Author: John Bleasdale

The Child (A Criança)

Posted on by John Bleasdale

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If there’s a sound of summer, it’s the sound of cicadas in the long grass. At the beginning of Marguerite de Hillerin and Félix Dutilloy-Liégeois debut film The Child (A Criança), the sound is a soothing soundtrack to overlay an almost Edenic pastoral existence. It is mid-16th Century, Portugal and Bela (João Arrais) is the adopted son of a rich merchant Pierre (Grégory Gadebois) and his wife Maria (Maria João Pinho). Bela is to get married soon and his prospects look very good. He’s fortunate in this that he was plucked from poverty, but with every fortune comes a price and everyone seems to have something to hide.

Bela for instance despite his upcoming nuptials is enamoured of a serving girl from the local monastery, Rosa played by Inês Pires Tavares. Everyone seems to be to some degree displaced. Rosa was stolen from Morocco; Bela’s family are French and speak French at home. Jacques (Loïc Corbery) – a friend, soldier and something of a poet – seems to be a wanderer at rest. As beautiful as the gardens and houses are, the orchards and meadows, a lingering unease grows. The sun begins to scorch and the sound of the cicadas begins to grate chainsaws.

Based on Heinrich von Kleist’s masterclass in suspense the novel The Findling, The Child is a very tightly held story. The framing of the shots is close and the locations limited. Servants hover at the margins, but this is a world apparently cut off. A merchant visits and there is news of a royal pregnancy coming to term, but the affairs of these people are intimate and cramped and surprisingly fragile. De Hillerin and Dutilloy-Liégeois keep all their elements in order, everything as neat as a pack of playing cards which they then deal out with a rhythm and that becomes hypnotic. This pastoral retreat seems suspended in time, but something will shake loose.

And of course, there is a death and the unravelling begins. Relationships are not what they seem and though there is much love, there is also jealousy and anger. Bela himself has an obviously entrancing beauty – somewhat like Terrence Stamp’s disruptive appeal in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Theorem. He is on the cusp of manhood and ought to have a great life ahead of him – at one point he is promised to be promoted and given ownership of the business – but his ambiguous status and his own unsettled heart means that something is going to go wrong.

The International Film Festival of Rotterdam (IFFR) is an online edition running from 26 January to 6 February.

Assault

Posted on by John Bleasdale

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There’s a crucial moment in Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel Lord Jim where the protagonist has a moment of crisis. Does he live up to his romantic notions of heroism and die? Or is he a coward and survive? Conrad’s main point isn’t the intricacy of the reasoning or the philosophical arguments for the choice. Rather, it’s the fact that Lord Jim doesn’t really make the choice at all. One moment he’s thinking about it and the next it’s done.

In Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s new film there’s a similar moment of moral dilemma when math teacher Tazshy (Azamat Nigmanov) finds himself in the middle of a terrorist attack. Masked raiders have entered his school and started firing guns. He was in the lavatory sneaking a ciggy, upset with his ex-wife Lena (Aleksandra Revenko) who had shown up to take their son (who is in his class). Tazshy has locked the kids in the classroom and now the terrorists approach. Does he run to free them? Or save his skin? Like Lord Jim, he doesn’t really decide: he just finds himself sleep walking out of the school. When he’s asked about the class he assures everyone they got away before hopping on the rescue buses himself. It is a moment of weakness, terrible weakness. And Tazshy will spend the rest of the film trying to redeem himself.

No help is coming. The small village Karatas in Kazakhstan is locked in the midst of a frozen waste so white it reminded me of the white prison that lodges Robert Duvall in THX 1138 (1971). It screams ‘existential alienation’ at the top of its frosty lungs. The SWAT team won’t be there for days. A motley assortment made up of parents, the school principal (Teoman Khos), the police chief (Nurlan Smayilov) and the PE teacher Sopa (Berik Aitzhanov) will have to rescue the kids themselves. ‘Pragmatics,’ Tazshy tells them as the hours click down to the assault of the title. They’re partly aided by Afghanistan veteran Dalbych (Yerken Gubashev), who is now an alcoholic school janitor.

At every point it’s hard not to wonder what the Hollywood remake might look like. Certainly it follows the kind of action movie grammar, with arcs of redemption and what have you, but it does so just to kick them to one side at the moment you thought you were coming to a safe landing. Dalbych doesn’t transform Steven Segal like into a killing machine. Tazshy isn’t a Liam Neeson Dad-bot of violent revenge. The best shot of the bunch is actually Lena who proves to be a crack shot but even she lacks confidence to actually you know kill someone. One of the more physically capable of the crew is Turbo (Daniyar Alshinov), a young man with special needs who can run like lightning (though stopping him proves difficult).

The obvious real life parallel to draw would be with the Beslan attack in 2004 and there is a strong satirical edge, particularly in the denouement. Yet the terrorists are as blank as the landscape, never revealing themselves as anything other than McGuffins. What saves the film from tastelessness is that constant subversion of expectation. When one character confesses something intimate, another one mockingly tells his neighbour: ‘your turn, don’t you want to tell us about when your uncle touched you?’ None of these characters will grow from this, or learn anything. One feels that the whole thing could easily just get drifted over and disappear from human sight. There’s a bitter dark humour similar to Riders of Justice (2021), if not quite as adroit. And it’s tastelessness is more honest and straightforward than the ghoulish right wing fantasy Run Hide Fight (2020), which had a similar concept.

The International Film Festival of Rotterdam (IFFR) is an online edition running from 26 January to 6 February.

The Plains

Posted on by John Bleasdale

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This is a really boring film. For the most part, it consists of a single camera set up in the back of a car which records a series of commutes from Andrew’s place of work to the suburbs of Melbourne. The first ten minutes he’s just driving on his own, phoning his wife and his mum who is in a care home and listening to the radio. A younger colleague David joins him on a few of the journeys and they talk. Awkwardly at first. They both work for a legal firm and neither of them are particularly happy about it. Especially a superior called Marie who comes in for some stick. Andrew has a bit of a ‘know it all’ air to him, his voice not that different from the talk radio. Some of the conversation is so banal you might want to try and bite your own ears off. How common are red cars? It’s like Peter Kay’s Car Share but without the jokes, or Peter Kay. So it’s just basically a car share.

And yet… and yet. There is something genuinely fascinating about this film too. You gradually get to know all about Andrew and David. Andrew has a long marriage to Cheri and his mother is dying from dementia in a nursing home in Adelaide. David has just broken up with his girlfriend and is living with friends. He might apply to the bar and set up his own practice. Andrew has a whole thing with his sisters. And again his mother seems to be deteriorating. The infrequent cuts always come as something of a shock. How comfortable we seem to have become as backseat passengers, listening in. Then suddenly Andrew’s on his own again with only the company of the radio. When he’s alone his conversation with his wife are a little longer and a little more tender. He’s brusque when David’s in the car and jokes about Cheri in a plaintive way. Some of the cuts take us out of the car altogether albeit briefly. Once released from the confines of the backseat we soar into the sky on one of Andrew’s drones which he delights in using to take shots of the countryside. Very late in the film he’ll show some of these films to David and there’s the strangely dizzy feeling of the film setting up a state of infinite regress.

We also get to know Andrew’s commute. The two speed bumps before he gets to the first intersection. The tricky run on to the motorway. The part where there always seems to be a traffic jam. The weather changes and with it the city and you get a feel for the rhythms of life, the hum of a humdrum routine. The near three hour running time makes me wonder: would anybody’s conversation become interesting once you learn to listen and watch intently? David Easteal, the director and I’m assuming Andrew’s passenger, leaves Andrew in the driving seat. We don’t really get to see much of either of them: just the backs of necks and what the rear view mirror occasionally reveals. At one point a drone’s point of view zooms down to Andrew’s house where he’s sitting controlling it on the porch. It looms into Cherie’s face with a jokey/aggressive insistence. Ironically it makes Cherie into the most seen face of the whole film.

At the risk of being repetitive, this is a boring film. And yet boring and interesting are not necessarily mutually exclusive – ask Steve Davis. Towards the end David scratches at Andrew’s story of decades long monogamy and finds there might have been another love long ago. But when David asks him to tell that story, Andrew for once clams up: ‘Let’s just enjoy the drive, David.’ The weird thing is I kind of did.

The International Film Festival of Rotterdam (IFFR) is an online edition running from 26 January to 6 February.

Please Baby Please

Posted on by John Bleasdale

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I think I counted three major film references in the first three minutes of Amanda Kramer’s Please Baby Please which opened Rotterdam International Film Festival. There’s a West Side Story gang dances-advances on a couple on a studio bound New York street. They Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1970) a couple to death before the horrified eyes of Arthur and Suze (Harry Melling and Andrea Riseborough), who like Janet and Brad from The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman, 1975), find themselves and their relationship transformed as they open themselves up to the possibilities of transgression. Arthur is particularly struck by Teddy (Karl Glusman), one of the Young Gents – as the gang is called – who dresses like Marlon Brando in The Wild One (László Benedek, 1953). Maybe four references.

Obviously camp is about exactly this. Taking on popular culture, reviving, restyling, parodying, pastiching, subverting and celebrating. It hovers constantly between a smirk and an embrace, over the top jumping for joy and bursting into floods of tears, but always with a slight ironic detachment. Phew. Arthur and Suze are in the process already of transformation. They live in apartment 2B, daring someone to add a Hamlet quote to the address. They hold intellectual discussions about gender identity with their poetry beatnik friends. They weigh up the benefits patriarchy bestows on a man against the horseshit indoctrination you have to go through as a boy. Upstairs lives Maureen, played by a lavishly served Demi Moore: “I ought to be famous, but I’m just married,” as she succinctly puts it. Gifted with household appliances she uses as sex aids, she fantasizes about being choked by her ‘daddy’ and gives Suze another possible identity to slip into.

This is a New York of dive bars and alleyways, streets wet with neon: more Herbert Selby Jr than Don Draper. The music has that grungy riff on 50s style that Angelo Badalamenti gave David Lynch’s weirder neighbourhoods. It’s a place lit by late Rainer Werner Fassbinder and early John Waters. And yet for all that there’s something almost too tasteful and restrained about Kramer’s approach. It’s erotic but not sexy. There’s no grit in the vaseline; no pain to the violence. And going back to Don Draper, there actually is a smoothness to this whole exercise, the distinct whiff of footnotes. You’re waiting for a moment to let rip but it doesn’t really come. Despite its musical feel, there are no real numbers – by far the highlight comes with a sad croon from Cole Escola dressed in drag in a phone booth. Towards the end Melling has a bit of a dance but it doesn’t exactly burst from the screen. Riseborough once again proves a daring and constantly fascinating performer. She’s also credited as an executive producer on the project. She is all energy and danger, gradually turning into a howling prowling gender fluid force of nature – a brundlefly combination of Teddy and Maureen.

Paradoxically for all its palimpsest of allusions Please Baby Please is like nothing being made at the moment and on that alone richly deserves an audience. It looks beautiful, with the production design and costumes specifically deserving mention. One wonders though: will it be the kind of film that a few decades down the line another film like this would be alluding to?

The International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) is an online edition running from 26 January to 6 February.

Daryn’s Gym

Posted on by John Bleasdale

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Millers and Sons has been in business for three generations. Daryn (Clifford Joshua Young) is a likeable but unlikely runner of the gym. He’s a bit of a weedy and a pushover with a tendency to burst into tears but he’s also got an indomitable spirit and a can do attitude. He’s helped by his no-BS sister Bianca (Carla Classen) and his protective mum (Natasha Sutherland): In addition he has a closely knit team which includes God-bothering weights man Jackson (Siv Negesi) who admires Jesus for his muscle to body fat ratio and Jacques (William Harding), who runs the juice bar and most enjoys turning straight men onto the joy of their prostrate: ‘like a grenade went off in the yoghurt factory’.

Unfortunately, a new gym has opened opposite and the competition – despite having a huge financial advantage – does not play fair. The shark-like Funi, (Hlubi Mboya) the manager of the new place, believes that no one remembers who came second. Driven to buy out Daryn’s gym, she sends in her sister Zintle (Ayanda Seoka) as a yoga teacher to spy on Daryn and his co-workers. Sabotage is part of the plan and Zintle isn’t the only Stars Gyms employee to infiltrate. But Zintle finds her loyalties torn when she begins to feel affection for Daryn and Daryn is almost immediately head over heels. The plucky little family business still has some tricks up its sleeve, embarking on a crowd funder to try to ensure its continued existence.

With Daryn’s Gym Brett Michael Innes has created an immensely likeable comedy. It is inevitably going to draw comparisons with the pithier workplace mockumentaries of The Office and Parks and Recreations. The David and Goliath storyline is fairly rote but serves to justify its 89 minute running time. Nothing is done with the format of the mockumentary either. And there are a few too many poopoo jokes, as much as farts are funny. Its real and enduring strength are in its characters and performances. Young is superbly innocent and adorable as the lead, just like one of the kittens he keeps in the gym. Negesi has a lot of fun with the broader strokes of his character and gets some of the best lines: like his interpretation of the Biblical text ‘man cannot live on bread alone’ as evidence that Jesus believed in a low carb diet.

Ultimately Daryn’s Gym the film is very much like Daryn’s Gym the place: unambitious but friendly and kind hearted and a nice place to spend some time.

The International Film Festival of Rotterdam (IFFR) is an online edition running from 26 January to 6 February.

Owls

Posted on by John Bleasdale

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The problem with Chekhov’s shotgun is that it only really works if you’re Chekhov. The mechanism itself is just about predictability and audience expectation. No one walks away from Uncle Vanya talking about the wonderful foreshadowing. Icelandic filmmaker Teitur Magnusson’s debut film is ambitious and technically highly accomplished but the machinations of the plot are predictable and the treatment of the subject matter of domestic abuse feels trite.

Pali (Bjartmar Einarssen) is a red haired, long bearded hermit. He spends his days fishing in the river in his pants, cleaning his Chekhovian shotgun, chopping wood (badly) and drawing owls. He’s not a scuzzy hermit, with gnarly nails and bad teeth. His house is neat and tidy and everything has what has recently been called Hygge. However, his state has been caused by a trauma and his isolation from the world is a determined retreat. It’s grief of course, but it has brushed its teeth at least. This all changes when Elisabet (Rakel Ýr Stefánsdóttir) appears at his cottage brutally beaten. Reluctantly, he takes her in and tends to her wounds, uncomfortable with this intrusion into his sterile routine. Slowly and tentatively a relationship between the two begins to develop, but all is once more thrown into doubt when Úlfur (Hafthor Unnarsson), Elisabet’s abusive boyfriend shows up full of simmering rage and transparently temporary remorse. But don’t worry, did I mention the shotgun?

Once more it’s important to acknowledge how accomplished the film is. The compositions, the landscapes, the performances are all fine. Absolutely fine. But it’s the writing. Elisabet is underwritten to the extent that she drifts from traumatised mute to magic pixie girl who wants to play tag without any discernible steps in between. Úlfur is so patently obnoxious that there’s nothing in him that looks remotely attractive to begin with. He’s an off the shelf abusive boyfriend. Pali, who the film is centred on, has a degree of depth to him. After all, he’s the one with the backstory that gives the film its title. But there is something unbelievable and precious about that very backstory. In some ways, it’s almost as if grief is being treated as a generic trope rather than something real, something authentic. The way they give Dirty Harry a dead wife to make him you know deep and single, and not gay.

It’s worth reiterating that the film is well made – Joshua Ásberg’s cinematography makes the most of the Icelandic landscape – but as it moves through the motions the artifice is too apparent and doom approaches by agreed upon stages.

The 32nd Tromsø International Film Festival runs from January 17th to the 23rd. DMovies is reporting live all week!

Achrome

Posted on by John Bleasdale

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The Eastern Front of the Second World War seems like it belongs to an entirely different war. Whereas D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge can inspire carefree action pictures and grimily realistic shoot ’em ups, the key film from the Eastern Front is Elem Klymov’s Come and See (1985). The obvious difference is the proximity of the Holocaust. Band of Brothers can wait until the end of the season before stumbling into the concentration camps. The Nazi’s ideology about the racial make up of the East meant that the killing fields were sopping with blood and atrocity was woven into the DNA of the warfare.

Maria Ignatenco’s second feature film Achrome portrays war in the Baltic states. Maris (Gregoriy Bergal) is an innocent seeming soul, content to lie on his back and look at the clouds. But his life changes when he and his brother join the Wermacht as auxiliary soldiers. He is the only volunteer not to have fired a rifle and he dumbly follows, impressed that the Germans have their HQ in the basement of a monastery. In fact, it almost feels as if Maris believes he has joined some kind of order. However, brutality is all around him. Prisoners are brutally murdered in the basement and Maris and his brother go out at night to rob the dead in their shallow graves. The thunder of guns can be heard in the distance and a doom might well be approaching, but in the meantime drinking and whoring silences the doubts and fears. Yet nightmares continue and Maris increasingly seeks a way back to his state of relative innocence.

Now I have my criticisms of this film but it is important to point out that these criticism to some degree reflect a preoccupation with the genre. These films from the east that relate atrocity all seem to do so with a set aesthetic of pale painterly beauty: two parts Tarkovsky to one past Vermeer, with a dash of Breughel the Elder thrown in. The woods are frosty and the interiors glow with guttering flame, casting that perfectly cosy teal and orange look. Everyone is brutish and cold; the victims are bodies in the moonlight. This aesthetics of atrocity can even be seen in the titles from Dénes Nagy’s Natural Light (2021) to Achrome, as if the titles were written by the cinematographers – who – Anton Gromov in this case – are uniformly excellent. But is this painterly excellence appropriate to the subject? Is it not letting us off the hook? The soundtrack doesn’t use music but it is as full of dripping branches and crackling firewood as your favourite ASMR video from YouTube.

Just to be clear. There is nothing wrong with this film. It is intelligent and sensitive. Maris tells us he has seen the face of war, ‘it has dehumanised me and made me a notch on the scale of history’. The trauma feels real. But when a group of German soldiers start to pose with the corpses of their victims , one can’t help but question our own act of looking, our own complicity even as we try to understand.

The International Film Festival of Rotterdam (IFFR) is an online edition running from 26 January to 6 February.

Katja Dreams of Waking Up

Posted on by John Bleasdale

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Katja is 27 years old and lives in Berlin with her Norwegian boyfriend Fredrik (Lasse Holhus). She makes money giving private lessons in German and spends her days in a frenetic rush, pinged on by the multiple alarms and reminders of her iPhone. Every night she dreams of her own violent death. Something has to give.

Will it be her own mental health or the collapse of the ecosystem? Or is she possessed by a demonic presence or are these more prosaically mental health issues? What is certain is that she needs a break. She longs to travel – she whispers Laos like an incantation – but hasn’t got money to pay the electricity bill. Her iPhone intrudes on her ‘waking’ hours, creeping into the screen or splitting it in two, or when she drops breaking the screen, the image breaks as well.

A trip to northern Norway to visit Fredrik’s family comes as a genuine moment of escape and potentially a spiritual awakening. The pace of the film slows down and her dreams recede as she embarks on a digital detox. But as she becomes fixated on the idea of a regeneration and reinvention – deciding to become a vegan and perhaps volunteering for a homeless shelter – so even this adoption of the New Katja begins to resemble the very mania she is seeking to escape.

Leonie Reiner gives Katja, who’s one yoga class away from being insufferable, a real charm and personality, with more than a passing resemblance to a young Diane Keaton. Her dissatisfactions, especially with the lazy drip of a boyfriend, are understandable and her panic about the future, exacerbated by the scab picking of apocalyptic environmentalist podcasts, is entirely justified.

Writer and director Truls Krane Meby developed his first feature from an initial idea for a short, and you can see that DNA in the film still. There is a real visual verve and the editing in the first half of the picture (also Meby) has the kind of cocaine fizz of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (2000). At one point nightmarish visions of thumb people made only for scrolling and screaming assail Katja’s dreams. And this surreal take on hyper-connected virtual life contrasts vividly with the landscapes and weather of northern Norway. Likewise, Katja and Fredrik’s doleful romance seems inauthentic besides the gentle comedy of a visit to Frederich’s parents and grandparents.

The film has some weaknesses. The bulk of Katja and Fredrik’s relationship is played out in an English which banishes much of the subtlety from their performances. The film sets up so much in the beginning that it later finds difficult to resolve or even meaningfully pursue. Ideas are left hanging midway, underdeveloped or simply disappear in the Nordic mist. And the film doesn’t so much end as finish. Open endings are one thing, but they shouldn’t whiff of ‘that’ll do’.

That said the film has a huge ace in Reiner’s performance, which is human and touching as well as funny. There must be something in the water in Norway when it comes to young women and the modern world and though Katja Dreams of Waking Up isn’t quite in the league of Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World (2021) and Ninjababy (Yngvild Sve Flikke, 2021), which premiered at Tromsø last year, Meby’s debut is an assured and exciting piece of work which bodes well for the future.

The 32nd Tromsø International Film Festival runs from January 17th to the 23rd. DMovies is reporting live all week!

History of the Occult (Historia de lo Oculto)

Posted on by John Bleasdale

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Sometime in the 1980s, the Argentinian president is in trouble. There are popular demonstrations on the streets and accusations of corruption. What’s more popular TV news magazine show 60 Minutes to Midnight is about to broadcast its live show, the last it will ever present. They’re being taken off the air but before they go a team of producers Maria (Nadia Lozano), Jorge (Agustin Recondo), Alfredo (Hector Ostrofsky) and Abel (Casper Uncal) hope to reveal a conspiracy that will land the President himself in serious trouble.

In the studio, the presenter has a sociologist and a special guest as well as a government minister. There has been a mysterious murder and the a reporter lurks on a street corner waiting for an ultimate piece of evidence to arrive which will prove that there is an occult cabal linking all the ministers of the government and the President.

Such is the set up for Christian Ponce’s realtime horror film. Shot (mostly) in black and white and (mostly) in Academy ratio, Ponce’s debut is eager to throw in as many chilling and uncanny elements as it can. Conspiracy, child kidnapping, alternate realities, a ritual involving hallucinogens, lurking demonic presences and thudding noises are all added to the mix and for the most part are very effective as the clock ticks down to midnight.

It’s never quite clear why the producers are huddled in a bungalow and not in the studio itself. Nor what the actual nature of the conspiracy is. The fact that it is hinted at murkily is sufficient. Ultimately, one might suspect that this is the equivalent of a shaggy dog – or more fittingly a shaggy hound of hell story. The skeleton of the plot can creak and there might not be anything under the sheet after all, but it is a lot of atmospheric fun getting there.

Things become crazier as the film progresses and the stakes are significantly raised. Franco Cerana and Camilo Giordano’s cinematography helps evoke the cloak in the cloak and dagger and occasional stabs of colour hint at something truly uncanny. There’s a minimalistic feel which hints at economy as much as anything. But if this is a calling card film – and there’s no shame in that – then it does introduce a truly interesting talent.

The 32nd Tromsø International Film Festival runs from January 17th to the 23rd. DMovies is reporting live all week!

Zero Fucks Given (Rien à Foutre)

Posted on by John Bleasdale

Here’s a good idea for budding young filmmakers in search of a subject. Pick a familiar job that people are aware of and that don’t ever get treated in films and then make a film about it. That’s what writers and directors Emmanuel Marre and Julie Lecoustre have done in their new film Zero Fucks Given (2021), which we caught at Tromsø International Film Festival.

Adele Exarchopolous plays 26-year-old flight attendant, Cassandre. She’s the one that has to go up and down the aisle of the plane asking: “any drinks, any snacks?”, or tempting you with duty free perfumes and colognes, or worse still telling you that your back doesn’t fit and you’ll have to pay an extra charge. They are the front line troops of the budget airline industry. Paltry paid and badly treated, with a corporate culture of the ‘time to lean, time to clean’ variety. Cassandre spends her hours off partying and swiping her way through Tinder, getting wasted and waking up in strange hotels in hot countries.

But somehow managing to get herself fixed and ready to go, hair tied up, make up on, breath mint sucked and please return your seat to the upright position! It sounds like a great hedonistic lifestyle but there’s a desperation to the partying and the constant dislocation has a frenzied feel. Sure enough it turns out that a tragedy has sent Cassandre on her course, losing herself in the numbing routine and avoiding responsibilities. Despite having been with the company – a Ryanair lookalike called Wings – for several years, she insists on staying as a junior member of the cabin crew.

In fact, it is when she is forced up the career ladder that things begin to unravel. The irony is that it isn’t her partying that threatens to ground her career but rather her empathy for an elderly passenger which leads her to behave with a degree of humanity not sanctioned by the company. Temporarily sent home, she has to confront her family and come to terms with what she left behind.

No Fucks Given is a film that actually gives a fuck. The air steward is a perfect example of the modern alienation that is written into the DNA of the service industry. You aren’t simply paid to do a job, but also you have to have an attitude, an emotional state which belongs to the company. You must be cheerful in the face of insults, eager to please, as long as that doesn’t contravene the moneymaking, and you have to shove the sales up which is where the profit margin lies. A job interview has Cassandre having to implicitly give up the right to have a baby or be in a relationship, as well as reveal how she would evade sexual assault. There’s no talk of how she would be protected. The onus is entirely on her.

But at the heart of this character study is Adèle Exarchopoulos’ searing performance. As an actor she has proven herself time and again capable of depicting the raw emotional responses of her roles: see Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013). Here she is as convincing in the ordinary moments as she is in the depths of her despair. She is grief and pain that doesn’t want to reveal itself, even to herself. The most moving scene in the whole film is a phone call about changing a roaming tariff plan. This is the opposite of histrionics.

From a technical aspect, cinematographer Olivier Boonjing follows the main character’s lead in using a mix of camera phone type shakiness and the occasional glimpses of the sublime. The garish nightclubs offer a cheerful vision of hell and soulless news while home is as gray as drizzle. Editor Nicolas Rumpi constantly surprises with his abrupt cuts which emulate the characters own sense of dislocation. This is a fascinating and soulful look at a key figure of our time and, when you next fly, it will make you wonder at the human beings behind the uniforms and bland frozen smiles.

Zero Fucks Given premiered at the 32nd Tromsø International Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. On all major VoD platforms on Monday, January 30th.

A Human Position

Posted on by John Bleasdale

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We all need a home. It’s not just a place, an address. It’s not just the building, the rooms or the furniture. It’s not even the people we live with. But it is all of those things as well. Anders Emblem’s second film – which had its world premiere at the Tromsø International Film Festival this week – is a meditation; a quiet, artful but insistent building of and furnishing of a home. And it’s a place you’ll want to spend some time in.

Asta (Amalie Ibsen Jensen) is a young journalist who is returning to work on her local newspaper in Ålesund. She spends her days reporting the sports events, business initiatives, grassroots political action and traffic incidents while her photographer snaps the pictures of the local people for a moment fixed in the small spotlight of local fame. She is burden by something though, distracted by some hidden burden.

The film will be stingy in its revelations, as if it’s not sure we can be trusted. This is a private thing. Asta lives with Live (Maria Agwumaro), but are they roommates or girlfriends? What’s the nature of Asta’s trauma? Where are the other friends and her extended family? The film has narrowed its focus to match Asta’s own. She is concentrating on what is in front of her. And the case of an asylum seeker Aslan comes across her desk and she is drawn into investigating his case and in the process considering the social injustice that she sees it as typifying. Here is someone who doesn’t have all that Asta – even in the depths of her depression – takes for granted.

Cinematographer Michael Mark Lanham frames each shot with meticulous care. At first the pace is slow – the first shot last in excess of one minute – and shows the town as a figure approaches on a path. But once we’re in then the story unfolds and the mysteries resolve themselves in their own time. The stationary camera sometimes looking from above catches Asta in profile or face on, emphasizing that there are whole parts of the picture that we are missing. The home at first carves the frame into oblongs which fix Asta and outside Lanham’s camera reveals the hidden geometry of towns, the slants of roofs and cycle paths, the passing ferries on the sea. Inside, her workplace is diagonal stairs and multiple screen set ups. Characters drift out of shot, carrying on conversations with unseen interlocutors and we stay with the place.

But it is Live and Asta’s home which she returns to and which slowly becomes more than the trap it had seemed. Live restores furniture, and specifically chairs – as well as providing the music of the film with an old fashioned keyboard. A meandering kitten also adds to the sense of life going on in a way which is comforting. Brynhild Dagslott’s design is superb as the house becomes increasingly a home and Asta begins to come back from the pain she has found herself in. But it is Jensen’s and Agwumaro’s performances which bring the film its warmth. We want to know what is going on because we care about these women.

This is a calm, thoughtful and drily (oh so drily) witty film. It demands patience the way someone in pain demands patience. But being witness to healing is a privilege: being allowed into someone’s house to share an intimacy makes us generous, better people. And quietly insists that this is not just a human position but also in the broader picture a human right.

The 32nd Tromsø International Film Festival runs from January 17th to the 23rd. DMovies is reporting live all week!