Tag: Andrea Riseborough

Please Baby Please

Posted on by John Bleasdale

QUICK SNAP : LIVE FROM ROTTERDAM

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.

Luxor

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

From her taxi driver to hotel staff to chance acquaintances in ancient ruins, Hana (Andrea Riseborough) seems to know everyone in the historic Egyptian city of Luxor. Staying in the gorgeous Winter palace hotel — a Colonial-era resort that would easily fit into the 1920s setting of The Mummy — she has returned to the beautiful town in order to look for something.

But what is it? Is it romance? Closure? Possibly both, or something else entirely. It’s hard to say with the enigmatic Luxor, which basks in arthouse tropes in order to reflect upon the difficulty of the human condition and overcoming trauma. Eschewing conventional narrative in favour of reflection and contemplation, it’s a clever, self-reflexive film boasting yet another fine performance from Andrea Risebourgh.

Hana is an aid worker and doctor, who in her time working in the Middle East, seems to have come across genuine suffering and brutality. She’s also suffering from memory loss; even claiming to have forgotten her trip to the great city of Abydos — a city we are told no one forgets in a rush. She criss-crosses the bustling modern streets of the city as well as the empty, gorgeous ruins, the camera unafraid to cut to the landscape and ancient drawings as a means to connect her with the world around her.

Operating in arthouse territory reminiscent of Michelangelo Antonioni and Alain Resnais’ existential vacations, Luxor is filled with long pans, silence, and empty spaces. The storytelling is also elliptical, especially when it comes to matters of sex, director Zeina Durra showing us everything but the act itself. By reducing the passion of the moment, Durra intellectualises the experience of romance and connection, making us really think about what it means to revisit a place of pain while searching for something new.

Luxor

While initially appearing to fall into common white-people-in-North-Africa tropes seen in dozens of Hollywood productions, Luxor actually interrogates (and celebrates) the setting of the film instead of simply using it as a backdrop for Western anxieties. London-born director Zeina Durra — who is of Bosnian-Palestinian-Jordanian-Lebanese descent — seems to actually understand the magic of the city, a place rich with both Egyptian and Islamic history.

It’s all held together by the central performance. It’s hard to think of a more consistently brilliant and varied actress than Riseborough. Even when she takes risks that don’t quite meet their targets, her work proves her willingness and ability to really get into the skin of her characters. At first, Hana seems like a conventional Brit abroad, staying in a posh hotel while profusely apologising to the bellboy for not having any change for a tip. But Riseborough slowly allows this facade to crack, opening herself up to the possibility of experience, change and renewal.

There are several moments that simply follow her as she wanders off from a group and stares into the distance, processing the landscape while thinking deeply about something. In the hands of another actor, these moments may came across as banal or as pretentious, yet Riseborough manages to keep our attention and see the world alongside her. Luxor-iating (sorry) in its surroundings, this is a slow and patient character work that rewards close attention.

Luxor is out in virtual cinemas on Friday, November 6th. On Sky Cinema and NOW on Wednesday, June 23rd.