Tag: biopic

Vita and Virginia

Posted on by victorfraga

Virginia Woolf’s novels are wholly original, dazzlingly sensational texts that sing right off the page, able to conjure up whole worlds, smells and sensation through the innovative use of stream-of-consciousness. A woman able to carve out a literary career in a world in which men still had all the advantages, she is a true feminist icon and one of the greatest writers of all time.

A large part of her later success is down to the inspiration of Vita-Sackville West, her friend, confidante, fellow writer and lover. Famously Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992), featuring a gender-shifting protagonist, is based on her cross-dressing style. Like Scott and Zelda Fitzgerland, or Henry Miller and Anäis Nin, this is one of the great literary relationships, and ripe material for cinematic adaptation.

Literary biopics can go one of three ways. In the first two, they either take inspiration from the writer himself, and ape his style, such as in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Terry Gilliam, 1998), or have a completely different auteurial approach, like Alexei German Jr’s melancholic look at Sergei Dovlatov’s life in the eponymous 2018 film. Yet too many take the third route, in which the major events of a person’s life are simply lifelessly recounted. Vita and Virginia is perhaps one of the most egregious examples of this, yet considering the specifically lesbian subject matter, even more of a greater disappointment.

Love has rarely seemed more anodyne than in Vita and Virginia, which has a miscast Gemma Arterton and Elizabeth Debicki playing the two lovers. Here one of the most important women to have ever put pen to paper is reduced to a wholly passive, sickly, and sad woman, devoid of any true emotion, inspiration or true internalisation. Her lesbian lover, Vita Sackville-West fares no better, Gemma Arterton more focused on her aristocratic mannerisms than her transgressive personality or desire to shake the system. Together they seem like they’re still reading through the script.

Rent apart by circumstance and repression, the two women read their letters to each other looking straight to the camera Barry Jenkins-style (although without any of the same cinematic tenderness). Here one line-reading struck me as symptomatic of the film’s laziness as a whole. The text on the screen reads “We can live in the present moment – together”. There is a dash between the words “moment” and “together” yet Arterton rushes straight through the phrase, giving her plea no weight whatsoever.

Everything feels off. There is little at stake and even less to care about. In better hands, there might have been something vital to say about the role of women in society, the patriarchy, the coded nature of same-sex desire, the power of romantic inspiration and the relationship between life and art, but Vita and Virginia — based on the 1992 play by co-writer Eileen Atkins — is devoid of any nuance, allowing characters to simply say things out loud that another film would’ve played out through genuine conflict.

For the vast majority of people, passion and desire is a mixture of mental and sexual sensations. When you’re homosexual in a repressed society, this can result in a great conflict between the two — for example in the great Call Me By Your Name (Luca Guadagnino, 2017), which elegantly linked physical motifs with mental sensations to a highly sophisticated degree. Here, Vita and Virginia may spend a lot of time discussing the nature of desire — sometimes embarrassingly through a heterosexual mouthpiece who asks stupid questions like “How do women really have sex?” — yet is remarkably tame when it comes to the physical component; even recycling the same sex scene twice. It reflects the British biopic’s still reticent nature to portray homosexual relationships with any true spark or joy, resulting in a boring suffering-narrative that is potentially more damaging to homosexuals than truly helpful.

The overwrought score by Isobel Waller-Bridge, full of ahistorical synth nonsense, takes us out of the past and retrofits their romance to try and suit modern times. These aren’t helped by the cony sound effects, kisses bizarrely complemented by extremely kitsch ASMR breathing sounds. This Luhrmannisation is both annoying and alienating, elevating Vita and Virginia from the bland to the outright awful. Woolf deserves much better than this.

Vita and Virginia is in cinemas on Friday, July 5th. On VoD on Monday, November 4th. Stay at home and read a book instead.

DMovies selected Vita and Virginia as the turkey of the year of 2019…

The White Crow

Posted on by victorfraga

his is an unusual title for a film about ballet. “A white crow” is a Russian expression for an outsider, someone who doesn’t quite fit in, an extraordinary person (some sort of antonym of our “black sheep). In fact, no description could be more apt for the subject of this film, Rudolf Nureyev, the greatest male ballet dances since Vaslav Nijinsky. It traces in outline Nureyev’s life from birth on a trans-Siberian train to his famous defection to the West at Paris’s Le Bourget Airport in 1961. The film is inspired by the book It is inspired by the book Rudolf Nureyev: The Life by Julie Kavanagh.

Nureyev could be a monster. The iconic ballet dancer was notorious for his selfishness, egoism, his temper tantrums, always demanding to get his own way even over the most trivial things. In a Russian restaurant in Paris, he doesn’t want pepper sauce on his steak, so he demands that his companion Clara Saint (Adèle Exarchopoulos) tells the waiter about his wishes. He won’t do it because the waiter is a Russian and thinks that Nureyev is a peasant. He demands that a director of the ballet company leaves the room because he thinks that the director and the man beside him are talking about him.

Nureyev was very insecure, worried about his origins in Siberia with its desperate poverty. He gets out of bed as a little boy to watch his mother leaving their dacha in heavy snow, dragging a small sledge after her in order to get essential supplies for the family. He feels abandoned by his stern father in a wood as he goes off hunting. He remembers his father’s hand on his back and compares it to the hands of the forgiving father in Rembrandt’s Prodigal Son, exhibited now in the Hermitage. He is a sinner, an outcast, someone who has not quite come up to standard.

All this probably drove his ferocious ambition, his determination to succeed, his absolute insistence that he would get his own way. This was probably augmented by his homosexuality. It has never been easy to be gay in Russia and it still isn’t. His affair with a German lover Teja Kremke (Louis Hoffmann) is briefly shown. He looks wistfully at men dancing together and flirting with each other in a Paris nightclub and knows that he must go West.

The defection scene in Le Bourget Airport is exciting and tense. He was supposed to have jumped over a barrier to get to the West. In the film he approaches two customs officers at a bar after being briefed by Clara Saint that he must formally ask them for asylum. Clara Saint has been rung up by her friend Pierre Lacotte (Raphaël Personnaz) and told to come to the airport immediately to exploit her connection with André Malraux (it impresses the customs officers) to get Nureyev in touch with those who can get him asylum. After desperate pleading by Soviet officials he walks through the right office door to freedom.

The film does not cover the years after his defection. Clara Saint gets no recognition from Nureyev for her help but then “please” and “thank you” were not part of Nureyev’s vocabulary. The meltingly beautiful Oleg Ivenko gives a very competent performance although his very good looks fail to convey Nureyev’s fierceness. Ralph Fiennes is a very submissive and gentle Pushkin (Nureyev demands that he be his dance tutor), having to put up with his wife Xenia (Chulpan Khamatova) seducing Nureyev. Alexey Morozov is the put-upon Soviet minder in Paris Strizhevsky, who can’t hold Nureyev back.

For all the difficulties of his personality, Nureyev brought much that was beautiful into the world. Those who first saw him dancing in Paris, said that his entries on stage were like “a bomb going off.” Ballet enthusiasts will love this film. It delivers lots of dancing eye-candy, both female and male. Nureyev himself was very beautiful and brought the best out in many beautiful people, including his dance partner Margot Fonteyn. The world is poorer for his passing.

The White Crow is in cinemas across the UK on Friday, March 22nd. On VoD on Monday, August 12th.

At Eternity’s Gate

Posted on by victor@dmovies.org

Another Vincent Van Gogh biopic, but with a synthesis of Willem Dafoe in the lead role and Julian Schnabel behind the camera, who can resist? Despite being a legend of the New York art world, Schnabel’s cinema comes under criticism for leaning too middle-brow. But these artists are always fascinating beasts, constantly examining how artists communicate the indescribable in their head into some kind of language. Think of Jean-Dominique Bauby in The Diving Bell and The Butterfly (2007) learning to write by blinking.

Schnabel turns here to perhaps the most famous artist ever, who had to create an entirely new language to communicate the things that he saw. Schnabel and Dafoe do a great job of contrasting that interior genius with a man who can barely speak to others, who is so overwhelmed by his visions of nature that he appears to be entirely mad.

Willem, a 65-year-old in the role of a man who died at age 37, plays the part as myth. And perhaps that casting inherently allows us to see heretofore unseen shades of the man, his old soul, and Willem’s youthful exuberance. It’s a part that allows the actor to show off everything that makes him such a beloved character actor, the wild energy, the sadness behind his eyes, the controlled physicality. It does a service to both actor and subject, and one hopes that the Academy goes the same way as Venice and gives Willem the Best Actor Award for a role that works perfectly with his persona.

I did have to laugh at the appearance of the postman Joseph Roulin and his gigantic beard, though, ‘May I paint you?’ intones a shitfaced Vincent. Willem gets strong scene partners, in the form of a moustached Oscar Isaac as Paul Gauguin, Mathieu Amalric as the famously painted Dr. Gachet. A stand out scene towards the end has Willem sparring with Mads Mikkelsen as a priest, who charges that Van Gogh’s painting is an insult to God.

Schnabel shoots the process of painting with an urgency. These scenes are so vibrant, the paint pops off the screen as though in 3D – what might Bi Gan do with this material? There is an effort to relate Van Gogh’s style to photography, through the abstraction of rain on a window. With coloured lenses and hurried camerawork, Van Gogh’s form becomes the film form.

So how well does this fit into the Van Gogh canon? The recent Loving Vincent (Dorota Kobiela/ Hugh Welchman, 2017) is a glorified kids film, that plays to the silver screen crowd, and these American takes – including Robert Altman’s Vincent and Theo (1990) and Minnelli’s Lust For Life (1956) – are too respectful and stately to really capture the genius. More successful are Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams (1990) and an old episode of Doctor Who, which treat the artist in terms of his influence and confront our wish to reach back to him. This lands somewhere in the middle.

For despite the formal tics and a game Dafoe, At Eternity’s Gate still follows the expected beats of a Van Gogh biopic. The Ear. The kids throwing rocks. The insane asylum. The notion of tortured genius isn’t really challenged by Schnabel, who doesn’t really bring anything new to our understanding of events surrounding Van Gogh. It’s a straightforward depiction of his last years, which may be enough. Its pleasures are varied, and the Dafoe performance is wonderful, but this is a tribute act, rather than an earth shattering new take.

At Eternity’s Gate showed at the International Film Festival Rotterdam,when this piece was originally written. It is out in UK cinemas and also on Curzon Home Cinema on Friday, March 29th.

Colette

Posted on by victorfraga

We have already seen Keira Knightley in The Duchess (Raul Dibb, 2008) astutely depicting the real-life Duchess of Devonshire, who, in the 18th century had to struggle with and failed to escape the tutelage of her ghastly husband. Here the tale is happier. Originally coming as an innocent country girl from Burgundy on marrying Henri Gauthier-Villars, the titular protagonist arrives in the Paris of the Belle Époque and is expected to ghost her husband’s novels, which are published under his pen-name of “Willy”.

These books are entitled Claudine, and in truth they are Colette’s semi-biographical writings. No acknowledgement is made of her contribution. The first book Claudine at School is so well written that it immediately becomes a runaway bestseller. Her husband is played with convincing obtuseness by Dominic West. He believes that his wife is somehow his property and even locks her in a room, expecting her to get on with her writing. This topic will ring bells with those who recently saw The Wife (Bjorn Runge, 2018), starring Glenn Close.

Claudine eventually becomes a brand. Girls go around in France dressed like Claudine with bobbed hair, a white collar and schoolboy like black uniform. Meanwhile Willy is making a lot of money – or rather not – as he keeps spending it on all sorts of things and wasting it on mistresses. Colette is expected to put up with all this, but she doesn’t. Into her life comes Missy, skilfully played by Denise Gough, and they start a lesbian relationship. Eventually, she breaks free of Willy and leads her own successful life as one of France’s leading authors.

In addition to being a ghostwriter, Colette eventually becomes a burlesque dancer. She performs highly risqué lesbian acts with Missy at the Moulin Rouge, with her Willy as her business partner. He is not too concerned about his wife’s sexuality. Willy’s big problem is that in presenting shows featuring lesbianism and trying to make money out of it, he reinforces the sexual stereotypes that oppress his wife and other women, while she is liberating herself with calm self-assurance.

So far so very satisfactory and so very gender-bending but what makes this film so moving is Keira Knightley. She quietly grows from an innocent country girl to a calm, self-confident woman making her own decisions on her own terms without any reference to what others think. She slips into bed with other women (both Missy and an American lover) because it suits her, not because she has adopted a Lesbian identity.

The Belle Époque is extensively depicted throughout the film. This is the Paris of the Moulin Rouge, the cancan, the frou-frou skirts, Toulouse Lautrec and elegant gentlemen in morning suits and top hats. It is the world that Marcel Proust knew. That will attract people in its own right. But there is also a dark side of the Belle Époque: the constant availability of women to satisfy male desire, the hard work of entertaining, the constant dependence on the rich, privileged male.

This is an exquisitely crafted film, and the research has been done properly. Everything from wash basins, to exercise books, the cut of women’s clothes, the dark, wooden, heavy furniture, wall paper and lighting seems right. Colette is definitely worth a trip to the theatre. It’s both delightful to watch and also a mature tribute to feminism.

Colette is in cinemas across the UK from Wednesday, January 9th. On VoD on Monday, May 13th.

The Russian filmmaker who shot Elvis!

Posted on by victorfraga

Most people in the West have never heard of Sergei Dovlatov, the Armenian-Russian writer who never found fame in the Soviet Union before eventually leaving for New York in 1979, but after his death slowly grew to become one of the most famous of all Russian novelists. A tragic symbol of the kind of culture Russia could’ve had if it were not under the yolk of an authoritarian regime, he is the subject of a new film by Aleksei German Jr. The director has a personal investment in the material, as his father, Aleksei German Sr., found himself constantly blocked by the Soviet authorities, only making six films over his lifetime.

Coming at a critical time in contemporary Russia, whereby thousands of citizens are also leaving the country for brighter opportunities, the dramatisation of seven days in the writer’s life seems to ring with political overtones. Winning the Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution at the 68th Berlinale, and just picked up by Netflix, Aleksei German Jr.’s latest film depicts a week in the life of the writer in Leningrad, 1971. Showing him hanging out with contemporaries such as Joseph Brodsky, the film is a muted and contemplative affair that creates an intimate portrait of the writer’s dream to be published and wish for a better life. Redmond Bacon sat down with Aleksei German Jr. during the 68th Berlinale to talk about his personal relationship to the material, the film’s political messages, and why Dovlatov isn’t as famous in the West as his contemporaries.

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Redmond Bacon – Did you have a personal interest in the works of Sergei Dovlatov for a long time?

Aleksei German Jr – The starting point is that Dovlatov knew my father. And my grandfather helped the family of Dovlatov. We lived close to them, a distance of several kilometres, and my father had a destiny that was a bit similar to Dovlatov’s. One of his movies was banned for almost 15 years [the 1971 WW2 film Trial on the Road]. It was personal family history for me. And of course, Dovlatov is like [the] Elvis Presley of Russian literature and there were no movies made about him before. And he’s a bit of paradox. He doesn’t look like [a] writer. Half-Jewish, half-Armenian, he was different from all the people who lived in St Petersburg. He’s witty and he’s tragic and he’s sometimes funny [but] can be hurt really easily. For example, he was very popular among women, but he loved his family and his wife very deeply. He’s a big paradox in himself.

RB – Can you tell me if you had a political message with this movie?

AG Jr – I wasn’t really interested in political messages three years ago when we started the film. When I want to give a political message I’ll give it directly, for example, through an article. I wasn’t interested in the political element. I just [wanted] very sincerely to make a film about the destinies of those people and things that shouldn’t be forgotten and as a reminder for the future that these things shouldn’t happen again. It’s not a political movie for me. It’s more a personal story for me, and it just so happened the time caught up with the film.

RB – Can you tell me why you choose such a white colour scheme for your cinematography?

AG Jr – We wanted to make two feelings possible. The first one is the feeling of [the] observer, the way you would observe what is happening. And the second is creating this feeling of a not very bright era. Because the Soviet Era was not very bright, we didn’t want to enhance this colour. I hate official Russian TV series about that era. They’re very bright, very rich, the fabrics are very beautiful. That was not the truth. It was quite [a] poor time. We didn’t want it to look like the pages of [a] fashion magazine.

RB – When you talk about an author like Dovlatov, how do you make the movie universal and not only for specific audiences?

AG Jr – We made a lot of translations [subtitles] of this film: 14 translations! And we tried to clarify the things that wouldn’t be clear to an international viewer. We wanted to put ourselves in the place of an international viewer who doesn’t know anything about 1970s or Leningrad. That was why we had a lot of translations to make it more readable.

RB – So Dovlatov is a very accessible writer, he’s very funny and his books are quite short. But he’s not as famous as other Russian writers from the period like Pasternak or Solzhenitsyn even though those writers are arguably more difficult to read and their books are longer. So why isn’t Dovlatov as famous in the UK or the USA as these writers?

AG Jr – It’s a very complicated question. You need to know in Russia that Dovlatov is one of the most famous writers, maybe the most famous writer, of the last quarter of the 20th century. And for foreigners it’s a bit complicated to understand his jokes because they are so rooted in Russian contexts and I think he’s not an expert writer. With Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, they’re just more understandable, the context is more understandable, the events, the situations of Stalin and repression are more understandable.

For example, we have two directors: [Andrey Petrovich] Zvyagintsev and [Boris Igorewitsch] Khlebnikov. Zvyagintsev is more famous than Khlebnikov. Both are very good, but Zvyagintsev is more understandable for Western viewers, because he can fit in with this view that foreigners have of Russia. Khlebnikov not. But they are directors of the same level, so it’s a matter of understanding the context and the culture. But they look the same. A lot like each other.

This is why we have these never-ending problems between West and East. You see what we are not, and we see what we will never become in your eyes and this is where the problem lies.

RB – Did you find something about Dovlatov you didn’t know and that surprised you?

AG Jr – We have unique material we found [during] the preparation. I found a lot of archived poems and alcoholic short stories of Brodsky for example. We even found the moment and the paper of when Brodsky first wrote down the telephone [number] of Dovlatov. We have literature and culture that’s a lot worse than came before — we found a lot of things in open access [that] wasn’t used in any books on Dovlatov. That means that the qualifications of the people who are writing these books about Dovlatov and Brodsky is getting poorer and poorer. They didn’t even use the material that is accessible.

RB – Why did poetry survive in the post-war time in Soviet Russia, when it was much less popular in other countries?

AG Jr – The duration was complicated. The war ended recently. There was a freedom when Khrushchev was in power. There was no immigration. The war with the government made the poets more united and stronger. I don’t know why we don’t have such striving poetry right now. Maybe it’s the tragic paradox that when the poetry gets worse, the country gets better.

Dovlatov

Posted on by victorfraga

The year is 1971, the month is November and the city is Leningrad. The urban landscape is covered in snow and the air is foggy. The mood of people is equally sullen and morose. After experiencing a period of relative freedom in the 1960s, the Soviet Union is once again gripped by censorship. It’s almost as if Stalin had made a return. The climate (in both the denotative and the connotative senses) is nasty. Plus, a sense of economic and political gloom prevails. Publishers seek “positive” writers who will convey a sense of hope and lift the spirits of the populace. The entire film takes place during a period of seven days.

Russian-Armenian journalist Alexei Dovlatov (played by the bulky Serbian heartthrob Milan Maric) does not wish to conform to the newly established orthodoxy. His writings are too subversive for the official media, and he is consistently denied membership by the ultra cliquey Writers’ Union. He endeavours to capture social reality: he visits and talks to shipyard builders and metro construction workers. He does not wish to leave the Soviet Union. He wants to stay and lead a normal life with his wife Lena (Elena Sujecka) and their daughter Katya.

Dovlatov’s ironic and transgressive writings were prohibited under Brezhnev, and he eventually migrated to the US, shortly after his friend Iosif Brodsky (also portrayed in the movie). Both men would eventually become recognised as some of the most influential Russian writers of the 20th century, and they die while living in New York – the film explains in writing at the end.

Dovlatov blends tragic events that took place during that week in November – such as the attempted suicide of a co-worker and the accidental death of a painter arrested for smuggling – with the oneiric (we see Dovlatov’s fears beautifully portrayed in two dream sequences). Polish DOP Lukask Zal (of Paweł Pawlikowski’s Ida, 2013) delivers a visually compelling movie, with a reality as murky and misty as Dovlatov’s imagination. The images of the majestic Saint Petersburg (then Leningrad) are enthralling (not too difficult, considering the city in question). Dovlatov, however, is artistically inferior to the black and white Polish film from five years ago. It’s far less audacious and inventive.

In case you have never heard of the Russian writer Sergei Dovlatov or are only very vaguely familiar with his work (I belong to the latter category), then you might find his biopic a little esoteric and overwhelming. References are so abundant and intertextuality so prominent that people lacking the specific cultural capital might not be able to engage with the film thoroughly. Gogol, Dostoyevski, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Chekhov, Solzhhenitsyn, Nabokov and many more are repeatedly referenced. Non-Soviet artists of all sorts and eras such as Pollock, Munch, Hemingway and Sophocles are also discussed. The namedropping is so intense that it’s difficult not to keep track of it.

All in all, this is a conventional biopic with an elegant photography and plenty of treats for fans of Russian literature, but nothing beyond this. It is unlikely to convert new fans. I would hazard a guess that the Russian director Aleksei German, who won the Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution just three years ago with Under Electric Clouds, will neither repeat nor excel his achievement.

Dovlatov showed at the 68th Berlin International Film Festiva, when this piece was originally written. It premieres in the UK as part of the BFI London Film Festival taking place between October 10th and 21st.

Birth of the Dragon

Posted on by victorfraga

In 1964, a 24-year-old Bruce Lee (Philip Ng), still mostly unknown to the world, operates a Kung Fu academy in San Francisco. He is a doting, effective and also very demanding master, who has quickly earned the respect of his mostly white and American students. Steve McKee (Billy Magnussen) is amongst the learners. One day the emblematic Chinese martial artist and teacher Wong Jack Man (Xia Yu) decides to visit the US in what he describes as a “penance trip” (he wishes to subdue his pride by staying away from fighting after nearly killing one of competitors in China).

Birth of the Dragon – a title alluding to Bruce Lee’s final film Enter the Dragon (Robert Clouse, 1973), released just six days after Lee’s untimely death caused by an allergic reaction to painkillers – is a film “inspired” in real events. Several elements did take place, such as Lee’s stint as a teacher, Wong Jack Man’s trip to the US and, most importantly, the historical fight between the two men in the final third of the movie. Other bits are fictionalised, such McKee’s character as well as a female called Xiulan (Jingjing Qu) with whom he develops a romantic affiliation. There are also some evil mafia people who want to prevent Billy and Xiulan from being together, and I would comfortably hazard a guess that this part was also entirely concocted for the movie.

The last third of the movie is impressive, and the fighting scenes are particularly beautiful and elegant (even for someone like myself, who’s not a big fan of martial arts), and never too gruesome. The film also educates viewers about the real nature of kung fu: “it resides, not in the fists”, and it’s more about “self-respect” than respect from others, Jack Man explains. Very significantly, the movie also highlights the struggle between modern and tradition. Jack Man does not wish to see Bruce Lee catapult kung fu onto the mainstream (TV and cinema). At first, he frowns upon Lee’s vanity and ambition.

The major problem with Birth of the Dragon is that a large chunk of the story arc is built upon the white heartthrob Billy, and his romance eventually becomes the central pillar and the driving force of the movie. The kind and courageous white hero – if a little clumsy – wishes to save the vulnerable girl in the hands of evil criminals and unable to fend for herself. This is both cliched and redundant.

Birth of the Dragon is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, February 23rd. All in all, this is a movie fun enough to watch, but not to be taken very seriously

Dalida

Posted on by victorfraga

This a movie that will make you dance and cry, both at once. The Egyptian-born Italian singer best remembered for singing in French captured the enormous sadness, loneliness and melancholia of chanson and later even infused music disco with her very own touch of desolation and heartache. In fact, Dalida is one of the best-selling artists of all times (in all languages, not just French), with nearly 200,000 million albums and singles sold worldwide, yet her name isn’t instantly recognisable in the English-speaking world.

If you’ve never or only vaguely heard heard of her, this is a golden opportunity to both listen to her songs and learn about her tragic life. If – like myself – you’re already a huge fan, this is an excellent chance to enjoy fabulous picks from her extensive repertory, attached to a mostly convincing reenacting of her life.

Dalida’s insecurities started a child because she had to wear thick glasses and was constantly bullied at school. She also described her father as an abusive figure. The sad and ugly duckling grew up to become an astoundingly beautiful woman, and she was even crowned Miss Egypt at the age of 20. Yet, other issues would arise in a life that came to epitomise female tragedy better than anyone else in the history of music.

The long-haired and tall brunette is played here by the Sveva Alviti, who’s also extremely attractive. Her stage performances are touching enough, but of course she gets a helping hand from Dalida herself (the audios are original). Hits such as Je Suis Malade, Le Temps des Fleurs, Paroles Paroles and the disco classic Laisse Moi Danser are played almost in their entirety, and you will also listen to her singing in Italian, Arabic and Japanese. Dalida recorded and performed in 10 languages. Alviti, on the other hand, sometimes lacks a little depth in the most intense moments of the movie. The profound sadness doesn’t always show in the eyes of the newcomer actor.

The film follows Dalida’s life in chronological order. All of the big events are there. Three of her lovers committed suicide: Luigi Tenco shot himself shortly after the two became engagement, her former husband and agent also shot himself (in the apartment where they lived together), while Richard Chanfray gassed himself (after they separated). Her inability to conceive a child also took a huge toll on her. She only found out at a very advanced age that she had damaged her tubes when she had an abortion at the age of 22. She felt guilty and unfufilled, and she hopped from one lover to the next feeling consistently empty and lonely. She also felt old, as reminded in her ballad “Il Vient d’Avoir 18 Ans”, about a woman infatuated with an 18-year-old. But she’s twice his age (at 36).

The film also follows her attempts to reconnect with herself, includes her spiritual journeys to India to meet with a guru and to meditate. It also remembers her short return to Egypt to record her role in Youssef Chahine’s comedy The Sixth Day. She was welcomed by the Egyptians like a proper diva, with the streets flooded with fans.

Those who understand French will grasp that her lyrics also defined her tragic life. She sings “Je suis vivre parce que je t’aime” (“I’m alive because I love you”), “Je n’ai plus envie de vivre ma vie, je suis malade” (“I have no desire to live life, I’m sick”) and “Je veux mourir sur scène, sans la moindre peine” (“I’m going to die on stage, without hesitation”). The last song is played as the film credits roll, after she killed herself with an overdose of barbiturates in 1987. She left a note saying: “life is unbearable, please forgive me”. She was 54 years of age. That’s three times 18.

In the end of the day, music didn’t seem to purge her enormous suffering. Perhaps it even catalysed it. We’ll never know for sure. Fortunately, Dalida lives through her music. And now also through this film.

Dalida is showing on Thursday, November 9th at the French Film Festival, and it’s out on all major VoD platforms on December 5th.

Tom of Finland

Posted on by victorfraga

Perhaps no other 20th century artist has captured the essence and the soul of male homosexuality as accurately and vibrantly as Touko Valio Laaksonen, best known as Tom of Finland outside his eponymous Scandinavian birth nation. Tom’s drawings of muscular men with bloated muscles and exaggerated phalli have featured in gay clubs, magazines and – most importantly – the imagination of gay men all around the planet at least since at least the 1980s. His immediately recognisable drawings continue to influence artists and to titillate libidos decades after artist’s death.

Tom of Finland is a very standard and effective biopic, portraying Tom from his youth at the aftermath of WW2 up until his death to emphysema in 1991. The five decades or so of his life are convincingly delivered by the Finnish actor Pekka Strang, who is both subtle and dramatic in his performance. Tom’s stoical attitude towards war, his insecurities in the face of homophobic scrutiny and a very Scandinavian sense of self-deprecating perfectionism are all there, composing a very complex and multilayered individual. This is no uni-dimensional character.

Overall, this is a very good movie, which provide moviegoers with both historical context and emotional insight into the life of a deeply subversive and provocative artist. It’s also a universal film that everyone – not just gay men – will find relatable. Tom’s work has drawn both admiration and disdain from different quarters of the artistic community, and the discussion whether his drawings are art or pornography will never cease. His influence, on the other hand, is not questionable.

The also Finnish filmmaker DomeKarukoski allow viewers to witness soldiers in Finland of the 1940s, the hedonistic underground of Berlin in the 1950s, plus the vibrant and colourful gay scene of California in the 1970s, and finally the Aids crisis of the 1980s. His ill-fated and tragic romance to a Finnish man called Veli (Lauri Tilkanen) is also a central topic, as and his affectionate yet somewhat distant relationship to his sister Kaija (Jessica Grabowsky). The movie also interestingly raises questions and notes some parallels between religion and gay culture: both are often insular and ritualistic. The photography is very convincing, even if at times a plush streak makes it more reminiscent of Pierre et Gilles than of Tom of Finland.

Karukoski deserves praise for making the film in Finnish (bar the bits in Germany and the US, where the respective local languages are predictably spoken), instead of opting for English in the name of commercial interests. He could have probably cast some international name such William Dafoe to play Tom of Finland, just like Abel Ferrara did three years ago in Pasolini. I am not a very big fan of films of movies that shun the local language in favour of profitability.

There is just one hardy and big problem with Tom of Finland, which wouldn’t be an issue for most films. Unlike many of Tom’s drawings, the movie Tom of Finland features no real sex and not even an erection. There’s what looks like a prosthetic penis being doused in a glass of beer, and a few naked Finns bathing naked in a river in the beginning of the movie, but otherwise this a very sexless endeavour. We doubt that anyone will ejaculate on the cinema seats or on the person next to them. How rude! This is of course a very significant flaw, as Tom’s work was teeming with explicit sexual activity (as you can see from the image above). It’s more of less the equivalent to making a film about Edith Piaf without music. Still, more than a worth a visit to the cinema!

Tom of Finland is out in cinemas across the UK in August, 2017. It’s now available on all major VoD platforms.

Rodin

Posted on by victorfraga

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM CANNES

The sculptures by Auguste Rodin were not stagnant. The were teeming with turbulent passion, action and emotion. Sadly his biopic is stationery, lifeless and tedious. I wonder why the veteran French filmmaker Jacques Doillon decided to make such a dull and ineffective piece of filmmaking, and why anyone would go to the cinema to watch it.

It’s not that the film is too esoteric; I doubt even die-hard fans of the progenitor of modern sculpture will like it. The movie simply lacks flare and guile, and it’s quite excruciatingly painful to watch at 119 minutes of duration. Vincent Lindon in the main role is quite boring, and there is absolutely no chemistry with Izia Higelin, who plays Camille Claudel. Izia (who starred last year in Catherine Corsini’s Summertime) is extremely limited in her role, and overall it feels like there was no coaching of the actors.

It is widely known that Rodin was quiet and soft-spoken, but the problem here is the delivery: it fails to convey sentiment. Even the erotic scenes are devoid of joy and intensity; when you watch Rodin painting two naked and naughty girls prancing around, you will get neither excited nor aroused. It feels like a failed attempt to emulate the extremely sexy Antonioni’s Blow Up (incidentally, the naked dancing in 1960 film features Doillon’s former wife Jane Birkin).

The film centres on the period of the romance break-up, when Camille moved to the UK and they began to argue as to who plagiarised who. Rodin lived with his maid Rose, and the children which she claimed to be Rodin’s offspring. There’s also the (in)famous statue of a very paunchy Balzac with huge testicles, which provoked a lot of controversy at the time. Paul Cezanne and Claude Monet make a short appearance, and the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke is mentioned multiple times. But the events never gel together. The film doesn’t even feel didactic, but instead as a loose tribute to various historical figures.

Praise must go, however, to the film’s photography and mise-en-scene. This is a beautiful and moving portrait on France in the late 19th century, with beautiful images of the countryside and recreations or Rodin’s pieces.

Rodin is showing as part of the 70th Cannes International Film Festival, which DMovies is covering live right now. The film is vying for the Palme d’Or, but it’s unlikely to take it.

Final Portrait

Posted on by victorfraga

How do you capture and fossilise the most innate elements of the human being onto a portrait? Swiss-Italian painter and sculptor Alberto Giacometti (played by Geoffrey Rush) attempts to rescue the essence of American art critic and biographer James Lord (the heartthrob Armie Hammer), but he is never satisfied with the outcome, to the despair of his patient subject.

What was originally intended to last two to three hours ends up lasting for weeks, and James suddenly realises it may never come to an end. He’s forced to change his flight back to New York several times in order to pose for an artist who strives for perfection while also recognising that such accomplishment is impossible. As a result, both artist and subject are caught up in a painful and perpetual artistic cycle.

Rush delivers a vibrant performance as the neurotic, and self-deprecating artist. He describes the dandy and polite American as a “brute” and a “degenerate”, and hazards a guess that he will end up either in prison or in an asylum. These hidden qualities – which noone else but the artist sees – are precisely the elements he wants to show in his painting, and he becomes increasingly frustrated at his inability to achieve this. He destroys painting after painting and starts afresh as many times as you can imagine. He will work almost invariably with a cigarette attached to his mouth, while hurling “fuck” and “putain” several times. James is in for a rough and yet entertaining ride.

The cultural shock between Americans and Europeans is also a centrepiece of the movie, in a way very similar to Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2003). Giacometti has a wife and a stable affair with a prostitute. His wife also has a lover, and the polygamy seems extremely natural to them and yet very awkward to the eyes of the American visitor.

The movie, which takes place in Paris, recreates a very specific period of Giacometti’s life, seen from the eyes or James Lord – it was based on the latter’s biography ‘A Giacometti Potrait’. It will not give you any insight into the artist’s history. It’s a delightful, gentle and warm piece with elements of comedy, supported by a couple of jolly French chansons. It’s likely to please art lovers or anyone fascinated by the incongruities, paradoxes and impossibilities of the artistic creative process.

Final Portrait was presented at the 67th Berlin International Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It is out in cinemas across the UK on August 18th.