabitants, look like today if secular democracy had been allowed to continue? Alas, we can only speculate.

Coup 53 premiered at the BFI London Film Festival in 2019, when this piece was originally written. It’s out in virtual cinemas across the UK, Ireland, the US and Canada from Friday, August 21st.